Frances “Frin” Mullin, the woman who was the basis for the heroine of Smack Goddess, understands how much fun the outlaw life was. She has an attitude, an insouciance, and may have been one of the first women ever to be charged under the dreaded kingpin statute. She and I were introduced in the attorney visiting room at the MCC, which was always my preferred stop on the Bureau of Prisons national tour—naturally, if for no other reason, there were women prisoners at MCC.
Frin’s reputation, indeed her infamy, preceded her arrival at the federal jail. She was busted while living in an apartment owned by writer Nik Cohn, who wrote the magazine article on which the movie Saturday Night Fever is based. In the TV room at the MCC, we saw Frin on the local news, this lovely doe caught in the headlights as she was led from an Upper West Side apartment building in handcuffs surrounded by DEA agents. The following morning, while Frin sat in a bullpen waiting to be processed into the jail, a picture of her arrest was on the cover of all the New York tabloids under bold headlines calling her, among other things, SMACK GODDESS and DEALER TO THE STARS. According to the news reports, limos bearing rock stars and movie idols would line up and cause traffic jams outside Frin’s apartment building.
The woman has what I call British aplomb; very little fazes her. When asked by a reporter what she thought of her life as a prisoner in the MCC, she compared it favorably to life in an English boarding school. Frin got a job in the kitchen while at MCC, and she used to smuggle bags of swag, special meals, and other contraband to me on the ninth floor. After she pled guilty and was sentenced to the minimum, ten years in a federal women’s penitentiary with no possibility of parole, one day before she was shipped out of MCC she took me aside and told me she had no intention of going for ten years without heterosexual sex. When I asked her how she intended to remedy that, she said she planned to escape. And she did, from the women’s maximum-security prison, at the time located somewhere in the boonies of West Virginia. No small feat: first you need to escape from the prison, and then you need to get out of West Virginia. All of which became the story I based my novel on. I got a postcard from Frin after she escaped. It had a picture of the Rockettes on the front high-legging it, and, on the back, well wishes. The feds got it in their heads that I had somehow assisted Frin in her flight even as I was still locked up in the MCC. They sent an FBI agent in to interview me, but I declined to speak with him. And Frin, bless her, was still in the wind, still a fugitive at the time of the Smack Goddess publication.
*Story title in the New York Daily News.
Chapter Eight
I WAS HUNGRY, AND IT WAS YOUR WORLD
THE NOVELIST KIM Wozencraft is seated cross-legged on the floor in the living room at Fielding Dawson’s apartment among the other PEN Prison Writing Awards presenters when I enter. Fielding looks from her to me, and then back to Kim, and he says, “At last you two meet,” as though it had been preordained.
Indeed, it is a meeting of destinies. There are several other people in the room—writers, poets who will speak or read at the PEN Prison Writing Awards ceremony. All have notable histories; but none other than Kim and I have served time in federal prison. None have been active players in the government’s war on drugs. There is an instant, unspoken affinity between Kim and me based on shared experience; we both sense it. There is a whole range of knowledge about and emotions engendered by imprisonment, and a life and the situations and experiences one goes through as a prisoner that we will never have to try to explain simply because we’ve both been there and experienced all of it firsthand.
Kim worked undercover as a narcotics cop in East Texas when she was in her early twenties. She got strung out on coke and was shot by one of the dealers she and her partner set up and busted. Sometime after all the arrests came down, Kim and her partner were arrested by the feds, charged and convicted of violation of civil rights for doing what they were ordered by their superiors to do: set up and bust low-level drug dealers. Kim served time at the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. When she got out, she came to New York, enrolled in college, first at Hunter and then Columbia, where she graduated from the esteemed master’s writing program under the tutelage of Gordon Lish, who dubbed himself Captain Fiction. Kim’s master’s thesis based on her experiences as a narcotics cop became her bestselling novel Rush. I read Rush while I was still in prison. I remember thinking that finally someone from law enforcement is writing truthfully about this war on the American people and the harm it’s causing not only to the users and dealers of illegal drugs, but also to the cops and agents who are sent undercover and onto the front lines and ordered to make arrests at any cost.
