As the party relocates to the Plaza, before we go into the hotel, I take Biff aside and berate him. “Why do you keep bringing up the trip in front of these people? They don’t need to know what we do.”
“This guy—he wants to make a movie. I was just thinking—”
“You weren’t even there. You put your tail between your legs and ran like a bitch at the first sign of trouble. Now you want bragging rights? Make a fucking movie? Just shut the fuck up, Biff. Take this guy and his bag of blow and get lost.”
He looks at me, stunned. “R… Doc, I’m always there for you, bro. Shit, I didn’t know you needed me… I mean—”
“Of course you knew we needed you. I told you. But you split as soon as shit got heavy and you thought we were going to get busted. You’re a fucking coward, Biff. Sammy doesn’t even want me to pay you. Now take this asshole and get lost.”
Surprised by my own harsh words, I regret them.
“But what about… I mean, the two hundred and fifty grand… Are you still gonna pay me?”
“Maybe. If you earn it. Seriously, get this guy out of here. I don’t want him coming up to the room. You’ve already said too much in front of him. Sammy may come by later. He’ll freak if he sees you. Don’t reach out for me. I’ll call you.”
He looks at me like a spurned lover. “I can’t believe you’re saying this to me.”
His self-pitying attitude brings out the worst in me. “Believe it. You let me down, man. Here.” I shove him a fistful of money. “Just go. Take your friend and get lost.”
Biff slinks away. The screenwriter is not so easy to get rid of. He’s wired and wants to party. I convince him we will all meet later at a club. Goofy John and his friends see the play and herd the sisters inside as I put Biff and his friend in a cab.
Office hours. It’s a group therapy session. So much for maintaining focus. About all I’m focused on now is this redhead’s ass. A lavish order from room service arrives. Caviar. Fruits and veggies for the vegan. Wine, beer, and tequila. Champagne. Goofy John provides more cocaine. There is an ample supply of hashish and marijuana. Sammy shows up with Bobby and a bindle of heroin. “Doogie,” he calls it. We have medications for all manner of mental disorders.
“Dr. Lowell, I presume,” Sammy says with a grin when I open the door.
We heat the junk on a piece of tin foil and suck up the smoke through a toilet paper roll. Goofy John produces tabs of acid. He phones around town for call girls. This is going to be a long night.
Doctor Lowell, however, is mainly interested in examining the redhead. When I ask her what she meant when she said she knows me, she says she understands me, like she’s the shrink and I’m the patient. I can’t quite identify her. In a sense, she is every woman I have ever lied to, every woman I have ever cheated on and hurt. Colleen, my high school sweetheart, virginal Catholic girl, drove her daddy’s white Chrysler. After I broke up with her, senior year one drunken night, I waited outside her house. Parked up the street in my ’40 Ford. When the guy she was out with dropped her off, I ambushed them on the doorstep. Admit it, bully, piece of shit. I beat the guy up for no reason. I’m confessing now, to the redhead. Colleen pleaded with me to stop. Her mother never forgave me for deflowering sweet Colleen. For years she called my parents’ home and left tortured messages. Then there was Kathleen, stacked, as we used to say, another Irish Catholic girl. Kept her virginity but gave me hand jobs and blow jobs and let me suck on those bountiful boobs. It’s like Frank Zappa says, There’s nothing like a Catholic girl at the CYO when they learn to blow.… Peggy, classic blond beauty. Her father walked in on us while we were fucking at their summer place in Newport. He literally shit his pants. Drank too much gin, something about loose bowels. They were all good girls before they made the mistake of dating Rick Stratton.
Ah, I could hate myself, but now the redhead is sitting on my lap, whispering in my ear as I confess and give her ear a tongue-lashing. She tells me this is therapy, a cure for my obsession with pussy. “I know how to make you happy,” she tells me.
“How?”
“You need to grow up and you have to stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Everything, acting like a fool, whatever it is you’re doing that’s making you so crazy. Just slow down and concentrate. Figure out what it is you really want to do with your life. And then—do that and only that.”
