Monkeyshines
chapter ten

It was Fall of l966. I returned from the marines to Chicago and signed up for the opening quarter of the brand new Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois. I studied philosophy and political science, and got a flower painted on my foot. Three Black teenagers crossed my path as I walked home from school. They ran out of the White neighborhood and into the dark. Two men in their twenties stopped running in order to set themselves and fire three shots each after the fleeing youths. A White woman walking through a Black neighborhood was doused with gasoline and set afire. Riots came to Chicago.
My neighbors asked, "Have you got a gun? You want a shotgun or a pistol?"
The National Guard set up weapons positions at various intersections. I left for Mexico. I nursed a sense of doom that America was foundering. We seemed to have no standard beyond the personal accumulation of wealth. Big fish ate little fish. Neighbors struggled to dominate each other or fight off domination. Groups threatened and belittled each other, sacrificing truth at the altar of discretion. The herd seemed poisoned. The karmic response, the proportions of the impending, compensatory change accumulated. Retribution seemed inevitable. In my mind, a cataclysm loomed.
Simultaneously, I kept a spark of optimism alive inside me, a whisper that the universe was unfolding in the one and only way it could. If there was a heart in the artichoke, the message there must be, "Judge not, fear no evil, and make a joyful noise unto the Lord."
It was only a brief trip to Mexico; most of the next academic year, I studied. Not hard, but regularly. I experimented with drugs; I tended bar and drove a taxi; and I moved from one apartment to another. My room mates were Gary Kilpatrick, a Kentucky Baptist, and Sheldon Edelson, a suburban Jew. And I met a young Polish woman named Christine.
At the end of the year, traveling fever took me again. My Mecca this time was California. Suzanne lived there in a house full of astrologers. (They were trying to predict earthquakes among other things.) I visited her, and it got kind of bizarre. I ran over her with my insistence, stole her autonomy, and drove away with her protesting self in a pouring rain. There wasn't physical violence. It was a psychological struggle. But when I agreed to stop and talk, she bolted into the storm. I starved for what I thought Suzanne had plenty of. I insisted she come along and feed it to me. She was nearly convinced. She was a triple Pisces. Her Sun, Moon and Rising Sign were all Pisces. Her imagination was boundless. She momentarily imagined it was a good idea to let me take her away, like a load of lumber with which I'd build my house.
Alone again, I traveled down the coast to L.A. and found Frank. He lived with his girlfriend, Pat, in Canoga Park, in the San Fernando Valley. I spread my sleeping bag on the living room floor. We planned to go to the beach the next day and look for a new apartment.
At 7 AM, the doorbell woke me. I got up to answer it. As I opened the door, three men with pistols rushed toward me. Instinctively, I tried to close the door. A hand holding a gun was caught inside by the door; the rest of the guy, and the two other guys, pushed the door from outside. The gunned hand waved ominously, and each time I tried to shoulder the door shut, the invading wrist absorbed the effort. Finally the door was pushed open.
"Down on the floor, hands behind your head, c'mon, before I blow your fuckin' head off," said the first guy through the door as he pointed a gun at my face and pushed me down to the floor.
He cuffed my hands behind my back while pressing the muzzle of his pistol into the nape of my neck. The others went into the bedroom to surprise Pat and Frank. Then more people showed up, some in police uniforms. I felt a surprising touch of relief to see uniforms. At least, these guys were police not robbers or simple thugs.
They searched the apartment. I lay there, my face squashing the harsh pile of the shag rug, and watched a guy search my pack. He found a bit of hash wrapped up like chocolate. Apparently he assumed it was chocolate, because he put it back into the pack.
Eventually I got to sit on the couch and was questioned. Name, address, what was I doing there? I told them. Then I asked if I could leave. So far, no one had identified themselves or their purpose. My two questioners looked at each other, apparently considering my request. The guy who’d searched my pack then found some hash in a kitchen drawer, maybe two ounces of the same as was in my pack. He brought it over and showed it to the men considering my request to leave. They confirmed it was hashish. The cop who found it in the drawer, I could see his wheels turning, went slowly back over to my pack and looked in it again.
