“Who you gonna call, Frank?” the host asks, chuckling.
“Who the hell do you think?”
A phone is placed on the low table before him.
Sinatra lifts the receiver, dials a zero.
“Hello, sweetheart. I’d like to place a long-distance call.
“Havana, Cuba.
“Mr. Fidel Castro.
“Tell him it’s Frank. Sinatra.”
Nothing else of Timothy’s evening survives to be retold. Sometime the following week, he buys a house in Oak Bluffs, paying forty thousand dollars in cash and taking occupancy the same day. By some accounts, he and his wife have been summering quietly there ever since. By others, the man whose marijuana Timothy brought ashore turns up that weekend. Let’s call him Blackbeard.
Blackbeard is a grizzled old cutthroat from Nova Scotia, a commercial fisherman who’s spent a lifetime trawling the corridors of the Atlantic, the Caribbean—hell, it’s all one ocean when you come down to it, he says, grinning at Timothy and turning to share the sunshine with the towering, snaggle-toothed colleague standing by his side, forearms crossed over a whiskey-barrel chest.
With no further preamble, Blackbeard comes to his point. There was some inclement weather on his last voyage north, he says, spreading his hands, and also some … let’s call it human error. A few pieces of cargo were lost. Word down at the docks is that one of those pieces found its way to land, and into the hands of—
He breaks off, laughs, and tells Timothy that he can probably guess the rest. Blackbeard is here to reclaim his property, and offer Timothy a small finder’s fee.
Timothy, to his surprise, finds that he is not nearly as frightened, standing at his new threshold with two seafaring drug-smugglers, as he was in the presence of Frank Sinatra. His breath remains regular. He shoves his hands into his pockets, and tells the truth.
“I sold it and bought this house.”
Blackbeard does not take the news in stride. He demands to be reimbursed in cash or cargo, and makes clear that his still-unintroduced colleague is conversant in the art of breaking legs.
Still, Timothy does not panic. He asks the men to follow him into his bedroom. From the top drawer of his dresser, he extracts an envelope, and from the envelope a thick wad of bills totaling five thousand dollars. This is all he has left from the sale, Timothy explains, and he offers the money to Blackbeard. In return for this gesture of good faith, he asks that Blackbeard be reasonable, and understand two things: first, that you cannot get water from a stone, and second, that a bale of marijuana is not a lost puppy, or an umbrella. When a man finds one, he can’t be expected to hold onto it until the rightful owner comes around.
Blackbeard’s face darkens, and Timothy adds that he will do everything possible to help the sailor recover his property from the man now in possession.
This man, Timothy assures him, is no stone.
Blackbeard stares at the professor for a moment, eyes narrow in the leathery pockets of his skin. Then he takes the envelope, hands it to his colleague, and growls, “Well?”
Haltingly, as if already regretting the deal, Timothy tells Blackbeard that the buyer is a man of tremendous wealth and discretion, whose name he does not know. But he is staying on a 168-foot yacht called The Southern Breeze; it is anchored in the middle of Vineyard Haven Harbor, between the drawbridge and the yacht club, accessible only by small craft. One must give the security guard a password in order to come aboard. The required phrase is “Cigar delivery from Mr. Castro.”
Blackbeard departs with threats and invective, pledging to return if Timothy’s rich customer gives him any trouble at all. That night, he and his colleague pilot a dinghy out to the yacht, equipped with a password, a plan, and a cache of small arms. They are not heard from again.
A wholly different version of the story holds that the entire bale of marijuana is eaten by goats. This is either accidental, or orchestrated. If orchestrated, the idea is to slaughter the livestock and sell the THC-laden meat, as a low-risk, high-reward method of alchemizing the marijuana into money.
This tale is always set in the mid-1980s, when recreational cocaine use is widespread, and hair-brained schemes abound. Most accounts claim the goats are killed as planned, and that for the remainder of the summer, the menu of a fine-dining establishment in Chilmark (long gone now, but infamous throughout the Reagan years for occasionally paying its kitchen staff in narcotics) features a fifty-eight-dollar braised goat stew. Despite the price, exorbitant even by the standards of Vineyard eateries, the dish sells out consistently.
