The End of the Dream (8 page)

This time there was no question about their feelings for one another.

Steve took Diana back to Italy in 1985, and they began to live together.
 
They loved the warm lazy days, the evenings where they sat in a street cafe, sipping red wine and eating pasta while they talked as earnestly as if they had just met each other. Steve was in love again, but it only made his already complicated life more complicated.

He wanted to be in America so that he could spend as much time as he could with Cara, who was five years old now. But Diana was a Brazilian citizen and needed the proper papers to emigrate to America. She couldn’t even visit until Steve arranged for that, so reluctantly, he left Diana behind in Europe and came home to obtain the paperwork that would let her travel to the United States with him. In the autumn of 1985, Diana Gerhart joined Steve in Virginia. They had some hard times ahead of them, although Steve was making some progress in selling his work. That year, he had a one-man exhibit of his sculpture and furniture at Unica Design in Bethesda, Maryland, and he showed his work at the Studio Garden Show in Great Falls.

Steve returned to antique-furniture restoration, but always with the hope that one day he would be doing his own sculpture and building his uniquely designed furniture exclusively. He had to go where the work was and so he traveled frequently. But Steve always kept in touch with Cara.
 
He wanted her to know she had a devoted father. This caused tension with both Maureen and Diana, his exlover and his fiancee pulled at him, making it difficult for him to arrange visits with Cara. Steve had an exhibition in May 1986, in the posh Georgetown section of Washington, DC. It was titled “Into the Twilight, “ and featured his incredible sculptures made of marble and steel. And in the fall, Diana Gerhart and Steve Meyers were married. Interestingly, the Reverend William Scurlock, Sr. , Scott’s father, presided over the ceremony.

Steve hoped that the fact he and Diana were married would show he was maintaining a stable home. His dearest wish was to have Cara come live with them. By the time Steve came home to Virginia, Kevin had finally found the ramshackle house he was looking for in Great Falls, Virginia.

He and Steve were alike in that way, they could see possibilities where no one else could, and they were creative workhorses, willing to put sweat-equity into something that would one day be beautiful.

Kevin’s dwelling had been built long before the Civil War, with various owners slapping layer after layer of peculiar facades over what had once been a classic log cabin. There was no running water, and a large family of snakes lived in the ceiling. But it didn’t matter, it was his. In a way, Kevin had come full circle. Steve was back in his life, and so was Scott. Bill and Mary Jane Scurlock were still living in Reston during the eighties, and Scott came home for Thanksgiving.

He’d been there just in time to help Kevin move into his Great Falls home. Scott slept on the floor there, and, for a day or so, it was almost as if they were back in Hawaii, “brothers” and best friends.

But they were a decade older, and they had gone in different directions.

They promised to stay in touch, and they did.

Back at Evergreen, Scott was gearing up to go into full crystal meth production. He couldn’t actually make the stuff in the university lab, the chemicals produced a noxious smell like cat urine. Some meth labs were set up in trailers out in the woods, some particularly stupid “chemists” set up temporary labs in motels but the smell almost always gave them away. Scott paid people he met to find deserted houses far from town where he could actually put the chemicals together and start them cooking. Once he found a likely spot, he set up elaborate venting systems to carry the pungent odors produced high into the trees until it was blown away by the next brisk wind. The crystal meth project brought in more money than Scott had hoped, and he liked the element of danger.
 
What he was doing was a criminal offense, and Scott enjoyed watching true-life police dramas on television, feeling it would help him keep one step ahead of the police. (Later, “COPS” would be one of his favorite programs. ) One thing, however, that Scott never worried about was that he would be betrayed by his dealers. The small army of men and women who took the speed from him and fanned out to Seattle and Tacoma to the north, and the Olympic peninsula to the west seemed, to him, to be only extended members of his loyal crew. While some might consider friendship among drug dealers and manufacturers to be a paradox, Scott didn’t. Just as he felt no guilt about the product he was selling, he took pride in his team.
 
