Cocaine's Son

by Dave Itzkoff

  Did this identity give me enough of an edge to make me sufficiently beddable to a couple of girls who would have paid me no notice in my button-down days? Probably.

  Did I, as the son of an addict, who had seen firsthand the havoc that drug use could inflict on a user and his loved ones, have any hesitation about taking those first steps along a route that could lead me to the same cul-de-sac where my father resided at length? Didn’t I hear in the back of my head an endless echo of that vintage 1980s television public service announcement in which the guy barges in on his kid doing some unidentified substance and demands to know where the kid got it, and the kid answers, “From you, all right? I learned it by watching you,” and then a Deeply Serious narrator comes on and says, “Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs”? Are you fucking kidding me?

  How do I think my father would have felt if he could have seen me in these moments?

  I’m not going to say that he gave me his permission to behave this way or that I needed his consent to do so. My decisions were my own, and I would have made them whether he wanted me to or not. (Especially if he didn’t want me to.) But I thought I had anecdotal evidence of how my father would have behaved in the same situation. Why else had he told me, and told me and told me, about his rooftop dalliances back in the Bronx, about smoking pot and getting caught and, above all, getting away with it, if he didn’t want me to know it was possible for me to get away with it, too? What else had he been trying to teach me from his example other than it is permissible and necessary to experiment with things until you find the way that you fit most comfortably into the world? How else would I know that I had measured up to him until I had a story like that of my own—a moment I could point to and say, “This is who I was before and this is who I was after”? From him, all right? I learned it by listening to him.

  He had his origin story, and now I had mine.

  My college career was weeks away from its conclusion, but two more years spent getting high to Here Come the Warm Jets by Brian Eno and Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges had not been able to drown out the diligent part of my brain. As senior year dwindled to an end, its voice said to me with increasing resolve: You must have a job before you leave this school—before you otherwise return home and are forced once again to depend on your father. So while many of my classmates were using those delicious days after final exams and before commencement to celebrate with revelries that were more extraordinary than any they had been able to think up during the past four years, I spent my mornings traveling up to Manhattan for job interviews, clad in a patchwork of dress clothes acquired for the college application process and grandparents’ funerals.

  On one of these trips, I promised my father I would stop by his office and have lunch with him after my interviews. I wondered if anyone had ever worn a suit to my father’s office until the day I showed up in one. As I waited to be buzzed past a rusty metal cage that lay beyond an imposing metal security door, I peered at his workplace and its towering burlap bales packed with oily animal skins. It looked more like a dungeon than ever. It had become a place that family friends would send their teenage sons to work as punishment when they got fired from their summer-camp-counselor gigs for drinking on the job. While I waited for its proprietor, I sat down tenderly in a chair, trying to allow as little contact as possible between its static-charged, fur-retaining surface and my dress slacks, and still stood up with a field of unidentified fuzz clinging to my ass.

  My father was up in his second-story office, his figure appearing and disappearing in its wide picture window as he spoke on the phone, pacing. He had no need for formal clothes; he was dressed in his typical uniform of a shabby white smock over a greasy flannel shirt and jeans whose expanding waistline marked the months he had kept himself free of drugs. While he was barking out a conversation with some overseas confederate—they almost always seemed to be named George—my mother traveled upstairs and downstairs from my father’s private suite to a chilly underground cellar where more bales of fur were stored. When he needed for his phone conversation some bit of information that only she knew, he would cry out for her on an intercom that bellowed from every room in the building, announcing itself with a maximum-volume beep before my father’s voice overtook it with a rumbling cry of “MADDY!” From anywhere in the building, you could hear his voice a split second before its electronic echo crackled through the intercom, a pair of alarms that might be sounded at any moment.

  It looked like I was going to be waiting a while before my father was ready for lunch, so I parked myself in a small first-floor cubicle delineated by particleboard. As a child, I had passed the time in this same space by snapping off small pieces of the partition to see what shapes they formed. After many years and many other similarly minded occupants, the partition had been reduced to a ruin, a knee-high shambles that no longer kept the outside away from the inside. The only valuable relic still contained within its imaginary borders was a wall-length corkboard flush with old family photographs.

  It was easily deduced that my father had taken most of these pictures, since he was the person least represented in them: there were a couple of snaps of him and my mother in the earliest days of their marriage, when his hair and his glasses were at their thickest and most colorful. There were a few faded black-and-white shots of my father’s parents in their prime, and the original business card that my grandfather sent out when he opened his own shop, with the caption WISH ME LUCK!, and many more photos of them in their later years. My grandfather in particular struck a compelling image, lean and assured, with narrow-set eyes that refused to divulge their color and a cigar always dangling from his half-smile of a mouth.

  The other pictures were almost exclusively of me and my sister: us as half-naked infants; bowl-headed toddlers racing around the old apartment or playing with toys my father loved as much as we did; gawky adolescents starting to become camera-shy; and then, except for a single picture of me at sixteen, pumping gas into my car for the first time, no more.

