And The One He Wanted Dead

Amber was cool, slim, and fiery and a favorite among those of us who spoke of such things during breaks in the action, although Starlita was easily the most exotic; she looked like a Mexican princess dropped into a southern murder trial. Michelle was the pretty little girl next door. Monique was innocently cute. Trisha, Rae’s current squeeze, was . well, a tad young looking. But she was pretty enough for you to understand why Rae would nod at her each day when, sandwiched by grim bailiffs, he left the courtroom nodding as if to say, Hey, babe, don’t worry: you’re the one now. And I swear, she believed it.

As the weeks passed and the women came and went, I would look over at Rae and stare at his profile, which never changed, because Rae never changed expressions, even during the closing argument, when the lead prosecutor played the 911 tape of Cherica Adams’s moans: sounds from beyond the grave, all sputtering utterances, atonal syllables so skin crawling that throughout the courtroom shoulders heaved in sobs. But Rae’s face flinched not at all. Animated and emotional and expressive as the women were weaving and looping their tales of his goodness and his charity Rae remained a well tailored sphinx.

And so, day in, day out, I’d ask myself a question. Not what they all saw in him; the first look at Rae explained that: this baby face, the contours all smooth and rounded, the outward downslant of his eyebrows giving him this puppy dog swatted with a newspaper look. Girls loved to take care of Rae even before he became a millionaire. No, the question I kept asking myself was this: If Rae Carruth loved women so much, why did he keep threatening to have them killed? How, if he gathered women around him like a cocoon, if he thrived on them and fed on them and drew sustenance from them, could a man get to a point in his life where he routinely considered disposing of them? And how could such a man wind up finding a home even flourishing in the National Football League?

Well, because he really didn’t like women at all. (He liked to fuck them, and he liked their attention, and he liked the idea of them, but he didn’t like them.) And because he was accustomed to violence. And because he was making a living in a league in which a man and his basest instincts are encouraged to run wild. Well, he was until recently, anyway; Rae doesn’t play football anymore. He’s in prison up in Nash County, where he won’t have to worry about women and women won’t have to worry about him, and as his crime swiftly seeps into the background noise of the culture, we’re already starting to act as if we didn’t have to worry about Rae Carruth anymore. As if the whole episode were an aberration.

Football is a violent sport, growing far more violent and mean and attitudinal every year, and it has been played by men who have traditionally been violent against their women. This has been the case since Jim Brown, the greatest running back ever to play the game, garnered the first of a half dozen charges of violence against women, ranging from spousal battery to rape to the sexual molestation of two teenage girls. Brown, who has never been convicted of a single charge, begat O. J., the second greatest running back, who, at this writing, continues to seek out Nicole’s true killers. O. J. begat Michael Irvin of the Dallas Cowboys, who, prior to one of his frequent cocaine sex bacchanals a few years back, cavity searched one of his girls a little too hard for the liking of her cop boyfriend, who then took out a hit on Irvin. It wasn’t just Irvin who dodged a bullet that time. It was the NFL, which retired Irvin with pomp and circumstance.

This year, of course, Super Bowl MVP and murder defendant Ray Lewis, who has twice been accused but not convicted of hitting women, commanded headlines and earned full forgiveness at the hands of a most understanding media machine. Wearing a Giants uniform in the same Super Bowl was Christian Peter, a man accused of so many crimes against women in college that public outcry forced the Patriots to drop him within days of drafting him in 1996. Lost in the shuffle but not forgotten, Corey Dillon and Mustafah Muhammad and Denard Walker contributed, each in his own way, to this long standing tradition. On the day he ran for a record 278 yards, Cincinnati’s Dillon, now arguably the game’s best running back, was facing charges of striking his wife; after the season, he plea bargained to avoid trial. His uniform was sent to the Hall of Fame, where it now keeps company with the memorabilia of Brown and Simpson. As for Walker, he played for Tennessee last year after being convicted of hitting the mother of his son. He then declared himself a free agent and was courted by several teams until the Denver Broncos anted up a cool $26 million. Muhammad, a cornerback with Indianapolis, led his team into the playoffs last year after being convicted of hitting his wife. And let’s not forget the domestic assault conviction of Detroit’s Mario Bates or former Packer Mark Chmura’s troubles surrounding his dalliance with his seventeen year old baby sitter.

