We were happy, broke but happy. I was borrowing money to finish work on the house. The lure of a fast score in a scam was never far from my mind. Glimmers of opportunity came my way, but I passed. I had a promise to keep. Then Jonathan and Avril came to visit one weekend. He kept riding me about being broke, paying for our dinner, flashing hundred dollar bills, offering to loan me money. I bet him that I could make more money in one month than he made in a year. I won the bet but broke my promise and lost my wife.
The Seagull and Avril have a young son and a supposedly viable marriage. If she’s pissed off at him for taking up with the divorcée, we have problems that impact on more than just their relationship. Anaïs could go either way. She’s loyal to her sister and says she is over me. Ours is essentially a business relationship now, which is odd given that she lobbied so hard to get me to quit. Last I heard she was seeing some straight guy. But the sisters have grown accustomed to the cash flow. They invested their money wisely. If it comes down to a matter of survival, the fact that Jonathan and I are both fucking other women will weigh heavily against us.
“Did you tell this woman why you were so happy to see they have an airstrip at her club?”
“No… of course I didn’t.” A lie, I’m sure. He goes on, “Just that, well, I—we—have a plane.”
“We?”
“I mean me… my company. The plane is there now.”
“The plane is at this woman’s club?”
“Yes.”
“What were you thinking?”
He’s excited now, over the tears. “It’s perfect! They think I’m this big land developer down here looking for deals.”
“They? She’s divorced, she has two young kids. You don’t know shit about her husband. He could be a cop for all you know. And you’re married and have a kid, and your wife knows a lot about what we do. How is this going to work?”
“Wait’ll you see this place—it’s just what we need,” the Seagull says. “And her, you’ll understand.”
It’s no use; there is no turning back. At a certain point these smuggles have a momentum all their own. Jonathan goes on to tell me he removed the rear seats from the plane. JD and Father Flaherty gathered a whole truck full of new appliances, electronics, a motor scooter, food and clothes, and cases of bottled water and soda to deliver to the Indians who live in the Mexican mountain village where the load is stored. The pot, all tight lime-green-and-gold seedless buds grown high in the mountains of Guerrero, is harvested, cured, and ready to go. The longer it sits in some adobe hut in Mexico, the more it costs, and the more we run the risk of losing it.
IT’S A BRIGHT moonlit night when Jonathan turns off the ranch road outside the county seat of San Saba, known locally as the birthplace of Tommy Lee Jones. I get out and swing open the gate. There is an engraved sign in the stone wall at the entrance to the driveway that reads Tierra Alta—High Country. The car rumbles across a cattle guard. I close the gate, get back in and we ride up the winding, mile-long limestone and caliche drive that mounts to the top of a gentle butte where the ranch house and barns sit above the surrounding landscape. When Herbert brought me out to show me Tierra Alta—6,000 acres bordering a real Texas-size spread of 40,000 acres owned by Clint Murchison, who also owns the Dallas Cowboys—I immediately fell in love with the place. My plan was to keep the ranch in Blanco for the smuggling business, move most of the horses and cattle and dogs and possessions here to Tierra Alta, and begin building the legal business.
Tonight the moon is so bright the limestone driveway glows like white gold. We drive past the airstrip, still under construction, past the acreage we are clearing to plant jojoba and aloe vera to realize my dream of legitimate respectability as a gentleman rancher and organic farmer. There is, of course, the matter of the case in Maine with Freddy spilling his guts, Wolfshein circling like a hungry wolf ready to lap up the entrails. Perhaps I can make a deal. He seemed to imply as much.
Fuck that. I’m an outlaw not a rat.
The perspective from the house, being high on the butte with a view of any encroaching armies of agents, appeals to my embattled sensibilities. I’m gonna fight this thing, I vow, fight it to the end. This is Texas, land of the Alamo. Never say die.
Jonathan pulls up in front of the house but doesn’t shut off the engine.
“You coming in?” I ask him.
He shakes his head.
“Where’re you going?”
“The house… in Dripping Springs—” he tries but I cut him off.
