Dad took us shopping at Macy’s and bought me a pair of silver hipsters. I later wore them on my first date of sorts, which involved walking around Bath trying to find things to say to this boy an inch or two shorter than me and, at the end, standing on a street corner and latching faces. Mom picked me up afterward, and on the drive home I told her, cringing, about how awkward it had all been, and we laughed a lot. She told me about her first kiss with a French boy on a ferry to Brittany for a school trip, and how they never said a word to each other, which she thought was insanely romantic at the time. And sitting there in my silver hipsters, it dawned on me that Dad might not be around for any of these moments in my life. For the rest of my childhood, he might be there only as a voice on the end of the telephone and a man behind bars.
* * *
In the middle of our visit, we were sitting in the galley kitchen of Artie’s house waiting for the rain to stop, so whatever agenda Dad had planned for us that day could begin. He had a resigned expression, which we attributed to the bad weather, but then he looked closely at us both and said he felt this was the right time to explain why he had ended up in this situation. I could feel his hesitation from across the table, as we looked expectantly back at him with the same blue eyes as our mother, and I saw how much he wanted for us to understand and not blame him.
“Firstly, I want you to know that back in the seventies, everyone was smoking pot. I used to light up in the movies, and there would be clouds of marijuana smoke above our heads,” he said, gesturing to the air about us. “I smoked walking down the street, or with your grandpa before dinner. Everyone I knew smoked pot; it was a lifestyle, and all I was doing was providing the people around me with what they wanted—and getting my friends very rich at the same time.”
He began telling us his story as we struggled to recalibrate our image of him. Our dad: the pot smuggler. Not a small-fry pot smuggler either, it turned out; in the late 1970s and early ’80s, his organization became the biggest supplier of Thai marijuana in North America. One deal alone earned his group $35 million.
I had been unaware that Dad smoked pot (though the smell now makes me oddly nostalgic). I knew nothing about drugs. I hadn’t yet, as would happen shortly after returning to England, while drunk on gin and juice with two friends, marched determinedly down to the local skate park where kids were said to smoke weed and asked a lanky, dreadlocked boy if he knew where I could buy some. I complained it looked like dried nettles, thinking I was being ripped off. He laughed at me, telling me to smoke some and I could have my money back if I didn’t get high. I rolled a joint the best I could, and the next thing I remember, my friends and I were eating a chocolate sundae at an ice cream parlor.
* * *
Dad said it had started small. He was smoking pot in college at Penn State, occasionally buying a couple pounds for his fraternity and breaking it up among his friends. Each of his group had a different animal nickname, and Dad was the Fox, thanks to his gambling skills—a moniker that stayed with him throughout his life. When he became president of the fraternity, it was investigated for flagrant drug use, so he had to crack down, which felt hypocritical. One summer he met Brian Epstein at a party in New York, and he asked Dad to procure some grass for the Beatles, who had just arrived for their second US tour. Dad rolled a hundred joints for them, neatly stacked into cigarette packets, an early claim to fame.
Later, when he was working as a broker with L.F. Rothschild in his mid-twenties, a friend of his started transporting pot from Miami to sell in New York, making several thousand dollars a trip. Dad decided to invest, fronting the money to buy the pot wholesale from the Colombians, who were bringing it in on speedy little cigarette boats, fast enough to outrace the coast guard. Within a year, he started paying his friends to courier it to New York on commercial flights. Back then no one scanned the luggage, and as long as you didn’t look like a hippie, they didn’t check your bags. But then Samsonite cases became carloads, with a baby seat in the back just for show. A large trunk holds up to three hundred pounds, which meant they had to adjust the shock absorbers so the car didn’t tilt up.
Soon Dad had rented a stash house in Coconut Grove and had dozens of couriers driving back and forth several times a week, each getting a few thousand per trip and legal expenses if they were busted, which they were. But back in the 1970s, if the DEA popped your trunk without your permission, the case was thrown out of court. Dad’s associates were conducting business from the court steps while waiting for the acquittal.
