My mother used the extra money to help educate the unwitting youth of the state. She bought bunting and corkboard for her classroom. She organized bigger holiday parties, deeper snack tables, fuller chip bowls. She liked the feeling of working without really needing to work. She liked having that hidden power. At the end of her first school year, an unsmiling boss came to see her about a report she had written.
“See this?” he said, pointing to the offensive document. “You’ve got a comma out of place here.”
He wanted her to change it—to retype the whole damn thing. Summer bloomed out the window. This was the last week of the semester. She had new money, and love, and she wanted out. But her administrator droned on.
“Our standards are our kids’ standards … If we don’t do it, they won’t do it … We simply have to do better.”
“I agree,” my mother said, cutting him off. The room filled with a silence like what rushes in when a lawn mower goes quiet.
“I think that comma is where it needs to be,” she said.
“Fix it,” he replied in a hard voice.
“It doesn’t need to be fixed.”
“Fix it,” he said again, “or you’re not getting your check.”
My mother had graduated from New Haven, as they say, but it wasn’t Yale: She merely acted like it was. She spun on the heel of a sensible shoe and made for the door. She heard him say that leaving was a fireable offense but he was willing to give her one last chance.
“Fix the comma,” he called. “Fix it or you’re fired.”
“You fix it,” she said.
My father held off on any big gestures until he hit a particular personal milestone. By late summer, he was almost at his goal: selling a ton of weed. Put another way, he was now a Class I violator of federal law, a fact he relished like the Eagle Scout ranking he never quite reached. When he dropped the last hundred pounds at Buddy’s, he tore his shirt off and put it in a plastic bag, like it was going into the trophy case at the front of his old high school. He gave it to my mother, who was not even close to being my mother yet, and told her to save it for “our son.” The truly crazy part is, she did. When I went away to college, she gave me a bandanna-tight Rolling Stones “Tour of the Americas 75” shirt, baby blue. Under the Stones logo is an image of a bald eagle.
My father’s celebration continued into September. He bought a new canoe, new hiking shoes, new fishing rod, new backpack and tent. He also bought a very fine wooden-handled folding blade. A whittler’s knife. Then he drove and hiked and drove again through rural Maine to Quebec and back. Some way through, in the lake-dotted forests near the roof of America, less than ten miles from the Canadian border, he saw a sign on a hundred-acre wood. He bought it.
That extended his Walden-like journey. He doubled back to visit one of his new customers, a Connecticut boy who’d moved to a cabin near the Sugarloaf ski resort. Together they got high and used words like communion and breathe. For the next few days, he set off into the woods. On the first night four white-tailed deer visited his tent, and my father took out a notebook, a rainproof, acid-free, thick-stock journal. He recorded the deer, “beautifully content and well fed in the rain.” The next day he killed a sucker fish to protect the larvae of the lake and apologized to a bass who swallowed his hook. At nightfall, he collected driftwood and whittled it, poorly, but without drawing blood, which has to be considered a success. And on his last morning, he paddled his canoe out to the middle of a lake clean enough to drink from and clear enough to catch fish by hand. He considered grabbing dinner from a shaft of sunlight. Then he saw it. A bald eagle, careening through the cold, crisp air.
“I am free now,” he thought.
2
Dealer McDope and the Golden Age of Marijuana
South Florida and New England, 1976–1978
Anthony Edward Dokoupil—veteran needle user, graduate-school dropout, drifter-laborer of the driving-nails and pouring-concrete variety, a sometime painter and onetime security guard—was, by his thirtieth birthday, making more money than 98 percent of American men. It was 1976 and the golden hour of the golden age of marijuana love was approaching.
After Watergate and Tricky Dick’s resignation and the fall of Saigon, marijuana was more than a protest drug; it was a victory drug. Bongs lined mantels like championship trophies. By decade’s end all but two states (Arizona and Texas) would go on to reduce the holding of small amounts of marijuana from a felony offense to a misdemeanor, and in eleven states—containing more than thirty million people—pot use would be outright “decriminalized”: reduced to a finable transgression, no more unseemly, legally speaking, than speeding or crossing the street against the light.