“Yeah, right—her house. Man, it’s past midnight. That’s a three-hour drive.”
“Do you mind if I take the car?”
“What am I going to say—no? You’re fucking crazy.”
“I know,” he says.
“That must be some good pussy, brother,” I say and grab my bag. “You know what you’ve got to do. Weather permitting, day after tomorrow—we go. Be ready.”
“I was born ready,” he says, his bravado returning.
The dogs in the kennels out behind the house bark at my arrival. That’s another enterprise I’ve embarked upon, breeding German shepherds. Jongo, the big male shepherd who lives in the house, is quiet, crouched inside, ready to rip my throat out if I am an intruder. When he knows it’s me, he comes up and rubs his body against my legs, then lies down so I can scratch his chest. In the kitchen, I pour a glass of Patrón Silver on ice with a slice of lime and walk out back to sit by the pool and smoke my last doobie of the day.
I’m alone here tonight. The ranch foreman, Chet, who takes care of the animals, and his wife, Sherry, who pays the bills and keeps the books, live in town. I wish Val were waiting for me naked in the king-size bed, ready to fuck me to sleep instead of out on the road taking care of business. I worry about her when she’s not with me—the girl likes to party. The moonlight is like pale, silvery daylight. From the patio behind the house I can see for miles in any direction—a big-sky view uncluttered by signs of modern civilization. Pyramid-shaped buttes glisten in the distance giving the sense one is living in ancient Mexico at the time of the Mayas and Quetzalcoatl or in Egypt in the age of the pharaohs. Not now, in the era of Reagan and the neon arches, DEA and CENTAC, whatever that is. It’s curious how content I feel when I fully arrive in this part of our vast country. I’m here body and soul. It may be the one place I come to rest where I am not immediately ready to move on, not thinking about where I will go next, happy to be in this infinite moment. I could die here tonight, and they could take me out by the well and bury me behind the kennels where I could hear the dogs bark and feel the cool evening breeze, and my spirit would be at peace, no longer caught in the material world, trapped in this restless body.
My parents spent the year before I was born, just after World War II, in the East Texas town of Marshall. Being conceived in Texas explains why I feel more at home here than in Puritan New England. And it could also have something to do with the Mexican border and long coastline. As a kid growing up steeped in the TV lore of the Wild West, land of legendary renegades and rebels, men like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, Wyatt Earp—who died on my birthday, January 13—I couldn’t wait to get out of Wellesley. The first time I passed through the Lone Star State was after my freshman year at Arizona State University. I was on my way back East, hitchhiking across the country. I was a wrestler in high school, and Arizona State’s Sun Devils had a highly competitive collegiate wrestling program. ASU offered me a wrestling scholarship. And there is where I strayed over the line.
That year, 1965, I shared a little bungalow off campus in Tempe with a pot-smoking radical leftie member of SDS, a graduate student I met while working out in the gym. When wrestling season ended, on weekends and over holidays, my roommate and I started going on excursions in his International pickup truck. At first we stayed in country, hiking and camping in the Grand Canyon and Saguaro National Park, hunting rabbits, getting high by the campfire at night. Later, after we had seen a fair share of Arizona wilderness, we
took longer trips south of the border, to Ensenada, then down the Baja Peninsula and up into the mountains around the Sea of Cortez. As we headed back to Arizona after a week-long visit to Mexico over spring vacation, we got sidetracked drinking beers and shots of tequila in a cantina in the border town of Nogales.
“I’m not going anywhere with one of these girls unless she looks like Marilyn Monroe and only wants ten bucks,” my roommate said, eyeing the flock of plump, young whores sitting around like wallflowers at a high school prom. Ten minutes later he disappeared with a chubby puta who looked nothing like Marilyn.
“You want a girl?” the bartender asked me.
“I want mota,” I said. “Marijuana.”
He called over his nine-year-old son, told him to hook me up. The kid brought me around the corner, down an alley to a place where they fixed flat tires. In a rear room a short, rumpled-looking guy named Pepe, who reminded me of a Mexican version of Humphrey Bogart, showed me a kilo brick of pressed commercial weed wrapped in brown paper. “I only want a couple of joints,” I said.
