Death Happens

Since I've managed to bring my Mom's passing into focus, this seems like a logical place to go into some detail about it.  Mom had rheumatic fever as a child and, with medical science where it was in the 1930s, she suffered the after-affects of that illness.

For the unfamiliar:

Rheumatic Fever Facts. Rheumatic fever is a complication of a streptococcal pharyngitis infection (strep throat) that can cause damage to the heart, joints, brain, and skin. The most serious complication of rheumatic fever is rheumatic heart disease.  Most significant of the complications are cardiac in nature. 

Patients with rheumatic fever who develop carditis may develop long-lasting heart dysfunction. Often the mitral valve or the aortic valve is affected, and if patients are not responsive to medications, surgical valve replacement may become necessary. Atrial fibrillation (irregular fast heart rate) and heart failure can occur. Sydenham's chorea can be the most difficult complication to treat, and the individuals with this complication may get recurrence of the disease. A few people remain very susceptible to reinfection with GABHS and may require lifetime antibiotic treatment.

Of course, back then there were no valve replacements and few antibiotics.  The post-fever advice she was given was to avoid stress and not have children.  Fortunately for my brother and I, she ignored that.  Unfortunately for her, it ended badly...  I guess...  Unless she was at peace in the knowledge that she had risked everything to bear and raise children.  At her passing, I was 20 in college and my brother was 24 in the Air Force in Southeast Asia.  Who knows how to judge such things in life?

Anyway, I was working on a term paper that was due right after the holiday, pecking away at my typewriter, focused on getting my assignment completed.  My father was at work with my grandfather (maternal) in the candy/stationary store around the corner.  It was New Years Day so Mom was off work, home cleaning our spacious 4 room apartment.  I remember hearing the vacuum…  Some time later…  might have been 15 minutes or 30 minutes…  I realized it was quiet and figured she had finished with the Electrolux.  Another few minutes and I went out to read her something I had written.  She always had a good fresh slant on things and I always relied on her to check my language.

At 20, I had exactly zero experience with death.  Yes, my grandmother (maternal) had died in August of 1959 while I was away at camp as a 12 year old.  And I recall visiting my grandfather (paternal) in a hospital shortly before he died a few years earlier.  I remember his appearance as someone who was wasting away, likely a cancer victim.  We were never close but he was dead shortly after.  Working in the store, I would hear that this one or that one died.  And on Yom Kippur, I knew my grandfather (maternal) would always go with my mother to the synagogue to attend the special Yizkor service for the deceased.  Dad would always stay outside…  I never understood why but he never went in.  Meantime, death was something that ‘happened’…  To me, it was an impersonal event that meant a life was over.  There was nothing emotional about it.  Looking back, I can’t believe how coldly I thought about it.  It was a clinical thing…  divorced from any sense of loss or grief.

Today, I look back and want to believe I was living in a bubble with a hard shell, protecting myself from any feeling.  Somehow, feelings were a sign of weakness.

The Sideways Event

I think the point at which it all went sideways was New Years Day in 1967, the day my Mom died. While it’s sort of normal to lose a parent, and as much as it sucked, I have to confess I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to recognize the obvious. First, my Mom died decades prematurely… At the time, I was like 19 and thought 46 wasn’t that young. After all, she lived a life, had married, had a career, had children, enjoyed life, Right? Nope, I can’t begin to relate how wrong that was. She had so much life left to live, so much more to give to her family and friends and the world she left. It was an absolute tragedy that she passed so young.

Now, as I approach 71, I can see it so much more clearly. I’m embarrassed to think of how I related to it at the time. I remember thinking of it as a ‘bad break’ when the policeman tried to offer solace to me. And how stupidly inadequate my emotional reaction seems today. It’s embarrassing to my sense of self but I can’t change how it happened at the time. It was actually decades later that I was able to recognize the truth and I’m forever shamed by the shallow nature of my reaction back then.

And, my redemption is rooted in that precise realization. People can change and I, for one, have done so. Yes, I can’t (nor do I really want to) undo the crazy events that ensued, after the early demise of my Mom.

