The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana

by Dokoupil, Tony

  To get an idea of what Daddy felt, I would have needed to smuggle that grocery-store chocolate into my first-grade classroom, stash it in my desk, sell it on the sly, and use the proceeds to consume a big bag of Doritos every day on the calendar. Eventually I would need to promise myself that I will stop such behavior, and then do it all again with two boxes of chocolate bars, two bags of Doritos.

  Because I didn’t really understand my father, I was free to adore him. I continued to try on his mannerisms, just as my son does in my shadow today. I crossed my arms like him, groomed my imaginary mustache like him, read the Herald like him. When it was time to go somewhere, I dolphined a hand through my hair and led my mother through the door. He was gone from our lives but present in me, and that hurt my mother more than his fists ever could.

  It was these echoes of my father, not the father himself, that gave her the energy she needed to end things, formally and completely. She said “no way,” and for the first time she meant it. My grandmother Phyllis would have understood if she knew: “Not my boy,” my mother was saying. “You have gotten me, but you won’t take him.”

  In early 1987 Ann sued Anthony for full custody of me, hiring a $200-an-hour Coral Gables lawyer to do the job. She alleged—accurately, I might add—that my father “calls or appears from time to time,” showing a “propensity for violence” and “consuming controlled substances in substantial quantities.” Because she worried about how he would respond, she filed a restraining order against him as well, and she secured Gulliver’s cooperation against the man paying the tuition: I was not to be released to him under any circumstances.

  This trickled down to me in the form of one bizarrely tense and tearful goodbye. When we arrived at the top of the school drop-off circle, my mother captured both of my hands in hers and turned me toward her, delivering a message of doom. I was not to go with my father if he comes to the fence during after-school play, she said. My father never did.

  He was too far gone, so far in fact that his memory of these years is spotty, like a series of subterranean tunnels, the entrance long since hidden in a rock slide and discoverable only by a fall through the ceiling when you are on your way somewhere else. He remembers a four-day binge with a girl he’d never met before, a girl he trusted like a Swiss Bank. He remembers giving her $75,000 to hold because the registration on his Mercedes had expired, and he was afraid he would be pulled over and caught with the cash. He remembers losing the Mercedes. He remembers losing the girl.

  He remembers losing his boat, too, but he can’t recall how. He definitely stopped paying slip fees. That realization came to him in a high-rise hotel, one in the endless, almost monotonous procession of luxury accommodations he consumed and then forgot. Inside the elevator he met a man who seemed higher than him, a man who was flying, swinging his arms and rearranging his stances. He said, “You got a boat, because I just got a boat, a nice boat.” As far as my father was concerned it was his boat. He knew it was.

  In addition to rehab bills, my mother paid medical bills. She wrote checks to Harbor View, North Miami Medical Center, Dr. Cope, Dr. Keeler, Dr. Nelson, Dr. Kahn. One doctor found an incurable infection lodged somewhere near my father’s heart. He called my mother and told her to prepare for a funeral. She laughed in his ear, and my father simply racked up another bill, another debt to be paid. All year my mother watched her accounts dwindle.

  By Thanksgiving she was broke enough to worry. We traveled to Connie’s house, kicking through the leaves and “exploring” (as I understood it) the property. No luck. My father had already dug up and squandered the two known stashes, and we couldn’t find others. My mother did snag two classic cars she had stored in the Florida Redlands, one of which she ended up loaning to the makers of Miami Vice. But two cars were never going to cover tuition for private school for another dozen years. Two cars weren’t going to break the chain. So in the lonely quiet, while I was at school, my mother planned a mission in search of the richest prize: that cooler in New Mexico.

  She bought a map, rented a Winnebago, and cleared the visit with her sister out west. But she needed time. It would take ten days to two weeks to drive a mobile home the four thousand miles round-trip with an incontinent black Lab and a kid on board. She was teaching again, so the trip couldn’t be until summer break, and she knew summer might be too late. Every day she changed the date on her chalkboard, and she thought maybe this is the day the money is gone.

