by Rob Sedgwick
“I got a load up the street in some house with a bunch of schvartzes.”
I asked if he wanted to come upstairs and use the phone.
He said yes.
After he was done muttering his phone calls and I was done pretending not to hear them, I offered, “Any time you’re in the neighborhood, doing whatever it is that you do do, I insist you come up here and use my phone.” Here was my opportunity to be magnanimous, to be the big man. To be liked. To be well liked.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks.”
“In fact, I insist that you use this apartment for whatever contraband you have. For all your needs.”
“Really?”
After a quick tour of the Thin Man–esque twelve-room apartment that was exactly as it had been for the last sixty-five years (he cased the joint; I’d always wanted to use “case the joint” in a sentence), he came back to the kitchen and said, “You know, this could really work out.”
“I insist it work out,” I said, with an exalted flourish of my hand.
“And you would be paid.”
“Nonsense. How much?”
“A lot.”
“What’s a lot?”
“Three grand a pop, and I do two loads a month. So that’s seventy grand a year for sitting around with your thumb up your ass.”
“No shit?” I said with my thumb up my ass.
And on that day, God created “The Moron.”
4
“Palisades Amusement Park! Swings all day and after dark!”
This is the game-show-worthy jingle of an amusement park we always go to.
Even though I’m only three, I know the place is somewhere over the George Washington Bridge because it always terrifies me when we drive over it. What if the bridge snaps and plunges into the Hudson? It’s not land. It’s not part of the world. It’s suspended over water, acres and acres of cement hung by some skinny wires. When I ask Mom about this, she says, “It could never happen. It’s impossible.”
But I don’t believe her.
I hide on the floor of the car, hoping this will save me if the bridge breaks.
I go on something called “The Swing Ride” by myself. The ride guy buckles me in—not too tightly, though. Mom and Dad watch, smiling. The machine starts and it goes around slowly, low to the ground. It’s fine. I’m fine. Then it starts to go faster. I lift myself up from the seat a little, hoping to slow the ride down because I don’t want it to go any faster than this. I grip onto something tight so I don’t fly out.
It goes faster.
It goes higher.
Now it’s going too fast and I’m flying through the air sideways.
The cable or rope or whatever it is that’s attached to my seat is of course going to snap. I’ll have a moment to anticipate a horrible crash into the ground. I’ve got to do something so this doesn’t happen because I’ve got to save myself because no one else will and no one else knows that I’m about to die even though I’m only three and I have no idea what death could be.
I start undoing the belt that’s keeping me in. I yell, “Please make it stop, please!”
I’m now free of the belt and begin to creep out of my seat, hoping to jump off.
I catch sight of Mom and Dad as I’m flying, but then I lose them because the ride is whirring around too fast. They can’t save me. I know I have to make a decision or my life will turn off like a TV.
It’s just grass down there. It looks soft. I know I can do it. It might hurt a little when I jump.
When I go around again, I can see Mom and Dad know what I’m thinking because they’re both shouting at me “Nononononono!” and waving their arms around. I see dad shouting at someone at the base of the ride and pointing at me. He makes a quick and angry move toward the ride, but I spin around too quickly to see whom he’s yelling at. But right then it starts to slow down, and we get lower, and I time it just right (Mom always says I move like a deer) and jump off, rolling onto the safe grass. They both come to gather me up and my giant tall father, all six feet, four and a half inches of him, lifts me into his sky and holds me. I bury my head into his neck, and my mother hugs my legs because she is shorter than my father.
5
My anticipation of the first load was like getting my first blow job.
Jordan called. I leapt down the twelve flights of stairs. At the curb was a small truck that could comfortably carry four large refrigerator boxes of pot. It contained two. There were three or four cute toys and balls on top of the doublewide-coffin-sized boxes. But they would fool no one if the truck were pulled over. Also there was the driver, who brought the stuff in from Mexico. His name was Jim. He had David Cassidy hair, a fireman mustache, and was attired utterly in denim. His walked stiffly like he was unsure how to act in New York. We hauled the boxes, which weighed 250 pounds each, into the elevator with the big sign:
NO MORE THAN FIVE PEOPLE ON THE ELEVATOR AT ONE TIME.
