In July I took an eighteen day trip to the East coast with Lindsey, (in our changed but cordial relationship) to visit her parents, my friends in Boston and my family in N.F. She’d been calling me at Louie’s place in June and we agreed on the adventure. It seems strange after so much fighting we could still sleep together, but once you reach an understanding on the major issues you can be friends again.
It was on this trip back East that I had my first serendipitous escape from the law, one I can never forget. I was sure I’d be arrested by that unexpected police road check and spend years in jail. For several minutes my heart almost stopped. But then the miracle occurred.
It began with sheer carelessness on my part. Part of our trip was a planned three day stop in Boston to see Jim and Maureen. I’d talked to him on the phone beforehand and he asked if I could bring him some recreational drugs. ‘No problem’. I had friends now that were drug ‘emporiums’ day and night. I picked up twenty ‘dilly’s’, Valiums, some pot and cocaine and mindlessly threw them into a few baggies in my suitcase. It was a domestic flight and back then you didn’t think twice about it. Bags were never checked. I also threw in a wad of cash to amplify a bank account in Canada. I had many at the time and the more, all in different places, the better. The flight to Newark was fine. We arrived in the evening and were picked up by a wild, young girlfriend of Lindsey’s for the one-hour drive to Middletown where her parents lived. Our two suitcases were thrown in the back seat and the three of us, like cozy chums, crowded in the front.
As we set out the girl promptly lit up a celebratory joint. We’d barely finished it, chatting away when we came up to a police blockade across the whole N.J. freeway, some ride check program checking every car, something I’d never seen before. Our vehicle was still clouded with white smoke and as we slowed down, we saw we were boxed in. The immediacy of our peril silenced us with a wave of panic. A young officer was soon tapping at her window with the butt of the flashlight in his hand. Luckily, there were so many cars to check, it was ‘one on one’. As she rolled the window down the white smoke billowed out and…he laughed.
This girl was a very close friend of his, living down the street, schoolmates who’d dated and kissed many times, years earlier. He smiled, waved us through and said: ‘drive safe’. Any other of the ten officers there would have arrested us, searched our bags, found everything and we’d be spending much more than seven days in New Jersey, probably seven years. My sense of relief that moment was mind-staggering. The phrase “you don’t know how lucky you are” was never so poignant. Lindsey and her girlfriend laughed it off as we drove away. I was dumbstruck and speechless. Silly girls, I thought, as if life was all a picnic.
The fact that, in many ways, I’ve lived what I consider ‘a charmed life’ motivates this journal. If I’d gone through a long string of unlucky events, I’d never record it. To be chastened by the state, caged in a cell block with societies’ uneducated, unlucky, angry refuse would be intellectually traumatic. Socrates and Dostoevsky and Boethius are the only ones I can think of who weathered such a trial and produced great works, (Francois Villon’s and Chidiock Tichbourne’s elegies being two other exceptions). Now Christopher Smart, Sir Walter Raleigh and Richard Lovelace come to mind, “Stone walls do not a prison make…”. If I keep thinking I’ll have a whole page of authors who did time. I suppose it’s a matter of willpower. What mangles and mutilates some, strengthens others. But I don’t despond that I avoided that extreme test.
As I said in my journals of this period several times, the miseries in my life were in large part my own doing, self-inflicted, either by my own hand or the bad company I chose and didn’t leave, until some damage was done. I was always my own judge, jury and bailiff. So the judgments were always mild, in my favor and lenient, prejudiced, in fact. Some lessons, (in business matters) I learned and corrected the mistakes by finally settling down and joining the Union for a profitable career. Others, regarding women, I was slow to learn, (‘stupid’ best describes it), making the same mad choices over and over, with the same sad endings, till middle age and the loss of libido freed me from the Siren songs of a nightie-clad, tiptoeing monster.
Then again, this life would have been a dull one, most likely childless, and this journal unwritten if I were uniformly sane and wise, a studious celibate, a tenured professor, either unmarried or with some staid and steady wife much like myself, settled, plain and eminently unremarkable, (an oxymoron). It takes a large portion of folly and intelligence mixed together in the same tumbler to make for a noteworthy history, just like any zesty drink takes various liquors, with spices, lemons or limes, or onions and olives stirred in. I had them both and the result was heady.
