The Last Thing I Saw (2 page)

I noted the books on the shelves next to Beers and said, “Most of your authors are gay people writing gay books. Somebody’s publishing them. Somebody’s reading them.”

She sniffed. “Donald, honey, yes, some gay people still do read actual books, not just porn catalogs and tweets. But there’s not a book up there that received an advance of more than seven thousand dollars. Most of those titles were done by small houses that paid no advance at all. I suppose you’re wondering, how the hell do
I
pay the rent? Well, dear, if you must know, Doctor Beers, my ex, Mister Root Canal of New Rochelle, pays the freight here on posh Hudson Street. For me, this business is not much more than a labor of love—or, in these grim times, let’s just say labor of like. Or labor of what the fuck else am I gonna do?”

“But Wenske’s pot book sold okay?”

“It did. It was nicely reviewed in
The Times,
the
Globe,
and
The Washington Post
, and Eddie did the cable talk show circuit, and that juiced up sales. It’s a usefully controversial book. The people who think pot should be legalized held
Weed Wars
up as evidence that decriminalizing the trade will drive the goons and psychos out of the business. And of course the war-on-drugs law enforcement types used it to lobby for harsher laws and more funding for themselves. Eddie favored the former approach, as you’ll see, Donald, when you take the trouble to
read
the book
.”

“I’ll read it on the train back to Albany.”

“That train must be even slower than I remember it.”

“When it comes to AMTRAK, I’m always careful to bring something along to entertain myself.”

“Well, you won’t be entertained by
Weed Wars
. You’ll be frightened and disgusted. And you’ll see why I’m so sure that something…something just
horrible
has happened to dear, stout-hearted Eddie Wenske.” Her voice faltered, and she shook her head and her eyes were wet.

“God, why couldn’t Eddie have let well enough alone? He did this nice job at the
Globe
with his series on pot dealers using a poor people’s health clinic as a distribution center, and how the community group that ran the place got into a war with the dealers. But that’s when he realized how ruthless the dealers were, and he started digging and came up with the material for the book. He’d already been warned a number of times to back off, and I told him myself, don’t mess with those people, it’s a hopeless societal situation—the thugs on one side, the Puritanism and hypocrisy on the other side, the billions in profits, and all these entrenched habits you can’t fight. But he was fascinated and he was shocked, and he thought it was an important and dramatic story about American society. Which of course it is.”

“I understand that the big cartels are vicious, but I’m surprised about the mid-level people. Especially with weed, that benign product that in any sane society would be available at Stop & Shop. It’s not coke or heroin, or crystal meth, which makes users crazy.”

“Ron Paul has the right idea. Just legalize it all and let people make their own choices.”

“It’s a shame,” I said, “that Ron also appears to believe that people should be left alone to take out their own tonsils and build their own roads.”

“Anyway, Eddie
had
moved on. That was good. He wasn’t about to devote his life to futzing around with the drug cartels. Not that this new project he was working on was going to set the publishing world on fire. I certainly wasn’t going to be setting up any auctions on that one. I have to say, I told him it was going to be
borrring.
But Eddie had this hair up his ass on gay media, and as usual he had his reasons, and I was basically instructed to get with the program, that that was the way it was going to be.”

“Gay media? A book on gay media?”

She popped another Necco wafer, a brown one this time. “Eddie had some filmmaker friends who’d been screwed by a gay TV network, Hey Look Media. Skeevy people run it who are cynical and cheap. They treat their own employees like crap, and they don’t pay people who do contract work for them. Half the writers and filmmakers in New York and LA are suing HLM for money owed. Eddie started hearing all these ugly stories about the company, and he thought, oh, well, maybe he’d do a magazine piece about these skuzzy creeps. I mean, is this what gay culture in America has come to? But then he found out that HLM
itself
had bought up most of the major organs of the gay press, both print and online, and of course no editor is going to do a story on how rotten their own bosses are.”

“I’ve seen some of Hey Look’s programming. It’s mostly pretty shoddy.”