"Bingo," he said, "We got a score here!"
Pat and Frank were brought out of the bedroom, and I was brought into the bedroom. Larry Newt, the apparent chief of the raiders, told me I was in a lot of trouble, and he wanted to know where I got the hash. I was scared as hell. I wanted to say whatever would make him the happiest. I felt like I had one night on 63rd street in Chicago, when six junkies robbed me at gun point. Their hands trembled, and so did the guns in them. I thought one of them might shoot me, possibly without even consciously deciding to pull the trigger, maybe not even hearing the shot. They'd scared the shit out of me, and I'd cooperated totally. Respectfully. Right, wrong, truth, strategy, lawyers, and retaliation were for some later time.
I groveled, and instinctively tried to distance myself from the hash. I told Newt a guy asked me to deliver it to a friend, implying that I didn't know squat about hash. I hoped Newt saw that I was basically a good person, not one to be destroyed. But I also felt like I was trying to get Sister Lucia to believe the dog ate my homework.
While I stammered out my impossible excuse, Newt looked through my papers. He found my passport and a letter from Morocco that mentioned the price of hash. He held them up in front of me, raised his eyebrows, and looked into my eyes. His eyes sparkled with success and power, and I saw that his ethical lights were all green. He offered me a deal.
"My people need somebody to float back to Morocco to find sources of hashish," he said.
The last of my foolish hopes died. I wasn't going to be cautioned and released. I was dead. Any which way the ball rolled, life as I’d known it was over.
"And end up floating around in Tangiers harbor. Are you nuts? This whole thing you're doing is illegal. Do you have any idea how much trouble you're causing?" I rebounded sharply, driven by new excretions of adrenalin, dead man's courage and chagrin.
"You think about it," Newt said confidently, "If you don't work for us, you'll do five years for smuggling."
They took me to the station and booked me on a variety of charges. I got a public defender, Berny Mainz, and I got to make this really swell phone call to my dad in Chicago. Dad took it stoically, but I felt the unprecedented depth of the pain he was suppressing. He agreed to send me bail. Anxious and confused, I bailed out, then began traveling back and forth between Chicago and L.A. as my prosecution proceeded.
I asked Frank on my first opportunity, " What the hell?"
Frank figured that a friend of his who had a lab, had been under surveillance. On November 2,1967, federal agents raided the homes of all the people seen visiting Frank's friend, arresting them, and booking them for conspiracy to manufacture dangerous drugs. The surveillance had been organized after a suspicious piece of lab equipment had been shipped to Frank's friend from a supply house in the east.) Unfortunately for the agents, no drugs were found, so there was no proof of a crime. They had to release everyone. Almost everyone.
They must have been relieved to have something to show for their effort. Me. The Feds recorded their first hash smuggling arrest ever in California. My life went up for grabs, of course, but I suppose I should have thought of that before I possessed hash. I was getting to the bottom of things now.

Whenever I saw Berny, he wore a hounds-tooth suit, diamond rings, and lots of expensive looking jewelry. Tufts of black hair stuck out of the collar of his shirt, just above his necktie, and out of his shirt cuffs, out of his ears, and out of his nose. Black bushes sat above his eyes. He seemed primarily interested in knowing if I dealt enough dope to pay a substantial fee. I did not. Secondarily, he wanted to meet my female friends. There happened to be a number of attractive females around me at the time, and this seemed to pique Berny's curiosity.
One of them was Melodie Wilson, a fashion designer living in a fancy house on a hillside overlooking Hollywood. She had a new Corvette and beach balls. I met her in downtown L.A. as I walked to Berny's office. I wore Levis, my old French army shirt, high top deerskin moccasins tied just below the knee, and a herringbone wool sport jacket. I had longish hair and carried a bedroll slung on my shoulder in a harness I made from string.
