“I’ll bet you marijuana won’t be legal in my lifetime,” Louis said. He was in his mid-forties. After so much clean living, he looked like he was in his mid-thirties. They put five dollars on it, my mother beaming as they shook.
In the fall she moved toward my father, enrolling in a teaching program for special education. For that whole first year of college, she was her father’s daughter, a good girl who wore natural fibers and rimless round glasses. She smoked some more weed, lighting up on her porch with two girlfriends and watching the screen door shimmy. But she dated thespians, not thugs or dealers, not even rebels. Getting really wild meant a long road trip, some magic mushrooms, sleeping in her car. The closest she came to the ’60s was backing over it one night in Provincetown. A hippie had passed out behind her car. The ’60s survived.
Everything changed for her the summer between sophomore and junior year. She visited her father’s store just after closing time, when the cicadas were screaming. She knocked, and her father appeared, looking unrested. He had called her that week, arranging the visit. He wanted to tell her a story—just as soon as he was sure the bolt was safely locked.
To be inside the store after hours reminded my mother of all the work she had put in here, all the hours of stocking and restocking, the mop-bucket water and laborious change-making from a register with metal keys that bruised her fingers on busy days. She was happy to be rid of it and wondered if her father had other ideas.
“A few weeks ago a man robbed the store,” he began, and my mother nodded, still not sure where he was going with this. The news itself wasn’t so surprising. That day comes for almost every corner grocer. Louis knew that; he was prepared for it financially. But he didn’t know how it would affect him, having a gun pointed at his chest, his head.
“It made me reconsider the way I’m using the years I have left,” he continued, and it was already practically the longest conversation of their life together. Louis explained, in so many words, that he didn’t want to be the abstemious one anymore. And when he finally came out with the point of this story, the words no longer needed to be said but he said them anyway: “I’m leaving your mother.”
In the months to follow he moved in with a young blond woman, bought a cloth-topped red CJ-5 Jeep, then filled the center console with golf balls and covered the backseat with clubs. Some years later, he moved to New Mexico, where every turn off the highway is a driving range.
The funny thing is, my mother was not angry, not after the initial shock. Life is indeed short, she thought, and she did not want to be the responsible one anymore, either.
That fall of 1970, the same fall my father moved into the uninsulated beach house, my mother moved in down the street, pooling money with friends. She and three roommates hung bead curtains, organized parties on a rotating basis, and started selling pot and hash to fund the good times. One of my mother’s housemates could get suitcases of dope smuggled up from Arizona. Her brother-in-law actually carried the stuff over the border, and her sister, his wife, trucked it north by Greyhound bus.
One cold Friday night, flush from a deal and tired of their own house, the girls walked toward the unrestful waters of the sound, through the front door of the Beachcomber, and right into my father, who liked the stool by the door. He noticed Ann immediately, a brunette in a floor-length red overcoat. He thought she looked like a Russian doll, albeit with a mood ring. And he liked his chances: She had three cute friends.
My father said hello. He said hello to everyone, in fact, including my mother’s three roommates. Then he smiled and waited to see who returned it, like a man yelling into a series of canyons and hoping for an echo. The year after she met my father at the Beachcomber, a career-placement test noted my mother’s “superior” judgment, an abundance of “common sense, foresight, and the ability to reach sound decisions.” Yet of the women there that night, she was the one who smiled back at my father.
She liked the strange blue of his eyes, and his Kant-quoting ways, and the fact that he had been an SDS organizer in the Midwest. She liked that as war raged in Southeast Asia and protesters died right here at home, what Anthony Edward Dokoupil wanted most of all was to own a tree farm and learn to whittle. In fact, he already had the right acorns picked out, a special crossbreed he thought might catch on as an old-fashioned breakfast food. She liked the way he had “discovered” the earth, our fragile, interconnected home, and railed against “the plastic nightmare” of modern America.
