The End of the Dream (6 page)

When they spoke of the things they wanted to accomplish, he had told her the one goal he truly wanted to realize was to save a life. And he did.
 
“It was a doctor.. . from the mainland who was on vacation, “ she said.

“The man had gone out too far and couldn’t get back .. . I never met the person, but Scott did see the doctor again. He took Scott out to dinner and Scott took him cliff jumping.” The three of them got along great in a platonic way that spring of 1976.

Marge kept house and added a woman’s touch to The Shire. While they planted flowers outside, she brought them into the house.

Often Kevin and Scott had work to do in Honolulu for Hawaii Plant Life and they came home only on weekends. They were glad to find that Marge had taken care of everything in their absence. If Kevin knew that she had romantic feelings for him, he avoided any discussion about it.

Things were perfect the way they were. On one of their hikes, Scott and Kevin came across a field of marijuana and they realized it would be a much bigger score than the “Catholic Banana Farm.” In their island social circle, good marijuana was highly desired. The group frowned on cigarettes, but not on pot smoking. They selected their marijuana the way a generation older might have picked a fine wine.

(Scott himself preferred female, sencea pot. ) They lived in a place and during an era where their youth happily isolated them, and they were benignly alienated from anyone over forty. So, when they found the field of illegal marijuana, they made plans to liberate it.

This time, they returned to the field with a beat-up old car to bring home a load of “produce.” They cut the mature marijuana plants and piled them onto the roof of the car, and when they could get no more in the front and back seats, they filled the trunk to bursting. They had less than a mile to drive to get back to The Shire. Literally buried in pot, they peered over the fragrant leaves and steered precariously down the road. “I went into Scott’s room late that night, “ Marge said. “And there were Kevin and Scott in a room filled with marijuana plants they had cut down. They were pulling the leaves off the stems and asked me to help them. There was this very intense energy in that room.” Watching them, Marge shook her head slowly, strangely revulsed by the smell of their sweat in the warm room. In the previous weeks, she had put a lot of house plants in Scott’s room, and they had all been thriving. Now, she saw that they were suddenly limp and wilted.

“Look what you’re doing to them, “ she scolded Kevin and Scott. “Look around and see them. They’re practically crying out they’re scared that they’ll be the next to be pulled out of the soil and have their leaves torn off. I can’t even stay in this room.” Scott looked at her as if she’d gone crazy, but Kevin understood what Marge was saying and bent his head. She could tell he felt bad. “The next day, the pot was gone, “ she said. “With some extra care the house plants all survived the orchids and all.

“ Kevin never knew where Scott had gone to sell the leaves they’d spent all night stripping. But, somehow, Scott had known just what to do.

The next day, he handed Kevin $2,000. Kevin was dumbfounded. It had been a long time since he had had anywhere near that much money. They laughed uproariously. They hadn’t taken all the “hippie’s crop, “ but they had taken enough to make a bundle of money. To them, it wasn’t stealing, it was more like a chess game. Marge and Kevin and Scott were a happy trio.
 
They showed off and she took pictures. She forgave them for the marijuana incident. In June 1976, some friends of Kevin’s docked their boat in the harbor. One of the men, Rich, had gone to high school with Kevin. Kevin asked Marge if she wanted to go out with them to a Mexican restaurant. The sailors hadn’t had real food or drinks or fun for a long time. Marge agreed to join them. Rich was quite taken with Marge that night, and later when he came out to stay on the tomato farm. The attraction was to be the end of the good times that Kevin, Scott, and Marge had shared. The crew of the sailboat explained that they alternated choosing new crew members, and it happened to be Rich’s turn to pick someone to sail with them for the next three weeks. Kevin said he wouldn’t mind going, but Rich shook his head. “Nope. This time we want a woman. We’re sick of looking at our own ugly, bearded faces. I pick .. . Marge.” Marge smiled and nodded. It would be another adventure. South Dakota, then Honolulu, and now, the open sea. Anyway, this leg of the trip was to be a short one.

She only planned to sail with them to Fiji, and she had enough money to buy a plane ticket back to Hawaii. “Once in Fiji, I decided to stay with the boat and sail to New Zealand, “ she recalled. “The boat was staying there six months. My money for a ticket from Fiji to the U. S.

would buy me a ticket back from New Zealand too .. . the owner had no problem with my staying on the boat as an unpaid crew member.” As it turned out, Marge stayed with the boat for fourteen months. They sailed on to Tahiti and then back to Hawaii, arriving in Honolulu in October 1977.

