Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (10 page)

“They saying you got Troy killed,” Troy's brother Tony told her.

“Who saying that?” she asked.

“Troy's wife. You knew he was married, didn't you?”

“Excuse me. Troy was married?”

Crystal had no idea that Troy had a wife and two daughters, living in another house he owned. Her mood changed from grief to anger. “I felt dissed and cheated,” she says. “Troy never gave me any suspicions he was married and had two daughters other than the one what lived with him, because he always beeped me right back, we spent a night in his room at his mother's house, and he showed me off in front of all his friends. We were supposed to go to Jamaica together before Christmas. I didn't tell him I was living in an apartment paid for by the government, and I ain't ask him what he did when I wasn't with him.”

Crystal, wearing the wig, went to Troy's wake early on Friday morning, before either the killers or members of the family were likely to be there. She had spent the night with Lonnie, a nineteen-year-old drug dealer who had been in prison. After Lonnie got out of prison, at the end of the summer, she had smoked reefer and had sex with him when she wasn't with Troy. Her fling with Lonnie was brief. “He acted childish, and I wasn't into babysitting,” she says. If Charissa hadn't been present when
Crystal learned that Troy was married, Crystal would have kept the news to herself, to avoid losing face with her wide circle of friends. On Monday, she went back to work.

C
rystal's social workers had known for years about her involvement with drug dealers, and had taken note of the expensive gifts they gave her. She had more gold jewelry than any of the other girls in the group home, and wore chains with a big Nefertiti pendant, a Nefertiti ring, half a dozen other chains and rings, and large gold shell earrings. Though many items were stolen from her at the group home and in two unsolved burglaries at the independent-living apartment, in which she lost not only much of her jewelry but also her son's name bracelet, there was always someone new to replace the valuables. The deaths of Diamond and Troy within three and a half months made the agency nervous. Perhaps Crystal wasn't dealing drugs, but she was associating with drug dealers, and the shots were getting too close. It was time for her to leave St. Christopher's. When Crystal's social worker paid a surprise visit to her apartment in November and found roaches in the ashtrays and wine coolers in the refrigerator, Crystal was told to find an apartment of her own immediately.

On December 5, 1990, Crystal Taylor moved out of the independent-living apartment and into a studio apartment in the basement of a one-family house in Hollis, Queens, fifteen
minutes away by car. She had been in St. Christopher's care for five years and eleven months. Her first post-foster-care apartment was small, dark, and drearily furnished. She had found it by buying a newspaper—Crystal has virtually no interest in the news and very rarely buys a paper—and scanning the real-estate ads. Lonnie had driven her around to look at apartments. The rent was five hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. The double bed sagged and smelled of mildew; water, not light, seeped into the place.

Crystal received a hundred-dollar discharge grant for clothing and a five-hundred-dollar discharge grant for furniture. She spent the five hundred dollars on a new double bed. She left St. Christopher's angry—she felt she had been hurried out instead of being allowed to stay until her twenty-first birthday, and she didn't like having to wait for her discharge grants until she produced receipts for her purchases—but she was also grateful. “If I hadn't been put in foster care, I'd have gone back to the Jeffersons',” she says. “Without the agency pushing me and keeping me thinking right, I'd have been a junior-high-school dropout. Me and Daquan would have had a couple of more kids before breaking up. I'd have stayed on drugs, and I'd probably be on welfare. I wouldn't be working for an advertising agency. I'd never have met Diamond. The staffs at St. Christopher's told me that if I had been fourteen in 1990 me and little Daquan would have gone home to the Jeffersons'. They say the system is getting more overloaded. My timing was right. Things happen for a reason. St. Christopher's gave me a second chance at life.”

C
rystal enjoyed smoking reefer, drinking liquor, and entertaining her male companions in her new apartment, without social workers arriving unannounced and pointing out how many agency rules she had broken, but by January 1st she missed St. Christopher's subsidies. She had previously been able to spend her take-home pay—about three hundred and twenty dollars every two weeks, without overtime—on additions to her stylish wardrobe. In the fall of 1990, she had cheerfully gone shopping after work, buying silk blouses, pricing Louis Vuitton wallets, putting leather jackets on layaway. After December, her earnings scarcely covered her rent, her phone bill, and her beeper bill. “I'm not shopping, that's the sadness in my life,” she observed to a friend. “There's nothing like having something else.”

