DUDLEY

He most definitely didn't do right....

My first partner, whom I married at 19, not because he was my knight in shining armor. Far from it!

Dudley was a con artist, a smooth-talking charmer. He went to prison for a year, busted for dealing cocaine. The Feds told me they were going to subpoena me to testify in court about my knowledge of his activities, which I had plenty of, having been his mule several times (those stories still give me anxiety all these years later just thinking about them!) But I was told that if I married him, they couldn’t make me testify.

We married.

I waited for him to do his time.

He got 10 years, but had his sentence reduced if he ratted out his suppliers. He turned informant and got off with just a year, albeit in solitary confinement for his own safety. He outed some heavy hitters. They weren’t called the Cartel back then, but Dudley fingered drug lords connected to El Chapo.

Meanwhile, I holed up in my mother’s basement. I spent that year in my own self-imposed solitary confinement, for fear of being watched, targeted for retaliation.

I visited him twice that year, when he was in prison. We actually were allowed private visits both times. I gave him a hand job. The guard looked the other way.

His parents paid for my travel costs from El Paso to San Antonio, where he was housed in the John B Connally Unit, just south of town. Dudley’s folks were very wealthy, old Texas money, and they were always cleaning up after Dudley’s messes. But this was one mess they couldn’t make go away.

But wait, let me back up and tell you how Dudley and I met.

This was shot at one of those little photo booths on Pier 39 after a boozy night in bars. We’d disappeared upon his prison release out to Frisco, where we hid from the Cartel.

Stay tuned for some hair-raising tales of life with Dudley, the charming hustler…