No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  Normally, when someone asked one of the questions that required I lie, I had stock answers prepared, now practiced. Some were the lies we had been told when we were small, now adopted into my own cache, and others were fabrications, whichever I found most compelling at that moment. People don’t really listen. My dad is an art dealer, a stock broker, a businessman, a hippie. He’s barely in my life; he’s, like, my best friend. Sometimes I played at being candid with strangers—I know Cait and Evan did this too—like teasing ourselves with what it would feel like to just talk. At a dinner party someone asks what our father does for a living, and we say, “International drug smuggler,” completely deadpan. They reply, “Yeah, right, no really, what does he do?” Or, “What, no way!” and then you say, “No, of course not, he’s in mergers and acquisitions,” which is also true.

  But I didn’t want to play those games when I was high; I wanted to talk. I wanted to tell my friends with a sense of urgency, and I was sure we would be bonded by it. But the next day I would wake up full of shame, a dirty gut feeling, like the world was falling even further apart, and it was all my fault.

  Slowly, all this talking, drug-fueled though it was, helped in some way. Or maybe that’s overintellectualizing it, and I was very simply getting smashed and having fun, which is enough of a tonic in itself.

  * * *

  On August 13, 2001, Dad was released from prison. He was fifty-eight years old. He had been inside for five years and four months of his ten-year sentence.

  There isn’t a clear celebratory moment in leaving prison, because they squeeze you out of the system peristaltically slow. From the low-security prison in Taft, where Dad served the last eighteen months of his sentence, he was assigned to a halfway house in Los Angeles—officially called a residential reentry center, which looks like a forbidding roadside motel—and then after two months he was deemed ready for “reentry” and released into home confinement.

  A friend of Dad’s had offered him a job at his company in the financial efficiency department, fast-tracking what might otherwise have been a challenging return to the working world. Over our summer visits we had slowly met many of Dad’s old friends, with whom he had lost touch when he went on the run, and each would tell us what a good guy he was, a warmth tinged with sadness, sometimes complicity, and it felt like Dad’s past kindnesses were now being rewarded. These were the same friends who had rallied together to cover our school fees when Dad’s stash of art was sold and the money ran dry.

  He had rented a ground-floor apartment close to his office in an old 1940s house with retro appliances and a shared garden shaded by the branches of a lemon tree. His belongings had been retrieved from that secret storage unit in London and shipped to America, reuniting him with Mobutu the gorilla painting and the black cashmere rug with its entwined Oriental serpents—these objects, signifiers of Ben Glaser, the man he had not fully embodied for close to twenty years.

  Back home, I tried to imagine what life on the outside must be like for him, the things he was experiencing for the first time in many years. Driving a car. Listening to live music. Choosing what channel he watched on TV. Choosing whether to explain his past to every new acquaintance. Silence. Privacy. Women. (After a failed attempt to salvage his marriage to Lana, blighted by five years of incarceration, he had now joined a dating website.) Most of all, what it must feel like for this to finally be over. The FBI found the books in September 1983. It was now 2002.

  * * *

  I flew out to visit him the summer after I finished school. I was leaving home that September to study English literature at Leeds University. His home confinement had ended by then, and he had to report to his parole officer once a week for three years under the conditions of his supervised release. He was on the home stretch.

  We decided to take a road trip together from LA up to San Francisco. It had been many years since Dad and I had spent time alone, and I was nervous before flying out that something would be missing, that this newly freed father would feel like a stranger to me. Each year I posted him photos before our summer visits, “so you know what to expect,” I wrote.

  It was a six-hour journey. The two of us driving north, Paul Simon or the Eagles blaring, just like when I was little.

  On our first morning in our rented apartment in San Francisco, we had lox, bagels, and cream cheese for old times’ sake. I watched him tearing the dough from inside his bagel, toasting then buttering it, a thin layer of cream cheese, and then the lox, his eyes wide, sitting straight up, fixated on the task at hand while narrating it back to me on autopilot.

  He moved with the swiftness of a hungry man, a man who was still thrilled by the simple pleasure of preparing and eating a meal of his choosing. Everything was wonderful to him during his first forays into freedom.

  Dad was thrilled with the progress technology had made in the past six years, though he was still getting his head around the advancements he had missed out on. The internet had happened while his back was turned. He was trying very hard to catch up.

  During our meal, Dad occasionally looked up at me and shook his head in disbelief—pressing his lips together in that closed-mouth smile of his—at the very simple act of sitting across the table from his daughter sharing breakfast.

  I asked how he felt now that it was all over. Excited, he said, and optimistic about the future. He was ready to start making big money again. Legally, of course. He had written a screenplay he was hoping to have optioned—about a scientist who discovers the secret to eternal youth and the wealthy tycoon who exploits him—and he had started to rebuild his connections in the art world. I found his confidence remarkable—unsettling even. Was he putting on a brave face for me, and if not, where did this inexhaustible supply of self-belief stem from? I worried the world had changed so much in his absence that his once-sizable skill as a businessman would soon prove obsolete, and his grand expectations would precipitate a fall. But that, I have learned, is a fundamental difference between Dad and me; where I want to preempt pain, he sees no point in suffering until the time comes.

