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

by Dokoupil, Tony

  When we arrived at the site, it was just a pile of rubble. My father put his hands on his head, and said, “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.” He stepped out of the car before it stopped rolling and, in his flip-flops, slipped in the construction muck as he walked to a perimeter fence and peered in at a mud pit. The picture could have run on front pages as a natural-disaster photo: Man in grief. It was not just the building they had flattened. It was my father. It was his “best times in the world.”

  So we returned to the new Sonesta, which was first class in every way, but I couldn’t help notice that it had no poolside bar, no Geno waiting with a shot of rum for Dad, a virgin daiquiri for his son. There was a business center but no beach for father-son Wiffle ball, and I didn’t see anybody wearing Speedos. As our first day in Miami faded to night, something heavy settled in my mind: Some of my own best times were gone as well.

  For dinner we went to the rooftop restaurant, where we had a view of Biscayne Bay, which bristled with dozens of sailboats in half silhouette. It was Sailboat Bay, we suddenly realized, almost the same view as from the upper rooms of the Mutiny Hotel, where my father had so much fun he didn’t come home.

  The old Mutiny was right next door but it too had fallen on hard times, changing hands and suffering a series of reversals. A federal savings and loan foreclosed on the Mutiny, and when it reopened in 1999 the club was gone and so were the rooms, which once had functioned like themed porn sets. The “Gypsy Caravan,” “Hot Fudge,” and “Outer Space” rooms, along with a hundred and thirty-five other scenes of vigorous American history, were redone in a uniform British Colonial motif and sold as condos.

  “All the good old times are fucking gone,” my father said the next morning at breakfast on the hotel terrace. He took one last glance at the ghost of the old Mutiny, found a poolside lounge chair, and lay down, throwing his hand over his head in a death-to-sunlight sort of fashion. After I ordered us some omelets, he came over to join me, adding a white wine to the tab. He seemed bored, like he had seen it all before, only better.

  In the afternoon we went to Miami Beach and took a gander at the lifeguard stands he used to sleep in, newly painted by the city. He took his shirt off for a dip in the sea, not far from Joe’s Stone Crab in the heart of South Beach, surrounded by half-dressed young people. He had the biggest gut I could see. Hard-living old men return to a baby’s shape: ab-less, curved, unsteady, walking with a T-shirt in hand that might just as well be a teddy. Men with his physique are on every boardwalk, every boulevard. They are your winos, your tramps, and every time I see one I see my father.

  That night I heard him singing nonsense in the shower, and when he came out he laid on top of the covers in his Fruit of the Looms. It was strange to shake the hands of men with whom my father had counted money, courted women, and snorted coke. It was stranger to hug women who had worried over these men like my mother worried over my father, and who stayed with them nonetheless. The urge in Miami was even stranger. I wanted to have a thousand drinks with my father, paint the town, until he looked at me like an old picture of him, which would of course make time an illusion and turn us into the same man at last.

  At one point my father looked in the drawer next to the bed, something he had done a thousand times or more. If it was a nice hotel, the drawer slid; a shitty hotel, the drawer stuck. This one slid and my father peered in. Just a Bible inside. The new Sonesta didn’t stock the yellow pages. No girls tonight.

  I realized then—in my strange state of disappointment—that I didn’t lose my father to drugs or addiction or anything quite so shameful. I lost him to work, to passion, strange to say, a drive not so different from another man’s drive to put his name on a door, his stamp on a building. Evidence of fatherless children is everywhere once you become alive to life’s trade-offs, and you learn that there is no such thing as balance, none possible, and for many, my father included, none really desired.

  The next morning we drove to Gulliver, and it was my turn for a melancholic survey. The classrooms were empty for the summer, the main office locked. With the possessive confidence of an alumni I jumped a waist-high playground fence and walked the school’s open-air hallways. Same tropic-hospital smell, same vague rustling in every bush. The sprinklers were on, black plastic periscopes poking up along the walkways, spritzing my ankles. The same spindly-legged birds owned the fields and blue crabs patrolled the walkways. In the distance, I could hear the heavier artillery, the big, clanging metal sprinkler heads that had drenched me the last day of fourth grade, my last year in the school. Had no one shut them off since I left?

