A Few Missing Pieces - 2009-2010

In chatting with a friend last night, I asked for an opinion of a particular passage that I recall writing...  and after a few minutes realized that the passage was never posted.  So this morning, I'm doing a little comparison to see which ones have slipped through the cracks.  So far, I am finding some from 2009 and will post them up.  If you want to think of them in order, I'll try to add a date in the subject lines...  Also, forgive me if any of this was previously posted...  And forgive me if you are someone who is in any of these stories.  The statutes have long passed...  and if you're reading this, God bless you!

July 2009
So... a very famous television journalist passed away a few days ago... which brought to mind a story from the old days. I'll leave most of the details out since they relate to a set of characters that haven't been hit yet here. But the gist of the story is a weekend when a half dozen of us descended on a small house in Cape Cod with a dock to wait for the arrival of a bunch of Lebanese hashish. The original plan involved dropping the stuff off a large ship packed in tires that were tied together and would float until they got picked up by the water guys and brought to this house. But, for whatever reason, the water and weather didn't cooperate for that plan. Plan B wound up being executed and ultimately several tons got landed and off-loaded at Walter's place. Nobody was home, nobody was around, and the landing was, at the time, quite successful.

January 2010
I wore my gold Rolex on New Year's Eve and couldn't help but remember Steve Pfeiffer... I feel bad for the way Steve died... pretty much alone up in Buffalo when a long-lasting backache was diagnosed as lung cancer. He was dead within a few months but his memory lives on...

Steve was the epitome of a 60s outlaw. He was there at the very beginning of the madness although I didn't know him that well until some years later. Back around 1968 or so, Steve went down to Mexico, bought a bunch of Mexican bricks, put together a harness, strapped it on his back, and actually swam across the Rio Grande, smuggling the stuff into the US. This was the tip of a 20 year iceberg of drug-induced madness that included free-basing, acid, heroin, coke (lots of coke), uppers, downers, booze, and just about every mind-altering substance known to man.

In terms of attitude, think Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. Steve was the whole package. He grew up in Astoria, not far from where I did (although I never knew him back then). I first met him at CCNY but we weren't more than casual acquaintances at the time. Later on, however, we got real close and he played a serious role in some of the more outrageous scenes in this story.

I remember Steve Pfeiffer stories that bridged the gamut from drug-crazed parties; renting a Lear to fly around to a half dozen cities collecting a couple of million bucks in an afternoon; to blocking the door to a pot-filled house (and by 'pot-filled' I mean rooms stacked floor to ceiling with bales and boxes), telling the cops to go fuck themselves when they said they had a complaint from a neighbor; to the discovery of the body of his main squeeze coke smuggler in Jamaica Bay who was identified by (my dentist) based on her teeth; to robbing four banks over a few day period... (He actually took the stand in his own defense during the murder trial.) Each of these and probably a hundred more stories are worth telling... I'll see if I can do them justice as time allows over the next little while...

Oh yeah... The Rolex... He gave it to me for paying up 1.5 mill minutes before a deadline so he could avoid assassination by some very angry Colombians. It has an inscription on the back "On Time"... Well... the one I wore on Thursday says "Still On Time" because the original got ripped off in Vegas and he replaced it with an exact replica.

