Dad moved like a man with $5,000 in his boot, and when he leaned across the counter—raw-eyed and irregular despite his confidence—I cringed, but the check-in girl leaned toward him. To my surprise, the exchange carried on for a while. She laughed a little. Finally my father sauntered back to me, his legs working in those enlivening half circles, never straight lines. “Seven hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, eyes half open. “Fucking rip-off.”
It was a similar scene at the Plaza, where we took a seat in the lobby, and I was sure we were about to be brushed back outside. A waiter appeared, dropping menus in front of us, and standing until we made a move. The Diet Coke was $6. My father moved first. “We won’t be having anything today,” he said, holding out the menus. The waiter’s pen hovered above the pad.
He said, “Excuse me?”
My father lifted his chin and managed to look down his nose at the waiter, who seemed to be losing air from somewhere in his lower back. The silence and the stare lingered until the little man could do nothing but tiptoe away, shooed off by a charity case in a purple thrift-store T-shirt. I didn’t even know declining to order was an option.
And yet our proudest moment was our last of the day: a peek inside the Gramercy Park Hotel, scene of my father’s most exuberant freak-outs and wildest parties, a place where he nettled the staff with endless late-night calls for more coffee and lubricant. The hotel had recently been redecorated, part of a quarter-billion-dollar renovation overseen by the painter and sculptor Julian Schnabel. The Times called the work “truly grand.” My father sniffed around as though it were a ruined car.
“It’s too bad they had to do this,” he said, passing artwork by Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. He paused by a massive fireplace in a baroque, heavy-beamed lobby, deriding it all as “some place in Vermont.” On the way out we passed beneath a humongous chandelier suspended by bronze chains. My father gave it a verbal middle finger. “Those crystals aren’t even real,” he said, and I dragged him out before anyone heard more. Later I looked it up, however, and it turns out he’s right. Schnabel designed the chandelier with cast-resin. My father knows his chandeliers.
For our first few days together, we were easy in each other’s company. My father was full of far-seeing criminal wisdoms and tourist-board-ready exclamations. On Broadway he sauntered into the middle of the street and yelled down the canyon of buildings, hollering toward the horizon line: “I love being back in New York!” He only got on my nerves when his tone turned to one of regret. “Boy, I wish I had the money to live in the city,” he said, as we walked a lane in the southeast corner of Central Park.
“You did have the money,” I said.
“I did have the money,” my father repeated. “But I had you and Ann.”
“That’s not where the money went.”
“No, that’s right. The money went like lightning. There was so much money I didn’t know what to do with it. Like that $500,000 I buried—but what else was I going to do?”
“Put it in a safe-deposit box?”
“Jesus. I shoulda. I should have put it in a fucking safe-deposit box.”
Part of me had not given up hope that my father had a pot of gold somewhere. I imagined that if I just asked him in the right way, he’d remember. He’d jerk upright as if bitten by a snake and we’d run off, driving to Long Island or the Catskills, where we’d dig up a carefully caulked, perfectly preserved Styrofoam cooler of cash. Or else we’d go find this lawyer together, rough him up like Charlie did, and demand our money. I asked him what kind of paperwork he got from the guy.
“He said he’d give me a certificate of deposit,” my father said. “But he never did.”
“Did you get a receipt at least?”
“No. I didn’t get any receipts. I didn’t ask for any. I never asked for papers. I had faith.”
“In what?”
“He was Charlie’s friend, so I thought he would be my friend, too.”
“What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I know. It’s a nightmare for me. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Six hundred and sixty thousand down the drain.”
I asked him about the $750,000 from his last job, and he shrugged. “I was totally fried.”
A few minutes later he patted all his stash spots, forgetting where he put his wad of taxpayer dollars. He found it and a government twenty fell from his pocket as he paid for a $2 food-cart coffee. People don’t change but the world around them does, and the world today—or at least the America that is the only world my father has ever known—has reversed itself once again on marijuana, redefining my father’s life in the process.
