Dreaming : Hard Luck and Good Times in America (9780307807274)

by See, Carolyn

  “Meanwhile, Michael’s band fell apart. They got busted on two or three of the dumbest cases you’d ever dream of. Michael hated LA! But LA probation wouldn’t let him go back to Berkeley. His whole dream of being a musician fell apart. He’d get a gig in Hong Kong and he couldn’t go because of his probation. He couldn’t go anywhere. Finally, after a year, in June 1978, he talked the probation people into letting him come up north, and he wanted me with him. I was worried. Like, he’s going to take me up north where I’ve never been and don’t know anyone. But he considered himself an artist, and his dream had fallen apart. He’d keep saying, what have I done to my life? He was still in his early twenties—I was twenty-eight. He kept telling me, ‘Look. If I’m going to be poor, if I’m going to have this fucked-up life, I’m going to do it up north. Because you can be poor in the Bay Area and still look good.’

  “It’s true. We lived much better up here on the same amount of money. Things happen better for you—it’s easier in the Bay Area. We stayed with his brother Keith for six weeks, and then we got our own place in El Cerrito. It’s a real quiet, pretty little town. We had a nice house in back of another house with a beautiful garden. Life was so easygoing. And I finally got off my probation.

  “This is by now the late seventies. Punk rock was starting to come in. Michael was in Eddy Money’s first band. Michael was the rhythm guitarist. (But he got fired because Eddy Money said I don’t want any mother-fuckin’ hippies in my band!) But Michael was getting back in the music scene. Life was starting to be really fun. He was even going to work for the Tubes, but the Tubes didn’t hire him.

  “One day I befriended a girl named Delia. She was beautiful, Swedish-looking, and she had these almond eyes. She had a beautiful little baby boy who was so darling it looked like she got him out of a Cracker Jacks box. And she had a big grumpy old man named George. He was the biggest methamphetamine manufacturer in the Bay Area! They really took to me and Michael. Michael would say to me, ‘Can’t you see, they’re buying our friendship?’ I didn’t see what he meant, because George looked just like the kind of people we ought to know. George wanted to start building a recording studio. He had all this cash from meth and he had to do something with it! They’d take us off to the city on excursions. They bought Michael a guitar. Michael was like, He’s the Prince of Darkness!

  “George and Delia moved to Orinda. You’ve got to have some money to do that. They leased this big old home. They had more money than I’d ever seen. So I began to say to Michael, ‘Why can’t we be rich like them too?’ Oooh, Michael resented me saying that! But George could spend two or three hundred dollars on chemicals and turn it into hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of meth. I really admired George, because he was a self-made man. He was just a high school grad. He taught himself everything he knew. He went down to the library and he read books and he talked to people and he did the work and he bought the equipment and set up the labs and he figured it out! So he’d come a long way.

  “But Michael would say to me, ‘Don’t you know it’s poison? It’s so poisonous you have to wear gloves and suits and masks in the lab while you’re making it! And then you make hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars because some poor schmuck is putting it in his veins. A lot of poor schmucks! And it’s poison.’ But I bugged him and bugged him and bugged him. I wanted to have some money, because we were still living in this little, little house, and we were still getting around on foot. I would say to Michael, ‘If George can do it, we can do it!’

  “George would give you four pounds of speed; he had so much of it, just as a present, to see if you could build up a clientele. If you got rid of it, then he could see he’d gotten a little worker. The thing about speed or PCP, or even acid, is you don’t have to get them. You can make them. You don’t have to worry about finding your product or shipping it, or getting it through customs. You have to remember there’s only a finite amount of marijuana in the world. There’s only a finite amount of hash. There are only so many opium poppies in the world! But there’s an infinite amount of chemicals. You can make a tiny, tiny investment and make a huge, huge, huge amount of money. But there’s a disadvantage to it. The labs are physically dangerous because they could always blow up. The fumes are dangerous—they’re poison. And you have to keep the temperature of the lab constant—if you don’t, that could blow you up. And it carries a sentence of fifteen to life. (Except that when George finally did get busted, he only did three years, and he’s back on the street now, making a whole lot of money.) So that’s why I nagged Michael to do it. Because it was so much money!

