And yet even here my father would claim he was happy, a fact I found astonishing until I learned the story of Captain Tony’s Saloon, the one in the watercolor my father bought me when I was five. He’d never explained his attachment to this saloon; he can’t even recall if he ever paid homage in person. But when I researched it as an adult the attachment had a way of explaining itself.
Captain Tony’s real name was Anthony Tarracino, and according to lore of his own creation, he dropped out of high school in the 1920s to help his father bootleg whiskey. After World War II, he turned to professional gambling, won big on horses around New York City—and fled south, freshly beaten by angry bookies. He arrived in Miami with a pink Cadillac, a blond girlfriend, and $10,000. Not long after, he fled farther south to Key West on the back of a milk truck, homeless and $9,982 poorer.
This was the kind of life my father loved, one that swung to rock bottom, as they say, which to my father felt like a catnap on God’s own carpet, the ultimate rehab from the pain of being a man. Each night in his box, if he got home in time to get one, my father would lie completely still until he would swear he could feel the planet spin like a Ferris wheel. He wrote me letters during this desolate period. Each one was on a different kind of paper, written in a different pen. The content varies, filtered through a mind cocked this way and that. But the return address was usually just “Daddy,” as though his next-door neighbor were “Santa.”
My mother saved many of these letters and I have eight of them spanning 1989 and 1991, with a gap in the middle, when my father’s life hammocked most dramatically. The hardest part about the letters is the confusion about just who I am and how old I am. The first letter begins “Hello.” Full stop. “I hope this letter finds you happy and healthy.” Full stop. Years later I would recognize the same tone in the letters federal prisoners sent to me as a journalist.
“Do you like the boy scouts?” the letter continues. “What Rank are You? I would like to know the name of your patrol and your troop number. I was a patrol leader of the Wolf Patrol, Troop 81.”
I was never in the Boy Scouts.
A follow-up letter references some pictures of me in my baseball uniform. I am a catcher and so he sends me a page and a half of questions about playing catcher. He wants to know if I signal the pitcher, tag guys out at home, catch long throws from the outfield, run down foul pop-ups, chase bunts. He asks me to write about the most exciting plays that I’ve been in, and then, just when his interest begins to warm a little part of me, to make it glow, the whole charade is revealed in a small loss of the plot.
“I figure your arm must be pretty good if you play the outfield,” he writes, reassigning my position mid-letter. “I figure that you must be pretty fast, too. Have you ever been playing outfield and had to make a running, jumping catch to ‘steal’ a double or triple or even a homer from some long ball hitter? Did you ever throw some runner out at home plate? Wow, I am asking a lot of questions, aren’t I?”
He always would. He would ask about summer plans, friends, teachers, tests, sports, clothes, food, weather. Some letters were more than 50 percent questions. The other 50 percent was demands. He wanted more calls. Pictures. Videos. The neediness was intense, endless. And what he gave back was cringe-worthy. He sent me two mushrooms from the woods. One had “a turtle bite out of it.”
His thoughts drifted from one genre to the next. The result could be funny, like when he downshifted from the high diction of fatherly advice into the coy flirting of a summer love letter. “I’m lonely for your sweet smile and warm hug. XXX.” It was more painful when the slip revealed just how far away from us he was.
He “heard” that I went on a trip with Mommy, the trip to St. Thomas to see Charlie, but he didn’t know where. He wrote “woof, woof Captain” in the margin, and “give him a pet for me,” and never knew that the dog—who at thirteen or fourteen could no longer see or hear or hold his bowels—had been put down. He said he was praying to God nightly, and he asked me to say the Lord’s Prayer before bedtime, and thank God for what I have, which was well and good but not at all how I had been raised.
Other passages show him waking up to what he has lost and will never get back. When I got an A+ in fourth-grade social studies, he wrote, “Tony, I’d like to tell you that learning to make friends and having friendly behavior is maybe just as important as studying hard. Both learning and being a friend are very important in being happy and successful in life.”
