What horseshit. I am in complete control. Never been more on top of my game, never felt better. I hear gongs from distant Buddhist monasteries resounding in the Thai jungle of my mind so spaced out it’s like a week passes between each blow with the padded mallet of my heart on the membrane between the hippie campus and the hippopotamus, with the preferential corex sopping up the brain leakage until elephants lumber out from of the hinterlands, those dead elephants in the Beirut penthouse come to life beating a path to little brown men in loincloths who take me by the arm and lead me to a clearing where I am presented to the Headman. Who looks exactly like me!
“Dick?” he asks, “Is that you?”
Not on your life. I am Richie Rich. I am Batman. Archie and Jughead in one. Elvis. Scrooge McDuck. Popeye. Al Capone. Tarzan. Frankenstein’s monster lurching through the woods calling out, Friend? Friend? Friend? to the angry villagers seeking to capture me. I am Joseph Kennedy marijuana mogul coming down now, hours later, on the highway tooling along the 401 with the radio on, past Belleville where the Rosebush took root, and Kingston where he was placed in confinement, heading up the river to Montreal, French Canada, back in my right mind, if such a space exists.
Man, that is some good reefer.
But now it is time to get totally serious. Not that I have been the least bit goofy or lackadaisical in my altered state of consciousness. Just the opposite. Herb heightens my awareness to every possible pitfall. I’m like a brain surgeon operating on myself. One false move and I am paralyzed.
I check into a motel northeast of the city on the outskirts of Drummondville. I’m now within one hundred miles of the US border. My Cannuck friend, Giles, drives down from Quebec and joins me for a late dinner. Two bottles of good wine. French cuisine. Good to be back in the civilized world. We discuss riding into Montreal to feast our eyes on the best strippers in North America. No, I can’t go, not with all this dough to babysit. Giles gives me another hundred and fifty grand and wants to know when he can get more hash. This is the way we like it—the money flowing freely, everyone wanting more product. I call our pilot, Wart Hog; he calls back from a pay phone—supposedly. Everything is in motion now.
Alone in my seedy motel room with six suitcases stuffed with money, three and a half million plus in cash, I take a few final hits of the Thai weed and lapse into a feeling of utter peace and contentment. At last I have figured it all out. I understand life—at least my life and exactly what I need to do with what is left of it. I place the suitcases on the twin beds, open them, and gaze at the contents. All these stacks of dyed and printed paper signifying amounts of an abstraction. It has no intrinsic value, and yet we define who we are in terms of its measure. Money is man’s greatest abstraction next to time. Money means nothing beyond what one does with it, also like time. How simple and yet how profound: Time means money and vice versa. If you squander it, you lose it, you blow it, and you lose time. If you use it productively, not just to make more money, but to do something useful, to build or create something that has real value to yourself and others—something of beauty, something that will bring joy and inspiration and good fortune long after you have gone—then it’s time and money well spent. You are an artist, a creator. But if you use it to buy booze and hookers and trucks and boats and airplanes, homes on three continents and more dope; and if you don’t do anything useful and creative with your money and your time, then it don’t mean shit, son. You are a fool, and you might as well douse all these suitcases with gasoline and set a match to it for all the good it will do you and the world you walk in.
You are, Mr. Stratton—now look in the mirror and get this straight, for at this moment and in this chemically altered head you are finally seeing yourself clearly, as you really are, and what you are is—say it: You are a fucking asshole. A genuine, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree, wizened but wartless, puckered, quivering, stained-brown, stinky bunghole who ain’t got no sense.
But wait. An asshole who knows he’s an asshole can become something else. A better asshole. Or even a new man. I can change. I can stop drinking so much. Stop spending a fortune in bars and restaurants. Stop fucking all these lovely young ladies—well, maybe not all of them, just most of them, save a few, and drink a good bottle of wine once in a while. But get back in shape. Stay off the vodka martinis. Work out. Meditate. Chill. Relax. Think. Use my brain for something besides a testing pad for adulterants. Stop running around the world like a lost soul. Be a man. Settle down and have a family. Maybe even be a father someday.
