Beyond the Song

by Carol Selick

  “Bend over,” she barked. Does she think I’m hiding drugs in my orifices? They had just confiscated about a thousand pounds, probably the biggest hash bust in American history, and she was worried about the little bit I could have stashed in my ass and vagina?

  I didn’t come to my senses until after she threw my clothes at me and told me to get dressed. “We need a lawyer,” I said as I walked out. “This is against the law. We have rights. You can’t just strip search us!”

  My words did some good because Melanie and Sandy were spared from the humiliation I’d been forced to go through. We weren’t allowed to leave until we each signed papers stating we would take a future lie detector test, which in itself was a lie. We didn’t care what the papers said. We just signed them and the cops drove us back to the house.

  As we got out of the car, one of the cops looked at me hard.

  “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” It was a line right out of a B movie.

  At the time, I didn’t answer him. Later, I thought I should have asked myself the same question, but I never did. This was my lifestyle and these were my friends. I never thought of it as dangerous. Drug dealers, musicians, lovers—they were my people, and this was my scene, and that’s where I wanted to be.

  We walked into the house like three zombies. We hadn’t eaten all day and that was the least of it. Melanie made herself some instant coffee and I found some flat coke and a bag of stale potato chips. Sandy poured herself a glass of milk and we all shared a package of chocolate chip cookies, stuffing our mouths and trying to make sense of the cyclone that had just torn through our lives. And then it struck me.

  “Oh my God!” I jumped up from the table and ran into my room. I opened the closet and dug my hand into the pocket of one of my vests that was hanging under a sweater. The wad of cash Joshua gave me to hide was still there.

  “Look! They didn’t find Joshua’s cash!” I shouted, proudly holding up a fistful of money. “The narcs got so excited when they found the weed, they stopped searching!”

  “Wow!” Sandy and Melanie said together.

  “What’s weird is, Joshua and I had a big fight about hiding it. I felt hurt at first when he didn’t want me to know where he was going to put the money, but I guilted him into letting me find a good place.”

  “How much do you think is there?” Sandy asked, looking wide-eyed.

  “I’m not sure. Could be thousands. Let’s go to the living room and count it. Sandy, make sure all the doors are locked and the blinds are down.” I plopped down on an overstuffed chair in the living room and counted out piles of hundreds.

  “It’s three thousand and fifty dollars! We can use this to get them out of jail!” I was trying to sound hopeful.

  “Cool, but we don’t even know where Mark is,” Melanie reminded us.

  Just then there was a knock at the front door. I grabbed the money, stuffed it under the chair cushion, and sat on it. Sandy opened the door to be met with two policemen. They flashed their badges and she let them in. Again, they started questioning us.

  “This is very serious. If you don’t tell us the truth about what you knew, you could end up in jail with your boyfriends.”

  I prayed they wouldn’t ask us to stand up or go back to the station. How much more of this could we take?

  No one said a word. Melanie, Sandy, and I just shook our heads and looked down at the floor. After some heavy silence and a few mumbled “I don’t knows,” the policemen looked like they were about to leave when one turned around. “By the way. We found your friend in New York. He’s in jail, too.”

  Melanie’s face turned white and I reached for her hand as the front door slammed. I retrieved the money and put it back in its hiding place.

  When I woke up the next day, I wished it had all been a terrible nightmare. But when I looked around the disheveled room I knew it wasn’t. There were so many unanswered questions! How did the narcs know about the deal? Who tipped them off? Where would Joshua and Joe end up? What jail in New York City was Mark in and how did he get arrested? And most of all, would Melanie, Sandy, and I be arrested, too? Just thinking about it made my head spin and I reached for a cigarette to calm down. I didn’t want to go back to the city until I got some answers, so I called in sick to the health food store. My voice must’ve sounded hoarse from too much smoking and too little sleep because my manager was very understanding.