  “Michael firmly believed in Karma. He firmly believed that if you were getting rich off little kids putting poison in their veins … that something bad would happen. And it did happen. All the people we worked with were finally busted. But the real bad guys all went to prison for five minutes and now they’re out doing it again. They’re all stinking rich.”

  I ask Rose what the chances are for a woman alone to succeed in the meth business.

  “A woman alone could never do it. You’d be shot and killed in two minutes. And in fact, you can’t really be awake and do it. You can’t think about what you’re doing, little kids putting that stuff in their veins. We never even tried it! The drugs we made we never used. We stayed on methadone. And PCP, oh my God! You could never try that. That’s just like death.

  “So! In November of 1980, we finally moved into a condo in Piedmont. It wasn’t cheap. All of a sudden, our life had changed. All of a sudden we had one or two cars, and a condo with a pool. We just had a lot of fun! The famous George was still building that recording studio he’d been working on. Just like with the meth, he taught himself how to do it. You know, I hate him more than anyone in my life, he treats women like shit, but I respect him too, for what he’s been able to do with his life.

  “Michael, by this time, was really fulfilled. All he had to do for business was make a couple of phone calls a week. He worked with George to finish the sound studio, he bought a mixing board that once belonged to the Beatles. And then! MTV hit the scene. I thought, Oh! OK! That’s what I want to do! Then Michael started buying video equipment. I worked on Jenny 456719 and one other real dumb little tape. During that time, I edited tapes of a lot of bands. Editing tape—that seems to be something that women are able to do. Either that, or that’s what they let you do. Anyway, during 1981, ’82, ’83, ’84, that was our life. We hung around with musicians and went to clubs and edited tapes. We lived in Piedmont. Michael had a Grand Prix—it was like driving around in your living room—and I had a Datsun 280Z and I was happy.

  “Then, in October of 1983, a series of events occurred. I finally got that settlement from the car crash I was in. Forty thousand dollars just came in one day. And right around the same time we met some more people, another couple, Max and Sasha. They had a lot more class than George and Delia. Sasha was always running off to London like a regular drug dealer’s wife. In fact, she’s out of the business now. She’s down in LA selling stocks and bonds. But she loved to travel. And he never did any work because he had all his little monkeys to do his work for him. Max was sort of white trash, but he was another one of those guys who came from the Berkeley drug mentality—that you could make something of yourself if you really wanted to. He taught himself everything, and he could make everything. They had a pretty good lifestyle—they had the fine wines and dinners and Porsches and Lamborghinis. They had a little boy too. Boy, they really spent money.

  “But Max wasn’t very nice to Sasha. You know how I told you you’re always sick when you’re using? Well, Max wouldn’t let Sasha touch any stuff until he woke up and that would be real late in the day, so she’d be sick and she had to get up with the kid. So she began to drink and he hated that. He said he hated to see a drunk woman. In fact, Sasha took me to my first AA meeting back in 1984. She was all the time deciding to get out, to get away from him and his methamphetamines, to be shut of all that stuff. Because
he was mean to her.

  “Around 1984, Max had this big disaster happen to him. He had one main lab, right there in the middle of Berkeley, in the basement of a little house. The guy who managed it was this little gay guy from New York, The Squirrel. As far as anyone knew, The Squirrel had taken some money from his contacts in New York and hadn’t paid them off in product. So these characters from New York came out here and put a gun to The Squirrel’s head and cleaned the place out. They took everything. They took the finished meth and all the chemicals and all the cash and everything. Now, you have to have these big machines to manufacture meth, to make the liquid into a solid. And here in town they’re always bolted to the walls, not because of thievery but because of earthquakes. So these guys cleaned out the place, the cash, the product, and they unbolted the famous machine and took it along.

