A few of the female hacks are running a prostitution ring. There is one who is definitely fuckable. I’ve had my eye on her. She has a dancer’s body with great legs and a firm, round ass. For a hundred bucks, I’m told, one of them will stop by your cell after the evening lockdown and give you a blowjob. As the coke hits, that gives me something to think about. Ernie and I light up cigars, he pours shots of cognac, and we play poker until lockdown.
Once I get my nose in the bag, I keep thinking, Well, maybe just one more hit. There is some idea, some notion I can’t quite capture, and I feel that one more blast to the brain might just enlighten me. I’ll experience a breakthrough. I’m alone, I have no cellmate unless and until all the cells are full and they bring up more new prisoners from the bullpens in the middle of the night; then I am the last guy to get doubled-up. I’ve been here so long, the cops all trust me. I help them by maintaining the bed board, so they rarely shake me down. My cell has become the depository for all D-tier Mafia Row contraband. Except weapons, I refuse to hold weapons. To what end? The only violence I have witnessed in the time I’ve been here has been cop-on-prisoner beatdowns, as in when the goon squad invades the unit to do a cell extraction. Man, that’s hairy, some kinda SWAT team shit. The cops march along the tier in their black riot gear, helmets with plastic facemasks, carrying shields and truncheons. They open the cell door and gang charge the recalcitrant prisoner who, for whatever reason, refuses to come out. They mow him down. Give him a few whacks with their batons for good measure. Sit on him, mash his face into the floor, chain the sorry motherfucker up, and drag him out of his cell. I saw that go down once with a very serious guy, a professional killer who was charged with over a dozen gruesome murders for one of the crime families. He was coked up and wouldn’t leave his cell. The cops were afraid of him. So they locked the unit down and the goon squad came and got him. They beat him into submission and then dragged him out by his cuffed wrists.
The Criminal Hilton—You can check out anytime, but you can never leave.
Yes, I’m thinking, I’m so horny a nocturnal visit from one of the female hacks is looking good right about now. I have an X-rated vision of her kneeling on the floor in her correctional officer’s uniform. I’m sitting on my bunk with my blaze-orange jumpsuit down around my ankles. Her cop head bobs up and down as she polishes my knob. Now that would be a step toward true rehabilitation. Hmmm … I have the dough, the five hundred Ernie boy gave me. Let me do another line and see who comes on duty for the graveyard shift.
After lockdown, suddenly feeling paranoid, I unscrew the towel rack and stash the bag of blow inside the hollow handle. Alone in the cell, locked up with nowhere to go, and already buzzed on coke, nicotine, and cognac, I check my reflection in the scratched plastic mirror mounted on the cinderblock wall above the sink. I’m looking at the man in the mirror, but I don’t know the guy looking back at me. He’s thin and looks haggard, his face ghostly pale with a stubble of red beard going gray. New wrinkles have etched latticework around his eyes. He’s thirty-eight years old and facing decades in prison. Perhaps the rest of his misspent life locked up. No, no, no … that must never happen. They wouldn’t do that to him—would they? He’s not a bad guy, really, just a fool who fucked up his life. You know, people do that. They lose their way. They forget about what really matters and go after symbols, illusions, myths they think will make them happy and give meaning to their lives. But it all adds up to nothing. Maybe someday he’ll change … and become a better man … more concerned with what really matters. There is still time. He’s been locked up now for a couple of years…. There is still a whole lot of time.
This jail cell is like a sleeper car on a train going nowhere. We are motionless as the world outside rushes past. Nowhere man is going nowhere, very slowly. He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.
To rat or not to rat? That is the question.
He has to think about it, certainly. Facing a whole shitload of time, nowhere man has to at least consider the alternatives. Escape? Tough but not impossible. The problem is you spend the rest of your life on the run until they catch you again. Become a stool pigeon and help them make a case against Norman Mailer and whomever else they want? It could be done. People do it all the time. Nowhere man just has himself to answer to. But what if there were children, little kids waiting in the world. Good thing the ex-wife had the good sense to refuse to have children. Perhaps she saw this day coming.