More - January 2010 

If you read some of the earlier stuff, you'll remember the 'Glop'... well... by the time the glop was all gone, I had developed a serious circle of guys who could move crazy amounts of the worst stuff around... And Steve, being from Buffalo, was a good part of that circle (Lee out in Idaho was another)... Meantime, the Colombians began icing the competition with increasing frequency... Steve was, as usual, a wild man who really never gave a shit about consequences and offered to move a ridiculous amount of crappy pot for them. As it turned out, his plan involved my circle and he dropped a few thousand pounds of total garbage into my lap and said basically to find a price and sell it. Although he wasn't a Colombian, Steve was not the type of guy you wanted to disappoint... So I grabbed hold of a bunch of my glop experts and proceeded to moved this stuff in places like Idaho, Montana, Kentucky and other really out of the way places. As his deadline for payment drew closer and closer, I realized that he had actually promised the Colombians a $2 million payment by a certain date and was in danger of being killed unless he made the payment. The morning of the deadline he only had 500k or so and most of the rest of the bucks were in places like Pittsburgh, Philly, Rochester, Ithaca, some town in Kentucky... Another suitcase of cash was being driven across and was somewhere in Ohio... I'm like totally crazed... because once they knock off Pfeiffer, I'm going to be the one with the goods and they don't care if I promised a deadline or not... They just want the dough... or else...

But is Steve nervous? Not even a little... He's partying like crazy... rents a Lear... stocked with coke and champagne... brings a couple of babes along... tells me to meet him at 10AM at the Marine Terminal at LaGuardia and off we go on a collection tour... In one day, we hit six cities... including Columbus Ohio to meet the guy driving across... ended up having lunch in Pittsburgh... Dinner in Buffalo... And I was home in New York to watch the 11 o'clock news... He got his bucks... The Colombians got paid... and he bought me this cool watch that I wear like once or twice a year... The original got ripped off at the Cooney-Holmes fight in Vegas when someone broke into my hotel room while I was sleeping (okay... I was more like unconscious than sleeping) and took it. As it turned out, that trip to Vegas had hidden benefits when the Secret Service showed up to investigate a bank deposit with some counterfeit money... but that's another story...

 BTW, flying in a Lear is one of the craziest feelings I've ever had... The thing takes off like a rocket and goes faster than anything I've ever been on... The wings are so short that it feels like you could reach out and touch the tips... And, in those days, the pilots didn't give a damn what you were up to as long as they got paid... This, apparently, wasn't the first time they had gone on a trip like this... It was like being in an air-taxi... Steve didn't tell them the next destination until we were back on the plane at each stop. They'd just file the flight plan and off we'd go... no security... no TSA... nothing but 'Where to, Sir?'

Still More January 2010
 My teeth have always been lousy... I used to go to the dentist as a kid and find out i had a dozen cavities. So when my brother turned me on to a good dentist, it was a good thing... both for me (since I needed one) and for Dr. Ken Saltzman (who saw me as a walking goldmine). Fortunately for me he did great work. Fortunately for him, I paid in cash...

So when Max S needed a dentist, I was happy to refer him... and Ken was happy to take on any set of bad teeth... especially bad teeth that paid cash...

Max was partnered with Pfeiffer at the time and referred him to Ken as well... And Pfeiffer had a mouth that needed serious attention. And Ken managed to fix everyone's problems... Whether it was root canals, crowns, caps, cavities or any other oral deficiency, he had the skills to take care of them...

And everything went along fine... Pfeiffer was so happy that he sent his coke-smuggling, gap-toothed Colombian girlfriend to see Ken... A dentist's dream... She was a real piece of work too... Nuvia (I think that was her name) was his current squeeze. Like I said earlier, Steve was a true outlaw and over the years I knew him, he got married twice (both nice girls, if you ignored that one was an addict and the other a hooker).

To Steve, being married wasn't anything remotely resembling anything like a 'normal' marriage... He was still out there doing whatever came next... whether it was a deal, a run to or from Canada, a trip to Mexico, or just plain basing himself into oblivion. In the meantime, he had a son by his first and never failed to take care of the kid's support. With all the messed up stuff he rationalized as okay to do, he still had a set of rules to live by. He never lied, never failed to do what he said he would, would give his last penny to a friend, was incredibly generous when he was flush and impossibly arrogant when he was loaded. Did I mention he was loaded a lot of the time? He also had a ridiculous temper. If he got pissed at you, you knew it immediately and it became the most important thing in your life. It was something you'd ignore at your own risk... and the risk was substantial since Steve liked guns and knives.