Cocaine's Son

by Dave Itzkoff

  We woke up late the next morning, groggy and sick, and traded shy, embarrassed laughs as we passed each other going to and from the bathroom. I saw Jana with decreasing frequency over the months and years that followed, and we never spoke of this incident even once.

  Here is how a house of cards begins to collapse. You build its foundation on a layer of unstable ground and add each tentative tier with a meticulous process of indifference and neglect, observing in disconnected fascination as each wobbly story is assembled atop a previous one, well beyond the point where your empirical understanding tells you that the fragile structure should be able to support itself. Then, with an inevitable tug, it starts to buckle and heave, and you watch with a mixture of defeat and amazement as it goes down and the familiar pieces you used to construct it come hurling back at you, as the whole enterprise spreads wider and sinks lower without ever finding a boundary or a bottom.

  Months had passed since my meaningless rescue of my father from his self-imposed flophouse exile, the memory of the event added to our backlog of personal tragedy to be discussed and reexamined as soon as we found a mutually convenient time, which would be never. I had a new magazine job, an editor’s title and my own private office, and a hip new East Village apartment, where I was relaxing one night only to have my modest tranquillity interrupted by another phone call at another odd hour. Proving that I had learned absolutely nothing from the previous episode, I answered it.

  “I need to talk to you about something,” my father told me, and right away I knew I was in trouble. I ran through the mental checklist that I had honed over the years, prepared for scenarios like these when he should call me out of the blue, designed to determine whether I was talking to someone who is sober or high: is his speech slurred or stuttering? Is his train of thought circuitous or disconnected, or does he drop out of the conversation for long periods of time? Does he only want to talk about his sex life? He passed all of these tests and yet something still seemed off, as if he were talking to me through a paper cup. Out of a kind of fatalistic curiosity, I allowed him to continue.

  “I want to talk to you about your aunt Arline,” he said, referring to his older sister. “She was up here to visit your mother and me a few days ago in the mountains. I don’t know what kind of life she has down there in the city. I think she should move up here. I think it would be good for her.”

  “Dad,” I asked, “what does this have to do with me?”

  “I need you to explain to her that she should do this,” he said. “I want you to convince her that this is the right thing for her to do.”

  Had I applied some of the more rigorous and obscure criteria on my father-testing checklist—does he want to discuss an intensely personal situation involving his family? is he asking for help that he seems to think only I can provide? does he sound utterly convinced of his own unflinching standards of right and wrong?—I might have arrived at the red-flag moment that signaled to me: Do not talk to this person unless you seek a frustrating, humiliating, ego-crushing conversation. But the signs were so numerous and imprecise that half of them could still apply to my father when he was completely clean. Some days I felt like salvaging him from the messes he had created, and some days I wanted to leave him behind in the hourly motels of his own invention, and on this occasion I decided to rebel.

  “I don’t see why I should get involved in this,” I said. “This is between you and your sister. I’m not going to do it.”

  With preternatural calm, my father replied, “Then you are a coward, and you are a failure.”

  It should be self-evident that hearing one’s own father refer to oneself as a coward and a failure would be completely devastating to anyone, and yet I still feel I should explain why I found the remarks so unsettling: not because I feared he truly meant what he said. What frightened me most were the retaliatory acts I had often cycled through and savored in my mind, that I was free to perpetrate on him.

  I had not only contemplated but fantasized about what my life would be like if I were to cut him off entirely. It was the same punishment he had threatened me with, turned on its head—I had nothing tangible that he wanted or that I could withhold from him, only unquantifiable commodities like love, contact, and compassion. My campaign would cost me nothing to perpetrate, but it would devastate him fully. I would be giving up nothing more than a sometime sounding board, a guy I could occasionally count on to hear out my plans for the future and then tell me all the ways they could possibly go wrong. He would be left to perpetually apologize to the rest of our family for my absence at gatherings and Thanksgiving dinners, to explain to his friends that he could not update them on my life because he did not know what I was doing, and to wonder, above all, how it was that he squandered the trust of this person who was once completely devoted to him—the boy of a thousand nicknames who used to believe that there was no rock so heavy that he could not lift it, no highway motorists so fast he could not outrace them, and no cocksucking traffic jam so fucking impenetrable and goddamn demonstrative of the fucking worthlessness of New York City that he could not curse it into a state of powerlessness.

  There was no formal declaration of hostilities, only an abrupt cessation of concordance that took him several weeks to notice. First I had to explain my actions to his proxies. My mother called and, after an exchange of banalities, asked if there was any reason why I hadn’t spoken to my father in all this time.

  “Mom,” I said, “didn’t he tell you that the last time we talked, he called me a coward and a failure? I don’t know what he was on, but I’m sure he was taking something or doing something. I don’t know if I’ll ever talk to him again.”

  Her voice turned cold with recognition. “I can understand why you might feel that way,” she said, and I’m sure she could.

  I next practiced the argument with my sister, who was deep in her studies at medical school. Some elements of the story had trickled down to her, but not the whole thing. “What’s going on, David?” she wanted to know, as if I were withholding the details of some fatal accident from her.

