My strongest memories of him as a father are all auditory. The exuberant ksssh of his newly opened can of beer. The happy thwack of a bottle top flicked free with a Bic lighter. The needful suck as he tilts the booze to his mouth. Then the unrestrained belching and the lip farts, which stood in for all manner of explication. “Charlie, what do you think of Operation Desert Storm?”
“Braauppt.”
When he inevitably bounced off the doorframe or bumped into the table, he made a sound like “Icccccce!” And then the night dissolved into howls and guffaws, asinine stories and Charlie’s spontaneous imitations of a panther. Why a panther? I’ve never known.
“So, anyway, the doctor asked, are you a diabetic, and, uh”—here he pauses to cover his eyes for a moment and gather himself—“No, no, I told him. I’m a Democrat.” Roaring laughter, dead silence, panther growl, then a surprisingly skillful wink.
The most terrible sound was when he rubbed his dry, calloused hands in solemn reflection, and with unbearable seriousness, leaned, squeakily, against our cigarette-scarred dining-room table and harmonized with whatever folksy tune he decided was good for dinner. His favorites were Brewer and Shipley, and his old friend Jimmy Buffett, whose music he now adored. “Goo-od times and riches, and son of a bitches, I’ve seen more than I can recall!”
Charlie could be a positive influence despite himself, more a billboard for clean living than an advert for the dangerous life. For the bad stuff, I still had my father, who might be dead but who lingered nonetheless.
It’s the absence of personal history, as much as its presence, that can be damaging to a young person. I had no father, so I made up a father. I built him up from the two scraps of truth I actually liked about him: that he had once sold marijuana, a fact I picked up like stray dog hairs and the smell of cigarettes, and that his whereabouts were unknown. I feathered those bones until I had a father myth I could live with, one that gave me confidence in my genes, confidence in my lineage.
I started telling friends about my dad, the big-time drug dealer. As high school progressed, I elaborated on that lie. He probably lived in Colombia, I told them, because he had fled there, and compared to their dads—federal bureaucrats, scientists, engineers—he was a badass. Compared to them, it followed, I was a badass, too. I had a hidden power, a knack for crime. My life had been cracked in two and the two parts didn’t match, the stories did not cohere. Rich then poor, beloved then abandoned. The dissonance was sometimes overwhelming and the outcome was cruel. The more my mother fought to put distance between me and my father, the more she added to his absentee charms.
I had the kiss of student-athlete status, as the starting center fielder on the baseball team. But my friends and I were not jocks but jokers, best known for a line of nonviolent pranks and high jinks. We spirited away faculty bathroom keys, photocopied hall passes, stole and then sold test answer keys. We slipped VHS porn into the video library of the SAT prep class, until the counselor’s cliché of “find a fit” never sounded so tawdry.
But my greatest scam was definitely as the high-school bootlegger. It began in tenth grade. My mother went in for a new license and I went with her. There was some sort of mix-up at the counter. We had to shuffle down to an out-of-service window to finish a form. I noticed a stack of licenses. There was no glass between the workers and customers, just raised counters, which meant you really had to drape yourself over to reach the other side. But drape I did. I tried to make it look casual, like I was stretching my lats, mindlessly drumming with my palms on the other side of the line.
I walked out with a stack of licenses as thick as a deck of cards—reclaimed licenses, as it turned out, because they were expired or nearly expired. Half were women, another third were guys over thirty-five. In the end there was really only one license that seemed like a match. I can’t remember the name on it, but the face will never leave me: long black hair, pale, twenty-seven years old. I was fifteen, dumb-jawed, fuzzy mustache, pimples, and a stage curtain of blond-brown hair. It was not a match. But I tried it and it worked. And it kept working.
During this stretch my mother was one of the county’s alcohol counselors. You had to see her if you were caught drinking underage, which meant I was a prodigious buyer of alcohol for exactly the market that walked through her door. I was also now a minor baseball star, the leading public-school hitter in the county as a sophomore, with no education fund other than the long-shot kind I might win for myself. It’s no exaggeration, in other words, to say I risked everything. I risked my mother’s job. I risked my future.
