Behind Hollywood's Mirrors

The day Mike got busted was a typical day on the studio lot. Everything seemed normal -- for Hollywood. The studio executives who had the habit sent their secretaries down as often as five or six times a day to pick up a gram of cocaine per visit. It was a shrewd move to send the secretaries. That way, the executives never held the substance. They snorted the cocaine immediately and left Mike to do the holding. That was part of the deal.

Mike is not his real name, of course. The names have been changed here, but the stories are real. Mike was a film projectionist at a major Hollywood studio. He ran the 35mm Simplex projectors, the ones that look like monsters and have exhaust ducts feeding into the ceiling. Mike had his own office. Nothing fancy, really: a desk and a chair and a couch. He kept his supply of cocaine in one of the desk drawers. Folks seemed to need it.

Mike had lucked into his job. A street kid from the East Coast, he had been busted at the age of 13 for smoking pot in the boys' room at school. He landed in a reformatory for a time. His own home wasn't much of a place for him. His Scandinavian father worked long hours in the restaurant business, and his Sicilian mother had left the family when Mike was four. "My dad backed me all the way," Mike says, "when he had time for me. But I didn't see much of him. I just sort of hung around the street after school."

When he was old enough, Mike went into the Navy for a while. But he kept jumping ship, and after his ninth A.W.O.L. charge, the Navy gave up on him. He got a general discharge under honorable conditions. He went home. There were no jobs. Then one day, without warning, his father showed up and handed Mike an airplane ticket to Los Angeles. "Your mother's sick," his father told him. "Go out there and take care of her and your stepsister." Mike, who had not seen his mother for 17 years, did what his father asked him to.

"No one knew it, I guess, but my mother was dying of cancer," Mike recalls. "She had a brain tumor. She lived in terrible pain. I tried to take care of her and my stepsister. It wasn't easy. I drove my stepsister to and from school every day. I helped my mom, helped her do things like take her pills--too many pills. I started doing speed just to keep up with the pressure. I couldn't get a decent job, but one day, I hopped a fence at the studio and sneaked onto the lot. There was a guy in the labor-relations office who talked to me. He gave me my first break. I guess he thought I was a good kid. He set me up as a temporary projectionist, showed me how to operate the machines, gave me an office. I'd worked with cameras and projectors before, and after a while, I got pretty good at it. I didn't have to fake it for long."

Mike's first job earned him about $600 per week. He was grateful for that, but he was also burning out on speed, and the specter of his mother, dying slowly at home, haunted him. He faced medical bills, food bills, tuition bills; financial responsibilities tumbled down on him.

"I remember one day on the lot, I asked a really dumb question: 'What are all these mirrors doing all over the place?' I mean, everywhere I'd go, there'd be these hand mirrors lying around--behind the facades, in the toilets, in the projection rooms. (Continued on page 192) Behind Hollywood's Mirrors (Continued from page 122) Sometimes they had traces of white powder on them. And a guy explained it to me: The mirrors were there so people could toot wherever they needed to. 'Oh, I get it,' I said. A little light went on in my head. There was a way out of everything. I could send my sister to college and pay my mother's bills and get some money for myself. And, sure enough, not much later, I got a call from a buddy of mine I hadn't seen in years. He wanted me to go over to his place. He said he had something to show me. I said I'd see him in a day or two. He said, 'You better get over here right now if you want a cut of some good shit.' So I went, and I'll never forget it: He was sitting in his room with six kilos of coke. He wanted me to do business for him on the studio lot."

Until he got busted, Mike spent more than two years as a dealer. "Toward the end, I was unloading a kilo a month on the lot. I was making an easy $2000 a day. I'm not saying that everybody snorts cocaine in Hollywood; it just seems like everybody. People on the lot know who's doing it and who isn't. Certain actors, certain film crews, some of the executives; you just get to know who does and who doesn't. And I was busy as hell. For example, if the word got out that I was going away for the weekend, it would take me eight hours to get out of my house. I'm not kidding. The limos and sports cars lined up around the block. My roommate and I couldn't believe it."

The business accelerated and the money flowed. Mike was extremely popular. Bigwigs came to know him and cultivate him. It was life in L.A.'s fast lane. Then envy raised its greedy head, envy in the form of Mike's boss, who wasn't pleased that this young punk was being wooed and pursued by important people.

"I'd told him straight out what I was doing," Mike says, "and for a while, it was OK. But as time went on, I became a threat to him. I was obviously making more money than he ever would. People--powerful people--were calling me up to their offices or asking for me to be home projectionist when they were throwing a party or previewing a film. It got to be too much; that's all. I didn't know it, but my boss alerted studio security. And security hired a private-detective agency. Now, studio security is a joke, but the private eyes were very professional. They infiltrated the lot. I never knew they were there. They came in as plumbers, drivers, outside equipment leasers--whatever could get them into the flow of the place."

Cut to the bust. Mike left the lot for lunch that day with a friend. "Usually, whenever I went somewhere, I'd hide my stash behind a tile in the wall. But for some reason, I didn't do it that day. I came back from lunch and found my boss and two private detectives and the chief of security in my office."

"Open that drawer," the chief said, pointing at the desk.

"What drawer?" Mike asked. He was wary but not frightened.

"That desk is studio property," the chief said, "and you're keeping cocaine in it."

"If it's studio property," Mike said, "then it's yours." He saw that the lock on the drawer had been jimmied. "Looks like you've already opened it."

