 'Get feedback from writers who are more experienced than you are. I cannot speak highly enough of MFA programs, with their helpful - if at times tedious - workshops. And don't ever give up.' - Annie Rehill |
In early 1972, I quit my university's year-abroad program in Nice, France, and moved to Amsterdam with my new boyfriend and his partner. They were hash smugglers.
Home turned out to be an abandoned storefront; Tommy had warned me. The display window was painted grayish green, and the room overflowed with newspapers, shopping carts, empty bottles. There were bottles everywhere, green, brown, clear. A path wound through it all, reaching a fork midway into the room. One led to two tattered mattresses on the floor, side by side, a sleeping bag on each—the bedroom. The other fork led to a kerosene heater surrounded by chairs and two wooden crates. On one of the crates sat an ashtray; on the other, a kettle, cast-iron stewpot, and some spoons and forks.
There was no bathroom. In the mornings we headed for the café around the corner. We did have water, courtesy of a hose in the empty lot behind the building. Showers became a sort of family outing, once a week at the spotless, bleach-smelling public baths.
"It's a cracked house," Tommy had explained. Dutch law provided that citizens could legally occupy—and eventually own—abandoned buildings, provided they improved the property. Tommy and Sam were stretching the law here, as Americans. But the storefront was on the outskirts of town and no one had bothered them in the six months they'd lived there.
During my four-month stay, the room changed. We did it in one day. Dumped the trash in garbage cans and dumpsters around the neighborhood, sifting out the good stuff. We discovered a broom and a couple of mildewed rugs, which Tommy hung over a rope in the lot and beat to death. We even unearthed an old couch, which got treatment similar to that of the rugs.
By the end of the day the mattresses were at opposite sides of the room, separated by the new living room. We sat around the heater smoking our reward spliff and drinking beer. "Why don't we stay home tonight?" Tommy said after a few. "It's kind of cozy now, don't you think? We could get spaghetti stuff at the store and have an evening here. What do you guys think? I'll play guitar."
So the boys talked drug-dealing strategy while I cooked. We ate straight out of the pot, and later Tommy played songs—The Band, Grateful Dead, J. J. Cale, the Rolling Stones—and we sang. We drank red wine from the bottle and smoked hash.
I liked dealing drugs. There was the risk factor, sure, but the money was great and the lifestyle a blast. We went to bed whenever we felt like it and went to clubs at two in the morning, if the mood struck us, where everyone smoked hash openly.
We ate big breakfasts late, eggs and ham at the local place or granola and yogurt downtown at the hippie restaurant. Sometimes Tommy and I walked around the old city all day, stopping at the Rijksmuseum to gaze at Vermeers or Rembrandts. We stopped in café s and strolled through parks, imagining ourselves living in one of the wide-hulled wooden boats docked along the canals. Painted red, yellow, green or blue, most had lace curtains and flowers in the cabin windows. Homey. Comforting-looking.
I wrote in my journal and read my books, and in the freezing nights I snuggled next to Tommy under the sleeping bag. I helped with all the tedious and necessary functions, such as lookout, waiting for phone calls at someone's apartment, waiting again the next day. There was a lot of waiting. To kill the boredom, I embroidered birds, flowers, squirrels, trees, mountains on people's denim jackets and shirts. Often I stitched away most of the day, and Tommy's clothing became a conversation piece.
Then, suddenly, a deal would go through and everything went into high gear. We holed up at home and packed as fast as we could, to get it in the mail ASAP. We cut out book pages with Stanley knives, filled in bottoms of chocolate boxes, gutted stuffed animals.
We mailed small packages to addresses around Tommy's native Burlington, Vermont area, at irregular intervals. We figured we could keep this up for another six months before somebody in the post office got suspicious. But Burlington had an international airport, meaning a lot of international mail, so it was possible we could conduct our business in peace for a while yet.
Soon it would be time to move on to our next venture. I wondered if I should return to Long Island and finish the one semester of college I had left. Tommy wanted to head to the Orient or South America, either of which also sounded good to me. He wanted to stay in importing, whether it was crafts from Malaysia or cocaine from Colombia. Whatever we decided to do, we wanted to make as much money as possible first.
So in April, when Max, a turquoise-and-silver bedecked quasi-hippie entrepreneur from California, mentioned that he and his partner were seeking a couple for a drug run across Mexico, Tommy and I looked at each other.
