Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (28 page)

As my trial date moved closer, I had a few trusted friends come up for visits, people like Derrick the Doctor and Hoss the gun fanatic. Hoss and I had great fun shooting our guns off in the car graveyard, blowing out car windows and puncturing the car bodies with bullet holes. One time Hoss brought up his black powder rifles and I learned a valuable lesson. Never fire a black powder rifle from the hip. The powder discharges right under your chin and leaves it pockmarked with bits of burnt charcoal.

Luc Lavoie came up with my pal Bishop for a winter celebration at the cottage. Luc brought along two bottles of Remy Martin cognac that eventually saw Bishop puking on the lawn in a fetal position and me shivering on the bed with alcohol poisoning. Luc ended up sound asleep in an easy chair until morning. Only Derrick and his girlfriend survived the drinking binge to drive home unaided through the cold winter night.

I took long walks with Barbara around the small lake beside the cottage and because the
TV
reception was poor, I read many books that I had put aside years before. In time, I had my gun possession trial and paid my fine. Irving was still in jail with several years to go before release. There was no point in hanging around Montreal waiting for a bullet and with no other restrictions to hold me back after the gun charge was dealt with, I was free to leave the province.

I decided to visit my old friend Larry Williams in Vancouver. I purchased a camper and we went on a cross-Canada journey that brought back memories of our earlier days camping around Mexico. I liked the feeling of having all of my possessions with me everywhere I went, and with no fixed address, I felt as free as a gypsy.

When it was time for us to leave Montreal, my buddy Bishop was pragmatic.

“Don’t tell me where you’re going to be staying,” he said. “If I don’t know where you are, then I can’t be forced to tell anyone.”

I told him not to worry and that I was coming back to take care of Irving as soon as he was sprung from jail. Bishop once
more offered to broker a peace between Irving and me, but I refused his offer, telling him that things between us had gone too far. I told him I had no choice but to take care of Irving. Everyone I knew lived in Montreal and there was no way I was giving them all up because of that fat prick bastard.

I know Bishop believed me, because for the first time in our relationship, I asked him to do me a favour and he refused. I stopped my car downtown and asked him to run into a wig store to buy me a wig. He adamantly refused. He was my best friend, he told me, but he drew the line at complicity in murder. I shrugged the incident off as one more reason to take care of business on my own.

I had no idea of the stress that I was under during this period, not until I jumped in my camper van with Barbara, our daughter and our dog and saw Montreal disappearing in my rear view mirror. When I hit the Ontario border, I removed the .
45
from under my coat and put it away beneath the bench seat storage area, next to the unregistered rifle and scope that Joe Dudley had purchased for me. The next several weeks were a tonic for frazzled nerves, as my wife and I took our leave of Montreal and it felt just like a vacation.

We stopped in Toronto to see my old friend Manny, who had left Montreal after Jean Paul died to make a fresh start with his new wife. Manny had been in partnership with Jean Paul and it was his ex-girlfriend, Susan Braun, who had died with the loan shark in her Montreal apartment. Barbara and I stayed for several days with Manny and his new wife. We were able to relax in a way that we had almost forgotten was possible and I enjoyed the new experience of not being armed as we saw the sights and sounds of Toronto.

After a week of warm hospitality in Toronto, Barbara and I left to visit the northern forests of Ontario. We eventually reached Sault Ste. Marie and stayed with my cousin Bill who I had not seen for years. We had a great time catching up on gossip from our youth and he took me for a hike to a small stream where we caught hundreds of tiny smelt-like fish in nets.

When we moved on from the “Soo,” Barbara and I stopped
at a government campground beside a frozen lake where we celebrated our journey with a bottle of wine. A magical moment is etched in our memories for all time: we sipped our wine on a deserted beach while the dog lay beside us and our daughter, Allison, played in the sand. As Barbara and I talked and laughed and smoked a fat joint of good weed, the lake crackled and snapped, sounding like champagne corks popping as the ice began its spring melt. That night, we slept in our camper beside the lake and it was the best sleep I had experienced in years.