There followed two hours of arguments and questioning. The chief insisted that Mike wasn't being officially held or charged. Mike asked for an attorney to represent him. He continued to deny that the cocaine in the drawer was his.

"The studio bosses were in the next office," Mike says. "I could hear them. The chief would go in and talk it over with them, then come out and talk to me. They didn't want to call in the police, and they were trying to figure out how to get me out of there. You want to know how dumb they were? It got to the point where they were seriously considering letting me resign and take my stash with me if I agreed to go quietly. You know what stopped them? They decided I might get busted on my way home and the stuff would be traced back to them."

After much discussion, the studio finally-decided the police had to be called in. Mike was arrested, booked, jailed, charged with possession of an illegal substance with intent to sell it. He got a good lawyer and beat the rap.

And how was he treated after that by those who had known him? "The big names stayed away like I had the plague. There was only one stand-up guy, one major star, who would talk to me. He was great. He was a true friend, offered me a job, wanted to know what he could do to help me. The rest of the big shots disappeared. But it didn't hurt my business much. I just started dealing out of my house exclusively." Mike laughs. "The night I got out of jail, a bunch of film editors came by. They wanted to know if they could have my desk drawer. I'm serious. They wanted to salvage the dust in the drawer."

Mike still works in Hollywood. He's a projectionist at a large studio. He's in his mid-20s, and he has a young, kind face, a contempt for his own trade and a need to talk about the business. He does use his own product. "I've tooted every day for the past five years," he says. As we talk, he toots. "I guess I could quit. I guess. What I do know is that coke gets something started in my brain that doesn't normally work." He looks off into the middle distance. We are standing by a projector that is running. It is noisy in the projection room.

"People don't know cocaine. They fall in love with anything they can get. They'd snort baby powder if you gave it to them. It's bullshit. They get off on cosmetics: Is it rocks or flakes? Does it shine? Stupid stuff like that."

•

Behind Mike, as he watches my face for a reaction, I see the daily rushes of a film being run. Two small figures in space suits walk across a bridge that seems to lead nowhere. The horizon is strangely purple and the bridge spans a landscape that looks as artificial as a Rubik's Cube. On a signal from the dubbing room, the projector stops, reverses itself. The figures move backward in a jerky motion, then forward as the sound editors replay it. This happens over and over again. It is boring work.

"Hoo-ray for Hollywood," the song says, and to the rest of the country, Hollywood does seem like a special place, a town filled with money and glamor, a trendsetter and a taste molder. America is as Hollywood does. Which came first, the disco craze or Saturday Night Fever? Video games or Star Wars? Our culture is inextricably linked with Hollywood, for better or for worse.

The Hollywood theory of relativity, now spreading across the country, goes like this: E = MC2 Euphoria = MegaCash2. Euphoria can be purchased if you've got the cash. It comes in the form of a white powder or crystal and is found in many places, from the street corner to the executive suite. The pursuit of euphoria covers Hollywood like a fog and seeps into unlikely corners. Even the guardians of the community are involved.

L.A. police chief Daryl F. Gates on recent scandals involving policemen in Hollywood: "It's like everything is for sale out there. Day in and day out, the officers don't get relief from it ... They see this happening--and all the people participating--and they forget the restraints we put on them. . . If there's a crack in their character, they succumb." Gates goes on to recommend a time limit to duty in Hollywood so policemen don't come down with what he calls The Hollywood Syndrome.

In Hollywood, you can cruise Sunset Boulevard after dark. The hookers are out by the hundreds then. The cops usually don't hassle them. The hookers stand on the corners, at the bus stops, near The Comedy Store, under the huge billboards advertising the latest movies, close to the Chateau Marmont. Any one of those hookers can put you in touch with whatever you want to ingest or molest. Euphoria is there for the buying and is being bought. It is badly needed.

The fact is that right now, there aren't too many hoo-rays in Hollywood. Our national dream industry is running scared in a recession that some people call a depression. Fear fuels the search for euphoria. Moviemaking is in flux, cutting down and cutting back, challenged by cable TV and home video recorders and electronic games and hard economic times across the country. There's not much development money, few films in production, layoffs in all departments, budgets shredded and deals canceled. Public taste is fickle, difficult to chart. Movie stars flicker and die. The land of illusion has collided with a tough reality, and that collision has frightened many people. The fear crops up in random places--in the words of a producer, for example.

He is tanned, smooth, corporate, bloodless in his talk, with accountant's eyes, a white-silk shirt, the smell of lilacs in his shaded office. He invites you to sit opposite his desk, brings you a cup of coffee he has mixed himself, places it on an end table and, for a moment, remarks on your profile, turns your face with his fingers as if he were contemplating your features for a starring role.

"Tell me," he says rather grandly as he returns to his seat, "what kinds of movies do you like?" The discussion is broad, too general; a waste of your time, because you are there to pitch a story, to sell a plot. He knows that. He is toying with you, being slightly bitchy. He has the power to buy or reject, and he wants to lead up to the moment. When he finally asks what you have in mind for a screenwriting project for yourself, you begin with an idea: You want to do a movie that portrays the life of a cocaine dealer who works in a studio. You want to do the story from the inside, The Hollywood Connection, let us say--a realistic portrait of how the white lady has taken over the film industry.

