by Dave Itzkoff
Then it was Sunday, and I began the day as I usually did, sifting through my drawer of sin, second from the top on the right-hand side of the rickety IKEA wall unit that my mother had helped me put together, where I kept all my musty dime bags and resin-clogged hash pipes, finding the least filthy pipe and filling it with the least crumbly pinch of green-brown herb from the least desiccated bag, lighting it up and letting its scorching smoke race through my lungs, scraping as it went, and amble out through my nostrils. With my brain enveloped in a comfortable fog, I was about to turn on the television to watch John McLaughlin harangue Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page when my telephone rang.
With some concentration, I was able to recognize the jittery, ethereal voice on the other end as my father’s. “I need your help, David,” he said. “I need you to get me home.”
This was a proposition I had to think about for a second. When I had been called on in the past to rescue my father, I had ignored his plea without even considering the circumstances and for no good reason other than the ironclad aphorism You got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out. No matter what trouble he was in now, I was in the worst possible shape to come to his aid. I was more than a little bit high myself, starting to feel anxious about a short freelance article I had pitched to The New York Times and was planning to report that night. Which would be harder to live with: leaving my father to fend for himself in his current condition, or explaining to a new editor that I would sometimes have to abandon assignments on a moment’s notice to bail out a junkie parent?
There was something, though, about my father’s repeated use of the word “need.” He did not say “you must” or “you have to” or “you will.” The imperative being communicated was If you do not do this, no one else will. (A possibly implied corollary was I have already asked for help from other people, and they said no.) There was something climactic and final about the whole dramatic scenario. Maybe this was what he had needed all along. Maybe if I were the one who at last redeemed him, he would never need redemption again.
“Just tell me where you are, Dad,” I answered. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He gave me the street name and told me to look for a red door. Then his voice faded into silence. I went into my bathroom and splashed myself with cold water until I convinced myself that I was sober, then went outside and hailed a cab downtown.
I was wandering through the slums and schlock shops of Seventh Avenue, navigating between the long shadows cast by Madison Square Garden and irritating, penetrating shards of sunlight. I was so close to where my father had kept his office for over thirty years but could not remember ever walking this forgotten block, populated with ancient import-export wholesalers whose dusty windows still promised wholesale fabrics and novelty linings even as they were populated with nude, decapitated mannequins. Among the storefronts I found a heavy steel door swathed in a layer of chipping red paint: the gateway to a flophouse where my father had traveled from his respectable suburban home for the privilege of paying twenty bucks an hour to snort cocaine in private.
The interior of the building was not particularly unsavory but was mostly barren, a makeshift waiting area with a couple of plastic chairs, wood paneling on every surface, and a lone clerk seated behind a layer of bulletproof glass, watching a black-and-white television that was probably not tuned to The McLaughlin Group. Beyond this area was a narrow hallway lined with doors; streaks of light could be seen underneath each of them, flickering tentatively as their unseen occupants scuttled around. On the opposite side of every door, some aching, appalling tragedy could be playing out anonymously, and there could be a hallway like this behind every door on the block.
I asked the clerk if there was someone staying here named Gerald Itzkoff, and without asking me who I was or why I was looking for him, he directed me to my father’s room.
I had never observed my father performing the complete ritual of getting high on cocaine, of consolidating his powder into fine white lines and inhaling them up his nose one by one, and on this day I still wouldn’t catch him in the act. His supply was exhausted; all that remained in the room were a few rolled-up dollar bills on a nightstand, a glossy porno magazine on the floor, and a frightened old man shivering on the bed, his nostrils cemented shut with a mixture of blood and mucus, his eyelids sealed closed by some bodily fluid whose origins I couldn’t even guess at. I had no idea how much coke he’d done or how long he’d been doing it, but he was coming down, and he was coming down hard. Though it was terrifying to see someone so familiar and generally functional in such a broken-down, helpless, and horrible state, I had no choice but to pretend that none of it mattered.
“Come on, Dad,” I said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
As he stood up and walked around the room, he seemed to be vibrating in place, like a tuning fork that had been struck. He could barely see me, and I didn’t want to touch him, but we worked out a system that allowed me to lead him out of the flophouse and onto the street by having him follow the sound of my voice. If I took my eyes off him or stopped calling out “Dad” every few feet, he would get distracted and try, very slowly, to shuffle away.
“David,” he said, “I can’t drive like this.”
“Yeah, no kidding, Dad.”
“You’re going to have to drive me home.”
He fumbled through the pockets of his putrid blue jeans, producing expired coupons and fishing licenses, scraps of paper on which he had scribbled down phone numbers and sales figures, and hundred-dollar bills folded into a kind of accidental origami, but he could not find the claim check for the garage where he had parked. We were in a neighborhood where every corner that was not occupied by a bodega, a porno video store, or a half-finished construction project had been turned into a garage, and I would have to approach every single one of them, with this lumbering, stumbling, snotty, bloody beast following me, to ask if they had his car.
At the first parking lot we passed, a group of uniformed attendants was gathered outside. “Excuse me?” I asked the least threatening-looking of them, and they all looked up at once like I’d just interrupted their craps game.
