Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer (29 page)

Instead of being thankful for all of my blessings, I vented my anger over the lost bail money as I painted the interior of my new house in North Vancouver.

Checkmate for Irving, I thought to myself, as I slapped paint on the walls and stewed over his victory. I swore to myself that I was going to get him back for all that he had done to me. The invasion of my home, his goons terrorizing my family, double-crossing me for my money and leaving me to fend for myself on the streets.

But the truth was, it had been months since I had carried a gun in my pocket and I was beginning to like the feeling. I liked the slower pace of life in Vancouver. The weather on the west coast was beautiful and I wondered why anyone would want to endure the climate of Montreal when they could live in British Columbia. The people were polite, beyond anything I had experienced before. When merging in traffic in Vancouver, there was an orderly spacing of one car per lane whereas in Montreal, one line of traffic would dominate the single lane until some brave soul in the other lane jutted the nose of his car out.

The friendships that Barbara and I had developed in Vancouver became very close knit because of the absence of any relatives. We had holidays and dinners together with our new friends. We went to shows and parties together. The people we met were schoolteachers and lawyers and people from worthy trades.

When I called for news back east, I found that some of the friends I had left behind in Montreal had moved away themselves. Some had gone to Toronto to escape the volatile situation of the French Separatist movement in Quebec. There were some friends I stayed in contact with and others who I was able to leave permanently behind. Picking and choosing who I would remain in touch with became as easy as flicking a light switch.

A few well-chosen friends, like Derrick and Hoss and Bishop, ended up visiting me in Vancouver. It was a mixed blessing to see them because the talk always went back to the past, which I had left behind. I was less and less interested in retold war stories, and the more I thought about returning to my old life, the less appealing it was. Barbara’s mother and both of my parents had come out to visit us on different occasions in Vancouver and we came to realize that our situation was no different than Barbara’s two other siblings who lived in England and the United States.

Barbara’s younger sister, Brandi, still lived in Montreal, and from what I was told, Irving had not approached her. He was not likely to cause trouble for her or any of my friends now that he had the bail money. I had a legal entitlement to the same amount of money from the Pronotary’s office and that challenge was in
the hands of the legal system. There was no need to pursue my vendetta with Irving if I did not want to.

I decided that if Irving contacted or bothered any of my friends or family, I would take that as a sign that I had to return and finish him off, and that would be that. But if Irving did not pursue our vendetta, I would let the matter drop and stay in Vancouver. The irony of it all came later, because it took twelve years to get the Quebec government to hand over the money they wrongly gave away. They tried every trick in the book to thwart me, including labeling the bail money the proceeds of crime. But that did not work because Barbara and I could show legal ties to the money, and in the end, the Quebec Pronotary’s office paid me the fifty thousand dollars they owed, plus bank interest.

The big loser, in financial terms, was the Government of Quebec, but somehow I felt no satisfaction in winning my case. My lack of excitement over the payout of the bail money just showed me again that everything I had gone through was not worth fifty thousand dollars. If I had had it to do all over again, I would have conceded to Irving’s demands right from the start.

I had a strange dream while sleeping in my new North Vancouver home. The stock market was going crazy at the time and I saw several news stories about a spectacular rise in gold and silver. That night, I dreamt I was talking to Barbara’s father who had died some years before. In my dream he told me to buy gold, so, the next morning I went straight downtown and bought twenty thousand dollars worth of gold and silver. When the certificates were ready to be picked up some thirty days later, I had another premonition, this time to sell them, which I did. I cashed out with over twelve thousand dollars in profit in less than thirty days. The very next day, after I sold my shares, both gold and silver hit the skids. My luck was returning and I took the dream about Barbara’s father as a sign that I was on the right path again.

I eventually heard from my friends back in Montreal that Irving was out of jail and on parole. He was selling cars in a small lot off Decarie Boulevard. It warmed my heart when I heard
that two French speaking holdup artists came onto Irving’s car lot and robbed him at gunpoint. They stole all of his gold jewelry, along with his Patek Philippe watch and took all of his cash. The two robbers also shot and killed Irving’s dog, Nitro, as he bravely ran to his master’s defence.

