The Next Run: A UC Berkeley Student's Rise to Major 60s Pot Smuggler

PROLOGUE

The first time I ever heard of marijuana was in Miss Russell’s class in third grade. This was in 1955. Miss Russell showed us a black-and-white clip of two black youths smoking reefer on the steps of a paintless wooden shack set in a weed-choked field in what could have only been the Deep South. Then she showed us a clip of a young couple getting arrested as they tried to bring drugs back from Mexico in their car. Either the actors were very good or the clip was footage of a real bust because the couple looked so genuinely miserable and repentant that my eight-year-old’s heart went out to them. I didn’t want them to go to jail. Maybe this story could have a different ending, I thought to myself. I raised my hand.

How did the police know they had drugs in their car? I asked Miss Russell.

She seemed unprepared for my question and didn’t answer for a long moment.

Because of their eyes, she said finally. Drug addicts have red eyes.

CHAPTER 1

I could write about the Big Time, when I drove an Aston Martin DB5 convertible, maintained a Swiss bank account in the Bahamas, carried a .45 semiautomatic pistol I didn’t really know how to use, and was bringing in tons at a time remotely—that is, without having to go anywhere near the stuff. One of my biggest runs was six tons and all I ever saw of it was a brick a trusted distributor brought by to complain there was shake in the load. The brick was unopened.

I just picked one at random.

I opened it and indeed there was a small amount of shake mixed in with what was otherwise good quality pot.

They’re all like that . . . Don’t get me wrong now. I can sell this stuff. Only it’s going to take time. Now if you could drop the price a nickel—or better yet a dime—I could probably off my share in a week.

I went out to a pay phone, called the Mexicans, and told them the load had shake in it and was going to take time to sell, but if they wanted it to go faster, they could drop the price by ten dollars a pound. The grass was partly fronted and they jumped at the chance to get their money back sooner rather than later. A week later the load was gone and my cut remained the same, netting me a six-digit figure in 1975 dollars.

During the Big Time I spent long hours going from bank to bank changing small bills into hundreds. By the late sixties the American hundred-dollar bill had solidified its position as the smuggler’s currency of choice. With hundreds the payment for a load took about a half hour to count and fit in a briefcase. With smaller bills it would have taken hours and required a suitcase.

Whenever a shipment came in, there was pressure to offload it as quickly as possible before something bad happened, and my distributors would spend their days driving all over the Bay Area and points beyond with no time to change the many fifties, twenties, and tens given to them by the smaller distributors they were supplying. That job fell to me and I made a science of it. Small bills went into the left door panel of my pickup, and after they were changed to hundreds, they went into the door panel on the right. I wore cowboy boots and could fit $3,500 in small bills into the left and right side of each boot for a total of $14,000 at a time. I especially liked dense financial districts where there were three or four banks within walking distance of one another. Upon entering a bank, I would remove small bills from my boot and upon leaving, I would tuck back in hundreds. Thirty-five hundred, I had learned, was close to the upper limit you could change before the teller would be required to call over a manager or make out a report to the IRS. Many of the tellers changed my money in a bored, mechanical fashion, but if they seemed at all curious, I would excitedly tell them how I was going to see a used Porsche for sale and wanted to flash hundred-dollar bills in front of the owner as I made my offer.

New ones if you’ve got ‘em.

Most of the mistakes I made in the business could be filed under the heading of forgetting what I was about. I had changed fourteen grand in small bills one day and was headed back to my truck when I happened to pass a store window with the exact model of Adidas basketball shoes I had been looking for. I swerved right in. The clerk found my size to try on and without thinking I yanked off my boot—only to see a shower of hundred-dollar bills flutter across the shoe store floor.

Oh, I just went to the bank, I blurted truthfully as I scrambled to gather them up.

The clerk never said a word, just averted his eyes till I had picked them all up, as though my bills were somehow obscene.

Anyway, I could write about the Big Time and I will. And not just Mexico but Colombia too with a twin-engine cargo plane picking up loads under cover of darkness and dropping bales into the lee of a deserted atoll off the coast of Florida to be recovered by waiting speedboats and brought in to Miami harbor the following morning complete with water-skiers in tow to make everything look cool. I’ll write about all that. And Morocco and Afghanistan too. But for me the best times, and what I’m going to write about most, were the early small-time days when everything seemed so lighthearted and romantic, and all of us in my crowd were still friends with no jealousies or betrayals, and I truly and wholeheartedly believed that flooding the country with pot was the most wonderful thing I could do.

