Bob Russell—the guy at the top of the heap at Van Waters and Rogers—walked around like he was the God almighty NBC peacock.
I didn’t get what it was about him that made him such a fantastic producer, but when I found out that he was not only getting all the business but making $80,000 a year—compared to my $30,000 starting salary—I had to figure out what his secret was.
While I had thought that my trip to meet my father would give me and Jackie the break we needed to appreciate each other more and help put everything in perspective, the stress picked up exactly where it had been before—the same patterns, the same arguments. Her frustration with herself, with me, and with how her dreams weren’t panning out always translated in my mind to the need for more money. So when I found out what Bob Russell was grossing, $80,000 became the magic number for me. If I can ever get there, that’s all I’ll ever want, I thought. At that time, I couldn’t even dream any bigger. But if Bob Russell could do it, I could too.
My confidence was apparently not shared by my sales manager Patrick, who had also apparently not been involved in the decision to hire me. It probably didn’t help that I was a tall, black man and he was just a little bit taller than a midget.
A fussy Irish American, Patrick was what I called a “pen guy.” He punctuated every sentence he uttered with a click-CLICK of his pen, emphasizing each and every point he made—and they were numerous since he knew everything and the new guys like me didn’t know anything—with additional clicks.
What I learned wasn’t so much how to be a better salesman as how not to be intimidated. So when Mr. Pen Guy started sending the message that he wasn’t digging me, I found a way to let him know, Hey, I’m not digging you either. If he made a mildly snide remark, instead of really barking back, my reaction was to bend down, subtly reminding him that I was tall and he was short, and to say, in mock politeness, “I’m sorry. What was that?”
Patrick’s face inevitably turned red. Of course, when he really pissed me off, I was less subtle as I cupped my hand to my ear, bent over, and said, “What? I can’t hear you down there, all the way down there.”
His only response in those instances was to click-CLICK away. Somehow my antagonizing him convinced him to teach me a thing or two about selling the Van Waters and Rogers line. During the middle of a sales call with a buyer, after I’d already started to take the order, he’d interrupt, reminding me, for example, that it was important to stress that even though competitors had the same products, Van Waters and Rogers had the superior products at a lower price. Then there was the time he stopped me and asked, “Gardner, where are the samples? You should have brought out the samples before writing the order.”
In situations like that, I couldn’t go off and ask why he didn’t wait to tell me later but had to humiliate me in front of a buyer. Infuriating though it was, I learned by default that it was vital to distinguish the product I was selling from the competition as superior and less expensive. What was more, I learned that there were stages to selling. There were also numerous intangibles. Some of the skills could be learned and developed, but I soon saw the truth of the matter—that the best salespeople are born that way. Not everybody can do it, and not everybody should do it. Did I have what it took? I didn’t know yet. But damn, $80,000? What did Bob Russell have that I needed to have?
Whatever it was, I refused to be deterred, even with having to drive outrageous numbers of miles from Berkeley to every whistle stop in Silicon Valley, from San Mateo to San Jose, mostly down the road from the San Francisco airport. But the most important call I ever made was in the city proper at San Francisco General Hospital, where I went to deliver samples and a catalog to Lars Nielson, who ran a lab we should have been doing some business with. Even though the call went well and I expected to come back for the order, when I exited the building, the math I was doing in my head was telling me that I still had a long way to go to compete with Bob Russell. Yet what options did I have?
Just then, after being momentarily blinded by the sun’s glare, I see the red Ferrari 308 circling the parking lot. The owner of the car, dressed in that perfectly tailored suit, who is the beneficiary of my parking spot after he answers my questions—“What do you do?” and “How do you do that?”—is a gentleman by the name of Bob Bridges, a stockbroker with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, who commands a salary of $80,000 a month!
Stop the presses. I don’t have to be a math whiz to compare and contrast that with Bob Russell’s $80,000 a year. Fuck Bob Russell!