I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps it was because the boys on the docks were upset that Irving had spent all of their money on his hash scam and they had sent a crew over for a collection visit. Or perhaps Irving had had a falling-out with the same two gunmen that he had sent to my house. Whatever the case, it was all happening three thousand miles away and that was fine with me.

In leaving my past behind me, I felt at first that I had lost the battle, but I soon came to see that I had actually won the war.

One of the first things I did upon arriving in Vancouver was to locate a reliable pot dealer. I had brought a pound of primo weed with me from Montreal when I moved, along with an ounce of good black hash. When that ran out, I had my wife’s sister, Brandi, mail me another pound of Jamaican weed. It was seedy and mild, but at six hundred a pound it was reasonable. This routine continued for several months until I was introduced to Lou Berger, a North Vancouver pot dealer.

At first, I was blown away by the two hundred dollar price Lou was charging for an ounce of weed. But as soon as I lit up a joint, I was more blown away by the quality of the herb than the price. The weed that Lou sold me was grown locally but came with names like Thai and Hawaiian and Cambodian, with flavours that were sweet and spicy and highs that were spiritual and uplifting. I could buy weed back east for six hundred dollars a pound, but I preferred to spend two hundred an ounce for Lou’s B.C. bud.

My friend Rolf Wolstrom moved from Edmonton to Vancouver and his pretty young girlfriend came with him. Rolf was promoting a
1950
s designed sports aircraft on the Vancouver stock exchange. When he was not hanging paper at the stock
exchange, he was flying German tourists on sightseeing trips around B.C. for a charter aircraft company. Rolf told me that the performance aircraft he was promoting had been designed as the way of the future after the Second World War. The aircraft never caught on in the fifties, but now that it was repowered and recertified with new turbocharged engines, the four-passenger plane was being hustled on the stock market once again.

The repowered aircraft was being promoted as a prototype for a new wave of pleasure aircraft and Rolf took me up for a test ride. It flew very well, particularly when landing against a cross-wind. The aircraft handled like a sports car until take-off speed, when it would launch into the air like a fighter plane. It banked and turned in a very tight arc, almost as if turning in its own wingspan. It was a fun plane to fly, albeit so noisy that Rolf and I had to speak through radio headsets the entire time. Visibility was excellent with the entire front of the cockpit made from a bubble of unbreakable Plexiglas. I was impressed with Rolf ’s repowered flying machine, but not enough to invest any money with him.

By this time I had found a job in the newspaper business and become a salesman for the
Columbian
newspaper chain. The
Columbian
was Vancouver’s oldest newspaper and had a paid circulation of twenty thousand, which was exaggerated to be over thirty thousand copies per day. Add to that another one hundred thousand
Columbian
weekly edition papers that were delivered door to door for free and you had a combined circulation of one hundred and thirty thousand papers. The job sounded better than it was, but there was really no other newspaper competition in its demographic.

The sales position was a slacker’s dream. There were seven unions pulling the small paper towards bankruptcy, and as a
Columbian
employee, I was a member of one of them. My direct supervisor was the picture of a burnt-out newspaper man from Toronto, with baggy red eyes and a sagging smoker’s face that matched his rumpled shirt and tie. He hired me and then quietly pulled me aside to give me some advice. He told me to just go through the motions and not to worry about achieving my sales quota.

“This is the
Columbian
,” he told me. “It’s not a real newspaper. Don’t make waves and we’ll all get along.”

I had never heard anything like it before in all my years of selling and I quickly took full advantage of my sales manager’s sage advice. I started driving my camper to work instead of my convertible Buick, so that I could drive down to numerous parks by the water to have a daily nap. I brought in enough advertising orders to satisfy my boss and I wondered where the other salesmen were napping because they were not doing any better than I was.

