I’ll Always Have Paris — Chapter 4

Somewhere around my Junior year in college I remember thinking that if I wrote and published a novel by the time I graduated, then I wouldn’t ever have to work. (Obviously I had yet to associate “work” with writing. Also, what I knew about publishing you could put in a thimble and have room for your finger, but the assumption was it would be successful.) Spoiler alert, I never got around to writing it. So when graduation rolled around, it was time to go to work.

My last real summer job was the last time I went home during the summer, which was between Freshman and Sophomore year. The next summer I stayed in St. Louis, with the 100 degree heat and 95% humidity and started looking. I got a call through an agency I signed up with from a couple who wanted someone to work on their property — clean the pool, other odd jobs, including serving, like a butler, when they entertained. I believe a white jacket was mentioned. The woman was German, and they lived out West of the city on a nice piece of property with a pool; I’d never known anyone with a pool before. I’d driven through those kind of neighborhoods in Wilmette and Winnetka back home, but I grew up in an apartment. My folks moved into a house the size of these people’s guest house a month before I graduated high school.

They had an enormous German shepherd named Max who only understood German,. He appeared to weigh more than I did and scared me to death. I was told to be firm with him; if I wanted him to sit just yell at him, “Max! Plotz!” It actually worked, but never for more than a second or two, and then he would start roaming, often in my direction. It would have been funny if I wasn’t constantly envisioning my head disappearing inside his massive, pointy maw.

Years later, hitchhiking through Germany, I met a couple of German guys at the Austrian border and got talked into taking a shortcut through a forest — y’know, the kind where Hansel and Gretel were never seen again — to avoid an onramp with dozens of people lined up ahead of us, hitching. So we’re hiking through this dense forest, heading for what we hope is the border, when we hear a shout aimed in our direction. HALT! (Think a German pronunciation. Go full “Great Escape.” You’re Big X and MacDonald at the train station. You’ve shown your papers and are walking calmly away when you hear it. HALT!) We turn, and a hundred yards away there’s a soldier in full uniform, an automatic weapon over his shoulder, and Max’s big brother by his side.

The soldier says something to the Hound of Hitler, and it takes off directly at us at a dead run, emphasis on “dead,” as I mentally picture our throats being torn out in the land that already got so many of my ancestors. The dog speeds up to us and then Bam! stops on a dime (German precision), sits, with nary a Plotz! to be heard, and never takes his eyes off us while his master walks calmly up to us and demands to know what the fuck we are doing. Regaining mastery of our rectums and confessing our idiocy in two languages and providing documentation, we’re escorted out to a road that will lead to the border with suitable warnings. Ever owning a German Shephard becomes completely out of the question. To this day, and I’m talking 50 years, it’s the one dog I cannot fully relax around.

Orientation Day for the houseboy job was a Saturday. The next day I’m sleeping in when the phone rings. It’s the Frau. Where am I? They’re having company.

“It’s Sunday,” I say.

“Yah, we need you seven days a week.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t work seven days a week. You’ll have to get somebody else.”

A few minutes later, the agency called. I explained to them that Lincoln had freed the slaves more than a century before, and they told me that my employers had agreed I could have one day a week off. I politely declined. That was it for summer jobs. From then on I made do with the $75 a month my folks were sending me and whatever I could put together hustling grass and hash, which on an ounce by ounce, gram by gram basis, turned out to be more than lucrative enough to keep the lights on and gas in the Honda 305 Scrambler.

I had fallen into dealing in college like I fell into working for Kenzo. In fact, I sold dope before I even ever smoked it, which says something about me, though I’m not exactly sure what, as I’ve clearly never been driven by making big buck. My first deal was buying a nickel bag and selling it for six bucks. A lot of locals used to hang out at the school café — The Bear’s Den — and I hit it off with some of them; I was growing my hair out and clearly not fraternity material…. Being someone at school who knew “townies” I was able to find sellers when there were plenty of student buyers. Somehow, it just happened, and luckily it never turned out to be oregano.

