For now I’ve stopped snorting Adderall and cut down to fifteen milligrams a day. Far less than the Beatniks or any of the addicts on the ADHD online discussion boards typing in all caps, begging for help. Some days I take only five milligrams, or none at all. I don’t take any more sleeping pills and I don’t take antidepressants. It’s not perfect. It’s not like Robert Pirsig’s sense of well being at the end of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but Pirsig allowed himself to come to false conclusions. Things were not going to be OK as we learned in his only other book, Lila, published seventeen years later.
When I was sixteen and decided to quit drugs and graduate high school, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seven times. I would finish the book and start over again. I didn’t understand what Pirsig was saying, but I was hooked on his sense of resolution. The final lines of the book conclude, “We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.” It made me feel good. In the poems I wrote constantly I tried for a similar thing, an epiphany to wrap things with a neat little bow. I searched for that in each of my novels, but kept coming to the same conclusion. In every book I ever wrote the point was to do as much as you could after coming to terms with your limitations. I can’t wake up one day with a healthy relationship with my mother and father and a sense of abundance. I wake up instead and I think my father hates me, and I know that I am partly to blame. I’ve written about him and made him into a villain. I’ve made him unhappy. I’ve mythologized myself and withheld my love, pretended my actions were justified by his actions. I put that on with my clothes and wear it throughout the day.
Pirsig’s conclusion was too much, too sweeping. It couldn’t possibly be true. Of course things wouldn’t be OK. They would be better sometimes and worse others. In her memoir Fierce Attachments, Vivian Gornick meets an old friend who tells her about a boy she grew up with and how well he turned out. “Who would have thought my brother would turn out spiritual,” the friend said. She could just as easily have been describing Sean, who came from a world without structure and found it inside the comforting walls of his church. “Oh Dorothy,” Vivian replied. “Davey’s not spiritual. He’s looking for a way to put his life together, and he’s got no equipment with which to do it. So he turned religious. It’s a mark of how lost he is, not how found he is, that he’s a rabbi in Jerusalem.”
When I was sixteen I didn’t need Gornick, I needed simplicity. I needed a promise and a path. I needed to know that from now on, things were going to get better. I had been getting high since I was ten, running away since I was thirteen. I found what I needed in the consumption and creation of art, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. I stopped getting high. I graduated high school in two years. I went to college. But it didn’t hold because there are no permanent solutions. I got out of college and I started getting high again. And I became a stripper. And I had an overdose and I went to graduate school and I drifted and traveled and I saw the world and I surprised myself with the things I could and couldn’t do. I saw peace and war and prosperity and things got better and they got worse, sometimes at the same time. There is no clear path. I have two models: my mother and my father, sickness and chaos. My mother long-suffering, the victim, my father a naked peacock strutting through the rooms, colorful, aggressive. I hear doors open but can’t always see them. I move forward without a path. I am not sad all the time but I will always be sad sometimes. I can’t read Pirsig anymore. Neat conclusions do nothing for me. I write to make sense, to communicate, to connect. I rely on people like Gornick to guide me through, people who keep searching when everything is dark. The search is the meaning. Even when her book ends.
Because we are silent the noise of the street is more compelling. It reminds me that we are not in the Bronx, we are in Manhattan: the journey has been more than a series of subway stops for each of us. Yet tonight this room is so like that other room, and the light, the failing summer light, suddenly it seems a blurred version of that other pale light, the one falling on us in the foyer.
My mother breaks the silence. In a voice remarkably free of emotion—a voice detached, curious, only wanting information— she says to me, “Why don’t you go already? Why don’t you walk away from my life? I’m not stopping you.”
I see the light, I hear the street. I’m half in, half out.
“I know you’re not, Ma.”
I need to see my father.
I have four books by my father. They sit next to mine on the middle shelf on my bookcase. In each the author bio changes, as if it were written by a different person. An early novel, published when he was around twenty-six, says he graduated from the University of Natal, served as airborne meteorologist with the South African Air Force, and worked as a geologist for two years before immigrating to the United States. His first hardcover book, released when he was living with his parents, has a picture of him in a jacket and tie, smoking a pipe, and says the author lives in Chicago when he is not on assignments overseas. It also says he is currently completing another book in his Florida home. The book he was “completing in his Florida home” is the book he wrote on his parents’ sunporch, with children lighting firecrackers in the park across the street. That book says he’s a former TV producer. His last book, based on the life of Jesus Christ, says he studied the life and teachings of Jesus at the North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, and that a play he wrote based on his son’s novel will soon be a film.
I’m not sure if he changed his biographies because he thought it would help sell books, or because he thought it would be funny, or if he really wanted to be someone else. Perhaps he recognized reality as constructed and wasn’t willing to let anyone else build it for him. What we’ve really been fighting about all these years is authorship.
