Becoming A Son

by David Labrava

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…..THE ROLLING STONES.”

  The roar of the crowd was deafening. Nightmare. Actually the nightmare was just beginning.

  We got into the locker room and there was a line of everyone that had gotten busted so far that day. There was about forty guys in a line and maybe five girls off to the side. Every cop had a desk and was processing their violators. We could hear the Stones jamming in full blast. Living nightmare. Two months into being seventeen and I am busted with what I think is a real bust, that I will really get in trouble for. I had done some Juvenille hall shit, not much. And had gotten busted before with hash and completed probabtion, so I knew the drill, but now I got caught with a bag of pills and money IN MY POCKET. I thought the end was here.

  I knew enough to keep my mouth absolutely shut. My dad had taught me well in that respect. He was a criminal attorney in Miami. He got it quick that his son was more of a criminal than a student so he advised me in that manner. KEEP your moth SHUT.

  “Cops speak a different language than you.” He used to tell me.

  “Just keep your mouth shut tight till your atorney shows up. You are only going to make it worse by opening your mouth. And don’t trust any of them. They are doing their job, which is to lock you up. Do yours, be smarter than them.”

  The cops walked us over to our own table and started emptying my pockets. Everyone started looking over at the pile of crumbled up bills and all the ludes.

  “We got the dealers of the night. WE GOT THE DEALERS OF THE NIGHT!” The cops started screaming as they were high fiving each other and slapping each other on the back.

  They counted all the ludes and money. There were 411 ludes left and $983 dollars. They put everything in evidence bags and put us in this line. Everyone had to take there clothes off and the cops would then check the clothes, make you bend over, hold you balls up and cough, look in your mouth and hair then they would give us our clothes back. There was a young Mexican kid who had taken too much of something. PCP maybe who knows? Anyway when he took his clothes he had an erection and all the cops started joking him about it.

  “What are you doing? Getting excited?? You getting off in the locker room?”

  The guy went into full freak out mode.

  “I jerk off. I jerk off. I jerk off.” He kept saying that over and over, louder and louder. I felt bad for the guy. They gave him his clothes back and he rushed them on. The cops hand cuffed him and he freaked out further.

  “You’ve got my hands. GIVE ME BACK MY HANDS. YOU HAVE TAKEN MY HANDS.”

  He was trying to bring his hands from behind his back but they were handcuffed tight. Poor guy. He was absolutely freaking out.

  They hand cuffed us all together in a line and walked us out to the van that would take us to Glasshouse which is what they called the jail in Los Angeles county. I have no idea why they called it Glass House. I didn’t see any glass. Only steel bars and concrete cells.

  They cuffed me to a real big guy who was totally wasted on my left with Zack on my right. The guy probably was wasted on the ludes from Zack.

  We were in the last row of seats all cuffed together with our hands behind our backs. The big guy immediately slumped over on me almost unconscious. They put the Mexican guy who was freaking out in the back behind us. He was totally gone at this point.

  “I want to be in a seat. I need to be in a seat.” The Mexican guy said freaking out.

  The big guy turned back.

  “Sit down and shut up.”

  “”Fuck you Gaylord. Fuck Gaylord. Fuck you Gaylord.” He then spit on the big guy except he didn’t have any spit. He tried spitting on him over and over.

  “When we get to Glasshouse I’m gonna break your arms.” The big guy said.

  “Fuck you Gaylord fuck you Gaylord Fuck you Gaylord.” The Mexican guy kept repeating.

  I turned back and looked at the guy.

  “Listen dude. You are freaking out. Try to breathe and listen to your heartbeat and relax.

  “Fuck you Gaylord Fuck you Gaylord Fuck you Gaylord.” He then spit directly in my face. Well I have a split in my two front teeth which lets me spit with accuracy. I spit in his left eye then his right. Now he was all messed up, handcuffed and he couldn’t see. He started spitting in any direction he could.

  “HEY YOU DUMB COPS THIS GUY IS SPITTING ON US.” The big guy screamed out.

