Smuggler's Blues: The Saga of a Marijuana Importer by Jay Carter Brown Read Free Book Online

“Remember his sarcastic tone? Wasn’t it you who said he was really telling us that he expected us to do just that? To run home to Canada. Wasn’t it you who said he was actually telling us that that’s what we should do?”
    “Maybe so, but I’ve thought it over. I would rather do my time and have nothing hanging over me.”
    “Who cares what’s hanging over you if you can slip the knot and go free?”
    “I have my future to consider. Some day I might want to take a job in the States.”
    “Future as a jailbird,” I replied. “Suit yourself, Bishop,” I said with a resigned shake of my head. “But five years is a long fucking time.”
    In the end our Canadian lawyer had our case thrown out on a technicality relating to the improper search and we were deported back to Canada.
    On Sidney Goldman’s advice, Bishop and I both left Montreal pretty quickly after that to let the heat die down. Bishop went to Morocco for six months, and Barbara and I went first to England, and then to Bermuda and then to Jamaica where the high life and the action started all over again.

Chapter Two

When You Lose in the Smuggling Business . . .
    My wife and I returned to Montreal where we cancelled the lease on our house in Beaconsfield and prepared to leave for Europe. That decision effectively put our houseguest, Ross, on the street. He was none too happy about it, but there was not much he could say under the circumstances. He ended up back home with his parents while Barbara and I discussed my legal situation and decided that it would be best to leave Montreal for a few months.
    It was October, which is a good time to visit Europe because all of the summer tourists have gone home. The trip would allow us to recapture the same vacation that we’d had to cancel a few years before. Barbara’s older sister, Margaret, was living in England and it would be a great opportunity to visit her. After starting off in England, we could decide later on which European countries we would visit next.
    We landed in Scotland because the fog at Heathrow Airport was too thick to land there and we made our way by train to the north of England where Margaret lived with her banker husband. The two were very happy to see us and welcomed us into their home for the better part of a week. They took us sightseeing to visit a drafty old castle, with a torture chamber that was as cold as ice, and they treated us to our first taste of East Indianfood, which left my stomach queasy and my asshole burning. After a pleasant stay with these in-laws in their small English cottage community, we made our way south to London where Barbara’s younger sister, Brandi, had just arrived from Greece. Brandi was in the throes of a breakup with her Greek con artist boyfriend and was more than a little happy to see us. We stayed close to her fifth-floor walk-up bed-sitter flat in London, in a somewhat nicer but not much newer flat of our own. Both flats featured heaters that operated on meters activated by one shilling coins. Brandi’s flat had a similar setup for her electricity and we howled with laughter every time the lights would blink off and we would have to search around for shillings in the dark.
    I was very unimpressed with London which was crowded, expensive and cold. It was barely October and the chill and the damp cut through my sheepskin jacket like it was made of silk.
    Our friend Bishop arrived at Heathrow airport a few weeks after we did and met us in London where we helped him find a cheap flat to rent. Bishop was on his way to Morocco to kill six months, and I was somewhat envious of his warm destination. When he noted my chunk of hash, which I had purchased from some Colombian exchange students who lived in Brandi’s building, Bishop asked me to get him some. I kept my stash in a matchbox. Just to pull his leg, I told Bishop that I bought my hash from the store on the corner. “Just ask for a pack of matches and give the shopkeeper a ten pound note and