In the twenty years since my father was busted Americans have elected three pot-experienced presidents, approved use of medicinal marijuana in eighteen states, and voted to do what no other government ever has: create a commercial pot market. In Colorado and Washington State, as long as the federal government doesn’t fight the will of the voters, pot will be sold, taxed, and regulated much like alcohol. It will be street legal not only for medicinal purposes but, as Rolling Stone recently enthused, “for getting high purposes.”
This may be the end of pot prohibition; or merely the beginning of the end; or simply the beginning of the beginning of the end; or the last instant before another two-decade lockout because the door of reforms is never so close as when it’s being slammed in your face. But it’s certainly no longer a world of outlaws and pirates, a country of little boys in the summer before girls.
It’s a business world: aboveboard, sober, boring. It’s as though Blackbeard went to Harvard Business School, cut his beard, and came out fluent in decision theory and schooled in the complexities of Excel spreadsheets. I know because I took a break from my father to tour the new pot world in Colorado. My guides were self-described “social entrepreneurs,” a “nerd herd” comprised of young men on good terms with a barber. A finance veteran, two children of the Ivy League, multiple lawyers, and the son of a police chief: They could have done anything with their lives. “My brother is a physician” is the kind of thing one hears them say, but they chose the pot business as a boom market, miracle cure, and social movement decades in the making and suddenly, thrillingly near.
“This is our Facebook,” said one of my hosts, a founding member of a marijuana industry group that’s buried the age of sandwichboard activism and instead strives to partner with law enforcement and politicians. In a high-rise in downtown Denver, I watched one of the group’s meetings, flanked by a Pulitzer Prize–winning communications consultant, two state lobbyists, and a nationally known political operative. The guest of honor was a state senator who hungrily accepted campaign donations, a series of envelopes stuffed with cash.
“Huge thank you, everyone,” the politician said, guiding the conversation back to the next legislative session and the kinds of legal changes this group would like to see. Here again, it’s not what you’d expect from a band of outsiders. There’s talk of youth drug-abuse prevention, a bill to define “drugged” driving. When the politician finally rises to leave, after more than an hour, the dealers in their pressed shirts and suit jackets clap heartily. “Thank you,” the politician says, bowing slightly. “Thank you for what you do.”
What they do is procure and distribute marijuana. And not via sailboats and street corners. Heading west toward the Rocky Mountains, Denver rises like a city in a snow globe, but before you reach the exits for downtown, there’s a stark industrial ring, a hard-hat zone of freight trains, heavy equipment, and all-purpose warehouse space. This is the Silicon Valley of the American pot business, which is housed in at least a million square feet, more than all the office space in the city’s tallest skyscraper.
I visited three of these warehouses, each as boring as a soundstage until the moment one actually sees the plants. One second you’re in the gray, empty cold of a warehouse, your mind hypnotized by the dull hum of electricity. The next you’re standing in a perfect simulacrum of summer sunshine with hundreds of gorgeous green
plants gently waving, stirred by fans and soothed by classical music (or energized by hard rock, depending on what the master grower says the plant “likes”).
It’s always harvest time in some of these rooms. Always processing time in others. A magic garden with no sun or bugs. My father’s pot was dirty: doused in ocean spray, soaked in fuel, infested with spiders. This is a beautiful, and explicitly professional, product: hundreds of acorn-size buds flecked with crystals of THC, the chemical without which these plants might as well be hotel ferns.
The old procurement side of the scam—Willy or John getting dope from darkest Colombia—has been replaced by a team of growers who act as botanical gods, replicating different seasons in different rooms, monitoring delivery systems that account for every gram of pot, every plant, all of it accessible to Colorado authorities twenty-four hours a day. If growing conditions slip, these tattooed gardeners (née smugglers) get a text message and respond not with dirty money and a new boat but with a tweak to the water line, maybe a few shakes of plant food.
