Title: Without a Net: a True Tales of Prison, Penthouses, and Playmates
Author: Barry Hornig & Michael Claibourne
Publisher: Koehler Books
Genre: Memoir
Find out more on Amazon
About the Book
Starving and certain that I would die in my dingy jail cell in Spain, I made a deal with God. I fell to my knees, promising to give up all drugs and criminal activities. I prayed out loud, witnessed only by the urine-soaked walls and huge rats that shared my cage. My desperation was raw and naked. I thought about the Countess. I thought about my parents at home on Long Island. But mostly I thought about myself. “Save me, God, and I will live virtuously and honor my family.” I was released early and found myself back home, penniless and living in my parents’ basement. God had kept his promise. I soon broke mine... Without a Net is an autobiographical road trip through a volatile period of American history. Barry Hornig was a seeker and an explorer. His adventures were splendid and sordid, and the sort of stuff that would teach anyone a lesson. This is the story of how he learned his lessons the hard way.
Prologue
I should have known what my life was going to be like from early on because I loved the Cyclone on Coney Island. Even as a kindergartener, I would drag my grandma and grandpa and anybody else I could hustle or trick into going with me (they wouldn’t let little kids on alone), and I would always put them in the rear car, the most dangerous one. My grandparents hated it. But I would make them go on every ride. They were Eastern European and very kind, so they put up with it.
This was advertised as the scariest ride in the world, but I was fearless. I loved it when it was completely dark, and you’d clatter up the track to the top of a hill, and on a clear night you could see the New York City skyline and the lights of the Rockaways. I couldn’t get enough of it, while I fortified myself with hot dogs, French fries, and Cokes from the original Nathan’s.
After the ride I wandered off to the carnie booths and watched all the bearded men, tattooed ladies, and double-headed people. I couldn’t know at the time what a foreshadowing that was of the freak show that would become my life.
I was banned from supermarkets at the age of four. I liked to pull everything down from the racks and scream. My family lived in my grandma’s house in Brooklyn. There was a wonderful girl who would walk me in my stroller up and down in front of the house. And the other day, when I saw on TV that she had died, I felt very sad. Her name was Suzanne Pleshette. She lived next door, and she was my baby sitter. We moved to Long Beach, on Long Island, in the path of huge storms. I remember my first hurricane and how the house shook. And riding my bike through the streets where the ocean met the bay. There were whitecaps in the streets. My dad, who I called Willy, would take me out on a rowboat in Reynolds Channel to fish for flounder and fluke. We ate delicious tuna-fish and salami sandwiches while we fished, but I didn’t know, until years later, that he couldn’t swim. How brave, and how reckless. A rickety little boat, a big guy with his son, one wrong move and over the boat goes. He was quite a guy, with his Errol Flynn moustache. I remember going down to the recreation center and watching him and my uncle hit a hard, black handball with gloves. I tried it, and I cried because it hurt my hand. Every Saturday and Sunday mornings we would go to the beach at eight and stay until dark. My father taught me how to surf-cast and dig for crabs, clams, and starfish. My mother and my aunt would show up by lunchtime with sandwiches and cold watermelon, and my friends and I would swim, fish, and make drippy sand castles. One afternoon, I went on a walkabout and got lost. In those days, the lifeguards would put a lost child up on a wooden platform and blow the whistle, so their parents would come and claim them. But I had wandered too far off, and they couldn’t hear the whistle. I spent an enjoyable afternoon with the lifeguards, but later in the day, my parents found me. They were very unhappy, and I got my first spanking. My grade school was right around the corner from our new house. The first afternoon I went, I got into a scuffle with somebody and wound up facing the blackboard on a stool with a pointed hat on my head. I remember my first fight clearly. One of the toughest kids in school was Johnny, who was a little bigger than everybody else, mean, and pushed everybody around. He grabbed me one day and told me he needed money to buy egg creams at the corner store and started to go through my pockets. I don’t think I was more than seven or eight, but I stepped back and hit him as hard as I could in the stomach. To my delight, he went down like a sack of rocks. Right to the ground, and he started crying. I found my new power, and a new way to negotiate.
I had trouble in my early schooling; I am dyslexic, and it was difficult for me to concentrate, so I was a C student. A coach helped me study phonetics because all the words looked backwards. I had still have a lot of trouble reading out loud, so, as a kid, I avoided it. I can comprehend language very well when reading to myself.