Ultimately, the league refused to ban Ray Lewis and his brutal peers because it needed them on the playing field, and that mandate speaks more loudly than a lecture about good citizenship especially to a remarkably immature kid like Rae. After all, little boys don’t like little girls, and what was Rae Carruth other than an overgrown boy, a bundle of muscle and fiber jerry rigged to play a game? Of course, most kids grow out of that stuff. It’s the rare one who is allowed to harbor his playground sexism until it blossoms into monstrosity.

He came from the place so many seem to come from; only the details vary from kid to kid. Rae didn’t grow up with his biological father. As a child, Rae split time among several houses, including his mother’s, set in a neighborhood of squalor and dismay on the south side of Sacramento on an avenue where vandals routinely set cars aflame and her sister’s place in a nicer part of town, absent the bars on the windows. Even then, even before he was showered with privilege, Theodry worried about the sharks and the vultures preying on her son, "the guppy."

This is how she describes him. This is why she describes herself as "the piranha" when it comes to protecting her son. To know Rae Carruth and to understand the course he chose to take, to divine the nature of his particular rebellion because isn’t that what all our adolescent contrarinesses are? rebellion against what was lacquered onto us beforehand? you must first know Theodry Carruth. There is a hardness and a strength to her, and they seem like the same thing; she seizes the space she is in and commands it from on high.

Theodry Carruth’s vigilance over her only son’s upbringing paid off at least in the short run: Rae’s grades at Valley High School were solid, he stayed out of trouble, and big colleges came calling. In 1992 Rae went off to the University of Colorado. Back on the infernal block on Parker Avenue, Theodry Carruth turned one of the rooms into a miniature shrine where family and friends gathered to sit in mock stadium chairs and watch Rae’s games from Boulder. It was called the Rae of Hope room. Neighborhood kids would set it on fire a few years later.

At Colorado, Rae’s coach Bill McCartney was a demagogue. On the field, McCartney was known for teams that played hard and thuggishly. Off the field, he was known for the conversation he’d had with God. One day God told McCartney to found the Promise Keepers. Soon thereafter, at McCartney’s urgings, tens of thousands of fathers and husbands took to gathering in football stadiums across the land to beat their chests and flagellate their souls and collectively recommit to their gender. The subtext of the Promise Keepers was a patently sexist one, of course: portraying women as worthy beings but regarding them, ultimately, as secondary, as biblical chattel.

But beneath the roar of McCartney’s fire and brimstone, his daughter was getting pregnant by two different football players in four and a half years the first, the star
besthairbuy facebook quarterback, wanted her to abort the fetus; the second sired his child during Rae’s freshman year. This only proved that when you climb too high in the pulpit, it’s easy to ignore the funky stuff going on under your nose. Especially if you’re a member of the sinning crowd: McCarthey himself quit on his Colorado contract after Rae’s third autumn in Boulder. Broke his promise, if you will.

Rae’s college athletic achievements were legendary in one game alone, he had seven receptions for 222 yards and three touchdowns. In 1997 he entered the hallowed fraternity of first round draft picks under the watchful wink of the NFL. The Carolina Panthers took him as their first selection, number twenty seven overall. Like all rookies, he would be instructed on how to behave. But like his first round peers, he knew what had actually just happened: he’d been ushered into a land of entitlement, where the only promise he’d really be held to was the promise he’d shown thus far on the playing field.

He immediately signed it over to his seventeen year old girlfriend in Boulder, Amber Turner, and told her to go ahead and set up house for them in Charlotte. Amber was a stylish and precocious beauty, a high school senior. (Even as a fifth year college senior, Rae’s tastes still tended toward postadolescence.) His girlfriend in high school, Michelle, had been a sophomore when he was a senior, and she’d just turned eighteen when Rae got her pregnant on a visit back home from college. He’d waffled about whether or not to have the baby from day to day. Michelle wasn’t surprised at his indecision. She says she knew him as a man of many moods. He could be a real joker, or he could be a cipher, or he could even be, in the dark moments, the Devil himself.

In the center of the place, beyond the sunken bar, is the main stage. But the dancers are not the only attraction; above the stage looms a huge television screen, like Oz’s mask, eternally tuned to ESPN, so that the allure of even the most seductive sirens competes with huge images of men being tackled and talking heads blathering about blitzes. In a very real sense, the women at the Men’s Club are just another product, with this exception: there is nothing real about them. The tattoos on the soft planes south of the hipbones are frosted over with pancake makeup. Their names are as false as their chests.
facebook besthairbuy They are stage actors. They are not meant to be the stuff of reality.

