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

by Dokoupil, Tony

  My father was cooking up some classic stash-house vittles in New Canaan when Bobby called and told him to get back on the road. Instead my father took his time, filling his belly with yellow mac and cheese from a box, canned tuna, and frozen peas. He downed a can of Miller High Life and had Fig Newtons for dessert, and still he didn’t leave. He chatted with his two helpers, more friends of Bobby’s, who flipped a coin to see who would take my father south.

  If you plotted the job on a matrix where the vertical axis is exertion and the horizontal axis is fellow feeling, working a stash house would rank near couch moving and television installation: a bit of sweat, but lots of smiles and beer. The pay was always $2 a pound, which was good money for a pleasant night’s work with like-minded men.

  My father filled an attached garage and living room with the bales, each of them tagged with a weight and a price, then numbered, so the count in the room always matched the count on his clipboard, which matched the count that comes in from the buyers, who were due within the next twenty-four hours. With hundreds of bales to unload, this process could take half the night, especially if the quality varied wildly, which it often did because a multiton load was usually drawn from multiple Colombian farms. But this load was exceptionally consistent and high quality, and it had been cleaned first, so it was almost all bud.

  The only problem was the two bales that had been hit with waves or plucked from the sea. My father set those aside as shrinkage. The ocean changed the way the weed burned, it was said, which is why sea bales were known as “headache” weed. No one seemed to know why this happened or what could be done about it, and over the years it became a genuine smuggler’s conundrum. A few years ago, Uncle Dougie and his partner had stayed up half the night in a stash house like this one, trying to solve it.

  What about hosing it off with fresh water? It’s not a head of lettuce.

  What about setting it in a cube of good bales and letting the steam evaporate the salt? That will contaminate other loads.

  What about sugar water?

  They settled on sugar as the antidote to salt, and filled a kiddie pool with water and a pound of the sweet stuff. They dragged the bale and the pool to a barn on the property, and tossed the bale in. They doused it and went to sleep.

  When they woke up the bale was gone, or almost gone. A few chunks floated in the sugar water, surrounded by ragged pieces of twine. The floor around the kiddie pool was clean except for a few dropped stems and seeds from the larger stash. Then they saw a kind of nest above the double doors, and another nest in a knothole near the floorboards. Their eyes followed the bones of the barn upward, and they saw more and more nests—almost every flat or dug-out surface was now a bed of marijuana. Saltwater weed may disagree with humans, but roof rats and deer mice don’t seem to mind it—especially if it’s coated with sugar. Even a trace of marijuana is enough for authorities to confiscate property, so it cost them a day’s labor to clean out the barn.

  That was my father’s parting advice as he left to retrieve the broken-down moving truck: Don’t use sugar water.

  He hitched a ride south, closing his eyes for the first time in more than a day. He awoke near Philadelphia, early the following morning, the hour when night and day noises overlap. He got out, took a piss, smoked a cigarette, and sized up the situation. He didn’t know the exact time—since wearing a watch always made him feel slightly off-balance—but he calculated that at least half a day had already passed, which meant the truck could be staked, bugged, followed, robbed, you name it.

  He sent his ride home and smoked another cigarette. The rest stop was little more than a hollow where the state parked heavy equipment when building the road. One or two picnic tables, a dozen old trees, fifty yards of blacktop, and a tennis court–size patch of grass you just knew was covered in little piles of dog art. The truck was parked alone near the edge of the surrounding forest. It looked quiet, but quiet was how people got caught.

  He began walking toward the truck, thinking he was surely going to be the leprechaun caught with his pot of gold. The door was open and he climbed in. As my father turned the key, he closed his eyes and opened them, expecting to be squinting into a flashlight beam. He waited for a second, still expecting to be yanked down to the curb. Instead the truck started up fine, and that was that; no one seemed to follow him. The gas pedal even wiggled back into place.

  A few days later, Bobby and my father were in Maine, near Seal Cove. It was the kind of place where you might write narrative history, sew fishing lures, or try to bond with your son. The kind of place you would bring a mistress. And since Inga was there, too, fiddling with her radios, waiting for word, my father figured she might make do. He had just played the hero, and she was beautiful, a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from the end of a dock. Inga did not want to wave to my father, however, and I’m reminded of my father in high school, messing with his teachers, trying to bait them. More than a few times, they called him to the front of the class and slapped him. Inga did the same thing, long before dawn. But he didn’t care. It was kind of the point.

  The Maine smuggle went off fine, smoother than the Virginia leg, which meant that the men had just secured the biggest score of their lives, one of the biggest single scores in marijuana history. My father was prone to a crash after a big job, and those crashes became ever more severe as the jobs themselves became ever more extreme. During this job he had succeeded in working clean, and yet as the work shifted from smuggling and sales to the simpler work of receiving boxes of cash, he shifted into the celebratory fugue he thought he deserved.

  In the middle of this good time, on the evening of September 14, 1986, Ronald Reagan preempted Sunday-night programming with “something special to talk about.” He was dressed in security-guard gray slacks and a blue jacket, and sitting on a flowery white couch in his private living room. Beside him was Nancy, dressed in a red skirt with gold buttons. They were holding hands and looked both tired and worried, as though America were out way past its curfew, doing God knows what, and had just come home smelling like cinnamon gum.

