the neighborhood guys who would stop by our house from time to time. I didn’t really know Dave. The five or six year difference in our ages seemed eternal, and neither of us had much interest in closing the gap. Dave graduated from the neighborhood high school, served a hitch in the Navy, and came home to find whatever work he could as an electrician.
The Navy had introduced Dave Blott to the bliss of cannabis. He found no shortage of ways to maintain a steady supply once he got out. He was, after all, living in El Paso. As a friend of Jack Stricklin, it was only natural that they would do business, sharing small loads of a kilo or two and breaking them down at $10 an ounce. Like Jack, Dave began to see the possibilities of scaling up. But Jack was going away to serve his own hitch in the Navy. He tried in vain to put Dave Blott together with Mike Halliday. But as good as he was at making connections, Jack Stricklin had thus far failed to link his two most reliable sources of supply.
MIKE HALLIDAY
At the time, I was living in the alley on Hastings Street. It was actually a house that was in the alley. And right across the alley was another little house. Anyway, this place had a glass-enclosed porch that was full of mismatched stuff. It was too cold to sleep there in the winter and too hot in the summer. We lived there probably two and a half years. The only time I slept in that little room was on that night. My son Mikey had an earache so I put him in bed with Karen. That’s why I was on the porch.
It’s about ten or eleven o’clock. I hear a car drive up and park in the alley, and I think, “Oh shit, is somebody here to see us?”
I look outside. It’s the guy who lives across the alley and another guy. They get out and open the trunk and start pulling out duffel bags and hauling them inside. I’m like, “Holy shit!” It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out, right? It was probably more pot in one place than I’d ever seen.
So the next afternoon, I’m waiting for my neighbor when he pulls up around 4:30. He gets out of the car, and I say, “Hey, I live across the alley, I’m Mike.”
“Yeah, I know who you are,” he says.
“Well,” I say, “I just want to talk to you about something.”
“What’s that?”
“I happened to be on the porch last night when you guys pulled up.” He gets this look on his face like he doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. So I say, “Hey, I just want to buy something, man.”
That turned out to be Dave Blott. It kind of shows you what a small town El Paso was back then. Here’s this guy Jack was always trying to put me together with, and there he was living right across the alley about twenty feet away.
The issues Jack Stricklin would have with authority were a minor annoyance compared to the issues authority would have with Jack Stricklin. With pot consuming more and more of his time and Jack consuming more and more pot, school ranked somewhere below wash the car on his list of priorities. Academic probation was followed smartly by double academic probation, which preceded academic suspension.
After about a year and a half of college, Jack had finally exhausted his final reprieve. He was reclassified 1-A, declared fit for service and about to receive his greetings from the local draft board. Few escaped military induction in the late ’60s.
To Jack, joining the Navy seemed the least objectionable alternative to the rifle and rucksack clusterfuck of Vietnam. The Navy, of course, was in Vietnam up to its waterline, but they mostly slept in soft beds and ate hot chow. The only downside to enlistment was a four-year hitch versus the two years Jack would have owed had the draft come calling. The Navy attracted more than its share of college boys willing to serve, but unwilling to be sacrificed. Be All You Can Be resonated with far more appeal than Join the Army and Die. Unfortunately for the Navy, education and blind obedience were largely incompatible qualities among recruits of the day. But this was the era of the body count and Jack Stricklin’s body would count just fine on the deck of a ship headed, of course, to Vietnam.
Jack would handle the Navy like he handled everything else—he would make the best of it. His father had served, and he too would do his duty. But he did it on his own terms, which actually meant doing as little of his duty as was humanly possible.
Jack had been assigned to the USS Wichita, the lead ship of the Wichita class replenishment oilers. Having undergone refitting at the Boston Naval Shipyard, the ship made its way to Long Beach where he joined the crew. In a few months they would be refueling ships operating on Yankee Station in the South China Sea.
Jack Stricklin found his groove in the spit-and-polish Navy thanks to the one ability he actually mastered in high school—typing. If you’re going to fight a war, the typewriter may not be the sexiest weapon in the arsenal, but it could be the most powerful. Armed with little but a lightweight bond and a single sheet of carbon paper, Typist Mate Jack Stricklin could inflict more damage than a company of Rangers. Here is where the true power lies. Single-spaced, in triplicate.
It was a job he could do in a coma. Jack spent most of his time staying high, and the rest making sure every shipmate who cared to join him was well-supplied. Even then, Jack knew he didn’t want to sell joints or grams. The reward hardly justified the risk. So he organized a network of distributors to sell his pot from stem to stern, making sure there was ample margin for everyone. It was his first real distribution network and it seemed to be working just fine.
With Mike Halliday and Dave Blott keeping him supplied, Jack was probably making as much money every month as most of the officers in his chain of command. He was definitely having more fun as he counted off his days on an advent calendar stocked with tightly rolled joints. It took Jack Stricklin no time at all to figure out the Navy and how best to endure his hitch. Now it was just a matter of doing the time.
JACK STRICKLIN
Mike Halliday and Dave Blott were my suppliers. One or the other usually had pot. At first, they’d send me a little for my own personal use. Then everybody started coming to me, so I’d get more and more.
Mike was a total genius when it came to packaging pot. He’d seal it up in coffee cans, cereal boxes, cookie tins—all the things you’d send a guy in the service. The pot was always manicured and packaged like it just came off the shelf. I was getting the whole ship high.
One of the guys on the ship—a black guy—he was a regular buyer—a distributor. He was a good guy. I’d even front him the pot sometimes. He always paid. Well, one day this guy gets in a fight with another guy—I mean, he beat nine shades of shit out of him. And the guy that took the beating got even by ratting him out.
So when the Shore Patrol shows up to arrest my guy, they find a list of names that he carried in his pocket. My name was at the top. Well, they came down on me even harder than they came down on him. They offered me everything but a commission if I would name names. But that wasn’t going to happen, so I was court martialed and convicted—my first pot bust. It was an eye-opener.
The lesson I learned was that it’s not always your own fuckup that gets you. You can be as careful as you want, but if you don’t surround yourself with people who are smart and loyal, you’re not going to survive. What kind of fucking pot dealer walks around with the name of his supplier written down in his pocket?
I never
