Desperado
On most of my adventures, nobody sat silently in the Maui current at midnight.
Names have been changed just because. Locations are vague for the same reason.
Patti and I parted ways not long after the night of the big fish. I returned to the mainland to try again to raise enough of a bankroll to get something going in Hawaii. I spent a couple months working in California and left there with the possibility of some money catching up with me later.
In 1976, I went back to Hawaii with a small amount of cash to get me started and settled in to former sugar town of Keaau. Our friends Roger and Bonnie had moved there to take part in transforming a cluster of old buildings into "The Sugar Mill"; a funky mall of artisan shops with a deli at streetside. I was able to rent a dilapidated store on the other side of the street with a small studio on the back. Johnny came to live with me and began Kindergarten there. The school property adjoined the back of the cluster of buildings where we lived. It was a pretty cool setup if I could only make the store work for me somehow. This was at the end of 1976, my second attempt to make a go of it in Hawaii.
Well, you know, like my father, I'm not a great businessman, and totally unsuited to be a storekeeper, but I did excel at making the storefront beautiful. I covered it with diagonally placed redwood siding trimmed out with fir 1 X 6's joined at the corners like jigsaw puzzle pieces. The narrow ramp that ran across the width of the storefront connected to the concrete sidewalk was covered with small remnants of finished plywood put together again like puzzle pieces. On the gable above, I made a sunburst of fanned out redwood wedges. And again trimmed with fir with puzzle piece corners. All of this new wood was brightly varnished. I found a great carpet at the nearby dump that fit wall to wall in the front half of the store. I refinished the heavy plank counter. A doorway at the very back corner of the store opened into our living space.
Through a chain of misfortunes, I wasn't able to acquire much of an inventory, and though the shop was beautiful and charming, inside there was little for sale. After Christmas came and went, it was clear my idea could not sustain itself, and in sadness, I accepted defeat again. Johnny went to live with his grandparents in California, and I began planning for some way to return to the mainland and seek another, bigger, bankroll. Had I known what lay in store for me, I would have stayed right there.
As fate would have it, a lady I had known in the commune, "Marsha", had a new boyfriend, "Winston". This boyfriend was a big time marijuana smuggler. It so happened that his west coast operations had reached a point where he was too hot, and he was going to set up a new scene somewhere on the East Coast to serve the needs of New York City. Marsha had told Winston about my skills, etc., and he invited me to come along; he had need of a carpenter.
Winston had purchased a fifty-acre property with an old farmhouse and an even older great big timber framed hay barn. My job would be to turn the barn into a warehouse and repackaging shop. His original thought was for me to go directly to the farm and get started, but he didn't anticipate how long the escrow was going to take, and we realized that we had a month to kill before I could even go there.
No problem, we would just go down to Florida and chill for the month. Winston had a "safe house" down there that we could enjoy. It fronted on a nice upscale suburban street, a four-bedroom house, and out in the back was a swimming pool and out beyond the pool there was a 30-foot catamaran, tied up along the arm of a marina that led to Biscayne Bay. All the neighbors had sailboats and small yachts too. Nice neighborhood, maybe they were all smugglers. You could just step out your back door, get in your boat and go...to Colombia, for instance.
We settled in for a while. One day Winston decided we'd go scuba diving. Marsha had never used scuba gear before, and neither had I. He gave us a few short drills in the swimming pool and figured we were good to go. It turned out to be a woefully inadequate training session. A friend of his had a dive boat and came by to pick us up.
Outside the bay and a few miles north, about a mile off shore, we dropped anchor. The plan was for Winston, Marsha and I to swim down the anchor chain and look around. Simple. The boat had a platform for divers right at water level on the back of the boat. We sat there in our gear; weight belts strapped on, masks adjusted, air turned on, and mouthpieces inserted, we got into the water.
I stayed treading water near the back of the boat as Winston fussed with Marsha's air tanks.
