Cocaine's Son

by Dave Itzkoff

  Had I made the effort to look for it, I could have found palpable and vivid evidence of my father’s politics in our therapy sessions, even when not a word of politics was discussed. It was all in the boisterous and certain way he conducted himself, the way his voice filled up the tiny room, and the expressive flailing of his arms and slapping of his hands against his lap that accompanied his most passionate rants: he might open a morning’s discussion with a tribute to the new computer he had just purchased and the attentive technical support he was receiving from the company, or segue into a side-by-side comparison of my and my sister’s financial acumen (“This one saves fifty cents out of every dollar that comes in; the other one spends every penny she’s ever earned”), and finish up maybe with a beloved anecdote about something a friend had once said to him when they were drunk at a party: “He said, ‘I’d rather that my son have sex with my wife than have sex with her myself.’ I thought that was beautiful.” That was supposed to illustrate, I think, the extent to which fathers will sacrifice for their sons (“Someday, when you have a son of your own, you’ll see”).

  There was no need for me to go in search of hidden clues to my father’s emerging political bent when the evidence had been accumulating for years. Between the confluence of the 9/11 attacks and his self-imposed exile with my mother in the Catskills, the ascent of the Internet, and the emergence of twenty-four-hour conservative news channels, he had created a hermetically sealed environment in which the only depictions of the outside world he engaged with were those expressed in all-capital letters and at maximum volume. His devotion to cable-TV news had become its own kind of addiction; its programs blared simultaneously from multiple screens within his house, putting him to bed at night, staying on while he slept, and waiting for him when he woke up in the morning. The man who was epically fearful of expressing himself in writing, and who trembled at the thought of having to write anything more on a page than his own name, now had a limitless supply of prefabricated chain-email messages appearing in and being forwarded from his account that, with the click of a button, could be passed along to his business contacts, his friends, and his son, to alert them that

  estrogen from birth control and morning-after pills is causing male fish across America to develop female sex organs—and environmentalists, who are overwhelmingly “pro-choice,” have helped cover it up

  and

  America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known

  and

  the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history while the “silent majority” is cowed and extraneous.

  Lately, in our therapy sessions, he had been talking a lot about the tremendous guilt he felt for never serving in the Vietnam War. His fate had been sealed on the day when he was busted for smoking pot and when his split-second response to a draft board disqualified him forever. Absent all those events, his age probably would have put him on the safe end of the eligibility curve by the time his number was called, though I remain convinced that circumstances and his lack of athleticism would have conspired to make him a name on a wall and not my father. But he was still wishing almost thirty years later that he could have participated in what was once America’s most futile military folly.

  I knew a single afternoon spent watching a combative, life-justifying interrogation of McNamara would not suddenly reverse the polarity of my father’s political philosophy. But I thought it might teach me a few things, like: how did someone who was once so very like me come to believe the complete opposite of what I felt? How can you identify with and love a person who, in crucial situations, will behave very differently from you? How can you rely on him and trust him if he thinks these things?

  I thought about this as we listened to McNamara recount his biography, his professional background steeped in corporate management and statistical analysis but devoid of any military oversight experience, and his philosophy, held then if not now, that a war could be won on paper if we just lost fewer men on our bombing runs than they did. I probed my soul for sympathy in the moments when my father would clench his fists or grit his teeth, shake his head in disagreement with McNamara, sigh an exasperated sigh, or mutter “stupid bastard” under his breath. To my surprise, he never burst into the same verbal furor elicited by the television pundits with whom he agreed or disagreed so ardently that he sometimes seemed to think he was debating them in his own living room. He said nothing back to the screen, or to me as the credits rolled while we walked up the aisle and out of the theater.

  Just as we did after each therapy session, we followed the movie by retreating to our Ukrainian diner, where, unmoved by the experience, my father ordered his eggs exactly as he always did. I waited for him to bring up the movie, and when he did not, I finally asked, “So what did you think?”

  “So many things, David,” he said. “So many things.” He wasn’t yet ready to share what those things were, and I hadn’t yet found a way to ask him. One prophecy from his email had come to pass: I felt cowed and extraneous, and I fell silent.

  II. The Plate

  Saying goodbye to my parents’ house in New City, the one I had lived in after we left Manhattan, was easy. It made me glad that there are words like “final” and “never,” abrupt enough to convey a sense of permanent nonexistence, even if our brains can’t fully comprehend the idea. I had never thought of the house as a place of residence, just a layover between the completion of high school and the start of college, between the completion of college and the start of my real life. It was the place where I kept my old comic books and a set of weights I used only once after my father bought them for me. All I had to do was pack up the comic books and discard the weights, and when I left the house, I would be leaving it for the last time. But I leave places for the last time all the time.