We were juniors when it finally happened. The weather was warm and we were drunk on a malt liquor called Steel Reserve. It made us punch glass and bleed into dish towels. We were tending a good junk fire in a pit behind Gordon’s house, which was just up the hill from my house and shabbier. I’d known Gordon for a year and had never met his parents. We all understood that his house was the house with not enough money, not enough rules.
His three- or four-year-old sister was always around, up at all hours but always in pajamas. People said she slept in a drawer. I don’t think Gordon ever denied it. The squalor of the place attracted a wider ring of friends—jocks, wits, stoners. Never girls, just boys who wanted to hit a blender with a golf club, throw a can of hair spray into a fire pit, and drink. I always bought the beer, the liquor, the cigarettes. I did not do it for the money. I never pocketed more than the change from somebody’s $20. I did it for the fun of it. I did it to see if I could. I did it because I was a kid and maturity sucks and, my God, what did the world expect from a kid with a dad like mine?
I read that one of my baseball idols had grown up with an absent father, modest home life, criminal sidelines, and I saw my own situation as it might appear two decades later as a human-interest story aired during a New York Mets rain delay.
“After his father left,” the announcer would say, over video footage of me blowing a bubble of pink gum in the brilliant summer sun, “Mets rookie Tony Dokoupil dedicated himself to two things: his mother and baseball.” I started taking a hundred practice swings a day, partly so I could tell interviewers later. The narrative grew until it encompassed everything in my life. I was not a delinquent on the road to ruin, but a hero whose story required some time walking the chalk line between good and evil.
One of the kids around the fire pit was Jonathan. He was Jewish in a Christian county, and the Christian kids let him know that. They called him the Juice, but pronounced it as the Jew and rarely got to the “ice” part without cracking themselves up. When the advertising slogan for Starburst candy was “The Juice Is Loose,” they got ahold of some stickers for Jonathan’s locker, backpack, shirt, hair. Jonathan was one of my best friends. He called me Poor Boy. I called him the Jew. And we were all together at Gordon’s, drinking, name-calling, drinking.
We passed a bottle of Goldschläger. We passed a bottle of Southern Comfort. We drank our Steel Reserve. At some point Jonathan decided to lie down in the kid sister’s room. She had a bed after all, it seems, because I found him in it a couple of hours later. It was around midnight, curfew time for most of us. His face was smeared with blood from a fall near the fire pit. He had wrapped himself in a blanket, a final act before sleep.
He wasn’t breathing.
I rolled him onto his back. I thought that might kill him, make him swallow his tongue, so I rolled him back onto his side. He spluttered. A breath, and then nothing again for a long time.
I had no good options. If I called for an ambulance, I might as well have called for a pair of handcuffs, I thought. I shouted into Jonathan’s face as the fire pit burned down in the backyard. We were the only ones left in the house when I finally called my mother, who called an ambulance. It seemed like five of them came, jamming the dead-end street where Gordon lived, bringing out the neighbors.
A few weeks later, Jonathan’s parents called me at home. They invited me over, thanked me, bought me a fleece vest from Eddie Bauer, and said I had saved t
heir son’s life. They said they were grateful for what I had done for Jonathan. I accepted the vest, said gracious things. No one ever asked where we got the booze. I guess they just figured boys will be boys.
I felt like a murderer for a while after.
But I did not stop buying people booze.
Genes are spooky that way. My father couldn’t stop, either. The only difference is, he was running from a monster and I was running from a ghost.
As a center fielder, I was positioned to see not only the whole field of play but also the bleachers and the parking lots, and I studied both at least as closely as the guy at bat. I was afraid my father would show up one day, a cameo by a guy who was more junkie than heroic drug dealer. Since I did not know what he looked like, every unidentified man was suspect. Everybody was my father.
