“Eisenberg told me.”
She’s thirty-seven but looks like she’s in her twenties. Never been married. I suspect she may have had an affair with Eisenberg, but I do not probe. I’m curious about her life in Colombia before she came to the US, and her family, how she happened to settle in New York and take up dental hygiene. There is something about Colombian women that has always intrigued me. Of all the Latinas I have known, Colombians strike me as the most emancipated, the most independent and sophisticated. I am still so raw emotionally, so open and susceptible to the charms of a woman, that by the time the drinks and appetizers arrive, Paloma has told me enough about herself that I am ready to get down on my knees right here in the restaurant and propose, carry her off to the nearest justice of the peace, and take her as my bride.
The relationship with Naomi has begun to falter, sad to say. She’s a great lady. Had she never been married—if only by common law—and never had children, and were she ready to start a family, it may well have been different. And the adulterous affair with Nora, the Indian professor of sociology I met while taking courses at the MCC, great as the fucking turned out to be, that holds no future either. She has a husband and children living on Staten Island. She told me she had an open relationship with her husband, that he didn’t mind her fucking me. But I do. I don’t need any more guilt.
The attraction I feel for Paloma is different. It has a new sense of promise. Timing is everything in life. I don’t want another affair; I want a wife. I want a family. I want to be a father. Time is running out. I’m forty-five years old. I’ve got my freedom, but I don’t have much time, or so I believe. I feel like so much of life has already passed me by. I don’t even know for sure if I can sire offspring; all these years, all these women, nobody ever got pregnant. Maybe I’m shooting blanks. Let’s find out. Let’s just elope, I’m thinking. Fuck supervised release. Fuck my job and my writing career. We’ll flee to Colombia. Go live on the beach at Santa Marta and make babies. I’ll pick up where I left off. Purchase huge loads of Colombian Gold pot. Dispatch freighters full of reefer back to the States and become a multimillionaire gringo drug lord in exile. Or not.
“Where do you live?” I ask as we step outside the restaurant after the meal.
“Queens,” she says, “Jackson Heights.”
“You’re beautiful,” I tell her. “You’re a lovely person, Paloma.” I take her hand; kiss her lightly on the cheek. “I hope we can see each other again, and not just in Eisenberg’s office.”
I hail a cab, give the driver her address, and hand him a twenty.
Good night, sweet lady. Such a chaste first date, I’m proud of my horny, promiscuous self.
AT FISHER’S OFFICE the next day, I busy myself reading proofs of the Smack Goddess galleys while I wait for Ivan to come in with a new case assignment. At lunch time, I walk over to the Birch Lane editorial offices to deliver the corrected galleys. I have to say, I’m not happy with all the cuts to the manuscript. My editor, Hillel Black, says he wants the book to read like a runaway train, whatever that means. I suppose he means pacing. So he and his editorial assistant have stripped out all of the asides, the internal dialogue, the descriptive passages. It’s spare all right. The story has momentum; I’ll give it that. But while hurtling along on that runaway train, it might be nice to look out the window occasionally and take in the passing countryside, muse on the journey, and think about what it means. This is my first novel. Hillel has been at this a long time. I suppose I should defer to his judgment.
I spend the rest of the afternoon at my desk drafting an affidavit in a new case, United States v. Miguel Munoz et al., an all-too-common story of a drug deal gone awry that resulted in kidnapping charges for a bunch of inept Dominican dope dealers. It’s still early when I leave work to head downtown for a meeting with Steve Fishman, a journalist who writes for Rolling Stone as well as other publications. Fishman wants to pitch a story on me to coincide with the publication of Smack Goddess. We meet in the East Village. I’m impressed to see how many freaks still abound in the streets of New York City. They don’t get up to Park Avenue in the sixties, nor do they migrate to Brooklyn Heights, but they are here in droves on St. Marks Place.
