In the World

by Richard Stratton

  Mailer and I had known each other and been friends for more than a decade by the time I was arrested. We owned a horse farm together in Maine that was ultimately seized by the government. Certainly, we were close; we remained in regular contact during the time I was a fugitive and after I was arrested. Next to my mother, Mailer was my most loyal prison visitor all the years I was locked up. And he welcomed me into his home when I was released. It was my choice based on personal convictions not to serve the government by creating false evidence and giving testimony against Mailer or anyone else.

  At my first trial in federal court in the District of Maine I presented a somewhat fallacious defense—not entirely bogus but a bit farfetched. I claimed that I was not a dope smuggler at all, not a criminal, but rather a writer, a journalist who was engaged in research on the illegal dope trade. This was half true. I was a writer before I was arrested. I had published short stories and some journalism. And, when I was twenty-one, I had been granted a writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where I first met and became friends with Mailer. At the time I was busted, I was writing magazine articles and doing research for a book on the worldwide cultivation and illegal traffic in cannabis.

  It was while on assignment for Rolling Stone to write an article on infamous Rochdale College in Toronto, a center for soft-drug distribution throughout North America, that I met and befriended iconic ­hippie godfather Robert “Rosie” Rowbotham. Rosie is a legendary character in the marijuana underground. The Bachman-Turner Overdrive song “Takin’ Care of Business” was inspired by Rosie. While at work on the Rolling Stone piece, I partnered with Rosie to import and distribute multiton loads of marijuana and hashish in the US and Canada. The market was there; it was booming, and the pot business paid better than journalism. I used to tell people that I supported my writing habit by smuggling pot.

  Ultimately, the sheer intensity of the outlaw marijuana business, and the intoxicating insanity of the outlaw lifestyle, came to dominate my days. I became a junkie, addicted not to dope but to the adrenaline rush I got from getting over on the Man. I wrote less and smuggled more and bigger loads of cannabis. As North America’s appetite for the illegal herb grew exponentially, and the business of importing marijuana and hashish continued to ramp up during the 1970s and into the 1980s, I became a full-time, 24–7 dedicated dope-smuggling outlaw.

  Yet always in the back of my mind there was the dormant commitment that once the craziness ended—however it ended, whether in a prison cell or as a fugitive in exile, as long as I was alive and still in possession of my faculties—I would use the experience to write about the global war on drugs, and, specifically, about our government’s ill-advised criminalization of cannabis. I became obsessed with the metaphoric implications of what I came to think of as a war on plants: a specific plant, Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica, and eventually the American-grown Cannabis Americana that has come to dominate the domestic market. There were stunning images on the nightly news: black helicopters descending into the lush green mountains of Northern California’s Emerald Triangle; paramilitary drug warriors dressed in black flak jackets, bulletproof vests, and dark-visored helmets to hide their faces and wielding assault weapons as they charged out of police choppers—to do what? Raid an encampment of enemy forces? Attack a heavily fortified criminal redoubt? No, these grown men, armed agents of the law, were there to uproot lovely, peaceful, verdant plants as they luxuriated in the sunshine. They were there to rip these plants from the bosom of Mother Earth.

  The story took me all over the world. I began by smuggling a few kilos of commercial weed across the Mexican border while still in college at Arizona State University. Later, I felt I needed to embed myself in the international illegal cannabis trade to fully understand it, to get to know the players, to visit the countries of origin and meet the growers in order to write about it knowingly. I came to appreciate that the government’s anticannabis effort is not about the dangers to one’s mental or physical health posed by consuming cannabis; rather it is about perpetuating the crime-control establishment. It is about law enforcement dominance encroaching upon the realm of private behavior and government control over how we alter our consciousness—indeed, how we think. And so resistance is tantamount to expressing personal freedom: the freedom that we as Americans are guaranteed by the Constitution to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Surely that must also include the right to alter our consciousness as we see fit so long as we are not harming anyone else.