Despite a terrific rookie season on the field Rae earned a starting position at wide receiver and finished with an impressive forty four receptions Rae’s home life soon proved rocky. Amber went home after that first season. He found her too possessive: she was jealous of all his other female friends. And there would be many female friends. There was Starlita, whom Rae had so charmed in a barbershop one day that before she’d finished having her hair done, Rae had taken her young son down the street for pizza. Soon Starlita thought Rae was the best thing in Jacobe’s life. Rae was worried that Starlita was turning her son into a mama’s boy. (Rae always harped on that. And what was Rae if not a mama’s boy?) There was Fonda Bryant, who kept a picture of her son on her desk at a radio station Rae visited one day, and before long the boy was spending nights at Rae’s. Rae was exactly what the boy needed; Rae was firm about staying away from alcohol and drugs, firm about making sure the boy did his homework. When they played, Fonda couldn’t tell who was the kid and who was the adult.

And yet Rae hardly ever visited his own child. He gave Michelle grief about breast feeding the kid and hugging him so much he worried she was making Little Rae soft. So Michelle sued him for child support: a judge granted her $5,500 a month. She offered to lessen it if Rae would come home and visit more. He promised. He didn’t. In the meantime, Amber went back to Charlotte for a quick visit. She got pregnant. As Rae’s responsibilities and missteps threatened to collide, as his little kid appetites met his stunted ability to cope with adversity, he began to consider a solution both novel and bizarre on the surface but certainly logical in the context of a man who regards his women as disposable and dispensable: any time he’d get a woman pregnant, he’d threaten her with death.

Cherica Adams worked in the Men’s Club boutique. She also danced under an alias at a different bar over on the stages of the Diamond Club, a slightly more frayed entry in the topless club genre, a place where a dancer is likely to be visiting from her home club in Buffalo for the long weekend, to pick up a couple of bucks, leaving the two year old back with her grandmother. Cherica Adams was a very attractive, baby faced young woman who moved with a glittery crowd and felt equally at home backstage at a Master P concert or courtside at the 1998 NBA All Star Game in Madison Square Garden, where several players, including Shaquille O’Neal, came by to say hello to her.

He was taking grief from teammates and friends about letting a stripper use him, about her boasting all over town that she was carrying Rae Carruth’s baby and wasn’t going to have to work anymore. By now Rae’s circle of male friends had expanded. Tired of the slick jocks in the Panthers’ locker room, he was glad to finally meet some people who were real. This new coterie included a man named Michael Kennedy, who had dealt crack, and a man named Van Brett Watkins, who had once set a man on fire in the joint and stabbed his own brother. Watkins, too, had unusual ways of showing love to his women. He’d once held a meat cleaver to his wife’s face.

Frequently injured, no longer a starter, Rae had by now become that singularly sorry football phenomenon: a first round draft pick gone bust. Taxes and agents had taken half the bonus. He’d invested in a car title loan scam that had promised the trappings of easy money and lost his money. He’d hired former wide receiver Tank Black, later indicted on fraud charges, to manage his money. He’d signed a contract on a new house, but he’d had to pull out when he couldn’t get the financing, and the owners had sued him.

They’d have heard Rae’s car pull forward and disappear up Rea Road, and Kennedy making a U turn to go the other way, and Cherica’s BMW weaving down a side street until it crawled to a stop on someone’s lawn and she bled out her life onto the front seat. They’d have heard the moans. They did hear the moans, in fact; the woman who lives in the house where Cherica ended up that night told me she’d never forget the moans. But she wouldn’t give me her name, and she wouldn’t open the door more than a few inches, just far enough to flick out her cigarette ashes.

The creak of the knee braces Rae wore beneath his pants to keep him from fleeing was the only sound in the courtroom when he was led in to hear the verdicts, one day shy of his twenty seventh birthday. Out the smoked windows in the back of the courtroom, black clouds huddled on command and great Gothic spills of water tumbled out of the Southern sky as Judge Charles Lamm pronounced the verdict of a jury of Rae’s peers: guilty of three of four counts, including conspiracy to commit murder. Innocent of first degree murder.