by Dave Itzkoff
“What?” I said, making no effort to stifle an angry laugh. “Are you kidding me?” I realized right away this was the wrong way to respond.
“No, I’m not kidding,” he answered. “Can you just give me the goddamn directions?”
“It’s in the same place it’s been every Saturday morning you’ve come to it for the last year,” I said. I gave him the address and flipped my phone shut.
When my father walked through the front door a few minutes later, his face was flushed and his breath was short. I had to remind myself these were symptoms of his garden-variety anger and nothing worse. “I don’t understand why you had to talk to me like that,” he said.
When we took our seats in front of Rebecca, the morning’s incident was the first and only thing my father wanted to discuss. “Why does he have to be so snide about it?” he said to the room, finding no apparent difficulty in talking about me as if I weren’t present. “Why can’t he just give me the directions and tell me how to get here?”
“Dad,” I said, “this isn’t what the therapy process is supposed to be for. If we’re going to use every session to debate whatever petty argument of the day, how are we ever going to get to the stuff that’s really important?”
“You know,” he said, continuing his train of thought, “he has always been a willful child. Even when he was a little boy. Did you know that when he was growing up, I’d be driving in my car, and he’d be sitting in the backseat, and he would lean up to the front to change the radio stations? I’m the one who’s driving, and he’s the one choosing the stations! Nothing has changed.”
“Dad,” I said, “I was six years old when that happened. Maybe seven. I can’t account for what I did when I was just a kid. I’m not that person anymore.”
“Look,” my father said, “right now you can’t understand what I’m talking about, because you are the son, and I’m the father. But someday, when you have kids of your own and you are the father, you’ll know what I meant today.”
“Oh my God,” I said, looking to Rebecca for any sign of sympathy or consolation. “Is that not the ultimate cop-out? How am I even supposed to respond to that?”
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Rebecca said in her quiet voice, holding up her hands. “Let’s stop this for a second and sort it out. David, what I’m hearing from you is that you want your father to stop criticizing you for things you did a long time ago, in your past, and to start seeing you as an adult. Is that right?”
I murmured a grumble of assent.
“And Mr. Iss-i-koff,” she added, “what I’m hearing from you is that you want David to recognize that you’ve got a perspective he cannot appreciate yet, that there are certain things he won’t understand until he becomes a father himself. Is that right?”
“It’s interesting that you bring that up,” my father replied. “Becky, is your father still alive? What’s your relationship like with him?”
Rebecca was startled by his nonanswer. “I’m … not sure how that’s relevant,” she answered. Her attempt at authority was unconvincing.
“Because I wonder if you would ever consider going into therapy with your father,” he said. “I think you both might benefit from it.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” I said. “We’re not here to work the refs, Dad. To debate the moderators. It’s not getting us anywhere.”
“I’m not allowed to ask Becky about her own father?” he asked.
“Dad, you just suggested that our therapist go into therapy.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“You don’t believe me?” My father began to eye the video camera that had silently and without acknowledgment been recording all of our sessions. “Here,” he said, “give me the videotape and we’ll play it back. I’ll show you what I said.”
I could see him preparing to get out of the chair. He was really going to do it. “Dad,” I said, “that’s not what it’s for.”
“Hey,” he said, “that’s me on there. Those are my words. I’m not allowed to play it back?”
Rebecca interceded. “We’re not playing the tape back,” she said. “And really, Mr. Iss-i-koff, let’s leave my life out of this.”
“I thought this was supposed to be a place where we could talk about whatever we wanted to talk about,” my father said. “Well, this is what I want to talk about.”
“Even if it comes at the cost of alienating everyone in this room?” I asked.
“David,” my father said, “I’m sixty-five years old. I’m pretty much fixed in my ways at this point. I’m not going to censor myself. I’m not going to change my basic nature for you or for anybody.”
“So then,” I said, “what was the point of any of this? Why did you ever agree to come to therapy if you never had any intention of coming out of this thing any different than when you started?”
And—Wait a second, holy shit, now I remember. I finally remember those twelve horrible words, that one stupid, simple rhyme that proved to me the whole project was lost. He put his hand on mine, turned to me, spoke my name, and said:
A man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still
“Really?” I said. “So that’s your answer? That’s it? What the fuck is that?” It might have been the first swearword I’d used in a year’s worth of sessions.
“Hey,” my father answered, “you can’t talk to me like that. In here, we may be peers, but you have to understand something: I’m your father, not your friend.”
The funny thing is, I knew exactly what he meant. But all at once everything dropped: the air dropped out of my lungs, the floor dropped out of the room. My heart and my stomach dropped out of my chest, and the clouds dropped out of the sky. I knew how to hear those words so they sounded sane and rational, and I knew how to construe them to sound like the meanest thing he’d ever said to me sober. And in that moment I also knew which way I wanted to interpret them.
The whole process had been revealed as a worthless sham. Maybe I couldn’t fight my father with words, but if I didn’t give him any words to work with, he would have nothing to fight against. I slumped in my chair, lowered my head, and resolved to myself that I wouldn’t speak again for the rest of the session.
