THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE

by Mark Russell

  'Ah, for Chrissake,' Cavalera sputtered in protest. 'Someplace back east?' God, he needed another hit on his pipe. His weedy business partner was nothing if not boring – no wonder the ladies stayed clear of him.

  'I know its a dangerous move,' Deuce said, 'but believe me, dude, I've got more brains than Thirteen and Sorenson put together. And short of breaking their heads with an iron bar, I can't think of anything better than grabbing a chunk of their market from behind their backs. Like I said, if this stuff's any good, you and I could make some serious dough.'

  From day one Cavalera realized Deuce hated Thirteen and Sorenson. Hell, the mousy-haired twerp hated them with a vengeance. Both men abused him and took him for granted as a “fucking little geek”, or so Deuce claimed. In any case, Cavalera didn't think his weedy business partner had it in him to do over a major leaguer like Thirteen. Didn't think he had it in him at all.

  'Come on, Deuce. Stop daydreaming, you little flogger. Let's talk some real business for a change.'

  'Listen to me, you Latino knockabout.' Deuce pushed the stained glass pipe across the table. He tightened his jaw and eyeballed his colleague. 'From the beginning I made sure no one in Fast Cash Boys knew my real name. I left behind a fake drivers license at the Westwood house one night. Tricking Thirteen and Co. into believing they knew my legal name.'

  Deuce smirked and nodded in silent accolade of his street smarts. 'Also, I've never had my fingerprints taken by state or federal authorities, which means' – and he couldn't help but grin profusely – 'that I can disappear anytime I want without anyone knowing my true identity. So, my doubting friend, you and I are perfectly placed to start manufacturing someplace back east. We could become wealthy kingpins of a profitable new market. Believe me, dude, this new drug could be the ticket to bigger and better things.'

  Cavalera looked at his lanky colleague. His predatory eyes turned into slits as he sucked on his Marlboro. 'So how do we get our hands on the formula?'

  'Well ... that I'm working on.' Deuce chewed his thumbnail that much harder.

  Cavalera made a disgruntled sound and blew cigarette smoke at his partner's face. Deuce flapped the smoke away and grabbed a capsule from off the table. 'Yeah, this is supposed to be good for in the sack. That's what Sorenson said.'

  'So tell me something I don't know!'

  'Well the guy from the army plant ... ' Deuce paused, before playing his last card. 'Well, he's gonna be at Thirteen's place Friday night, and he's bringing the drug formula with him. He wants to sell it to Sorenson.'

  'Is he now?' Cavalera grinned shrewdly and stubbed his cigarette into the table's ashtray. Deuce leaned forward to scoop up the remaining capsules, but Cavalera beat him to it.

  'No,' Deuce protested, lunging forward.

  'Don't worry,' Cavalera said. 'You've still got one. So, pop it, you never know, if it's as good as you say, you just might get laid.'

  'Fuck you.' Deuce jumped from the sofa, but Cavalera had already pocketed the other capsules.

  Wednesday, 5th November 1980.

  General Turner sat back in his executive leather seat in his upper-floor office in the Pentagon. The other offices of the Defense Intelligence Agency were in a sub-ground level of the massive pentagonal building. After his appointment as Director of the DIA, Turner had used his influence to obtain the upper-floor office. For the sweeping view alone it had been worth it, not to mention the odd moment of solitude that came his way, such as now. By and large the general spent his time in the sub-ground offices below, or at Bolling Air Force base, both of which constituted the beating heart of the DIA.

  He gazed out the window at Harris Point (most of the landmass, however, was unrecognizable due to low-lying haze). The general grinned and fingered the DEA report on his desk. He couldn't believe his luck. It wasn't everyday something like this dropped in his lap. He sat with steepled fingers, studying the hazy vista outside his window.

  After Friday night he would have one less problem to worry about. It was a problem that had plagued him considerably.

  He'd found Goldman. And not a day too soon.

  All things considered, the bothersome chemist would be dead by the weekend. Turner had already organized the hit (he hadn't risen to his heights from being a lax man). The fruitful chain of events leading to Goldman's whereabouts had started on the other side of the country, in the sunny climes of southern California. Turner's good fortune had come about from a well-placed source.

