Calm down, Dickless, I tell myself. Yes, it’s true; I do appear to have become some sort of pussy magnet. This is a new experience. Never before have women seemed so eager to fuck me. Amazing what eight years in prison will do for you. But can it last? Or will I have to go back to the joint for another jolt to have this mysterious attraction recharged?
The morning air is as fresh as it gets in New York City, the pavement on the sidewalks still damp with morning dew, and the trees and shrubs and plants show the first colorful traces of fall. My body and soul are sated, rejuvenated, revivified with the deft loving touch and embrace of a woman. It’s as though I were a whole new creation, as though I’d shed years of pain and loneliness in one night. I take a deep breath and look up at the sky and thank God that I am alive . . . and free.
SUAREZ DID FINALLY fax me an agreement to write the treatment, but he still hasn’t come up with the $2,500 initial payment. Dealing with this guy has become a real pain in the ass. He makes appointments, and then he cancels them at the last minute. He tells me he is going to do something right away; days go by and he still hasn’t come through. But of course, now I’m hooked. I’ve begun the research—my favorite phase of the work—and I’m into the story of Chapin’s life.
While reading his biography and compiling my notes, I conceive what I believe to be a viable concept for the biopic I’m calling Listen to America: The Harry Chapin Story. Harry may have been one of the first commercially successful pop music artists who was also a socially conscious activist. He made his music and his life stand for a higher cause than fame and fortune. He was a dedicated humanitarian, and a key organizer and participant in the Presidential Commission on World Hunger. Until his tragic death in a freak automobile accident on the Long Island Expressway, Harry continually sought deeper personal commitment to aiding the arts and helping the less fortunate. More than half of his concerts were benefit performances. So I have a theme, a concept to build the story around: Harry as a voice and an embodiment of the emerging idealism coming out of the youth movement of the sixties and seventies that was abruptly cut short. His life could be symbolic of a positive cultural upheaval that seemed to die before its time. I want to meet his wife, Sandy, in person, and hear her story of life with Harry. I’m ready to write a treatment and then a screenplay that will hopefully get made into a movie.
MEANWHILE, CLEM CASERTA and his pal Ron Peterson want to get together and talk business—film industry business. Lots of talk, drinks, meetings . . . but no one is coming up with any money, or even any ideas as to how we might raise some money. I’ve heard nothing from Radha Battachargi at Guber-Peters. It occurs to me that if the illegal marijuana business operated like the movie business, no one in this country would be getting high.
Efradi calls Ivan and asks him for a photograph of me to prove that I am who Ivan claims I am. This strikes me as weird: who else would I be? I find a photo of me sitting at a table in Beirut with Mohammed and two of his sons, and I fax it to Efradi’s office in Tel Aviv. I complete a draft of the motion to have Levy’s indictment in the Operation Pyramid Overdrive case dismissed on the grounds of the several egregious violations of his Fourth Amendment rights. Ivan reads it, he has his associate Ken Tuscillo read it, and when they are both happy with the edits, the motion is printed up, and I take it with me on my way home to file with the clerk at the Eastern District Federal Court in Brooklyn—the same courthouse where, nearly fifteen years ago, I beat my first hashish importation case.
I think we all know that this motion is a loser. Courts have held that it doesn’t matter to what lengths the agents go in their efforts to bring a defendant to trial. Constitutional rights don’t apply until the defendant is on US soil. The brief is aimed at trying to get the judge to order an evidentiary hearing, and to then force the government to reveal the sordid details of Levy’s abduction and torture, as well as to uncover the facts of the rogue DEA Special Operations Group we have identified as Group 33, and to use all this material as a bargaining chip to urge the prosecutor to make a better offer should Ivan’s client agree to plead guilty. We have a good judge, the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein. When presiding, Judge Weinstein eschews the judicial robes. He dresses in a business suit and chooses not to perch above the proceedings and rule from the bench, but rather he takes a seat at a conference table in the well of the court with the representatives from both sides. It was in a ruling by Judge Weinstein that I found the language that resulted in my sentence being vacated.
