The End of the Dream (10 page)

Julie knew about the marijuana plots, but that wasn’t what drove her away from Scott. She left him for another woman. Scott was dumbfounded.
 
And bereft. When he first suspected Julie had taken a female lover, Scott simply could not believe it. But then he was a man on fire who had to have proof, so when Julie left one evening to visit Ursula Ving, * Scott followed her. After she went into Ursula’s house, he climbed a tree outside the bedroom window and watched in horrified fascination as Julie made love with a woman. He had seen them theretogetherand he could no longer deny what seemed impossible. His beautiful “Greener, “ his woman who had smelled like clover and sunshine and the wind in the cedars, was a lesbian. Scott’s male ego may have suffered a profound blow because he had once tried to “convert” another beautiful lesbian student at Evergreen. A female classmate and no fan of Scott’s recalled that situation to The Stranger, a Seattle publication, “My most outstanding impression of Scott Scurlock is that he was an asshole. I was in class with him at Evergreena full-time program. We met five hours a day, three or four days a week, for a term. “Scurlock was extremely handsome in a slick kind of way. He was rugged and outdoorsy, with a big head of curly black hair and tight jeans. And he was a jerk, a real jerk.

Scurlock and a buddy of his in this program were in love with this woman in the class. She was incredibly beautiful and turns out she was a lesbian. They would sit around talking about her, how they were going to convert her. They sat around ogling this woman in class. It was like it really bugged him that a woman he wanted could care less about him. He (was) the cave man, Me want her.” But even Scott had not been able to seduce the beautiful lesbian.

Scott wasn’t used to losing women, and his close friends remember how changed he was after Julie Weathers left him. There was a bitterness about him now, a hard edge they had never seen before.

The fact that Julie chose a woman over him did terrible damage to his sense of self-worth and his masculinity. After Julie left, Scott didn’t seem to care about anything but money. Money afforded him the income that he needed to live his life exactly as he wanted. He sometimes explained that it was the actual spending of money that gave him satisfaction. He spent most of it on his journeys, he gave some of it away, and he bought whatever he wanted technical gadgets, guns, tools, books, furniture. Once he spent $3,000 on a lie detector. It was just something he was curious about. But he rarely bought clothes.

Sometimes he would buy L. L. Bean clothes, but he wore them until they were old and scruffy. He still wore the same cheap Converse All-Star sneakers.

The thing was that Scott Scurlock was so beautiful that no one noticed what he wore. Scott still laughed and he still behaved outrageously at times, but there was a side of himself that he kept hidden now. Kevin could be talking to him and see some door close behind his eyes.

Suddenly, he wasn’t Willy Boss at all, now eighty percent of him was the same old Scott, twenty percent of him was a complete stranger.

Disappointed and wanting not to believe what he already knew in his heart, Kevin had proof in the summer of 1986 that Scott was involved in a lot more than growing marijuana. One day he accepted Scott’s invitation to go for a ride. Scott drove far out into the isolated counties beyond Olympia. They were on a modern freeway, but the fir forests crowded up on both sides, and there were logging roads that snaked through stands of trees so thick that they shut out most of the sun. Kevin was gripped with a bleak kind of curiosity. He sensed that this trip was not one of their boyish adventures. Now he suspected that Scott was manufacturing crystal meth on a massive scale. Scott turned his 1972 red-and-white Ford pickup a truck indistinguishable from any logger’s again and again until they were speeding along some logging road so far off the beaten path that Kevin would never be able to find it again. Scott slowed and pointed to a beat-up sixties’ model Ford van.
 
A man got out and walked toward them. He was a good twenty-five years older than they were, bald-headed, wiry, almost emaciated, with sweat beaded on his flushed face. He didn’t look particularly menacing, though. He was grinning. “This is Captain Pat, “ Scott introduced the stranger. “He works with me.” Kevin nodded.

The guy had the twitchy look of a longtime drug addict. Captain Pat gave Scott a package wrapped in a garbage bag and sealed with duct tape.
 
Scott took it and tucked it down between the truck’s seats as he drove off. When they were some miles away, Scott pulled over and peeled off part of the wrappings. “It was $250,000! “ Kevin recalled. “That man gave Scott a quarter of a million dollars. Scott told me he had a whole network of people working for him. He gave them the crystal meth, and they went out and sold it. Out of Olympia. Up to Seattle. Over to the coast. Even Virginia.” Kevin was amazed.

