The Falcon and the Snowman (5 page)

Besides, Daulton had other plans: he had decided to become a full-time professional dope pusher.

When he was in high school, Daulton had watched how handsomely the older pushers lived and had been impressed: they had new cars or vans, wallets stuffed with cash and plenty of girls. And they didn't have to work very hard. There was something else, too. After one of his suppliers recruited him as a runner to deliver pot at P.V. High, Daulton made a pleasant discovery: for the first time, he was
somebody
. The tall, leggy blondes whom he'd admired but who had spurned him while choosing oversized, blue-eyed surfers began to select seats near him in the cafeteria and show enthusiasm for his boasts. Because of his access to drugs,
they
courted
him
. Daulton was a perceptive student of human nature, and he was pleased by what he saw in the eyes of the daughters of doctors, aerospace executives and businessmen.

And Daulton decided to take advantage of the curious hunger: if he became interested in a girl, he offered her a free joint or, if he liked her a lot, cocaine, which was more expensive. A pattern developed: First, he created a dependency by giving away drugs to girls; then he waited for them to ask for more. It was as if he were playing them like game fish until they were hooked. Once they were hooked, he demanded payment—in the back seat of a car. In a way, Daulton might have imagined the transaction as a form of pure capitalism: he provided drugs to fulfill a need, while they paid in a currency he wanted: attention and sex.

Daulton and, to a lesser extent, Chris had grown up with just about everything a rich society could bestow on its young men. They had money, good schools, a good family and a good future. They had everything—including boredom.

As younger brothers often do, David Lee had grown up worshiping his older brother, and he was a spectator who witnessed at close hand the processes that shaped his brother. “There was too much boredom,” he would recollect about the years he and Daulton were reaching maturity. “There was not enough to do, and the people were so rich … A big dealer would come around and he seemed like a big shot. There was nothing else to do, and some of the people got stuck, like my brother.”

As an apprentice pusher, Daulton learned quickly, and after a while he decided to hang up his own shingle. He carefully studied other pushers' methods, learned where to obtain drugs from wholesale dealers and began to recruit teen-age students as his runners. Whatever Daulton's problems were with a textbook, he proved to have a natural flair for business. Before long, he was making several hundred dollars a week at his new trade and had begun a climb that would make him one of the most successful drug dealers on the southern rim of the Los Angeles Basin. He was becoming, in the jargon of the times, a snowman—snow, as in the snowy-white grains of cocaine.

6

Chris was having more difficulty than Daulton charting the course of his life. The straight A's that he had earned at St. John Fisher had begun to deteriorate in high school into a mediocre record of mostly C's; he could usually count on good marks in history, speech or athletics, but he rarely showed much interest in math, languages or sciences.

His parents thought they knew the reason for the change in Chris: Andrew Daulton Lee.

At the beginning of his junior year, they decided to transfer him to Rolling Hills High School, which was on the other side of The Hill, on a slope that faced the city of Los Angeles rather than the ocean.

The school-district boundary lines were drawn in such a way that most of the wealthiest communities on The Hill sent their children to Palos Verdes High School. The students who went to Rolling Hills High were, for the most part, indisputably prosperous, but more middle-class. The Boyces lived in a neighborhood where their children could attend either of the schools.

By the end of Chris's sophomore year, they had decided they didn't like some aspects of the atmosphere at P. V. High. They were troubled by the ostentatious wealth displayed by some of Chris's friends, but mostly they were upset by what they saw as an aimless lazy pursuit of pleasure by some of the rich kids there.

More than any of Chris's other friends, they disliked Daulton. They suspected he was involved with drugs, and they saw something sinister in the short, scruffy, long-haired youth who drove up to their house in his parents' blue Cadillac, and it made them worry; they were sure he had something to do with the changes they'd seen in Chris. Chris's mother urged him to drop his friendship with Daulton: “You're known by the people you associate with,” she said. But then, as later, Chris possessed a strong loyalty to friends he had made, and his parents' strategy did not work. Even after Chris went to the new school, they continued to see each other frequently, to fly their falcons and go trapping together.