An alternate telling has the goats, stoned out of their gourds, wandering off their owner’s property and laying tragicomic siege to a large outdoor wedding party being held on an adjacent plot. But such a thing is clearly too outrageous to be taken seriously.
PART II
SUMMER PEOPLE
BAD NIGHT IN HYANNISPORT
BY SETH GREENLAND
Hyannisport
I was dead. That was the main thing. And I never saw it coming. Maybe if I hadn’t been suffering from the worst hangover of my life I would have sensed something was amiss. The aftermath of a tequila bender can do that to you—dull your perceptions, make you a tad less sharp, create a membrane between you and reality that will keep your receptors from taking in the subtle signals that often spell the difference between survival and oblivion. That was the extent of the wisdom I had accrued over a lifetime: I was an expert on hangovers. But what do you expect from someone who had just turned nineteen?
This was 1974 and it had already been a strange year. Abba had won the Eurovision Song Contest but back then bad music was the least of it. Everything was crap. Bleak and corrupt. The Watergate saga had unspooled and Nixon had resigned. It was the middle of August and I had just finished my freshman year at a famous university. Here is all I will say about the school: you probably couldn’t get in. I don’t mean to sound arrogant. People have told me I can come off that way. But is it arrogance if it’s the truth? You probably couldn’t get in. Don’t kill the messenger.
I was spending that summer as a construction worker on Cape Cod. We were building condos in Hyannisport, not far from the Kennedy family compound. My job was to build forms, wooden structures into which concrete for the foundations would be poured. I was the only college kid on the crew and I spent my lunch hours sitting alone, eating bologna on white bread, and reading Atlas Shrugged. I wasn’t being a snob. I could just tell the other guys didn’t want to talk to me. Early in the summer I thought I had a friend on the crew, this guy Bob. He was around my age and had a sister. She was a couple of years younger and middling attractive. They were locals. I took her out one night, slipped something in her drink, and made it with her on the beach in Harwichport. I wasn’t sure if she remembered when she woke up. A couple of days later, Bob asked if I planned to call her, but I didn’t see the point. Although Bob and I were together at work all the time, he didn’t speak to me again until he told me she was pregnant. How was that my problem? I asked. Bob said he was going to kick my ass. I told him to try it.
Every night after work, I’d go to the beach. I’d swim out and pull off my shorts and float until the last rays of the sun disappeared over the horizon. As peaceful a scene as you could imagine, like a Winslow Homer painting that hung in the art museum at school. All this naked swimming had one profound effect: it made me incredibly horny. Nineteen-year-old boys are notorious hormonal cauldrons, but there was something about the feel of salt water against naked skin that induced a sensuality so sublime I desperately wanted someone to share it with. I already told you I wasn’t interested in Bob’s sister. So it was after one of these twilight immersions that I decided to call Margaret Shaughnessy.
Ah, Margaret, light of my life, fire of my loins! Yes, I know Nabokov wrote that in another context—we did him in freshman English—and Margaret was nineteen, not whatever age Dolores Haze was, but you get the idea. We had met two years earlier in Chamonix, France. Please don’t
think I’m some jetsetting dickweed who casually wings to Europe for coke-and-champagne-fueled skiing jaunts. It was my first time in France. I was there with my suburban Connecticut high school ski club and Margaret was with her family. We met standing in line at a ski lodge where I was trying to order sausages in my eleventh grade French. We spent the rest of the day gliding down glaciers cutting S-curves in the snow. That night we got drunk on Tuborg (no one checks IDs in France) and we skied together for the rest of the week. A mane of thick, honey-blond hair cascaded over her shoulders and down to the middle of her back. The perfection of her white teeth was rendered more exquisite by virtue of being marred by the left incisor leaning slightly out of alignment. Her skin, burnished by the Alpine sun, was flawless, although now would be a good time to say I never got to lay a hand on it. Our brief European idyll ended and we both returned to our American hometowns. Her family lived in the Boston area so we found ourselves more than a hundred miles apart. A few letters were exchanged, then we promptly lost touch.
Margaret’s family had a summer house in Hyannis. She had not forgotten me and we made plans to go out. Roomful of Blues were playing at a local club called Connie’s and I was no stranger to the unlikely aphrodisiacal nature of the 1940s-style swing they purveyed. If Margaret couldn’t swing dance I would teach her how. And then sex would ensue.