On January 15th, Crystal received an upsetting piece of news. Little Daquan had told his teacher that Mrs. Hargrove hit him in the face with a stick. Crystal had visited her son regularly while he was in the Bronx but had slacked off after his return to the Hargroves', because she knew he was safe there, and because she was too busy running around with Troy and Jimbo and Star—other drug dealers she was seeing. Daquan Jefferson had not been visiting his son much, either. Crystal knew that Mrs. Hargrove might “chastise” Daquan but would never hit him. Since Mrs. Hargrove had all the foster children and
adopted children she was certified to have, she felt she could not jeopardize her situation as a foster parent, so she told Crystal to please fetch little Daquan in three days. Crystal believed that her son's lie was his way of getting his parents to pay some attention to him. In January of 1991, Daquan, six, went back to the Bronx to live with his father, his grandmother, and his teen-age cousins—the children of one of Daquan's brothers, who had used drugs and died of pneumonia.

I
n January, a week after her birthday, Crystal was introduced to Tarrant, a thirty-nine-year-old Bahamian who owned a grocery store in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, by an acquaintance who had once worked part time for him, off the books. Tarrant was busy in his store Mondays through Saturdays from about 10
A.M.
to 2 or 3
A.M.
and netted about a thousand dollars a week. He sold everything—bread and condoms, cigarettes and beer, milk and envelopes (three cents apiece). He smoked reefer, but he didn't drink much and didn't sell drugs. “He was too scared,” Crystal says. She wasn't taken by his looks. He had plain features and “he always needed a decent haircut and a shave.” His clothes were custom-made but unstylish; to Crystal it seemed that he could be mistaken for “a bum on a train.” She was attracted to Tarrant by what his money could buy her. He gave her a VCR two weeks after they met, as a belated twenty-first-birthday present. He bought her
a heater for her dank apartment, gave her a hundred dollars here and two hundred dollars there to have her hair done, to buy a dress, to pay some of her bills. He gave her groceries.

Crystal was not physically attracted to Tarrant, and for a few weeks she fended him off by saying she wasn't sexually active. When she finally had to go to bed with him, she got herself “really cheebered up” on marijuana beforehand. She knew she had to spend Sundays with him, when the store was closed, and although he was considerate—on his birthday, he took her to City Island to eat lobster, her favorite food—Crystal found him boring. He asked too many questions about things that she thought were self-evident. He called her at ten-thirty one night to ask her what she was doing. She said, “Getting ready to go to sleep. What the fuck do you think I'm doing? I have to be up at 4:30
A.M.
to get ready for work.” Tarrant bored Crystal more after he was robbed at gunpoint in his store one night in May. He lost about thirty-five hundred dollars and had less money to spend on her. When he didn't give her a television set that he had promised her as a Mother's Day present, she told him, “Mother's Day comes just once a year.” When he answered, “I'm backed up on my bills,” she said, “That sounds personal. I don't got nothing to do with that. Just give me mine.” She did entertain a few doubts about using him. “If you go to bed with a man for money and not pleasure, it's not good for the other part of you,” she says. Crystal got the TV set from Tarrant and started dating Stanley, a young man who had no money but was more fun to be with—for a while. Then she
started seeing Glenn, a young man who sold drugs on her block, where one house stood out for what it was—a crack house, to and from which dealers roared in their cars and on motorcycles day and night.

I
n July of 1991, Crystal contemplated a relaxing summer. Little Daquan was going to Savannah, Georgia, to stay with some of his father's relatives from early July until mid-August; she wouldn't have to make the trek to the Bronx for six weeks. Tarrant was going home to Nassau to visit his family for the first two weeks of August. She would be free to watch her twenty-five-inch Sharp TV with stereo, and be cooled by a fan Tarrant had recently provided, with Herb, a van driver she had met while riding with him as a passenger, or with Cyril, a subway-maintenance man she had met at a subway station, or with Glenn, who had “put some zest back in my life.”