Looking back, the absolute lack of concern I had for being caught selling drugs on campus is astounding. The times, the mid-60’s — pre Tet Offensive — were still so naïve, an idyllic extension (at least for suburban kids like me) of the 50’s. I wasn’t oblivious to breaking the law; at twelve I was a junior Hole in the Wall gang member. We once stole a cement tub from a construction site and carried to a local park to float out into a pond before detectives came crashing through the underbrush. Nearly got busted. Never occurred to us that on the way to the park we’d passed the picture windows of half the mothers in the neighborhood who knew our names. But I had no sense or fear of life-changing consequences. I recall tons more nervous tension around sneaking out of the neighborhood Walgreen’s without paying the dime plus a penny tax for the chocolate phosphate I’d had at the counter. Here I was a scholarship student in a university my parents couldn’t possibly otherwise afford; yet when someone asked me, “Hey Paradise, know where I can score some grass?” taking pride in being an efficient middleman and turning a profit came with “Glengarry Glen Ross” ease. When it came time to actually trying it, (and you never feel stoned the first time) in my dorm room with my friend, Carolyn from Dallas, it was all kind of anticlimactic.

Getting stoned, however, wasn’t the point. Making a little extra money was. Fun was smoking up a little of the profits, parties, and getting laid, and food was cheap, too. Things were so cheap that my parents actually believed I was making it on the $75 a month they were sending after I moved out of the dorms sophomore year. Rent for our spacious three-bedroom apartment was $105 a month. A phone was a few bucks a month; utilities were paid. Even when I only had one roommate I could practically scrape by. We were barely removed from turn-of-the-century days when the bar lunch was free, but beer was a nickel a glass to cover it. It never occurred to me to turn my modest dope business into a lucrative enterprise and staying small meant less exposure. It was bad enough one day when crossing the quad that someone yelled out, “HEY, HASH-MAN” as a greeting. Although every boy yearns for a cool nickname, that wasn’t it, and more than enough exposure for a lifetime.

My family has not been blessed with the ambitious gene or the drive for outsized success. My father took a stab at taking advantage of the GI Bill, but after one year of college, went to work selling. He rationalized this by saying, “I thought I owed it to your mom to be earning a living,” but Mom would have gladly continued to work for a few years using her secretarial skills to see him through college. Instead he put on his shoeshine and a smile and hit the pavement, commission-only for a long time — toys then books — in and around Chicago, expanding his route to Wisconsin, the Upper Michigan Peninsula, Indiana, and twice a year, Lexington, KY. It was not totally unlike “Death of a Salesman” around our house, right down to my mom mending stockings, and teaching me to mend my own. I was the only kid I knew who could darn, sew, crochet and knit by age eleven. Can still sew on buttons and close a hole.

My dad came by it honestly. His father, my grandfather, one of six brothers (the other five successful I’m told), was not particularly a go-getter. He was a guy who worked in haberdasheries, or what we today call, men’s clothing stores, all his life. He was small and taciturn and distant, wore thick glasses, not a fun-loving grandpa at all, and he passed away when I was twelve with my having next to no idea about who he was or what he thought. His father, my great-grandfather Jonah, was a key-maker and locksmith, and the first to arrive in America from Lithuania. In the one picture I have of him, I see myself. I have his eyes.

I say I’m told Grandpa’s brothers were successful, because I knew none of my father’s side of the family growing up. Apparently the rest of the family looked down on my grandfather for two reasons. He was a worker bee, not a self-made man. He had no business and no money. Worse, he was a Litvak who married a German. That’s the kind of thing that in the Jewish world can transcend generations, and if you know your bible, any good curse goes on past the current to the succeeding generations. So in retaliation for their writing off their brother, his father, Dad wrote them off en masse in return except for the offspring of the one sister, Pearl, who were invited to Bar Mitzvahs and funerals. Apparently, my great aunt was not so judgmental. Of course women at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t really have many choices regarding ambition; they didn’t even get the vote until my father was born. We celebrated holidays with my mother’s family, my Aunt Minnie and Uncle Jake; Cousins Sarah and Chuck, and Oscar and Gert.

