My Other Life (61 page)

"After a while smuggling became a high. It became a tremendous rush. It wasn't the money or the coke—it was beating them, being able to think on my feet."

George smuggled the coke by filling condoms and inserting them in cans of talcum powder. In the tropics everyone used talcum and deodorant. Everyone carried it. George doctored his containers, replacing the tops and bottoms.

"I remember one time I had some 'material' in some deodorant and the agent had it open and was about to stick his finger in. Golden rule—you never break rhythm. So I continued my conversation and I said, 'By the way, where can I get my money changed?' He thought for a moment and used that same finger to point and give me directions. Then he gave me a 'Now what was I doing?' expression, and looked at the deodorant, and screwed the top back on. Now that was a rush."

To learn the drug business properly, George worked part time in a cutting house in Los Angeles, owned and operated by infamous drug dealers, the Huggins family from New Orleans. There wasn't much money in it for him, but it was an important apprenticeship.

"Processing cocaine is very involved," George said. It is first
pasta,
a paste made from the leaves. That is made into base, commonly known. Base is then crystallized into a rock form that you might term early rock. That can be reprocessed one more time, into flake. If all the hydrochloric acid is removed, it becomes crystal or pharmaceutical cocaine.

The rock, which might range from a bundle of lumps to a solid kilo, is chopped small with knives, and chopped again. This is then sifted through nylon stockings. The resulting powder is blended, then cut with milk sugar to increase the amount of salable coke.

If it is strong, the coke is cut further, always tested by a "pig" who shoots up the provisional cut and comments on the high he gets from it. The profit derives from the strength of it—how much it can be stretched and still retain its potency and the thoroughness with which it is mixed. Finding the perfect homogenous blend requires experience and fine tuning, because no cocaine is exactly the same in purity or composition.

George was at this for months, starting as a chopper—carefully hacking the sometimes two-pound rocks—and progressing to a blender, a more demanding skill. He also helped sell the drug. Each person in this operation had his own customers. George and his colleagues were the exclusive suppliers to high-profile people—"beautiful people," George said. Basketball players, entertainers, singers, celebrities.

"Is it possible to be a serious basketball player and have a coke habit?" I asked.

"It wasn't a habit with them. They were very serious about their thing, and they were also very serious about their party time. But no angel dust, no acid. They would snort cocaine and smoke reefer, but they wouldn't fire."

Wouldn't inject it.

One day in L.A. he and Gene, a Tuskegee friend from the civil rights years, had a pound of coke to sell.

"Gene and I were playing gangsters. I even had a little gun. We had a deal and got a hotel room to meet the buyers. One of the buyers said he didn't want the stuff and they left. Later on that night there was a knock at Gene's door. We had adjoining rooms.

"'Police,' I heard, and shut the door to the room where the cocaine was. There were three men—black. One, the gorilla, had red eyes. I'll never forget that. They threw us to the floor, and because we didn't move fast enough they smacked us on the head with their pistols. They tied our hands and feet, put pillowcases over our heads. 'Get on your knees. Where's the cocaine?' 'What cocaine?' All that. One of them said, 'I'm going to make this real simple. The one that's alive is going to tell me where it is.'"

I was in Singapore, writing, teaching, living on the margin. We had two children now, and lived in a tiny house that stank of bus fumes and the monsoon drain that ran by the front door. I had finished my fourth novel,
Jungle Lovers,
and was working on
Saint
Jack.
Now and then my short stories were published in
Playboy.
George saw my name in the magazine and read them.
I went to high school with this dude. Heh-heh.

"Why didn't you get into the drug thing, Paul?"

"I did get into the drug thing. But it didn't last." And I explained.

Now and then I smoked ganja, buying it from a Chinese waiter at the Staff Club or a Malay in a bar on Arab Street. One Saturday in Singapore I bought a joint from the Malay and went home and smoked it. I had the sense that my arms and legs had inflated, that my brain was blazing, my eyeballs boiling in their sockets. Out of control, I clawed my clothes off and rolled on the floor, gasping with pleasure, feeling airborne, and at times twisting in a horrific frenzy of vertigo. The joint was not ganja. It was my first experience of smoking heroin, and it was the last drug I took.