  I had to squint as I entered the school’s breezy limestone amphitheater, snug in the center of campus. Here Florida’s brightest school officials responded to the drug-fueled floating orgy of greater Miami. We heard from former junkies and fallen athletes, and once from “Punchy,” a robot with tank treads for feet, glowing red eyes, and boxing gloves for hands. He zoomed and twirled like Johnny Five from Short Circuit, playing “Ice Ice Baby” from hidden speakers in his head.

  I noticed a new-looking mural along the outside wall of what used to be my second-grade classroom. It’s a collage of Florida characters: politicians shaking hands, teachers leading class, architects with plans rolled up under their arms, and various people in uniform, firefighters, police. Then there’s something else. Like Lenin’s head in Diego Rivera’s old mural in Rockefeller Center, there’s a lazy gringo in this hall of the learned. He has a brush mustache, sombrero over his eyes, and he’s lying in a hammock. He looked like an “Indian chief” to me.

  “You were happy here,” my father said, when I came back to the car. My blood boiled. The idea that he had any insight into how I felt. This man who abandoned me. This man who made his own Vizcaya, then torched it for fun. I wanted to level him with a question, remind him how much he had missed.

  “How would you know?” I asked.

  “I know because I used to park over there,” my father said. He pointed to a spot where the bushes break and the playground was visible from the road. “I used to watch you swing. I know because I used to watch you play. That’s how I know.” I loved him then, at least a little bit, but back in the car my father volunteered that he was going to heaven, and he reminded me that his was a victimless crime, and that if he had the chance to do it again he would live his life exactly the same way.

  “All of it?” I said.

  “In a second,” he said.

  And right about then I felt something release.

  We had driven over the causeway to find the Monkey Jungle, one of the only father-son haunts we had left to visit. It was gone, another casualty of Hurricane Andrew. So I headed down an interesting side road, passing dry pines, then mangroves, then a greedy water line that left just a few feet of land, and a row of colorful shacks, fishermen’s lean-tos and the like, festively repainted like the lifeguard stands. A school bus threw shade on some old men selling drinks. We bought Diet Cokes and walked out on a dock, revealing a perfect view of the Miami skyline.

  My father started in again about money and wishing he could live in Miami, and I realized that he was enjoying this trip too much. He loved the high life. He loved to lose it. And he didn’t give a shit about the damage that remained. Evidently, he never even thought about it, never had the creeping feeling that maybe he made the wrong choices, that his life was all wrong, all of it, wrong, wrong, wrong. His own father went crazy because he could never see what really happened after the bombs fell. My father never even cared to look.

  “Do you think there was something romantic about pissing your life away?” I asked him.

  “Looking back, it wasn’t romantic.”

  “Yeah, I know. Sure. That’s what you’re supposed to say. But seriously. Was it literary for you to live the low life?”

  “Tony,” he said, with a shrug, “I’ve liked my life. I liked the drugs and the girls and the money. I liked living like a pirate, outside the real world, never doing anything but dabbling and ta
lking.”

  “I’ve liked my life.” I repeated it back to him slowly. He was like a tongue on a sore tooth, a finger in a scab. I hated him for having it both ways. “You wouldn’t change a thing?”

  “I wouldn’t have walked out on you and Ann.”

  “But you had that chance. You made a choice.”

  “I chose drugs.”

  “Yes, you chose drugs. So you can’t go through the motions of regret, not if you don’t really feel them.”

  “I regret …” He stopped. “I regret that I pissed it all away.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “That’s what I mean. You don’t. Obviously you don’t. You had to piss it all away or you wouldn’t be an outlaw.”

