Take Him For All In All

My adventures with Craig Spence

I spent the summer of 1988, between my college sophomore and junior years, living in Washington DC, enrolled in an organic chemistry class at Georgetown University.  I had decided a little late in my first years at Harvard to major in Biochemistry, so I was slightly behind in fulfilling the course requirements, and needed the summer class to catch up.

My mom had recently bought a house in the Kalorama district of DC (although she would never live in it; she married my step-father and moved in with him in Maryland).  I felt I could use a break from Boston, so it made sense for me to take the class there.

Organic chemistry is one of the very hardest classes offered by any university, and I was cramming an entire year’s worth of it into one summer session, which I knew would be brutal.  So I fully expected that summer to suck.

As it happened, it would be the beginning of one of the most exciting and eventful chapters of my life.

My mom had purchased the house from a man named Craig Spence.  I needed to move in a few weeks earlier than the closing date so that I could start my class, and Spence needed to remain in the house a few weeks later than closing since his new place wasn’t yet ready.  So he and my mom struck a deal, and he and I overlapped our stays in that house for about a month and a half.

Spence was middle-aged, average height and build, with a mustache, and always incredibly well put-together, usually in a suit.  I liked him at first.  He was personable, very articulate and obviously intelligent, and overall a charming gentleman.  But he was prone to sudden personality changes.

On my second day living there I passed him by on my way up to my room and said “Hi.”

He looked at me coldly. “When you speak to me, you will address me as sir.”

I was sure he must have been joking, so I laughed a little and continued to my room.

“I said,” he bellowed, “you will address me as sir!!”

I was suddenly certain he was serious.  But I had always had a pathological hatred of authority, and I wasn’t about to acquiesce to this ridiculousness.  “I don’t think so.”

Spence snapped his fingers and one of his bodyguards grabbed my arms from behind me, immobilizing me where I stood.  Spence was never anywhere without an armed security detail, all of whom were former Secret Service agents or Navy Seals.

Spence approached me with the menacing look of a rabid doberman. “You will address me as sir.”

“Fuck you.”

I was of course helpless, but I didn’t think he was really going to hurt me, and I was now starting to seriously dislike him.

But then he hit me in the face.  Not hard, but certainly enough to intimidate me, and also to make my nose bleed.  In my youth I was prone to frequent nosebleeds, and it didn’t take much to open the faucet.

The sight of my blood caused a dramatic 180 in his demeanor.  He sank away from me like a terrified whimpering little child.

“It’s no big deal,” I said, unsure of why I was trying to make this maniac feel any better about himself.  “I get nosebleeds all the time.”

Still shaking, he snapped his fingers commanding the security guy to release me, and slipped off into his bedroom.

Several months later I would learn what his sudden fear was all about.  He had AIDS, and he knew the virus could be transmitted through blood.  He was afraid of infecting me.

But at the time I found it equally bewildering and utterly terrifying.  I called my mom, imploring her to save me.

She said there was little she could do, since she and Spence had made an agreement.  My mom is the sort of mother who thinks young men should solve their own problems, unless the situation were truly desperate.  My physical restraint at the hands of an armed brute and Spence’s assault on my face didn’t quite qualify, so I was stuck living in this freak show.

She is also the sort of person whose head is constantly in the clouds dreaming up grand ideas, to the extent that she can often forget the little things.  Little things like remembering to send her son the money he needs to live.

The crash course in organic chemistry would consume practically every second of my life, so there was no possibility of having any kind of job to support myself.  I was dependent on my mom mailing me checks.  But she forgot to send the very first one, and by the next day following my harrowing encounter with my lunatic housemate, I had no money.

I called her, and she promised to fedex a check to me, but for the next day and a half I was broke with nothing to eat.  I was left with only one, dreadful option.  I knocked on Spence’s door.

“What do you want?” he barked.

“Sir,” I began, thinking this was the time to flatter his bizarre narcissistic vanity.  I explained my situation.

“Are you asking me for money?!?”

“Sir,” I began again, but he cut me off with a pointed finger, and opened a desk drawer.  In it was an envelope containing hundreds and hundreds of $100 bills.  I just stared at it.  I had never seen so much money in one place.  The envelope was labeled “Petty Cash”.

He grabbed one of the bills, crumpled it up, threw it at my feet, and told me to get out.

“Thank you sir,” I said, picking up the bill, “I promise I’ll pay you back tomorrow.”

