But mostly they drank. My father and his buddies bought homemade wine from a spinster and hey-mistered their way into pints of Schaefer beer. In the early spring of sophomore year, when one of his friends got a driver’s license, they drove to the city for the first time, sipping from sixty-cent bottles of Colt 45 malt liquor. Along Bowery, they took shots that tasted like two twists off a wet bar rag and went outside to laugh at the bums. One bum was too sick to even wash windshields. He was an old black guy with swollen feet.
Even then my father had an innate sense of himself as a redeemable figure, the kind of guy who could still see right from wrong when he was blind drunk. He couldn’t always walk this line, as my battered mother will tell you, but he challenged himself to do so. And while his friends laughed, he gave the man a quarter.
Later in Miami, when it would be $20s and $50s, and the bums would be wearing tank tops, it was the same gesture. My father gave money to them because they gave back to his traveling show, his life as performance art, just as surely as if they had stuck a chewed piece of straw in his mouth and made a breeze blow through his hair. He felt a certain kind of kinship with the homeless because he saw them through cataracts of sheer romance. They never traded freedom for stability, adventure for the everyday, and my father never would, either.
By his senior year in high school, my father had kissed girls, done drugs, won fights. He had broken laws and literally leaped over tombstones to escape punishment. Yet for all his misbehaving, he was also a member of the National Honor Society. He was a student delinquent. And to the people who knew my father in high school—to the boys who cruised with him and the girls who folded his picture into their pocketbooks—his ticket was stamped. His whole demeanor suggested glorious get-it-on fun.
But in fact my father felt the opposite of glorious. He was a boy who grew up in a cash-strapped family with a war-broken father, and that made him doubt his performance. He felt best during the school day, when he had things to do: check his schedule, find a desk, locate pens and paper. He dreaded the still moments when pleasantries were exchanged and character was revealed. When drugs came along they were a way to script himself into life, “to prove myself one of the crowd, to show everyone I belonged, that I could joke and swear and please.”
Until then he still had normal dreams. Please-your-parents dreams. Kennedy dreams. He thought of a career in chemistry, maybe engineering. He told friends he would work in research and development. He liked the way people responded to that idea. And when he graduated in 1964—third in his class—any of those futures were still open to him. His graduation pictures show an almost military young man: brushed hair, bright eyes, square jaw.
In the fall, with a $400 gift from his grandmother, my father took his first plane ride, a flight to Los Angeles to begin college at Loyola Marymount University. Why LA? The sound of it. The reactions it elicited from guys on the block. Tony from the corner in LA? Get out of here. Also, the Beach Boys. “Surfin’ Safari.” “California Girls.”
The Fonz had yet to come along to introduce New Jersey to the rest of the country, so at Loyola my father looked like a visitor from outer space. He felt like one, too. At his first dance he found a seat all alone and stared at his palms. The next thing he knew he was surrounded by a clump of boys. “Hi, my name is Tony,” my father said, raising himself to shake the hand of the boy in front of him. My father was wearing a red cabretta leather jacket, perhaps the only one in Los Angeles. Someone’s fist banged the side of his head, and after he crumpled in shock, my father walked home past strange houses and people, feeling the first stirrings of what he believes was his fate to become a lover of drugs.
When the school year was over, he drove cross-country and spent the summer chain-smoking in Greenwich Village. It was then, through the big square window of one bar or another, that he saw men doing a slow nod, a loose smile on their faces. He watched as one man lit a cigarette that burned to nothing before he could get around to taking a drag. On his way home, he passed these same men at the top of the subway stairs, paused there, peering down into the gloom for what seemed like hours. He was looking at his first heroin addicts, the lowest rung of the ’60s drug experience. But he thought: I want to try that.
Addiction is ravenous: It devours people, families, communities. Oddly, however, addicts are often among the most gracious hosts. They take from the straight world, but if you’re interested in joining them in their world, an addict will happily give you a free tour. Which is how my father found himself in his childhood bedroom with two old high-school chums taking a free hit of heroin. His little sister, Carolyn, listened at the door.