We are on the sofa in the sitting room. One of the hookers waltzes through in an advanced stage of undress and with Goofy John in meandering pursuit. He’s lost his glasses and walks into a closet. My hand slips up under the redhead’s skirt, but she takes me by the wrist and places my palm on her face. I tell her, “I want to make love to you.”
“No you don’t,” she says. “You want to fuck me.”
“Well, that too.”
“Why?”
“Why? What kind of a question is that? Why not? You’re beautiful. You smell so good, I want to bury my face in your pussy. Tell me: Is the hair down there red too?”
“You want to hide from me. You want to hide in me. But you can’t. Listen to me, Richard,” she says. “You don’t even know me. But I know you. You’re not the kind of guy who is into wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. And I’m not that girl.”
She has touched a nerve. This is how I think of myself, and I know I’m fucking up. But tonight I want to be that other guy, the guy with the stiff cock and no pangs of guilt. I want to lose the alter ego that sits in judgment. I am so horny, all I can do is gaze at her with a stupefied look on my face. My dick is hard, hormones and pheromones blended in a heady mix more intoxicating than any drug known to man. And then there is THC, cocaine, heroin, alcohol… LSD. I feel like I’ll jump out the window if I can’t get inside her. I’ll buy her a home and fill it with children if that is what she wants. Wait a minute now, that was Val’s wish. I’m confused, loaded, delirious.
“I think you’re really a nice guy,” she tells me. “At least you listen when I speak. You’re basically a quiet guy, kinda shy. This is an act. You want to be the naughty boy. That’s how you get attention. You want everybody to fear you and yet love you. But it’s only going to hurt you in the end. You need to settle down and think about how you really want to spend the rest of your life. ’Cause the way you’re going, you’re gonna be dead or in jail very soon.”
Her prophetic words pierce my puzzled consciousness. I know she’s right, if only I had the presence of mind to take heed. Some part of me senses she has found me out, seen through my act, but it does no good. I am nibbling on her neck like some infantile vampire. There is a nerve there that if you bite just right, they melt.
“So how are you going to make me happy?” I ask. “Why don’t we go to bed and figure it out? I will follow your every command.”
She smiles and kisses me. We are making out, hot and heavy now. The heat is rising. I’ll get her naked yet. I have an intimation of the crack in the universe through which I might slip to eternity. But not this night. The junk has my orgasm waiting in the wings like a patient understudy. This might yet constitute some elaborate regimen of sexual healing. A woman such as she could fuck me sane.
Then the door opens, and Val waltzes in. There are two ways the night might go from here. From good to better: Val could take off her clothes and join us. Or from bad to worse: She could go ballistic. She is tired. Been traveling all day. In no mood to play. She drops her bag, walks over, and stands before the sofa with her hands on her hips.
The redhead, seeing the look on Val’s face, gently eases off my lap.
“You dick!” Val says and smacks me hard across the face.
* * *
WORD IS OUT. A massive load of high-quality Lebanese hashish has hit the continent. There are only a handful of smugglers who are in position to have managed such a scam—and my name is near the top of any such list. I am certain Wolfshein and his CENTAC agents are aware I am in action and working diligently to track me down. I grow a beard, dye my hair, take to wearin
g hats and shades.
Val creates such a scene at the Plaza, throws everybody out of the suite, that we move the next day, relocate to an apartment in the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West. She forgives me, attributes my behavior and excessive horniness to not having had her for two weeks. This is a girl who likes her powders. She confiscated all the drugs in the suite at the Plaza, and over the next few days we proceed to smoke the heroin and snort all the coke in our Mayflower digs. For three days we don’t leave the apartment. We get high and fuck for hours, grateful for the fact that there is only a drug war going on outside. Then Sammy calls and says he needs to see me; it’s important that we meet. We go for a walk in Central Park.
“Not good, bro,” he tells me. He’s got his Rottweiler, Rufus, on a leash walking with us.
“What’s the problem?”