Suddenly, I was living with my Dad and nothing was the same. For a few months, he mourned… and we’d often dine out at the Greek diner on 31st Street near Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria. It was, frankly, just sad. He was ill-equipped to parent on his own… and, at 20, I was hardly a child. You could say the results were inevitable, except they weren’t. The course of events were sealed in place during a unique moment in time. Hey, I’m not saying I was special or that I did anything that hundreds, if not thousands of others did, but I am saying that it’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Things went on like that for almost a year... until he hooked up with a widow from Bridgeport and that changed everything... really... everything...

Time Flies By And Paths Converge

And time is just flying by these days...  It's almost Thanksgiving 2017 and the last 18 months have brought some serious lifestyle changes.  While I've been considering (admittedly off and on) how to continue this story, we've moved from the New York metro area to the Low Country Coastal South Carolina Empire.  And as evidence that the long and winding roads of life eventually end up in the same place, we're now living two houses down from a DEA agent and across the street from a retired judge.  But hey...  does anyone care what you did 30 years ago?  We're all just happy to be here and, while I don't share my stories with my neighbors, there's always the wink and nod when the conversation gets too close to the madness I can't possibly ignore or forget.

Someone sent me a private message last night asking me if I'd read this book...   https://www.amazon.com/Hotel-Scarface-Cocaine-Cowboys-Partied/dp/1592409288/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510643011&sr=8-1&keywords=hotel+scarface or seen this picture http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/books/miami-book-fair/article183852346.html (Pfeiffer's epic Hotel Mutiny descent) and of course, the memories began festering once again.  I've been waiting for over a year to begin posting up the next chapter(s) of what happened when the authorities finally arrived and what happened after that.  I'm still waiting to clear the fallout with a few people before setting out on that journey. 

Thanks for waiting.   :cheers:

Under The Microscope

It wasn’t until the spring of 1989 that it became obvious I was, in fact, a target in the ongoing investigation. After months of delusional wondering and hoping that it wouldn’t happen, the other shoe dropped and the news arrived that I had been named by the rat they caught in Switzerland as one of the distributors and even as something of a principal in the affair. And at that point, the slowest clock of my life began to tick. I’d had some disturbing dreams about what life might be like under the government microscope but nothing in my experience prepared me for the reality.

The smuggler was in a Federal lockup in Rhode Island and wasn’t talking at all. He was held there because they apparently (allegedly) had done a Rhode Island deal in which the rat was a participant. To my best recollection, one of the other players had a heroin habit, got popped and spilled a lot of beans on the operation. The next thing to happen was like a blood-in-the-water shark attack. When the feds seized all the cash at the father-in-law’s house, they knew they had a big thing going. Next, all the ambitious players, (prosecutors, DEA guys, IRS guys, etc.), wanted in on this career-enhancing deal. They really didn’t know exactly what it was they had uncovered, but they knew it was significant and that they had possibly snagged the central player who had put it together. The other set of circling sharks were the quasi-hip criminal defense attorneys and private investigators who had built their fortunes on the misfortunes of the baby boomer underworld.

The ensuing time was like the opposite of your entire life passing before you in the final few moments before death. In this process, the final few moments took years and I had time to reflect on every little nuance and ‘what-if’ a thousand times while the disease crept forward. Denial was still alive and well but it wasn’t based on anything real. I sustained my belief in the certainty that the smuggler would never give me up and most all of the other potential problem witnesses were in the wind. And, from my experience, the investigation would go up the ladder and not down.

After all, we’d paid taxes, declared a lot of income, obeyed all the laws that didn’t relate to the business, and weren’t there a lot of easier targets? Plus, this was, in the end, a financial crime, right? And we paid our taxes... Lots and lots of taxes... Unfortunately, this apparently only served to infuriate one particular investigator. And as the first days, weeks and months passed, I tried to kick back and stay as far out of things as I could. From the summer of 1989 through the winter of 1990, we split time between the mountaintop house, the condo we rented on St. Croix in the Caribbean and our house in Huntington. Paranoia raged and every time I stepped off a plane, I expected to be led away in handcuffs. It was not a very happy time. Except it didn't happen. Again and again, I'd get off a plane and there'd be no welcoming committee. And after a while, I began to wonder if my luck was going to keep me out of the jackpot...