  For my parents, the circumstances of their forced diaspora to the Catskills were much different and the stakes much higher. An old creditor of my father’s, long forgotten, had suddenly returned from financial near-death, demanding repayment on an ancient loan and the exorbitant interest payments my father had agreed to at a time when his business was not so prosperous and the notion of his living a long and healthy life seemed as laughable as the idea of his ever owning a house in the suburbs or achieving sobriety. In time a court would rule these interest payments usurious and declare the debts void, but for now my father could not take any chances: he could not claim poverty while owning two houses and three cars, and he might need a lot of money very soon.

  So he and my mother sold the home where they rarely resided, knew none of the neighbors, and had no friends. They spent their last days there dejectedly packing up its contents and preparing to move them to their much smaller house in Monticello, or into cold storage alongside my father’s fur. It probably occurred to them, as it did to me, that in the next instance when their earthly belongings were subjected to such a thorough inventory and relocation, they would not be available to help out.

  On my final visit to that house, I went out to lunch with my father on an afternoon break from the upending of his life. As we drove around town in the car, once mine and now his, that he had unhesitatingly bought for me the summer when my previous ride, a five-hundred-dollar wreck that lacked even a cassette player, died abruptly, I was taking a victory lap in my mind: past the movie theaters I had visited on Friday nights no matter what was showing, the pizza parlors that went out of business only to be replaced by other pizza parlors, the country roads where my father had taught me to drive, and the highway where he had once nearly driven us into oncoming traffic. After we ate, we were sitting in the car when my father put his hand on my arm. “David,” he said to me, “can you hold on a second?

  “I’m not sure how to tell you this,” he went on. “I’m not even sure I have the right
to do this to you. But it’s always been my policy to tell you the truth, and I feel you should know it.”

  “Dad,” I said, “what is it? Would you just say it already?”

  “Okay,” he said, “here goes. A few weeks ago I went in to the doctor for a routine blood test, and when the results came back—well, they think they might have noticed something with my prostate. I have to go in for a few more tests. They said it’s most likely nothing, but then again, it might be something.”

  “So that’s it?” I said. “You got me all worked up over something that’s probably nothing?”

  “David,” he said, much more tenderly than I had responded to him, “this is something I’ve been wrestling with for days. I didn’t know how to tell you. I know you don’t like it when you feel like you’ve been left out of these things, and I wanted you to know as soon as I could, as soon as I was ready to tell you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but did you have to tell me like this? So much … drama? Maybe you need to think about how you say things like this.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe you need to think about how you react.”

  I had planned to bring up this exchange at our next therapy session, but my father arrived with plans of his own. He began the meeting with a not unfamiliar complaint about my sister, with whom he was having difficulty communicating in the most basic sense.

  “This one,” he said, “never answers her phone. And if I leave a message, do I get a call back? Maybe two days later, maybe three. Maybe never. Sometimes it’s like, I wonder, hey, do I even exist?”

  “Do you think she’s avoiding you?” said our therapist, whom my father still insisted on calling Becky.

  “Hey, I don’t know,” he said. “Becky, let me ask you something. You’ve got a father, right? He calls you sometimes? You ever not return his phone calls?”

  “Mr. Iss-i-koff,” said Rebecca, “this isn’t about me. Let’s stick to you. Why do you think your daughter doesn’t call you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But let me tell you something about my own father. Do you know that he had a glass eye? And he was always embarrassed by it. I was rifling through the glove compartment of his car one day when I found an eye that he kept in there. And later on, I told him that I had found it.” He began to get choked up. “And I put my arms around him and said, ‘Dad, I want you to know that I don’t think any less of you because of this.’ And do you know what he told me? He said, ‘Gerald, if it wasn’t for that damned eye, I could’ve been president.’ And I said, ‘Dad, don’t you understand that you always could?’ ”

  It was unclear to me how the story related directly to the issue of him and my sister, but before I could express this, he had moved on to another anecdote.

  “Do you know,” my father continued, “that it was my father who saved me from drugs? It was his idea to split up the business and to leave me in charge in New York while he went back to New Orleans. At the time I begged him not to do it. But he knew—he knew!—that it would be the best thing for me. He said, ‘Gerald, I know you, and I know you’re going to do whatever it takes to keep your business afloat. You’re not going to let yourself go down like that.’ ”

  Set aside, for the moment, the fact that over a decade would elapse between when my grandfather put my father in charge of the fur business and when he achieved some semblance of sobriety. Everything, it seemed, that now or ever preyed on his psyche was simultaneously issuing forth from him in a cacophonous blurt. The remembrances and the grievances were all somehow interconnected in his mind, a string he could keep pulling on and pulling on like handkerchiefs produced from a magician’s sleeve. The trick in this case was getting the performer to stop.

  “Dad,” I interrupted, “I know all this stuff is important to you, but we’re supposed to be here to talk about us.”

  “In all fairness, Mr. Iss-i-koff,” Rebecca added, “you have been talking for a long time now. Maybe you should let David say something.”

