In the cantina the next week I gave Galvan the money, and after a few tequila shots we went to his house. It was a whitewashed hacienda with endless rooms enclosing a large courtyard. Parched palm trees and awnings kept the heat down but it still was oppressive; hot breezes whipped the sombrero brims of the groundskeepers. Brawny bodyguards with bull torsos and tattooed arms brooded with guns strapped around their huge guts. Antique ranch spurs and mule saddles were nailed to the exterior walls. Inside, wagon-wheel candle chandeliers hung from rusting chains. The red-brick floors had corded throw rugs at all doorways; see-through lace curtains covered the arched windows. The rooms were decorated with pre-Columbian gold figurines, Mayan and Aztec artifacts that Galvan boasted were sold to him by Mexican grave robbers. Several beautiful Mexican women floated around the place like dark swans against the white adobe. We lounged poolside, drinking tequilas, as he told me I had nothing to worry about as far as the locals went—border guards, judges, police, and lawyers were eating out of his hand. But, he warned, “Keep your eyes open for DEA. Yuma’s a wholesale port of entry and DEA are like cockroaches here.”
Two days later, five hundred pounds of weed arrived at our doorstep.
Lonnie thought we were moving too fast and began to worry. She said I was gritting my teeth at night. When we ate out once a week she said I’d look at every face, suspecting every glance. I was indeed now more careful than I had been in San Diego, looking in my rearview every few minutes, discussing the biz with Marcos only when no others were around, putting my index finger to my lips when Marcos started talking in a café.
“You’re too paranoid,” he said. “Gotta enjoy it while it’s here.”
“Marcos,” I said, “it can only work if we’re careful. We can’t just be throwing our shit around, buying a new car, eating out all the time and flaunting it.”
Lonnie was alarmed by the amount of money we counted each night on the bed, stacking and tying it in five-thousand-dollar piles and stuffing it in pillowcases. She explained that dealing was touching every aspect of our lives. Every knock on the door, every phone call, took on a whole different meaning. I reassured her it was only temporary and promised to quit after we had saved enough to move back to New Mexico.
But privately, I knew I was in over my head. I had to keep riding Marcos because he wanted to go on a shopping spree. He wanted to buy a boat and paint TWO TIMES on it. I asked him, “Wouldn’t it be a bit weird to have a new boat parked in the middle of the desert?” All he could think of was going back to La Zona to screw the Mexican babes at the brothels in San Luis. I told him after we had some money stashed and got out of dealing we could do all the partying we wanted. In the meantime, we had to keep our business under wraps and act normal. Even though Marcos was still getting high, I couldn’t because it made me too paranoid. Carey would show up at night and we’d load his trunk with half the load, and the following night he’d show up with the money and load up the other half. It was 1972, the weed business was just starting to boom, and we were at the right place at the right time.
Carey was selling between five and six hundred pounds a month, and Galvan was forcing more and more on us, and we couldn’t keep up with the quantities. Sometimes at night, separating the fives, tens, twenties, and hundreds on the bed, I’d tell Lonnie how poor we were when I was a child. When I lived with my mom in La Casita we had an outhouse, cold running water, and one bed. The most common phrase that I could remember from childhood was “No hay con que.” It meant there was not enough of whatever was needed to go around. The fights, the worry, and even my parents’ breaking up resulted in no small part from poverty. We never went to a movie and seldom bought new clothes unless it was work gloves, boots, or thermal underwear.
I let my imagination run away, telling Lonnie how I wanted to buy Grandma a new stove and phone and get her the best medical help money could buy because she was blind and arthritic. I’d buy my brother a new truck and my sister a new car once we got home. I’d like to put my dad in the hospital to get him to stop drinking and then buy him his own house and car. Lonnie suggested we take a vacation to relieve the stress from being pent up like we’d been since we started dealing. Marcos was more than up for it. It was the first planned vacation I ever had. We gave the house keys to Carey and left him in charge of everything.
