THE FISH BUSINESS

These are the big fish who always try to eat down the small fish . . .

They would do anything to materialize their every wish . . .

Woe to the downpressors, they’ll eat the bread of sorrow!

—From “Guiltiness” by Bob Marley

After the two stents had been inserted into my pulmonary arteries so I could breathe again, and after losing my job with Sanctuary Records when they sold the company, I needed to start looking for work. A job. I had spent the last twenty-five years in the music business, had no college degree, and was not really suited to work an office job. I had a small music label, Tafari Records, but it was not earning money. I still did some touring with Bunny Wailer and made good money this way. But as I described earlier, the final straw for me came when Bunny canceled a long-awaited Brazilian tour. It was a crushing blow and I realized my days of touring Bunny were over. One week later I would apply for a sales job in the seafood business.

I had been in this business with my brother thirty years earlier, and I knew quite a bit about fish (as I had given up eating meat and pork decades earlier). I had noticed some seafood trucks moving around town and liked the logo of Profish. I got on the phone and told the owner I was the number one seafood salesman this city had ever seen, and after he explained that I might possibly be number two (after him), an interview was set up for the following week. I met with the two owners, Greg Casten and Tim Lydon. We talked and I gave them my pitch and they bought it and said they would give me a shot.

It felt strange to change my profession at fifty-four during a time when the US economy was in bad shape and jobs were tough to find. I started at a salary of 25 percent of what I had been getting paid at Sanctuary. That was a tough pill to swallow but I needed a steady income, and most importantly Profish offered health insurance for my entire family. I also knew I would have access to the best seafood and would literally be putting food on the table for my family each night.

My first day at work was torture. I was in a cramped and stinky office in a DC ghetto, with junkies and alkies hanging around the street where our warehouse was located. I tried to keep my cool and stay focused on work but I had a major panic attack. I was freaking out. I had no idea what in the world I was doing there. I wanted to run out the door and never come back. What the fuck was I thinking? I knew I could not make it in this environment.

When I got home that night I was trembling. My sister-in-law Julie explained that most people in the world go off to their jobs every day and just make the best of it so they can pay their bills and get on with their life. That I had been living the dream and my years in the music business were an aberration and that very few people in society ever had the freedom I’d experienced. She said to hang in there. Get up and go to work the next day, and slowly things would settle in and I would be okay. She was right.

Things gradually got better, and as the new kid on the block, I was enthusiastic and working hard to learn the business and get accounts. I even called some chefs I had sold fish to thirty years earlier and got some positive reactions. I began to build up my sales, but I also learned what it meant to work for The Man. To be a part of the dog-eat-dog world where everyone is trying to claw their way a little higher out of their pit. Even the sales guy sitting next to me said that it was “every man for himself.”

This concept was foreign for me. I had always believed (and still do believe deep to my core) that if you do good work and take good care of people, it will come back to you in the form of both money and positive vibrations. With music, I figured that if I produced a quality product that people liked, customers would buy it and money would flow back into the company. Why should it be any different with fish? My modus operandi was to only give my customers good product so they knew they could depend on me and would continue to order. Yes, price was a factor, but just like in the music business my strategy was to build strong relationships with chefs where they could trust me to take care of their needs. I wanted to network and build a reputation that Gary was the go-to guy they could depend on for their seafood.

It was tough. Many of the chefs liked to beat you up and make you feel like they were doing you a big favor by buying fish from you. A mini–power trip within their own small universe. By demanding to see how far you would go to have the honor of selling to them. As I was just getting started, I had no choice but to do whatever was asked of me. And in the year and a half I worked at Profish, I was only once told that I was doing a good job. That was when I had doubled my sales from one month to the next. The company would post all of the salespeople’s results on a spreadsheet so everyone could see, and I guess they thought if they created a competitive atmosphere it would make everyone work harder. I also spent a lot of time with the guys in the warehouse and cutting room since I spoke Spanish, and they appreciated this. They made sure my customers got the best fish, and they would also take good care of me when I was bringing home fish for my family.

