The Don CeSar Hotel in St. Pete Beach, Florida, is a pink stucco wonder. It opened to the great parties of the Jazz Age, died out with Fitzgerald, and was reborn as a military convalescence center specializing in “operational fatigue.” It was the best the army had to offer at the time, which isn’t saying much. One common procedure was “barbiturate narcosynthesis,” a drug-aided flashback. It was based on the idea that it might help a soldier to relive his most traumatic war experiences, thereby giving him a second or third or fourth chance to “process” his worst nightmares. This didn’t work.
But the doctors at Don CeSar had an insidious way of placing blame on their patients. Symptoms appeared to be caused by combat, as one Don CeSar study of men suffering hallucinations concluded in 1944, but “on further study proved related to the character and personality conflicts of the patients.” In another paper, doctors took a close look at the case of a man much like Henry: a young white sergeant who flew thirty combat missions as an engineer-gunner aboard a B-24, and ended up at Don CeSar with rashes and related signs of mental distress. These represented “the heavy burden of his marriage,” the paper concluded, plus a “loss of parental attention and affection.”
The year after Henry was admitted to Don CeSar, the director and his assistant published Men Under Stress, the official textbook on flight fatigue. They concluded that what patients really needed was “replenishing affection, consideration and attention, as a small child needs to be praised and comforted after a particularly strenuous and exhausting activity.”
This was the army’s best thinking on the subject: that scores of unwell bombardiers needed fresh soup, and not, say, relief from their scribbling minds. As far as I can tell, there is just one positive scrap to come out of Don CeSar, a single reference in Men Under Stress to a soldier who meets a girl on the beach and feels mysteriously relieved. Unfortunately, this man wasn’t Henry.
There are a couple of versions of Henry’s story. Both involve him getting sick before mission thirty-four, but in the first version he was forced to sit out the flight and Bodacious was shot down. In this version, Henry was brave but the darn army held him off that flight, and he came to Don CeSar wracked by survivor’s guilt, the noblest kind. This is the version that makes all the awfulness that would come after the war a sign of Henry’s deep, deep worthiness. The more he went on to drink, the darker his moods, the more honorable a man he truly was.
But there’s another version, one with the heavier feel of truth to it. It holds that Henry blacked out on the thirty-third mission and broke out in a rash before the thirty-fourth, and that was what put him in the infirmary. Bodacious still goes down, and Henry is still the sole survivor. But he no longer deserves any of his medals because he is not a man who is “cool under pressure” but a man with rashes on his legs and a need to apply a useless brown salve and wear house slippers because his feet are too swollen for boots. In this version, he is hardly a man at all. He’s alive because he was fragile; his friends are dead because they were not.
A month after he was sent to Florida for treatment, thirty-three of the remaining thirty-six planes in Henry’s squadron were shot down, and dozens of men spent the next seven months in prison camps eating a diet of dandelion stew and waiting for the Allies to rescue them. I often wonder if Henry knew about this, and if it felt like he had lost his shot at valor for a second time. If he had gone bad in the prison camps, he would be a wounded warrior. Instead he was just wounded.
After three months of Florida sunsets and sedation therapy, a panel of psychiatrists diagnosed him with a “nervous condition,” and he was honorably discharged on April 3, 1945, four weeks before V-Day, the biggest party in the army. His disability was rated at 30 percent.
The army sent Henry away with a standard letter recommending him for civilian work as a mechanic, inspector, or engineer. It declined to mention that he now had a hard time with loud noises and flashing lights, but no matter what “pre-memories” my father may claim, Henry kept his injuries hidden for years. He worked for a manufacturer of commercial jet engines on Long Island, paid for family vacations on the Jersey shore, and pushed his three boys to succeed in school. In 1953, when he was thirty-eight, with a fourth child on the way, Henry moved the family to the suburbs of northern New Jersey, a middle-class Catholic area with Madonnas on the lawns, candles in the windows. The boys hopped from one private school to another, part of a pipeline to Notre Dame and Loyola.
