In the World

by Richard Stratton

  “I told you to go fuck yourself, motherfucker! You can’t touch me! I have all the power in this place,” Pappy says, and then he swings his long arm around and points it at the terrified prosecutor. “You! I’ll kill you, too.” Then back at Judge Korman, “All you punkass motherfuckers!”

  And then Pappy delivers his final statement to the shocked court: “Your whole tribe eats donuts!”

  IF PAPPY ISN’T mad, he’s one hell of an actor. He had everyone in the courtroom on the edge of his or her seat, including Judge Korman. A shame to think of all that manic creative energy going to waste.

  The motion may have failed, but it not only provides ample material should there be an appeal, it also convinces me of Pappy’s mad genius. I leave the court with an image of the judge, the court officers, the marshals and cops, and the lawyers and agents all sitting around a campfire congratulating themselves as they nosh on donuts.

  A few days later I read in the Post that Fat Cat has disappeared into the Witness Protection Program—no doubt as his reward for implicating Pappy.

  Chapter Seven

  MAILER PAL WRITES DRUGGIE NOVEL*

  The early reviews of Smack Goddess are in, and on the whole they are encouraging. My agent, Jack Scovil, is elated. He calls me at the office and reads me the Publishers Weekly review. “Smack Goddess is a striking, documentary style novel teeming with manic drug world characters. An exciting prison break is detailed with dreamlike lyricism. While the author’s account of a degraded, manipulative justice system may be biased, he conveys it with a passionate authority.” And from Booklist, another publishing trade journal: “For its convincing depiction of a circle of hard core, high-living drug dealers with their contingent of lawyers, and for its fast-moving plot, readers will ‘just say yes’ to Smack Goddess.”

  The Kirkus review is mixed, calling the novel “a lumpish, intermittently energetic mulligan soup of a novel . . . (read: great sex in the prison conference room). . . . A.G.’s powerfully jaundiced view of the drug industry helps smooth out the bumps.”

  I get a call from a writer in Toronto who is doing a piece on the book for Maclean’s magazine. And writer Anthony Haden-Guest calls to tell me he is doing a piece for Vanity Fair. We meet for a drink after work. Anthony intimates that he is working on a book he’s calling Zigzag about a character he says I may know called John Donahue. That name means nothing to me until Haden-Guest mentions that Donahue is also known as “The Wizard of ID.” Of course I know Donahue. He’s the conniving motherfucker who stole my briefcase from the rear of my locked car (expertly, I might add), and then ran off to Lebanon to do a huge hash deal with Mohammed Bero while using my name as his introduction. I had a confrontation with Donahue at a dinner in Beirut, and I hit him hard across his mouth with an open hand, bitch-slapped him. He ended up ripping the Lebanese off for their share on seven tons of hash his people landed safely in the US; this is the money, the seven million dollars, that the Lebanese claim I owe them. Haden-Guest, who had some sort of book collaboration deal with Donahue that also went bad, tells me that his experience with the Wizard has caused him to redefine evil as “a sickness of the soul for which there is no known cure.”

  I go to see Barbara Kopple’s new documentary American Dream, about a strike at a meat-packing plant in Minnesota, with Shane, my Iranian friend from jail, and Shane’s friend Charlie Minnig, and Charlie’s wife, Sarah, a.k.a. Maddy. We go to dinner after the film, and I wonder how Gloria Lawless would react if she could see me now. These folks are all former, semiretired, fully retired, or still active international drug smugglers. Maddy was Smack Goddess Frin Mullin’s cellmate at the women’s prison in West Virginia before Frin escaped. She tells me she heard from Frin recently; she’s back in England living the fugitive life. The conversation at the table is all about the current state of “the business.” It’s not good. Too many rats. Even people you know and trust from the old days, they get busted now with these heavy mandatory sentences, and they flip and give up everyone they ever did business with, including family. It’s depressing, enough to make someone want to go straight; it certainly has that effect on me.

  Shane says Barbara Kopple, who is a close friend of his, may have a new project, a documentary about the former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson and his fall from grace after being convicted of rape. She is looking for someone who knows about boxing to write the proposal. He asks if I’d be interested. Yes, sure, I’d be happy to work on it with Barbara.

  Suarez calls to tell me that Sandy Chapin has given the project her blessing. He says he will messenger a check for five grand to my office to get me started on the screenplay.

