That summer Carolyn drove to San Francisco, selling those peace buds to pay her way.
From those first kilos of pot, my father would build his sales machine, selling enough smoke to hold Woodstock every day for a year. The journey accelerated quietly, taking shape while my mother was at class and my father sat on the porch of the beach house, dead sober beneath a wind chime. They had been together for more than a year, and he wanted to take care of her, the feeling uncoiling in some deep part of his brain and surprising even him.
He put on some records. The usual collection of drowsy, sorrowful road and drug songs that helped explain a generation to themselves. As a whole they shed advantages like neckties at a luau, and the music—from the chipper Beatles to the shrill sounds of Jefferson Airplane—made that act into myth. My father felt heady as Cat Stevens serenaded him, and he rooted through the board-game cabinet, looking for a pen and a scratch pad.
He made some calculations. Arthur sold him a kilo of Mexican dope for $250 or so. He could break it up into ounces and easily triple his money. But selling small meant dealing with a lot of potheads, which besides being a lot of work was a lot of exposure and not very glamorous. Wholesaling was safer, sexier. But street-level dealers needed another middleman like they needed another car on the road during rush hour.
The mark-up on marijuana was already crazy. My father could squeeze only dollars out of every deal, even before shelling out for gas, scales, baggies, pads, pen, tape, and the shrinkage and loss that comes in any business. To make this work, he needed either more customers or a much bigger margin. The only way to get both was to make a jump up the chain.
He wrote down JUMP. Circled it. Underlined it. He took a little walk around the room and returned to his pad, raised his pen as if to write, and came up with nothing. He needed to JUMP, but he had no idea how to actually do it.
To make matters worse, Arthur quit the roofing business to focus on dealing full time, so my father had to find other work. He started painting houses, complaining about the “poisonous” fumes. Then he reluctantly took full-time work in a concrete-step factory. He wore a plastic cap, poured water into concrete mix, and concrete into molds. The only good news he had was legal. Because of his on-again, off-again needle use, his draft status had been officially changed to 4-F, or “unfit for military service.” A truer ruling has never been issued.
The man my father needed to meet was Eddie, a sinewy, sunken-cheeked, chain-smoking, thousand-yard starer of the dope-dealing variety. He ran a concert business, one that brought the biggest folk and rock stars of the era to the grand old Palace Theater in nearby Waterbury, Connecticut. Connecticut itself is a small town, so my father knew Eddie by reputation. He knew Eddie had a petite raven-haired girlfriend with an Ivy League education, and a nice house on a bluff overlooking a tidal stream. Dad had been present at parties when Eddie walked in—unmissable with his bald pate and rim of cascading black hair—and threw down some exotic strains of dope and an opium poppy. He’d then pierce the plump green seed, letting it ooze sticky brown serum. People sucked it, and then sat down and shivered like newborn mice.
My father had never actually met the guy, however, until one fine day in the spring of 1972 when he walked through Arthur’s back door.
“Tony, Eddie. Eddie, Tony.”
My father was still officially part of Arthur’s distribution chain, so Eddie didn’t flinch as he waited for Arthur to count out some money he owed. Remarkably, my father didn’t flinch either. He started talking. He was a bullshitter before he was anything at all, a man who could twist words and bend situations. He read books like Body Language and The Art of Reading People and a slew of self-empowerment books, and he believed that he could talk his way into any heart, any mind. With the right combination of words, at the right time, he could cast a spell. It wasn’t sorcery. It was just listening to people, to what they need to hear, and knowing how, when the pins tumbled into place, to pop the lock and push open the door, as he pushed it then.
He talked expansively about his market in New Jersey, and how he could grow it if he could get a better price. Eddie stitched an eyebrow at Arthur, who shrugged back to Eddie, and just like that a play was materializing. Who to work with: It’s the most important decision a drug dealer makes, because your partners will either make you rich or put you in jail. There’s not much in between. Eddie decided to work with my father. He offered him a much better buy-in price—$200 a kilo—and a bigger supply, a first order of fifteen kilos.