The one time I did try to escalate my dealing profile and make a real score did not go well. So trusted was I in those days, that I was able to get money put up front on a massive order to go to New York and make a hash buy. I raised hundreds of dollars on single gram orders — dozens of people. (Thinking back, this probably should have been a sign that I should have gone into politics. That kind of trust is hard to come by.) However, I then went and made the rookie mistake of fronting half my stake to the friend of a good friend who swore he could deliver. He did not. I wanted to rip his tonsils out, but I was not the tonsil-ripping type. At one point, from somewhere, a .22 Beretta (minus any bullets) did find its way into my hand to be used as intimidation, but that was a bridge too far and just shows you how things can escalate until you’re really a little out of your mind. I had to eat the loss. With the money I had left though, I was able to score and bring back enough to make all deliveries and produce my usual small profit, but it put the kibosh on further ideas of “going big.” I’m also reminded of those golden days of air travel, when you could get on a plane with just about anything on your person or in your luggage without inspection or fear.

Oddly, the story of my rip-off, however, did not end there. Three years later, the summer before I left for Europe, I paid a visit to my friends Bobby and Sharon on their two acres in rural Western Massachusetts. Bobby had been nominally in graduate school in U. Mass, but they were now living a subsistence-level, bucolic life up a dirt road off Route 9 — the two lane that connected Amherst and Belchertown. Down the road from them lived a rare couple — Ellen and Guy. Guy was descended from local Indians, dug their 450 well, and did a lot of fishing and hunting. Ellen brought in the regular paycheck as a licensed, practical nurse and was a character in so many ways. She smoked a corncob pipe — often while standing in her boxers in the doorway of their tiny cabin that stood on concrete piers — and told fortunes with playing cards.

Before I left, I went down to get my fortune read. Remember, this is someone I’d never done more than shout, “Hey” to from the road. She sat me down in the kitchen, held my hand a minute, and started laying out her deck of cards — Aces, threes, kings, and nines, whatever came up. Over the next 10–15 minutes she dropped two bombshells: I was going to be going on a long trip, and it would be over water. She had no idea I was working my way to Europe on a freighter. I also would be coming into money, soon. A large sum. I was catching the ship in a couple of weeks. When could that possibly happen?

Upon returning to where I was staying in Yonkers, with my friend Ted’s family, one night his friend Fred and his wife Donna came by from Manhattan. In the course of things I told the story of getting ripped off years before by a guy named Coe. Fred, who’d always been a bit of a dealer himself, came out of his chair. It turned out this guy Coe had gone on to become a rather successful dealer — that he and Fred had done business together — and had bragged to Fred that he’d never gotten anyone ripped off. Fred picked up the phone and dialed his old running mate. “Guess who I’m sitting here talking to,” he tells him, goes on to remind him of the $300 I got ripped for thanks to him, and passes me the phone. Within seconds, the guy is falling all over himself apologizing, and telling me that if I’ll come downtown to his place the next day, he’ll make my loss good.

And he did. He had a nice apartment, full of unnecessary shit you collect when you’ve got disposable cash and want to impress, like a pool table in a room too small to keep the cues from hitting the walls, but he put three, crisp Benjamins in my hand before we cracked open a couple of Rolling Rocks. “You’ll be going on a long trip and travelling over water,” Ellen had told me. “You’ll be coming into some money. A large amount.” Okay, I hear your minds working; something about my trip to Europe might have leaked its way down the road, but a dope deal gone bad three years before. I was going to get my money back? I will go to my grave believing Ellen could predict the future with that deck of cards. Was she a herald for a belief in cosmic or Divine justice, for “what goes around comes around”? Who can say? Along with roads not travelled, there are all those lives left unexplored and unexcavated.

Ultimately, my life as a drug mogul remained low-rent and short-lived, and I escaped unscathed despite a couple of almost comically close calls. Once, I returned from visiting my neighbors across the hall to find two uniformed cops in my living room, one casually poking around, lifting up things, etc. When I asked what they were doing there, they said they’d had a call about noise from my upstairs neighbors. (Three spinster sisters in their 60’s and 70’s lived upstairs and, of course, since they were hard of hearing, they heard things all the time.)

“Do you hear anything?” I asked.

“Nope,” one of them said.

“Then I’d appreciate it if you’d please leave.”

They left. No apologies to the hippie, but getting them out of there was what mattered. I wasn’t interested in winning any points over whether they could legally be in there, certainly not with three dozen grams of hash in the freezer.

