Blow (20 page)

After Fat Harry's wake-up call, George made his way down to where Wong, the Chinese heroin dealer who had dusted George with antilice powder on his admission, now stood ready to exchange the prison duds for a nice suit, compliments of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. George glanced at the government threads, which looked like something off the rack at Wal-Mart; it was gabardine, with a funny weave to it, weird orange with a blue tinge. He cast a fond thought back to the soft Cabrera jacket he'd been wearing the day of his arrest, a luxuriant doeskin that had cost twelve hundred dollars at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, and that was back in 1973. He thought also of those five-hundred-dollar Bruno Magli loafers, of their wafer-thin leather that fairly caressed the feet. Thanks, but no, he told Wong. “I told him I wouldn't wear that thing to a shit fight. Wong also looked disgusted and told me that's what everyone said. ‘I don't know why we keep this stuff. No one ever wants it.'” On the way out, his caseworker shook his hand and told him to behave himself. Hey, don't worry on that score, George said, throwing him one last promise on the fishing boat. He handed his papers through a glass partition to the guard, who pressed a button sending the electronic door sliding back into the wall with a low moan:
brooooooo.
And George walked out into the glaring spring sunlight, a free man—in a manner of speaking.

George greeted his father with an enthusiastic hug and asked him to stop at the first liquor store he saw so he could get a couple of bottles of champagne for a little celebration. The trip back proceeded pleasantly enough, Fred tooling up Route 84 toward Massachusetts, George draining the champagne while watching the Connecticut hills undulate on by, until they got to Middletown, when the Mercury threw a rod and they had to rent a car to get them home—not a good omen.

Back home things didn't go too badly for the first few weeks, mostly because George's friend the Sad-Eyed Lady often stopped by the house from her place down on the Cape. Her name was Beth, and George had met her three years before when he was back East with Annette doing business. She was forty-three at the time, ten years his senior, about four feet eight inches tall and plumpish, a diminutive Mama Cass character dressed in flowing white muumuus with Indian-style braids and lots of beads. George had nicknamed her from the Bob Dylan song “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” with the line “Your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes.” She called him Kurt Kruger, because that's what she thought his name was. It was an alias George had picked up from a German movie actor and used when he had to be in Massachusetts, once the FBI was after him. He didn't tell her for two years who he really was.

Beth lived in a large, rambling house in Dennis, presiding over a ménage of children from her broken marriage that resembled the Munster clan, hippie division. When home from college, her oldest son, Nicky, stayed down in the basement mixing up batches of crystal methamphetamine and putting together explosive devices he used for blowing up mailboxes outside draft-board offices. The two younger children, aged eleven and nine, sat around smoking pot in the living room. Upstairs a fifteen-year-old anorexic-looking daughter named Dulcinea worked on her oil paintings—mournful landscapes mostly, along with portraits of stricken children. She took George up there one day to have a look at her artwork and suddenly was all over him, kissing and caressing him, working her way down his body, eventually unhooking his belt, pulling down his zipper, and honoring him with a very educated blow job. “After that,” George recalls, “she started acting a little crazy, getting all excited and talking fast. ‘I'm going to take you out to Provincetown and have some fags fuck you, and I'm going to watch.' I told her I didn't really think I could get into that.”

Topics of conversation ranged from the passionately loathed Richard Nixon (Nicky doing his David Frye number complete with the scowls and eyebrows) to the Trilateral Commission's plot to seize control of the world's resources to Beth's theories on reincarnation, the collective unconscious, and time travel. After having a little smoke, she'd tell George he'd been a Greek warrior in a previous life. “She'd ask me to take off my shirt so she could see the battle scars from the Peloponnesian War. She said I was in the favor of the gods, but that there was an evil force that was totally destructive and I had to watch out for that one.”

George would perk up, though, when talk turned to the subject of Nietzsche. “I'd talk for hours to him about Nietzsche,” says Beth, who last saw George in 1976 and has since moved her family from the Cape to Los Angeles. “Nietzsche argued that a person is a whole thing, consisting of light and dark images. If you try eliminating the dark ones, how do you know that you might not also be eliminating something that's light, too? They're intertwined. George was very enchanted with that part of it, about the Damons and Angels. It seemed to provide a perfect rationale for the things he did. ‘They're both in there, inside me,' he'd say. ‘There's nothing I can do about it. And they're in you, too. I'll show you.' And he'd go right to where your devils were and command them to rise. If he said, ‘Rise,' they lived. If you were the slightest bit greedy, he had you in the palm of his hand. That was George Jung. That was the secret of his success. I found that out very painfully.”