At this stage of my life, I know as much about Wall Street, stocks and bonds, capital markets, and high finance as most people know about the preservation of myocardial high-energy phosphates. But even before I sit down to lunch with Bob Bridges in order to learn more about what exactly a stockbroker does and how to do it well, I’m already seeing myself in that arena. How can it be any different from everything I’ve ever done before? From working at Heartside Nursing Home and the Navy Hospital at Camp Lejeune in general surgery and the proctology clinic, to heading up a laboratory at the VA Hospital and the University of California Medical Center, to being the up-and-comer doing sales in the Silicon Valley, I’ve walked into jobs with no knowledge of the fields but have succeeded and done well in all of these areas. Not just done well. Done absolutely fucking fabulously well. No, my monetary success hasn’t been overwhelming. But in growth and skill, I’ve excelled beyond my own expectations.
All that is enough for me to think I can do the same as a stockbroker. Despite the fact that this is the first time the notion has even come up on my radar screen, from here on out there is not one doubt that I have found my calling and that I’m going to be in hot, relentless pursuit of a career in that arena. For reasons I can’t begin to explain, I know with every fiber of my being that this is IT.
To the average man or woman on the street, this certainty probably sounds crazy. Besides not having gone to college, I don’t know anybody and have no connections or special privileges to help me even get a foot in the door. That is, except for Bob Bridges, who I don’t know from Adam, other than the fact that I gave him my parking space.
Nonetheless, when we go to lunch and I ask, “What does a stockbroker do?” he patiently and generously describes his average day.
Basically, Bob says, every day he goes to his nice little office and he sits there, takes a couple of phone calls, and writes something down.
“Let me get this straight,” I repeat. “You take a call and write something down. That’s it?”
Bob goes on. “Well, yes. And I call people too, and we talk. I tell them stories about companies, and they send me money.”
Another light flashes on in my head. This dude—wearing another custom-made, beautiful suit, at a cost of a couple thousand dollars easy—is selling, just like I’m doing. But instead of having to drive all around, up and down highways, to find obscure facilities and labs, carrying a small warehouse in the trunk of his car, he gets to go to one office, sits there, and talks on the phone. I want to say, Damn, that’s slick! but only listen attentively as he conveys the secret to his success.
Bob is self-motivated, he says, setting his own goals. “Every day when I’m sitting there talking on the phone, I say to myself: I’m not leaving until I make four or five thousand dollars today.”
Again, the math is overwhelming. He sits there and talks to people until he makes four or five thousand dollars that day. I’m killing myself to gross four or five thousand a month! To be sure that I haven’t misunderstood, I ask, “Bob, let me see if I got this right. You talk to people, some of whom you know, some of whom you don’t know, some of whom you have to get to know, and you tell them stories about these companies and these investment ideas and opportunities, and they send you money?”
“That’s what I do,” he says, with total sincerity.
With total sincerity, I announce, “I can do that.” Just for emphasis, I add, “Yep, I can do that. And you know what? I want to do that!”
Laughing, whether he believes I can or not, Bob offers to introduce me to some branch managers at the different brokerage firms in town. The fact that I haven’t been to college is a liability, he admits. But he also tells me that there are training programs at these various companies for which I could qualify, even without a degree, and receive training in every aspect of the job—from the fundamentals of investment to financial planning and the full spectrum of economics and high finance—while I’m studying for the licensing exam. But in order to be hired on full-time—to do what he’s doing—I have to be licensed.
Done, I thought. Chris Gardner, stockbroker. This was where I was supposed to be. Period. Despite the logistical nightmare that ensued, I knew from that lunch forward that it would be worth it. Geography became my first major obstacle. When Bob started setting meetings up for me, most of them were scattered across the financial district in downtown San Francisco, all of the meetings during the nine-to-five prime time of the working day. No early breakfasts and no meet-and-greets for drinks. Since my sales calls for Van Waters and Rogers were mostly all down in the Valley, also during the nine-to-five working day, that meant either being late or missing meetings that my pen-wielding boss Patrick was scheduling for me.
Most of my interviews were at the larger firms with training programs, like Merrill Lynch, Paine Webber, E. F. Hutton, Dean Witter, and Smith Barney, companies where Bob knew the branch managers. If there was any possibility that the hoops I had to jump through were going to discourage me, that was eliminated the moment I stepped foot in the first brokerage firm I visited. Talk about being turned out! One hit and I was hooked. It was something in the air that was instantly invigorating.