My tacit vow had startlingly little effect on the trajectory of the remaining conversation. Words whizzed by; my father reiterated his assertion that I was an exceedingly prompt son while my sister was never on time, and that my sister spent all her money while I saved half of what I made. He retold the anecdote about his friend who had told him of a desire to see his son have sex with his wife; and he repeated the story of discovering his father’s glass eye and my grandfather weeping that were it not for his handicap, he could have been president.
Then, mercifully, we ran out of time. I can’t be sure, but I doubt Rebecca ended the session with any remark more conclusive or profound than “See you next week.”
My pledge of silence continued during the traditional post-therapy diner lunch, but it did not stop my father from conducting a conversation with himself.
“Did you see the game last night?” he asked. “You know, the problem with Torre is that he just wants to prove how right he is. The genius. Always has to meddle. He will not let these guys pitch—will not let them pitch. I say, if you’re going to bring a guy in as a reliever, let the man pitch. Let him face a few batters, notch a few outs, build up his confidence. This one’s always ready to pull out his pitcher over one bad pitch. Joe Torre the genius. He’s no genius, I say.”
And then: “You want to know how crazy your mother is? She’s pulling the car out of the garage the other day, and she scrapes the whole side of the car along the wall of the garage. Instead of backing out slowly, she has to peel out all at once—she hears the sound of the metal scraping against her car, and she tries to accelerate even faster. It’s like I always tell her, ‘Maddy, if you’re not sure which way the car is going to go, just go slowly.’ ”
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And then: “I gotta say, David, I’m pretty happy with my life up in the mountains. A lot of people say they like warm weather all year round, but me, I like the seasons. I like it when the sun goes down earlier in the day and the air gets colder. I like that things should be cyclical. It lets me know I’m alive. And that’s why I could never move to Florida.”
I hadn’t spoken a word since ordering my club sandwich. At last my father noticed that I wasn’t acknowledging his monologues. “Well,” he said, “aren’t you going to say anything?”
“No,” I said, breaking my vow. “Not until you apologize.”
“What did I do?”
“You know what you said in there.”
“David,” he said gently, “I thought we had an agreement—what we say in there, we leave in there. We don’t take it out here.”
“I know you said you wanted an arrangement like that, but I don’t remember actually agreeing to it. I don’t know that I can abide by it. I can’t flip a switch and be two different people. I can’t just forget what you said now that I know your mind.”
As my father had said to me before, he said again, “We’ve got to find a way to talk to each other in there. We’ve got to find a way to signal to each other when one of us is hurting the other one’s feelings.”
“Dad,” I said, “what do you think this has all been about? You already hurt my feelings. I don’t know what more you could say to hurt them worse. And I don’t know that I can hear you say anything like that again.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing not for what he had already said but for what he was about to say. “Because I’ve got to be able to feel I can say whatever I want in that room. I can’t censor myself at this age. I’m too far along and too set in my ways.”
We finished our lunch quickly and quietly, and he still needed directions from me to drive me home.
Our next two sessions had to be postponed because my father was traveling one weekend, and the next was the Thanksgiving holiday. We had told Rebecca that we would be in contact with her when we were ready to schedule our next appointment. But we never did. One Saturday passed, and then another, and our newly inert routine was cemented. Not once did my father ask me when our therapy schedule might resume.
One morning during the week, when I was working in my office, I got a call from Rebecca. Over the phone, her voice sounded smaller and more distant. “Have you decided when you’ll be coming back?” she asked. “I think we still have a few things that we need to work on.”
I answered her the same way I would have a publicist who was trying to push a story I wasn’t interested in, or a pollster trying to get me to take part in a telephone survey. “There’s, ah, a couple things I just need to sort out with my dad,” I said. “As soon as I do, I’ll get back to you.” It was the last thing I ever said to her, and I doubt she bought it.
Here’s a story from my adolescence in suburban exile. One afternoon I returned home from a full day of school where I had said nothing to anyone, in preparation for another of the routine afternoon naps that passed the time until the evening, and I found that my parents were already back from work. Their presence in the house before sundown was generally a bad omen: it meant that my father had been pulled away from what he most wanted to be doing, which was yelling into the phone and selling fur.
Earlier that morning they had left for work separately, my mother in her car and my father in his, and by the time he arrived at his office, he could no longer remember how he got there. He could not mentally retrace the uncomplicated route he drove every day of the week—the Palisades Parkway to the George Washington Bridge to the West Side Highway—and could not even recall sitting behind the wheel of his automobile, tapping its pedals with his feet to make it stop or go. He knew his name, where he worked, and who his wife was, but by the time she had driven him back, he had already forgotten how that happened, too.
