The Sting---from Epistolary Memoir

[Lightning Rod]

(from Epistolary Memoir)

BG,
How did I come to be in prison, you ask? Aside from having a standing reservation since the moment I decided to follow the path of freedom, the immediate reason, the crime that I committed, was getting entirely too creative with my chemistry set, otherwise known as Manufacturing a Controlled Substance. The prosecutor characterized it as an evil treason designed to, "crucify no telling how many thousands of our school children on the cross of drugs." Moments before delivering this oratorical stroke worthy of William Jennings Bryan, he had ushered a class of about thirty shiny-faced junior-high school civics students into the front row of the courtroom gallery. It was great legal theater. The prosecutor was good. Had he been my lawyer I would have walked on that charge because I was a clear victim of overzealous, entrepreneural police work which the law calls entrapment.

One of my college professors remarked to me one day as we were discussing the recent bust of a campus political leader on trumped up dope charges the day before a scheduled demonstration, that, "Anyone truly committed to freedom in this world has to expect to be institutionalized, put in jail or an asylum, at some point in his life." He said it with a wistful resignation as if thinking he would never have the thrill of being arrested for a cause or maybe that he was already institutionalized in the University. The truth of that statement caused it to stick with me over the years and through my numerous tribulations with the legal system. Civilization hates freedom, as it should.

I have no agenda to excuse or otherwise mitigate my behavior or to cry about what a raw deal I received from our justice system. I deserved to be in jail if only for felony stupidity for being such a patsy and falling for the sucker game that the cops were running. OK, if you insist, I will tell the story as it happened.

Once upon a time a semi-young poet was nursing his wounds in a garret in Oak Cliff. The divorce hadn't been easy on him and the pet monkey was becoming a gorilla. The beating and kidnapping hadn't helped either. He was still getting used to the new teeth. The wolves were beginning to yap on the doorstep and he felt desperate as poetry. He needed to do something big. This is when the phone usually rings in Lrod's office as the rain streams in rivulets on the dirty window past the sad Venetian blinds. He contemplated the whiskey bottle sitting on his desk next to the smoking ashtray for two more rings before he finally answered it. It was Moe, one of his seedier underworld connections. The secretary usually screened his calls but she hadn't been to work in a week because of the elastic properties of her last paycheck. In his wheezy voice Moe said he thought he had something happening, a deal. Some old boys from out of town had a bottle of P2P and they were looking for a chemist to cook it up into speed. Just six months before the same deal was floating around town and Lrod had passed it up because it sounded too risky. But times were tougher now in the venture noir and his security standards weren't quite as high.

The meeting happened at the Foxy Lady over on Northwest Hwy. Normally Lrod wouldn't walk into an establishment like this to piss on the floor. He found such places to be existentially sad and degrading to both the feminine ideal and to masculine dignity. He didn't condemn or object to others who liked this form of recreation but he didn't prefer it for himself. As he made his way through the T-shirts and tattoos he noticed the bored and vacant look in the eyes of the dancers as they pulled the lunch shift grinding listlessly for electricians and truck drivers. The guy was sitting were he said he would be at the end of the bar. He mentioned Moe and asked Lrod what he was drinking. Said his name was Leon. He was a fat fisted country boy with porcine blue eyes who spoke confidentially out of the side of his mouth while watchfully scanning the room. Leon said he was from College Station and he had some friends who ran an industrial cleaning company down there. He said they had a contract with Texas A & M to clean the science labs in the middle of the night. This allowed them access to chemical supplies and they had managed to avail themselves of four liters of reagent grade phenyl-2-propanone which is one chemical step away from meth-amphetamine. Lrod knew that this was enough reagent to make a quarter million bucks worth of crank give or take depending on the talent of the cook. As the pitch unfolded, the story was that the guys knew they had something valuable but they were not familiar with the slimy nether-world of speed freaks and didn't really have any contacts. Their vice was gambling, the story went, and they were in arrears to some mob bookies out of Bossier City not known for their patience or the civility of their collection methods. Impromptu orthopedics were mentioned. The boys needed money fast. When Lrod asked Leon what his friends wanted for the chemical, he said that they were really looking for a chemist to do the cook so that they could make more money on the deal because they were badly in the hole. Something about the urgency that was creeping into Leon's tone made Lrod's nose itch so he told Leon he would think about it and get back in touch.

The very next morning the phone rings again in Lrod's office. It is Leon announcing that his friends are driving up from College Station to show and tell. When he answered the door, the first thing that flashed through Lrod's mind was, 'these guys are cops.' But they were quickly in the door and he ignored his first impression judging it to be nothing more than natural paranoia. One said his name was Jim West and since the other one didn't try to pass himself off as Artemis Gordon, Lrod bought into their gambling janitorial engineer routine. They seemed like good old country boys and after a cursory bit of conversation that was perhaps a bit too laden with gratuitous profanity, they produced a brown, two liter bottle containing what appeared to be genuine P2P. Again Lrod made an offer to buy the substance outright. He really didn't want to do the cook himself. It was a messy, smelly, risky enterprise and since P2P had been placed on the controlled chemicals list, it was becoming hard to get and cooks would pay top dollar for it. Lrod preferred to do the quick flip and call it a day. He was not enthusiastic about joining forces with strangers and risking life, limb and freedom just to make a few more dollars. When the mop jockeys balked at his request that they leave a sample of the chemical with him for further examination Lrod cordially told them that he probably wasn't interested but allowed that he would keep his eyes open for other cooks who might want to do it. He was trying to get rid of them.