Sitting there waiting for my interview, I could feel my adrenaline pumping, like a contact high, just from watching all the activity that was happening simultaneously: phones ringing, ticker tape running, stockbrokers hollering out orders and transactions and stamping time clocks. It was all at once like visiting a foreign country and like coming home.
The impact was exactly what I felt the first time I heard Miles Davis and saw how his music could totally change the mood of everyone hearing it. The trading room had a similar kind of power. It was a nerve center, hooked into the doings and happenings of millions of other people all over the world. What a rush! Some rushes came and went; this didn’t dissipate. This was sustained intensity.
Waiting for the appointment that day didn’t bother me because the more I absorbed what was going on, the more certain I became that I could do this. There weren’t any other black guys in the office, or at least not any that I could see. But that didn’t alter my confidence. Not when there was a chance to make $80,000 a month!
Of course, I may have been naive about that being the going rate for most stockbrokers. Still, it was part of what had fired me up. Momma had told me that if I wanted to make a million dollars, I could. Eighty grand a month times twelve, with some overtime and bonuses thrown in—I figured it was only a matter of time and I’d be making that million in a year! Again, if Bob Bridges could do it, so could I.
Now that I had found the vehicle and venue to do what I believed I could do, it was only a matter of getting one person at one of the firms with a training program to agree with me. That wasn’t so easy. Interview after interview, the answers varied, but they all translated to no. N.O. And with every no, as a parting gift, I invariably spotted the ubiquitous pee yellow parking ticket under the windshield wiper when I dashed out to my car. Another fifteen to twenty-five bucks that I didn’t have, another reminder that I’d have to take time off from work one day and go to court to plead my case to have the tickets reduced or cleared. Still, I wasn’t going to give up.
Racism wasn’t the main issue, although it was a part of it. My understanding eventually about why I kept getting turned down was that it was “place-ism.” The questions boiled down to connection, placement. What was my connection to the market? What was my connection to my peers, since I never went to college? My résumé showed lots of experience, but the objections piled up about what wasn’t there. You’re not from a politically connected family. You’ve got no money of your own. Who’s going to do business with you? What’s your connection to the money?
Place-ism. It made sense. But I just kept telling myself, I know I can do this.
At the San Francisco office of Dean Witter, a friendly broker named Marty made himself available to me. He was someone to whom I could turn for advice now and then, even if I didn’t have an appointment. When he referred me to the Oakland office of Dean Witter, I assumed it was because I was black, even though when I got to that office, set in a mainly black section of town, there were no other employees of color to be seen. By that point, nothing mattered but getting in their training program. It had been a few months, and no one had given me any indication of interest, while I was starting to really jeopardize the job that I did have, with the Pen Guy on my back. The reality was that I was getting tight, and with that in mind I marched into the Oakland branch manager’s office prepared to close the deal, not to pitch myself but to ask: “When can I start?”
Under the heading of the worst job interview ever, I sat there in this cat’s office overlooking Lake Merritt, and as I was talking, he stared right over my shoulder, interrupting me to say, “Oh, that’s so interesting, a horse has jumped into Lake Merritt.”
I wanted to say, Fuck that horse. After all, Lake Merritt wasn’t deep, so the horse wasn’t in danger of drowning. But it was all too clear that he could have cared less about me. As professionally as I could, I stood and said, “Obviously, I’ve gotten you at a bad time, so why don’t we try and do this again at a later date?”
He agreed, and I excused myself, only to gallop horselike out to my car, pluck the parking violation ticket off the windshield, and haul ass down to the Valley, where I was supposed to be picking up Patrick to go call on an account. In my haste, I forgot to hide the pile of annual reports I’d been amassing from these stockbrokerages—Dean Witter, Paine Webber, EF Hutton—that was sitting on my front passenger seat.
It was in that split second when Patrick started to get in the car that I realized they were there. With veiled panic, I went to grab the papers just as he sternly asked, “Gardner?”
