In 1971, when I was seventeen, I hitchhiked from St. Louis to San Francisco, hoping to join the Merry Pranksters or at least take some acid and meet the Grateful Dead. I achieved one of those goals, at a cost of five dollars and several days of disorientation. At the end of a week of couch surfing I woke up and found myself out of cash and without prospects for getting any. A friend of a friend had a van and was headed back East, and in the spirit of the times that anything that could be shared, scrounged, or stolen ought to be free, I was able to cadge a ride as far as Colorado. I can tell you right now that I still owe that unnamed hippie fifteen dollars’ worth of meals, not to mention whatever I ought to have put in for gas back when gas topped out at thirty-five cents a gallon.
You see, your Honor, I’m not trying to hide anything. I made mistakes, but I’m not ashamed and I’m willing to tell you the whole story.
I met Carson at sunset just east of Denver.
He told me he was passing through St. Louis en route to Memphis and I could ride with him all the way there. It might help to know what I looked like to understand why Carson was as open with me as he was. I was five foot four, with an eight-inch Jew-fro thick enough to hold a soupspoon straight up; I weighed a hundred and six pounds soaking wet and hadn’t changed my jeans since leaving St. Louis. Also, I was hitchhiking. What I’m saying is, it was pretty clear I wasn’t employed in law enforcement. On the other hand, maybe none of that mattered. Carson liked to talk and he had a lot of stories to tell. I took them with a grain of salt until he showed me the .38 in his glove compartment.
You may ask why I didn’t get out right then. But there was nothing threatening about Carson; he didn’t swagger and he didn’t come on to me. He was matter of fact about the pistol, like he was showing me how to use the tape player.
Carson looked to be about twice my age at the time. He had straight hair that feathered over his ears and a handlebar moustache. He was tall, although I didn’t know how tall until we reached Goodland and we got out to have dinner in a bar near the highway. Having never been in a roadhouse (no family trip had ever involved dining anywhere more outré than Howard Johnson’s), I looked at the clientele and decided that they were all truckers or bikers and we could expect to end up in a brawl. I was glad Carson was as substantial as he was.
But my Easy Rider fears of getting beaten up for my hair did not come to pass, neither were we attacked during the night as we slept in the car, me in the back seat and Carson up front.
In the morning he bought us both breakfast. I took a shift behind the wheel while Carson rolled a joint and we got high as I-70 fell down the long slope off the Rockies to the Mississippi. Goodland to Colby to Hays, Russell, Salina, Abilene, and finally, Kansas City. The road ran dead straight for sixty miles at a stretch, mostly four lanes with no divider, no stop signs and no other cars for half an hour at a time. When he was high Carson didn’t talk as much. He rolled another joint and I drove for hours that seemed like weeks that passed in minutes. Kansas looks and feels to be all one level, but actually it leans to the right. A thousand yards up when you leave Colorado, it slopes down to seven hundred forty feet in KC, MO (with St. Louis, on the other side of the state, only 120 feet further down). It felt flat enough but I knew we were descending, and I wondered, if I turned off the engine, if we couldn’t roll all the way to the Mississippi in Mexican overdrive.
When we realized that we were hungry I pulled off at a sign that said what we needed to see: “Eat.” It was a roadside burger stand with a menu that maxed out at fries, dogs, and shakes. “Gimme two of everything,” Carson said and the glum-faced girl behind the counter came back with, “That’s three forty- eight.” Carson hit the restroom while I waited for our food. Hoping to make conversation, I asked the girl how far it was to Lawrence, thinking perhaps we knew someone in common at Kansas University. She said she didn’t know, she’d never been there. I asked if she thought she might go there when she graduated and she said, “Already graduated. Can’t afford K.U., can’t get in anyplace else.” I couldn’t think where the conversation could go after that, so I joined Carson, now back behind the wheel, and we took off.
The oil light on the dash came on about twenty miles outside town, after I’d finished the burger but while I was still nursing the shake, and Carson said we’d head back, that he’d rather not bet that we’d reach the next gas station to the east before the engine conked out. The car started a sputtering cough along the way and by the time we made it back to “Eat,” a radiator light had lit up and we were down to fifteen miles an hour. Carson pulled into the station across from the burger stand just as the engine died.
A gum-chewing blond-haired kid opened the hood under Carson’s supervision and pronounced the fan belt shot. I looked over his shoulder but there was no fan belt. Apparently it had popped off somewhere back up the hill toward Denver. Carson asked how much to replace it, and the kid said, “Don’t cost too much, only we ain’t got one. You ain’t in a rush, I can have it tomorrow.”
“And if we are in a rush?” Carson asked. “Tomorrow. Afternoon.”
We slept that night eight feet in the air, the car raised on the garage’s hydraulic lift. I was a little wary that I might somehow open the door in my sleep and fall to the cement floor. I would have been more concerned, with more cause, if I’d known that Carson had five pounds of cocaine bolted inside the wheel well eighteen inches from my head.
I found out about the coke the next day when Carson filled me in on how he and a partner were running drugs to Memphis, home to a cartel of doctors who were his financial backers. I was completely fascinated and Carson answered all my questions and there was nothing about his story that I didn’t like. He talked right across the Mississippi and I didn’t stop in St. Louis at all, but rode with Carson all the way to Memphis, where the first thing I did was get my hippie hair cut off. Then Carson bought me a suit and I could have been mistaken for the president of my high school’s Junior Achievement club. I looked like that until I turned twenty-four.
Carson had Greg, the partner, find me a place in the rooming house where he stayed and I started running errands for them. They called me “Jockey,” because of my build. I went through the border twenty-seven times between ’71 and ’74, never crossing the same checkpoint twice in a year. Before I reached my majority I’d had a dozen passports and as many names.