The day my father finally appeared was one of my proudest. I felt sharp walking through Reagan National Airport, wearing a Windbreaker with my number on it. It was 2001. I had a six-figure college scholarship to play baseball and study, and I was returning from Disney’s Wide World of Sports, a name that still sets off a geyser of pride inside my chest. It was the site of our conference tournament, and although we had been eliminated, each member of the team got $120 a day for food and free theme-park tickets, so we came home feeling like champs.
“This came for you at the office,” my coach said, handing me a letter. The postmark was many weeks old. I opened it and my knees almost buckled at the salutation: “LITTLE TONY!”
The note inside was from Aunt Carolyn. It said that my grandmother Phyllis’s health was fading, but her last wish was to see her long-lost grandson again. Uncle David had found me “on the computer,” and he suggested they send this letter to the athletic department, since they couldn’t trust my mother.
“CALL ME!” she added.
When I did call, a couple of days later, I learned that my grandmother was dead. I have no memories of Grandma Phyllis, this keen-minded, strong woman who was good for a hat and a savior to her children. But Carolyn had other news. Your father is doing well, she said. He’s living in Boston and would love to hear from you. She didn’t say what he was doing, or how he ended up in Boston. She didn’t mention drugs or addiction, let alone the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, U.S. marshals, and federal time. As far as I could tell, in fact, he was almost as estranged from his family as I was.
I wrote down the number, folded it into my pocket, and tried to put my father out of my mind. I reported to play in the New York Collegiate League, giving myself over to the sweet Simon and Garfunkel melancholy of the road, the man-walks-into-a-room anonymity of sandwiches from Subway in ten different counties, the banded weirdness of spending two months in a new town with your exact counterparts at other colleges. I found under-the-table work digging pools for a local company. It’s what it sounds like: dig a hole, dodge a back-hoe blade, fight the hidden river of clean, cold water when it bursts through the surrounding mud walls.
I was happy with the work and excited about my life, so I called my father, confident enough to think I was ready to replace myth with reality, dumb enough not to know what reality would be. He picked up instantly like a man at a desk, a personable fellow waiting on orders for his workshop full of toys. His voice was singsongy.
“Hel-oh,” he said, and I realized I never should have called. When I introduced myself, he uncorked great spraying arcs of champagne about how he loved me and missed me. How he bought me everything as a baby, did everything for me, went everywhere with me. I felt my chest compress, my brain burn, and I hurried the conversation along, pushed it forward like a man swallowing a piece of food it would be too impolite to spit out.
I’ll be in Boston over the weekend with friends, I told him. Could I stop by? We could have dinner.
I wanted my father to let me in on the story of his life. I wanted him to tell it to me in the belly of some smoky Boston restaurant, and for me to get angry for a moment before I let him bear-hug me into a golden period of camaraderie and high spirits as “your daddy and your friend.” I wanted to feel a shift from the ranks of those for whom the past is blank, the future uncertain, to those for whom all is known, all fates sealed. I wanted the simple, straightforward example of a parent’s life well led. I wanted to be him, is what I’m trying to say. But it sounded like he was nobody.
He refused to see me.
“Oh, Tony,” he said, “I’m not well.” And I felt something shatter inside, my carefully imagined display case containing my father: “Drug Dealer,” American. He destroyed it with a few words. I hadn’t seen the man since 1987, when he smashed a table in our living room and the Mets lost every time I watched them play. Fifteen years later there would be no reunion. He said no, because he didn’t know how to explain his real biography. I hung up, because I didn’t dare ask for it.
I might have immediately cut ties with him if not for a hint of his temper, a crackle of interference that seemed to belong to a bigger man. It came across when I told him about Ann and Charlie, their marriage, and the fact I was paying for college with scholarship money and a loan. He growled at the news, hissed about the money, all the Mr. Rogers gone from his voice. “I don’t understand,” he insisted. “Ann has money.”