He referred to himself as “your daddy and your friend.” And he signed every card “your loving Daddy,” or “all my love,” or “Remember that you are my special boy like I always used to tell you. I love you with all my heart and all my strength. Kisses, hugs, love. Daddy.” Scrawled across one letter was a note, an apology for not giving me a birthday present. “I don’t have money for a present now,” he explained, “but let’s just say I owe you one.”
One of the last letters is a Shoebox Greeting Card. It arrived in the summer of 1991, three years since I’d last seen him and mere weeks before we left Florida for good. The front of the card is a Tyrannosaurus rex sitting in a director’s chair, legs crossed daintily. The beast’s head is turned coquettishly, thumbs twiddling. This is the character my father had chosen as his stand-in: a predator trying to look harmless. Inside the card said, “Haven’t heard from you in ages.”
Eventually my father signed himself into Dade County Jail for a spell, making use of a special detox program that offered three hots and a cot for recovering addicts. Afterward he moved from under I-95 to Miami Beach, where he slept in the lifeguard stands and bathed in the ocean, in another achingly romantic self-portrait. If my father could fish from the crook of a crescent moon, I am sure he would, just for the imagery of it.
One day he walked into a regional convention of Narcotics Anonymous, held in one of the old hotels on Collins Avenue, and as he had done before, he buttonholed his way into a job. This time the job was with Miami-Dade County Beach Operations, as part of a trash crew on Miami Beach. It did not pay well, just $128 a week, and could not be called a good job by any stretch.
But it was a new experience, and not permanent, which was the same way my father viewed the first flophouse he could afford, and the little black-and-white television that only let him down during electrical storms. Work began each morning at seven, and my father walked to the beach from his little room a few blocks away, joining a three-man crew.
His job was to walk behind a flatbed truck for a hundred blocks, from 100th Street to South Beach, pausing to hoist metal cans to a man on the truck bed. At eleven, the crew would break for lunch at the interesting end of the beach, near the cold-water showers the girls use to wash sand off their feet. Then they would drive back, three abreast in the cab, bathed in air-conditioning, watching the surrounding animals like rich tourists on safari in Africa.
There was always extra money to be had. Film crews would pay to have the beach cleared of seaweed, and my father learned the catch points for valuable debris, the places where stray cash would blow and stick, turning fetid groves into money trees. Some days a kind of beach Zamboni would skim away the top layer of the sand, revealing fresh white beneath it, then dumping the gray stuff near the operations shack. To the beach operations team, these were like dredgings from the treasure coast.
Mixed in with the six-pack holders, crates, plastic tarps, and odd pieces of lumber there were goodies: rings, watches, smashed cigarette packs, which almost always had a crumpled bill or two. My dad never told his friends on Mount Trashmore—men who celebrated a dented pack of Camels and a diseased dollar—that just a while back he had been a millionaire. Like the government, they would never have believed him.
In the months before he was indicted, my father was accepted into a federal program for people with “mental disabilities.” He was referred to Orlando J. Valdes, PhD, who produced a report, stamped and filed with Florida’s Mental Health Unit. The nine-page document begins with a recap of my father’s life,
including his career in “the antique business” and “construction.” “Mr. Dokoupil did live with a female for approximately 14 years, which resulted in a 10-year-old son,” Dr. Valdes notes, but this “lady friend” recently left him, taking the boy. My father has since found himself in some “unorthodox” living arrangements, the good doctor noted, including “under the bridge” and “on the beach.”
“I hit rock bottom,” my father told Valdes in conclusion. “What I have are the clothes on my back.”
To assess my father, Dr. Valdes gave him the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Revised (WAIS-R), the most popular IQ test of all time, defined by its maker as a gauge of “the global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.” Purposefully … rationally … effectively. Not exactly the three words one might associate with Anthony Dokoupil. A perfect score is a 150. Mensa eligibility begins at 130, and anything above that level is termed “very superior.” The word genius is popularly attached to scores in the 140s and above.