No question, I was lucky then. I never got busted, never did time. Mostly, I was lucky to meet Carson. The .38 aside, he was a role model for me: completely professional, a heavyweight dealer with the quiet demeanor of a social studies teacher, which in a sense is what he was. Somehow, he saw gifts in me that I didn’t know that I had. You hear that kind of mentoring story from successful people in every field; in my case, Carson saw that I had a gift for deception and smuggling. Without his tutelage I likely would’ve ended up in prison, possibly not an American one.
“Three things to remember when you go through customs, Jock. First, you’re an American citizen. You got rights. Never let ’em convince you otherwise. Second, travel is Ed-u-CA-tional. Why the fuck you in Mexico, anyway (or Istanbul, or Thailand, or Amsterdam)? It’s to learn something, so do it. Third, you got people who care about you. That makes a difference how you handle y’self.”
Carson was absolutely right. I knew that I was a citizen, a seeker, and a person who meant something to somebody. And nobody ever hassled me. I saw the kind of people who did get stopped and searched at the border and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with how long their hair was or whether they wore jeans. It was because they were dumb and worthless and they knew it, and they practically shouted, “Put me away, I’m no good to anyone.”
Carson and Greg had a simple division of labor: Carson negotiated between doctors and dealers. Greg came in when negotiations broke down.
Once Carson had me make a delivery to one of the doctors in the cartel. I went to an office in a shopping mall out west in Binghamton. It was around eight-thirty and the office was empty except for Doctor Richards. He let me in and took me back to his consulting room to examine my package, which sounds funny, in retrospect, since he was an urologist, but at the time was not so funny. The walls of his office were covered with medical drawings of flaccid genitals, diagrams that illustrated how a man’s urinary system worked or malfunctioned. They made me uncomfortable. I had some trouble imagining what it would be like to have difficulties there, but then I assumed if I did have these problems it would be so far in the future—thirty years, maybe—that I didn’t need to give it much thought. I was off by about three years.
I handed Doctor Richards the cocaine and he wrote out a check and handed it to me. I just stared at it. For one thing, I’d never seen a check for that much money, especially not one made out to “Cash.” The other thing was that Carson had told me that Doctor Richards would give me a briefcase. He didn’t say what would be in it, but this wasn’t a briefcase.
“I’m supposed to pick up a briefcase,” I said.
“You go right ahead, son. You should be able to get a pretty nice one with that,” he nodded at the check in my hand as he hung his white lab coat on a hangar and put on his suit jacket.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to get a check. I’m supposed to get a briefcase from you.”
Doctor Richards opened up a briefcase, loaded in some manila folders plus the package I’d brought. “Well, this one is for my practice, so that check is going to be what you get. You give that to Carson and everything’ll be fine.”
I wasn’t sure how to convey my sharp sense that Doctor Dick was putting us both in a very awkward position. “I don’t—” He cut me off and assumed the authoritarian voice that must be part of every med school curriculum.
“Now listen here, John-boy,” he put a large hand on my shoulder, “do you know what I do in this office?” I nodded a little uncertainly. “No, you don’t, because if you did, you wouldn’t be giving me any gas.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a two-foot-long rubber tube with a tapered tip. “See, John-boy, someone comes to see me, got some problem with his dingle, I stick this tube right up it so he can piss or whatever he needs to do.” I swallowed with some difficulty. “Usually, I cover it with some anesthetic—I suppose you could use blow; I think one of my residents at Methodist tried that—but you got to use antiseptic. You know why?” I shook my head, wondering if maybe I could grab his briefcase and steal my own dope back from him, or maybe just run away because this was not fun, but his grip was like a trailer hitch on my shoulder. “’Cause of infection, that’s why. Get your dingle infected, you get renal inflammatio—that’s in your kidneys, dysuria—can’t piss right—back pain, organ failure, can’t piss at all sometimes and you just get backed up until your bladder explodes.”
He was trying to stare me down so I looked away, but on every wall there were pictures of dicks that didn’t work right. “John-boy, I love my job. I’ve stuck this catheter up more dingles than you’ve had hot dinners, and I don’t mind at all strapping you down on this “’xaminin” table and shoving it up yours. But I do mind wasting good antiseptics and anesthetic on a two-inch jimmy like you got, so if you plan to give me any more gas about that check, you better piss your pants first, boy, because it gone’ be the last good piss you ever take.”
Then he shoved me out into the darkened hallway. “Next time, tell Carson to send someone who knows the skinny. Now beat it.”
I went straight to Carson’s place and handed him the check and told him what had happened. His face went dark and he told me that I didn’t need to worry, Greg would know what to do with it.
And he did. The next day, Greg picked up the check and when he came back, he had eighteen thousand dollars in cash, in a briefcase with some stains that weren’t quite dry. The next time I met Dr. Dick, he seemed a lot less intimidating to me, but maybe that’s because he was riding a wheelchair.
After that I made myself two promises. The first was that I would never do anything to hurt Carson or in any way betray the gratitude I felt toward him. The second promise was never to cross Greg, because I figured my life wouldn’t be worth much if I did. Back then, I thought that Greg and Carson were like two sides of the moon—one light and one dark. But they were separate people, like all parents, and they moved in separate paths that I was not well aware of at the time. I’d like to tell you that when I had to choose which promise to keep and which one to break, my gratitude was stronger than my fear, but you already know that’s not true.
Mort Milder is a writer, editor, and playwright born in St. Louis, Missouri, and living in New York City. His stories have appeared in La Piccioletta Barca, October Hill, DoveTales Writing for Peace, the Metaworker Literary Magazine and the American Drivel Review. His play, “Book Club,” was selected for the Red Eye New Play Festival. Mort is a co-producer of Rough&Ready Productions, a performance salon for works-in-progress in New York City and on YouTube.
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