Chapter Seven
I met this guy named Chuch through Cathy down on Homecrest and we became friends. He was a drug dealer too and had a lot of connections. He was this little blond-headed guy with a square hairdo, looked like the little fucking Dutch boy on the Dutch Boy paint can. He was a biker and had a Harley named Cherish that we would take to bike shows. In the early sixties when I met him, he knew these wise guys, gangsters, and they knew him. At first I was dealing drugs with Chuch, buying stuff from him all the time and he was buying different stuff from me and we became really good friends and then became drug dealers together. We would go partners on a lot of stuff. At this time we got into heroin. They actually gave us ounces of heroin to sell because they didn’t know what to do with it. Meantime, I was shooting a lot of cocaine so I was a little on the nutsy side, doing coke and selling heroin. I never sold heroin before. I sold LSD, reefer, speed, all kinds of pills and psychedelics, and everything like that, but I never got into selling heroin because that was taboo. It was a bad thing.
So me and Chuch got this heroin and Chuch says to me, “Can you sell this stuff?” That’s how the conversation started, and I said, “Yeah no problem, I could do that,” which I never had done before. I never cut heroin, didn’t know how to cut it or anything about it. I bagged up the heroin one night and put it out on the Parkside and before I knew it people were OD’ing all over the place. I don’t know if they were dying, but the word got out, “Oh, people died on this dope, it’s good powerful stuff, let’s go get it.” Then I found out that you had to cut this stuff. You needed screens and nylons and wire hangers. I learned how to do the lab work asking and watching other people how to cut it, to get it all down pat. Take the lactose or bonita or some quinine and vitamin K, add the heroin on the nylon, mix it together screened through the nylon several times until it is totally mixed. I needed to learn how to make four ounces from two ounces, adding stuff to it, what they call cutting it to knock down the potency so people wouldn’t OD.
What I did was put out a product that everybody loved. They wanted it especially when they found out people were dying. Heroin addicts are like that. They could watch somebody die and then say, “Where did he cop it?” That’s what they do. “All right, so what he died . . . where did he buy it?” That’s the truth, that’s what they say, so we learned how to cut this heroin, me and Chuch, and I started bagging it up. Chuch was selling it to me. I was still my own man and made literally millions of dollars. I became a big heroin dealer.
That’s when things got really hot with the cops in the neighborhood, up on Ninth Avenue and on the Parkside and in the bars. They didn’t bother me before that, but it got worse when they found out heroin was in the neighborhood. They could deal with all the psychedelics, they could deal with the cocaine because they were doing most of that shit themselves. They could deal with acid, they were doing that and reefer, and drinking, even taking barbiturates and pills and all that other happy horse-shit, but the minute you put heroin anywhere, you become the fucking bad guy. You become the number one killer. They don’t want you in the neighborhood. “Look what you’re doing to our kids.” Meanwhile everybody’s all fucked up already.
I think that if they didn’t put heroin in the neighborhood everybody would have been crazy. It calmed a lot of people down. Everybody was going to die on acid, jumping off fucking roofs doing all these psychedelics, doing drugs that they didn’t even know, robbing drug stores. I robbed a drug store one time. We had all these drugs and I shot this stuff, sulphate, that we used to cut with other drugs and I went fucking blind. I had all these pins and needles in my arm and in my head. I used to do crazy shit like that and I always sold speed even though I was into heroin. I kept selling speed and using it, but then the more and more I sold heroin, the more I got into it. This is when I started selling it in the city to the doctors, prominent people, rock n’ roll groups, all these different people bought this shit, and I got a big reputation as a pretty big dope dealer. It got so bad that I really didn’t like it. I was scared a lot of the time.
Selling the heroin got me mixed up with different types of people who had no regard for life, people who didn’t care if they killed people. This was the scary part of my life. When you’re dealing in the psychotropics like LSD, reefer, cocaine, acid, Mescaline and even some of the other things I dealt in, people were normally nice, flower people. I went to many homes selling twenty pounds of reefer and all the women would be sitting around. We’d all be smoking and doing lines of coke; everything was pretty cool in those settings at that time.
It was so different than being in a room with twenty people who were using heroin. They were fucking sitting there with guns looking at you, notorious, waiting for you to fuck up. I’m talking about the dealers, the people who were behind it, these people don’t care. It’s a big product, it’s expensive, there’s a lot of money involved.
In the early sixties when I was selling speed, there were people who became rats and were found cut up and put in trunks. I was dealing with these people from downtown. Everything revolved around thousands of dollars. People got killed for very little. Life had very little value; money had all the value. People were shot, people were murdered. They’d give them a hot shot; put some sulfuric acid in it, some battery acid in it, and some rat poison—just kill them. People did crazy shit like that when they didn’t like someone. It was a very scary time meeting Chuch and becoming friends with him and then starting to hang out all night, selling the drugs and then starting to use heroin.