But 1953 was a turning point for the Dokoupils in other ways as well. It was the last year the Dokoupil family went to the shore. I have a picture of Henry from that year, his head shaved, his hand paused on the way to pounding a shot of liquor, three friends around him, two whiskey bottles already half dead on the picnic table. It was the beginning of Henry’s decline.
My father’s and grandfather’s professional lives were utterly different except for a singular fact: They both dropped a foreign object onto strangers and never saw the crater themselves. By the 1950s Henry would have been forced—through press reports and people talking—to confront the fact that he wasn’t only bombing military bases and soldiers but towns and civilians. Likewise, in the 1980s my father would have been forced to consider the fact that his product was a poison, like the press and his president were always saying. It’s not a poison, of course, and Henry was no war criminal. But both men went through a war, both men were demonized, and both men lost their minds in the process. They were even the same age when it happened: thirty-eight.
Henry ruined a series of jobs, and his prospects dwindled. It was as though something inside him that had pulsed and pulsed, exerting the same pressure in the same spot year after year, burst entirely. The new Henry was violent and abusive. He would shout at Phyllis until his brother Jack could get there, take him out for a drive. Jean and Phyllis stayed behind to reassure the kids, and hours later the men would return to a quiet house, the kids asleep. Henry would hug Phyllis and say he was sorry. But that was only if Jack could make it over in time. When he couldn’t, it was the cops who arrived, usually because the neighbors would call. A few times, however, my father called the police. Anything to stop the yelling.
Henry hated his father but he became him. David was the favorite son, Joseph and Carolyn were the babies. Anthony was the whipping boy, the Henry of his generation. Fathers often expect that their sons will be do-overs of themselves, perfect versions with all the cracks and fissures puttied and smoothed. But this never comes to pass, and the disappointment can be so fierce that in a curious way the boys end up feeling both impossibly loved and utterly unwanted.
That’s what happened to Anthony. He was beaten and abused by his father, and as it happened he felt that this man who had dreamed of him, had met him and instantly regretted everything: the marriage, the suburbs, the years at the shore. Like a good little boy, my father tried to change his ways. He tried to improve himself, which of course meant acting more like his father, who offered a model of manhood that made my father one helluva drug dealer, one monster of a dad.
For years Henry balanced ale and whiskey against soup bowls of coffee that kept him awake, and the man who in his thirties looked like Aldo Ray now in his forties looked like Aldo Ray’s corpse. His face became gray and lined, and took on the strangely desiccated look of the chemically unwell. Sometimes he would rehab at his parents’ house a few towns over. Anthony could never predict how long he would be gone or if he would stay sober. Church Sundays, holidays, birthdays, and graduations were always hit and miss with Henry, just as they would be with my own father in years to come.
Henry (and later Anthony) would not show up, or would show up late, or would arrive on time and be an abusive wreck. Henry (and later Anthony) called his family members names, shitting dogs and bitchin’ bastards. And he delivered these lines like God on Judgment Day, with such deep conviction in his voice, taking the time to look into his children’s eyes and souls and then point his finger and emphasize that they were all the things he called the
m. Even David, who loved his father and defends him—and says, “Sometimes I feel like my brothers and sister and I grew up in different homes”—admits that the man struggled with confrontations, “had no patience and was very nervous.” That, and “he had a pretty volatile personality.” That, and he was “a loner and somewhat antisocial.”
The Dokoupil household had at least two shotguns in it. They were used for sport hunting in the Meadowlands, two or three blocks from the house. The Shotgun Incident, as it’s known to some in the family, could be treated as several separate incidents, since the shotgun was brandished several separate times. I could go into each one. The time Henry chased his wife off the porch, for example, or the time he lined the three youngest kids up and gave each a sip of the muzzle. I could try to find some rational reason for them, too. But none of it would matter, because all that matters is this: He pointed the gun. Once you point a gun at your family, you can lower the barrel, wrap the weapon in blankets, and throw it in the swamp, but you can never get rid of it. The gun is pointed forever.