  There was something terribly dishonest about this presentation. All these events had occurred as surely as they had been recorded. But merely displaying the photographs as if they told the complete story of a family, or even represented the most salient points of its history, was profoundly untrue. There was a guiding hand at work here, deciding what to include and what to leave out, and what was omitted were moments that no one could capture, because the person in the family who customarily took the pictures was not able or present to photograph them. No photo album can completely represent the truth, but this array was an egregious lie, constructed by and for the benefit of the family member who had the most to gain from rewriting our history.

  The anger seethed and circulated inside of me the longer I waited for my father to finish his phone call, and the longer I waited, the louder he seemed to become.

  “George, let me tell you something, George—George—George—shut up, will ya? Right now is when we wait. We. Wait. Ain’t nobody ever sold nothing for more than a customer is willing to pay for it, right? Am I right? So that is why we wait. I don’t care if we have to sit on this merchandise for two. Fucking. Years. We got it, they don’t, and they’re gonna come around.”

  What was going on up there, a spiritual revival? Where did this ersatz Southern accent come from all of a sudden? Who was this suddenly boisterous, bragging, self-assured dynamo, and what had he done with the timid, self-conscious man who could barely string together two sentences when he was on the phone with me, for all the times he bothered to call me in college? Who was he faking it for, and why couldn’t he be like this with me?

  [beeeeeeeeep] MADDY!

  This was how he talked to my mother these days; this was the reward she had earned for her years of dutiful service, to be chained to him like a prisoner in the business she helped prop up during the years he could hardly run it by himself? Just because this was his business, what gave him the right to subjugate her like that, and what made him thi
nk he was entitled to have whatever he wanted at the moment he wanted it?

  “George, here’s the thing, George. George! A man don’t sell when everybody else is selling and buy when everybody else is buying. Not a smart man. When everybody else is buying, you got to ask yourself: why is everybody else buying? Who you gonna sell to when everybody already has what you got? When nobody wants it, that’s when you got to make your move. And then you got to wait till the market comes back. And trust me, George, trust me, it always does.”

  Didn’t he realize how he sounded when he talked like that, how rudimentary and obvious his wisdom was? Did his buddies know how he used to spend his weekday mornings, when he was sober enough to go in to work, whining and pleading with my mother not to send him to the office? Did they know of his relentless gallows humor and how he used to joke to his own son about yearning for the sweet release from drudgery that a leap from his twenty-fifth-story apartment window would provide—how his merely uttering the word “plummet” was enough to conjure up all the terrible imagery associated with this gag?

  [beeeeeeeeep] MADDY!

  And what was I doing sitting here, letting him push me around? Hadn’t I spent more than enough time waiting for him in this office? Why was he the only one whose time was valuable, who got to come and go as he pleased? I swore to the nonexistent Jewish God, if that fucking intercom went off one more time, I was walking straight out. I was leaving the office, getting right on the next train back to New Jersey, and never—

  [beeeeeeeeep] MADDY!

  I felt so right on the train ride back to school. I don’t know that I’d ever felt so right about anything I’d ever done, and it felt so good to feel so right. The righteousness was tingling up my spine and twitching in the tips of my fingers. I could hardly sit still, I felt so right.

  And when I got back to my dorm room and the half-dozen telephone messages left for me in the last ninety minutes, it was easy to tell which were from my father and which were from my mother.

  The messages from my mother sounded like this: “David, that was not nice, what you did. We were trying to find you and we didn’t know where you went. Please call your father back and apologize. You really startled him.”

  The messages from my father sounded like this: “David, please forgive me. Please, please forgive me. I didn’t realize how long I had kept you waiting, and I just feel terrible. Please call me back as soon as you get a chance, as soon as you can. Please forgive me. This is your father.”

  I thought about not answering his calls at all, letting him wallow a little longer in the feeling he hated most, of not knowing how I felt. (It felt good to be right, but it felt even better to know that I could inflict emotions upon him that no one else could.) But while my brain still blazed with those sensations of validity and my courage was at its peak, I decided to call him back.

  He still sounded a lot like his phone messages. “Please forgive me. I hope you’ll please forgive me. I’m sorry, David, I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I know you are, Dad,” I said, being careful not to cede any ground to him. “But I feel like this happens to us all the time. And it keeps happening to us, no matter what I try to do. If I accept your apology and say that it’s okay, how do I know that things will turn out different the next time?”

  “I don’t know, David. What do you want me to say? What can I do to make it up to you?”

  “I’m not coming back to your office. Can you come down to school to see me?”

  “Sure. When?”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  It seemed almost unimaginable that in under twenty-four hours’ notice, my father would be anywhere that wasn’t his office, his couch, or his fishing boat. But true to his word, he showed up the next afternoon, looking adrift as he paced the living room of my dormitory, hands buried firmly in his pockets while he watched other people’s children race to and from their lunchtime appointments and wondered where his son fit in to all of this. We tried to hug inconspicuously, and as he leaned in to kiss me on the cheek, I scanned the room for anyone who might be watching.

