So, to make a long story a little shorter: I bought a gun. Not for any good reason. We made no enemies. No turf wars. Never sold shit in Baltimore; Hopkins wasn’t even on our radar. Nobody was going to try to rob the house; it was still the fortress it always was. But living alone so much of the time — and watching too many movies, too much bad TV — makes anyone crazy. You get so you can’t even make conversation with the girl giving you change for a meatball sub at the deli. Everyone starts giving you these big eyes. So I bought one gun, a Glock. Kept it under my pillow. Then Jonas, the guy I bought it from, offered me a discount on a hot double-barreled Mossberg. I kept that one next to the front door. If I had to I could kill someone by shooting through the door. Then another Glock to keep under my seat in the car. Then a little gun, a Walther PPK, 25 caliber, that I kept in my waistband wherever I went. Then, just for the hell of it, I bought an AR-15 kit gun off the Internet. Screw-on silencer, extra-long clip. No special reason other than that any kid who grew up watching The A-Team wants one of those things. I just wanted to take it out to the range and see the look on people’s faces. Hell, going to the range had become my only means of entertainment other than jerking off. I had an unlimited pass. In a couple of months I’d gone from just another unarmed Joe Schmo to the owner of my own private arsenal.
And then Seymour came for a visit. Just stopping through. We hadn’t seen each other face-to-face in nearly a year. He came through the door and took it all in with one look. I was holding the Mossberg in one hand and a bottle of NoDoz in the other. That was my drug of choice in those days. Espresso wasn’t strong enough. Epinephrine freaked me out. Coke and meth were too dangerous. So I’d take six NoDoz at a time, ground up in a Mountain Dew.
Look at yourself, he said. This isn’t just pathetic. It’s dangerous. This isn’t the business we’re in.
How do you protect your money?
I hide it, he said. I launder it. I can teach you all that shit. Why didn’t you just ask? You need a course in Drug Banking 101. But first you need a vacation. Callie’s taking over Little Green Bus. You’re coming back with me to Burlington, right now.
And you know what? I knew he was right. I had to get out of town. Baltimore was killing me. That house was killing me. All Dad’s things were still around: his pictures, his records, his clothes in the closet. I still slept in my old room, on the same bed I’d had since middle school. I was turning into some kind of pale underground fish, you know, the kind that live in caves, that never see daylight in their entire lives? I was turning into a bat. My skin kept breaking out. I hadn’t had a girlfriend in years, but I was watching porn and jerking off four times a day. It was deforming me, all this easy money. It was warping my spirit. Ultimately, I’d screw up somehow and get caught. Or go crazy. Or get so sad I’d kill myself. Or do it by accident, cleaning my guns. Seymour made me get rid of them before I left. One by one, we filed off the serial numbers and threw them over the Tydings Bridge into the Susquehanna. I cried, doing it; it was like killing kittens. Those guns were innocent. They were the only family I had. Then I curled up and fell asleep in the back of his Wrangler and woke up the next morning in the Green Mountains.
I know it’s silly. I know it’s a cliché. But I’m not afraid. I’m not deceived. No one would tell this story for me. Listen: when I was in Burlington, this was in the spring of 1998, April, May, I was there for a month, and it seemed like every house I went to, every car I hitched a ride in, this song was on the stereo. Okay. Big whoop. Crunchy granola folks like Bob Marley. But everywhere, and the same song. That bass line was in the air; it carried me. Days and nights blurred together. I was carrying around fifteen thousand dollars in a little Mountain Gear backpack. Bricks of dirty twenties. Seymour had made up with his girlfriend, bought a new house with her, and he kept saying, look, let me show you what it’s like here, you’ll never want to be anyplace else.
It was pretty great. No matter how high you are in Vermont, and I was high, you feel as if you’re just getting healthier every day by breathing the air. It’s like air conditioning for the soul. Anywhere you walk in Burlington you can see these amazing mountains, Mount Mansfield, the Green Mountains, and then there’s the lake right at the edge of the city, and everything just feels washed clean and new. I suppose it reminded me a little of what Big Love was like, back in the day. Wouldn’t want to live in Vermont, god knows, but it’s about the best place in the world to recharge. And Seymour had this amazing house, a modern place, all wood on the outside, huge windows, beautiful trees all around, cedars and hemlocks, with a sauna and a hot tub on the back patio. His girlfriend — I think her name was Amy — was this incredibly beautiful half-Japanese, half-Mexican girl, still in college, who was some kind of professional vegetarian chef and also a harpist. She would make us these incredible meals, huge salads, fresh soups, sushi, cold noodles, homemade tofu, and then go off into her studio over the garage and play the harp all day. It was the first time I’d ever really tasted food in my life. Seymour took me downtown and bought me all new clothes — lots of linens, and a couple of really beautiful suits, from this tailor he knew, a Czech refugee named Jaroslav.
You know what I’m trying to show you? he said. It’s very simple. You want to know how I hide my money? I don’t. Nobody bothers rich people in this world. Yes, there’s some basic mechanics involved. You’ve got to get that dirty cash into bank accounts. I mean you. Starting now. We’ve got to work on that. But the most important thing is, you’ve got to live like you’ve got nothing to hide. No fear. And for god’s sake, live like a grown-up. Don’t know what couches to buy? Get a decorator. Better yet, marry a decorator. Don’t know what suit to wear to a summer wedding? Go into Bloomingdale’s and ask. You’ll put it together soon enough. That’s your work from now on. Worried about getting a life? Forget that. Get a lifestyle.
I was listening, but at the same time I wasn’t really listening. You could say I was storing it up for later. His life wasn’t my life. I was still an egg. Still cracking. The chrysalis. It was all coming together, but I couldn’t see what it was. I was just walking around with a gigantic rock in my gut. Seymour knew it, too, and he kept saying it was a matter of changing the formula. He had a whole room full of bud, in glass jars, all labeled, sources and dates — his apothecary — and his philosophy was that there was a blend for every psychic condition. That was what he was working on: weed psychiatry. First he had me on “Questioning,” then “Anxiety Detox,” then “Clarification.” I smoked it, I used his atomizer, ate it in brownies, ate it ground up and sprinkled on rice; I got high in the sauna, in the hot tub, in the woods, sitting in his massage chair — I was his guinea pig, in other words, and it wasn’t working. What happened instead, not surprisingly, is I started to forget things. Whole conversations, whole days. Names of people I hadn’t thought about in months. I thought I had early-onset Alzheimer’s or something. And then I came to my senses and I knew I had to leave.