Saltwater cowboy, p.2
Saltwater Cowboy, page 2
CHAPTER TWO
How did I end up in prison? How did an outdoors-loving boy from the Midwest wind up as one of the most successful marijuana haulers in the United States? When you look back at my childhood and where I came from, you don’t see the stereotypical story of a poor kid from a rough neighborhood who seems destined for a life as an outlaw. You see a kid who was born near a military base and who grew up in a nice neighborhood on a lake. You just never know how these stories are going to turn out.
I was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina. My father was with the 82nd Airborne, stationed at Fort Bragg, so I guess that makes me an army brat. My father’s career went from jumping out of airplanes to jumping into them, as he traveled to every city on the East Coast, selling construction equipment. He was gone for months at a time, so I didn’t see much of him while growing up. That was just how it was.
My mom went to work each day several towns over as a swimming instructor and an educator to children with special needs, jobs she held all through my early years. She taught my oldest brother, Mike, to swim in the bathtub before he could walk. My middle brother, Pat, and I were taught to swim by age one. There was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing even the least bit dysfunctional in our family life.
My brothers and I were raised to be independent. However, if we strayed out of bounds by even the slightest margin and my old man was around to see it, he would snatch us back and make those boundaries very clear. Dad was a harsh disciplinarian. He grew up getting his ass whipped by his old man, and he believed it had made him the man he was. It was a tradition, traceable back to the days when young dirty-faced, barefoot boys would be sent on merciless quests to retrieve the very switches that would be used to emboss their fathers’ message across their asses. It only made sense to my father to continue the tradition; he believed firmly in it. That was just the way it was in those days. Mom tried to follow suit in his absence, but we boys outgrew her gentler brand of discipline.
The memories of North Carolina are very vivid and very fun. My family’s roots are in Ohio, so my grandma and grandpa, aunt and uncle (who was my mom’s brother), and cousins shared a beach house with us each summer on Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It wasn’t all that far from where I was born, and the best part is that it was right next door to a miniature golf course. As kids we would play on the beach and in the surf during the day, and after dinner each night, right up until bedtime, we would play mini-golf. Then it was bedtime and the adults’ turn to cut loose. They partied as we kids sat in the upstairs windows that overlooked the spinning windmill, the mysterious lost cave, the impossible maze. We could see the grown-ups as they drank, smoked cigarettes, and danced to the doo-wop and Motown that blasted from loudspeakers hung from lampposts, where strings of brightly colored lights lined the boardwalk.
As I approached my teen years, my father’s sales career took off and he was given a Midwest territory that included Milwaukee and Chicago. I guess the company figured he could utilize either city’s airport to keep up with his East Coast territories. So we settled in between, in Wisconsin, on the north shore of a lake that bears the town’s name: Delavan. This is where I began and finished high school. And where I would be introduced to the leafy green plant that changed my life
* * *
This is how I remember my family’s home. North Shore Drive is one of those lazy, shady, slow-winding back roads that, at times, tunnel their way beneath the branches of two-hundred-year-old oak trees. You can taste the cool, crisp lake air in the spring as it passes over your tongue like a sweet drink. The mailboxes and oak trees, those beautiful lake homes and brightly colored summer cottages, flit by like frames of a film. Just ahead a mailbox reads “McBRIDE.” This is where you turn in. The driveway doesn’t go all the way up to the house; it ends at the three-car garage just off the road. From there you take a quaint, but not very useful, flagstone path that winds through the backyard around a huge Sitka spruce and up to the house. When the home was built in the late 1800s, I’m guessing more thought went into its craftsmanship than how far it was from the road.
Once you enter, it immediately feels like home. No matter the time of year, there’s a lingering hint of roasted firewood. Across the expanse of that spacious living room and just beyond the huge river-stone fireplace is the showcase of the home: a true picture window that spans the width of the house and affords a view so spectacular it looks like a painting. The lawn is greening up and attempting to show off its meticulously mowed and manicured surface—sculpted, of course, by yours truly. The flowers are soon to blossom in their beds, and the afternoon sunlight looks like fireworks on the rippling surface of the lake.