Two decades later, she remembered the day well. There was a heat wave in Honolulu and they went to the movies to escape the heat.

“We saw Star Wars.” When Marge Violette had sailed out of Honolulu, she didn’t realize that she wouldn’t be coming back for more than a year.
 
She had simply stepped out of Kevin and Scott’s perfect world onto a sailboat. But in the interim, an invisible curtain had dropped between them, She would see Scott Scurlock only once more in the seventies, and that was when she stopped over in Honolulu briefly after her long cruise. “Scott took me and another girl to a Halloween party, “ Marge recalled. “I wore leotards with wings attached to my arms and went as a butterfly.

Scott may have worn a plaid shirt and gone as a lumberjack but on this I’m not sure.. .. There were a lot of University of Hawaii students there.. .. It was one of the nicest parties I have ever attended.” Marge’s brother was getting married back in New , .

Jersey, and she left for the mainland the first week of November 1977.

In the years ahead, Marge kept in touch with Kevin and saw him once in a while. On one occasion, she took a train across Canada. to see him in Edmonton, and she visited him in Virginia and met his mother. Years later, when Marge got engaged, she called Joanna Meyers to tell her.

Joanna blurted, “Oh, I’m sorry it’s just that I always hoped you and Kevin would get married.” It was different with Scott. Marge would not cross paths again with Scott for seventeen years. When they did meet again, their worlds would be completely changed. Joanna Meyers’ children had not only left home, it looked as though they were going to settle in far flung corners of the world and she might never see them all together again. Dana was in New York, Steve in Italy, Kevin in Hawaii, and now Randy, too, had headed off to Europe. He would make Italy his base for a very successful career writing musical scores for movies. Their homecomings would be infrequent but wonderful. Joanna was always so glad to see any of her children. She was proud and grateful. Somehow they had come through the fire of her stormy marriage and had grown past the ego-damaging neglect of their father.

Dana was married now to the stage director of the New York City Ballet Company, Peter Gardner.

And although Steve wasn’t married, he had settled down with a woman.

But neither Randy nor Kevin had shown any signs of permanent romantic commitments. Of all the children, Kevin seemed the most unsettled, the searcher who knew that he wanted to paint and that no other career would suit him, but he hadn’t found a spot where he could set up a real studio. He was younger than Dana and Steve and not as disciplined as Randy. And, by all accounts, he was having a wonderful time in Hawaii.

He wasn’t thirty yet. There was time. Just when it seemed that all the Meyers were going to be fine, small things started to go wrong.

There was the slightest creaking in what had seemed to be a solid structure. It was like finding a fissure in a wall left behind by an undetectable earthquake. The damage seemed minuscule, but deep inside, there was a fault that would one day make itself known.

Kevin Meyers trusted Scott Scurlock completely. Although he liked almost everyone he met, there were only a handful of people he trusted completely. Scott was one. They were best friends, brothers, coconspirators, adventurers together. Kevin would recall those days and say, “I honored Scott’s pathi honored him.

“ They still had little money, but they didn’t need L much.

Their landscaping jobs paid them enough to rent The Shire and buy what they needed. They weren’t joined at the hip, Scott spent time in Honolulu, and Kevin took short trips to Edmonton, Alberta, and sailed with his friend Rich. But The Shire was their home base, it was the most stable, dependable, welcoming home either had ever found. But then their perfect way of life hit a roadblock. Kevin’s job with Hawaii Plant Life was phased out, the tomato farm was in a fallow period, and he didn’t have the money for his share of the rent. He didn’t miss the jobs, though. He had made up his mind to believe in his skill as an artist.
 
But Scott didn’t have enough to pay for both of them, and he said, “Bubba, we’re in trouble. We haven’t got the rent.”

“Don’t worry, “ Kevin said. “I’ll get the money.” At that moment, the phone rang. Scott answered and handed it to Kevin, saying, “It’s for you, Bubba.” It was Michael Lau, who owned a wonderful tourist attraction called Paradise Park. Kevin had put his bid in to do some murals at the park, even though he’d never painted a mural in his life.

