Cocaine's Son

by Dave Itzkoff

  “Who? Who am I alienating?”

  “Me. My sister.”

  IV.a. The Queen’s Gambit Accepted

  “Oh, is that so? You think you know what your sister thinks?”

  “We’ve talked about you. I think she would agree with me.”

  “You sure about that? You want me to call her on the phone right now and ask her?”

  “N-no.”

  V. The Invocation of the Immutable Past

  “You have always been a willful person, David. Even from the time you were a little boy, when we would go for drives in the car, do you know that you used to reach up from the backseat and change the radio stations I was listening to?”

  “What the fuck does that have to do with anything? You listen to me, you monster, you have no right to invoke my childhood. You missed half of it because you were constantly high on drugs. You have no idea who I was then, and you have no idea who I am now.”

  “David, I can’t keep apologizing to you for all the years that I was on drugs. I’m not taking them now, am I? I’m not high now, am I?”

  VI. Outright Revisionism

  “Do you know that in all the time I used to get high, I never once raised my hand to you or your sister? I never once got physical with either of you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Oh my God, that is so not true! You say this all the time, and I always correct you, and you never remember. You think that if you say it enough times, that makes it true.”

  VII. Turnover on Downs

  “I think you still have a lot of issues to deal with from my drug use.”

  “And your problem is that you’re incapable of seeing people as anything other than who they used to be.”

  VIII. The Threat to Throw the Chair out the Window

  “I think I’m going to throw this goddamn chair out the goddamn window.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  IX. Closing Statements with Partial Apology

  “Look, David, I apologize that you overheard me talking to your mother before. I feel terrible about that. It’s like I keep telling you: I’m a work in progress, okay? I’m not going to get everything right all the time. Now do you forgive me?”

  “Okay. Fine.”

  X. The Changing of the Subject

  “I’m starving. You want to go downstairs and get something to eat?”

  “Sure.”

  On the morning of our third day in New Orleans, my father awoke reinvigorated. Prior to our trip, his greatest concern had been that everyone he once knew in the city would be gone, and those who remained would no longer remember him or choose to acknowledge him. Following our fight and reconciliatory oyster dinner, the pendulum of his emotions was free to swing in the opposite direction. Daylight had barely broken, and he was already dialing away at his cellphone, calling information in search of phone numbers: for a woman with whom he used to play cards at Tulane, who he had heard was unmarried and still living in Louisiana; for a former roommate who had fled all the way to Arizona to escape his gambling debts; and for another roommate who had apparently made a fortune as an executive for a Texas-based cafeteria-services corporation. It did not matter if these people lived in time zones where the sun had not yet risen, or if his son, in the bed right next to his, was not yet ready to accept the fact that it was morning. He wanted to get someone, anyone, on the phone, and he wanted to talk right away.

  He was especially concerned about a woman named Adelphia, a New Orleans native who was about his age and who had started working for my grandfather at around the same time he did. I did not have to ask if my grandfather paid her the same wages that my father received, or if her duties were commensurate with his; she was a woman, and she was black. But she remained with my grandfather for the duration of his Louisiana career, and she was at his hospital bedside every day as he suffered the progressively worsening stages of a subdural hematoma, and she was with him on the day he died. Despite the crucial supporting role she played in my family’s history, I had never met Adelphia, although I had once briefly encountered her daughter, Esther, who worked in the hospitality department of the hotel where my friends and I stayed during our bachelor-party debauchery. She sent a complimentary fruit basket to our room before we proceeded to throw up all over our accommodations.

  It seemed certain that Adelphia and her family would have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and we had no idea when or if they might have returned to New Orleans. Months before our trip, when I first sat down with my father to review his life history, he had asked me to help him use various search engines and other computer tools to see if we could find Adelphia’s telephone number or home address. But for as much as my father professed to care about her, he could not remember what last name she went by, and all the phone numbers we found that might have been hers simply rang without end.

  This morning, with the help of a Louisiana phone book and a directory assistance website, my father had managed to call just about every number that might have been Adelphia’s, politely disposing of the respondents who turned out not to be her, and diligently making note of each listing that went unanswered. Somewhat deflated, he snapped his phone shut and went into the bathroom to take a shower. And then Adelphia called back.

  I answered my father’s phone, and in a soft Southern twang, she explained to me that she had spent the morning locked out on her porch. Though she had no answering machine, she had noticed my father’s name on her caller ID when she at last got back into her house. She said that we could come by to visit as soon as we wanted; knowing my father, I told her that would most likely be right away. I did not interrupt my father’s shower to tell him that Adelphia had been located, or that she had located herself; I waited until he emerged from the bathroom, with a towel around his waist and an electric toothbrush whirring in his mouth, at which point he started to cry. The tears streaming down his cheeks began to commingle with the toothpaste froth that had accumulated around his lips, and he looked positively elated.