“God dammit!!”  He crumpled up another $100 bill, and threw it at my feet.

“Thank you sir, I’ll pay…”

“Good god, would you please stop bothering me!”  He crumpled up a third bill, again throwing it at my feet. “I’m sitting here running the country, and I don’t need you distracting me.”

I gathered the remaining bills off the floor and left as silently as I could.

If you’ve ever studied pet training you know that punishment is a far less effective approach than rewarding.  Spence gradually adapted his methods, started speaking kindly, and dispensing $100 bills to me like kibbles.

“How’s my boy?”

“I’m fine, sir.”

“Good!” Boom! Another C-note.

All I had to do was keep quiet, stay out of his way, and address him as “sir”, and he would reward me.  My mom had always taught me that it was perfectly acceptable to sacrifice one’s dignity in pursuit of money, so… ok, just kidding.  My mom never taught me that.  I picked that one up on my own.  Spence had trained me to behave, and I was an eager student.

And by the standards of my lifestyle up to that point, I was getting rich.  My heart was warming to him.

One day he ordered one of his bodyguards to take me out for a drink.  At the time I thought it was simply a nice gesture, but thinking about it now, I’m guessing he probably needed me out of the house for some reason.

Washington DC had recently raised the drinking age to 21, but anyone who was eligible to drink before then was grandfathered in.  I was 19, and had frustratingly missed the cutoff day by only a few months, so I wasn’t able to enter any bars.  I was curious how I was going to be taken out for drinks.

As we approached the entrance of some fancy bar somewhere, a frumpy college-age bouncer looked at my ID, and dismissively let me know I wasn’t getting in.

Like all of Spence’s bodyguards, my companion was an enormous, muscular monster of a man who looked like he could kill you just by thinking about it.  He leaned down to face the hapless bouncer and said, firmly, “My friend gets in.”

Likely afraid for his life, the bouncer nodded and we went in.

My heart was also warming to the security guys.

This particular one was very friendly.  “What are you having?” he asked.

Back then my experience with alcohol consumption was mostly limited to pumping kegs of foamy crappy beer at college dorm parties.  I had never ordered a drink anywhere.

“Rum and coke, please”, was the only thing I could think of, trying to seem worldly.  My fondness for single-malt scotch was about a decade away.

“So you’re a rum and coke man!  All right!”

This bodyguard was a former Navy Seal, and that’s like rock star to me.  If you’re a Navy Seal, you might as well tell me you’re the lead guitarist in Guns N Roses.  I am in awe of these people.

“I bet you’ve got a lot of stories you can’t tell me.”

“That’s right.”

“Are there any stories you can tell me?”

“Well, I was with the first team that landed in Grenada.”  Ronald Reagan had ordered that invasion a few years earlier.

“Cool!!!  What was your mission?”

“My particular job was to take out the enemy’s communications.”

“Does that mean destroying some equipment, or does that mean killing people?”

“Our job is to accomplish the mission as quickly and efficiently as possible.”  He paused.  “That usually means killing people.”

“Wow…”  This dude certainly was interesting.  “So, like, what’s the deal with Spence?  Why does he need all these bodyguards?”

“You’ll need to speak to him about that.”

“What does he actually do?”

“You’ll need to speak to him about that.”

I clearly wasn’t going to get anywhere with that line of questioning.  Spence was an enigma wrapped in an acid trip.  But a sensational demonstration of his power and reach would come a few nights later.

Spence and a phalanx of his security guys barged into my room at 1am.  I had been asleep for a few hours, needing to wake up early to make the city bus to Georgetown every morning.

“Put on a suit and tie!” he ordered.  By this time, I was so well trained that I was obeying even outlandish orders like dressing up fancy in the middle of the night.  I really loved all those $100 bills.

We piled into a couple cars and drove off.

“Where are we going, sir?”

“Stop talking.”

I hadn’t had much time to explore the city, so I didn’t recognize any of the neighborhoods or buildings we drove past, until I suddenly recognized one building quite unmistakably: the White House.  To my silent astonishment, we pulled up right into the front gate.

A couple of Secret Service agents waved us through.  We drove up to the front entrance and sauntered right in.  No one greeted us inside, no one asked to see my ID, and as far as I knew I hadn’t been subjected to any background checks, yet here I was in one of the most famous — and presumably most secure — buildings in the world.  The only thing I had to do was don a lanyard one of the agents had handed me.