*

On a rainy December night in 1965, I was playing cards with my two best friends, Bill Gretsch and Arf, as we wondered what we should do over the Christmas break. Arf and I were studying engineering at UC Berkeley and Bill was going to Merritt Junior College. Neither Arf nor I had any interest in engineering, but we were both good at math and science, and engineering was the only science-related major that didn’t have an English requirement. We had been traumatized by our English teachers at Berkeley High, who always seemed to want something more from us, though we could never figure out what, and asked questions like, What does the river symbolize in Heart of Darkness? To us it was just a river. Anyway, this is what we were basing our future careers on: avoiding English class.

Arf came here from Puerto Rico in tenth grade and our teacher introduced him to the class, then asked me to show him how to use a slide rule. I introduced him to our crowd and he told us people called him Raf, short for Rafael, but because we liked to mangle words, and especially because Raf wanted nothing more than to blend in here in this new country and not stand out in any way, we changed Raf to Arf. At first he hated the name. One day I called him by it and he drew himself up to his full, six-foot, Latin-macho height and said, The name is Rafael Agustín Lopez Loera! I figured I would never be calling him Arf anymore, but a few days later he called me up, saying, Hey, what’s new? This is the Arf.

Above us we could hear the rain with its random pounding on the roof of Bill’s flat as we concentrated on our cards. We were playing hearts and I was always trying to shoot the moon while Bill and Arf kept trying to stop me. For a long time none of us said much, then while Arf shuffled, Bill said, Say, we ought to go to Mexico over the break. We could take your truck, Tom, and Arf here could do the translating.

Now I had dreamed of going to Mexico ever since I was partly raised on my grandparents’ farm in the Salinas Valley, where I saw Mexicans driving around in their long, low, rattly cars with the sarape over the rear deck and a pile of kids going wild in the back seat while their mother sat placidly in front. A Mexican family lived next door to my grandparents and I used to play with their kids and envied the secret language they had for talking among themselves. I vowed I would learn Spanish and even got a little, red, Morocco-bound Spanish dictionary to carry with me wherever I went.

So by the end of the evening, it was decided: we would go to Mexico over the break. Then as a complete afterthought, Bill said we should bring some pot back in order to defray our trip expenses. Pot was still something of a mysterious unknown in 1965, at least in our circles, and none of us knew much about it. Bill had tried it several times, I had tried it twice, and Arf had never tried it at all. Coming from an aristocratic Latin family, he regarded pot as low class. The game broke up with our deciding vaguely to look into it.

Bill used to live in La Jolla, where he learned to surf, and a few nights later he called to tell me one of his old surfing buddies was in town. He’s been to Mexico, he told me, then whispering over the phone, He knows where to score. We met with him the very next night at a Mexican restaurant in an industrial area of west Oakland. Arf was there, along with Bill and his friend, and we took a booth at the back, next to the kitchen. Bill’s friend kept looking behind him as though the cook might be listening.

Mazatlán’s the place to score, he told us in low tones, leaning close. Just hang out on the beach there. Watch out you don’t get burned, though. A lot of cats will sell you weed and then turn around and have you busted. They get their weed back as part of the deal. Just ask some surfers where to score. They’ll hip you to the right people.

A few days later I ran into Arf on campus and learned he had no intention of scoring grass. He had only been playing along with the idea for the excitement of plotting something dangerous and evil. He called our plan a pipe dream and said it would never happen.

Anyway, what am I going to do with a bag of pot? He waved his hand in a deprecating way that was like a habit with him.

Sell it for a small fortune.

I don’t know anyone who would buy pot.

"I’ll sell it for you. Better yet, I’ll buy your share."

He thought this over, the prospect of easy money seeming to interest him.

But we’ll get caught.

No, we won’t. Remember, bad stuff only happens to other people.

We both laughed because this was a conclusion we had come to recently during one of our late night, philosophical discussions. I eventually got him to go along with our plan, and the next day the three of us checked my truck out for hiding places and decided the door panels were the safest place.

CHAPTER 2

We left on a crisp winter day. I picked up Bill and Arf and they each laid their gear in the back of my pickup, arranging the heavier items on top so nothing would blow out in the wind.

Don’t ever grow old! Arf said as he slid into the cab. In his left hand he was holding a paper bag gripped by the neck. He was upset about his grandmother.

All she does all day is sit in a chair and dream about Puerto Rico. She has no friends here. How can she? She doesn’t speak the language.

Well, she needs to learn, said Bill. She should take a class. She could make friends that way.

Anh, Arf waved his hand. She’ll never learn English. You know what she told me last night? . . . She’s just waiting to die!

What’s in the bag, Goose? Bill said then, quoting our favorite television commercial.

Arf reached in and pulled out a bottle of eggnog his grandmother had given us for the trip. He passed it around and to our surprise it had rum in it—lots of rum. Evidently Arf’s grandmother saw nothing wrong with giving alcohol to three teenagers on a road trip to Mexico. It was gone by the time we reached San Jose.

