Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (30 page)

The villa was owned by May, a lovely old Jamaican lady who lived in the maid’s quarters at the far end of the house. I told her son “G,” who was handling the transaction, that my Jamaican work permit would be ready soon and I rented the house at the local rate that was close to what a Jamaican would pay. The villa featured a spacious covered seating area under a peaked roof, next to a concrete pool that was fenced off for safety. I felt like Ernest Hemingway as I sat on that patio plodding away on my book, while overlooking a coral sea as tropical birds and insects filled the air with peaceful sounds.

I bought an old Fiat to drive to town and back, which worked out to be cheaper than taking a rental car over the long term. I would be able to sell the Fiat when I was done with it, thereby recouping most of the cost while still enjoying the privilege of having a car.

I ran into my old pal Brian Kholder from Montreal who was living with his wife in Montego Bay. Brian was drying out from his heroin habit, which he felt was a necessary intervention from time to time to keep him from becoming a full-fledged junkie. I caught up on the news from Montreal and he told me that the boys downtown on the docks were looking for me. It appeared that they wanted to continue the Jamaica scam, only this time
without Irving. I thought about it some but I was in no rush to go back to Montreal and the games of cowboys and Indians. I liked my life in Vancouver and I liked my life in Jamaica and I had no interest in returning to my life in Montreal.

While I sat writing my novel on the shaded terrace by the pool, Barbara was writing letters to everyone she ever knew. She described our large villa and the view and then invited everyone she could think of to come down for a visit. I found it amusing that many of her invitees took her up on her offer and came to visit us in Jamaica, in comparison to how few came to visit us in Vancouver. There was no problem in terms of accommodation, with two unused guest rooms and plenty of empty space in the dining and living room areas of the house. The property we rented sat on five acres of cleared land, as did all of the villas in Great River Private. There was more than enough space for us and our visitors to enjoy quiet walks and conversations without anyone ever feeling crowded. Their visits were coordinated in such a way that every week or two, I was driving to the Montego Bay airport, either picking someone up or dropping someone off.

My father came down at Christmastime. He had recently split up with my mother and it was a good tonic for him to travel down to the island for a visit during the holidays. He enjoyed his two weeks of vacation and we enjoyed having him stay with us.

I met up with some friends of Brian Kholder’s while I was in Jamaica. In particular, there was a husband-and-wife team from the West Island of Montreal who had started as low-level helpers for Brian before they moved off to their own scams and into the big time. The husband and wife team were manufacturing honey oil in Jamaica and they were transporting it in huge amounts to the U.S. and Canada. The couple lived in Hopewell, not far from us. Their villa was situated high on a mountain overlooking the entire west coast of Jamaica. It had the most awesome view I have ever seen on the island. You practically needed a mountain goat to get up to there, and I felt afraid for my little Fiat, as it climbed up potholed streets that would be next to impassable in the rainy season.

When I finally made it to the top of the mountain, I was struck by how cool it was compared to the heat down below. The West Island couple needed their lofty location on the mountaintop in order to communicate with the regular flights of small aircraft that their buddies were flying into Jamaica, to pick up oil.

The smugglers in their planes were forewarned by the West Island couple about the schedule of the American
AWACS
that were patrolling the Caribbean. Their information came from an associate who lived in Miami near the airport. The associate was able to see when the
AWACS
were in for servicing and when they were assigned to fly. When the
AWACS
were down for servicing, the drug runners would fly over to Jamaica, pick up their oil or weed and fly back to the States to a drop zone. The West Island couple charged fifteen thousand dollars per flight and their fee covered the
AWAC
s schedules, access to a remote landing strip in the jungle, aircraft refueling and as much oil or ganja as required at a decent price.

The couple offered me honey oil at eighteen hundred a pound, but I passed on the deal. I told them I was not in Jamaica on business. I was there for pleasure. Although their oil was exceptionally good, the price I could get for it in Canada was not worth the premium to be paid in Jamaica.

Like the West Island couple, my buddy Brian Kholder was also in Jamaica to set up a scam. It was like old home week as Brian and I and Barbara and Karen rekindled a friendship that had not wavered in spite of time or distance or a heroin habit. When I met Brian and his wife on the beach in Montego Bay, they were low on cash. We invited them to stay with us in our villa. Brian made more money than anyone I ever knew in the drug business, most of it smuggling weed from Jamaica. But Brian was a junkie, and one hundred thousand dollars is just a drop in the bucket to a man with a high-grade heroin habit.

