Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues Read online

  “You mean,” she’d say, pointing her finger to the ground, “here?”

  “Right, right, you’re digging it.”

  “Ah, yes, I guess so, well, here, I mean right here, well, I’m a guest, I guess.”

  “A guest!” I’d guffaw loudly, and she’d look tremendously pleased that she’d said something funny. “A guest, wow. You got it, honey. That’s far out. That’s too much.”

  After a while she’d venture to say, “What’re you doing here?”

  “Me? Well, I don’t know what I’m doing here right now, you dig? I mean, I could tell you why I thought I came here, but I don’t know no more if that’s what’s happening or not, see?”

  “Tell me,” she’d say, “tell me, you can tell me.”

  “Well, like I came down here ’cause one of these creeps give my manager a ring, said he wanted a band to play this afternoon, down here. Dig it? So I came down. First thing I find out when I get here, they don’t want no band. At least I don’t think so, I mean nobody’s said nothing to me about it so far—”

  “You,” she gulped her drink and pointed an astounded finger, “you play? In a band? A rock and roll band?”

  “Shit, honey, I don’t play in no shortwave band.”

  It’d be her turn to guffaw. “A shortwave band.” Ha, ha!

  “No, I mean, of course I play in a band. You might have heard our latest album on the radio, maybe. You ever listen to WBCN?” She’d shake her head yes, yes, all the time, of course she did. Of course, my ass. “Yeah, they got our latest album, you know, Lucifer Harkness and The New Administration. You remember that one? With the lead cut, remember that one, the lead song called ‘The Cabinet Member,’ and the guitar riff that goes dee-dee-dee, de dah, dee-dee-dee-dee deda dah, dwah, dwah, da duhn. Right? Can you dig it?”

  “Gol-lee,” she’d say, “that’s you? That’s your band? Gol-lee! I mean I never thought I’d ever actually meet you, and here, I mean, with all these … creeps.”

  That always got me. I’d guffaw.

  “I thought you looked familiar. That must’ve been what it was—on your album cover, that big picture?”

  “Right on,” I’d say, “right on. Outasight. I knew you had it, honey, first time I seen you. Like you’re the first chick here today’s recognized me. Outasight.”

  “Gol-lee,” she’d say.

  I had to keep moving, though. The word got around amazingly fast, about the unknown celebrity in the greasy jeans who everyone’d been shitting on without knowing that he was really …

  Who?

  Finally it was four o’clock, and to my relief and the members’ indescribable joy, I politely excused myself, regretting, to the ladies, that it looked after all as though I weren’t going to be given a chance to play for them. They said it was a shame, I agreed it was a shame, and I made my escape.

  On the way out, I looked around for Annie to say goodbye, but I didn’t see her. I didn’t look very hard.

  35

  I GOT BACK TO THE room just after four. I was a little bit smashed, but I didn’t mind and I didn’t figure that Sukie would. I kicked the door open, put my hands in my pockets, and walked in.

  “Well, hi there,” I said.

  “Well, hi there,” John said. “Bought the Lotus this morning. Magnificent machine. Got a pretty good trade-in on the Ferrari, too, better than I thought.”

  “Swell,” I said, looking around.

  No Sukie.

  “I also got a place for the chick to stay,” John said. “Sharon’s old place. She’s moved out, you know, and the rent’s paid for another two weeks, and the furniture’s still there, so …”

  “Fine,” I said, still looking.

  “Don’t thank me or anything, Peter-old-boy,” John said. I looked over at him and realized that he was hugely pleased with himself for having lined up the place.

  “Yeah, thanks, man, thanks. But where is she?”

  “Here,” John said, sprawling back on the couch and suddenly intensely interested in the new Rolling Stone.

  “In Cambridge?”

  “No, in Boston. She just called from the airport. Christ, that reminds me. What’d you give her our number for? You know I don’t like—”

  “Why did she call?”

  John shrugged. “Some hang-up. They lost her bag.”

  “What bag,” I said, but it wasn’t a question. I just wanted to know what I was already afraid I knew.