Nonunion construction workers didn’t make a lot of money on Cape Cod in 1974 and I had no intention of spending what little I had on drinks. So before picking Margaret up in my blue 1969 Peugeot, I purchased a pint of tequila. When I knocked on the door of her family’s sprawling house Margaret answered and looked exactly as I remembered her. The diffidence was new, but I ascribed that to not having seen each other in two years. Her parents loomed disapprovingly in the hallway. Gray and thin-lipped, they were a matching set ordered from an L.L. Bean catalog. Margaret’s mother would develop Alzheimer’s. Her father would die from a massive heart attack. I could tell they didn’t like me so I shot them my best Burt Reynolds smile and hustled their ripe daughter into the beckoning evening.
On the drive to the club, Margaret told me she had just finished her freshman year at the University of New Hampshire. I had no problem with that. It wasn’t like I was going to marry her. I asked her what she planned to major in and, honestly, it’s hard for me to remember her answer. She sounded less interested in it than I was. Next came some desultory reminiscing about the few days we had spent together in France. By the time we arrived at the club, I was afraid we might have exhausted the conversational possibilities for the evening.
Connie’s had once been a large, private home but walls had been ripped out and a bar and dance floor installed. Now the place jumped from June to Labor Day. I paid the cover charge and we sat at a table and ordered beers as we continued to chat about nothing. Margaret liked college. She was working as a waitress at a clam shack for the summer. One of her brothers had beaten the shit out of a guy she’d been dating and served six months in jail for assault. What? That was interesting. He’d just been released and had moved back in with Margaret’s parents. I asked her why he had done it and she told me it was because she had asked him. Did I want to meet him? Not really, I said. Then she laughed like she was kidding about the whole thing.
The band started to play and they were terrific. I had been eager for them to go on because I was hoping that, however difficult our verbal communication was, Margaret and I might find communion on the dance floor. But when I stood in front of her with my hand extended in my best Fred-to-Ginger gesture, she demurred. “I don’t know how to dance to this,” she said. I told her it didn’t matter, that it was easy, that I would teach her. I might as well have been talking to a lobster. The vivacity of the music, revelers popping and jiving all around us, the beers—nothing made an impression. It was then I realized that smoothly moving along a French glacier in a haze of sunshine and Tuborg will make anyone seem fascinating. I sat back down and stared at the band, who were tearing their way through “Choo Choo Ch’boogie” by Louis Jordan. Margaret went to the ladies’ room. My plan for the evening was not working and clearly I needed another. I drained the remainder of my second beer, removed the pint of tequila from my pocket and emptied the contents into the beer glass: sixteen ounces of pure Jose Cuervo. Over the next ninety minutes, I proceeded to drink every last drop. I have absolutely no recollection of what I discussed with Margaret. All I remember is that the tequila made the conversation a lot more scintillating than what had come before. But I was tired of not dancing.
I excused myself and stepped out on the small dance floor where I began to do the modified neo-lindy hop that passed for swing dancing in the post-hippie era. This is not the easiest thing to do without a partner. I looked completely spastic but I didn’t care what these people thought. Two taps of the left foot, two taps of the right, and I swung my arms around and spun, accidentally slapping the woman next to me hard across the face with the back of my hand. Her boyfriend took exception to this and smashed his fist into my chin, causing me to crash into a table where another couple was sitting. I heard breaking glass and the girl—blond, topsiders, and a tight red Lacoste shirt that encased striving breasts—swore loudly. As I was trying to stand, the bouncer grabbed my elbow. He was a gorilla in a Bruins jersey and when he escorted me outside, I made sure to tell him the Bruins sucked. Maybe that’s why he threw me to the pavement and kicked me in the gut.
I was spitting tequila-flavored stomach juice out of my mouth when I looked up and saw Margaret staring at me as if I were a traffic accident. I asked if she’d like a ride home but she told me she had already called her jailbird brother and he was on his way. This did not sound promising. I had no intention of meeting him so I said I’d call her and lurched toward my car.