Like most of his contemporaries, Chris now used marijuana regularly, but it didn't become the obsession that it became for Daulton; indeed, most older people who knew him probably would have been amazed to know that he had ever smoked even one joint. To most people in the adult world who knew him, Chris remained a sort of quintessential clean-cut American teen-ager with good manners, brains, ambition and religious piety. He worked part-time as a delivery boy for a liquor store after school, was idolized by his brothers and sisters, and faithfully led his family to Mass every Sunday. As they had for years, friends kidded Chris that someday he would become the first American Pope.

But unbeknownst to them or his mother, a storm was brewing over his faith in Catholicism. It began with a burst of atheism that flared about the same time his pubescent voice was deepening. Before long, the atheism had burned out, but it was replaced by doubts of the divinity of Jesus. This was a fundamental crisis for the teen-ager; his church didn't leave any room for doubt that Jesus was the Son of God.
It was the cornerstone of the Catholic faith
. Without it, Chris wasn't a Catholic.

Until then, Catholicism had been a joy for Chris. Many, maybe most, other children in the parish found church discipline, required attendance at Sunday Mass, confession, the Rosary and other church rituals a wearisome, if necessary, obligation. Not Chris; the church had been
fun
for Chris as far back as he could remember. His enjoyment of church had perhaps begun when he was only six, when he went to Mass with his mother and his baby sister, Kathy, and in front of them there was an old woman who was wearing a mink scarf flung over her shoulders. It was the kind of scarf with the minks' stuffed heads on it. Chris was so tiny that he couldn't see over the woman and beyond the pew, and so his eyes focused on the tiny faces of two dead minks in front of him. After a while he became curious, and reached out and tweaked one of the minks on its nose. His sister giggled at the sight, and Chris began to giggle too; soon his mother joined them and all three were laughing out of control. The woman in the mink scarf turned around and looked at the woman and her two children. Chris's mother quickly grabbed the children and herded them out of the pew and up the aisle, and they all hid behind the baptismal font, still laughing. From then on, Chris associated the Church with good times.

As he grew older, he discovered other pleasures in the Church. He liked the ritualistic world of sisters and priests. His teachers convinced him that the Church, as well as America, was filled with and led by men of honor and selfless goodness; at the age of ten, he fell in love with his nun, and the Baltimore Catechism had become his definitive guide to his beliefs and behavior; he was embarrassed slightly when his mother's temper occasionally flared in a Gaelic oath, and as a child, he occasionally was ashamed that his father was an Orangeman, a non-Catholic Irishman. But he was devoted to his mother and his father—who, he rationalized, mitigated his heresy by going to Mass on Christmas and the Holy Days.

The Church was the family's link back to Ireland and to the ages, and it seemed a natural choice for Chris when, in the third grade, he decided to become a priest—and eventually a saint. When all else failed, Chris was told, when evil and barbarians ravaged humanity, it had been the Church that stood firm and saved Christendom. Church and—later—the Constitution: these were the absolute truths in his home, and if anyone doubted either, he was a heathen.

Sometime during his years in high school, Chris developed what he would later call “a terminal case of ‘Prove it!'” “I wondered,” he said later, “were there any absolute truths? I decided probably not, except that hate was a universal trait; but surely Catholicism would be my last refuge.”

But the more he read history and science, the more he wondered if he had been hoodwinked. Reality was not like the Baltimore Catechism. He asked himself, Why don't modern Catholics lay down their military burdens like St. Paul and the converted Christian martyrs in the Roman legions to live at one with Christ? Now they went to war and killed—like Catholic Bavaria for Hitler and Catholic South Vietnam. It wasn't something new; hadn't Catholic Popes called for the Crusades to reconquer the Holy Land? Chris decided there had been a widening gap between the original teachings of Christ and the teachings of his church since the second century.

It was a realization that Chris did not take lightly. He began to wonder if he had been
betrayed
, made a fool of. He began to question the rationality of accepting as infallible the word of the Pope, and as he read more about the papacy, he wondered if the Vatican was not just another selfish political power center wrapped in jewels, hypocrisy and ritual. Once his doubts surfaced, they cascaded out; he was troubled by Church teachings on the Virgin Birth, by stories of barbaric murders during the Spanish Inquisition, by the secondary place of women in the Church and other elements of Catholicism. Yet he could not be sure. The stitches of faith sewn in his conscience by his mother, Father Glenn, Monsignor McCarthy and the sisters at St. John Fisher did not all rupture at once. Some were sewn too tightly. On one side of his mind was the awakening of reason challenging dogma; on the other side, the dogma, well entrenched, continued to tug and nag at his conscience.