I was thirty when I found this report in my father’s papers, and while I do not feel like my father, not at the moment, many scientists say there is no meaningful distinction between genetics and personality. DNA is not destiny but genes are spookily consistent, uncannily cumulative. The battle between nature and nurture is over, in other words, and nurture has lost. The “Psychological Report of Tony Dokoupil” is, according to the best science of the moment, exactly what it sounds like: a psychological report about me.
What I read started off promising. My father’s full-scale IQ score was recorded at 142. His verbal score was even higher at 148.
“Cognitive difficulties are not noted,” Dr. Valdes wrote. “Anthony Dokoupil presented himself as a pleasant, highly intelligent, 44-year-old male.” He “possesses a keen ability for details, common sense and expressive vocabulary.” And, yes, the doctor concluded, he “appears to be intellectually gifted.”
I considered the possibility that Dr. Valdes was describing the wrong patient. There is a stray reference to a man of a different name in my father’s report, which gravely imperiled the whole document. But Valdes also administered the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory exam, a popular gauge of “abnormal” mental health. What follows can only be described as ominous, at least if your name is Tony Dokoupil.
“His overall profile was suggestive of low frustration tolerance and much impulsivity,” Valdes concluded. “Similar patients are often seen as having self-centered tendencies, adventurous and unreliable manners. They tend to disregard the potential of actual consequences and may minimally profit from experience. Even though Anthony created a good first impression, it is apparent that the subject may have many interpersonal problems, particularly with authority figures.”
Valdes was bullish on my father’s chances for rehabilitation. A second government therapist concurred. He need only to “leave his past behind,” she wrote, recommending him for work in a library. Yes, Anthony Dokoupil was on his way up when Charlie and Willy conspired to keep him down.
My father himself seemed to sense that the time had come for some final sentiments. His last letter to me—our last communication of any kind for a long, long time—arrived a few months before he rallied into his job as beach cleaner. It was written on thick-stock, high-quality paper and would pass as a professional man’s paper if the top were not emblazoned with the logo for Gables Cats, a Jaguar repair shop.
He told me that he loved me, always and unconditionally. He told me that I was strong and handsome, and he warned of puberty, an “exhilarating feeling,” “a busy and tireless time”; he told me to eat my fruit and vegetables every day and to drink orange juice; and he told me to pray. Lastly, like a man about to embark on a very dangerous mission, he adopted a man-of-the-house tone, suggesting that I give my mother a kiss on the cheek for him.
Near the bottom of the letter, he got to the point: “There is not one hour of the day in which I don’t think of you, and want to be with you,” he wrote. “But perhaps God has other plans.”
My father was arrested on July 7, 1992, a payday, as he sat with coworkers at the Miami Beach operations shack at Seventy-ninth Street and the Atlantic Ocean. It was early afternoon and the men were waiting on their checks, ribbing Leon, their boss, about his yellow jalopy. A black sedan pulled up and a pair of Windbreaker-clad men walked over to my father. They presented a glossy photo for his inspection, not a mug shot but a snapshot, something a friend must have taken. It had been blown up to the size of a sheet of paper, and it showed a young man with brown hair streaked corn-cob yellow by sun. The table went silent.
“Are you Anthony Dokoupil?” one of the U.S. marshals asked.
“You know I am,” he said.
“You’re under arrest.”
“For what?”
“We’ll get to that.”
A few hours earlier my father had cleaned South Beach, emptying metal trash bins into a truck with a piece of stale pizza crust in his mouth, day-old watermelon juice on his chin. It was a pleasant day and he was looking forward to the weekend. But instead he was in Miami’s federal detention center, where a woman took down his personal history in a perfectly round bubble script, the handwriting of someone who chews gum at the office and smells of hand lotion. I can see my father leering at her as she records his vitals: Anthony Edward Dokoupil, five foot eight, a hundred and sixty-five pounds, forty-five, blue eyes, brown-blond hair, complexion “tanned.” The rest of her report is a portrait in negative space, the history of an unemployed “schoolteacher,” with a rented room in one of the vacancy-sign hotels along Collins Avenue. No phone to call. No identification to show. No money owed. No money saved.