“Yes…” I began, sure that I was about to be busted.
Patrick peered at me with suspicion, asking, “Are you going to open a brokerage account?”
“Oh, yeah…” I answered, trying to look really cool, feeling relieved. “Yeah, I’m thinking about opening up an account.”
But then, just to show he didn’t quite buy it, he gave me a funny look and a click of his pen. In the days that followed, Patrick started to check up on me more closely. Though he didn’t actually know that I was interviewing with other companies, he was obviously beginning to suspect something, especially when he found out that I’d been canceling appointments and showing up late for others.
To make matters more stressful, Jackie had been hinting that I was fooling myself into thinking I could make it on Wall Street. Her point of view, valid enough, was: “Well, most of the guys there in that business, don’t they have MBAs?”
No matter how many times I explained about the training programs and that you didn’t always have to have a master’s degree, she had no evidence that was true. Her friend at this firm had his MBA, and her friend’s husband at that firm had his MBA. “Chris, you don’t even have a bachelor’s. Don’t you have to have some kind of degree to work in that industry?”
It was the credentials argument all over again: “You ain’t got the papers.” This from the woman with whom I was living, and the mother of my son.
You watch, I kept promising. I’m going to do this. I saw it, tasted it, smelled it. Even so, with money tighter than it had been in a long time, the Irish midget waiting to nail me, and Jackie worried, I knew something had to give.
Just when I thought I had exhausted all my options, I had a follow-up interview at E. F. Hutton: the culmination of several conversations was that the branch manager did not say no. He said, “We’ll give you a shot.” Walking me to the door, he shook my hand and told me that he’d see me two weeks later, at seven o’clock in the morning, to start the training program.
I could have tap-danced out of his office, Gene Kelly style, into the San Francisco midsummer rain. Practically on wings, I kissed the parking ticket left on the car and called it lucky, promising myself to finally take a day off to go to court and take care of all the tickets. At long last, the validation that I wasn’t crazy was here! My mental bank account started ringing up my stockbroker commissions.
Though I intended to close up some Van Waters and Rogers pending sales over the next two weeks, there was a slight wrinkle that turned up a few days later when Patrick announced, “Gardner, we don’t think this is working out. You don’t seem to be making any progress. We’re trying to grow this territory, and you’re just not cutting it.”
Relieved, I admitted that the feeling was mutual and that I had other opportunities lining up that I wanted to pursue. Big mistake. The minute I said that, even before I could wrap up diplomatically, Patrick cut me off with a click and prepared to hurry me out. Just to clarify, I asked if this was a two weeks’ notice, and Patrick explained that we were terminating our arrangement then and there. They would mail me the check.
Beautiful. A perfect plan: go home, wait the two weeks, start collecting unemployment, spend some time with the family, then head off to Wall Street, where I’m going to make more money than even Bob Russell, not to mention Patrick.
When what I thought was my severance check arrived but turned out to be a reduced amount for time I’d already worked, I learned that because I had “quit,” there was no money for the two weeks that I would have worked and also no unemployment. That was a drag, but since I planned on conquering the stock market soon, I didn’t sweat it.
In an experience to be filed under the heading of “best-laid plans of mice and men,” after enjoying those two weeks—during which I don’t get around to taking care of the parking tickets—to make a good impression I show up thirty minutes early on the appointed Monday morning and no one seems to know who I am.
Surprised at the lack of organization, I ask for my new boss, who is also the branch manager, the guy who hired me, the person who told me, “We’ll give you a shot.”
Oh, says one of the brokers, he was fired on Friday.
Standing there at the reception desk, for the first time as an adult I become conscious of the strength of my own sphincter muscle. To some, this could be a cause for irony, even humor. Not for me. There is not one iota of humor in me as I freak out, exiting the building to see that it’s pouring rain but not bothering to use my umbrella. How could this have happened? The job that I left my other job for doesn’t exist. I got no income. I’m having beefs with my woman. What the hell am I going to do? I don’t know.