We took the circular route around Winnipeg, because we had visited once before and found the best feature of the city to be the bypass. When we drove on towards Edmonton, we experienced the wide open spaces of the Canadian prairies which was immensely enjoyable. We kept looking for “Orbit,” that was advertised as coming up on road signs, and were amused to find out that it was nothing more than a large orb-shaped garbage can alongside the highway.

When we arrived in Edmonton, we stayed with a friend that I used to work with in the printing and copier business, named Rolf Wolstrom. Rolf, as you might expect, was of German heritage. Rolf was taking care of a high-rise apartment in Edmonton and put us up for free in a fully furnished suite. He and his young girlfriend had left Montreal to have her baby, although they had not yet committed to marriage. They made us a dinner of potato pancakes and made us feel most welcome in a way that only ex-patriots can understand. We had a lovely time while we were there, but as nice as it was to have a free furnished apartment in Edmonton, warm weather beckoned us and we were anxious to move on to Vancouver.

The next highlight on our journey across Canada came as we stopped within view of the timeless Rocky Mountains. They were still as magnificent and spectacular as they had been the last time we saw them, ten years earlier. The granite peaks of the Rockies exceeded fourteen thousand feet in altitude and were so steep that even snow could not adhere until the lower reaches of the mountainsides. We stopped at the hot springs in Jasper, where we took a bath in the warm spring-fed sulphur
streams that collected into a swimming pool. Barbara and I watched a vain, handsome man who looked like a movie star standing in the spring-fed pool, unaware that the sulphurous chemicals were making his hair dye drip in red trickles down his face. It sent us into giddy laughter that we had not experienced for quite some time.

On our way into Vancouver, we drove through Mission and I could smell the moisture from the mighty Fraser River before I even saw it. We drove on to Port Moody, where we inhaled the fragrances of apple blossoms and salt water as we rounded the head of Burrard Inlet. The weather was a balmy seventy five to eighty degrees and sunny. People in cars and on the street were tanned, even though it was barely the end of May. The streets were lined with flowers and fruit trees in bloom, as bird cries rang from eagles, gulls, crows and songbirds that were all competing for territory. The houses in Vancouver looked old but were well kept, and everywhere we looked around the city, the streets were pristine and without litter.

Spring in Vancouver was quite a contrast to spring in Montreal where melting snow reveals a winter’s worth of dog crap in front yards all over the city. In Montreal, you might have found some warmth at this time of year by huddling in a sunbeam in some wind-protected alcove. A walk outdoors back there would have required fur coats and fleece-lined boots, in contrast to the pretty girls of Vancouver who were riding around in the back of pickup trucks wearing halter tops and shorts.

We arrived in British Columbia to experience the best summer that the province had seen in fifty years. Sunny days followed sunny days that followed more sunny days, stretching throughout the entire summer with nary a break. Barbara and I made jokes about Vancouver’s reputation for rain and suggested that it was a ruse to keep the rest of Canada from migrating here. The two of us were having too much fun to miss our families or friends back in Montreal and every day was filled with new experiences. Barbara and I became closer as a couple than we had ever been before and I found myself forgetting that in a matter of months or years, I would have to travel back to
Montreal and take care of business with Irving.

We stayed with my friend, Larry Williams, who had honoured me as best man at my wedding several years before in Montreal. Larry and I had been workmates and friends at my old printing company job, before he grew his hair long and followed Timothy Leary’s advice to turn on, tune in and drop out. When Larry visited me in Montreal, at the height of my flamboyance, he had been suitably impressed by the large home, the fancy cars and the lifestyle that I was leading at the time. But he showed no envy or jealousy and seemed quite happy in his own hippie sphere of the universe.

Larry was a car salesman on a new car lot in North Vancouver at the time we met him again in British Columbia. We stayed with him and his family for about three months, making certain to disappear in our camper every few weeks so as not to overstay our welcome. Barbara and I and the baby visited Long Beach on Vancouver Island and Brightside Resort on the Sunshine Coast and then went inland to the Okanogan Valley and the resort towns of Osoyoos and Kelowna. That summer, we saw all of the sights that British Columbia had to offer, including Victoria where we had “High Tea” at the Empress Hotel. With the approach of winter, we skied Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains which was nothing like the bunny hills in Montreal called Mount Tremblant and Saint Sauveur.