Now we were on the 101, the King’s Highway, El Camino Real. Everywhere we looked, it seemed, there were signs of Mexico and we eagerly pointed them out, hyping our trip. We exulted over the littlest things: a prickly pear in someone’s front yard or a black-on-white license plate that said only B.C. In Gilroy we lusted over the brown-skinned Mexican girls selling fruit at rickety stands. And every time we passed a place name in Spanish that I didn’t know, I would ask Arf what it meant. We passed a sign that said Salsipuedes and Arf said it referred to a game kids play where they pretend to be birds and try to pour salt on each other’s backs, the folk belief being that if you pour salt on a bird’s tail, it can’t fly. Arf explained this in a very authoritative tone, warming as he was to his job as chief interpreter for our trip. If I don’t know it, it’s not Spanish! he declared with a laugh. I later learned his explanation was nonsense and not at all what Salsipuedes meant, but at the time I believed Arf’s every word.

Late that afternoon we were approaching King City when we came up behind a stake bed truck carrying Mexican women laborers home from the fields. By now the sun lay just above the horizon, a huge, red ball bathing everything in a thin, wintry light. The truck in front of us had no tailgate, affording us a clear view of the fifteen or twenty women in back. All were standing save for a lone teenage girl who sat at the tail end of the bed, facing us, her legs dangling over the edge. She wore a dirt-smudged peasant blouse and was big-boned with strong worker’s arms, full breasts, and skin that shone like copper in the fading light. We guessed she wasn’t wearing a bra, for every time the truck went over a bump, her breasts jiggled. She caught us staring at her breasts and to our surprise, she grinned. We pulled out to pass and she waved. Her boldness blew us away. Bill then declared she was a good omen and signified that we were all going to get laid when we got to Mexico. This led to a discussion of the Tijuana Donkey Act and sex in general with Bill speaking from true experience while Arf and I could only pretend to know what we were talking about based on what we had learned from books and off john walls and the like. Bill was already living with a girl but rarely even referred to this fact and never questioned Arf or me when we intimated stuff he likely knew never happened.

We made it past L.A. and threw our sleeping bags out under a row of palm trees along a deserted farm road domed with stars. In the morning there was dew over everything and a chill in the air so that we had to work up to getting out of our bags. We found a Flying A station and used the restroom to wash up, drying our faces with paper towels as we joked about all the señoritas we were going to ball when we got to Mexico. At a roadside café we ate huge breakfasts of eggs, pancakes, and hash browns with plenty of bacon and sausage on the side and coffee to wash it all down with. The bill came to over eight dollars, but we figured it was as good as paid for by the grass we were going to bring back.

We cut inland and next thing we were crossing the border at Calexico. This involved navigating a maze of tall concrete corridors bearing intimidating signs that read, All narcotics addicts must register with US Immigration before entering Mexico. Federal law. The corridors finally opened up and ahead of us lay Mexicali. Wow! we murmured to ourselves. Instantly I fell in love with this place. It was crazy: brightly colored buildings, cars zooming about, people everywhere, little shops sandwiched between the big ones, wooden stands where there was no more room for shops, pushcarts for the vendors too poor to afford a stand, and signs everywhere, many of them hand painted, often in red and blue, which are at opposite ends of the visible spectrum so that the letters seem to scintillate. And the cars! Many dated to the thirties: long four-door sedans with suicide doors and running boards, and the men driving them in white linen suits and white sombreros looked just like gangsters out of a tropical version of The Untouchables.

We got caught in traffic and a peddler rushed up to sell us a piñata. He had an immense bundle of them hunched over his back. We told him no, but he kept jogging alongside us, quoting lower and lower prices, his absurd burden of piñatas bouncing. To get away from him, we turned down a side street, but it was one-way the wrong way and a motorcycle cop pulled us over. We were so excited to be in this new, crazy country that we acted silly in front of the officer. Arf rolled down his window and pretended not to speak Spanish. The cop kept asking for "dinero para los cafés."

"Los cafés?" Arf repeated with a thick gringo accent, scrunching his face up in puzzlement.

"Sí, sí. Los cigarillos," the cop tried.

Oh, you want a cigarette? Arf whipped his pack out and deftly shook it so that a single cigarette popped up.

The cop gave up and strode back to his motorcycle, shaking his head in disgust. As he roared off, we roared laughing. We can get away with anything here! we told ourselves. We headed on and at the very edge of town sat a squat cinder block store advertising "Cerveza." We decided to take a chance. We pulled over and walked in, making conversation in deep, manly tones as we pulled a six-pack of Bohemias from the cooler and brought it up to the counter. Sure enough, the clerk sold it to us without asking for I.D.

He hardly looked twice at us, I said as we got back in the truck.

This country’s wide open! exulted Bill.