“Shoddy and dumb. And the other gay network, Brand Gay, isn’t much better. You’d never know from these two channels that some of the smartest and most creative people in the country are gay. It’s all just so…
lame
. Clunky gay vampire series, cheesy private eye movies that look like they were made for about a dollar-eighty-five, and reality shows featuring supposedly glamorous gay men who have bronze asses, tiny IQs and the emotional development of eleven-year-old girls.”

“Timothy Callahan, my beau, and I tuned in a few times. Somebody told us a few of these shows were a guilty pleasure. But whenever we looked, we experienced neither guilt nor pleasure, and we quit watching.”

“Then,” Beers said, “after his approaches to gay magazines didn’t pan out, Eddie thought maybe he could do a piece on this sorry state of affairs in gay America for
The New York Times
magazine. He thought it was that important as a social phenomenon. He talked to an editor at
The Times
who’s gay, and this gal, Gerri Anastos—I’ve known her for years—was interested. The more Eddie dug, though, the more he began to think he had the material for a big book on the subject. His idea was, he’d do the
Times
piece and live off that and the proceeds from his modest
Globe
buy-out while he finished what he saw as a major expose of the gay mediocrities and opportunists and scammers who’ve moved in in the wake of gay liberation.”

I said, “This sounds interesting. It’s a book I’d read. But you said you thought it would be boring. How come?”

“No,
you
wouldn’t be bored, and neither would I, and neither would several hundred other people. But the larger market? Who really cares about a specifically gay culture anymore? And maybe the market is right. Except in Gum Stump, P-A, we’re so assimilated now that we may not need our own magazines and TV channels. We’re on the sitcoms and Showtime and HBO and in the mainstream press. Every time you turn on an awards show, the winners are all up on the stage waving their trophies and tongue-kissing their same-sex boyfriends and girlfriends in America’s face while America shrugs or says oh isn’t that nice, sissies and dykes can be so adorable. And the mainstream gay stuff is generally so superior to the gay-channel gay stuff that what’s the point, really, in having our own separate news and entertainment venues?”

“Did Wenske have a contract for the gay media book?”

“A couple of university presses said they’d look at it. I told him he’d better be prepared to take another newspaper job, because this book was going to bring in pretty close to zilch in the way of an advance.
I’ve
got Mister New Rochelle Root Canal, but Eddie never had the good sense to marry and divorce a dentist. Which of course in gay old Massachusetts he could easily have done.”

“It sounds as if he was as emotionally wrapped up in this project as he’d been with the pot book.”

“Maybe even more so,” Beers said. “He was outraged that gay people could set up a business aimed at gay customers and then fuck over the gay people they’d hired to produce what they were selling. It seemed to Eddie like a betrayal of the cause of gay social progress. He seemed to expect gay tycoons to be more honest and more humane than straight tycoons. That struck me as naïve, and still does, but this innocence is one of the things I find so appealing about Eddie. I may sound like a cynic, but in current-day conglomerate-dominated publishing I’ve seen plenty to be cynical about. My dear, Alfred and Blanche Knopf are
looonnngg
in their graves, believe me.”

“Straight or gay, I think we can consider all con artists objectionable.”

“In his pitch to
The Times
, Eddie compared the Hey Look owners to the black poverty pimps who showed up in the wake of the civil rights movement. First it’s the selfless visionaries who push history ahead in some fine way, and then the exploiters and hustlers move in. It happened in the sixties with black civil rights, and it happened more recently with gay liberation. Of course this all struck a chord with Eddie, because he saw gay social progress as
his
movement. He took what had happened to the mistreated filmmakers personally.”

Was Beers missing something here? I said, “If Wenske was researching the gay media book when he vanished, why couldn’t his disappearance have had something to do with that instead of the marijuana book?”

Beers gave me her boy-is-this-bozo-dumb look and reached for another Necco wafer. “Just read the goddamn weed book, will you,
please
?”