Fishman published a book called A Bomb in the Brain: A Heroic Tale of Science, Surgery and Survival about his experience as a neurosurgery patient after he developed a cerebral blood clot. I met him through John Hubbard, a fellow prisoner at FCI Ashland. Hubbard is a radical libertarian and failed mad bomber. Described as “a guerrilla fighter in his own mind,” Hubbard made and planted some fourteen bombs in and around the city of Salem, Kentucky. None of the bombs went off. Fishman wrote a story on Hubbard for Rolling Stone. At a café on St. Marks Place, I give Fishman a copy of the Smack Goddess galleys. He tells me he also wants to read my short story, “A Skyline Turkey.” It’s a good meeting; I like the guy. I expect he’ll write a good piece.
On the way back to Mailer’s, I stop by the gym in Brooklyn Heights and have a good long workout and steam bath. Nothing like physical exertion and a good sweat to dispel residual malaise. Some guy tries to hit on me in the showers. “Listen, pal,” I tell him, “you don’t know who you’re dealing with. Better just back off.”
After eight years in the can, the mere sight of a naked man is about as attractive to me as a prison cell.
SO, IT’S OFFICIAL: I have the written notice from Lawless signed by her supervisor. My employment has been approved. I should feel vindicated, or at least relieved. The book is on track to come out in November. After working on an hourly basis, I presented Ivan with a salary proposal: $1,200 per week based on thirty dollars per hour for a full forty-hour week. He feels it’s too high but says we’re close.
With my employment secure, I feel encouraged to look at an apartment just down the block from the Mailers. It’s one large front room and a small bedroom just big enough for a bed. Sure beats a jail cell. It has the same endlessly absorbing view of New York Harbor and the looming cityscape of Lower Manhattan backlit by luminous sunsets—a beautiful sight most nights. The Mailers are due to return from Cape Cod at the end of August. I need a place of my own before then, so I give the real estate agent a deposit to hold the apartment and make plans to meet with the landlord.
Back at Norman’s, Ivan calls to tell me he spoke with Tom Puccio, John Mulheren’s lawyer, a few minutes ago. He tells me that John was convicted. He faces five years at sentencing in front of US District Court Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum. She’s a Reagan appointee who may well give John the whole five. This is a man who, along with his wife, has adopted nine kids, all of whom were born with life-threatening medical conditions. John and Nancy nursed the children back to health and raised them as their own. The entire Boesky affair, and John’s manic plan to murder Boesky, resulted from a government sting that rebounded on John when Boesky flipped. I call John, who is still out on bond pending sentencing and an appeal. He tells me he’s frustrated with the whole jury process. He says his case is so complicated, with reams of documents from conflicting teams of accountants, and the various complex SEC regulations and statutory restrictions governing the market, to say nothing of the zeal of the Giuliani regime in 1989 with the Boesky case, and particularly given the prosecutor’s closing argument comparing Mulheren to a heroin dealer, there is no way a lay jury could comprehend it all and reach an informed, open-minded verdict. The jurors were overwhelmed. They figure he must have done something wrong if the government is spending all this time and money to present their case and seek to send him to prison. So it’s on to the appeal and, John says, “another several million dollars for the lawyers to continue to defend me against what is a noncrime.”
I know the feeling. I tell him of my hard-fought victory over the federal government, the Bureau of Prisons, and now the parole commission. “I should have had you defending me,” John says.
NAOMI CALLS FROM Vancouver; she’ll be back next week. She is a wonderful woman. She’s been so good to me, I really do l
ove her, but it just doesn’t feel right. Not now, not yet. I don’t know how to tell her this, and I don’t want to broach it over the phone. But she knows. She can sense it in my voice.
IT’S NOT EASY trying to restart your life in early middle age. Having been an outlaw my entire adult life and a juvenile delinquent before that, I’ve always been a troublemaker, a trouble seeker; it is how I defined myself. How am I ever going to reinvent Rick Stratton as an upright citizen and continue to obey the law? Where’s the danger in that? Where’s the excitement? And what difference does it make anyway? A life in prison or out here in the world, does it really matter? I want to believe it does—it must. But it matters only if I make something of it: a record, however incomplete, to convince myself that life has meaning. I know that’s why I kept my journals all these years, and why I am now writing this book—to prove that it all really happened and hope that the writing, the putting down in words, might reveal some universal truth, and give me peace of mind.