  “Good evening,” Reagan began, the camera tightening on his face, which had aged in office. There were now cords of flesh at the corners of his mouth and a gobbler beneath his chin. “Nancy is joining me because the message this evening is not my message but ours.” He mentioned some of his successes, rebuilding the economy and serving the cause of freedom in the world. Then he turned to the focus of the evening: drugs.

  Drugs are “threatening our values and undercutting our institutions,” he said, before a weighty pause. “They’re killing our children.”

  Since early August the idea for this joint speech had been floating around the White House. It was being drafted and redrafted as Bobby and my father sold seventeen tons of marijuana to eight wholesalers. Each man drove a truck up from New York City, meeting my dad at a busy rest stop off I-95, where he left them to use the vending machines while he drove the truck to the stash house, unloaded their down payment of some $300,000 a ton, and loaded their dope.

  As Reagan’s speechwriter processed the president’s thoughts and bundled his ideas, my father and Bobby processed more than $11 million in mixed bills and bundled them for shipment to the Caribbean and beyond. Scrimshaw was set up for deliveries, sitting in an apartment he’d found on Manhattan’s Upper East Side: an eleventh-floor two-bedroom in one of those big prewar buildings. He figured the doorman and the laws of probability would limit the risk of a random robbery. His cover job was art trading, which he actually did part time, spending weeks in and out of Sotheby’s, Christie’s, MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Frick. If you consider that $1 million in hundreds weighs almost exactly twenty pounds and gets heavier with each drop down the denomination ladder, we’re talking about at least half a ton of cash, probably more.

  The night Reagan delivered his biggest drug-policy speech since declaring the War on Drugs, my father and Bobby were splayed out beneath the fourteen-foot ceilings of a
Plaza Hotel penthouse—a reward after couch-surfing at the stash house. They had between them $1.5 million, $750,000 each. The rest was already out of the country, on a journey around the world and into banks in the Channel Islands, Switzerland, and Hong Kong, as well as more local and less distinguished holes, including deep into the bilge of a few sailboats.

  My father and Bobby didn’t watch the address, but if they had it might have confused them. After all, the night Nancy Reagan accused drug dealers of “destroying the brightness and life of the sons and daughters of the United States,” my father and Bobby were having a bright and lively time indeed. She said that drugs take “the dream from every child’s heart,” “the vivid color that God gave us,” but in their come-down room, my father and Bobby had a childlike money fight and did lines off of the mahogany side tables until they were catatonic with joy.

  They would have been most mystified by the president, however, who found the camera for his dramatic closing statement. He used the word crusade six times in the next ten minutes. He compared the fight against traffickers to the counterpunch that followed Pearl Harbor, dubbing it “another war for our freedom.” And he brought good news from the front lines.

  “In four years the number of high-school seniors using marijuana on a daily basis has dropped from one in fourteen to one in twenty,” the president said. What’s more, he continued, “shortages of marijuana are now being reported.”

  Forgive him, he didn’t have the latest figures.

  All smugglers are dreamers. They live for their last big job, the mother of them all, and they talk endlessly about what they would do if they actually pulled it off. In this way they are a lot like teenage boys who talk about all they would do if they could just get this or that pretty girl undressed. In both cases success is the first step to failure, the dream come true is the demise in waiting.

  My father did not take well to his success. I remember a beautiful day on Virginia Key, collecting seashells and driftwood, Dad and I playing Wiffle ball until our shoulders still felt warm in the shade. In the afternoon, we headed back to the car, my mother’s maroon Volvo, planning to buy some roadside key lime pie or add another plastic baseball helmet to my collection of sundae bowls from Carvel. The passenger-side window was shattered, and the radio was gone.

  My father went wild, slapping at the exposed wires and reaching his hand into the slot as though the machine had merely fallen in. He prowled around the car and scanned the lot, like a man who had just lost a briefcase with his soul inside, not a radio and a hundred bucks or so to replace a window. I think he must have had his drugs behind the radio.

  In early October, my father’s bender got so bad that Bobby and his other supplier, John, came to physically retrieve him and put him back in a quickie rehab program. They needed him to help handle John’s three-ton load, which was still coming into Martha’s Vineyard that month, so they knocked on our front door.

  No answer.

  They kicked on our front door.

  No answer.

  Finally, they banged on our picture window and then stood back to see the blinds part.

  Two red-rimmed eyes stared out.

  They took my father to upstate New York, where Bobby found him immediate placement in a fancy rehab center with complimentary massages and twenty-four-hour racquetball. My father went willingly. He loved those guys, after all. They were his best friends and he knew he was putting them at risk. They had a week before he was needed in a stash house for John.

  In the middle of the night, however, my father went to the front desk with a packed duffel bag and asked the guard to call him a cab. When the guard made a move to call the night staff, my father made one of his own, telling the guard he was going to piss in his face and tell him it’s raining. The next day Bobby called to check in on his friend, and he got the surprise message: Tony Dokoupil is no longer a patient here.