  Good. I can pay my rent. Things are definitely looking up.

  AT LAST THE eve of November 14, 1990, is upon us. I ride over to the Century Club in a car with Norman and Norris. On the way, Norman advises me that these events tend to get off to a slow start. He says people don’t usually begin to arrive until the last hour, and he says that I should not be disappointed even if the party is sparsely attended. The New York literary crowd, he cautions, is a fickle and unpredictable lot. You never know what will bring them out in numbers.

  We arrive at quarter of six and are directed to a cavernous, empty room on the ground floor. Indeed, it will take a sizable crowd to fill this space. By 6:15 the room is half full, and by 6:30 the place is jammed. It’s an eclectic mix of literary types and cops, lawyers, and crooks who have come out to celebrate the publication of Smack Goddess and drink free booze. Writers Gay Talese, George Plimpton, William Styron, Jay McInerney, and Hunter Thompson, to name a few; editors and publishers from Birch Lane and Random House; literary agents; perhaps even a few undercover federal agents; and more than a few representatives of the criminal bar, including Michael Kennedy, Ira London, Marshall Stern, Bob Leighton, and Ivan, of course. There are former cops and current private investigators: Charlie Kelley and Bill Majeski, the NYPD homicide detective who tracked down and arrested Jack Abbott. And there are a fair number of former and perhaps a few still active criminals in the crowd: Shane Zarintash, Charlie and Sarah Minnig, and former lawyer and ex-con Alan Frank, whom I was friendly with during my final year at FCI Ashland.

  My mother, Mary, has taken the train down from Boston and is enjoying the night as much if not more than I—it’s her wish come true as well as it is mine. Her son has finally done something she can be proud of. The old man, as expected, stays home. Paloma comes as my date and brings her niece, Tiffany, who is strikingly beautiful. Everyone from Doc Eisenberg’s office is there now that it is no longer a secret that Paloma and I are seeing each other. Tony Suarez and the lovely Susan Loring come with Sandy Chapin. Naomi has come down from Upstate. My nephew Robert is there with his girlfriend, Lisa. John Mulheren stops in after his sentencing. He tells me he got a year and a day and a $1.6 million fine. He remains out on bond pending an appeal.

  Steven Schragis, the Birch Lane publisher, and Norman both speak. Norman, drink in hand, opines that there are writers who have rich experience and mediocre talent, and then there are writers who have much talent and little experience. He says I am one of the few writers he knows who has vast experience and a talent to equal it. I hope he’s right.

  After the party breaks up, a group of us head uptown to Elaine’s, the literary hangout on the Upper East Side, for a late dinner and fitting finish to a New York literary evening. I sit with the lovely Paloma on one side and her gorgeous niece on the other as in some prison fantasy become reality. Ivan orders bottles of Dom Pérignon. My mother sits with Norman and Norris. It is well past midnight when Elaine finally shoos us out so she can close the place.

  This is a night to remember for the rest of my days, a culmination of dreams and ambitions, of efforts, and of prodigious resources of will and determination at a time when all seemed hopeless. And it is the beginning of a new phase in a life that still seems alien to me—not quite real or somehow not truly mine—a life belonging to someone I am pretending to be.

  Back
at the apartment in Brooklyn, lying in bed beside Paloma, I’m way too hyped up to sleep. I think back to a very different night—the night I spent in a county jail in Lowell, Massachusetts, the town named for my forebears. I had just been convicted of smuggling pot and sentenced in Federal District Court in Portland, Maine, to the maximum, fifteen years in the penitentiary. I was on my way to New York City, in the custody of deputy US marshals, and there I would be tried again, charged under the kingpin statute with operating a continuing criminal enterprise, be convicted once more, and pick up another ten years running wild for a total sentence of twenty-five years and six months.