By convention in the dope world, wholesalers deliver product “on the arm,” meaning the supplier fronts the goods at a radically reduced cost and the dealer pays the balance as he sells it. How much to front is another big decision in the business, akin to banks extending a line of credit. Eddie decided not to front my father the dope. He wanted 50 percent down, or $1,500, not an insignificant sum when the average wage earner was making only $7,500 annually. It was more than my father could handle.
“No problem,” my father said. “I’ll call you in a couple of days.”
When my father entered the beach house, my mother was in the living room studying for finals, her last college exams before starting as a special-education teacher the following fall. She wore bell-bottoms and a knit top, and she looked up through the light pink lenses of oversize sunglasses, which she had taken to wearing day and night, indoors and out.
Loudly, my father let the outside screen door swing shut and kicked the front door tight with his heel. He began to pound around the room. With every footfall the plates in the kitchen bounced until he stopped suddenly and faced my mother. “I have the most amazing chance,” he told her, and he unfolded the entire story of Arthur and Eddie and the market he thought he had in New Jersey.
My mother listened. She had a model for life as a drug dealer’s girl. Her old roommate Connie was married to a man named Dale, a wiry guy of the sort who liked putting his face close to the fan blades. For their honeymoon Connie and Dale flew to Colombia, where Dale went off alone for a few days, scoring a kilo of cocaine, which his new wife smuggled home to their starter house on Long Island, where sixteen-foot pot plants reached for the sun.
So as my father spoke, my mother’s smile widened and she started to nod her head, curls bobbing. She believed in weed and she believed in him, and she felt there was no question—none at all—that this was a great opportunity, certainly better than him working at that concrete-step factory, which she believed was the reason he had been flashing his temper recently. She even helped my father get the money he needed, calling her father, telling him that she and Tony wanted $2,000 to get their own place, to start to grow up. He sent the money the same day.
All Tony needed then were customers. He called an old junkie friend, Buddy Bone, who said he could sell ten bricks a month near the University of Hartford. Buddy introduced my father to Black Earl, aka Earl the Pearl, who bought a few bricks for the pot-hungry kids at Yale. Tony’s New Jersey connections gobbled up another five or so bricks at his new low price of $120 a pound. In every case he ferried the dope in brown paper shopping bags: a bag of weed, a bag of love.
His customers became his friends, and his deals became a source of pride. It was a small-time trade, but it was his: his investment, his networking, his profits. For the first time in his life, my father made more money than he could fit in a wallet: $1,500 that month, $1,500 the next. In three months he’d made more than my mother made her whole first year teaching. Within six months he had quit his job at the factory. It was the last legit gig he would have for almost twenty years.
To understand how it could all go down so easily, you have to understand more about the kid-level response to Richard Nixon. The dawn of the War on Drugs, the moment when Nixon turned the federal arsenal against smugglers and dealers, was also the dawn of the century’s greatest push for the acceptance of marijuana: the emergence of two Americas in mystified conflict with each other, a conflict that continues to this day.
In 1972
Nixon’s own National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse issued the results of a two-year study of the marijuana problem. Its conclusion: There is no problem. Pot should be “decriminalized,” a move which would make its use legal or nearly legal in the land of amber waves of grain. More than thirty states did in fact reduce their penalties for pot possession. San Francisco became the first big city to outright decriminalize. The National Review, The New York Times editorial board, and the American Bar Association endorsed an end to all federal laws that considered marijuana use a crime.
Nixon was livid. He defended his ban on marijuana, saying that legalization “would simply encourage more and more of our young people down the long, dismal road that leads to hard drugs and eventually self-destruction.” He redoubled the war on marijuana, aiming to pinch shut the borders and create a shortage, one that would push up prices and turn pot into an untouchable expense for the average user.
The effort worked all too well. Prices soon rose—but the result wasn’t fewer smokers, it was more smugglers. Tens of thousands of young, white, college-bound or college-educated men “from higher social levels,” as Interpol put it in a 1970 report to the international police community, started smuggling and dealing in quantity. Some nights every one of Nixon’s sensors in the desert went off simultaneously. Radar picked up hundreds of planes—Cessnas and Beechnuts, behemoth DC-3s, Constellation airships—all of them delivering dope like U.S. aid packages.
