Mr Nice

by Howard Marks

  ‘Good luck, Komo. Maybe see you in Bangkok one day.’

  ‘Me never go Bangkok, British. They kill me there. Me American. Stay here.’

  ‘They’ll kill you here, too, Komo,’ I said, ‘but much slower and more painfully.’

  ‘Slow is okay, British, and very slow is very good.’

  I couldn’t risk telephoning anyone with the news. It might not be true, and besides, the phones were tapped. If the authorities discovered that I was leaving, they just might change my travel plans.

  There were eight others leaving that night: an Americanised Nigerian of British nationality and seven South Americans.

  ‘Is this all your property, Marks?’

  I had approximately one hundred dollars, a pair of shorts, nail-clippers, comb, toothbrush, alarm clock, papers confirming my ‘release’ date of two weeks ago, a credit card I could use in prison vending-machines, and five books, including one written about me, Hunting Marco Polo.

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’

  I put the money in my pocket. It felt strange. First time for over six years. How often was I going to be thinking that? First time for over six years. Money, sex, wine, a joint of marijuana, a bath, an Indian curry. All around the corner.

  My other belongings were put into a cardboard box. I was given a pair of blue jeans with legs about a foot too long and an extremely tight white tee-shirt. This was called being ‘dressed out’, a gift from the United States Government for those re-entering the free world.

  We were handcuffed, but not chained, and squeezed into a small van. Then we picked up two other guys from another prison exit. One seemed Hispanic, the other seemed northern European. Everyone was silent, excited by his own thoughts. The van’s engine made a terrible racket as it headed towards Houston and the dawn, just beginning to break. By nine o’clock, it was like sitting on a rock in a sardine can on fire. By ten o’clock, we were sitting in an enormous holding cell at Houston International Airport, along with over fifty other criminal aliens.

  The northern European asked the Nigerian, ‘Where do you live?’ His accent was strong South Welsh. I had never met a Welshman in an American prison, nor heard of one. I’d met very few Americans who’d heard of Wales.

  ‘Are you Welsh?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, looking at me with deep suspicion.

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Oh yeah!’ Deeper suspicion.

  ‘Which part are ’ew from?’ I asked, laying on the accent a bit.

  ‘Swansea,’ he said, ‘and ’ew?’

  ‘Twenty-five miles away from ’ew in Kenfig Hill,’ I answered.

  He started laughing.

  ‘You’re not him, are you? God Almighty! Jesus wept! Howard bloody Marks. Marco fucking Polo. They’re letting you go, are they? That’s bloody great. Good to meet you, boy. I’m Scoogsie.’

  We had a chat, a long one. Scoogsie explained how he, too, had just finished a drug sentence, and he told me of his early days in the business.

  ‘My wife has worked for a long time in a drug rehabilitation centre in Swansea. Not a bad partnership, really. I get them hooked; she gets them off. We keep each other going, like.’

  Memories of South Welsh humour had often helped me through the bad times in prison. Now I was hearing it for real. I was heading back towards my roots, and they were reaching out for me.

  Looking confused, the Nigerian belatedly replied to Scoogsie’s original question.

  ‘I live in London. I am being deported there. I am never coming back here. They took away my money, my property, and my business. Just because someone I didn’t know swore in court that I sold him some drugs.’

  An all too familiar story.

  The number of deportees in the converted aeroplane hangar was dwindling. ‘Anyone else going to London?’ Scoogsie asked.

  No one.

  Soon, there were just the three of us left. We’d found out that the Continental Airlines flight to London should be leaving in an hour. An Immigration Officer came in holding a gun.

  ‘This way, you three.’

  A small van took us to the gangway. With his gun, the Immigration Officer indicated we should climb the steps. The Nigerian led the way. Scoogsie followed and spat dramatically on American soil.

  ‘None of that!’ ordered the immigration man, waving the gun.

  ‘Don’t mess it up now, Scoogsie. You know what they’re like.’