We drove to San Diego and dropped Lonnie off at her parents’ house; we’d pick her up later in the evening. For old times, Marcos and I were going to shoot pool at our old hangout, but while cruising there we spotted Cadillac Cuz, the dealer/pimp at the old Sleazeball Hotel. We pulled into the alley behind his Caddy and, after slapping fives and bullshitting, he smoked a sample and said Bingo! In his Superfly talk, sliding his pink sunglasses down his nose and cocking his red hat to one side, he asked, “What’s the P.R. on an L.B.?” We quoted our prices and locked him in for a load a week.
When we picked Lonnie up, she was jubilant because her parents had accepted her decision to live with me and were no longer mad. I told her we were extending the vacation. Might as well try to make up with my father too. We were going up to San Francisco to find my dad, who had gone there in search of my mother. My sister had given me his address.
Also in San Francisco was a guy we’d met in jail. We headed north on 101 to see Big Tommy, a biker from Redwood City. Driving along the breathtaking coast road, we laughed and sang and played music and smoked. We stopped in at old missions and lighthouses and took lots of pictures. Lonnie and I walked on the beach boardwalks of a tourist hamlet to eat and stretch our legs, and we kissed and made promises never to leave each other. It was romantic and passionate and gave our hearts a sorely needed lift, a push back into the real world away from dealing and Galvan and paranoia. Feeling caught up in the moment, I told her I used to be in love with an old girlfriend, Theresa. And that while I sometimes still thought of her, the pain from those days was slowly fading. Lonnie hugged me, whispering, “I’m always going to be yours and love you forever.”
We got into Frisco eight hours later and found Big Tommy in his garage with other bikers, customizing Harley motors and frames. He had a full-blown three-bay shop with a black-lacquered tool chest the size of a bedroom on wheels. He took us into his office, and we laid out the bud we’d hidden in the car’s door panel. He grabbed one stalk by the stem and hurled it against the window, saying, “Here you go, we’re going to do a line or two of this, what I call Raising the Dead meth, and after we’re done talking, if that bud don’t slip and fall, I’ll take five hundred a month.” It didn’t, and the deal was sealed.
The next morning, after breakfast, we went to find my father. After a while we found the Tenderloin district. I grew very quiet, seeing the tramps passed out in the gutters, winos rummaging through Dumpsters, guys slinging heroin and cocaine on street corners, buildings boarded up and secured with barb-wire fences. I didn’t say anything. Marcos was tracking the streets by alphabetical order, until we found the address and pulled over in front of a crumbling brownstone. “This is it, Jimmy. Eighteen-thirty-eight Duran Street.”
“He doesn’t even know my mother’s back in New Mexico,” I said, staring out the window at the gray skies. I thought of the times riding with him in the car as a child, fearing we might be killed. Him crying about Mother, begging to know where she was. I kept wanting to get out and walk up the stairs and see him. But I knew my fantasy of a father was only that, a fantasy. It went something like me entering his room to find a well-dressed and sober man, embracing him, and going out to eat and talk. Taking him with me, waking up in a nice hotel room and having breakfast with him and buying him an airline ticket and flying him out to New Mexico, where I’d meet him and we’d get a place. But if I went up those stairs, he’d be on the bed half naked, puking his guts out, screaming that he needed a drink. What was I going to tell him when he asked about Mother? That she was married with two kids and another life and never wanted to see him again? I shouldn’t have come. “Drive on,” I told Marcos. “Drive—drive
, get the fuck out of here!” Lonnie grabbed my hands because I was picking my bloody cuticles. I pushed her hands back. I squeezed myself with my arms crossed, trying to rock the pain out of me.
Marcos screeched the tires, fishtailing through the red-light district, past the nightmare of drunks and addicts and hookers. I didn’t want to see my father like this. “Where to?” Marcos asked. “Home,” I said. “Open this motherfucker up, let’s see what she’s got.” I hoped the speed would take away the bad feelings, take away my grief. Marcos asked me something, but I couldn’t talk. Lonnie was sniffling and I couldn’t comfort her. I sat there cold and distant as we drove out of San Francisco, up and down the hilly streets. The thunder rolled ominously and the rain turned everything gray. I pictured my father lurching and stumbling in the rain, moaning for my mother. He sincerely believed an encounter would miraculously mend years of destruction and that they would live happily ever after. I rolled my window down and threw away the piece of paper with his address on it.
