Walking the Dog (14 page)

“I'm not,” I'd reply. “I'm just trying it out to see if it adds anything to my biography.”

“Just don't Jackson Pollock on us. It's been done with the car thing and it'll only up your sales for a year at most.”

When I wasn't biking with Miko or planning heists with my friends, I helped David stretch canvases. I loved the feeling of pulling a canvas over a frame, the pain of it getting tighter and tighter. I was making an enormous drumhead. I just loved the labor and the groaning sounds that went into the collective birth. David always said that painters are engineers and mechanics. All the good ones are messy, greasy boys and girls who have muscles and crave dust, grime, and dirt.

34. My criminal life developed slowly and steadily at the same time. I mapped out jobs that were far away from one another and would look as if they'd been done by crooks with different personalities and motives. Here is the list:

            
1) 205 bottles of nail polish from Kim Soh Nail and Waxing—Vermont

            
2) 68 true crime books from Mr. Mystery's Bookstore—Massachusetts

            
3) 12 Priest, Nurse, Police, and Fireman uniforms from Buckles, Inc.—Rhode Island

            
4) 72 wigs and hats from Moskowitz's, an orthodox family factory—New York

            
5) 100 boxes from a FedEx office—Maine

The wig heist was really the climax. We each tried on tons of them at the tree house, drunk on vodka and beer and me blasted on coke. We loved being a posse and, like any addicts, longed to find new ways to commit more significant, dangerous crimes.

35. Miko and I had become closer since Leonard was away on his fellowship. My drug use increased, and pictures, tableaus, and images jumped out at me in 3-D. Miko became an ancient god to me. It was his black hair that hung to his waist. His muscles were defined so strongly under his tight black jeans, white undershirts, and black vests. His scuffed motorcycle boots had just the right flamenco heels. He was involved with the secret crystal-meth lab deep in the woods and was making money. For once I wasn't paying for all the motorcycles and cars, and my respect for him grew. In exchange I dealt for him on campus. Or rather I delivered
and collected the cash. I also experimented quite a bit. The biggest effect it had on me was that objects and sensations took precedence over human beings.

36. I tried to work in David Sessions's warehouse during my straight hours. Besides stretching canvases, I mixed pots of paint as big as the Egyptian vases at the Met. Putting together colors was like cooking for a villain. He and I would stand over a pot for as much as two hours, adding a touch of yellow or taking out red by adding a spoonful of black. We talked over the formulas. He was obsessive. No detail was too small. The first painting I took part in must have been fifteen feet long. I treasured using house paint rollers and walking barefoot over the canvas as we spread the base. We talked about our childhoods, Leonard, the men in his life, as well as art, music, the cross-country trip, police procedural TV shows, fashion, and politics. He became a real friend as well as a mentor. But I didn't reveal a hint about my posse or our antics. I didn't know what his reaction would be and we both took stock in being the best of ourselves for each other.

37. Since I financed the whole criminal operation, it was up to me to propose the next step. Something more dangerous. More high stakes than college pranks. Miko said that I might find hijacking to be a real high. I'd learn to run cars and trucks to a dead stop or off the road. We'd force the drivers to leave their vehicles. But then we wouldn't take anything. Miko was in a “loving Ester” mode so he taught me some techniques he'd used on vans and trucks that delivered jewelry or cash to store owners. I wanted our first hit to be a Pepperidge Farm cookie truck.

38. Miko told me if I bought a van he would teach me how to push it off the road with my Buick. So I did. A VW camper. Miko and I practiced for hours in the abandoned countryside with the van and the Buick. The exercises were like the bumper cars at an amusement park. With all the drugs I'd taken, I had no concept that innocent people might be driving the van. I just knew that all this practice was leading up to a monumental Ike and Tina Turner–style crime and we had to perfect our act each step along the way. Miko had done a bunch of hijackings, and he'd never rolled over or crashed into a tree. No one in the other cars got hurt either. He swore on it. (He lied.)