“My father can’t remember if he parked his car here or not,” I said matter-of-factly. “Do you recognize him? He might have come here yesterday. He’s got a drug problem.”
The attendant gave a short, reflexive laugh. How else was he supposed to react? You stand around on a city street long enough, you see a dozen guys shamble by in tattered clothes, their skin burned by constant exposure and their beards mangy and overgrown from inattention; they push shopping carts full of soda cans, tote their possessions in bulging, overstuffed backpacks, try to carry on conversations with their reflections in the windows they pass, listen intently to the transistor radios they carry whose batteries expired in 1978, or sit motionless on the curbside with their head buried between their legs.
You have to laugh at them, because it is dreadfully, morbidly funny to see a human being to whom you have no connection reduced to the level of a windup toy. But you don’t want to know him, and you don’t want to know how he ended up that way. Because if you stop believing for a moment that his slapstick misadventures have been orchestrated for any reason other than your personal amusement, you might find out this wandering old vagrant, was, hours ago, coherent and clearheaded enough to drive an expensive and dangerous American-made vehicle. You might find out he is actually someone’s father. You might find out he is my father.
I did not need to visit any more garages to know that this same scene would play out at every single one. I hailed a taxi in hopes that one would be willing—in a city where a request to drive from Manhattan to Brooklyn is regarded as an ethnic slur—to deliver my father back to Rockland County. Incredibly, the very first driver I stopped agreed to do so for the proper fare mandated by the immaculate copy of the Taxi & Limousine Commission manual he kept in his glove compartment, and he even waited and watched over my father while I ran to a bank machine to withdraw money.
We were somewhere on the Henry Hudson Parkway, as I sat in the back of the cab with my father’s head in my lap, when I reached into a pocket of his winter coat and pulled out an overlooked stub: the claim check for his car. His eyes were still mostly shut, and before he fell asleep, he let a final utterance dribble from his lips: “You saved my life.”
From the front seat, our driver, who had deduced exactly what was going on, agreed: “You’re a good kid, to do this for your father.”
But how could it be that I once again found myself in this position: him, passed out in the back of a car; me, in charge of a situation I had no idea how to handle. If the shoe were on the other foot—if I were the one with the debilitating dependency and he were the one with the sober clarity—wouldn’t I want him to do everything within his power to get me cleaned up? To turn his whole life upside down to make sure that mine was straightened out again? Forsake his business and the whole world he knew, if he needed to? If I was such a good kid, what was I actually doing for him? All I was doing today was sitting with him in a cab, and as soon as it reached its destination and dropped him off, I’d have my mother drive me straight home. I just wanted to get back to my empty apartment, report my story that night, get my New York Times byline, build my career. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice anything. When you got right down to it, I was a pretty goddamned lousy kid.
When I wanted my drugs, at least I didn’t go about scoring them in such an undignified manner. All I had to do was wait for a friend to throw a party, and then I’d show up and wait again until the witching hour when the timid teetotalers had gone home for the night and the drinkers had drunk their fill, when the pot pipes would be passed around and smoked in plain view of everyone who could still see straight. When a party could not be convened, I would call my delivery service: I would dial a beeper number, leave my phone number in return, and wait for someone to return the call, usually a gruff male voice that would state simply: “I’m returning a phone call.” Within thirty minutes to an hour, I would be greeted at my front door by a dreadlocked young man or woman with a gym bag full of tiny translucent plastic cases packed to the brim with a sticky green crystalline algae, so potent that one bowlful would send me reeling for four or five hours, and I was warned to never, ever smoke it in a joint.
The process was chic and civilized, so routine and stripped of embarrassment—not like the desperate, demeaning groveling that my father undertook when he wanted to get high, scrounging from door to door and dealer to dealer, scrambling to find the cheapest, most isolated place where he could light himself up in private. It was a damn shame when that delivery service stopped returning my pages, for reasons I never found out. (Whom do you call for customer service?) But my supply problems were quickly rectified: I started buying from a friend’s roommate, a flabby ex–frat boy who liked to walk the apartment bare-chested in backward-turned baseball caps and boxers that barely constrained his hairy belly. He was gregarious, fond of high-fiving people for any occasion, and never worked at a day job or stopped watching his big-screen TV long enough to leave his apartment. He was always available, willing to entertain at all hours, and, for a price, provide access to a metal cookie container in which he kept his entire inventory: plastic bags full of marijuana and crumpled chunks of aluminum foil that contained something else.
One afternoon, in the course of a typical transaction, I impulsively told him that in addition to my customary bag of weed, I would also like to purchase one of the foil chunks. He slapped me five as he pressed one into my palm, and I hurriedly stuffed it in my pocket. After hastening home to my empty apartment, I laid out my purchases on the dinner table and tore into the foil as if a suffocating child were trapped inside it. Its contents were slightly different than I expected: not a pile of white power but a small chunk of solid cocaine.
I looked at it for a while, unable to unlock its mysteries or extract its narcotic properties with only my eyes. Was I supposed to smoke it? Was I meant to shove the whole thing up my nose and wait for it to take effect? Should I just leave it on the mantel as a conversation piece, to prove to houseguests that I owned a small chunk of cocaine? It was supposed to be a totem of the adult experiences I was allowed to partake in, and instead, it sat there mocking me: the hardest controlled substance I had ever purchased, and I had no idea how to use it.