It helped that he was good-looking, too, with a wide, eager face like a Labrador. In the months to come, she’d realize he also had a Lab’s tendency to run off and return sparkly eyed and dirty, radiating love-me-anyway charm. But for now that quality was just background energy, a faint hum of electricity, which she found impossible to resist. She was a special-education teacher in training, after all, a person drawn to those whose best quality is a single magnificent sunflower set on the windowsill of a burning house.
Sometime after midnight, they left together, walking into the cold. At her place, beneath an electric blanket, in a bed pushed against the radiator, they kept each other warm and talked about their strangely amazing lives. They made love and made love again and by dawn she felt needed while he felt cared for. On such a basis they stayed together for the next fifteen years, straight through the era ahead, an era remembered as the dawn of the Great Stoned Age.
Marijuana wasn’t even illegal when Richard Nixon took office in January 1969. The problem of the “marijuana menace” in the 1930s, when pot was said to drive its users to violence and gymnastic orgies, resulted not in a prohibition but in a complicated middle position: a marijuana tax. Passed in 1937, it established federal control over its use by requiring people to pay a tax of $100 an ounce. Hardly anyone could afford that, so they would be busted for tax evasion.
President Nixon felt the drug was an attack on American values, however, and he was right. To smoke marijuana (no one yet called it cannabis) was to realize that the government had lied about the dangers of the demon narcotic and to wonder what else they were lying about today. “A new man was born smoking pot,” Jerry Rubin wrote in his memoir of the ’60s, “a longhaired, beaded, hairy, crazy motherfucker whose life is theater, every moment creating the new society as he destroys the old.”
The battle between pot’s motherfuckers and the White House began in September 1969, with the largest search-and-seizure operation ever undertaken by civil authorities, an effort to stop the flow of marijuana from Mexico. Federal agents subjected every northbound car, truck, trolley, or bicycle to a three-minute search and the line snarled for miles. Later they militarized the American side of the border, burying sensors in the desert to detect foot traffic, floating radar balloons to watch the skies, and putting drug-interdiction teams on twenty-four-hour alert from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, California.
Congress finally banned marijuana outright in 1970 when it passed the Controlled Substances Act, which gave the U.S. attorney general—not health officials—the responsibility to classify drugs by their danger and potential for misuse. We all know how that ended. Marijuana was classified as “schedule I”: a narcotic with no medical value and a high potential for abuse, just like heroin. This was significant because heroin use was an out-of-sight small problem (if you were not my mother), but marijuana use was big enough to justify an all-out offensive. It allowed President Nixon to treat innumerable middle-class concerns—among them race riots, braless women, dirty-haired kids, drum circles, and the extra-large foam middle finger extended from young America to old—as one single addressable issue: drug abuse. He called it “the modern curse of youth.”
This wasn’t even the War on Drugs yet. Nixon didn’t unwrap that phrase until June 1971, by which point drugs and dealers were the cause of a stupendous panic that swept Congress, the Supreme Court, and a media happy to provide the words and pictures. The Senate Judiciary Committee investigated “the Marihuana-hashish epidemic and its impact on United States security
.” Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black argued that “traffic in deadly mind, soul, and body destroying drugs is beyond a doubt one of the greatest evils of our time.” President Nixon himself set an emotional tone, calling drug dealers “literally the slave traders of our time” and framing the fight in terms of “our children’s lives.”
What could explain such a reaction? It was more than politics or culture, more than a fight over pleasure and probity. The War on Drugs was primarily a war on marijuana, which seemed to awaken an absolutely primal fear inside the establishment, turning one generation against the next in a fight over what was once unabashedly called “consciousness.” The politicians never used the word, of course, but it played on the lips of marijuana users and their smiling wise-man suppliers, both of whom thought they had discovered the same fire that lit the universe.
They swung every joint like a torch in the dark, smoking to expand the borders of thought, to rise into the realm of the senses. By contrast the drug warriors fought to anchor consciousness to the here and now. They fought to defend the symbol world of old flags and new money. And for millions of young Americans, my father and mother among them, the difference between these two perspectives was everything. It was the difference between life and death.