The fear is there instantly. It comes out as defensiveness, disapproval. "I'll tell you this: No one can hold my kind of job and do cocaine,". he says. "I don't know anyone who does it. I've never seen it done. This whole Hollywood-cocaine crap is overplayed." He stands up, moves to the drapes, pulls them more tightly shut against the sun.

"Besides, what right has society to legislate against something that makes a person feel good? What harm does cocaine do? It's a sociable drug, as I understand it. You want to do a movie that makes us look bad? You know who the big dealers are? The police. The narcs. You read in the paper, '300 Kilos of Cocaine Seized.' How do you know it was 300? It was probably 600. The cops took half and then announced the bust." It is a diatribe, not an argument, and there is nothing you can say. You have touched a nerve.

There are false smiles as you are ushered out of his office, handshakes, the suggestion that he definitely wants to keep in touch, hear your ideas, cook up a movie deal. It is pure hype, and you know it. You will never be able to get through to him on the phone again. You have stepped into forbidden territory. No big studio is going to tell on itself.

The bottom line? Today's Hollywood is a place where opportunity rarely knocks. You develop this feeling that you'd better be bright and beautiful every moment. The pressure to be alert, on top, in control, perfect, a creature of brilliance prepared to project that brilliance on a moment's notice, is always there. Cocaine has a way of helping you feel brilliant. At least for a while. Cocaine promotes the grandest illusion of all: that euphoria can be bought. Euphoria = MegaCash2.

•

Babe has this routine he does with his friend's cat. He takes a vial of the cocaine he has been mixing and taps it on the cap. "Here, Archie; here, Archie," Babe calls. Archie, the cat, perks up. He mews and whines. He stands at Babe's feet. Babe wets his thumb and takes a small chunk of cocaine from the vial, smears it on Archie's nose. "Watch," Babe says, smiling. Archie licks his nose. "One blink, two blinks, three blinks!" Babe yells. "Hey, this must be good shit. Not the best, but good. The record is seven blinks," he says. Archie, who has remained paralyzed but blinking, stops licking his nose and wanders off to enjoy the buzz. On a strict ratio of cocaine to body weight, Archie has to be one of the most coked-up creatures in Hollywood.

"Doesn't hurt him at all," Babe claims. "I took him to a vet. The guy couldn't believe the shape he was in for an old cat. See, cocaine is good for you. It cleans out your system, gets the uric acid out of your blood."

Babe, something of an old cat himself, a dealer in his late 40s, makes many romantic claims for the elixir of cocaine, the food of the gods, nirvana in white. Babe worships cocaine. He also toots it most of the time. That does not disqualify him as a dealer. His clients are some of the biggest and the best: producers, directors, actors, business people. He's a popular man who moves several kilos of cocaine per month. When you talk with him for a long time, you sense that he is warm and kind, almost doting. He is a man involved in puppy love, a midlife infatuation not with a person but with a substance.

"I've been stoned for eight years," Babe says, smiling. He is seated at a table with several ounces of cocaine piled on a transparent-plastic blotter. As he talks, he mixes the coke, never taking his eyes off it. "I'm watching the flow," he says. He takes one small speck out of the mixture. He works with the care of a surgeon. "That'll change the whole flow now. You take a little bit out, everything changes. Isn't it beautiful?" All I can see is a white powder being stirred. Babe sees the universe.

There is a ritual for everything. The tool Babe uses to mix his cocaine is a wax carver he bought in a lapidary shop. It's a Peer Stainless Steel Number 13, made in Germany. Nothing else touches the coke until Babe's ready to test it. The carver looks like a small spatula. Babe whips it through the coke like a Chinese cook mixing a wok dinner. Every few minutes, he stops, plucks a pinch from one of the small mounds, puts the carver to his nose and snorts. He speaks of his reactions the way some people describe fine wines: "mellow," "distinguished," "euphoric."

"I'm taking the negativity out," Babe says as he mixes. "It's unbalanced right now. I want to smooth it, make it more mellow. Most coke jangles the nerves. There, you see the way that's flowing? It's getting better.

"I've had some great mixes," he says. "I learned coke at a good time, before it turned to shit. The coke today is from immature plants that don't have the alkaloids you need. The demand is too great. Nobody wants to wait and let the plants grow.

"Seven years ago, I had a mix," he says. "I called it Super One. It was beautiful, soft on the nose, left you with a clean head--no big jag, no false euphoria. I've got some pictures of it around here somewhere. I kept some of it in a bank vault for years."

Babe goes back to mixing. He is coming off a flurry of activity. He has been up for several days, mixing for the past 26 hours straight, testing and weighing and sorting. When he fills a vial with what he thinks is the proper mix, he shakes the vial over and over again, flicking his wrist and watching the powder fall into various formations.

He talks about his time "inside": two stints as a Marine in the brig, including 52 days in solitary; three years in prison for safecracking; two busts for marijuana dealing (a few hundred pounds of grass); several years on Federal probation.

"If they want to lock me up again, they'll have a hard time finding me. Nobody knows where I am. I've got no property in my own name, no bank accounts. I never stay in one place for very long. As far as this society is concerned, I don't exist. Sure, I make a lot of money. Thousands of dollars a week. But I never know where to put it, you know? I keep it around. I carry some of it with me. Mostly, it's in attics and basements. With friends. The only thing I worry about is fire. A couple of fires and I'd be wiped out."