  “The bag with the grass.” John sighed. He seemed to be taking it well. I couldn’t believe he was just sitting there, telling me she’d lost the dope and sighing.

  “The bag with the grass,” I said. “Sweet Jesus, how could she lose that? It was under the goddamn seat—”

  “No,” said John. “She checked it.”

  “She what?”

  “Checked it. It was a forty-brick run. You know as well as I do that if you’re carrying forty bricks, you’re gonna have to check one of the bags.”

  “You didn’t tell me it was going to be that big a—”

  “You didn’t ask,” John said, slipping back into his magazine. He was again suddenly fascinated by the magazine, the bastard. From behind it he said, “Anyway, she’ll be okay. She said they just lost it somewhere in transit.”

  “In transit, my ass,” I said. “What did you tell her to do?”

  “I told her to go back and get it.”

  36

  I HAD TO SIT DOWN for a minute to think that one out, it was so unbelievable. And then I found that I couldn’t think, that I was so pissed that I couldn’t do anything but shout at John and tell him what I thought about sending the chick back. He just sat and stared at me and said nothing and finally I realized that I was wasting precious time. Bag or no bag, if I could get to Sukie before they did … “Where’re the keys to the Lotus?”

  “Give me back the Rolling Stone,” John said. I’d ripped it out of his hands without knowing what I was doing, and as I handed it back he gave me the keys. “Don’t run it over forty-five-hundred revs,” he yelled after me, as I hustled out the door, “it’s just had a valve job.”

  All the way out to the airport I ground the gears and ran it over forty-five-hundred revs. Fucking John, he’d really screwed me this time, screwed me so bad that I couldn’t believe it was happening—that he’d just let it happen. The dude had a loose bolt somewhere, especially when it came to chicks. Or other people. Or other people’s chicks. I mean, what the hell was the cat thinking of, sending Sukie back for the bag. Because he knew about running dope, and he knew about “lost” bags at the airport. This wasn’t the first time we’d ever “lost” a bag. The first time had cost John a pretty penny, to buy Jeffrey off, and we’d all learned from the experience. Ever since then, we’d had strict rules for runs, especially runs which involved bags in the hold. First, no matching sets of luggage. Second, no name tags. Third, no real names used on tickets, so that nothing could be traced from the baggage check on a busted bag. Fourth, the specially designed, double-locked, lined bags, which made it impossible for the heat to open the bags without irreparably breaking them and so disqualifying any potential evidence on the grounds of illegal search and seizure.

  Those were the first four rules, and the fifth was never to go back for a lost bag. Because it just meant trouble and time in court and a hell of a lot of money. We never went back for a “lost” bag, because these days the narcs didn’t always have to open a bag to find the stuff. The narcs were into all kinds of things now: dogs trained to growl at the smell of dope, even dope soaked in Coca-Cola and wrapped in aluminum; and odor-analyzers, weird little machines with a sort of gun attachment that sniffed the air and lit up when they smelled dope.

  And so anything that we put in the hold was a strictly calculated risk, and not something to be toyed with. Because the heat had their own little, hustle: when they’d catch a bag full of weed, they’d hold it, announce that it was lost, and then bust whoever showed up to claim it. Not a very original hustle—and anybod
y who’s carrying always knows that if they say your bag is lost, split. Split fast and never go back. But Sukie’d never run any dope before, and so she’d called John and asked him what to do. And John—

  Fucking John.

  I hot-assed it through Sumner tunnel, paid my toll, and blasted up the ramp toward the airport—only to come to a dead halt twenty yards up the road. Airport traffic. Newsboys sauntered in and out among the rows of cars with maddening assurance that nobody was going anywhere. Hawking the Boston papers, the most provincial newspapers in America (“Saugus Man Dies in New York Nuclear Holocaust”) and the crookedest (look at page ten for the small item “Ten Officials Indicted in 44 Million Swindle”) as befits the town. I sat in the car and swore and lit a cigarette and got paranoid. My head was completely spaced. I couldn’t even remember if Sukie had come in on United or TWA. Most of all, I couldn’t figure out what John had been trying to do when he’d sent her back. Because if anyone knew how much it’d cost to buy her off of a forty-brick rap, he did. American justice is extraordinarily expensive; the bribe must always measure up to the crime. Forty bricks was going to set John back quite a ways, if anything happened to Sukie.

