Hold it. Dead? Did he say Jonathan Livingston Seagull is dead? How can this be? The straight guy I brought into the business, who is married to my wife’s sister. Involved them all in crime, didn’t I? And now he’s dead?
See, this is how it plays out, Dickhead Stratton. In your mind you’re some kind of hotshot outlaw movie star defying the Man, breaking laws that are stupid and unenforceable. Un-American. You see yourself as a folk hero. You glorify what you do. But the truth is people die before their time. Or they molder and waste years of their lives in prison. Families are destroyed. For what? So you and your friends can live like rock stars and addle the brains of America’s youth with high-grade illegal herb?
Yes, true, all true. But fuck it! People die of cancer and heart attacks and strokes, like that fat guy filling his gas tank, filling his belly, trying to fill the empty place in his life. Yeah. People die and kill innocent women and children fighting illegal wars in foreign countries supposedly defending a way of life that has more to do with drinking soda, smoking cigarettes, and pumping gas than with preserving freedom. It’s all bullshit. America, land of the free. My ass. My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of hypocrisy. Land of the brainwashed. Land of the fat. Land of the mindless consumer. Land of the—
“Dead? How—”
“Ah, man… shit, brother… Huero… I been trying to reach you.”
“What happened?”
I have a vivid picture in my mind of Avril, the Seagull’s wife, a statuesque, good-looking honey blonde, and her young son. They are on the road in a car traveling from Toronto to visit me with a million plus in colorful Canadian bills. She’s nervous but outwardly appears calm, straight looking, fits no money courier profile, and has her act together as she crosses the border. She’s a very cool lady in her own way. Smarter, more sensible than her… now dead husband. And how am I going to break the news to her that her husband is dead? And then how is she going to explain to her son that he’s never going to see his daddy again? She’s always been so careful; she has good nerves. She took to the business right away, and never let it change her.
But now it will.
“He crashed, man… Went down with a load,” Miguel tells me.
Then it all blubbers out. The Seagull and Miguel tried to pull one over on me. Miguel confesses that he and Jonathan embarked on a trip of their own, using my plane, the new Aero Commander. “You were away so long, hombre; we didn’t know if you were ever coming back.”
Jonathan flew down to Guadalajara in the big, turbo-charged Aero Commander and picked up eleven hundred pounds of sinsemilla. “Something went wrong.… I don’t know what happened, hermano. He got lost on the way back. Tu sabes? He crashed, man. Ran out of gas. Lo siento. He was only like a hundred miles from the strip when he went down. There was another guy with him. Mexican dude. They both died. I know.… It’s fucked up, man.… I’m sorry… I’m really sorry.”
There is nothing to say. As I hang up, I know I will never speak to Miguel again.
IT’S LATE WHEN Jonathan’s wife arrives with their son. The boy, Jason, is asleep. I carry him in from the car and put him in bed. She takes a shower, changes. I open a bottle of wine. She’s relieved to have made it in safely with all that money, glad to have it out of her home in Toronto even as her sister is there taking in more cash from Rosie. “He said to tell you he needs more,” she says, crossing her long legs, sipping her wine.
“Yeah… I’m working on it.”
“Have you heard from that asshole husband of mine? He’s with that woman, isn’t he?”
She’s angry with him for his affair with the divorcée. There was even talk of divorce. They have never been a particularly loving couple. Jonathan complained she was cold. But they had decided to patch it up, stay together for the sake of the child, and for the business. Divorces are ugly enough when the couple splitting is legit. When outlaws divorce it nearly always ends in someone ratting on their former spouse.
I take a deep breath, sigh, and shake my head.
“What is it?” she asks.
There is no way to tell someone something like this except to say it.
“He’s dead,” I tell her. “He died… in a plane crash… in Texas.”
She puts down her glass, looks at me with wide blue eyes. “When?”
“A couple of days ago. I just found out this afternoon—after I spoke to you.”
“Oh, God… I knew it.” She shakes her head and fights back tears. “I knew something like this would happen.”