Although I’ve never been tested, I think I’m probably bipolar as well. My ups and downs have always been intense, and when I got manic, I was out on the street.
Since the bay and the ocean were only separated by six blocks, we spent most of our time on the water. There were fishing piers, and my friends had small boats, so we went boating up and down the channels after school. In the summer, we had the ocean and the Boardwalk. I kept out of trouble, even though I was in rumbles and gang fights as I got older, because I was a promising athlete in constant training. I lifted weights and didn’t smoke or drink. I had coaches to motivate me from elementary school on—and I was disciplined.
I had my heroes. I watched some of the star athletes in sporting events when I was younger, and it made a great impression on me. I wanted to be the Indian who became an Olympian in the Burt Lancaster movie, Jim Thorpe—All-American. I used that film as my blueprint and decided I would never get in trouble as I was determined to become a fearless athlete with lightning reflexes. I had no qualms about flying through the air or hurting someone in sports. In fact, I wanted to inflict pain; that was my job—to stop them.
I never realized just how fast I was until they timed me, and I noticed that nobody could beat me. Some of the other kids hated that I was as fast as they all were. I raced with Bobby Frankel on a bet, and won—and he was the fastest boy in Far Rockaway High School and also a Hall of Fame horse trainer. I shot baskets with my friend, Larry Brown. It got to where they wouldn’t let Larry shoot anymore at carnivals because he won all the teddy bears. Larry became a pro basketball star, and a Hall of Fame coach.
When I went into the city with my buddy, Steady Eddie, we saw street jesters, poets, drifters, and grifters on 42nd Street where we went to the movies—porn movies they didn't show in Long Beach. By the time I was ready to go to college, I was street-smart. I was tall and athletic; people said I was good looking. I always worked so I could help my parents, and I knew everyone on the corner. I was able to inflict pain and run so fast that nobody could catch me. I thought I was special, and I knew I could take care of myself.
That didn't prove to be enough for the depths of distress and heights of optimism which would test my ability to survive. Many of my adventures in Without a Net fill me with shame. My path is full of missteps, awful choices, uncanny luck, and wild expectations.
In my story, you might glimpse the surprising and strange choices you might have made, had you lived a life like mine.
Chapter 1: The Red-Eyed Rat
We had really pulled a burglary, a jewel heist to fund a scheme to purchase drugs. Where did we get the guts to do it? And was it guts or bravado? And, did we really expect to get away with it?
So, here I was. Football star, athlete, Mr. Popular, and a jailbird. A disgrace, a drug dealer, a thief, a convicted felon in a foreign country. What would my family say? And my dear Grandma—how could I ever look her in the eyes again?
I was riding shotgun with Weenie, disembarking from the ferry in Algeciras, when the policeman went through the rental car and discovered the hundred kilos of hashish in our duffel bags. Everybody came around and congratulated him like he’d won the lottery, cheering him like a soccer hero.
They handcuffed me and my friend, Weenie, drove us to a prison that must have been hundreds of years old, and threw us roughly into a filthy cell. The windows were approximately ten feet up, and the light stayed on high up in the cell. It could have been there during the Inquisition. But now, Francisco Franco’s men were the inquisitors. “Remember the Phalange!”
They let us have our sunglasses, our jeans, our sandals. They took all identification, of course, but not our dinero, or our belts. They didn’t care if we hung ourselves. I sat with my back against the cell with my other cellmate; the shock made it impossible to speak.
Three days went by, with gruel, beans, and rice, wriggling with little living things: “Papillon sauce.” I wasn't hungry enough, even on the third day, to try to eat it. They brought us a razor and told us to shave. I didn’t really know what was happening. But I thought of burning stakes, Joan of Arc, the Inquisition, or a firing squad. We shaved with cold water and no soap, and since the blades had probably been used thirty times, we just got a little of the stubble off. My hair was already full of lice.
They marched us out single-file, handcuffed from the rear, to an ornate courtroom, where three plump men in their fifties sat, wearing dirty black robes. They assigned a public defender to help us, who spoke broken English, making it difficult to follow the proceedings. They started reading a criminal charges document to us. It sounded like the Declaration of Death. This went on for an unbearably long time.
They asked Weenie and me to explain what had happened. Of course we had a pre-arranged story ready, just in case. But when it was my turn, the words came out of my mouth, but I’m not sure what I said. My voice cracked, and tears welled up in my eyes. I tried to regain my composure.