  Pablo Cavalera.

  It turned out the underground chemist was a police informant. Six months earlier DEA agents had raided Cavalera's warehouse loft in Anaheim (the well-equipped loft on Harbor Boulevard was close to Disneyland; and on still summery nights when Cavalera was engaged in his illegal craft he sometimes heard the echoing screams of those daring souls who'd taken the Space Mountain ride). A makeshift laboratory and four kilos of MDA were uncovered during the DEA raid. It wasn't the first time Cavalera had been arrested for making the drug.

  Truth be told, he was hard-pressed not to make the hallucinogenic amphetamine. The drug had become something of an obsession. He always relished the sparkling sight and bitter taste of the tiny crystals, as well as the thick wads of cash they brought. With this new batch of MDA, and his previous record for manufacture, Cavalera looked set to do time. The DEA and the County Prosecutor's Office offered indemnity if Cavalera became a confidential police informant. Keen not to see the inside of a federal penitentiary, Cavalera reluctantly took up the offer.

  For the past six months Cavalera hadn't given much to his case officer, East Precinct Detective Adam Bradford. Only a minor backyard PCP factory and a makeshift amphetamine lab hardly the bigger. As a result Bradford become more threatening with each monthly visit. Furthermore, it seemed the detective had reached the end of his tether in regard to Cavalera's ongoing plea that he be given more time to build up the Fast Cash Boys connection into a headline-making bust. Cavalera couldn't understand why Bradford didn't want him to work the “Deuce connection”.

  On his last visit the burly detective came close to punching Cavalera. He'd even threatened to plant narcotics on Cavalera to ensure his bargain-failing ass was locked up in a crowded penitentiary. Cavalera came to realize that his case officer's judgment was seriously clouded by alcohol (and Bradford's scotch-soured breath at all hours only endorsed the disturbing conclusion). Cavalera knew it was in his best interest to hand over the capsules he'd got from Deuce. And he did just that, informing Detective Bradford that a classified military formula was about to hit the black market.

  At East LA's Hollenbeck Division station, a shapely blond police clerk logged Detective Bradford onto NADDIS, the federal government's Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System. Bradford read a newly posted DEA Alert for unscheduled crystalline compounds. He contacted the agency. Two hours later DEA agents took possession of the gelatin capsules (in a gruff manner that spoke of the federal agency begrudging its intermediary role in the affair). The DEA then notified the DIA, as per the juridical directive posted by General Turner.

  On Monday afternoon, November 3rd, an enlisted production chemist from Silverwood Centre flew on a military transport to Air Force Plant 42 near Palmdale, California. He brought with him an authorized amount of MPA. At a UCLA drug laboratory, chief research chemist Peter Lutyens compared the brought powder with the capsules of powder handed over by Detective Bradford, employing a molecular diagnostics program which utilized thermal analysis and ejection angle distribution for comparison tools.

  Of course the powders matched.

  From the DEA report on his desk, General Turner knew the LA address where Goldman would be Friday night. The DIA Director gazed at the report as if it were a recently unearthed map detailing the location of hidden treasure. He turned again to the window. A 747 banked through light cloud as it lifted up from the hazy horizon. The ill-defined meeting of heaven and earth was balm to the general's mind and caused him to reflect on the hectic pace of recent days.

/>   From yesterday's federal election result, Turner was beside himself that Reagan had knocked Carter out of the White House, and that he, General Alexander Turner, would have a permanent seat on President Reagan's National Security Council.

  In the back of his mind, however, was the unsettling notion Goldman might taint the general's new credentials by going public with an outrageous claim about the murder of his father, Joseph Goldman. Of course any legal action against Turner had little chance of succeeding in court, in that Goldman's copy of Tape 64 had been illegally obtained. However Turner had been in politics long enough to know that once mud was publicly thrown it stuck to its victim for a crippling time afterward. Turner couldn't afford any media scandal at this pivotal point in his career. He'd never been so close to realizing his dream of sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  General Turner had hired Pelayo Guttierez to kill Goldman.

  The hit was no longer business for Guttierez. It was also a matter of revenge. Goldman had made a fool of Guttierez; what with Goldman destroying two of Guiterrez's cars and causing outlaw bikers to attack Guttierez's men – all in the same night.