There is an ugly underbelly to the Operation Pyramid Overdrive case, and several related international heroin investigations that I suspect the government would prefer to keep hidden from a judge like Jack Weinstein. Charlie Kelly and I meet with a former agent who tells us about a rogue DEA Special Operations Group that calls itself Redrum—murder spelled backwards from the movie The Shining. Once again, this resonates with a story I heard from a young Lebanese prisoner I met while in holdover at USP Lewisburg. He was busted in a controlled delivery setup while working with DEA agents in the Middle East. Multikilo shipments of heroin from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley were packed into suitcases, placed on prearranged commercial flights into Detroit and other US cities where they were allowed to clear customs. The heroin was then turned over to wholesale distributors in a law enforcement scheme known as “allowing the drugs to walk.” Once a significant amount of the junk hit the streets, federal narcotics agents would swoop in and make any number of arrests of mid-to-low-level distributors, to much local media fanfare. Most of the money and drugs was never accounted for. In our brief, I compare this narcotics agents’ enforcement tactic of “walking” the drugs to firemen setting fires so they can keep busy and be heralded for bravery by putting them out, and then partner with the real estate owners to collect on the insurance.
The Special Operations Group Redrum is in fact Group 33—somehow Mohammed Bero fits into all this, though I haven’t figured out how as yet. It’s life imitating art. So much of Operation Pyramid Overdrive resembles aspects of the plot of Smack Goddess. In the hopes of finding out more, I put in a call to a real estate office in southern New Hampshire, and I leave a payphone number and a callback time.
I WRITE UP a draft of my degree program for Shirley Ariker to submit to Empire State College. Once I have a BA, if I still have any inclination to pursue a career as a lawyer, I could go to law school for one year, work for two more years for Ivan, which, if approved, would qualify me to take the bar exam and, possibly, after further consideration of my criminal convictions, allow me to be admitted. Something else to think about as the Smack Goddess publication date draws near. If I can’t be a criminal, why not a criminal defense attorney? Or a crime novelist? Or both? The principal goal must always be to write, otherwise none of this makes any sense, and there’s no telling what aberrant urge may hold sway.
SUSAN LORING SHOWS up at my office unannounced to present me with Tony Suarez’s check for $2,500. Ivan, to his misfortune, is not around to ogle her. She suggests we go out for a drink to celebrate. Much as I would like to join her for a drink, perhaps even spend the evening with her, I must beg off. I have an appointment to meet for dinner with the journalist Steve Fishman. As soon as Susan leaves the office, once I allow her time to clear the building, I rush out to the bank to deposit the check before the ink disappears.
So, it’s really happening. I have been hired to write a treatment for a film about Harry Chapin. Apparently, Suarez reached an agreement with Harry’s wife, Sandy. This is exciting, my first gig in the entertainment business—actually, it’s not my first. While I was still locked up I was hired by Dustin Hoffman, through Mailer, to critique a prison-based novel called Green River Rising. An English psychiatrist who I suspect never set foot in an American penitentiary wrote the book. Hoffman had starred in the classic prison movie, Papillion. He also worked with crime novelist Eddie Bunker, and starred in the film Straight Time, an adaptation of Bunker’s great postprison/parole novel No Beast So Fierce. Norman told me that Hoffm
an was fascinated by prison stories. Hoffman believed he had been a prisoner in a former lifetime. He was considering optioning and making a film based on Green River Rising.
It’s a good thing Suarez finally came through with the initial payment, since, while doing my research, I already wrote a rough draft of the treatment. The movie business, as I am learning, may be an occupation that attracts a lot of charlatans and scam artists who hope that by becoming movie producers, they might also get laid. Still, I’m serious about pursuing the entertainment business and feel drawn to the work not only because I want those big pay checks that are so hard to come by as a novelist these days but also because the form appeals to me. It’s the communal waking dream, the shared journey of watching a movie. Myths are evoked. Heroes, antiheros, heroines, and femme fatales are all ten feet tall. They speak to us. I remember once going to see Last Tango in Paris in LA with two young actresses, sisters I was hoping to fuck, and being so stimulated by the film that, once we left the theater, without saying a word the three of just ran for several blocks to release the energy provoked by Brando’s incredible performance. A great movie can change the way you feel about yourself, the way you experience your own life, and the way you see the world at large.