Why wouldn’t a druggie with $250,000 in his hands simply have taken off for parts unknown? But this guy had been so proud to give it to Scott.
 
He sighed, wasn’t that the way everybody felt about Scott wanting to please him and to be part of his inner circle? Kevin had always wondered if Scott was bragging when he had hinted about the scope of his drug business.

Now, seeing the money, he saw with sickening clarity that Scott had not exaggerated. He was making a fortune. And Kevin knew “Hawk’scott’s contact back in Reston, Virginia, too, he had always figured the guy was a legitimate businessman who was making such a good salary that he could pay for the new house he had custom-built. Now he realized that Hawk had to be part of what was going on in Washington State. Who else might be involved? Scott could be so seductive. Kevin knew that Scott would die for him, they had come close many times before. He also knew that somehow Scott had the ability to corrupt, to ferret out other men’s weaknesses and entice them with money. Something in Scott needed to make others beholden to him. Kevin winced. Now he was beholden. He’d accepted Scott’s offer to pay his mortgage that summer.

He had accepted Scott’s generosity for their trips to Nicaragua and Xalapa. He wondered what he would owe Scott. They stopped near a beach on the Pacific Ocean and skipped rocks and ate lunch. Kevin could hardly digest his food knowing that Scott had a quarter of a million dollars hidden in the ratty upholstery of the truck. While Kevin had begun tentatively to move toward a more spiritual life, Scott’s journey was just the opposite. It was a reality that ate at Kevin when he allowed himself to think about it, he longed for a return to the world they had once known.

But once Scott told him about his crystal meth operations, he seemed obsessed with telling his old friend everything about it.

It was soon apparent that most of Scott’s close coterie of friends knew about his crystal meth business. He was proud of the money that was rolling in. Another friend recalled that one day, Scott climbed the stairs to the treehouse and plunked down a shoebox that had been decorated with buttons, glitter, sequins, and bows.

“Scott set it down on the table, “ the man recalled. “He lifted the lid and there was more money in there than I’d ever seen in my life.” Scott had another “partner” in the business, apparently a man a half dozen years older than he. Where Captain Pat looked the part of delivery man, the “partner” dressed in three-piece suits with expensive ties. He was a silent contributor, matching Scott dollar for dollar when they purchased the raw materials.

Apparently this man had ways of obtaining the basic ingredients and the necessary apparatus from drug-supply companies without arousing suspicion. He wasn’t anyone Kevin knew, or wanted to know.

Scott was into another world, a dangerous world. “Scott always had to be the best at everything, “ Kevin explained. “Whatever it was sports or money or whatever. But success had to come fast for him. One time, he invested a little money in the stock market, but he had no patience, and he lost money. I think it bothered Scott that one of the guys we went to school with in Reston was a millionaire in computers while the rest of useven Scott were way behind.” Scott always kept meticulousif phony records.

Notations of his “purchases” and “expenses” were all filed in neatly labeled folders in a cabinet in the gray house. He told Kevin that he always paid his taxes, too. That is, he paid taxes on what he declared as his income, the income of a carpenter. As far as the IRS knew, Scott’s annual income was about $24,000. He was careful never to buy a new car, preferring nondescript used models. He never wanted to be in debt to anyone, so he paid his bills punctually each month. The property on Overhulse Road was about to be transformed into a Northwest version of The Shire Plantation in Hawaii. Only this time, Scott planned to own it.

There was the gray house, the barn, the outbuildings, and the treehouse, and Scott intended to spare no expense in his plans to remodel it all.
 
But the most important remodeling would be to the treehouse. The first treehouse had been only a shack compared to the one Scott envisioned. He intended to use some of the $250,000 to put a down payment on the place when the time was ripe. Scott planned to eventually rip out seventy-five percent of the original treehouse that had been built in the seven cedars. Those cedars remained, but the new and perfected treehouse would be built in and around forty-seven trees.

There would be a working bathroom, a tub, and planked walkways that extended far back into the forest. There would be decks and ladders and look-out spots.

Kevin suggested that Scott call his carpentry business “Seven Cedars, “ and he did. Despite everything, it was easy most of the time to pretend that Scott hadn’t changed. He drank a little more, maybe.