  “I don’t know if I can be a part of this family anymore,” I told her in my most self-aggrandizing tone. “I’ll always be there for you if you ever need money,” which was the one asset I inevitably equated with independence and self-reliance. “I’ll be there for whatever you need from me. I think from now on we’ll have to learn to take care of each other and look out for ourselves.” Whatever I said and however I said it must have been pretty convincing, because she started to cry.

  These practice confrontations were not enough preparation for facing down the man himself. He caught me off-guard with another of his sudden phone calls, this time when I was at work.

  He had the opportunity to say only one thing to me, but it was enough. “David,” he said, and I could just about hear the tears welling in his eyes, “are you going to stop loving me?”

  In my private office, I could have closed the door behind me and said whatever I wanted without fear of being overheard. But I didn’t say anything in reply. I simply hung up the phone. In the moment it felt courageous. And when I look back on the course of my life—not just the times when I could have supported my father but elected not to, out of spite or anger or confusion, but all the sins I’ve been responsible for, all the stains that will never be fully cleansed from my soul, all the acts of deceit and larceny, guile and ruthlessness, I’ve committed in my own self-interest that I dare not ever confess—I think it may have been the cruelest and most terrible thing I’ve ever done.

  I was talking to my mother in a stolen moment when I could be certain she wouldn’t try to pass the phone to my father or allow him to listen in on the conversation when she made the suggestion. “I think you and your father should go into therapy,” she said.

  Setting aside the accusatory, slightly satisfied way she said this, something about her advice sounded right to me. For all the times I had tried to make my father understand that the past didn’t matter—t
hat previous disputes between us were no reason to conclude the bond between us was broken beyond repair, and previous reconciliations no reason to assume that it would always remain intact—now was my chance to show him that I meant what I said, or that I meant what I always intended to say anyway.

  We didn’t have to be one of those parent-child pairings who spent their adult lives wondering what happened to their dynamic without realizing that it was always, perpetually happening—whatever it was that we once had, we could always get it back, and we could always create it anew. We didn’t have to treat our relationship so delicately, as if it were some exotic electronic device with a baffling array of buttons, any of which threatened self-destruction if you pressed the wrong one. We had to experiment with using this device, and any time we could not figure out how it was supposed to operate, all we had to do was unplug it and plug it back in again. And we could do it over and over, as many times as we needed to, until we got it working the way it was meant to.

  “Yes,” I said to my mother. “Yes, I will. Yes. Can you arrange this for us?”

  As soon as I agreed to do it, I became extremely frightened about the process I had just consented to. The harder I tried to avoid cliché in my life, the more inevitably I ended up fulfilling it. Now here I was, perpetuating the tradition of being so impotently unable to solve my own problems that I had to turn to a total stranger for help, doled out in one-hour increments. And once I had been in therapy, I could no longer say that I’d never been in therapy; my personal belief that I was the sanest member of my family would be that much harder to hang on to.

  By agreeing to participate in therapy with my father, I was basically admitting that I was just as messed up as he was. This guy, I always knew, needed therapy. But me, too? Really? For all the things I had ever done to excess, at least I had the good sense to do them in private, in a way that didn’t interfere with anybody else’s life. But once I was poked, prodded, and picked apart in that therapist’s office, what horrible and long-denied truths about myself would emerge after the superficial layer of infallibility was peeled off of me? What if, for all the suffering I blamed him for inflicting on me, I had perpetrated as much pain on him?

  The psychiatrist’s office was in a big midtown skyscraper of steel and glass, and his waiting room was all right angles and oak finishes. I arrived there well before my father, and if I thought I was nervous, he looked positively panic-stricken. He rarely came to New York anymore, having moved his fur business nearer to his summer home in Monticello a few years earlier, and in that time he appeared to have forgotten how to live among civilized society. He showed up in a T-shirt, sweatpants, and a windbreaker, probably the first things he’d grabbed when he woke up that morning, or maybe the same clothes he’d worn to bed the previous night. His hair was ghost-white and mangy, and he was unshaved, and every part of him twitched and tingled at its highest state of alertness, like he was about to be interrogated by the police for a crime he knew he’d committed. When he saw me already waiting, he spoke my name and reached out to embrace me or shake my hand, but I rebuffed him.

  The psychiatrist was a thin man in a suit, with a full chestnut beard and a gentle but clinical demeanor, and he consistently mispronounced my father’s name.

  “Mr. Itz-off,” he began, “do you want to tell me why the two of you are here today?”

  “Well,” my father said, turning to me, “maybe you want to—?”

  I recounted the story of his confrontational phone call, the insults leveled at me, and the mystery of what substance or substances had elicited them from him. “Do you know,” I said, “that he still hasn’t apologized to me for this? And I still don’t even know what he was on at the time.”

  “Is this true, Mr. Itz-off?” the doctor asked. “Did you say this to him? Were you high at the time?”

  “I don’t know,” my father answered, which surprised me more than if he’d admitted it or denied it outright. “I suppose it’s possible. I’m sure if that’s how he remembers it, then it probably happened.”

