Out of Orange: A Memoir Read online

  I had carried a man’s suit jacket stuffed with heroin in my garment bag. Phillip’s expression registered surprise when I told him about its contents. This was the first he had heard of heroin being smuggled. When I had been asked and had agreed “to work” in Chicago, we’d thought the whole smuggling business was about diamonds.

  Phillip had wanted to go with me then but he hadn’t been invited. I’d had to act surprised when the offer was made to me; my sister was not supposed to have told me anything about her friends’ and my new roommates’ real vocation. Therefore, I couldn’t really advocate for Phillip joining us or pass on his interest in doing so at the time. Phillip definitely wasn’t supposed to know anything about the smuggling operations going on under his nose. I think he had been disappointed but had accepted the situation for what it was. I had then vowed I would return to Chicago a week later, a few thousand dollars richer.

  When we were done with dinner, I told him how Henry and Bradley had prepared and swallowed the big capsules and how the guys had harvested these capsules back in Chicago, counted and cleaned them. I told him about the way we’d had to stay in our Chicago hotel room for days babysitting all the heroin, waiting for it to get picked up and to be paid. Then I ran out of storytelling steam, and besides, Phillip wanted to get to the liquor store before it closed.

  The money I had earned was back at the hotel, and I wanted to show him. I thought he needed to see this to believe it all—everything I had just told him sounded insane, made up. I knew it was a lot to take in as quickly as I had spouted it all off, and I had seen a look on his face that suggested he might not believe some of the details. I recalled not believing my sister when she had told me about Henry, who after all these many years admitted to her he smuggled diamonds for a living, and how she had been invited to do the same.

  I paid our check, and by the time we left, there was perhaps four inches of snow on the ground and more where the wind had created drifts. It didn’t feel as cold as it had when I had gone into Spoleto, but that was probably the scotch or the wine numbing my senses. At the liquor store, I grabbed a bottle of Dewar’s and a pack of smokes. Phillip’s order was identical. I took him back to the hotel with me. I was happy to have the escort and I was not ready for the night to be over.

  He followed me like an excited puppy to the Hotel Northampton, running to pick up speed and slide down the slippery parts of the sidewalk that had not yet been salted in several places. We walked into the hotel and past the empty hotel desk, past the bartender, who had patrons to serve and who looked up and said, “Hello.” We passed two other hotel guests on their way out and it delighted me that the hotel no longer seemed abandoned or spooky.

  The elevator ride and walk to my room didn’t spook me on this trip. In fact, the hotel felt warm and sheltering. I pulled back the drapes and listened to the howling wind coming from the deserted streets outside my windows. My view was partially obscured by the sideways snow precipitating on the glass, but I could see the traffic light at Main Street swaying back and forth, casting its flashing red light into the snowfall. Phillip would have to go soon to make an arctic trek home with his girlfriend Meg. I think I recalled that Meg was getting off work at closing time and he was going to walk home with her from town. This was one of those nights when families and couples stick together—a survival instinct thing, I imagine. I wondered if Joan was alone.

  I sent Phillip to the ice machine with a little plastic bucket the hotel had provided and turned on the television to see if I could catch any news about how much snow we were expecting and whether the earlier predictions were holding. This storm seemed to have picked up a little more punch than I had seen in New England in a long time. When Phillip returned with the ice, I dropped a couple of cubes into each of the two water glasses and poured a couple of fingers of scotch. Phillip grabbed his drink and sat down, swirling the ice in his drink before he emptied it in one gulp. He wouldn’t be staying long.

  I retrieved my money from the safe and showed him the contents of my manila envelope: thirteen thousand dollars in cash, minus the costs of a shopping spree, a plane ticket to Boston from Chicago, bus fare from Boston to Northampton, and the room charges for three nights at the Hotel Northampton. I knew the money made my stories all real for him. Unless I had robbed a bank, an even more preposterous story to believe than the one I had told, neither of us could have that kind of money. He excitedly stared into the envelope of cash, then looked up and handed the envelope back with a strange expression, like he had an idea or realized something shocking. He pulled the envelope back jokingly when I went to take it from him. “Mine!” He held the envelope tightly against his chest with his arms wrapped snuggly around it.

