Biff is shocked when I tell him about Jonathan. They knew each other fairly well. Biff often delivered or picked up money from him in Toronto. In many ways, they are a lot alike, though neither of them would appreciate the comparison. Both Jewish guys married to blond shiksas; in their forties and with no discernable careers to maintain expensive lifestyles; willing to break the law but petrified of the repercussions. For my selfish purposes, to look at either of them, it worked. You would never guess they were involved in criminal activity—that is, until Jonathan started flaunting it.
Biff gets fidgety and asks me for money. I give him twenty-five grand in Canadian. He seems disappointed. Fuck him. Let him work for his end helping launder some of this Canadian money. He gives me that sheepish look, says Nasif has been calling him every day, several times a day. Fuck them too. Let them wait. After all they put me through, and the time they kept me waiting in Lebanon while they tried to pull one off behind my back with the Wizard. Shit.
“Tell him I’ll meet him in Nassau in two weeks,” I say. “With at least a million bucks. And remind him: It doesn’t pay to be impatient. Look what happened to that fucking Seagull. Now his kid’s got no father. All because he couldn’t wait.”
11
MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING
A BODY IN motion, always harder to track. For over a year now I have been on the run. Running from the law, from Bernie Wolfshein’s sharp intellect. Running from the consequences of my renegade life. Running from my fear of exposure. Running from my fear of mediocrity. It seems I never stop traveling, moving from place to place—a day here, two days there—as if I sense that to cease to move would be to fall under the shadow of death that follows me. Or succumb to stasis, locked in the prison cell I know awaits me. Revealed as a fraud, a mere criminal.
Jonathan’s remains have been returned to the earth. I am bound to Toronto—no matter the risk—to visit the family sitting shiva. There is death all around. Yesterday I learned from my friend Jake’s sister that Jake had been murdered in Mexico. A scorched VW minibus was found in the desert of Northern Mexico with Jake’s and his Mexican wife’s burned bodies inside, riddled with bullets. He had taken the money he made selling hash and invested it in a load of weed from Michoacán. Got as far as Chihuahua and ran into the wrong people. Before he met me, Jake was into armed robbery. I turned him on to the nonviolent world of marijuana trafficking.
I am brutally hungover. Haven’t slept all night. Last night was spent in Philly cavorting with Doctor Kato, indulging my preference for dark women. As if fucking a fiercely alive black African American female could gentle death. Back to the roots, back to where it all began millions and millions of years ago. I doze in the car as Kato speeds me to the airport in his BMW. Through the mists rising in my brain I am trying to remember my name. Who am I today?
On the plane—Air Canada to Toronto—I memorize my alias profile. Reason for visiting Canada: funeral. That much at least is partially true. The funeral is over. I’m here to offer condolences to the mother and wife, assuage my guilt, show my face to convince them—and me—it is not my fault the Seagull croaked. I regret that your son had to die such an asshole, and fuck this whole thing up, bring down intense DEA and Royal Canadian Mounted Police Heat on the family here in Canada. Now we are all vulnerable. The Mounties, as you know, always get their man.
Won’t even mention the hundred and fifty grand plus for the new Aero Commander the Seagull crashed. Plus another forty or fifty grand to upgrade the avionics. Seems like he should have installed some long-range bladder fuel tanks. Who knows? Maybe he did. I can’t keep track of these things. They come to me and ask for money for this or that, I give it to them. Who cares? It’s only money. But no, there is more—a crack in the chalice. Energy seeps away. I can feel it as the plane lifts above the clouds and enters Canadian airspace.
Rosie. Got to love that man, the marijuana martyr, done more time for herb than anyone else in the history of this nation. He glories in the role, loves to rub his defiance in their faces. Last time he was sentenced, to fourteen years, the Rosebush spoke for an hour and fifteen minutes to the court and showed no remorse. On the contrary, he told them all what for. How they are a bunch of unenlightened fools, reactionaries at the beck and call of Uncle Sam, and how men like him who dare to defy laws that are stupid and not in the common interest will one day be seen as heroes, whereas the judge, the Crown prosecutor, the cops and Mounties who busted him will all come to be regarded as anal repositories of everything that is counter to growth and freedom and intellectual curiosity and art and passion. Evolution! It was a beautiful speech, even if it rambled on too long and he repeated himself. The same self-justifying rant I play over and over in my head. The point was well taken by his supporters in the courtroom. The judge, however, was unmoved and gave him the maximum available under the law. Rosie vowed he would continue doing what he did and never give in to their repressive and totalitarian impulses.