Eventually, Dad bought his own DC-6 passenger plane and took out the seats to make room for his cargo. He made a couple trips to Jamaica and found the contacts for his first major smuggle. After that came Colombia, and then Thailand, with tankers, and Tony the Thai, and a pot-growing village deep in the jungle. He specialized in Thai stick: bundles of high-potency sativa buds delicately sewn together with hemp rope, previously unseen in much of America and consequently in high demand. He transported the product around the country hidden behind false walls in the backs of moving vans. The vans were then loaded with heavy furniture bought from the Salvation Army, making them a nuisance for any inspecting officer to search. The furniture would all be donated back to the Salvation Army on the other side, a karmic down payment of sorts. His group had its own logo: a purple Thai boatman stamped on each package.
He spoke about these years as if he had just gotten carried away. His statements were littered with financial jargon—supply and demand, investment and returns, applying the lessons he had learned on Wall Street to the pot trade. He spoke as if he had chosen to ship inordinate amounts of cannabis into the country because it made good fiscal sense.
As the morning turned to afternoon, a dusky hush settling in, Dad emphasized that he had been extremely careful in his illegal dealings, never being present at the offload—when they bring the drugs from the boat to shore, which is the most dangerous moment of any smuggle—and never working with people who sold cocaine. Cocaine was a dark drug, he said—“It turns everyone into an asshole, never try it”—and because the sentences were harsher, the people involved became paranoid and aggressive. It felt surreal to hear my father talk about drugs like this.
Most of all, Dad wanted us to know that he never hurt anybody. The pot industry in his day was benign, for the most part. It wasn’t the gun-toting thrill ride of violence and narcs we might imagine from the movies, at least not often. Dad’s smuggling organization was made up of his best friends. The one member of his inner circle who carried a gun, Dad referred to as a “pretty scary guy.” He portrayed his organization as a group of free-spirited hippies motivated by a penchant for good weed and easy money.
Fundamentally, Dad said, his was a victimless crime.
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to be sorry for him and supportive and strong all at the same time. And those first stirrings of anger only came out as a question or two about why he hadn’t told us before. He said he had been waiting until we were old enough to understand, but I felt that time had come and passed awhile back, and he had said nothing.
17
Before our trip ended, Dad took us back to the Yellow House to see where I was born, just a short drive from where we were staying. It was as if he wanted us to see the beginning of the story. To show us, this was what it was all for. This was what we were running all that time to save.
When we arrived, the house had been painted gray and a big dog with glistening gums barked and growled and stopped us getting at our past. Dad pushed Caitlin forward. “You’re good with animals,” he said. Tentatively, she let the dog sniff her hand, and it promptly rolled over, panting heavily in the afternoon sun.
We walked up the drive, through the shadowy arches of the apple trees’ twisted branches, gnarled like an old man’s arthritic hands. We trespassed on the lives we could have led had Dad never got in trouble. Cait and I tugged at Dad’s sleeves, urging him back to the car, knowing how foolish it was to break the law now—of all times. But he want
ed a closer look. “It’ll be fine,” he said, like he always had.
He wanted to peer through the windows to see what they had done to the rooms we had lived in. He pointed over to the lake, once home to two black swans, now present only in the glimmer of pond skaters, a shadow on the surface. He wrapped his fingers around the wire fence of the tennis court, overgrown with ivy, and his eyes animated memories I could not share. I stood close to him, listening eagerly to his silence, waiting for something to dislodge my infant amnesia, a glimpse of the house from a certain angle, perhaps, and I would see it suddenly through the blurry, colored orbs of a baby’s vision and hear the chirp of the ducklings Mom kept in the paddling pool—but nothing came. The opening pages of my story remained blank.
* * *
The gray house Dad took us to bears no resemblance to the Yellow House in my head. My Yellow House is inescapably beautiful, like a promise that can’t be broken. It has become a mythic place, a place we might go when we die. I built it on the backs of secondhand stories, told to me over the years, and then remembered and retold, so many times the truth has become lost like a fading photograph—curled at the corners with nostalgia and stacked in a box labeled photos #2.
