Out of Orange: A Memoir Read online

  I started playing with crazy ideas, thoughts of not getting my job back at Spoleto but of taking another trip instead. I calculated how long I could live on the money I would make without all the expenses of moving and buying the computer and what not. If I behaved this time and was more frugal, I could make the same amount of money last so much longer than I had this time. Now that I knew how fast even that much money could vanish, surely just one more trip wouldn’t hurt.

  My crazy thinking started with trying to figure out how Phillip could do it. Phillip had been clear about his desire to be invited on a trip. I thought maybe he could go with Bradley and I could get the three-thousand-dollar finder’s fee Alajeh had promised if we knew anyone we trusted enough to bring to him. But I realized Bradley would have to lie for me and say Phillip was his friend, not mine; we couldn’t bring someone else’s trusted friend. Bradley would have to train Phillip too. That wouldn’t work. Bradley wouldn’t give up that money if he had to do all the work and take all the risk. Then I started thinking about doing it myself and taking Phillip, and that actually sounded like a fun adventure.

  The only hitch in this idea was that for Phillip to work for Alajeh, he had to meet him. I would have to return to Africa again myself. I had to be there with my new recruit and personally vouch for Phillip, and I also had to be the one to train him. Alajeh also had to do his weird voodoo mumbo jumbo, have his marabout priests pray for his blessings, and Alajeh had to “look into his face.” I don’t know what that meant; it just had to be done before he would allow someone to smuggle his drugs. One of my sister’s roommates had recruited me, and Henry had trained me. My being Hester’s sister made me an exception to the rule. My sister was still pissed at them for that one—not because she didn’t get the finder’s fee for her own sister but that they had recruited me at all.

  I remembered the night in January when Henry walked me into a restaurant in Paris and Hester didn’t know I was coming. She thought I was in Chicago with my cats and Phillip, hopefully getting my shit together and selling ads in the magazine Phillip and I had gone there to start, with her financial help. She had paid for printing these beautiful posters we were hanging all over Chicago. But nobody wanted to buy ads in a magazine that didn’t yet exist. I was broke, so when her roommate gave me the chance to work, I jumped on it. Hester nearly kicked my ass all the way back to Chicago, but I’m stubborn, and if she could do it, so could I. Of course, I hadn’t learned what exactly that meant yet. My poor sister had been trying to save my stupid butt, not deprive me of some great adventure.

  At first, the idea of returning to Africa was unthinkable, though I had obviously thought it through. Then Alajeh started calling me. These were the days before cell phones. Connecting with someone who didn’t have a landline or voice mail was all but impossible, even for “God.”

  I had recently had a phone installed, never dreaming that Alajeh was trying to reach me and had gotten my number from either Bradley or Henry. I could hear his frustration in the message he left on my new recorder. My respite was over. The reality was, all this vacillating over whether or not I would do it again had been wasted energy. Alajeh’s assumption had always been that I knew he would not waste all that time on someone for only one trip. He was trying to get me to confirm when I would be able to go again, not if.

  Bradley answered the phone in Chicago one night when I was trying to reach my sister. Hester wasn’t home, but he was eager to tell me all about his second trip. He had made eighteen grand on this latest trip because he had carried an additional jacket home. He was pretty pleased with himself for taking the extra jacket. He had figured out that taking the additional jacket wouldn’t make any difference, except in the amount he was paid. He would have been either 100 percent busted or not.

  “Where are you now?” Bradley asked and I realized I hadn’t talked to him since we’d both come back to Chicago after our first trip. A lot had happened in a month, least of all April and spring had finally arrived. The world had turned from cold, snowy, and gray to warm and pastel so fast, which made it feel like it had been much longer since my wintry return to Northampton and my trip to Africa. But it had been less than a month since I had talked to Bradley.

  “Still here. I mean, here again. I moved back to Northampton.”

  “Why?” He sounded horrified and incredulous all in one. He could’ve been asking me why I had poked my eye out. Of course, he had a reason to sound this way. He had helped my sister convince me to move to Chicago and start my new life there.