He meant it; he did and does carry on undaunted. Fourteen years don’t mean shit to the Rosebud. I would go visit him at the penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, smuggle him in a vial of honey oil he would slip up his ass with the practiced ease of a proctologist inserting a suppository. We planned and schemed. He got fatter in the joint. Most people lose weight and lose money. Not Rosie. He hooked me up with his man, the Squid, we call him. Squid has a wandering eye and a raspy voice. He’s a numbers man—low profile, smart—and we made a lot of money while Rosie did time. And Val, who came to be my partner and lover, she was Rosie’s connection as well. Also his girl. Rosie was making more money locked up than he did on the street. Then there was the whole Nervous Nick trip, the New York bust in ’78 that nearly resulted in my going to the joint for what could have been a long jolt. Rosie did just under seven years on that bid, not quite half the sentence. The Canadians are liberal with good time and early parole. Unlike American correctional authorities, the Canadians still hold some belief in rehabilitation. Fat chance for that when you are dealing with R. W. Rose. He caught a new case in a holding cell while waiting to be released; like catching the flu, the man was vulnerable, his immune system was compromised. He felt he had some catching up to do. The Crown’s rat infected him with extravagant conspiracies. The judge just shook his head. Won’t you ever learn, Mr. Roseblossom? But there were no overt acts, just a lot of blather, and Rosie spun it back on them, claimed he was checking the guy out, setting him up—a bald-faced lie but it worked. He did another couple of years and came out to start a new life as the don of Sprout House. He and his partner, the Squid, have this legitimate enterprise where they grow all kinds of sprouts and sell them to health food stores.
Come to find out, the RCMP is up on a wire in the office at Sprout House. Rosie had the place swept and found it infested with bugs of the electronic variety. He left them unmolested so he could disseminate misinformation. They have a pen register installed on the phone to track outgoing calls. Rosie makes his illegal business calls from pay phones in the vicinity of the office. So the Mounties bug half a dozen or so pay phones within easy walking distance and are slowly picking off our lines of distribution. Just days before I arrive in Canada, the RCMP cracked the Thousand Islands route, took down 500 pounds of hash and three of Rosie’s people sitting on the stash in the house on the island in the Saint Lawrence River. That means of access is blown. Another fifty kilos got popped in the city. Toronto is flooded with our Lebanese hash, as is Montreal, Vancouver, Quebec City. Despite the Heat, Rosie still manages to move one thousand pounds a week all across the Great White North.
Bobby got away from the Thousand Islands bust unscathed and relocated to Alaska. Last I heard, he shipped out on a salmon fishing boat. It feels like time to shut down the whole northern theater of operation. There is so much Heat it’s melting the polar ice cap. My wife has already left the country. She flew to the Bahamas with a satchel of money for the Arabs. It could be argued Toronto is the last place in the world I should make an appearance given
my fugitive status and the mounting temperature. But that is precisely why I am here. One must obey the risk.
The plane’s wheels bite the tarmac with a screech and bump that jerks me awake. My clothes are rumpled, I smell like dark pussy, and residue of booze is oozing from my pores. It is one of those hangovers that feels like an altered state of consciousness. Like doing acid or mescaline or psilocybin mushrooms. Everything is painfully clear and fraught with sharp, pointed edges and fears like invisible razors and daggers shredding my nerves. Move the wrong way and get stabbed in the heart. Indulge the wrong thought and disappear down a rabbit hole of paranoia and guilt.