Spence smiled at my bewilderment.  “Where do you want to go?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“We can go wherever you want.  Where do you want to go?”

“Um… the Oval Office?”

“Ok, it’s over this way.”

The Secret Service agent standing guard at the entrance to the Oval Office prevented us from going in.  But he let us take a few photos from right outside with a Polaroid Spence had brought along.

“Where do you want to go next?” Spence asked.

“Um… the Press Room?”

“OK, that’s this way.”

No one stopped us from entering the Press Room, so I posed for a few photos pretending I was delivering my first White House press briefing.

“Anywhere else?”

“The President’s private residence!”

“No, that’s one place we can’t go.”

We walked around for a bit, and I saw several rooms full of fancy china, certain that every last dish and teacup was leaden with great historical significance.  The many Secret Service guards we passed by seemed curiously uncurious about what we were doing roaming the place.

We drove back to the Kalorama house, and I had a story that nobody would believe if it weren’t for those photos, or until everybody would read about it a year later in The Washington Times.

The next week, Spence again barged into my room with his Praetorian Guard.

“Pack your bags.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“We’re going on a trip.  We’ll be back in three days.”

“Where?”

“I’ve got to parachute into Nicaragua and blow something up.  Our extraction will be the next day.”

By that time I had seen so much crazy stuff with this guy that I believed him.  However, the intensity of my organic chemistry class was such that I could barely miss a minute of any of it, and missing three days was simply out of the question, as intrigued as I was.  I tried to imagine asking my mom’s permission to go on such a trip.

Disappointed, he tossed me a $100 bill and left.  He was gone for three days.  When he returned all he said was that I missed a hell of an adventure.  He had trained me not to ask any further questions.

Eventually Spence moved into a new apartment somewhere across town, and he often invited me over.  It was palatial, as if one of the wings of Versailles had been transplanted into this building.

Something odd I noticed were these intensely bright lights on the edge of his balcony shining outwards.

“Why are you shining such bright light into the night?”

“To blind any potential snipers who might try to shoot me through my windows.”

Spence was always giving me tips on how to avoid assassination attempts.  Such as, never check any luggage on your airplane flights: you’ll be a sitting duck at your destination waiting by the luggage carrousel.

Also, don’t ever own a yacht.  Way too easy to blow up.

One Sunday afternoon he summoned me over to his new residence.  He had placed a dining chair in the middle of his office, facing a large-screen TV, and had me sit down.  He motioned one of his security guys over and ordered him to stand behind me.

“Zé is going to sit here and watch the entirety of The Godfather.  Then he is going to watch the entirety of The Godfather II.  You will not allow him to leave this chair except to use the bathroom.”

So I spent all afternoon watching both of those movies.  They eventually became two of my all-time favorite films, but at the time I thought they were a little boring.

“So what did you think?” he asked.

“It was a little slow, and I didn’t fully understand it all.”

“That’s OK.  You will.  Consider this an important element of your education.  Most of what they teach you at Harvard is rarified bullshit.  Thank God you have me to teach you what’s important.”

One pleasant weekend afternoon I was sitting outside the Kalorama house studying my organic chemistry when a police cruiser pulled up.  The two cops inside wanted to talk.

“Are you the new owner of this house?”

“Well, it's my mom’s house, but I live here.”

“Does Craig Spence still live here?”

“No, he moved out a few weeks ago.”

“Oh thank God!!” they both exclaimed, with huge sighs of relief.  “We hated him!”

“Why’s that?”

They told me a story about one night pulling him over driving his Ferrari while extremely intoxicated.  Another car full of his security guards pulled up behind them.  Spence dropped the name of some senior police sergeant and demanded they call him.

The sergeant ordered them to let Spence go.  Don’t let him drive any more, have one of his guards drive the Ferrari home, but tell him to have a nice day and let him go.

The next day the two cops were summoned into the office of the district commander, who ordered them never to bother Spence again under any circumstances.

I was often unsure how many of Spence’s stories were delusional fantasies, but hearing two police officers tell me he was untouchable was another big indication that Spence had juice.

At the end of the summer I returned to Boston to resume my studies at Harvard, or as Spence often called it, The Kremlin On The Charles.

I didn’t expect to ever see him again, but he’d frequently call me, asking “How’s my boy?”

We’d often have lengthy conversations.  I always knew him to be exceptionally intelligent, but the depth of his knowledge was often astonishingly profound.