Chuch was a barbiturate-head, he would take a lotta lotta pills. It slows you down. I can remember him taking forty Tuinals. He had this 1948 truck, a van with flames painted on it that he used to transport his bike in. I remember him being stoned and driving that thing all over the place. The more stoned he got, the better he drove. You would think he was gonna crash, but he didn’t. It was the wildest thing I ever saw in my life, the way Chuch handled a lot of shit while being high on the pills. If you took barbiturates early in the evening and then drank and later shot up some heroin, you very likely could OD like Paulie, Sal, and a few of the other guys. So Chuch was that type of guy, he would do all these drugs.
In 1970 we were doing drugs and making drug deals. We used to sell a lot of drugs to people, but I never sold drugs to anybody I didn’t know or didn’t trust. I had to know them pretty well, especially a heroin deal because you can get caught and go to prison forever. Chuch sold some drugs to a guy who wanted two ounces of heroin, so we sold him the two ounces of heroin. But not good heroin. Then the guy came back and he said that it was so good he wanted four more. I said, “Chuch, this guy’s no good, this guy’s a fucking cop or a rat. I just sold him shit, stuff that I know is no good,” so I told Chuch not to sell to him, but Chuch sold it to him anyway. I stayed out of the whole deal, because I didn’t like it right from the get go. There was a guy involved, Charlie, Georgie, or something like that, who was just no fucking good. I didn’t like the guy anyway; I never liked doing any business with him. I don’t like guys that are strung out, fucked up, looking for money; he looked like he would be a rat bastard, a shady hustler. I can’t deal with people like that. He was tall, thin, skinny face, bald on top with a rim of blondish brown hair. I deal with calm, collected, business people. They might be even a little notorious and shit like that, but they’re making sense, you know what they’re saying, “We’re gonna meet, we’re gonna buy this, we’re gonna do that, and this is where we’re gonna do it.” They make a little bit on the deal, I make a little bit on the deal, they make a little bit more, I make a little bit more, I compromise, they compromise, and somehow or another we get to a happy medium where we both can do our thing and then we do it boom, boom, boom, it’s done, you’re happy, I’m happy, good night, see ya . . . that’s the way it was done. And I always dealt with people I knew for years and years and years. I didn’t know this guy . . . so what happens is the house gets raided the next time. The guy was a rat.
There was a drug bust at Chuch’s house. When they heard all the commotion outside, everyone who could jumped out a window but Chuch and another person got caught in his house. The guy who he’d sold the drugs to pointed him out and Chuch got busted, which meant that he could go up for ten or twenty years. We had a great lawyer at the time, a very notorious lawyer. He was my lawyer for years after that and got me off of attempted murder and drug raps where I was facing seventy-five years. Anyway, Chuch got caught. He was going to court and we were telling him, “Don’t worry, you’re gonna beat it; you’re gonna beat this, you only got one drug charge.” But it came down to he might have to go away for a year, and he wasn’t the type of guy that could go away.
Chuch was terrified of going to jail—he just wasn’t a jailhouse guy. He was one of the original flower children. He didn’t even have fights with people. He played nice, he was a real good talker, he wasn’t a hitter or a gang guy, which is what attracted me to him. I don’t think I ever really got mad at him for anything, ever. I don’t think I was ever really resentful or angry or wanted to hurt him. He was one of the first guys that I didn’t really want to hurt. He was just a nice guy who couldn’t handle going to jail or his own life, so I said, “Listen, let’s work it out. Do what I did, go into a drug program. You get yourself known as a fucking drug addict; you get on a methadone program.” At this time I was on the methadone program. For twelve years I couldn’t get off of methadone. I was on 120 mg of methadone, still trying to shoot a thousand dollars worth of dope a day and couldn’t even get high. Chuch is going to court, we’re dealing drugs, life is a fucking mess, and we’re still out partying with the girls trying to have a good time, watching the court cases, trying to be big shots, still dealing the heroin and other drugs and making lots of money.
A couple of months into this case, we’re going down to Chuch’s house one night and we see a whole bunch of people outside his house. The cops are stopping us from going in. Chuch was dead, he’d been dead for two days sitting up in his room. He had this little tiny room up in his mother’s house, and he kept his motorcycle on the porch. His room had stop signs in it, mattresses on the floor, a real sixties pad and we all used to gather there. His mother never bothered us, his father never bothered us, we could come in and say, “How you doing” and walk upstairs. When they found Chuch he was sitting up like a little Indian, with his feet and legs crossed. He was slumped over, dead. He had taken a lot of barbiturates and methadone and he’d started snorting dope, which he’d tried to stop and didn’t want me to do. This is what we all didn’t want; we didn’t want nobody to start on this shit that’s gonna take us down for the big count, which is dope. At this time we were doing a lot of dope.