That and the fact that I got tangled up in some apocalyptic fucking last night. The lady in question, and she is every bit a fine African princess, manages one of Doctor Kato’s shoe stores. Imagine how cunning this guy is: a proprietor of stores that sell ladies’ shoes. We know how they all love shoes. And to have their feet rubbed. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, the way into a woman’s cunt is through her feet. Kato, with his true calling in laying pipe, knows all this and opened shoe stores catering to young ladies. Brilliant. An endless supply of female feet padding in and out sampling his wares. He gets down on one knee, genuflects before the altar of their spread legs, and, like a prince slipping the glass slipper on Cinderella’s foot, tries it on for size. It’s the instep, he tells me, the arch, you can tell everything about how a woman fucks by her arch. If it is delicate and finely curved, expect deft, gymnastic, catlike coupling and a pussy with a mind and muscles of its own, the kind of cunt that clings to your cock and tugs on it like a sucking mouth. If the feet are wide and flat with splayed toes you are in for a hard, serious drubbing—like being worked over by a 200-pound German masseuse. Boot-knocking, ass-slapping, bed-breaking sex. Either way, according to the good doctor, pay attention to her feet and she will treat you right.
I can go on about this, and probably I will, later, because cunt is never far from my mind. Pussy is like any other source of solace: the more you get, the more you want. I’m ready to fuck my way across Canada. Even as I inch closer to the counter and computer where Canadian Customs and Immigration officials will examine my phony ID, run it through their system, and ask me a set of questions designed to reveal any inconsistencies or tension in my rap, I’m thinking about two French girls from Quebec, using them to take my mind off what is going on before me so I don’t invest it with too much stress.
These government people are trained to sense nervousness and pounce. I’m so nervous my heart is sweating, my balls are huddled together in my scrunched-up scrotum. I know these fuckers would love to get me in their clutches. Not that they believe what I do is so wrong. Hell, no. Half of them smoke the shit themselves. They want to dominate me, they want to make me beg: Please don’t lock me up! I’m scared. I don’t want to go to prison. We are like a pack of dogs. Who’s gonna hump who? Who is gonna roll over and expose his genitals? In all my comings and goings, at no moment am I more exposed and vulnerable than these few minutes when I stand in the portals of officialdom. So I focus on the land of cunt from which I have recently departed and will hopefully soon return.
The Customs guy is young, looks like a hockey player, the kind they call an enforcer who would hip check you and kick you in the ankle with the blade of his skate. Immediately, I want to smack him, punch him in the gut, tell him to take his miserable civil service gig and choke on it, bend him over and kick him in the ass. One thing you don’t want to do with these people is appear too friendly or upbeat. Look bored, mildly pissed off, unhappy to be away from the little lady and the kids. He looks me over, scans the driver’s license, glances at the landing card I filled out on the plane.
“US citizen?”
“Yes.” I’m thinking, Ah, yeah. No shit. Didn’t you look at the card?
“What’s the purpose of your visit to Canada?” he asks. “Business or personal?”
It’s all there on the card, but I tell him, “Personal.” Asshole. I am here to pick up money from the illegal drug business. Never give them more information than they ask for. I can tell he wants to know more, but I wait to make him inquire. He doesn’t like me any more than I like him. He resents my Americanness, the contained Yankee arrogance, the expensive, conservative if rumpled suit, the beard, the fact that I do not appear to live a nine-to-five life like his. The fact that I look happily fucked and he is an onanist.
“Visiting friends? Relatives?”
“I’m going to a funeral.”
Ah, yes, death. The inquisition stopper. He stamps the landing card and allows me entry. I confirm the identity I’m using is still good—or, possibly they are allowing me to enter unmolested so they can follow me. There is little sense of relief as I walk from the international arrivals terminal and head for the exit and queue of taxis parked outside, for I expect that at any moment they could appear, flash badges, take me roughly into custody. Or they could lurk among the throng of expectant relatives and friends and lovers, watching me, murmuring into hidden radios: There he is. Pick him up at the exit.
It makes me feel important.
In the cab on the way into the city my mind wanders back to black pussy. The lady bathed me in her juices, anointed me with her essential oils. I reek of cunt. The fecund animal smell rises up mingled with my nervous boozy sweat. Must take a shower and change before I appear at the shiva. I don’t want those old Jewish ladies to pick up the shvartz scent.