Carolyn was thirteen, a rising high-school freshman, and Anthony was nineteen. He had moved home to finish school among his own kind, the local boys at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. She heard the leather squeak and a buckle clatter as the boys made a tourniquet to bring up Anthony’s veins. She heard the scritch-scratch of a lighter and the hungry crackle as someone cooked the dope, flash-boiled the white powder and water in a soda cap, held with a bobby pin. Silently, a ripped cigarette filter fell into the clear, syrupy liquid, the syringe filled, and the needle slipped into her brother’s arm. She heard someone yelling, “You’re gonna kill him!” Then the creak of the bed as her brother was laid out like a corpse, not dead, but a little closer to dead than he had been before.
“I feel like I’m floating,” he said from behind his bedroom door, and maybe he was.
When his friends left, he came downstairs and sat in his father’s easy chair while dinner was cooking. Carolyn came down and joined her mother on the couch, and they stared at Anthony, who looked like he was goofing them, with his eyes unfocused, his mouth hanging open.
“Anthony!” Phyllis said. She snapped her fingers. “Anthony! Stop that.”
Soon my father had a “chippy,” which meant he had an internal dope clock and when his dope clock called for another hit, he had to get another hit or his eyes would water, and his nose would run, and his bones would ache. He learned what junkies learn if they mean to beat the clock: the cheapest dealers, the quietest places to shoot, the best pawnshops. When Joseph went to Vietnam, his fiancée bought him a gold watch, a piece of civilization to come home to when he was done being a soldier. Anthony pawned it for a few dozen nods.
It’s simple, really: When you’re high, anything seems possible. The unforgiving physics of family are suspended. You fall far from the tree.
Walking by a travel agent’s window in the spring of 1968, Anthony stopped at a picture of white sand and bikini-clad girls. He would graduate in a few weeks, and he had a summer to fill before entering a master’s program in English and philosophy at the University of Detroit. He would fill his summer there, right there, in the picture, on the white sand, with the bikini-clad girls. He did not invite a single friend to join him on this graduation trip. Instead, with the money he’d saved by living at home, he bought a copy of The Playboy Book of Mixology and a one-way ticket to St. Thomas. Specific plans: sand, girls, bartend, quit drugs.
The trip did not begin well. My father failed to crack his drinks book as his plane gurgled and smoked its way to the Caribbean. On the ground, no one wanted to hire a pale New Yorker with only the most transparently fictitious experience behind a bar. And my father was on the brink of going home when the navy chugged into the harbor of Charlotte Amalie, the capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands. As white-suited midshipmen disembarked from the gunship, he scampered alongside them, asking, “Where are you headed, where are you headed?” He asked every third or fourth man, and the general consensus seemed to be the bar at Caravan’s, a ticky-tacky hotel across the harbor.
Only the head bartender was behind the counter when Anthony arrived, out of breath. As he had at other bars, he invented a fake work history. He used his hands to cut the air into great dancing advertisements for himself. But as at other bars, the manager was unmoved. Until the navy arrived. For the next six hours, Anthony made big sloppy pineappl
e daiquiris and banana daiquiris, and vodka and gin martinis. By 2:00 a.m., his pockets bulged with tips, and he had a job for the summer. He even went home with a girl from Southern California.
Take that, Los Angeles.
At the University of Detroit my father read hard philosophy, but he and morality began to permanently part ways. He fell back into heroin use. Trying to cop in Harlem, he was robbed twice. Once by three kids with knives. Once at gunpoint. By then, his mother and sister knew what was going on, having overlooked the marble glare but not the white church shirts blood-spotted in the crook of each arm. They sent him to his first rehab, an in-patient clinic on Long Island.
