Blow (9 page)

Nothing George or Malcolm did, however, could compare to the high level of chaos that attended any appearance on the scene by a boy named Waino Tuominen, or “Tuna.” A former classmate of theirs at Weymouth High, Tuna was of Finnish extraction, had a short, barrellike physique, and possessed a resilient set of teeth, which he regularly employed for everyone's amusement in removing the caps off beer bottles. On nearly every occasion George and his friends gathered, Tuna could be depended upon to end the evening with some notable flourish. When the police, following up on complaints from angry neighbors, would show up to dampen the noise level at one of these parties, Tuna would slide into the idling cruiser while the cops were in the house and drive it down the road apiece, then return to the party via backyards in the neighborhood, forcing the officers to seek help from headquarters in finding their lost vehicle. Tuna was rarely seen to have a date. This was the consequence, no doubt, of one of his less resistible impulses, which was to drop his pants after a sufficient number of drinks and as a grand finale to the evening jump out from somewhere—a curtain, a door—with a beer bottle dangling on a string tied to his penis.

Not long after yet another near-fatal accident—a five-car pileup on the Southeast Expressway—and with his family's full encouragement, George and Tuna, who by now had received his own suspension notice from the University of Colorado for taking off his clothes in a girls' dormitory, acquired a 1963 black TR-3 with red upholstery and a white top, jammed their belongings into the tiny trunk, and in the winter of 1965 set out to see if living in California would have a positive effect on their lives.

*   *   *

The trip across the country was remarkably free of any run-ins or incidents, and when they got to Long Beach, just outside of Los Angeles, George and Tuna were put up for a while by George's ex-boss, Russell Delorey. Russell had put aside his bricklaying business the year before and with a friend from Weymouth had also journeyed to California, where he was attending Long Beach City College, taking some business courses with the hope, unfulfilled as it would turn out, of getting into the advertising game.

George soon moved to nearby Belmont Shores, took history and philosophy courses at Long Beach City College—more to look like a student than to be one—and hung out on the beach, where he ran rapidly through dozens of girlfriends. “The girls were driving me crazy—they were all over the beaches, in the supermarket, on the sidewalks, wearing these little string bikinis, everywhere you looked there were asses and tits hanging out. I had this feeling that I wanted to make it with every woman that walked the streets.” Exercising the social leadership skills he was known for back home, George soon became king of the beach. At one point he organized a contest in which the person with the best tan by the end of the semester would be crowned with suitable fanfare as King of the Sun Gods. He concocted a mixture of iodine and baby oil to enhance his own tan, and of course, he won. Weekends, he and Tuna would venture down to Mexico, often getting into one minor scrape or another. On one occasion they were thrown out of a bullfight in Mazatlán after George got sick drinking tequila in the hot sun and threw up all over the two people sitting in front of him, who turned out to be the mayor of the city and his wife.

George's first fling at legitimate entrepreneurship involved going in with a friend to buy a load of huaraches, the rubber-soled sandals with leather straps, down in Mexico, and setting up dealerships at colleges all across the country. In exchange for peddling the sandals the students could earn bonus points toward free vacations in Tijuana. The scheme languished after they made the mistake of seeking help from college administrators, who saw the business as counterproductive to their academic mission. Eventually George quit school and got a full-time job with a pile-driving crew for twelve dollars an hour plus overtime—good pay in the mid-1960s; the job required him to sit up in a little crow's nest holding on to the top of a five-and-a-half-ton, one-hundred-foot-high I-beam to steady it while a giant steam hammer beat it into the ground. A one-inch miss on the part of the hammer driver, and George's hands, arms, and maybe some other important parts would have been only memories.

Just about everyone George knew was involved in some way in the drug business, as consumers or retailers, and George himself filled a steady part of his leisure time smoking dope. As someone who had never even smoked cigarettes, he found the crude marijuana joints so harsh at first that he had to filter the pot through a water pipe filled with ice cubes and crème de menthe. He got the hang of it soon enough, however, and before long he was smoking it every day. Then, at a wedding reception in Long Beach, he ran into a dentist who brought him back to his houseboat—replete with stained-glass windows and psychedelic posters on the ceiling—and gave him a tab of LSD.