Another time, I’m sitting in the back bedroom in the Delmar Loop, kind of a glassed-in porch overlooking the garages, cleaning a pound of weed, when I look up and see a total stranger standing in the doorway of the room. Young guy, maybe my age, mustache. Never seen him before. Talk about your DefCon5-sphincter moment. Your mind goes blank, and you can only hope that this is not a narcotics squad trainee. He turned out to be the townie, ex-husband of a girl who was a friend of someone I slept with occasionally, and his wife was missing, having skipped out on the psych ward of a local hospital. St. Louis was like that. He’d found my name and address somewhere, but I had no idea where she was. I later found out that the cops were looking for her too, and if they’d coordinated with him first, that would not have been three old ladies with a noise complaint. Luckily, he was cool, but I cleaned up and moved everything the moment he left.

It was in the course of my Euro-travels I was tempted back into “the life” as they say. I was hitchhiking out of Nancy, in Eastern France, heading back to Paris. I would always be anxious for the 24 hours before getting on the road again, worried about who knows what, but after taking a bus to the edge of town, once I got my pack off my back and my thumb out, there was the exhilaration of the next adventure. I was an on-the-road guy long before I’d read the novel with my namesake character.

After a few minutes, a family pulled over to pick me up. I had stopped being amazed at moms and dads with kids that would pick up strangers and just felt grateful for the ride. Either I looked remarkably safe, or they were just cool. This family turned out to be Turkish-French, and the father spoke good English, though not the wife and kids. After an hour or so I guess he’d gotten a good impression because he just flat out asked me what I would think about our going into business together. He, through family, would organize shipments of kilos of hashish hidden inside handmade Turkish furniture like end tables and such. He could arrange it being shipped directly from Istanbul wrapped to make sure no odors leaked, etc. Just looked like furniture. He sounded like this was not his first rodeo.

I looked at his wife and kids, absorbed with each other in the back seat, apparently oblivious to the conversation. Here was one of those moments again. This was the big time. This was about J. Edgar Hoover-size shipments arriving wherever I was and my having to worry about customs and the Feds, about thousands of dollars on the line, but tens of thousands of dollars in potential profit at a time when you could buy a whole fiefdom for fifty grand. And there I was, a guy going through the second (and last) $500 of my life and no idea exactly where I was headed. Well, to Paris for the moment, but where was I headed when I got back home, assuming I would eventually get back home? (This was before Kenzo employment, Hong Kong, and a future in fashion.) Ultimately it was way too big a decision to make between Nancy and Bar-le-Duc, where they were headed to their weekend house. I turned it down.

He was fine, gave it no more gravity than if he had asked if I wanted to stop for an ice cream or to take a piss, and when he dropped me off, leaving me on the National Route, headed West, he gave me his address and said he’d be open if I ever changed my mind.

I don’t remember where it was when I got my last ride into Paris that night. I do remember that it was late and dark, starting to get cold, and I was deciding whether or not to walk back into town and look for a room, or roll out my sleeping back by the side of the road, when a Deux Chevaux, a boxy, little French Citroen model that looked like something you’d take apart with a can opener, pulled up with four people inside. They made room for me and said they were going all the way to Paris. My excitement was immediately tempered by realizing that they were all smoking, but it was no time to be picky. For the next two hours. I sat in an enclosed space the size of a shower stall with four people who literally, and I’m not kidding, all lit new cigarettes from the butts of the old ones, and refused to open the windows and dilute their enjoyment. Even though I had started to smoke again occasionally almost as soon as I got to Europe (with all the exotic new cigarettes — English Ovals, Du Maurier, Gauloise), I turned down all offers. Instead I smoked an entire pack in secondhand smoke.

I prefer not to think of how many months of my life were lost on that one two-hour drive, but it must be substantial. (I regret to say I continued to smoke casually in Europe, but stopped cold turkey upon returning home and have never since.) It is always wonderful to be arriving in Paris, day or night, but I have never been so glad as that cold midnight when they dropped me at a downtown corner, and I emerged gasping for air as if I’d been trapped below Earth with Chilean miners. At that moment, even downtown Parisian air tasted sweet.

(To Be Continued)