This part has a soundtrack. Bob Marley, “Exodus.” One of the greatest riddim tracks ever. [hums] Bum, bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum-bum. Listen to it. Whoever’s listening to this, if anyone ever does: if you don’t have it, go out and get a copy. You should have it on as you listen to me. One layered on top of the other. Don’t worry about the words just yet. Just the bass and the drums.
What do you hear? Walking. Moving. The song is taking you somewhere. Right? Don’t you want to go? Doesn’t everybody want to go? Move. Move. Move.
So what happened from, say, 1994 to 2000, in my life? The lost years. Six lost years. What happens when someone goes out of sight, in this day and age, in this economy, in Baltimore, when they make every effort not to be found? When they have no visible means of supporting themselves? Well, okay. I’ll spell it out.
Pot.
I was running pot in its second heyday, when it was the chronic, the KGB, the Super Sticky, the Buddha, Sour Diesel — when the demand was skyrocketing and the supply, at first, was not that great. Most of what was on the market in 1994 was Mexican junk. Mota. People were adding other stuff to it just to get a buzz — meth, mescaline, even PCP. The Colombians weren’t in the market yet. Escobar didn’t believe in pot. Too much volume. And the American and Canadian growers were just coming in on a large scale. It was just the beginning of hydroponics, aeroponics, when costs were coming down and all those years of hippie research were finally paying off. That was when they invented the Sea of Green and the Screen of Green — autoflowering, cloning, using colloidal silver to feminize the plants. You could put in $50,000 and get yourself a house, racks, trellises, grow lights, carbon scrubbers, ozone generators, seeds, buckets, motion detectors. The whole package. The challenge was all in distribution. You had dealers everywhere, of course, demand was out the window, but most smokers were still used to paying twenty or thirty bucks a bag for total garbage; the high-end stuff was still a niche product. Friends selling to friends. There was a lot of paranoia about expanding your field. What we were doing was like Starbucks. Create a market, then feed that market. Convince people to spend four bucks on a Frappuccino instead of a dollar on coffee, then make sure that Frappuccino is everywhere they want it. In the mall. In the grocery store. Buy bulk and corner the wholesale market.
Seymour was the one who got me going. He was my lodestar, my mentor, my launch pad. My compass. I probably wouldn’t be alive today except for him. We first got together in ’94. First time I met him — it was at a party somewhere, I think at Willa Rodriguez’s mom’s place off Coldspring — he was just back from Miami. Kept going outside to make calls on his cell phone. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone — other than a banker, maybe, or someone on TV — with a cell phone. The old squarish kind with the huge battery. So I asked him: who do you have to call so desperately, man, at two in the morning?
And he said, You really want to know?
Yeah. I really want to know.
You’re graduating high school, right? You have a job?
That was it for me. Curiosity killed the cat.
Before him I’d never really known a white criminal. Of course I’d known dealers, or at least knew of them, around the neighborhood when I was younger. But Seymour didn’t do anything at the street level. He didn’t have turf. His dad was some kind of banker at Alex Brown; he grew up in Roland Park, got kicked out of Boys’ Latin and then Dartmouth for dealing. Then his family cut him off, and he basically went to ground, went AWOL, and climbed up the ladder of the business — developed his own sources, his own clientele, all up and down 95. Maine to Florida, the Appalachian Trail of weed. I must have smoked two or three hundred different varieties with him. He got product from everywhere — Colombia, Peru, Thailand, Afghanistan, Nepal, Jamaica, Humboldt, Salt Spring Island, Paraguay. He carried around metal suitcases full of samples in the back of his Saab, and would go around having tastings, four or five stockbrokers or doctors or what have you at a time. Developing customer profiles he wrote up on his PowerBook. With him it was all classy, down to the way he dressed, super-put-together, all blacks and grays, Banana Republic style.
And so a month after I met him he had me signed up as a courier working the New York — to — Miami route. Trying to crack the distribution nut, break into the regional business. We drove these vans that old Cuban ladies took back and forth, visiting family. Pick up the abuelas on 125th Street and Lex, stop overnight at a Motel 6 in Richmond, drive all the next day and night to Miami, do the drop-off, pick up more abuelas on Calle Ocho, stop at a Motel 6 in Charlotte, same time, same station, and when you get back to New York take the van uptown to Inwood, leave it in this garage overnight. The chassis, the floorboards, the hood, the wheel wells — we could carry five hundred pounds and all it cost was a little extra gas money. Kept it at a cool 67 the whole way. Made sure the tires were solid, tested the lights, did everything to make sure we never had a stop. Because the thing was — no matter how hard we tried, how many air fresheners and pounds of coffee — you could still smell it. The abuelas would get all giggly before we stopped for pee breaks. You can’t have all that sticky bud in an enclosed space and not smell it. Triple-bagged Ziplocs and all. I would do three runs and then take the bus back to Baltimore and have two weeks off. A thousand dollars a run. Tax-free. It was a genius operation. White kids saving money for college; old Cuban ladies visiting their sisters; never had a cop give me a second look.
So anyway: that went on for two years. The entire time Dad was sick. Easy work, easy money. Then — overnight — the whole thing disappeared. The vans, the company, the garage up in Inwood: poof! Never knew why. Seymour thought they’d found an easier route. Shipping containers, maybe even commercial air. There were FedEx people involved in those days, before the company came down hard on side deals. All those big planes carried a little extra weight. In any case, for six months, I was shit out of luck, work-wise. Seymour had left town; I didn’t know if he’d ever be back. I’d saved a lot of my cash, and of course I had the house outright.
So what did I do? I went to school. UMBC. Econ 120, Accounting 120, Con Law, and “Introduction to Holocaust Literature.” I registered late, and all the intro English courses were full. So instead I had Dr. Klefkowitz in this little tiny room with eight other kids. Klefkowitz must have been at least seventy. And he had the numbers tattooed on his arm. Never said a thing about it, but he didn’t hide it, either. He looked at me as I was leaving on the first day — I was the last one out of the room — and said, excuse me, Martin Lipkin, may I ask, you are a Jew?
My father was Jewish, I told him, my mother wasn’t, as far as I know, I never went to synagogue, never had a bar mitzvah. I know a lot of Jews. I don’t know. Am I a Jew?
He shrugged. You’re asking me? Don’t ask me. Ask a rabbi.
I don’t know any rabbis.
Well, he said, maybe you’ll read these books and feel something.
We read — who did we read first? Primo Levi. Elie Wiesel. Borowski. Danilo Kiš. But the best one was this guy I’d never heard of, Bruno Schulz. Who wasn’t even really a Holocaust writer at all. I mean, yes, he was killed by a Nazi. But everything we have that he wrote, just two little books of short stories, was written in the Thirties, before the Germans invaded Poland. He never wrote a thing about the Nazis. All his work was about his childhood and his family. And his debates with God.