My Dad, the Pot Dealer

I always got funny looks when I told people what my father did for a living. "He's a drug dealer," I would say. "He runs the marijuana trade in the West Village." It was a big thing to me at 14. Kind of like having a parent who's a celebrity or an astronaut. But I spoke of it so matter-of-factly that it didn't sink in to the listener at first. When they realized I wasn't kidding the questions came flying. Of course I would go on to tell them about how he got busted in '82 and how he became a landscaper in New York and pro bass fishing guide in Florida after a short prison term, but they always wanted to know the details.

Painfully, but with great fervor, I would recap the day in late summer when the state police raided our place in upstate New York. If I felt particularly frisky I would say there were helicopters involved, and how they took my pop away, burning hundreds of kilos of superkind indica buds in their wake. How I spotted the cops first on my ATV in the woods and told them we were only growing tomatoes. I would bask in the ooohs and ahhs my friends would utter leading up to the big topper. The fact that, as a result of my intimate knowledge of the dealing, there was a hit out on me, and my mom was forced to whisk me away to the Fontainebleau in Miami while things cooled down.

I would fail to mention how my best friend who was up for the summer saw the whole thing go down and how I had to tell him I was "sick" and needed to go back to New York immediately. How we sat quietly, in a stranger's car, shell-shocked and confused on the way downstate. How my friend was cool enough at 12 to keep the story to himself and not tell everyone at school, but his parents stopped letting him hang out with me as much. How my dad told me he wasn't in jail and would call me all the time saying he was fishing with his buddy in Massachusetts. How I would hear the slamming cell doors in the background of the collect calls, but I believed him. How someone had given me an article cut out of a local paper detailing the bust and the jail time, but they spelled our family name a little wrong so I was convinced it wasn't him. How I was exposed to all the major players in the deal, knew them by name, and seriously could have been "taken out." How I never said a word to anyone about it for two years.

My old man's dealings with illicit substances went back to the late 70s, when he and my mom were splitting after a fire destroyed our brownstone in the Village. Some fucked-up real estate-owning Iranian arsonist burned down the building next to ours for insurance money, and the nine-story factory fell on top of our four-story brownstone. We lived in a sweet loft on the bottom floor; my parents used to say our building wasn't crushed but pushed underground. I always envisioned our home, intact, four stories underground, with all my toys and all their antiques waiting for some archaeologist to dig it up like Tut's tomb. The only thing we got out before the place went down was my beanbag mole and some Tiffany lamp shades.

In the early 70s my folks entertained all sorts of celebrities and artists who used to hang in their living room doing drugs and playing my dad's extensive record collection of 45s and LPs. Yoko had a crush on my dad, Paul Simon sang "Mrs. Robinson" to me as I sat on his lap (I got up midsong and walked away, so the story goes) and Frank Serpico used to guard my parents' business from dirty cops and robbers.

The West Village was different then. I can remember the first Korean vegetable stand on the corner of Hudson and W. 11th St. My school was across the street from where we lived, and there was a sense of community among old gay guys and thirtysomething hippies with kids. There were no tourists, and you could buy a factory on the river for under a million. I've always romanticized this time in history, and must watch the film Gimme Shelter to shock me back to the reality that it wasn't all daisies and cobblestone over there.

The fire destroyed my parents' union. They were never married but had lived together since the mid-60s, busting their ass to support us. But this was too much for them, and by 1980 my dad got heavy into coke and my mom needed to run their business without his crutch. There was a nasty breakup that took two years or more, during which time I was relieved to see them away from each other.

Now my old man needed to make a living. He had lots of friends in the drug business, so it was easy for him to set up. He always said, "Don't deal what you do," and he was never a big pot smoker, so it was natural he would get into the pot and hash biz. Pot made him paranoid, he'd say, while lacing my mom's wine with elephant tranquilizer and snorting lines of Colombian.

The earliest deal he made that I remember was around 1980, when a shipment of hashish came in on a submarine from Turkey to New York harbor. It was loaded on an 18-wheeler and brought to our place upstate, where it was packed into a wing off the house. We called this area the "Chicken Wing" because a chicken was living in it while it was being built. The delivery guys packed the hash so tight you couldn't get in the door. Literally, it was a room full of hash. The hashish slabs were packed in white burlap with a stamp of the Turkish flag on it. It wasn't even good hash, and our friends had it sitting in their freezers for years unsmoked.

The deal with the hash was that my old man would get $250,000 to hold onto the shit for two weeks, then it would be reloaded into a truck and distributed to smaller dealers around the country. A man with an Uzi and a couple of eightballs would live in a trailer on our property to guard the stuff. He would stay awake for the whole two weeks making sure we and the drugs were safe.