What I do know in the hours and days that follow is that nothing puts more stress on a relationship between a man and a woman than if the man has no job. At least, in the world I come from and inhabit, that’s so. A man without a job, as far as my upbringing taught me, is no man at all. Any man that was a man had to take care of and provide for his family. Even old drunk-ass Freddie basically went to work every day. So it was unacceptable for me to wake up in the morning and not have anywhere to go to work—after being so sure that I was on the way to Wall Street and knowing that it was my responsibility because I made the decision to do what I did. I could only imagine how Jackie was going to take it.
Later I would refer to what happened next as a series of incidents and circumstances that taken all together might be seen as the perfect example of Murphy’s Law. Complicating those principles was the crumbling foundation of my relationship with Jackie. When I first came home to tell her what had happened, she said absolutely nothing. What could she say? “Sorry, old chap, hang in there,” but she didn’t. We had no savings, no income, only bills. Not anything extravagant, just your normal run-of-the-mill living bills: food, rent, car note, day care, Pampers.
My first order of business was bringing in some bucks, immediately. Returning to some of the odd jobs I’d done when I was supplementing my salary at the VA, that same day I made fifty bucks painting houses all day for a friend in the contracting business. Fine. That meant we were going to eat that day and pay the gas bill. The next day my buddy hired me to work on a roofing job, and the next day I cleaned out a basement, and the day after that I did yard work. Whatever work I could scrounge up, I did it, not joyfully, not with expertise, but willingly.
This was, in my mind, a lousy setback, an unfortunate rut in the road. But it wasn’t the end of the ride by any means. In fact, while I worked those jobs, all I could think about was getting back on track, finding that open door, that one break that would pan out.
In the midst of money arguments and increasing daily tension at home, all the while that I was painting houses, junking, and mowing lawns a semblance of a strategy emerged. The one remaining possibility that I had going was over at Dean Witter, where they hadn’t said yes but hadn’t said a final no. My challenge was overcoming the placement argument: what was my connection to the business, my experience? A bigger challenge was having to explain that I was currently unemployed, after having been dropped by my last sales job. My thought was that if I could get someone to vouch for me, someone like maybe Joe Dutton, an African American entrepreneur in the high-tech field I’d met at a business seminar, that could make a huge difference.
When I called Joe to ask him for the favor, he was happy to help a brother. With that, I was able to set up the interview at Dean Witter. If they told me no this time, I wasn’t sure what I’d do after that, so the interview loomed as though my life depended on it.
Later I would wonder how different things would have turned out if the first training program had gone forward or the guy who hired me hadn’t been fired. Would that have changed the turbulent dynamic in my household? The lack of money made everything worse, but there were other problems. In Jackie’s view, my smoking weed to take the edge off was intolerable, as were my sometimes loud and critical comments. In my view, she had no confidence in me, which was infuriating. And my gut instinct warned me that she was capable of using Christopher to retaliate against me.
The showdown came on a Thursday night after we heard the news that my friend Latrell’s little boy Sebastian had been killed on the street when he was playing on his tricycle and a car hit him. It wasn’t what we were arguing about, but the tragic news compounded our emotional state when we began to bare all our complaints in an epic verbal argument that was so exhausting, we finally both fell sleep without any resolution. On Friday midmorning, the minute our feet hit the floor, everything picks up where it left off.
When she starts getting dressed to leave, an indication to me that because I’m not going anywhere I need to get Christopher dressed and over to day care, where we have no money to pay for his care but need to keep him so we don’t lose our place when we get the work, I panic. Moving quickly, Jackie heads out the front door, and I follow her out, demanding to know, “Where are you going? We gotta work this out, and you ain’t going nowhere until we do!”
Refusing to acknowledge me, she starts down the steps and I run after her and attempt to take her by the hands and turn her toward me. As she pulls away, I grab her by both wrists and she pulls back again, trying to get away. Upset that I’ve stooped so low, I release my grip and let go, only to watch her fall back into the rosebushes.
I watch her stand up, brush herself off, looking slightly scratched, and as I start to swallow my damn pride to apologize, Jackie seethes, “You’re getting the fuck out of here.”