As his crystal meth network expanded, Scott often traveled all the way back to Reston, Virginia, to deliver his product to a dealer there. His Virginia connection was an old school friend who had lived an apparently straight life, but who had very expensive tastes. His friend, known only as “Hawk” to everyone but Scott, was ready to take all the product Scott wanted to sell to him.
 
Scott flew into Dulles Airport, handed over the crystal meth, and got right back on a plane to Washington State without ever leaving the airport. He could wake up in Olympia, fly the roundtrip across America, and return to sleep in his own bed. Sometimes, though, Scott stayed longer in Reston, visiting his parents and sisters, catching up with old friends.

He visited Kevin and saw that he had performed miracles with the dilapidated house he had bought in Great Falls for $45,000. The original log cabin beams were exposed now, and he had remortared so that there were no chinks to let in the winter wind. And the snake nests under the roof were all gone. Kevin’s Great Falls home, which he called “Springvale Studios” had the most serendipitous ambiance for painting that he had ever found. His work was going better than he could have dreamed. His paintings of the sea and sky were selling almost as fast as he could finish them. The Washington Gallery of Fine Art sold one of Kevin’s canvases, which depicted a mighty, crashing white wave rolling over a beach of black sand, for $2,000. By 1984, Capricorn Galleries in Bethesda had featured Kevin’s paintings in two shows.

Both of them were immediate sell-outs, and the gallery urged him to return with more paintings. Kevin saw Scott fairly often since he usually came by Kevin’s studio when he was visiting Reston.

During one of Scott’s visits, Kevin’s older brother Steve happened to be home too, and the two were finally introduced. Kevin bragged about what a skilled sculptor and carpenter Steve was and Scott invited Steve to come work on the property in Olympia that he hoped to buy soon.

Steve’s income was sparse at that period in his life, and he seemed interested when Scott suggested he come out to Washington State for a few months. The compensation he offered was attractive, and the project sounded good. It didn’t concern Scott that he didn’t even own the acreage on Overhulse Road, the owners were several states away.

Scott shared the rented gray house on Overhulse Road in Olympia with his friend Mickey Morris. “I’d been looking around for a place to build in the woods, “ Mickey recalled. “Scott had the same dream, so we put our heads together and came up with this idea to build a platform in the trees.” They had seemingly endless space on the acreage, and Scott thought it would be fun, and profitable, to build a treehouse in a cluster of evergreens. He had walked out in the woods and noted a circle of cedars, a natural location for the treehouse he envisioned. “It started out as a really small idea, “ Mickey said.

“We built this massive platform, and while we were doing it, we just kept getting more and more donations of wood.

People would say, Well, we’re tearing down this house, and you can have the wood. We ended up with this huge stockpile of wood.

“We built with all hand tools. Essentially, we were squatters.

It started off very innocent and low-key .. . we just never planned on building this major structure.” Scott and an assortment of old and new friends carried on the building project.

Some of the materials for the first treehouse were paid for with meth money, but Scott confided to a friend that he had also stolen lumber from deserted old houses, tearing the places apart to take what he wanted. If anyone cared, they never heard about it.

That first treehouse proved to be a highly successful project, so much so that Scott and Mickey moved into it as a full-time residence. They sublet the little gray house to a young woman named Julie Weathers. * Julie Weathers was also an Evergreen student, but she was very different from many of Scott’s friends.

She was one of the “Greeners, “ the members of the student body who embraced health food and the preservation of all things natural.

Vegetarian, of course, Julie wore clothes made only of cotton, linen, and wool. She smelled of clean soap and fresh air.

Moreover, she was the perfect embodiment of the kind of woman Scott Scurlock had sought all his life. She came from Montana, and she was a tall, slender girl with flaxen hair that fell straight and gleaming to the middle of her back. Her body was absolutely perfect. Julie wore Levis and cowboy boots and Guatemalan shirts. She had a Bo Derek or Linda Evans face, clear-eyed, openand beautiful. It was probably inevitable that Scott would fall in love with Julie Weathers. He let her keep her horse on the property, and he loved to watch her ride bareback.