  My father recoiled as if she and I had both pulled knives on him. “Hey,” he cried, “isn’t this supposed to be a place where I can talk about anything I want? Don’t I have enough going on in my life that now I gotta fight with you two? I’ve got a daughter who doesn’t even acknowledge that I’m a person, I’m dealing with this prostate thing, I’m losing my house.” He paused, and then with all of his might: “My plate,” he bellowed, “is full.”

  He brought his hand down as if to punctuate his declaration with a loud slam, but there was no table in front of him, so he ended up slapping himself on his leg. I closed my eyes and let a few tears slip out and caress my cheeks.

  “David,” my father asked hoarsely, “why are you crying?”

  “I can’t stand to see you get like this,” I said. “It just reminds me too much of when you used to get high.”

  “Do you think that I’m high now?”

  “No.”

  “Have I ever once gotten high in the last five years?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Someday,” he said, “you’re going to have to learn that you can’t hold everything against me just because I used to do drugs.”

  III. The Fan

  The box for the ceiling fan and lamp assembly contained eleven pieces: two teapot-shaped parts that joined together to form the motor, four plastic blades with a fake wood finish, a remote control, and four ceramic fixtures to hold the lightbulbs (not included). Its retail cost at a Home Depot in Kiamesha, New York, was about ninety dollars, but its actual cost to me, as a gift from my father, was zero. He told me these things were a snap to build, and that he had previously set up several of them in his Monticello home, and I believed him. We never imagined that in the course of putting one together, we would dismantle each other.

  The whole enterprise of installing the ceiling fan in my apartment had been my father’s idea. He had decided on a previous visit to my boxy fifth-floor walk-up that the cool breeze generated by my air conditioner did not carry well enough from my bedroom to my living room, in the same way that he decided my upstairs neighbors, a pair of bone-thin NYU undergraduates who barely filled out their flip-flops, made too much noise as they trampled across their floor (“Are you living underneath Frankenstein?” he wanted to know). It had been a long time since my father and I had collaborated on a project requiring physical exertion: the last time had been in the 1980s, when he helped me install a hard drive in my computer, after he came home to find me attacking the device with a hammer. Since then, I told myself, I had matured.

  The ritual began in my living room on a Saturday afternoon one summer after our therapy session and our customary lunch at the Ukrainian diner. We attached the fan’s four blades to the motor unit and removed my old light fixture with graceful, professional ease. We brimmed with deceptive bravado, believing the task would be completed well before the afternoon’s Yankees game. We would be done soon enough to watch Derek Jeter put our own crude displays of dexterity to shame while an energy-efficient fan circulated the air and cooled our exposed knees.

  Our first challenge was mounting the assembled fan to the newly created hole in my ceiling, which yawned above us somewhat higher than we’d anticipated. From the basement of my brownstone, I retrieved a ladder, but my father and I could not stand on the ladder simultaneously, and one of us needed to hold the mount steady while the other person screwed it into place.

  “Do you have another ladder?” my father asked.

  “Another ladder? I’m lucky I had one.” I went back downstairs and walked across the street to a Spanish bodega, where I borrowed a second ladder from a Bangladeshi clerk who did not even ask what I needed it for. I bought a lot of soda and Ring Dings from that place.

  I had carried two ladders a total of eleven flights of stairs, and my father and I were now standing atop them at the same height, only to discover that we had a problem with the division of labor. While I held the mount, my father attempted to screw it into place with an
electric screwdriver. But he could not balance the screws on the tip of the tool and drive them up into the ceiling. Each time he tried, the screws would fall to the ground, roll around on the floor, and get lost underneath furniture, to which my father would say, “Whoopst.” Not “Whoops,” as everyone has ever said since expressions of embarrassment and dismay were first invented, but “Whoopst,” with a T at the end. “Whoopst! Whoopst!” he would say, and laugh at his own mistake.

  The fan was becoming too heavy for me to hold over my head. So I jury-rigged a temporary solution by placing a pillow on my head, putting the fan on top of the pillow, and holding the fan in place with the pillow on my head, while my father continued his hopeless chore of locking in the screws.

  “Whoopst! Whoopst!” he said.

  When I could not bear to hear him say “Whoopst!” one more time, we switched places. The head-pillow-fan arrangement seemed too undignified for my father, so he tried to hold it up with his hands while I operated the screwdriver. I also found it difficult to screw upward, but I was able to lock one screw in place and needed to secure only three more to finish our task. That was when, to my horror, I saw that my father’s arms were trembling.

  “David,” he said, “I gotta let go.”

  “Not now, Dad!” I demanded. “We’re almost finished. You have to hold on just a little bit longer.”

  “David,” he said, “I’m sixty-five years old. I’m not a young man anymore. I know when I’m beat. I gotta come down. I’m coming down.” I was sweating profusely and my father even more so. We really could have used a fan to cool us off.