After a series of jobs as an airline mechanic, Henry continued to create a path his middle son, Anthony, would eventually follow. He worked as a plastics cutter and a night watchman, and he later retired as a short-order cook. Long after that, years and years after the Shotgun Incident, a new panel of army psychiatrists diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia, and awarded him 100 percent of his military income as disability. Around the same time, in a different city, a different doctor would diagnose my father with post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia. It reminds me of that old playground threat, “I’ll hit you so hard your mother will feel it.” A war so bad, the son got PTSD.
“Oh, how I love you little boy,” my father wrote to himself after the diagnosis. As he continued, his words became a procession of broken mechanical scratches until the paper’s edge was reached, and he had to write up into the margins, filling the corners with messages to his former self. “How I want to comfort you. How I ache to hold you and talk to you and soothe you and kiss away your tears. I cry for you now little blond boy, that day, those days, this day.” My father was writing about himself but the problem is ours.
Perhaps what’s hardest to understand in all this is where was Phyllis. Where was the mother, and why didn’t she leave? This is also the hardest part of understanding my own mother, Ann, whose similarity to Phyllis was one reason my father fell in love with her, and one reason both women faced the special problem of pulling a son off the path of their father. Phyllis and my mother were kind, softhearted people unable to resist a genuine apology. And yet both women were also strong, stubborn, and savvy. They knew that leaving was more complicated than simply walking out the door.
The war had taken Phyllis’s first child, and the effects of the war were threatening to take the four children who followed. She wasn’t going to let that happen. She worked the assembly line at Economic Laboratories, a since-vanished soap and sanitary-products company in Manhattan. She’d given up her dream of being a designer, but the mannequin in the Dokoupils’ basement was constantly dressed in children’s clothes and draped in new slipcovers and curtains.
She also transferred some of her pent-up creative energies onto her children. Her sister-in-law Jean came over one day, let herself in, and found everyone in Anthony’s bedroom, where Phyllis was standing, arms crossed but beaming. “Come here,” she said. “Look what my kids did.” She pointed to a wall of wild crayon scribbles, colorful patches of construction paper. The wall looked like the face of a clown who had tried and failed to stanch his shaving cuts. Jean covered her mouth with her hand. “What?” said Phyllis. “They’re children. They’re expressing themselves.”
So don’t think for one second that Phyllis had given up on her kids; on the contrary, she was invested in them more than ever. Henry flew into rages, waved around a shotgun, and on occasion even ran off with other women, just as Anthony did to Ann. Phyllis could have filed divorce papers. She could have gotten them approved by a judge, too. But only the daughter would have been hers. The sons, a helpful lawyer friend explained, would go to their father. Those were the rules in the 1950s, so she stayed with Henry. She stayed and tried to be a positive influence, and whenever it got hard she reminded herself of why she was doing it. She repeated a simple phrase that became a mantra: “Not my boys.”
It must have helped that they loved her for it. “My refuge and safety zone,” my father confided to his journal. He cried on his first day of kindergarten, begging his mommy not to go, hoping she would keep her word about coming back. She did, of course, and she tried to do much more than that for all of her children, but especially for her three boys. And she succeeded.
She saved two out of three.
The Dokoupils had family in Katonah, New York, a bedroom community north of the city. And it was here that Anthony Dokoupil’s great-uncle—whose name was also Anthony Dokoupil and who evidently didn’t work much—showed his young nephew that the straight world was for dummies. The Dokoupil kids and their cousins would caravan up in Jean’s green Jeep station wagon, surfing the special wicker seats as affluence gathered outside their windows. Shrewd Uncle Tony lived with his wife in a large and quiet home, perched on large and verdant grounds. They had no kids of their own but an endless tolerance for the chaos of other people’s offspring.