An older woman got on with us. The elevator stalled.
Jordan and Jim turned green.
The old woman asked: “What are the boxes for?”
Normally I would have started to panic, but because I didn’t want to understand what was going on, I casually slid the door open with my foot, resetting whatever thing had to be reset on the ancient elevator, and I took a moment to create some reasonable scenario in my head.
“Oh, these are grand friends of mine, and they’re opening a clothing store in Tribeca, but the keys got lost, so they’re keeping these clothes in my apartment until they can get into the store.”
“How wonderful.”
“Yes. The shirts are ex-quisite.” Suddenly I was all preppy and effeminate in my delivery. Where was all this Fifth Avenue panache coming from?
She got off the elevator. Jordan and Jim exhaled.
After we got the boxes inside the apartment, I could tell clear as morning that Tybalt was torn. He loved company, so he was aching to jump and juke around the apartment, but it was obvious that he was not keen on Jordan and that the hulking six-foot-tall three-foot-wide refrigerator boxes filled him with confusion and dread. Like a mother able to hear her lost baby above all the hubbub in Times Square during rush hour, I could hear the faintest notion of a warning growl formulating in his head.
I pretended not to notice.
Jordan said I was a natural and that my acting was a huge asset to this Operation.
I had never been a part of an Operation before.
I had a new vocation.
I was now accepted.
I had a job.
I was contributing to something larger than myself.
I was a worker among workers.
Selfless and free.
Since I was brand new to this calling and only familiar with its upside, I grinned like a bobblehead doll, carefree and idiotically happy on the dashboard heading down a road to who knows where.
Tybalt rolled over, farted, snorted loudly enough to wake the upstairs neighbors, rubbed his back up and down on the carpet, and grinned molar to molar, as if to say, “HEEERE WE GO!”
—
The next day, Jordan showed up with his long leather overcoat that made him look like the Ichabod Crane version of Shaft.
“Don’t worry about this right now,” he said, indicating his leather jacket. “You want to buy the basics. Underwear and socks. Calvin Klein. Top of the line. Don’t be cheap. Spend the money. Then you start moving into the leather jackets and cars.”
At some point, I would own a Shaft jacket and cars. I wanted to swoon.
Then we got to work.
The pods containing the marijuana had to be cut open, put into trash bags, and weighed in twenty-pound increments. I didn’t know who Diego Robles was when he showed up at the apartment. I just turned around and there he
was, counting up bales of pot like the rest of us. He was a short, pimpled Mexican with a Bobby Sherman feathered mane who looked like he had been dipped in pubic hair. Jordan introduced us and then brought me into the kitchen to explain that Diego was the Main Guy, the Mexican Source, a Career Criminal. Jordan said if it were a hundred years ago, Diego would be the guy with the long Pancho Villa mustache, the belts of bullets around his torso, a gun in each holster, and the vacant, badass stare. His grandfather was a general in the Mexican army, so anytime we had a load, it was whisked through the border, no questions asked.
A carousel of drug dealers whirled in and out of the apartment all day, each taking his share; some took more, some less. Before they left, they would disappear into my bedroom for a while.
The loads dwindled.
I wandered into my bedroom to see what special thing was going on in there and saw the wonder of wonders, miracles of miracles: my crappy, king-sized mattress, which lived on the ground with some springs pushing out at the top, covered thickly and absolutely in a neat, high mound of cash. All twenties. My eyes were swimming lustily with Andrew Jacksons. Not that I would have any idea what millions of dollars in cash would actually look like, but that’s what it seemed like to me.
Jordan told me later that it was not millions. It was $1.2 million.
Fuck acting.
—
Jordan’s money counter whirred. My shitty mattress still held the hill of cash. All the other drug dealers had left except for Seth Goldberg, a friend of Nikko’s and a best friend of Jordan’s. He had gone to college with Nikko for a year, then left to pursue “other interests” with Jordan.