They were having some difficulty with it. The current was causing me to drift away from the boat, and I was swimming harder to stay in one spot. Minutes went by and I was getting out of breath treading water at the surface with all this gear. I figured that I would be better off if I went under so that I wouldn't have to expend all that energy. So I put my mouthpiece in and sunk down about 10 feet. I was shocked to find that I couldn't suck enough air from the tanks to recover my breath. I realized I was in a bad situation. I unbuckled my weight belt (about 20 pounds of lead on a web belt) and let it fall. I had an easier time when I got to the surface, but still I couldn't catch my breath.
The wind was picking up and a swell was rising, and I could hear Winston yelling and waving his arm. He and Marsha were in trouble too. The boat captain hurriedly pulled up his anchor, and started up the boat. They were 50 yards off his stern and he wheeled around to rescue them. I was at an even farther distance, and would have to wait until they were retrieved before I could be attended to.
I was still out of breath, and could barely keep my nose and mouth above water, and it was going to be minutes before I would get any help. Reluctantly, I unbuckled the scuba tank and held on to the strap for as long as I could. I never was in any danger; I could survive indefinitely in the water, even in a semi-conscious state, as shown a few chapters back. It was the equipment that was at risk, and if I let it go, I would be just fine. So finally I did, and I was.
It turned out that it took several minutes more to get Winston and Marsha back on the boat and they could start looking for me. By the time the boat reached me, a rainsquall had started and the wind had picked up even more, and we headed back to the house. A couple of take-aways from that experience: First, I was never tempted to try scuba again, I could always use snorkel and free dive to the depths I wanted to go; 25-30 feet maximum, like I had done my whole life, and second; It was time to stop smoking cigarettes.
I started smoking tobacco when I was about 18, and I soon had a pack a day habit. I was probably addicted to nicotine long before I toked on my first cigarette. Back in the 1940's and 1950's when I was growing up, smoking was everywhere; in the theaters, restaurants, and buses. If one of your parents smoked, like my father did constantly, at home or driving along in the family car with the windows rolled up you were continually dosed. So I grew up, like many of us did, with a baseline of craving for what, we did not know. When we came to the age of experimentation, we quickly fell into the cycle of addiction: It produced an unmistakable satisfaction, followed in time by a specific dis-satisfaction. Repeat. By the time I was 33 in 1977, it often was more like two packs a day, and my lungs had suffered. The scuba experience became my motivation to quit.
When escrow had finally closed, and Winston could take possession, I got to go to the farm and get started. About 40 of the 50 acres were gently sloped fields in the low rolling hills, probably hayfields. We just left it go wild while we were there. The house stood in the middle of the property on a low rise so that it overlooked the lower field and the long gravel road that led up to and past the house to the barn.
That barn was framed with hand cut oak posts and beams. It was about a 75 foot square as I recall. The ground floor was set up for milking cows. The ceiling height in there was 8 feet. The floor above was completely open and the peak of the gambrel roof was about 20 feet above that, so that hay could be stacked high. My mission was to make it into a warehouse, while keeping that fact invisible from the outside. It took me some time to cover the walls in plywood, and where a gap might show new plywood between the boards, or there was a big knothole, I'd paint the spot or strip on the plywood that showed through grey and throw dirt in the wet paint, to maintain the dilapidated old barn look.
I covered the entire floor with a layer of plywood, and the coated the whole room with polyurethane to seal it all up. I brought in new electric wiring for fluorescent lighting and utility for work areas. I made a new trap door to the level below, and a new ladder. At the top of the ladder were lighted-when-off switches for the fluorescents, so they could be easily located when the room was dark.
I reinforced and rehung the big hay barn door facing the road and I devised an angled loading dock that was easy to set up and knock down when trucks came to load or unload.
There was a swimming pool on the property a couple hundred feet from the barn and I set up a pump and water line to the barn so that we would have some fire fighting capability if the need arose.