Kim may be the only person at the PEN Prison Writing Awards ceremony who gets my lame jailhouse joke about how to do a long prison sentence that I tell as an introduction to the story I read. How do you do a long prison sentence? Winter/summer. Winter/summer. Skip spring and fall. We speak before, during, and after the reading. I notice that she wears sensible shoes. I find her attractive in a sexy, Texas law woman way; I can picture her with a gun on her hip and a badge on her breast as she sashays into a roomful of bad hombres and says, “Put ’em up!” So I give her one of my Ivan S. Fisher Forensic Specialist business cards in the hope that I will see her again.
A few days after the reading, Kim shows up at my office with her copy of Smack Goddess, which I inscribe for her. We make a date, but she cancels on the day, says she’s down with a stomach virus. I assume she’s had second thoughts about dating a former criminal. But then a week later, we try again and go to the Ninety-Second Street Y to hear Norman read from his new novel, Harlot’s Ghost.
At a reception after the reading, I introduce Kim to Norman and Norris. Kim wears a gray wool skirt. I can’t help but notice when she squats down to speak to a small child that she has a great ass and an apparent fondness for kids. Later, at dinner at Elaine’s, Kim tells me she doesn’t drink. I answer without thinking, “Well I do,” and order a drink. Here’s where our similarities begin to diverge. She smokes cigarettes. Typical pothead, I can’t abide cigarette smoke. She orders sausage. I haven’t eaten beef or pork except during extended stays in Lebanon since my early twenties. But we have much in common. Besides both having served federal prison time and both having played active roles in the war on drugs, we are both writers, both crime novelists who actually lived the lives we write about. And this like-mindedness can be either an affinity that draws us together in mutual pursuit and respect and becomes a bond, or, in time, it can devolve into a negative force driving us apart, even turning us against each other as our separate careers rise and fall. In some ways, we are too much alike, in others opposites.
When I drop Kim back at her apartment building in the East 30s after our date, we share a brief, passionless kiss in the back of the cab, and I carry on home thinking that we will probably never see each other again.
But God has other plans.
NORMAN CALLS TO tell me that his friend Buzz Farbar killed himself. After he was released from prison, Buzz was living in Amagansett and trying to write a book, for which he had been paid an advance, about his experience as part of the hashish smuggling conspiracy that had brought about his arrest and subsequent cooperation with the government. On the last day of his life, he went to the gym and worked out. He said goodbye to all his workout buddies at the gym, took a shower, and then went home. He attached a vacuum cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and asphyxiated himself. Norman says it was like Buzz to go to the gym and work out so he would leave a good-looking corpse. Norman tells me that he was aware Buzz had been seriously depressed. Norman went out to Long Island to visit Buzz, but he couldn’t seem to find anything to say to him that penetrated his deep, hopeless despair. Norman forgave him for agreeing to wear a wire and arrange a lunch meeting in an attempt to get Norman to say something on tape that the feds could use to indict him. I never could forgive Buzz. There was a time when I seriously considered killing Buzz myself. Norman talked me out of it. When I tell I
van that Buzz killed himself, he throws open the window in his office, takes a deep breath and says, “Ah! The air in New York smells better already.”
PALOMA TELLS ME she quit her job at Dr. Eisenberg’s dental offices, and she has decided to move to Miami. She’s heartbroken; we both are. And yet we know that what’s missing and what’s not working in our relationship can’t be fixed. If she were to get pregnant, I would marry her. That’s a given for me. And perhaps that shared fantasy of having a big family and living happily in a finca somewhere near Cartagena might have come true. But it’s not to be.