39. This was the mode of hijacking:

            
a) I'd be in the head car and run the van or truck to the shoulder of the road. I tried hard to avoid bad accidents.

            
b) Miko would be in the next car with two of the Terrartists.

            
c) One would stay back in a bar or store to be good for our alibi.

            
d) Once I got the van or truck stopped I'd zoom ahead to a designated location (about twenty miles away) and wait.

            
e) The others would descend on the crippled vehicle to scare the drivers or take some loot (I gave in on this).

            
f) Then they'd disappear in three different directions toward our meeting place. This way I figured that if a cop got alerted and started chasing us, he wouldn't have a clue about which one of us to follow.

40. Our Heists:

            
1) Pepperidge Farm cookies (I got my revenge).

            
2) A whole truck of Chef Boyardee canned spaghetti and ravioli.

            
3) CARE organizations' boxes of toys for poor whoevers (I felt a bad about this).

            
4) We did agree: a shipment of the new Fryes. Everyone took at least five pairs.

41. The drugs were draining my sense of humor, and I had an edgy nervousness in my body. During practice I liked scaring the drivers, but I was always careful not to do them serious harm. Miko mocked me and said that I'd never know what it was really like until there was genuine danger. When the stakes were real. He was the one who found out there was a shipment of Cartier jewelry going through southern New Hampshire in about two weeks and we should “do” the truck. He'd take the jewelry and fence it. The gold would make us a fortune. His constant proximity to crystal meth had brought on a kind of grandiosity that I found hard to counter. I asked the others and they were all for it. They were put off by me having too much power. They preferred Miko because he was risky, dangerous, beautiful, and scary—a “real criminal” who probably knew more about what we were doing than any of us.

42. My creativity was shot to hell. The only real work I did was in David Sessions's warehouse. He'd never admit it, but I painted about five of his most popular giant canvases. It doesn't reflect on his talent. All his other stuff was brilliant, too. I didn't judge his integrity. I was grateful for the opportunity to lose what guilt I was feeling in oceans of color and texture. He also said
he'd give me credit if they were taken by a collector or museum. He never did. However, he did care about my deterioration. He always had fresh fruit and yogurt around when I arrived, and I could see him staring at me when he thought I was preoccupied with a mixture of hues. “Darling,” he said to me on several occasions in various ways, “you seem to be involved in some opium den or, less romantic, let's say a filthy crack house. Don't go down the tubes. It's so unattractive—a washed-up genius. Boring if you ask me. All those circles under your eyes, cracked lips, that look on your face as if you're playing an understudy in Dawn of the Dead. Really, it doesn't suit an upper-class Jewish girl from Central Park West.”

43. Leonard called me almost daily from wherever he was in Denmark. He had his suspicions, too. I was rarely home when he called, or was sound asleep. “If you're going anywhere near Miko, I'm annulling our marriage as soon as I get back.” For some reason, this bothered me. I liked the state of being married, though I did nothing to respect it. Leonard seemed to miss me, and it was an odd emotional transaction because I tended to forget about him for long periods of time.

            
a) I smoked several pipes of meth before the Cartier heist. The Terrartists were scared shitless and the fear jazzed them. I found the truck cruising on a back road toward I-95 and began my excellent bumping and pushing. Miko was in the car with me, shouting when to brake, steer, accelerate, and bump. His approach wasn't delicate. I ended up pushing the Cartier truck over the shoulder
and it flipped onto its side. Miko got out and I sped forward to our designated meeting spot near Lenox, Massachusetts. I thought about the truck on its side and saw the violence repeated in my head in slow motion. No one could get hurt, I reminded myself. Anyway, I'd been reading some of David's philosophy books and there was this writer, Timothy Oldsmar, who claimed that physical pain was the key to finding our connection to our primal animal. He was a performance artist who hung himself from hooks in Soho. Part of me thought his claims were bullshit. But, on the other hand, David Sessions often said he wished to capture the human experience on his canvases in its most extreme (he could talk pretentiously too). He had a series of watercolors called
Adrenaline 1–15
and I could see physical pain in every one of them. I cramped up and I knew it wasn't philosophical—it was guilt. I thought, How did I go from lifting Statue of Liberty pins to throwing fellow humans off the road? But the thought left before it was finished.