Would they believe us? They had to. We were Americans on a holiday in Spain. We wouldn’t rob each other. It had to be the gypsies. When they couldn’t solve a crime, it was always the gypsies.
The three judges talked back and forth. The police officer got up on the stand. He seemed to have a new uniform and a shiny new watch, and the spectators cheered him, of course. There seemed to be a few more witnesses, but I had no idea what was going on. They told us to stand, and the middle one banged the gavel. “Convicto!” There was a pause, and then the translator spoke. “You will serve six years and a day as a guest of General Franco in his hotel.” That was the dream from which I couldn’t awaken.
When you have a nightmare, you wake up, and everything is okay. But when you have that nightmare, and you try to wake up and you are awake, that’s the end.
It seemed delusional, and it came so fast that it was almost as if I had dreamt it. I felt that it wasn’t me there—it was somebody else, and I was looking down on the whole situation in disbelief. Like words in the pages of White-Jacket, about the voyages that transformed Melville from a boy into a man. But my own transformation would be a long time coming.
Weenie and I went back to our cells and started a hunger strike and an all-around commotion. It didn't work. A guard in a green jumpsuit came with a billyclub, started banging the front of our cell, cursing at us, and decided that we needed to be separated.
Four or five days later, it was time for showers. I was getting ripe. I was lead into the shower room with other sordid prisoners—Arabs, Basques, Spaniards. I was the only American. The shower was ice-cold, the towel more like a handkerchief, and the soap stank.
One large Moroccan guy was watching me very carefully. I pretended I didn’t see him. He was obviously aroused, his member swollen. I was sitting on a stool drying myself when he made an aggressive move towards me. I don’t know what happened, but the stool hit the middle of his head, and it split open. There was screaming, there was blood, there were whistles, and we were brought back to solitary. I could tell by the looks of the other inmates that I'd made my point. I had established our alpha position, and I wasn’t about to be pursued or intimidated by the “pack.”
I was so angry at them and at myself, I felt like smashing him again. I looked around for the next customer. There’s always a next customer—when you’re looking.
I had a piece of wood with a smelly mattress on it—if you can call it that, a quarter-inch thick, half a pillow, a tin dish for food, and a hole for a toilet.
Unfortunately, I had roommates, the four-footed variety. Weenie and I had been separated. But Rudy, the red-eyed rat, and his friends found me. It was war. And I only had my thongs. At first, they were standoffish. Circling, making noises in the middle of the night, bothering my sleep. Then Rudy started making aggressive moves for my toes. He was good-sized—like a cat. Ugly yellow teeth, red eyes, mange. If I had had some bread or something else, any morsel I could spare, I would have fed him and tried to win him over, but I didn’t have that luxury. The other problem was the mosquitoes, the relentless mosquitoes biting me non-stop, as my blanket was too small to wrap myself in.
And if that weren’t enough, the food—I can’t even speak of the food—if you could call it that. And I knew it was only the beginning.
I sat there in the darkness, asking, “What did I do to deserve this?” I knew I couldn’t last six years. Impossible. I figured I’d go mad within a year.
With our money, which they hadn’t taken, much to our surprise, we were able to buy Carnation milk, cigarettes, delicious Hershey bars, and Valencia oranges.
Things got better, but I kept hearing fireworks, or shots in the street, and a lot of screaming and noise late at night from another part of the prison.
One day, after a couple of weeks, they brought in other inmates who looked like they’d been beaten and kicked. It appeared they needed solitary more than we did, so they put us back in our original cell.
We were able to get writing paper and envelopes and started our campaign to free ourselves. We wrote to everybody we could think of to spring us. We were charged an exorbitant fee for stamps, and, years later, I learned that the letters were never mailed because no one received them.
The only things we had to read were several pamphlets from Tim Leary’s lectures and a stained National Geographic that I was learning to read upside-down, so it seemed different.
Lighting a cigarette. Waiting for more rats, and the mosquitoes. I ended up soaking cigarettes in water, dipping rags in the liquefied tobacco and wiping it all over myself—my neck, my face, and all my other exposed parts—and the nicotine would stop the mosquitoes from biting. It gave me something to do, a little project every evening. I was looking at nothing, and nothing to do, for six years.
