The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  “My happiness and joy come from the inside now and not the outside, so I don’t have to have those things. Back then, I just had to be on top, I just had to be seen. It’s the pride of life, that’s how you get caught up in those things. But now, none of those things mean anything. I’m saved, I’m satisfied.… I love it, man, it’s the best life I can have.”

  …

  Of all the members of our team, Damian is by far the most grounded in the church. With most of the others, religion and spirituality rarely arise in the course of our conversations. Dino mentions in passing that his kids go to Sunday school at the Greek Orthodox Church. Chris attends weekly meditation classes and practices in the mornings.

  In 2007, Coach McClain started his own church. He shares space with an older, more established Central Area congregation and preaches to a dedicated flock of about seventy-five people on Sunday afternoons. Every Wednesday evening, he and his wife, Diane, host Bible study at their house. At one session I attend, McClain sits at his kitchen table and leads a group of ten people, including men, women, and teenagers, through a reading of the book of Colossians. For the McClains, the church is a natural extension of what they’ve done for decades—open their lives to people in the community who need help, guidance, and love.

  Willie Jr. occasionally goes to his dad’s services. One day, when we go to lunch at a Mongolian barbecue place in the South End, I ask Will if he’s religious. “I know all about church, but I don’t lead the life of a Christian,” he says. Will is big, boisterous, and quick with a joke. He still loves sports, and tells me he enjoys entering darts competitions at taverns, where he often wins money. “I still drink, go out,” he says. “They say you can’t live Christ’s life when you do that.”

  With Damian, his faith and the church have shifted his life’s trajectory, removing him from one path and putting him on another. Though Maitland did not undergo a religious conversion like Damian, he, too, has put a lot of thought into the direction of his life. He’s made major adjustments since we were kids.

  If Maitland is surprised when I first reach him on the phone, he doesn’t show it. I am so taken aback by the lack of inflection in his voice that I ask if his dad, who had given me his number, had told him I was going to call. “No,” he answers, and lets it drop. I wonder if somehow Mait’s been expecting an old Lakeside classmate to phone out of nowhere and ask him about basketball.

  We chat a few minutes, catching up. Maitland is working at a winery in the Willamette Valley, south of Portland. We set a time for the coming weekend to talk further. When I call on Saturday, he doesn’t pick up. I leave a message but don’t hear back.

  It takes two more years of intermittent phone calls before, one day, Mait calls while I’m in Seattle. I’d left him a few messages letting him know I was planning to drive down to California the next week and would like to see him on the way. When his number comes up on my caller ID, I’m so shocked I do a double take.

  We plan to meet the next weekend. When I ask him his address, Maitland says, “An address won’t do you much good.”

  On the way down, I pass through Portland and continue another thirty miles south. I exit and head west, crawling through what seems to be an unending succession of little towns lined with strip malls and regulated by poorly coordinated traffic lights. Past the town of Newberg, it all thins out as I head toward Yamhill, which has a population of roughly eight hundred people.

  The two-lane road is empty of traffic as I speed past a series of wheat, barley, and hops fields. Yamhill itself has one blinking traffic light on the main street. Maitland lives eight miles out of town. The driveway to his place starts where the road turns from pavement to dirt. As Mait has instructed, I turn left when I see a dead oak tree. My car bounces up and down as I drive up a hill along a rutted path toward a white one-bedroom house—almost a shack. I pull up under the sheltering branches of a massive cottonwood tree and look out over the valley below, the yellow leaves of grapevines shimmering on the hill opposite. Stepping out of my car, I see beer- and wine-brewing materials—five-gallon glass jugs, various measures and funnels—arranged under the awning by the door.

  Maitland comes out to greet me, followed by his small, mixed-breed dog, Sangi. Mait is big—at more than six feet tall, he has packed some weight onto his frame. He wears black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt, has dark blond hair, and a long, dark beard. My first thought, as he ambles toward the car, is that it looks like I’m the first visitor who’s been out here in a while.