I see her one last time at the café outside FAO Schwartz in Rockefeller Plaza. She’s carrying a copy of Moby Dick she says she’s reading to expand her knowledge of American literature. Then she cries and tells me that she loves me, and that she always will, but that she knows we must part and go our separate ways, look for and hopefully find happiness elsewhere. I know it’s my doing, my apparent restless dissatisfaction not only with her but also with myself, with my work, and with my place in the world. I walk away from our meeting with what feels like a deep gouge ripped out of my chest, a bloody gaping hole where once there had been nothing but tender feelings for a woman who had only love for me.
NORRIS MAILER AND I attend a session at the Actor’s Studio, and then we go to a cocktail party for Kurt Vonnegut. I immediately start pounding back shots of vodka. What the fuck am I doing here? I’m miserable over the split with Paloma. Norris tells me that, as much as she likes Paloma, she never felt she was right for me. What is right for me? Who? Certainly not anyone or anything I might find here among this gaggle of pompous, self-satisfied fops and sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued Manhattan career women. The feeling of being an outsider in this world, of never being accepted by the likes of James Atlas or Jay McInerney, the sad-eyed guy who’s standing talking to me now, the feeling of alienation is deep, as it should be, for I will always be an outlaw in their eyes, a criminal, an ex-convict, and no partisan of the literary establishment. If I could run from this party now, run from my new life, and catch Paloma before she boards her plane, violate the terms of my supervised release and just—what? Disappear? Become somebody else? Become a criminal again? I’m still floundering, trying to find my way.
AS PART OF my ongoing research on the Harry Chapin story, on a whim, I call Kim and invite her to go with me to see The Buddy Holly Story musical on Broadway. I think we are both surprised there is a second date, and yet it feels good. The show is upbeat and fun. Music I grew up listening to, and though a little before Kim’s time, she digs it. Peggy Sue. Everyday. That’ll Be the Day. Rave on. C’mon, she’s a Texas girl at heart. What’s not to like? You can’t tell me it’s not getting to her. I can see it in her smile, in the glow suffusing her lovely face. We hold hands and snuggle closer. Now I’m feeling this woman in a way that eluded me before. She’s a gal with a big heart, but it’s been seared, scarred, and it’s men who did that to her. After the show, we go to a bar, and end up making out heavily until someone tells us to get a room. We go back to her place, make intense love, soul-exposing love. I stagger out the next day deliriously well fucked.
From the beginning our romance is a rocky one, at once giddy, passionate, tumultuous, fun, painful, hurtful, and ultimately glorious. Yes, glorious, for it’s the fruits of such mating that will go on long after our brief time together. We are having dinner at the Red Inn in Provincetown on our first trip out of town together when I say to Kim, “If you are serious about this, then let’s forego all means of contraception.” Then again while on vacation in St. John when I ask her to marry me, Kim wants a reciprocal vow: that I promise to leave the outlaw life behind once and for all.
It has been a struggle for us to reach this point. Several times I have left her, walked out, and thought, No, no way, Stratton, this will never work; we are all wrong for each other. One night we sit in her car outside my apartment in Brooklyn when she tells me that in the past she has only been attracted to men who abused her either physically or emotionally. That, I say, is something I never want to do. I don’t want to be that guy. So let’s just leave this now where it is and go our separate ways. Walking across the street and back to my apartment I think, Good, let it go; forget about her. This is not for you—not for her, either. We may end up doing more damage to each other than good. There may be few differences between us, but those differences are enormous.
First, there is the disparity in where we are in our respective careers and bank account balances. My career as a novelist appears to have stalled. I can’t survive without my income from the legal writing I do for Ivan. I have a job, but I’m broke, struggling to get paid, teetering on the verge of resorting to my previous source of income. Kim is riding a financial windfall and international acclaim as a bestselling novelist. The film rights to Rush have been bought by a major Hollywood producer and the novel is in the process of being made into a movie starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Patrick. Smack Goddess appears to have attracted a cult following of dedicated doper readers. (The fact-checker from Vanity Fair tells me that the novel has attained an underground reputation as one of the best novels to come out of the drug subculture.) Kim has a contract and is at work on a new novel about women in prison to be called Notes from the Country Club. Kim shows up at my office and says, “C’mon, let’s go out and play.” I’m too busy, too preoccupied trying to rebuild my life at forty-five to go out and play, but I go anyway.