****
As I lay in my cell, cold and hungry, I recalled a sunny afternoon in Long Beach in 1956, when I was working in a Safeway supermarket with my old friend, Mark Newman. We were fifteen, and we were putting food on the shelves to make “hot dog money” in the summer. I think we came up short. We ate more than we shelved. Another friend came into the Safeway market, and told me that somebody from a lower grade had called a girl I liked a “whore” and a “rag.” I sent word back that this was not acceptable, and I might have to crush his face if I saw him. The reply came: Meet on the beach at sunset at the end of the Boardwalk with my gang, and they would bring their gang. I talked this over with Newman and we decided to put small kitchen knives in our socks. I had read too many Harold Robbins books.
I was evaluating the situation. The kid I was supposed to meet was a grade under me, but he was six-four, two hundred pounds. . Elvis haircut, engineer boots, menacing arms from weightlifting. I myself was six feet, one hundred forty-five. We walked down to the beach, and before we were supposed to have the fight, we were surrounded by our gangs. Mike Kosella, one of the guys from the luncheonette at the Franklin Hotel, who later went over a cliff in a motorcycle and burned in the air at age twenty-two, was with me. They showed up with ten assorted hoods. I didn’t like my prospects. We decided to arm wrestle first, which was ridiculous, since his arm was twice the size of mine. But since I had been in football training that summer, he could not move my arm from its position. We pulled and tugged for fifteen minutes. Nothing happened. This was a sort of 1950’s warfare.
We backed off. He took his black jacket off, combed his hair like Elvis, smirked, and put a cigarette in his mouth. We all turned to go to the beach. Big mistake on his part. Don’t ever turn your back in combat. We walked onto the beach. I was wearing khakis, a T-shirt, and sneakers. We got about twenty feet into the beach when Mike Kosella handed me a “jaw teaser,” which is a piece of lead pipe wrapped with adhesive. It felt very comfortable in my hands. I knew if I hit him hard enough he would go down. The red mask came on me, my “ultimate rage”—the blood pulsed through my head, and I was on him, a panther on an ox. He gave up; I used a wrestling hold called the “Princeton,” where I was able to put both my hands behind his hands when he reached up to grab my head, and he couldn’t move. I don’t know if I hit him five or ten times, but the top of his head started to get mushy. He lay motionless for a time, and then he started to move again. We ran.
The next day the rumors were flying around town. Evidently he went to the emergency room and got quite a few stitches.
My mother was very good to me, very supportive, and played the he-can-do-no-wrong card with the police, keeping me out of trouble. “He’s just young and learning ...” The cops didn’t really believe it, but, alright, so he busted the guy’s head open; they didn’t care. My brother was proud of me, even though the guy I smashed was the toughest guy in my brother’s class.
The most famous beach club was El Patio, which the movie The Flamingo Kid was based on. The movie was about us. The good-looking card-playing guy who beat the old man was Harvey Sheldon, a.k.a. Rodney Sheldon. The parking lot attendant in the movie was Jimmy Pullis, who later owned the club “Tracks” in New York City, the hangout for rock ‘n’ roll musicians. These beach clubs provided great jobs for young guys. I worked at El Patio for three summers during high school. We were cabana boys. “Cabana boy, get me ice water.” “Cabana boy, I need a club sandwich and a strudel.” “Hurry, cabana boy.” The tips were good, and their daughters were available.
The clubs brought in name entertainment on the weekends from Tito Puente to Bobby Darin. El Patio hosted the great garmentos. They lived in huge houses on the swamplands, had spoiled daughters with gold chains, huge bar mitzvahs, long cigars, and polished nails from 1407 Broadway. There were pick-up bars, like Lou’s, and Furies, near the railroad tracks in Cedarhurst. That’s where all the rich Jews were. I wished I was there again, right now.
****
The battle with the rats continued. Underneath my bed I found a few old logs and pieces of wood and waited for the right opportunity to kill Mr. Red-Eyes, pretending I was asleep. The first few times I missed—he was too fast. Finally, I was able to get a rebound shot and cracked him on the nose, and he disappeared, never to be seen again. And the friends he left behind were a piece of cake—they were easy to scare. So all I had to do was deal with the mosquitoes, and, since it was getting colder, they were disappearing. Perhaps, now, I could regain what little sanity I had left.
They started to let us go out into the exercise yard, and I met Felipe. He had been there for ten years. They’d caught him with explosives trying to blow up a police station. One of his hands was blown off, and he had a stump. His English was quite good, and he told me that his family had owned a restaurant in the North of Spain, the Basque area, and after the war they took his dad away, his mother, all his property, and all their animals. He would be getting out in a year.