She was all grace and fluid movement, this was a woman that even he could be faithful to. It might seem that a man could not make his fortune manufacturing a pungent-smelling, forbidden drug, and, at the same time, be consumed with a love for nature and personal fitness.

But Scott was always a man who believed that he could have it all, he didn’t see that many of his activities were at cross-purposes, that if one succeeded the other must fail. His personality, always bifurcated into diverging loyalties, developed deeper fissures. He saw himself as a true friend, a protector of the weak, a loyal son, and as much an advocate of natural resources as any “Greener” at his college. A large part of Scott Scurlock really wanted to be good. At the same time, Scott’s pursuit of worldly wealth continued undiminished. He was catering to the weaknesses of his fellow human beings and dealing with some of the sleaziest members of society. Any one but Scott would have had great difficulty reconciling the two sides of his nature but he was apparently quite able to partition off sections of his mind. When he was with Julie Weathers, he was the complete naturalist, when he delivered his product to his dealers, he was a cunning businessman. It may have been just too crowded in that first pilot treehouse project.

Whatever the cause, Scott and Mickey had a disagreement and Mickey moved out. Even though he and Scott parted company, Mickey’s picture would hang on one of the tree walls for the next ten years. Nobody ever bothered to take it down. It was as familiar as the Winchester rifle Scott always kept by the door. Mickey continued to be a reminder that Scott had not as he liked to claim built the first treehouse all by himself. “It would have been better for his big image, “ Mickey said, “to have built it by himself. I think whenever he would see me, it would remind him that he didn’t do it himself, and he really hated that.” Sometime after Mickey left, Scott decided that the treehouse needed major upgrading. He and his helpers took ladders and broke into lumberyards at night, taking the boards and beams they needed. “You’re kidding, “ a friend laughed when Scott told him about the midnight lumber thefts. “Doesn’t that take a lot of energy to get those heavy boards back to your place?

Wouldn’t it have been easier just to buy the stuff? “ Perhaps.

But, for Scott Scurlock, there was the excitement of stealing what he needed. Any one could buy a 2-by-12-by-16-foot board, but few had the guts to steal themnor the sheer physical strength required to run through the woods in the dark with a board that size on their shoulders.
 
Scott and his henchman would go without a night’s sleep to steal $200 worth of lumber. “He wanted to do anything that took balls to do, “ his friend said. “That was what he was about.” Scott’s treehouse was so unique that word about it reached The Seattle Times.

The Times’ Sunday paper had a section that featured unusual homes in the area everything from millionaires’ penthouses to refurbished 1920s bungalows to houseboats and log cabins. The treehouse in Olympia was, however, a first. Scott agreed to let photographers and a reporter visit his home high among the branches, but he asked not to be identified.
 
That wasn’t an unusual request, many of the featured homeowners preferred to remain anonymous. They didn’t want their homes to become stops on somebody’s Sunday drive. Scott, particularly, wanted to keep his world private. Even so, Scott couldn’t resist posing for The Times’ photographer. A shot taken from high above showed him sitting in an Afghan-draped easy chair.

The photograph was of a good-sized room with a table, range, refrigerator, and wood stove. Two huge multipaned windows revealed the tops of tall trees just outside. Scott was almost thirty at the time, but he looked nineteen. He didn’t bother to tell The Seattle Times that he wasn’t really the owner of the property on Overhulse because, in his mind, the place was already his. Despite the favorable publicity his treetop home had received, Scott’s treehouse still needed a great deal of refurbishing and remodeling. He recognized the fact that he wasn’t a skilled carpenter, even as he claimed to have been the sole builder of his treehouse. Although Scott first offered a carpentry job to Steve Meyers, it was Kevin who agreed to accept a temporary job during the summer of 1984. But what Scott wanted from him had little to do with building.
 
The offer came in the middle of a conversation back in Virginia earlier that spring.

Scott approached the subject in an oblique way, saying, “If I present you with this situation, would you participate? “ Kevin stared at him confused. What situation? And then, before giving any more details, Scott said, “I have to think about it.