When rehab didn’t work, Uncle Cecil intervened. He got his nephew a three-day supply of methadone, a doctor-prescribed synthetic high that’s supposed to alleviate the pain of withdrawal, and hired him for a job down in Puerto Rico. Cecil checked them into separate rooms of a nice hotel, and they went to the casinos, where my father was given $50 to have himself a good time. The next day they went to the job site, which turned out to be a massive old brewery with a bar attached. My father wore work clothes, and didn’t think about why Cecil was not dressed the same until they swung open the doors. The bar was stripped clean.
“What the hell happened?” my father asked.
“Relax,” Cecil said. And he shut the door.
For three weeks, Cecil locked my father in the brewery during the day. He lay on the cool concrete floor, staring at the skylights, watching the light change, and feeling his bones ache for heroin. At night Cecil freed his nephew, and they went to an Italian restaurant in the hills owned by Cecil’s son, Michael. After three weeks without drugs and with good food, my father seemed to improve, revivify, and Cecil left. Anthony stayed on, working at Michael’s restaurant and living in an apartment overlooking old San Juan.
Before long, however, he started to get that old romantic feeling about himself and went for a walk, stepping his way over cobblestone streets until he found himself in La Perla, a candy-colored slum, with chickens in the street and no doors on the houses. He thought of handing out some money to beggars, as he had in the Bowery. Then saw some guys nodding in the shade, and he knew he was in the Dopeville of old San Juan, and his rehab was over. The relapse had begun.
My father dropped out of the University of Detroit the following spring, a couple of months and a thesis paper away from graduation. At the end of the semester he accepted a ride from a classmate who was going home to Milford, Connecticut, a little beach town ten miles from the state university.
There my father found his calling as an outlaw. He became a marijuana dealer because otherwise what would become of him? He was always moving, always devouring new experiences, because he was afraid that if he ever sat still the transformation into Henry would begin.
That kind of life is exhausting. It’s a life of pure performance, and my father knew it and that drove him deeper into drugs and crime, further from the main thoroughfare of life, where most kids drive along feeling free, never realizing that their wheels are fixed on the track, their destination determined at birth.
You could even say my father took drugs preemptively, as a way to give himself something, anything, other than the destiny of his old man. But there was no real escape. My father took stupid risks because he wanted an intervention, cosmic or legal, but instead he got what he feared the most: genetic destiny.
In his late thirties, my father became his father: violent, foul-mouthed, rambling, totally absent, perpetually there. As I’ve said, I am not an Anthony on my birth certificate or so far in my life. But I turned over his pictures, cursed his name, and imagined that I was my mother’s son and no one else’s. It seemed to work until I had a boy of my own.
One day in an elevator I noticed him beaming at me, age three, his legs crossed at the ankle like mine. He echoes what I say to his mother: “Love you, babe.” “See you later, babe.” He recites the banalities I offer to cabdrivers, cashiers, or friends I see on the street.
“He is you,” my wife often says, and at this point I have to agree. Paul to Henry to Anthony to me to my own son. Five little blond boys, the sickly-sweet prophecy of the “Footprints” poem coming true. Even my son seems to understand on some level. When I show him pictures of me as a toddler in Florida feeding a sheep, he sees himself.
“It’s me!” he says. “I feed the sheep!”
“No, no,” I say. “It’s Daddy. Daddy was once a little boy, too.” But there’s no changing his mind. He knows what he sees. And I do, too.
6
The Pirate Life
Miami, Florida, 1985
My father walked into a thirty-day rehab in January 1985, feeling like a man one step ahead of the falling piano. It was a group therapy program somewhere in pine-tree Mississippi. He fished on a lake named after a racist and played volleyball every day at four thirty. He also did some thinking, some “work,” as the counselors called it.
During the past year he had sliced and knotted all the nerve endings between high and unconscious until he could feel nothing anymore, not even the shame of leaving his four-year-old son in the care of Walt Disney’s in-room entertainment center. So he was happy to be in rehab, pleased to be restacking the blocks of his life. He needed to be reminded of his potential. That was always important, a sense of another possible reality for himself. To throw away a life, one needs a life to throw away.
