What’s your name?
You can call me Ricky… you can call me Rick… you can call me Richard. Just don’t call me Dick.
You hear that? she says to Nancy Wilson. He says, Just don’t call me Dick.
Nancy Wilson says, You’re cute. I’m gonna call you Ricky.
They call over Bon Bon DeLoach, “Just don’t call him Dick.” They are all laughing and cuddling me. “Call him Ricky.”
I’m dancing with Dionne Warwick, holding her in my arms. She’s singing in my ear, Don’t make me over.… Now that I can’t make it without you.… Accept me for what I am.… Accept me for the things that I do.…
It is Thursday, June 3, 1963. I’m nineteen years old, and I’m smitten. I love my country in all its diversity. Fuck the flag. It’s not about the flag. All that patriotic bullshit. It’s about the people. Black yellow red brown white mestizo mulatto octoroon: the great melting pot.
God bless the American people.
* * *
I GET OUT of a cab a few streets away from the family home of Jonathan Dead Seagull. Not the home where he lived with his wife and child, but his mother’s home in the Forest Hill section of Toronto. Earlier, I checked into the Windsor Arms Hotel in Yorkville, five-star digs under yet another name, using a clean credit card to break the paper trail in case there is some flag on my ID and they are surreptitiously tracking me. Spruced up, deodorized, I walk past the house, eyeball the several cars parked along the quiet residential street. There does not appear to be anyone staked out on the home. Still, I stand at the end of the street watching the house as an elderly couple leave, get into a car, and drive away. Can’t be too careful these days.
I am so exhausted I feel like weeping. I want to lie down on some strange lawn, cower in the hedges, hide my face in the turf, and just disappear. It all feels so pointless and futile. Why bother? Who gives a shit? We are all going to be dead anyway. Fade away, cease to exist, wiped off the face of the earth like the Seagull. Disintegrate like spume on the tide. Go to ashes like Jake. In my mind I conjure an image of him and his Mexican wife, their bodies stiff and black as burnt logs, faces like grinning charred masks. The words crispy critters come to me, and I choke on them, a grim guffaw. Dead, dead, dead. You’ll be dead too one day, Stratton. Maybe sooner than you think. And no one will give a shit. Not really. Life goes on, such as it is. Thousands and millions and billions of people on this teeming ball of matter spinning through the universe. What the fuck is it all about?
Seagull, Seagull, where are you now, you motherfucker? Why couldn’t you just be patient? We were making shitloads of money. Isn’t that what you always wanted? No, you wanted to prove to me that you were—what? Smarter? Braver? Tougher? That you could drive faster, redder automobiles? That you didn’t need me? That’s nonsense. That’s a lie. We all need each other, or what’s the point in doing anything? Standing out here in this street alone, I feel your presence. Without me, without you, there is nothing.
I see figures moving in the windows of the Seagull family home. A flock of Jewish mothers alight on elegant chairs and settees like a jury. Am I afraid of their recriminations? Probably. And just as probably that is why I am here. I came to hear them say, “You killed our son. You led him astray. Fucking goyim bastard. It is always you Gentiles killing our sons, leading them off to war, leading them off to concentration camps and to the ovens. Leading them off to mad adventures in strange lands. Leave us alone!”
What is my karma with the Arabs and the Jews and the Italians, the Blacks and the Hispanic people? White man. Anglo-Saxon. It has to be blood guilt. Genetic guilt. Guilt that goes back centuries. A barbarian, a conqueror, a Crusader, a slave trader, a colonist. I’ll pay for it all in this lifetime. I have a horsewhip in my spine. Brass knuckles in my handshake. A vault for a brain. My balls are made of amethyst. You want trouble, trouble is my real name. You can’t take it, get out of the game.
Thus encouraged, I march up and enter the grieving household. Truth is, it’s the kid I don’t want to see. Don’t want to see the accusation in his eyes: You killed my daddy.
“Thank God you came,” my sister-in-law says and holds me briefly as I kiss her cheek and tell her, once more, how sorry I am that her man is gone. “I have something for you,” she says, focused on the present, on life. “I’ve been worried sick about it. It’s here. I had to get it out of my house. They’re watching me. They come every day. They don’t even try to hide.”