*   *   *

As George had foreseen only too well back in Danbury, it didn't take long before life with his parents became unendurable. Over supper at night, his mother always maneuvered the talk to her favorite topic, how George had ruined his life, and theirs too, while he was at it. “You're thirty-three years old and you're a bum,” was her main theme. “You're a common criminal. You've been in prison. You've disgraced us with the neighbors. We can't lift up our heads. You've thrown your life away. You've never been any good. You can't hold a decent job.” George couldn't get away from it by moving out, because that would get him in trouble with the parole office. Malcolm MacGregor, Mike Grable, and Barry Damon were all married and most raising children—there was nothing in their lives he could identify with. He also gave a wide berth to the big colonial at the bottom of the hill, where his high school sweetheart, Gerry Lee, now lived with her husband, John Hollander, who'd played end on the football team. They had two kids now, and a big yard with nice woods in the back. George felt like an invisible man, thrust backward into a former life but lacking the ability to connect with anyone who lived there. He snuck around the town, not wanting to be seen. “Here I'd been up in the hills with Manuel and the Indians, running free for years, making more money than anyone I ever knew, leading my own life. Suddenly there I am with no car, living with my parents, going by their rules, sleeping in the bedroom where I was a little boy, and them yelling at me, even Fred started doing it. ‘I don't want to catch you going down to the bottom of the hill and start making any trouble,' he said.”

George busied himself reshingling his parents' house and duly broached the fishing idea to his parole officer in Boston, a young woman named Jo-Anne Carr, who'd visit the house regularly to check on his progress. “My mother and Jo-Anne got along real well. It was, ‘Oh, Jo-Anne, darling, come on in and have some cake and coffee.' She was a little lame for a parole officer, naïve to the whole thing, and young. Kind of cute face, but heavy in the legs. I used to play with her—give her a hug. ‘You're not bad-looking, you know. Maybe we could go out sometime.' I don't think she got asked out on many dates. ‘Oh, George, we're not supposed to do that,' she'd say.”

At Danbury, George had hoped to do his temporary fishing stint with his friend Arthur Davey. Arthur had a magic touch when it came to putting his boat right where the fish were. One time out on the Georges Bank he landed such a huge catch that he ran out of space in the hold and ordered the crew out of their bunks so he could fill them up with haddock and cod. Arthur wanted George to come out with him, but their parole officers nixed the arrangement on the grounds that two ex-convicts couldn't be going into business together.

George had more than enough money—$50,000 in hundreds stashed in a safe-deposit box in the Rockland Trust Company in Weymouth. It was all that remained of the quarter of a million or so from his smuggling days, most of which he'd blown in the last six months before the FBI caught him. He'd taken one of his girlfriends on a tour of first-class hotels in Santa Fe, Mammoth Lakes, and other parts of the West. What with the champagne-and-caviar breakfasts and the sprees at clothing stores, $200,000 of it disappeared with remarkable speed. He couldn't touch the remaining money unless he could show he'd earned it from some honest endeavor. Clam digging at Wessagussett Beach wouldn't quite fill the bill. As it was, his guilty plea left him owing the IRS $286,000 in special taxes the government imposed on large marijuana seizures. So as long as George continued in the pose of a law-abiding member of society, the fifty long ones wouldn't do him much good.

In regard to his problem with the IRS, George sought the help of Fat Harry, who on his release from Danbury went back to running the book on the South Shore and living with his wife and mother-in-law in their neatly kept house near a cemetery just outside of Boston. Harry advised him to go down to the Federal Building in Boston and see a certain lady named Mrs. O'Toole. “She brought me up as a kid,” he said. “Get a dozen roses and I'll call and tell her you're coming down. She'll take care of it.” George did, and Mrs. O'Toole proved to be an old fan of Harry's. “He's a bad boy sometimes, but I love him anyway,” she said. “He told me all about you, and we can just eliminate this because if you sign a pauper's oath that you don't have any money, I can take care of it.” So one minute George owed the federal government $286,000, and the next, with the stroke of a pen, he didn't owe it anything at all.