  Melanie made a pot of coffee and we began straightening up the house. Sandy was still sleeping. Around 11:30 the phone rang. Melanie and I froze a moment and then I picked up. It was Joshua’s lawyer, Ronald Gilbert, calling to tell me he’d been hired by Joshua’s parents. He didn’t want to talk on the phone since it could be tapped, and asked if I could come to his office in New Brunswick the next afternoon at 2:00. I asked if Melanie could come with me and he agreed. When Sandy finally woke up I told her about the phone call, and she said she was gonna try to go to some classes instead. I promised to find out as much as I could about Joe.

  Monday afternoon, Ronald Gilbert led Melanie and me into his office in a converted house on Livingston Avenue. He was a middle-aged, slightly overweight man with a pleasant face, dressed in an expensive suit. As he filled us in, I kept staring at his tie, a paisley pattern of purples, pinks, and blues. It helped me to focus on the dreaded details.

  “Joshua and Joe are being transferred to Middlesex County Jail, here in New Brunswick, until their trial and sentencing. Your friend in New York is in a downtown jail. I’ll have my secretary tell you the exact location.”

  “How did this even happen?” I asked.

  “The connection from Pennsylvania was working for the Feds. He’d been busted and cut a deal to be an informant.”

  “So I was right! The phone was tapped!” This was one time I wished I’d been wrong.

  “How did Mark get caught?” Melanie asked.

  “When he got out of the car in New York, they arrested him and impounded the car. His charges are more serious because he crossed state lines, which is a federal offense.”

  Melanie and I just looked at each other. Mark didn’t have a wealthy Daddy to get him a high-priced lawyer. He was as good as gone.

  “Joshua said you had some of his money, Carol. He’d like you to use it towards legal fees.”

  “Okay, but it will have to be in cash.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll let you know. You girls were very lucky. It’s a miracle you weren’t arrested on possession charges!”

  Another close call, I thought as I unsteadily walked to Melanie’s car. I’d narrowly escaped going to prison and having a police record. My grandmother, who I was named after, may have been watching over me, but it was time to stop pushing my luck. I’d help Joshua as much as I could, but I needed to get my priorities straight. I’d worked too hard on myself to risk losing my dreams for some guy living on the edge of his.

  20

  JAILHOUSE BLUES

  Darlin’, don’t let them take your man,

  ’Cause when the judge says “One to three,”

  They’re gonna lock that door and take the key.

  Darlin’, you gotta speak up for your man.

  Joshua slid a piece of paper through the small slot in the glass between us at the county jail. It was a blues song he’d written for me, scribbled on the back of some Jewish Federation stationery he’d received from a visiting volunteer. It was a shock to see him looking so lost and innocent in his blue prison work shirt and sweat pants. The whole scene brought back memories of the day I bailed him out of jail in DC for not paying his parking tickets. What a pivotal day that was—the day I realized I was his one phone call and we would be a couple.

  Now the stakes were much higher. He was facing major drug charges, yet I still refused to believe he deserved to be in jail. To my mind, he was providing a service, selling something that was no more danger
ous than a few beers. It was my generation’s prohibition and no one was dying from a few tokes on a hash pipe.

  His face lit up when he saw me.

  “How are they treating you?” I asked. He looked thinner but other than that, okay.

  “The food is horrible! The milk they gave us at lunch was past the expiration date.”

  “That’s fucked up.” I was trying to sound sympathetic, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, You got arrested for the biggest hash bust in American history and you’re worried about the date on your milk cartons?

  “You made the front page of the Sunday paper. They even compared it to The French Connection!” I tried joking, but no one was laughing. My parents weren’t laughing when I’d gone with Melanie the day after the bust to give them a watered-down version of what had happened. They would’ve recognized Joshua’s name and Stevie’s address, so I had to confess in person. It was bad enough that I’d started seeing Joshua again and was spending weekends at the South River house. Not to mention it was only a few minutes from their place, and I didn’t even visit them. Melanie and I tried to act reassuring and claimed we weren’t in danger of getting arrested, but the paper made it sound so bad that our mission was doomed from the start.