  Adelphia’s home in the Garden District was only a few miles from our hotel, and the directions she gave us were precise, yet we managed to drive past it at least once or twice before we arrived. It was our first visit to a predominantly black neighborhood in the city, and our first opportunity to view up close how arbitrary Katrina’s devastation had been. No structure had completely escaped the hurricane’s punishing touch, but on any given block, the damage from house to house could run a frustrating, heartbreaking gamut; one building might be missing substantial parts of its roof or its walls, or leveled to its foundation, while its immediate neighbor sustained nothing more permanent than superficial water damage.

  Adelphia was waiting for us on the lawn in front of her townhouse, but my father did not recognize her right away. A small, compact woman of sixty-six, she was now dyeing her short hair a bright copper red, and her expressive eyes were hidden behind a pair of glasses that my father had never seen her wear. With a combined 133 years of life between them, they hugged each other, and my father began to cry again. She was a patient woman with a perpetual, genuine smile, but the smile, too, was a disguise; it concealed a wellspring of endurance whose depths had been plumbed by repeated misfortune and tragedy and whose bottom had yet to be found.

  She was no older than sixteen or seventeen when she began working for my grandfather, a man she referred to even in the present day as “Mister Bob,” and her memories of him were fairly consistent with my father’s: “Mister Bob, he hollered at me, too,” Adelphia explained. “People used to say, ‘Why do you work for that Jew? He always hollerin’ at you.’ I say, ‘Ah, he don’t mean half of what he say.’ ” She would have known about his temperament from her first husband, Ray, who was already in my grandfather’s employ when Adelphia joined the business; Ray was an inveterate drunk who rarely showed up sober for work, if at all, but she forgave him, perhaps because she had her own habit of betting her wages on horse races.

  Adelphia and Ray eventually split up, but not bef
ore they produced two sons, Patrick and Tracy. Tracy had been a heroin addict for most of his life and had done time in the Angola penitentiary for felony drug possession, but Adelphia still referred to him as her “best child,” as in “I tell everybody my best child went to prison.” He had been spared incarceration once before, when he was caught stealing money he was supposed to deposit in my grandfather’s bank account; my grandfather appeared at the trial to testify on Tracy’s behalf. (According to my father, my grandfather told the court, “The bank put money in the hands of a drug addict. What do you want him to do?”) When Tracy was jailed for a later offense, he got seven years shaved off his sentence for defending a female guard from the attacks of a far more dangerous male inmate.

  For ten years, Adelphia worked as a New Orleans cabdriver even as she continued to work for my grandfather, and after he died, she took a job as a cook and housekeeper for a fraternity house at Tulane, whose brothers were so enamored of her that they paid for her to travel with them on their annual spring-break visits to Florida. When Katrina came to town, Adelphia and her second husband, a man whose round, ebullient face gazed upon us from photographs that hung throughout the house, wasted no time in evacuating the city, driving first to Baton Rouge and then to Greenwood, Mississippi. For many months after the waters had receded, they resisted going home, anticipating the cataclysm that would be waiting for them, and her husband, who had prostate cancer, never made the trip. “He passed,” Adelphia explained.

  She returned to New Orleans to find the roof of her house missing and its insides largely flooded. The first contractor she paid to repair the damage simply absconded with her money. So she called on Patrick and Tracy, who helped her rebuild the house. Now she lived there with Esther—who did not remember our earlier encounter at the hotel, the fruit basket, or the vomit—and Esther’s daughters, a trio of school-age girls who dressed in kneesocks and respectfully referred to Adelphia as “Grandmother.”

  I should confess here that I am not telling this story in the order it was presented to me. Adelphia did not convey the complete details of her life and her whereabouts since Katrina to my father and me in a single uninterrupted telling; I had to assemble it from the fragments she was able to dole out in the brief intervals between the lengthy soliloquies that my father had come to perform for her. We had barely settled into Adelphia’s living room, with its new carpeting and vinyl couches assembled around a big-screen television enshrined in a wobbly plastic wall unit, when my father began to recount the story of how my grandfather split up the family business in hopes that it would compel my father to give up his drug habit—a story that Adelphia knew well, because she had consulted with my grandfather on his decision.

  “Do you know, Adelphia, how much that man sacrificed for me?” my father asked rhetorically, his voice breaking, his eyes once again welling with tears, and his face in frighteningly close proximity to hers. “There is no one—no one—who helped me more than my father. He’s the only one who finally helped me get clean.”

  Everything he had said up to this point I could dismiss as the harmless rationalizations of an old man, but this last statement struck me as patently untrue. It ignored the honor roll of pleading friends who had, over the years, begged him to seek help for his problem; the cooperation of other family members who had stood by him through other, more traditional treatments that did not work; and the immeasurable support of my mother, who could have simply walked away after any number of failed therapies, abortive institutionalizations, and foreseeable relapses, but never did. I said nothing, and the performance continued on.