We drank while we drove, figuring there was no law against it, and flipped our empty bottles out the window and up over the cab so they landed in the bed. Later I got the idea to ride in back and made a comfortable pallet out of our three sleeping bags as we headed on. We were in the great Sonoran desert now. Beneath me the truck’s drive train made a reassuring drone that varied in pitch with the dips and hills in the road, and above me arched the blue immensity of the Mexican sky. From time to time a raw, red earth road cut flashed by. I sucked in the pure desert air rushing past and thought how all these years I had dreamed of going to Mexico and now I was finally doing it and had the wonderful feeling that this was going to be the beginning of a whole new life for me. I punched my fist into my palm and shouted, Yeehaw! . . . You’re doing it! . . .You’re gonna make it! along with other crazy things only the rushing wind could hear.

I took the wheel later that evening as we passed through a barren stretch of desert with only the occasional, pale yellow lights of a lonely ranchito to break the monotony. There was no moon out and the surrounding land was inky black. Once in a while headlights would appear, grow brighter, and flash past. The three of us sat slouched in the cab and for a long time none of us spoke, each lost in his own thoughts as we hurtled through the night. While we were in this pleasant, dreamy state, a great orange glow flared up from behind a dark hill just ahead of us, lighting up the sky. A fire! we all cried at once, jerking up in our seats. I pressed the pedal to the floor.

It had to be some horrible accident, we figured. I pushed my poor truck for all it was worth, propelled by teenage visions of pulling a beautiful Mexican girl from the wreckage. We topped the hill doing ninety and there below lay the burning wreck. It was off the highway and cars had already stopped and there were people milling about. No one seemed to be approaching the wreck and as we drew closer, we saw why. It was an inferno. Flames were reaching twenty to thirty feet into the sky. Whoever was in there didn’t have a chance, Bill murmured. We pulled up, jumped out, then stood there dumbly watching like everyone else.

Looking around, I saw there were several Mexican families and four or five lone Mexican men. I didn’t see anyone excitedly telling how they had just narrowly escaped death. Bill shook his head.

Even if the people had managed to get out, the nearest ambulance is probably a hundred miles away.

I looked around and, aside from the fire, there were no lights anywhere, just miles and miles of desert with bleak buttes casting their purple bulk against the dark of the sky. We were in big, bad Mexico now, we told ourselves. Anything could happen here and no one to save us. It felt exhilarating. I wanted something to happen that would shake up my life and this seemed like the perfect place.

We watched until the fire began to die down. Two kids had already lost interest and were playing in the dust alongside the highway. A car took off and we decided to leave too. There was nothing we could do here to help anyone and anyway, we had a mission ahead of us. But as I opened the door to my truck, I took a last glance at the burning vehicle and had a sense of What’s wrong with this picture? By now we could make out the silhouette of the vehicle and it appeared to be an older pickup, probably from the forties. Then I saw it: the vehicle had no wheels! It was propped up on blocks! This was no fiery accident, but just an old stripped wreck someone had doused with gasoline and set on fire for God knew what reason. Realizing this, we looked around, wondering if the other people knew this too or had maybe even started the fire. It was hard to tell. Anything could happen here, we decided, but it might not always be what it seemed.

CHAPTER 3

At the lonely border town of Sonoyta, we waited in line with other drowsy travelers as a clerk typed up tourist visas by the light of a naked bulb surrounded by moths. From here the highway turned south into the interior of Mexico, and after a while we came to a brightly lit inspection station with pylons in the road diverting us in. We rolled to a stop and a bored officer approached, asked if we had any radios or appliances, and waved us on when we said no. In the lane next to us, a Buick was being searched by soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders while the apparent occupants, two Mexican men, looked on. Back on the highway Bill said, Did you see which way that Buick was pointing? Arf and I both had. It was pointing north. To our left, pylons were set out to divert northbound traffic into the station as well. This was sobering. We hadn’t counted on having to go through any inspections in Mexico. Obviously the grass would have to be well hidden before we got back here. It was going to be like running the border twice.

We drove on till we grew tired, pulled off onto a lonely set of tire tracks, and threw our bags out on the open desert. With no lights around we could see every star in the sky. I picked the dimmest, tiniest star I could find, a star no one else would ever think to pick, and got bearings on it from nearby larger stars so I could find it again and decided this would be my star forever, my star to wish upon. In the morning we took off and a peasant couple flagged us down. We let them ride in the back of the truck and soon more campe-sinos flagged us down and before we knew it, we had eleven men, women, and children riding in the back of the truck. My poor truck! I worried that the springs would break. Thankfully they were all going to the same nearby village and we soon had our truck to ourselves again. And this is how we learned about the Mexican style of hitchhiking, which involves several quick waves of the index and middle fingers, which to us gringos looked as though they were flagging us down.