The speed of this shift was breathtaking to behold even at the time. In 1970 President Nixon closed America against the “enemy force” of pot smugglers, who along with other drug dealers were “public enemy number one.” Six years later, half of all Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five had tried the product my father was selling. A third of all high-school kids had done the same. And the country swelled with more pot smokers than there had been Truman voters a generation earlier. Inhale in America in 1976, and someone was liable to yell, “Hey! Smoke this! It’s better!”
On their land in Maine, my parents spent the summer of marijuana’s rise in a state of peaceful repose. They were acting out the lessons of the Whole Earth Catalog, eating vegetarian hot dogs off a tree-stump dinner table and ruminating on the fragility of the known world. Every day they hiked and camped. When it was dusk, and the fireflies glowed, they collapsed in the uncut grass of a vast waving field.
In the mornings, when it was too chilly for sex, too bright for wine, they drove to town for coffee and doughnuts. They picked up the newspaper, awash in retrograde bicentennial patriotism, and discovered that both presidential candidates had come out in favor of more progressive laws on marijuana. Jimmy Carter, whose three sons had tried marijuana, endorsed decriminalization, and Gerald Ford at least agreed that smokers shouldn’t be going to jail.
“Did you see this?” took on a note of ritual as my father smashed pastries into the slot beneath his mustache and my mother read out the news from Portland and beyond.
Sometime that summer my father realized what in retrospect was an odd fact: He feared congressmen more than cops. The latter could lock you up for a while. The former could put you out of business forever with the pull of a lever: a vote for legalization. He imagined the Marlboro company flipping a switch to produce Marlboro Greens, the first mass-market marijuana cigarette, and it occurred to him that there weren’t many people making money off moonshine these days.
When the fall came, my mother went back to teaching at her old school—the drama of comma-gate having subsided—and my father went back to dealing. He was desperate to expand his business, so he hired a couple of new dealers as well as an apprentice who he came to love like an heir. It was my mother’s younger brother, Dougie, a community-college kid with a patchy beard and the lingering soft edges of youth. Dougie liked New Riders of the Purple Sage, a country-rock group with a hit called “Panama Red” and an album featuring a sketch of a mustachioed gringo of the same name, obviously a marijuana maven, who Dougie thought looked a hell of a lot like his sister’s boyfriend.
It was more than the sunken cheeks and the furry curled finger of a mustache that made Dougie decide to wholesale for my father. It was the clowning physicality of the weed business. It was the hugs. My father was always embracing his crew, theatrically kissing their cheeks and pumping their hands, giving the room his biggest goomba-goomba smile as he joked that so-and-so was a narc or a woman or a fag. It was pretty crude stuff, to be sure, but by the old codes of masculinity the change was profound. My father told Dougie he loved him, which to a boy raised by a taciturn, standoffish World War II vet felt uncommonly warm.
My father looked at Dougie and saw all the makings of a huge earner, which is why he bought the kid an old car to help him get s
tarted with deliveries. It was a sign of Dougie’s talent that he soon had his own ride. He partnered with a rich kid from school, the heir to a small fortune who owned a fresh red BMW. Together they plumbed the pot markets of half a dozen major universities. They drove bags of dope down from Boston to New York to D.C., and returned with bags of cash.
Everything worked smoothly until one night that fall, when the boys felt their car shudder and stall on its way across the George Washington Bridge, which enters Manhattan at 178th Street, then one of the worst areas in the city. They coasted the rest of the bridge and then restarted the vehicle on the shoulder only to cough and sputter to a halt again, this time at the bottom of an off-ramp in a rancid, broken-down stretch of dead row houses. They were out of gas.
A kid emerged and then another and another. The kids, Dominican kids, started hollering, asking if they could be of service and the question reeked of violence and sent shivers up Dougie’s spine.