  As we followed Adelphia upstairs to the second story of her home, where she sat herself down in front of a smaller television set, at a coffee table strewn with blank lottery tickets, Social Security checks, and uncompleted government forms, my father began the next segment of his oration. This time he told her the story about rummaging around in the glove compartment of the family sedan and discovering my grandfather’s glass eye.

  It was not until this particular recitation of the story that I learned my father waited to confront my grandfather about this until they had been business partners for many years.

  The only reason he was able to open up to my grandfather so courageously and so completely is because my father was high on cocaine at the time.

  Now, here’s the punch line: having related this tale to Adelphia, my father asked her, “Was it better that I could only tell my father how I felt about him when I was high, or would it have been better if I never told him at all?”

  It was a neat bit of sleight of hand that my father had pulled off, one that his conscious mind might not even have been aware of. This was the sort of loaded, binary question a pollster asks when he already knows the results he wants to produce; and it lacked an obvious third choice: find the strength to tell your father how you feel without having to get high at all. But given the two choices offered to her, Adelphia came back surprisingly quickly with the answer I’m certain my father wanted to hear all along: “I think it’s better that he knew how you felt about him before he died,” she said.

  Adelphia knew my father’s history maybe better than I did; she had seen it firsthand. In the years since they last saw each other, it was her life that had become a complete mystery, not his. But she was too tolerant of life’s torments to ever ask him to yield the floor, and he was too caught up in his self-perpetuating narrative to stop. He was going to keep reciting his mortal offenses to her until she told him that the life he had lived was its own act of contrition and that no further penance was required. And still I said nothing.

  On Adelphia’s television, the courtroom reality show she had been watching was interrupted by a news bulletin announcing that a tornado watch was in effect for New Orleans and the surrounding area. Within minutes the report was made redundant as the skies turned gray and let loose with a thick, persistent rain; one moment the street outside Adelphia’s house was dry and cracked and begging like a transient for sustenance—the next, it was so deeply flooded that cars could no longer drive, and pedestrians were attempting to ford it with gardening tools. In another hour or so, a television anchor announced that it was the most rain the city had seen since Hurricane Katrina—only five or six inches but enough to send me running to the windows every few minutes in attempts to convince myself that what I was seeing was actually happening. There was something pitiless about it, that anyone who had been made to bear these conditions once before should have to experience them again so soon.

  Adelphia never stirred from her seat, not even when Esther came into the room to declare, “If it really keeps raining, we’re getting out of here, sister!” Nor was my father the least bit dissuaded in the slow and ceaseless recitation of his ongoing harangue. He told Adelphia he was unimpressed with the quality of leadership in the African-American community and that those who stayed behind in New Orleans when Katrina touched down and attempted to ride out the storm got what they deserved; they had no reasonable expectation for the government to provide for them in the aftermath, he felt. “If FEMA tried to give me a trailer,” he said, “I wouldn’t take it. I’d rather sleep on the floor.” Adelphia nodded in agreement, as she had through the previous portions of the sermon.

  On a break from talking about himself, my father began to tell Adelphia about me and the passage from my first book that he had been fixated on lately. He wanted to lecture her about the scene where I described my experience taking Ecstasy and his misbegotten interpretation of that moment. Though I had already committed that incident to paper for anyone to read, I found it uncomfortable to hear my father describe my past drug use, in my presence, to a sixty-six-year-old woman whom I’d known only for a couple of hours, and who, for all her worldly experience, probably had no idea what Ecstasy was.

  So I asked him to stop. “Dad,” I said, “can we please not talk about this right now?”

  “Why?” he said. “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want you to,�
�� I said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  Genuinely confused, he answered, “But you’re not my father.”

  That was all I needed to hear. There had never been anyone who could tell him what to do or not to do, or convince him of anything he did not already believe, except his father, and that man had been dead since 1989. I excused myself from the room, went downstairs, and walked out the front door of Adelphia’s house. Before the storm, I had the good fortune to park our rental car on a hill next door, in front of a tenement house wallpapered in bumper stickers calling for the reelection of Representative William Jefferson, the nine-term Louisiana congressman who would be indicted on corruption and bribery charges the following month. I unlocked the car and sat inside, listened to the radio, and watched the rain subside and the flood recede.

  Later, my father came out of the house with Adelphia behind him. They hugged and kissed each other farewell, and I stepped out of the car to tell her goodbye. “David,” she said gently, “be good to your father. Listen to what he says. He needs you.” I told her only that I would try. When my father asked me for the car keys so that this time he could drive, I allowed it.

  At our fourth hotel of the week, while my father fell asleep to a late-night television broadcast of Red River, I sneaked out of our room to be comforted by the recurrent hum of the nearest soda machine. Illuminated by its glow, I called Amy to tell her of recent events—the visit to Adelphia’s house, the rains, the constant fighting.