That’s the main reason I have come to love the law: the words have real meaning and consequence. Guilt, innocence, imprisonment, parole . . . the words mean something important. Ah, but how those fuckers know to deceive us with the simple substitution of different words: parole becomes supervised release.
And suddenly I know what’s missing, why I still don’t feel satisfied. Yes, I may have won the battle, but not the war. Perhaps I need to fuck with them some more, take the Parole Commission and the Bureau of Prisons to court and challenge this whole doublespeak concept of supervised release. Let a judge order them to explain how it’s any different from parole, or, better yet, order them to cut me loose.
This is my dilemma: I’m really only happy and feel fully alive when I’m engaged in a life-or-liberty-affecting conflict with authority. What a sick fuck.
IT’S A BEAUTIFUL midsummer night. I make myself a stiff drink of rum and tonic, take it out onto the balcony at Mailer’s, and sit gazing at the harbor traffic and downtown skyline with pink-and-shades-of-blue skies in the background. How I love this city. Ever since I was a kid growing up in the staid suburbs of Boston. On my first visit to New York I fell in love with Manhattan, and while free I only wanted to live here. Right down there on the docks in Brooklyn we landed containers filled with contraband—cannabis, outlaw herb of mindfulness. New York was and still is the center of the movement to change the culture of America through proliferation of this mysterious plant. Maybe I should just say “fuck it” and revert to my old ways as an outlaw. The temptation is great.
I feel like smoking some weed right now, doing some serious examining of my situation and dwelling on life in general from the various new perspectives open to the mind after ingesting tetrahydrocannabinol. Zapping the synapses with some fresh energy to figure this shit out. Norman must have a few buds stashed around here somewhere. . . . But no, with Lawless on the warpath, she is sure to pee me next time I report. She may even show up here unannounced with her little bottle to collect a sample of my piss. She has the right to order me to pee in a bottle at her whim to have my urine analyzed for traces of controlled substances. Ms. Lawless can show up at my place of employment or my dwelling unannounced whenever she pleases. I could sit here and drink a whole bottle of rum, get thoroughly shitfaced, and, though excessive alcohol consumption is frowned upon, it does not merit revocation of one’s parole unless abstinence from booze is a specific condition of release. But smoke a joint, get a dirty urine for reefer, I’d be on the next bus back to Lewisburg.
Speaking of Lewisburg, I had a call from Danny Marino, a guy I met and became friendly with while in holdover there in K Unit. Danny is what’s known as a knock-around guy, not a made member of a mob family—in fact, he told me he would have refused the “button” as the wiseguys call the official rank of inducted Mafia family member if it had been offered. “Too much heat,” Danny’d said. “Organized crime means big time.” He is an associate of a New Jersey branch of the Genovese Crime Family. A funny guy, Danny, and a nonstop raconteur of wacky, horrendous mob tales. We would walk around the small, enclosed recreation yard attached to K Unit at Lewisburg, and Danny would regale me with stories of disorganized crime: guys who were killed by mistake, brutal murders in retaliation for minor offenses. Danny reached me at Ivan’s to say he wants to introduce me to a friend of actor Robert DeNiro, a guy named Clem Caserta who has had a role in every one of DeNiro’s movies. We made plans to meet at the Tribeca Grill tomorrow evening.
I’m ready to go to bed when Ivan calls back. He says he’s reading Smack Goddess, and he wants to know if the Frin X I name in the dedication is the same Frin he knows, whom I met when were both locked up in the MCC. “None other,” I confess. And the lawyer, her attorney, Aaron Held, is that character based on anyone he might know? Ivan asks. I plead the fifth. I tell him he’s not supposed to call me until he finishes the book, not while he’s still on the first chapter. Fifteen minutes later he calls again. “And this Aaron Held fellow smokes English Ovals, Richard? But only five a day.” I suggest he’ll be ready to fire me by the time he finishes the book. “No,” he says. “The one has nothing to do with the other. If I don’t like your book, we’ll settle it mano a mano.”
Ivan tells me there is to be a meeting with co-counsel on the Munoz case tomorrow morning. He wants me there, as well as his investigator, Charlie Kelly.