The next day, after another evening with Mr. Red-Eyes, it rained terribly—and it rained and it rained and the water came into the cell. It was starting to get dark. I lit another lousy Spanish cigarette, closed my eyes, and thought of college. My memories were my only door to sanity.
****
I was a freshman at Boston University in 1958. My parents let me off at Miles Standish Hall, where my suite was up on the sixth floor. I had a horrible bed with hanging springs, a lumpy mattress, and I kept complaining to the dorm monitor, day after day, the first week, until I could take it no longer.
The red mask came down on me, my eyes pounding, and I don’t know what happened, but the entire box-spring, bed, and mattress went out the window into the courtyard, and I was immediately put on probation. I didn’t care; I snuck out the following night. I met a family friend who was at another college, and we drove down Commonwealth Avenue to a mixer at one of the women’s colleges. His convertible had New York plates. We were driving along, minding our own business, when we got cut off by two huge gorillas with a Boston College sticker on their car. They screamed curses, something like, “Jew pussy, go to the ovens!” or “Death to you all!” and I answered, “Come on back, and we’ll see who’s the pussies!”
They stopped their car, they got out, and they got out, and they got out. They were big—they must have been the two starting tackles on the B.C. football team. The red mask came on me again; I charged one of them, and my “new friend” ran off screaming, “Don’t hurt me! I just had new braces put in!” This happened right in front of the school mixer. Everyone came pouring down from the stairs. I just made it under the car to protect myself, hiding, because they were kicking me and trying to turn the car over. A guy I knew, who later became a good friend, a frat brother from Long Island, the size of one of the football players, took them on. Fortunately, for me, he had been a high school champion heavyweight wrestler. In later years, he leapt out of a thirty-five story office building in Manhattan and killed himself—he was bipolar. He threw one of the gorillas over one of the garbage cans. It appears he had a red mask, too, because he ripped off their antenna and proceeded to slash the guy who was left. Then he pulled me out from under the car and helped me to the school infirmary. I needed some iodine and bandages. I looked like I’d made and lost a bad decision. The word went around campus quickly, as these things do. The next day everyone wanted me to pledge their fraternity. I was the Jewish hero.
After the incident, one of the fraternity brothers named Sandy Gallen patted me on the back and said, “Way to go!” I remembered his name years later when I heard he’d become Dolly Parton’s partner and Michael Jackson’s rep.
After college, I lived at 1012 Lexington Avenue, between 72nd and 73rd on Lexington. I had a one-bedroom apartment for forty-nine dollars a month, a third floor walk-up with French windows. I had a mattress on the floor, some built-in shelves, a bathroom with a bamboo curtain door, a hot plate, and a refrigerator.
****
I could tell through the windows in my prison cell that the sun was out. It must have been a beautiful day. And tt must have been Sunday, because I heard singing from the church across from the prison. I broke my last cigarette in half and searched for more memories to keep my spirits up.
I thought about another sunny afternoon, when I was in Long Beach on one of the canals. I was only fifteen. In front of my girlfriend’s house was a fifteen-foot boat with an outboard motor. I was with Mark Newman and Joey Burrel, a swimming champ from one of the tough high schools in New York whom I’d also had a fight with. It was warm, and we wanted to go fishing and swimming. We got into the boat, which was not ours. Joey, being a pro at stealing cars, got the engine started. We both jumped in and went down the canals out to Reynolds Channel. We were having a good old time, just going around. We knew where everybody would be later in the afternoon—the tennis courts. As the then-popular disc-jockey “Murray the Kay” would say on his “swinging soirée,” it was where we would go with our dates to watch the “submarine races.”
As I mentioned, Joey Burrel was a world-class swimmer, and I was pretty good, too. Newman, who came originally from the Bronx, told us he wasn’t much of a water man. We started to show off. Everybody was cheering from the shore; they knew who we were. We were doing figure eights, going backwards and forward in circles. We were having a terrific afternoon together, until … We noticed from going around in all these erratic directions that the back of the boat was filling, and filling quickly. What do you do? Man overboard! Joey went in like a fish, and I was next. It was approximately a half mile to shore, maybe less. No big deal, we were on our way to shore anyway. Newman went down with the ship. He had on big heavy dungarees. Joey was on shore first, already smoking a cigarette. I was coming up second. Of course the boat was sinking, and Newman was struggling out there. His head was underwater. Joey was taking bets, with cigarettes, as to whether Newman would make it.
