No more of that dilly-dong bullshit on Whittier Boulevard. Oscar's drug bust was still alive on the Evening News when he was evicted from his apartment on three days' notice and his car was either stolen or towed away from its customary parking place on the street in front of his driveway. His offer to defend his two friends on what he later assured me were absolutely valid charges of first degree murder were publicly rejected. Not even for free, they said. A dope-addled clown was worse than no lawyer at all.
It was dumb gunsel thinking, but Oscar was in no mood to offer his help more than once. So he beat a strategic retreat to Mazatlan, which he called his "other home," to lick his wounds and start writing the Great Chicano novel. It was the end of an era! The fireball Chicano lawyer was on his way to becoming a half-successful writer, a cult figure of sorts -- then a fugitive, a freak, and finally either a permanently missing person or an undiscovered corpse.
Oscar's fate is still a mystery, but every time his case seems to be finally closed, something happens to bring him back to life. . . And one of them just happened again, but it came in a blizzard of chaos that caused a serious time warp in my thinking: my nerves are still too jangled for the moment to do anything but lay back and let it blow over.
The Flash Man Cometh. . . Queer News from Coconut Grove. . . Murder, Madness & The Battle of Biscayne Bay. . . The Death of a Cigarette Boat & A $48,000 Misunderstanding. . . Res Ipsa Loquitor. . .
A screech owl the size of a chow killed two of my peacocks on the front porch. The county attorney called the cops on me for interfering with the work of a labor crew painting yellow stripes on the Woody Creek Road. The antique winch-powered crossbow that Steadman sent over from England was seized and destroyed by sheriff's deputies and a man named Drake from Miami spent all afternoon at the Hotel Jerome, demanding my phone number from the bartenders because he claimed to have a bizarre message for me.
Then Sandy came back from the store with the mail and the latest issue of Newsweek, the one with the photo of Caroline Kennedy rolling Jann through the door of Elaine's on that custom-built, cut-glass dolly from Neiman-Marcus. Sandy didn't even recognize him at first; she thought it was a photo of Caroline and Bella Abzug on the campaign trail.
We went out on the porch, where there was plenty of light, to get a better look at the photos -- but the sun made me blind for a moment, and just then Tom Benton came howling into the driveway on his 880 Husquavarna, and when he saw that story in Newsweek (you know Tom, with that fine artist's eye that he has), he said, "Well I'll be fucked, that's Jann! And look at the wonderful smile on him. Wow! And look what he's done to his hair. . . and those teeth. No wonder he moved to New York."
Benton was taking off his leathers as he talked. He'd been riding up on the logging roads in the high pastures behind his house, looking for a rogue bear that tore the top off his jeep and killed his mule last week.
"I just want to hit him with this Taser, then chain him to a tree until we can go up and get him."
"Get him?"
He nodded. "It's that grizzly pup that Noonan turned loose before he left town. He's about a year and a half old by now, and he's starting to act crazy."
"Fuck the Taser," I said. "It's not good beyond fifteen feet. We'll need the M-79, with CS grenades, then drag him down with a jeep."
"No," he said. "I want to get the bugger in a van, then drive him into town and back the van right up to the side door of that restaurant where all the lawyers eat lunch. They'll love him."
"Wonderful," I said. "Shoot him right into that private dining room where they have those Bar Association luncheons -- feed him a whole bucket full of acid and raw meat, then take him into town for the meeting."
Benton started to laugh, then stopped and reached into one of his pockets and handed me a small envelope. "Speaking of lawyers," he said, "I almost forgot -- there's a guy from Miami in town who says he has a message for you, from Oscar."
I flinched and stepped back. "What?" I said. "Who?"
"Yeah," Benton said. "Oscar Acosta, the Brown Buffalo." He shook his head. "This guy has a very very strange story. It's so strange that I wasn't even sure I should come out here and tell you."
"I know all those stories," I said. "Hell I wrote most of them -- and besides, Oscar's dead."
Tom opened two more beers and handed me one.
"Not according to this guy Drake," he said quietly. "He says Oscar almost got killed about two months ago in Florida. They took a midnight ride out to Bimini in Drake's boat, and on the way back they got ambushed at sea and a friend of Oscar's got killed -- and Drake's $48,000 Cigarette boat was a total wreck; he says it was so full of bullet holes that they almost sunk in midocean."
"Bullshit," I said. "That's impossible."
He shrugged. "Well, that's what Solheim said. But he talked to Drake for a long time last night and he says the guy is absolutely positive. He even had a photo." I suddenly remembered the envelope I'd been holding. "Let's see what this is," I said, tearing off the end. Inside was a paperback book cover, folded lengthwise -- the cover of Oscar's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, with a picture of the author on the front and a message scrawled on the blank side. "Dear Thompson," it said. "Please call me as soon as you can. Very urgent. Acosta might be in bad trouble. HEAT! Not much time. Call me in #353 Hotel Jerome. Thanks. Drake."