A panic began to engulf Chris regarding his future. Years earlier he had decided to become a priest. Now he was nearing the end of high school, when he should be making plans to enter the seminary. Yet the foundations of his faith were rocking beneath him.

At the same time he was experiencing this crisis of conscience, the nightly news was haunting him in a different way.

The revulsion toward war and what he saw as its roots that had begun to flower in his mind was fertilized by the drumbeat of the televised casualty reports from Vietnam and his reading of history books and biographies that he brought home from the school library. Chris concluded that Vietnam was part of a long continuum of history: they were all the same, from Carthage to the Central Highlands, mindless wars of man butchering man for idiotic concepts of patriotic pride. Just as he had begun to suspect he had been hoodwinked by the nuns and priests, Chris began to wonder if he had been betrayed also by his country and its teachings of liberty and justice for all. He decided America was living a lie: its citizens
were
afforded liberty and freedom, but to protect these freedoms, didn't it encourage repressive dictatorships around the world where such freedoms were forbidden? Modern America, he decided, was like ancient Athens. It provided liberty and parasitic prosperity to its citizens while exploiting its empire of slaves on the Aegean.

In the recesses of his mind, Chris no longer thought of himself as an American. He rejected nationalism as a fundamental evil of mankind and as something that conflicted drastically with his—and, he felt, God's—vision of, and hope for, One World, a “universal state.” That state, Chris hoped, would come someday, but not before there was a final battle of nationalistic giants.

As Chris continued to develop his own concepts of the world, he realized that he was growing farther and farther apart from his father. By the end of his senior year he felt they agreed on very little. They still shared a love for history and sports and tradition, and they continued to go fishing together regularly in the High Sierras, and his father never missed seeing a game in which Chris competed. Theirs was never a stormy father-son relationship. Chris could recall being spanked by his father only once in his life, and there were seldom harsh words between them. But there were few overt signs of affection between them, either. Chris had become his mother's son.

Eventually, Chris would reject virtually all of the attitudes of nationalism and patriotism that were so fundamental to his father. But for the most part, he kept his heresy to himself; no one knew how deep were the doubts that tormented him.

In June, 1971, Chris was graduated from Rolling Hills High School, 367th in a class of 505, with plans to enroll the following September at Harbor College, a two-year, blue-collar college in the port town of Wilmington, not far from the base of The Hill. When his parents asked what he intended to do with his life, Chris said he had two possible careers in mind—the priesthood and law.

But Mrs. Boyce was worried. She had noticed that he had begun to miss Mass, and occasionally doubts about some aspect of the Church surfaced in his conversations with her. She decided to seek the advice of Monsignor McCarthy, for whom she had a special reverence, and the compassionate priest quieted her doubts.

“Look, Noreen,” he said. “These are turbulent times he's going through; don't worry. It happens to a lot of young men; there was a time I wouldn't go near a church when I was young either. Chris will come back.”

When he was frustrated about his faith or his future, Chris retreated to falconry. It became not only a hobby but an obsession that consumed his every spare moment. He devoured every book he could find on falconry and plunged into its history, lore and traditions with the fervor of a religious zealot. To Chris falconry was a bridge to ancient history; in his fantasies he began to see himself as part of a continuum that had begun with kings in Persia, Egypt, China and medieval England. Flying a falcon in exactly the same way that men had done centuries before Christ transplanted Chris into their time. His greatest pleasure was to trap a passage (a falcon in its first season and juvenile plumage) that had followed its parents from the eyrie and learned to hunt and then coax it to become his own partner in the hunt. It was a strange transaction: a man offering himself to a bird. It usually began with an offer of the warm breast of a partridge or pigeon to the tethered bird; a quick, cautious jump to the wrist and then a slow courtship and free flight; and finally a kind of marriage between man and animal.