In his mug shot, my father is wearing a polo shirt, suavely unbuttoned, his mustache neatly groomed. He looks like a man roped for drunk-driving his Porsche through Coconut Grove, not a laborer arrested from work at a trash shack. His eyes stare into the camera like it refused him a quarter for bus fare.
These are the sworn entries into his affidavit:
Have you any cash on hand or money in savings or checking account: NO.
Do you own any real estate, stocks, bonds, notes, automobiles, or other valuable property: NO.
Debts and monthly bills, please list all: Apartment: NONE. Creditors: NONE.
Total number of dependents: ZERO.
Only that last line was a lie.
9
Big Tony, Little Tony
Maryland and Massachusetts, 1993–2006
Before dawn on the morning of August 24, 1992, a year after we had hightailed it to Maryland, a hurricane crushed Miami along with what remained of my father’s legacy as a drug dealer. The storm swamped my mother’s antique cars and blew away her black market slum investment. It reduced our old house to a drained aquarium, which my mother paid to have bulldozed. She sold the lot for less than $30,000, or roughly what my father once had stashed under the washing machine.
She also started to think of my father as a dead man. She had a vision of him facedown in a rising tide, a shark no more. She didn’t know he had been arrested six weeks earlier, taken off the very beach where television anchors began their tours of Hurricane Andrew’s destruction. If Charlie knew of my father’s arrest he didn’t say, which resulted in the family’s strange middle position on my father’s mortality. On a long drive to one of my summer baseball games, my mother delivered the halting and indirect news that my father was probably no more. I nodded and agreed and exuded the straight-spined sobriety only a twelve-year-old boy can summon in the presence of a chance to act like a man.
Without those cars and the rental income, the high life was truly behind us. We scraped by in the summer, cutting costs by only air-conditioning the living room and using old sheets over the doorways to keep in the cold. Our house in Maryland looked like it had arrived on a flatbed truck. It had no basement or attic and, with the exception of the porch—a slab of concrete covered
with a moldy square of putt-putt grass—nothing obviously predated the beep-beep of a wide load in careful reverse.
Someone’s sailboat was slowly collapsing near the property line. A basketball hoop was tacked shoddily to a pine tree. The white siding was dirty and the flagstones wobbled after rain and spit mud on your clothes. The house always seemed to be narrowing the distance between itself and you. It was not on the wrong side of the tracks, but the tracks were in our backyard, transformed into a bike path I wasn’t allowed to walk at night.
At school I felt the way people feel when they walk into a high-end clothing store: unkempt. My new public-school friends took to calling me “poor boy,” the kid with an AWOL father and a mother working three jobs to get by. Charlie, meanwhile, resigned himself to a kind of malingering that made him a famous neighborhood character.
His back bothered him too much for regular construction work, and our dinner-table talk was about a high-risk surgery that would either fix his vertebrae forever or kill him outright. My mother got him jobs as a substitute teacher, but he came home fuming about “kids these days.” He became like a feckless older brother who smoked in the good chair, monopolized the remote control, and filled the septic tank with beer piss, because he could not get his act together.
I spent a year collecting, without irony or even a nimbus of parental discouragement, thousands of “Marlboro Miles,” tiny proof-of-purchase labels (worth five miles each) from the side of cigarette packs. I successfully redeemed shirts, a wallet, and a dartboard. I regret not holding out for the pool table, maybe the canoe. I ran up our cable bill buying dirty movies, and Charlie’s response was, “Hell, Tony, why didn’t you call me out to watch?”
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 23