  “Quite honestly, I really loved basketball, but I could have cared less about games,” Maitland tells me. “I could have taken or left playing basketball on the high school team. It didn’t really bother me whether I got playing time or not.”

  We’re sitting across a table in brewpub in McMinnville, about fifteen miles from Maitland’s house. He’s been working twelve- to sixteen-hour days over the past few weeks, and he hasn’t been able to get out much.

  It’s the fall wine harvest, the busiest time of the year for winemakers. There are literally tons of grapes to pick, sort, crush, and shift into fermenting vats. The work has left Maitland’s hands stained a dark purple, the color deepening to black on the creases around his knuckles and the lines on his palm. While his hands look like those of an old crone who has cooked up too many potions, Maitland’s face appears almost totally untouched by time, as if he hadn’t aged a day since I’d last seen him. His eyes are soft and blue.

  We’ve come into town so Maitland can wash his clothes, with me following in my car to allow Sangi to ride shotgun in his red pickup. McMinnville, home of about thirty thousand people, is a rough-and-ready rural Oregon town leavened with bed-and-breakfasts and other businesses catering to the tourists who come to sample the area’s famous pinot noir. At the laundromat, Maitland—who has shaved and changed into jeans and a flannel shirt—throws a small bundle of clothes into a front loader while kids run around us, shrieking and joking in Spanish.

  Maitland first learned to make wine in France, where he worked at a few vineyards after graduating from Western Washington University with a degree in French and chemistry. When he came back to the United States, Mait went to work at his dad’s small winery near the Canadian border. In 1999 he moved down to Oregon to start work at a much-lauded boutique winery. He’s just gotten a new job as an assistant winemaker at a much larger winery. The work has been demanding—getting up at five in the morning to make the commute in, arriving home at nine or ten—and the weariness shows on his face as we sip on dark beers and talk about basketball.

  “I can’t speak to my father’s motivations,” Maitland says when I ask him about the team. “I have wondered at various times, you know, why did this all really happen? What was going on?”

  Maitland had, for me, been an object of envy and sympathy. Randy Finley was a big and charismatic man, and his energy was uplifting and contagious. But he sometimes seemed so dedicated to his own visions that they clouded his perception. One of those things he couldn’t quite see clearly was perhaps his own son. Randy, it was obvious, really wanted Maitland to succeed in basketball. To an outsider, it was clear that Mait, while having the size, ability, and temperament to make a decent role player, did not have the athleticism or desire to do more.

  “I was probably just as much into sports as other people, but sports have not really remained an integral part of my life in terms of what I do,” Maitland says. “I’ve heard my dad say many times that ‘I wanted you to experience sports,’ that basketball is a great team sport and skiing is a great individual sport. It’s all fine and good and it’s hard to say what the correct or incorrect thing is. But I was pushed or borderline bullied into doing that stuff.

  “As I’ve gotten older it’s more just that masculine, kind of testosterone-driven thing, you know, I’m not into that, I’m not into winners and losers and proving I’m better than somebody else,” Maitland says. “That’s the way I try to live my life these days. I try not to feel the need to
try to prove to someone that I’m right and they’re wrong, and I’m better and you’re worse. As long as it stays within the realms of the game, the sport, I’m fine with that. I just don’t personally get a kick out of it.”

  Whenever Maitland came up in a conversation with any of my other teammates, the reaction was similar. Mait was a rock—stoic and solid, a good guy. Maitland, perhaps through his silence more than anything, seemed to have things pretty together. Willie Jr., especially, remembers him with fondness, recalling things they did together as the sons of the team’s organizers, such as the time when Will, his dad, and Damian took a trip with Maitland and Randy to a cabin the Finleys owned on the Oregon coast, where Randy took everybody out in a boat to go crabbing.

  “I got real close to Mait,” Will says. “I remember I used to call him on the phone when I was at Prep and he’d talk me through my homework.”