Pepe shook his head. “I only sell kilos.”
Out of curiosity I asked, “How much?”
He shrugged, wiped his greasy hands on his coveralls. “For you, one hundred dollars per kilo.”
A hundred bucks a kilo. I had $300 on me. I did the math in my head. Commercial Mexican weed (the only kind of pot available in the mid-sixties) sold for $20 an ounce in Boston. Sixteen ounces in a pound, 2.2 pounds in a kilo. That’s forty ounces per kilo times three. One hundred and twenty ounces at $20 each. I could gross over two grand on a $300 investment. On an entrepreneurial impulse, I bought the three kilos with no idea what I would do with them. Almost as if I were being directed by some external force—that which I have come to think of as the gods of cannabis—I asked to borrow a screwdriver from Pepe. I removed the panel from the passenger’s side door of my roommate’s truck and stashed the bricks.
In those days the border was as porous as skin. I figured if my roommate didn’t know the weed was there, he wouldn’t get nervous when we crossed back into the States. Turned out he was too wasted to drive. I was tense, my mouth dry, hands sweaty on the steering wheel right up until the moment the Customs guy at the US border crossing was beside the truck, asking how long we’d been in Mexico. I’d heard stories of pot prisoners serving life sentences for possession of a joint. I’m thinking they could execute me for three kilos. “Couple of days,” I said. He looked over at my roommate, who was passed out, leaning against the door holding the hidden weed.
A clear, out-of-body calm took hold. It reminded me of how nervous I got before a wrestling match, then, as soon as I shook my opponent’s hand and the match began, the fear was gone.
“Where’re you headed?”
“Tempe… back to college.”
“Have fun.”
I wasn’t sure if it was a question or an order. “Yeah, always,” I said.
He nodded, waved us on, and I drove away.
What a rush!
America was wide open back then, still a gloriously free country. There were no security checkpoints and X-ray machines at the airports, no dope-sniffing dogs, no armed soldiers. Back in the bungalow, I packed the three kilos in my luggage and flew home to Boston. Deano, one of my childhood pals and a former underboss in the Pink Rats gang, had a cousin who sold ounces and helped me move most of the weed. I made $1,500 on that trip and was hooked.
Curious, I’m thinking, as I sit out by the pool and breathe in the Texas night, in a way I have the old man to blame for my becoming an outlaw. Little as I knew Emery as a kid growing up, I’m always impressed to see how much influence he had over me. He was a fine athlete, a graceful man skilled in the strokes of sports with balls. Tennis was his game until some malady of the lungs sent him to a dude ranch in the dry, hot air of Arizona. Those infrequent times he talked about Arizona and the year he spent there, it was with a kind of nostalgia and reverence that stuck in my mind, for my father was not a man given to expressing sentiment. If the old man liked the Southwest, I figured I had to check it out. So when the Sun Devils beckoned, I answered the call.
Pot changed my life. After those first few hits in my ’40 Ford Coupe out in the beer-drinking fields behind Babson Institute, and over the course of one academic year at Arizona State, I went from a crew-cut jock who believed his highest service to his country would be to join the Green Berets and kill Viet Cong to a long-haired, dope-smuggling, card-carrying member of Students for a Democratic Society. I quit ROTC in protest and became an early opponent of the war in Southeast Asia. I yearned for a cause, something to give meaning to my life. I was already disillusioned. Nothing ever quite brought me back from November 1963. I remember sitting in my girlfriend’s home watching TV for hours on end after the first Kennedy assassination. Then Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who allegedly murdered our president, proclaimed for all to hear that he was just a patsy. We saw Jack Ruby live on TV as he walked into the basement of the Dallas police station surrounded by a gang of cops and shot Oswald dead. How could that happen? I sensed even then that we weren’t seeing events in America as they really are, that there is no real law and order. There is just power and privilege controlled by a shadow government. The dream of America was forever corrupted. Then Bobby Kennedy got hit in Los Angeles by the Manchurian candidate, Sirhan Sirhan, who probably didn’t fire the kill shot. And they murdered Martin Luther King in Memphis and hung it on some escaped con who didn’t have the means or the motive. I began to see our government, or at least some aspects of what we think of as our government, as another criminal conspiracy. A gang, and treacherous in that many of these guys carry badges as well as guns. They wear the white hats, and they control the accepted history. They own TV.