Brian was a walking oxymoron. He was a gentle man with hippie tastes and values but he also had a multimillion dollar heroin habit. Brian and Karen were trying to get it together again after several separations that began after Brian was sentenced to
three years in Edmonton. Brian and Karen’s daughter, Brooke, was almost the same age as our daughter. They used to call her their little angel and Brooke often slept in their bed until she was about eight. It was a pleasure to have the Kholder family stay with us as our young daughter Allison enjoyed Brooke’s company. I, for one, enjoyed Brian’s intellect and my wife enjoyed Karen’s earthy reality and lack of pretension. Karen was jogging to lose weight and she would laugh out loud about the Jamaicans who drove past her and yelled “Run Fatty!” Jamaican nicknames reflect the people who carry them, unlike North American nicknames. In Canada a fat man is called “Slim” while in Jamaica he is called “Bigga”. There was plenty of room at our villa and for a while we projected a family image that looked quite normal. Brooke was in school in Jamaica during the day while Allison, who was not yet school-age, was with her mother and Karen. Some nights Brian would wander into town alone. With no car of his own, he took the local minibus that was crowded with Jamaicans. Brian would come home stoned in the wee hours of the morning. On some nights there would be no moon and zero visibility. One time he was accosted by an armed police patrol as he staggered up the Great River Private service road that led to our villa. The Jamaican police officers turned their flashlight on Brian as he approached their parked car.

“What are you doing wandering around in the dark?” one of the cops asked him.

“I’m going home,” answered Brian pointing in the direction of our villa.

“But it’s so dark. How can you see where you are going?” the cop asked him.

“I can feel where the pavement ends with my feet,” Brian answered.

“Aren’t you afraid of duppies?” the cop asked, meaning ghosts, which most Jamaicans believe in.

“Nah,” answered Brian before tip-tapping his feet along the pavement towards home.

Pinot Mufasantii was both our neighbour and the developer of the Great River Private Estates. He lived a few villas above
ours and he occasionally came down to visit us. On one occasion, he had a conversation with Brian and posed a question.

“What are you going to do in Jamaica?” the millionaire developer asked.

“I’m going to make some money,” Brian answered.

Without demanding the specifics of how Brian was going to make his money, Pinot asked him again. “But what are you going to do when you make your money, Brian?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you think you should have a plan?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So what are you going to do when you make all your money down here in Jamaica?”

“Open a nightclub maybe.”

I could see where Pinot was leading with his questions, even if Brian could not. Pinot was trying to say that it was not enough to make money dealing ganga, unless you have a plan to do something with it.

In the evenings Brian would sometimes confide in me and he told me that he had fifteen hundred pounds of sensi that he was going to air freight into Montreal in two shipments. The scam was a mind-blower, with almost a half a dozen customs officers at Mirabel Airport in on the deal. Brian told me he had to wait until all six Canadian Customs officers were on the same shift in order to get the load through. Customs in Jamaica were already paid off and they took good care of Brian’s weed for him while he waited several months before the time was right. He finally got the green light from Canada to send his cargo off and ended up getting one seven hundred pound shipment through while the other one was lost. Brian’s end was about two hundred thousand dollars, which in his world was barely enough to last a year.

Brian told me a story about his partner Hank who was a heroin dealer in Montreal. Hank had a pretty young girlfriend, half his age, who was going out with Hank and fucking Brian on the side. Brian told me a story about how another friend of his named Moe tried to move in on Hank’s girl and how he would not be warned away. One night Brian and Hank were
watching a movie about a man cutting another man’s throat over a fight for a woman. The next night Hank went to Moe’s apartment with a delivery of heroin and a loaded .
45
. He had a friend with him as backup, which was a good thing because, just like in the movies, the gun jammed at exactly the wrong time. Hank and his accomplice had to finish Moe off with a knife and according to Hank, he and his accomplice barely got out of the apartment in one piece. Brian figures Hank was watching the movie and came away with the idea. After hearing this, I asked Brian how he could be crazy enough to fool around with Hank’s girlfriend after telling me that story.