My mom was not in the picture at this time. At 10 I was just chilling in the country, receiving lavish gifts from my dad like a three-wheel ATV and .22-caliber snake guns. My job was to ride the ATV around the property and tell him if there was anyone snooping in the woods. I didn't smoke pot but had seen everyone else around me doing it, so this all seemed pretty normal, if maybe a little tense and paranoid.

That deal went off without a hitch, and the hash went out to be smoked by Midwesterners and Canadians, and the guy with the Uzi had a big breakfast and we all got paid.

My friends would come up from the city and we would all tool around on the ATV and play sardines. That's the hide-and-go-seek game where one person hides and whoever finds him gets into his hiding space with them. It was a great game for groping girls' asses and tits. One time we were playing and I decided to hide in the small space under the stairs. As I crawled in there was a strong smell and what seemed like big beanbags. One by one my friends found me and we packed into the space. When the game finally ended we crawled out and inspected one of the bags. It was a Hefty bag filled with marijuana buds.

That's around when the seedlings arrived. It was early summer 1982 and they arrived by truck in little individual peat-moss containers, each with a single sprout of cannabis sativa.

There are several major stages in marijuana growth: germination, vegetation, flowering and harvesting. The germination stage lasts about two days, vegetation stage four to six weeks, the flowering stage about eight weeks.

It was seven weeks into the flowering stage when the cops showed up. Before that my dad had set up an intricate system of outdoor hydroponics with a thin hose that fed each plant and delivered a massive dose of fertilizer and water. It was on a timer. We would take our morning coffee and juice and tend to the crops. The plants were neatly organized in rows at the bottom of three four-acre meadows that were surrounded by trees. They hugged the tree line, so they couldn't be seen from the air?but unbeknownst to us the cops were using infrared photography to spot growers from the sky. The pot came up cooler than the trees and thus could be differentiated from legal flora. That's how they found it.

Now, most growers place their plants far apart so a mass of cooler temperatures doesn't show up on the infrared. Ours was a ballsy operation requiring that the plants be placed in close proximity to one another over a space of a few hundred yards. Stevie Wonder could have spotted that mass from the air. Or at least smelled it.

The plants flourished into August, when things really started to heat up. The dealmakers never came by to check on their investment, but my dad knew that when the crop was mature they would be there to collect. He would check constantly on the now 8-foot stalks covered in sticky buds with white and red hairs. My old man was just a spoke on a huge wheel of the drug trade that included the initial dealmaking, the growing, the harvest and the distribution, ranging from kilos to nickel bags. His was only a small farm operation in a much bigger agricultural conglomerate. Except for the fact that the government would never subsidize him if he had a bad crop, he was very much like a farmer in Idaho. The difference was that the going price for potatoes is 59 cents a pound, compared with five grand for the good shit my dad was growing (I'm adjusting for inflation).

So these towering weeds, overfed, sun-drenched, leaning over from their own THC-laden weight, were finally ripe for the picking. I went for an ATV ride in the woods with my friend on back, arms around my waist, to look for moss and salamanders for our cruel little collection of terrariums. As we were riding down one of the more picturesque paths on the property, with bright green ferns and old-growth trees, we came across a neighbor and another man dressed in street clothes. We greeted the neighbor, and I was taken off-guard when asked if we grew anything on that "farm" of ours.

"Tomatoes," I said without missing a beat, just as I'd been taught to say, "we grow tomatoes."

I drove off with a sick feeling that what had just gone down was way more of a big deal than it seemed. I rushed back to the house and ran inside to tell my dad. I don't remember what he did just then, but I think he hid some money in a safe and walked outside.

There was the man we had met in the woods. He didn't yell or draw a gun or handcuff us. My dad just said hi to him in a jovial tone, probably for my sake. My old man turned around and slowly walked inside with the cop on his tail. There were no sirens, no unmarked cars or state troopers, just two guys on opposite sides of the law unable to do anything but what was set down in the state legal system.

I imagine a bust of this kind would be all over the papers nowadays, what with the fervor of the drug war, and the cop who did the busting would be running for DA and eventually mayor. But this was 20 years ago and shit was just different. My dad called some friendly neighbors. I did the "sick" thing because I couldn't think of any other way to explain our hasty exit, said bye to my dad and got in the neighbors' car. Four months later he showed up on Christmas Eve, fresh out of jail and asking for forgiveness. My mom never gave it to him, and is pissed to this day at him for putting her son in danger. But it only took me 20 minutes before I was back in his arms, looking forward to the next perilous adventure he would take me on.