  1.5 MILLION WORTH OF HASHISH SEIZED

  The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs yesterday arrested four men in connection with the largest domestic seizure of hashish ever made in the United States.

  Standing before a mountain of suitcases full of the brown-colored drug at a news conference yesterday, Regional Director Donald F. Malley announced that federal agents seized 1,500 pounds of the narcotic in Saturday raids in Manhattan and South River, New Jersey.

  The raids took place after three months of surveillance in the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area.

  The sting netted the four suspects and a huge cache of hashish, cut into one-pound “bricks” and wrapped in clear plastic. The drugs are valued at $1.5-million wholesale.

  Hashish, like marijuana, comes from cannabis, but is produced from the resin of the plant and therefore much more potent. An agent holding up a single brick explained: “This single pound of concentrated illegal euphoria can produce 4,554 highs. Think of it—a purchaser could stay high for life!”

  Questioned about the commitment of resources to stemming the influx of non-addictive drugs like hashish, Mr. Malley replied, “While heroin is our main concern, the illegal sale of a thousand pounds of any controlled substance calls for extensive investigation. The case is similar to The French Connection: The smugglers likely obtained the drugs in Morocco and hid them in the cavities of cars to be smuggled into the United States.”

  Bail of $100,000 set.

  The following have been arraigned in Manhattan Federal Court on $100,000 bond each:

  Howard Sachs, 25, of West End Avenue, a lecturer at Hunter College

  Mark Thompson, 21, of Boulder Colorado, a musician

  Arraigned on $100,000 bond each in Middlesex County were:

  Joe Martin, 21, of 364 Main Street, So. River, a teaching assistant at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

  Joshua Goldman, 23, of 364 Main Street, So. River, occupation unspecified.

  The purchase and seizure

  The distinctive nutmeg odor of hashish permeated the room as Mr. Malley explained the sting. The operation was initiated when an undercover agent disguised to fit into the long-hair crowd arranged to buy 500 pounds of hashish at a bulk rate of $450 a pound rather than its current $1,000 a pound rate.

  The undercover agent arranged to purchase the first 50 pounds at Mr. Martin’s house in So. River on Saturday. Driving from So. River, Mr. Goldman picked up a suitcase at Mr. Sachs’ West End Avenue apartment, then returned with it to New Jersey, where he was arrested. Agents made further arrests in New York and allegedly seized the rest of the cache at Mr. Goldman’s residence.

  Asked if educators and other professionals were often involved in the illegal dealing of drugs, Mr. Malley replied, “People in the educational field, so-called “intellectuals,” are just as likely as anyone else to be implicated—and maybe even more so.”

  I promised my parents I would break things off with Joshua. Given everything that had just happened, I meant it. I wasn’t being brave. The universe stepped in and decided for me.

  I visited Joshua just one more time to say goodbye before his parents coughed up the $100,000 bail. What I did not tell my parents was that I’d promised Melanie to visit Mark, who was jailed in downtown Manhattan. As for Joe, we had no idea what happened to him. I asked Sandy, but all she knew was that he came from a big family in North Jersey. Her parents had threatened to pull her out of school if she tried to contact him. I prayed he would be okay in prison, but feared that he was an easy mark with his laid-back attitude and that purple nail polish Sandy had painted on his pinkies.

  Melanie and I were shaking as we walked into the massive building in downtown Manhattan where Mark was being held. The place had evil vibes and the reputation of being one of the worst prisons in New York. The name said it all: The Manhattan Detention Center, aka “The Tombs.” Our nerves only got worse as we waited for him in the dismal visitors’ room. When he finally dragged in, we barely recognized him. His long, musician’s hair had been shaved in a crewcut. Thin and pale, he picked up the phone on the other side of the glass and looked at us, expressionless. Melanie told him she was working on getting him a decent lawyer, and he described what happened on the day of his arrest. When he got to New York and opened the car door, an agent put a gun to his head and told him to freeze. If he’d moved even an inch, they would have shot him.