  As he stood from the table, he knocked twice with his knuckles, a habit he picked up inside to signal the movement he was about to make wasn’t aggressive. I smiled and copied him.

  * * *

  We went up to Haight-Ashbury to see where the hippies once convened, now lined with tourist stores selling tie-dye T-shirts and head shops with their colorful glass pipes crowding the window displays; that ubiquitous ganja leaf imprinted on tins and posters for teenagers like myself to purchase in order to shock their parents—or not, because pot-smoking wasn’t such a big deal anymore, and soon enough, it wouldn’t be a big deal at all, despite all those people still serving time for marijuana offenses.

  We went to City Lights Bookstore and talked about the Beats back in the day. Dad was keen to kit me out for the start of classes. He was hoping to get special dispensation from his parole officer to fly to England and visit us soon: Evan, working in TV production in London; Caitlin, at medical school in Manchester; and me, soon to be just an hour east, in Leeds.

  We ate dinner in Chinatown and walked through the lantern-lit streets, ripe with the smell of sweet roasting meats and the fish water washed down the gutters at our feet. Dad shared what he knew of this city in tidbits and tales, told to me as we strode side by side, the whole time working something out together—working out who we both were all these years later and what we meant to each other now. Our relationship had been conducted over prison picnic tables for the allocated twenty-eight hours a year for the past five years straight. Not to mention three hundred minutes of annual phone calls and one final furlough. I wanted Dad to know me as a person with tastes and opinions and joys and heartaches, not the nine-year-old girl he once left behind, like Kristina Sunshine Jung on the doorstep with her pink suitcase. We are woven from the cloth of our parents and yet emerge dyed in a different ink. I was also coming to realize, while he’d missed out on many years of watching us grow up, we’d misse
d out on him too. The dad of my childhood felt far removed from the dad I went to visit in prison and whoever this man was now walking by my side. I wanted to reconcile these people. Who was this man, who had been through so much, his optimism intact despite everything? Who, for better or worse, chose for this one short life we have to be an incredible adventurer.

  * * *

  We were driving back to Sausalito later that evening, back to Artie’s place; he had first housed us before Dad’s self-surrender. Dad was asking me about my new boyfriend. I was now in love with a boy called Matt; it was that easy young love that happens before you have the chance to question it. It occurred to me how strange it was that Mom had seen this procession of boys progress through my teenage life, teasing me about each in turn, usually because they were varying degrees of stoned, and Dad had not met a single one. He hadn’t met any of my friends either, even if he did make a concerted effort to remember their names.

  “And have you told Matt about me?” Dad asked.

  “What? About your situation?”

  “Anything?”

  “Yeah, I told Matt. I guess it felt natural to tell him,” I said. “He’s not someone to gossip anyway. I don’t think he’ll tell anyone.” I thought about this for a moment. “Not that it matters anymore, I guess, but I still don’t talk about it much.”

  “No?” Dad asked, occasionally glancing over at me from his focus on the road ahead. “Myself, I tend to gauge who to tell depending on how cool they are with drugs, how liberal, you know?”

  “I guess. But when you don’t talk about something for so long it gets kinda ingrained.” Dad didn’t say anything. “Like, when you were on the run, the second time in France and stuff, Mom always hammered it home that we had to be careful not to tell our friends, or anyone, and then when you went to prison I think she worried we would be ostracized at school if they found out. It wasn’t the sort of school for girls who had dads in prison.”

  Dad made a dismissive sound, as if Mom had just been overly cautious, and I found myself getting angry with him.

  “Dad, I need you to appreciate that it wasn’t easy for us,” I said. “I know you suffered more than any of us, and I don’t want to put you through any more, but it wasn’t just your life that was messed up by this. I’m telling you now, because you weren’t there to see it, and I don’t know if we’ve ever told you before.”

  “I might not have physically been there, Ty, though believe me I wish I could have been, but I always tried to be there through phone calls and seeing you at every opportunity,” he said, “and I like to think we have a closer relationship than a lot of fathers and their daughters who haven’t been through half what we went through.”

  It was something he said often, and it was true. But that wasn’t the point.

  “I know,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean you had any idea what I was going through. You weren’t there, Dad. I went pretty crazy for a bit…”

  He looked over at me. “I probably didn’t fully appreciate what I was putting you through, no, because if I had, I’m not sure I could have kept going. I think also you protected me from what was happening at home, so I wouldn’t worry. Whenever you came out here you seemed so happy and well adjusted; I never thought you were having a hard time. I’ve always been incredibly grateful to your mother for doing such a good job raising you. Whenever my friends meet you guys and tell me what great kids I have, I say, ‘Don’t look at me, it was their mom—they’re this way despite my influence.’” He smiled as if it were a joke, but he was looking grim. “I’m glad you’re telling me now. This is what this time is for.”

