I still know my father’s hands. Their shape and texture. His fingernails are almost completely flat and they’re made of different stuff than mine. Dad’s nails are like the heavier calcified nails of an animal that digs. Badger nails, Mom calls them. In the time between our visits I missed his hands. I missed his physical presence. I felt an enormous sense of longing.
Over time, however, this longing changed from one directed at Dad’s person to the cut-out-and-keep father figure of storybooks. I wanted any dad at all as long as he was here to do dad things.
I watched other girls with their fathers, a curiosity mingled with sadness. My friend Jo racing her dad up to the top of the hill while on a dog walk and jumping on his back when she caught up to him, her acting the little girl she no longer was. Another friend, Bella, playing chess with her father in their sunny study looking over the apple trees in their garden. Occasionally he would look up and tell us something wonderful about the world that we hadn’t known. Would my dad be like that with my friends? Wise and caring?
Through these other fathers I identified the shape of the void, the one that had opened on that first morning when Mom told us that our father was gone, and the void had been growing ever since. I remember asking Mom why I felt so sad all the time, and she told me I was heartbroken. I said if this was heartbreak I never wanted to fall in love, and she smiled and told me that even if it seemed impossible, one day none of this would hurt so much. Mom said there were many different types of love and there ought to be as many words for love as Eskimos have for snow, and later I realized it wasn’t Mom who’d said this, but Margaret Atwood in Surfacing, which Mom had given me as part of my feminist literary education, followed by The Handmaid’s Tale, Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. These were her books and I swallowed them whole, working my way through our shelves between schoolwork. When I reached Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When?, I sent it to Dad to read in prison. I wanted him to know that I was connecting with my Jewish heritage even in his absence.
Dad wouldn’t tell us how long he had—just said he was working on having his sentence reduced, so we knew it was a number big enough to scare us. He was going to miss out on watching me grow from a child to an independent person, those shifting chameleonic years of adolescence, and by the time I emerged on the other side, I wasn’t sure he would know me at all. I wasn’t sure he knew me now. When I thought about that, the creature with talons and teeth would climb up my throat and I’d have to cover my mouth with my hands to stifle a shout. It would be a guttural noise of sorrow and rage.
I didn’t care about the pot smuggling. I got it. It sounded like they were having the time of their lives. Fine. What I cared about was that he hadn’t stopped once he had a family. He said he kept smuggling because he never thought he would get caught. After a decade in the business, Dad felt there wasn’t a situation he couldn’t handle using his wealth or his connections. But he wasn’t gambling with just his freedom anymore. He was gambling with the chance to watch his children grow up. He was gambling with our safety and our happiness, and wasn’t ensuring those things his one real job as our father?
* * *
It’s a pointless exercise to ask if he would really have quit. He swears that the last deal was such a mess he was done with the business for good. But maybe a year or two would have passed and a new opportunity would have come up—or maybe not. It wasn’t about the money. I know it just by his expression when he talks about smuggling—a certain cautious pride in the audacity of it all—at least it wasn’t about the money at the end, when he had more money than he knew what to do with. Mom’s theory is Dad saw himself as The Godfather. He loved being The Man: the one his friends could come to for help, for work, the problem solver, the fixer. Fundamentally, he kept doing it because he loved how it made him feel and there was nothing else that gave him the same thrill, the same sense of power.
Reading the massive tome he wrote from his prison confines, I trace it for contrition. It’s impeccably detailed, down to the going rate for a pound of Colombian Gold in 1971 ($250 wholesale) to the description of the wallpaper in his first Upper East Side apartment with Rick and later Mom (black and orange swirling amoebas, chosen by Grandma and apparently disastrous when on hallucinogens). Dad warns that his past self isn’t necessarily reliable for two reasons (he loves a list). First, he would have been aware that at any time the prison guards could confiscate his belongings and use his writing as evidence, and second, he was at his most depressed in prison and likely to view his choices in a negative light. His writing is punctuated with regret, but not in an overarching way—he never questions whether he should have started smuggling in the first place—instead, he locates specific moments in time when he should have made different decisions, like in 1980, when Captain Jack’s wife was shot in Oregon. “It was then I should have quit the drug business,” he writes. It’s typed here in Courier New, the letters indented on the page from the typebar forks hitting the ribbon too hard.
This is what happened to Captain Jack’s poor wife: during Dad’s second major smuggle from Thailand, his group had brought in 15,000 pounds of Thai stick straight past the coast guard, having paid the night watchman of a local pier $10,000 to turn his back. Captain Jack manned the fishing boat sent out to retrieve the pot bales from their 105-foot triple-masted schooner, The Sol, and bring it to shore. Unbeknownst to Dad, Captain Jack had been arguing with his wife, and, unhappy with her share of the profits from her husband’s sideline, she went to the police. Later, during a particularly tempestuous row, the story goes, she told Captain Jack what she had done, and he took out a pistol and shot her dead. He did his time for murder and never talked, but the police now had enough information to open a case on a pot-smuggling ring out of Oregon associated with one Benjamin Glaser.