The old distribution side of the scam—my father and Bobby selling the dope to everyday America—has been replaced by a retail storefront. Stash-house buddies have become young female “budtenders” (née dealers) who distribute the dope from glass apothecary jars. If there’s a problem, the owner, who would have been my father in another life, appears on the scene with a clipboard and an official employee badge, threatening to take this up to human resources rather than cool everyone out with a box of Velveeta, frozen peas, and a six-pack.
The frisson of illegality isn’t gone completely. Every morning outside the unmarked bottling factory, home to Dixie Elixirs, America’s first multistate cannabis-infused-soda maker, men in suits hold the door for twenty-somethings in spiderweb-patterned skullcaps and sweatpants. At one of the warehouses I toured, the master grower, a six-figure hire, was wearing flannel pajama pants and a “420 Weed” T-shirt, as he threw out a doughnut box. Another tour was interrupted by the arrival of one of the staff trimmers, the wizard-bearded host of a Web show called Tokin. All the best talent is de facto black market talent, developed in violation of federal law.
And this tension between the shadowy roots of pot and the direct light of legalization pervades the industry. I saw fleets of contractors collecting checks, along with gardening wholesalers, business consultants, and software developers. But because the industry is still technically felonious under federal law, new businesses struggle for basic services. Banks and landlords hesitate to take their money. They can’t get traditional loans, or insurance, or health coverage. Credit-card companies won’t process transactions in their stores. Judges won’t enforce their contracts. The IRS forbids normal business deductions, bankrupting many operations.
This in-between nature of the business is present in the very product, too. Does medicinal pot help people? Absolutely. It eases pain and nausea, generates appetite, encourages sleep, and generally comforts the seriously afflicted. Yet it’s also a euphoric drug that parks itself in a part of the brain named after the Sanskrit word for “bliss.” It’s both a medicine and a drug—a medicine you like to take—which is why some patients with pot prescriptions have cancer or glaucoma, but the vast majority are young to middle-aged men with vague complaints of pain. “Skateboarders with bruises” is the running aside from critics.
The prescribing of medical marijuana is also a bit of a slapstick routine. Oh, you have cancer? Try this wonder medicine called Pineapple Grenade or Alien Dog or Face Wreck. Oh, you have a doctor’s recommendation? Try smoking this dab of hash with a butane torch, some foil, and what looks like a crack pipe. And then there are the festivals, so-called cannabis cups that blend the sobriety of a bar crawl with the crowd behavior of the Adult Video News Awards, all doctor-approved. Sometimes there’s even a doctor on-site writing scrips.
The future can perhaps be glimpsed in pot companies expanding in an upscale direction, choosing clean generic brand names that would work for any bourgeois bohemian product. Names can grow, in other words, which is perhaps the biggest distinction between the new pot and the old: sheer size and visibility.
As state laws have softened, pot use has risen sharply. More than three million people started smoking it regularly in the past five years, and the rate of high-school experimentation is at a thirty-year high. One in fifteen high-school seniors are smoking daily or near daily. And when a kid first lights up at about age sixteen, it’s usually not with a cigarette. Prohibition prevents an even more tremendous uptick; remove it and you can expect a doubling or even tripling of the existing market, a spike to levels far surpassing any on record, and this in a country that already consumes the plant at three times the global average.
My new friends in the boardroom are counting on it. Sure, they revel in their historic role, talking like the future subjects of a Ken Burns–style documentary, the pioneers who emerged from a dysfunctional prohibition. One framed the federal letter warning him that his store was too close to a school. Others brighten as they describe the signs of surveillance—the clicks on the phone, unmarked vans in the lane. They talked to me in part because they respect my father, a Rosa Parks of the legalization movement who in time will be honored appropriately along with his colleagues: friends of freedom who violated an unjust law.