  When June 1988 arrived our motor home swayed westward without incident, and we returned home with our hidden cargo of illicit cash. I lazed on the big bed in the back, oblivious to the real purpose of our mission and listening to one oldie station fizzle into the next. The songs were the same as they always were, a singable mix of antiwar melodies and folksy drug ballads from my mother’s youth. The difference was that my mother did more singing along, and I joined in, mumbling toward the chorus when our voices rose and flattened, and everything flew right out the window with our sound.

  My mother was making her break. She called my father at his Brickell Avenue apartment, and they agreed to meet just over the causeway, in the Art Deco district along Miami Beach. My mother didn’t want to be alone with the man, not ever again, so she picked a side road near the ocean, arrived early, and waited in the car until she saw my father.

  He looked so old, she thought, as she watched him walking past teens in Jordache jeans and broad-limbed Cuban men in guayaberas. He was forty-two years old, but when he took off his sunglasses, he had the eyes of an old man, and his belly, which once felt like a warm stream over hard rocks, looked stuffed with feathers. She handed him a contract. My father signed it, his signature such a palsied, coked-up mess that the E in his middle name, Edward, came out a bit like a cartoon stink line.

  The document confirmed my mother as “a single woman,” and it gave her possession of the house, which she paid for with $30,000 in a suitcase. It was a nothing sum, but my father was getting desperate. He’d lost his identification somewhere, so he could not get access to his safe-deposit box no matter how many times he told the guards that his code name was Plato.

  In his telling of this story, my mother handed him the money and drove off yelling to any thief in earshot, “He’s got $30,000 on him! He’s got $30,000 on him!” This doesn’t sound like my mother. Then again I’ve never treated my mother the way my father did, so I won’t pretend to be able to get to the bottom of their traded barbs, except to say that whatever began in the Beachcomber during the Nixon years was over.

  My mother bought herself a makeover of mind and body. She went back into therapy, cut her hair short and streaked it blond. She commissioned a new ring: two fourteen-karat-gold dolphins swimming around a smooth piece of turquoise, which she said represented power, freedom, and peace. She also invested a large portion of the money, buying into a shady apartment project in North Miami. And she secured her own Vizcaya, or at least the property for it: two waterfront lots in the Turks and Caicos, an island chain that once harbored Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the lady pirates who sailed with Calico Jack, Captain Kidd, and Blackbeard. In symbolism it doesn’t take an English professor to point out, she used drug money to pay for a graduate certificate in drug and alcohol counseling from the University of Miami.

  For New Year’s she hopped on a cruise from Miami to Mexico, traveling through Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, including two midnight celebrations, as the boat raced from one time zone to another. Lastly, she bought a deep purple Mustang convertible, the color of a bruised apple, with a little chrome horse galloping on the hood. She took me for a ride, touching a hundred miles an hour on a straightaway in the Everglades, where she felt uncatchable.

  My father didn’t respond kindly to this turn of events. As with the rest of his violence and abuse, he did it around corners, behind doors, and when I was out of earshot. But I do have one solid memory from the middle of 1988, when I was seven years old. Like all true tales of heartache it begins with the New York Mets. They were my dad
’s team, and therefore they were my team. We saw them together in New York and followed them together in the local paper. Once I turned on a game when they were playing the Yankees at the moment after Darryl Strawberry hit a home run. It gave me the idea that I was a jinx, a ruiner of things. When I wasn’t watching, the team did well. When I watched, the team did poorly.

  The Strawberry homer represented a balance between these two positions. It happened because it was allowed to happen almost entirely without the weight of my waiting for it, watching it, jinxing it. So for all of the 1988 season, that’s how I watched the Mets—by not watching the Mets, except for the moments when I would sneak up on the TV and surprise them in the act of winning.

  This required subterfuge and guile. I would wipe boogers on the wall next to my bed or throw parachute men into the air in the front yard until I got the feeling that winning was happening. I would run over the cool smooth concrete of the garage and fling open the door of the living room.