My father was drafted into the marijuana movement the same winter he met my mother, in the very same bar. He met a guy named Arthur, a former navy man who gave good eye contact and wouldn’t buy you a drink without weighty cause. My father and Arthur hit it off immediately, and Arthur invited Tony to form T&A Roofing. It was an odd endeavor for two guys whose approach to construction involved showing up late and asking each other, “How’s your hammer hanging?” My father ruined the roofs he didn’t fall off of first. Arthur didn’t seem to care. Weeks would go by between jobs. Arthur wouldn’t work in light rain or medium cold. At night he would host poker games and lose big without flinching. He paid the tuition for his live-in girlfriend, bought a new Buick. He lived in a two-bedroom house with an attached garage. It didn’t add up.
One afternoon Tony and Arthur were smoking a joint in Arthur’s kitchen when the doorbell rang. It was a man from the phone company, there to shut off the phone. He was very sorry, he said, but the bill hadn’t been paid in months and it was almost $100. Arthur’s face was a mask of solemnity and respect. He said he understood completely. Then he went into his bedroom and came out with a hundred-dollar bill. The man from the phone company didn’t whistle, but a hundred-dollar bill was rare enough in those parts that he could have whistled without ridicule. My father looked on, quietly astonished.
Spring gave way to summer, and Tony was over at Arthur’s again, for another beer and another joint at the end of another long day of no work. Only this time when he walked in, he smelled something sharp and ripe on the edge of the house’s usual odor. When he turned around, he saw that there was a little project on the living-room floor, a miniature Mayan ruin made entirely out of foot-long bricks wrapped in blue-gray crepe paper. A temple of marijuana.
Arthur smiled and sat cross-legged on the floor, which isn’t easy in blue jeans too tight to mount a horse. He opened a package and plucked a few nuggets of mota, brownish-gold and free of sticks and seeds. They looked rare and exotic, precious enough to be pinned and labeled and viewed through a layer of museum glass. Arthur massaged a few grams into the folded hull of a piece of rolling paper, gave the outer edge an adhesive lick, and lit the joint for my father.
Dad recognized the taste. It was the same stuff he had been passed at parties, where a few hits made him feel like Mother Nature had just blown on his earlobe. He felt his skin tingle and the top of his head fly away. During the next few hours, my father’s dope IQ skyrocketed. He learned the difference between shit and good shit; he learned about too much lumber (seeds, stems), bad nose (none of that good aroma), and dustiness (dried out, desiccated).
Arthur explained that this was a Mexican sativa, a good plant that grows tall and bushy in the hidden ravines of the country, where the dope waves green in the sunlight. The farmer harvests it and hands it off to the smugglers, he continued, ever so romantically, and the smugglers are mostly gringos for hire. They keep to trails where Comanche warriors once roamed and American train robbers took refuge, the federales one step behind.
Arthur showed my father how to process the load. He examined the quality of each brick, considering its smell, its feel, and the overall look, and that gave him a dollar value. Then he weighed the brick on a professional-grade scale, multiplied the two numbers, and tagged it with a strip of masking tape and a number in black marker. He threw the finished bricks into a nylon laundry bag.
And that was that.
In the space of an afternoon, my father, a man who would go on to sell tens of millions of joints, learned how to sell his first, and millions of lives were changed in the process. Maybe they changed only by a degree or two, but all the smoke that followed from that first fire put millions into an italicized state of mind, where they found a friend, discovered politics, made love. Certainly some people got busted but most just got high, joining the hundred million Americans who have done the same during the last forty years.
Recently, after a Gallup poll showed for the first time that most of the country supported legalizing marijuana, I got a note from Keith Stroup, the founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and the grand old man of the movement. “Please tell your father,” he began, “that I honor and respect those like him who risked their freedom to get good marijuana into the country before we had such a good domestic industry. I realized at some point in this struggle that if we had no marijuana to smoke, there would be no marijuana culture, and thus no legalization movement. So I am an honest fan.”