He could still walk upright and speak clearly, and his personality and sense of humor were in no way altered, but he could not remember anything that had happened to him over five minutes ago. He would notice the group of gardeners working on our front lawn and jokingly ask, “Who are those guys? Mommy’s boyfriends?” Then he would resume reading the same page of the newspaper he had been working on all afternoon before once again noticing the gardeners and asking, “Who are those guys? Mommy’s boyfriends?”
Transient global amnesia, my mother was told over the telephone later, was what my father was most likely suffering from: a temporary condition lasting no more than a day, in which his long-term memory was unaffected but his short-term memory was impaired. It was explained that this was in no way a threat to his life and would shortly resolve itself without treatment, which it did, but watching him under its weak influence was as excruciating as seeing him suffer through a deadly illness—at least we would have to imagine; to this point, my sister and I had never seen him confined to a hospital bed or stricken with any ailment more severe than bronchitis. For the rest of the day, until he went to bed, my father sat at the kitchen table with the same simple grin, unaware there was anything wrong with him, able to read the distressed expressions on the faces of his family but incapable of recognizing that he was the one who was causing the distress.
Here’s another story. On a winter night some months later, my father was driving on an icy patch of road near our home when he lost control of his car and wiped out on a highway divider. His car was completely wrecked, but somehow he emerged from the accident unharmed. A policeman who examined my father at the scene found him disoriented and slightly incoherent and suggested that he see a doctor, believing he may have suffered a stroke during or just before the crash. Actually, he was high on cocaine.
I was thinking about these incidents several years later, as I made the drive to reach my father in his modest house in the Catskills. Having failed at what was supposed to be a fairly conventional and time-tested method of reconciling two occasionally estranged family members, I decided I would try a strategy of my own devising.
I was going to sit my father down and make him tell me his life story. All of it, in as much unexpurgated detail as he could remember, with a special emphasis on his cocaine addiction, a history that stretched back even further than his history with me; which began casually long before my existence was even contemplated; which reached its frenzied, catastrophic zenith with eerie synchronicity right around the time I was born; and which continued for years and years and years—and then ended at a moment that was difficult to pinpoint precisely, for reasons I was still not completely sure I understood.
I thought that in hearing this story told to me and diligently writing it down, I could turn it into a coherent narrative. As I learned the many details of his life I did not know; heard him retell the tales he had told on a thousand previous occasions for their thousand and first time; had him correct all the inaccuracies I had mistakenly propagated in my erroneous accounts of these episodes; dispelled my mythologies; and exposed my biases, I thought I might be able to show my father a side of himself he did not realize he possessed. Maybe I could show him how close we had been in the times when we seemed furthest apart. Only, to compile this account, I had to start with a man whose own memory could not be trusted, who could lie to your face with a smile whether he realized he was doing it or not.
Traveling to my father in the Catskills is like passing through a ripple in time. From my own unexceptional Manhattan dwelling, the hundred-mile trip upstate is almost entirely confined to highways, until I exit onto a two-lane access road where the unrelenting advancement of the years yields for its most faithful traveler, age sixty-nine, and appears to run backward from the perspective of the son half his age. On my left-hand side, I pass proud monuments to my father’s past, still vital and only gently touched, if at all, by the progress of the present day: colonies of weather-beaten but sturdy bungalows, nearly identical to those where he spent his childhood summers, and where I later spent mine; the horse-ra
cing track that recently welcomed its first supply of slot machines. From my right-hand window, I watch symbols of ambiguous potentiality recede from view: wide green fields forlornly planted with for-sale signs; dirt paths that branch off into countless unpaved tributaries, none of which I have attempted to explore to their unknown ends.
The route winds around the lake where my mother once photographed me at age six, surrounded by water and clinging to my father’s towering legs for support; beyond the wooden sign advertising the summer vacation properties where my parents can now be found year-round, even in winter; and finally, to row upon row of undifferentiated cedar-colored cottages, one of which shelters my father and mother, their dog, their menagerie of ceramic ducks, and their collection of throw pillows stitched with mottoes like EAT, SLEEP, FISH and OLD FRIENDS ARE THE BEST FRIENDS. It’s a long way to go to enjoy the privilege of believing your life is no different from anyone else’s.
Other than the fear that I would not get home from my trip in time for a Sunday-night episode of The Simpsons, I had no trepidation about asking my father to reveal all the secrets and details of his life in a single weekend. Although I had not learned about his addiction until I was eight, from that moment on, there was no part of his personal history that my father ever kept secret from me. He may not be proud of the life he previously led, I thought, but nor would he ever deny how he led it. In fact—and you will simply have to take my word on this—were you to spend no more than five minutes in my father’s company, he would probably confess as much to you, followed by some randomly selected anecdote from his substance-abuse highlight reel. The last time I had visited my parents, bringing Amy upstate with me so she could see their home, we were all eating bagels at the dinner table when my father spontaneously decided to tell us the decades-old story of the time a group of his business associates introduced him to freebase cocaine. “We were all in a circle,” he recounted, “and when you were done, you were supposed to pass it to the guy sitting next to you. And by the time he was done, you already wanted it back.”