That guy in the scratched-up mirror gazing back at nowhere man was brought up to believe there is no life form lower than the rat, the informer, the snitch. When he was kid, as president-for-life of the Pink Rats—the first and only juvenile delinquent gang in his hometown of Wellesley, Massachusetts—he and his fellow gang members determined they were pink because they wouldn’t fink. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. Hold your mud, motherfucker. Accept the consequences for your own fucked-up choices. At least get that part right.
But what if you are faced with life with no possibility of parole?
Can you do the time? You, the man in the mirror: Can you do the fucking time, motherfucker?
That guy unscrews the towel rack and does another blast of cocaine in each nostril. Last one! This is it! No More! There is an idea hidden somewhere in this bag of nose medicine—maybe even a revelation. No, no, no. Put the fucking shit away and stop! Stop thinking. Stop obsessing. Impossible. Just let the man in the mirror, the nowhere man in the cell, figure this out, capture the fugitive thought, and then we can rest.
Mailer. They want Mailer. Norman Mailer. For fuck’s sake, give them Mailer and you walk. This is the era of government star-fucking in drug cases. Just weeks after Stratton was cracked in LA, maverick automobile designer John DeLorean was busted in a federal cocaine sting operation at the very same hotel where nowhere man was brought to ground. Mailer has long held a prime position on the Fed’s hit list. J. Edgar Hoover pegged him as an enemy of the state back in the day when he was flirting with leftwing politics. Radical conservative, Mailer would call himself. Opposed the war in Vietnam. Arrested marching on the Pentagon to protest the war. Nixon had Mailer on his enemies list. Fucking hero, if you ask Stratton. Nowhere man loves Mailer like a father, like a brother, like a kindred soul. But what does the man in the mirror think? The guy who will end up doing the time?
That guy lies down on his bunk and tries to sleep. It is all here, somewhere in the whirling dervish of consciousness trapped in this cell: the key to unlock the door, the nugget of gold to trade for freedom. But it must not be another man’s freedom. That would be fool’s gold. No, there is a pure essence somewhere in this man’s life that must be preserved to have real value and worth beyond the experience, beyond the physical, for the body dies and fades away, the spirit, the soul, the character lives on. And who is this man, Richard Stratton? What does he really stand for beneath all the posing? The wads of money, the dope, the women—who is he? The answer lies somewhere in the connection, the relationship, the friendship. What brought these two men together in the first place, Mailer and Stratton? An affinity. Both stood for something. But what? Honor. To have the courage of one’s convictions. Yes, yes, we’re getting there now. Courage, yes, certainly. Grace under pressure. “Look for the risk,” Mailer wrote. “We must obey it every time. There is no credit to be drawn from the virtue of one’s past.”
Does any of that have real meaning when faced with life with no parole? Perhaps the answer lies in the bag stashed in the towel rack. Just one more whiff! … and we may have a revelation.
But, wait. They are counting. The midnight count. It’s her! Lord God above, it’s the hack with the great ass. She looks in at the prisoner and nods, glances at the vacant upper bunk. Counts. “Just you in there, huh, Stratton?” She doesn’t recognize that there are three of us in the cell now: the outlaw prisoner, the initiate, and the observer.
I am the observer who is observing.