The next afternoon, when we talk, Babe has had some sleep. A strange kind of sleep, granted. He has just scored 2000 bootleg Quaaludes at two dollars each. Street value, five dollars each. He tried one, just to test it. Cocaine gets him up; he needs 'Ludes to bring him down.

We have planned to go out to dinner at a sushi bar. Babe stumbles around trying to get dressed. The tranquilizer is still in effect, and it takes him a long time to put on his pants. "This is shit," he mumbles. "This is no way to live." He toots some coke and brightens up.

"Straight is the best," he says. "I know that. I'm going to get balanced one day. This life ain't worth it. If any body asked my advice, I'd say don't toot. It costs too much and the shit is no good. Maybe if you could get to Peru and chew the leaf, it would be OK. But what we got here is lousy." He stands up, moves in slow motion, struggles to pull up his pants. "I lost $500,000 on the horses in the past five years. Can you believe that? I lost $27,000 last week on them. I should have so much money now. Millions. But I don't. I got maybe $200,000 total in cash spread around. I gamble it or I toot it. That's where my money goes." He makes it into his trousers.

The scene at the sushi bar is both funny and sad. Babe tries to talk about his career. He talks money: He pays about $68,000 for a kilo of coke today; he sells it for about $85,000. He's had as many as six kilos at a time, but that's rare. He sells some coke to other, smaller, dealers at about $2200 per ounce, and they pass it on for $300-$500 more; or they can give it another cut and add to their profit. There's one thing Babe doesn't do: He doesn't cut his cocaine with the crap you usually find on the street these days--coke mixed with quinine or procaine or ephedrine. "May God strike me dead if I ever do that," he says.

The problem is that as Babe talks, his eyes water and his nose starts to run. He wipes his face with a napkin, goes to the rest room and comes back with a huge wad of toilet paper. "I forgot to bring a toot," he whispers. He presses his sinuses, rubs his face again. He is clearly in pain. We rush the meal, drive carefully but rapidly back to his place, and he quickly snorts several lines of cocaine, one thin white line after another. Within minutes, he is better.

Babe and I talk openly, no pretension or self-protection on either side. I have seen him at his worst, and to even the trade, I tell him about my worst: my struggles with alcohol, an early history of South Chicago drugs, a fondness for opium, a later cleaning up. We are, for the moment, not reporter and subject. We're two guys talking, period.

Babe continues to toot as he talks about the hazards of his trade. His brother chisels him, steals the names of some of his clients from his address book and tries to take them over for his own. His son is on coke. The big dealers, the ones who fly in thousands of kilos unmolested from South America, can become dangerous to work with. They tend to go paranoid and crack up, to see the DEA under the soles of their shoes.

There are other problems: Babe's bookie expects special treatment. So do other Hollywood hot-shots. Babe sells on credit to the most powerful people and they end up owing him thousands of dollars. If they don't pay him, there's little he can do except not supply them with any more coke.

And in the room where he mixes and packages, there is a nylon rope coiled in the corner, tied to the foot of the bed. That's for the day when the guys with the sawed-off shotguns appear at the door and shoot their way into the house in an attempt to blow Babe away. He will, he assumes, have time to do a Tarzan, to swing out the window and down the canyon, free as ever, alive to deal another day.

As we talk, I see a ghostly image floating around the room. I see Babe dying. Literally. Slowly. He is pale, slightly soggy in the brain, married to the white lady and no one else.

This thought is interrupted by a phone call. Babe talks in primitive code to the client at the other end. "Ahhh," he says, "you picked up your darling, did you? Was she nice to you? Great. I thought she was nice, too. Wonderful lady. Listen, I'll come by and see you tomorrow, OK? OK. Ciao." He hangs up and smiles. "He got his lady," he says fondly, holding up a vial of the cocaine he had mixed the night before. "She was good to him."

•

The party is up in the Hollywood Hills. The house itself belongs in Hawaii, in Kahala, near Black Point, not here above the California smog. It is huge, modern, tropical, with plants inside and out. There are tiki torches, a trim lawn with a large pool, tables set under a huge tent, a combo playing music of no identity save smooth. Waiters serve drinks: champagne, whiskey, rum, all on trays. Dress is neither formal nor informal. Since this party begins at dusk, some people wear evening clothes; they will be moving on to more formal things. On the other hand, there are people in denim and clogs, sport shirts, puka shells, planter hats.

The producer throwing this dinner is magnanimous, understated, a wonderful host and an unassuming man. He makes introductions that aren't introductions; call them charcoal sketches; brief lines, drawn with words, that sum up a person's best profile, a little Daumier of language, so the lowly writer can meet an Academy Award winner or a German director or a high-powered agent on somewhat equal terms. If there is a class system functioning here, it certainly isn't obvious. People seem interested in other people. Period.

And the talk? It's magnificent, not in a witty, superficial way but in a direct, professional way. You can learn from the conversations around you. This is a working party, a business party. Want a Hollywood orgy with hot tubs and naked starlets? Forget it. Not here. These people have produced and worked with the best, and their lives, they convey, are not wasted. In a very real sense, you sit at their feet. Their credits include many films you've loved in the past ten years. They tell stories about making those pictures. They critique current work, trade notes of who's in and who's out, listen to you when you speak your opinions.

