by Rob Sedgwick
And when they smelled freedom on you, that’s when you were wanted.
I booked two studio movies in a row.
The casting director of Tune in Tomorrow was top shelf, high end, and very difficult to see. The director had just come off a hit series in England, and as with everything across the pond, it was revered in the States.
Who cared? I had fish to fry at home—big fish. About five hundred pounds’ worth. I was a bit miffed that they had kept me waiting for twenty minutes, and told them so. They apologized.
We improvised a scene. I got the hang of it the second time.
I dashed home, back to my real job, to weigh out cannabis and prepare for the next load. By then, the word “load” held a thrilling connotation.
My gay agent’s gay assistant called to tell me I got the part.
“Darling, they loved you! And the stars are Keanu Reeves, Peter Falk, and Barbara Hershey. You’re on your way!”
Yawn.
—
Julie obviously stripped for the money, but she also got a kick out of it. She thought it was funny, a game of sex, of being wanted. She was twenty-two, and parading around drunken men in a G-string gave her power absolute. I told her as long as it was just for fun that was fine, but if it started to mess with her head, she should quit.
But I loved that Julie shattered every guy’s concept of what the perfect woman’s body should look like. It’s a lousy thing to admit, but I think most members of the male species, out loud or not, love being with a woman that every other guy finds achingly desirable and gets nervous looking at. I loved watching her dress and undress.
I wanted to show her off. So I went with Moss and Milo Goldstein, my best friend from high school, out to Passaic to leer at Julie at her strip club. Milo made Woody Allen look hip and Orthodox Jews look sturdy, and he was so excited at the prospect of seeing Julie in action that he started to twitch.
Julie said I would know when I got to the club because it looked like a rocket ship that was about to take off.
It did.
We entered the rocket ship that was in some crummy section of Passaic, though I imagined that all sections of Passaic were crummy, and then—yikes! There was a stripper doing the nasty with soap suds from the bar sink. She was wiping those suds all over the place, up and down and all around, she was working it and it was working. She was a downtown bottle blonde, slutty as hell.
Perfect.
I affected an air of chivalry, introduced myself, and told her I was Julie’s boyfriend.
“Julie’s boyfriend?! Hold on! I got somethin’ for you!” She scooped out more suds and slathered them up and down her crotch and neighboring areas with an admirable verve.
We sidled up to the bar. The barmaid was Dick Butkus with less of a moustache. Moss and I were at bars all the time, so we were all elbows and swagger, but Milo Goldstein was rarely at a bar and up till now had only had sex once in his life, and so the whole shebang—the soap dance, the lurid atmosphere, the sex and liquor smells—all this combined to send his teeter meter up to tilt.
Julie entered. A real fantasy.
Her lush chestnut hair was done up librarian-style. Deep blue eyes were offset perfectly by jet-black eyebrows. Ravishing, all-American good looks. She strutted onto the stage in high-heeled pumps, all business. She was wearing a trim leather jacket that ended at her midsection; the lower half of her remarkably fit dancer’s body was clad in a whiff of a G-string.
Some women are born to wear a G-string, others are not. It was Julie’s raison d’être. She threw off the leather jacket with disdain to reveal barely brassiere-d breasts that defied gravity, tightly muscled arms, a stomach you could bounce bowling balls off of, and the ass of an Olympian sprinter. She made a beeline for us.
“Oh my God, I’m fucking her!” I blurted to Moss. What wonderful things had I done in my life to deserve this? “I’m getting a hard-on looking at my fucking girlfriend.”
“I’m getting a hard-on looking at your fucking girlfriend!” Moss said.
Milo was in his own galaxy, one of amazement and wonder, a child thrown onto the moon.