Melody was sitting in a coffee shop as I walked by. She had a keen eye for novelty, and she came up to me and started talking. Who was I? Where was I going? Did I want to live at her house while I fought the federal government? But Melody was no flake. She was smart, aggressive, beautiful, successful, and the same height as me, 5'10 1/2". She was a Sagittarius, and she had a goofy roommate who never wore underwear and liked to flash beaver shots at strangers. I usually stayed with Melody when I was in L.A. for court. She was a major moral support, and she let me drive her Corvette. Berny saw Melody and her Corvette through his office window one day. A couple days later he looked out his window and saw me with the gorgeous Amundsen sisters. They lived with Steve Dworkin, an acquaintance of mine from Hyde Park.
Steve had inherited a fortune, and spent his time playing the silver market from his Hollywood home, and playing house with the Amundsens, whom he'd imported from Sweden to be his housekeepers. Erica and Jessica Amundsen were tremendously kind and sympathetic human females. I think one or both of them would have happily had sex with me, just to be nice, if they weren't a little worried it might annoy Steve. I never pressed it, because I didn't want to annoy Steve either. I wanted Steve's help and reassurance.
I needed friends. As a recent bustee, I was regarded as a potential turn-coat, especially by friends as they were the people most vulnerable to betrayal. (Narcs arrested 600,000 young people a year, then, and generally used them as ‘informants.’) I cherished a fantasy that Steve would hire me a real lawyer. I wanted desperately to ask him if he would please hire me a real lawyer, but I never did ask.
I assumed Berny thought I was sexing it up with the Amundsens and Melody, too. Then my attractive sister, Barbara, visited Berny's office to say how much she and the family hoped he'd get me out of this trouble. Berny liked her as much as Melody or the Amundsens.
Between visits to L.A., I wandered up to Haight-Ashbury, one of the few places in the world in my life where I felt spiritually at home. It didn't last long. The media announced there were lots of open, trusting people there, and human sharks came to feed; narcs started harvesting hippies, and the VD rate went through the roof. Some of the ‘good’ people of America seemed to focus serious attention on that deviant little community, the way sunlight is focused by a magnifying glass into tinder to start a fire.
The court was 2,000 miles from home, the feds weren't moved by pleas for mercy from my family and friends, and the agents perjured themselves. I was quickly convicted. The perjury surprised me, because everyone, even mean criminals in jail told me the feds wouldn't lie on the stand. I relied on this, and allowed Berny to waive a trial by jury. If the agents had told the truth about their method of entering Pat's apartment, the cause to search my pack, or the absence of a Miranda warning, I'd have ‘gotten off’ on the technicality called the Bill of Rights, which guarantees due process of law. Instead, they swore to God that I’d invited them to come in, permitted them to search, and agreed to talk after being duly warned. It only took one judge to find me guilty.
Berny asked the court to declare me incompetent to assist in my own defense, mainly, I thought, because I’d refused a plea bargain. The judge sent me to a court psychiatrist who interviewed me for ten minutes and declared me legally sound in suggestive language that implied I was maladjusted by virtue of my ‘Nomadic’ lifestyle.
After that, Berny said the judge was sympathetic, and wanted to sentence me to probation. Still later, he said the agents told the judge about some big dope deals in New York which they falsely attributed to me. This apparently moved the judge to overcome his sympathetic feelings, and he sentenced me to five to twenty years, the mandatory sentance without the prosecutor's agreement on a lesser sentence. Berny asked for bond pending an appeal, then a stay of execution, but the judge denied both, saying, "I don't believe in postponing the agony."
Berny was batting a crisp .125.
I wasn't at all glib or smart-alecky during these proceedings. They were too painful and confusing for that, and I was keenly aware that my parents' agony certainly hadn't been postponed. But the experience was on my life's path. I had to remember it in its context of inevitability. The pressure was a useful test for me, and others, too. I had to pass this way to reach my son and his mother. It was a difficult paradox, but I chose to feel lucky.