Actually, our plan would net us $15,000 for roughly half a day’s work, if it came off. My share of fifteen G’s wouldn’t have put me on Easy Street for life; but for a poor, struggling college student, c. 1981, it would have been a nice little chunk of change. There were many ways I could have
I was about to give up on college by then, anyway. I’d made the Dean’s list my first couple of semesters, but after that I had started sliding, for various reasons; and I was about to go on academic probation, if not suspension. I’d been hit by a shit-rain of personal setbacks, and had got deeper into the hardcore partying lifestyle at and around the school, and my academics, such as they were, took a backseat to everything else. In fact, presuming we made the big score, my nascent plan was to ditch school altogether, and take off for the Caribbean. Find a quiet island somewhere, establish myself, and then just go as far as my money would take me. I didn’t plan beyond that – I figured nature or my guardian angel or whatever would take care of me when the time came, come what may.
It is probably needless to say, but things didn’t come off exactly as we’d planned. If they had, I’d probably either be dead by now – dead, but at peace; either that, or I’d be sitting on a beach on St. Kitts, where I would’ve been the last 30 years, happily wasting away in the bright sunshine.
Anyway, Lynn was a guy I knew in college. His girlfriend was friends with my girlfriend, and so on and so forth. Both girls, Lynn’s girlfriend and mine, were little sisters to a fraternity that Lynn was a member of.
What was I doing hanging around with these PKE’s? Or with any other fraternity, for that matter? I was then, am now, and probably forever will be an extremely un-Greek-type person. There was no active animosity against the fraternity/sorority thing. It just wasn’t my style. My indifference didn’t stem from some sort of rejection, either – I had been rushed by two fraternities; the Sig Epp’s, who were pretty seriously trying to get me to join, for some reason, and the Sigma Nu’s. If I’d been inclined to join any of them, the Sigma Nu’s would have been probably been it. They were by far the funkiest fraternity on the campus at the time, in some ways pretty close to the Animal House model. But I already knew most of those guys and partied with them already, so I really didn’t see the point in formalizing the association. Plus, I didn’t want to join anything where I would be compelled to go to meetings and shit. Perform civic duties. Fuck that.
My dad and my brother were in fraternities. SAE’s. So its not like I wasn’t familiar with Greek thing. I guess I could’ve pledged SAE at UT as a legacy or something. Not that I was inclined to . . . but I didn’t go to UT right off, anyway. I wanted to work pretty much full time and start college locally, then after a couple of semesters, once I’d got a feel for it and had saved up some money, I’d transfer to UT. It wasn’t that hard to do in those days.
In the meantime, that summer between high school and college, I got involved with this girl I’d met down at the beach. She was still in high school, a year younger than I. By that time I’d moved out of the house and into my own place; and once school started up again, this girl would stop by my apartment every morning on her way to high school, sometimes in her cheerleader uniform and shit, at like 7:15 a.m. She would let herself in and make sure I got up in time to make my first class out at Lamar U . . . by climbing in bed with me and inducing me to perform all sorts of unnatural acts with her, all of this before 8:00 in the morning. It was a pretty good deal, I thought at the time. I didn’t care about her all that much, it was very much a one-way affair. I am not proud of that, but sometimes you find yourself in a situation where, no matter what you do, it looks like you are going to get the better end of the deal. You can either fret over it, or just enjoy it. Maybe it is some kind of cosmic payback for all the times you’ve been fucked over in the past. Whatever. I chose to enjoy my little situation, even though I knew it might not be exactly noble of me.
Anyway, that whole summer and fall was a fond memory, of me and this high school cheerleader girl, cavorting around and having fun; until somewhere in there, among all our goings on, I’d forgot to protect us properly. It was near mid-semester when she let me know she was knocked up.
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Like I said, my original plan had been to
The frat little sister I was dating was named Carla. She was a part-time receptionist at the same law firm I interned at. Sweet, dark-eyed Port Arthur girl, half-Cajun, half-Hispanic. She was slender and had long, dark hair and was tall and leggy and gorgeous. And, she was wild as hell.
Naturally, I was immediately in her thrall. We started dating, and it seemed like almost every time we went out, it turned into some kind of disaster – one time, she passed out and started turning blue at a Parliament-Funkadelic concert at The Summit; a few weeks later, I got pulled over at the beach by the DPS for DWI (I wasn’t drunk, which they finally figured out); somewhere in there, she fell in the Neches River and nearly drowned during a radio station sponsored raft race; and so on.