Among my father’s earliest memories are sock-sliding on Tony’s oak floors, swinging by the low branches of a giant weeping willow, the pleasure of plenty, and the sensation—as unforgettable as his mother’s love—of resting his grubby grade-school head on a large soft pillow until a single thought buzzed like a bee in a jar, an idea that he would ruminate over with adolescent intensity for the rest of his life: Don’t be a sucker.
As for the teenager my father would become, it was a more distant uncle on his mother’s side who shaped him the most. Uncle Cecil lived three houses away from the Dokoupils in New Jersey. He was the big man in the area: the first on the block to have a pool, the first to have a color television, the first to drive a Cadillac, with seats so firm you could safely rest a mug of coffee on them. He owned a bar called the 440 Club, situated on what was then a vein for trucks heading to New York City. He also operated his own long-haul company, which somehow landed national contracts and government accounts, and meant that Cecil’s garage was a wonderland of fur coats and federal satellites.
Cecil was not exactly like the other businessmen of his day. He was a little less orthodox than the average entrepreneur in the 1950s, even the average bar owner. He couldn’t count, for one thing. He would call one of the Dokoupil boys to help him do his payroll, which consisted of a box of money, a list of names, and some envelopes. He also organized meetings in the loft space above the bar, accessible only via an attached staircase. It was a big, creaky room with bare bulbs and curtains that gave it the look of a grand hotel gone seedy. On unpredictable days a fleet of black cars ghosted to the curb, and the stairway played host to a procession of dark-coated men, coughing into hankies and hugging the railing as they made their way skyward.
One Sunday my father, then seventeen, happened to watch them from the front seat of an ice-cream truck. The vehicle’s freezers were packed, but it was summer and he was a teenager and they didn’t pay him enough to be ambitious, so he hadn’t refilled the dry-ice supply and now the treats were melting.
He thought: I’m fucked.
He thought: Cecil can fix this.
Miraculously, Cecil did. He called a friend at Dow Chemical, who delivered a few pounds of dry ice. Joy returned to Lyndhurst.
So, yes, my father idolized Uncle Tony and Uncle Cecil. They gave him a future, just not a reputable one.
Henry gave my father his peculiar energy. Dad was the goofiest, giggliest, happy-go-luckiest kid in his part of the county. He was a boy who danced for company and told jokes for the neighbors. When my great-aunt Jean thinks of Anthony, she thinks of him arms in the air, butt wagging, legs sprea
d out. The casual observer would say he was the loudest little man because he had the largest wounds, and the casual observer would be on to something.
As a teenager my father walked around his community in cuffed jeans, a white shirt, pomaded hair, spouting theories on girls that involved chatting them up while prancing backward and emoting a lot. Or else driving by groups of them very slowly and leaning out the window, panting, banging on the door with an open palm, maybe whistling.
In class he was a good student and a bad disciplinary problem. He felt entitled to jerk around. “I already know what this guy is talking about,” he’d think to himself, “explaining some simple bullshit, A plus B.” He would play with the teachers, bait them, and try for a reaction. Sometimes that meant standing up and throwing his shoulders forward, stretching his back like a cat. Other times he would stroll over to the window mid-lecture. He wanted to make them call his name and scold him, and when they did he would act surprised: Ooooooh, you don’t let people do this?
The principal’s office was on the girl’s floor, so sometimes he got reprimanded just to make the visit, just to slouch in a swirl of perfume, swinging hair, and popping hips, just for the chance to clutch his heart, say, “Ooh, ooh, it hurts, you’re looking so good today,” and then spin away, pushing off football players on his way back to class. He was a theater geek without being in the theater.
Three months into high school, my father and some friends walked to a patch of trees behind a used-car dealership, and many coughs and splutters later, they started laughing and giggling and pushing one another around. They were high on their first high, but they were definitely drug high, too. An older brother had given them a wrinkled little joint, and they blazed it down to their fingertips.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 14