As part of some distribution requirement course in art history, I had to write a 10-page paper on the art of the Italian Renaissance.  No offense intended to anyone interested in Italian Renaissance art, I’m sure you find it moving, but I’m a science nerd and I simply have less-than-zero interest in that stuff.  I wasn’t even sure what to write about and I was dreading it.

Spence called me up.  “How’s my boy?”

“Well right now things are kind of a drag.  I have to write a big essay on something I totally don’t care about.”  He had me explain the class, and the specifics of the assignment.

For some crazy reason Spence knew all about the Italian Renaissance.  Not just the art, but the political machinations, warring factions, and palace intrigues.  He devised a brilliant essay topic for me, and I ended up enjoying it.

That Thanksgiving my mom was off somewhere with her new husband, and I didn’t feel like flying all the way to California to be with my dad, so Spence invited me to spend the holiday with him back in DC.

We had a blast.  Spence was obviously a man of great wealth, and he loved spending it extravagantly.  We went to the finest restaurants in town.  He would share his wisdom and witticisms, and I found his lectures far more interesting and entertaining than most of my college lectures.  I grew to think of him as a loving father figure, and I cherished my time with him.  Yet I still had no idea what he did, or how he had acquired his fortune.  Several months later I would read all about it.

The Washington Times began publishing a series of exposés on a blackmail operation headed by Spence, in the Kalorama home.  Apparently, Spence would host wild orgies with senior government and military officials, numerous young call boys, and mountains of cocaine.  Also apparently, Spence had secret video cameras throughout the house that recorded every little bit of it.  And again apparently, Spence had blackmail and extortion material on some of the most powerful and influential men in the world.

This explained his wealth, explained his constant need for bodyguards, and explained how he could obtain things like late-night unaccompanied tours of the White House.

On that last point… The Times (and soon many other news outlets) made a big deal about Spence’s habit of rewarding White House tours to his favorite call boys.  Many of my friends, and my mom, knew that I had been on one of those tours.  They all started wondering if I had a really big secret.

It’s kind of surreal to have to explain to your mom that you’re not a homosexual escort.  I mean, I was pretty sure she knew I wasn’t gay, but she also knew I never had any moral problem with prostitution.  She had a few questions for me.

I had never witnessed any of these Caligulan orgies, but somehow these revelations were shocking and unsurprising at the same time.  And somehow it didn’t change the way I felt about him.  He had been really really cool to me.  Yes I had once thought of him as the same kind of deranged sociopath as the media was now portraying him, but since then I had developed a genuine affection for him.

If he ever really did hurt anyone, break up any families, or cause the foreign policy of the United States to turn sideways, well then I hate all those things.  But I’m still not sure whether to believe any of it.  As with Spence, I was never sure whether the Times was telling the truth or spinning some weird fantasy or cover-up.  All I can say is that I never once positively knew Spence to be dishonest with me, whereas the mainstream media has bullshitted me so many times I’ve given up on them.

He called me up not long after the scandal broke, but instead of “How’s my boy?”, he had orders for me.

“You will fly down to DC on the next flight.  You will check into such-and-such hotel.  At registration they will hand you a duffel bag.  You will spend the night, then catch the first flight back to Boston.  Three days from now I will call you using the code name Charles Foster Kane.  From this moment you will only ever refer to me as such.  You will then deliver the bag to me at the Ritz-Carlton at Boston Common.”

“OK, wait, you want me to fly to DC right now?”

He hadn’t yelled at me in a long time, but this time he was angry.  “I shouldn’t have to repeat my instructions to you, should I?”

“No, sir.”

“Get going.”

That night in DC, and the following two nights in my dorm room, I was nearly overcome with curiosity about what was in that bag.  But I never looked.  Partly because I had great respect for him, but also partly because I suspected he’d have a way of finding out if I had peeked, and I didn’t want to take the risk.

Turns out it was just his clothes.  I had helped him execute a clever ruse.

When we met at the Ritz-Carlton, Spence explained to me that he was under constant FBI surveillance, and he needed to lose his tail.  So, that morning he left his apartment with nothing but a tracksuit, and pretended to go out jogging.  After a couple of miles of nothing suspicious, he suddenly hailed a cab, went straight to the airport and bought a ticket to Boston.  His travel bag was waiting for him with me.

“That should throw them off for a few days.”  Spence leaned back into his chair and smiled with the self-satisfied evil grin of a Bond villain.