But we were so attracted to each other, we just kept at it. Maybe we were both terminal then. I probably was; and if you are in a terminal mode of some sort, it is bad juju to get involved with someone in the same frame of mind. The two of you will tend to feed off of each other. You’ll be in this tight embrace, thinking you are having a great time, not noticing the downward spiral you have fallen into.
It was so weird dating Carla. I felt like I was along for a ride I had no control over. If you asked me at the end of it if I’d loved her, I would have said I didn’t know. Sometimes I think I really didn’t even know her. We were fucked up too much of the time to really develop any kind of a lasting relationship. As soon as something went really wrong – in this case a screwed up cocaine deal that nearly got the both of us killed – we were destined to shatter. And we did. Into a million little pieces, it seemed like at the time. What is odd is, I find myself at times thinking of her wistfully. Rather like thinking fondly of a near-miss train wreck. Nostalgia can be a strange thing.
To be honest, there are a lot of things I don’t remember from that time. I doubt Carla does, either. That may be a good thing. We were just fucked up all the time - me, Carla and her best friend, Cathleen, who was pretty hot, and had a boyfriend named Lynn, who may have been wilder than the rest of us put together. All I do remember is a lot of fun, right up to the day it stopped being fun, almost forever.
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Lynn was friends with a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy . . . I forget how far down the line he was removed, but anyway the guy at the end of the chain was a big cocaine dealer – a distributor, actually – out of Galveston or Houston, I forget which. Lynn’s friend said there was a quantity of coke being ferried into Sabine Pass on a shrimp boat, an offload from a much larger shipment anchored out in the Gulf somewhere. There had been some problem with organizing a plan to get the shipment from Sabine Pass to further down the chain of distribution. Lynn related to me this proposal as it was presented to him. Someone was needed to pick up the cocaine in Sabine Pass and then take it to a storage facility in League City or Dickinson somewhere, where it would be delivered to some guy who was a big-time street dealer in Houston. That guy, assuming everything was in order, would hand over a bag of cash that would then be delivered back to Galveston, where the delivery guy would receive his cut, again assuming everything was in order. And that was it.
Lynn said the payoff was $15,000. He said if I would drive he would give me $10,000, and he’d take $5,000. That seemed awfully generous; and there were other questions I had about the whole thing, but something – probably the thought of 10 G’s in my hot little hands – told me to forget my reservations, and just agree to do it.
When we got to the Coastal dock in Sabine Pass that Saturday morning, it was barely light. The air was thick with humidity and the smell of the ocean. It was 6:30 a.m. or thereabouts, and the sun wasn’t quite up yet, but it was already hot and sticky.
I could hear noises coming from the Western yard next door, where a big semi-submersible was being refitted. Apparently they were running extra shifts to get it done. It is kind of funny, in retrospect – that was at the height of the early 1980’s oil boom, and people were working frantically to get rigs up and operating out in the Gulf. Within three years, the whole thing went bust, and these same docks were surrounded with out of service rigs everywhere, it was like a fucking graveyard.
I wasn’t aware of any of that at the time. I was aware of the acid in my stomach churning with nervousness as Lynn and I stood out on the dock next to my Trans Am. I could hear the girls talking and laughing in the car, and then – just faintly at first – I could hear the churning of an engine, somewhere out on the water.
Shortly, a big shrimp boat came into view, chugging into the dock. It had been out on an all-night trawl somewhere, out in the Gulf. The boat was Vietnamese, but as it neared the dock I could hear conversation in Spanish and, sure enough, there were Mexicans on the boat, too. Pretty unusual at the time, it seemed to me. As soon as the boat was tied off, Lynn recognized someone on the deck and went right over the gunwale and onto the boat. As I watched with some apprehension, Lynn and this guy disappeared down an interior stairway to the hold.