Life around Seven Cedars was essentially about having a good time.

Kevin teased Scott about the place, calling it “Peter Pan Land.” The boys who played there were growing older.

Scott was well over thirty now, but he was little changed from the twenty-year-old who had hopped Off the bus in Hawaii. His heroes, real and fictional, surrounded him. N. C. Wyeth’s painting of Robin Hood hung over his king-sized bed in the treehouse. “He liked to think he was like Robin Hood, “ Kevin said. “But he really used his money to impress people. He spent most of it on himself, and the money he gave away was what he gave to waitresses.” Waitresses loved Scotty Scurlock. He was a big and flamboyant tipper, although he had a system. Scott would tip pretty waitresses $10 the first time they served him, even if the check was less than $15. “After that, you don’t have to tip them any more than normal, “ he would say, smiling.

“They still remember you as that big tipper.” Scott liked Gardner’s Restaurant, Ben Moore’s, Louis’s, and the Bud Bay Restaurant in Olympia.
 
They were spots where he didn’t have to dress up even though he preferred to drink Dom Perignon and Cristal champagne and where he was always greeted warmly. He was, after all, “the big tipper.” Other than that, Scott’s generosity didn’t come without a price tag.

The plane tickets, the free rent, and the vacations he gave to his friends came with implied debt. Whether it meant that his friends had to work on the treehouse, the barn, the gray house, or in the marijuana fields, whether they were expected to participate in his newest experiments or provide company for him when loneliness caught up with him, those who shared in his wealth and his hospitality somehow knew that, someday, they would owe him.
 
During one of Kevin’s visits to Olympia, he helped Scott develop a rope system using horizontal ropes and pulleys that would let them swing like Tarzan between trees 70 feet above the ground.

It began in the treehouse itself and ended 185 feet out into the woods.

Scott commented that he needed it for a “getaway in case of a shoot-out.”

“Shoot-out? “ Kevin asked, puzzled. “In case the cops come, “ Scott explained. Kevin realized Scott was serious.

“Who gets to test it? “ Kevin asked, pointing to the rope escape.

“You do, “ Scott laughed. And Kevin did test the intricate system high in the air, although, uncharacteristically for him, he was terrified.

“I dropped thirty-five to forty feet straight down before that rope got taut. It was like jumping off the top of a building.” Kevin swung to one tree forty feet away and he had to inch his way back hand over hand, finally scissoring his legs over the line for a more secure purchase.
 
Like most of Scott’s brainstorms, the rope system was far from perfected, if Kevin had lost his grip, he would have fallen six stories.
 
But he was still in good shape, and he made it back to the safety of the top deck of the treehouse. After Kevin tried the ropes, and proved they were basically safe, Scott swung out, too. Kevin filmed him on a camcorder. The videotape is reminiscent of Light foot and Thunderbolt, together again. Their images appear on the amateur video slightly out of focus and tilted. Their shouts of “Hey Bubba! “ sound like kids calling to one another. They still hiked, and both of them remained in peak condition. No matter how he might indulge in drugs or alcohol, Scotty Scurlock was obsessed with maintaining his body like a perfectly tuned machine. He kept a note on his refrigerator door, “Spirit ain’t spit without a little exercise! “ They climbed snow-packed Mount Rainier wearing only shorts and tennis shoes. Although it was unheard of, they took no provisions with them, not even water. Scott had always maintained that there would be water when they needed it. And, so far, he had been right. Once he had hiked the Grand Canyon from the north rim to the south rim, with the best marijuana he could find his only provision. Much to the park rangers’ amazement, Scott completed that dangerous solo hike. He found water along the way, drinking deep from small waterfalls. He never got sick, and he never took a misstep. He trusted that some divine providence looked after him, and apparently it did. It was like the time he and Kevin had climbed up a sheer cliff near Havasu Falls near the Grand Canyon.
 
Copper miners long-since dead had left a kind of ladder attached to the steep walls that led to the mine, its rungs five feet apart. Kevin and Scott both made it up to the top of the miners’ ladders just fine, but Kevin felt himself weakening in the heat as they came back down. There was only one way down, and he realized that if he couldn’t swing off the last rung, he would fall forty-five feet down to rocks and cactus and quite probably his death.
 
“My muscles were exhausted, I was out of gas and I was trembling, “ Kevin remembered.