Over the next six months Jim West made numerous periodic phone calls to Lrod trying to coax and cajole him into coming down to College Station to do the cook. He said that he and his partner had a secluded place where they could keep security while the cook was being done. Lrod continued to demure. While he had participated in a number of clandestine culinary efforts in the past, Lrod didn't consider himself a master speed cook. He had mostly served as soo-chef to more experienced practitioners. Among his solo performances were as many bombs as there were hits. But West persisted with his calls, 'C'mon, man, we can all make a lot of money, get out of trouble.' Six months of calls every week or two, six months in which Lrod's pecuniary distress steadily worsened. Finally, under the nagging duress of both persuasion and circumstance, he took the bait and the hook was sunk. He agreed to grab a jug of methylamine at the chemical supply, gather a few pieces of glass and drive to College Station to perform the magic trick. Something told him that in three days he would be either rich, dead or arrested.

It was cold and damp and getting dark when Lrod and his two accomplices arrived at the Hi-Lo station. Roger had volunteered to be Lrod's assistant because he had never seen a cook before and he wanted to witness this arcane and mysterious process. Lucy was his girlfriend. They were riding in her car. Jim West and his partner were waiting by the telephones at the Hi-Lo under the huge yellow sign. It washed the color from their faces leaving a hue of saffron treachery. Lucy followed their pick-up for about ten minutes out of town through the wooded Brazos bottom land until they came to a gate admitting them to a piece of property which was described as a 'deer lease.' It had a small shack sitting in a clearing in the trees. As Lrod examined his rustic laboratory, West and his partner were ostensibly securing the area by means of creeping around in the darkness carrying gold plated M-16 rifles. Lrod didn't like guns. The very smell of them conjured specters of fear and weakness. But he understood that they were part of the ritual vestment in the twisted eucharist of the speed cooking ceremony. By midnight, as the chemicals were happily percolating in a large Oasis bottle inside the cabin, the group of conspirators gathered around a campfire in the clearing. Jim West produced a reefer and lit it. About the time the joint had made it once around the circle the whole clearing suddenly lit up like Cowboy Stadium on game night. Twelve sets of headlights were pointed at the group. Lrod heard the crackle of a loudspeaker saying, "This is the Brazos County Sheriff's Dept. Drop your weapons and put your hands on your heads." Someone said, "It's the cops!" and Jim West reached inside his coat and drew a revolver. As he placed the muzzle in Lrod's ribs he said, "Yeah, us too. You're under arrest, muthafucker."

So, mon Gremillion, that's the story. If it all sounds like pulp-fiction it's because that's what it felt like while it was happening, a B movie, very much in the third person. I'd never felt like such a fool in my life. To think that I had fallen for their charade and volunteered to be the oblivious warm body, the patsy for their little farce, well, it just mortified me. How could I have been so stupid? Even after all the bells and red lights had jingled and flashed, I ignored my own senses and instincts and took the bait anyway. Every time I think about it I want to slap myself in the head. On the cosmic level, I knew it was just a rap on Lrod's noggin by the old zen-stick because he had been too proud of his intelligence. But on a more temporal plane, I knew that the cost of this lapse in mindfulness was going to be high. Each time in my life that I have betrayed my intuition or failed to heed my inner voices I have paid in the most precious currencies, time being the dearest.

I could expound at length about the injustices of the Texas judicial system and about how I was victimized by a bunch of cowboys who had conjured up this 'crime', had authored the entire drama for the edification of their careers, and used me as a warm body, a stand-in stunt man to make their pantomime seem plausible. I could moan and cry about how I was mistreated by a corrupt system, but it's all done now and it's not my style to solicit pity. I can only benefit from the experience by what I take away from it in the form of knowledge. I was in no way a babe in the woods in this adventure. There was larceny in my heart. I admit it. I was looking to touch the Philosopher's Stone, turn dross into easy money. That's the only reason they were able to lure me into their little reality show. I arrived in prison in 1984. Besides being the literarily correct year to get locked up for your politics, it was also the year of DeLorean's bust. Every time I walked into the day room the story was on TV complete with hidden camera video of DeLorean rubbing his hands together and goo-gooing the cocaine. It was obvious entrapment but it cost DeLorean four million bucks to prove that. If I had his attorneys and he had mine, I would have driven away in a DeLorean and he would have been making license plates. America has the finest Justice system that money can buy.

Anyway BG, if you know any really desperate and seedy filmmakers, the movie rights are still available.

Onward
GTCOHP
toots

[Steve Plonk]

Very well told and sarcastic sample of personal pain... Looks like you were "set up like a bowling pin and then knocked down for a spare". The "po-poes" needed a warm body for their sting operation and you were "it" for a day.

I remember when DeLorean was busted--also many years earlier when Abbie Hoffman was busted on trumped up cocaine charges.
The former got off and the latter had to go in hiding for years. It pays to have connections and money doesn't talk, it swears. The world can be a cruel place when you are a round peg trying to be jammed into a square hole. But, "like a bird on a wire, you've tried in your own way to be free." Perhaps, you finally are. I liked your earlier snippets also and the things in your column. I, too, remember your insightful posts on Litkicks many years ago.

[dadio]

Good prose work and theme.