Our apartment in Boston
We stayed in Boston for two months in 1971. It was hot and muggy but we made good friends and worked hard to get some money together for a Greyhound Ticket to take us round the States for our last month.
I worked in the Dei Haus on Massachusetts Avenue along with a bunch of speed freaking waitresses and two murderers. Life as a dishwasher was hard and hot. I was run off my feet from six in the evening to three at night. I sustained myself on chocolate frappes. These were rich chocolate ice cream milk-shakes. I lived on them.
While I toiled in the steamy back room with the cockroaches and radio churning out some easy listening Rock station that seemed to specialise in Carol King and Rod Stewart, Liz worked as a demure waitress in City Hall. She made good tips. They actually tipped her to speak in her English accent. The only tip I got was from Boris the chef. He shouted at me that I’d better work faster or he’d batter me.
We had managed to get a room in an apartment. It had a communal living room which was full of people twenty four hours a day and had the TV blaring. I didn’t know who most of them were but the smell of pot was always pungent. It seemed to me that most of them just wandered in. But this was the sixties. It was like that. When I got off my shift at three in the morning I’d hitch home. I would often get a lift with a couple of guys who were tripping on acid or STP and cruising around to check out the lights. I’d walk into the front room and a cloud of smoke would billow out the door. There would be half a dozen people in there staring vacantly at the TV all tripped out.
It was one of those weird scenes Jim Morrison sang about.
Our room was at the back. It was quite quiet there.
We shared the place with a lanky black guy called Laurie. He claimed to be a member of the Black Panthers but in reality he was just a young kid who worked in a shoe shop. He probably dreamt of joining the Black Panthers. All day long he was being ultra-polite to obnoxious white men and being subservient. That was enough to drive anyone to join a black power movement.
In the middle room were two young girls who shared. They were quite straight and I think the whole business going down in the apartment was a bit of an eye-opener. They were very sweet and shy and didn’t join in much.
Next to us was Bob. Bob Reilly was of Irish descent and was a swashbuckling character who was as close to Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Murphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as I’ll ever meet.
Bob was larger than life. He seemed to sit around all day playing music, hanging out with the guys in the front room and going to gigs. Bob told us that he was a ‘go-between dealer’. He shipped dope from the producer to the dealer. He claimed that when he set up a deal he would cream off ten thousand dollars.
We both thought he was a bullshit artist but Bob was forever receiving packets of dope that he claimed were samples that he had to test.
We were proved wrong and Bob was fully vindicated. One day we came back from work to be shown Bob’s room. It was stacked high with bricks of compressed grass wrapped in tin foil. Each brick was a kilo and there were hundreds of them. From the smell they were top quality. Bob assured us that they were the best Columbian grass money could buy.
He only had that stash there for a week while he organised the deal to pass it on but that was the week I was picked up by the police.
I was hitching home from work at three in the morning and a police car stopped me. They shook me down and questioned me. Then they gave me a lift home. They dropped me off outside the door and watched me go in.
I knew when I put my hand on that door that the front room would be blaring with the TV and a cloud of smoke would billow out. I also knew that if the cops decided to check it out further they would find half of Colombia’s annual production of marijuana sitting in Bob’s room. I could imagine what would happen if we had been bust. We would have been caught up in it. We’d probably on just be getting out!
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