  “Things are different.” I didn’t want to say that I had gotten back together with Joan. Because that would make it clear why I had moved back to Northampton. Bradley would know I was an absolute idiot, especially since I would have to tell him that she had dumped me again already.

  “How long were you gone on your trip?” I changed the subject back to him, expecting to hear tales of fright, hardships, and boredom. His trip had been quick and easy, just as Henry had said they would be from that point on.

  “Wow, you make it sound so tempting.” I referred to his expeditious trip. I hoped he heard my sarcasm and understood. He did. He was alarmed that I would not be interested in working again now that it would be easy and fast. I pondered whether it was a good time to get the word out that I was done and had no interest in returning for another go.

  “It scares me.” I’d said “it” instead of “he” and I left out any more preaching about not liking how the Nigerian treated Hester. Bradley joked about my being a chickenshit hiding out in lesbian land.

  He said, “He asked about you.” He meant it was my turn to take a trip. I thought, at first, that it was just sweet banter and the drug lord missed me.

  “How nice.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re all good?” He was asking a very specific question, which wasn’t getting through.

  “Okay. You do that,” I added to our little coded conversation, which I now realized we were having. A few phone calls later, I accepted the invite to work when I found out Alajeh would be in Europe and that he could meet Phillip there. We could forgo the trip to Africa. For some reason, it scared me so much less to encounter Alajeh in Europe than in Africa. I still hadn’t recovered from the culture shock of my first trip into the third world to stay at a drug lord’s compound.

  Phillip and I flew to Chicago to pick up travel money and left for Paris within a week. My trip with him was more like a quick shopping expedition than a smuggling drama. I discovered Phillip was a closeted fashion whore. We lived in a college town, remember; we were surrounded by students and we identified ourselves as slackers. We had both done everything we could to hold growing up at bay. However, if we had followed the traditional path most did, we would have been a few years into a career by then, working nine to five and dressing up the way he was about to, every day. There was even a chance we would have been wildly successful by then. That is what Phillip wanted to be, wildly successful, so we went about dressing him for the part.

  I took him to the fancy little boutique where I had bought my fine leather gloves and expensive Italian leather boots, and we found a similar store for men nearby. We went to a French tailor and had a suit made. The ritual and the fit were both much better than just buying a suit off the rack. Phillip fell in love with his suit, his tailor, and the tiny little shop full of materials and accessories to select from.

  We met Alajeh at the Sheraton Hotel in Brussels, where he was staying under yet another name. Phillip wore his new attire for the big meeting and looked confident and handsome. Alajeh had also dressed for the occasion. I had never seen him in a suit. I had only seen him in Africa, where he wore the African garb that indicates a man’s power, wealth, and status. In this Western garb that indicates a man’s power, wealth, and status, his presence was just as commanding, maybe even a little more so, since it spoke more directly to my sense of what power and money look like on a man, and really the African garb had looked like comfy pajamas to me. Alajeh wanted a little o
ne-on-one time with Phillip after the initial introductions, so I left the two suits alone.

  It was still a long train ride to Brussels from Paris in 1993. This is prior to the current high-speed rails that whisk you from city to city in little over an hour and run more than once a day. Phillip and I had rented a cheap room near our intended meeting place with Alajeh. Instead of spending the entire day on trains and making the round trip, which would require taking an even longer night train back, we’d planned to have a little adventure, spend the rest of the day figuring Brussels out, and return to Paris the next day. Once introductions were made and Alajeh made it clear that he wanted time alone with Phillip, I went back to our hotel to wait and worry about what was happening between them. What is Phillip being asked, and oh my God, what is Phillip doing and saying? I hadn’t told Phillip everything about Alajeh. I’d forgotten to mention that because of his dabbling with a form of voodoo he called zuzu, and the rules instituted by the marabout priests in his backyard, he didn’t drink or smoke. I’d also forgotten to tell Phillip that Alajeh liked to test people to see how they act in certain situations—for example, observing if they drink too much. I had learned quite a bit about the man while in his home for a month in Africa.

