by Paul Theroux
The FBI was also watching George Davis. It was years before he was aware of the thickness of his file, but it dated from his first civil rights arrests in 1964. Three years later at the SNCC convention, George was more consciously an outlaw and identified with the renegades—the reefer smokers—not with the suits.
Even in this rebellious frame of mind George decided to go to law school. He applied to a number of schools. "I was a high black recruit, one of the top recruits in the nation. All the schools accepted me—they all accepted the same blacks." George won a full scholarship to UCLA and became UCLA's adviser to the Black Student Movement. "I got very political. I worked with the Panthers." And with prominent black athletes and student leaders. "I got to practice my smile." He did no studying. "I passed one course, I think."
Then, in 1968, with so much happening, the murders of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, and George hugely successful, "I went utterly wild." Using his considerable mathematical skills, George worked a scam with credit cards and airline tickets. He soon had a stack of both. He now also had a taste for cocaine and a confidence that there was profit in the drug. "At the end of the second semester, 1968, I was living in Frank Zappa's house in Laurel Canyon, and I started doing some business around L.A. One of our runners from Panama got busted."
Although George had never been out of the United States, he decided to go to Panama alone and buy as much cocaine as he could afford. He heard fireworks on his arrival at the Panama City airport. But no planes were taking off and the streets were empty. It was, he was told, a military coup: Omar Torrijos was taking over.
Very soon he met a Panamanian drug dealer, Little Tito.
"He became my teacher. From him I learned the true art of smuggling."
"George, did you smoke dope in high school?"
"Yup. I met a fellow from New York at the Newport Jazz Festival my junior year."
"You were probably the only person in high school doing it."
"I was the first to do a whole lot of things."
3
I understood George's divided mind. I shared it. There was placid George, intelligent, rational, cool, orderly, and philosophical, considering his options; and there was urgent George, the fastest man in Medford, the dreamer, spinning yarns, trying everything, the risk taker, the vulture. I was similar, but I had devised a use for all my experience and everything in my mind. At the point where George became imaginative, and restless and active, I shut the door and turned to fiction. George left the house and lived his fantasies.
It was some months before I saw George again, but I had become fascinated by our stories, our parallel lives. We were Medford boys. We were exactly the same age. Our family circumstances were comparable, we had gone to the same high school, and had been close friends. Academically we were about equal; George was my superior as an athlete, and he was socially far more gregarious. We had grown up at the edges of the city, he by the Mystic River, I by the woods of the Middlesex Fells. Our earliest memories, we agreed, had been the same—the longing to leave Medford, to experience the world, to take risks.
I picked up George in Medford and we drove towards Boston, to find a place to talk.
"Take a left here," he said.
"That's not the way, George."
"Listen to me. That is a freakin' short cut!"
And it was. George knew every back street, every connecting road. I had grown up here and had never gone this way to Boston, through Somerville, down these side streets. It amazed me that he had his own map of the city, and when I told him, he said that he had always used these back roads. Coming home from downtown Boston late at night, or after a football game in Somerville or Maiden, he had to stay off the beaten track where uproarious white youths might confront him and challenge him to fight. In his mind he had a black map of the city, full of safe zones.
I turned on the radio, having forgotten that my son's tape was in the tape machine. It was "The Chronic" that blared from the speakers, on a Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg rap tape, about "a nigger with a motherfuckin' gun."
"Heh-heh." George made a face. "That's not my thing. I still like Coltrane and Miles and Monk."
He was doing his master's degree in drug counseling, and being counseled himself in Boston. Still living at home, in an almost monastic way—studying, exercising, avoiding risky friends. And confined, and solitary, he began to write. Sometimes he wrote about his past, vivid stories, one about a gunfight, one about a robbery. A long story about two friends whose lives are interlinked he called "Tight Partners." The stories gave some coherence to his past, but there was so much incident in his life that these few episodes did not help much. Looking back, everything was chaos. He had trouble connecting one incident with another, one place to the next. He lost his wife, he found her again, he changed countries, he got money or drugs, and often he lost the money or flushed the drugs down the toilet. He smuggled; sometimes he got caught, more often he succeeded.
"After a while smuggling became a high. It became a tremendous rush. It wasn't the money or the coke—it was beating them, being able to think on my feet."
George smuggled the coke by filling condoms and inserting them in cans of talcum powder. In the tropics everyone used talcum and deodorant. Everyone carried it. George doctored his containers, replacing the tops and bottoms.
"I remember one time I had some 'material' in some deodorant and the agent had it open and was about to stick his finger in. Golden rule—you never break rhythm. So I continued my conversation and I said, 'By the way, where can I get my money changed?' He thought for a moment and used that same finger to point and give me directions. Then he gave me a 'Now what was I doing?' expression, and looked at the deodorant, and screwed the top back on. Now that was a rush."
To learn the drug business properly, George worked part time in a cutting house in Los Angeles, owned and operated by infamous drug dealers, the Huggins family from New Orleans. There wasn't much money in it for him, but it was an important apprenticeship.