  “I think part of it all was that I was angry with you and I didn’t know how to tell you that while you were still inside. I felt if you had really loved us, then you wouldn’t have done it. I know nothing’s that black and white now, but back then, that’s how it seemed to me—”

  “If I had thought for one minute the choices I was making would end the way they did, I would never have continued, but I felt confident I had the risks under control—”

  “But that’s just it, Dad,” I cut in, “can’t you see? I know you wish it hadn’t turned out this way—obviously—but really you just wish you’d never been caught, don’t you? You never acknowledge that you shouldn’t have smuggled drugs when you had a young family who needed you. We needed you. I did. You’re so busy trying to get us to see that it was the lifestyle back then or that, I don’t know, it wasn’t your mistake, or whatever, and you never just stop and say you’re sorry that you fucked up. I’m eighteen years old. This has been my entire life.”

  Dad had pulled into the driveway of Artie’s house and turned off the engine. He sat back in his seat looking out over the Bay. I saw him struggling, my words hammering away at years of fortified denial.

  “Of course I’m sorry, Ty. My mother always said that regret is a wasted emotion and I try to keep that in mind, but if I could tell you the nights I’ve lain awake wishing I could go back and undo what I did … I just try not to let myself think that way.”

  We were still sitting in the car, but I felt we couldn’t leave until we arrived at some sort of resolution. A few moments passed, and then I remembered the letter I never sent and I knew what I wanted to tell him.

  “To go back to what we were talking about before,” I said, “yes, I have told some friends, really only my close friends. You know, when I tell people, the first thing they say is ‘That’s so cool, your dad was a pot smuggler!,’ and I just roll my eyes at them.” Dad smiled at this. “The next thing they ask is whether we’re still in touch, like a dad who would do something like that couldn’t possibly stick around, you know, a stereotype of a drug-dealing prison dad on the lam or whatever, some sort of real con. And it always makes me angry, and I defend you, and I say we talk every week, and wherever in the world you were, you always made sure to find a way to see us.

  “I have been angry and hurt, but I’m not angry anymore, or at least, I don’t know, I’m ready not to be. The thing is, I realized you didn’t have to keep seeing us or shipping us around the world, and if you hadn’t, you’d probably have gotten away with it. It was me they followed, after all—I know that. I used to be scared you and Lana would start again without us”—Dad made protesting noises, but I continued regardless—“and then you would still be out there somewhere on a beach in the Caribbean and I wouldn’t have you in my life at all. But I know now that’s something you would never have done.”

  * * *

  Dad did visit me at university in Leeds. Twice, in fact. The second time he flew over for my graduation in 2005—his parole had ended by then—and it was the first time I had seen him and Mom together since I was nine years old. Twelve years had passed since then, and having dispensed of my hat and gown after the ceremony, we went for a celebratory lunch in a gastropub. Sitting in the July sunshine at a white picnic table, our fingers picking from the same basket of bread in the middle, I listened to Mom and Dad gently flirting, reminiscing about past acquaintances and their young lives together. They directed their anecdotes toward me, but it was for each other they told them. It gave me a glimpse into what they were once like as a couple and the life I might have led if I was that other Tyler. But it was just a passing thought, and I realized, sitting there between them, that I didn’t need to be that girl anymore.

  NOW

  31

  June 2016

  I’m back in Marin County visiting Dad, where he lives with his wife of ten years. Shortly before their wedding, she told me she wished they’d met earlier in life so they could have shared more time together, which I thought a beautiful sentiment. Those Gods of Good Fortune weren’t so unkind after all.

  I’ve come here to finish this book, which seems apt as I started it with Dad in 2008, when it was a biography of his life—a condensation of that 300,000-word prison tome. I went to live with him in Los Angeles and interviewed him every day for a month, sitting in the shade of the lemon trees in the garden. It t
ook me more than a year to realize I didn’t want to write another book about a man’s misadventures at the expense of the women and children, and trying to do that was only making me mad at him again. At that point it became a novel “based on a true story.” When people asked me where the concept came from, I lied and said the family were old friends. I wasn’t ready to say that girl was me; instead I called her Cameron and then Robin, until four years later I realized I’d written a memoir, and I became Tyler again.

  Halfway through writing this, I found myself on the phone to Dad, hysterically demanding he call his lawyer so I could see it in writing that he or Mom couldn’t go to prison based on this book. I was wedged in the doorway of my work space in New York, my knees tucked up to my chest, hoping no one caught me in this catastrophic state. Dad calmly explained about the statute of limitations and assured me that everything was going to be fine, which only made me cry harder, while acknowledging in the quiet part of my brain that I was behaving like a crazy person. I hung up the phone and realized these tears were the same tears I’d cried when Scotland Yard took my diary at twelve years old. Dad forwarded the response from his lawyer, as he had promised. Rationally I know there’s nothing to fear, but a child’s voice somewhere inside still warns of terrible things in a whisper. I shush it away, and put one word after the other, writing my past back into place.

  * * *

  Dad wakes up at six o’clock every day to manage his stocks—he works as a financial manager now—and when I get up two hours later, he makes me a cup of tea and encourages me to eat one of the small cinnamon donuts that he loves. Over breakfast we plan our day. “Let’s discuss the schedule,” he says.