  I laughed, prying the envelope from his clutch, and told him he would have to get his own. He could too, of course, if he wanted. “The easiest part of the whole trip was getting through Customs,” I said as he released the envelope and let me have it.

  He said, “Really?”

  I said, “Yes,” with emphasis, thinking to myself, A monkey could do that part. It was a mistake to have said so, but it was no fun if Phillip was going to be jealous.

  He questioned me a little more intently about the actual trip home, now that he knew it was not fiction, while looking outside and then at his watch every few moments. One slowly emptied drink later, he had to go. We said good night and made plans to meet at the Haymarket Café in the morning. He would bring Meg along too, if she didn’t have to go to school.

  I closed the door behind him and unmuted the television’s volume. The newscaster kept me company with updates on conditions around the area while I undressed and slipped into my sweatpants and a T-shirt. Boston was getting walloped. The snowstorm had even caused power outages as far east as Hyannis and Wellfleet. If that was the case, Provincetown was getting buried. I wished for a moment I was there already. All the year-rounders, which included a bunch of my friends, would have gathered at the Grand Central Café. There are so few places open in Provincetown when the summer season ends, it’s easy to locate your tribe on a night such as this.

  I didn’t know what was next for me, but I didn’t want to go back to Chicago. I loved the East Coast too much, and besides that, I had way too many reasons not to go back to Chicago. I still had to retrieve my cats though. I wished that I could have brought them home with me on this trip. But until I made a decision about where that would be and got a place to live, I would have had nowhere to put Edith and Dum Dum.

  I took one last peek outside. The snow was still coming down heavily and it looked like a foot had already fallen. I turned off the lights and lowered the television volume, then jumped into bed and under the thick covers. I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes. The red traffic light outside cast a soft orangey-yellow hue on the room each time it flashed. I started counting flashes and recalled a French television station’s late-night sign-off, which had been playing in the room I’d shared with Joan in Paris. It had been a series of ballet dancers dressed as sheep, leaping in slow motion to the count of un, deux, trois, quatre . . .

  I woke to the phone ringing just after the crack of dawn. The sky was clear blue—I could see that from my bed—and the wind had died, so the storm had passed. The snow on the glass had turned into crystal, reflecting prisms of sparkling light from the sun. Joan was on the phone, excited as a child on a snow day. She wanted me to meet her at the Haymarket Café. She had to make the scones, but we could have some coffee and be the first ones out in the winter wonderland before everyone else spoiled the virgin snowfall.

  3 U-Haul, We Haul, We All Fall Down

  Northampton, Massachusetts

  April 1993

  MY SNOW DATE WITH JOAN ended two days, one drunken declaration of love, and an apartment hunt later. We weren’t moving in together, but now I was moving back to Northampton, the town I had sworn three months prior that I hated and couldn’t wait to get out of. I was leaving Chicago, the city I had also claimed was a better fit for a
thirty-year-old who actually wanted to do something with her life. My flight back to Chicago, where I had left my cats and belongings, left that Monday.

  Doing this meant I had less time before I had to go back to work and start earning money the old way to pay bills. I wouldn’t have the rent-free arrangement I’d had in the Chicago apartment with my sister, Bradley, and one other drug courier. Hester was leaving Chicago for the same reason I was anyway, except she was not running back to an ex-lover. She was running from one. She was planning on returning to Provincetown for the summer, where she could make plenty of money during the season and have the whole summer on the beach to ponder what was next for her. I, on the other hand, already knew what was next for me.

  I figured I could get a job somewhere in Northampton, maybe at Spoleto restaurant. I had also decided to forgo poetry and take on a bigger challenge. With a little money stashed away in my magical manila envelope, I could take what time I did have, before reality set in, to start writing a book. The more I repeated my bullshit story to friends, about working for the woman in Paris, the better it got. I decided it would make a great novel—this double life I had briefly led. It would be fiction though, not a confession.