In the afternoon we grew hungry. All along the highway we had seen signs for restaurants, some of them little more than letters painted on a board. Anyone, it seemed, could call their place a restaurant and put out a sign. I got the idea that we should eat at the beatest, most tumbledown place we could find and Bill and Arf went along with this crazy plan. Soon we found a squat adobe hut with no panes in the windows, no door in the doorway, and a bald tire hung up on a post out front with the letters "RESTAURANTE" hand-painted across the top of the tire in white. We walked in and a young couple hurried to seat us at the only table, a rickety affair situated next to the stove. The back doorway had no door and looked out over a ragged vegetable garden carved from a field of weeds. The couple set the table and I told Arf to ask them for the menus.

Are you kidding? There’s no menus.

I looked around. Well ask them where the bathroom is.

Arf nodded toward the field out back. There.

Yeah, and that’s where our food’s coming from too, put in Bill, whose father was in public health.

The couple served us and Arf said, You know we’re eating their dinner, don’t you?

What do you mean?

You didn’t see them chase their kids out as we were walking up? This is their dinner.

Meanwhile, Bill had picked a piece of lettuce out of his taco and was holding it up to the light. Hm. . . . Salmonella City.

While he and Arf carefully picked all the vegetables out of their meals, I made a show of eating everything on my plate. Wimps! That evening, though, I got sicker than I had ever been before in my life. For the first time on our trip, we had to pay for a motel. I got in bed and felt so chilled, I had Bill and Arf pile all three of our sleeping bags on top of me and still shivered miserably and couldn’t get my teeth to stop chattering. Every few minutes I had to jump up and run to the bathroom to throw up or have diarrhea or both. Finally I grew so exhausted that I couldn’t even get out of bed when I needed to and fell into a deep, coma-like sleep.

Morning came and I woke up feeling strangely refreshed and full of energy. I took a long, thorough shower, left a fifty-peso note for the hapless maid, and we headed on. Our next stop was the Tropic of Cancer, which was marked by a truncated stone pyramid with an inset bronze plaque. Bill and I had never crossed the Tropic of Cancer before and we pulled over to check it out. No one was around as we crossed the highway and walked up to the monument. I piss on the Tropic of Cancer! Bill declared and proceeded to do just that. Arf and I quickly followed, laughing as we aimed so that our three trajectories intersected at the same spot on the stone.

Then came Mazatlán. I will never forget our first sight of it because there was a dense, white mist lying over the lowlands between us and the town, which made it look as though Mazatlán were floating on clouds, like a city out of a fairy tale. We came to a fork in the road with a sign offering El Centro or La Playa, which seemed an easy choice, and soon found ourselves looking out over the most beautiful stretch of beach I had ever seen. The sand was white, the water blue and clear, and there was practically no one around. To the north, the nearest hotel was over a mile away. To the south, two men were building the second story to a small cottage. One man stood on the ground next to a wheelbarrow full of bricks and lofted them up one at a time to the other man, who was kneeling on the second floor, trowel in hand, as he laid a wall. Mexican efficiency, remarked Bill. We parked right on the sand next to a patch of ice plant, threw our trunks on, and jumped in the water. Bill taught Arf and me how to shuffle our feet along the seafloor to kick up stingrays, but we soon stopped bothering. There were no stingrays here. This is just like Puerto Rico! Arf cried and went rolling over and over in the sand until he was covered with it and only his eyes gleamed out.

We pitched our tent right there on the sand and rolled some bleached logs over to serve as benches. As we were sitting there admiring our new digs, we spotted a man heading down the beach from the north, the first person we had seen since the two laborers. He was thin, older, and wore a white muslin shirt and pants but no hat, his bald scalp red from the sun. On spotting us, he headed in our direction. Then to our astonishment, he stepped into a tall bush, squatted, and proceeded to hang a shit right there on the beach. We could see him grinning through the branches. After using some leaves to wipe himself, he strode up to us with his hand extended. Bill and I shook hands with him, but Arf just let the man’s hand dangle there in midair. The man ignored the snub.

Good morning! he said in reasonable English. I am pleased to offer to you my services as your guide to Mazatlán. I can get for you whatever you need. You like peyote? Mushrooms? Grass? Bennies? Reds? . . . Nice Mexican girls?

He said he could get us Acapulco Gold for ten dollars a kilo. We asked to see a sample, and he said for the trouble to get it he would need five pesos, which amounted to forty cents. This we readily gave him and watched him head on down the beach, which was the last we ever saw of him. When I realized he had gotten our hopes up just to beat us out of forty cents, I got pissed and wanted to go find him, but Arf just laughed and said it was a typical Latin trick.