Look a little farther to the right of this scene and there are pieces of lumber of various sizes and lengths stacked neatly along the bank—that would be our dock. The lake is roughly a half mile across to the south shore here, at its widest, and stretches just a bit over four miles in length. A lake this size freezes over during winter, and the thick ice shifts and moves as the months pass. If the docks aren’t removed from the water by October, they’ll be locked in the frozen lake’s grip; then the slowly shifting ice will have them splintered into firewood by December.
I remember this time clearly. It was the middle of May. I was sixteen, and my brother Pat was seventeen. Our big brother, Mike, was twenty and off to see the world as a proud US Marine. So this annual chore of reassembling the dock rested solely on our shoulders, and it was by no means a two-man job. So he and I piled into our hand-me-down powder-blue 1966 Chevy step-side pickup truck and took off for town to recruit a few friends to help us reassemble that pile of lumber in the front yard for the coming summer. It really wasn’t hard, and it took very little time to get four of our buddies to sign on. Most of our friends came out and helped just to be there kicking back on the lake. We were back home with a crew in tow in less than an hour.
But before we began, the guys took a little walk out to the end of the driveway, past the mailbox and across the road. I followed, of course, curious to see what they were up to.
I knew about weed. I knew it was illegal, but I had never seen it and I had never smoked it. When one of the guys pulled out his pipe, I didn’t give it much thought. Sure, I’d try it.
First came the flavor, then the stupefying shift in consciousness followed by a bout of coughing. Even at sixteen, I knew about the disastrous effects alcohol had on my thinking process and my overall ability to function, not to mention the wretched hangovers and disgusting expulsions of everything I’d had to eat or drink the day before. Smoking weed was so much different. I never lost control of my thoughts or my actions. Instead, I experienced hours of giddy excitement and random bursts of joyous laughter. It did not make me sick or hungover, nor did I have any regret for having smoked it. It was like the world around me had slowed its pace, allowing me for the first time to truly appreciate what it had to offer. The sights, the sounds, the smells that were suddenly awakened around me—they had always been there. What had been missing was a way to tune into this elusive sensory buffet. Mother Nature provided the means in the form of the contents of that little brass pipe.
The first time I tried marijuana, I found it difficult to keep a straight face as I reentered the house. The other guys and my brother went about their day as usual, and I … Well, let’s just say I wasn’t ready to build the dock quite yet. The boys made their way out the front door and along the walk to the steps leading down to the lake’s edge.
At that moment my mom called out to me from what sounded like the other end of a long tunnel. I couldn’t tell you what she was yelling about; I just knew I had to get out of there fast. But for each step I took toward the door, it retreated the same distance. Determined to escape, I made a lunge and caught it.
I went outside, where my brother and our buddies somehow managed to put that dock together without any problems. We bullshitted and swam around for a while before returning to the house. There, every cabinet and pantry shelf in or near our kitchen came under siege. My mom was in the living room glued to the TV set, fully engrossed in a new episode of M*A*S*H and didn’t even blink when six of us ran past her with the screaming munchies.
That summer turned out to be a blast, and getting stoned was the turning point. I saw that there was no harm done, no fouls committed. For the months that followed, my friends and I woke up early each morning to water-ski and trick-ski before the lake traffic made it too rough.
One of those friends was a guy named Clark. He was four years older than me, the same age as my oldest brother, and we became tight. He lived right next door, which made for easy access to the perfect ski boat, an eighteen-foot Chris-Craft Century inboard. As summer waned and school began, we skied before I went to class and again after. When the leaves turned, we donned our wetsuits and did the same, right up until the first snow.