  As I did so this particular time I heard a kind of whoosh, almost a cheer. And I saw my father on his knees, fists poised over the table, glass entirely shattered. My mother appeared from the kitchen, her face melted by emotion. The game was on, but I shut the door and only later learned that she was trying to throw him out.

  “Why are you doing this?” my father had asked.

  “To break the chain,” my mother said.

  I never saw my father again, not as a kid, anyway, not when it mattered most. He disappeared from our lives and the lives of his friends. And he edged toward nightmare.

  A funny thing about drug dealers: many of them live low-rent even when they have enough money to live lavishly. The contrast is richest with coke dealers, guys making tens of millions of dollars, buying mansions in the Bahamas and Miami, fellas who own tigers, helicopters, and racehorses, fleets of fast cars, and every other cliché of the narco rich. These same guys often live in squalor, and not just metaphorically. There’s the emotional squalor, sure, the wretchedness of perpetual wish fulfillment and the wreckage of broken relationships.

  But there’s honest to God squalor, too, the traditional stuff: dirty house, dirty car, dirty body. Time and time again, when a coke dealer was busted in Miami, the cops were shocked to find, in a ten-thousand-square-foot property, piles of steaming tiger shit, banisters plastered with exotic parrot scat, stained and torn furniture. The dealers could pay someone to pick it up, of course, but they don’t. Maybe they think it matches the squalor on the inside, or maybe it makes them feel safe, or never mind why, because it’s simply true and my father was such a dealer.

  He was always interested in the other side of a situation, the opposite pole. If he stood before you in a brass-buttoned blue coat, lean-jawed and proud, happy and healthy, bright and shiny, he began to play a little game in his mind. He began to toy with a question: How far can I slide? What he wanted to know—what he wondered in a way that screamed undergrad philosophy student with a substance abuse problem—was what’s the value of my life absent … everything? What’s the weight of just … me?

  In this my father was not unusual among big-time dealers. In 1979, Larry Sloman, the soon-to-be editor in chief of High Times, published Reefer Madness, a book billed as the first social history of marijuana in America. It was a hit and remains a well-reported classic of pot studies. But people were confused by Sloman’s portrait of drug dealing as a sad, walled-in business of easy money, thin friendships, and existential despair. He sat down with a ton-level dealer who turned the interview into a gin-and-tonic therapy session in the corner of a dark bar.

  The source acknowledged the top notes of dealing: the glamour and girls, the fanfare and rituals (“Are you high? I’m high. You high?”), the pleasure of being trusted and giving trust in return, the simple pride, the post-job smile, the feelings of power, and the pain of hand-counting a million dollars. But he pivoted hard into the dark stuff. He hammered the way dealing makes you climb the ladder or get off. The way it drives up the need for thrills, until you’re running red lights and goading cops, anything to give the nerves a tingle. Above all he admitted to the loneliness of the business, the way you hang out with people who want your drugs, not you.

  “It’s not the dope hero that has been portrayed in High Times,” Sloman’s source said. “Out of all the people who make all the money, none of them are happy.”

  The founder and publisher of High Times, the original dope hero Tom Forcade, was himself a cautionary tale, a window into the calamitous mind of a dealer, and a much sadder case than the average marijuana smoker would know. He was described in his own pages as “a flying ace of the dope air force,” who ran marijuana jobs “like a military operation with overtones of religious fervor.” But here’s how Forcade really spent the last years of his life, after a pipe burst in his Washington Square Park apartment and firemen found two hundred pounds of dope in his closet.

  He fled to Florida’s Gulf Coast, where he secured a nine-ton load of marijuana that a friend smuggled into the Everglades. He neglected to hire help, however, and it took him twenty-four hours to load the bales into his Winnebago. By then he was spotted by a wildlife officer. Police soon blocked the only road to Miami, forcing Forcade to jerk the camper into the swamp. Three days later he emerged undiscovered but mosquito-mauled, determined to liquidate High Times, presumably to cover his losses.

  He was talked out of doing so by friends, but Forcade returned to smuggling in 1978. The job called for a pilot to fly to Colombia, pick up a load, and kick it out over a remote location in southern Florida. Tom had no role in the actual smuggle, but he needed to be part of it, to be able to say, “Hey, man, we did it together, didn’t we?”