“I can’t sell this shit, man. Can’t even get most of my people to look at it. The town is flooded with some black Afghani. No one wants to hear about Leb after all the bogus slabs that were around last year. I keep telling them this is different. It’s better than the Afghani and cheaper. But they don’t want to hear it. Everyone wants Colombian or Thai sticks. Nobody’s willing to put up any money for hash. Your friend John took a couple hundred kilos on the arm. At this rate, we’ll be sitting on this load next year, still waiting to get paid.”
“Fuck.”
“I know. It sucks. You work your ass off. The product is righteous—and no one will even look at it.”
“So we’ll take it up north.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. We’re gonna have to move most of this in Canada. You game for that?”
The longer we sit on the load, the more we run the risk of getting busted. Nasif calls every day; they want to get paid. Sammy’s father needs money to keep his business from going under. Even Biff has the audacity to bug me for money after the disappearing act he pulled. And I have my own ongoing extravagant fugitive lifestyle to sustain: new smuggles in the works; airplanes, boats, trucks, motor homes, cars, and multiple homes to maintain; workers from Hawaii to Maine who depend on me for their daily bread; and people all across Canada—Canada. Of course. Land of the hashish eaters. Canadians love hash. They smoke it in cigarettes like Europeans. There is a dearth of reefer in Canada. The Canadian dollar is trading higher than the almighty buck. So what the fuck, sell the load—or most of it—in Canada. Which is okay. That means we make more money. It also means I have to go back to work. Which is good. I don’t know how to handle myself when I’m not working. I spend money crazily, I drink to excess, I fuck my brains out. Work, as Mailer always says, is a blessing.
JD DRIVES DOWN to the city in the Global Evangelism motor home. We load it up with five hundred kilos that Val and JD then drive out to a stash house she has rented in Snowmass near her place in Aspen. She starts working her people in Kansas City and Alaska. Sammy’s guy, Bobby, loads the camper van with two hundred kilos and takes it upstate to a campground on Wellesley Island in the Thousand Islands region on the St. Lawrence River. I’m comforted; it seems like an auspicious sign that the name of the island is the same as my hometown. I may be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, but part of me wants to stay connected to home.
I fly into Rochester and rent a car. From where Bobby is camped you can practically cast a fishing line across the US-Canadian border—an imaginary demarcation drawn somewhere in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. Rosie and I are on the horn pay phone to pay phone. One of his boys rented a summer place on an island on the Canadian side. The Canadians come across by boat and we load them up. Miraculously, once the slabs pass over that man-made line in the river, they go from being a sluggish, burdensome inventory to a highly sought-after commodity. This is the lure of smuggling: how the value of something can change exponentially simply by moving it from one place to another. I thank world governments for coming up with the concept of international borders.
The trip has become a double smuggle. Within a week we have landed a thousand kilos and all of the hash oil in Ontario. I consider the huge amount of free-flowing energy released all across North America. People who are not skilled or disciplined at handling money suddenly find themselves with more cash than they know what to do with, myself included, and are more likely to crash and burn. Success can be as big a pitfall as failure. Bigger. Trickier. It’s a shape-shifter. Comes on looking like some gorgeous piece of ass who only wants to party and fuck you stupid. Ends up a raving crack whore babbling to the Heat.
I know it’s insane to push my luck back in Maine, but I have two airplanes sitting around doing nothing but costing me money. Jonathan Livingston Seagull has the Aero Commander parked somewhere in Oklahoma. While I was in Lebanon, he was supposed to go to Jamaica and make arrangements to fly a load of ganja out and land it at an airstrip controlled by a Chicano friend of mine in South Texas. I reach out for the Seagull, call his wife, Avril, my sister-in-law, on a secure phone in Toronto.
“I thought he was with you,” she tells me. She goes on to say she was planning to drive down to New York, to a safe house we rent in Millbrook, with her six-year-old son. She’s bringing over a million dollars in cash. Rosie is moving the hash as fast as we can get it to him, and the money is flowing. Avril wants to get the money out of her possession. My plan was to have Jonathan fly half the money out to the Bahamas and turn it over to Nasif, give the other half to Sammy and his father, maybe hold on to a hundred grand. Give something to Biff. But now I can’t find the Seagull. I’m also thinking I’ll use him to fly a load of hash into Quebec for our Montreal people, who are desperate for more product.