The plan was to store Colombian pot in there, tons of it, and distribute it to his team in the urban areas. My plan was to get paid off as soon as possible and return to my son in Hawaii for a new start.
At some point, Winston and Marsha picked me up at the farm and we drove to Cape Cod. He had purchased a lobster boat that would be used for the operations. When the three of us were in the car, I was the driver, so they could drink cognac, etc. This was probably the best car I ever had the pleasure of driving. Years earlier, I had a smaller Jaguar sedan with a straight 6 engine. That had been my favorite car up until then. Winston's car was a much newer and bigger Jaguar sedan and it had a V-12 engine. I dropped them off at the boat dealer out on the Cape. They were going to take the boat up the coast, where I would meet them with the Jag. What a wonderful drive it was; up the coast in the moonlight on a fateful mission, shadowing my smuggler friends offshore.
We met up at a place on the coast where the unloading was to take place: a region with a lot of little bays and fishing villages. Winston had rented a vacation house nearby, and he showed us around the small bay and where unloading might take place. Then they dropped me off back at the farm.
I only saw W & M for brief visits when they would show up at the farm. I have little idea where they were most of the time, but it must have entailed travel to Colombia to set things up. The arrangement was that a "mother ship" would cruise offshore at a certain time and distance from the coast and exchange signals with the smaller boats coming out to meet them, like Winston's. They were to take on a load of pot at sea, and bring it in to the waiting trucks onshore. Repeat.
I never had any idea of what was going on at that level except that things did not always go smoothly. The date of our particular shipment kept getting set back, because of problems with the mother ships. As I waited at the farm, the clock was running out on my top goal; to get back to Hawaii before Johnny’s school year began and continue being his dad.
At last in August, things started coming together and the group of off loaders that had worked with W before began arriving from places all over the country. We all met up at the vacation house to make plans.
To make this long story much shorter, a dry run was planned in the middle of the night, where the lobster boat would go out, cruise around for a while, come back in, the trucks would drive down by the water, meet the boat, then drive away. The actual smuggle involved considerable risk. I had debated whether to go along, but there I was. Some of the crew believed we were being followed (we were) and had gotten nervous and didn't even want to be part of the dry run. It was decided that I drop them off at a nearby motel, and then come back to the vacation house. As I returned and pulled into our driveway I noticed two of our neighbors in the cul de sac out watering their lawns...and I mused, "If they only knew who had moved into their neighborhood". Turns out, they did know, and it wasn't their neighborhood.
So far I had been a carpenter and a driver, my usual occupations. M and W had already left for the rendezvous by the time I got back from the motel, so I just settled in for the night. Down by the water, I'm later told, everything went as planned, the boat went out, the boat came back, the trucks drove down, a couple of duffel bags were taken off the boat and thrown into the back of one truck. At that point, Federal agents came out of the woods with guns and floodlights and a whole raid unfolded. They rounded everybody up, and when they looked inside the duffel bags, they found...sleeping bags.
I was back at the house, sleeping on the couch at about 4:00 in the morning, when the Feds came barging in, guns drawn. Soon I had my hands on the mantelpiece, with a gun at my head while I was being searched. The DEA agent was trying to rattle me and get some answers. It didn't work, so he left me alone. Another guy been had sleeping elsewhere in the house, and I could hear them trying to scare him in the kitchen. Then a call came over the DEA radio, and the agents began cursing and yelling in frustration the moment they got the word that we had only been smuggling sleeping bags.
In a few hours, they let me walk away and as I began to hitchhike, a car came by with two agents in the front seat, Winston and another one of our crew in the back seat. I put my thumb down while they passed. I caught a ride soon after that.
I took a twisted path by airplane and bus back to the farm in case I was followed, not unreasonable paranoia since for the past week we definitely had been followed. I quickly collected my tools and everything else that was important to me, and flew back to Hawaii.
I had missed my window for getting back to Hawaii with Johnny before his school year started
And now his dad was a desperado, and still broke. What next?