To make matters even more intense, Hurricane Hugo happened in September of 1989, literally blowing the island of St. Croix pretty much off the map. For over 20 years, we vacationed in St. Croix without fail. Some years, we’d spend six weeks there and it became part of who we were. I can’t imagine life without the tropics. We frequently spent weeks at Grapetree Beach Hotel on the east end of the island. It got to the point where we were regarded as locals and it was easy to forget what was going on back in New York when we were there. At this particular juncture, we had rented a condo at Coakley Bay, overlooking Buck Island, a national monument with a spectacular coral reef. It was one sweet place to pass the time and we felt right at home there.

Just A Quick Note...

One of the problems with writing this story is how it might affect the survivors.  Certainly there are scenes in the story that some folks would prefer to forget, or prefer not to remember.  Of course, for those who haven’t survived, it’s less of an issue.

A few years ago, I found a comment on a post asking how I knew ‘Uncle Keith’ and another time someone recalled my friend Scott as a guy ‘who I used to deal grass with’.  Keith is not a survivor and Scott, if he has survived, is in parts unknown.

Recently, I heard from the daughter of someone who, unfortunately, is no longer here, and was deeply moved.  It seems I’ve shined a light into a dark corner that was somewhat kept hidden from her.

It should be no surprise that a lot of what we did back then was done on the low-down and the hush-hush.  However, even those who weren’t participating, clearly knew what we were doing and that we were seriously shattering some laws.

Today, some of the survivors are upstanding civic leaders...  one key player is now a successful lawyer and a young legal assistant even has become a judge.  The prosecutor became a criminal defense attorney.

What began as a way to buy an engagement ring, ended in an entirely different place that noone... absolutely nobody...  could have predicted.  And as I sit here 25 years down the road, my head is filled with stories inside stories about unique adventures in the baby boomer underworld.  And I only hope I have the time to put it all down as best I can remember it.

So to those who would prefer these stories remain untold, I apologize.  In most places, I’ve left names either incomplete or slightly modified.  For those who aren’t in that frame of mind, I hope the stories are entertaining, exciting, and possibly bringing back some fond remembrances.  As for the ghosts, I hope they are all having a big party wherever they are.

The Countdown Continues...

And so it goes...  we successfully complete our mission, and ruminate about how foolish it was to send the stash into space and ultimately into the hands of the feds.  The smuggler is sitting in a federal facility while the investigators investigate and try to put together flowcharts, money-tracking, identity-checking, and all the other ‘connect-the-dot’ items that are necessary before they can file charges.  As the government became aware that the amounts in question were, at the time, unprecedented, the agents all wanted this one chalked up as a win in their personnel files.

They still didn’t know Stu’s real name or much else about him other than what they learned from the original informant.  They quickly realized, however, that they had uncovered a serious smuggling operation and that it had been going on for quite a few years. 

As the events unfolded, though, and the various pieces become known, the case just got juicier and juicier.  Stu’s father-in-law, whose house they raided to seize the bank stash, wasn’t just a civilian.  He was a high-ranking retired naval officer who had won medals of valor and was an outright American military hero from the Korean conflict.  I think he may have won the Medal of Honor but I’m not sure.  One thing I do know is that he was sometimes referred to as the Admiral or the Commander is deference to his rank.  So now the DEA, FBI and the T-guys have to slow down.  They’ve definitely found something illegal, but suddenly, they are in the middle of a process that will end up indicting a celebrated Korean War hero who is pushing 70 years old and never used a drug in his life except alcohol.

Meantime, we’re hunkering down wondering just how bad this situation is for us.  Investigations, while unwanted, don’t necessarily have to end badly for everyone on the flowchart.  Just because you get mentioned doesn’t mean they will have enough evidence to make a case or to even decide you’re worth pursuing.  In fact, as a group, we (the investors), were collectively hanging on to the hope that the government would be engaged in an upward-looking investigation.  After all, why would they want the low level guys like us when they could go after the guys overseas who were doing the exporting...  and the shipping guys...  and the local boaters who were meeting the mother-ships.  Us?  We’re figuring that there are so many of us that it would take a task force to unravel the circle and even then, what would they find?  The deals they were investigating had happened in 1986 and prior.  This was 1988 going into 1989 and they had nothing beyond the rat from overseas and the smuggler...  And they weren’t even sure of who he was. 

Of course, that isn’t to say that we didn’t take measures to obliterate any evidence we could find.  I was an assiduous list-maker and an incorrigibly anal keeper of things.  I kept books in these triple column Chinese ledger books that were bought in Chinatown periodically.  I had dozens of them...  Often using a different one for each deal.