  The cops came to the back of the van and ripped the Mexican dude out. They hogtied him, which means he is on his belly with his hands and ankles tied together behind him. They then laid him on his belly and we took off to Glasshouse.

  As we left the stadium I saw Jeff on a pay phone outside the stadium with Marie next to him.

  “I just saw Jeff on a payphone.”

  “Good. He is calling his Uncle Joe. He’s a bail bonds man. We’ll get out soon.”

  As we rode away handcuffed from the forum all I could think was this was not how I planned the night to go.

  We rode to the Glasshouse in silence. No one person in the van made a sound, not even the Mexican who was laying on his belly hog tied in the back. When we got there the cops picked him up by his elbows and carried him over to the processing desk and dropped him on his belly. His chin hit the ground and split open making a pretty big pile of blood.

  Immediately after that, they uncuffed us for processing and the big guy sprung to life and started swinging on the cops. I backed up as six cops swooped down on him and beat the living tar with their batons. One cop put him in the sleeper hold and held him there till he passed out. I had never seen that before, holding a guy till he passed out.

  I had already been arrested before so I knew damn well to shut the hell up. Just get pics and prints and let the attorney figure it out later.

  We got into this holding tank with about forty bunk beds and about two hundred guys in it. There were full on junkies, fiending for the candy cart, which would come by every half hour. They would stand by the bars and buy up all the chocolate bars and rip the wrappers off so fast and them chew them up it was amazing. Then bug everyone in the cell for spare change to buy more. I didn’t even know what a junkie was. I for sure had never seen one.

  “Junkies.”

  “What?”

  “Junkies. Look at ‘em. Trying to get that sugar rush. Any rush. Whatever’s out there at this point.”

  This tall skinny black man was talking to me. He had a city bus driver uniform on, but the tags and patches had been ripped off. You could see that somebody had ripped them off violently. He looked all bummed.

  “What are you in here for?” I asked him.

  “Bank Robbery.” I was shocked. He looked so normal. I think of bank robbery I think of John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde. Not the city bus driver.

  “For real? You robbed a bank?” I was astonished. A real live bank robber.

  “Yeah. I did it while I was driving my bus route. I figured they wouldn’t think a bus driver on his route would rob the bank. I had been casing the bank for months. Used to park my bus down the block during my break. One day I just woke up and said, ‘Todays the day’ and on my break I took my shirt off, walked in as easy as you please and handed the girl a note.”

  “What it say?”

  “One thing about them tellers is they gotta do whatever the note says. And you don’t want them to have to read a book. Short and simple. Fill the bag with cash. Large bills. No dye packs. No alarm. Or I’ll kill you.”

  “Whats a dye pack?” I was amazed.

  “Exploding money. They give you a pack of bills that will explode with a dye that will cover you and the money also s you get caught and you can’t spend the money.”

  “Wow. I can’t believe it. You’re a bank robber.”

  “It aint so uncommon. You’d be surprised. Probably five banks a day get robbed in Los Angeles. Maybe ten. Some of them are real shoot outs.”

  “How’d your patches get ripped off?”

  “I guess some of these cops took it kind of person
al. Like we all work for the city or something like that. I didn’t even finish my route before they caught me. Don’t know how they figure it out so quick. Soon as I saw them red cherries burning in my rear view mirror I knew I was sunk. I though about running for a minute but where the hell was I gonna go with a bus full of passengers? Man I thought I had the whole thing figured out.”

  “ Can I ask you a question? “

  “Sure kid.”

  “Why they call this the place glasshouse?”

  “I was wondering that myself.”

  The line for the phone was a mile long. I walked over and got in line. There was a sign over the phone that said limit calls to five minutes but guys stayed on till everyone started yelling. Which took about five and a half minutes.

  I called Marie and she was as pissed off as can be. Zack called Jeff and within a few hours we were out on bail.

  The next day I called my dad because he had covered the bail and he unloaded on me. He thought it was a different Zack and David, two weed smuggling clients of his. So as soon as he figured out that he was spending money and not making it he went ballistic.