Where is this guy? The Seagull is still on my shit list for the stunt he pulled in Texas, but I need him. I know he needs to make money—he’s another one who blows through cash. And now he’s MIA. I figure he probably shacked up with the divorcée. But when I call her, she says she hasn’t seen him for ten days. Finally, I get a message to my Chicano friend in Houston. He calls me back at the Millbrook house.
“Huero,” he tells me, “we got to talk.” He gives me a coded pay phone number, tells me to call him at his “office” in two hours.
This is not good. I get through one crisis, and here comes another one. I feel uneasy as I wander around the Millbrook property trying to take stock and organize my thoughts before setting out to find a pay phone. Millbrook, New York, county seat for the wealthy elite of Duchess County, has history in the drug subculture. It was here in a mansion on the Hitchcock Estate owned by the Mellon family that acid guru Timothy Leary was busted in a raid orchestrated by then district attorney G. Gordon Liddy, later of Watergate infamy. Leary had been holed up at the mansion conducting experiments with LSD when Liddy and his posse of local and state cops raided the joint. “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” was Leary’s mantra. They busted him for possession of a small amount of pot. LSD wasn’t even illegal then.
Sometimes they won’t let you drop out. Not when it’s outside the law. Not when you are proselytizing to the youth of America. Leary got popped again crossing the US-Mexico border in Texas with a small amount of pot hidden in his daughter’s underwear. He took the weight and was sentenced to thirty years in prison. While out on bond, Leary relocated to Southern California, where he hooked up with Val’s people, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love hippie mafia family. Val got her start in the business as a teenager smuggling hash and acid for the Brotherhood. She never trusted Leary; she saw him as a phony opportunist. The Brotherhood was bringing in Afghan hash hidden in surfboards. Leary got arrested again, for possession of two roaches. He was locked up, and then he escaped from prison with help from the Brotherhood and the radical wing of Students for a Democratic Society, known as the Weathermen, as in Dylan’s line, You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Leary was eventually run to ground in Afghanistan. President Richard Nixon labeled him “the most dangerous man in America.” Huh? Val called Leary a rat; said he gave up some Brotherhood people to get himself out of prison.
>
Who knows what a man will do when faced with prison time?
I’m trying to occupy my mind until it’s time to call my Chicano friend and hear what he has to tell me—which, from the tone of his voice, I already know is not good news. My wife, Anaïs, leased the Millbrook property from a Swiss German couple who live in Europe; I never met them. I’ve spent only three nights here in the year we’ve had the place, last night being the third. It’s a rambling, four-bedroom, gray gables kind of house with a big, open banquet room—a later addition with an arched cathedral ceiling built in an L off the main house. The driveway winds up beside a brook, past the barn, and comes to a circle in front of the house. Just above the barn there is a man-made swimming pond built by damming the icy-cold water in the brook. I sit on the rocks beside the pond and light up a spliff of Sammy’s hydroponic reefer sprinkled with Double Zahara to try to settle my nerves.
“HERMANO,” MY CHICANO friend says when he picks up after three rings. Miguel is his name; I met him through some Mexicans from the Rio Grande Valley who worked on the ranch in Blanco. He’s got a bad scar on his face, always wears tinted glasses, lives in Austin. We’ve done a couple of trips together, importing high-altitude Mexican weed across the Texas border.
“Where’s Jonathan?” I ask him.
“Hombre… shit, man. I don’t know how to tell you…”
“What?”
“He’s dead.”
I’m standing at an outdoor pay phone at a gas station watching a man probably around my age, mid-thirties, drink a can of soda as he fills his gas tank. He’s wearing a tie, short-sleeved light blue shirt straining at the buttons, no jacket. He has big pit stains under his arms, man-tits, and a prodigious beer belly hanging over his belt. He’s got a crush-proof box of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. I’m thinking, in a self-satisfied way: Thank God that’s not me, imagining how boring the guy’s life must be—the hours spent drinking beer and watching TV—when Miguel’s words register.
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