My family moved into the Yellow House in 1981, shortly after Caitlin was born, in anticipation of more babies. Built in the sun-drenched wine country of northern Marin County, like Midas, everything the house touched turned to gold, from its lemon-yellow walls to the bleached-blond crowns of my brother and infant sister.
Mom spent her days barefoot and serene, padding around the eight acres of land with a pair of secateurs in her hand, watching Cait out of the corner of her eye to stop her shoveling dirt in her mouth.
In theory, Dad had quit the pot business by this time, a promise Mom had elicited from him just after Caitlin was born. As he cradled his first daughter in his arms, still astonished by her existence and so in love with every little part of her, Dad was happy to quit. He promised Mom he wouldn’t take on another deal without her permission, and even though this promise sounded flaky and thin, she still pocketed it for safekeeping, knowing she might need it later on.
Dad channeled his surplus energy into developing what he called our “compound.” He reinforced the lake, draining it and installing an overflow system, so the fish he had stocked it with—trout, bluegill, bass—wouldn’t die every summer when the lake dried up. He rerouted the surplus water from winter rain into an irrigation network throughout the gardens so the parched Californian land burst with roses and vegetables.
He built an octagonal tennis court, so the balls didn’t collect in the corners, and designed a state-of-the-art playground with Evan’s input. He installed an intercom so we could all communicate from any room in the house, except it was pointless, as Mom refused to be communicated with at someone else’s whim. He commissioned a guesthouse, a forty-foot swimming pool, a pool house, and a boathouse with a matching rowboat for the lake.
Dad collected vintage cars and art. We played with toys as Warhol’s Mao presided over us, red-lipped and enormous.
He spent a lot of time sitting in a sun lounger by the pool, naked with his emergency red telephone in his lap, working on his tan while contemplating our future. This was to be the start of a great dynasty. It was also important to have bronzed hands because they looked especially handsome beneath a white shirt. A peacock would join him, fan his green feathers, and strut as they basked in each other’s reflected glory.
The Yellow House was overrun with animals. There were two ponies in the paddock, which Mom rode with Cait, on a horse before she could walk, tucked safely between her legs. Dad had sent Mom shopping with $5,000 cash, and she had returned with two rescue ponies and a bag full of charity shop clothes. She returned $4,950 and went to introduce Lucky and Rub to their new home.
There was the Siamese cat, called Sativa, who meowed down the chimney whenever she was locked out, sending great echoing wails through the house until someone opened the back door, and Omi the Akita, a handsome but stupid dog.
On the lake, there was the pair of black swans, imported from Australia as a housewarming present from one of Dad’s associates. And there were the ducks, who finally had ducklings just weeks before we were due to leave. Every night Mom collected the ducklings into a box and brought them inside to be safe from the foxes. Mother duck would wait on the doorstep for her babies to be returned in the morning. One day when Mom was unwell, Dad left the box outside. In the morning, all that was left was torn cardboard and a bloody trail of yellow feathers. Not one baby was left. Mom said that was the first thing Dad did that she could not forgive.
For days afterward, the mother duck waited on the doorstep quacking imploringly. By then, Dad was busy preparing for our departure, and everywhere he went she followed him, flying overhead, hoping he would lead her to her babies. It was the persistent presence of the mourning duck that broke him. He sat down by the lake and cried. He cried for his mistakes. For his family’s lost future and for the duck’s lost babies.
* * *
Throughout his life, Dad had felt blessed, a good fortune foretold in his freckles. His childhood was the stuff of all-American Coca-Cola daydreams, and his luck expanded and grew up with him. Born in Washington Heights in 1943 to a second-generation immigrant family working in the garment trade, by the time he left for college, his parents had moved to a nice house in Long Island and spent summers in the Catskills with other well-off Jewish families. Grandma’s interior design business was taking off and Grandpa had come on board after his own company had declared bankruptcy.
Each winter Dad shoveled snow from neighborhood drives with his friend Jimmy to earn pocket money. Dad had the idea one year of putting all their earnings together to buy a snow plow and be twice as efficient. They made so much money that the following year he could afford to buy his first car, with his parents’ help, a 1962 red Corvette. Jimmy bought him out of the plow, and it didn’t snow again for two years.