  ‘I know what the fuckers are like, all right,’ said Scoogsie. ‘I hate them. I wouldn’t piss in their mouths if their throats were on fire. I’m never going to eat another McDonalds. No more cornflakes for breakfast. And pity help any Yank who asks me the way anywhere. Let anyone dare try to pay me in dollars. God help him.’

  ‘Take it easy, Scoogsie. Let’s get on board.’

  Walking into the aeroplane was like entering the starship Enterprise. Passengers with spacey haircuts and clown clothes took out computers of all shapes and sizes. Had things really changed that much, or had I forgotten what it was like? Lights flickered on and off. Glamorous and smiling women, the like of whom had existed only as photos on a prison cell wall, walked the aisles. One actually talked to me.

  ‘Mr Marks, your seat number is 34H. It’s in the aisle. We shall hold your passport until London. Then we’ll give it to the British authorities.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that, but I was too mesmerised to pay much attention. Scoogsie and the Nigerian were placed out of sight. I sat down, gloated over magazines and newspapers and played with knobs adjusting seat position and volume of canned entertainment, like a child on his first flight. I had flown on commercial airlines thousands of times before, but I remembered none of them. Take-off was magic. I saw Texas disappearing. Then, all of America vanished. There is a God.

  ‘Would you like a cocktail before your meal, Mr Marks?’

  I had drunk no alcohol and smoked nothing for three years. I was proud of my self-discipline. Perhaps I should carry on as a teetotaller.

  ‘Just an orange juice, please.’

  A tray of food was placed in front of me. In the old days, I would rarely eat while flying: apart from the caviare and foie gras given to first-class passengers on long-haul flights, it was all fairly disgusting and well below the cordon bleu standard to which I had become accustomed. Prison fare had cured me of that bit of pompous pseudery. This meal was the best I could remember, and I loved fiddling around with the little packets of condiments. There was a very small bottle of red wine on the tray. Surely, I could drink that. It was exquisite. I ordered six more.

  I began worrying about the remark made by the air hostess. Which British authorities? There were so many I’d upset and so much they could still do me for. While I was spending the last six years in prison, the British authorities had obtained evidence that I had been involved in countless other marijuana and hashish importations to England, ones that I hadn’t been charged with. They’d also found more of my false passports. There are no statutes of limitation in British law. They could bust me if they wanted to.

  Two books had been written about me, each making it clear that I was an incorrigible rogue with nothing but contempt for the forces of law enforcement. Fourteen weeks earlier, at the end of a high-profile, colourful, nine-week trial, I had been acquitted of being the ringleader for the largest-ever importation of marijuana into Europe – fifteen tons of Colombia’s best. The charges had been brought by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. It had been their biggest-ever bust. They would never forget me.

  A chief inspector of police had committed suicide after being blamed for leaking my involvement with the British Secret Service to the press. Scotland Yard had lost a good man because of me. There wouldn’t be many friends there.

  MI6 weren’t too happy with me either, smuggling dope with the IRA when I was supposed to be spying on them.

  Ten years ago, after assessing me as having earned two million pounds from cannabis smuggling, the Inland Revenue reluctantly settled for a tot
al tax liability of sixty thousand pounds. As a result of public proclamations by the most senior of DEA staff, it was now accepted as a matter of fact that I had well over two hundred million pounds in Eastern bloc bank accounts. The tax man would want some, no doubt.

  Even if the British felt I had been punished enough, Special Agent Craig Lovato was bully enough to change their minds. During the mid-1980s, he’d almost single-handedly mobilised the law enforcement agencies of fourteen different countries (United States, Great Britain, Spain, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Pakistan, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, and Australia) to band together in unprecedented international co-operation to get me locked up forever. He would be bound to take my premature release as a personal failure and suffer extreme loss of face. He’d get the British to arrest me on arrival. He’d get tough with them and promise them helicopter rides, computers, and days shopping in Miami malls. What was waiting for me at London’s Gatwick airport?

  A large-scale map appeared on the screen and indicated we were descending over the Welsh mountains. Kenfig Hill seemed a long time ago.

