Books |
Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade
Robert Sabbag
By
Published: Apr 19, 2021
Category:
Non Fiction
“420” started as a secret code among kids in the early 1970s. A group of friends at San Rafael High School in Marin County, California would meet at 4:20 PM near a statue of Louis Pasteur to get high. The Grateful Dead picked the phrase up, and “420” gradually spread across California and beyond. Now April 20 is widely celebrated as “National Weed Day.” The single best book I have ever read about drugs — and one of the most enjoyable books I’ve ever read — is “Snowblind.” Yes, it’s about cocaine. But it begins with marijuana, which is, we were endlessly reminded in the wayback, a “gateway drug.”
In the mid-1970s, I found myself at Elaine’s seated next to Nora Ephron. She raved about a book by a first-time writer no one knew – like: how could that be? (She wasn’t alone in her enthusiasm. Hunter Thompson: “A flat-out ballbuster. It moves like a threshing machine with a fuel tank full of ether… This guy Sabbag is a whip-song writer.”) I bought the book the next day and, because it was not just good but outright great, I read it as slowly as possible, making the pleasure last.
Then I called the author.
Bob Sabbag turned out to be small and wiry and not likely to be going to Elaine’s any time soon. At one point, I suggested he read an article in The New Yorker. “This month’s issue?” he asked, and at that moment we became friends for life.
I recently read Bob’s book again. It is still that good. Better, in a way, because although it was a big book for a generation of young writers, no one has successfully imitated his style. It’s as Louis Armstrong said of Bix Beiderbecke: “Lotta guys want to play like Bix. Ain’t nobody done it yet.”
You’ll notice I have not led with the subject of the book. For good reason. “Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade” is the story of a successful package designer named, in these pages, Zachary Swan. He starts smoking marijuana and soon discovers the high school truth that if you buy a pound and sell 15 ounces yours is free. Then he moves on to cocaine, where a small chunk is exponentially more profitable.
We now know what coke is: addictive, reality-distorting and available mostly from people who would be called “bad company.” In the early 1970s, it was something much more innocent: a party drug. And it was a kind of amusing challenge: How do you smuggle a kilo of the stuff from Colombia to New York without getting busted?
Zachary Swan did it successfully many times. That is the real subject of the book — how a prankster uses his creativity and immaturity in the service of an enterprise that will put him behind bars for quite some time if he screws up or has bad luck. To read an excerpt, click here. To encourage you, here’s how the book starts:
Zachary Swan is not a superstitious man, but he is a very careful one. Like any professional gambler, he has survived by taking only calculated risks. So, in October of 1972, when he decided to throw a party to celebrate his most recent return to New York, he decided to throw a small one, and his caution was inspired less by the fact that it was Friday the thirteenth than by the compelling reality that on the mantelpiece above his suitcase there were three and a half kilograms of 89-percent-pure cocaine.
The cocaine had entered the United States that morning in the hollows of three Colombian souvenirs fashioned out of Madeira wood. They included a long, colorfully painted rolling pin, the symbol of marital bliss in Colombia; one rough-hewn statue, twenty inches high, of the Blessed Virgin; and a hand-wrought effigy of an obscure tribal head, about the size of a coconut. The fill had been made a week earlier in Bogotá. The load had passed U.S. Customs at Kennedy Airport, New York. It was carried through and declared: “Souvenirs.”
The arrival of these artifacts at Zachary Swan’s beach house in East Hampton, Long Island, launched a celebration which would not end until the following morning. It began at eight p.m. when the Madeira head was cleaved top-dead-center across the parietal lobe with the cold end of a chisel. Within minutes of this exotic lobotomy — a procedure reminiscent in equal measure of desperation combat surgery and a second- rate burglary attempt — the skull yielded up 500 grams of high-grade uncut cocaine, double-wrapped in clear plastic.
By the time the skull, which looked like that of a shrapnel victim, was reduced to ashes around the andirons of the fireplace, the celebration had assumed ceremony and the coke was performing fabulous and outlawed miracles in the heads for which it had been ultimately intended. They belonged to Swan himself; his girlfriend Alice Haskell, twenty-four, a children’s fashion designer; Charles Kendricks, thirty, an Australian national and sometime employee of Swan; and Kendricks’s girlfriend Lillian Giles, twenty-three, also an Australian. The Bolivian brain food they had ingested was only one course in a sublime international feast which featured French wine, English gin, Lebanese hashish, Colombian cannabis, and a popular American synthetic known pharmacologically as methaqualone.
It is difficult to verify at exactly what point in the proceedings (possibly over dessert) Swan’s originally calculated risk became a long shot. The party went out of control somewhere in the early hours before dawn, and the steps he had taken in the beginning to minimize his losses were eventually undermined by the immutable laws of chemistry —– his mind, simply, had turned to soup. He was up against the law of averages with a head full of coke. The smart money pulled out, and the odds mounted steadily. By sunrise, Swan was beaten by the spread.
Essentially, it’s “The Thomas Crown Affair,” just with a different commodity. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
There are wonderful characters in these pages: Honest Ellery, Nice Mickey (and, yes, there’s a Mean Mickey too). Crazy Leslie (because someone must have a gun), the Lothario (“one of the world’s most accomplished assmen”), Bad Breaks Billy, the Canadian — you get the idea. And there are brilliant importing schemes: coke in religious statues, coke in rolling pins delivered to unsuspecting girlfriends, coke in gifts carried home by couples who have won a “contest” created by Swan.
Sabbag writes in an afterword, “Never in the history of American literature, I would venture to say, has a book been purchased by so many people who had never before purchased a book in their lives.” Fools! Yes, this is a how-to book — for 1974. But these techniques went out with the Nixon administration; it’s a much nastier business today.
“Snowblind” now has cult status. It’s an “underground classic.” Too bad about the underground status. The book is a romp, a giggle, a writing lesson, a cautionary tale — and, in its category, a kind of masterpiece. I envy all of you who have never read it and have such gems as the Duplicate Bag Switch ahead of you.