Now I’m back in the fight. “No, I ain’t. I’m not going nowhere.” Seething myself, I slam the door and go back into the house to get Christopher into his bath.
What follows is a series of events that spiral meteorically out of control, resulting in legal complications that to this day remain ambiguous—due to Jackie’s ultimate decision not to press charges over the rosebush incident. Initially, however, it was apparent that was what she intended to do, when some ten minutes after she split, there was a knock at the front door and, with Christopher wrapped in a towel and in my arms, I open it to find two young Berkeley police officers, in uniform, on my doorstep. Behind them, on the sidewalk, is Jackie.
One of the officers asks, “Are you Chris Gardner?”
“Yes,” I answer, with a shrug. Not following.
The second cop explains, “We have a complaint from the woman who lives here. She said you beat her.”
What? “No, I didn’t beat her,” I say, adamantly.
The first cop asks how she happened to have scratches on her body, so I point to the rosebushes, explaining how she fell. But the second cop says, “No, sir, she said you beat her, and the State of California treats domestic violence as a serious offense.”
Just as I’m about to explode over the fact that I know domestic violence is a serious offense and that I know what a woman who’s been beaten looks like and how I would turn myself in to the police before I committed that crime, I watch the first cop walk over to my car and write down my plate number.
After he verifies that it is my car, the two announce that they’re taking me in to the police station.
When I object, saying, “No, I gotta get my baby ready and take him to day care,” they announce that they will hand the baby over to his mother and she can take care of that. In shock, I helplessly watch as they hand my swaddled son to Jackie and watch her carry him inside the house, closing the door without a glance in my direction. In the meantime, I am handcuffed and put in the backseat of the police car.
In a state of total disbelief, I cuss under my breath at Jackie the whole way to the station. Whatever I’d done to deserve her resentment, I could accept responsibility, but the further we drive away from Christopher the more I start to lose it. Making matters worse, I learn next that besides the possibility of battery charges, I am definitely being charged with owing $1,200 of unpaid parking tickets. Now I go out of my mind, my anger giving way to fear and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Those two demons have lurked in the wings whenever circumstances have spun out of control and have suddenly emerged centerstage.
After they book and fingerprint me, I’m led to a holding cell where I’m informed that Jackie’s complaint isn’t the cause—since if it was just that I could sign myself out. But unless I can pay the parking tickets, I have to plead my case to a judge. This is where the screw gets turned, as I wait to be taken into court. But it’s Friday. Soon it’s Friday afternoon. After waiting and pacing in my holding cell, I see one of the desk guys heading back my way and listen as he explains, “Oh, about the parking tickets. The judge says it’s too late today to do anything about this. He’ll see you on Monday.” He pauses, then adds, “You have to stay here. You can’t leave until you see the judge.”
“ARE YOU FUCKING TELLING ME I HAVE TO WAIT IN JAIL UNTIL MONDAY TO SEE THE JUDGE?”
Like I’ve offended him personally, the desk guy says, “You owe the State of California money, and while we’ve got you here we’re going to get this resolved.”
The dictates of Murphy’s Law demand that things get worse. And they do immediately as I’m escorted now to another cell and I see that they’ve put me in with three of the meanest, ugliest, freakiest motherfuckers I’ve ever seen in my life: a murderer, a rapist, and an arsonist. And now I’m in here on parking tickets? With heavy-duty flashbacks to the only other time I was put in jail, for stealing pants at the Discount Center, and was ridiculed for reading my books, I’m not saying a word as I listen to everybody taking turns telling their little jailhouse story and why they’re in here. Of course, the first thing I learn, a lesson soon to be reinforced by other convicts, is that nobody did the crime for which they’re serving time. It’s all a case of mistaken identity or somebody who didn’t tell the truth. Each of these badasses says the same four words: “I didn’t do it.”
In unison they then turn their thick necks slowly toward me, leering my way, asking at the same time why I’m in here. Not about to admit that I’m in jail on parking tickets, I reach down to my lowest vocal register and squint up my eyes menacingly as I say, “I’m in here for attempted murder, and I will try it again, all right?” To establish my turf, I point to where I’m going to sleep and let them know, “And that’s my bunk over there.”