Before Tarrant flew to Nassau, on August 1st, he gave Crystal five hundred and seventy-five dollars. Some of it was designated for little Daquan's return train fare from Savannah and some for her telephone and credit-card bills. Tarrant had also told Crystal to use some of the money for a deposit at the Jack La Lanne Health Spa near her office (she wanted to improve her stomach muscles), and said that after his return he would give her the money for the monthly fee. While Tarrant was away, she went to Jack La Lanne twice after work. She got
more exercise in bed. Over Friday and Saturday one week, she had to change her satin sheets (another gift from Tarrant) twice. By the time Tarrant returned, she was through with Cyril (“He treated me like a common slut”) and Herb (“He was too childish”) and was angry with Glenn, who had dropped out of sight a few days earlier.

By late August, Crystal was neglecting Tarrant for Marcel, an outside messenger she had met at work. “I never really knew what to say to Tarrant,” she says. “Marcel had no money, but I could be myself with him. We'd walk down Lexington Avenue and I'd laugh so hard the bones in my cheeks used to hurt, and he'd be laughing, too.”

On Sunday, September 8, 1991, at about 3
A.M.
, Crystal returned to Queens from the Bronx, where she had been shopping for school clothes for little Daquan and hanging out in a park with Marcel. As she and Marcel approached her apartment, she spotted Tarrant's van parked outside and told Marcel to turn around and go back up the block. Tarrant didn't see him, but he started to argue with her. She told him she was going into the house. He got out of the van and stormed into the apartment behind her. She took her sneakers off, and he kept arguing with her. “I'm getting out of here,” she said, and bent down to put her sneakers back on. “You ain't leaving out of here,” Tarrant said. “You don't love me, and I don't have nothing to live for right now. I might as well take you and me together.” As she was putting on her second sneaker, she heard four clicks.
She looked up and saw a 9-mm. pistol pointed at her head. It had malfunctioned. Tarrant set the gun down on the table, quickly pulled a smaller pistol out of his pocket—a .22-calibre—and aimed it at her head. Before he pulled the trigger, Crystal put her left hand up to her head—a reflex action. The smaller pistol was working—Crystal heard a loud pow and felt something strike her left hand. Tarrant got ready to pull the trigger again. Crystal grabbed him and cried, “Please don't, please don't!” He told her, “I got to kill you, because I shot you and you'll tell the police,” and he kept the gun pointed at her.

Crystal apologized for having hurt Tarrant—she hadn't telephoned him when he beeped her, she had pulled a pillow over her head when they were in bed. She said, “I love you, I love you, and let me show you something I just got for you.” She had bought Tarrant a card, and she took it out of her pocketbook. The words printed on the card were “I'm sorry for all the pain I've caused you.” Tarrant read it while still holding the .22-calibre pistol in his hand.

“I won't go to jail,” he said.

“I won't tell on you,” she answered. “I'll go to the pay phone up the street and tell the police I got robbed.”

Crystal walked out of the apartment toward the pay phone. Tarrant followed her in the van and parked it in front of another building. She called the police, and Tarrant drove away. When they arrived, she said she had been on her way home from a girlfriend's house and two men had jumped her in
the street. The police drove her to North Shore Hospital, on Long Island. Her reflex action probably saved her life. The bullet had lodged in a bone of her hand.

A surgeon operated on her hand on Sunday. Crystal spent the night in the hospital and was discharged on Monday. Her left hand was in a cast, and she couldn't do much for herself. She was also afraid to return to her apartment. A year earlier, shortly before Crystal settled into her basement studio in Hollis, Florence Drummond had moved into the first apartment she had had since 1982, when she was evicted from the sixth-floor walkup on Sheridan Avenue. During the past year, Crystal and Florence had seen each other often and had become good friends. They went to clubs together. Florence went to Tarrant's store to keep Crystal company during the one or two evenings a week that Tarrant expected her to be there to keep him company. A drug-rehabilitation program that Florence completed in 1990 had given her a second chance at life—a second chance to be a mother to her children. On Monday, September 9, 1991, Crystal left the hospital and went to live in Florence's apartment. It felt good to her to be going home.