  “That’s good, Tony. You’re a pretty smart kid, you know that? I think you hit it on the head.”

  We stood in silence.

  “I also think I was angry inside. You think that’s bullshit?” he asked.

  “I think you made your choice.”

  “I thought I was going to die not being with you. It felt like a stone in my stomach, like having a rock inside me, a heavy rock, and the dope didn’t take it away, and the prostitutes didn’t make it better.”

  “If it was so bad, then why didn’t you stay with me?”

  “I did the coke to dull the pain.”

  “If the pain was so bad, why not alleviate it by staying?”

  “I have no explanation. I don’t know,” he said. “I know the coke didn’t work.”

  The world of drugs and crime is stupid with paradox, but I find the compassion paradox the most galling. How could a person so compassionate, so empathetic—a man who couldn’t bear to be around people in casts, would throw up if he saw vomit, would give away his last dime—also be so insensitive, so hurtful. He abandoned his family, hit his wife, allowed a another man to father his son. I had to ask: Had he really thought he was up for fatherhood?

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How could you think that?”

  “It just seemed like the next step.”

  “That’s not the question. Why did you think a drug-dealing, drug-taking smuggler would be a good dad?”

  “I guess I was delusional.”

  At the hotel in Miami, on our last night, I looked up old news reports of Carolin Mines using a more powerful archive than Google. Shares were frozen in 1987, it turned out, after the company admitted to misleading press releases. Previous reports of a mega-lode of gold, it said, were not “to be relied on.” It went bankrupt the following year, when I was eight. Later I called the old phone numbers my mother gave me. I quizzed Connie about burial spots on her lawn. Nothing turned up. The money is gone, all right. It’s gone, fair and square.

  We parted ways again in New York. I headed for my family in Brooklyn, he headed to Chinatown for an all-night bus to Boston. That night, for the first time, I looked at the darker side of my father’s story without looking away. I glanced through pictures from the trip, toggling between the reality of the picture, my father’s reality, and my own. To everyone else who saw him bathing in the sea on that Saturday on Miami Beach, he was surely a bum. To me he was a bum who was once a millionaire, and that’s a very different thing. It gave him the air of an elite performer who has gone soft in retirement. I am a son, and a son sees what he needs to see.

  Or maybe it is just that I have my father’s eyes, not their blue tint but their double vision. I see the horror; I see the glory. I am a little blond boy abandoned by a father who still describes his time drug dealing, and not his time raising a son, as “the most exhilarating and wonderful years of my life,” “absolute heaven.” I am a starry-eyed adult who understands my father’s reasons, even if I do not find them compelling. When I look at my own son, as my father must have looked at me, I think my father is heartless for leaving. When I look at the man who left, I think he is human for doing so.

  “I loved you,” my father said at one point, interrupting one of my interrogations. “I would die for you. But I was what I was. I was a scammer and a smuggler and I was a good one. That’s it. That consumed me. I never thought about doing anything else.”

  This is also the part where I might scold my father for losing his bearings. But he’s actually hard to hate. He spent his adult life in the deepest streams of American romanticism, living as the sensitive junkie, the intelligent hobo, the moral criminal. His life was a way of exploring the world, of giving himself enviably extreme experiences. Americans love traditional success but we are ambivalent about what results from it: daily planners, insurance premiums, savings accounts, tomorrows as mild as today. In the end, whenever it comes, my father will have skipped all that and lived exactly the life he wanted: an earth-kissing existence of near triumph but never greatness.

  God help me, I love this about my father. It means everything, in fact, because for as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of becoming him. I thought I would lose control and go skidding into his state of being. But my father wasn’t out of control. He wasn’t driven by demons. If he chose his life, I can choose mine.

