One year, one month, and twenty-eight days have passed since we left Dad on the dusty side of the road in Saint Lucia. I’m thirteen years old now, and I’ve shot up tall and cut all my hair off in a short pixie crop. I want to look like Angelina Jolie in Hackers. I meticulously gel it in place each morning, and it turns to downy duckling fluff by the end of the afternoon.
I finally kissed a boy at my first school disco. The girls huddled at one end of the dance floor, twirling their hair and laughing too loudly, while the boys lingered at the other, their hands shoved deep in their pockets, a standoff with all the unchecked hormones rocketing around between them. Everyone, that is, except for Mike and me; we shuffled awkwardly in the middle to a song I can’t remember. He asked if I wanted to “get off,” which I consented to eagerly, and then his tongue explored my mouth in great rotary explorations like the churning mechanism of an old washing machine. I had to wipe my face on my sleeve afterward. It was thrilling.
That was in Year 8—no longer the youngest grade in senior school—and my new gaggle of friends and I had begun to siphon booze from behind parental backs and secretly down alcopops under the covers at sleepover parties, Spice Girls blaring, each sip a step closer to being the proper teenagers we were dying to be. Sometimes we asked strangers on the street to go to the offie and buy us a bottle of schnapps or Tia Maria, and sometimes they said yes. We used a lot of words we didn’t know the meaning of, shouting “Oi, slapper!” at each other across the classroom, heckling boys on the street, and talking about how horny we were without having ever had sex. We were loud and brash and clueless, clambering wildly out of the last clutches of childhood.
I didn’t tell these friends that my dad was in prison. Not even during impassioned sessions of Truth and Dare when they told their secrets.
I only half told Anna when she asked why I didn’t see my dad anymore.
“He did something bad and had to go away,” I said with appalling sympathy mongering, which both thrilled and disgusted me.
“What did he do?” she asked, and already I felt that guilt like a pair of hands wringing out my gut.
“I can’t talk about it,” I said, blinking away the sensation I might suddenly cry.
“Don’t tell anyone, okay? Promise, yeah?” I looked at her imploringly, panic starting to rise. She nodded solemnly, and we didn’t talk about it again, but the conversation stayed with me, making vulture circles in my mind, returning when I least expected it.
I tried to confess to Mom that I had broken my promise, but I was never able to find the words. I wanted her to tell me it was okay and nothing bad was going to happen because of what I had said. I hadn’t told Anna that Dad was in prison, not really, or about Scotland Yard or Saint Lucia or the phone calls, but I was still sure Anna would tell someone else, who would tell the rest of the school, and then I would be expelled, and Mom would go to prison, and all because I wasn’t able to keep a secret.
At the end of term, our form tutor had asked us to write our parents’ address on envelopes so they could post our report cards. They knew my parents were divorced, so I was given an envelope for each parent, and I panicked. I said I didn’t remember my dad’s address. The teacher told me just to write his name instead and they would look it up, but that didn’t help either. What was he called now? In the end I wrote Martin Kane, and I spent the next few weeks worried the school was going to find out and ask me to leave, just as I was settling in.
* * *
We weren’t allowed to visit Dad at first. He was sent to San Francisco County Jail to await trial or until he accepted a plea bargain, which his lawyer was trying to negotiate. It was the type of prison with bulletproof glass and orange jumpsuits—that cinematic montage realized. All sorts of bad men were in there with Dad, not just a little bad, but very bad too, and all the moral categories in between. He didn’t want us to see him there. Only Evan was allowed to visit, now twenty years old and in California to see his papa over the summer break from university. It must have been grim because he didn’t tell us anything.
We couldn’t talk often. International calls were expensive, and there were only two phones in Dad’s unit, so the queues were long and aggressive, with fights breaking out when someone took too long and the younger, tougher men dominating. The calls were noisy too; all that anger and frustration creates static on the line. We wrote instead. Dad’s letters came at least once a week, sometimes more. He said when he felt lonely, writing to us was a way to reconnect, but he didn’t expect us to respond to every letter, because he knew we were busy with our schoolwork and friends.
He tried to find ways to engage with us despite the distance. I had decided I wanted to be a film director or scriptwriter, so he sent me a list of the top 100 movies of all time, highlighting which ones he felt were important for me to watch. “These should keep you busy until I’m out.” He asked for the catalogue of films available at our local video store so he could make some suggestions. He sent brain teasers, like we used to do together on holiday, one for Cait and me each to complete; he had the answers, and he would tell us on the following call if we got them right. He sent Caitlin an article he cut out from Time magazine on how freckles were the new “hot accessory” and that she should be proud of their unique beauty.