  Phillip returned late and he was drunk. He claimed I was crazy. He thought Alajeh was fun, personable, and interesting, not scary, as I had described him. He imitated Alajeh’s accent. “He is my brother!” Alajeh had been so happy when he learned Phillip was not gay. He had invited Phillip to come to Africa, where he said Phillip could experience the most beautiful women in the world. By the end of their short meeting, Phillip believed he had found an exotic friend. Of course, his new friend had apparently also asked for the address and a picture of someone in his family, and Phillip had willingly provided this.

  Our trip proceeded in much the same fashion that my first had, except it was just Phillip and I. We flew back to Chicago, pretending not to know each other from the time we got out of the cab at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris until we were seated in a taxi together at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. It was an important control to travel separately, because if one of us got caught and we were known to be traveling together, we would both go down.

  Phillip slid into the taxi next to me and wore a grin I had never seen on him before. His cheeks were even flushed. He grabbed my hand with his shaking hand. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. I was pretty sure he was holding his breath. The cab driver, meanwhile, wondered where these two mute idiots in his backseat might want to go. “The Blackstone Hotel on Michigan Avenue,” I finally said.

  When the cab jerked into motion, Phillip let out his breath and started laughing. “Oh my God! That was ridiculous.” I think he was referring to his trip through Customs. “I don’t think that guy even looked at me.”

  I realized Phillip might be about to launch into a story about his trip through Customs, right there in the cab. People sometimes forget that cab drivers have ears, and who knows who they know or who they are. I quickly cautioned him by shaking his hand; he was still holding on to mine like he might float away. I held my finger up to my lips to shush him.

  “Save that stuff till we get to the hotel,” I said to be clear he understood that what I meant was to shut the fuck up. I nodded toward the driver to indicate to Phillip why I had cut him off so rudely. I didn’t want to spoil his good mood. I just didn’t want him to confess to Rajid, our cab driver, that we had just succeeded at smuggling heroin into the United States.

  Phillip made the call from our hotel room in Chicago to his new brother and best friend Alajeh. He gave him our hotel’s phone number and room number before we began our wait for someone to come and retrieve our successful delivery and to pay us for our efforts. I changed out of my travel clothes and into something comfy. Phillip did the same, changing into his normal T-shirt and jeans from his beautiful suit. We carefully packed our cover-story costumes away in my garment bag.

  All we had left to do was wait for our contact to arrive. Neither of us unpacked; we just rearranged our stuff. We had to remove the heroin-stuffed jackets we each had smuggled and place them all into the one garment bag Phillip had flown with. We then repacked our own stuff into my bags. We ordered room service and watched pay-per-view movies. The hotel room began to feel like a gilded cage. At first, neither of us wanted to be left alone when the courier arrived.

  By the end of the second day, we were getting on each other’s nerves. Phillip kept wanting to call Africa again to see what the hell was going on, but that wasn’t protocol and any odd behavior could create a problem. So we waited.

  I suggested Phillip get out of the hotel for a little air. I was less concerned about the risk of meeting a courier alone than my killing Phillip or his killing me. Of course, as soon as he left the room, someone knocked at the door. I thought it was Phillip and answered the door to our couriers totally unprepared. They busted right into the room like they lived there. It was two women who looked like they had just stepped off the set of Married to the Mob. One impatiently told me in her overdone Jersey accent, “We-a ah he-a to pick sumptin’ up. We gotta caw waitin’.” I handed them the bag full of jackets and they, in return, handed me their shopping bag and left.

  The door closed and I laughed, thinking, What the fuck was that? I quickly leapt into action though. I looked into the shopping bag, stuffed with cash. An assortment of rubber-banded stacks: fives, tens, twenties, and a few fifties of varying thicknesses, depending on the denomination and the newness of the bills. The fifties were the thinnest stacks; they were the newest bills. I couldn’t stop to count it. I just wanted to confirm that it at least appeared to be enough money. It looked like a lot of money, so that was good enough for me.