“He was flying a load out of Mexico. I’m not sure what happened. They think he ran out of fuel.”
He had no ID on him, that much I know. The plane was registered to a shell company. Miguel told me they altered the plane’s registration numbers. It will take some time for the Feds to figure out who he was and contact the RCMP and next of kin. Once the various agencies connect all the dots, they will no doubt pay a visit and keep an eye on comings and goings from the house in Toronto. I’m trying to think of the gentlest way to tell her she had better clean out the house and prepare to be questioned. I’ve already contacted Rosie, told him to change the plan up there given what went down.
I want to tell her Jonathan was not working for me when he crashed, to relieve some of the guilt I feel, when she says, “Mexico? I thought he was supposed to be going to Jamaica.”
“He was. From what I can gather, he decided to go off on his own, with… a friend of mine. I… I didn’t… I had no idea what they were up to. First I heard about it was this afternoon when I called looking for him.”
She’s crying now, quietly, tears welling in her eyes and rolling down her flushed cheeks. “I knew it,” she says. “I knew it! God damn him!”
“Don’t—”
“No! I told him. I knew he was planning something like this. He said he was fed up working for you. He was going to do this trip on his own and quit working for you. Bragging about how much money he was going to make… We had a big fight. I made him promise he wouldn’t do anything without talking to you first. He’s such an asshole!”
She’s full on weeping now, tears of pain, anguish, sorrow, and anger, her body rocking back and forth. I hold her, let her cry it out. “How am I going to tell Jason?” she says between sobs.
I have no answer.
* * *
THERE IS WORK to do. Lots of it. Indeed, work is a blessing. Takes one’s mind off the apparent meaninglessness of life. And the inevitability of death. There is hashish to move. Tons of it. Money to distribute. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars to receive from distributors, get converted into large bills, and turn over to the various partners. And there is considerable Heat to avoid. Agents from the DEA, RCMP, US Marshals service, FBI, IRS—Bernie Wolfshein and CENTAC—out there trying to locate me and lock me in a cage. As Uncle George would say: a man has got to do what a man has got to do. Stay focused. Keep moving. Stay a step or two ahead of the Law and the Grim Reaper.
This is how I have managed so far to avoid any prolonged periods in a prison cell, or permanent residence in a grave—I keep moving. I keep changing the game plan, altering my modus operandi. I start out early each day with no idea where I will rest come night. That makes it much harder for the agents to track me. I smoke my morning joint, write out my list of things to do, people to call, and go from pay phone to pay phone, meeting to meeting, city to city, hotel room to hotel room, always ready to alter my plans based on the outcome of the next event, the next pay phone assignation.
I leave Avril and Jason at the house in Millbrook and head down to Long Island to visit Biff. Avril said she needed a few days on her own with the boy to break the news about his father. Anaïs knows now too, and plans are being made to bury Jonathan’s remains once they are returned to Canada. The sisters’ unspoken decree would seem to be: That’s what you get when you fuck around.
The hash is moving, slowly in the US but picking up, particularly on the West Coast and in the Midwest. Goofy John paid his tab
and re-upped. The fickle, competitive New York market has yet to fully embrace our product. To boost sales, I place a centerfold spread in High Times with a blurb in their Trans-High Market Quotations section. Boston is stepping up, always a good market with all those institutions of higher learning. Val and Judy have got action in Alaska. But this amounts to dribs and drabs, a few hundred kilos every week or two compared to what Rosie is capable of doing. And we have tons still sitting in the basement of the house in Staten Island waiting to be moved. Canada is where shit is happening. Toronto. Montreal. Vancouver. We’re moving half a ton a week north of the border.
Biff is staying at his place in Amagansett. He invites me to go mako shark fishing on a charter boat. I’m thinking I’ll go out there, strangle him, and throw him overboard. I reach out for a pilot Sammy turned me on to who keeps our Cessna Single Engine at an airstrip on Long Island. Weird dude. We use him to fly small loads into Canada. He got into some kinky sex scene with Fred Barnswallow and one of the strippers who frequents Fred’s place. Fred would smoke coke and watch them fuck. The pilot told me about these warts he has on his asshole, anal warts, he called them. It was more information than I needed. I have never been able to get that image out of my mind. Whenever I see him, I look at his face and I see an asshole with warts all around it. For me, his name would always be Wart Hog.
