The men cheered. An old McClellanite threw some mock punches.
Bobby stood up. “I found an old deportation order on Carlos Marcello. He was born in Tunis, North Africa, of Italian parents, but he’s got a phony Guatemalan birth certificate. I want to deport him to Guatemala, and I want to do it danm soon.”
Kemper broke a little lightweight sweat–
62
(Rural Mexico, 3/22/61)
Poppy fields blitzed the horizon. Stalk bulbs oozing dope covered a valley half the size of Rhode Island.
Prison inmates did the plucking. Mexican cops cracked the whip and did all the conversion work.
Heshie Ryskind led the tour. Pete and Chuck Rogers tagged along and let him play MC.
“This farm has supplied me and Santo for years. They convert ‘O’ into morphine for the Agency, too, ‘cause the Agency’s always backing some right-wing insurgents that get shot at and wounded a lot, and they always need the morph as medication. Most of the zombies they got working here stay past the end of their sentence ‘cause all they want to do is suck a pipe and nosh a few tortillas on the side. I wish I had such simple needs. I wish I didn’t have to keep nine fucking doctors on retainer ‘cause I’m such a fucking hypochondriac, and I wish I didn’t have the chutzpah–which is the same as ‘audacity’ to you goyim–to try to break the world’s record for getting blow jobs, ‘cause I think I’ve reached the point where all that suction is doing my prostate more harm than good. And I’m not the blow-job magnet I used to be. I’ve got to travel with a good cunt man now to see any action at all. Lately, I’ve had Dick Contino bird-dogging for me. I catch all his lounge gigs, and Dick shoots me all the surplus suction I can handle.”
The sun slammed down. They rode out in rickshaws, with junkie inmates at the helm.
Pete said, “We need ten pounds precut for the Cadre. I won’t be able to get back here until after the invasion.”
Chuck laughed. “If and when your boy Jack approves it.”
Pete flicked a bulb–white shit oozed out. “And I want a substantial morphine supply for the medics at Blessington. Let’s just figure this is our last visit for a while.”
Heshie leaned against his rickshaw. The pilot wore a loincloth and a Dodger baseball cap.
“All this can be arranged. It’s a lot simpler than arranging blow jobs for sixty at some farkakte Teamster convention.”
Chuck dabbed bulb goo on a shaving cut. “My jaw’s going a little numb. It’s a nice effect, but I wouldn’t ruin my life for it.”
Pete laughed. Heshie said, “I’m tired. I’ll go back and get your stuff loaded up, then I’m taking a nap.”
Chuck hopped in his rickshaw. The pilot looked like fucking Quasimodo.
Pete stood on his tiptoes. The view spread waaay out.
Maybe a thousand stalk rows. Maybe twenty slaves per row. Low worker overhead: cot space, rice and beans came cheap.
Chuck and Heshie took off–dig that crazy rickshaw drag race.
Boyd said Mr. Hoover had a maxim: Anti-Communism breeds strange bedfellows.
o o o
They flew from Mexico to Guatemala. The Piper Deuce cruised sluggish–Chucky overstuffed the cargo hold.
With rifles, hate pamphlets, heroin, morphine, tortillas, tequil, Army surplus jump boots, Martin Luther Coon voodoo dolls, back issues of Hush-Hush, and five hundred mimeographed copies of a Guy Banister–circulated report culled from the L.A. FBI office, stating that even though Mr. Hoover knew full well that President John F. Kennedy was not playing bury-the-brisket with Marilyn Monroe, he kept her under intensive surveillance anyway, and duly noted that during the last six weeks Miss Monroe fucked Louis Prima, two off-duty Marines, Spade Cooley, Franchot Tone, Yves Montand, Stan Kenton, David Seville of David Seville and the Chipmunks, four pizza delivery boys, bantamweight battler Fighting Harada and a disc jockey at an all-spook R&B station.
Chuck called it “essential ordnance.”
Pete tried to doze. Air sickness kept him awake. The training camp popped out of a cloud bank, right on schedule.
It loomed biggg. From the air it looked like ten Blessingtons.