I was ready to believe it, since how else to account for the abundance of our lives in Miami? It didn’t make sense that we were poor, unless I was missing something. And I was: No one ever used the word marijuana.
That fall I went back to college in Washington, D.C., where I heard from yet another long-lost family member: my father’s elder brother, David. He wanted me to know that my father had inherited about $40,000 from his mother’s estate and that he had decided to give me $5,000 of it as “fun money.” This news arrived in the form of a check, and a note from my uncle telling me to cash the check right away. I thought that was odd, but I did as I was told.
The check bounced.
Frantic, David sent another check for $5,000. That went through, and I blew it on a hiking trip to Colorado and a surfing foray in California. My father spent the remaining $35,000 in five days flat.
Dad and I talked a lot more by phone that semester. After his gift, I felt like I owed him my time. But he reverted into a man striving toward respectability. With each banal anecdote about my crib toys or how I enjoyed the sprinkler, he was desecrating my idea of him, scribbling over the picture. In the summer I reported to play in the Great Lakes League, one of the best in the country, and where I generally swaggered around working in bars and hitting.
Baseball culture was a lot like smuggling culture, and my father and I might have talked about that if he ever took off his sweater vest. He seemed relieved when I told him I couldn’t bear to call anymore. At the time I thought it was odd, his willingness to go separate ways. Today I suspect the conversations were hard for him, too. He must have hated being so boring and vulnerable. He must have hated being the good-guy father he thought I wanted, instead of the bad-guy father he was.
I was on the run after those calls. When my father was merely gone, an empty cauldron to be filled with whatever spell I needed, I could do or be anything. The phone calls eroded that belief. I struggled with the dismal math of our relationship. If my father was nothing, how could I ever be something?
I had this idea that if I could just distinguish myself academically and land a job, I would be free of my father. I stayed with this idea, even as I started failing at baseball, moving from center field to left field to right field to the bench, where I lost part of my scholarship. I stayed with it through sessions with a school counselor and rounds of antidepressants that left my vitals feeling like the frozen center of a microwaved pizza. I stayed with it until, improbably, I graduated as valedictorian of my undergraduate business school, the first to get my diploma, the only undergraduate speaker at our graduation. When the hats dropped, I had a job at the world’s biggest and oldest public relations company, with offices all over the world. I chose San Francisco, the West, w
here I had no family and no friends, and I would be free to invent myself.
But almost right away my father slipped through the mail slot. He must have been in some sort of a program, because he volunteered that he was mentally ill, bipolar, and schizophrenic. When I replied that he was being a hypochondriac, he sent me a doctor’s note attesting to it all. He’d been living mostly off disability for years, he explained, and he furnished me with more paperwork to prove it.
Oh, I said. I see. You’re scamming the government, posing as ill for the money?
No, no, no, he clarified in another letter. He told me again that he was crazy. He told me that all the men in our family have been crazy, and that none of them had a real chance in life. He warned me about “a pack of wolves” who don’t care who you are or what you can be. He signed off, “Hope this letter isn’t a burden.” No, Dad, not at all. He added, “Don’t let it be!”
A few days later, after I had settled into life again, I received the cover of Civilisation, Sir Kenneth Clark’s 1969 history of the world. The title of the book and Clark’s byline had been torn away, and on the back of the page my father explained his gesture.
Tony—
Meet Sparks, Pirate Extraordinaire, whose treasure is lost to every treasure hunter the world over for 300 years until his two sons—on down the line—crack the code held in the simple child’s necklace of carved wooden figures that he wore the day his mother was murdered by the King’s Assassin, Mad Dogo.
Belief and Hoorays!
Dad
A few weeks later, he wrote to say, “The Pirate Kings is writing itself. I never experienced such a wonderful power! My left hemisphere flashes and feels hot, like a magic lamp someone has rubbed, and a marvelous thing happens—theme, characters, conflicts and resolutions start to march in my mind’s eye.”
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 24