Somewhere in Texas

It was a hundred pounds of Mexican weed somewhere in Texas. I’d never been to Texas. Steve, my guy in Vermont—who smuggled grass into Canada in the winter, using snowmobiles to cut through remote wooded sections across the border, far from roads—seemed interested. I’d make a few thousand, which I needed. So I said I’d come get it. They’d front it to me. I’d drive it to Vermont. My guy would give me the money. I’d pay for the grass and keep my cut. Done. It was 1978.

The connection was through my former “old man,” Don. I hated those terms—old man, old lady, chick. I also hated hip and heavy—heavy as in deep and intense, not fat. I had been essentially his old lady—his mostly main squeeze (he screwed around plenty and we had group sex a few times: this was pre-AIDS, of course). Despite all the painful (for me) playing around, I was still the woman he lived with, our twinned toothbrushes in the bathroom in our duplex in Greenwich Village. But I told him early on, please just call me a friend, albeit a special friend—not girlfriend, not old lady, not even lover. And please don’t call me heavy or hip. What’s hip? I’m not hip, I said. Hip is for lame people. I hated that shit. I was eighteen when we met (he was twenty-seven) and twenty-one when we split. Now at twenty-two, I was living on my own in a loft on the Bowery, trying to make my rent.

Before Don and I went our ways, he had met this guy from Texas, Peter, who bought direct from smugglers. Maybe he had even smuggled? I don’t know. Peter was the source of this Mexican weed.

Peter had his own little mafia-like family. A dominant Leo with an entourage of women and various minions. There was number-one wife, Mary, with some children by her, and a few other younger women, various hangers-on whom Mary tolerated—one or two of them pregnant. He was a tiny kingpin in his little grass kingdom. I instinctively didn’t like him. But my ex fell for him completely: Peter was, Don proclaimed, a wise man. I always knew that Don—despite his decided intelligence, scary ability to manipulate, and aggressive bluster—was a weak man without a compass, too easily influenced by someone, anyone, who seemed to “know.”

Peter had an aura of pseudospirituality. He was traditional in his views of men and women: men dominant, women submissive and in the house. To him, polygamy made sense, was natural, and so he practiced it. The I Ching was his sacred text. He consulted the book daily, tossing coins and basing his decisions on the signs: broken lines, solid lines, stacking up to some informative hexagram. I was an obsessive coin tosser myself—though my focus was love affairs. The coins like plucked daisies: he loves me, he loves me not.

I knew a somewhat ditzy woman, Monica, who was a sometime lingerie model. She wanted to be high fashion but her tits were too big so she was stuck in the underwear ghetto of sexy bras and panties. She was a bit older than me and savvier in some ways but still something of an airhead, I thought.

Monica was laterally part of the world—my world then—of drug dealers, along with a few artists and prostitutes. A shadow world. I knew she ran drugs occasionally for money.  I asked her to drive with me to Texas to pick up the weed. I think I paid her $350 for what would be about three days of work; I, of course, covered all expenses. We were to share the driving.

I rented a car, and we began the long trip from New York City to . . . where? Somewhere in the Texas panhandle. No GPS or cell phones then. Strictly maps and pay phones.

I wanted to get this trip over as soon as possible, no stopping on the way. So the deal was that I drove as long as I could. Then she took over while I slept on the backseat.

When she pooped out, I was back on it. No stopping except for gas. She later described me to others as “a machine.”

We got to Texas less than two days later. I remember it as dry, brown, flat, and windy. We were to meet some joker, some minion of Peter’s, in some out of the way place—a pullover on the side of the road.

I was fried and hyper. Strung out and anxious. When we drove up, I immediately realized the guy waiting for us was a sexist asshole. He was about our age, shaggy and dressed in denim. He saw two women and smirked condescendingly. Just being female meant we were lightweights and fair game. And then of course we were from New York City, which provided its own pile of preconceptions. Never mind that I was really a country girl who had grown up in North Carolina and Vermont—as far as he was concerned, I was a tender-footed city slicker, aghast at all things rural.

He told me to follow him in his pickup. It was a wild ride with him making no effort to help me follow him. He drove fast, swerving around curves, and I struggled to keep up, exclaiming to my model companion, “What the hell! What’s with this guy?” It was obviously a test.

