moved to New England, as I tried ever harder to fit in and tone it down. I finished the first draft of the novel in a matter of months only to begin the long frustrating process of submitting it for publication. And thatâs when the problem started.
I was finished with the novel but not the coke. I was like a runaway subway train speeding underground with
no passengers. I had the energy, I had the concentration, I had the time, but there was more milk in a green coconut than ideas in my head. I was a hyper-graphic perpetual motion machine overwhelmed with the urge to write. Regardless of the quality or the content, I wrote pages and pages and with no inclination to revise. I had a stack of yellow legal pads a foot thick, every page covered front to back in illegible longhand scrawl. And because I was on cocaine and totally empowered, completely without fear, I thought every word profound.
As I was now living with Marge, over a hundred miles from Boston, I procured my drugs on Cape Cod, from a middle-aged iron woman who surfed, swam long distances outdoors seven months a year and ran a furniture restoration business on her own. She lived in an old farm house near Pleasant Bay with an enormous yellow barn, did her deliveries in a two-ton pickup truck, boasted a string of lovers that included the most famous abstract expressionists in the New York school, and cared for an ever increasing pride of cats fathered by a huge calico tom named Caesar. Although her skin was as tough as a lizardâs, wrinkled by age and weather, she cut a handsome figure, with a tight athletic body, high cheek bones, a Maori tattoo on her bicep, silver white hair which she grew to her waist, and heavy native jewelry made of ivory and turquoise. Raised in New Zealand, sheâd been an Olympic swimmer before locating to Manhattan where she operated an antique gallery on Lexington Avenue. In the late seventies she moved to Cape Cod with her much
older husband, an architect who succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver. Since his death sheâd had a series of affairs with much younger and very buff seasonal workers from Jamaica who became her source of drugs.
Although she hosted dinner parties for gallery owners and antique dealers and their wivesâsmoky, vodka-swelled affairs in which the drinking began at eight and it wasnât until ten-thirty that she absently strolled into the kitchen to start the roastâshe was a woman who mostly liked men, who identified with men, with the image of the archetypal tough guys and outlaws of her generation. Because I was a man who had come of age in an era of less extreme sexual identities and found her attitudes as naïve as they were outdated, we treated each other with caution.
She was fun company in a group but tête-à -tête conversation was difficult with a woman who referred to her last one-night-stand as a henpecked wuss for returning to his wife, or a temperamental woman friend as deserving a good hard bitch slap. However, she was the only person I knew who always had quality cocaine. No hundred-mile trips to Boston, and worse, the long slow paranoid drives home, eyes scouring the rear-view for a state trooper; no loud sports bars enduring a TV hockey game while waiting for a white suburban college dropout dealer who fancied himself a gangsta. I could shop safely, on-Cape, except for one glitch. My dealer was perfectly happy to receive a kilo of coke flown up from Kingston inside a gift box of mangoes, cut it into tightly
wrapped origami-like one-gram packages and sell them at an enormous profit, but she saw herself as a craftsperson, an athlete, a doyenne of the furniture restoration business, and did not like to think of herself as selling drugs.
Therefore every desperate attempt on my part to score and likewise every opportunity on hers to move product occasioned the semblance of a formal social visit.
Although I never called her unless I wanted drugs, and as my habit grew had to
I was finished with the novel but not the coke. I was like a runaway subway train speeding underground with
no passengers. I had the energy, I had the concentration, I had the time, but there was more milk in a green coconut than ideas in my head. I was a hyper-graphic perpetual motion machine overwhelmed with the urge to write. Regardless of the quality or the content, I wrote pages and pages and with no inclination to revise. I had a stack of yellow legal pads a foot thick, every page covered front to back in illegible longhand scrawl. And because I was on cocaine and totally empowered, completely without fear, I thought every word profound.
As I was now living with Marge, over a hundred miles from Boston, I procured my drugs on Cape Cod, from a middle-aged iron woman who surfed, swam long distances outdoors seven months a year and ran a furniture restoration business on her own. She lived in an old farm house near Pleasant Bay with an enormous yellow barn, did her deliveries in a two-ton pickup truck, boasted a string of lovers that included the most famous abstract expressionists in the New York school, and cared for an ever increasing pride of cats fathered by a huge calico tom named Caesar. Although her skin was as tough as a lizardâs, wrinkled by age and weather, she cut a handsome figure, with a tight athletic body, high cheek bones, a Maori tattoo on her bicep, silver white hair which she grew to her waist, and heavy native jewelry made of ivory and turquoise. Raised in New Zealand, sheâd been an Olympic swimmer before locating to Manhattan where she operated an antique gallery on Lexington Avenue. In the late seventies she moved to Cape Cod with her much
older husband, an architect who succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver. Since his death sheâd had a series of affairs with much younger and very buff seasonal workers from Jamaica who became her source of drugs.
Although she hosted dinner parties for gallery owners and antique dealers and their wivesâsmoky, vodka-swelled affairs in which the drinking began at eight and it wasnât until ten-thirty that she absently strolled into the kitchen to start the roastâshe was a woman who mostly liked men, who identified with men, with the image of the archetypal tough guys and outlaws of her generation. Because I was a man who had come of age in an era of less extreme sexual identities and found her attitudes as naïve as they were outdated, we treated each other with caution.
She was fun company in a group but tête-à -tête conversation was difficult with a woman who referred to her last one-night-stand as a henpecked wuss for returning to his wife, or a temperamental woman friend as deserving a good hard bitch slap. However, she was the only person I knew who always had quality cocaine. No hundred-mile trips to Boston, and worse, the long slow paranoid drives home, eyes scouring the rear-view for a state trooper; no loud sports bars enduring a TV hockey game while waiting for a white suburban college dropout dealer who fancied himself a gangsta. I could shop safely, on-Cape, except for one glitch. My dealer was perfectly happy to receive a kilo of coke flown up from Kingston inside a gift box of mangoes, cut it into tightly
wrapped origami-like one-gram packages and sell them at an enormous profit, but she saw herself as a craftsperson, an athlete, a doyenne of the furniture restoration business, and did not like to think of herself as selling drugs.
Therefore every desperate attempt on my part to score and likewise every opportunity on hers to move product occasioned the semblance of a formal social visit.
Although I never called her unless I wanted drugs, and as my habit grew had to
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