It’s curious. The older I get, the more attracted I seem to have become to a certain kind of woman who is near to my opposite physically. I’ve had a hankering for black women since I first laid eyes on Dionne Warwick; since I first heard Billie Holliday, Dinah Washington, and Diana Ross sing; since I first saw Lola Falana nude and caught an image of her bushy twat as she ran through the otherwise hairless pages of Playboy. Maybe it’s because there were no black girls in the town where I grew up. Jews were about as exotic as we got in Wellesley Hills, and only a few of them, mostly with names changed, trying to be WASPs. A smattering of Italians from the other side of town. We had to go into Boston to see black girls who oozed sexuality like sap from a slippery elm. Man, the way they walk. The way their asses move when they walk. Forget about it—their asses, period. Where do you see asses like that except on black women? Brazilians. Puerto Ricans, maybe, but that’s because of the African blood. And it’s their attitude I like. The way they look me over and smile. Sassy like. As if to say, White boy, come with me. Let me show you something so pink and succulent, something redolent with scent you never get a whiff of from those fey girls out there in the suburbs.
You know I’m going. I’m already gone, headed into Boston driving my grandmother’s ’54 Chevy, the Blue Racer we called it, and singing “Satisfaction” along with the Stones on the radio, I can’t get no… oh no no no… no girl reaction… I’ve already crashed all my other cars. Totaled my mother’s baby blue Dodge Phoenix, blew the transmission in the ’40 Ford. Grandma Ba Ba gave me the Blue Racer when they took away her license for too many speeding tickets. I’m with one of my craziest high school friends cruising along Tremont Street in the South End, a beer in one hand and a smoldering roach in the other, steering with my left elbow, we pull up in front of the Estelle’s Musical Lounge with no idea how we got here. Maybe I saw some blurb in the newspaper about a private party for Dionne Warwick and thought that sounded like fun.
Eighteen, nineteen years old, white as the lines in the street, white as the priest’s collar, white as milk, white as the White House, white as the Founding Fathers and the slave owners, white as a Klansman’s sheet, white as the fluorescent light in the interrogation room where they give you the fifth degree on your bigotry.
How do you feel about them black folk, son?
Oh, Daddy, I don’t like ’em, they scare me. They got big muscles and bigger cocks. But the women… mmm-mmm, now the women… they sure can sing… and dance… and fuck… Yes, subject to all that crap. And living through it.
Attracted to everything I was not. But with one advantage: I never believed shit they told me. And certainly, once I got high, it was all about putting the lie to the test. I would go there, follow them down, and find out what was real and what was bullshit.
This is how we happen to trip down the stairs into the private room and even more private birthday celebration of Mr. William Elliot thrown by Dionne Warwick. You know, someone must have told me about this. Maybe at our usual haunt on Mass. Ave. near the juncture with Columbus where the pros hang out, where you can score a nickel bag, where very few white boys from the ’burbs would dare to show their faces. Someone told us about this, had to be. There’s a party, they tell us, down the street at Estelle’s. Private party. Just ask for Bill. Tell ’em you’re friends with Bill.
Bill who?
It don’t matter, just Bill.
The guy at the door looks us over. What the fuck’re you doing here?
You know, we’re friends of Bill.
He just laughs. Bill, how you know Bill? Bill! You know these white boys?
Bill is playing the piano. Singing. An elegant, slim and handsome young man, he looks over and smiles. Sings like it’s a lyric from the song: “Never seen ’em before in my life.”
Man, you boys got to be crazy. You think you can just walk in here and join this party? Look around. You see any other teenage white boys here?
But that’s exactly why you should let us in: We’re not like any other white boys. We can dance! Yeah, man, I can dance like Elvis. Like James Brown. And sing like Chuck Berry. Bo Diddley and Fats Domino. Fuck all that white boy stuff, man. I am the blackest motherfucker in the room!
Of course they let us in. I’m sitting at the bar with Dionne Warwick, put my arm around her and whisper in her ear, I love you. Marry me. This is some kind of dream come true. She smiles. A mouth full of gleaming teeth.
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