He turned now to establishing himself in the fishing business. The Sad-Eyed Lady put up ten thousand in cash from her divorce settlement and signed a bank note for thirty thousand more, which was enough to purchase a slightly leaky forest-green thirty-eight-foot dragger out of Plymouth Harbor, which George christened the
Hunter.
The vessel was too small to make the seventy-mile trip out to the rich fishing grounds of the Georges Banks, where the seas could get pretty rough in sudden bad weather. On the other hand, it was shorter than the sixty-foot length that would have required George to hire a captain with a master's license from the Coast Guard. To take out the
Hunter
he had only to know how to read a compass. But there were several catches. When Beth agreed to put up the money, it was with the understanding that George was going into the fishing business for real, to make money at it. To do that he had to work hard, meaning the boat had to put out to fish every day, weather permitting. He didn't tell Beth, but George didn't quite see the venture that way. He viewed the vessel as a sort of Potemkin village for Jo-Anne Carr to inspect. He was also silently hoping the boat would put her in mind to reduce the number of months he'd have to spend on parole.

To keep the boat going out every day, George hired a captain, a guy he knew named Gordon, whom George had found selling used cars on the Lincoln-Mercury lot in Quincy but who harbored great ambitions of making it in the fishing business. George took on another acquaintance, named Peter, as a deck hand. Peter was an airplane pilot who happened to be visiting from Los Angeles, having just jumped bond on a three-year sentence for marijuana smuggling in California. He knew all about the dry lake beds. George wanted him close at hand—not just for net hauling. Beth complained at first about why they needed to pay an extra hand—it meant less money all around, she said. But George's persuasive charm had not been diminished at Danbury. “I don't remember what reason he gave,” she says, “but one of the things about George was he could get anybody to do anything he wanted. I never saw so much power in a person, so much charisma. He had such great charm, perfect manners. He'd talk to the waitress or someone in a bookstore, anyone, and he could transform them, bring joy into their lives. They were beaming when he left.”

Whatever his talents might have won for George in some other field, they certainly availed him of very little in his fishing enterprise, where he was dogged by bad luck and inexperience. Not far into the venture, he and his crew snagged a sunken wreck of another fishing boat and tore their net all to hell, which cost them several days in port. They were hunting in largely depleted waters, netting only five hundred to a thousand pounds' worth a day, which added up to only three hundred dollars a week apiece, even going out all the time. That winter of 1975–76 it stormed constantly, and got so cold that Plymouth Harbor froze over for the first time in local memory. Fishing in the freezing weather was about the least amount of fun George had ever experienced. After taking in the net on a big reel, the catch would be dumped on the deck, to be gutted and sorted in the howling wind, with sleet or snow icing up the deck. They wore insulated boots and gloves, but water seeped in and soon numbed up their fingers and toes. The boat would be pitching 20 or 30 degrees. Fall over the side now, and someone had to do quick work to save you from a watery death. It got so miserable that Peter finally made the decision to return to California, do his prison time, and get on with his life; at least he'd be warm. This meant George had to go out on every trip or leave the boat idle, which would bring both Beth and Jo-Anne down on his neck.

Then one foggy day the engine failed as the boat was coming through the Cape Cod Canal, and the current took them in toward the rocks. George radioed for help, but the Coast Guard rescue ship passed right by without seeing them. George became so apoplectic shouting into the transmitter—We're over here, you fucking assholes!—that the commander in Hyannis later called him in to account for his breach of radio etiquette. Just before disaster struck, the engine somehow restarted, and they got the boat safely back to port. Subsequent breakdowns, however, so debilitated their fishing effort that, in the end, George let the repo people from the bank simply come and tow the
Hunter
away, to sell it for whatever they could recoup. Beth's ten thousand dollars went down the drain, along with what remained of her faith in George as a business partner. Shortly after that, word also leaked back to her about some of the things going on between George and her daughter, Dulcinea, the little session with the art critique not having been the last of it. George wasn't completely surprised, therefore, when one day in mid-February of 1976 the Sad-Eyed Lady ordered him to clear the hell out. When he arrived at her house, she was standing in the doorway. “She was shrieking, ‘You son of a bitch. I've put a curse on you that's going to last the rest of your miserable life and destroy you.'”