They respect my father—they just don’t want to end up like him. There are always exceptions but new pot barons are generally uninterested in social banditry; they are immune to the allure of pirates and codes, dive bars and profligate living. After the board meeting, in fact, I went out drinking with eight or ten of them and found myself not in one of Denver’s evergreen-scented holes in the wall but the Churchill Bar, a smoking club inside the city’s poshest hotel, the Brown Palace. There, as a pretty waitress delivered round after round of top-shelf conviviality and an electronic joint prototype appeared, it was easy to see my hosts in thirty years, when legalization is old news and my father is dead, sitting in the same woozy affluence—fatter, balder, and fabulously rich.
Our flight to Miami was my father’s first takeoff since his extradition flight in 1992. Back then he was wearing an orange jumper, his feet chained together and his hands cuffed and then locked inside a black box, as though otherwise he might spontaneously procure and deal another seventeen tons of reefer. This time he wore an oversize blue knit shirt that has, in two-inch letters, POLO emblazoned across his heart. He began furiously chewing gum, mouth open wide enough to pop in a grape between each clench. His toes, exposed and wiggling in a pair of liquor giveaway flip-flops, looked like they were recently recovered from an archaeological dig.
“Where’s the stewardess?” he asked me. I looked up from a magazine to see my father hit the orange Call button again, and again, and again. Finally a flight attendant came over, a concerned expression on her face, like my father might be having a heart attack.
“Is everything okay, sir?”
“Could I have a coffee, please?”
The flight attendant looked annoyed but also wary. This might be a corporate test, or else a revived season of Candid Camera. She leveled with him, gingerly.
“We don’t have coffee prepared yet, sir. I’m sorry.”
“Well, how long before the meal?” my father asked.
“No meal, sir.” She gave him a wincing smile. “We’ll be around with a drink cart soon enough. Meantime, would you like some peanuts?”
“Yes, thank you. And some coffee when it’s ready.”
My father downed the peanuts. When the coffee came he downed that, too. He’d assumed he’d get a plate of eggs, which is why he hadn’t eaten in the airport. I could hear his stomach rumbling. He moved to hit the button again, and I grabbed his hand.
“Quit it.”
“Why?”
“They don’t give you multiple cups of coffee anymore.”
“They don’t?”
“No,” I said. “What are you thinking?”
“They used to,” he said, sinking back into a t
eenage sadness.
In Miami I got a glimpse of my father in his natural habitat, the place where he lived among his own kind, a group of righteous dope dealers that Timothy Leary once described as “the holiest, handsomest, healthiest, horniest, humorest, most saintly group of men that I have met in my life.” And why? Because they are “the new Robin Hood, the spiritual guerrilla, a mysterious agent—who will take the place of the cowboy hero.” When the legalization movement took off, my father was a supporter but his enthusiasm was tempered by a crisp, self-satisfied melancholy, an acknowledgment of the fact that legalization meant the final extinction of this old way of life.
But all that was far away as he was walking through Miami International Airport, recalling the spirit and thrill of his last triumphant arrival in the fall of 1986. Back then he was a hero to thirty million regular marijuana smokers in America, all of whom needed him and his kind to get their ticket to freedom and joy. He was their forty-year-old god, with a frisky bag of money at his side and the promise of extraterrestrial bliss until every dollar was spent. He could go anywhere in those days—the Mutiny, Tobacco Road, Sonesta Beach—secure in a certain elastic definition of fatherhood and fidelity, love and family.
The first thing we did was drive to the Sonesta, where I had booked us a room. My father hummed happily to himself during the trip down South Bayshore Drive in the rental car. The old Sonesta Beach Hotel was one of my father’s favorite hangouts. But when we pulled up to the hotel, his mood blackened.
“What the hell is this?” he said.
At the front desk, we learned that this was the new Sonesta Bay-front, in Coconut Grove. We were given an address for the old hotel. We were not prepared for what it would look like. It turns out that the Sonesta Beach Hotel had been on an epic slide of its own. It was half destroyed by Hurricane Andrew, which left it windowless and closed for more than a year, and it never fully recovered. It had changed hands a few times, sold and resold. Big rehabs were hatched. And then, just a few months before we got there, the Sonesta was demolished, the tennis courts hacked up, the beach brushed clean.
The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana Page 26