I WAKE EARLY the next morning in a cold sweat from a prison nightmare. It’s the same dream I used to have when I was locked up in the Hole at FCI Ray Brook waiting for the Bureau of Prisons puppet masters to figure out what to do with me. My release date was in limbo after I’d won the appeal in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and was fighting with the bureau over good-time. This was easily the hardest time I did during the entire bid. The worst possible punishment is to be locked up in solitary confinement with no idea how long you’ll be made to stay there, no discernable end to the isolation. It is a sure prescription for madness. In my dream, the prison has no walls, no fences strung with razor wire, no cellblocks or guards or even other prisoners. But it still feels so real, so oppressive, like being caught in a giant invisible machine. I can’t get free. Unseen captors monitor my movements. They—whoever they are—are on to my every move. It’s the thought police, and they know how I defy them. They know how I question, dispute, and ultimately flout their rules and regulations. They know I’m sitting on a huge cache of illegal plants I intend to use to alter the consciousness not only of America but of the world.
When I sit up and look around the small, cell-like room in Norman’s writing studio I am hardly assured that it’s a dream. This is a process, I remind myself—getting out, and then getting free. It takes time . . . and it takes patience.
I get a call from the guy Dick Goodwin turned me on to, the aspiring film producer Tony Suarez; he calls me at Ivan’s office just as the Munoz meeting is wrapping up. When I call him back, he tells me I should leave the office and head over to a bar called Hemingway’s on Fifty-Sixth between Madison and Park. I arrive at the bar, but there is no Tony Suarez. Instead a tall, gorgeous woman with long blond hair sidles up next to me at the bar.
“Richard?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Susan Loring . . . from Tony Suarez’s office.”
She offers me her hand.
“Tony got held up in a meeting. He asked me to meet you and give you this.” She hands me a copy of Taxi: The Harry Chapin Story, a biography of the singer/songwriter by Peter Coan.
“He asked me to get him a copy of your book,” Susan Loring tells me.
If I’m supposed to be impressed, I am. Not only is Susan beautiful, her blouse is unbuttoned to her navel, and she’s not wearing a bra. I try not to be rude and gawk at her boobs, but isn’t that the point? Horny ex-con. Give him a glimpse of some succulent tits and he’ll be smitten. This is obviously some sort of honey trap. Okay, I’ll go along with it—at least for now. I explain to Ms. Loring that if I had been asked, I would have gladly brought her a copy of
my book—or, actually, a copy of the bound galleys, as the book won’t be out for a few more weeks. But I’m happy to give her a copy of the galleys if she’s willing to come back to the office with me.
“Sure,” she says. “But first let’s have a drink.”
Susan says she’s an actress (Really? Imagine my surprise) and a friend of Dick Goodwin’s son, Richard Junior, who she tells me now lives in New York. I learn she’s originally from New Hampshire. No surprise there either. She’s definitely got that willowy New England Yankee look. I can picture her on a field hockey pitch. Or on horseback. Susan and I have a couple of martinis. Why not? When with WASPs, do as WASPs do. The woman can hold her booze. She excuses herself to make a call to Suarez and tell him we’re heading back to the office to pick up a copy of my book. She’s not the least bit unsteady as we walk the few blocks to Park Avenue.
In my office, I give Susan a copy of the Smack Goddess bound galleys. She says she will be working with me on the Harry Chapin project.
“Really?” I say. “And what exactly will you do?”
“I’ll be your research assistant. Help you organize the materials. Set up interviews. Take notes. Whatever you need . . .”
“That sounds great.”
Fisher passes by. He looks in my office, sees Susan Loring, and does a double take. He circles back around and appears in the doorway to ask for an introduction. He’s tall, well over six feet, an impressive figure in his tailored, pin-striped Brooks Brothers suit and fashionably long hair. I introduce him to Susan, who is decidedly more his type than mine, and tell him that she and I may be working together on a film project. Fisher encourages her to read Smack Goddess. He indicates the copy of the galleys on my desk, and he tells her she should be sure to pay special attention to one character in particular, a criminal defense attorney named Aaron Held. “You may note some resemblance,” he says with a mock half bow. “I’m available to play the part.”
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