Read an Excerpt
Saltwater Cowboy
By Tim McBride, Ralph Berrier Jr. St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 Tim McBride
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8238-6
CHAPTER 1
After a three-hour workout, I tossed a towel over my shoulder, picked up my water jug, and went for a walk to cool down.
Finding an empty bench was rare at that time of the evening, so when I saw one, I sat down for a while. I took off my shoes and socks, and I stretched my legs out so I could feel the cool grass under my bare feet. I sat there with each arm over the back of the bench and my head tilted back toward the evening sky.
Hearing the activities of others around me gave me a measure of contentment. There was the ricochet of a racquetball being struck, the ringing bang of a bouncing basketball, squeaking shoes as players ran up and down the court. I closed my eyes. I could hear an occasional jogger go past and birds singing as they prepared to roost for the night in one of the five trees in the yard. I opened my eyes in time to catch a glimpse of a moth drawn to the lights that had come on. It struggled against the same cool breeze that was drying the perspiration from my body.
This might sound like any of a thousand parks and any one of a million park benches in America. But this was the upper compound rec yard of the federal correctional institution in Tallahassee, Florida, and I was sharing it with 1,100 other convicted felons. It was 1991, I was the property of the US federal government, prisoner identification number 09498-018, and I was in hell.
I'd been here three years, and it was still hard for me to get used to the idea that I had seven more to do. It is a dose of harsh reality when you come to the realization that the world as you once knew it doesn't exist anymore. My whole world now was a little patch of land surrounded by two fences, separated by a twenty-foot stretch of land filled with razor wire, referred to as no-man's-land.
Every one hundred yards or so, those two fences met up with a concrete and brick structure that stood roughly fifty feet tall. Those were the half dozen or so gun towers. Behind the mirrored glass inside each tower were two armed guards standing vigil, their rifles in hand, just waiting to put a hole in your head should you decide to try your luck and make a break for home. If you were lucky enough to somehow make it past the interior fence, no-man's-land, and the exterior fence, you would surely be met by one of the two vehicles circling outside. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and three hundred and sixty-five days a year, those sentinels stood ready with their dogs and their rifles. The guards controlled the convicts' movements. That's what they called it—"controlled movement." They told us when to get up, when to eat, went to move from one area of the prison to another, when to piss, and when to sleep.
You see, there were only two ways for us convicts to get out of there. You either did your time like a good con, or you died. In a sense we were all castaways sharing the same desert island. Eating together, sleeping together, and growing older together.
That said, the most difficult obstacle wasn't the lack of control. It was the terrible feeling of loneliness and yet never being alone.
The time was nine thirty p.m., and over the intercom came those all-too-familiar words:
"Lockdown ... Lockdown ... All inmates return to your unit and prepare for ten o'clock count."
Everything began to wind down. All 1,100 of us would soon be locked into our units. I got out of my sweaty clothes and took a quick shower, then stood around bullshitting with a few guys near my cubicle.
Ten o'clock came and two guards approached. One remained at the door while the other shouted, "Stand next to your bunk, ladies, and shut up ... It's count time!"
So we all stood up straight next to our bunks, and one by one we were counted, like cattle in a pen. The first guard to do the counting must have been a fucking moron or something because when he did his count, he would take a bean from one pocket and put it in the other for every con he counted. After completing his round, the second guard would repeat this process. Only difference was that this guy could remember his count. Afterward we were left standing there while he helped the dumbass figure out how many beans he had in his fucking pocket. When the count was done, the guards would leave and lock us in for the night. We would now have one hour to do whatever we cared to do until lights-out.
Every night at that exact same time, my buddy George and I played as many hands of gin rummy as we could until lights-out. George lived about eight cubicles away from me. I knew that he was locked up because he'd been a bank robber, and he knew that I was in for drug smuggling. But it was the kind of secondhand knowledge that was rarely, if ever, discussed. He was a man of many years—and by "many years," I don't mean just that he was in his mid- to late sixties. I mean that he had been there for twenty-eight years before I met him.
George was a kind man and very soft-spoken. When he did speak, it was with a slow Southern drawl. He stood only about five foot six, with a thin face and piercing green eyes. His brown hair was streaked with silver, and he liked to comb it straight back. He was like a father to me. Of course I had a real father, but that was in another life, in an alternate reality.