The food isn't pretentious: roast beef, salad, sourdough bread, coffee and wine and liqueurs. The seating is casual: talk to whom you want, move around, joke and learn and laugh. It is a cool night, and as the evening wears on, the party moves inside. There is a huge fireplace in the living room and a smaller one in the library. The lights are low and the fire is warm and Hollywood lies stretched out below you like an electronic map.

If drugs are consumed, it is done very privately, behind bathroom doors, upstairs in the bedrooms, no outward sign that people are getting loaded on anything. The pleasant atmosphere gives the lie to the idea that all Hollywood socialization is corrupt and meaningless.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent his own years working in Hollywood and died there at the age of 44, wrote of the eternal sense of irony of one of his characters: "The old interior laughter had begun inside him." He was writing of Dick Diver, a man consumed and amused by his own charm, a man not unlike Fitzgerald himself. But he could have been writing about you that evening. Your sense of irony is strong while you talk with these bright people. Because while you talk, there is the tinkle of laughter consistently in your inner ear. You know too much about these people. And they do not know that you know.

The producer giving the party owes Babe $17,000. He hasn't seen Babe or called him for months. There are indications that he is going to stiff Babe, politely at first, then toughly.

Other people at the party owe Babe, too. Some of them are nice to him, setting up time payments, giving him clothing and jewelry for barter if they don't have the cash, keeping him posted about their finances. But others avoid him like the plague, cross the street when they see him coming, change their phone number, tell their secretaries to freeze him out.

Without knowing you know, the producer has invited you to a party that is populated, in part, by Babe's clients. It is difficult to keep a straight face when a person who hides from his own dealer carries on a high-flown conversation about life and truth and drama. And it is even funnier when he launches into a discussion of dramatic irony as defined by Aristotle.

"Right," you nod, "the audience knows what the characters don't."

"The basis for all suspense," the person says.

"Riiiight," you say.

•

Mel moves several million dollars' worth of cocaine into Hollywood every year. Moves is the word he prefers. "I'm a mover, not a dealer," he says. "I have only a few clients. I get it to them and they go out and do the dealing. It's a skeletal system. It's in place and it activates at the right time. I get a call. I go pick up some kilos and pass them around. The whole thing is dormant until it's called for. I move stuff maybe once a week on the average." Mel speaks mildly, objectively. We are sitting in his modest apartment in West Hollywood. He seems continually amused at the situation in which he finds himself, and he has some interesting thoughts on the quality of life in the L.A. cocaine world.

"I've been dealing for eight years. I came out here looking for work, something in the music or movie business, but it was obvious that what people really wanted was cocaine.

"Cocaine is the oil in the machinery of Hollywood. But it's fucking up the creative process. Especially free-basing--cooking down the coke to get out the impurities, and then smoking it. Free-basing caught me by surprise. It started in a big way here in Hollywood about three years ago. It's very expensive to do, but I think it's the next big drug habit in the country. It's ruining people here. Did you see 1941? Those people were basing all the time on that set. Did you think that movie was funny? It was chaotic--that's all. They did more than $1,000,000 of base on that film. They made a movie that basically said, 'Look at me, Ma, I'm high.' Basing is a junkie drug, and it's going to kill the cocaine business. And the movie business. And the people in the movie business.

"John Belushi, of course, was doing a lot of basing. You can bet Belushi didn't stick himself. He was afraid of needles." Mel has a slight stutter sometimes. When it occurs, he stays silent for a second. "There were more people with Belushi that night than you ever read about. See, Hollywood PR people have a different job now than they used to have. They used to dream up stunts to get their clients' names into the papers. Now they work at keeping names out.

"I think what we had for a long time was a situation unique to L.A. There was a lot of loose money hanging around. Cocaine was inevitable here. The nature of this town is stimulative. Coke's the focal point. You can tell when you see movies these days, can't you? Where do you get to see movies like John Huston used to make? Basing interferes with production. It screws up the writers, who can't come up with a logical script, and the cinematographers, who make a mess of the visuals, and the sound men, who lose their ears. The crew chases a high and the film falls apart. It happens all the time."

Mel is the only dealer I talk with who makes it through the interview without having to snort some coke. I ask him about that. "Everybody gets high in my business," he laughs. "It's not like other drugs, where the dealers stay away from it. I toot. I just don't like to be under the influence all the time. There's a negative side to cocaine. It's a very powerful drug. It can become your companion. When it does, you're in big trouble. You just can't fuck with it."

Mel speaks like a businessman, thinks like one, runs his life accordingly. "Cocaine is a commodity, that's all," he says. "I have to remind myself sometimes that it's illegal, that I could get 20 years for dealing it without a Federal license. But let me tell you, nobody's going to fuck up this game. No way. Everybody's getting fat off it. Fatted lambs. The underground economy keeps America afloat these days. Some people say 60 percent of the gross national product is underground. A lot of that is coke money, my man. The state of California makes money off us. And if I get busted? The state loses all that cash I'm turning over--and it has to pay to keep me locked up." He laughs. "Besides, what do you think happens when a BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] guy or a narc busts me? He walks into my living room and I've got $3,000,000 worth of coke in my closet and I offer him half of it if he'll go away. What do you think happens?"

When Mel laughs, he sounds mostly bitter. "Coke has gone sour for me. It's no fun anymore. See, I've got a basic problem when I try to sell cocaine. I'm trying to talk people into shoving a powder up their nose. It is not necessarily a natural act. So I hype the mystique of it, the romance, 'the leaf of the gods.' But it's all bullshit; it really is."