The room is full of people I don’t know. Thankfully, the boy is already asleep somewhere upstairs. Mrs. Seagull senior, who I met only fleetingly before at the wedding, seems equally beyond grief. She is a frail, sharp-featured widow in her seventies. The line, No mother should have to bury her son, comes to my mind as I walk to her, but I do not say it. There is no reproach in her touch as she takes my hand. I get the sense she doesn’t know, or care to know, the details of how her son died. Plane crash is enough information. She never understood why he had to fly around in his own plane anyway. Leave that to the others. Stay home. Get a real job. Doctor. Lawyer. Professional man. Accountant. Like your younger brother. Like your father, may he rest… like Aunt Bea’s sons. Take care of your family. Enough with this running around.
The gathering feels like something between an Irish wake, where everyone’s drinking and flushed with relief that the son-of-a-bitch is dead, and an Italian funeral, where the women are dressed in black and wallow in sorrow while the men stand about calculating their losses and gains. Here there is plenty to eat. Food for the living. Which is a good thing because I am famished. And some alcohol. I help myself to a stiff glass of vodka and scarf up a plate of hearty victuals. And death shall have no dominion—Dylan Thomas resounding in my brain.
“I told her it was just some stuff of Jonathan’s I had to get out of the house,” Avril says as she opens the hall closet and drags out two suitcases. “But I think she knows. This is everything.” She looks at me steadily. “I hope you told him not to bring any more.” There is something in her that enjoys the criminal. She will miss it, her eyes say.
“I did. But you should hold on to whatever you need.”
“Don’t worry, we’re okay. I just want this out of here in case… something happens.”
She calls me a cab and I lug the suitcases out, heave them in the trunk. At the hotel I don’t want the bellman to handle the bags because they are abnormally heavy. “Bring me the cart,” I say and hand him a fifty. “I’ve got these.” In the room later I open them. Two point six million mostly in brown hundreds and red fifties. A ledger with Rosie’s careful accounting. In the minus column a notation: five hundred. And another: fifty, the shit that got busted.
Who’s gonna eat that?
I put the suitcases in the closet and forget about them, fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. No dead bodies to dispose of. The Seagull is at peace in his grave.
In the morning I rent a car, one way with a drop-off in Montreal. This is what I’m made for: a man of action. I reach Squid pay phone to pay phone. It is imperative I rendezvous with the Rose, I tell him, but equally critical that he not draw his Heat to me—I have enough of my own. He must use all his skills as a veteran outlaw, a seasoned ex-con, an intelligent if outrageous dope dealer to make absolutely certain he is not followed to wherever we meet. I buy more luggage, clothes, underwear, wrap the money and split it up so the individual bags aren’t so heavy. I check out, greasing palms along the way, drive downtown and park the rental in a garage near the Royal York Hotel.
The Squid has rented a suite for our meeting. He answers the door when I knock. He’s ordered a lavish breakfast from room service: omelets, French toast, coffee, tea with milk and honey for Rosie. I give Squid the keys to my rental car, the location and the parking ticket. The Rosebud, he tells me, will be along presently.
There are a few men in my life I can honestly say I love. Men I believe would lay down their life for me, and I want to believe I would do the same for them. Men to whom friendship and loya
lty mean everything. Even more than money. Call them brothers, but they are closer than kin. Brothers are bred for rivalry. Friends of this rare caliber are bound together in some vista of the soul where past, present, and future events are clearly understood without need to express where one stands.
Norman Mailer is such a friend. As is Rosie. They are alike in many ways. Both men of large intellects and unbridled appetites. When I introduced them at the farm in Maine some years back, it was like bringing together two rogues of equal but disparate nature. They sized each other up warily like wrestlers approaching one another in the center of the mat. Mailer testified as a character witness at Rosie’s trial. He compared him to Errol Flynn and Robin Hood. An apt comparison since the Rose is as Celtic as the crown jewels, as British as Blackbeard. Descended from a long line of pirates and horse thieves.
