Survival of the Fastest

1

Coming of Age

Virginia and Florida, 1950s and 1960s

South Florida came to define my life, but I didn’t start there. I was born in Virginia in 1954. My family had a small house in a small town called Madison Heights, where my parents grew what we ate. A far cry from private planes and luxury yachts. We had chickens, and some of my earliest memories are of going to collect the eggs. I had three brothers and one sister, and we spent lots of our time running through the miles of woods behind the house, building forts, and having battles throwing mud balls across rambling creeks. We had swings on the front and back porch, and a clothesline in the back where we would hang our laundry to dry.

Across the street was a place called Bryant’s Market where the old-timers sat out front chewing tobacco. At age five, I started going over there to help pump gas, at the only pump there was for miles in either direction on the main road. I couldn’t wait to get out of bed in the morning so I could run across the street and get started. Sometimes I’d wait hours for a vehicle to pull up to the pump. I loved how every car was different. I’d observe the way they looked and smelled, delighting in the shiny chrome and the stink of the engine fumes. I was only a kid, but every time I filled a tank, I felt like a man.

Even then, cars were at the center of my dreams.

My mother was the most compassionate woman I’ve ever met. Her name was Elsie Maude Elliott Lanier, and she worked at a state institution for mentally and physically disabled people. Sometimes we would pick her up from work, and I would see these young people struggling to walk. It was hard for me to understand why they were the way they were. My mom cared so much for these people, and they loved her back. All her life until she retired, that’s what she did: be in service to others. My mom taught me that the greatest form of knowledge in our lives is empathy.

My dad, Noel Edward Lanier Jr., had no formal education beyond the sixth grade, but he could read and write blueprints, and he had a job at a pipe foundry. People called him Junior, and he could build anything. All over our house, there was stuff that he made out of wood with his hands—couches, potato bins, tables, and chairs. He had a Harley-Davidson with a suicide clutch—a shifter near the tank and a clutch pedal by his foot. On Saturdays, he would take one of us kids on a ride. I would get so excited when it was my turn. The motorcycle looked so huge, and the engine was so loud. He would pick me up and put me on the back and away we’d go, riding along the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Shenandoah Valley.

It felt like heaven, holding onto my dad and riding through this valley. Speed, open air, family. What else do you need?

My father had a dark side, however. He would drink, and a couple times I saw him beating my mother. I’d hear the screaming and run down the stairs, trying to stop him, and he would chase me back up. I’d huddle in my room with my younger brother Glen, trying to distract him so he wouldn’t hear.

But mostly it was good times. Idyllic, even.

Every Sunday we’d go to my grandparents’ house. Going for a car ride was a big adventure. Us kids would stand up on the floorboards looking over the driver’s seat and out the windows. At my grandparents’ house, we’d make homemade ice cream in the shade of a walnut tree. Unlike our home, my grandparents’ house had no running water. They had a woodstove and, instead of a toilet, a well-beaten path outside with wooden planks leading through the overgrown weeds to what we called the johnny house.

My grandparents grew tobacco. Tobacco fields spread out as far as the eye could see. They had a big tobacco house where they dried the leaves, and this place was spooky. To me it was like a medieval castle. My senses were always alert when I went in there.

This one time, I walked inside and saw my uncle on a homemade bench, and there were some people around him. I saw a lot of empty beer cans. He had this AM radio, and the guys were listening to something turned all the way up. I was six years old at the time. I approached them, and the closer I got, the more I could hear what was coming out of the radio speaker. The announcers were calling the Indy 500. I believe it was 1961, the first year that A. J. Foyt won.

I’d never heard of the Indy 500 or any motor race. The announcers so excited, it sounded like they could barely catch their breath, and you could hear the engines thunder as the cars shrieked past. It was like the air in that tobacco house was electrified, and as I listened, I started to fantasize about what it would be like to drive a race car. It was a world so far away from mine, it might as well have been another planet. That I’d ever get to sit in one of these cars, or even meet A. J. Foyt—let alone race against him and beat him—seemed as likely as me landing on the moon. Still, I sat on a piece of wood holding my arms up with my hands clenched, clutching a phantom steering wheel, imagining myself piloting down a straightaway at terminal speed.

For me, that was the day the future was born.

One day when I was twelve, I was in the backyard working on a homemade go-kart when my father came to me, telling me to come inside the house for a family meeting. I thought I was in trouble because I needed wheels for my go-kart and so I’d taken my sister’s roller skates apart without asking. Instead, at the dinner table, my father explained that we were moving to South Florida. He never told us why. He just said we were going.

Everything was changing, and I was nervous. My oldest brother, Steve, had gone off to Vietnam. I was going to have to leave my friends and my baseball team, which felt like my entire existence.

We sold our house for $6,000 and drove all the way to South Florida. In 1967, outside of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, South Florida was rural. But that was about to change. The whole peninsula was about to blow up with what would later be thought of as the great South Florida building boom. Everyone wanted to be in South Florida, and why not? All the rich people from New York came down to drink champagne and see Frank Sinatra at the Fontainebleau in Miami, the city that was the gateway to the Caribbean islands. Others came because there was work. Home developments were going up all over, and the boating industry was exploding.

I couldn’t know it at age twelve, but South Florida would become as much a part of me as my own skin. Looking back, I can’t imagine what my life would have become if we hadn’t moved there.