  The pot smuggler’s life is about defiance. We defied specific laws we knew were wrong. The outlaw life for me was also about high adventure in foreign lands, and risk, serious risk with real consequences—all contributing to the intense adrenaline rush of being a renegade and a free spirit, of waking up every day and wondering if this will be the day cops and federal dope agents finally catch you. Soon I came to realize that the outlaw lifestyle is itself a drug. It becomes an addiction that can only lead to death or imprisonment. That day of reckoning came when a small army of LAPD cops, DEA agents, and deputy US marshals with the Fugitive Task Force finally brought me to ground. They surrounded me with guns drawn, slapped handcuffs on my wrists, and hustled me off to jail. After years on the run, my first thought was, “Okay, now it’s over. At last I can stop running and write about it.”

  And write I did, all during the time I was locked up. In addition to the legal writing I did as a jailhouse lawyer—which resulted in my getting myself as well as a few others released from prison—whenever I had an opportunity I wrote short stories, one of which, “A Skyline Turkey,” won the 1989 PEN Prison Writing Award for short fiction. And I wrote a novel, Smack Goddess, loosely based on a lady kingpin dope dealer I met when we were both locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York City. The novel was accepted for publication just weeks before I was due to be released.

  TODAY, AS I walk out through the prison gate with my reputation, my dignity, and my asshole intact, the possibility of a new, legitimate career as a working professional writer is every bit as real in my mind as the prison cell I leave behind. If I fail to make it out here in the world, if I let the twin demons of hubris and megalomania regain control, I will have no one to blame but myself.

  PART ONE

  PAROLE:

  DOING TIME ON THE STREET

  Chapter One

  LAWLESS

  OUTSIDE THE PRISON gate in Ashland, Kentucky, a taxi waits to take me to the Tri-State Airport in Credo, West Virginia. The Bureau of Prisons has provided me with a one-way ticket to New York City, where I am to be paroled. I was also given $100 in cash and a government check for whatever was left in my commissary account, $27.33 of the eleven cents per hour I earned working as a clerk in the prison law library.

  When I change planes at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, suddenly it hits me: I’m free. I’m out of prison. I’m going home. It all feels so new: a virtual midlife transformation. Rebirth at age forty-five. Prisoner one moment—in custody, confined behind bars and walls and fences, watched over by grim keepers, in constant peril—free man the next, walking around surrounded by male and female civilians. It’s disorienting, it’s surreal, it’s amazing to be able to move around and mingle with normal people, no longer in the company of brooding convicts dressed in khakis or blaze-orange jumpsuits, but in close proximity with free American citizens wearing civilian clothes—and, yes, no doubt, there are women out here, actual living humans of the opposite sex, those endlessly fascinating and alluring creatures without whom I have existed for so many solitary years. Now to be in their company once again, to be assured that women still move freely among the population, strikes me with an almost dizzying rush of liberation and optimism—a zest for life.

  Can this really be happening? Is it real, or am I imagining it? Dreaming it, as I dreamed of freedom so many times while locked up, only to wake and realize I was still in prison.

  This is good, Stratton, I a
ssure myself, very good indeed for a man who loves women, to find that they exist out here in the world—and lots of them, all sizes and shapes, and dressed not in the garb of a prison guard but in skirts, dresses and blouses, shorts and tank tops; smelling deliciously of female; infusing the atmosphere with their intoxicating pheromones—it gives me new hope for the future, new joy to think that I might yet live again in close proximity with a woman, oh, God, yes, and to love her and cherish her, perhaps even have a wife and a family, children—something I had all but given up, something I wanted with all my mind and soul.

  It is all so fantastic and bewildering even to entertain these thoughts when not so long ago it appeared hopeless. There were times during my years as a prisoner when it did not seem likely or possible that I would ever get out and be in a position to contemplate having a family, a wife and children of my own. The prospect of fatherhood seemed doubtful if not impossible. Locked up at thirty-seven with a twenty-five-year, nonparoleable sentence, had I not won my appeal and been resentenced, I would have had to do somewhere around seventeen or eighteen years at the very least. That would have meant I’d be in my midfifties when I was released—if I made it out at all. And by then, there is no telling what shape I would have been in mentally and emotionally. As it is, after eight years in maximum- and high-medium-security joints, it remains to be seen how sane I am, how well I will be able to adjust to living in the free world. The longer you do, the harder it is to get out, and the harder it is to assimilate back into society, to free yourself of the mindset and distorted code of ethics of the convict.