He described the people he was meeting and the friends he was making, such as Eugene, a large tattooed man, who was his “bunkie.” Dad had tutored him in math and English, and he had taken Dad under his protection. Eugene had been in County for three years awaiting trial for armed robbery and manslaughter, but he had found God and now read the Bible for two hours a day. One afternoon after about a month inside, Dad came down with a fever and started to feel dizzy and see flashing colors. While on the phone to Lana—at the moment he was trying to tell her that she should move on, because he didn’t know how long she would be waiting for him, I later learned—he collapsed, and Eugene helped him to his bunk. Holding his hands over Dad’s feverish body, Eugene began reciting prayers loudly, calling on God’s healing powers. “Can you imagine this scene?” Dad wrote. “My mother would pass out! A New York Jew being blessed by a prayer to Jesus. As ridiculous as this looked to everyone there, no one would ever dare do anything to offend Eugene—he was frightening. Anyway, whatever he did, he helped me through that terrible moment. Don’t worry about me becoming a religious fanatic—no chance—I still believe in magical elves and the tooth fairy, but religion is a very real part of life here.”
Dad described his life in detail, from the cost of cigarettes on the black market ($8 for a single, $100 a pack) to how some inmates illegally distilled alcohol from fruit juice or lit cigarettes using an electrical socket. He included diagrams. He sent a list of the food, beverages, and provisions available for purchase in the prison commissary. He was reading books on how to write a screenplay, and when he was released, he said I could direct the movie of his life, and then we would win an Oscar together and something good would come of all this. He remained positive, reminding us to stay strong and that we were lucky to have such a close bond, a bond that many conventional families never shared.
He didn’t tell us how bad it really was. He didn’t tell us that there were sixteen inmates in his twelve-man cell with four sleeping on mattresses on the floor. Or that each twenty-by-twenty cell was divided in two areas separated by a sliding iron bar door, which screeched when it opened: one side for sleeping and the other side for eating, watching TV, showering, or using the toilet, which was behind a thin partition. He didn’t tell us that the TV was kept on the same music channel all day with the same songs playing on repeat, which he would hear in his head for years to come; or that they left the lights on at night so the guards could see into the bunks. He didn’t tell us that the guards sometimes deprived the inmates of their two-hour allocated recreation time per week or that they never once went outside. He never mentioned the bloody brawls in the shower cubicle where he watched men’s faces beaten against the tiles until he saw the smooth white of their bones. He didn’t say that the guards sometimes made bets on these fights. And ultimately he never told us that the 195 counts he was now facing could amount to a life sentence, and he might never make it out.
In his letters, Dad asked us lots of questions. He asked us to confide our troubles in him and not just tell him our good news, so that he could feel included in our lives, and that perhaps there was some wisdom he could share from a father’s perspective that we might not otherwise have. He wrote Caitlin, Evan, and me individually, but encouraged us to share our letters with each other, because each told different stories.
In return I sent everything I could think of: photos, drawings, photocopies of school reports and essays. Dad had arranged for his camera to be given to us from his storage unit in London, so we would be able to take pictures for him. For his birthday, I painted a scene from our lives when he was free: us all—including Mom and Poppy, though no Lana—on a beach together somewhere tropical. I wrote him a story in which he was the hero and by some mystical intervention he was no longer in prison and had his riches restored.
I sent him other stories too; I was writing compulsively. My English teacher had asked me to read one aloud to the class over two periods—it was about a girl who was paralyzed from the waist down and is conned by a medical charlatan into undergoing an experimental treatment, which ultimately kills her. I was terrified standing at the front of the classroom reading my work, but occasionally I would steal a glance at the girls and see they were alert and listening, a momentary thrill, which quickly plummeted to shame when I reached a passage I disliked, and I didn’t dare look up. Afterward my teacher told me she expected to see my name in print one day, a comment I kept safe and returned to in moments of doubt.
In those early letters, I told him everything, scrambling for things to say: I told him about the boys I liked (“apparently he’s a good kisser, not that I know”), the beers we had clandestinely drunk in a pub garden (“don’t tell Mom!”), and the intricacies of my shifting friendships, all in a tone of breezy teenage cheerfulness.