“What are you doing in Boston, sir?”

“You will address me solely as Mr. Kane.  I am here to liquidate what remains of my wealth.  We have five days.  You will meet me here every evening at 6pm.”

Over the next few nights we bought the fanciest bottles of champagne at the fanciest restaurants.  We sampled bottles of fancy liquors over a century old.

Spence was dispensing a steady stream of $100 bills, not just to me, but to anyone who would so much as open a door for us or press an elevator button.  His largesse was commanding such loyalty that at each of these fancy restaurants we had personal servers standing next to us at attention and responsive exclusively to our every gastronomic whim.

On the third night, we were in the Ritz-Carlton lobby waiting for our limousine when Spence suddenly became agitated.

“It’s taking too long.  They’re on to us.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Kane?”

“Limos get to their clients quickly and on time.  They don’t take this long.  Something’s wrong.”

I didn’t have a lot of experience ordering limousines.  “What do you think is wrong?”

“When our driver finally shows up, it’ll be a fed.  The FBI finally found me.  You’ll see.”

Our driver arrived and everything looked normal to me, but Spence had cautioned me not to say anything inside the vehicle.

We drove to a restaurant that was disguised as a typical Boston townhouse, nestled in between countless others, with no signage or indication of any commercial activity.  As we walked inside I noticed that every room was a private dining room with a single table.  There couldn’t have been more than eight of them.  I didn’t know restaurants like this existed.

Our room overlooked the street from two stories above, and we could see our driver in the limo parked below.

Spence gave me a knowing look.  “I’m going to prove to you that’s a fed.”

I forget exactly what dishes we ate, but all of it, soups, salads, quail something or other, was the best tasting anything I had ever had.  Spence ordered our server to deliver several such dishes down to our driver.

From our dining room we watched the server, in a white dinner jacket carrying a large silver tray, approach the limo with this feast.  “Watch this,” Spence said.  “Any old schmuck limo driver would kill for a meal like this.  But this guy won’t take it.  A fed on the job won’t accept it.”

Spence was right.  The driver refused it.

Back in the limo after our meal, Spence whispered he was going to prove it to me again.

As we drove through the streets of Boston, Spence suddenly barked an order at our driver: “TURN RIGHT, RIGHT HERE!!”

The driver immediately turned right — right onto the wrong way of a busy one-way street.  I saw multiple oncoming headlights at full speed. I panicked.

Our driver didn’t.  He calmly flicked on the emergency blinkers, weaved between a few cars, guided the limo to the side of the road, and exited at the next intersection.

Spence was chuckling.  “Only a cop could have handled that so effortlessly.  Any regular old limo driver would have freaked out.”

He was saying this aloud, so the driver could hear.  “Well done, G-man!  But you can report back that you were made.”

The driver said nothing.  It seemed to me that if he weren’t some kind of a cop, he might have asked what in the world Spence was talking about, and also why he had just made him almost kill us.  But he just continued driving, stone-faced.

At the end of our last night we went back to Spence’s suite at the Ritz-Carlton.  He sat me down, and became uncharacteristically sentimental.

“I want you to know something, Zé.  I’ve never had a friend like you.  I’ve never really had any friends.  The way I’ve chosen to live my life made that impossible.  There was never anyone I could trust.  You came into my life randomly, innocently.  I could trust you.  You have meant the world to me.”

My eyes teared up.

“But now it’s over.” he continued.  “This is the end.  It’s time we say goodbye.”

My tears started falling.  He was fondling a bottle of pills, and I knew what he was going to do with them.

“You don’t have to…”

“Yes I do.  You know I have AIDS.”  Back then it was a death sentence.  “And I’m going to jail.  I don’t want to rot away my last few months in a cell.  I choose to go out now, with my dignity.”

I was too numb to say anything.  I understood his logic, and I probably would have made the same decision.  But I had never been this sad.

“I’ve had a phenomenal life, Zé.  I regret nothing.  You too, will have a wonderful life.”

At the end of every night with him I had taken a taxi home, but this time I walked.  It took me several hours.

When I finally made it back to my dorm my roommates had many questions.  Why do you look so forlorn?  What have you been doing all these nights?  Who is this Charles Foster Kane you’ve been meeting?  Why do you have so much cash?

I’m not a crier, but that night I cried myself to sleep.

At the memorial service my mom had printed cards with a quote from Hamlet:

He was a man, take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again.

Perfect.