  Maitland looks shocked when I relay Will’s words to him. “I don’t remember helping Willie out all that much,” he says. “I have good memories of him, definitely. But at that point in time, I was a pretty quiet, shy guy. It took a lot to get me to open up.”

  The pressure at Lakeside to excel academically, socially, and in sports, Maitland says, made it difficult to tell anyone he was struggling. “It was hard to admit any problems period, because people are expected to be very good if not perfect,” he says. “I never felt like things worked very well for me at Lakeside; I think I would have been better off probably elsewhere.”

  Maitland tells me he remembers feeling anxious, not wanting to talk to anyone, being on the outside and observing. “That social anxiety and depression made it hard for me to follow any friendship,” he says. “A lot of people mistook me for being even-keel, and just slightly aloof and unemotional. That was just the way that I dealt with my problems. It was better to shut down, turn around, and not deal with things—be unemotional.”

  In the years since school, Maitland has tracked his own path as much as anyone from our basketball team—moving away from Seattle, living a rural life, rethinking the lessons about masculinity we learned as kids. He also has dealt with depression, for which he has found that medication has helped. “I think most of my problem is just a chemical imbalance, because it’s just like a switch off or on,” Maitland says.

  Over the years, he says, he’s worked on coming to terms with his dad’s very large shadow. “He’s a very intense guy. It took a long time to learn how to deal with him and be myself and not just acquiesce,” he says. “There’s enough that we butted heads about, but by and large we both have our mutual respect at this point.”

  That evening, we return to Maitland’s home. From inside, looking out the windows into the dark, it feels a long way from anywhere. The night seems to have coated the shack like a layer of syrup.

  There is only one chair in the small living room—a padded armchair upholstered with black vinyl. I sit in it and Maitland on a beanbag. Sangi—named for Sangiovese, the Italian grape—runs inside and leaps onto my lap, leaving mud all over my jeans. Maitland lightly scolds the dog, grabs it, and cleans its paws with a wad of paper towels.

  A chess set sits on a folding stand in a corner. The TV is piled with instructional yoga videotapes, and a bookshelf holds works on wine, yoga, and chemistry. Jugs of homemade beer sit under a table near the door.

  Maitland tells me he was surprised to run into Chris a few years ago. Chris, at least in his hard-core playing style, was about the opposite of Maitland—during practices in high school at Lakeside, Maitland was given the punishing job of defending him. “He’s turned into a pretty interesting person, not what you might necessarily have expected,” Maitland says. “I think a lot of what you saw was just a product of where he came from and his family.”

  Maitland says that the long days making wine are tiring. “Part of getting into the wine industry for a lot of people is an issue of quality of life and the romance of winemaking and all of that, but for a lot of us, it doesn’t end up being that way at all. It’s just a lot of hard work. You’re doing things that you like and love, but I’d like to be able to find just a slightly more sustainable work position.”

  He tells me he likes the variety of the job and the way it involves coming up with practical solutions. “You got all sorts of things you gotta do. There’s problem-solving: How do we move this wine from here to there? Driving a forklift is kind of the same situation, a geometric puzzle: How do I get to this pallet, dig this out? It’s not the same thing day in, day out. There’s variety. You solve a problem and there’s a tangible result. It’s good, physical, hands-on labor and troubleshooting.

  “And in the end you’re hopeful you have helped to make something that people will enjoy. Whether it’s the greatest wine in the world doesn’t matter, just as long as someone somewhere appreciates it.”

  When we wake up the next morning at five, the house is completely fogged in. Maitland turns on NPR, and the sedate voices of Morning Edition tell of new bombings in Iraq. I pack up my sleeping bag, and Maitland brews some coffee.

  The night was cold. I stumble out to warm up the engine of my car and flip on the parking lights, which glow in the mist. Maitland rounds up Sangi, who has been frolicking in the dark. I follow the taillights of his pickup down the hill. We turn right at the dead oak and drive through the deserted roads on the way to the winery. Maitland drives slow, at twenty-five miles an hour, to avoid hitting any deer that might wander into our path.