  I got back on the greyhound and went up north to Marin County. When I finally went back for court the public defender had beaten it down to six months of informal probation. Informal probation is almost like having no restrictions on you at all. You just gotta be a little extra careful. That’s not so good for learning lessons, or not learning them. I spent the next few years getting arrested over and over. Using the jail like a revolving door, in a quest for the next high or the next scam or the next thrill.

  30

  “Wanna go up to Mendocino and harvest? We can take your truck you could make a pound easy. Maybe two.”

  “Hell yes.” I was always looking for the next scam, the next way to make money, get high, without ever looking far enough to see the danger in it. It takes a while to see the danger as opposed to the rewards in things. Guess you gotta face the dangers head on a few times first. Some people even more than a few times. Like me.

  Jeff had things sewn up tight. He was living in San Rafael with his girlfriend, who was WAY hot and WAY older than him. He was on a crew that was harvesting hundreds of pounds every year of outdoor kind bud. Green weed. Sinsemilla. This is when green weed was first hitting the scene.

  It was the pot wars of the 80’s. Humboldt was booming and all around that area was a war zone. The pot farmers against the cops, the city people against the cops because this huge cash crop was sustaining so many lives. Then you add in the natural paranoia a farmer carries next to his .44 magnum and you have a seriously volatile situation.

  The season before we lost the whole crop. This is after all of us taking two week shifts for four months at a time living out in the forest in a big tee pee. We had a car battery to power the TV. A bear claw bathtub that the water stayed in till it was black and had a compost heap the size of the house. Every night you could hear folks firing off guns, riding ATV’s, hootin’ a and hollerin’ like banshees. Bunch of pot farmers.

  We lost that first crop all right. We sat on the top of the ridge and watched the cops cut it all down.

  But this year was different. We bought a parcel on a gated area that was cordoned off with some other growers. It’s tons of work growing weed outdoors. First of all you have to always watch out for bears. They are the real predators out there. I carried a shotgun and Jeff had a .44 magnum.

  “You are just gonna piss him off with that shotgun.” Jeff would tell me.

  “Then what good is it?” I asked.

  “It’s gonna get his attention while I blast him with this .44 Magnum. This thing would stop an Elephant.”

  That didn’t make me feel any easier about the situation. There was weeks of digging holes, then carting water up and down hills while we set up water lines, then bringing out clones of insane Blueberry crossed with Sour Diesel, or gas, or glass, or sewage. They all had brand names even back then And Kryptonite. Everything was Kryptonite back then. Kryptonite was the biggest. Everyone figured of it could drop Superman it was great. So they named their weed after that. Krippy. Killer Krip. Krypto.

  Jeff’s Brother has it really together in the brains department and he set it up with the best clones around. No one had weed like us we had the best.

  Jeff was into other drugs though. Like a bad science experiment I watched my friends demise in record speed. From the time he picked up opiates till he was dead was less than a year.

  You can only become a junkie once, not twice. And you never see yourself becoming a junkie while it happens, it just sort of happens. Jeff was into smoking Heroin.

  “There is something wrong about this.” I would say to Jeff. He was definitely living a high life. He had made great connections from bringing keys out from Miami. Jeff and his brother were plugged into Grateful Dead family and we were going to every show there was in the Bay area backstage. These guys were tapers meaning they could sit in the taping section and record the concert. They would wheel in tanks of Nitrous Oxide, laughing gas, disguised as their taping equipment. They would have hash, weed, pills, acid and do it all at once. Mass Transit we called it. Jeff would be in the top row smoking Persian Heroin at 800 dollars a gram all alone. His brother didn’t want any part of the opiate scene.

  “Don’t bring me down with your trip. This is my own money, my own drugs, my own life. You want some or not?” Jeff asked me. Of course I wanted some.

  Misery loves company, although Jeff didn’t seem so miserable. He was having a blast. I am certain he was unaware the monster of a junkie he was becoming. Like I said, you can’t see it happening, it just happens. And when you realize it, usually it’s too late. That’s why you never see any old junkies. They all die. Or get locked up.