"Processing cocaine is very involved," George said. It is first pasta, a paste made from the leaves. That is made into base, commonly known. Base is then crystallized into a rock form that you might term early rock. That can be reprocessed one more time, into flake. If all the hydrochloric acid is removed, it becomes crystal or pharmaceutical cocaine.
The rock, which might range from a bundle of lumps to a solid kilo, is chopped small with knives, and chopped again. This is then sifted through nylon stockings. The resulting powder is blended, then cut with milk sugar to increase the amount of salable coke.
If it is strong, the coke is cut further, always tested by a "pig" who shoots up the provisional cut and comments on the high he gets from it. The profit derives from the strength of it—how much it can be stretched and still retain its potency and the thoroughness with which it is mixed. Finding the perfect homogenous blend requires experience and fine tuning, because no cocaine is exactly the same in purity or composition.
George was at this for months, starting as a chopper—carefully hacking the sometimes two-pound rocks—and progressing to a blender, a more demanding skill. He also helped sell the drug. Each person in this operation had his own customers. George and his colleagues were the exclusive suppliers to high-profile people—"beautiful people," George said. Basketball players, entertainers, singers, celebrities.
"Is it possible to be a serious basketball player and have a coke habit?" I asked.
"It wasn't a habit with them. They were very serious about their thing, and they were also very serious about their party time. But no angel dust, no acid. They would snort cocaine and smoke reefer, but they wouldn't fire."
Wouldn't inject it.
One day in L.A. he and Gene, a Tuskegee friend from the civil rights years, had a pound of coke to sell.
"Gene and I were playing gangsters. I even had a little gun. We had a deal and got a hotel room to meet the buyers. One of the buyers said he didn't want the stuff and they left. Later on that
night there was a knock at Gene's door. We had adjoining rooms.
"'Police,' I heard, and shut the door to the room where the cocaine was. There were three men—black. One, the gorilla, had red eyes. I'll never forget that. They threw us to the floor, and because we didn't move fast enough they smacked us on the head with their pistols. They tied our hands and feet, put pillowcases over our heads. 'Get on your knees. Where's the cocaine?' 'What cocaine?' All that. One of them said, 'I'm going to make this real simple. The one that's alive is going to tell me where it is.'"
I was in Singapore, writing, teaching, living on the margin. We had two children now, and lived in a tiny house that stank of bus fumes and the monsoon drain that ran by the front door. I had finished my fourth novel, Jungle Lovers, and was working on Saint Jack. Now and then my short stories were published in Playboy. George saw my name in the magazine and read them. I went to high school with this dude. Heh-heh.
"Why didn't you get into the drug thing, Paul?"
"I did get into the drug thing. But it didn't last." And I explained.
Now and then I smoked ganja, buying it from a Chinese waiter at the Staff Club or a Malay in a bar on Arab Street. One Saturday in Singapore I bought a joint from the Malay and went home and smoked it. I had the sense that my arms and legs had inflated, that my brain was blazing, my eyeballs boiling in their sockets. Out of control, I clawed my clothes off and rolled on the floor, gasping with pleasure, feeling airborne, and at times twisting in a horrific frenzy of vertigo. The joint was not ganja. It was my first experience of smoking heroin, and it was the last drug I took.
George, at that time, "took a fall in Atlanta. My first big bust. I was still new at the business. It was during the Muhammad Ali fight. All the gangsters and players were in town."
He was at the house of a man the police had under surveillance. And the drug deal that afternoon, the day of the fight, was going slowly—the customers were doubtful, and they stalled. The police moved in, and they found George, who had agreed to carry his friend's wallet. There were drugs in the wallet.
"I was in jail in Atlanta for a month, and then out on bail."
While on bail, preparing his case, George wrote a letter to a university up north. It was another inspired George Davis strategy. When he was truly desperate he became ingenious, fluent, even eloquent.
"I wrote them about what the problem is with going to graduate school today. Universities are basically hostile environments"—few or no blacks at these institutions—"yet they invited blacks to come. I said I wanted to attend, but the only way I could do it was if Gene and his wife came. I got a scholarship, the Martin Luther King scholarship. I was made a teaching fellow. Negro history. I changed it to black history—American Domestic Policy."
"What about your drug bust in Atlanta? Wasn't that on your mind?"
"I won the case. And things were all right. But then I do the flip side. I get in trouble up there. I did something horrible. I don't want to tell you."
"I need to know, George."
"Heh-heh. You got all the questions," George said. "I cut a dude with a buck knife. He was calling me names. It was bad."
"Did he die?"
"No, no. But it was trouble, and I had to leave. That was the end of American Domestic Policy." George's alternative to teaching history was to return to his other passion—smuggling cocaine. "I got back into business again. And then Tito took a fall in Panama. So I started looking for new sources for the product."
"Different dealers?"