            
b) Miko found a fence and each of us got about five thousand dollars. I knew he kept much more off the top, but he was a criminal, so I expected him to screw us. There was another shipment of gold and diamonds passing through Troy, New York, a couple weeks later. Troy was a connection to the New York State Thruway toward the city. This company was a multimillion-dollar jewelry legend called Wolfmanns. They leased necklaces and bracelets to movie stars and society ladies.
Very few sales were less than six figures. They didn't have a store in Manhattan, but rather a town house where the jewelry was on display. Then, if a wealthy lady or gentleman was interested in a purchase, they brought it to your home for private appraisal. The van for this treasured jewelry was more elaborate than the others we'd hit. The driver and his assistant carried keys to boxes in which the pieces were kept. Miko used some of his connections and found a way to have duplicates of the keys made. He'd moved up in the crime world with the meth business and was being courted by some kind of Russian mafia group or a South American cartel. He exaggerated, confused the details, and simply didn't care. But he and I were both doing more meth, which made us impulsive and quick-tempered. I had bronchitis from smoking too much, and there were voices in my brain singing cheap pop songs.

44. Meanwhile, the other Terrartists held a meeting behind my back and decided Miko and I were going too far, were too into drugs, and that they wanted their normal college lives back. One of the practice Cartier drivers smashed up Miko's arm and that freaked them out. They realized they were way past pulling pranks, and the buzz was gone. They didn't like me much anymore either because all I did was strategize and give them orders. One by one they pulled out. I didn't care and wished them well, but Miko got paranoid. He said if even one of them became a snitch we'd be ruined. He took it upon himself to hold a meeting and warn
my gang of artists that if any one of them ever talked, even to each other, about what we'd been doing the past two years, he'd make sure that not just one, but all of them and all their families would be kidnapped, tortured, or killed. The five of them were flabbergasted, and I remember the silence in the room. I could feel it. A black hole. I remember nodding off in a corner and thinking to myself that Miko was sounding very
Godfather II
–ish, and I found it ridiculous and sexy. I knew we had nothing to worry about. They were all headed for graduate school, teaching, orchestras, or publishing. What would be the purpose of sending themselves to jail? Then Miko laughed, hugged each one of them, and gave them an envelope with some cash. The atmosphere was eerie.

45. A week before the major Wolfmanns heist, Leonard returned to the States. A young, growing architectural firm was impressed by his proposals and wanted an interview for building experimental playgrounds. He demanded to see me though I claimed to be on deadline—I never had deadlines—and was down with the flu and looked horrible. After much back and forth, I agreed to meet him in New York City. I washed my hair, found a clean smock, and drove the BMW on the Taconic so at least I'd have the pleasure of its curves.

Our meeting was evasive. It was next to impossible for me to get through the day without meth, and wherever we went—Bully's Deli, the Empire Hotel—I excused myself to go to the ladies' room to at least sustain myself with a snort of coke (though that was no comparison). Leonard didn't comment on the
obvious fact that I'd lost nearly twenty pounds, and I didn't say anything about his frizzy hair tied back in a ponytail and Van Dyke beard. He wore a suit and tie and I looked like his rebellious daughter. We tried to talk at the restaurant.

“How's the painting going?” he asked stiffly.

“Harrowing,” I replied.

“Are you trying something new?”

“I'm always trying something new,” I snapped, and sighed. “I'm sorry,” I said.

He smiled meekly and looked distant.

I changed the subject.

“So, did you get lots of new ideas?” I asked.

“I've always had the ideas.” He was annoyed. “I'm learning how to craft them.”