Rosie is even fatter than the last time I saw him. He smokes cigars when not burning herb. His teeth are stained brown with resin and tobacco tar. Prosperity is not sitting well on him—or on me, for that matter. What is wrong with us? We work so hard to accomplish this, why can’t we enjoy it? Or be satisfied with it? Why don’t we use the energy to make us better? Stronger? Healthier? Instead of crazier and more dissolute.
“I need more,” he says. “I’m gonna run out by the end of the week.”
We go over the books, balance our accounts.
“Who’s gonna cover the five fifty that were lost at Thousand Islands?” I inquire.
“Split it?” he suggests.
“Explain to me why I should eat any of that loss. It went down on your side. We agreed. Once it crosses the border, you own it.”
“Okay. Give it to me for cost. But I need more to make up for the loss.”
“That doesn’t seem right. You know Sammy and the Arabs are gonna take it out of my end.”
He shrugs. “I’m making you guys a fucking fortune.”
“We’re making you a fortune.”
“So we should split it. Everybody takes a piece of the loss, it doesn’t hurt as much.”
There’s truth to this. Why be greedy? But it’s not about that. It’s about security. And responsibility. He’s too fucking flamboyant. I love the guy, but he troubles me. It’s like he needs to get caught to validate who he is and what he does. Squid told me the story, how they were having a party recently, Rosie and a whole tribe of freaks and hippie dope dealers in a public park, all puzzled up on reefer and Heineken, carrying on like a bunch of nymphs and satyrs at some Dionysian rite when the Metro Toronto cops rolled up and took them all downtown. The cops seized two slabs stamped with the Flower of Bekaa seal. Doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to solve this mystery. Rosie argues the gathering was like a corporate picnic where the worker bees get to mingle with management and let off some steam. Good for company morale. It’s like anything else, he says, somebody has to get out there and hustle. A happy salesperson is a productive salesperson. It makes them feel good to frolic with the bosses. The Squid got hauled in as well. No wonder the Law went up on a wire at Sprout House.
There’re these two cops, Rosie tells me, Metro Toronto drug squad, who have a hard-on for him. They want to make their reputation by taking down Canada’s hippie godfather. He gives me their names, Carter and Mason—in one ear and out the other. I’ve got my own Special Agent Bernard Wolfshein and his crew to worry about. I say, “Fuck these guys. Don’t make their job any easier.”
Rosie is like one of the old-school mob bosses: He hates to leave the neighborhood. He has his set routine, his daily stops like going to the social club. He can’t fathom the anonymity of a life on the lam. We settle on a compromise. The Heat seems to be concentrated in Toronto—naturally, on him—so we’ll spread it out, ease up distribution here and focus on his West Coast market. If he wants to send some of his best local customers out there to score, so much the better, as long as they don’t bring the Heat with them. And we will not store any more product or accumulate large sums of money anywhere near Rosie’s operation. He is to profess he’s gone into semi-retirement, let his underlings handle the business, while he spends his days thinking of ways to frustrate the Man. I urge him to take a holiday, go on a trip and relax; but he says he can’t, he’s still on paper from the last bust and is not allowed to leave the Metropolitan Toronto area without permission from his parole officer.
“So get permission and go away.”
“Maybe I’ll go to Vancouver,” he says with a lopsided smile.
“Great… no, stay here.”
“What do you want me to do with the…” He consults his ledger. “Four hundred K plus I still owe you?”
“You mean, not including what you owe me for the five hundred and fifty pounds you lost?” I remind him.
“You’re hard.… You sure you’re not Jewish?”
“Swamp Yankee.”
“Same thing.”
“I’ll send someone to pick it up. Whatever you do, don’t bring it to Avril.”
“How’s she taking it?”
I shrug. “Right now, I think she’s so freaked by all the Heat she hasn’t had a chance to miss her old man. It’s like it hasn’t sunk in.”
“Who could miss that guy?”
“C’mon, you liked him.”
“Some people are better off dead,” he says.
“That’s cold.”
“He brought this Heat.”
I shake my head. “No, brother. This is your Heat.”
“And yours. You’re the fucking fugitive. You think they don’t know who brought in this load? It’s got your MO all over it.”