The weed, eight hundred to a thousand pounds a month, was bricked and wrapped in plastic and yellow butcher paper, then stuffed in gunnysacks and delivered by Carey. The DEA relocated from Florida were easy to avoid because they stood out like blond, rosy-cheeked, suntanned stop signs. But neither the burgeoning weed business nor the profits lessened the depression I suffered after coming back from our vacation. I started getting high and drinking at bars with Marcos. Instead of going right in and out when delivering money to Galvan, I now took his invitation to stay longer and party with him, doing cocaine and messing around with La Zona girls. Feeling guilty about that, I took Lonnie on shopping sprees, buying her expensive dresses and jewelry.
I began to grow more nervous; the volume was taking over my life. Marcos and I spent a lot of time with Galvan partying at his ranch, joining him for dinners with lawyers, judges, cops from Yuma, and big shots from Chicago. Lonnie didn’t trust Galvan; neither did I. Suspicious of his overly gracious manner, I went back to staying straight. I worried about being watched or slipping up. Marcos and I took care of the paperwork and returned to landscaping, light pruning, and molding hedges. Carey was still handling the base and making his runs to California. Lonnie kept the books on how much money we owed and how much we were making. We took our cut and hid it in the broom closet. Often, we’d sit out in the backyard and talk as in the old days, watching the sunset on the horizon. Other times we’d watch basketball or football on the color TV and drink beer and relax. But dealing was always in the back of my mind, The weed was in high demand, and orders kept coming in.
Things were getting crazier, faster, reeling out of control. There was no structure to my life. Day and night, situations came up, and after six months it was getting to my nerves. New customers, heavier loads, phone calls at all hours of the night, waiting and worrying if so-and-so could be trusted; fronting weed and waiting for the money; waiting for word from loads en route to destinations, and a hundred other details. To relax, Lonnie and I went to a lake outside of Yuma one Sunday. Carey had scored some PCP on the base. He said it was okay to take. Lonnie and I mixed some of the white powder in our sodas, and within the hour we were drowning in the worst nightmare of our lives. It lasted two days, and when we came out of it, we decided then and there to quit the business. Lonnie and I got into praying after that, something we had never done, but the demons and ghosts that attacked our minds while tripping made us both certain we were lucky to be alive. We were only twenty. We didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives vegetating in a loony bin.
We’d saved up enough of a nest egg to go home, and I asked Lonnie to marry me and she agreed. It was a big move, but if I was going to do it, now was the time. She wanted to return with me to Albuquerque, buy a house of our own, and have a family.
At La Zona I told Galvan and he shrugged with little dismay. He had expected the news and said he was not going to dissuade me. “I am always here,” he said, and raised his glass to the good times. I spent a couple of hours with him drinking and doing a few lines. He kidded a lot, saying I had to do what I had to do, but that in his opinion I had dealing in my blood and I had a certain way about me that attracted money and customers. Swaying his index finger at me, he said, “You’ll be back.” I was certain he was wrong, and when Marcos returned from Ocean Beach where he’d taken a girl to party, I told him too. He was laid back about it, and even seemed anxious to hit the road for home too. That evening during supper Marcos suggested we go to La Zona one last time to end our partnership with a party and commemorate our parting with a good old bottle of tequila. So that night we went to party for the last time. After half a bottle of tequila, Marcos went to one of the rooms with a woman and I sat in the booth nursing my drink and remembering the months in Yuma and the business deals we’d done. Reminiscing, enjoying the mariachis and sexy women, I waited for Marcos until a vendor boy with a box of cigarettes came up to me and slapped a pack of Marlboros down on the table next to my glass.
“No quiero cigarros” I told him, handing them back.
“Me dijo que traiera cigarros.” Someone told him to bring me cigarettes. I couldn’t figure out who. I told him to leave and forced the pack back on him.