After racing round various back roads we wound up at a clapped-out house that was truly in the middle of nowhere—not another house or even tree in sight for miles. In front of the two-story frame house, the paint so peeled the clapboards were mostly gray, were lots of large barking dogs. There were a few other shaggy denimed ne’er-do-wells wandering around the sad brown premises.

There was a feeling of menace in the air, and I did feel nervous—for myself and Monica. But I also felt this was a setup for us to feel this way, and the best thing was to not exhibit much anxiety and to get the hell out of there as fast as we could. Much like being near a predator—don’t show fear and don’t run.

We got out of the car, and he said, “Hope you ladies ain’t afraid of dogs,”  referring to the roaming barking mongrels. Snigger, snigger. That condescending smirk. I wanted to punch him. “No,”  I told him coldly. “I’m not afraid of dogs.”

There was, of course, no offer of drink or food and no pleasant inquiry about how our trip had gone. I sensed he and the others just thought we were a pair of mules, running drugs for some dealer. I longed to somehow tell him that I was no mule—I was the dealer. But didn’t.

They loaded the trunk with weed. Big black plastic bags of it. I think I was dimly aware that it wasn’t exactly primo. But Mexican weed usually wasn’t—on the green and dry side. Anyway, it was too late: I had committed to this arrangement.

With relief, we slammed the trunk shut, climbed into the car, and drove away.

Back we went on the long drive north, this time to Vermont, the cruise control set at the speed limit. Couldn’t risk any run-in with a cop. Did we stop on the way? I don’t think so. I was a bit of a maniac. Hard to believe that I drove us so hard, but I have no memory of some cozy time in a motel room, engaging in girly talk with Monica. Mainly, I was trying to save some money: any extra days on the road meant money lost.

Our destination was a motel in a small town on the Canadian border, where the grass would be stored in the basement of the motel. My parents ran this motel cum restaurant. They knew what I did and benefited from my activities. Steve knew my dad and liked him. My dad ran money for him and got nicely paid for his cross-border journeys, which helped a lot because the motel business had been abysmal for years, with my parents barely scraping up the monthly interest payments on their mortgage.

And then the big Mex deal began to unravel. Steve came to look at the weed. He dubiously examined a dried-out bud and shook his head.

“I can’t do anything with this right now. I just moved a bunch of grass. There’s no market for this right now,” he said.

“But you said you could sell it,” I said, barely containing my consternation, a slight whine in my voice. Steve insisted that he had never been that assured and had only expressed mild interest. Maybe I had heard what I wanted to hear. He did indicate that he could sell some, not all of it, but it would be some weeks before he could do even that.

Holy fuck. Now I was stuck with a huge pile of bad weed, and winter was coming to the Northeast.

I had to eat some really nasty crow pie. I had to go to Don and Peter and tell them I couldn’t move this stuff after all, or at least not right away. I knew it would be chalked up as some lame female move: I was just this incompetent young woman trying to be a big-time dealer except I couldn’t cut it. Except, dammit, I had cut it and had made some decent money and gone traveling around the world on my illicit lucre.

Not much to do at first. The punky dried-out weed languished at my parents’ motel, getting worse by the day. We were nigh onto Christmas time when I got an anxious call from Don: “Peter got a tip that the feds are on to your dad. He’s got to get the grass out of the basement and hide it. He’s got to do this now!”

I believed Don. It sounded serious. I nervously called my dad, from my cavernous underfurnished loft in lower Manhattan, with the bad news. And my poor dad, then in his fifties, went out at midnight, dug a big hole in a snowbank out back, and dragged out all those big black bags and buried them. Furious shoveling in the December dark. It was the height of the ski season and the motel was full of guests.

Not much later I learned from Don that there was no concrete threat, nothing specific. Peter had just gotten a bad I Ching throw. The I Ching told him that danger was approaching. And the coins were as good as reality, as good as truth. Don, in his Peter swoon, didn’t see this as crazy. I saw it as crazy and it was crazy. But Don told me I was the crazy one for questioning this: How could I be so prosaic and dull?

I gave my dad the latest. He was furious. “I was out there sweating bullets, digging in the snow, hoping no one would see me. We had a motel-full of guests! And this was all based on the I Ching? Are you kidding me?”

My father’s wrath fell on me, making me feel responsible and guilty for this ridiculous turn of events.

Eventually, the grass was freed from its snowy hole, some of it sold, and the remainder hauled away. I don’t remember exactly how. Likely Don showed up with a vehicle—and I wasn’t made responsible for the whole load. But I sure didn’t make much on that caper.