It’s odd about pilots. They may be the single least stable element in a way of life that attracts the human equivalent of quarks and neutrinos. Yogi Bear: that guy flat-out disappeared. I heard he got involved in some deal with The Happy Hooker, Xaviera Hollander, and fled to Amsterdam to avoid federal fraud charges. And Jonathan, he is never far from my mind. Poor dead Jonathan Livingston Seagull. His body, what is left of it, is on its way to Toronto in a box.
Twice that fucking Seagull nearly killed us both. Once we were landing in Provincetown, going down to visit Mailer. No contraband in the plane, Jonathan’s Aero Commander, not the new big one that he demolished in Texas. After we landed, instead of putting up the flaps, he hit the wrong lever and retracted the landing gear while the plane was still rolling along the runway. The plane did a hard belly flop and scraped to a stop in the middle of the strip. My head hit the roof. Try explaining that move to the guys hanging around the airport lounge. It cost Jonathan everything he made flying a load to repair the plane. We were lucky a spark didn’t ignite the fuel tanks and burn us both to a crisp.
Another time, we were bringing a load of reefer back from Mexico, had it safely in the States. We stopped to refuel in Tennessee. I was monitoring the weather heading east. There was a large, nasty front moving in from the northwest. But we had time to get where we needed to be in Massachusetts and unload well ahead of the storm—if we kept our asses in gear, fueled up, and moved on. But Seagull was dithering around the airport, bullshitting with the guys hanging out at the private aviation terminal. He decided he needed to take a look at a small plane called an Ultralight, thought he might want to buy one with all the money he was making. He was feeling good about himself, cocky after having brought in the load, but irresolute about seeing it through, as though he didn’t want the excitement to end. I kept trying to impress upon him that there is no guarantee of safety until we arrive where we’re going and unload. We still have to stash and then sell the shit. Then we can relax and think about how to spend the money.
Once we were back in the air, sure enough, the weather turned ugly—ominous storm clouds filled with rain and lightning. Jonathan freaked out. His face was flushed; he was sweating. We both were scared. I was convinced we were going to die. The plane was being tossed around in the sky like a toy. He made some comment, “See, I told you we shouldn’t have taken off.” I lost it. I grabbed him and was ready to choke him when I realized that if there was any hope of getting this plane safely on the ground, it was up to him. He tried to take us higher to get above the weather. Ice began to form on the leading edge of the wings. We were both suffering from oxygen deprivation. Pounding headaches. Hearts racing. Hands ice cold. Getting light-headed.
I looked out the window and saw sheets of ice building on the wings. I am not an experienced pilot; I had taken a number of flying lessons, passed the written test, soloed, flown on any number of smuggling ventures with pilots who knew what they were doing. So I understood enough to know that ice accumulating on our wings was not a good thing. When I mentioned it to Jonathan, he went into a total panic. His brain seemed to freeze. He stared straight ahead into the stormy sky, hands in a death grip on the yoke. I was thinking, This is it, I’m going to die, we are both going to die tonight in this plane with a load of weed.
Then, thankfully, as happens to me in moments when I perceive extreme, life-threatening danger, a clear, out-of-body calm took hold. This may be the one solid attribute I have as an outlaw. It’s as though I can step outside myself to a place beyond the immediate peril, and my brain starts to focus on a way through the situation. It is a tremendously satisfying feeling and a good part of what keeps me coming back, sanctions putting myself in the crucible when that other self takes over and leads me to safety, or at least to some medium ground where all is not lost. It is, ultimately, fun. A terrifying variety of fun and dumb. Like when I was a kid jumping off the cliffs at the rock quarry into a small, deep pool, and knowing I had to land just right or run the risk of breaking my neck. Tempting death. Exhilarating. Thriving on the juice, the energy of the moment when anything can happen. And the rejuvenated feeling I’m left with when I know I’m still alive.
