Dad didn’t get the call at first. It was September now, and he was away on a five-day rafting trip down the Tuolumne River. It was Mom who spoke to Gordon, one of Dad’s right-hand men and one of the few she trusted. Gordon wasn’t his real name, and he only ever made calls on pay phones. He had once told Dad that his organization was living in a bubble that could burst any day, and Dad had dismissed him as overly cautious.
Gordon made Mom promise to have Dad call him back immediately. Mom had listened distractedly while watching Evan drag Caitlin across the carpet by her ankles, still testing the limits of his little sister’s mortality. Enormous and lulled by pregnancy hormones, which made it hard to consider anything but the suitable shade of blue for the baby’s cot, she didn’t think of Gordon’s call again. That is, until a day later, when he called back. This time, he told her he was leaving and recommended we leave too.
“Is it that bad?” Mom had asked.
“I’m sorry,” was all he could say.
She hung up and considered calling Rick to get the full story, but decided there was nothing to be done until Dad was back.
Happy to be home again after a long trip, Dad waited a few hours before he made any calls; he had tales to tell of his near-death experience on Clavey Falls, and he wanted to listen to baby kicks, hear news of baseball scores, and admire fridge drawings. He called Aaron, one of his two partners, to find out what was happening. Aaron was one of Dad’s closest friends; tall and thin, he was a habitual smoker with the type of laid-back attitude that epitomized the 1960s—except on this occasion, when his anxiety was evident. Aaron instructed Dad to call him back immediately from a pay phone. Just twenty minutes later, Dad was on his knees, his head in his hands, saying to the empty world around him, “Aaron, you have ruined my life,” and then shaking uncontrollably, because he knew no amount of money or connections or blind optimism could fix it.
After the last deal was finished, Aaron had immediately undertaken another. Unbeknownst to anyone, the FBI was watching one of Aaron’s men. Ryder had managed one of the warehouses during Dad’s last smuggle; he also had a sideline in cocaine, which had come to the FBI’s attention. When Ryder picked up a car to use in Aaron’s deal from a man called Owen, who had also been a bookkeeper in one of the cleaning houses, the FBI watched the exchange and presumed the car was loaded with drugs. On September 8, 1983, the Feds acquired a search warrant and raided the storage unit in San Rafael where the car was kept. There were no drugs to be found, just one black accounting book: the last remaining accounting book, unburned and intact, pertaining to a multimillion-dollar Thai marijuana importation and distribution operation straight out of the Bay area.
* * *
Dad says one of the reasons he kept smuggling was because he was good at it. I say in response, “Clearly, not good enough.” Neglecting to incinerate the highly incriminating books with your own hands qualifies as a monumental fuckup. But Dad didn’t see it as his fuckup.
From that point on Dad clawed and grasped at happiness as it slipped through his fingers, a fortune squandered in careless hands. It was no longer the 1970s with Jimmy Carter’s liberal approach to cannabis legislation; Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign had laid its foundation in the drug-fearing minds of the public, and Dad’s was one of the first cases handed to Ronald Reagan’s newly formed Drug Task Force in Northern California, a collaboration between the DEA, Customs, the FBI, ATF, IRS, army, and navy to mobilize against traffickers. They went at the accounting book with the hungry precision of termites destroying a tree from the inside out. A puzzle of code names, initials, and numbers, the Feds started with Ryder and Owen—both of whom Dad and Aaron immediately dispatched out of town—and worked their way through each name at an agonizing pace, slow enough to allow for hope before each incremental setback.
Dad and Aaron coordinated a mission of damage control, with Aaron taking responsibility for his man’s mistake by covering two thirds of the expenses. Dad always described him as a stand-up guy. The book recorded sales from just one of the cleaning houses (the house on Trinity Road, Sonoma County), implicating its six cleaners, but with significant leads up the chain of command—including Dad’s initials, B.G., a fact that left Dad reeling. He was further incensed when the Feds raided the Trinity Road house to discover large plastic bags containing marijuana residue, two vacuum cleaners full of marijuana debris, dust masks, and three scales, including one with a 300-pound capacity.
The pot cleaners weren’t in the drug business; they were friends of friends, hippies and artists, who wanted easy cash. They were scared, and if one of them cracked, they all risked five years for perjury. Dad and Aaron offered each cleaner the same choice: either they could go into hiding, and their expenses would be covered for fake IDs, plane fares, and hotel rooms until the investigation hit a dead end; or they would hire a lawyer to fight their case, and they would give only limited information. Dad had an informant close to the FBI (they called him Deep Throat), who kept the group one step ahead of the investigation.
Federal agents soon moved into a dusty old shed at the end of our drive. Like parasites they lived alongside us, peacefully at first, so quiet we didn’t know they were there. We did a lot of living with them by our side. They were there for nearly two years: through one birth (mine), one wedding (Mom and Dad), and one death (Grandpa).
I was born on October 30, 1983, at 20:22 pm at home in the never-ending bed in Novato, California; it says so on my birth certificate. And then straight into myth: Mom says she squeezed me out just in time to avoid Halloween, fearful I would emerge green with horns and sharp teeth, a creature of her nightmares.
In the end I was the only child to be born at the Yellow House. And even I only had eighteen months before we had to leave ourselves behind.
Dad proposed shortly after the investigation started. Mom was indifferent to marriage, having two behind her already, but Dad suggested it was a wonderful way to celebrate almost twenty years since they had first met. There were other reasons to marry besides the romantic gesture: a wife cannot be forced to testify against her husband, and Mom conceded that seemed as good a reason as any.