He came up, he went down, he came up, he went down. Finally, he was able to get up out of the gunk and clumsily started for shore. We had to jump in and swim back out to help him. He was panting and flopping like a wet flounder.
Two days later, my parents woke me at three in the afternoon. There were two detectives who wanted to know what I knew about the boat. They took me down to the police station, put the hot light on, and started questioning me. I didn’t crack under the pressure. I never gave up Joey, who was on probation. Newman they already knew about.
So much for my summer of loafing. They told me that I had to pay the man back for his boat, so I got a job sanding cabinets for the entire summer. Everything I made had to be paid back to the boat’s owners. Newman had to do the same.
My reminiscing ended when a blood-curdling scream came out of one of the cells. I stuffed rags in my ears. It was a death cry—one of many.
****
Three months into my incarceration, my teeth were bleeding from the diet, and my clothes were all starting to fall apart. I sat down, and was very quiet.
I concentrated, and said very softly, “If I can get out of here, I will change.”
I was not religious. I’d been bar-mitzvahed, but after that, or even before, I hadn’t given much thought to any God or divine being helping me, but at this point I had nowhere else to go. I decided to try to make a deal. I gave God my word that I would change if I could get out of there, that I would help other people. That I would try to live a moral vision of some kind.
It was getting dark.
I said, “Please get me out of here. I can’t take it. Please!”
In the depths of my despair, a powerful fantasy took shape. I imagined a sort of prison Olympics, and I got the guards to go along. It was easy because they would give us extra time to do things if we’d stay out there and be productive—by cleaning up and working on the grounds. So by building the high jump and broad jump pads, I was also able to clean up the grounds. Then I got wood from the woodshop and we made hurdles. And I got them to provide lime so we could make lines on the track, and I set up coaching classes to teach them what I knew. The prison was divided into three parts, and word got out about what we were doing in our part. And others volunteered to do it as well. The guards got involved. Watching us all train made their jobs easier. Most of the inmates were uncoordinated, and many were inept. But they tried; they were good sports. I gave them encouragement and set up competitions—the fifty-yard dash, the high jump—everybody got involved.
One afternoon, there was a commotion, and we discovered that the supervisor of prisons for the southern district of Spain had come by and watched what we were doing. They called me in the office the next day and told me it would be okay to have the games in two weeks, on a Sunday, so the guards could bring their families and have wine and cheese. And then they asked if some of the guards could participate in some events. Why not? It was turning into a carnival, like a baby Olympics!
On the day of the jailhouse Olympics, the stands were packed and there were bands playing loud music, and people were taking pictures. I was planning to pole-vault my way to freedom, but I couldn’t isolate myself to take a run at the wall. It was impossible. Everybody was watching me. I got down on my knees, asking, “What am I going to do”?
The next morning, I had a very high fever and diarrhea. I suppose the dream was part of the delirium of being sick.
Suddenly, the main guard banged on my cell, shook the doors and screamed, “¡Andale!”
They chained me and handcuffed me, and put a manacle around my waist and legs, and marched me into the warden’s office. They had a conversation, but all I got out of it was, “…mucho urgente… no más… malo… americanos...” No good. I didn’t know what was going on.
I did not have control over my bowels, and they wouldn’t let me go to the baño. Instead, they took me to another room, where I saw my suitcase and Weenie’s. I had money stashed in my suitcase, and an extra set of keys for the Peugeot that was who knows where. I was sure I was hallucinating as they told me to strip, threw me a towel, and led me into the showers and told me to clean myself up.
I got into my old street clothes, which no longer fit, grabbed my suitcase and Weenie’s, and was escorted out through the giant gates. A beat-up bus pulled up with a group of shackled prisoners—men with head and leg wounds, battered and torn—some Basques who had blown up a bank. Perhaps they needed my hotel room. But what about Weenie?
Much to my surprise, the guards escorted me back to the Peugeot to get my personal things. It was still locked up in its own little custom’s prison with hundreds of other cars. I took out my extra suitcase, a canteen, my walking boots, and some pesetas. I also took the rest of the jewels, gold, and cash I had hidden in the air conditioning system.
Luckily, the guards weren’t watching me. Then I got a cab to take me to the Hotel Christina.
I was free. But not Weenie. By sheer luck they kicked me out to make space for the Basque bombers. But my friend, the guy who came to Europe to help me find the love of my life, sat rotting in this hell hole. I had to get him out—somehow. And then I had to find my girl.
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