With all the free time I had on my hands and partially due to the literary environment I was working in, I began to write a novel. My wife had always thought that I had the talent to be an author, ever since I wrote an essay for her and got her an eighty percent mark in high school. Within six months of joining the
Columbian
, I told my wife that I could not stand my job anymore and suggested we take a sabbatical down to Jamaica. I was making decent money at the newspaper and the working conditions and benefits were excellent. However, I felt I was going nowhere in a job at a newspaper that was threatening to fall under the bailiff ’s lock and key every day especially with a boss telling me not to work so hard. None of the seven unions allowed for any of the concessions the newspaper publisher asked for and the province’s oldest newspaper folded not long after I left it.

Barbara and I had been trying to conceive a second child since we came to Vancouver, and after almost three years, we were still unsuccessful. A relaxing trip to Jamaica might be just the tonic to produce our new baby, or at least that was my soothing sales pitch to Barbara. While I was down in Jamaica I would open a business renting motorcycles to tourists and at the same time, I would complete the work remaining on my book.

While working at the
Columbian
newspaper, I met a lawyer who had emigrated from Jamaica and he happened to be moving back down there now that the government had changed. His name was Vincent Chen and he was an ally of the new prime minister, Edward Seaga, a free enterprise capitalist who had defeated the socialist party of Norman Manley. Vincent
offered to help me with my immigration papers and work permit, which he started working on even before I moved down to the island. I researched the type of motorcycles I would purchase and made a deal with a local supplier to ship them down from Vancouver. I sold my camper and my convertible to aid in financing the trip and I found a suitable tenant for a one-year lease on our North Vancouver home. To complete the preparations for our move, I bought a cheap Underwood manual typewriter, along with several reams of typing paper and plenty of correction ribbon. Barbara and I left our Doberman in the care of my friend, Tim, who was kind enough to take her into his house.

We flew to Toronto, which is a connection point for travel to Jamaica when flying from Vancouver. In Toronto we met with our old friends Manny and Bishop and their respective families. Manny had moved to Toronto shortly after he met his future wife in Montreal. He was part of our Montreal rat pack until he met his fiancé and disappeared with her like a thief in the night. It was a smart move on Manny’s part, considering his wife’s beauty and the nature of our mutual friends. The boys would have been after Wendy for sure had Manny stayed around in Montreal with her.

Manny no doubt had other reasons for leaving Montreal, since his ex-girlfriend Susan Braun had been murdered, gunned down along with his partner Jean Paul. My pal Bishop subsequently joined Manny in Toronto as part of the great exodus of Anglos who followed a well-publicized convoy of Brinks trucks that was filmed leaving Montreal for Toronto.

Barbara and I had a great time in Toronto reconnecting with our old friends and preparing for a year-long stay in Jamaica. The day before we were booked onto Air Canada’s flight
992
to Jamaica, Barbara fell ill with stomach flu and went to see Wendy’s doctor.

“Congratulations,” Wendy said to me when they both returned from the doctor. “You’re going to have a baby.” After the shock wore off, Barbara and I came to accept the unexpected blessing and continued on our journey.

Upon arriving in Jamaica, we rented a car and I met up with
Duke, my Jamaican friend from my pot smuggling days. Duke came with us as a guide, while we scouted around Montego Bay for a nice place to stay. We found a villa eight miles from town in Great River Private, an almost exclusively white neighbourhood. The villa was situated on a hill, overlooking a plantation of fruit trees with the ocean about a half mile in the distance. The villa’s main residence was a sprawling rancher with acres of space inside. There were four bedrooms, with two facing the front driveway and two that overlooked the ocean. The two ocean-facing rooms had louvred walls made with doors that folded open and closed. When the doors were pushed fully open, the entire west wall folded away so that the bedrooms were completely exposed to the sunny Jamaican sky. Each bedroom in the villa had its own ensuite bathroom and there was another bathroom in the main entrance next to the dining and living rooms.