  My father and I shared a mostly quiet lunch at a diner near school, where we ate and didn’t say almost exactly what we would have eaten and not said had the meal taken place the previous day. As we walked past the large public fountain lately being used as an impromptu swimming pool by seniors who had turned in their thesis papers, he stopped and put a hand on my arm, a processional of words gathering in his throat.

  He looked mostly at the ground and walked in small circles as he spoke. “David,” he said, “I want you to know I’ve been thinking a lot lately about us. About what it must have been like for you growing up, how I wasn’t there for you all the time and how confusing it all must have been for you.

  “David,” he said again, “I don’t want you to grow up like I did. I don’t want you to suffer like I suffered. I don’t want you to be afraid of the things I was afraid of. I don’t want you to have hang-ups. I want you to know that sex can be a wonderful experience.”

  It was the most perplexing thing. Every outward sign told me that he was stone sober, and yet he was talking like he was high.

  “Dad,” I said, “you don’t have anything to worry about. I don’t want you to think that I haven’t had sex—I have.” I added, “I’ve lived. I mean, I’ve done things. Some things that I’d probably be embarrassed to tell you about. I don’t want you to think that you did anything that kept me from having these experiences, that prevented me from enjoying them. It doesn’t help to be so focused on the future. But we can still control what happens to us right now.”

  It wasn’t clear he had heard me. He reached into a pants pocket and, in broad daylight, pulled out an envelope that was stuffed with a wad of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills; at a glance, I thought it must have contained at least a thousand dollars, maybe more.

  “David,” he resumed, “I want you to know that the business is doing well. I’ve made a lot of money. I want to give this to you, and I want to give you some money every month, like an allowance, that you can spend however you want. I never want you to worry about not having money when you need it.”

  “Dad, what does this have to do with anything?” I said, still fixated on the sum of money dangling from his hand. “I don’t need this money.”

  “Go on,” he said, “just take it.”

  I didn’t take it, although there were many bone-dry, dead-broke days after this when I wished I had, when I would fantasize that I had asked my father to put his allowance plan in writing and have it authorized by a notary public, because that money was never tendered to me on any future date, and the allowance plan was never discussed again.

  If this was the origin story of our adult relationship, its moral was dependent on who was deemed the story’s protagonist. My father left that day satisfied that he had shown to himself and his son that, whether or not his assistance was needed, he would always be prepared to offer it, or so he thought. And as I watched him go home, I was more certain than ever that I did not need his help to make it in the world, or so I thought.

  I used to have this tradition, when I first moved back to New York and was living on my own, of waking up early on Sunday morning, packing a small pipe with some marijuana, and smoking it while I watched The McLaughlin Group. The ritual had nothing to do with the show itself—getting high hardly made the frenetic, deafening political chatter any more comprehensible or tolerable. I did it just because I could. I thought it was a show of strength, a kind of daredevil act to see how close I could come to the boundary between the weekend and the weekday and still fuck myself up, then head back in to work on Monday morning, showing no lingering effects of the lonely debauchery I’d engaged in hours earlier. But really, it was an act of weakness, a last-ditch effort to stave off that feeling of paralysis that inevitably set in around four or five o’clock on Sunday evening as it became increasingly clear that, no, the world was not going to come to
an end and, yes, I would have to go back to my job the next day and work there for five consecutive days before I got two in exchange to spend as I wished (usually smoking pot). I reacted to the onset of each working week like I imagine a condemned man waits to be led to his execution: with utter cowardice and a headful of preposterous fantasies about how he might still avert the foregone conclusion of his foregone conclusion.

  I don’t practice this particular tradition anymore.

  I had been working in Manhattan for about a year, still trying to make my way in the magazine industry, already working at my second menial assistant’s job and living in my second minimalist apartment. But if I believed that I had left my family behind in suburbia completely, there were still occasional reminders that we were bound by blood and a lexicon of sardonic shorthand.

  We are sometimes happily reminded of this union by the fact that my mother’s and father’s birthdays occur within a few days of my own, and the closest weekend to all three is the rare occasion when my parents can be persuaded to travel down to the city to celebrate with me and my sister. On one such Saturday afternoon, my sister and I arrived at a restaurant near the big, empty studio apartment I was renting on an Upper East Side block whose desolation and epic distance from the bustling center of town put the “End” in East End Avenue. At our lunch table, we found only our mother waiting to meet us. Her face was sunken and funereal, and she barely lifted her head to make eye contact. When we asked where our father was, she answered, “He’s gone crazy.” This was a long-standing family euphemism, by which she meant he was somewhere else in the city, and he was getting high. The three of us ate our lunch quickly and quietly, my sister and I split the check, and we kissed our mother goodbye.