The End of the Dream (11 page)

“But old Scott was still doing fine. He swung out and he could have been free but he could see I was in trouble. He showed me what I had to do.
 
He put the rope in front of me and showed me how to swivel out with a straight arm and drop. I still couldn’t see how, but he got me down step by step.

He saved my life.” Although Scott had won their latest contest, for once he didn’t crow about it. He had seen how close Kevin had come to death.
 
Their hikes and their climbs together were an integral part of their camaraderie. Kevin just laughed when he saw how Scott shocked other climbers on Washington’s Mount Rainier.

“Once, when we climbed Mount Rainierof course without taking any

supplies scott offered some other climbers twenty dollars for a

sandwich. And more money for water. They looked at us as though we were

crazy in our shorts and sneakers, but they sold Scott the sandwich.” * *

After Julie left him, there were many women in Scott Scurlock’s life. Oddly, for a man as handsome as he was, he didn’t necessarily pursue beautiful or even pretty women.

Indeed, most of the women who now managed to bind him to them for more than a night or two were basically plain, although they wore a lot of makeup and had “big hair.” His friends quickly spotted the women Scott would home in on. Whenever a woman would walk into a bar with heavy makeup and hair piled high, they laughed and chanted, “Mousse alert.

Mousse alert. Scottie’s going for it.” But as Scott had told Marge Violette years before, he simply enjoyed women. Over the years, he bedded scores of them. Some said he was a perfect lover, and others maintained he was only average. And some women found him curiously asexual, not even interested in necking. Scott had one fetish, he kept photographic souvenirs of the women he dated. Some women posed naked willingly in seductive poses, others appeared unaware that they were being photographed. By using mirrors, Scott was able to put himself in the scene too. He saved a series of photographs of a clearly identifiable woman performing oral sex upon him, and other shots that showed fairly tame episodes of missionary position intercourse. Scott collected more than a hundred photographs of himself with a variety of lovers. Some of them were artistic, most were simply pornographic.

Neither Scott nor his women ever expected the pictorial records of sex in the treetops to become
 
public knowledge, although he often showed them to his friends and even to his father. It was almost as if Scott needed to prove to Bill Scurlock that he was a successful womanizer.

The elder Scurlock was far from shocked, rather, he complimented Scott on his prowess. Undoubtedly, the girls who had been delighted to be led up the ladder to Scott’s bed, who had unknowinglyor cheerfully posed for his camera, would have been mortified if they had known that their private pictures had become trophies. A lot of people would eventually see Scott’s collection. One woman, whose job it was to catalogue them as evidence, remembered her shock as she recognized an old friend. “I was packing them up when I went, Wait a minute!

That’s Cissy Mendoza’*my childhood friend from Olympia. Only she was taller and she was naked.. .. She was in the shower, bending over, posing for Scott’s camera.” Sometimes, Scott allowed hippies to live in the gray house free with the understanding they would take care of his property while he was gone. But they almost always left the place worse off than it was when they moved in. He didn’t have it in him to evict the “Granola Eaters, “ as much as he despised what they represented.
 
Scott hated to have anyone dislike him. He usually waited until one of Kevin’s visits and asked him to throw the squatters out. Kevin was glad to do it. “Scott really couldn’t stand hippies, “ Kevin remembered. “He hated seeing those guys standing by the freeway with signs that said, Will work for food.

“ He’d say, “Why don’t they carry a sign saying, Too lazy to work give me money.” . Nevertheless, the people who camped on Scott’s twenty acres couldn’t be described any other way. Kevin called them “Scott’s hangers.
 
They’d linger around Scott for all the energy he poured out.

“ The only squatter Scott liked was a squirrel he dubbed “Roscoe.” Roscoe was probably a female, and had a definite proprietary interest in the treehouse. He or she always found a way in while Scott was gone and helped herself to any food left behind. Scott enjoyed the audaciousness of the tiny squirrel and laughed when he came back to the chaos Roscoe left behind. Crackers, beans, and potatoes all over the expensive Turkish rugs, cupboard doors open and dishes broken.

Scott didn’t care. Roscoe was the closest thing Scott had to a real pet, he had no patience or sense of responsibility to another living thing.
 