When the processing work was done, Arthur asked my father if he could “move some weight.” Getting weight, hiding weight, moving weight—that was the whole business, my father would soon learn. But he had no idea if he could move some weight, or how he’d even begin to find out if he could move some weight. So he looked at Arthur and put on a serious face and, not for the last time, he lied.
“Sure,” he said. “I know some guys.”
He said “sure” because he was seeking peril, adversity, a renunciation of normalcy; he was crazy for difficulty, for experience, for the kind of life he could only find if he lived in outermost beach houses in winter and shot heroin on condemned rooftops and dealt the drug his president hated to the friends who loved him for it. If he were completely honest with himself, he was also pursuing the feeling of being pursued. He desired a dream that journeyed toward nightmare, toward the ecstasy of demolition and the joy of doing wrong.
The best explanation I’ve found to describe my father’s tendencies isn’t even from a criminal or a junkie or a junkie criminal. It’s from the Italian mountain climber Giusto Gervasutti. His notebooks were found in 1947 after he fell to his death in the French Alps. He was trying to explain why climbers risk their lives for simple altitude, but his words stand as the best explanation of the itch for extreme living of all kinds.
The itch “may take the form of a need to live heroically, or to rebel against restraint and limitation: an escape from the restricting circle of daily life, a protest against being submerged in universal drabness, an affirmation of the freedom of the spirit in dangerous and splendid adventure.” It may take the form of “the search for an intense aesthetic experience, for exquisite sensations, or for man’s never satisfied desire for unknown country to explore, new paths to make. Best of all, it should be all these things together.”
Dealing gave my father all these things together.
Arthur fronted him five bricks, slang for kilos, a total of about twelve pounds of Mexican marijuana, for $1,250. My father drove it down to New Jersey, where he had spent much of his childhood. Happily, he found that his high-school friends had also quit heroin, gotten wise to politics, and were taking a turn as weed dealers almost as a democratic exercise. My father sold them
ten pounds for $125 a pound, making about $120 in profit. That left half a brick—and he had plans for it.
He borrowed an ice-cream truck from a friend who worked for Good Humor and parked it in front of his parents’ house with the jingle jangling. Kids ran up to him, and he had to shoo them away. He saw something out of the corner of his eye—the edge of a curtain lifting, a break in the blinds—but when he turned no one was there.
It was June 1971 and the brick was for his little sister, Carolyn, eighteen, who had just graduated high school. She was planning a cross-country trip with her boyfriend, and after a year of LSD in Greenwich Village she was strangely immune to the sound of an ice-cream truck on her street. My father laid on the horn a few times, just to call a bit more attention to himself. He wanted to show off a little, let the neighborhood know Anthony Dokoupil was the guy you needed if you wanted some weed.
Finally Carolyn came out of the house, squinting at the psychopath in the paper cap. As she approached she recognized the smile, wide as the teller window, white as the side of the truck. Carolyn hated my father, actually. He used to steal from her piggy bank, and when there was trouble at home, he’d skedaddle and leave her behind. But in that moment, none of it mattered.
The very process of securing a single joint in 1971 was a profound countercultural orgasm, a high before the high. The smoker had to know someone who knew someone who could score him a baggie, which he or she then hid from God, Country, and Family, and fired up only in private. People bought as much as they could afford, put it in a shoe box, and then watched the shoe box start to drain, hoping for the chance to score some more. It was exhilarating, that kind of sneaking around, and both my father and his sister felt the charge. They talked like coconspirators and then he gave her a coconut vanilla ice-cream bar, followed by a freezer-cold brick of weed, and as he passed her the package he could feel the power of the act. It glowed somewhere in his solar plexus, better than heroin, better than sex.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 3