Meanwhile, at Nixon’s new border checkpoints smugglers got creative. Some went wide of the official crossing points, winding through canyons on foot, trudging across the muddy Rio Grande, or bringing the dope in on donkeys. Others hid it in shipments of vegetables, or furniture cushions, or in the paneling of a car, or the underside of a Winnebago, or beneath trunk loads of hockey sticks, soccer balls, manure. They used apples and oranges and cayenne pepper to hide the scent and beat the dogs. During droughts, it was common to smuggle plastic-wrapped dope inside water trucks, because not even the cops will want to be seen pouring water out on a hot day. Snake containers were another option; no one cares what’s under a cobra’s cage.
Demand was also rising, as it would throughout the 1970s: ten million smokers nationwide; fifteen million; twenty million; twenty-five million. Dope rings sprang up in every big border city: Tucson alone had eighteen, according to the authorities; San Diego had twenty. In New Mexico, a hundred pilots were said to be known drug runners. The coverage of these high jinks drew even more people to the industry. FLYING DRUG RUNNERS REAP BIG PROFITS, read one headline in The New York Times, sounding more like a special advertising section than traditional journalism. “You can make a lot of money,” related the head of customs, as if to say: “Act now before supplies run out.”
Before long a double standard developed. As was the case during Prohibition, when drinkers were overlooked while bootleggers were pursued with bullet-sweeping zeal, marijuana smokers were relatively safe while their suppliers were hunted like the last hogs on a desert island. The crucial difference between the two periods was in how marijuana smokers came to view their suppliers as extensions of their own compassionate community. In a twist on the Eugene Debs maxim “While there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” the marijuana brotherhood believed that while there are suppliers in jail, no smoker is free.
From this line of thinking, smuggling and dealing gained a new and still more powerful attraction: not just money but fame, not just status but legend. The notion of dealers and smugglers as righteous heroes grew directly from the laws that supported use but banned sales. This all fits in neatly with the history of American crime. Briefly, it’s the story of two kinds of lawbreakers: criminals, bad men who do bad things; and outlaws, “good” bad men who do “good” bad things.
The distinction developed slowly over time and across cultures, but by the twentieth century certain illegal exploits clearly took on a chivalric glow, the honeyed tones of epic. The outlaw became the darling of newspaper men who made him the darling of the American people, and in this way, the outlaw became a recognizable hero, updated for each generation.
For the Woodstock generation the update was the gentleman dealer and his accomplice, the gentleman smuggler. They challenged unjust laws and fueled the Great Stoned Age, supplying the sensual side of the antiwar movement, a symbol for all who wanted to flip off the hypocritical elite and dance around in the tall grass. They didn’t invent the guitar, or the campfire, or sex in the mud. But they made those things better—and in doing so they made themselves divine.
In 1974 my mother was twenty-four and my father was twenty-eight. She was a teacher and he was officially unemployed. But with a household income of $16,000 they were earning as much as the average Manhattan professional in his fifties. They moved out of the beach house and into an old stone homestead attached to a three-hundred-year-old farm. The backyard was an estuary that ran for a quarter mile in both directions, ending where a new line of plummy beach houses began. To help them explore it, they bought a black Lab puppy, purebred, and they walked him daily, talking about their future together.
Around the same time my father secured his first cover profession, perhaps the coolest job in America besides marijuana dealer: ticket seller. I don’t mean that he was the guy in the booth, flipping through alphabetized envelopes at show time. In a pre-digital world, you needed an advance man, someone to deliver paper tickets to all the places you could buy concert tickets in those days. That meant record stores, but also restaurants, bars, clothing stores. He left home each week with a satchel of tickets and returned with a satchel of cash. Along the way he made marijuana drops, and at night the same weed would cloud the Palace Theater, as much a part of the show as the houselights and speakers.