After that no one approached us. The days went by and we spent our time body surfing or roaming the crooked Mazatlán streets all lit up with Christmas lights. For dinner we ate freshly caught seafood at thatched-roof restaurants that hung out over the water, and in the evening we built bonfires out of driftwood and talked our hearts out late into the night. When we were too tired to talk anymore, we threw our bags out just above the high tide line and let the crash of the waves lull us to sleep. The sun on our faces woke us up in the mornings.

The days passed and I eagerly took note of little details of this new country that I somehow knew was going to become an important part of my life: pelicans flying parallel to the waves as they inspected them for fish, a cur lying in the shade of a beached skiff, the lanterns in the restaurants made out of dried blowfish, and at night the way the reflections of the green and red neon signs danced gently over the rolling waters. At a restaurant, I held up a salt shaker to show the cute waitress how someone had put grains of rice in it as a joke, and she smiled and told me they were put there on purpose to keep the salt from caking in the humid air.

We were having the time of our lives, but our plan to score grass was going nowhere. We had seen a few American surfers in town, but they looked so sullen and cliquish, we were afraid to approach them. We told ourselves we should do something and decided to try scoring at the most popular stretch of beach, which was in town, across from the Hotel de Cima. We went there, purposely dressed in street clothes and street shoes and wearing shades. It was the middle of the day and the beach was crowded with people lying on towels while their kids played tag with the waves. The air smelled of salt and suntan lotion. Circulating among the tourists were the usual vendors, peddling everything from dried blowfish to opals to bracelets made of abalone shell set in silver.

We walked back and forth across the sand, doing our best to look sinister and heavy, stopping from time to time to raise our shades and peer meaningfully over the crowds. No one paid us any attention. Paralleling the beach was the Avenida del Mar, which was four to eight feet higher than the beach and separated from it by a stone wall, interrupted every so often by a set of concrete stairs. On the street side, the wall was only a couple of feet higher than the sidewalk and wide enough to make a convenient bench. The sidewalk and bench-like wall were called el malecón and served as an esplanade, where vendors sold mangos and paletas, lovers sat holding hands, and cab drivers stood about looking for fares. Arf suggested we hire a cab and ask the driver where to score, but after discussing this for a good half hour, we couldn’t quite get up the nerve to do it. Bill then pointed out that we hadn’t scored grass and hadn’t even gotten laid, yet were having the best vacation of our lives.

I would do it all over again and don’t give a damn about the cost because it’s money well spent!

Arf and I agreed and in a way it was a relief giving up on the idea of scoring pot. We had discovered paradise and began talking about our next trip here and all the friends we couldn’t wait to bring.

CHAPTER 4

About a week had passed and we knew we had to leave our wonderful paradise soon in order to get back in time for classes. The problem was we had lost all track of the date. We tried to figure it out by counting backward, but the days all ran together in a blur. We were sitting at our favorite hangout, a cocos helados stand set on a concrete platform that projected out over the beach a few blocks north of the Hotel de Cima. The tables here were thick, round, concrete disks with red and blue tiles set in them checkerboard fashion and were shaded by parasols. A faint breeze off the ocean kept us cool.

We watched as the proprietor selected three coconuts from a rusted ice chest and deftly cut the tops off with a machete before serving them to us with straws. After we had sucked out the sweet milk, he cut them open for us and gave us spoons to dig out the meat, which is soft if the coconut is truly fresh. We looked out over the beach, where the usual vendors paced back and forth, plying their wares with the persistence of the tide. This was their lot in life, I thought to myself, and wondered what my lot was going to be. I had no idea. The prospect of earning a living daunted me and was something I didn’t like to think about. There were a lot of things I didn’t like to think about. I was still living with my parents and was dying to move out but didn’t have any way to make money. I was nearing the end of my teens but didn’t feel at all ready to go out in the world as a competent adult. I wasn’t sure how well I would get along with people. In high school the kids who were socially awkward or didn’t have friends were called gimps. I hated that word and went to absurd lengths not to be thought of as a gimp. A couple of times I even made up stories that made me sound like someone exciting. More often I didn’t commit myself, only hinting that I was up to something secretive and important. In reality, I was up to nothing. Berkeley High had social clubs made up of jocks, cheer leaders, and other popular types, and there was even a consolation social club for the kids that couldn’t get into the desirable ones. My friends and I weren’t even invited to the consolation club.

While I was thinking all this, a vendor came up to us, offering woven palm leaf hats. Arf had taught me how to say we weren’t interested, but before I could get the words out, the vendor was speaking to Arf in rapid Spanish. Arf leaned across the table toward Bill and me.

This guy says he can get us grass.

I stared at the vendor and he grinned, nodding up and down as if to affirm what Arf had just said. He was dark-skinned with smooth, broad, almost feminine features and a pencil line mustache, like a Mexican version of Muddy Waters. Later I would come to appreciate this wasn’t entirely coincidence. The vendor came from Guerrero, where many of the inhabitants have African blood that can be traced back to the days when slaves were imported to work the plantations there. He said his name was Meche and handed a hat each to Bill and me.