How are such things possible? I never knew such underwear existed…that women’s bodies had such contours…such power…like moving sculpture. I know this woman, I’ve spoken to her, we have an easy rapport—when she wears clothes. How can I possibly have an easy rapport with her now? I’ll keep imagining her in a G-string. I’ll be sweating and lustful, filled with shame. This is perfection I couldn’t have imagined, that I didn’t know was possible. I was never taught this at temple. I could die right now and that would be all right.
MY GOD, she’s coming this way. How can Robbie and Moss be so cool about it? They are smiling like used car salesmen. I am a quivering eel. I’m going to vomit my heart up. Jesus! Look at her! Nothing jiggles! She is standing above me smiling. Just to touch once, to feel, my hand is rising upward by itself, I can’t stop it, oh how glorious…
“Milo?” Julie said. “What are you doing?”
“Hum, what? That…what?”
“He’s just a little excited,” Moss said. “He’s never been to a strip bar before. Right, Milo?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve never been to a strip bar before?”
“Yes?”
“You have?”
“Yes. I mean no.”
“Milo, you okay?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Why are you breathing so hard?”
“Yes?”
“And why do you keep saying ‘yes’ to everything?”
“Like I said, he’s just a little excited,” Moss said.
“Oh yes!”
“I’m glad you’re having fun, Milo,” Julie said.
“YES.”
“Baby, I think we’re going to take Milo home,” I told Julie.
After dropping them off, I arrived home to an apartment filled with pot. The load hadn’t been broken down yet, so it was all over the place, the whole quarter ton.
I took Tybalt for a quick walk, then fell asleep smiling about my successful illegal enterprise and my girl in a G-string.
Creamy, soft, moist kisses on my face: it was Julie, waking me after her shift. The image of her on the strip bar runway sent my whole sex system aflutter. She kissed me deeply. It was tender at first, then grew tougher, harder, hotter. She liked it when I bit her.
So I did.
She liked it when I yanked her hair.
So I did.
Writhing and wet, she thrust my head between her legs, choked me with her iron thighs, and stared at me impassively. We mesmerized each other. She squeezed harder. I was about to pass out. She loosened her torque, pressed against me, started to rumble, gyrate, and spasm.
She wanted me inside her. She wanted me to take my leather belt and tie it around her neck. We had done this a hundred times. I pulled the belt with feeling, entered from behind, and thrusted.
She commanded, “Pull harder! Go deeper.”
I was okay with the thrusting, but the choking was becoming strangling.
“Still harder!” she croaked.
I felt a sense of power, an abuse of power. But she was ecstatic. Her face grape purple. “Fuck me!” A growl from a haunted house. She barely got this out and it was through an all but crushed windpipe, and her face was a raging purple by now, eyes popping out their sockets from a fresh hanging. Yet her will was such that she would not die and didn’t want to stop.
So I kept going.
I often looked at Julie in the early mornings. Sometimes, when you catch people unawares, you see—in a flash, in an instant—their real face. You can be shocked by what you see: demon lust, incredible despair, unbridled joy, uncivilized expressions.
In deepest, sustained repose, Julie looked capable of murder.
—
Jordan wanted to move our operation from my grandparents’ apartment to the safe haven of an apartment with no doorman. “Doormen know everything that’s going on,” Jordan said. Between her stripping and my dealing, Julie too was getting peppy with the crime bug. She assisted happily in the search for the perfect drug apartment. The requirements were a one-bedroom in the back of an elevator building between the avenues, preferably mid-block. Big closets.
We found one that was perfect, and she gestured lovingly to me in front of the guy showing us the place, Let’s Make a Deal style. “Honey! I love these closets! They’re huge!” Her smile was canyon wide, and her teeth sparkled. We met the go-between of the apartment we wanted in the west 90s for brunch in Chelsea. Julie played one half of the happy yuppie couple perfectly, and that was a good thing, because I was having a hard time leaving my newfound gangster persona behind for an hour, replete with sweats, baseball cap, marshmallow sneakers, and the omnipresent slouch.
The go-between explained that his friend was out of town and he was helping him rent the apartment.