  If anything happened to Sukie …

  I had visions of arriving just as they were slapping the cuffs on her, of a fleeting glance of her face looking over her shoulder, looking at me sadly the way she had that night they had dragged me away. She was showing no reproach and somehow that made it worse. And then suddenly she was at the end of a long hallway, it was somewhere in Berkeley but I knew that the hallway would look the same no matter where it was, fluorescent lights leering, and she had on a gray sack dress and two matrons were taking her, still cuffed, down a flight of stairs. I watched helplessly and saw again the sad, un-reproachful face over the shoulder.

  Then the line started moving and I began thinking about lawyers and bail bondsmen and where in the world I was going to scrape up the bread. I drifted out of my lane and some swine in a Cadillac honked and skinned my front fender in a burping burst of exhaust. Fuck you, fella. I was down the ramp and at the airport and parked in a cab zone before I knew it. A cop shouted at me that I’d have to move, but I just ran inside, past the people and the porters and the heat that seemed to be everywhere, wondering why I’d never noticed how many heat hung around the place.

  I knew where the lost-bag rooms were, and I decided to try United first. I sprinted down a long corridor, turned a corner, and found the office. There was nobody there. TWA’s depot was just a little farther on down, so I decided to check it out, then return to United if nothing was happening there. But the seemingly endless construction that was always going on at Logan had transformed TWA’s lost-bag office into a coffee shop, so I stopped a porter and asked him where it had gone.

  “I just flew in on TWA and they’ve lost one of my bags,” I said. “Where do I find it?”

  “TWA’s baggage over there,” he shrugged, pointing around a corner. I ran over, and stopped in front of a door which said MISCELLANEOUS, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The door was open but partially blocked by a low table, and inside there were racks and racks of bags, bags of all kinds, bags everywhere.

  And standing knee-deep in this ocean of bags was Sukie. On each side of her was a man in a raincoat. One of them was putting on the cuffs and before I could turn away and get out of there I saw the tight, familiar, ugly neck, heard the rough, humorless voice. And knew that Murphy had busted another freak.

  3

  A Taste of Soup

  If a fool be associated with

  a wise man even all his life,

  he will perceive the truth as

  little as a spoon perceives

  the taste of soup.

  THE DHAMMAPADA

  You can steal my chickens

  But you can’t make ’em lay.

  WILLIE DIXON

  37

  I WAS BACK OUT IN the Lotus and on my way back to Cambridge before I really thought about what I was doing. And even when I did start thinking, it was only about one thing: John, and the shit I was going to knock out of him. I hadn’t been able to understand, on the way to Logan, why he’d sent Sukie back; but now I didn’t care. He was alone when I found him in the room, and he didn’t even look up when I came in. He was tearing the place apart. The radio was on, giving the weather report. John was pulling out dresser drawers, removing the bricks that were taped to the back.

  I just stared at him.

  “Well,” he said, “let’s get it on.”

  “Get what on, half-ass?”

  John stopped and looked at me. “You’re alone, right? So the chick’s busted, right? So let’s get it on and get this place cleaned up, so we can get out of here.”

  I froze. “You bastard. This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t sent—”

  “This wouldn’t have happened, Peter, if your chick hadn’t already given the pigs her name, her Berkeley address, and our Cambridge telephone number before she thought to call me up and ask what she should do about her ‘lost bag.’ So I told her to go back. What the hell, why not? It didn’t make any difference at that point.”

  “She gave them our phone number?”

  “Yeah,” John said. “That’s a smart little pussy you’ve got. She really set us up—you with your record—your recent record—and me holding.”

  “She didn’t know …”

  “And you didn’t tell her, did you? That’s why she didn’t know. You didn’t tell her the first goddamn thing about it.”