We talk for several hours. Mel refuses to be paranoid. Cynical, yes; fearful, no. We leave his apartment together at midnight. When we shake hands goodbye, he shows me a roll of money. "I've got $30,000 on me tonight," he says. "I've got to deliver it downtown. Out here on the street, they'll kill you for nickels and dimes, and I'm walking around with $30,000. So secrecy is my only security. To be successful at this game, you have to be isolated. I don't have any friends, really. I'm not ostentatious. I just do my job as quietly as I can. And as soon as I can, I'm going to stop this shit and get out of town." Mel walks off into the night, briefcase in hand, money stashed in pockets and money belt, a reasonable man in a wild world.

•

On the Strip. Night-life contrasts: You go to a sleazy strip show, naked dancers and naked waitresses, dollar bills left by the audience on the raised platform, said bills picked up in variable fashion by the dancers. After asking around, you find that coke is sold in the alley behind the club--$150 per gram, according to the Filipino with the tattoos and numerous friends who stand laughing at you as you check prices and systems. A police car cruises by the mouth of the alley and nothing changes. You continue to bargain, the Filipino continues to stall, the cops couldn't care less. A dog trots by. He doesn't care, either. As you start to walk away, the-price comes down to $125, then $100. Your lack of interest is taken as snobbishness, and an empty beer can whizzes by your ear, the sound of laughter and swearing, the beat of drums from the record playing loudly inside the club. For a moment, you think you are in a Botero painting. There, at midnight, behind a short picket fence, sits a very young Latino boy in a small lawn chair, his eyes black and nonblinking, taking in the action and the shadows.

Light-years away in terms of economic class but only a few miles away geographically, there's a singles bar you go to that same evening. The word is that Jason, the bar's supposedly cool and connected manager, is doing celebrity coke, dealing to all the Beautiful People with a client list that will knock your eyes out. It's the kind of tip that sounds good at first, and when you get there, you think it's pay dirt: The parking lot is filled with BMWs, Mercedes and Corvettes, and the clientele appears moneyed, neither young nor old, ageless in the dim light of the bar. It is a place filled with hanging plants, posh furniture, low ceilings, the sound of soft rock played by a trio of musicians who wear formal attire. The clientele is gorgeous; the women look like models, the men like ads for hair spray and body building.

What you expect as you are ushered up some stairs and into Jason's office is something subdued, controlled, understated. What you get is melodrama and paranoia rolled into one human package of fear and complexity. A play is being staged for you; Jason stars. He is seated at his desk, a very messy desk, and he is speaking into the phone in a man-of-destiny voice: "I don't care what he says; the inventory's short and he goes. Now. Out. He's a goddamn crook, and I won't have crooks working for me." He slams the phone down. He still hasn't offered to shake hands. You stand there. "One of my bartenders is stealing from me. I ought to kill the son of a bitch." He opens his top desk drawer and pats a pistol. "I have a .357 Magnum within reach at all times. Let me see your press card." He makes a show of checking your features with your picture on the press card. Idly, he toys with the Magnum. It is not a relaxing moment. "I want you to know," Jason says in that same resonant voice, "that I have never dealt cocaine, nor do I know anyone who has dealt cocaine, and I have never used the substance myself. I do not intend to go to jail, understand? I'd kill someone before I let that happen."

The problem is that the man making these pronouncements is strung out. His hair is messed and his eyes are nervous and his face is fatigued. He looks more like a janitor than like the manager of a fancy bar in Hollywood. When he finally hands back your press card and gestures for you to sit down, you wonder if you should simply leave while you can. You suggest that this is probably the wrong time, that he obviously doesn't want to talk with a reporter about anything. Strangely, this tack makes Jason wild. He is insulted that you do not want to interview him that badly. He has stories, he insists. He has the scoop. You should listen. You might learn something.

"You don't mind if I toot, do you?" he laughs suddenly. The coke comes out and the stories begin. There has been an enormous shift in the emotional spectrum of the moment; Jason wants to feel important, and talking with you will help that. He is putting on an entertainment.

Jason talks of busts and taps, of hiding places and hauls. He watches you carefully. He cannot stand neutrality, and he ups the ante continuously, telling taller and taller tales, waiting for you to be awed. If you are to believe him, his clients include all of Hollywood. He names the head of a national TV network, your favorite actor, your favorite talk-show host, your favorite comedian. He rambles, tooting all the time, losing track of his own conversation, then apologizing. "Cocaine can make me irrational," he says.

After three hours, you have exactly two pages of scanty notes. Nothing, by your standards. Jason has been full of lectures and dramas and specious advice, but as a source, he is not worth a damn. The wilder his stories, the less you trust him, and he senses this. It makes him frantic. He has latched on to you, he likes you, and he is afraid because the bar has closed and the Beautiful People have gone from downstairs and he does not want to be alone. You make motions to go and he is immediately at your side. A very big movie star is free-basing at his house right now. Who? Marlon Brando, that's who.

You try not to laugh. Brando is not even in town, and you know it. Jason has never met Brando in his life. You talk gently to him as you move slowly toward the front door. No, you do not want to rent a limo and drive around town. No, you do not want to go to his house or go over for breakfast or meet him tomorrow night.

Dawn is not Hollywood's finest hour. The sky is gray with morning clouds, and the last remaining hookers look like qualified knife fighters. Trash from the night before lies in the gutters.