Julie, looking like a Wall Street guy’s wet dream, said, “We love the apartment, we’ll take it,” and reached under the table and passed him a paper bag: five grand in cash to secure the place. His jaw dropped to China.
Life was humming.
Then, I started to wonder…
Maybe this might break bad?
What are the chances of getting caught?
What would happen if we were?
I knew who to call.
Linus’s brother: Hank.
Linus Jerome had been our cook, back when the townhouse we lived in was so big it needed its own cook. Raised in exclusive Nyack, schooled at the Skunk Hollow School for the Gifted, Linus came from ancient Dutch and WASP stock; his grandfather was the leading breast surgeon of his day. Linus was Flemish painting come to life, a wandering minstrel whose instrument was a recorder (he played it consummately) and whose oxygen was booze. He insisted his alabaster skin marked him as a member of the aristocracy. As a cook, he was a genius, but he fancied himself a painter and was devoted to the Old Master Giorgione. He made countless copies of his work by stretching cellophane over the plates and books, tracing the images, and calling his finished products “interpretations.” It was always time to get high with him. Linus called snorting coke “the pause that refreshes,” and he had the best coke connections in New York because his brother, Hank, had been the dealer. He was the kind of guy at a party who’d make a snake of coke over a four-foot mirror. There was so much that the party would never finish it.
Hank was fiercely devoted to Linus, and also happened to be his opposite: a good guy who came off a badass. He did two years (state) for cocaine distribution. He once came to our house with his former cellmate from Rikers, who was packing a serious-looking gun, but soon after Hank got out, he decided to join the other side. Of crime, he said, “It’s a good life, but it’s a short life.” He became a lawyer in Nyack.
I called him on the phone to tell him about what I was doing and that I needed some advice. I figured I could hint at the subject because I knew high-end criminals were able to comprehend each other merely through tone and inflection. I had seen Jordan do this effectively, so I followed suit:
“Hey, Hank.”
“Hey, what’s up?”
“I was calling about things.”
“Things?”
“Yes. Things. Endeavors.”
“What things? What endeavors? How’s the dog?”
“He’s fine.”
“’At’s good. That guy is somethin’ else.”
“Aw thanks. I was calling about hypothetical things.”
“What hypothetical things? What the fuck are you talking about?”
Hank said I had better come to his office. I borrowed a car, threw Tybalt in the back, and drove over the George Washington Bridge. I suddenly became worried that it might snap and plunge into the Hudson, much like I did when I was a kid. But I knew I was being silly because Tybalt didn’t seem worried at all. He was riding in the front seat, nose to the wind, ears and jowls flapping like crazy. He was deep into a profound meditation. How he achieved such serenity and focus, I had no idea. I, along with most of the humans I knew, was wholly incapable of such contemplation. I would just hustle over any bridge that life put in my path and hope for the best.
I drove the winding country road to Hank’s office and walked in. We were glad to see each other, and I felt a real kinship with him. I was a good friend of his brother, and we had partied together a lot.
After he cleared the room of secretaries, I told Hank what I was doing. I felt so free and easy in front of him. The canvas I painted was big.
His eyes grew wide and misty with Remembrances of Deals Past. I told him about the loads, how we broke them down, the endless stream of people coming in and out of the apartment, how happy Tybalt was, my gangster gear, the cash, the amazing body of Julie and her stripping escapades, my full throttle self-esteem. Little people waiting in line at the ATM? Not me! I’m gonna buy a Ford Bronco and a Shaft jacket. I’m James fucking Bond.
Hank smiled dopily.
“What d’ya think?”
I asked this rhetorically, throwing in the “d’ya” to match Hank’s moderate to thick Union-ez accent so he thought I was one tough hombre in addition to being, of course, an impressive, up-and-coming drug dealer.
He was in love with the picture I painted. I was in love with how sexy I felt about the whole thing.
And then he said, “Stop immediately.”