  I can’t see any farther than the cab of his truck. Inside, I make out the back of Maitland’s head. Next to him, Sangi pokes hers out the window as we silently cut a line through the fog and the fields.

  The System

  The evening of January 21, 2006, was a festive Saturday night in Seattle. The next day the Seahawks were scheduled to play the Carolina Panthers in the NFC Championship game. If the Seahawks won, the team would reach the Super Bowl for the first time in its thirty-year history. The clubs downtown were crowded with people getting a start on the next day’s merriment.

  The parking lot next to Déjà Vu, a strip club near the entrance to the Pike Place Market, one of Seattle’s top tourist attractions, was packed with cars and people. At eleven P.M., Myran Barnes was wandering among them. He had on a black baseball hat, a black jacket, and black jeans. Two undercover cops standing in front of the strip joint—a garish, brightly lit place with a pink-and-black color scheme and a logo of two crossed female legs in fishnet stockings on the wall next to the door—saw Myran talking to a man sitting in an SUV.

  As Myran walked away from the vehicle, one of the cops approached him.

  “Anything going on?” he asked Myran.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Forty.”

  “Who you with?”

  The cop pointed at his partner.

  Myran asked who had the money. The cop said his friend did.

  “I’ll take you to it, but one of you has to wait here,” Myran said. The cop said he would stay behind, and Myran walked off with his partner.

  The pair headed two blocks east on Pike Street. When they got to Third Avenue, Myran told the cop to hold on. He walked over to a man standing near a bus stop, who called over a girl who was waiting inside the shelter. The three conferred, and the girl walked back to the bus shelter. When she returned, she handed a bag of crack cocaine to Myran. Myran returned to the officer, handed him the drugs, and accepted $40.

  The man and the girl who had given Myran the drugs headed north up Third Avenue before a team of cops sprang on them, putting them facedown on the sidewalk and handcuffing them. Myran, who had walked in the other direction, turned around, saw them, and took off running. A bus happened to stop, and Myran climbed on. For a moment he thought he was in the clear, until he saw that several police officers had boarded behind him. Myran took the two $20 bills out of his pocket and held them out. “Here’s your marked money,” he said.

  This was far from Myran’s first arrest. A little more than a y
ear earlier, he’d been busted in similar circumstances. An undercover female officer had approached Myran and asked him for some “cream.” Myran told her he had to make a phone call. He then gave the officer his driver’s license and a $5 bill to hold while he went off. When he came back several minutes later, he handed the officer 0.1 gram of crack cocaine. The officer gave him a marked $20 bill. The arrest team moved in a few minutes later.

  It was a little different this time. The girl who had supplied the crack was searched and found to be carrying 11 grams of cocaine. She was only sixteen years old. The cops booked Myran for violation of the Uniform Controlled Substances Act and for using a minor as a drug courier. The girl’s involvement, whether Myran knew her or not, raised the seriousness of the alleged crime to a level III drug offense, the highest in the state of Washington. As the cops booked him into the King County jail that night, Myran was facing the prospect of a decade in prison.

  As you drive through downtown Seattle on Interstate 5, the King County Correctional Facility is just west of the freeway. A twelve-story concrete building coated with beige paint, it could be easily mistaken for a parking garage. At any one time, there are about 1,350 prisoners inside. The main entrance is on Fifth Avenue. When prisoners need to appear in King County Court, they walk through a windowless sky bridge that spans from the jail, over the top of the King County administration building across the street, and into the courthouse, which takes up the block between Third and Fourth avenues.

  After the day when Damian and I ran into Myran on the street, it had seemed just a matter of time before he was picked up. The areas where he tended to hang out—downtown near the Pike Place Market and a little bit north, up in Belltown—are the targets of constant stings by the narcotics police. For someone involved in the lowest level of the cocaine trade, they are the most obvious places to go to turn a quick deal. If you sell drugs in those areas, it is almost guaranteed you will be caught before too long.