Marcos finished with the woman in the back room. When he came up, I told him, “Let’s jam, my man. No ands, ifs, or buts—we’re outa here.” I suddenly felt like a mouse about to get trapped. I don’t know why, but alarms were going off in me. Marcos, flushed and beaming from sexual exertion, put his arm around my shoulder and we walked out. It was good to see him so happy, but as soon as we were outside two Federales escorting the cigarette boy approached us with rifles racked.
“Esos son, esos dos.” The vendor pointed at us.
“¡Paganse cabrones!” the Federale ordered us. Pay the vendor.
“What are you talking about? For what?” I asked.
“Los cigarros, los cigarros” the vendor kept bleating like a wind-up toy. “¡Me robaron!” He insisted we robbed him.
“We didn’t steal any cigarettes,” I stated, directing my comments to the Federales holding their rifles on us.
A paddy wagon pulled up, and one of the Federales motioned to Marcos to get in.
“You can’t be serious?” Marcos asked incredulously.
“¡Pa entro!” the Federale ordered.
The van driver swung the back panel door open and Marcos got in. The Federale gestured for me to depart but I couldn’t leave Marcos to fend for himself. I leaned low and entered the wagon with Marcos. “You’re not going alone,” I said to him. They slammed the doors, and it was immediately pitch black. The wagon jostled over the ruts and made us grip the steel bench. A small grated window frame separated the front seat from the prisoners. I knocked on it; a Federale slid it back. His cap band shimmered and his polished black brim shaded an arrogant leer on his lips.
I tried to bribe him. “Dejanos aqui y te doy cien dolas”
“A ver, pasalo”
He went for it. I twisted a hundred-dollar bill into a straw and pushed it through the mesh screen. The Federale took it, laughed, and slid the shutter closed.
“Yeah, man, leave us here, we gave you the money!”
The Federale slid the slot open again. “¿Qué quieres?”
“Drop us off! You got the money!”
He lifted a leather thong and slapped it against his palm. “¡Qiete!”
“You shut up, muthafucker!” I cried back.
The slot slammed and the paddy wagon lunged forward, jostling us for twenty minutes until it lurched to a stop. Keys scratched at the lock and the door swung open. An impeccably dressed guard reached in, and grabbed Marcos by the back of the shirt, and threw him out, sprawling him on the ground. Another Federale butted me in the back with his rifle.
We were led into a dank concrete facility. Hostile noises from prisoners in the cavernous labyrinth echoed as from a deep chamber. We were stripped and searched, and all our money was pocketed by the Commandante. He smoked a cigar and sported a
huge Pancho Villa mustache. Without asking what our charges were or speaking a word, we submitted. Had we uttered a word we would have been beaten. We were led down a corridor leading to cells. I paused to tie my shoelace. Bent over as I was, it hurt even worse when the guard kicked me in the chest and ordered me to move. We went into a courtyard blockhouse with communal cells on two sides facing each other and a compound in the middle. The guard opened a gate to a cell and pushed us inside.
Most of the men were Indian peasant opium runners, squatting shoulder to shoulder around the cell. I squeezed out a space to stand by the latrine, a hole in the floor, and Marcos crammed in between snoring Mexicans. The overwhelming stench of hangover breath was nauseating, compounded by layers of drunk vomit ingrained and putrefying in cement pores. Above us a guard patrolled, walking around the catwalk, cradling a rifle and peering down into the cells.
The cell could accommodate at most twenty prisoners, but it held about sixty. Marcos and I exchanged looks of despair. For weeks I slept standing up, ate corn meal for breakfast, tacos for lunch, and soup and tortillas for supper. We washed once a day at the spigot and took our turn at the horrible-smelling latrine, which was just a hole in the concrete.
We were released about three months later, Marcos to go home and I to the cantina for a meeting with Galvan.
Galvan was expecting me.
“You are angry about the Commandante? I cannot put my reputation on the line for one who does not work for me.”
“That’s fine, I’m finished. I don’t want anything to do with selling weed.”
A Place to Stand Page 9