One hit of “orange sunshine” while sitting on the dentist's couch and George knew that the sensations he'd been eliciting from pot and alcohol were ragged and paltry compared to what he was now experiencing. “Suddenly,” he says, “I could see with a pill what the Dalai Lama sits for ten years in a cave to find out.” The LSD gave him X-ray vision into his physical surroundings, and he and Tuna, who took to LSD like a pussy to catnip, would do things like hang around the local Baskin-Robbins shop, staring fixedly into the tubs of different-colored ice cream. More significantly, George found that under the influence he could now chat with God, ask the Man what was in store for the universe. “What it did was to take away my ego. It made me realize the unimportance of the self. I knew what my place was in the universe and that life was eternal, that there was no such thing as death, and you would live forever.” But for George, the true value of LSD had to do with sex. “When you had an orgasm on acid, it was like the whole universe exploding. It would take about forty-five minutes for the acid to come on, and then you were in for an eighteen-hour journey, where the orgasms were intensified ten times. Ha! You don't think that's a good time?”

Hot on the trail of love and visions, George began taking acid virtually every day and in all forms—little BB-size “barrels,” triangle-shaped red and pink “wedges,” the stuff known as “white lightning,” which was laced with Methedrine and came on with the force of a freight train. The more acid you dropped, of course, the more risk you ran of embarking on a bad trip. This happened once to George in the fall of 1967, after he arrived in Manhattan Beach and was living with his new girlfriend, Julie, a pretty brunette who ran a dress boutique in town and whose father owned department stores in Albuquerque and El Paso. George and several others were sitting around watching the surfers out the window, listening to the new Beatles record,
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
and after four hits of white lightning the music started to blur and whine; George looked around and noticed that all the people in the room had turned into monkeys. Leaving the apartment to get a little air, shake it off, he went into the streets of Manhattan Beach to find that the whole town had been struck by bombs. It looked like Berlin at the end of World War II, its buildings with gaping windows and the roofs gone. Everything was frosted over, glazed with a thin layer of ice, all white. The telephone wires were also coated in ice and began to sing with an increasingly unbearable screech, which George described as the noise of a million telephone conversations going all at once. He lost himself in the back alleys of the town. A fog descended, and it seemed like days before he made it back to the apartment. When he got there, George ran into the bedroom and hid under the covers until the visions faded away.

Tuna, meanwhile, had developed a nice little business supplying LSD to a local chapter of the Hell's Angels and was living with a snake dancer who kept her boa constrictor in a box in their bedroom. But one day down in Tijuana Tuna disappeared altogether during an acid trip. George had last seen him walking out of town on the railroad tracks, staring down at the ties, doing a Dean Moriarty act from
On the Road,
heading north toward the border and never looking back. The next time George saw him was in 1970 back in Weymouth, where he'd gone for a quick visit. There was Tuna, working on the grounds crew at South Shore Hospital, riding a mower around the lawn. “Hello, George,” he said, as if three years had not gone by. Tuna was vague about what he'd been doing, George recalls, other than to say he had only recently emerged from his bedroom where he'd locked himself in for a long time, afraid to go out on the street.

In Manhattan Beach, George rented a house with a front-yard pool, three blocks up the hill from the beach. On weekends the gang—the women in long, straight hair and bare feet, dressed in shifts, with flowers painted on their faces—would get a bag of dope, a jug of wine laced with acid, and head for the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles to hear Country Joe and the Fish, or up to the Fillmore in San Francisco for Jefferson Airplane concerts, featuring Grace Slick. Invariably, one of the band members would christen the show, throwing out handfuls of LSD, like stardust, into the crowd, creating a pandemonium. For sure, George told himself, not much of this stuff was going on back in Weymouth. This was the youth of America living out the true American Dream, getting all the spiritual guidance they needed from Bob Dylan and effecting an overnight transformation in their lives. Take Lawrence, a friend of George's who had arrived in Manhattan Beach from Baltimore. One day Lawrence had been slogging away at his job as a rag salesman in the garment business, and the next he'd traded in his suit and tie for a white robe, had pink flowers plaited into his hair, and walked the streets calling people brother, talking about God, feeding himself and his Irish Setter on rice balls and processed seaweed.