  “I didn’t know she’d have to check a bag—”

  “The fuck you didn’t. You sent her a check for ten thousand. That’s forty bricks. You just overlooked it, you were in such a ball-crushing rush—”

  “Now listen, brother, you talk like that, you’re gonna have to pay some dues. I sent her the check, yeah, but I didn’t know—”

  “Help me clean this place out,” John said in a voice that was final. He was throwing the bricks onto the center of the floor.

  I still couldn’t get very excited about John’s problems. “Listen, man, you don’t seem to be digging what’s happened to the chick. She’s in jail, for Chrissake, and—”

  “And we won’t be any good to her,” John said, taking out the jars and bottles from the medicine cabinet, “if we’re in there with her. Now come on.”

  We cleaned the place out. All together, we found sixteen bricks of good smoking dope, a hundred caps of synthetic mescaline, five hundred and fifty caps of psilocybin, thirteen peyote buttons in cellophane, four ounces of hash, and some Thorazine. John got one of his friends to drive it out in a couple of suitcases to John’s uncle’s house in Lexington.

  When that was done we both had a big belt of his Scotch. The room was disordered; John kicked some clothes off the couch and sat down. “If Murphy busted her, you’d better do what I’m doing,” he said. “Take off for a day or two, at least stay away from this room. It’s not going to be too cool for a while.”

  I didn’t give a shit how cool it was, I had other things on my mind. “Look,” I said, “we’ve got to get her out of jail as fast as we can. She won’t know what to say, and she’ll fuck herself over in a matter of hours without some advice. If we can’t get her out and talk to her before the arraignment on Monday, she won’t know enough to plead guilty. And if that happens, the case’ll go up through the courts, dig?”

  “Yeah,” said John. He was digging it. He was digging the fact that if that went down, we’d never be able to buy her off, no matter what lawyer we eventually got for her. And she’d take the full rap for the bust, probably even do some time. I waited for John to say something, to figure something out. There was a very long pause, and then he just said, “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  John looked pained, really pained, for the first time since I’d walked in the door. “Peter,” he said. “The pigs have overvalued the bust, as usual. They’ve announced that they picked up fifteen-thousand-dollars’ worth of dope. So
that means it’ll cost us at least three thousand to get her off. Plus her bail, which as you have noticed is essential. Now. I don’t know if her bail’s been set yet, but you can bet your ass it’ll be at least ten thousand. So that’s another grand we need right there—”

  “So?”

  “So this is Saturday,” John said.

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “The market’s closed.”

  “Now wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me you’re broke? You?”

  “I’m saying I won’t have a nickel until Monday.” John paused, then added, “After ten o’clock.”

  I couldn’t believe he’d said that. I couldn’t believe any of the things that had gone down that afternoon, but that was the end. Finally I said, “Far out.” Nothing more.

  John nodded. “It is far out. It’s a drag, too, but it’s what’s happening. I’ll do everything I can. But I can’t do anything till Monday.”

  “Far out,” I said again. Then, almost as an afterthought, “You son of a bitch.”

  “Peter,” John said slowly, “it’s all I can do. It’s all I can do.” He got up and put on his jacket. On the way out he paused and said, “If you want me for anything, I’ll be at Sandra’s.”

  Then the door closed, and I was alone.

  38

  THE FIRST THING I DID was pour myself three fingers of John’s J & B, put on some blues, and sit down to try to get my head together. Which was easier said than done. I was flashing on all the things that had gone down, on all the ridiculous little twists and turns the trip had taken in the course of a few hours. Sukie busted. Murphy on our backs again. John broke—that was what really blew my mind, that John could be broke. It was too much. Finally I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere, that I had to get ripping or I’d just drown. But I just sat there, immobilized.

  The worst thing in the world is not to be moving when you’ve got to move, when you’ve got to do something. Like hitching. I used to hitch a lot, whenever I was desperate to get moving. Once when I was bumming around Vermont I ran into this fag, an old guy who was really hurting for somebody to come-on to. He picked me up, wanted to know where I was going, and I just said, Wherever you are. Which was all he needed to get it on. Before I knew it we were off the road and at his house, and he said I should go on in and make myself comfortable, he had a few phone calls to make.