Having a real pet would interfere with his ability to walk away from his life in Olympia whenever he chose. Sometimes stray cats wandered in and turned half-feral out in the woods, and when Kevin was around, he brought his dog. But Scott had no steady woman, no child, no pet, no bonds of any kind. Kevin believed Scott’s obsession with freedom would never change. That was why he was utterly amazed to hear in late 1987 that Scott was planning to get married. Scott told him his fiancee’s name was Pam* and Kevin assumed that it was the Pam Scott had dated in Olympia after Julie left. She was a warm, pretty young student who had lived in the gray house for a while. That Pam was someone Kevin approved of, he believed that she really loved Scott.

But Kevin
 
soon learned the bride-to-be was a different Pam. Scott referred to one Pam as “The Queen of Spades” and to the other as “The Queen of Hearts.” And it was the Queen of Spades that Scott was going to marry. He told Kevin he had met her while he was on a trip to Mexico.
 
She was a wealthy Catholic girl from California who was vacationing with her parents. Scott had taken photographs of Pam in various stages of undress, and when he returned from Mexico, he was eager to show her beauty off to his friends.

“Look at this wonderful woman I found, “ he told Kevin, as he handed over a stack of photos. N What does a friend do in that situation?

Kevin knew he was being asked to compliment Scott on the new woman, so he looked through the pictures slowly and deliberately, searching frantically for something positive to say. She had a great figure and dark hair done in a huge bouffant style, but her features were sharp.

“She had a real long, pointy chin.” Kevin murmured vague congratulatory phrases. He wasn’t much concerned. It wouldn’t last.

Since Julie, Scott never lasted very long with any woman not even the good Pamand this one would go away soon enough, too. But this Pam didn’t go away. Scott seemed determined to marry her. Scott had concluded that it might be best for him to choose a woman who either didn’t ask questions at all or who didn’t care what the answers were.

The Queen of Spades didn’t mind that he had plans for a huge network of crystal meth dealerships. All that mattered to her was that he had money.
 
“He knew he should have married the one with the good heart, “ Kevin said regretfully. “She might have saved him. But he chose to go with the Pam who was corrupt, and it just got worse. She changed him for the worse. She really changed him.” Kevin was painting at Springmale in Great Falls in 1987, and he heard that Scott was in town and he stopped by the elder Scurlock’s condominium on Lake Anne to see him. He bounded up the steps to see the front door was wide open, and he could hear sounds from inside. He was in the doorway before he realized that Scott and Pam were naked and engaged in a sex act in the room just beyond. Too late to turn back. Kevin bent his head and knocked loudly on the door, calling, “Hey, Scott” Pam leapt up like a frightened deer and fled into another room, completely mortified.

Scott wasn’t embarrassed at all. He turned, grinned, and shouted, “Hey, Bubba! Come on in. Just hang on for five minutes. We’re getting married in five minutes. You’re just in time to be the best man.” Any one could have come to the door, but Scott didn’t seem to care. In fact, he had expected his father to show up. Bill Scurlock was going to preside over the wedding ceremony, which, indeed, he did.

It wasn’t a particularly auspicious occasion. Scott wore raggedy shorts, Pam wore a bathing suit. Kevin wore a look of bemusement.

They stood on the dock at Lake Anne where Scott and Kevin had swum so many times as boys. Reverend Scurlock said the words and the ceremony was over in minutes. Pam and Scott’s honeymoon was more impressive.

They took a trip around the world, and he bought her a $12,000 necklace in South America. But their honeymoon lasted longer than their marriage.
 
Why Scott married the Queen of Spades is a puzzle that no one who knew him well could understand. Maybe he felt that he should experience everything onceeven marriage.

He and Pam certainly had an intense and uninhibited physical attraction for one another. She was smart and fit into the mold of the plain woman with a good figure that Scott seemed drawn to. And she never nagged him about his “experiments” or his secret business meetings.

But it is unlikely that he loved her or that she loved him. Pam was anxious for Scott to purchase the Overhulse property. The owners lived two states away, and they didn’t plan to return to Washington. They were, seemingly, unaware that property values had soared in the Northwest in the late eighties.

Their twenty acres were worth more than $200,000 now. But Pam Scurlock typed up an offer of $90,000, with $25,00 down, and mailed it to them.