  The wing where they housed me in the county jail in Lowell had been condemned, which struck me as appropriate. They locked me up for the night in a damp, cold, filthy cell that had no bed and only a stinking bucket full of piss and shit in which to relieve myself. Good, I thought, this is perfect. This is where I belong. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I felt content, gratified that I was finally getting what I deserved, finally had arrived where I’d been headed all my life, fulfilling everyone’s worst expectations, including my own. It had nothing to do with my so-called crimes, the illegal activity for which I had been sentenced. No, rather it had only to do with who I believed they—the authorities—determined I was: a bad kid, the kid the mothers of the other kids said stay away from, don’t play with that Rickie Stratton, he’ll get you in trouble, he’s a wayward child doomed to end up—exactly where I was, in a filthy, dank dungeon. From that night to this night, in a place of my own with a beautiful woman lying by my side, and all the nights and days in between, I have tried to discover who I really am beneath all the names—dope smuggler, prisoner, ex-con, novelist, forensic specialist—why I am here, and why, wherever I am besides perhaps in a jail cell, I never feel as though I belong, I always feel I’m a fraud, a pretender, and basically full of shit.

  I roll over and sniff between Paloma’s legs. Ah, now this makes sense. Here is something a man can feel clear about. . . .

  Come to papa, mamita.

  THE NEW YORK Times Book Review features Smack Goddess as the lead fiction review, a full page in the December 9, 1990, edition, under the title “Still Bored, Still Dealing Dope” by a guy named James Atlas. Norman is upset; he tells me this is a hit job; he and Atlas despise each other. Atlas wrote a nasty piece about Norman for the Times Sunday Magazine. Predictably, in the review, Atlas can’t resist attacking Mailer by revisiting the Jack Henry Abbott debacle.

  Thirteen years ago Mr. Mailer discovered another promising author who had come out of that unlikely writers’ workshop, the Federal prison system. Jack Henry Abbott, a convicted murderer who had been in jail for nearly 25 years, had initiated a correspondence with Mr. Mailer, who was so enthralled by the charged rhetoric of Mr. Abbott’s prose that he got him a book contract and sponsored him for parole. Six weeks after being released from prison, in 1981, Mr. Abbott provoked a dispute over use of the men’s room in a Lower East Side restaurant and stabbed to death a young actor and playwright who worked there as a waiter. Mr. Mailer was philosophical: “It’s a tragedy all around.”

  Mailer, it seems, will never live down the Jack Henry Abbott disaster. And apparently, I am destined to be compared to a man with whom I bear no resemblance except for the fact that we both served time in prison. Yes, the Abbott story is a tragedy all around, certainly it is, particularly for the family of the young man Abbott killed; but it has nothing to do with my story or who I am. Abbott’s life is a tragedy. He was the bastard child of a prostitute, a state-raised convict in and out of jails and prisons all his life. By the time he was released from prison, Abbott was a fully formed product of the brutal, inhumane American penal system, where there is not even a pretense of reform or rehabilitation, where there is only dehumanizing dog-eat-dog survival, guard-on-prisoner violence, institutional malevolence, and gang warfare.

  Mailer was credited and damned for supposedly helping to get Abbott released on parole. Anyone who knows anything about how the parole board and prison system work understands that this is nonsense. Nothing Mailer or anyone else except the governor or the president could have done would have enabled Jack Abbott to get out on parole. In fact, having someone famous like Mailer lobbying on your behalf could have the opposite effect. The people who sit on parole boards in both the state and federal system have their own way of doing things. The real story is that Abbott got parole because he became what he railed against in his own book: a jailhouse snitch, a rat, the lowest form of prison life.

  A convict named Garrett Trapnell, who had done time with Abbott, wrote a letter to novelist Peter Matthiessen and revealed the truth about Abbott. Abbott had given up the names of strike leaders at the US penitentiary in Marion, Illinois—an unforgivable transgression of the convict code fervently espoused by Abbott in his book. In a 116-page affidavit Abbott provided to an assistant United States attorney, he also gave the names of lawyers who were smuggling drugs into the penitentiary and passing them to prisoners. The prison officials knew Abbott was vulnerable. His book was about to be published. He had every reason to want to get out and bask in the glory of his unlikely success as a writer. The fix was in.

  I have done some things in my life that I am not proud of, and a few that still haunt me to this day, mostly to do with the way I treated women who loved me. But refusing to cooperate with the government—refusing to provide evidence and testify against Mailer, Hunter Thompson, my lawyers, and other friends and enemies, and refusing to become a jailhouse snitch—that will never be something I regret. Accepting the punishment and doing the time has actually worked to my benefit. I have respect and acceptance in both the criminal world and from those in law enforcement. And I can look in the mirror without feeling ashamed of who I see looking back at me.