  “So … Max was beside himself. He needed money to start all over again. Nobody was willing to cough up money for the machine. So, who did he come to? Us. We had part of the forty thousand I’d gotten from my settlement, and it cost about twenty-five thousand for the machine. I handed it over to Max, I invested in his business. And we wouldn’t get anything in return for about three or four months. Max made fun of us later—‘Yeah, like Michael’s teeth were chattering when Rose handed over the cash!’ ”

  I ask Rose why she and Michael didn’t just go into business for themselves if they had that kind of capital, and she gives me a pitying look. “Because we didn’t have the formula! You can’t do anything if you don’t know the formula! But we became one-third partners with Max. For our initial investment of twenty-five thousand, our very first payment was eighty thousand. For two years we had plenty of money coming in. It was the funnest time of my life.”

  Rose had two abortions in the early eighties. Michael didn’t want any babies and he was annoyed the first time with Rose for getting pregnant. She waited a long while, hoping he’d change his mind, but he was clear he didn’t want the kid. “When I went into the clinic, I was getting to be three months pregnant. When I went in, I was crying, crying, crying. But he just didn’t want a baby. He would have been twenty-six then, I was thirty-one. But the second time I just rushed down there. I went down there by myself. We were branching into a lifestyle now where I saw it the way he did. We couldn’t have any kids.”

  There was more trouble in the early days of 1984. A rich Iranian drug dealer was gunned down in his van, leaving behind a beautiful widow and a fortune in drugs. Michael immediately moved in on this beauty, partly to “protect” her, partly as a financial venture. Repeatedly, Michael reassured Rose that he was only using this woman, that their affair meant nothing. Rose, still in the condo in Piedmont, decided to hang in there, to tough it out, to see if she could keep Michael. She had heard that the beautiful Iranian had a terrible temper and banked on that to drive Michael away to return him to Rose. The affair lasted from September 1984 to the end of that year. Rose remembers the next six months as the happiest days of her life.

  “Michael was sweeter and nicer to me from December to June 1985 than he’d ever been. He had me out looking for a house. He had me out there with actual real estate people, which was difficult, because we didn’t have jobs. Even if you have a fifty thousand down payment, they want to know whether or not you have a job. Before, we could have said we were working for the recording studio, but now it was closed.

  “On June 9 of ’85 we were going out to dinner with a friend of ours named Sally, a customer. She would make us maybe twenty thousand a month. So we were going to go over to San Francisco and have a crab soufflé with her. Michael had stayed up late the night before, and we went to bed, but around four or five in the morning he jumped up and said, what was that? Then he got up again around six, which wasn’t like him. He’d said, did you hear the pounding on the door? And when he couldn’t go back to sleep he got up and gave the cat a bath and blow-dry. Then he decided to go downstairs and work on his 1964 Grand Prix, which was like a collector’s item. That’s what he did that day. He had a few visitors, one guy who came over with some cocaine. But Michael said he didn’t feel like cocaine, why didn’t they go out and see if they could find some stuff? Because he felt like some stuff. Michael’s friend always blamed himself after that, because he said no, he didn’t feel like it, he’d rather do the cocaine, and drove away.

  “By that time it was five or six in the afternoon. Michael said why don’t you take a bath before we go out to dinner? He said he was going to go down to the 7-Eleven, then he was going to lie down for a while and read. He came home with the Rolling Stone with David Letterman on the cover. He came into the bathroom, I was just letting the bath water out and getting up to turn on the shower. The radio was playing—do you know that song, “Two Birds of Paradise” by the Pretenders? Ordinarily Michael hated that kind of music, but he looked over at me and said, ‘ “Two Birds of Paradise.” That’s us, baby.’ Then he walked out and shut the door.