You split from Jason, conscious that he still carries his pistol. He is now promising great parties during the week ahead. Across the street, he shouts that he may have to fly to Europe in the afternoon; a famous Las Vegas entertainer has run into trouble with French customs and has called Jason for help. The fool was trying to smuggle a vial of cocaine in his shaving kit. Jason had warned him.

Later that week, you learn that Jason is looking for you. He went out and rented limousines for several nights running, thinking that you might come back and play with him. It is his opinion that you owe him $450. He has bills to present, recriminations to make.

•

"I'm not in the drug business, I'm in the people business," Marty says. "Cocaine is the vehicle. Money is the tool. But it's a people business, very intimate and very close. If we ever forget that, we might as well pack up and go away."

Marty's house is in the desert beyond Los Angeles. Somehow, that is appropriate. Marty's business circles spread up and down the West Coast; they are wider than the city itself.

Other dealers have confirmed that Marty is Mr. Big. "Marty?" one of them laughs. "He's something else. He brings in 2000 keys at a time." To understand the awe in his voice, you should understand that 2000 kilos of cocaine have a street value of about $140,000,000.

The word is that Marty has run into some problems, however. "Internal and external," he nods when asked. The problems almost put him out of commission. Right now, he's making his move back into big-league dealing. His presence will, by definition, cut some other people out. The question of who will survive and who will not hangs like a cloud over his desert hideaway.

The house has high adobe walls, TV surveillance, a master control on the TV set in the living room, a set that is always on and that carries the picture of any outside camera chosen. Jack, Marty's friend, switches from site to site, moving from front door to back door to yard to pool to garage to roadway to roof. This switching goes on all evening.

Marty and Jack are both in their late 30s. They dress casually: T-shirts and wash pants and shower slippers. Their studied ease is sometimes broken as we talk. Once, when a shadow flits across the picture of the driveway, Jack bolts out of the room, comes back a few minutes later and laughs at my concern. "It's not cops we're looking for, man," he says. "It's in-laws."

Marty is known in "Family" circles as a mediator, a good negotiator, the man they call if there are two factions that want to settle a dispute without blowing up people. He is also known as an extremely tough cookie, no one to mess with. I ask him about these things. He answers in a low, calm voice. As he talks, he toots some cocaine.

"I learned to be a mediator in my own home, I think. I had brothers and sisters and grandparents and parents, and I recognized the problems of the old and the young. I learned to get people together. So if the Family needs me to help, I'm happy to do it. Listen, before I came out here, I lived in Las Vegas, and I was introduced around there by one of Meyer Lansky's people. That was a tremendous help to me.

"As for free-basing: I do it. I think it's physically addictive. But you have to understand something. I've been dealing for 11 years. And I've been doing coke all that time. Basing is the only thing that can give me some kind of lift. I have a tremendous tolerance for drugs. It scares me. I can't get off on drugs anymore. Basing is not for most people. I'm very concerned about the direction coke is going."

"People are fucking the drug up," Jack says. "They push it beyond its limits. If they'd just use it naturally, carefully. . . ." His words drift off as he watches the surveillance monitor.

Marty describes a day in his life. His day is longer than our day--by about five or six days. That's his time between naps. "I don't sleep much," he laughs. "And when I go out of town to set something up, it gets even worse. I operate on a 25-day cycle then. I might get 50 hours' sleep over that time. I set people up, the drug goes out, then the dollars start to come back in. You'd be surprised; it takes 25 days, no matter where you are, to see the money start to roll in. I'm a very finicky person. I keep close tabs on my people. You can't keep track of your people if you're asleep. So I do base to stay awake. If you sleep too much, things can get out of control. You might get surprised. And I hate surprises. 'No surprises,' I tell my people. I never want to be surprised.

"If you and I were doing business, you'd never come to me. You wouldn't know where I live, what my home is like--nothing. And I wouldn't do business with you unless you were ready to take a minimum of 30--40 keys. Right now, I'd sell you 40 keys at $61,000 per key. That's about $2,500,000. If you can't handle that much, I don't talk to you.

"I deliver to you. That's part of the service. I know where you live. If you screw me, the first thing I want to do is get my money back. That's the goal. If I can't do that," Marty laughs, "then, unless you're my cousin and your mother's still alive, I'll waste you if I have to." He pauses. "But that's bad business."

Throughout the evening, Marty leaves the room at various intervals. He carries a battered leather address book and goes into another room to make calls, to talk to his woman, to free-base. Jack doesn't often leave the living room, but he is restless. He drinks beer. He has more surface energy than Marty and a humor that cuts strange ways. For example, when I explain to him that nothing I write will allow people to locate or label either Marty or him, Jack smiles and says, "You like living?"

When Marty comes back, he tells Jack to put on a tape: Just Another Day in Paradise, by Bertie Higgins, the man who sings of cocaine and smuggling and tropical love. The songs fit Marty's history.

He started in the cocaine business down in the Florida Keys, running boats filled with coke past the Coast Guard's nose, using his years as a Navy man to good advantage.

Various Government agencies tried to recruit him, but he left the Navy when he flunked his Underwater Demolitions Team physical; his lungs weren't good, and without the excitement of UDT training, Marty wanted out of Government service altogether. Because of his contacts, he started high on the coke chain, with access to thousands of pounds of the stuff. Those were the good old days, racing a $100,000 speedboat from Bimini to Miami, unloading the coke and heading back for the Blue Moon Hotel, living a tan and fast and salty life. That's what Marty and Jack remember, the life Bertie Higgins sings about:

"Been working down South,

The old Caribbean boy.