  Adding fuel to the fire, Turner claimed Goldman had regularly stolen data from Silverwood Centre's computer. Goldman, as told to Pelayo Guttierez, was selling the data to the Soviets, using Castro's intelligence agency, the DGI, as a conduit. The chemist had gone to Cuba on a tourist visa the year before, it was said, to meet DGI agents and put a spy pipeline in place. Guttierez's men were some of the staunchest anti-communists Roswell knew. Their hatred of Castro and his Soviet backers was unbridled. And time hadn't checked their hatred one iota.

  Guttierez's men, collectively called Commando C, were part of the 1,200 combatants captured by Castro's soldiers during the thwarted Bay of Pigs invasion in the early sixties. Due to Bobby Kennedy's tireless diplomacy, the captured combatants were eventually returned to America. However shortly after their return Commando C came in disfavour of Alpha 66, the most militant of Miami's Cuban-exile groups. After a lengthy shootout on West Flagler Street, Little Havana (the bloody fracas made front page news in Diario Las Americas for two consecutive days), Guttierez's men fled to Baltimore, to etch out an existence from racketeering and occasional freelance work for General Turner.

  After a time Commando C splintered. Many of its younger men moved to Los Angeles, lured by the sunny city's legendary criminal profits. Turner knew the West Coast exiles (many of whom were tortured while languishing in Cuban jails after the Bay of Pigs fiasco) would be only too willing to kill a DGI sympathizer such as he had painted Goldman. They'd hardly care if they got paid.

  Turner turned from the window and pushed aside the DEA report on his desk. He pressed a pen against the upper corner of a NSA KH-11 satellite report outlining the tactical strength of Soviet tank divisions in North West Afghanistan. He etched a series of dark circles, the overlapping rings symbolic of incessant calculation.

  The sooner Goldman was killed the better, the three-star general opined. He returned the limited edition Montblanc pen to its holder on the desk, before looking at a framed picture of his wife and children. After cleaning his reading glasses with a micro-fibre cloth, he flipped open the KH-11 satellite report.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Friday, 7th November 1980.

  Goldman stood back up after a gruelling round of push-ups. His stomach muscles were firm and apparent, his hairline sheened with light perspiration. Before the push-ups he'd done a hundred sit-ups, and had performed the aforementioned exercises with such little fuss, Michelle still slept soundly in the room's silk-sheeted bed.

  Clad in boxer shorts, he drew aside the curtains of the guest room in Sandy's hillside home. Trim and fit, he felt equal to the fine morning unfolding upon the Los Angeles Basin below. He folded his arms and watched distant vehicles crisscrossing streets like worker ants in the maze of an established colony.

  He grew more optimistic about the day. If everything went his way he would sell his MPA formula for a handsome sum, and get a reliable contact for a false passport. It didn't seem an unreasonable expectation as he surveyed the horizon-stretching view on the other side of the glass door.

  He turned and studied Michelle in bed. No woman, including his late wife, Rachel, had evoked such feelings in him in so short a time. Of course a part of him was averse to any kind of emotional attachment. How could he have fallen for Michelle during this dark period of his life? In any case, he couldn't imagine not being with her. There was no going back. He was determined to travel abroad if that's what it took for them to remain together. Of course they were hardly suited. Star-crossed lovers at best. Michelle was barely in her early twenties and had fallen into his arms on the rebound from a long-suffering relationship; he a federal fugitive no less. Even so, she was still with him, and he loved her all the more for it.

  He studied her graceful repose on the bed. As surely as his heart pounded from recent exercise, he would do all in his power to protect her, to make her not regret the decision to stick with him.

  The crowd kept growing at the Subway Slaves concert, even as the band was quarter-way through its repertoire of songs. An empty Anaheim warehouse was the chosen venue for the much-touted performance to kick off the band’s national tour. Fans, musicians, photographers, journalists and agents were crowded one and all before the colourful stage. The band played an infectious punk-pop beat layered with the husky vocals of Danni Devlin, the outlandish singer of the all-girl band. Photographers from music magazines, Rolling Stone, Circus and Creem, pointed their cameras at the stage, and equally at the dancing crowd in the hope of capturing a partying-down celebrity.