  Doing time in prison becomes a way of life; like anything else, you get used to it. You lose touch with the outside world. You adapt to a whole new culture and morality. You shut down and deny tender feelings, feelings of love and compassion. You forget the skills and manners it takes to live in society. You learn to live by the convict code: lying and deceiving the authorities simply to get by without becoming that most despised creature of the prisoner population—the jailhouse snitch. And it’s easy to fuck up and lose acquired good-time, even to pick up a new case, especially if you are inured to rehabilitation, still and always an outlaw in the eyes of the authorities.

  I nearly blew my release date by getting into a fight in the prison TV room and getting locked up in the Hole when I was just weeks from release. And all the time I was in prison I continued to use and deal pot—of course I did; I wasn’t about to admit I was wrong. I daily violated any number of rules and regulations imposed by my Bureau of Prisons keepers that could have resulted in a new prosecution had I been caught. There is also the psychological effect of imprisonment to contend with. The long-term prisoner begins to fear freedom, if not consciously, then at some deeper level. One questions one’s ability to make it out there in the world. Ex-con. No job. No place to live. Fucked-up value system. Will I find someone to love me? And, if I do, will I know how to love and respect another person after so many years of living in close custody with nothing but brutal keepers and damaged men? There was no prerelease counseling to prepare me, only all these bad habits, these unsavory relationships, these inner demons and self-destructive impulses to contend with. The convict may even self-sabotage and fuck up on purpose as his release date draws near, what’s known as short-timer syndrome. Or get out, find he can’t make it on the street, and hasten his return to the cloistered life he has come to know so well.

  But I am in no frame of mind to contemplate failure. No, I will not succumb to fear of what I have longed for and dreamed of, worked so hard to achieve, and prepared myself for. I am in a far better situation than most ex-cons hitting the street. I have a novel about to be published. I have a job in a law firm waiting for me. I have a place to go to live until I can find a place of my own. And, above all, I have friends and family who love me, believe in me, and support me. I have nothing to complain about. I have no excuse if I fail out here. I should fall to my knees right here in the airport terminal and praise God that I lived through the last eight years in prison to experience the incredible high of resurrection in midlife.

  Enjoy it, Stratton. And whatever you do, don’t blow it.

  WHEN I ARRIVE at La Guardia Airport in New York it’s just 2:00 p.m. and I am at a loss where to go, what to do next. I call my parole officer, Joe Veltri, in Manhattan. I know Veltri; he’s a decent guy. He was assigned to prepare my presentence report, and he came to interview me at the MCC before my sentencing. Veltri tells me that my case has been transferred to Brooklyn, where I will be residing temporarily at Norman Mailer’s home in Brooklyn Heights. Veltri gives me the number and address for the Brooklyn, Eastern District Parole Office. He also informs me that once I report, I will not be allowed to leave the district. I will have to wait for some time to get myself established, and then apply for written permission to go beyond the five boroughs of New York.

  With still nearly two days before I’m required to report, I decide to continue on to Massachusetts to see my long-suffering parents, who have been waiting for this day with almost as much anticipation as I. When I call my friend and attorney, Ivan Fisher—who is to be my employer—Ivan whoops for joy. He cries, “Mazel tov!” and declares for the whole office to hear: “Stratton is out of jail!”

  I walk to the Trump Shuttle, no longer the Eastern Airlines Shuttle, where I learn that the airfare to Boston is $119. I have only $77 left from the hundred the Bureau of Prisons gave me upon my release. After a few more calls, I take a cab to Brooklyn Heights where I meet with Judith McNally, Norman Mailer’s secretary, who gives me $100 and the keys to the Mailer home at 142 Columbia Heights.