It’s a beautiful summer day in Chicago and chairs are set up on the edge of the sidewalk. My father arrives wearing a do-rag decorated with skull and crossbones, a ring with the face of a demon on his finger, a rubber brace wrapped around his other hand. The fingers on the hand with the brace are curled painfully. He wears a thick leather strap two inches wide buckled around each wrist; one contains a watch, the other something else, both with skull and crossbones on top. He wears a leather vest over a long sleeve denim shirt. The vest is open and the shirt is unbuttoned almost to his navel. He’s limping terrifically as he enters the café, gripping the counters. I ask him to meet me at one of the tables outside. I’ll get us something.
This used to be a rougher area but now there are restaurants and even a gym. We’re near Loyola University. The school has been expanding south while Andersonville, formerly known as Edgewater, and the trendy bars there gradually spread north to meet it. Two stops away, in Rogers Park, things are also cleaning up, though not as dramatically. The crackheads aren’t hanging out in front of the station as much, and the bar next to the train has finally taken the boards off the windows.
“So how’s the sadomasochism?” my father jokes, as I sit across from him. “Got any women beating you up these days?”
“There’s one,” I say, placing two coffees in front of us.
Ladies pass on their way to Sheridan and the lake. He says hello to every woman who walks by. He’s always done that. When I was younger it made me uncomfortable. But now that he’s over seventy it seems harmless. “That one looks like she’ll dominate you,” he says, pointing to a tall, dark woman in platforms and a summer dress.
“Dominant women rarely look dominant,” I tell him. “You would never be able to pick one in a crowd.” I try to explain why that might be, but he’s not interested. He just nods and smiles.
It’s three in the afternoon and hot. I feel uncomfortable and not sure of what to say. It seems like I should have been prepared with a plan. I thought if I just kept my heart open everything would be OK. But the truth is my heart is not as open as I want it to be.
The conversation moves forward in fits and starts. He tells me when my mother was dying he was so confus
ed he couldn’t stop screaming. He says I can’t resent that person because that person is not who he is now; that person no longer exists.
“When you ran away I had aches all over my body and I couldn’t sleep. I tried traveling but it didn’t help. I suffered much more than you did.” I tell him I don’t get any pleasure out of his suffering. I don’t want anything to do with his suffering. He says, “I made a lot of mistakes when you were younger. I should have been more strict.” He complains about the social workers, how they only took my side and didn’t even ask his opinion. He talks about a profile on me that ran in the Tribune.21 He refers to it as an article about him, which it wasn’t. The reporter contacted my father. He sent her over fifty emails and she hardly used any of it. She quoted my father telling her that I was a “bad seed” and “human garbage.” She wrote that I was damaged, which my father found offensive. He wrote a letter to the editor saying his son wasn’t damaged; his son was a successful author.
“She had an agenda, that fucking cunt,” he says. “I would break every bone in her body.”
“I thought she went easy on you,” I reply. I tell him we have different memories and interpretations of those memories and that’s unlikely to change. I feel like this isn’t going well. My father never wanted a third party involved when I was sleeping on the streets. He didn’t accept the authority of the court. He says the social workers would make appointments and cancel them at the last minute. He stopped fighting the state for custody of me because the hearings kept being continued.
“You have to understand,” he says. “I was a working stiff. I had to make a living. Me and your stepmother were just trying to get by.” He tells me his neighbors think he’s a child abuser because of things they read about me. He says he took down the most recent reviews he left of my books on Amazon but I tell him I’d rather he left them up. Once I’ve read them it doesn’t matter whether they’re up or down; I’ve already integrated his words into my life. I tell him I keep screen shots of all of them so I won’t think I’m going crazy when they disappear. I wish every action was recorded and we could have a little Google bar to search ourselves, find out what we said last time and in response to what.
“I’m always going to retaliate,” he says.
“We all think we’re retaliating,” I say. “That’s the nature of conflict. We all think our actions are justified by someone else’s actions. But actually, we’re responsible for what we do.”
“No,” he says. “That’s not how it is. You hit me I’ll hit you back.”
I want to laugh. My father is pure Chicago and I’m turning into some new age San Franciscan full of self-help platitudes. If Chicago ever attacked San Francisco it would be like the Nazis invading Belgium. He talks about all the women he’s seeing, the women he meets online, rich women with houses all over the world. One he meets in Florida every winter. But how he always comes home to my stepmother and what a wonderful woman she is. I never really got to know my stepmother, and I resented her for a long time, but that had nothing to do with her. That was about me and my father and my mother. She was always nice to me, and a good mom to my little brother and sister. My little brother and sister turned out fine.
“You never know what matters,” my father says. “Everything important comes from left field.”
I tell him I’m writing a memoir that was supposed to be a true crime book and that in the process of writing it I realized that I love him and my relationship with him is the most important relationship in my life. He looks at me like maybe I’m pulling his leg.
After sitting outside for an hour, he asks if I need to go somewhere.
“No,” I say. “Not for a while.”