The performers were singer-songwriter types, balladeers and acoustic acts, ideal to take in while high—ideal for a nation who, like my father, was looking for an emotional comedown, descending from the rage of the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” to the more subdued language of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” There was no darting around the stage, no knee sliding, no windmill guitar playing. The acts simply appeared when the stage lights flicked on and spent the next few hours making soulful, toe-tapping noise. Along with my father’s weed, the effect was like instant yoga, an evening in an ashram. Afterward the performers slumped backstage like beaten prisoners and smoked joint after joint of their own.
The Steve Miller Band, Steppenwolf, Blue Oyster Cult, Mothers of Invention, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Eagles, Queen, Alabama, Hall and Oates, Dave Mason, Steely Dan, ZZ Top, Lou Reed. Eddie booked them all, and my father actually went to the concerts, freely moving between the floor and backstage, feeling like the ghost writer responsible for everyone’s story, a thousand and one good times. My mother loved it as much as he did. She sat backstage with the acts, the greenroom lit only by a candle stuffed in a wine bottle, my father off doing who knows what with God knows who, and she contemplating the same.
They both were “working on themselves” as devotees of the human potential movement, leach field for all that lost political energy. They bought tarot cards, paged through the Tao Te Ching, and actually read the Whole Earth Catalog. If the New Age ever came, they believed it would arrive one person at a time, starting with themselves.
My father used “the power of the ticket” and “the power of the plant,” as he called them, not to mention the power of cocaine, a hot new drug universally adored and yet to be feared. In 1974, Dr. Peter G. Bourne, a drug expert who would later become Jimmy Carter’s chief drug policy adviser, blessed cocaine as “probably the most benign of illicit drugs,” a substance “not physically addicting, and acutely pleasurable.” It gave my father a high that felt like a mother’s love, a high that left him feeling warm and secure and utterly coddled.
But before long it was resulting in very little sleep, followed by terribly brittle recovery periods and another night out, where a new depth of craziness and paranoia would be reached and more drugs would be
taken. One night, after snorting coke with the guys from the band Alabama, my father headed home with bloodhound eyes and skeletal cheeks. On the way he was cut off by a guy in a Corvette with a vanity license plate.
My father flipped the guy the bird and howled at him out the window. The Corvette let my father pass him again and then started to tail him, which only further infuriated my father. He flipped him off again and tapped the brakes and all but dared the man to pull up beside him. Then my father took a left where no left existed, and a wooden telephone pole stopped his car, and the windshield stopped his head. He opened the door and spilled out onto a quiet, rural street and the Corvette stopped behind him, popping and tinging in the night. All my father saw was a boot hit the pavement as the driver approached. If the stranger thought about helping it was only for a second, because by the time he reached my father the man’s hand was already cocked, and he punched, kicked, and tore my dad for perhaps ten seconds. Then, as though on rewind, he walked backward, got into his car, and pulled away.
At the hospital later, my father was still raging. Eddie had to shush him, and comfort Ann who was blubbering. The wounds weren’t life threatening: a dented head, a concussion, broken ribs. But the incident and all that it revealed—the loss of control, the crying girl, the risk to the business—hung in my father’s memory like a rotting corpse. He could lose everything, he realized, it could all disappear.
My father returned to work with new discipline and his network only grew. Soon Buddy Bone and Earl the Pearl wanted almost twenty-five kilos a month for the New Haven area. The New Jersey market tripled. Drugs made you friends, and my father was using that simple fact of the ’70s to make new friends out of complete strangers. The best new friends were two guys in Dutchess County who could move twenty kilos a month.
Add it all up, subtract by the two or three slow months when the dope is being harvested in Mexico, and my father sold about a half ton of weed in 1975, earning $40,000 in the process. That was just a smidgen below the average salary of a major-league baseball player. Dope was “the only business in the world where a young adventurer can start out one day with a few thousand dollars and end up a couple of years later a millionaire,” wrote New York magazine, in a cover story that August. My father was running hard in that direction.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 4