  “Probably?” I said, incredulous. “Do you see,” I said to the therapist, “how he’s already trying to absolve himself of responsibility for his own actions?”

  “I’m not saying it didn’t happen,” my father continued. “I just can’t imagine what I might have been on. That’s not how I talk when I’m high. If I said it, I didn’t mean it.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. “Usually, the things you say when you’re high, you mean them as intensely as possible.” I started to cry. The therapist silently extended a box of tissues in my direction.

  Seated in his chair, my father clutched at the zipper of his windbreaker like it was a rosary and attempted to change the subject. “Do you know what a willful child he can be?” he said, extending at me a finger that he had been gnashing on moments earlier. “Do you know that three years ago, I moved my business up to the mountains? Three years ago, and in all that time, he hasn’t visited my new offices.”

  “Dad,” I said, “what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Is that right?” the doctor asked me, trying for the moment to placate my father. “Have you never been to his new offices?”

  “It’s true,” I said. “His offices always make me really uncomfortable.”

  “And why do you think that might be?” the doctor asked.

  “Because,” I said, “they are always run-down and ugly. They always smell terrible. And they have always been places where he goes to get high.” I started to cry again.

  My father gave me a dismissive wave of his hand. His breathing was heavy, and he was constantly crossing and uncrossing his legs. I had reached a conclusion that had been building up in my mind like a bomb, and I decided to detonate it.

  “You know what?” I said. “I think you might be high right now.”

  My father leaped to his feet with such force that it rattled the diplomas and citations on the therapist’s walls and shook the trophies in his display cabinets. “It’s not true,” my father insisted. “I am not.”

  “Calm down, Mr. Itz-off, calm down,” the doctor said, but his repeated urgings made my father angrier still.

  “I’m not gonna calm down,” he said. “I’m not. I’m not gonna be accused of being high when I’m not.”

  “I have to say,” the doctor said, “your behavior has been very erratic from the start of this meeting. I would like to recommend that you take a drug test.”

  “Fine,” my father said, rolling up his sleeves. “Let’s settle this. We’ll see who’s right. Give me a cup and I’ll take it into the bathroom.”

  “Not now, Mr. Itz-off,” the doctor said. “After the meeting.”

  “No,” he demanded. “I want to take care of this now. You don’t have a cup? Fine. I’ll go piss in my hands.” He held out his palms as if begging for charity.

  Thus our first joint therapy session came to a close. After writing the doctor a check for his four-hundred-dollar fee, my father approached me outside his office doors. “I’d like to talk to you alone,” he said. “I’d like to settle this, you know, between ourselves.”

  “No,” I told him. “I don’t want you riding down with me. I don’t want you following me. You wait for me to leave, and then you take your own elevator.”

  A few days later, I learned from my sister that on his drive home from this appointment, my father got into a car accident. He walked away uninjured, but his SUV was totaled. It was agreed that we would not see this same doctor again.

  After further research, my mother came back to me with a new suggestion. On the advice of my aunt, the same one whose unwillingness to relocate herself to the Catskills had inadvertently triggered the fight, she had located an institute on the Upper East Side that specialized in therapy for families dealing with substance-abuse problems. She made an appointment for me and my father there, and I found myself blithely looking forward to this visit as if the previous attempt at psychotherapy had never occurred. But I was
bothered by a couple of inscrutable omens that preceded it.

  First, after having recommended this new institute for me and my father, my aunt abruptly reversed course and sought desperately to talk us out of going there. Her argument hinged on the fact that the facility charged only seventy-five dollars for each session. How good a job could its staff members do, she said, if they got paid so little? Wouldn’t we be better off, and get higher-quality attention, if we went somewhere more expensive?

  Then, on some sleepless night, I happened to turn on the television in time to see a cable documentary about this same institute. Three couples had agreed to be videotaped during their therapy sessions and in follow-up interviews: a boyfriend and girlfriend, a husband and wife, and a mother and daughter. One by one their relationships unraveled: the boyfriend and girlfriend were both cheerful, severe alcoholics, missing work and losing jobs to go on benders for days at a time; by the end of the show, they had broken up without diminishing their addictions in the slightest. The mother was no longer on speaking terms with her daughter at the documentary’s end and did not even know where she was currently living. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out what happened to the husband and wife. I remained resolute in my belief that my father and I would somehow beat the odds. I just had to remember not to let anyone film our sessions.

  Encouragement was coming from other places as well. A few months before, I had created a page for myself on Friendster, a website where people were invited to set up profiles for themselves, fill them with photographs and lists of their favorite books and movies, and see how many other people’s profiles they could connect themselves to. Then I abandoned the project, having concluded that online social networking was a passing fad. But even when left unattended and ignored, this little Web page was doing more for my dating life than I ever could. One day, through absolutely no effort on my part, I received an email message from a young woman who said she had read something I had written and enjoyed it so much that she had sought me out and discovered we had a friend of a friend of a friend in common and, by the way, would I want to meet her for a drink some night? She probably felt as excited and frightened and ridiculous writing that note as I did reading it.