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
Names have been changed just because. Locations are vague for the same reason.
Patti and I parted ways not long after the night of the big fish. I returned to the mainland to try again to raise enough of a bankroll to get something going in Hawaii. I spent a couple months working in California and left there with the possibility of some money catching up with me later.
In 1976, I went back to Hawaii with a small amount of cash to get me started and settled in to former sugar town of Keaau. Our friends Roger and Bonnie had moved there to take part in transforming a cluster of old buildings into "The Sugar Mill"; a funky mall of artisan shops with a deli at streetside. I was able to rent a dilapidated store on the other side of the street with a small studio on the back. Johnny came to live with me and began Kindergarten there. The school property adjoined the back of the cluster of buildings where we lived. It was a pretty cool setup if I could only make the store work for me somehow. This was at the end of 1976, my second attempt to make a go of it in Hawaii.
Well, you know, like my father, I'm not a great businessman, and totally unsuited to be a storekeeper, but I did excel at making the storefront beautiful. I covered it with diagonally placed redwood siding trimmed out with fir 1 X 6's joined at the corners like jigsaw puzzle pieces. The narrow ramp that ran across the width of the storefront connected to the concrete sidewalk was covered with small remnants of finished plywood put together again like puzzle pieces. On the gable above, I made a sunburst of fanned out redwood wedges. And again trimmed with fir with puzzle piece corners. All of this new wood was brightly varnished. I found a great carpet at the nearby dump that fit wall to wall in the front half of the store. I refinished the heavy plank counter. A doorway at the very back corner of the store opened into our living space.
Through a chain of misfortunes, I wasn't able to acquire much of an inventory, and though the shop was beautiful and charming, inside there was little for sale. After Christmas came and went, it was clear my idea could not sustain itself, and in sadness, I accepted defeat again. Johnny went to live with his grandparents in California, and I began planning for some way to return to the mainland and seek another, bigger, bankroll. Had I known what lay in store for me, I would have stayed right there.
As fate would have it, a lady I had known in the commune, "Marsha", had a new boyfriend, "Winston". This boyfriend was a big time marijuana smuggler. It so happened that his west coast operations had reached a point where he was too hot, and he was going to set up a new scene somewhere on the East Coast to serve the needs of New York City. Marsha had told Winston about my skills, etc., and he invited me to come along; he had need of a carpenter.
Winston had purchased a fifty-acre property with an old farmhouse and an even older great big timber framed hay barn. My job would be to turn the barn into a warehouse and repackaging shop. His original thought was for me to go directly to the farm and get started, but he didn't anticipate how long the escrow was going to take, and we realized that we had a month to kill before I could even go there.
No problem, we would just go down to Florida and chill for the month. Winston had a "safe house" down there that we could enjoy. It fronted on a nice upscale suburban street, a four-bedroom house, and out in the back was a swimming pool and out beyond the pool there was a 30-foot catamaran, tied up along the arm of a marina that led to Biscayne Bay. All the neighbors had sailboats and small yachts too. Nice neighborhood, maybe they were all smugglers. You could just step out your back door, get in your boat and go...to Colombia, for instance.
We settled in for a while. One day Winston decided we'd go scuba diving. Marsha had never used scuba gear before, and neither had I. He gave us a few short drills in the swimming pool and figured we were good to go. It turned out to be a woefully inadequate training session. A friend of his had a dive boat and came by to pick us up.
Outside the bay and a few miles north, about a mile off shore, we dropped anchor. The plan was for Winston, Marsha and I to swim down the anchor chain and look around. Simple. The boat had a platform for divers right at water level on the back of the boat. We sat there in our gear; weight belts strapped on, masks adjusted, air turned on, and mouthpieces inserted, we got into the water.