Today it would be obvious that dope is the one true Esperanto, but it wasn’t at all obvious to Dougie. He opened the trunk, pulled the last of his weed out, and offered it to the boys, the largest of which he half expected to backhand the package to the ground before pounding Dougie’s pasty white form into the pavement. Instead the boy started to laugh, and then everybody was laughing and the contents of the package were vigorously consumed. When Dougie told the story to Big Tony, the boss man wasn’t angry or full of advice. He gave his young deputy a hug.
In November, Carter was elected on a platform that included decriminalizing marijuana. The nation’s potheads rejoiced. Keith Stroup and the staff of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) fired flares from the window of a New York hotel and bounced around on some mattresses with the fine young ladies of COYOTE (Cast Off Your Old Tired Ethics), the sex-workers lobby, whose support was enthusiastically welcomed.
The host of this pot-world bacchanal was Thomas King Forcade, a self-proclaimed hippie Robin Hood who used smuggling money to help fund NORML and launch High Times—the Playboy of pot, the naked ladies of the centerfold replaced by hi-res shots of marijuana buds. “Dope was no longer a fad or a problem,” one of the magazine’s early editors later wrote. “Dope was a world.” And High Times covered it, “a vast underground society that had its own myths and folklore and social etiquette and pecking order, songs and language, heroes and humor.”
The magazine claimed four million readers a month, few of them subscribers for the same reason you wouldn’t want a magazine called Piracy and Plunder sent to your door two centuries earlier. The ads ran to bongs, rolling papers, and counterintelligence equipment. The “Highwitness” news pages covered busts, scams, and new legal openings. The features were a mixture of service journalism—“How to Smuggle Like a Pro”—and epic tales from the underground.
High Times exalted men like my father, the brave men who provide “a metaphor for civil liberties” and “a gateway to outlaw consciousness.” It talked in terms of the “contrabandist executive elite” and “aces of the dope air force.” But perhaps the coolest ego trip was the board games advertised in the back pages. One was called SCAM: The International Game of Dope Smuggling, but the better seller seemed to be Dealer McDope, which was based on an underground comic character by Gilbert Shelton.
“We’ve all had fantasies of making the million dollar deal,” as the introduction to the rule book put it, with “tons of contraband and that enormous bank roll in our pocket. Lots of folks are coming out these days telling us what dealing big time was all about, but we know one thing for sure. McDope went to all those places, played and panicked, scored and whored, and now that he is ‘legit’ he wanted to pass along to you the way it was really done. So sit back and cop to some fantastic entertainment.”
My father was living his life as a game of Dealer McDope. He began in Doobietown, U.S.A., aka Milford, Connecticut, and grew quickly into a player there, rolling the dice and drawing a winning combination of Deal, Bust, and Karmic cards. For the last few years he’d had the real-life version of “Perfect Karma,” which sent cash his way and allowed him to “ascend to Nirvana immediately,” aka the woods in Maine where the deer are unafraid and eagles fly.
But there’s a lot of game left to play, a lot of cards left in the deck.
“Smak City!”
“Schizoid Informer!”
“Screwed by the Karmic Kock!”
Eventually everyone draws the equivalent of “Watch Your Ass! It’s a Karmic Fuck!”
My father drew it near the end of 1976.
His business tanked.
He got the news in the form of a phone call from his Dutchess County customers. He had given them a few dozen bricks of Mexican, and two weeks later they wanted to give them back. This had never happened before. It was good weed, this Mexican stuff. It was grown in the mountains between Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, and the high was formfitting to your mood. It could make you feel like a coyote howling atop a pyramid at sunset or a snugly bear donning a nightcap and blissfully turning over on the couch. The problem wasn’t the weed. It was the market. Everyone with a Mexico connection was getting a Karmic comeuppance.