Dad discovered this by chance on a flight back from the Cayman Islands with his father shortly after. (Dad was open with his parents about his line of work.) He had been hiding cash in offshore accounts, having made too much on the Oregon smuggle to launder cleanly in the United States. On their return, Dad was stopped by US customs and questioned extensively. When the official left his desk to talk to his supervisor, Dad quickly leaned over to view the screen and saw his name in connection with an international smuggling organization. Dad thought he would be arrested on the spot, but they let him through.
“This is when you stop,” Grandpa told him in hushed tones on the airplane home. “You have a family. You have lots of money. They know your name. You’d be crazy to continue.”
And he did stop, at least for a few years.
Dad knew he had gone too far in agreeing to Ray’s deal, but by the time he realized it, it was already a catastrophe that kept unfolding, as if to prove how empty his assurances had been.
In April, after the Greek tanker had already left Thai shores and was somewhere powering its way through the Pacific, Ray’s offload site fell through. At this point, Dad could have bailed, but he decided the only way to ensure the deal went smoothly was to manage the logistics himself.
As he was waiting for the birth of his second daughter—me!—he was also waiting for the arrival of 35,000 pounds of Thai stick in San Francisco Bay. He didn’t tell Mom that he had taken on more responsibility, frightened by her censure, but lying in bed at night, as she grew slowly bigger beside him, he would pray for the ship to be hit by a squall and sink to the bottom of the sea.
* * *
It’s late May 1983 when the tanker arrives in international waters just beyond the US Coast Guard’s reach. Three fishing boats bring the bales into a discreet cove in Oakland, where the Hell’s Angels are waiting. They load the bales into the backs of vans—taking a $3 million cut by way of payment—and the vans are then dispatched to stash houses around Marin County. When it’s done, Dad calls Mom from a pay phone to tell her the offload has been a success using an agreed code phrase, and he comes home, relieved.
But those Gods of Good Fortune give Dad only days to recover, teasing him with hope. Soon dealers are complaining that some of the pot is moldy after it got wet out at sea, and demands are made for refunds, and then more demands for price reductions from those dealers taking advantage of the situation. In the end, Dad decides to recall every delivery and starts a process of cleaning the pot.
He and his two partners set up six houses around California with a different manager in charge of each house. The pot is passed down long tables with fluorescent lights overhead to illuminate the white moldy leaves. The cleaners—earning $100 a day plus pot benefits—finger the sticky buds with all the care of picking lice from their children’s heads. The worst parts are thrown away; they dry, treat, and sell the bad pot at reduced rates; and the high-quality buds are separated to be packaged, stamped with the logo, and sold at full price.
Each moment the pot is in Dad’s possession, the probability of being caught increases. He runs the houses like factories, keeping production sheets and meticulous books to account for every pound going in and out.
Less than three weeks later, in time for Dad’s fortieth birthday celebration in June 1983, it’s done, the pot cleaned and distributed, the money collected, the houses closed, and the paperwork burned.
For his birthday Dad’s friends clubbed together to buy him a 1962 red Corvette, the same as his first beloved car, which had been sold to pay for his college fees. They wrapped it in a giant red bow and drove it into the center of the party as the crowds sang and cheered. Dad undid the Corvette’s bow, letting it fall to the floor, and drove it to take prime position alongside his vintage Harley-Davidson, red also, and two Ferraris. Everyone had made a lot of money from the last deal.
Dressed head to toe in white with a dark beard, looking every bit the 1980s kingpin, Dad mingled among the guests, a sense of satisfaction in his grand exit from the drug trade. A swing band struck up by the pool house and people danced along the shore of the lake as the ducks and birds took shelter in the reeds.
There’s a videotape of this party, which I watch with Dad, laughing at the buoyant perms and popped collars. There’s Mom, the same age as I am now, and she’s pregnant, bronzed, and serene. Her edges are softer than the mother I know. I can hear Dad asking her to look up at the camera, which she does, eventually, and gives him a gentle eye roll, followed by a smile, her gaze just above the shot to what must have been his face. She looks happy. As the camera scans around the compound, past the rows of round tables set up along the waterfront and the bow-tied caterers, Dad points out smiling faces on the screen to me, lifting their flutes in a toast, as if to us all these years later, and he tells me their names, backgrounds, and then how many years in prison they went on to serve.