"Jesus," I muttered. "Why the hell does he want to talk to me?"
"He's looking for Oscar," Benton replied. "And so is the Coast Guard -- and the DEA and the FBI and half the cops in Miami."
"So what?" I said. "He's been dead for two years."
Tom shook his head. "No, Drake says he's still working in and out of Florida, running a lot of white powder."
"I doubt it," I said.
"Well Drake doesn't," he replied, "and he's about to turn him over, unless Oscar pays for his boat. He wants forty grand and he says he knows Oscar has the money."
"Balls," I said. "We should have this bastard locked up for blackmail."
He shrugged again. "Hang on. You haven't heard the rest of it. Drake's talking about murder, not drugs."
"Murder?"
"Yeah. Drake says the Coast Guard came up with three bodies after that ambush, and two of them didn't have heads. Oscar ran that Cigarette boat right over the top of a Boston Whaler with at least two guys in it."
I stared at him for a moment, then went over to the couch and sat down. "Jesus Christ!" I said. "Let's go back and run the whole story again. I must have missed something."
You are better lost than found.
-- Clement Robinson
Which was true. The story I got from Benton was from Mike Solheim, who got it in spades from a total stranger who said his name was Drake and who showed up in Aspen one afternoon, looking for me because he thought I could put him in touch with Oscar Acosta -- a "dead man" who somehow showed up at Drake's home in Coconut Grove one night last summer and offered $5,000 in cash for a midnight ride out to Bimini and back in Drake's new $48,000 ocean racer with no questions asked.
It was not the kind of business proposition that a veteran dope smuggler like Drake would have been likely to misunderstand. There are only two possible reasons for even owning a thirty-five-foot-long bullet-shaped fiberglass hull with two 370 horsepower engines on the back: One is to win races in the open sea at speeds up to 90.555 miles an hour (the current world record, set by the "World Champion Cigarette Racing Team" in 1976) and the other has to do with the virtually priceless peace of mind that comes with doing business in a boat that will outrun anything the U.S. Coast Guard can put in the water.
So there was no need for Drake to ask why these two cash-heavy Mexicans needed his boat, or even why one of them came aboard with a Uzi submachine gun. He had made this run before, and even on moonless nights he felt he knew every bump in the water, even at sixty miles an hour. . .
But he was not ready for what happened on the way back from Bimini this time: They were almost home, sl
owing down to half-speed or less about a mile off the south tip of Key Biscayne, when he was suddenly blinded by spotlights coming into his face from the front and both sides and the whole night erupted with gunfire. The Mexican with the Uzi was dead on his feet before Drake even heard the first shots; the Uzi bounced into the water and the Mexican sat down in the cockpit with at least ten big holes in his chest. Drake felt his boat shuddering in the water as the hull started coming apart in the crossfire. "We're surrounded!" he screamed. "They're killing us!" Then he fell down and tried to hide himself under the dead man just as Oscar got his hands on both the wheel and the throttle at the same time. The big speedboat lunged forward with a roar and the next thing Drake felt was an airborne jolt as his boat ran straight over the top of a twenty-foot Boston Whaler. . . and suddenly there was no more shooting as he felt the boat moving toward Miami at sixty miles an hour with the cockpit six inches deep in blood-colored water and Oscar screaming in Spanish as they started coming up, too fast, on the lights of Dinner Key.
Drake stood up and took the wheel. The boat felt like it was coming apart in his hands as he aimed for a clump of trees on the dark end of the marina. By the time he felt the jolt of a sandbar under his feet, Oscar was already going over the side with the small suitcase they had picked up in Bimini, and that was the last time Drake saw him.
The boat stayed miraculously afloat long enough for him to hump the dead man and dump his $48,000 wreck about a half-mile down the beach in a place where he could drive it up under some branches and watch it sink out of sight in five feet of dark water. Drake covered the hulk as well as he could, then slogged out to Biscayne Boulevard and hitchhiked back to Coconut Grove where he spent the next forty-eight hours locked in his bedroom and trembling with a fear worse than anything he'd ever felt in his life.
This wild and puzzling story out of Coconut Grove was only the latest of a dozen or so "Brown Buffalo sightings" in the past two years. Everybody who knew him as even a casual friend has heard stories about Oscar's "secret life" and his high-speed criminal adventures all over the world. Ever since his alleged death/disappearance in 1973, '74 or even 1975, he's turned up all over the world -- selling guns in Addis Ababa, buying orphans in Cambodia, smoking weed with Henry Kissinger in Acapulco, hanging around the airport bar in Lima with two or three overstuffed Pan Am flight bags on both shoulders or hunched impatiently on the steering wheel of a silver 450 Mercedes in the "Nothing to Declare" lane on the Mexican side of U.S. Customs checkpoint between San Diego and Tijuana.
There are not many gypsies on file at the Missing Persons Bureau -- and if Oscar was not quite the classic gypsy, in his own eyes or mine, it was only because he was never able to cut that high-tension cord that kept him forever attached to his childhood home and hatchery. By the time he was twenty years old, Oscar was working overtime eight days a week at learning to live and even think like a gypsy, but he never quite jumped the gap.
