Life [1]
I had a denim cap with all these pockets in it that were filled with dope. Everything was filled with dope. In the car doors themselves, all you had to do was pop the panels, and there were plastic bags full of coke and grass, peyote and mescaline. Oh my God, how are we going to get out of this? It was the worst time to get busted. It was a miracle we had been allowed into the States at all for this tour. Our visas hung on a thread of conditions, as every police force in the big cities also knew, and had been fixed by Bill Carter with very hard long-distance footwork with the State Department and the Immigration Service over the previous two years. It was obviously condition zero that we weren’t arrested for possession of narcotics, and Carter was responsible for guaranteeing this.
I wasn’t taking the heavy shit at the time; I’d cleaned up for the tour. And I could have just put all of that stuff on the plane. To this day I cannot understand why I bothered to carry all that crap around and take that chance. People had given me all this gear in Memphis and I was loath to give it away, but I still could have put it on the plane and driven clean. Why did I load the car like some pretend dealer? Maybe I woke up too late for the plane. I know I spent a long time opening up the panels, stashing this shit. But peyote is not particularly my line of substances anyway.
In the cap’s pockets there’s hash, Tuinals, some coke. I greet the police with a flourish of the cap and throw pills and hash into the bushes. “Hello, Officer” (flourish). “Oh! Have I broken some local law? Pray forgive me. I’m English. Was I driving on the wrong side of the road?” And you’ve already got them on the back foot. And you’ve got rid of your crap. But only some of it. They saw a hunting knife lying on the seat and would later decide to take that as evidence of a “concealed weapon,” the lying bastards. And then they made us follow them to a car park somewhere beneath city hall. As we drove they watched us, surely, throwing more of our shit into the road.
They didn’t do a search immediately when we got to the garage. They said to Ronnie, “OK, you go into the car and bring out your stuff.” Ronnie had a little handbag or something in the car, but at the same time, he tipped all the crap he had into a Kleenex box. And as he got out, he said to me, “It’s under the driver’s seat.” And when I go in, I didn’t have anything in the car to get, all I’ve got to do is pretend that I have something and take care of this box. But I didn’t know what the fuck to do with it, so basically I just scrunched it up a bit and I put it under the backseat. And I walked out and said well I don’t have anything. The fact that they didn’t tear the car apart is beyond me.
By now they know who they’ve got (“Weeeell, looky here, we got some live ones”). But then they suddenly didn’t seem to know what to do with these international stars stuck in their custody. Now they had to draft in forces from all over the state. Nor did they seem to know what to charge us with. They also knew we were trying to locate Bill Carter, and this must have intimidated them because this was Bill Carter’s front lawn. He had grown up in the nearby town of Rector and he knew every state law enforcement officer, every sheriff, every prosecuting attorney, all the political leaders. They may have started to regret that they’d tipped off the wire services to their catch. The national news media were gathering outside the courthouse —one Dallas TV station had hired a Learjet