In my reasoning, the marijuana underground stood in opposition to all that. Pot was the truth plant. Smoke it and the bullshit detectors were activated. Hell no, we won’t go. Question authority. Forget the News, here’s what’s really going down. I would leave for Canada or go to jail before I would go to Vietnam and kill people who never called Muhammad Ali nigger. Not that I was afraid. I craved danger, I was ready and willing to go into battle. I just didn’t want to go to war with a phantom enemy.
And now Bernie Wolfshein of the Drug Enforcement Administration, my enemy in the so-called War on Plants, has added a new equation to the calculus in my brain, tangled up in shades of gray: there are no black-and-white answers anymore. If I hear him right, he’s saying at a certain level crooks morph into cops and vice versa. And it is okay. It is the American way.
Stars wheel overhead. The evening breeze picks up across the West Texas plains, and I am blown away. I take a deep hit and roach the joint, gaze up into the dizzying reaches of the cosmos. These wide-open skies will do it to me every time, make me feel so insignificant in the overall scheme of creation. None of this really matters. It is not real. Material life as I know it is all symbol, pointing to something other. The universe is so vast, so beyond my ken, stranger than I can think: How can I ever know my true purpose? Only if I follow my path wherever it leads me.
By the time classes finished at the end of my freshman year at ASU, I had done two more successful smuggles from Mexico, never more than three kilos at a time, and amassed a small bankroll, a little over five grand, which was a lot of money for a nineteen-year-old in 1965. I decided to drop out of college and embark upon the hippie highway in search of cannabis and satori. I could have bought a plane ticket home, but I yearned for the adventure of the open road. I had just finished reading Kerouac’s On the Road and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. I began my journey hitching from Tempe to Wellesley with the idea that once I arrived there I would just keep going.
It took me three days to cross Texas. The road I followed dipped down through this part of the Hill Country, a few miles from where I am right now. I recall a warm night in May spent sleeping by the side of the road, a night not unlike tonight with billions of stars glitteri
ng in the skies over Texas. Those heavenly bodies felt as near and as much a part of me as the cells of my body. At times I would wake and sense myself lifted up above the planet, hovering in space and vibrating with energy.
Early in the morning as I was getting ready to head back out to the highway, just as the sun rose over the hills to the east, I was overcome with an intense sensation that I had been there before, in that exact spot, and that what I was living through at that precise moment had happened previously at some unknown time in the past, even though I knew it was impossible. It was all so familiar, the feeling so strong—of being in a timeless state, of having left my body and expanded into some new dimension. I fell to my knees in praise, overcome with reverence for all life. I placed my hands on the earth and gripped rocks and soil to assure myself I was alive in this time and space.
What I saw that morning was nothing like how I imagined Texas. In spring the land is carpeted with wildflowers with names like Indian Blanket, Mexican Hat, Texas Paintbrush. Brilliant splashes and pools of color thrown like paint on canvas-covered hills, vales, and swaths beside the highway. The land west of the geographic lesion known as the Balcones Fault bucks and heaves in buttes and razorback ridges with names like Devil’s Backbone before it settles down onto the vast, open plains of West Texas. Wild oak, mesquite, and lofty pecan trees circle the lakes and stand at ease beside the rivers.
This is outlaw country; there is a tradition in these parts of living outside the law. In the later part of the nineteenth century, when there was no law west of St. Louis and supposedly no God west of Arkansas, the territories were known as Robber’s Roost, a safe haven for remnants of the Missouri Border Raiders and Texas Freebooters. For me it would be the same—a place to hide out between runs across the border into Mexico to gather booty; then to rest up and regroup while the spoils were distributed back east.
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