  For James Atlas or anyone else to compare me and my long and close friendship with Mailer to his brief, unfortunate, no, tragic convergence with the life of Jack Abbott may be inevitable, but it is also bogus, and a cheap shot. I smuggled and distributed cannabis. That, and laundering the money I made, is the extent of my criminal activity. Abbott was a low-level thief who turned a short bid into a revolving prison sentence that then became self-murder. And for all the hoopla, In the Belly of the Beast does not hold up to the best prison novels like Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead, Edward Bunker’s Animal Factory, or On the Yard by Malcolm Braly, to name just a few examples of great prison literature. Of course, I’m disgusted with Abbott, not only for what he did to Adnan, which is unforgivable, but also for what he has done to Mailer’s reputation, and to the hopes of other prisoner writers.

  STEVE FISHMAN’S PIECE in GQ is out. God bless my mother, Mary Stratton. As much as she loves her only son, and I know she does, she goes on record in her interview with Fishman to call me an asshole. And she’s right, I was and no doubt still am an asshole. My mother refers to when I was an unabashed drug kingpin making way too much cash money to keep my needy ego in check. Money will do that to a man, particularly one who grows up in a household where his parents are always fighting about money. I remember those fights. They were bitter, nasty, and upsetting to me as a young boy. One time at breakfast my mother threw a frying pan full of sunny-side-up fried eggs at my father. He ducked and the eggs ended up all over my mother’s new green curtains.

  It wasn’t as though we were broke. My father was never a big earner. My mother pretty much always had a job outside the home when we were kids, and that was not as common at that time as it is now. I think Mary enjoyed working; she was not content to be a homemaker. She certainly enjoyed spending money, though never on frivolities. She had an eye for real estate as well as for good quality antique furniture. She bought homes, furnished them tastefully, and often sold them at a profit. The money usually came from my grandmother on my mother’s side, who was a descendant of the Boston Brahmin Lowell family.

  The old man enjoyed playing golf, that was his true love, and he was very good at it. He was an amateur New Engl
and champion. Golf celebrities from all over the world would come to play golf with Emery Stratton at the exclusive Charles River Country Club. Had he been born a decade or two later, he would have been on the pro circuit and probably made a lot of money. When he wasn’t playing golf, Emery played cards: bridge and gin rummy and later cribbage. He was good at cards also. But he was never much good at making money which, I suspect, is because he didn’t care about money. And he wasn’t particularly good at being a father. Both my parents came from relatively well-off blue-blood New England Yankee families. I like to say that our family was at the vanguard in the decline of the WASP.

  I rebelled against all of that. Growing up, I wanted to be a tough guy, to be the opposite of my taciturn, withdrawn father. I aspired to be a criminal. “What do you want to be when you grow up, kid?” A gangster. Getting in trouble was a sure way to attract my father’s otherwise self-absorbed attention. And being tough was my way of distinguishing myself from what I saw as my father’s passive manhood. The man played golf; I wrestled and played football. While still in elementary school, I formed perhaps the one and only kids’ gang ever to emerge from the suburban, tree-shaded streets of Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. Our gang was called the Pink Rats, named after a teenage gang of motorcycle-jacket-wearing hoods depicted in an episode of the TV cop show Dragnet. We specialized in shoplifting, vandalism, protection, and extorting lunch money from other kids at recess.

  Smuggling pot from Mexico in my late teens, by my twenties I was making and spending crazy amounts of cash money, living like an outlaw rock star, and certainly at times behaving like a total asshole. If I were out to dinner with, say Mailer, Dick Goodwin, his wife Doris Kearns Goodwin, Hunter S. Thompson (who was always broke), Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine, and assorted girlfriends and hangers-on, when the check came and there was that sometimes awkward moment as the men in the party looked at each other waiting to see if someone was going to make a move to pick up the check, or if it would be one of those group payments with some proffering cash, others putting up their credit cards, and Hunter reaching for all the cash, saying to put it on his credit card, which ultimately Wenner would have to pay, in my assholeishness I relished the moment as I picked up the check and paid it not with a credit card, but from the fat roll of bills in my pocket. Was there any doubt what Rick Stratton did for a living? He certainly wasn’t making that kind of money writing for Rolling Stone. More like working at High Times.