By Joshua Hunt, Illustration: Antoine Cossé, The New York Times, July 13, 2022
When I was 9, my family went on a long, strange road trip. Our destination was Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Fla., and the cost of admission was a lie.
It was April of 1989, and my parents said the trip couldn’t wait until summer break. As the oldest of three children, I had the job of excusing our prolonged absence by telling our school we were headed to a family funeral. I remember being touched by my teachers’ condolences, which struck me as genuine, even if the funeral was not.
Staring down the American landscape from the back seat of a rented car, I pondered the logic and suddenness of our trip. We were very poor and had never been on vacation, much less traveled to an amusement park resort. Then there was the decision to drive cross-country to Florida, which hardly seemed practical for a family living on a small island in southeastern Alaska. My stepdad was miserable by the time we crossed the Rockies, and I couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t chosen to make the much shorter drive to Disneyland, in California. None of it made any sense at all until our last night in Florida, when I woke up to use the bathroom after a long, soda-fueled day of exploring the Magic Kingdom. Stumbling through our cheap hotel room, I saw my stepdad packing a suitcase with bricks of cocaine — something the television program “Miami Vice” had taught me to recognize.
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