He says to look at them as though you’re thinking of buying them.

While Bill and I feigned interest in our hats, Arf and Meche spoke in rapid-fire Spanish. Meche said the beach there was muy caliente — very hot — meaning there might be agents or informers around. He asked where we were staying and said he would meet us there in an hour.

He arrived at our camp and straight off handed us a piece of folded newspaper with pot inside. Grinning in a way that was almost like a giggle, he explained how he sold hats on the beach as a way of meeting Americans who wanted to buy grass. While he and Arf discussed terms, I used a piece of the newspaper to roll a joint. I lit it and offered it to Meche, but he declined, saying he would be back the next morning to see what we thought of it.

He left and Bill and I passed the joint back and forth. Arf still looked down on pot and refused to try it. Before long a feeling like you get in a fast-dropping elevator spread out my arms and legs to my fingertips and toes. I became aware of the sun blazing down and felt the salt on my skin tingle. I lay down and let myself go limp on the sand. I thought how lucky we were to have found Meche and began to laugh. It was a soft kind of laugh that welled up in my throat like bubbles in a spring. Arf frowned, thinking I was hamming it up, and seeing him looking skeptical like that made me laugh all the harder. Bill just smiled and took drags off his cigarette. Bill never got the giggles. He was too mature in a way.

I laughed and laughed. I laughed until my sides began to ache and said I needed to calm down with a fresh orange juice at the Rocamar, which was a restaurant perched on a rocky bluff a half mile down the beach. The whole way there I couldn’t stop laughing. We climbed the narrow steps to the entrance and I worried there might be a lot of people inside—I was still laughing—but the only other patrons were four surfers sitting at a far window overlooking the ocean. The surf must not have been up, for the surfers looked very sullen and morose, which caused me to laugh all the harder. The waiter came and Arf had to give him my order. My orange juice finally came and as I felt the golden liquid slide down my throat, I thought of the Peruvian Indians who poured molten gold down the throat of the Spanish governor who tried to over-tax them and fell into a pensive mood.

So you think this stuff is pretty good? I heard Arf asking me as though from the far end of a tunnel. I turned to stare at him.

Arf, I said in the most serious tones I could muster—as though if he had had lapels, I would have grabbed them. "We have got to bring some of this stuff back."

Meche approached our camp the next morning, taking long, quick strides over the sand. He asked how we liked the grass, flashed a quick grin when we told him we liked it, then turned serious. The deal had to be done today, he said, his people couldn’t wait. The price was ten dollars a kilo. We made some crude attempts to calculate the volume of the door panels and told him we wanted twelve kilos. He asked to see our money, then told us he would be back at noon to take us to the score. We broke camp, packed everything into the back of my truck, and waited.

Just like that the character of our trip had changed. Before, we had been happy and carefree and now we were worried and nervous. This was our plan, though, and we were determined to go through with it. We tried to imagine what the score would be like and worried we might get cheated on the weight. Arf said we could drive into town and buy a scale, but we stayed where we were out of grim inertia.

Meche arrived nearly an hour late, appearing nervous and agitated. He asked to see our money again and the four of us piled into my truck. I drove, following Meche’s directions interpreted by Arf. Soon we were in a poor fraccionamiento, far from the usual tourist spots. Deep chuckholes pocked the road and Meche kept jerking his hand up at every one as though I couldn’t see them for myself. People were everywhere: in doorways, by the side of the road, hanging out on street corners. They must know, I thought: three gringos crammed in with a Mexican waving his hand like a maniac in an area where tourists never go. I cursed my truck for being painted a bright construction yellow. Bill hardly spoke, I noticed. He was chain-smoking and had his hand outstretched against the dash to steady himself against the jolts. Arf was the only one who seemed at all calm.

We crested a small hill and Meche directed me to pull over next to an adobe home painted phosphorescent pink. Arf stepped out to let him out and he disappeared inside. Instantly we were surrounded by a gang of ragged kids staring up at us and giggling at our foreignness.

This is the score? Bill said. This is crazy. There’s a million people watching.

He said not to worry about the people.

Bill gave a faint snort, looking around. Someone’ll turn us in for the reward, for sure.

I glanced behind us. See if anyone gets our license number.

Meche’s probably already got it.

I don’t think so, said Arf. If he had an arrangement with the police, I don’t think he’d be so jumpy.

Several minutes went by. We’ve still got the money, Bill said. We ought to split.