CHAPTER TWO

“My thinking when I left the city,” I told Timmy, “was that Wenske’s disappearance might have had something to do with the book he was working on at the time, this gay media book. The controversial marijuana book was behind him by then, and according to Marva Beers he was considerably worked up over all the jerks and sociopaths he’d been hearing about in gay TV and magazines. But then I read
Weed Wars
on the train, and I saw why Beers was sure of a connection between the pot book and his going missing. You should read it. We think of pot as so innocuous, and of course the stuff itself is—sweet and companionable and harmless when not over-indulged-in. But the business of producing and marketing weed is not so mellow. It’s cut-throat, and I mean in the literal sense. Anybody who cheats or steals or screws up or even just competes too assertively can end up in a shallow grave in the woods somewhere. Knowing this, I don’t think I’ll ever toke again so casually.”

“You hardly ever do, anyway,” Timmy said. “Your primary drug of choice has been Sam Adams almost as long as I’ve known you. Sam Adams and green curry.”

“And both are especially satisfying tonight after the micro-waved hot dog I had for lunch on AMTRAK.”

We were at the Thai place on Lark Street, after Timmy had walked over from Assemblyman Lipshutz’s office at the end of his work day and I’d taken a cab from the train station in Rensselaer back into Albany.

“You can actually get a little bit of a high from a strong curry,” Timmy said. “It’s the chili peppers.”

“So when you were in the Peace Corps, were the Indians you worked with all chillin’ and groovy? The ones in your poultry development project—were those farmers constantly getting the munchies and eating all the eggs?”

“You don’t get that kind of a high from curry. Donald, when you order your curry Thai-spicy instead of
farang
-spicy, don’t you get a little buzz?”

“No, just a little sweaty.”

“Actually, I can see it happening now. Something is dripping off the end of your nose. Unless after your long, tiring day that’s beer that you carelessly sucked up into the wrong hole in your face.”

I used my napkin and said, “It really is an eye-opener, Wenske’s book. The
wars
in
Weed Wars
is exactly
the right word. We often read about the drug violence in Mexico, but we don’t really hear much about the U.S. gangs and their ruthlessness with their own people and the deadly turf battles. It’s like Prohibition and the criminal life in the twenties, except worse, because of the technology—cell phones and tracking devices and the easy access to automatic weapons. Nobody knows exactly how big it is. Estimates on the reefer trade in the U.S. range from ten billion to a hundred and thirteen billion dollars a year. Law enforcement tends to exaggerate the size of it to keep their own multibillion-dollar industry prosperous, but there’s no doubt that it’s gargantuan.”

Timmy helped himself to more rice and a spoonful of the robust curry. “I believe what you’re telling me,” he said, “and I will read this book that seems to have made such an impression on you. But it’s hard to think of what’s-his-name, that old blacksmith in Half Moon who sells pot to the smokers we know, as being part of a monstrous criminal enterprise. He’s just so unthreatening and…laid-back.”

“The lowest-level local retailers often are. It’s the next level up where it gets dicey. It’s the mules and the wholesalers who take on the greatest risks, and they tend to be a hard-bitten bunch. And the sums of money at play are so huge that a lot of the people involved will do just about anything to hold on to their market share. Torture, dismemberment, cow-pasture executions—they’re not all that rare. In the weed business, you can’t just hire a lobbying firm and buy off a few elected officials with campaign donations to protect your interests.”

“Not yet, anyway.”

“How long will it be until we get to that point? Twenty years?”

“Maybe. Though the pressure to legalize pot and regulate sales and tax the heck out of it like alcohol and tobacco will keep looking better and better at budgeting time in the Legislature. It’s really a question of who’ll have the courage to propose it first—and then find out to his or her relief and amazement that the electorate thinks, well, yes, okay, we guess it’ll be all right with us.”

“It’ll be like the end of Prohibition when relative calm returned to the urban landscape and the bootleggers all went straight and became semi-respectable burghers.”

“And,” Timmy said, “they could start planning for their sons to become president of the United States.”

“Was Nixon’s mother a rum runner? I thought she was a Quaker.”

“You know who I mean. I wonder who’ll become the Joseph P. Kennedy of weed kingpins with an eye on the White House?”