  Forcade took up a second plane to “guide” the first plane to the drop point. Everything worked perfectly until Forcade radioed instructions for the pilot to “Get lower! Get lower!” The pilot got lower, hit a tree, and died. The gang lost its load. Forcade lost one of his best friends. And six months later Forcade killed himself with a pearl-handled .22 pistol.

  “Tom died like a soldier,” wrote Albert Goldman, another former High Times editor, in a retrospective published on the magazine’s twentieth anniversary. “He didn’t flinch, he didn’t fail. His hand was steady, his aim was true. He died without a cry or even a complaint. He was alone, wounded, cut off from his comrade. But he was in supreme command of himself. Such have been the deaths of men who cared less for life than they did for the Great Adventure.”

  There’s only one serious long-term ethnography of my father’s peers, and it too confirms the sad arc of the average dealer’s life. Between 1974 and 1980, the University of Colorado sociologist Patricia Adler followed sixty-three “jet-setters of the drug world,” specifically marijuana smugglers and wholesalers in Southern California. She revisited her subjects in the 1990s and was unable to locate many smooth transitions into a post-dealing career, amid dozens of tales of arrest, addiction, and abysmal living, much of it uncannily similar to my father’s own experience.

  Dad had more than a million dollars to his name in 1987, and that’s not counting his gold-mine investment and his safe-deposit-box money, neither of which he could access. Less than three years later he had nothing. Where did it all go? The missing million: that staple of family history. The difference in my family is that this is not a story of missed opportunity—a stock not bought, an idea not pursued—but of actual cold, hard cash that was lost, sometimes literally misplaced, sometimes disappeared up a nose, into a vein, or under a hooker’s mattress, sometimes just gone.

  The $750,000 he made in his last job? My father could not find it. He thought maybe my mother had the bulk of it, or possibly even me, age eight and untrustworthy with lunch money. He wrote to her in 1989, outraged, saying: “I am still $30,000 short of having received my 1/3 of the $700,000 you took.” But of course she didn’t take it, and I didn’t take it. It was just … gone.

  And my father was gone, too. He went out again and again with $100,000 on him, p
artied until he passed out, and woke up broke, until one day he left his apartment with his last box of $50,000. He hailed a cab for the ghetto, where, in the manner of Tom Forcade, he might die like a true soldier of dope.

  As my father sank into the mud, my mother flew to St. Thomas, where my father’s partner Charlie had also recently left a long-term relationship. This was the summer of 1989, and I went with her, bringing along a friend. We stayed in Charlie’s house for about a week, touring the island by day and playing Connect Four by night.

  Charlie wooed me with soldiers’ dirty old folk songs. To this day, as I wipe up spilled apple juice or change a diaper, I am liable to mindlessly sing, “On Friday I had my fingers in it. On Saturday she gave my balls a wrench.” He added an inheritance of obscene limericks, and a nasty habit of unrestrained burping and farting, along with a picture of a woman’s naked derriere as she walks down the beach. This was a painting, he explained solemnly. It was not pornography, it was art. Har-har. Our joke. I liked him, of course. I was a boy and he spoke my language.

  My mother liked him, too. He had blue eyes like my father, but he didn’t seem mean or abusive. Looks were no longer a major factor. So he was short? She didn’t care. Their overlapping past made the present instantly comfortable. Nothing needed to be said. They already knew each other and where each other had come from, and Charlie was smart—or at least responsive enough to chat through bottles of wine and throws of the Yahtzee dice. People in the islands are serious about their board games.

  By the end of the week they were already acting like a couple. By the end of the year, they were in love. It was good timing for Charlie, because in September 1989, Hurricane Hugo ravaged the Virgin Islands. It destroyed Charlie’s home and his restaurant, and with the money habits of a typical brother of marijuana, he arrived in Miami with nothing but the clothes he had on the night of the storm. That, and some psychedelic mushrooms, which were a nice accompaniment to the cocaine he’d shipped ahead in a hollowed-out chess set.