We could talk about anything, George and I, especially when one of us was having a bad day. Those days didn't often happen, but when they did, they were very emotional. You constantly trained your mind to leave your old life behind in order to live the new prison life that was ahead of you. But sometimes your mind just couldn't help but drift beyond those fences. You started thinking about how good it felt to be free. My friendship with George was a special one. We helped each other stay behind the fences. It was the kind of bond that is virtually impossible to achieve in the outside world—and often the only thing that allows you to keep your sanity in a world where insanity reigns. Playing cards was a ritual that helped get us through. We talked about what went on that day. Who got busted, who got his ass kicked. Any other prison bullshit.
But George must have been in a pensive mood that night because he asked me a question we'd avoided over the preceding years. It was the same question I had asked myself dozens of times after lockdown, as I lay on my bunk and stared at the ceiling. A question that, for no matter how long I considered it, I could never answer.
"Timmy, how in hell did you wind up here, anyway?"
CHAPTER 2
How did I end up in prison? How did an outdoors-loving boy from the Midwest wind up as one of the most successful marijuana haulers in the United States? When you look back at my childhood and where I came from, you don't see the stereotypical story of a poor kid from a rough neighborhood who seems destined for a life as an outlaw. You see a kid who was born near a military base and who grew up in a nice neighborhood on a lake. You just never know how these stories are going to turn out.
I was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina. My father was with the 82nd Airborne, stationed at Fort Bragg, so I guess that makes me an army brat. My father's career went from jumping out of airplanes to jumping into them, as he traveled to every city on the East Coast, selling construction equipment. He was gone for months at a time, so I didn't see much of him while growing up. That was just how it was.
My mom went to work each day several towns over as a swimming instructor and an educator to children with special needs, jobs she held all through my early years. She taught my oldest brother, Mike, to swim in the bathtub before he could walk. My middle brother, Pat, and I were taught to swim by age one. There was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing even the least bit dysfunctional in our family life.
My brothers and I were raised to be independent. However, if we strayed out of bounds by even the slightest margin and my old man was around to see it, he would snatch us back and make those boundaries very clear. Dad was a harsh disciplinarian. He grew up getting his ass whipped by his old man, and he believed it had made him the man he was. It was a tradition, traceable back to the days when young dirty-faced, barefoot boys would be sent on merciless quests to retrieve the very switches that would be used to emboss their fathers' message across their asses. It only made sense to my father to continue the tradition; he believed firmly in it. That was just the way it was in those days. Mom tried to follow suit in his absence, but we boys outgrew her gentler brand of discipline.
The memories of North Carolina are very vivid and very fun. My family's roots are in Ohio, so my grandma and grandpa, aunt and uncle (who was my mom's brother), and cousins shared a beach house with us each summer on Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It wasn't all that far from where I was born, and the best part is that it was right next door to a miniature golf course. As kids we would play on the beach and in the surf during the day, and after dinner each night, right up until bedtime, we would play mini-golf. Then it was bedtime and the adults' turn to cut loose. They partied as we kids sat in the upstairs windows that overlooked the spinning windmill, the mysterious lost cave, the impossible maze. We could see the grown-ups as they drank, smoked cigarettes, and danced to the doo-wop and Motown that blasted from loudspeakers hung from lampposts, where strings of brightly colored lights lined the boardwalk.
As I approached my teen years, my father's sales career took off and he was given a Midwest territory that included Milwaukee and Chicago. I guess the company figured he could utilize either city's airport to keep up with his East Coast territories. So we settled in between, in Wisconsin, on the north shore of a lake that bears the town's name: Delavan. This is where I began and finished high school. And where I would be introduced to the leafy green plant that changed my life
* * *
This is how I remember my family's home. North Shore Drive is one of those lazy, shady, slow-winding back roads that, at times, tunnel their way beneath the branches of two-hundred-year-old oak trees. You can taste the cool, crisp lake air in the spring as it passes over your tongue like a sweet drink. The mailboxes and oak trees, those beautiful lake homes and brightly colored summer cottages, flit by like frames of a film. Just ahead a mailbox reads "McBRIDE." This is where you turn in. The driveway doesn't go all the way up to the house; it ends at the three-car garage just off the road. From there you take a quaint, but not very useful, flagstone path that winds through the backyard around a huge Sitka spruce and up to the house. When the home was built in the late 1800s, I'm guessing more thought went into its craftsmanship than how far it was from the road.