  Melanie and I promised to visit again. This was our new reality. It could’ve been worse—it could’ve been us in jail. Joshua had told me that a detective came to his cell every day and asked him if “the girls” had anything at all to do with the deal. Lucky for us, he kept his mouth shut. But in reality, it was true—we actually didn’t know that much.

  A few weeks later, I got a letter from Melanie, who was still living with her parents on Long Island. She needed to vent.

  Dear Carol,

  Mark is finally being helped . . . the lawyer I wanted for him is the official lawyer. . . He also is very good. He might be released in my custody, which would mean I would be responsible if anything should happen—it sort of puts me up-tight . . . but anything is better than thinking about my gentle friend being locked up in a world where he doesn’t belong . . . in a world where very few care about him. I’ve been trying to compose a letter to Goldman without sounding too bitter, but have been unable to simply ask him for Mark’s belongings without flying into a rage. I’ve heard Goldman should be out by now, but I really have no desire to see him. It must be nice to have a rich daddy to bail you out of jail, but what about Mark and Joe? Who’s going to help them? I just can’t shake the turmoil that is inside of me—I carry it around every minute—so many mixed feelings about all the people involved. I know my attitude is very selfish and even hateful . . . but even my friends didn’t turn out to be that separate from the world around me … and maybe that is what hurts me the most.

  Mark’s mother thought it would be better if he remained in jail and got it over with. What the fuck is wrong with people? This is no game. Can’t she envision the reality of her son in a place like that? Ignorance and absurdity and horrible visions . . . nightmares . . . worlds of guilt and pain . . . Must I swim here the remainder of my life? God made Mark’s road a little rougher, and because of that, God made him a little more beautiful. And it’s not that I want him for a lover, but I want him to be able to love again. It would be wonderful if you two could play music together. . .

  I will probably see Mark on Saturday to tell him the good news . . . I hope all is well with you. Love to Sandy and Joe . . . What has happened with Stevie? Will be in touch with you soon.

  Much love
,

  Melanie

  Why are we both in love with outlaws? I wondered as I put down the letter. Is it a way for us to feel empowered? A “fuck you” directed at the uptight society we were raised in? Politically and culturally, the country was deeply divided. You couldn’t be a little bit pregnant. You had to choose a side. That’s one explanation, I thought. But what if it has nothing to do with being idealistic and political? What if it’s just that Melanie and I are attracted to “bad boys”? Weren’t nice guys boring? Whatever the reason, I knew I had to kiss my bad boy goodbye. It was time to explore boring.

  21

  WAKE-UP CALL

  The energy between us grows stronger all the time.

  You are my strongest weakness, the tie I can’t unbind.

  I’ve tried so hard to give you up, replace you with a stable love.

  And though I keep on trying, I find myself

  Back in the arms of heartache . . . .

  When I heard the phone ringing at 6:30 a.m., the first thing I thought was, maybe one of the guys was calling from prison or something else terrible had happened, but I was wrong.

  “Carol, this is your father.”

  “Is everything okay? Is Mommy alright?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t been able to sleep since you and Melanie told us about the bust.”

  I took a big gulp. Here it comes, I thought, mentally trying to prepare myself for the lecture of a lifetime. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and you cannot keep going down the road you’re on,” my father continued. “Am I going to spend the rest of my life saying I told you so? It’s clear to me that you have not been exercising good judgement and I don’t think that therapist is helping you. I will not continue to pay for you to see him. It’s been over a year and you’re still hanging out with the wrong crowd.”

  I opened my mouth to defend myself, but couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He just kept on lecturing. “I’m still your father and you should know I have your best interests at heart. I want you strongly to consider moving back home no later than next summer. Working in a health food store is not a career. Unless a miracle happens and you make it in the music business, I want you to keep the promise you made after you dropped out of school and go back to college next fall.”