  It ended up making no difference to John, whose load arrived on a single forty-foot ketch named Calliope. The boat only got as far as Martha’s Vineyard, where the captain mistook one island for another and ran into the rocks of Nashawena, just across the sound. The crew escaped, and no one was arrested, but the Coast Guard counted 144 bales of finely cleaned reefer in the hold, telling The Boston Globe: “She was full from the decks to the top of the ceiling.”

  That December the gang met for a celebration in St. Thomas, where my father and some friends were supposed to mark their exit from the catastrophe business. Charlie and Bobby were there, along with a long-retired smuggler named Brandy, Bobby’s girlfriend (a former hooker), my mother, my father, Bobby’s son, Brandy’s son, and myself.

  Before we all set sail, my mother and father and I ambled around the island. We patted old cannons, paused over the iron information placards, and yo-ho-ho’ed our way around the ancient warehouses of the capital, Charlotte Amelie, which once supposedly held the bounty of Bluebeard, Blackbeard, and Captain Kidd. Before we returned to the hotel, my father got the idea that he would start stockpiling man stuff for his little guy. You know, passing on the wisdoms of a life lived in obeisance to romance, as the star of his own epic.

  The tradition actually began with that baby-blue Stones T-shirt in 1975. It continued with a small watercolor of a saloon in Key West. It ended in St. Thomas, when my father bought a carved and painted coconut, depicting a pirate holding the hand of a little monkey, which of course stood for my father holding the hand of little blond me: happy and free.

  Our hotel was holding a “pirate hunt” down by the water. It was only a few doubloons buried by the hotel staff and a treasure chest disguised by a few well-worn palm fronds, but I was a kid and fantasy is easy. I dug up the money, popped the lock on the treasure chest, picked up handfuls of yellow plastic—the “treasure”—and let it drizzle into a pile, which I rolled through and defended against the encroaching fantasies of other little boys.

  Two or three days later, my father was gone. He walked off the boat, down the pier, and disappeared into myth, where he has lived ever since. No one could really find him there. It’s a place where my imagination is a spinning instrument panel, and even now with all my research I feel like I can only just find the horizon line, maybe make out a few shadows. I have big questions. Where did he go? Why did he go?

  He flew back to Miami and moved out of our house, officially this time, and into his place on Brickell Avenue, which I never saw until recently. It became the high board for his swan dive toward the asphalt and down through it, deeper, to the very scummy bottom, past the rock, and into the sludge and the swamp.

  During this stretch of his life, he thought a lot about the 150,000 books he claimed to have read. One of his all-time favorites was Death in Venice, a book about growing old in a young world. It seemed to deepen his blissful tragedy, allowing him to feel his body shrivel and his mind reel and to revel in the loss of whatever powers he’d once had. It was sublime. It was dying.

  My mother thinks my father was addicted to the partying. That’s probably what most people would surmise. The good times got him. But I think the opposite was true. I think he was addicted to the bad times, to the foxhole. When he had money, my mother, and me, he lost his god, so he created a new foxhole, a low stinky place where he could find a new god. He created problems for himself, so he could have problems. He was miserable without them.

  What he never considered, and seems incapable of considering, is the other side of the equation. The simple, sad possibility that we might be miserable without him.

  III

  Coming Down

  8

  Busted

  Miami, Florida, 1987–1992

  Plenty of pot barons self-destructed in retirement, but no one did it quite like Anthony Edward Dokoupil. For weeks at a stretch he lived in hotels, upended kilos of cocaine, and hired naked strangers by the squad. The girls were in the phone book under E for escorts. One night my father started dialing, and the agencies somehow knew it was him. Every one refused him service. And
his life was only just beginning to get ugly.

  My mother supported him through a long series of thirty-day rehab programs at as much as $10,000 apiece, and no refund if the patient decides to piss in the guard’s face before the month is over, which one way or another my father always did. He ran away from mud huts, hot stones, and heated pools. I visited him once, and we fished from the landscaped banks of a stocked pond while my mother waited in the car, polishing off a Tupperware bowl of homemade pasta. She gained more than forty pounds in 1987 and 1988, telling friends that food was her medication.

  The phrase “no way” reoccurred in my mother’s life. She first said “no way” when she was dating my father and he called her names. She said “no way” when he slapped her around, too, and “no way” when he disappeared for days. She said “no way” that night in Connecticut, the night my father became his own father, throwing a knife instead of pointing a gun.

  She said “no way” again in early 1987, after she gave me The Brown Bottle, a kids’ book about addiction. I was six, the target age, and together we read about Charlie, “a fuzzy brown creature who leaves the caterpillar kingdom to follow the bright, invigorating glow of life inside a discarded brown bottle.” Charlie gets drunk, in other words, likes it, and never becomes a butterfly.

  It was simple enough, and at first I seemed to show a new understanding of Dad and his demons. A few days later, I pointed to a chocolate bar in the rack next to the checkout at the supermarket. “I really want that,” I said sagely, “and that must be how Daddy feels when he wants drugs.” But of course this was not how Daddy felt.