George, at that time, "took a fall in Atlanta. My first big bust. I was still new at the business. It was during the Muhammad Ali fight. All the gangsters and players were in town."

He was at the house of a man the police had under surveillance. And the drug deal that afternoon, the day of the fight, was going slowly—the customers were doubtful, and they stalled. The police moved in, and they found George, who had agreed to carry his friend's wallet. There were drugs in the wallet.

"I was in jail in Atlanta for a month, and then out on bail."

While on bail, preparing his case, George wrote a letter to a university up north. It was another inspired George Davis strategy. When he was truly desperate he became ingenious, fluent, even eloquent.

"I wrote them about what the problem is with going to graduate school today. Universities are basically hostile environments"—few or no blacks at these institutions—"yet they invited blacks to come. I said I wanted to attend, but the only way I could do it was if Gene and his wife came. I got a scholarship, the Martin Luther King scholarship. I was made a teaching fellow. Negro history. I changed it to black history—American Domestic Policy."

"What about your drug bust in Atlanta? Wasn't that on your mind?"

"I won the case. And things were all right. But then I do the flip side. I get in trouble up there. I did something horrible. I don't want to tell you."

"I need to know, George."

"Heh-heh. You got all the questions," George said. "I cut a dude with a buck knife. He was calling me names. It was bad."

"Did he die?"

"No, no. But it was trouble, and I had to leave. That was the end of American Domestic Policy." George's alternative to teaching history was to return to his other passion—smuggling cocaine. "I got back into business again. And then Tito took a fall in Panama. So I started looking for new sources for the product."

"Different dealers?"

"Different countries. I went to Harvard, to the Peabody Museum. That place has some of the world's greatest work on cocaine. And I got the major book on the subject,
Peru: History of Coca, the Divine Plant of the Incas,
by W. Golden Mortimer, M.D., 1901."

That was the George I recognized from high school, from the Magoun mansion of the Medford Public Library, pacing the stacks, rifling the shelves, and ending up with the unlikeliest books.

"I did a lot of reading. I found out there are coca plants that grow in Ghana—wherever there's coffee, and if you've got nine thousand feet, you've got coca. There's four areas of the world where we get the species that produces what we want. An area crossing South America, an area in Africa, an area in the Golden Triangle, and an area in Indonesia—in Java. There are about a hundred different varieties of the plant. The one that produces the most echocaine is in Africa. So I went to Ghana and the Ivory Coast."

It was August 1970. "I was hanging out with Africans, thinking of giving up cocaine, thinking about staying. I had never been around so many black people that walked the street. You know, like they don't have to stoop."

But he had a wife and child and responsibilities. This trip had cost a lot, and he had not found any cocaine. So, "in order to salvage the trip," this search for product, he went back to the States and left almost immediately for Peru. He brought back a package, which he sold at a profit. And then he set his sights on Ecuador.

"How did you find out about Ecuador?"

"Gene had read a
National Geographic,
and from my research at the Peabody Museum."

"Was this drug thing profitable?"

"Oh, yeah."

"I was getting fifty bucks a week at the University of Singapore."

All went well with George until, later in 1970, on one trip, his plane made an unscheduled landing in St. Croix, which entailed George's unexpectedly having to pass through St. Croix Customs and Immigration. He had pioneered a route from Ecuador through Venezuela and Trinidad to Canada. The key was that you had to lose your passport and get rid of your ticket in Trinidad, and get a new ticket and use your driver's license as an ID—all of this to obscure the fact that you had ever been in South America.

Life has no apparent plot, and so it seems messier than fiction, but if you have the stomach for it, this raw ingredient of art in its pure form is dense and fascinating, as different (to use the cocaine image that George had given me) as the rock is from the crystal. So many things happen in a person's life without warning, contradictorily, seemingly unrelated and without a pattern, and so without discernible unity it seems as though in all these incidents a single person has been leading separate lives. In one long life, so many people, so many other lives. Yet because they happen to that one person, a pattern is established, so large and elaborate that it cannot be read from the little we are able to see. Who can tell from a few hundred yards of road that this is a highway that goes from coast to coast? There is, in any long life of a person, the logic and harmony that is crystallized in fiction.