That December, shunning convention, they had a surprise wedding—much like a surprise party except the surprise was on the guests, whose invites described the occasion as “a very special dinner.” Mom and Dad only confided in Granny, because she had to fly over from England. The justice of the peace posed as her date for the evening, sitting in awkward complicity.
When the meal was over, Mom, Dad, and the justice of the peace slipped away. He reemerged in his robes progressing slowly through the dining room playing “Here Comes the Bride” on a recorder. Everyone laughed, because it looked like a prank, until Mom and Dad appeared arm in arm behind him, Mom wearing wedding gown #3 (still surviving today, albeit a bit moth-eaten) and Dad in a smart morning suit with a burgundy cummerbund. Evan and Caitlin brought up the rear as ring bearer and bridesmaid, while I was cradled by Granny.
For a moment the room was silent, and then, as if all the guests understood in one moment, they rose in applause and adoration.
To appease Grandma they added in a few Jewish traditions. They shared a sip of wine from the wedding cup and then smashed it underfoot in a napkin.
There’s an old photo album dedicated to the night on a shelf at Mom’s house, the protective cellophane having long ago lost its stick, leaving the images to gather carelessly in the spine of the book.
It was a beautiful evening, the guests blissfully unaware that as they celebrated in the insulated cocoon of the yellow walls, outside two men might be watching with binoculars from the bushes. Most of the wedding guests were also under investigation.
The FBI came on the honeymoon to Maui too. We all went, because I was only two months old. When we arrived at our condo on the beach in Kihei, Deep Throat made contact with Dad to warn him that four federal agents were posing as a pair of young couples and had gotten on the plane with us. That was when Dad first noticed them—the man on the pay phone adjacent to him at that very moment was one of them.
The two couples took the condo next to our own. They came to the beach and did not hold hands. They looked on, silent and uncomfortable, at a table near ours, not enjoying their ahi steak. They wore their leis with sinister gravitas. They appear in our family photographs. Cait, grinning and oblivious, her arms spread as if approaching for a hug, and in the background are two shady figures with cameras.
Dad instructed our friends to avoid the Yellow House, as he tried to minimize the reach of the investigation. From that point onward, he saw them everywhere. They would follow his car as he went to collect his clothes from the dry cleaner or to play golf with a friend. Sometimes he would take them for long road trips around Marin County, all the way out to Stinson Beach, where he would sit quietly, watching the dog walkers pass by. And then he would drive home, where they would politely wait at a distance before stationing themselves again at our front gate.
It was never just one car. When one car dropped away, another would replace it, falling in and out of the lead like a flock of migrating swallows.
Once home, Dad would leave via the back door, shimmying on his belly over the hill behind the house, which led to a woodland copse. He would emerge from the thicket, brushing dust from his jeans, and walk to the nearby town. Undetected, a car would collect him and he would continue to conduct the obstruction of justice that now occupied his entire existence.
He almost did it. Even when they identified him by cross-referencing B.G. against police records—Captain Jack’s dead wife back to haunt him—even then he still thought he could beat them. Even when the FBI came knocking on the door of the Yellow House, a year and a half into the investigation, and asked to have a few words. Pretending not to know what they wanted, Dad invited them in. Mom offered them coffee, but they refused, not wanting to be wooed, and Sativa declined to wind her oatmeal-colored body around their legs.
They sat across from Dad in his study, Mobutu looking down on them, regal and proud, as they probed his finances, observing the signs of wealth around them. Eventually Dad, realizing the error of allowing their entry, asked them to leave; all future inquiries were to go through his attorney. On paper, he looked like a law-abiding citizen with a successful Wall Street company who filed his taxes on time every year and attended each baseball game his son played. Afterward, Deep Throat said the agents had described him as charming yet arrogant.
There was only one occasion when he genuinely thought they had him. Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge with one of his partners in the passenger seat, a pair of speakers in the trunk loaded with $250,000 in cash, and illegal papers in his unlocked attaché case, a patrol car pulled them over. He watched in the rearview mirror as the officer drew his gun and approached holding it shakily in two hands, gripped in prayer.
Almost at the same moment, the hyena screech of sirens blasted the air and three more patrol cars surrounded him. He tried to flip the lock on his case, but six officers took a step closer pointing six guns at his head. He exchanged a look with his partner and raised his hands.
What surprised him most at that moment—hands now flat against the hood of the car and head down—was that he didn’t feel panic, only something closer to relief. But then an unmarked car pulled up and two plainclothes men hastily got out. They had a few words with the police captain before returning to their car. The captain called off the officers and apologetically shook Dad’s hand. It had been a case of mistaken identity.
After that Dad took to hiding under a blanket in the backseat and Mom would drive him where he needed to go. The FBI didn’t usually follow her—they had learned her daily routine of dropping off and picking up Evan from school, perhaps stopping at the farmer’s market en route—although occasionally a car would roll into sight in the rearview mirror. Dad taught Mom to spot a tail, and she found a certain secret thrill in her new underworld skills. It was exciting at first, because we were always one step ahead, and it was hard to feel threatened while ensconced in the Yellow House. She believed we could win. Dad encouraged her to believe this.
During this time, Dad used to come down to my bedroom at night after the rest of the house had gone to sleep and, holding me close to his face, he would whisper “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” into the chubby pink fat around my cheeks again and again.