The first place we lived was a trailer park in the town of Hollywood, which bordered Fort Lauderdale to the south, at the corner of Johnson Street and US 441. There was a bowling alley, an A&P market, and honky-tonk cowboy bars. I’d watch my father down whiskey while he played poker with the guys in the trailer park. After a year or so, we moved into a nicer home. My father got a job doing home construction at Pasadena Lakes, a development west of Hollywood. My first job was washing dishes at an Italian restaurant, where I made $1.10 an hour. The summer after ninth grade, my father got me a job digging foundations for new houses. I started out at $1.65 an hour, shoveling dirt in brutally hot weather.

South Florida in 1968 was a wild place to come of age. Almost all the people that I met had families who had come here from somewhere else. There was an indescribable draw to this place, which lured creative, strange, edgy people. People with pasts they couldn’t talk about. People who didn’t care about tomorrow, only about today. People with no money. People with endless money. People who didn’t give a shit about the way life was supposed to be lived; people who chose their own path. When I look back on it now, it was like coming of age in 1960s Haight-Ashbury—hippies everywhere. Only unlike San Francisco, the sunshine blazed, and there were beaches and boats everywhere, girls in bikinis, honky-tonk bars, and outdoor parks full of palm trees and rock ’n’ roll bands jamming.

By that point, a lot of the kids at my school were already smoking weed, as most people called it back then. The first time I smoked a joint, it didn’t do anything. Then one day a friend of mine told me that he knew two sisters who had some hash. We smoked some of it out of a pipe behind a farm supplies store. This time I did get high, and I liked it.

I had long hair, and I kept it in a ponytail. My dad was on me to cut it off. He was a country guy, and it drove him crazy. After a while, all he could talk about was that ponytail. So one of my closest friends, a guy named Alan Hollingsworth (with whom I’m still friends today), and I decided we were going to take a vacation. Without telling my parents, we met up and got a ride to the I-95 on-ramp. We had twenty dollars between us, a cardboard matchbox full of weed, two hits of LSD, and a bunch of clothes in a pillowcase. We stuck our thumbs out and hitchhiked all the way to Canada. We slept underneath bridges. We had no food, so we had to steal it.

So many crazy things happened that summer. The moon landing, Nixon and Vietnam, the Manson murders, the Miracle Mets. On the way to Canada, we heard about this rock ’n’ roll festival happening in upstate New York. It was Woodstock, but we didn’t stop; we kept on going.…

At one point I called my parents. They were furious. But my brothers had told them where I’d gone, so they hadn’t called the police. When Alan and I finally got back to Florida after about three weeks, my mom was thrilled I was back, but my dad wouldn’t even look at me. That was punishment worse than being whipped. But you know what? They forgave me. I still refused to cut my hair, though. I held my ground.

I went back to school and to working construction on weekends. Because I had a ponytail, all the construction workers were always asking me the same questions:

Did I smoke weed?

Did I know how to get it?

One of my friends had a neighbor who had gone to Vietnam, and he was sending weed back. He would grind it up, put it between two postcards, and glue the edges. It was that easy. When this guy came back from the war, he had a source who started sending weed in bigger quantities. So now I had a way to get my hands on some.

I started selling four-finger lids (close to an ounce) for fifteen dollars to the construction workers so I could smoke for free and make money at the same time. This was mostly Mexican weed and sometimes Jamaican weed. Big, dried, brown and green buds with tons of stems and seeds, not as good as the stuff we got from Vietnam. I was still fifteen, and I was already making more money selling weed to the workers on the construction site than I was for the job itself. I didn’t even need the job anymore, but I kept it because that’s where I got my clientele.

And that’s how it all started. It was innocent enough, it seemed to me. Smoking weed was a way of life. It bonded people together. It was a connection to nature. It was an instant cure for boredom, a party in my pocket. When I looked at a map of the United States on the wall of my history classroom, the whole South Florida peninsula looked like a giant joint waiting to be torched.

Nobody was getting hurt, and nobody was getting arrested. It actually felt like I was helping people, turning them on, being of service—just like my mom had taught me.

My two biggest passions were weed and cars. All my heroes were race car drivers: A. J. Foyt, Gordon Johncock, Mario Andretti. So on my fifteenth birthday, I got my mother to drive me to the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles office early so I could be the first in line to get my driver’s license. In Florida, at that time, you could get a restrictive license at fifteen. That meant you could drive, day or night, if you had an adult with you. I walked out of the Florida DMV that morning not just with a driver’s license but with a whole new outlook on life. I was mobile.

That night, I asked my mom if I could use the car to go to a movie with a neighborhood friend.

“I’m picking up a friend who’s eighteen so it’ll be legal for me to drive,” I told her.

She said yes. I had some friends—two sisters, plus one other guy—meet me at a movie theater. We were all lying to our parents. We weren’t going to see any movie. We were heading to the beach with a six-pack, some Mexican shake, and rolling papers.

Later that night, I was lying on a blanket smoking a joint with one of the sisters, and I noticed headlights flashing. So I got up and went to check it out. A cop had pulled up, and he’d found one of the sisters with my other buddy in the back of my mother’s car, parked under some pine trees. This officer saw me. He asked if this was my car, and I told him it was my mother’s. He ordered my buddy and the two sisters into the back of his squad car. Then he turned back to me.

“Put your hands on the hood of the squad car, kid.”

This was my first interaction with a police officer, and I was nervous as hell. I did what I was told. The red-and-blues were flashing, and I could hear the waves crashing on the sand, nearby. I had the bag of weed in my jockeys and was doing everything I could to hide my nerves. The cop searched me, but by some stroke of luck or providence, he didn’t find it.