  When I told my father that he would soon have a grandson, he was of course overjoyed. When my son is older, I figured, I’d tell him about his grandfather, but I assumed they would never meet. The time for bonding was over, I said, even though my father seemed oblivious as ever. Were we thinking of calling him Anthony, he asked. “No, Dad,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  I was right about the name. The one we chose is clean and capacious, well-suited for a lawyer or a writer, anything, really, but a drug dealer. But I was wrong about my father never meeting his grandson. My father has made a few trips to Brooklyn. In fact, it’s no longer clear which Dokoupil is the more haggard one: me or my father. My son emerged with a ferocity that can only described as Braveheart-like, and so it has been a hard few years. Nightlife doesn’t destroy one’s body nearly as much as fatherhood does, if honestly pursued.

  My father holds nothing back on his trips to see us. When he met my wife, a woman far classier than myself, he pointed to a picture of me on the wall, a head shot taken in a photo booth overseas. “It looks like a mug shot!” he said. “Jesus, you should shave more, Tony. You look like a criminal.” Later my wife put on a white shirt with ruffles, declaring herself ready for dinner. My father was all compliments. “Oh, my, that’s gorgeous. You look like a pirate girl.”

  During the meal he filled us in on his current life, which he still lives as though for the benefit of some unseen camera. He rides around Harvard on a classic English bicycle, a three-speed, which he keeps in the easiest gear, collapsing in the grass near the Charles River, where he likes to watch the girls run. He lives well, for a man on the dole. He goes to yoga four days a week at the senior center and circle time at the Quaker House. He owns a juicer and a computer, where he’s back at it with “Pirate Kings.” He says, “I’ve got the whole book down in my mind now.” He remains hard to stay angry at because his monstrousness is limned by likable idiocy.

  The other day on the way to his Quaker meeting he was stopped by a kid with a clipboard, an activist collecting signatures for marijuana reform. My father signed and at group he spoke out in favor of legalization, which won him a shoulder tap and a handshake from a libertine hippie in his old folks home, who invited my father over for a homegrown joint, something Dad had never tried.

  It “touched all the pleasant memories,” he told me, and knocked him flat with its strength. One puff, two puffs. Pot today is four, five times stronger than it was in my father’s time, each bud fuzzy and sparkly and wet as a stamp pad. He goes back for more every month, gets lit up, thinks a little, smiles a lot. He still likes his life. He wouldn’t change a thing.

  I once told him about an essay I cowrote about how to make men more involved as fathers.

  “And that’s possible?” he says.

  “Yes, Dad. That’s possible,” I say.

  “Well you certainly didn’t learn a
nything from me.”

  We can laugh at it now but it can also get uncomfortable.

  “Where’s that knife you found the other day?” my wife asked one night. She and my mother were on the living-room floor trying to put together a toy garage for our son.

  “This one?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s my dad’s pot knife.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He opened bales with it.”

  My mother snorts, but my wife waves away the conversation. “Can we not, please? Thank you.”

  Not long after, my wife and I were sitting in a coffee shop, our son asleep on my chest. My father was with us, and we were talking about the old days, until my downstairs neighbor walked in with his three-year-old son. My wife and I shut up instinctively. But my father plowed on, shaking his blocky head about “the hookers, the hookers, I couldn’t stay away from the hookers. The hookers were my downfall.”

  He continues to have a keen if not exactly insightful sense of his own story. One day I watched him pick up The Pearl, a thin Steinbeck novel, in a box of free books. It’s about a poor skin diver who tries to provide for his infant son by selling the world’s biggest pearl, then loses the boy and the money in the evil that swirls around the object. Sound familiar?

  “That’s a good one,” my father said, pushing it on me, and reaching for James Michener’s The Drifters, a world of “dreams, drugs, and dedication to pleasure,” per the jacket copy. He pocketed it as we walked on.

  As a grandparent, he is a lot like he was as a parent. He brings gifts and plays endless chasing games, exactly as he played with me. One day we walked to the park, and as we watched my son play, my father was undeniably the same man he has always been. “It gets pretty boring, huh?” he said.