12
BETTER THAN SEX
NORMAN MAILER GOT a visit from Agent Wolfshein and a deputy US marshal with the fugitive task force. This I learn in an early morning pay phone to pay phone conference with Biff. From what Norman told Biff, the agents were polite and seemed mildly amused to be visiting the famous author on police business. Wolfshein informed Mailer that they believe he was one of the last people to speak to me before I split. The Wolf went on to say that the United States Attorney’s office in Portland, Maine, was distressed to see that Mailer’s signature was missing from the bail surety bond putting the farm up as collateral. He told Mailer that the government might be required to sell the farm and give him half of the proceeds. Mailer should expect to hear from the prosecutor’s office. Did Mailer have any idea where I might be? No. Was he aware of the penalties for harboring a federal fugitive? He was not. Wolfshein informed him that even knowing the whereabouts of a fugitive and failing to inform the government could constitute a harboring offense punishable by imprisonment. Mailer thanked the agents and told them that if he heard from me, he would be sure to pass along their concerns.
Wolfshein has moved in to occupy a substantial piece of real estate in my head. While I was in Lebanon, I rarely thought of him. Now he is never far from my mind. I’m sure his intelligence has informed him that North America is experiencing a glut of high quality Lebanese hashish that has the Stratton/Rosie freak family imprint all over it—our telltale stamp, both marketing contrivance and slap in the face to the authorities.
Be that as it may, there is still work to do. And running around with suitcases containing nearly four million dollars in cash is risky business indeed. Stressful. I hate the idea of getting caught with all this money. Losing any amount of money is anathema to me: the embarrassment, the ridicule, the shame. And the satisfaction it would give the Feds. The loss. I don’t mind spending money like an Arab sheik, but allowing it to be seized by the Heat is worse than losing a load. One can always get more product. Money is never easy to come by, and once it’s lost you can never get it back.
Giles shows up with another forty grand to balance out his account. We pack all the suitcases into his car, then he follows me to Montreal where we return the rental. Wart Hog lands in our Cessna 210 at the municipal airport in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, and calls me at the motel. He has filed a legitimate flight plan, informed the authorities he is picking up an American businessman and returning him to Bangor, Maine. Giles drives me to the airport, where I greet Wart Hog and board the single engine Cessna, carrying only one small overnight bag and my briefcase. When we taxi to the far end of the runway, with Wart Hog on the radio filing his return flight plan, Giles pulls up along the access road, I throw open the rear door, and we quickly load in the suitcases containing the cash.
And we take off, up over the mountains of western Maine well ahead of the weather that tends to gather along the plains of Ontario, picking up moisture from the Great Lakes, which builds into banks of dense cumulonimbus by mid-to-late afternoon. The joy of flight lifts my spirits. It’s a great feeling to be suspended midair in a small plane, airborne above the earth like some minor deity looking down upon the firmament. After the geometric designs of family farms arrayed like postage stamps in shades of green and brown and auburn give way to wooded mountains and vast expanses of nearly uninhabited pine forest, crystal blue lakes and green ponds, frothy rivers and boulder-strewn streams, there is America—the great beast lies beneath us s
lumbering, dozing in the summer heat, unaware of our gnatlike intrusion.
Wart Hog is quiet, perturbed by the potential fallout from Fred’s having flipped. He also makes it clear he expects to be paid more for this trip, since there is obviously something illegal in the suitcases. He knows it is most likely money, having done this a few times before. Or some exotic weed. I tell him not to worry, of course he’ll be adequately compensated. I have a few days work for him; he could make himself twenty grand.
“Does that work for you?” I ask over the drone of the 210’s engine.
“Yes, that’s fine,” Wart Hog says. He’s a precise guy, a good pilot, gets the job done, but he’s suspicious, acts uptight like he believes everyone is out to cheat him.
“I thought you told me Fred never knew your real name,” I say.
“He doesn’t.”
“So what are you worried about? You have no record. It’s not like they can show him mug shots.”