Much of Harry Chapin’s life was spent in and around the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood where I now reside. I visit a playground just down the street from my apartment that is dedicated to, and named for, Harry. And I walk by 45A Hicks Street, also nearby, where Harry spent some of the happiest years of his life from age eleven to seventeen.
I’ve been watching similar biopics about musicians and rock stars: The Buddy Holly Story, starring Gary Busey, directed by Steve Rash, and La Bamba, directed by Luis Valdez about Chicano rock star Richie Valens, starring Lou Diamond Phillips and Esai Morales. Like Chapin, both Buddy Holly and Richie Valens died young, at the height of their careers. They were killed in a plane crash along with the Big Bopper. For contrast, I also watch The Rose, starring Bette Midler and Alan Bates, and Sid and Nancy, directed by Alex Cox and with an unforgettable performance by a young actor named Gary Oldman as Sid. I was living at the Hotel Chelsea off and on around the time when Sid Vicious’s girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, died in their rooms at the famous hotel. These folks were heavily into the junkie life/death downward spiral. Sid and Nancy may well be the polar opposite of what I intend to do with the Harry Chapin story; still, it’s a powerful film.
I JOIN JOURNALIST Steve Fishman downtown for dinner and to do an interview. He records much of our conversation about writing, and, specifically about writing in prison. We talk about drugs, the international illegal drug trade, and the politics of the drug war, particularly when it comes to cannabis. Over the weekend, Steve comes by the apartment in Brooklyn Heights to complete the interview. I let him borrow Mailer’s letters to me in prison.
Radha Battachargi finally calls. We make plans to have lunch next week. My prison pal, the inimitable defrocked psychiatrist, Doctor David Buckley, shows up in town and invites me to join him at an informal dinner party at the Bromley Building on West Eighty-Third. On the way home, I am stranded in a stalled subway car somewhere under the streets of Manhattan and have to struggle to keep from having a claustrophobic panic attack. I remind myself that this is a subway car, not a prison cell in an isolation unit, not a bullpen filled with angry prisoners. Being stuck in the subway is not the same as being locked in a prison cell doing twenty-five years with no parole. The train will soon move on, the doors will open at my stop, and I will be able to get off and move about freely once more.
Doc Buckley is engaged in some sort of contentious situation over parental visiting rights with a former paramour, Judith Regan, with whom he has a child, a boy named Patrick. The Doc is always up to some shenanigans, but Judith Regan is not one to be trifled with. Judith edited the tabloid National Enquirer, and she is a producer for The Geraldo Rivera Show. I let the Doc talk me into writing Judith a letter on Fisher’s stationary, and I fax it to her.
Big mistake. When am I gonna learn? Or, as Neil Young would sing: “Why do I keep fucking up?” Judith promptly calls Fisher and threatens to have him disbarred for hiring “a notorious criminal.” Notorious goofball would be more like it.
Guber-Peters passes on Smack Goddess sight unseen. When Radha Battachargi tells Peter Guber that the book is about a woman drug dealer, he says there is no way they will have anything to do with a story about drugs or drug dealers as both he and his partner, Jon Peters, have been depicted in the media as illegal drug users themselves, and they do not wish to appear soft on the subject. Radha tells me this over lunch at the Trump Plaza Bistro. She says that although she found the novel absorbing, in the end she was disappointed because she “didn’t know who to root for,” a statement that strikes me as ludicrous in this day and age. I explain that to me a novel is not a football game or a boxing match; there doesn’t necessarily have to be someone to root for, although I would argue that one could root for Rickie Rude, the punk rock star who is falsely implicated in the main character’s drug enterprise. “Who do you root for in Sid and Nancy?” I ask her. To which she answers the book may be ahead of its time, and that she believes it will eventually be made into a movie, “but not by Guber-Peters.”
As Ivan would say, “Next.”