In a few
minutes, the prisoner is back up, unscrewing the towel rack. This is going to be a long night. The prisoner sees the years stretched out before him like the white lines on a road through a tunnel with no end. That pathetic asshole with no future hunched over the magazine cover sucking up flaky crystalline white powder, and the adult juvenile delinquent Lucky Luciano Al Capone Bugsy Siegel wannabe big shot. Those two have got to have a conversation and a meeting of the minds. Between them, they can figure this out. For the answer lies somewhere in him—the fool, the outlaw, the egotist, the man who would be infamous, kingpin! Organizer and manager, boss, ringleader, gangster, criminal mastermind, pirate—that guy and the other one, the humbled man who falls to his knees and marvels at the beauty and glory of all things in God’s creation and who feels crushed by the sight of those who have been expelled from the family of man, the lover of fat girls who wanted to dance with all the wallflowers at Miss Erickson’s Dancing School in sixth grade, hold their chubby, sweaty hands, feel their gratitude in the awkward, halting steps, and make them his own, make them feel good. That guy! … The guy who felt bad for the girl in the woods getting fucked by a gang of stiff cocks—but not bad enough to stop it. And don’t forget the noisy black guy who got his head wrapped with duct tape. No, forget them all, just run away … and duck the other guy, the compassionate one who has strength of character.
But wait, those two, if they can just put their heads together even for a minute, they will discover an answer to everything. Then the free-floating entity observing it all will take note, and finally we will have the essence of a workable plan.
On the soundtrack, J. J. Cale sings Cocaine.
She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie … cocaine.
Stratton sings the Outlaw Blues:
This is my story
This is my song
Can’t do right by doin’ wrong …
Now all three of us know what those lyrics mean. My whole life plays out before me in moments. There is no getting around it, I see the climax: I am a failure at crime. I squandered a fortune, blew any chance I might have had for a family and a decent, productive life. By the time that miserable fuck sucking up the coke gets out of prison—if he gets out, if he survives with body and soul intact—he/I will be too old and too crazy to start over. I’m lonely. I want a wife. Kids. A family. Say it again, motherfucker: Prison is the loneliest place in the world.
But that other guy is far from being rehabilitated. Look at him, asshole that he is, still doing the same stupid shit. His cell is full of contraband. He’s still dealing drugs, even in prison. At this rate—the man in the mirror, the convict, and the higher self—none of you will ever get free.
One more trip to the towel rack and I am ready to face the Big Question: How did this happen? How did a well-educated, middle-class WASP boy from the gentle, tree-lined streets of Wellesley, Massachusetts, end up in a place like this? Charged with being a drug kingpin?
Facing life in prison. Are you happy now, Dick? Have you fulfilled your childhood fantasies? All that trash you watched on TV as a kid. You should have been reading the classics. All that devil’s weed with roots in hell you smoked. You should have been drinking martinis. All that rock ’n’ roll music you listened to. You should have tuned in to Lawrence Welk. Now lie down in the darkness of the prison cell and feel the shallow breathing, the rapid pulse. Watch the movie of your life play out in hyper-speed on the backs of your eyelids.
Wait. I have it! The answer.
Let those two fight it out, the convict and the man in the mirror. I know the answer. I sit up. I stand and once more face the man in the mirror.
There is only one of us here now. Evil weed, the war in Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination—I wasn’t ready to suck up and swallow their shit then, so why should I break weak now?
This is only about me, no one else. To rat or not to rat? That was never the question.
Chapter Six
KINGPIN: A CONTINUING CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE
IT IS THE Orwellian year of 1984. My mind is twisted. I am ripped to the tits on high-altitude Humboldt skunkweed, and soothed, riding above the fray on Sicilian white heroin.
That would be fine except that I am standing before Chief Judge Constance Baker Motley in federal court in the Southern District of New York. The government has charged me with being the kingpin of a far-flung dope smuggling ring that has been importing large loads of marijuana and hashish into the United States and Canada since the seventies. If convicted, I face a minimum of ten years and up to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Judge Motley is a heavyset, no-nonsense African American woman in her sixties. She peers down at me from her lofty attitude on the bench. The Honorable Motley had been chief counsel for the NAACP before Lyndon Johnson appointed her to the federal bench—the first black woman so named. Judge Motley is a lady of firsts: first African American woman to argue a case before the US Supreme Court; first African American woman elected to the New York State Senate … the list goes on. And today will be another first: first time a pot smuggler indicted under the dreaded kingpin statute will appear pro se in her court.
“Mr. Stratton, where is your attorney?” the judge inquires.