He unloads. He met Fred’s “friend,” the corrupt cop, a couple of times, once at the airport after returning from ferrying a load of pot into Canada. And another time at the bar and restaurant Fred owns a piece of in Sanford, Maine, the town where he lives, the joint where Fred would hang out and party with his stripper friends, one of whom Wart Hog fucked in the ass while Fred smoked coke and watched, playing with himself, trying to get his dick hard. Wart Hog seems to take perverse delight in telling me this.
I shake my head and sigh. “Does she know your real name?” I ask.
“Who?”
“The hooker. The stripper. What’s her name?”
“Oh, Piper… I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, Piper. You don’t think so. But she might.”
“Well… I caught her going through my wallet once.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me this before?” I want to know. “You think she’s a snitch for this cop? You think this cop is really bent? Or is he playing Fred?”
“He asks a lot of questions,” Wart Hog says, and I sense in his voice that he fears the worst.
“So you think you might be hot?”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying.”
“Change of plans,” I tell him, enraged but keeping it to myself. “Drop me in Rangeley. Then go on to Augusta instead of Bangor and leave the plane there. Check in to a hotel and call the service in New York. Leave a pay phone number where I can call you tonight at ten. Don’t leave the area code. Just the number.”
I was contemplating doing this anyway. Nothing like a sudden change of plans to confound the Man. I know the little airport at Rangeley well. I took flight lessons there, did my first and only solo takeoff and landing. I’m friendly with the sole proprietor of the flight school, a taciturn local who comports himself with typical Yankee reserve: Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. People in these parts make it their business not to stick their noses in other people’s business. Particularly when you pay in cash. With any luck, there won’t be anyone around the airfield this time of day. It consists of a three-thousand-foot paved runway, a windsock, a small shack, and a pay phone and is situated at the foot of a range of mountains overlooking the magnificent vista of Rangeley Lake. The only hazard is the unpredictable crosswinds.
We land. I load the suitcases into the shack, and Wart Hog takes off alone and empty. I call the farm down the road from my place where JD stays with my neighbor’s wife. No answer. Then I page my nephew, Carlos, who lives with my parents in Wellesley, and leave the pay phone number. I’m stranded with nearly $4 million in six suitcases. But better that than busted. When Carlos calls back from a pay phone fifteen minutes later, I tell him to pick up the truck with the camper from my partner, Benny, retrieve 300 pounds of hash from the stash in Cambridge, and drive it to Maine, near Farmington, check into a hotel, and leave the number on the service in New York.
“No area code, just the number,” I repeat the instruction.
Still no call back from JD. I reach a local taxi service and arrange for a ride from the airport in Rangeley up through Stratton, Maine—the town named for my intrepid forebears—past Sugarloaf Mountain, where there is some sort of summer music and arts festival going on, to Kingfield. The taxi driver, who picks me up in a station wagon well past its warranty, is a talkative sort with a deep, backwoods Maine accent and a ponytail. He’s got a USMC tattoo and, I learn, knows fellow ex-Marines JD and Father Flaherty. He tells me they are both probably up at the Sugarloaf Mountain music festival with the rest of the local freaks and hippies and bikers and dopers. So I give him some buds from the bag of Thai weed as an added tip and ask him to track down JD and have him meet me at the bar in the Herbert Grand Hotel in Kingfield. He drops me at a motel on the outskirts of town. I check in, leave my luggage, and then walk to a local upscale inn and tavern owned by a friend in a large restored Colonial mansion set on a hill in the middle of town.
Something about the way the taxi driver eyed those suitcases when he dropped me off and my general heightened paranoia at leaving all that money unattended will not leave me alone. Even as I walk around without the suitcases, in my mind I’m still carrying them. I need to put this burden down. Where the fuck is JD? I need him. And Father Flaherty, I could use them both with a couple of guns to sit on that money until I can get it out of my hands and safely into Sammy’s hands, Nasif’s hands, even Biff will get another taste of the cake. Pay some bills. Hide some in an offshore account.