I’m jet black, mad as hell, and bigger than anybody there. My ruse works so well that I am able to obtain the most important coin of the realm for anyone incarcerated: cigarettes.
Ironically, I had started smoking back in the Navy while working on long night shifts in the hospital. By this point, I’ve quit because I can’t afford it, but apparently a weekend in the slammer is going to get me back on the habit again. Smoking is far preferable to the stale bologna sandwiches and cold coffee we’re served over the course of the longest, most excruciating weekend of my life.
Monday morning can’t come fast enough. When it does and I’m standing before the judge, he barely looks up from his paperwork as he says, “Mr. Gardner, you owe the state of California $1,200. How do you want to settle this?”
He asks if I’m working, and I shake my head no. He asks if I can pay, and I again shake my head no.
For the first time in this ordeal, more than fear and anger, I feel unbelievably sad as I grapple with the reality of these circumstances. “I don’t have the money,” I mutter, at my wit’s end.
“Well, Mr. Gardner, you give me no choice but to sentence you to ten days at Santa Rita.” With a bang of his gavel, he calls out, “Next case!”
A guard appears instantly and chains me up, ushers me out of court, marches me to a bus that drives out to the boonies of the heat-trapped northern California Central Valley to the overcrowded, decrepit county prison, Santa Rita, where the current most famous convict is the crazy Mexican ax murderer Juan Corona. In shock, I look around at the pit bulls sitting next to me on the bus. My crime? Not the alleged battery, which was Jackie’s initial complaint, and about which it was still unclear that she would go forward, requiring still more legal wrangling. But the parking tickets? There’s no trial. They are a fact, proven documents of my disregard for the law because I was trying to get ahead in the world. If you can’t pay, you’ve got to stay. Period. The end. For ten days.
Where is my attorney? Everybody else has a public defender, somebody. That’s it, I think. My recourse, my way out. They didn’t give me an attorney. So as they’re letting me off the bus, I try to explain to the sympathetic-looking African American driver of the bus that he needs to take me back to court. Or maybe, I actually hope, he’ll let me go. Well, the second I step out of line, prison guards start jerking the chain, dragging me right back in line.
If there was anything that helped me survive the dehumanizing effect of incarceration, it was my time in the military. It wasn’t just the prison uniform of orange PJs and clear jelly sandals, it was the total control and regimentation, the diet consisting of more unpalatable bologna and nasty coffee, and the acclimation to ovenlike conditions. There were no Pacific Ocean breezes, no Santa Anas. Hot. Hot. Hot. It was a perfect recipe for me to get into an argument with one of the guards when I realized that my new contact lenses were hardening in my eyes like fish scales since there was no saline solution to be found. Convinced I was going to go blind, I demanded to see a doctor, and when the guard wouldn’t respond, I muttered something brilliant like, “Fuck you.”
That was rewarded with a fast trip to isolation, what turned out to be a brick hut without a roof, the size of a bathroom, not even large enough to lie down in, what they called “the hot box,” where I was alone, suddenly missing the same prison conversations that had been driving me crazy earlier. Good thing I’d been talking to myself most of my life, as I began a two-way conversation by saying out loud, “Oh, man, this done gone from bad to worse, bro.”
“No shit, man,” I commiserated as best I could.
“So why they say they got to cool you off in the hot box? That’s some kind of an oxymoron.” With the sun baking down, it was demonically hot. Then again, it could rain, and there would be nothing to do but get wet.
When I ran out of small talk to make with myself, I started singing, then eventually just made noise, all in an effort to block out the fear: How did this happen? What was going to happen now?
The hot box cooled me off only to the extent that I tried to reasonably request a hearing to get to the funeral for Sebastian, knowing what it would mean to Latrell. But after quietly and calmly making my requests, I was turned down.