"Different countries. I went to Harvard, to the Peabody Museum. That place has some of the world's greatest work on cocaine. And I got the major book on the subject, Peru: History of Coca, the Divine Plant of the Incas, by W. Golden Mortimer, M.D., 1901."
That was the George I recognized from high school, from the Magoun mansion of the Medford Public Library, pacing the stacks, rifling the shelves, and ending up with the unlikeliest books.
"I did a lot of reading. I found out there are coca plants that grow in Ghana—wherever there's coffee, and if you've got nine thousand feet, you've got coca. There's four areas of the world where we get the species that produces what we want. An area crossing South America, an area in Africa, an area in the Golden Triangle, and an area in Indonesia—in Java. There are about a hundred different varieties of the plant. The one that produces the most echocaine is in Africa. So I went to Ghana and the Ivory Coast."
It was August 1970. "I was hanging out with Africans, thinking of giving up cocaine, thinking about staying. I had never been around so many black people that walked the street. You know, like they don't have to stoop."
But he had a wife and child and responsibilities. This trip had cost a lot, and he had not found any cocaine. So, "in order to salvage the trip," this search for product, he went back to the States and left almost immediately for Peru. He brought back a package, which he sold at a profit. And then he set his sights on Ecuador.
"How did you find out about Ecuador?"
"Gene had read a National Geographic, and from my research at the Peabody Museum."
"Was this drug thing profitable?"
"Oh, yeah."
"I was getting fifty bucks a week at the University of Singapore."
All went well with George until, later in 1970, on one trip, his plane made an unscheduled landing in St. Croix, which entailed George's unexpectedly having to pass through St. Croix Customs and Immigration. He had pioneered a route from Ecuador through Venezuela and Trinidad to Canada. The key was that you had to lose your passport and get rid of your ticket in Trinidad, and get a new ticket and use your driver's license as an ID—all of this to obscure the fact that you had ever been in South America.
Life has no apparent plot, and so it seems messier than fiction, but if you have the stomach for it, this raw ingredient of art in its pure form is dense and fascinating, as different (to use the cocaine image that George had given me) as the rock is from the crystal. So many things happen in a person's life without warning, contradictorily, seemingly unrelated and without a pattern, and so without discernible unity it seems as though in all these incidents a single person has been leading separate lives. In one long life, so many people, so many other lives. Yet because they happen to that one person, a pattern is established, so large and elaborate that it cannot be read from the little we are able to see. Who can tell from a few hundred yards of road that this is a highway that goes from coast to coast? There is, in any long life of a person, the logic and harmony that is crystallized in fiction.
An old black woman ahead of George in the Customs and Immigration line at the St. Croix airport was confused. Like George, she had not expected to be here, and she was disoriented, slow with her responses when the St. Croix official demanded explanations. And then the man began to intimidate the woman with his repeated questions. The old woman, frightened into silence, roused the man's fury. "He was a cracker, a southern dude. It was white against black, young against old, and he didn't understand about the plane."
"I'm tired of you people trying to sneak in," the immigration official said to this woman whose trip to Montreal had been interrupted.
George stepped forward. He said, "Mister, have you got a grandmother?"
The man eyed him.
"Well, how would you like her to be treated the way you are treating this woman?"
The man said sharply, "Get over there, mister wise guy."
For his supposed insolence, George was interrogated and then searched. "They were just elated."
They found three ounces of cocaine in a can of talcum. "We got your black ass now."
For this offense George spent three months in the fort—"a historic place where they had put slaves"—on St. Croix.
After another arrest, this time in San Francisco, George decided that he might be safer if he relocated to Ecuador. And so he went to Quito and fell in love with the place—the Sun Festival, Viva Quito, was in full swing—and also fell in love with an Ecuadorian woman from a prom
inent family. Her parents approved of George, whom they took to be an American businessman.
"I had moved up. No more smuggling. I became a packaging expert. I brought in sealing machines."
And throughout the year 1971 he stayed put in Quito, packaging and sending cocaine out of Ecuador. He had a car and a house; expatriate life had its nuisances, but it was safe.
In November 1971 I quit my job in Singapore and went to England. I lived in Dorset, in a cottage, paying five pounds a week rent—less than ten dollars. I had not saved much from my Singapore job, but even the little I had would allow me to live there for a long time. That was what I needed: security, monotony, life in the bosom of my family. After nine years in the tropics I was in retreat from experience.
I asked George what he was doing that month and year.
"Living large," he said.
4
On those summer weekdays in Medford and Boston that George and I talked, catching up, I sometimes saw people glance at us and look away with a kind of sour disapproval, muttering the way they do when they are baffled by the threat of unfamiliar men who don't seem to fit into the foreground.
We were two older fellows, one black, one white, sharing a park bench in the middle of a working day, laughing too loud, and not dressed particularly well. Most likely out of work, or procrastinating, looking reckless and marginal. What probably roused the fury of many passersby was our indefinable air of conspiracy and, worst of all, an obvious disregard, like those motionless and apparently unemployed figures in a landscape who seem as though they have not earned the right to be so idle.