I stayed treading water near the back of the boat as Winston fussed with Marsha's air tanks. They were having some difficulty with it. The current was causing me to drift away from the boat, and I was swimming harder to stay in one spot. Minutes went by and I was getting out of breath treading water at the surface with all this gear. I figured that I would be better off if I went under so that I wouldn't have to expend all that energy. So I put my mouthpiece in and sunk down about 10 feet. I was shocked to find that I couldn't suck enough air from the tanks to recover my breath. I realized I was in a bad situation. I unbuckled my weight belt (about 20 pounds of lead on a web belt) and let it fall. I had an easier time when I got to the surface, but still I couldn't catch my breath.
The wind was picking up and a swell was rising, and I could hear Winston yelling and waving his arm. He and Marsha were in trouble too. The boat captain hurriedly pulled up his anchor, and started up the boat. They were 50 yards off his stern and he wheeled around to rescue them. I was at an even farther distance, and would have to wait until they were retrieved before I could be attended to.
I was still out of breath, and could barely keep my nose and mouth above water, and it was going to be minutes before I would get any help. Reluctantly, I unbuckled the scuba tank and held on to the strap for as long as I could. I never was in any danger; I could survive indefinitely in the water, even in a semi-conscious state, as shown a few chapters back. It was the equipment that was at risk, and if I let it go, I would be just fine. So finally I did, and I was.
It turned out that it took several minutes more to get Winston and Marsha back on the boat and they could start looking for me. By the time the boat reached me, a rainsquall had started and the wind had picked up even more, and we headed back to the house. A couple of take-aways from that experience: First, I was never tempted to try scuba again, I could always use snorkel and free dive to the depths I wanted to go; 25-30 feet maximum, like I had done my whole life, and second; It was time to stop smoking cigarettes.
I started smoking tobacco when I was about 18, and I soon had a pack a day habit. I was probably addicted to nicotine long before I toked on my first cigarette. Back in the 1940's and 1950's when I was growing up, smoking was everywhere; in the theaters, restaurants, and buses. If one of your parents smoked, like my father did constantly, at home or driving along in the family car with the windows rolled up you were continually dosed. So I grew up, like many of us did, with a baseline of craving for what, we did not know. When we came to the age of experimentation, we quickly fell into the cycle of addiction: It produced an unmistakable satisfaction, followed in time by a specific dis-satisfaction. Repeat. By the time I was 33 in 1977, it often was more like two packs a day, and my lungs had suffered. The scuba experience became my motivation to quit.
When escrow had finally closed, and Winston could take possession, I got to go to the farm and get started. About 40 of the 50 acres were gently sloped fields in the low rolling hills, probably hayfields. We just left it go wild while we were there. The house stood in the middle of the property on a low rise so that it overlooked the lower field and the long gravel road that led up to and past the house to the barn.
That barn was framed with hand cut oak posts and beams. It was about a 75 foot square as I recall. The ground floor was set up for milking cows. The ceiling height in there was 8 feet. The floor above was completely open and the peak of the gambrel roof was about 20 feet above that, so that hay could be stacked high. My mission was to make it into a warehouse, while keeping that fact invisible from the outside. It took me some time to cover the walls in plywood, and where a gap might show new plywood between the boards, or there was a big knothole, I'd paint the spot or strip on the plywood that showed through grey and throw dirt in the wet paint, to maintain the dilapidated old barn look.
I covered the entire floor with a layer of plywood, and the coated the whole room with polyurethane to seal it all up. I brought in new electric wiring for fluorescent lighting and utility for work areas. I made a new trap door to the level below, and a new ladder. At the top of the ladder were lighted-when-off switches for the fluorescents, so they could be easily located when the room was dark.
I reinforced and rehung the big hay barn door facing the road and I devised an angled loading dock that was easy to set up and knock down when trucks came to load or unload.
There was a swimming pool on the property a couple hundred feet from the barn and I set up a pump and water line to the barn so that we would have some fire fighting capability if the need arose.
