Chapter One
Passaic, New Jersey
July 25, 1989
AS THE CAR PASSED US, I knew something was up. The gray sedan was nondescript, the kind of car that wanted to be ignored. It drove by slowly, deliberately. I caught the driver’s stare, menacing like a flashed pistol.
“The hell’s wrong with that guy?” I said, under my breath, more to myself than to my wife. “He’s grilling me like he wants to kill me.”
My wife, Sunshine, and I were sitting in my prized possession, a customized AMG Hammer. It was a specially modified Mercedes-Benz, with a candy-apple-red exterior and black interior. The car had a custom sound system with gooseneck controls, like a swivel game controller. Its trunk was bored out of a complete white fiberglass encasement for two fifteen-inch woofers, midrange speakers, and tweeters in the basin instead of a spare tire. The body was widened so far out that the side vents had to be extended from the doors into the quarter panel. The tires were low-profile Hoosier Racing Tires, and the frame was lowered a few inches from the ground. There were running lights below the headlights that in the dark made it look like a UFO creeping up on you at night.
It was the kind of car that got you noticed.
We were parked curbside on a two-way boulevard in Passaic, New Jersey, fifteen miles outside Manhattan, about an hour north of the quiet suburb where we lived. We were waiting for Carlos, who had asked me to meet him here, near his house. In nearby Paterson, Carlos owned a successful custom furniture and cabinet business. That spring he and I had decided to team up. I’d put in the money for inventory and run the business side and he’d produce custom pieces for me in a fifty-fifty partnership. He did everything in-house and his guys churned out quality work, though they didn’t speak a word of English. Any time I stopped by the shop, including earlier that day, we’d have these gesture-heavy conversations around questions like Where is Carlos? When will he be back?
Carlos had some new furniture designs to show me, designs I’d been asking to see for almost a month. That morning on the phone he told me to meet him at the shop, but when I showed up, he wasn’t there. When I finally got him on the phone again, he said he had to “make a run” near his house and I should come up to his neighborhood in Passaic. I knew that “make a run” meant a drug sale, but I paid it no mind. I wasn’t involved with that side of Carlos’s life and I didn’t care.
I had lived in neighborhoods in Harlem in the early 1980s where you couldn’t see the sidewalk beneath the river of empty crack vials crumbling under your feet. When I moved out to the Far Rockaway projects, I was still surrounded by hopelessness and desperation. Everyone was committing crimes of survival. The stickup kid, the hit man, the prostitute, the numbers runner, the burglar, the scam artist were all my neighbors, some of whom came to be my friends. As I moved up in life, I didn’t see myself as any better than them. They remained my friends and it wasn’t my way to worry about what every person in my orbit did. If it wasn’t my business, it wasn’t my business. That had been my attitude when I lived in New York City, and as Sunshine and I met new people and built a life in New Jersey, I carried it with me.
After almost thirty minutes waiting in the car, Sunshine started getting antsy. My wife was a music performing artist—I was her manager and producer—and she was due at a recording session in the city. I kept putting off her pleas for us to go, telling her to give it five more minutes. As we sat there, waiting for another five minutes to pass, she pointed out a parked car up ahead, its lights on in broad daylight. I didn’t think much of it until I looked it over a second time. Brake lights. They weren’t just on, they were flashing in random intervals—from a car that appeared to be empty.
“What the—” I said, putting my car in drive and rolling up the street. When I pulled alongside the car, I saw a figure crouching down under the steering wheel, his knee inadvertently pressing on the brake.
The sight shook me. Is this guy waiting on me? My mind ran back through the day, going over clues my subconscious must have registered: the same unfamiliar car appearing in my rearview, the same stranger’s face at a different location, a pair of eyes staring at me too long. Sunshine and I were an hour from home, in a place we didn’t know, directed there by someone I knew to be a drug dealer. Now we were surrounded by surveillance.
I stayed out of trouble, but this was not the first time I had encountered police. I was used to being profiled, stopped and searched illegally, harassed and aggravated by cops. But this was different: the police had located me in a place I didn’t even know I’d be at. They were hiding—far removed from the bold, arrogant show of force I was accustomed to. I assumed the cops were waiting on Carlos, even though they were on me. But how’d they even know where I’d be? I didn’t even know where I’d be.
Then it hit me.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “They got something in this car.”
“What?” Sunshine asked. “What do you mean?”
“This car,” I said, lowering my voice. “There is something in this car.” I tried to remain calm, but my throat was pinched, the oxygen tight. That car was my pride and joy, and somehow, at some point, the cops had gotten to it. It felt invasive. I thought back to the dealership. After I left the car to get serviced about a month back, they had called and asked me to come pick it up right away. They even offered to waive fees under a “goodwill policy” if I came and got it immediately. It didn’t seem strange at the time, but now I was thinking: Why would the dealership care if I picked up my car right away?
Sunshine was still worried, firing questions. “Something like what?” she asked. “How do you know? Can we just get out of here, please?”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” I said, trying to calm her down. I didn’t let her know about the alarms going off in my head. “We got to wait. A few more minutes.”
“Wait? Why?” she asked, her voice tinged with panic. “Let’s just get out of here.”
Sunshine’s instinct was to bolt, and I understood it, but I didn’t react on impulse. I knew that’s what brought trouble. If I did anything rash, it could get me in serious shit. I had no idea what the police were doing there. They could’ve been after Carlos and waiting on him to show up. If I took off without telling Carlos, it could look like I had set him up, or at least had left him a sitting duck. Then he and I would have a problem that would require one of us to respond. That was what the streets demanded. This was my world, and the riches and spoils of the music business had done nothing to protect me from it. In fact, part of the music business, specifically hip-hop, was inextricably bound to the street.
At the time, all my worry was focused on Carlos and his people. I didn’t think I had anything to fear from the police. I thought that by staying, I could warn Carlos, protect him from whatever trouble the cops might drop on him. Over the past thirty years, I’ve replayed that afternoon many times in my head, but I usually come back to a simple conclusion: I didn’t respond like a criminal because I wasn’t one.
When Carlos’s red SUV appeared in my rearview, I opened my door and got out. “Wait here,” I told Sunshine, then walked up the street toward him. A tall, dark-skinned Dominican in his thirties, Carlos sat in the car with a relaxed air about him.
Copyright © 2022 by Isaac Wright Jr