Although I was born in El Paso, Texas, I am actually a small town kid. A hick from the sticks, a Mexican boy from the other side of the tracks. I grew up in Riverbank, California; Post Office Box 303; population 3969. It's the only town in the entire state whose essential numbers remained unchanged. The sign that welcomes you as you round the curve coming in from Modesto says THE CITY OF ACTION.
We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in one-hundred-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at five a.m. while he chopped the logs we'd hauled up from the river on the weekends.
Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies and Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks.
We lived on the West Side, within smelling distance of the world's largest tomato paste cannery.
The West Side is still enclosed by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks to the east, the Modesto-Oakdale Highway to the north and the irrigation canal to the south. Within that concentration only Mexicans were safe from the neighborhood dogs, who responded only to Spanish commands. Except for Bob Whitt and Emitt Brown, both friends of mine who could cuss in better Spanish than I, I never saw a white person walking the dirt road of our neighborhood.
-- Oscar Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 1972
The Lawn of Fire and Another Icepick for Richard Nixon for Old Times' Sake. . . Slow Fadeout for Brown Power & a Salute to Crazy Ed. . . Poison Fat Goes to Mazatlan; Libel Lawyers Go to the Mattresses. . . Fear of the Plastic Fork & a Twisted Compromise. . .
Oscar Zeta Acosta -- despite any claims to the contrary -- was a dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking monument to the notion that a man with a greed for the Truth should expect no mercy and give none. . .
. . . and that was the difference between Oscar and a lot of the merciless geeks he liked to tell strangers he admired: class acts like Benito Mussolini and Fatty Arbuckle.
When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar's name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity and generosity in that overweight, overworked and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar's size for the rest of our lives -- which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.
He was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in court or on the street -- but it was none of these things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing.
What finally cracked the Brown Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between the self-serving elegance of his instincts and the self-destructive carnival of his reality. He was a Baptist missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he was a lawyer in Oakland and East L.A., or a radical-chic author in San Francisco and Beverly Hills. . . But whenever things got tense or when he had to work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that was the governing instinct that ruined him for anything else. He was a preacher in the courtroom, a preacher at the typewriter and a flat-out awesome preacher when he cranked his head full of acid.
That's LSD-25, folks -- a certified "dangerous drug" that is no longer fashionable, due to reasons of extreme and unnatural heaviness. The CIA was right about acid: Some of their best and brightest operatives went over the side in the name of Top Secret research on a drug that was finally abandoned as a far too dangerous and unmanageable thing to be used as a public weapon. Not even the sacred minnock of "national security" could justify the hazards of playing with a thing too small to be seen and too big to control. The professional spook mentality was far more comfortable with things like nerve gas and neutron bombs.
But not the Brown Buffalo -- he ate LSD-25 with a relish that bordered on worship. When his brain felt bogged down in the mundane nuts and bolts horrors of the Law or some dead-end manuscript, he would simply take off in his hotrod Mustang for a week on the road and a few days of what he called "walking with the King." Oscar used acid like other lawyers use Valium -- a distinctly unprofessional and occasionally nasty habit that shocked even the most liberal of his colleagues and frequently panicked his clients.
I was with him one night in L.A., when he decided that the only way to meaningfully communicate with a Judge who'd been leaning on him in the courtroom was to drive out to the man's home in Santa Monica and set his whole front lawn on fire after soaking it down with ten gallons of gasoline. . . and then, instead of fleeing into the night like some common lunatic vandal, Os
car stood in the street and howled through the flames at a face peering out from a shattered upstairs window, delivering one of his Billy Sunday style sermons on morality and justice.
The nut of his flame-enraged text, as I recall, was this mind-bending chunk of eternal damnation from Luke 11:46 -- a direct quote from Jesus Christ:
"And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers."
The Lawn of Fire was Oscar's answer to the Ku Klux Klan's burning cross, and he derived the same demonic satisfaction from doing it.
"Did you see his face?" he shouted as we screeched off at top speed toward Hollywood. "That corrupt old fool! I know he recognized me but he'll never admit it! No officer of the court would set a Judge's front yard on fire -- the whole system would break down if lawyers could get away with crazy shit like this."
I agreed. It is not my wont to disagree with even a criminally insane attorney on questions of basic law. But in truth it never occurred to me that Oscar was either insane or a criminal, given the generally fascist, Nixonian context of those angry years.
In an era when the Vice President of the United States held court in Washington to accept payoffs from his former vassals in the form of big wads of one hundred dollar bills -- and when the President himself routinely held secretly tape-recorded meetings with his top aides in the Oval Office to plot illegal wiretaps, political burglaries and other gross felonies in the name of a "silent majority," it was hard to feel anything more than a flash of high, nervous humor at the sight of some acid-bent lawyer setting fire to a Judge's front yard at four o'clock in the morning.