Clearly they had to go.  And while the internet was still just a scientist’s wet dream, there were DOS-based bulletin boards and I did have an IBM PC with floppy drives.  Lotus 123 was a revelation for me.  I could put more information on a single floppy disk than I could put in 20 notebooks...  and the information was sortable, searchable and could be manipulated in a hundred different ways.  You could categorize the product by name, country, quality, price, consistency, color, aroma, and virtually any other element you cared about.  The ledger books had to go.  The lists became digitized and disposed of.  Any possible thing that connected us to the business was identified and made to disappear.  It was a healthy project but one of serious paranoia.  We had pictures of people that had to go.  Our reggae wedding stuff had to be put in deep storage. 

As the weeks turned into months, hope inevitably rose that we were not going to be targeted.  Any business that got done was more of a favor than anything else.  I couldn’t just cut off the income of dozens of friends.  These were working class folks and many of them depended on the supplemental income to live their lives on a day to day basis.  Personally, we were more than comfortable.  Over the course of a few years, we had accumulated a lot of ‘stuff’...  Some of it was definitely from the business, but there were things that weren’t business-related.  There were three houses...  Huntington and Brookville as well as a glorious ski chalet that we built from scratch on a hilltop out in Park City, Utah.  We had bought some vacant land in St. Croix.  Our cars were modest, except for the 1988 white Mustang that rarely left the garage. 

I was driving a Saab 9000 and it was both low key and interesting.  (Never mind that they wanted $800 to replace a dashboard light.)  Also, in some crazy dream, I helped out a buddy and tried to accumulate some abandoned buildings in the Caribbean where we wanted to put together a small tropical shopping mall.  So, by any measure, we were doing just fine, and had built this mini-empire from scratch using PJ’s accountant and an awful lot of cash money. 

The best laid plans...

On Time...

Time.  Time is part of everything we do.  The measurement of it is uniquely human.  A dog may experience time but it’s unlikely to be measured.  Seasons change and behavior runs in cycles but animals are blissfully unaware while people are continually reminded of it.

 

What time is it?  When does my show start?  How old are you?  How fast are you going?  What’s the ETA?  Should I use second day delivery?  When did I get my last haircut?  Is it dinnertime yet?  What time will you be home?  When does the school year end?  When is Happy Hour?  When is that bill due?  What year is that car model?  When does the hockey season begin?  What quarter is this?  Is that the two minute warning?  What was your time in the marathon?  How long does it take to cook a hard-boiled egg and how long before it cools? 

 

Sometimes, it seems ‘like only yesterday’ since we’ve seen someone while years have actually gone by.  When we say ‘slow as molasses’, we’re talking about time, not molasses.  Being consistently late is unacceptable.  But it’s cool when you never appear to be in a hurry.

 

And most working people trade time for money...  What’s the hourly wage?   Is there overtime pay?  How many vacation days per year?  When is the due date?  When is high tide?   When was your last period?  I’m sorry Officer but how fast was I going?  What is my pulse rate?  How long does the music play during Final Jeopardy? 

 

The bottom line of time is that it can only be measured by itself.  You can’t see it or feel it but with altered perception, you can slow it down or speed it up.  You can’t escape it and if you try to, you are just wasting your time.  This is leap year...  but real time will still pass at the same pace.  The first time I smoked pot, time seemed to stand still.  It literally shape-shifted for me and what felt like an hours-long ride home ended when I got in the door and the clock said I was right on time.  This was quite the mystery.  How can time slow down and pass at the same speed simultaneously?  It’s all about perception.  Sanity is being able to distinguish between what we perceive and what we’re expected to perceive. 

 

My first awareness of time was probably when I knew it was dinnertime or time to go to sleep or maybe it was Howdy Doody time.  It took on a different meaning when I started school and discovered the difference between the school year and the summertime.

 

At this point in my life, approaching 70, time seems to be racing like a runaway train on a downhill track, constantly accelerating with no station in sight and with failing brakes that can’t be replaced.  Seasons pass quickly, and today becomes yesterday in the blink of an eye. 

 

So...  where is this going?  Time slows down considerably when you are waiting for the Federal government to decide whether to arrest you or not.  Time becomes the right to a speedy trial if it happens...  and how your charges might fit into the sentencing guidelines...  and, if the worst happens, time served.