Cape Cod Noir

VARIATIONS ON A

FIFTY-POUND BALE

BY ADAM MANSBACH

Martha’s Vineyard



It is generally agreed upon that at some point during the last several decades, a fifty-pound bale of commercialgrade marijuana, sealed in plastic and lashed with burlap, was found bobbing no more than a thousand feet off Menemsha Beach, in the calm waters separating Martha’s Vineyard from the privately owned, unpopulated Elizabeth Islands.

No consensus is to be had regarding the discoverer of this child-sized brick (child-sized in the sense of weighing as much as a ten-year-old, not in the sense of being an appropriate portion for a preadolescent), nor its fate. The consistency with which otherwise divergent tales pinpoint the size and location suggest a singular event, much as the persistence of flood myths across the whole of the world’s indigenous cultures is taken as evidence that some such cataclysm did occur. The bale is never forty pounds, or sixty; it is never found floating off Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark by nudist Jews, or spotted undulating in the frothy surf of Edgartown’s South Beach by salmon trouser–clad Republicans.

No version accounts for how a solitary swimmer—it is always a solitary swimmer, and the bale is always sighted from the beach, never a boat—managed to maneuver this ottomanshaped prize back to the island’s most public beach without attracting the kind of attention he would doubtlessly seek to avoid.

There are two possibilities. One is that the bale was not spotted during the summer months, and thus the beach was deserted, the boat slips empty, the Hatfield-and-McCoy bloodfeuding fish stores closed. Launching oneself into the ocean in the dead of winter or the dying of fall would have required far greater curiosity or bravery or foolishness or intuition on the part of the swimmer, or else previous experience in large-scale drug trafficking. Perhaps he had one of those. Perhaps he had several.

But if it was summer—as seems likely, that being when people go to the beach—the swimmer would have decided to come ashore somewhere more private. Menemsha Beach ends a few hundred yards east, past a stone jetty. The coastline bunches, like a piece of fabric caught in a sewing machine, and all the land is private. Probably, the swimmer found an inlet or a dock, stashed his bale, and came back for it later with a car. Presumably, the teenage lifeguard on duty was too busy flirting or applying zinc oxide to his nose to notice any of this, or he didn’t care, or he was a friend of the swimmer’s and it was his car in which the bale rode home. Or else the swimmer was the lifeguard himself, which would make a lot of sense: binoculars, elevated chair, nautical aptitude.

It is also possible that it was simply 1973 when all this happened, and nobody raised an eyebrow at a bale of weed, so the swimmer just hauled it straight up onto the sand, where everybody slapped him on the back and said things like “Far out, man,” and grabbed fistfuls to take home.

In one popular version of the story, the guy—let’s call him Zonk—decides the best way to maximize profits (or the only way to make any sales) is to move the load piecemeal, smallbore, eighth-ounces, quarters, dime bags. Who cares how long it takes? Hell, the longer the better so long as it means he doesn’t have to work.

Zonk is an islander, knows everybody, does a little carpentry and a little fishing and plays guitar in a bar band just like fifty or a hundred other still-young-but-getting-older catch-as-catch-can good-time Island Charlies. It’s the 1970s, and Zonk’s got a beat-to-shit Ford pickup he tools around in, only it’s broken at the moment, needs a new fan belt, so he’s been hitching. Luckily, the mechanics at Up-Island Garage are all stoners, so by the weekend Zonk is up and running. He throws the whole bale into the flatbed, ties it down with a tarp, and spends the next few days making the rounds, howdy friends and acquaintances, I come bearing sensi, like he’s the Good Humor Man or something.

A few buddies tell Zonk he’s insane to roll around with the entire load like that, but their warnings are drowned out by the silent approval of the majority. Back then, not only do most Vineyarders not lock their cars, they never even remove their keys from the ignition. Granted, the example is flawed, as few things are less tenable than stealing a car on an island. The point is, there’s a pervasive atmosphere of trust. Which is not to say that Zonk isn’t something of a dipshit.

These days, Brazilians do all the Vineyard’s landscaping, and half the construction; most avoid driving except in a company vehicle, because they’re undocumented and if they get pulled over, they could end up on an airplane. The cops know they’re here, of course, and for the most part, it’s a live-andlet-live landscape, since the island would fall apart without them, but a traffic violation could still bring everything tumbling down. Before the Brazilians, it was Eastern European college kids coming over for the summer to work the cash registers and clean the hotel rooms, Slovaks and Ukrainians and Poles, plus a sprinkling of Jamaicans. But if you rewind all the way to Zonk’s Summer of Bud, the migrant seasonal help is all Irish and predominantly teenage. A lot of them stay together in a kind of barracks out by the airport, long gone now and probably doomed from the moment a building inspector got around to visiting.