In 1976, so many people were smuggling and dealing professionally—and so many people were smoking—that quality mattered more than ever. Just as Rolling Stone made everyone a rock critic, High Times coached smokers upscale, publishing an annual Top 40 guide to “the most potent, precious and prettiest crops,” and seeding the magazine with lines like “a fine strain of marijuana, like a fine wine or cigar, has its own characteristic flavor, appearance, and aroma; it is as unlike any other plant as two snowflakes. Learn to distinguish the vulgar or presumptuous, domestic window-box hybrid from the truly amusing little-imported thoroughbred.”
Plenty of Mexican farms were ahead of this shift, including the number-one selection of the High Times Top 40 of 1977, a strain of Oaxacan Red that when harvested and sent to the streets looked like something scraped off the undercarriage of a lawn mower on a wet morning. This was typical of old-school American pot, which was grown outdoors, smuggled by boat or plane, doused in ocean spray, soaked in fuel, infested with spiders, and never less gnarly and natural and unpredictably weird than nature itself. Every item on the Top 40 looked like a piece of animal scat or something half chewed and spit into a napkin.
But while Mexican could still be great, most Mexican was bad and getting worse relative to the market. Mexican farmers were stuck in a past when American gringos smoked whatever shriveled plant could be grown out of mule piss with minimal effort. They didn’t display a sense of basic pot science, which demands an understanding that good pot is a matter of resinous buds. The female plants produce resin to trap pollen from the male plants, so it’s best to cull the male plants entirely and let the lonely girls pump out resin in vain. This is something the Mexicans didn’t always bother to do. Less forgivably, they clung to the metric system. Those were strikes one and two against them.
Strike three was more interesting, and ultimately it’s what doomed my father’s booming trade. Aside from quality, smokers in the mid-1970s began to think more about story as well. Where was the dope sourced? How did it get here? You can see the roots of half a dozen future food trends in this impulse. To sex up their brands, some Mexican dealers started dropping beads into their loads, telling people to spread the word: This stuff came from the Indians themselves. A thousand years of history.
It didn’t work.
Mexico has Indians, ruins, lush forests, unfamiliar seas, and lost worlds, as the Department of Tourism will happily confirm. But every issue of High Times had a price list, a kind of S&P of weed, a Dow Jones for marijuana. It was called the Trans-High Market Quotient, and it used reader reports and the well-earned phlegm of experience to distill supply and demand into a specific price for almost every kind of dope on the market. Like any market it was prone to wild, irrational shifts, and arguably this was one of them. But at the end of the day, the message was clear.
The people didn’t want Mexican reefer, which until that year had been supplying 90 percent of the market. They wanted the intrigue of Caribbean dynasties, Far East war zones, Arab kingdoms, and South American jungles, which translated into basically four countries of origin: Jamaica, Thailand, Afghanistan, and the big winner of it all—comprising eighteen spots on the Top 40, and retailing for up to $750 a pound—Colombian Gold and Colombian Red, the best-selling strains of the 1970s.
My father’s wholesalers sent a small baggie of what was selling well in the city: some leafy, golden stuff that looked like wild sunflowers passed through the insides of a bear. It was Colombian Gold. They also sent along the unwanted Mexican kilos, which my father sold to a low-grade dealer in Philly.
A couple of years earlier, at my mother’s urging, my father had gotten a teaching certificate from the University of Connecticut, New Haven, a piece of paper that said he could educate the youth of the state. He had applied to seven or eight schools, with no luck. But he might have gone back to that path, perhaps beginning as a substitute English teacher. He might have dropped out of the drug trade entirely in 1976, but who could think about going straight with the Carter administration in office?
He had to get some Colombian. He tried a local connection, a friend of a friend in Bridgeport who gave him about eight bales, or three hundred pounds of dope. (Yes: Colombia tossed out the metric system and dealt in pounds, not kilos.) It was terrible stuff. Young, seedy, dry. You would have to smoke the whole three hundred pounds to catch a buzz, and my father called his contact to say so. He was certain the code of the brotherhood of the righteous weed dealers would ensure a full refund. Not this time. This was Mob weed, Mob rules. You bagged it, you bought it.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 5