The owners accepted, and Seven Cedars belonged to Scott and Pam. Scott figured a mortgage was the best indication of a solid, responsible citizen. He never missed a payment. For all of his suspect activities and his often wobbly moral sense, there was something in Scott Scurlock that seemed to long for the kind of love he saw in the movies he watched so avidly. After Julie Weathers, after the woman Kevin called the good Pam, true love was a concept that he could no longer grasp intellectually or achieve in his own life.

Perhaps he hadn’t even felt it with Julie. Had she sensed that and sought a deeper commitment with another woman? Possibly. Did Scott expect he might find it with the dark Pam? If he did, he was disappointed. The marriage ended in acrimony and haggling over money.

In the end, Scott told his friends that he had to buy his way out of being married to Pam.

The Queen of Spades knew too much about him. According to Scott, he finally met Pam in Las Vegas. He had reserved a room for her at Caesar’s Palace, where he always stayed when he was in town, but there was nothing romantic about this meeting. He walked into the room with a sum of $20,000 in cash to settle their accounts. They had a tacit agreement.
 
If she kept her mouth shut, the money was hers. If she chose to betray him, Scott allowed her to think that her life wasn’t worth five cents.
 
Would Scott Scurlock have hurt Pam Scurlock really?

No one will ever know. She went away quietly, and her absence seemed to cause barely a ripple in his life. Although the Queen of Spades was out of Scott’s world within a few years of their meeting, she had done some subtle permanent damage. Or, perhaps more accurately, they had each done damage to one another. Scott had never been blessed with much of a conscience, and he had been taught to be a free thinker who made his own rules. Pam’s acceptance of his lifestyle helped erode his character further. Even though he no longer thought about her, being with Pam had made him more of a hedonist. He seemed unable to escape his descent into what seemed to be outright sociopathy. But it didn’t have to be that way. So many people loved Scott Scurlock. “He was one of those people that you just wanted to make happy, “ an old friend recalled. “He didn’t get angry. The minute you met him, you wanted to be friends with him.

You didn’t want to be a lamb to follow after him, but you just did anyway. I only saw him get really angry once. And that was at his wife.” Bill Scurlock was ready to retire as the eighties came to a close, although he had no intention of giving up his religious work entirely.
 
He and Mary Jane announced to their congregation and neighbors in Reston that they were moving to Sedona, Arizona, one of the bastions of New Age philosophy. The general belief was that if there was intelligence in outer space, or psychic communication or conversations to be held with those who had gone on before, Sedona would be the most advantageous location. There they hoped to have a closer connection to the God that they referred to as “The Great White Light.” Kevin Meyers attended the going-away party thrown for the Scurlocks. He had long since learned that the Scurlocks were the complete opposite of fundamentalists. The Scurlocks talked of a religion that allowed the widest of personal choices, they approached it much as they had approached child rearing.
 
There were no rules except to say there must be no rules. Sometimes Kevin found the New Age fads were laughable, and he teased Mary Jane or Bill. So did Scott, although they did it so subtlely that Scott’s parents often didn’t recognize the bite in their jokes. “If they’d known about all our Rambo ways, “ Kevin laughed, “they probably would have thrown both Scott and me out.” At the Scurlocks’ going-away party, Kevin walked up to Mary Jane and three other women as they discussed the current thinking on mantras in Sedona. “I heard them talking about color they were saying that This year, the color in Sedona for auras is orange and yellow .. . for bringing the god into your soul. They were saying it would be important for the shakras of the earth to wear a lot of yellow and orange. “I thought what a crock of shit. I walked up and said, Hey, I just got back from a spiritual session in Arizona, and it’s all shifted. The color’s green now. Wear nothing but green.” The women turned to him, fascinated. “Oh, really? “ He had them. “Yeah, “ Kevin continued. “Green. The color of Franklins.”

“What?”

“Benjamin Franklins. One hundreds? You got a pocket full of those green babies, you always feel good! “ The women laughed. The Scurlocks bought a home in Sedona with a clear view of the cliffs where the Red Rocks Church stands. It would become more and more stately through the years as they made improvements. Most of the residences close by were in the half-million dollar range, and their neighborhood was marked by an artificial waterfall of brilliantly colored water that flowed endlessly from the barren desert. Scott often visited his parents and helped his dad remodel the house. He was generous, he told friends he’d given them a significant sum of money and helped them redo the basement so that students attending their seminars could stay there. The house, lovely to begin with, became more and more valuable.