An old black woman ahead of George in the Customs and Immigration line at the St. Croix airport was confused. Like George, she had not expected to be here, and she was disoriented, slow with her responses when the St. Croix official demanded explanations. And then the man began to intimidate the woman with his repeated questions. The old woman, frightened into silence, roused the man's fury. "He was a cracker, a southern dude. It was white against black, young against old, and he didn't understand about the plane."

"I'm tired of you people trying to sneak in," the immigration official said to this woman whose trip to Montreal had been interrupted.

George stepped forward. He said, "Mister, have you got a grandmother?"

The man eyed him.

"Well, how would you like her to be treated the way you are treating this woman?"

The man said sharply, "Get over there, mister wise guy."

For his supposed insolence, George was interrogated and then searched. "They were just elated."

They found three ounces of cocaine in a can of talcum. "We got your black ass now."

For this offense George spent three months in the fort—"a historic place where they had put slaves"—on St. Croix.

After another arrest, this time in San Francisco, George decided that he might be safer if he relocated to Ecuador. And so he went to Quito and fell in love with the place—the Sun Festival, Viva Quito, was in full swing—and also fell in love with an Ecuadorian woman from a prominent family. Her parents approved of George, whom they took to be an American businessman.

"I had moved up. No more smuggling. I became a packaging expert. I brought in sealing machines."

And throughout the year 1971 he stayed put in Quito, packaging and sending cocaine out of Ecuador. He had a car and a house; expatriate life had its nuisances, but it was safe.

In November 1971 I quit my job in Singapore and went to England. I lived in Dorset, in a cottage, paying five pounds a week rent—less than ten dollars. I had not saved much from my Singapore job, but even the little I had would allow me to live there for a long time. That was what I needed: security, monotony, life in the bosom of my family. After nine years in the tropics I was in retreat from experience.

I asked George what he was doing that month and year.

"Living large," he said.

On those summer weekdays in Medford and Boston that George and I talked, catching up, I sometimes saw people glance at us and look away with a kind of sour disapproval, muttering the way they do when they are baffled by the threat of unfamiliar men who don't seem to fit into the foreground.

We were two older fellows, one black, one white, sharing a park bench in the middle of a working day, laughing too loud, and not dressed particularly well. Most likely out of work, or procrastinating, looking reckless and marginal. What probably roused the fury of many passersby was our indefinable air of conspiracy and, worst of all, an obvious disregard, like those motionless and apparently unemployed figures in a landscape who seem as though they have not earned the right to be so idle.

Sensing this scrutiny from car passengers and pedestrians, George said, "Watch this," and smiled at the strangers, giving them his irresistible George Davis smile. He never failed to provoke a smile in return.

What the strangers saw was partly true. We were men in suspension, performing hard-to-describe jobs, keeping odd hours—high school buddies thirty-four years after graduation, grizzled but still fit, the runner and the rower, crowding the bench by the Mystic River, or near the Admiral Morison statue on Commonwealth Avenue, single again, back home.

All the pain and the pleasure, all the difficulty of living, were in the past, with the risks, the compromises, the friendships, the failures. Now our lives were just talk. And it was random. We would launch on a theme—drugs, civil rights, school—and end up talking about our ex-wives, or injuries, or children, or music, or baseball.

"Back home" said it all. George was living at his parents' house on Jerome Street; I was alone on the Cape. My wife and I had split up—I accepted it now; George and Tunie had done the same. George was not working, I was not writing. But no matter what had happened in all the eventful intervening years, still we had started off together, white boy, black boy. Now we were back where we had started, living outside Boston, not needing to be hopeful, because although no miracle would happen to us, the danger was in the past, with the sorrow, the risk, the great anger that comes from impatience and ambition. What we felt was not resignation but a kind of enlightenment, even wisdom. No bitterness, only mercy and gratitude for being still alive. As George said: Smile back at them.