Seth looked like a Puerto Rican Jesus even though he was a Ukrainian Jew and sounded much like Elmer Fudd via the Jersey Shore. He had this speech impediment, so when he said “curtains” it sounded like “kerdins,” “buttons” like “budins.” He also malapropped: a coffee urn was a coffee urinal, okra became an ocean-dwelling Orca, the situation was exasperated, not exacerbated. Édith Piaf was Édith Pilaf. All of this added to his exotic criminal appeal.
At last we were done for the day. Smiles and congratulations went around. I had a whole three grand in cash.
I bought athletic warm-up pants and a matching jacket. I wore a baseball cap. Thus appareled, I felt very much the urban gangster. I started dating a hot twenty-two-year-old named Julie who was the girl in the gym every guy wanted; she also moonlit as a stripper. I loved rubbing this in everyone’s face, but in actuality it was just a minor sideline for money. Julie had her own business arranging flowers for the Yale Club and other uppity establishments, so she interfaced with corporate people all the time, could waltz effortlessly in those circles, and came across as very prim, efficient, almost ordinary in a run-in-the-mill businessy way. But underneath her hood, yikes! Stunning, sinister, and smoking in a G-string. She also danced and taught a ballet fitness regimen that gave her steel thighs, a corrugated stomach, and an ostentatiously perfect ass. Watching her do the “walk away” in her dental floss underwear was a sight every man should see before he died.
I met her in the pool one perfect summer weekend at my stepfather’s place. She just wound up there, the daughter of a business associate of his. She and I ended up spending a lot of time together that weekend. We obviously dug each other, and when you’re talking to a girl in a bikini the size of a postage stamp in an overly heated swimming pool and you’re both slathered in tanning lotion under a hot sun and she’s got an ass they’ll still be talking about into the next century, it’s tough to keep what’s going on under wraps. Not that I tried to.
On her way out the door that same weekend, Julie gave me her phone number. I ran into the kitchen town crier style, announcing to my brother Nikko and our housekeeper Carla, the lady of the house, “I’m going to fuck that chick!”
Carla cackled in her spicy West Indian accent, “There will never be another Rob!”
But people leave breadcrumbs.
There was something odd about an elegant, presentable, corporate, flower- arranging sometime stripper who was the boss and owner of her own high-end business glomming onto an unemployable actor and sometime drug gofer in the span of one weekend. Her deep blue eyes were focused on you during conversation, but behind the eyes something else was going on that gave you the willies. Something wasn’t quite cricket.
But, what the hell? I was getting into bed with everything else dangerous, why not her?
Three days after the triumphant first load, Jordan suggested that he, Nikko, and I go to the Post House, one of the best steakhouses in NYC. We were allowed into this exclusive haven of beef because a friend of mine named Moss was friendly with the maître d’, and so he came with us. Moss was the bartender at Brats, the I-hate-my-wife bar that I lived at uptown. He went about six feet, two hundred pounds, and was the strongest guy for his size I ever saw. He was the white guy in the basketball game that all the black guys were afraid of. But he could also speak fluently about Styron and Vonnegut. He would flirt with eighty-year-old Jewish grandmothers and make them smile like teenagers again. He made men feel manly merely by paying attention to them.
Walking into the restaurant felt like walking into an old-fashioned men’s club. Everything was decked out in sumptuous leather, and old Colonial paintings hung heavily on the walls: a Revolutionary War soldier in profile with a blocky nose; hunting scenes with turkeys a-gobbling for their lives; a seated, naked (not so Colonial), languid, and leggy lady. The scotches were triples; the cigars were fireplace logs; the steaks were the size of Utah.
Nikko, Jordan, Moss, and I clearly didn’t fit in there, even though Moss and the maître d’ were slapping each other’s backs in that hearty men’s club way. I slunk to the bar to order a Cuervo and beer, please.
