The Last Pirate by Tony Dokoupil

Author:Tony Dokoupil [Dokoupil, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53347-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Dokoupils had family in Katonah, New York, a bedroom community north of the city. And it was here that Anthony Dokoupil’s great-uncle—whose name was also Anthony Dokoupil and who evidently didn’t work much—showed his young nephew that the straight world was for dummies. The Dokoupil kids and their cousins would caravan up in Jean’s green Jeep station wagon, surfing the special wicker seats as affluence gathered outside their windows. Shrewd Uncle Tony lived with his wife in a large and quiet home, perched on large and verdant grounds. They had no kids of their own but an endless tolerance for the chaos of other people’s offspring.

Among my father’s earliest memories are sock-sliding on Tony’s oak floors, swinging by the low branches of a giant weeping willow, the pleasure of plenty, and the sensation—as unforgettable as his mother’s love—of resting his grubby grade-school head on a large soft pillow until a single thought buzzed like a bee in a jar, an idea that he would ruminate over with adolescent intensity for the rest of his life: Don’t be a sucker.

As for the teenager my father would become, it was a more distant uncle on his mother’s side who shaped him the most. Uncle Cecil lived three houses away from the Dokoupils in New Jersey. He was the big man in the area: the first on the block to have a pool, the first to have a color television, the first to drive a Cadillac, with seats so firm you could safely rest a mug of coffee on them. He owned a bar called the 440 Club, situated on what was then a vein for trucks heading to New York City. He also operated his own long-haul company, which somehow landed national contracts and government accounts, and meant that Cecil’s garage was a wonderland of fur coats and federal satellites.

Cecil was not exactly like the other businessmen of his day. He was a little less orthodox than the average entrepreneur in the 1950s, even the average bar owner. He couldn’t count, for one thing. He would call one of the Dokoupil boys to help him do his payroll, which consisted of a box of money, a list of names, and some envelopes. He also organized meetings in the loft space above the bar, accessible only via an attached staircase. It was a big, creaky room with bare bulbs and curtains that gave it the look of a grand hotel gone seedy. On unpredictable days a fleet of black cars ghosted to the curb, and the stairway played host to a procession of dark-coated men, coughing into hankies and hugging the railing as they made their way skyward.

One Sunday my father, then seventeen, happened to watch them from the front seat of an ice-cream truck. The vehicle’s freezers were packed, but it was summer and he was a teenager and they didn’t pay him enough to be ambitious, so he hadn’t refilled the dry-ice supply and now the treats were melting.

He thought: I’m fucked.

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