The plan was to store Colombian pot in there, tons of it, and distribute it to his team in the urban areas. My plan was to get paid off as soon as possible and return to my son in Hawaii for a new start.
At some point, Winston and Marsha picked me up at the farm and we drove to Cape Cod. He had purchased a lobster boat that would be used for the operations. When the three of us were in the car, I was the driver, so they could drink cognac, etc. This was probably the best car I ever had the pleasure of driving. Years earlier, I had a smaller Jaguar sedan with a straight 6 engine. That had been my favorite car up until then. Winston's car was a much newer and bigger Jaguar sedan and it had a V-12 engine. I dropped them off at the boat dealer out on the Cape. They were going to take the boat up the coast, where I would meet them with the Jag. What a wonderful drive it was; up the coast in the moonlight on a fateful mission, shadowing my smuggler friends offshore.
We met up at a place on the coast where the unloading was to take place: a region with a lot of little bays and fishing villages. Winston had rented a vacation house nearby, and he showed us around the small bay and where unloading might take place. Then they dropped me off back at the farm.
I only saw W & M for brief visits when they would show up at the farm. I have little idea where they were most of the time, but it must have entailed travel to Colombia to set things up. The arrangement was that a "mother ship" would cruise offshore at a certain time and distance from the coast and exchange signals with the smaller boats coming out to meet them, like Winston's. They were to take on a load of pot at sea, and bring it in to the waiting trucks onshore. Repeat.
I never had any idea of what was going on at that level except that things did not always go smoothly. The date of our particular shipment kept getting set back, because of problems with the mother ships. As I waited at the farm, the clock was running out on my top goal; to get back to Hawaii before Johnny’s school year began and continue being his dad.
At last in August, things started coming together and the group of off loaders that had worked with W before began arriving from places all over the country. We all met up at the vacation house to make plans.
To make this long story much shorter, a dry run was planned in the middle of the night, where the lobster boat would go out, cruise around for a while, come back in, the trucks would drive down by the water, meet the boat, then drive away. The actual smuggle involved considerable risk. I had debated whether to go along, but there I was. Some of the crew believed we were being followed (we were) and had gotten nervous and didn't even want to be part of the dry run. It was decided that I drop them off at a nearby motel, and then come back to the vacation house. As I returned and pulled into our driveway I noticed two of our neighbors in the cul de sac out watering their lawns...and I mused, "If they only knew who had moved into their neighborhood". Turns out, they did know, and it wasn't their neighborhood.
So far I had been a carpenter and a driver, my usual occupations. M and W had already left for the rendezvous by the time I got back from the motel, so I just settled in for the night. Down by the water, I'm later told, everything went as planned, the boat went out, the boat came back, the trucks drove down, a couple of duffel bags were taken off the boat and thrown into the back of one truck. At that point, Federal agents came out of the woods with guns and floodlights and a whole raid unfolded. They rounded everybody up, and when they looked inside the duffel bags, they found...sleeping bags.
I was back at the house, sleeping on the couch at about 4:00 in the morning, when the Feds came barging in, guns drawn. Soon I had my hands on the mantelpiece, with a gun at my head while I was being searched. The DEA agent was trying to rattle me and get some answers. It didn't work, so he left me alone. Another guy been had sleeping elsewhere in the house, and I could hear them trying to scare him in the kitchen. Then a call came over the DEA radio, and the agents began cursing and yelling in frustration the moment they got the word that we had only been smuggling sleeping bags.
In a few hours, they let me walk away and as I began to hitchhike, a car came by with two agents in the front seat, Winston and another one of our crew in the back seat. I put my thumb down while they passed. I caught a ride soon after that.
I took a twisted path by airplane and bus back to the farm in case I was followed, not unreasonable paranoia since for the past week we definitely had been followed. I quickly collected my tools and everything else that was important to me, and flew back to Hawaii.
I had missed my window for getting back to Hawaii with Johnny before his school year started And now his dad was a desperado, and still broke. What next?
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com