I could feel people glancing at us sideways, clucking their tongues. Jordan, oblivious, looked at the wine list and ordered the Château Lafite-Rothschild, 1961, like he knew what he was talking about, like it was his birthright. Word of our purchase galloped throughout the dining room. Jordan seized my tequila.
Instinctively, I tried to grab it back.
“Rob, don’t be a meathead. You are about to have the great wine experience of your life, and you don’t want to ruin it with some shitty tequila.”
The wine arrived. I had heard over the years from my stepfather that this was one of the great vintages of the twentieth century. It cost over a thousand dollars a bottle. The maître d’ took over for the sommelier because if the cork disintegrated, the house ate it. It was a big to-do with lots of paraphernalia: a corkscrew, napkins, a sensuous decanter, candles to examine the bottle for sediment.
The big, raucous dining room went silent as the maître d’ mildly twisted, finessing the twenty-nine-year-old cork.
I was amazed such artistry was for our benefit.
Success.
The maître d’ poured for Jordan. Everything about him suddenly became kingly: the way he whirled the huge glass so that the contents swirled and sloshed, the way he flared his nostrils and inhaled the aroma, and finally the way he sipped, tasted, and tongue-savored the deep burgundy liquid, the kind of magical potion that could turn even a loopy Ichabod Crane pot dealer into a king.
Then he gave a regal, poker-faced nod.
Relieved, the management smiled and bowed at us as they backed away. The room continued to stare. We were Post House royalty. Jordan confided to me that the Lafite was astonishing, and it was. It tasted like liquid lavender, the finest velvet.
For the rest of the evening, the service was impeccable. We entered bums, we left royals. For years to come, we would be treated as cherished customers. Our bar tab was always on the house, and the waiter would bring us a shopping bag filled with leftover steak for Tybalt.
—
I started seeing lots of Julie. She came over late during a load night, when the place was crawling with pot. It carpeted the ca
rpet. To witness this full on for the first time always stopped the beholder’s life for at least fifteen seconds. She was so titillated she might as well have been a teenybopper watching Elvis live. She hopped, skipped, and jumped over the bales of pot. The sex was two thick exposed live electric cables jamming together, and the explosion was quick, violent, and transcendent creating an us, a we, a freshman Bonnie and Clyde high on the illegalness of my marijuana enterprise.
In quick time, we would float the streets smiling at and with each other about our big secret. This created happy, vaulted, spinning dreams and a tight bond. But a bond based on a dream. Dreams can build subway systems, couple people like magnets.
We saw each other all the time. We would sleep late and go to her fancy gym downtown, called Better Bodies. We would better our bodies for about three hours; men would clamor for her attention while I was off doing sets of something. One guy’s line to her was, “Your stretching is an inspiration.”
Okay. He tried.
God knows I’ve said worse.
She made Tybalt her own, and in a blink we were a unit, a one, a team. Tybalt would growl for her and be her demon of defense—not that she needed the help, but he was there if need be. And she was backup for me, a co-conspirator who was on my side.
Thus continued my life. Loads came in twice a month; Julie and I became so inseparable we started living together at my grandparents’ place; the cash drawer never dipped below eight grand and usually hovered around fifteen. At one point, it rose to about twenty-five.
When Julie and I went out to dinner in the neighborhood and they didn’t have a table for us, I would start flicking twenties at the waiter until a table magically appeared.
Life was grand.
I sneered at auditions. I had no fear of them because I didn’t need them. I almost didn’t even want them anymore. I say almost because, as an actor, I was hardwired to exist and get work based on other people’s opinions of me. If I didn’t get work, I was a failure—a tiny place to be. The high and power I got from being master of my own fate, from being above (or below) the law, the liberation of having so much cash in hand and the hottest girl by my side, made the world in my head a wide boulevard of adventure and fantasy, and because of my involvement in this enterprise, the fulfillment of each. The notion of failure did not exist. It was a lovely and sweet-smelling existence. My newfound gangster gait loosened me in the hips, backbone, and actually nurtured a blossoming uptown aura of cool about my excessively white and WASPY/Jew person. I was free. So, when I did audition, I didn’t care.