For a while George fancied putting his own life on the track toward becoming a famous Hollywood star and even began taking acting classes conducted by the character actor Ed Begley. George had been encouraged in this by a friend of Lawrence's, another guy out from Baltimore, who was trying to break into the screenwriting business. His name was Barry Levinson, which didn't impress anyone at the time, since he hadn't yet written or directed
Diner, Avalon,
or
Good Morning, Vietnam.
George rented him a room in his house, where in the daylight hours Barry sat in front of the TV watching sitcoms and soaps, tapping out notes on a portable typewriter. At night he and George would go to their acting class. The drill was to assume roles of different characters and improvise scenes illustrating their personalities. George did pretty well as long as he could act gangster parts or tough guys. One day the instructor, saying George was getting too narrow and needed to expand his repertoire, gave him a part to perform that put him a little beyond his range. He was to be a homosexual, going on this long-distance bus ride, and to show how it would look if he tried to come on to that cute guy in the next seat. Well, maybe not acting, George thought.

*   *   *

Like a lot of other dope smokers, George had already been dabbling in the selling game—buying two bags, smoking up one, selling the other for enough to get two more. Although in the late sixties possession of more than just one marijuana cigarette was classified as a felony-level crime in California, you had to be heavily stupid or pretty unlucky to get busted for dealing dope in Manhattan Beach. The police department consisted of fewer than forty men, only one of them assigned to narcotics. He was a thirty-one-year-old detective named Fred McKewen, who had no budget for launching undercover operations and whose face was known from two hundred yards away by every drug dealer in town. It was a lonely job, McKewen recalls. “I'd get calls from other police agencies working cases in the Manhattan Beach area asking to talk to our narcotics bureau, and I'd say, ‘You are.'” Considering also that he had a load of thirty or forty other nondrug cases to follow, from gas station run-outs to murder, it was no wonder Detective McKewen never got a very big handle on what was going on in the Manhattan Beach drug scene.

Most of the busts he did manage to log came thanks to the luck he had playing a little ruse with parking tickets. When McKewen got the name of a suspected pot dealer, for instance, from a snitch or from the talk on the street, he would run it through the traffic bureau looking for unpaid tickets. “In Manhattan Beach the parking is so bad it's not unusual for people to have one or two warrants against them, and if you're a lazy-type guy, you don't pay them. So if I saw where you had an eleven-dollar warrant, which is what they were then, I'd take that and go to your house. I'd knock on your door and say, ‘I'm from the police department, I've got a traffic warrant for your arrest, and I'm going to have to take you into custody.' Nine and a half times out of ten I'd be invited into the house while whoever it was went upstairs to get the money. Now that I'm in the house, there was so much marijuana around it was not unusual for some to be lying out on the coffee table. You didn't need a search warrant in those days, so literally, if I saw one marijuana cigarette on the coffee table, your whole house belonged to me.” When suspects started confessing their sins, Detective McKewen, in this pre-Miranda era, wasn't obliged to interrupt and advise them that they had a right to get a lawyer before they spilled their guts like this. “If you were a smart drug dealer, you paid your parking tickets, because that's how I made a lot of cases.”

By 1967 marijuana was fairly streaming across the Mexican border into California, secreted in hollowed-out surfboards, hidden in false bottoms of bulk gas tanks, stowed under the floorboards of VW campers, in the engine compartments of sailboats. One notable smuggler even paid people to bring it over a desert border crossing at night in a caravan of electric golf carts. But until George entered the picture, the pot runs usually involved a lot of little people bringing in small quantities, rather than large shipping operations. The biggest bust McKewen helped make during those days was a hugely complicated, multidepartment effort involving only fifty kilos of pot. It had been purchased by American smugglers in Tijuana and driven over the border at Chula Vista in the trunk of a car bristling with fishing poles, spear guns, and other vacation camouflage. McKewen and the fifty or so other state and local cops involved in the operation had planned to follow the car up to Manhattan Beach to find out how the dope was going to be distributed. U.S. Customs, in a departure from normal policy, agreed to allow the shipment to go through the border untouched, but only if the local police promised to arrest the smugglers before any of the dope hit the street. Driving up on Route 5, however, the smugglers broke a water hose just north of San Diego and had to pull over to the side of the road. Not wanting to spoil their surveillance plan, the whole cavalcade of about thirty unmarked police cars drove right by the stalled vehicle, pulled off at the next exit, and came back going the opposite way, circling their prey like Indians around a wagon train. “We drove around them for three hours before they finally got the damn hose fixed,” says McKewen.