One morning we had gotten a new shipment of flounder and I sold a bunch to an important DC seafood market. I casually asked the owner Tim what we paid so I would know what to charge my customer. Instead of giving me a simple answer, he barked at me to go look it up on a computer. I had noticed how Tim always berated everyone who worked there and seemed to enjoy being a dick just to be a dick. Most of the people there disliked him, as he rarely showed any respect for his employees.

I was learning how the Babylon system (which Peter Tosh famously called the “shitsdem”) worked firsthand, which I had of course heard about in countless reggae songs, but had never really experienced since I’d always worked for myself. The labor system is too often based on control and power, replete with time clocks and the threat of punitive action. This company’s oppression was palpable, and permeated every aspect of the organization. But Tim had pushed me one too many times and I was going to defend I-self. I told him that no one could disrespect me or anybody in my family. No one. He told me to get out of his face in front of a bunch of employees and I refused. It got to the point where he just left the office and headed out into the warehouse. I followed him out there to continue our conversation. I told him to go ahead and fire me. Right then and there. (I had asked the same thing of the majority owner Greg Casten some months earlier, which he had refused to do; I had started to believe that my time at work was hell and that being fired would be my salvation.) Tim looked really nervous. I’m not sure if anyone had ever stood up to his bullying. As he walked away again, without firing me, I continued to vent.

It’s funny, but some of the Latino workers came up to me that day and shook my hand and asked if they could help me load fish into my car. They actually thanked me for standing up to the boss, and more than one of them told me I had big cojones. Even the sales guys saw a different side to Gary Himelfarb, and they now knew that I should not be messed with. Yet I am not a quitter, and I hung in there and tried my best to do a good job.

But a few months later there was another incident and Tim finally told me I was terminated. I put out my hand and thanked him. I really did. I gathered up my shit and left. Free at last. Free at last. As it turned out, Tim ending up serving a number of months in the slammer for purchasing illegal striped bass. There were strict regulations about fishing for striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay, whose population had been dangerously reduced over the years. But the greed of some cannot be abated, and it’s money alone that motivates how some people choose to live their lives. The company was fined close to one million dollars. This had all gone on long before I started working there but had been hanging over Tim and the main fish buyer the whole time, and maybe that was the reason he was such a miserable son of a bitch.

* * *

So, I was briefly out of a job but soon found work with Congressional Seafood, one of the area’s best seafood distributors. I was told I would need to come to work at five a.m. because that is what everyone in the market did. The crews worked all night to get the fish cut and ready to put onto trucks for early-morning delivery, and the salespeople needed to be there to handle the phones and enter orders. My salary was significantly less than what I had been making at Profish, but they had the upper hand. I believed that once I got in there they would recognize my value and compensate me accordingly. We talked and joked and they said they’d hire me just so I could get them tickets to concerts, but I wanted them to realize what I could bring to the table; I explained that I did more than just merely sell fish. At Profish, I had created publicity for the company and streamlined some of their more cumbersome systems; I wrote a biweekly newsletter about the company to circulate throughout the industry; and I built important relationships with chefs. With me, they would get more than just a salesperson.

I also knew the long hours were going to fuck with my arrhythmia, since lack of sleep is a major factor, yet I had no real choice. Without a regular paycheck from another source, what else was I going to do? Even during my first meeting with the company, the arrhythmia hit me hard and I was just barely able to keep it together.

Wow. Dragging my sorry ass out of bed each morning around four a.m. was not what the doctor had ordered. It really kicked my ass. Many of my friends told me how proud they were of me—I had changed my whole lifestyle to work in the fish business just so I could support my family. And I knew my family was relieved that I was working again. That said, I will admit it was tough and that I became a more miserable person because of this; the conditions, both physical and mental, were wearing me down.