And there is a deeper divide. We are both lying to each other. Kim is still involved with a former lover, a married man who is the editor of Rush and of her new book. She makes up an affair with an Italian musician she says is over. I am still married to my first wife who went to prison in Canada for money laundering, and whom I have not seen for a decade. We are divorced psychically, physically, and emotionally, if not yet legally. But I tell Kim the marriage was not legal to begin with, another lie. It’s as though Kim and I both wish to reinvent ourselves in order to embrace the inevitability of this new relationship unfettered with our past attachments and subterfuges—a clean slate. It feels like a karmic necessity, a sense that it must be, and that it must do deep character work for each of us, be founded upon honesty, bring us to a new level of growth in our journeys no matter how painful, no matter how hurtful to each other if we are to transcend our old disingenuous selves and become truthful as to who we were, who we are now, and who we are striving to become. But first we will have to confront the old selves living their duplicitous lives—undercover cop, outlaw drug smuggler—so we can come clean with each other, and then start over.
IT HAPPENS IN a tent in a campground in the wilds of Maine under a night sky emblazoned with stars that appear close enough to reach out and touch. We’re on the loose, I’ve left the five boroughs of New York without my parole officer’s permission, and we’ve been munching on magic mushrooms like a couple of hungry chipmunks. Kim confesses. Not only is the Italian musician a fictional character (ah, the mind of the novelist) but she has also continued to meet with her real lover, the editor, while telling me she hasn’t seen him. So there is a lie on top of another lie. I accept all that. There is no stopping where this is going. I allow that my marriage is long over all but for the paperwork. There is no one else for me. My dear, sweet Paloma flew the coop. I miss her, but I’m ready to commit to a monogamous relationship with Kim. She and I have decamped from the workaday world and taken up carnal residence in Fuck City. Moved in just down the street from Cunnilingus Corner, and around the block from Blowjob Boulevard. Do they have a piss test for psilocybin in Fuck City? Never mind. Who cares? Get naked. Take off all your clothes, smear your body with mud and gobs of green moss, stick slabs of tree bark and twigs in your hair, shed all pretense of civilization, and dance around the campfire like a couple of aborigines. Nature Boy and Earth Goddess delight in the campfire light.
And then I leave Mother Earth. Oh, yes, I am way out there. Other entities gather in the cosmos looking for the right circumstance to reincarn
ate. Hold on tight, for there is no going back. This is the beginning of a great adventure. I enter deep space during an exquisite orgasm that is timeless, boundless, extraterrestrial—a revelation!—and I drift out among the planets and stars. I have become a disembodied consciousness, a heavenly body to float beyond the known universe, where I meet—what? My karma . . . and my son. Yes, a child is conceived. I see him as a giant embryo in orbit around our fused entities, as he seeks to merge with a cosmic flow of earth-bound energy and incarnate.
It comes as no surprise when a few weeks later Kim tells me she is pregnant. I knew it the moment our child was conceived. We are both blissfully happy. When I tell Norman, he says his only concern is that, if the writing doesn’t work out, Kim and I will resort to robbing banks.
Chapter Nine
HEAVYWEIGHTS
AT SHANE’S SUGGESTION, Barbara Kopple hires me to write the treatment for her film about Mike Tyson to be called Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson. She gets the gig, a ninety-minute documentary to air on TV, and she brings me on as a producer. Here I get lucky. In an interview with the woman who ran the home where Tyson’s mentor, Cus D’Amato, lodged the young fighters he was training, she tells me that she has footage from some of Tyson’s earliest fights at the Junior Olympics Games in 1981 when he was just sixteen. She gives me the tape, and the footage ends up being a crucial element in the story of Tyson’s early years under Cus’s tutelage.
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