Five thousand dollars does not sound like much today, but in 1972 it was enough to hire a college dropout and her small-time hash-smuggling boyfriend to look like a tourist couple on a camping trip. Tommy was against it at first, but I talked him into it. He had felt guilty about hiring others to do runs; I felt sure that if he did one run of his own, he would be cured. Unfortunately, I did not give much thought to the danger involved for us both. Thinking ahead was not among my strong suits in those days, but I would learn.
*
We helped pack the pungent, pliable black slabs, all eighty kilos, in Max's living room. For two days we sat on an oriental rug that Max had imported himself, smoking hash and wrapping hash and drinking Lapsang tea and listening to Grateful Dead melodies on his top-quality stereo.
Previously I hadn't liked Max much, with his jewelry and constant chatter about material possessions and acquisitions, but during those two days' work I saw another side of him. He worked right along with us, joking and changing records and fixing tea and talking about music and telling Tommy about how you tell a good oriental rug from a bad one.
Something about the knots. I didn't much care, but Tommy loved this sort of information. Tommy, seeing himself as an importer too, liked to collect random facts about exotic countries and the products they sold.
The hash had to be carefully wrapped in several layers of plastic. We used cut-up garbage bags. After turning a slab around two or three times in the plastic, you taped it securely with electrical tape. No air could be trapped; the plastic had to hug the hash, airtight. Then, holding the package over another piece of plastic, you covered it with baby powder before wrapping and taping it in a second plastic layering. You did this whole thing one more time, so that when you were done, each slab was wrapped in two layers of powder and eight or nine of plastic. All this was to throw off the dogs at Customs.
Tommy and Max packed the eighty keys into a VW microbus, in an empty space on top of the gas tank at the back of the van. It was a tight fit. To access the space, they had to drain the gas tank so they wouldn't blow us up, then blow-torch and cut into the metal plate on the inside of the van. This was tricky, because they had to aim above the gas tank without being able to see exactly where it ended. But they aimed high, and by the time they were close to the tank, they could stick their heads through and verify they weren't going to hit it.
They packed it from inside the van, tight enough so it wouldn't move during the sea voyage from Rotterdam to Veracruz, yet not so tight that the plastic would rip. Then they welded a new metal plate over the hole, covering it. Tommy built a big wooden box with a lid, so we could sit on it. They bolted the box onto the metal plate, and we packed it with camping gear: sleeping bags, blankets, propane stove with extra fuel cylinders, tent, lantern.
I had two jobs: lookout, and providing the domestic touches. My observation post was toward the front of the vast sheet-metal garage that Max and his partner had rented for this operation. I sat on a folding chair, with the kerosene heater four or five feet in front of me. There I worked on my sewing, creating lace curtains for the van's windows, and a light-blue corduroy cover for the box's foam-rubber cushion.
I took my jobs seriously, applying myself with diligence. If this was to look real, it had to be real, I reasoned. I would fix up the van exactly as if I were doing it for an extended camping trip. We were going to live in this van.
In late April, we shipped the van from Rotterdam to Veracruz.
*
Tommy and I flew to LA in mid-May, taking the indirect route into Mexico to avoid possible suspicion about coming from a well-known drug center. We reveled in a week of rest and relaxation, swam in the Pacific, ate avocadoes, took showers in bathrooms, smoked sinsemille pot, saw the Grateful Dead in Hollywood Bowl. I saw Tommy interact with kids. It had never occurred to me to wonder how he was with children, but as I watched him make immediate friends with them at the motel pool, become one of them and organize games that lasted all afternoon, I saw an aspect of my drug-smuggling boyfriend that I liked very much.
They accepted him instinctively as one of them. I had seen Tommy's big heart during our enterprises: he was loyal and hard-working, on the team, steadfast. Tommy really tried to make it all work. Maybe the kids recognized his nature, as kids sometimes seem to; maybe they saw that if he was on their team, he would give it his all.
After our playtime in California, a short-haired, scrubbed-up Tommy and neatly groomed Annie flew to Veracruz. The van was registered in his name; mine appeared nowhere in the papers. He had instructed me that if we got busted, I was to deny all knowledge of the hash.
"I'm not going to ditch you, let you take the rap alone," I protested.
"But what's the use of having us both rotting in a Mexican jail?" he countered, to my secret relief. My job, which I far preferred, would be to get the money to get him out. I knew they might simply arrest me too, if they felt like it, which allayed my guilt about being willing to let Tommy take the rap, if it came to that. But I wouldn't abandon him. I'd get him out. Hopefully I wouldn't be trying to get us both out.