  Two

  MASTER MARKS

  My earliest memory is of throwing a cat into the deep ocean from the deck of a ship. Why did I do it? I swear that I expected the cat to go for a swim, catch fish, and return triumphantly. So, I didn’t know any better and mustn’t blame myself. But maybe consigning Felix to a watery grave was symptomatic of a character far from nice. If it’s any comfort to cat lovers, the image still haunts me. Whenever my life flashes before me, which happens not only when I’m about to die, that cat’s face is the first I see.

  We were on the Indian Ocean. The ship was the Bradburn, a 10,000-ton freighter owned by Reardon Smith and Co., Cardiff. The cat belonged to the Prince of Siam, and was the darling of the rough-and-ready ship’s crew. My father, Dennis Marks, son of a boxer/coal miner and a midwife, was the skipper of the Bradburn, and he was coming to the end of his twenty-one years’ service in the British merchant navy. He had been allowed to take my mother, Edna, schoolteaching daughter of an opera singer and a coal miner, and me on various lengthy sea journeys. Between 1948 and 1950, I went everywhere. I remember very little, just the cat. Perhaps the reason this cat is indelibly imprinted on my psyche is that when my murderous actions were discovered my father was constrained to give me a spanking in front of the crew, who were seething with hate and developing murderous intentions of their own. He has never hit me since.

  The incident did not turn me into an animal lover (though I do like cats best), but it has made me very hesitant of consciously inflicting pain on any creatures. Even cockroaches in prison cells do not have to worry for their lives (except in Louisiana). And if I do have to admit to any religion, I risk the hot flames of a Christian hell and say I’m a Buddhist, especially in Bangkok.

  Although most inhabitants of the South Wales coalfield spoke Dylan Thomas English rather than Welsh, my mother was an exception. Her mother hailed from the Druidic wilds of West Wales. For the first five years of my life, I spoke only Welsh. The next five years, I attended an English-speaking primary school in Kenfig Hill, the small Glamorganshire mining village where I was born. Apart from my sister, Linda (a few years my junior), I had just one real friend, Marty Langford, whose father not only owned the local ice-cream shop but also had won a nationwide competition for the best ice-cream. Marty and I were bright infants and most of the time could hold our own in schoolyard scraps.

  While waiting for my 11-plus results, I decided to fall ill. I was very bored with school and needed some attention and sympathy. I had previously discovered that the mercury in a regular clinical thermometer could be flicked up almost as easily as it could be flicked down. So long as no one was watching, I could decide what temperature to be. It’s true that near the thermometer’s bulb a gap in the mercury line was visible, but no one examines the end. Occasionally, I could not risk flicking it up without being caught, so I shamelessly fabricated symptoms such as sore throat, dizziness, nausea, and headache, while my temperature when I was unobserved would seemingly oscillate from just below normal to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Very few diseases produce roller-coaster temperature graphs. One is rather unimaginatively called undulant fever, although it is sometimes referred to as rock fever or even Gibraltar fever. It tended to occur in the tropics. Apparently St Paul had it. My father had certainly had it, unless he, too, was scamming. Although the local doctor was sceptical (he knew I was at it), he had little choice other than to agree with the medical specialists’ diagnosis that I, like Dad and St Paul, had contracted undulant fever. I was placed in an isolation ward in the nearest general hospital at Bridgend.

  This was great stuff. Dozens of confused and interested doctors, nurses, and students surrounded my bed and were incredibly kind and considerate to me. They gave me all sorts of dope and all sorts of tests. My temperature was taken several times a day, and, unbelievably, I would sometimes be left alone with a thermometer, so I could engineer another fever. I would also take sneaky looks at enormously bulky files labelled, rather unjustly, ‘Not to be Handled by the Patient’. I developed a genuine interest in medicine and an even more genuine interest in nurses. I suppose I must have had erections before, but I certainly hadn’t associated their onset with leering at women. Now I did, but I still had no idea that these sensations were intimately linked with the survival of the human species.