  'So, who are you shooting for?' Goldman stood beside a stocky man wearing Levis and a black Harley Davidson T-shirt. A string of Native American beads hung about the fellow's bullish neck, along with three expensive-looking cameras.

  'Rolling Stone,' the cameraman replied.

  'Really?'

  'Random Notes. You know that front section with pictures and gossip?'

  'Uh-huh. Along with the record reviews, the only part of the magazine I read while browsing at the newsstand.'

  'Say, you haven't seen any celebs arriving have you?' The cameraman gripped his SLR camera and looked resolutely about the crowded floor.

  'No, but isn't that Joan Jett arriving?'

  'Fuck yes.' The cameraman made a beeline for the leather-clad singer, slicing through the crowd like an ice-breaking ship through Arctic waters.

  Up on stage, the Subway Slaves finished a mettlesome rendition of Venus in Furs. Multi-hued stage lights gyrated hypnotically as the audience clapped, whistled and cheered. A large screen mounted above the stage showed black and white footage of other bands who'd risen to prominence at CBGB in New York.

  Michelle snuggled against Goldman. Her wide eyes moved this way and that as she was caught up in the sweeping energy of the performance. Goldman pulled her closer and couldn't imagine the magic between them ever ending, particularly at this exhilarating moment with her warm body flush against his.

  'Let's move closer,' Michelle said.

  As they made their way through the crowd, the band paused between songs, the couple were privy to passing snippets of conversation:

  “... no way? You're gonna spend fifty grand producing the new Damaged Goods album? ...”

  “... I heard Madonna Ciccone's demo tape yesterday. She just did a stint with Alvin Ailey's dance troupe ...”

  “... come on, that's definitely the lead singer of Teen Tiger ...”

  Up on stage, Danni Devlin took off a studded leather jacket. Queen of the black lace C-cup, the tops of her cupped breasts gleamed like oily knobs. Wearing black pumps, black fishnet stockings, black lace panties, a black suspender belt and the aforementioned brassiere, the shapely twenty-six year old shouldering a battered Stratocaster guitar was in a signature state of undress that young female fans increasingly sought to emulate, as a similar lack of attire in the front audience attested.

&n
bsp; 'This is a song I wrote last year in rehab,' Danni said, between breaths. 'A time when I was weak and desperate for mercy. It's called Do What You Want 'Cos You Got Me.' The well-rehearsed band broke into a power pop beat. Danni played a catchy rift of major and minor chords. Her bright red lips rakishly enunciated each lyric: “... sex is my back room fix, the plague of my haemorrhaging heart, blacken me with your burning passion, I'm begging you to start ...”

  The band's bass player wore knee-hugging boots and an over-sized T-shirt with 4PLAY BABY printed across its front. Her vacuous look gave hint of her being another casualty from the Summer of '76 – which was, of course, her chosen stage persona. The blood-flecked bandages about her wrists only furthered the impression.

  "... cuff me, I'm tied to your will, a servant of your need. Oh yeah, make me do it, baby, make me whimper and plead ..."

  The Subway Slave's drummer wore skimpy latex shorts and a midnight blue bra. Magenta-streaked hair swirled about her pale shoulders as she attacked her drum kit, all the while her foot stamped the kick pedal on the bass drum. A lit cigarette poked from her mouth and her narrowed eyes spoke of an ongoing exertion to keep other band members in time.

  Up on the screen, a Latino woman stroked the bushy triangle between her legs with a leather riding crop. The band broke into a frisky Tex-Mex beat. The lithe keyboardist jabbed at the keys of her synthesizer and bounced up and down like a crazed marionette. With spiked red hair, cutoff jeans, and a black fishnet singlet which did little to cover her pubescent-like breasts, she hardly looked out of place with the other girl players.

  Like a masochist in pleasurable pain, Danni snarled into the microphone: "...no one can do it like you ... NO ONE!”

  Psychedelic artwork (circa San Francisco 1967) swirled on the screen above the band. Coagulating colours morphed into footage of a woman clasping her welted buttocks. Chrome handcuffs encircled her wrists, while a dragon tattoo rose up from the base of her spine like an Oriental creature come to life on human flesh.