I was so tired by the time I reached home each afternoon that I would just drop from pure exhaustion. I would wake to have dinner with my family and often I would cook the fish I brought home, as I was getting pretty good in the kitchen. To me, cooking is like a science—each food reacts differently under certain conditions and when combined with other foods, just like the elements in the periodic table. A leek will behave differently if sautéed in oil at high or low heat, or depending on when exactly it’s put into a dish, or on the size of the cut.

As soon as dinner was done, the chefs would call me to order their fish for the next day. I had gotten the reputation as the one sales guy who stayed up past eleven p.m. So I was essentially working from four a.m. till eleven p.m. If the phone rang with fish questions I would answer it. It’s just part of being a salesperson.

I managed to push my schedule back a couple of hours, but the conditions were still intolerable to me. I could not even think straight. I loved to eat seafood and I felt good about working with chefs, but I found the working environment there distasteful. Imagine after all the freedom I had experienced in the music business and the open-mindedness of the artists I worked with to have to show up each day at the cold, smelly fish market and face these conditions. The love I had felt from the Rastafari community was nowhere to be found. Just the insatiable drive to make money and maintain a hierarchy where those at the top persecuted those beneath them.

We had this rough-and-tumble guy from Philly named Ritchie who ran the warehouse. We never hit it off; he didn’t like my style and I didn’t like his. He once accused me of “sucking dick” when I was assembling an office chair for one of the VPs. Then he asked me if I would be “sucking the dick” of a different VP when we would be driving three hours to New Jersey to land a big account. I later took him aside and explained I found his dick-sucking references extremely distasteful and told him to stop. But he did it a third time and I really blew up. He tried to apologize but I did not want to hear it. Imagine having to work in this type of environment where people cannot even have the respect to treat you like a human being. It was something I and I faced every day. Every fucking day.

In Jamaica, when two people meet they will often bump fists and say, “Respect.” This means that I will respect you and you will respect me, and this level of mutual respect fosters a healthy relationship. I had always tried to express this basic principle in all my interactions with people in the music business and in my life in general, but clearly the rules of the game are different in the corporate world. Respect means nothing; the only motivating principle is money. How many people working today loathe their jobs and the people they work for? How many people feel exploited by their bosses, or not adequately appreciated or compensated for their hard work? I had been lucky and privileged to have never been beholden to anyone before this point in my working life. But can you blame people for resenting their jobs when they work for greedy motherfucking hypocrites and are required to be subservient? (Believe it or not, I was literally told to be “subservient” in boardroom meetings with my employers.) Later, I couldn’t help but reflect upon the parallels between the corporate world and the slavemaster mentality.

I continued to hang in there and did the best I could. For me, it was all about sales. Why should the company care what I do or where I am as long as I’m delivering strong sales? But they did. Most companies want to own their employees. To keep you down. If you become too powerful, you become a threat. These guys were extremely confrontational and seemed to take pleasure in the misfortunes of their competitors. Instead of appreciating the hard work of their employees, they were aggressive with no empathy for anyone but themselves, walking around the place like Nazi storm troopers inflicting their will over others. I could never understand this approach. Where was the kindness? Where was the love?

Soon my time in the fish business was over. I was fired for reasons I cannot get into, and it did not resonate well with my family. But I had served my five years and in my mind I was done. My last words to one of the bosses were, “Until you start caring about other people and not just about yourself, you will always be in pain.” I had promised to let him know the secret of why he was always in pain once I left the company, so I took this opportunity to tell him.

I had come into the job believing that the meek would inherit the Earth and that by being kind and generous to people, all would be repaid. And when I left I saw that greed and power and the thirst for money was what controlled the Earth. The meek did not stand a chance. It was a wake-up call that deeply disturbed me, though what could I do about it?

I knew that my days of working for The Man were behind me. That I would need to reinvent myself on my own terms. I will tell you that I and I am trying very hard and it is a daily struggle but I will never give up. That Jah is still my light and salvation and His will and my hard work will get me to where I need to be. Jah live!!!