* * *
When I graduated from high school, I had already been working as a machinist for a year through an on-the-job training program, and I continued to work for nearly a year after. Later, for about fourteen months, I had a full-time job in show business, more or less. I started working for Sammy Davis Jr. out in Los Angeles. My cousin Joey and his pal Hogan had this sweet gig driving Sammy’s giant tour bus. When Sammy wasn’t using it, Joey and Hogan chauffeured a fellow named Richard, Sammy’s financial adviser, all over the country. I was getting tired of the same old routine, and when my cousin suggested I join him for a little hiatus on the West Coast, I split. Turns out Richard and I hit it off great, and he offered me the job of videotaping Sammy’s favorite TV programs for him. Besides being a financial wizard to a few stars, Richard owned one of the first video duplication companies in Hollywood. The era of the VHS cassette was just beginning, and Richard had a deal with most of the major motion picture houses of the day to duplicate movies from their original film versions to VHS tape on a massive scale. My duties included delivering these videos to his star clients and friends all over LA—Hollywood, Bel Air, Brentwood, Westwood, and anywhere else a celebrity lived. But my most important job was to visit Sammy once a week, wherever he was, and personally hand him a new TV Guide in exchange for one that he had marked up to show the programs he wanted to watch that coming week. All I had to do was sit in my apartment in Encino (“the Valley”) and watch TV and movies. Most of the time, I just set them to record, took off down Ventura Boulevard and cut through Topanga Canyon to Topanga Beach, and threw a Frisbee with my friend Sean all day. Later, after an awesome day at the beach, I simply edited the commercials out of the programs, then walked Richard’s dog.
It took about a year for my excitement over Hollywood to wear off, and I soon found myself driving back across the country to the lake, picking up right where I had left off.
* * *
While I was away, in the spring of 1978, my pal Clark had moved to Milwaukee, chasing a job. A year later, he called me to say that he and his girlfriend, Kat, were going to move to southwest Florida, where his sister ran a fish house with her husband. Clark had a plan. He was going to work on a crab boat, get high every day, and generally live like a beach bum. He asked if I wanted to go.
I had inherited from my dad a pretty wide independent streak, and I was eagerly looking for something better to come along … again. I had learned early in life that you should never pass up a promising opportunity. I dreaded the thought of looking back someday and kicking myself in the ass over something that I should have done. I’m not one of those guys who stands on his tiptoes in the back of a crowd, trying to see what’s going on. I’m the guy elbowing and plowing his way to the front, because if there’s some shit happening up there, I want in on it. So when my friend presented me with the opportunity—well, I did not hesitate.
“Hell yeah!” I said.
I just did it. I didn’t even give two weeks’ notice at work. I just threw everything I owned into the back of my Mustang Cobra with four bald tires and left Wisconsin the very next day. Just like that. My life was about to change in ways I never could have imagined.
CHAPTER THREE
I followed Clark and Kat in my Mustang Cobra, and we drove twenty-four hours straight to a pinprick on the map called Chokoloskee Island, a pile of sand, oyster shells, and trailer parks connected by a causeway from Everglades City, a speck of a town on Florida’s southwest coast, with a neighboring population of just under five hundred souls. Chokoloskee Island turned out to be a 192-acre slice of heaven, tucked away in the northwest corner of Everglades National Park. People seemed to traverse the narrow streets by three primary modes of transportation: bicycle, golf cart, and bare feet.
I had no idea that day how well I would come to know and love this island and its quirky landmarks.
As we crossed the causeway, we passed the post office/laundromat. At the end of a dead-end street to the left, beyond the rows of trailers, was the only fish house on the island, Ernest Hamilton’s Stone Crabs. Past that street was Ted Smallwood’s trading post, which is now a museum. Most of the island’s residents lived in trailers. There were occasional “houses,” usually built up on stilts, most of which, I later learned, belonged to the families who were born and raised there on the island.
The island had a distinct and perpetual smell of low tide. Not only was it surrounded by water and mangrove swamp, but it seemed that every available open space was stacked with thousands of stone crab traps, which were waiting to be scraped of barnacles and other sea debris from the previous season, then dipped in a solution of diesel fuel and creosol. After the traps were drip-dried, new lines and buoys with a specific boat’s identifying numbers branded on them would be attached.