  In April, I moved into a cute apartment on Crescent Street and quickly turned it into my home. I would have no major expenses there, only my phone bill and rent to worry about, since the utilities were included. I splurged a little and furnished my cha-cha palace with reasonably priced IKEA-like finds. The furniture fit well with the hardwood floors and creamy white walls and woodwork. The kitchen and bathroom were nothing special, but the apartment was comfortable and stylish compared to the dumps my kitties and I had lived in previously. We had the place all to ourselves, and my rent was reasonable, so I didn’t need a roommate to contribute. My cats, Edith and Dum Dum, loved it there too. We had never had a place all to ourselves before.

  I made one impulse purchase, and it was a big but practical one. I bought an Apple Macintosh PowerBook for over three thousand dollars. I had wanted my own Mac ever since the 1984-inspired Super Bowl ad had aired a decade earlier. Henry’s laptop had nearly swayed me to abandon my loyalty to Macs. But when the Macintosh PowerBook came out that spring, it became clear to me: I simply couldn’t bear to go on without one. My PowerBook made it possible for me to go wherever I wanted to work. I could even take it into the Haymarket Café to write; all I needed was an outlet to recharge every couple of hours. I could hang out where Joan worked and write the great American novel my laptop would surely elicit from me. How cool was that?

  Of course, this made a huge dent in what remained of my rotten nest egg. I knew I had to get back to work somewhere soon, but I procrastinated. I had created a bit of an obstacle for myself. I had told almost everyone I knew the elaborate lie about working for some woman in Paris, traveling the world in this dream job and collecting art for an anthology she was paying me well to assist her with. I would have to tell everyone a new lie now. What would I say happened to my dream job? I certainly couldn’t tell my old boss at Spoleto the truth: I had smuggled drugs, I was too afraid to go back, and I was broke. No, before I begged to get my job back at Spoleto, I had to figure out my new lie, a story that would put the old lie to rest. I needed to solve this. It wouldn’t be long before I wouldn’t have money for rent.

  My reconciliation with Joan was short lived—just long enough to fall back in love and move back to Northampton. She dumped me again a few weeks after my cats and I got settled in our new home. She had slept with another woman and was unclear about whether she intended to do it again. That was her noncommittal way of ending things. As long as I didn’t mind her having a girlfriend and that we wouldn’t really be having sex anymore, nothing needed to change. We could still be together. We went to see Jurassic Park with some of her friends the same night she dropped the bomb on me. When I felt an affinity with the goat tied to a post in the movie, waiting to be lunch, I left.

  I didn’t feel as horrible this time—no debilitating depression or the-world-is-ending feeling. It wasn’t the same as the first breakup, where I’d had to move to another state. I liked Northampton. I had bigger problems to deal with, though, before I could focus on the simple business of living. There were still loose ends I needed to tie up. Ignoring them until they went away wouldn’t work. My sister was trying to break up with Alajeh, our boss, the Nigerian drug lord she had been sleeping with and was supposed to marry. The problem was that she still lived with friends who worked for him. I couldn’t relax until she broke up with them too.

  Alajeh and his transcontinental business network totally spooked me. At first, Northampton had felt a million miles away from all of that, but more recently, I felt like he was looking over my shoulder. One night I woke in a sweaty panic. I thought he was standing by my bed while I slept—ready to pounce. But that was Dum Dum. Hester, still in Chicago, planned to make the move to Provincetown in May. I wanted her away from Chicago and her friends, several of whom were still tied up in Alajeh’s drug empire. But now I learned that Bradley and Henry were going to P-town too.

  My sister had sworn it was over with Alajeh when we left Africa and I didn’t doubt her sincerity. He had been a complete jerk to her while we were there, treating her like his whore, not his fiancée, and then he’d made her carry bags of heroin home. You don’t do that to your wife-to-be. I had seen enough for myself to know that the ring he had given her was total bullshit. He never meant to marry her.