Each in our own way, we love rubbing it in the Man’s face.
THE SQUID RETURNS with the keys to my rental and a new parking ticket from a different lot. He says there is an additional eight hundred sixty grand in the trunk. Mostly large bills. Two hundred and sixty thousand in American. They have buyers from Detroit and Madison, Wisconsin, coming over to buy hash in Canada and smuggle it back into the States. “The Weather Underground,” Rosie says. “We are helping finance the revolution.”
“So we’re smuggling it into Canada so they can smuggle it back into the States. That doesn’t make sense. Tell them we will deliver stateside and save a lot of aggravation and risk.”
“But I still get my price,” he says. “I don’t want them to meet anybody. I’ll send one of my people down to handle the exchange.”
“As long as whoever it is doesn’t bring the Mounties with them.”
We readjust the books. The eight hundred and sixty grand was supposed to be an even million. That’s another hundred and forty grand that goes back on his tab. “Plus the—”
“I know, the five fifty. You’ll talk to Sam and see what kind of a number you can get me on that. What about Thai weed?”
“What about it?”
“Can you sell it in New York?”
“Sticks?”
“Loose. Comes in bales.”
“Any good?”
“Squid. Show him. It’s beyond good.”
Squid hands me a Ziploc full of lush dusty green buds veined with red hairs and clustered with furry, seedless bracts. I pinch a bud and hold it to my nose. Smells like exotic Eastern incense. “It’s expensive,” Rosie tells me. “Fourteen hundred a pound in Vancouver. But there’s a lot and we can make a deal if you can handle transportation.… Keep it,” he says when I go to hand him the bag.
I’m leery of carrying any quantity of reefer while transporting cash. But this is too nice to pass up. I roll one up for the road and stuff the bag in my crotch. We hug.
“You fat motherfucker,” I tell him. “What is it with this belly? You’re gonna have a fuckin’ heart attack.”
“Don’t worry about me. How’s Val?”
I’ve been wondering when he would ask this. “She’s good. Busy.”
“She keeping her nose clean?”
“She better be.”
“Watch out for that, bro. You still fucking her?”
“Whenever I
can.”
“Yeah, well, tell her when she gets tired of that Yankee needle dick and wants a real man, she knows where to find me.”
“I’ll tell her to look you up in the fat farm for worn-out, old hippies.”
“Bend over an’ spread ’em, I’ll show you how worn out I am.”
Rosie’s vices have never included powders or pills. He did a lot of acid as a kid and now consumes cannabis like a Rastafarian. More. His cells are drenched in THC. He reminds me of a pot plant. No wonder they call him Flower. His long, thinning reddish hair is like pistils and filaments, and his gangling appendages wave in the breeze like branches. His big, bulging, rheumy, and bloodshot eyes are like luminescent disk flowers at the center of the ray. When he dies and they bury him, a whole field of sativa will sprout with Rosie’s face in the bud.
Rosie rolls up a towel from the bathroom, places it along the space at the bottom of the door to keep the odoriferous ganja fumes from drifting out into the hallway and mesmerizing the hotel staff. We fire up a joint of the Thai weed. I take a couple of hits—all I need. I feel the twinge of pain as my lungs expand. Rosie sucks it down to the roach. We embrace again, clasp hands in the Brotherhood handshake. Bid adieu. Commend each other to the gods of cannabis. I leave first.
The rush assails me even before I reach the elevator bank. Suddenly, I have no idea where I am, how I got here, who I am, what I am doing, and where I am going. I’ll be lucky if I can find the elevator and press the right button to get me to the lobby. I’ve lost my moorings to reality, such as they were. I don’t even know my name or any of my names. I’ll never find this car with the three and a half million dollars in the trunk. I’m going to spend the rest of my pathetic life wandering around this strange city babbling to myself like a schizophrenic homeless person trying to remember who I am and what I’m doing here. If agents of the law stop me and inquire what I am up to, I will be reduced to a blubbering idiot, I will sink to my knees and beg them to lock me up for the rest of my life. Save me from myself! A wave of fear and paranoia grips me in a mental bear hug. I can’t move, I can’t think. I’m too high… way too high.
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