This was not the closest cocaine had ever come to my sinus cavities. Some had gone up my nose quite recently, in fact. Weeks ago I had been on a corporate retreat in Jamaica with my magazine colleagues, the last such time the publishing industry was so flush with cash that it could afford to pack off its employees on Caribbean vacations that were somehow supposed to lead to higher-quality media products. It was on one of those nights when our group had gathered to drink piña coladas and carouse in the living room of a stately Jamaican villa. When a small reconnaissance party split off from that group to smoke pot in a bedroom, I followed them, and when a smaller group split off from that group to sneak into the bathroom, I followed them, too.
In the available space, three or four of us were crowded around a toilet, where, on its tank, a female coworker was using her American Express Gold Card to separate a pile of cocaine into discrete, organized lines. She took the first snort, ran her forefinger under her nose, and massaged her nostrils. Another colleague did the same, and then another, and finally, there was only one line left on the tank and only me to inhale it. Without hesitation, I leaned in, trying to coordinate which nostril I would breathe through and which I would press shut with my thumb. It took more force than I realized to draw the drug into my nose, and when I lifted my head, there was still a small trail of cocaine residue that lingered like bread crumbs to mark the path. But my innocence was gone.
I waited for some profound shift in my consciousness—to receive even the tiniest glimpse or taste of whatever it was my father found so enthralling that he had rededicated his life to its constant pursuit. Other than the mild intoxication I had brought into the bathroom with me, and the deepening shame with which I exited, I left feeling no different than when I entered.
The defeat was still fresh in my mind when I brought my first fragile cocaine rock home from the drug dealer in its swaddling foil clothes. A female friend of my named Jana had recently come back into my life. She and I had worked for the same magazine, though not at the same time: when I showed up there, she was leaving to live in Los Angeles; after a few months there, she packed up again and headed to Australia. She was a funky and free-spirited Jewish girl who knew she had this Jewish boy wrapped around her finger, and the fact that she did not need me in her world—that I was not a sufficiently compelling incentive to keep her from upending her life every few months and moving thousands of miles away—only made me want her more. On breaks from her adventures, she would occasionally return to New York and we’d pal around platonically, but between her fearless globe-trotting and my passive hope that things would naturally fall into place, no more ever came of it. I was determined to change that on this visit.
We had spent the evening at a screening for a new George Clooney movie, which I knew would soften her up enough that she could be convinced to make the lengthy journey back to my apartment.
“How far?” Jana asked when I explained to her the distance between Sutton Place and East End Avenue. Even in my native New Yorker’s mind, it sounded far.
“I have something there to show you,” I said. “Trust me, you’ll like it.”
“Okay,” she said with a devilish chuckle. I liked this newfound boldness that my untested drug supply had provided me, and she did, too.
If Jana thought we were headed home to smoke pot and look at pictures of her recent trip to the Great Barrier Reef, I made it clear this wasn’t my intent. From my dining table, I retrieved my wad of foil, where it still sat next to the napkin holder. “Look what I just bought,” I said to Jana as I unwrapped the foil and displayed its chunky, chalky contents.
“Oh my God,” she said with sly s
urprise, and as decorously as one would butter a dinner roll, she produced a nail file from her purse and began shaving away at the crystals, creating little piles of powder that she gathered into lines with another American Express Gold Card. With a snort, the first line disappeared up her nose, and then a second, and a third, and then finally, she let me try a couple, too.
This time it worked. The effect was unlike anything I had experienced in any previous state of consciousness: I did not feel dizzy, dazed, or distant; I was not hallucinating or mixing up my senses. I felt like I had been plugged in to myself and, in doing so, had tapped in to an aquifer of adrenaline and testosterone that was laying dormant for over a decade, accumulated through a lifetime’s aversion to organized athletics, gym workouts, or any activity more strenuous than videogames. I was happy and proud to be me, infinitely confident and unafraid of anything, and brimming with more energy than I knew what to do with. But I knew exactly where I wanted to put it.
Jana was lying on my couch, looking back at me through needful, half-open eyes, and suddenly, her body started looking like an elaborate instrument panel that I had rarely gotten my hands on but which I knew exactly how to use. I started peeling off her clothes as if they were made from tissue paper, latching on to an ample breast with one hand while pawing at her pubic mound with the other, all the while in utter disbelief that she was actually allowing me to do this to her. As I immersed my face between her legs, her tiny moans and gasps gave way to a soft, uncertain entreaty to stop. Whether or not I wanted to heed it, she abruptly sat up and ran into my bathroom, where she began throwing up.
Within a few minutes, Jana returned to the room, unashamed. “See what happens when you get me too excited?” she said before climbing into my bed and passing out. She had taken off her remaining clothes and was dressed in one of my old college T-shirts, which barely came down to her waist. At its hemline, a few small hairs poked out from underneath, a teasing reminder of the anatomical bits that had been both my inspiration and my undoing on this night.