Once you enter, it immediately feels like home. No matter the time of year, there's a lingering hint of roasted firewood. Across the expanse of that spacious living room and just beyond the huge river-stone fireplace is the showcase of the home: a true picture window that spans the width of the house and affords a view so spectacular it looks like a painting. The lawn is greening up and attempting to show off its meticulously mowed and manicured surface—sculpted, of course, by yours truly. The flowers are soon to blossom in their beds, and the afternoon sunlight looks like fireworks on the rippling surface of the lake.
Look a little farther to the right of this scene and there are pieces of lumber of various sizes and lengths stacked neatly along the bank—that would be our dock. The lake is roughly a half mile across to the south shore here, at its widest, and stretches just a bit over four miles in length. A lake this size freezes over during winter, and the thick ice shifts and moves as the months pass. If the docks aren't removed from the water by October, they'll be locked in the frozen lake's grip; then the slowly shifting ice will have them splintered into firewood by December.
I remember this time clearly. It was the middle of May. I was sixteen, and my brother Pat was seventeen. Our big brother, Mike, was twenty and off to see the world as a proud US Marine. So this annual chore of reassembling the dock rested solely on our shoulders, and it was by no means a two-man job. So he and I piled into our hand-me-down powder-blue 1966 Chevy step-side pickup truck and took off for town to recruit a few friends to help us reassemble that pile of lumber in the front yard for the coming summer. It really wasn't hard, and it took very little time to get four of our buddies to sign on. Most of our friends came out and helped just to be there kicking back on the lake. We were back home with a crew in tow in less than an hour.
But before we began, the guys took a little walk out to the end of the driveway, past the mailbox and across the road. I followed, of course, curious to see what they were up to.
I knew about weed. I knew it was illegal, but I had never seen it and I had never smoked it. When one of the guys pulled out his pipe, I didn't give it much thought. Sure, I'd try it.
First came the flavor, then the stupefying shift in consciousness followed by a bout of coughing. Even at sixteen, I knew about the disastrous effects alcohol had on my thinking process and my overall ability to function, not to mention the wretched hangovers and disgusting expulsions of everything I'd had to eat or drink the day before. Smoking weed was so much different. I never lost control of my thoughts or my actions. Instead, I experienced hours of giddy excitement and random bursts of joyous laughter. It did not make me sick or hungover, nor did I have any regret for having smoked it. It was like the world around me had slowed its pace, allowing me for the first time to truly appreciate what it had to offer. The sights, the sounds, the smells that were suddenly awakened around me—they had always been there. What had been missing was a way to tune into this elusive sensory buffet. Mother Nature provided the means in the form of the contents of that little brass pipe.
The first time I tried marijuana, I found it difficult to keep a straight face as I reentered the house. The other guys and my brother went about their day as usual, and I ... Well, let's just say I wasn't ready to build the dock quite yet. The boys made their way out the front door and along the walk to the steps leading down to the lake's edge.
At that moment my mom called out to me from what sounded like the other end of a long tunnel. I couldn't tell you what she was yelling about; I just knew I had to get out of there fast. But for each step I took toward the door, it retreated the same distance. Determined to escape, I made a lunge and caught it.
I went outside, where my brother and our buddies somehow managed to put that dock together without any problems. We bullshitted and swam around for a while before returning to the house. There, every cabinet and pantry shelf in or near our kitchen came under siege. My mom was in the living room glued to the TV set, fully engrossed in a new episode of M*A*S*H and didn't even blink when six of us ran past her with the screaming munchies.
That summer turned out to be a blast, and getting stoned was the turning point. I saw that there was no harm done, no fouls committed. For the months that followed, my friends and I woke up early each morning to water-ski and trick-ski before the lake traffic made it too rough.
One of those friends was a guy named Clark. He was four years older than me, the same age as my oldest brother, and we became tight. He lived right next door, which made for easy access to the perfect ski boat, an eighteen-foot Chris-Craft Century inboard. As summer waned and school began, we skied before I went to class and again after. When the leaves turned, we donned our wetsuits and did the same, right up until the first snow.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Saltwater Cowboy by Tim McBride, Ralph Berrier Jr.. Copyright © 2015 Tim McBride. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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