I HAVE A meeting with poet, novelist, and short story writer Fielding Dawson at his apartment in the West Village. Fielding is chairman of the PEN Prison Writing Program. Founded in 1971, the program fosters the restorative, rehabilitative power of writing for prisoners; PEN also sponsors an annual prison writing contest. My short story, “A Skyline Turkey,” was selected as the first prizewinner in 1989 while I was still locked up. “A Skyline Turkey” will be published in Fortune News, a publication of the New York Fortune Society that offers assistance to ex-prisoners upon release. It is also scheduled appear in an anthology of prison writing, Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing, edited by Bell Gale Chevigny. Sometime later, it will also be published in Story magazine.
Fielding invites me to his home to talk about writing in prison, and to ask if I’m willing to speak on the subject and read at this year’s PEN Prison Writing Awards ceremony. Of course I will; I’m passionate about the restorative value of writing for prisoners. Even as it does out here in the world, writing sustained me while I was in prison and in danger of losing hope. The act of taking raw experience and emotion and crafting them into a story to be shared with, and possibly move or inspire, others kept me sane during the years of my imprisonment. It kept me from becoming murderous, picking up a new case, and possibly never getting released. Writing gave me a purpose to get up every day. It gave me confidence in my competence to compose and submit legal briefs that ultimately moved courts to give me back my freedom. Writing in prison is power for the powerless. And it gave me hope, always hope, hope of release, and hope of a new life after prison. Writing—all art—is the highest form of hope.
It was never easy—no, writing in prison was always hard, a clandestine activity because the authorities discouraged anything they felt they couldn’t control. And writing is still hard out here, even given the marvelous accoutrements of a computer, a printer, and a desk in a clean, well-lit, quiet place of my own with no prison guards to harass me. Now it is the exigencies of earning a living and the inner demons of doubt and self-sabotage conjured to stand around my desk mocking me that give me pause. But, as I learned in prison, there is only one way to deal with impediments to doing the work, be they human or psychological, personal or universal: put ass in chair and write. The first word, and then the next, then a paragraph, and a whole page as you follow your dream, find your inspiration, and make it reality. Out here, as well as in there, the act of writing is a way to find and give purpose to your time here on earth.
I tell Fielding I am happy to share my experience in the hope that it might inspire some other prisoner or ex-con to seek new meaning in his or her life through writing. Fielding signs me up to speak at the coming event; he i
nvites me back to meet with the other speakers as we draw closer to the date. He asks if I know Kim Wozencraft, author of the novel Rush, who is also scheduled to read at the PEN event. “No,” I say, “I’ve not met her. But I do know her book.”
Tonight I am to see my sweet Paloma. I will sleep in her arms. Tomorrow I must report to my parole officer.
I AWAKE IN Paloma’s loving embrace. She clings to me all night long like a frightened child. And when we wake, she rolls over and sticks her ass up in my face, and I enter her from the rear. She is so lovely, so passionate, and already devoted to me. She’s ready to have our child.
I leave Paloma’s at 6:30 and take the train to Brooklyn for my meeting with Ms. Lawless. I prefer riding the train to above ground transportation even after my panic attack. Ivan can’t understand why I choose the subway rather than taxis or a car service. Well, there’s the expense for one thing; but beyond that there is also something about mingling with the hordes of commuters, the hoi poloi, the great unwashed that humbles me and reminds me how grateful I am to be out of prison. It helps me to feel that I am part of a greater humanity. When I chided Ivan about his preference for traveling in a hired car, he said, “Do you know how lonely it gets in the back of a limousine?”
At the parole offices, I have to wait for over half an hour, but when Lawless finally shows up and we meet, it turns out to be the most relaxed and friendliest visit we have had to date. Something about her attitude toward me has changed, it’s as though she has finally come to terms with who I am. She understands that I will not be bullied by authority, that at some level I simply don’t give a fuck, I’ll fight, I’ll even go back to prison if need be. But I think she has also come to believe that I am sincere about my work for Ivan, it’s not a bullshit job, and that I am determined to fulfill my obligations and abide by the reasonable conditions of my supervised release in an effort to turn my life around; and, more important, to get out from under government control. This has given Lawless new comfort in our relationship. I offer to give her a signed copy of Smack Goddess, which she declines, says she is not allowed to accept gifts from her parolees, but that she will buy a copy. Still, before I leave, she remembers to hand me the little plastic container and motions me off to the men’s room.
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