My resolve to stop drinking hard booze evaporates. At the bar in my friend’s tavern I order a Patrón margarita prepared by a friendly bartender who is astounded to see me.
“I heard there was some kind of trouble down there in Phillips,” he says. “No salt, right?”
“No salt.”
“Something about a big plane that crashed. Then you took off. That was like… over a year ago.” He eyes me with a glint of humor and pours the lime green liquid into a chilled glass. “What was that all about?”
“You know how these things get all blown out of proportion,” I say and slake my thirst first with a cool glass of water and then sip the margarita. “There were some problems, yes. Someone did leave a wrecked plane on the strip.”
“It was in all the papers,” he goes on. “There were pictures of the plane. Fucking huge. I read that you got arrested in Farmington. And then… split. I heard the government was going after your farm.”
I shrug. “Fuckers. I heard that too.”
“Man, why don’t they just leave people alone?”
“Exactly… listen, can I borrow your truck? Just for half an hour. I’ll give you two hundred bucks. I need to pick up my luggage, and I can’t find JD or Flaherty anywhere.”
“My wife has got my truck,” he says. “She should be by here any time now.”
“Can you call her?”
“This is urgent?” he asks.
“It’s not that. I just want to get changed, clean up, and settle in.”
“Let me speak to Michael, the owner. He knows you. Maybe you can borrow his car.”
Michael knows me only too well. He’s a weed head, gets his herb from Father Flaherty, and he’s close to my friend and attorney Channing Godfried. Part of me had hoped to keep my presence in these parts known to a bare minimum of low-profile residents lest word get back to law enforcement and some state cops decide to take me down. I wanted to stay clear of Michael; he’s a compulsive gossip, loves intrigue. My visit will be all over the county within a few days.
The other side of me, the side that has a penchant for notoriety, enjoys it when Michael walks out of his office and says, “Jesus Christ! Look what the cat dragged in!”
He’s an Irish guy, dapper and well fed, always wears red suspenders. He has a ruddy face with a graying, carefully trimmed beard, handlebar mustache, and arched, startled looking eyebrows. We hug. He slaps me on the back, then looks around suspiciously, goes to the door, and peers outside. “Fuckin’ Legs Diamond,” he says. “Any G-men on your tail, Legs? Should I clos
e the place down?”
“That’s not a bad idea. We could have a party. But Mike, first I need to borrow your car. Just for a few minutes. I want to pick up my luggage. I’ll be right back.”
“Pick up your luggage where?”
“It’s just down the street.”
“C’mon. I’ll drive you,” he says.
“Where’s Godfried?” I ask as we head down the hill from his place and out to the motel on the road to Sugarloaf. I’m feeling better already. Safer. It was the right thing to do, always is—to trust in friends.
“He’s around, been in town most of the summer. He was down on the Cape at Mailer’s. You going down there?”
“I can’t. Mailer already has enough Heat because of me.”
“You got one rolled up?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“What the fuck’re you waiting for? Fire it up.”
“It’s not four-twenty yet.”
“It is somewhere.”
I light a joint of the Thai weed, take a couple of hits and pass it to Michael.
He gazes at the burning joint. “Shit smells good. What is it?”
The car is veering off the road.
“Thai weed. It’s excellent. Watch where you’re going.”
“Can you get me an ounce?”
“I don’t have it right now. There should be some coming through soon. Stay in touch with Father Flaherty.” I make a mental note to reach Rosie and order as much of this herb as I can get. Now that my head is used to it, the high is extraordinary.
Michael takes a couple of deep hits. “What’s going on, man?” he asks. “I’ve heard so many crazy stories. All this crap in the papers. Biggest drug bust in the history of the state, or some shit. And I’m thinking, What the fuck did they really get? A few hundred pounds of pot? I heard they found nothing at your place. And the plane was empty. You’re like some fuckin’ Robert Vesco fugitive kingpin, for fuck’s sake. Man, this is some good dope,” he mumbles. “It was even on TV, the bust, I mean. I hear the government is trying to seize your farm… sell everything. Wow! I’d take a quarter pound of this. How much is it?”
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