Unsure of the way home, I gunned the Peugeot into the night. One turn, then another—in complete control of the car, thank you very much—and I found myself in Hyannisport. Traffic was remarkably light, and all going in the other direction. I was quite pleased with myself. The alcohol coursing through my bloodstream coated the recent events in a patina of hazy amusement, and I ascribed the evening to experience, a story I would tell the three guys from school with whom I was sharing a ramshackle garage apartment. Tomorrow, I surmised—ever the optimist—would be a better day. The flashing red and blue lights in my rearview mirror put a toe tag on that thought. I cursed under my breath and pulled over.
A bright light shone in my eyes. I squinted. “Can I help you, officer?” I asked.
The cop was young, in his twenties. He had pasty white skin and black hair, cut short. As he scoured the interior of the car with his flashlight it occurred to me that I might be more inebriated than I realized. He asked for my license and registration. I handed them to him with the most helpful-seeming alacrity. If I could convey the essential sweet harmlessness of my nature, I knew he would just wave me along.
“You know where you are?”
“Hyannisport.”
“This is a one-way street, and you’re driving the wrong way,” he said, to my immense chagrin. Then he ordered me out of the car where, beside the curb, illuminated by the headlights of the patrol car, I performed the DUI ballet: walk in a straight line one foot directly in front of the other, touch your nose, turn around, and repeat. I executed it perfectly. So I was stunned when he told me to place my hands behind my back.
“Exactly what do you think you’re doing?” I asked as he slipped the cuffs on, like I was Mr. Howell and he was Gilligan. He told me I was under arrest, which came as a shock, although in retrospect the handcuffs should have been a giveaway. Then he told me to shut the fuck up. In a Boston accent. Which I hate. The tequila said he should go fuck his mother. I noticed his name tag read, O’Rourke. He shoved me in the backseat of his car.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” I asked, as Officer O’Rourke drove toward the police station.
“You’re the dipshit I just arrested,” he replied.
“I think you�
��re missing my point,” I said. “I pay taxes, so that means you work for me. Take me home.”
O’Rourke laughed, but it wasn’t the kind of laugh you hear when a guy thinks something is funny. It was a little brutal. “Maybe you shouldn’t talk.”
“I’ll do all the talking I want,” I said. Yes, I was sitting handcuffed in the backseat of a Hyannisport police car, conversing with this submoron O’Rourke, but he would have to release me eventually and I’d have another piquant detail to add to the saga this evening had become. What would O’Rourke have? Another shitty night, then home to a beer and bad TV. I told him that. What was he going to do? Beat me to death? O’Rourke grunted in reply. Then I threw up in the back of his patrol car. Up came the tequila, along with the cheeseburger and fries I had eaten for dinner. I was careful to cant my body forward and didn’t get any on my khakis or white Brooks Brothers polo shirt. I told O’Rourke that if he had let me go he wouldn’t be stuck scraping the reeking detritus of my stomach off his backseat. Then I asked him if he knew what the word detritus meant. He did not say. Instead, he cursed me volubly. I asked him how he liked his job. More curses flew my way. I laughed at O’Rourke and took pains to let him know I was laughing at him. When I was done laughing, I said: “You fucking loser.” Then I said: “Do you really not know who I am?” It wasn’t like I was really anybody, but I was better than O’Rourke and wanted him to know it. He didn’t answer. I got a glimpse of his face in the rearview mirror. He had that look Elmer Fudd gets right before he shoots Bugs Bunny. Then Elmer pulls the trigger and the shotgun blows up in his face. I asked him if he ever watched Bugs Bunny. O’Rourke would be killed in a one-car accident on Route 28 nine years later. If I had known that at the time, I might have treated him better.
When we arrived at the police station, O’Rourke led me into the squad room. There were five officers there and they all looked as if they had just returned from a saturated fat convention. “If this is what the police force looks like,” I remarked, making sure it was loud enough for them all to hear, “no wonder crime in America is exploding.” It was like talking to a painting, but not a real painting by an actual artist—more like the kind where dogs play poker. I sat down and one of the fat bastards requested I blow into a straw attached to something that looked like an old radio. It was a breathalyzer, someone explained. I was bored with the conversation—honestly, it was like throwing a tennis ball at a marshmallow wall—so I did what they asked. This would be a good time to tell you that I received a nearly perfect score on my college boards. I was accustomed to doing well on tests, so when I registered a 0.27 on the breathalyzer, I wasn’t surprised. 0.08 is considered drunk. At the time I found this very amusing, but my laughter failed to move them.
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