The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [89]
Art had been a scrawny twelve-year-old when his father had last seen him; now he was twenty-eight and nearly six feet tall, with broad shoulders and an upper body powerful from working out. “A few minutes before we landed, I realized that my dad probably wouldn’t even recognize me, and I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize him,” says Art. “I didn’t want to walk past him, or even just up to him and see nothing in his eyes. It really hit me that this wasn’t just going to be awkward, but awkward from the very first moment.”
Senior had told Art he’d be waiting for him just past the security checkpoint at the main terminal, that universal nexus where everybody except your own people are vaguely disappointed to see you. Determined not to be a lost pup, Art concentrated on the older males as they entered the crescent of expectant faces. After a few anxious seconds he locked on to a man who looked like he was in his early fifties. The square jaw, the narrow cheeks—he was suddenly certain that he was looking at his father.
“Pops,” he said.
“Arty!”
The Hollywood rule of estranged-father-and-son reunions is that the son must keep his dad at arm’s length, while the father tries to win his kid back over with a combination of repentance and love, but Art hugged his father right there. Like it had been on the phone, it was easiest to go through the motions of normality. Anice was there, too, and Art embraced her as well. She seemed to have aged far faster than his father. Her face, Natalie would note, “looked like it had been wadded up at the bottom of a laundry basket,” and her stringy hair, dyed orange, fell down to her chest in an attempt at youth. She was bony and frail, a weathered ghost of the woman Art remembered from childhood. Crowning her overall decline was the fact that she was in a wheelchair; a few weeks earlier she and Senior had fallen into an argument, apparently over a woman he had been seeing on the sly. They had been driving when the fight erupted, and in her anger Anice had jumped from the moving vehicle, breaking her right leg in several places.
After Art introduced Natalie and Alex, the party piled into Senior’s truck, a big red dually, and drove to a diner for dinner. As the initial shock of the reunion wore off, both men began to relax. They ordered food, then Art said he was stepping outside for a cigarette.
“I’ll come with,” Senior said, and the two went back to the truck. Sitting in the front seat together, they small-talked a bit, then paused and looked at each other.
“I can’t believe it.”
“I know.”
Junior started to relax. The one thing he had heard about Alaska, other than that it was extraordinarily beautiful and overflowing with dark and light, was that it was legal to grow pot there for personal use. He asked his father if this was true.
“It is,” Senior said.
“I guess you don’t know this about me, but I wouldn’t mind trying some Alaskan bud, just for the hell of it,” Junior ventured.
His father laughed and popped open the glove compartment. He withdrew a Ziploc bag filled with the greenest, thickest marijuana buds Art had ever seen, followed by a pipe.
THE DRIVE FROM ANCHORAGE to Senior’s house near Chickaloon was about two hours, most of it along one of Alaska’s most scenic routes—the Glenn Highway. They’d arrived during the short night so there wasn’t much of a view, but outside the truck’s windows was a landscape that would later take Art’s breath away. A few miles north of Anchorage, forests gave way to lush green flatlands framed by the Chugach Mountains. As they headed north along the Cook Inlet, crossing it near the town of Palmer, the mountains narrowed in from