  At first we would do Fentanyl. I am sure we thought it was China white Heroin, who ever sold it to us told us that. The smallest match head of Fentanyl and we would nod out for eight hours. We had no idea how deadly that stuff was. It’s amazing we didn’t die with the amounts we did, for weeks on end waiting for the plants to grow. By the time we went up to harvest the first truckload Jeff was so strung out it was insane.

  “Hurry up. We gotta go.” Jeff said already sitting in the truck smoking dope.

  I jumped into the driver seat and started the three hour drive up to the crop. Jeff was smoking Persian Heroin on tin foil, chasing the Dragon, and nodding out the whole way.

  “ Can I get a hit of that?”

  “Naah. You gotta drive.”

  “I can drive.”

  “Then drive.”

  Jeff was less and less into sharing his dope as he got further down that road. At first it was a social environment, he always shared his dope with me, but that soon went away and only despair and desperation remained. And a big dope habit.

  We got up to the Crop and Jeff’s Brother Sammy was standing there with the two other guys we did this with Tom and Harry. They had cut down and boxed up the first load to drive back in cardboard boxes. We filled up the back of my Chevy pick up with cardboard boxes of freshly cut weed, then we put a tarp over the boxes and covered the tarp with the smelliest compost from the heap. This was six months of rotting garbage and it stunk bad. We figured that would disguise the smell of freshly cut weed, which surrounded the truck for twenty yards in every direction. Seemed like a good plan at the time.

  We said goodbye to Sammy, Tom and Harry and took off in the first truck of what would be fourteen trucks full of weed this season. And I mean we grew the very best weed at that time. And it smelled like it.

  “You two be careful. Do the speed limit. Don’t stop till you get on the highway. There’s cops all over Willits. DO NOT stop in Willits. They are looking for guys just like you, who recently harvested. There’s a war on.” Sammy warned me.

  “I got it.”

  It took about an hour to get off the mountain and to the road to town. We grew our weed at the same altitude as Afghanistan. All on the correct facing ridge to get the mo
st out of the sunlight hours. This was stuff that Sammy thought up or knew, cause he is as smart as any one person could be. He had straight hippie hair down to his ass and smart like Einstein.

  It was definitely a big responsibility taking back the first load. I looked over at Jeff and I knew I was going to be doing all the driving. He had run out of dope this morning and he was scratching. He looked beat up bad. Nose rubbed raw like it has been sandpapered, sweating profusely. He needed to get back and get loaded. “Take it easy. You are gonna lose the compost. SLOW DOWN.”

  Jeff was irritable about everything cause he was coming down so hard. Everything bothered him. The bumping up and down on that country road wasn’t helping his ride a bit either.

  We pulled into Willits about eight o’clock in the evening. It was quiet. I had gas and I planned on driving straight through.

  “Pull over. I need some coffee.”

  “Sam said not to pull over. I think we should….”

  “Pull over at that Quickie Mart. I wanna get some chocolate.”

  I Looked at Jeff and he was a mess. Any cop would look at him and know something was up. I thought about the junkies at glasshouse and that my buddy was strung out bad. We pulled into the Quickie mart.

  “I need some coffee. With lots of sugar.” Jeff jumped out of the truck. I looked all around, seemed quiet. I got out of the truck and went inside. Jeff was making himself a cup of sugar with some coffee and I grabbed a sandwich. We were standing waiting to pay and an old lady walked up to Jeff.

  “Is that your Chevy Pick up out there?” She asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Cops are looking at it.”

  Jeff put the coffee on the counter.

  “We are leaving.” He said as he made a mad dash for the door. What I should have done is made a mad dash for the back door. But you never see this shit as it happens, it just happens.

  I jumped in the truck and leaned over and opened the door for Jeff. Soon as he got in and shut the door, a man with a flash light flashed it on us and started walking over towards us. Jeff looked right at me.