Been burning the Coast Guard

From St. Pete to St. Croix.

Freedom is my wager,

Smuggling is my game.

Cocaine is my pleasure,

'Bout to drive me insane...."

Their life then, in retrospect, makes them smile. But not their life now, not when the DEA and IRS are sniffing around waiting to bust you, not when one of your brothers has been killed recently in an automobile accident on his way to a methadone clinic, when all your role models are dead and the cocaine you used to love can't do a thing for you anymore, when you're stuck inside a desert house that is wired like a spaceship and is as much of a deathtrap as it is a home, when you've got $500,000 worth of coke out on the street in the hands of a dealer who thinks he can screw you, who thinks he is invulnerable, immortal and invisible and has dared you to come out and get him, and you have to do it to prove you can't be fucked with. "I was such a macho kid," Marty chuckles. "I'd take any dare, no matter what. I used to go to school praying, 'Please, God, don't let anyone dare me today.' Because if I got dared, I took up on it."

Indeed, irony of ironies, it is not a good life when you have become basically antidrug, fed up with the crap they put in the white lady, frightened at your own humongous tolerance for free-base, spending your life by a little blue flame in a shiny lamp that cooks your powder for you, frightened even more by the fact that a few months ago you were clinically dead--that's right, dead--all vital signs gone. The doctor brought you back, but he couldn't believe the lab tests. The toxins in your body broke all records for living things.

We talk for a long time. Marty has been up for five days. "This is my best time," he says. "It takes me a couple of days to get started, but about the fourth or fifth day, I feel great. I feel like I'm in control of everything. I'm smarter than everybody else and I've got it made." He toots again. "I tell my dealers, 'It's not what it is--it's what it ain't.' And I mean that. Cocaine isn't cocaine anymore. It's all synthetics. It's crap. So you test it to make sure there are certain things that are not in it."

As I get ready to leave, and after Jack has made one more sweep of the surveillance cameras, Marty and I stand outside in the night air of the California desert. The sky over Los Angeles glows in the distance. Marty is pale, a fatigue beyond tired.

Behind us, the front door is open. Jack stands there. He still isn't sure about me. He says, apropos of nothing, "You know, Marty, the friendlier they are, the deadlier." Jack doesn't trust my smile. There is a silence. Marty and I are cool. We like each other. He understands my job, I understand his weariness and loneliness. Bertie Higgins punches through the desert space. I lean against the railing and listen. It's a good song:

"Gonna get me a room

Down at the Blue Moon,

Gonna get paid, gonna get laid,

Gonna get real, real high.

Won't you send me a tune

Down at the Blue Moon?

So belly up, boys,

Let's make some noise.

Tomorrow we may die."

•

Mantegazza, one of the earliest writers on the subject of cocaine, made the inflated claim that he saw 77,438 worlds during one especially wonderful trip on the stuff. Chances are, he had entered a time warp and was flying over modern Hollywood.

There are arguments about the status of the drug. Some people think it's just now peaking in popularity, others that it's as passé as disco and mechanical bulls. But most observers admit that cocaine is around in a big way and that it's causing problems.

Probably the best conversation I had about it was a brief one held in the Hollywood office of a powerful producer, a man with millions of dollars to sock into film projects that please him, a gentle man who speaks in a whisper and who looks older than he really is. His office is in great disorder--newspaper clippings and cans of film and letters and bills piled at random--and he greets his visitor without getting up from his sofa, slippers on his feet, loose cotton clothing, a Turkish Kayseri carpet hanging on his wall, a small palm in the corner, saddlebags as pillows. You might think you were in Egypt or Morocco.

"I had a friend who wanted me to try free-basing," the producer says softly. His face is heavy, pale, deceptively calm, a quick mind under a turtle's features. "He wanted me to try it because he was doing it and he loved it. He said it was the best experience of his life, better than any other drug, better than sex. I told him I wanted to ask a question first. 'What's the down?' I asked.

"'What do you mean?' he asked me back.

"'What's the down?' I asked again. 'Every drug has a down.'

"'I've never had one with free-basing,' he argued.

"'How long have you been basing?' I asked him.

"'Six months,' he said, 'and I swear to you, I've never been down.' "

The producer sits on his sofa, gazing sadly out the window, like a pasha at a funeral. "He was telling me the truth, of course. He'd been basing steadily for half a year without stopping. No breaks, no coming up for air. With basing, even if you do it only for a day, there's a terrible down afterward. But he couldn't face that, so he just kept on basing. He looked like death warmed over. Which is what he was."

Up in the hills, near a firebreak on the ridge line, a house is burning. You can see it from the office. You have a straight shot at it across the valley, line of sight for half a mile. You and the producer watch silently as the flames leap from the roof and catch in the trees. As far as you can tell, there are no fire trucks in the street, no neighbors showing concern, no family straggling out with belongings and pets and valuables. It is as if the fire has been placed there for your visual entertainment, as if everything's a movie and nothing really matters.

"Death warmed over," the producer says quietly, with only a touch of irony.

"I'm not saying that everybody snorts cocaine in Hollywood; it just seems like everybody."'