But Lau didn’t know that and he hired Kevin on the spot to paint a seventeen-by-fifty-five-foot mural at Paradise Park. He would pay him $3,000. This amount of money was unheard of in their world, but Kevin accepted the commission without betraying the excitement he felt. It would mean leaving The Shire for a long time, but it was necessary if they hoped to continue renting their home. “I wasn’t going to waste any money renting another place, “ he recalled. “I bought a tent from somebody for $150 and found a place out in the jungle next to a stream.

It was gorgeous, and I ended up living there for six months.” Kevin painted thirteen murals at Paradise Park. It was fortunate that he was an athlete, the murals rose so high above the ground that he had to be both an acrobat and a painter. The wall he created in the Bird Theater looked so real that you had to touch it to tell it was a painting. A crystalline waterfall cascaded over lifelike rocks and banana leaves and crimson halacoya shaded the “water.” One night, there was a violent tropical storm and Kevin woke up in his tent to the sound of trees crashing down all around. When he ventured out at dawn, he saw that a huge coconut palm had fallen inches from his tent. Rather than being frightened, he felt blessed. He was alive, he had finished his assignments at Paradise Park, and he had more money than he had ever made in his life. Most important, he had proved to himself that he could, indeed, make a living with his art. Kevin Meyers had come to believe in signs and omens. Some unseen hand had saved him from being crushed by a falling tree in the jungle. He was free now to go back to The Shire. Kevin’s homecoming was not what he expected. On the surface, everything looked the same, the gardens they had planted were, if possible, even more lush than they had been. But, as he walked through the property, Kevin felt the hairs prickle at the back of his neck. He looked closer and saw that someone had cleverly planted marijuana in sheltered pockets of space between The Shire’s gardens.

The pointed .

leaves hid themselves among the coleus and the hibiscus plants, but they were there, as luxuriant and thriving as everything else they had planted. Kevin turned to Scott with a question in his eyes. “Who planted it? “ Scott grinned. “I did. See how it blends in? I hid it so well that no one will ever see it.” It was one thing to rip off somebody else’s illicit field of pot, it was another to plant the illegal drug in front of their home.

Scott couldn’t understand why Kevin was upset. And Kevin couldn’t explain that growing marijuana on the land that Bill Pfiel had leased was a betrayal that could bring them all down. This wasn’t like stealing cherry pies, or bananas, or even somebody else’s marijuana.

This was fouling their own nest. Kevin didn’t want to be at The Shire.

His friend Rich was sailing to California and needed him to crew.

Kevin accepted. He hoped that when he came back, things would have returned to normal. But a Pandora’s Box had been opened, and there was no way in the world to close it.

Scott wasn’t at all deterred by Kevin’s shock and disappointment.

He simply went ahead with his bumper crop of marijuana, reaping it when it was ready, rolling the leaves and preparing to sell it.

It was his second foray into the world of drug dealing, only this time Scott was selling his own product. Perhaps because he had no real experience in the cultivation of marijuana, Scott Scurlock was clumsy.

Bill Pfiel found out about the forbidden crop. It would be difficult not to notice that the gardens of L The Shire Plantation were full of growing things one day, and virtually decimated the next. When Pfiel and the owner of the tomato farm verified what was going on, they evicted Scott. By the time Kevin returned, Pfiel knew that he had had no part in growing the illegal plants, and Kevin was still in favor to a degree. But since Kevin had brought Scott to The Shire, he was now somehow tainted too. “They told me that I could move back in but everything had changed, “ Kevin Meyers said. “They wanted triple the rent and, for that, I could only rent the basement where I’d had my old art studio. Somebody else was moving in upstairs. It wouldn’t be The Shire any longer. That part of our lives was over.

“ Scott left Hawaii to return to Virginia to sell the marijuana he’d grown. Kevin moved in with some friends, staying in Hawaii only long enough to finish one final mural commission. “It was all ending, “ Kevin recalled. “I had about $3,200 left, and I headed for Canada to live with Ron Jacksonone of the guys from the University of Hawaii track team. I didn’t know when I’d see Scott again if ever.” Kevin Meyers spent the next few years traveling between Edmonton, Alberta, where he ran youth hostels during the summer, and Virginia, where he spent winters. He didn’t see Scott Scurlock, although he heard that he’d gotten a job with the county back in Reston as a building inspector. That would be the kind of prestige job that Scott’s dad would approve of. Kevin wanted to live full-time in Virginia, if he could find some broken-down place that he could remodel into a studio.