His words lingered in the silence that followed. He had said them in a half-joking way, but I could tell he meant them. Showing fear was considered a sign of weakness in our crowd and his words felt embarrassing to me. Arf wasn’t saying anything, but I suspected he felt the same. I was still mulling this when we suddenly became aware of two men at the back of the truck. We turned in time to see them lay two large cardboard boxes in the bed. The contents of the boxes were concealed by sheets of newspaper neatly folded so that they just fit inside the boxes near their tops. Meche appeared at the passenger side window, hissing, "¡El dinero! ¡El dinero! ¡El dinero!" Arf moved to step out and make sure the boxes really had grass in them.

Just pay him and let’s get the fuck out of here! cried Bill.

Arf handed Meche six twenty-dollar bills and I gunned the truck down the road.

The kids scattered. My poor truck was bottoming out from taking the chuckholes too fast, but all I cared about was getting away. I imagined Mexican cops closing in on us any second. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something white flash in the rear-view mirror and felt my heart freeze. It was the folded newspapers flying away in the wind! Inside the boxes we could see loose, dark green pot jiggling with the bumps in the road and spilling out over our gear. Pull over and let’s cover them, Arf offered reasonably, but I was too panicked. Instead I turned left, right, left, trying to find the way out.

Fraccionamientos are like American subdivisions in that they often have only one way in and out. Every road we tried came to a dead end and I kept jerking my truck around to try a different way. This seemed to go on forever. People in doorways stared as we careened past for the second and third time. Finally I found a way out, only it led directly to the center of town, where we had to stop for a red light at a major intersection. A crowd of pedestrians proceeded to cross the street directly in front of us and one of them, a young man, slanted behind us, right past the open grass. Grim, we muttered to ourselves, grim being the latest word in our crowd for anything that wasn’t cool. Grim, grim, grim, we chanted over and over like Buddhist monks as we waited for a light that seemed never to change. This is really grim!

At last we were out of town and pulled over onto a deserted side road. Arf and I jumped out, grabbed the boxes, and ran them into the jungle, where we left them like live bombs while we debated what to do. Our problem now was that the grass took up far more space than we had imagined. Back home we were used to seeing grass in tiny amounts and had imagined twelve kilos might take up the space, say, of a briefcase. These boxes were big, though. There was no way all this grass was going to fit in the door panels. We searched my truck for other hiding places and discovered that the cab was double-walled. By removing the dome light, we were able to access this hidden space. I began poking grass through, using a pencil to move it along, but after twenty minutes of this, I had managed to pack only a few ounces. It was going to take a day or more to pack the whole load, and I wasn’t that happy about opening my truck up like a tuna can to get the grass out when we got back to the States. It was mind-boggling: we had an amount of pot worth a fortune back in the States, but with no way to cross it, it was worth nothing. About a pound had spilled in the back of the truck and Bill used a branch to sweep it out onto the ground in a gesture of mock extravagance.

It was growing dark and we decided to bring the boxes back to the truck and head north, hoping an idea would come to us before we reached the Mexican inspection station south of Sonoyta. If not, we would simply have to abandon the grass on the desert. We placed the two boxes in the truck bed, covered them with our gear, and took off. Night fell and everything seemed different now that we were holding. I felt very alert and took notice of little details along the road. We passed a bus with "Amor es perder finger-painted in red on the back bumper. To love is to lose." Many of the semis on the road had replaced the lights outlining their trailers with colored Christmas lights, adding cheer to the night. In the purple fold of a distant hill, I spotted a faint yellow light and wondered what sort of conspiracies were being hatched there. The Mexican night seemed filled with mystery and now we were a part of it.

We approached an agricultural checkpoint with a sign saying, All trucks must stop, and in the dim light we could make out a police cruiser parked out front. After stopping at several of these on the way down and getting waved on, we had concluded they only applied to commercial trucks, not pickups. Just the same, my heart pounded as we barreled past. Later we rolled into Culiacán and I spotted the motel where we had stayed when I got sick, and got an idea.

*

The desert air felt cool against my face as I stared up into the night sky. With no lights around, I could see every star. Underneath me, my truck’s drive train made the reassuring drone I found so soothing. I figured it was well after midnight. I had our three sleeping bags over me to keep warm and beneath me was our grass, packed into a large duffle bag. At the mouth of the bag we had stuffed our dirty clothing, including at the very front a pair of underpants we had purposely soiled with poop watered down to resemble diarrhea.

I felt the truck slow down and the whine of the drive train dropped in pitch. The whine changed again as Arf downshifted to second, and when the stars faded giving way to a brighter light, I knew we were entering the Mexican inspection station. I felt us roll to a stop and closed my eyes. I heard an officer ask Arf for papers, heard some rustling, then felt a bright light in my face. I half opened my eyelids, letting my eyes roll upward, and gave a faint groan as I turned away.

"Está muy enfermo, I heard Arf say. He’s very sick. We need to get him to a doctor in the