He offers to help with my memoir; he probably remembers things better than I do. I tell him he doesn’t even remember how many high schools I went to. And anyway, the memories are the point. What we remember, and how we order and interpret what we believe to be true, are what shapes who we are. I tell him the book is for me. My books are not letters to him. He says I should write whatever I want and promises he won’t read it. I tell him I appreciate that, but I don’t really believe him.
“I read your memoir,” I say. “I read about the guy beating you up in front of your parents’ house.”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “That’s hard to think about. Even now. I was traumatized. You don’t know what it’s like to take a beating like that. They got the jump on me. Hit me with a club.” I ask about the pictures and he confirms there were pictures of him with black eyes and blood all over his shirt, but he doesn’t know what he did with them. For a while he kept them as evidence.
It’s Memorial Day and they’re closing the café early so I ask if he would like to go to the beach, which is only a block away. We walk past his car, a new silver Cadillac convertible. He says his wife drives a Hyundai. He says Hyundais are great cars, which sounds funny and also comforting coming from him. I remember all his giant, beautiful American cars, the black ’74 Oldsmobile with white and black striped interior, the ’70 Cougar, cars big enough to take up the entire road. My fondest memory of my father is when he let me drive the Cougar with the top down in the parking lot at Warren State Park, maneuvering that beast past all the parked cars, with its gleaming sky blue paint job and white leather seats, the hood angled above its muscular engine. I tell him my friends stole his car.
“Which one?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
My father walks awkwardly, body bent close to the ground, swinging his feet forward from his knees, like a puppet. He looks like he’s going to fall with every step and I stay close, ready to catch him. I wish we had worked things out before, negotiated our lies and truths so our histories could be a shared one. But that’s not how things work, at least not between us. We were too stubborn then and we’re just as stubborn now. Our memories are calcified. Halfway down the street he leans against a pole, breathing heavily. I can’t believe how he has deteriorated in five years. At the same time, he’s sharp as ever. He hasn’t lost any of his intellect. His face is heavily lined with wrinkles, but handsome, more handsome than I remember. The contrast is hard to read. It’s as if he were dying and vibrantly alive at the same time. He appears so healthy he’ll live forever, even as his body collapses beneath him.
“Do I seem worse?” he asks.
“Only a little,” I say.
We sit for another hour at the lake drinking lemonade. I don’t know what it’s in response to but I tell my father, “I’m straightforward. I’m an honest person.”
“You?” he says, laughing like it’s the funniest thing he ever heard. “Sure you are.” Before we met I thought I had created a way for us to see that our memories were equally valid. I don’t know how to spend time with someone who thinks I’m a liar. We both think we’re indulging each other. We both think we’re doing one another a favor by pretending to forget. He says he goes dancing on Friday nights with his wife. I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re crippled if you have good rhythm. He asks if I would go with them.
“I’ve never seen you dance,” he says. “I hear you’re a good dancer.”
“I am,” I say. “I’m a good dancer.”
It’s getting late in the day. I’ve been with my father over three hours. I’m meeting my sister for dinner soon. He asks if I would like a ride but I say I’d rather walk.
There’s a woman nearby with a book open on her lap, a bunch of children playing in a foam-padded park, a homeless guy sleeping on a bench. It could be any hot day in Chicago. What did I want? What did I expect? I had told myself he couldn’t give me anything, but I must have wanted something because I feel disappointed.
“You know, in your memoir you say you killed that guy that beat you up.”
“I did? I wrote that?” He stiffens, not smiling at all.
“Yeah. You did.”
“Wow. I can’t believe I wrote that.”
“But you didn’t. I looked into it. There wasn’t any murder like that tha
t year.”
“With a shotgun?”
“Yeah. I went through all the papers. I even found a study.”
“But you don’t have his name.” It’s almost a question. He doesn’t remember exactly what he wrote and he gave me the only copy. I agree with him. I don’t have the man’s name, and without his name I can’t prove he wasn’t murdered in 1971, less than six months before I was born. And I can’t find the man’s son, which is what I really want. When I first read the memoir I had been certain it happened. I’ve been wrong about him so many times and I wanted to be wrong about this. I looked for assault records from 1970, when the beating occurred, but they’ve all been purged. I’ve thought of asking about this murder many times. But I had decided not to ask him about it today. I thought we had more important things to talk about, and I didn’t want to push him away. I wanted to suck some of the poison out of our relationship. And then I asked him anyway, and now we’re at the lake and he’s insinuating the murder is true. But I don’t want it to be true. That would make me the second child orphaned by my father.
My father grins like a boy playing a prank. All that water spread out before us, the condo towers on either side of us, the tan brick public buildings behind us. Chicago is a sturdy city. It’s possible I know less now than I knew before. I watch my father’s face, the area where the tangle of wrinkles fade into where he wore a beard for many years and his skin is smooth. The sun is full on us.
The Adderall Diaries Page 19