The ground started to crumble. I was falling. The George Washington Bridge?
“Whaddaya mean?!”
“I mean stop immediately.”
“Why? It’s only pot!”
“Yeah, but you said this enterprise has been going on for a coupla years before you stepped in, right? So it’s only a matter of time before you guys get caught. Plus they’re tryin’ ta change the drug laws now so that a federal situation isn’t just a wrist slap and a fine anymore. They’re tryin’ to institute a five-year mandatory minimum if you’re indicted. And that’s just minimum. Also, whatever money you’re making now is gonna go to copious legal fees if yer busted, and it’s prolly gonna be more than that. And jail ain’t a walk in the park.”
“But I feel so wonderful about myself. Finally. And I’m making some money for a change!”
“Yeah, but ya’ asked what I think, and that’s what I think. And lemme tell ya’ something else: if you do get busted and you go away, don’t back down. You get into a fight, they break yer arm or somethin’, keep goin’. You get respect. A guy tried to slash me with a razor in Rikers. I said, ‘What’re ya gonna do, shave me?’”
I didn’t know if I would have such a snappy comeback if somebody tried to slash me with a razor—at Rikers, no less. The very name sounded tough, impenetrable, scary.
Rikers.
My mellow thoroughly harshed, I bid Hank a limp adieu and drove back to Manhattan.
Now what? Do I abandon Christmas? Give up all the joy and glitz of life as an international spy? I’ve hinged my future happiness, self-esteem, and self-worth on being an outlaw, this well-paid pot gopher person. What an acute bummer! What would I do all day if I didn’t have pot deals to worry about?
As soon as I got back onto the bridge, Tybalt riding shotgun, I decided to ignore the advice I was just given. I thought if this bridge was going to snap, fuck it. I didn’t care. A shock of holy faith surged through me, and in that instant I felt all-powerful. I was a definitive man, a man committed to his huge and nerveless decision. A man. If we were going down, so be it. Tybalt and I would swim like hell and survive.
6
My sister brings home a nameless dog from the pound.
It’s 1984. I have just graduated from college and landed my first acting gig—a soap opera
. I aspire to be a great Shakespearean actor in the tradition of Olivier and Gielgud. Of course this soap opera is well beneath me, but it is my first pro gig out of college, and I am making about a grand a day. I stoop for now. I’ve done so much acting in and out of college by this point that the audition is a cinch. In my final callback, I put my feet up on the producer’s desk to ooze entitlement and self-admiration the way my character would, and the producer loves it.
I’ve gotten an awful apartment in the West Village. The kitchen is painted salmon pink and made out of cardboard. I live on top of a store named Bagel World, so the place always smells of boiled dough. I go to the gym whenever I’m not working or drinking at the bar, wear form-fitting tees to accentuate my pectoral muscles, my blond hair is Daryl Hall luscious, and five minutes out of college I am expecting to ride the wings of success and victory both now and forever.
When I arrive at my stepdad’s place in East Hampton for the weekend, Kyra is annoyed by my cocky, breezy, going-straight-to-the-top attitude. She’s been working as an actor for longer than me, but for now she’s out of work and peeved about it. She tells me, “You even look like a soap opera.”
The dog she has gotten is a white blond retriever mixed with husky. He doesn’t trust anybody.
When you talk to him like he’s a good doggie, he looks at you like you have got to be kidding. He’s weary of idiots. He has been in the pound for a while. He knows what time it is and wants to be left alone. He goes into one of the guest rooms and crawls under the bed, and only his ass sticks out. It’s big. Don’t tell him that. My sister tries to pull him out. There is a blood-curdling growl from the scariest place in the world: underneath the bed. My sister backs up like the scene in Jaws when Roy Scheider sees the actual shark in all its hugeness and says, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The name “Tybalt” just stumbles out of my mouth. Kyra likes the name, and we both call to him: “Tybalt, Tybalt!”