“I let him go, your Honor.”
She glowers at me. “You what?”
“I dismissed him.”
Title 21, United States Code, Section 848 is known as the continuing criminal enterprise (CCE) or kingpin statute. Federal law defines a criminal enterprise as any group of five or more people. Where one of the five occupies a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management, he or she is deemed the kingpin. The enterprise must be shown to generate substantial income or resources, and to have been engaged in a continuing series of drug law violations.
Guilty as charged! Yes, that description fits. But whoever thought of what we did in those terms? Criminal enterprise? We were just a bunch of hippies smuggling weed.
However, why let inconvenient truth get in the way of a good trial? United States Attorney Rudy Giuliani’s lackey, Stuart Little, is upset. He believes I am determined to turn this prosecution into a circus, a showcase trial, a farce, like I attempted in Maine. He wouldn’t budge on any sort of plea deal without cooperation, and in particular they want me to rat on Mailer. No fucking way. My double jeopardy motion was soundly denied, first in the district court by Judge Motley, then by a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit appellate court after a lengthy interlocutory appeal that delayed the trial for more than twenty months.
Yes, it took them twenty-two months, almost two full years to say: No, you lose. Yes, we can and will try you again here in New York because the charges are different from the charges in Maine. In Maine, you were charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute marijuana. This is a different conspiracy. Here you are charged with conspiracy to import seven tons of hashish from Lebanon to the United States and distribute it throughout North America. Different co-defendants. Different criminal agreement.
True, but as I argued in my motion, the government was aware of the hashish smuggle at the time they tried me in Maine. All of the substantive acts in both conspiracies happened contemporaneously. Therefore, it was all part of the same series of drug law violations. Hence, it was incumbent upon the government to bring all of their charges together in one proceeding instead of piecemealing them out as they have done, taking in essence two bites of the apple. Otherwise they could try me twenty or thirty times for all of the different smuggles I participated in over my career.
That argument the appellate court simply ignored.
Try the bastard again! Fuckers … Oh, well, it is theater, after all. And having previewed my production in the provinces, so to speak, here is my opportunity to take the show to Broadway, New York City, baby! Southern District. This is the Big Time.
“Will you be retaining new counsel?” The judge casts a quick look at AUSA Stuart Little. “Or are you requesting that the Court a
ppoint a lawyer to represent you?”
“Ah, no, judge,” I say. “I’m petitioning the Court for your Honor’s permission to represent myself.”
It is not purely drug-fueled hubris that motivates me to want to act as my own lawyer. Though I will admit the skunkweed I’ve been smoking and the tiny mounds of junk I’ve been snorting each morning before court are having a salutary effect on my state of mind. The cannabis high causes me to be endlessly fascinated by the minutiae of the criminal proceeding against me and to enjoy leaps, if not bounds, of perception that at the moment seem brilliant. At the same time, the heroin emboldens me to the point where I don’t give a fuck. Yes, it’s a heady combination. I stand outside myself. It’s like watching a play where the main character looks and sounds like me but is someone with whom I share no emotional connection. There goes that maniac, Stratton. He has such confidence! Now he wants to act as his own lawyer! Oh, man, what will he think of next?
I produce the brief I wrote citing the relevant Supreme Court and Second Circuit Court of Appeals decisions granting criminal defendants the right to act as their own lawyer at trial, and I hand a copy to Judge Motley, a copy to the judge’s clerk, and one to Stuart Little, who closes his eyes and shakes his head with a weary oh, no expression.
The heroin kicks in. Fuck him. We are not here to please this wimp, this government lackey. We are here to kick ass. Cause a ruckus. The cannabis agrees. This is a brilliant maneuver! They are totally flummoxed now!
Judge Motley gathers all her judicial gravitas. “Mr. Stratton, are you an attorney?”
“Ah, no, your Honor, I am not.” Nascent jailhouse lawyer, perhaps. And maybe the first person charged under the kingpin statute to appear as his own attorney—who knows?
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