  After a few weeks of sex and drugs, I became bored again. I wanted to go home and play with my Meccano set. I stopped flicking up the thermometer and complained no more. Unfortunately, in those days hospital, like prison today, was much harder to get out of than to get into. My anxiety to leave the hospital bed took away my appetite. Accordingly, I was presenting the specialists with yet another symptom for them to log and ponder over. Eventually, by drinking gallons of Lucozade, my appetite returned, and I was discharged to undergo convalescence. My first scam was over.

  In South Wales, there were more pubs than chapels and more coal mines than schools. The local education authority sent me to a school named Garw Grammar School. Garw is the Welsh for rough, presumably referring to the terrain rather than the inhabitants. An old-fashioned co-educational grammar school, it lay at the dead end of a valley which was an eleven-mile, forty-five-minute, fun-filled school bus journey away from my home. Sheep were often to be seen wandering through the schoolyards, and occasionally they would attempt to graze in the classrooms.

  I received an intensive crash-course in the facts of life, which form the first few lessons of the unofficial syllabus of any Welsh grammar school. I was told that a carefully handled erection could produce intense pleasure through ejaculation and that a well-guided ejaculation could produce children. The techniques of masturbation were painstakingly explained. In the privacy of my bedroom, I tried. I really did. Over and over again. I tried very hard indeed. Nothing. This was terrible. I didn’t mind not having kids. I just wanted to come, like everybody else, and my inability to do so plagued and depressed me. I had yet to realise that if one had to fail at anything, one would choose failing to become a wanker.

  I had stopped scrapping and fighting, partly because I had lost the knack, i.e., I was getting beaten, and partly because I couldn’t stand physical contact with boys. The nurses had spoiled me. God bless them.

  Mutual masturbation in the sports and physical training lessons was not unknown, and the idea of being coerced to participate and admit my shortcoming (and demonstrate my no-coming) terrified me. Relying on my increased medical knowledge and, once again, flicking the mercury thermometer, I developed a mysterious illness and was excused from all school physical activities. This rendered me a wimp (though the word then and there was sissy) in the eyes of my peers. My ability to do well in school examinations made me into a swot, which in some ways was worse. My life was not going the way I wanted it to: girls ignored me and boys made fun of me. Some radical changes were necessary.

  Elvis Pre
sley clearly suffered from none of these problems. I watched his movies and listened to his records endlessly. I read everything about him. I copied his hairstyle, tried to look like him, and attempted to sound and move like him. I failed. But I was getting there, or so I thought. After all, I was slim, tall, dark-haired, and thick-lipped; and by standing up straight I could even lose my round shoulders and pot-belly. Also, since the age of six, I had been taking twice-weekly piano lessons at a neighbour’s home. To my parents’ dismay, I now stopped practising Für Elise and the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata in the early morning and directed my talents towards giving note-perfect renditions of Teddy Bear and Blue Suede Shoes to an imaginary audience.

  At school, I decided to become really mischievous. This, I hoped, would make me unpopular with the staff and popular with my classmates. To a large extent it did, but my lack of physical toughness continued to bestow upon me an aura of wimpishness, and I was subject to occasional bullying. I didn’t yet have sufficient pluck to pull out my Elvis card. What I needed was a bodyguard.

  There were no organised extra-curricular activities at the Garw Grammar School because most of the pupils lived in scattered and fairly isolated mining communities. Each village had its own social life and its own youth, only a few of whom attended a grammar school the other end of the valley. Each village also had its tough kid. Kenfig Hill’s was Albert Hancock, an extremely wild and strong James Dean look-alike, a few years my senior. I used to see him around, but I was scared stiff of him. So were most people when they were sober. It was impossible to conceive of a better bodyguard. How on earth could I befriend him? It was easier than I thought. I supplied cigarettes and asked him to show me how to inhale. I made myself available to run errands for him. I ‘lent’ him money. A long-lasting alliance began to develop. My schoolfriends were too intimidated to taunt me further: Albert’s fierce reputation was known for miles around. When I was fourteen, Albert took me to a pub to sample my first pint. There was an old piano in the bar. With alcoholic courage, I strolled over and accompanied myself singing Blue Suede Shoes. The clientele loved it. The good times had begun.