The Irish kids come back year after year, trading up from retail to construction as their muscles come in. They bring their cousins, and sometimes their sisters and sweethearts. The girls post colorful, handmade fliers at the Chilmark Community Center and the six town libraries, advertising themselves as au pairs and mothers’ helpers, and make more money than the boys. There is usually a tapped keg of Natural Light or Milwaukee’s Best at the barracks, sitting in a plastic trash can full of ice. If a few of the boys are able to get three days off in a row, they take the ferry to Woods Hole and the bus to Boston, which they call “Southie,” and return with new tattoos.

Sometimes they turn up at islander parties, but the Irish kids make guys like Zonk uncomfortable. There is a sense of menace to them, as if bone-shattering violence is always only another beer away, and what makes it worse is that you can’t be certain you aren’t just imagining it. The Irish boys seem to know what they’re doing. Who they’re supposed to become.

Zonk figures they’ll buy an assload of weed from him, and he is right. The barracks pools its resources, and Zonk lets the McDonnell brothers, Sean and James, chisel him down a hundred bucks on a quarter-pound—more than twice the amount he’s sold to date. He stands there in the middle of the woods with them from early sunset to pitch black, drinking beers and listening to stories about crippling rugby injuries they’ve witnessed and inflicted, then gets back in his truck and motors home to take a nap before the night cranks up.

It’s worth noting that the McDonnell brothers feature in any number of stories, usually as black hat–wearing villains or entropy-embodying Billy Badasses, and that police records from the era reflect no such thing. Sean was arrested four times between 1976 and 1979, twice for disorderly conduct, once for misdemeanor theft, and once for assault. James’s record includes a DUI, an underage drinking charge, and an assault rap. Neither served any time. Not in Massachusetts, anyway.

Zonk wakes up, scarfs down a leftover thing of clam chowder, and makes his way to a small gathering in the town now called Aquinnah and then known as Gay Head. Only when he’s parked, climbed up on the Ford’s flatbed, and thrown off the tarp to grab some nugs for smoking and selling does he realize his stash is gone.

There are a couple of Irish au pairs from the barracks there, the kind of cute, frisky fifteen-year-olds who always move as a duo and only last one summer on the Vineyard because the older brothers or cousins who’ve brought them spend all their time engaged in a furious and losing battle to defend the girls’ purity. Zonk and a few of his bearded fishermen-carpenter compatriots corner them and demand, wild-eyed, to know where Sean and James are.

The girls shrug and tilt their beer cans to their lips, then call over two more fifteen-year-old au pairs. Eventually, it emerges that the McDonnell brothers have their boss’s Jeep for the weekend, and are on their way to Southie.

Zonk, or somebody acting on Zonk’s behalf, calls the Vineyard Haven cops and tells them a red Laredo containing two Irishmen and fifty pounds of marijuana is either boarding the last Woods Hole–bound ferry or has recently reached the mainland and is currently headed north on Route 24.

The cops call the Steamship Authority, learn the ship has left the port. The man who answers the on-board phone, a ferry worker whose name is lost to history or bullshit, is appraised of the situation, asked to confirm the presence of a red Laredo registered to the Tisbury Landscaping & Construction Co., and told to sit tight; the Woods Hole PD will meet the boat and take it from there.

Sensing an opportunity for heroism or grand larceny, the ferry worker unlocks the safebox in the crew quarters, removes and loads the handgun stored there, and makes his way to the cargo bay. There, he finds the Laredo. And the McDonnell brothers, slumped down in the front bucket seats, passing a pint of whiskey.

The ferry worker’s approach lacks artifice. Glancing behind him in the driver’s-side mirror, Sean sees a man snaking through the narrow aisle between vehicles with a gun held low at his side. The McDonnell brothers jump from the doorless Jeep and rush him. No shots are fired; whatever the ferry worker has in mind, he does not have in body. It is also possible that the gun jammed.

Either way, Sean and James McDonnell beat the nameless ferry worker within a yard of his life, and then they either do or do not throw him off the boat into the blue-black moonlit or not-moonlit Atlantic. There is no record of a ferry worker dying, so if they throw him off, he swims. It is even possible, if slightly romantic, to imagine Sean and James providing him with a life vest or an instantly inflating raft, both of which are in ample and accessible supply.

Regardless of how the McDonnell brothers dispense with the ferry worker, it does not solve the problem they now understand themselves to be confronting: namely, that the authorities know what is in the Jeep, and Sean and James are trapped in the middle of the ocean.