“Hank wouldn’t do that to me,” Brian explained, with a curious logic that only a junkie would understand. “It wasn’t that she was fucking the guy. It was a matter of respect. The guy wouldn’t take a warning. It’s too bad too cause I liked him. He reminded me of you.”

A few weeks later, Hank came down to Jamaica for a visit, and after asking if it was okay, Brian brought him over to my house to meet me. I was surprised to see that Hank was an elderly man with receding hair and an ample girth. I felt sorry for any young chick who had to fuck this old guy for her fixes, but he was very polite and I really had no reason to feel as uncomfortable around him as I did. Hank was another leg shaker who nervously bounced his legs whenever he sat down. My old partner Irving was a leg shaker, too, and I wondered if all these leg shakers had the same troubled consciences.

Brian and Karen left shortly after his load of sensi was sent off to Montreal, to join in the feast of the kill. I did not mind. More guests were coming and we needed his room. Barbara’s mother and sister, Margaret, from England came for a visit after Brian and Karen left. I was getting smirking looks as I walked the two blond sisters down the beach, both women being several months pregnant.

Then Rolf Wolstrom and his new girlfriend, Sierra, came for a three-week visit after Barbara’s mother and sister left. The two spent much of their time exploring the island by motorcycle. It was nice to have their company, although I thought it somewhat
cheap of Rolf to throw us a ten dollar bill for the maid before leaving for the airport. A bottle of good wine for his hosts might have been more appropriate or at least he might have treated us to dinner out somewhere.

Derrick the Doctor and his wife came for a two week visit from Montreal after Rolf and Sierra left and we had an exceptionally good time with him and his wife Marion. Marion and I were approached on a beach in Negril by the cast of a Jamaica Tourist Board film crew. They wanted us to do a commercial, along with my blond-haired daughter who was the focus of the shoot. Marion and I were supposed to walk along the beach as backdrop to the scene, while a colorfully dressed Jamaican woman sat under a Mango tree with my four-year-old daughter, Allison, on her lap. As Marion and I walked the beach, the director had to coach me several times to look more amorously at Marion, which was somewhat difficult to do with her husband Derrick looking on. The filming experience would have been tedious had we not partaken in some of Ma Brown’s magic mushroom tea before the shoot. The tea had us laughing out loud on the set and made the seventy-six takes that followed somewhat bearable. Marion and I were paid seventy-five dollars each in U.S. funds and I received an additional seventy-five dollars for our daughter’s participation. In addition to the union scale payments, we were all put up that night in a posh hotel on the beach and were invited to eat dinner with the film crew.

After Derrick and Marion left us to fly home to Montreal, Manny and his family flew down from Toronto. It was great to have Manny visit and his young son had a ball diving for coins that I threw into the deep end of the pool.

I thought of our own baby who was coming due and I tried to convince Barbara to have the birth in Jamaica. I was hoping to gain dual citizenship for our child, thinking that it might help us if we ever immigrated to Jamaica permanently, but she would not hear of it. My lawyer friend Vincent squelched that idea completely, informing me that there would be no benefits to our child being born in Jamaica. He advised Barbara to have the baby in Canada where universal health care covers everything
and where the best nurses and doctors and facilities are available.

At that point, Vincent was still waiting for my work permit to be processed and I was glad I had not yet ordered the motorcycles from Vancouver. Barbara wanted to go back home to have our baby. And besides, if the truth be told, I was getting bored with Jamaica. I knew every bump in the roads, and I was tired of going to three different food stores in order to complete one grocery order. After a while even the beaches and water were uninviting and I began to understand why everyone living in Jamaica said they wanted to “get off the rock.” There was nothing to do besides watch videos and smoke ganja and I was getting tired of living in paradise. The things I missed most were small things, like a real McDonald’s hamburger or a glass of milk that did not taste like goat’s milk. I longed for a breath of cool fresh Canadian air that had been flavoured by the Pacific Ocean and washed clean by the Rocky Mountains. I missed the efficiency of Canada, with customs officers who don’t take bribes and service industry employees who don’t move so slowly as to look like they’re working underwater. I missed telephones that worked. I missed conversations with my Canadian friends whose views were cosmopolitan, compared to those in Jamaica.