Mom encouraged us to send letters, and I tried very hard to keep writing. Whenever I neglected to send anything for a few weeks, the same image returned to me of Dad on his bunk alone in his room with no word from the outside world to acknowledge his existence. Worse still was this same image repeated on his birthday or at Christmas, a time when no one should be alone, and the idea of him receiving these paltry little drawings or stories made me furiously sad, because it wasn’t enough. There was nothing I could do that would be enough.
Dad didn’t fill us in on the legal wrangling behind the scenes back then, but by May he was losing patience and we could feel it. His lawyer pushed him to accept a plea bargain rather than go to trial, or they might come down on him hard. They had an enormous case against him, and he had no leverage with the authorities: There was no one left to cooperate on (even if he had been willing to cooperate), and he had no money left to hand over. In the end, he accepted the plea bargain just to get out of county jail, his only condition being that he was allowed to keep his collection of art in order to support his family while inside, which the prosecutor accepted. As soon as he pled guilty to the charges, he was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institute in Dublin, California, to await sentencing. Leaving offenders to stew in a bad jail like 850 Bryant Street is an effective tactic used by the prosecution—they aren’t in any hurry.
During this time Caitlin wrote Dad a letter to tell him she was thinking of him and loved him more than “the millions of words in the dictionary or all the paper in the world could express.” Written with her school fountain pen, the page was stained with tears, words blurred in inky pools. Cait and I debated whether or not she should send the letter, but in the end we felt he would be moved by it, and that was worth whatever heartache it might also cause. Dad sent it on to his prosecutor, against his attorney’s advice, and he still maintains that it was Caitlin’s letter which convinced the court to release him on bail pending a self-surrender when he was due to begin his sentence. They rarely grant a self-surrender for known fugitives. But for the first time, the prosecutor saw Dad as more than a convict; he saw him as a father too.
Dad was sentenced on October 24, 1996, and released into Grandma’s supervision. Grandma was so nervous in court that when she was asked to raise her right hand to take the oath, she put up her left hand accidentally.
With nearly three months until he was due to begin his sentence, Dad immediately began planning for us to visit him over the Christmas holidays. Mom was meant to come to California with us, but her case with Scotland Yard remained unresolved. Dad had tried to bargain for the charges against her to be dropped, to no avail. They still had our boxes of family photos and school certificates, family ephemera, somewhere in the catacombs of Scotland Yard, and they still hadn’t told us whether they were going to pursue the charges against Mom in court or take our home away. Her solicitor advised her against traveling, so Caitlin and I were to fly out alone.
I was nervous about seeing Dad after so long. One year, one month, and twenty-eight days feels like all the time in the world at thirteen years old. I couldn’t imagine what he might make of me now that I was an almost grown-up. I felt like a completely different girl.
An old college friend called Artie had offered to house Dad at his place in Marin County, and us too. Mom spoke fondly of Artie, which warmed us to him. He was a real estate agent, but during that week we saw him perform in Guys and Dolls, which was how we would think of him in the future, in a pinstriped suit and fedora and singing show tunes. Now that Dad was back in America, he was slowly reconnecting with the friends Mom and he had left behind, the ones they had been unable to contact over the years on the run. When we met these friends, they looked bewildered that Cait and I were no longer the babies who had disappeared with their family over a decade ago.
* * *
We flew to San Francisco just after Christmas.
They said “Welcome Home!” at customs.
Dad had a security bracelet on his ankle to monitor his movements and make sure he was home before curfew at 10 pm. Apparently, if he tried to dismantle it, an alarm was set off somewhere and he would be arrested. One day Dad fell to the ground, shuddering and jolting as if he were being electrocuted while reaching for his ankle, and we jumped from our seats, before he started giggling. “Dad!”
In the daytime we went sightseeing. We went to Alcatraz and tried to make jokes. After the tour took us through solitary confinement, I said, “At least it won’t be that bad!” and Dad began telling us about “the hole” in County, but he stopped himself, realizing that this wasn’t something we should know. Instead he told us about how, shortly after I was born, we all went on a tour of Alcatraz. I started crying in solitary confinement, ruining the experience for everyone, so Mom breastfed me there and then, commenting with a wry smile as we all left the cell, “I hope that wasn’t a bad omen.”
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.