Thinking quickly, the brothers do one of three things.

They decide to cut their losses, easy come easy go, and heave the contraband into the water. This possibility is attractive in that it returns the bale of weed to the ocean from whence it came, setting the stage for rediscovery and further adventures. It is even conceivable that the ferry worker, if he too is in the drink, finds the bale and paddles it to shore.

Or else, the McDonnell brothers figure in for a dime, in for a dollar, steal a lifeboat, and load the bale. Then one of them rows home and stashes the shit, denying the limp-dick accusations of Zonk and his weirdo-beardo islander pals, while the other stays with the Jeep, drives it off the docks, and sits placidly on the nearest curb in handcuffs as the WHPD search it to no avail, eventually accepting the baffled officers’ apologies and heading up to Southie.

Or perhaps, and most ingeniously, Sean and James transfer the bale to another vehicle—the flatbed of a truck, perhaps—and one of the brothers stows away there also, with the ferry worker’s gun. WHPD surround the disembarking Jeep and find nothing; meanwhile, some working stiff drives the bale and the hidden McDonnell brother onto the mainland, then is ordered at gunpoint to deliver both to a prearranged rendezvous point, such as the parking lot of the International House of Pancakes just before the Bourne Bridge.

Another equally apocryphal story takes place in the late 1960s. The swimmer—let’s call him Timothy—is a staid, respectable type in his mid-thirties. He and his wife, both professors at a small liberal arts college somewhere in northern New England, have been renting the same Vineyard Haven house each summer for six or seven years.

Timothy is no drug dealer, but he’s no fool, either. Sitting in his basement, staring at this absurd quantity of marijuana, he knows the only sensible thing to do is sell it all at once, as quickly as possible and at an attractive markdown.

Timothy does not move among the exceedingly wealthy, especially not the kind of rich people likely to drop fifty thousand dollars (Timothy’s steep-discount appraisal of the bale’s market value) on reefer. But the exceedingly wealthy are certainly within shouting distance, here on Martha’s Vineyard in glorious mid-August, and they are full of surprises. Why wouldn’t one of them want to lay in a supply of cannabis? The thing to do, Timothy decides, is to proceed as he would were it a barrel of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1945 he’d pulled out of the surf. Only with greater discretion.

Timothy waits a couple of days, then begins making quiet, theoretically phrased inquiries at the cocktail parties he and his wife attend at the rate of two per night. On consecutive evenings, multiple interlocutors invoke the same man as a potential buyer, and here the story trifurcates.

The enthusiast is either a foreign-born energy magnate who owns a palatial spread in Chilmark, a best-selling novelist with harbor-front property in Vineyard Haven, or a glaucomastricken movie star retired to a hundred-acre farm in West Tisbury.

No telling of the story specifies how Timothy manages to secure entrée to the tycoon, writer, or actor—although presumably, as an enthusiastic and pedigreed cocktail party–goer on a miniscule and rarefied island, he is separated from these distinguished personages by no more than one or two degrees.

Trundling his product in a pair of smart new suitcases, Timothy is shown into the Chilmark, Vineyard Haven, or West Tisbury estate sometime around eleven at night, by a servant. A large dinner party seems to have recently adjourned. Timothy is unsure what to do, but the servant—assistant is probably a better word—makes it all very easy. He relieves Timothy of the bags, hands him a personal check for fifty thousand dollars, and asks if he has time to stay for a drink. Timothy says he does, and is shown to a screened porch or den in which half a dozen men are sipping bourbon and smoking cigars.

The actor or writer or tycoon greets Timothy warmly, fixes him a drink, and insists that he tell the story of his windfall. But Timothy finds himself tongue-tied, because among the men who break off talking and turn toward him with an air of inquiry is Frank Sinatra.

Timothy is not starstruck. He is terrified. He has read about Sinatra. He knows the Chairman of the Board is a Mafioso, mixed up with the gangsters who got Kennedy killed. He does not belong in a room with this man—this man and his muscle. For that is what the others are, Timothy realizes at once: the singer’s portable amen corner of New Jersey paisanos, every last one decked out in a gorgeous handmade suit slightly inferior to Il Padrone’s.

A few beats of silence is all it takes for Sinatra to lose interest in Timothy, and when his attention flags, so does that of every other man in the room. Timothy is merely an observer now, and by the time his panic subsides, Sinatra is holding forth on cigars, waving his in the air so that the ember draws a streak of light and telling the star or writer or businessman that what he needs instead of this second-rate crap are some authentic hand-rolled Cubans.