  “After a while I came out of the bathroom. He’s not in the apartment. But we’d been together for eight and a half years, I wasn’t going to get worried about something like that. I just thought, well, he’ll be back. I started getting dressed and just lollygaggin’ around. I put on a little red miniskirt. I was thin and cute then. And I started working on my makeup. Then the doorbell rang. I looked through that little hole in the door and saw three cops. I thought it was Michael’s worst nightmare come true! OK, we’re busted! I scurried around with nothing but my skirt on, just ran around like a chicken with my head cut off, because we had four ounces of PCP in the freezer, and eleven thousand in cash in the dirty-clothes hamper, and several handguns, only one of which was legal. I literally ran around in circles! I finally hid some Zig-Zags which were out there on one of the end tables, and I put on a blouse and went to the door.

  “They said, ‘Does someone named Michael live here?’ I could see a commotion from where I was standing in the door of the condo. Something was happening down by the pool.

  “The three of them came in without asking. They said, ‘Michael’s had an accident.’ I looked out and I could see somebody there, a body. But Michael was Latino, and the legs I saw were so white! I said, no, that can’t be Michael. Then I saw the stripe on the side of his trunks.

  “I said, ‘Is he breathing?’

  “They said, ‘Not at this time, ma’am.’

  “This is why I’ll never ever say a word against the Oakland Police Department. Because I just went nuts, screaming and crying. Finally a policeman had me pinned up against the wall, not hurting me, just holding me. I was screaming, he can’t be dead!

  “And they said, you have to get ready because we’re all going to go to the hospital.

  “I went over to my side of the bed to pick up my rosary, and they saw one of the guns. One of them asked, ‘Whose is that?’ And I said, ‘That’s mine.’

  “As we went down past the pool, there was this nice little guy who’d dived in to save Michael. I asked, ‘How long had he been down there?’

  “Jack said, ‘Thirty minutes.’

  “It started to hit me. During his youth Michael had been through a couple of heroin overdoses and a real bad car crash. I’d always thought he was invincible. I never thought he would die. And I knew he wasn’t loaded that afternoon. But he was dead.

  “They put me up front in the ambulance, while they took us to Merritt Peralta Hospital. Michael looked so calm, like I’d seen him a million times, like he’d caught good nod, perfectly at ease. I began to think—he got to go out young and beautiful, with no disease. The lucky son of a bitch. Boy, did he get off easy! They took him into a room at the hospital and kept on working on him. But … do you remember that movie, Jason and the Argonauts? Remember when Jason was sailing around and he had a goddess for a figurehead on his boat? And sometimes when Jason would get into trouble, the goddess would open her eyes and talk to him, and then turn back into a figurehead again? Well, I prayed so hard to the Virgin Mary, let him live, let him live. I don�
��t know whether you could say I got a vision. But it was like this lady with a big face came and said, ‘There’s nothing more I can do for you. It’s over. You need to take care of yourself now.’

  “They came out and said, ‘Michael didn’t make it.’

  “And I said, ‘I know.’

  “Then all of a sudden reality said, you have four ounces of PCP in your freezer. You have eleven thousand in cash in your dirty-clothes hamper. You have handguns all over the house. I tried to phone Max, the big dealer, but all the times I’d ever called him, I couldn’t remember his number now. I ended up calling a kid I didn’t even know very well, who lived over in San Francisco. That kid was there at the hospital, boom.

  “It was going to turn out that the only drugs they were going to find in Michael’s body were methadone and Valium. And one of the neighbors said he’d seen him with a beer. There was no foul play, no bumps on the head, nothing like that. But the pool was unheated, and when it’s cold like that you’re not supposed to stay in more than eighteen minutes. No one will ever really know what happened.

  “So, the kid and I went back to the apartment. We collected all the drugs in the house and put them in garbage bags with garbage on top of them and put them in the trunk of Michael’s Grand Prix and parked it on a side street. I got all the cash out of the house and put it in my purse. Then I realized I had to call Michael’s family. But there was no way I could do it. I just couldn’t call his mother! So I called the hospital back and talked to the doctor and he did it. His brothers were thirty-seven and thirty-eight by then, both back at home, living with their mother and their grandma. Louie answered the phone—it was late at night by that time—and he went into where his mom, Sylvia, was reading.