Just past the Baptist church was Mr. Kelly’s little general store, where a sign above the door welcomed you in with the words “Y’all Spoken Here.” Before you put your hand on the old rusted screen door, Mr. Kelly would yell, “C’mon into the house!”
From the first moment I crossed the causeway, Chokoloskee Island felt like home to me.
Clark had lined up a job on a crab boat. He would be heading out into the Gulf of Mexico and bringing back loads of the island’s chief delicacy. Me, I had squat. Soon, though, his brother-in-law hired me to work on his house, helping the carpenters and stonemason. I mixed the mortar and hauled blocks and stone for the fireplace up to the first level, and when I wasn’t doing that, I was cutting and stacking lumber for the carpenters. It wasn’t what I had come to Florida for, but I was a big, strong dude by this point, about six foot two, and 185 pounds of solid muscle, so I was equipped for physical labor. My physical features aside, if it involved a challenge, I was up for it.
In just those first few weeks on the island, I started to hear some local buzz about drug smugglers working the area, but it sounded like big talk to me. Until I saw it for myself, it was all just typical rumor crap.
I’d been down there about a month when Clark told me that there was an opening for a crewman on the crab boat he was working on. Second mate. I didn’t know a second mate from a first cousin, but I told Clark that working on a boat sounded awesome. I wanted the job. I went down to the dock and met Captain Red, whom I expected to look like Captain Ahab, all sinister with a peg leg and a white beard and a long blue coat, tossing insubordinate crewmen overboard for shark food. Turned out that Captain Red was a measly five foot eight, as redheaded and as fair-skinned as Clark, and burned to a crisp. Frankly, he didn’t look like the kind of guy who should spend too much time in the sun. His weathered face made him look older than he actually was. He had wavy hair and red stubble on his unshaven cheeks. He wore a flowery shirt, like any ordinary sandals-wearing, Bud-swilling beach bum Parrot Head you’d see at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Hell, he strolled on the dock with a baby under one arm and his wife hooked around the other. He was the coolest, most laid-back, family-friendliest Ahab I had ever seen.
He didn’t say more than two sentences to me when Clark introduced us. But when Captain Red walked away grinning, I knew I had the job.
“Just play it cool, man,” Clark said, rubbing zinc oxide on his bright-red nose. He popped Dramamine like Pez to ward off seasickness. (Even in our water-skiing days, he always was more of a landlubber.) “Captain Red just became a daddy for the first time. He needs a couple of good guys to keep the boat working. I vouched for you, man. You got the job. Let’s go to work.”
Stone crabs are a seafood delicacy found only in the waters off the southwest coast of Florida and the Florida Keys. I didn’t know anything about crabbing, but I was strong and I figured I could handle sixty-pound traps filled with luscious stone crabs. I liked the physical work I had been doing in Florida, and I loved working outside in the sunshine. A job on the high seas sounded perfect to this Wisconsin boy. The next morning at three a.m., I reported to Captain Red’s forty-nine-foot, twelve-cylinder, twin-turbo-charged Detroit Diesel–powered crab boat—disturbingly named the Difficult Days—and we set off before dawn from Chokoloskee Island.
The first thing I learned about the crabbing business is that there’s not a lot to do until you actually get to the place where the crab traps have been set. I settled into my bunk to catch a couple more hours of shut-eye. When I rose with the sun, we were still chugging through the water. Clark set up a couple of fishing poles, and the two of us stripped down to cutoffs and kicked off our fishing boots as we motored deeper into the Gulf of Mexico. I tied a bandanna around my head and put on a pair of sunglasses and reclined on the engine cover. I felt like a hippie on top of a VW bus, except in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. The only thing that would have made life better would have been if I could have fired up a joint—but I thought that might be bad form for the first day on the job.
Then Clark spared me the trouble: he fired up a doobie and passed it to me.
It’d be a while yet before we got far enough offshore to pull the traps that had been set the previous week, so I slipped back into my bunk in the wheelhouse, where Captain Red piloted the boat, and the steady rumble of the engine lulled me back to sleep.