Sinatra drains his glass. It is instantly refilled. He takes it down to half-mast, then calls for a telephone, announcing that he’s going to procure some decent shit.

“Who you gonna call, Frank?” the host asks, chuckling.

“Who the hell do you think?”

A phone is placed on the low table before him.

Sinatra lifts the receiver, dials a zero.

“Hello, sweetheart. I’d like to place a long-distance call.

“Havana, Cuba.

“Mr. Fidel Castro.

“Tell him it’s Frank. Sinatra.”

Nothing else of Timothy’s evening survives to be retold. Sometime the following week, he buys a house in Oak Bluffs, paying forty thousand dollars in cash and taking occupancy the same day. By some accounts, he and his wife have been summering quietly there ever since. By others, the man whose marijuana Timothy brought ashore turns up that weekend. Let’s call him Blackbeard.

Blackbeard is a grizzled old cutthroat from Nova Scotia, a commercial fisherman who’s spent a lifetime trawling the corridors of the Atlantic, the Caribbean—hell, it’s all one ocean when you come down to it, he says, grinning at Timothy and turning to share the sunshine with the towering, snaggle-toothed colleague standing by his side, forearms crossed over a whiskey-barrel chest.

With no further preamble, Blackbeard comes to his point. There was some inclement weather on his last voyage north, he says, spreading his hands, and also some … let’s call it human error. A few pieces of cargo were lost. Word down at the docks is that one of those pieces found its way to land, and into the hands of—

He breaks off, laughs, and tells Timothy that he can probably guess the rest. Blackbeard is here to reclaim his property, and offer Timothy a small finder’s fee.

Timothy, to his surprise, finds that he is not nearly as frightened, standing at his new threshold with two seafaring drug-smugglers, as he was in the presence of Frank Sinatra. His breath remains regular. He shoves his hands into his pockets, and tells the truth.

“I sold it and bought this house.”

Blackbeard does not take the news in stride. He demands to be reimbursed in cash or cargo, and makes clear that his still-unintroduced colleague is conversant in the art of breaking legs.

Still, Timothy does not panic. He asks the men to follow him into his bedroom. From the top drawer of his dresser, he extracts an envelope, and from the envelope a thick wad of bills totaling five thousand dollars. This is all he has left from the sale, Timothy explains, and he offers the money to Blackbeard. In return for this gesture of good faith, he asks that Blackbeard be reasonable, and understand two things: first, that you cannot get water from a stone, and second, that a bale of marijuana is not a lost puppy, or an umbrella. When a man finds one, he can’t be expected to hold onto it until the rightful owner comes around.

Blackbeard’s face darkens, and Timothy adds that he will do everything possible to help the sailor recover his property from the man now in possession.

This man, Timothy assures him, is no stone.

Blackbeard stares at the professor for a moment, eyes narrow in the leathery pockets of his skin. Then he takes the envelope, hands it to his colleague, and growls, “Well?”

Haltingly, as if already regretting the deal, Timothy tells Blackbeard that the buyer is a man of tremendous wealth and discretion, whose name he does not know. But he is staying on a 168-foot yacht called The Southern Breeze; it is anchored in the middle of Vineyard Haven Harbor, between the drawbridge and the yacht club, accessible only by small craft. One must give the security guard a password in order to come aboard. The required phrase is “Cigar delivery from Mr. Castro.”

Blackbeard departs with threats and invective, pledging to return if Timothy’s rich customer gives him any trouble at all. That night, he and his colleague pilot a dinghy out to the yacht, equipped with a password, a plan, and a cache of small arms. They are not heard from again.

A wholly different version of the story holds that the entire bale of marijuana is eaten by goats. This is either accidental, or orchestrated. If orchestrated, the idea is to slaughter the livestock and sell the THC-laden meat, as a low-risk, high-reward method of alchemizing the marijuana into money.

This tale is always set in the mid-1980s, when recreational cocaine use is widespread, and hair-brained schemes abound. Most accounts claim the goats are killed as planned, and that for the remainder of the summer, the menu of a fine-dining establishment in Chilmark (long gone now, but infamous throughout the Reagan years for occasionally paying its kitchen staff in narcotics) features a fifty-eight-dollar braised goat stew. Despite the price, exorbitant even by the standards of Vineyard eateries, the dish sells out consistently.

An alternate telling has the goats, stoned out of their gourds, wandering off their owner’s property and laying tragicomic siege to a large outdoor wedding party being held on an adjacent plot. But such a thing is clearly too outrageous to be taken seriously.