Jonathan’s brain didn’t work that way. He used to drive his Porsche way too fast, and he didn’t have the nerves for it. Or the skill. He would have been better off if he had never learned to fly. He should have taken a desk job and kept his ass in a chair on solid ground. Whenever we were getting ready to take off, as I watched him go through his preflight check, I would see the high deep crimson flush rising to his cheeks and know this made him way too anxious for him to be a good pilot.
If nothing else, the ice thickening and misshaping the wings would surely cause the plane to crash. But wait, wasn’t there some device, some switch one could flip that would activate heating elements beneath the black rubber leading edge of the wings and melt the ice? I seemed to remember talk of this, or reading something in the manual.
“De-icers?” I shouted. “Aren’t there de-icers?”
Of course there are. And it was as though one of those lightning bolts flashing outside the plane struck the Seagull’s brain. He flipped a switch to turn on the de-icers, and another switch in his head snapped into place and he understood that only by his continued efforts were we going to be able to live through this night. Action. One must act. One cannot quit and allow death to enter. He got on the radio, made contact with the tower at an airport in Pennsylvania. He was instrument rated. The air-traffic controller in the tower talked us down. The visibility was so bad we couldn’t see the ground until moments before the landing gear touched the runway.
Later, in the hotel room, I attacked him. I wanted to beat the shit out of him, but I couldn’t do it. We both started laughing.
After the debacle with the dive-bombing incident in Blanco, when the Seagull had moved in with the divorcée and was causing all kinds of internal family strife, I was on my way to kill him one night. Yes, I was driven to contemplate murder. I had a Browning 9mm automatic, fully loaded, under the seat of the car, and I had every intention of blowing his brains out. I was going to shoot him and then dispose of his body in Canyon Lake. Of course, I had been drinking—the only time murder enters my mind with any marrow is when I’ve been drinking. Jonathan got in the car and before I could reach for the gun he started crying, bawling his eyes out about how he fucked up his life, betrayed his wife, ruined his family. I don’t know if I could have killed him in any situation; but it’s hard to shoot a guy who’s weeping about how he’s a total fuckup. I know the feeling only too well.
In my mind’s eye, I can see him in the new Aero Commander. He’s run
ning low on fuel, still off course. Someone hasn’t done their due diligence on this trip and arranged for radio contact or some infallible means to guide him to where he needs to be. Whatever they did or didn’t do, they fucked up. It is the attention to detail and careful planning that separates professional smugglers from amateurs. Planning. Planning. And more planning. As General Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, once said, “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” And effectuating those plans, seeing them through. It’s like those guys who pull off sophisticated bank burglaries as opposed to desperate holdup men. It’s what Mailer always says about his writing: “I am, after all, a professional.” There is no room for these kinds of mistakes if one is a professional. I see Jonathan has that frozen-in-fear look on his face, his cheeks flushed scarlet. He’s staring straight ahead as though waiting for someone to say something that will snap him out of it. Panic has short-circuited his powers of reasoning. He can’t figure a way out of this one. And the Mexican sitting in the copilot seat is no help. He’s crossing himself and saying his Hail Marys, preparing to meet his maker. The engines sputter and quit. The plane loses altitude, goes down fast. The ground comes up faster. Jonathan Livingston Seagull is about to fly off into the hereafter.
I’ll miss the fucker. People would ask me, “Why do you keep working with this guy? He’s such a fuckup.” Benny, my partner in Wellesley, in particular, couldn’t understand it; he had no tolerance for the Seagull. JD loathed him. Val too had serious misgivings about Jonathan. “He’s a Heat score,” she would say. She doubted he’d stand up if he took a fall. Rosie found him amusing and useful to a point but complained he was flaky and talked way too much. He kept trying to take over the operation. But he was family. And it was because of him, because of the bet we made in P’town those many years ago, that I got back in the business. At times we had a lot of laughs together, when I wasn’t looking to kill him.
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