When Vietnam came marching in, Dad and his friends enlisted in the reserves, hoping to avoid active duty. Just a week before he was preparing to fly out, a letter fell on his doormat with an honorable discharge due to a heart condition he didn’t have. While friends fought in strange jungles far away, he began to climb the Wall Street ladder.
A combination of luck and guile saw him get out of trouble again and again. The Gods of Good Fortune poured their bounty on him, offering him gold, and land, and love, and he still asked for more, until one day they shook their weary heads, turned their backs, and walked away, leaving him—greedy fool, a mere mortal—to his fate.
According to Mom, this day came when I was nothing more than a cluster of cells in her womb, a secret that no one yet knew. She remembers the conversation they had. It must have been at the beginning of 1983. They were probably in the kitchen. Maybe she was making coconut macaroons or picking the scraps of meat from a carcass of desiccated roast chicken, like I have seen her do so many times since. Maybe Dad was sitting at the other end of the long oak table, where he would usually read the Wall Street Journal and talk to her while she cooked. In a moment of domestic harmony like this, Dad mentioned in an offhand way that Ray had come over that day and asked for his help with another deal.
Mom, eyebrows shooting up and casting him a razor-blade glance, was immediately angry, knowing exactly where the conversation was going, and he felt her anger in the way she crunched the remaining chicken bones into the pot with both hands. “That didn’t last long,” she said.
Ray had previously been a cocaine runner for the Colombians and then used his connections to set up his own trips. He wasn’t someone Dad would normally do business with—he was the one member of Dad’s group who carried a gun, the “pretty scary guy”—but Ray’s girlfriend, Lucy, had been involved with Dad’s last two major smuggles, and Dad trusted her. Lucy had stayed in contact with Thai Tony, who controlled the marijuana fields, and helped Ray set up another smuggle, bringing in 35,000 pounds of high-class Thai
stick. They had found a 500-foot-long Greek shipping freighter for the transportation and organized the offload site—all they needed from Dad was to bring together the investors.
Here’s the math that Dad would have done before he spoke to Mom: at $1,000 per pound, the deal would bring in $35 million. That’s $5 million to the Greeks for the boat; $5 million to the investors; $3 million for the offload; and Ray would owe the Thais another $5 million. After expenses of houses and cars and workers, Dad would make $150 a pound to be split among his investors and salespeople, netting him a tidy $3 million. I wonder at what price per pound was our future no longer worth jeopardizing. Because that’s the math he was actually doing.
Dad downplayed the smuggle to Mom; he would just be on the sidelines, and Ray and his people would do all the work. It was like making money in his sleep, he argued.
“We have enough money, Ben,” Mom countered.
What made his task difficult was that Mom could not be motivated by money. Dad would come home after a night of gambling with the boys in the pool house and lay out the hundred-dollar bills on the bed, like a hunter displaying his kill. She would smile at him, mildly amused at his schoolboy coup, but she had no need for more money or the curses it brought. Unlike him, she was cautious of good fortune, knowing it was cruel and fleeting. Mom had walked away from both her previous marriages without demanding her due half of their wealth, because she refused to be indebted to anyone.
Happiness, for Mom, was the first shoots of spring. It was raspberries with lashings of cream. It was a perfectly ripe mango eaten in the bathtub or someone else brushing her hair. She did not enjoy being decorated in finery like a trumped-up Christmas tree. She had survived a decade of modeling without vanity and had no place for it now.
For Mom, money offered security and the freedom to make her own decisions and the decisions that were right for her children. Dad’s desire for excessive wealth, for riches beyond necessity—that meant nothing to her. She loved him. She loved us. She loved the Yellow House. She loved her garden. She loved that now she could contemplate going back to school. She had once wanted to be a doctor like her grandfather, but her own father didn’t think women should go to medical school. She paid her way through NYU regardless, graduating summa cum laude in biology, but her income from modeling was insufficient for her to accept the place at medical school. Now it was possible. She sometimes felt overwhelmed by the luck of it all.
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