  My little sister might as well have been my own daughter. We were only four years apart, but I had raised her. I’d had a little help from babysitters or our very absent mom and dad. Both our parents were professionals with demanding careers to nurture. We were like most children of the seventies, when villages really did raise children, because Mom and Dad were busy climbing the corporate ladder. I had always been the one Hester came to when she needed something. When Alajeh had treated her like his whore in front of me, I couldn’t even imagine how he treated her behind closed doors, nor did I want to. But if he hadn’t been who he was—didn’t have his little barefoot bunch of rifle-toting vagrants, voodoo spells, or hobo priests guarding his compound and tasting his food like he was royalty—I would have confronted him about it or gotten her out of there, but I was too afraid of him, too lost already myself to save either of us.

  I knew my sister had issues, but I had never wanted to look at them or what they stemmed from. But when I went to Africa to meet her husband-to-be and my new boss, her issues just about knocked me out. We were staying at Alajeh’s compound in Cotonou, Benin, a small country on the Ivory Coast of Africa, when my sister was sick. Actually, Henry, Bradley, Hester, and I all had Giardia, to be precise, and we had been throwing up for days. He came to fetch her from the room we were staying in at his compound, presumably for sex. Then he returned her to the room when he was done.

  At that moment, I knew he wasn’t going to marry my sister, no matter how many times he said it. He had been using her and I felt like a fool for ever believing it was more. I had wanted it to be true, my baby sister getting married to a rich Nigerian exporter. It had sounded so exotic, so wonderfully exotic, when she had told me about her new love. When I learned that in addition to the rice, diamonds, and oil I knew he exported, he moved drugs, I didn’t think he would expect her to continue doing that. He was her lover. Why would he risk losing her?

  It made me so sad to watch my sister tiptoe back into our room that night, trying not to wake us. She sat in the dark for hours and didn’t want to talk when I asked, but I knew she had figured out the same. When he finally withheld all of his affection because she refused to carry jackets full of heroin back to the United States with the rest of us, I was furious. By then, though, I was also more informed. I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. He was “God”—that’s what they called him. All I could do was get out of there and get her away from him for good.

  I worried though. Her so-called friends liked that she was sleeping with Alajeh. Perh
aps they thought she would have his ear if they needed his favor at some point, like the poor girls sent to marry Henry the Eighth. I don’t know, but it made no sense to me that they would want to see their friend subjected to degradation such as this. Whatever the cause, they tried to justify his behavior with confusing cultural differences she would have to train out of him and they attempted to nudge her back into the happy bride-to-be she had been when we’d arrived. I knew she was smarter than that. But matters of the heart can be very tricky territory. He was tall, dark, and handsome—I thought he looked a little like Wesley Snipes. I was terrified by the prospect that maybe the spell he’d had her under once before could be renewed if he chose to reignite it, especially if her friends helped him. I kept thinking of how horribly he treated her, and that her friends would encourage her to go back to him made me doubt their loyalty to her.

  My sister would be broke again soon too, and Henry had always supported her emotionally and sometimes even financially. As long as I spoke to her regularly, which I had every week for the last month since we’d returned, I was calm. I felt I would be able to sense any change in her intentions, even if she wasn’t being honest. So I did that, but without Henry and Bradley out of the picture, it made it hard to see an end to the worry. I couldn’t be sure that whatever pull Alajeh’d had on her at one time had no conduit.

  This meant that a door would remain open for me too. I was trying to forget how easy it had been to glide through Customs and go home with ten thousand dollars. But I couldn’t think about my sister’s problem without getting distracted by the fact that just because I didn’t want my sister to ever go near Alajeh again didn’t mean I couldn’t. Besides, could I really be certain she wasn’t seeing him with my head stuck in the sand. Oh, I had some fabulous rationalizations for doing it again.