After serving my ten days, in lieu of paying the parking tickets, they were no longer an issue. Now, as I wearily awaited transfer back to the Berkeley jailhouse where I could have my hearing to find out if there was a charge from Jackie’s complaint, I faced what I considered the biggest problem of this whole ordeal. The interview at Dean Witter was scheduled for the next morning. All those months and months of effort had come down to my last shot with the fellow who could say yay or nay to my future as a stockbroker. But upon arriving at the Berkeley jailhouse, I learned that I couldn’t see the judge until the next morning. What to do? How could I show up at Dean Witter when I was still in jail?
The answer came in the form of a guard, a Latino brother, who must have gotten up on the right side of the bed that morning and who agreed to let me make a phone call to try to reschedule my meeting. Perhaps it was my begging. Perhaps it was my explaining that I had a real chance at this job, and I really needed it.
Whatever the reason was, he dialed the number and handed me the receiver through the bars into the cell. There I was, behind bars, calling Mr. Albanese at Dean Witter. When he answered, I greeted him warmly, with a “Hello, Mr. Albanese? This is Chris Gardner, how’re you doing?”
“Fine,” he said.
I went for it: “I’ve got a meeting with you tomorrow, but something’s come up. I need to know if I can reschedule for the following day?”
Heaven smiled on me as he replied, “Fine, no problem. Be here at six-thirty in the morning.”
Thank you, Lord, I prayed right in front of the guard. Mr. Albanese had said he was looking forward to meeting me. I told him that I’d see him the day after next.
My legal ordeal with Jackie continued the next morning when we had to meet in court. It was my intention to take the high road, apologize, and find a fair way of sharing equal responsibility for taking care of Christopher. Obviously, our relationship was over. My plan was to head home, get my stuff, and find a place to stay. But Jackie came armed with a desire to punish me, apparently, which resulted in a subsequent court date that was set for several weeks later. When I watched her leave that day, despite what I perceived as an icy cold demeanor on her part, I still had the hope such a court meeting wouldn’t be necessary.
My other comfort was the prospect that lay ahead, the possibility that the interview would be the open door to my future. By the time I hit the train heading back to our house, where I planned on packing up fast, spending some time playing with Christopher and figuring out how I could have him come stay with me, wherever I landed next, I was cheered up enough that I was willing to dismiss a gut instinct about how Jackie behaved toward me that day—as if there was another shoe that was going to drop. But after what she’d already put me through, that didn’t seem plausible, so I let it go.
Nothing was out of the ordinary as I walked down the path to the house and up the steps to the front door. It was only when I glanced at the window that it struck me as odd that there were no curtains there. Hmmm. What was wrong with this picture? The bombshell exploded when I peered inside the window and saw that the house was empty. Bare. No Jackie. No Christopher. No furniture, stereo, pots and pans, clothes. No car on the street. The locks had been changed.
In a frantic, anguished daze, I stumbled down the sidewalk, approaching anyone who’d talk to me. “Where’s my son?” I asked neighbors and strangers alike. “Where’s Jackie?”
One woman, her close friend and a semi-landlord, wouldn’t tell me anything. “You shouldn’t have beat her,” she scolded. “Don’t ask me, ’cause I don’t know nothing.”
Obviously she knew everything. In fact, I was doubly mortified that everyone seemed to know what had happened except for me. It was too late to defend myself against whatever Jackie had said about me. All that mattered was that Jackie and Christopher had seemingly fallen off the face of the earth and I had to find them.
And first I had to find somewhere to sleep that night, and I had to go to the job interview the next morning in bellbottom blue jeans, T-shirt, maroon Members Only jacket (which matched the sporty maroon car I used to have), and the paint-speckled Adidas sneakers that had become my work shoes for odd jobs—the same outfit I’d gone to jail in and spent most of the time wearing, other than the prison orange PJs and jellies.
Days after she had buried her son, a subdued Latrell Hammonds took my phone call and said it was no problem for me to come over, wash my clothes there, and stay on her couch that night. Falling to sleep was difficult, especially as it came over me that these days and nights ever since the police drove me to the station had marked the first time in his life that I had been physically separated from Christopher. When I did finally give in to sleep, I didn’t dream at all as the conscious question rammed insistently all night long in my brain: Where is my son?