After nearly three months of living with my buddy Larry, it was time to move out on our own and we started to search for a place to stay in Vancouver. We tried looking for a place to rent, but we had two strikes against us as far as landlords were concerned. We had a young child and we owned a dog. I had never experienced anything like that in eastern Canada, where it was so easy to find rental accommodation. Vancouver, on the other hand, had a zero percent vacancy rate and the perspective landlords had you sign an application form before choosing who would get the honour of renting their dwelling.

For about three months we looked everywhere for rental accommodations, but in the end, we finally had no choice but to buy a house. We chose a small bungalow in scenic North
Vancouver, a stone’s throw away from where my friend Larry and his wife Linda lived. The house was barely a thousand square feet in size and was a shadow of the house we had left behind in Quebec. I used to laugh that I could kick the house down with my feet and I was not joking. The tiny clapboard and shingle house featured two bedrooms and a huge, private fenced-in backyard. There were several Chinese maple trees there, as well as half a dozen fruiting plum trees. The house was apartment-sized but it was roomy enough for us all, once I converted one of our large shipping crates into a doghouse in the yard for Tania, our Doberman.

I had enough money for a year or two of living, with the insurance settlement from the fire, but a good chunk of that was already eaten up with the house purchase. We became less extravagant in Vancouver, but not enough to please one housewife friend of Larry and Linda’s. Bev found our spending habits outrageous. She took our free spending as a threat to her own frugal lifestyle and warned her car salesman husband, Carrie, about getting too close to us.

I began the interior painting and other house renovations myself, instead of wasting the money on a contractor and was surprised at my own abilities. I had never lifted a finger to do manual labor in the past, and this new experience of completing projects without spending a lot of money felt very rewarding.

I had been communicating with my lawyer in Montreal to make sure that Chip the Limey’s bail money was secure and to have it paid out to me as quickly as possible. The money was being held in the Pronotary’s Office of the Quebec Court and I was told that it was only a matter of weeks before I would be able to collect it. Shortly after telling me that all was going well, my lawyer called to inform me that there was a problem. The fifty thousand dollars in bail money had somehow been paid out to Andrea, Jane’s sister.

“But we had a seizure order on the bail money. How can that be?” I asked my lawyer with amazement in my voice.

“We don’t know how it happened,” the lawyer told me. “Someone apparently removed the seizure notice on Chip
Jenkin’s bail money from the Pronotary’s file. There is an investigation underway, but it looks like it was an inside job. We have demanded payment and we expect to win, but you know how it is when you sue the government. It will take some time.”

I was angry at first. Then I became livid with rage at the thought that I had been outfoxed again by Irving. I knew that my lawyer and I had taken all the proper procedures to seize the bail money, but how did Irving, who was in a maximum security jail, manage to get someone to infiltrate the Pronotary’s office to pull the seizure order from the file?

Or had he? Could the Quebec Crown have ordered the Pronotary’s office to release the money to Andrea to further spark up the confrontation between Irving and me? The authorities were not very happy about seeing me freed on the Lebanese hash importation charge, and now they were even less happy about my lawsuit against them for the bail money. It could have been a simple accident of some kind that saw the bail money doled out without the proper checks and balances. But in a conspiracy-driven mentality like mine, I found that to be the hardest of all theories to buy into. Whatever the reason, I had no choice but to instruct my lawyer to stay on the case, while I sorted out this latest twist in the never-ending saga of Irving versus me.

I marveled at what a mess it all was. I was lucky to have beaten the drug charges against me. But if I continued to make a nuisance of myself, the Quebec Crown could get angry enough to drag me back before the courts again. And if Irving or anyone else involved in my case were to rat and bring forward new evidence of my involvement, I would certainly be subject to a new trial.