  Norman calls while I’m with Judith. He and the family are at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for the summer. He tells me he’s hard at work on a new book, his long-anticipated novel of the CIA, Harlot’s Ghost, which now stands at over two thousand pages and is, he believes, no more than half done. Norman faxes his daily output of handwritten pages to Judith, who transcribes them on a computer, prints out the pages, and faxes them back to Norman. Ah, the wonders of all this new technology.

  “This is great news, Rick,” Norman tells me. “Get yourself settled, and then come see us here in P-town. . . . Stay as long as you like.”

  I catch a six o’clock shuttle to Logan Airport in Boston. My mother, Mary, my father, Emery, my sister Judith, who we call GiGi, and her oldest son, my nephew Robert, meet me at the arrivals gate for a full-on, joyous reunion—the prodigal son back in the bosom of his family. On the way to my parents’ home, we stop for a celebratory dinner at Legal Seafood, a restaurant in Brookline. I order lobster and a bottle of champagne. Yes, this must be freedom, and it’s a far cry from the mess hall at the FCI at Ashland, Kentucky. Two sips of the wine and I’m already feeling light-headed.

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, unable to sleep past dawn, I finally realize my one abiding prison fantasy of life in the free world. I get up, get dressed, and walk out the front door of my parents’ home unobstructed. I continue to walk for several blocks with nothing or no one to impede me until I reach the town square in Wellesley, Massachusetts. There I use actual US currency to buy today’s edition of the New York Times. I find a coffee shop and order a cup of real, brewed coffee. Then I sit down and read the paper and drink my coffee with no one watching over me, no one to question me, no one to demand that I recite my name and federal prisoner number, no one to tell me to drop my drawers, bend over, and spread my cheeks so they can peer up my asshole, no one to tell what I can or cannot do, where I must report, whom I must report to and when. No more controlled movements—that’s all over; the control, the constant supervision has ended. Walking down the street, buying a newspaper and a cup of coffee, sitting down and being left alone to read my paper and drink my coffee—this, more than anything else, this simple act has come to define what it means to me finally to be a free man living in the free world.

  A few days before I was released from prison, while I was still in the Hole after the fight, I got a visit fr
om my unit manager, Axelrod. He cut me a break. He released me from the Hole and went to bat for me before the disciplinary committee so there were no new charges and no loss of good-time. Axelrod advised me that I should seek help when I got out. He warned that the psychological defenses and character traits, the physical and mental demands of getting and giving respect that one develops and builds upon to survive in prison do not easily translate to the free world. That was the extent of the prerelease counseling I would receive. I knew what he said is true. I’d seen it in how I reacted to even the most insignificant perceived threat to my character while locked up. You could not cut in line in front of me in the mess hall and not expect to be challenged. To let something like that go in prison is the beginning of the end of your dignity and the integrity of your personal space. Once the other convicts suspect that you will break weak, the next thing you know they will be demanding you go to commissary and buy things for them—or worse. I believed that I didn’t need any help. I imagined that I would adapt to freedom as well as I had conformed to life inside.

  And so it seemed, sitting with my parents, my sister, and my nephew in the restaurant the night before. I probably appeared normal then, and I felt one with my family like someone who has returned from a long journey. But now, alone, as I look around and try to appreciate what I’ve achieved, the euphoria, the sense of wonder, and the optimism slip away. As a new reality sets in, I perceive a distance, a sense of alienation, of not belonging, of not being one of these people in this world, out here, these civilians with their humdrum workaday lives. And yet I must try to fit in, to be one of them. I can’t go on defining myself as a convict, an outlaw living by a different moral code, a different set of laws and values, or I will surely end up back in prison. I imagine this is how veterans must feel upon returning from war, and why some choose to reenlist while others sink into despair, drugs, or alcohol, or succumb to mental illness. Post-traumatic stress disorder: that’s what I am feeling. There is a whole depth of experience one cannot hope to share with normal people. And why share it? Why not just forget it?