  According to the rules, I had only fifteen minutes to get out of the room and out of the hotel. There were two reasons for this. The first was I was in a room with a ton of money and no protection from being robbed. At the very same time, an unknowable number of bad guys—or girls, as the case may be—knew that I was sitting on a pile of cash, and exactly where to find me, seeing as they had just delivered it.

  I quickly grabbed my stuff and crammed any loose tidbits into the cash bag. I piled all of our belongings together on the bed. Then I started cleaning up the room for the second reason I had to be out of there fast: police. Cleaning up is a speedy ritual where we wiped fingerprints off of as many surfaces as possible with a damp facecloth: the phone, the TV remote, the sink top and faucet, the toilet handles, shower control, etc. I was hasty and did a less-than-Henry job, but I did it.

  Henry had explained to me on my first trip that since we couldn’t know what was happening once the heroin left us, and the possibility existed that something might go wrong, we didn’t want to make it easy for the police to figure out who had just handed the heroin off to the couriers. We had to get out fast and leave no trace behind us. What if the people who came to make the exchange got busted and decided to tell on us?

  When I had gotten back to Chicago on my first trip, Henry had been much more anal about this. He had limited the number of things we touched in the hotel room, making a big to-do about it if we touched something not included on the list, like the windows or the bathroom mirror. He made me very self-conscious about remembering what I had touched. Then every night of each day we had waited for our contacts to arrive, we made a thorough sweep of our room, cleaning every surface we had touched. On the day the bags were retrieved and the cash delivered, we only had to make a fast pass at the cleaning because we had stayed on top of our bread crumbs, so to speak.

  I had not been so careful on this second trip with Phillip and had been caught unprepared for the arrival of the Jersey girls. This cleaning had to be done fast because the only thing more stupid than leaving our prints all over the scene of a crime was to still be sitting there myself when the police arrived. Fifteen minutes later, I was ready to go and Phillip had not come back. Shit! Shit! Shit! I paced rapidly, trying to figure ou
t what to do. His wallet wasn’t there, but did he have any money with him? Chicago was a rough place to be stranded with no money. I made the decision to go. I could deal with Phillip’s anger at leaving him behind later. At that moment, I was worried about the police showing up or the Jersey girls’ boyfriends coming back to the room to rob me.

  I walked out of the hotel onto Michigan Avenue. It was raining and barely warm, but I was sweating bullets. I was just about to get into a cab when I heard Phillip yelling my real name, rather than the false names we had used to register at the hotel. I was too happy to hear Phillip calling me to be irritated at the faux pas of yelling out my real name. I’d had no idea how I was going to find him otherwise. Besides, we had to call Alajeh to say our business had concluded successfully. There were probably negative outcomes to making that call too late.

  Phillip slid into the cab seat next to me, but this time there was no big shit-eating grin when I made the international symbol for money—rubbing your thumb and first two fingers together. In fact, Phillip looked mad. We rode in silence to the Drake Hotel and checked into a room as Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Bloss, without actually addressing each other the whole time. Whatever it was, it passed. I wondered if he had thought I was trying to run off with his money when he caught me jumping into a cab. If that was the reason, I would ask him why he thought I wanted to steal his clothes and shaving kit, since I had also packed his belongings left behind.

  After we made our journey back to Northampton, Phillip ran home to Meg and disappeared. They had never before been apart for more than a couple of days, and he hadn’t communicated with her during the whole two weeks we had been away. He had sent postcards, but they wouldn’t have arrived yet. Although it had been only two weeks, it was probably a long time for them to be separated. I had been looking forward to a celebratory dinner, one that would include Meg. But she didn’t know what we had really done because she had been told our cover story. Phillip had simply adopted mine; he worked for the art expert at the publisher in Paris too. That was all that he wanted her to know. He wasn’t sure how she would react to the fact that he had lied to her and become a criminal.