The fact that he was a professional drug dealer must have added a layer of unspoken hilarity to his in-take papers.
Has your reputation been affected by your drug use?
Yes, I broke the pirate code.
Have you found that it takes more drugs to give you the same high (or low)?
Yes, as a matter of fact, every year I need to sell more weed.
Have you ever neglected your obligations for two or more days because of drugs?
Indeed, I left my son in a hotel room at Disney World.
Rehab succeeded in turning my father back toward the goal of being a better man. At the end of the month he walked the small path to our front door, which led into a living room. It was sunken with wall-to-wall white carpet. A plush violet couch and love seat covered one wall; a big-screen television, heavy antique marble-top tables, emerald green stained-glass lamps covered another; a mirror—teeming with light from the picture window—covered a third. The fourth was open and included the space for a baby grand piano I would never learn to play.
That night at dinner with my mother and me, at a frosted-glass table surrounded by chairs with shiny golden arms, my father used words like promise and cherish. He said he had a surprise, but we had to close our eyes. When we opened them, my mother saw a three-piece diamond jewelry set—two earrings and a necklace—and three round-trip tickets to New York City for Valentine’s Day weekend. I was too young to remember, but I must have seen shiny rocks and paper and my mother’s smile, which I hadn’t seen in a while. My father smiled back at her, and he was sure there had never been a more beautiful woman.
We stayed at the top of the Plaza Hotel, a room my father reserved with a credit card plucked from a wallet bulging with an unusual amount of cash and unorthodox forms of identification. In a slot behind his Florida driver’s license, for example, he had his other life. He changed it every few years. This one included a social security card, vehicle registration, and employee photo ID from an air service company in Los Angeles where he was registered as a mechanic.
His own father had been an airplane mechanic, so when his contact—West Coast guy named Glen, the friend of a Connecticut wholesaler—offered the identity, my father grabbed it. The whole package cost him $500 and included a few pleasant hours in Los Angeles with the local professional girls.
It would be hard for me to lead such a double life. I can’t imagine opening my wallet for ice-cream money and finding a reminder of my two-girl weekend in another state. Even if I wanted to try for such a weekend, my good time would be blotted out by an internal monologu
e, a nagging alarm that said: I am a father. I have a family.
That’s what’s amazing to me, in a darkly macho sort of way: My father evidently never had this experience. He never found himself standing in the light of a new day, looking at his wife and son, and then at himself in the mirror and thought: Can I really be the same man I was last night?
The lobby of the Plaza was thronged with men in suits, clean-shaven, chins lifted toward the future; wives in dresses so recently dry-cleaned they crackled with each step; mistresses with chopsticks in their hair and high heels that sounded like the click-click of a toy train set. Against all odds my father was still free, and on such a day it was possible to believe he always would be—incarceration less a reality than a rumor, an idea discarded with the morning paper.
The governors of five Southern states were at that moment begging the military to start targeting drug smugglers like my dad. “We’re literally being invaded by land and sea,” Mark White, the governor of Texas, had told reporters a month earlier. Bob Graham of Florida said he had begun to organize residents in a “civil defense” effort against smugglers. The phrase called to mind women who water their shrubs at midnight, watching and waiting, prepared to give Oliver North the signal to take down Anthony Edward Dokoupil and tear apart his family.
But my father was enjoying himself too much to care. It made him happy to flash his plastic at the desk of a place like the Plaza, where he appeared winterized and rugged in a black leather coat and gray corduroys. My father’s credit cards were all in his real name, the fruit of his years as “president” of his two front companies. He paid taxes on six-figure earnings and that put him on all the glossy solicitation lists. “The credit card companies love me!” he used to say, bouncing back from the mailbox in the morning, pleased with his little caper.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 15