I had initially been pretty gung-ho about this deal, but as it got nearer I began to have some trepidation. It bothered me that I was relying on Lynn for everything. I liked him well enough, but he was absolutely disorganized, and his personal life was a mess; yet he was organizing this complicated drug transaction? It had been his idea to let the girls come along, for the ride. I thought it was a terrible idea, but I got outvoted on it. Now here we were down on this dock, with my partner and some dealer down in the hold of a boat, retrieving our haul, and it suddenly came over me we were totally out of our element. Just some fucked up college kids, and now we were dealing with the real thing. The Vietnamese on the boat were watching every move I made – basically trying to get a cigarette lit in the stiff wind – and I was thinking that to us, this was kind of a lark, but those guys were dead serious. And even if we got out of this situation intact, I couldn’t imagine who or what would be waiting for us at the other end.
My good sense was finally kicking in, but way too late. My partner was down in this boat somewhere, and he’d made who knows what kind of commitment to some drug overlord I had no idea of. But there was no way, nowhere to run by then. We would just have to ride it out, and hope for the best. But I resolved right then and there that, come what may, I’d never put myself in a situation like that again. If I got a chance not to.
Finally, Lynn and his buddy emerged from the boat. Each had two large, brown paper-wrapped bundles, about the size of full grocery bags. They hurried across the dock and I popped my trunk. It was a tight fit, but they got the bundles shoved in there, and I quickly shut the trunk again. Lynn’s friend hurried back to the boat, which was already beginning to back away from the dock. Lynn and I jumped in the car, and I fired up the Trans Am and we got the hell out of there. We hadn’t said a word to each other, the whole time.
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We left the docks in Sabine Pass and pulled out onto Highway 87 and headed west, along the coast. It was a straight shot – from Sabine Pass to High Island and then down the Bolivar peninsula to the ferry. Probably 50-60 miles altogether. I could drive it in my sleep.
The section of 87 between High Island and Sabine Pass was washed out by a storm sometime in the mid-1980s, as it had been many times before. Only the last time, the DOT or whoever decided not to rebuild it again. There had been talk of maybe raising that section up, like a causeway, but there were environmental concerns, not to mention it would have been crazy expensive. So the whole section of road – thirty miles of highway, or more – had basically been abandoned to nature.
You can still drive it, but it would be a good idea to have a four-wheel drive with plenty of ground clearance. Whole sections of the pavement are still there, but much of the old road is covered by loose sand, some of it quite deep. The whole place is part of a nature preserve now, so maybe it is just as well.
Still, I miss being able to just drive that road. The beach in Chambers and Jefferson County never was really developed, and once you got past McFaddin Beach, it was basically desolate, all the way to High Island. Especially on an overcast, gloomy day, it was bracing to ride along that road for miles, the open ocean in clear view on one side, the black clouds roiling up over the flat grasslands of the coastal plain on the other. I’d be in my car, listening to the stereo, cruising along, completely surrounded by my two favorite things in nature – the ocean, and rain. It was so comforting, about the closest one could come in this world to feeling like being back in the womb.
I wasn’t feeling comfortable at all that day, driving down Highway 87 toward High Island in the morning sun, with two loud, chattering women in the back seat, a partner in the front seat who insisted on changing the music on the stereo halfway through every song, and enough cocaine in the trunk to get us all put away for multiple years.
We talked about what to do next. We weren’t due in League City until 3:00 that afternoon, which meant we had 5-6 hours to kill in the meantime. We could either stay on the Bolivar side and hang around at the beach or something, or go ahead and cross the bay on the Galveston ferry early, before the traffic, and hang out on the Galveston side.
We opted for Bolivar. We felt more comfortable with it. I don’t know what we would have done in Galveston, but I knew of an unoccupied-for-the-weekend beach cabin in Singing Sands at Crystal Beach, and I knew where the key to it was hidden. I felt a little better after we decided to head for the cabin at Crystal Beach to chill out for a few hours, before doing the rest of our deal, on the other side of the water.
We got to the cabin about 8:00 a.m., and sure enough, I found the key. While I went up and opened up the place, I could hear the girls and Lynn messing around in the screened in area underneath the cabin. Once I opened some windows and turned on the water, I laid on top of one of the double beds in the large main room, and thought how beneficial it would be to get a few hours of sleep. I hadn’t got much the night before. I was laying there on my back, just drifting into that nether land between wakefulness and sleep, when Carla came upstairs and said they were going for a walk along the beach. I told her to go ahead, I needed a nap. So she kissed me just hard enough to arouse me a little – on purpose, I think – and then flip-flopped on out of the room and down the stairs outside. I lay there, temporarily distracted by impure thoughts; but before very long I fell into a deep, restful slumber.
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