Cocaine's Son

by Dave Itzkoff

  We were not so different in this respect. Perhaps all along, we had both been engaged in the same project without realizing it. We both endeavored to preserve all the pieces of our family history that were meaningful to us, the ones we thought were certain to be eradicated by time and neglect if no one else made the effort to enshrine them somewhere. We were each the self-appointed family historian of our generation—we just worked in different mediums. If it took a certain amount of focus and frustration for me to get my words down on a page, for my father, the same act could not be accomplished without an agony that he found utterly unbearable. It was easier for him to live his life surrounded by a thin mist of nostalgia. If he ever stopped reciting and re-reciting his beloved stories, he ran the risk of even greater agony, that they would disappear forever. All he could do to forestall this was to tell them, and tell them, and tell them again.

  Was I getting any closer to the lesson that the constant repetition and rerouting of my wedding events was supposed to teach me? I was gone again, off to another destination in time, before I found out.

  Amy and I are a week into our honeymoon. In four days we have succeeded in driving on just about every road in Maui and seen just about every feature, including the improbable sight of Charles Lindbergh’s grave: a wide slab covered in rocks and marked by a fading, rusted plaque in a mostly empty field behind a tiny, unremarkable church. In this time we have enjoyed so many different activities, variously so mundane and so perverse that I won’t dare describe them here, and our only regret is that so far only one person has attempted to sell us weed. (That he did so on the steps of a courthouse only made it seem that much more suspicious.)

  Everywhere we go, we meet other young couples on their honeymoons, who seem like us but not quite—like photocopies that came out smudged or crumpled or elongated. Sure, they seem happy and blissful, but are they truly fulfilled? Do they desperately need each other? Would they spend their lazy weekends together singing Stephen Sondheim songs at the living room piano, and would they stay up all night convincing each other that they aren’t fat or friendless, and would they plunge the toilet without complaint when the other one clogs it up? I don’t think so, but then they probably don’t think so about us, either.

  For our penultimate dinner, we have chosen to travel from our luxury hotel complex in one resort town to another luxury hotel complex in another nearby resort town. We stand on the beach with the other honeymooners, waiting until right before sunset, when we turn our attention to a set of nearby cliffs. We have been waiting to watch a Hawaiian native perform a cliff dive. I expect a grand act of showmanship—swelling music, a defiant full-speed charge toward the precipice, an acrobatic display on the way down, concluded with a mighty splash. But no announcement is made when the diver appears on the cliff; he walks to the edge and jumps in, landing with a quiet, whispering plunk. We see him later in the dining room while we eat our buffet dinners, walking from table to table, educating patrons on a plastic fish he is carrying around. Everything here is the slightest bit inauthentic.

  I am toughing my way through my third or fourth piece of prime rib, and Amy and I are reciting a familiar conversation about how we’re not going to have children for at least a few years. “They say it changes everything,” she says. “I don’t want to do it until I feel like I’ve worked and I’ve lived and done everything else I want to do.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “assuming we have a choice in the matter.”

  What I mean by this is: Am I the only person at this table who feels like his life is coming apart at the seams, like it’s being pulled upon from every direction until it bursts? Can’t you feel it, too? Doesn’t it scare you to death, back to life, and to death again to think about what we’ve done? Everything we could say for certain about our lives is over. Our security is gone. Now we’re no one else’s responsibility. Now we’re no one else’s obligation. Everything that happens to us, from this moment on, is our own fault.

  Then she takes my hand, and without realizing it, she solves the riddle and banishes all doubt with her reply. “We’re our own family now,” she says.

  What she means, or what I decide she means, is that we are all potentialities at any given time, but our potential will never be greater than it is in this moment. It was this transcendental quality that attracted our guests to our rehearsal dinner, that they were celebrating at our wedding. We savored the sensation of that energy, too, but now we have to start expending it. From every day forward, we will become less nebulous and more defined, but if we’re smart enough to see it happening, and careful enough to pay attention, we can choose this definition for ourselves and be the ones shaping it, rather than letting our circumstances do it for us. We are now a unit so tight, with a membership so exclusive that not even our parents can force themselves into it—although we can allow them in if we so choose.

  What kind of couple will we be? Will we be socialites with a large circle of casual acquaintances, or homebodies who count each other as our only friends? Will we be coldly unapproachable or unbearably cute? Will we be nose-to-the-grindstone strivers or coulda-been, if-only-I’d, the-world’s-against-me failures? Will it all fall apart in five years over some factor we never could have anticipated? Will we become swingers, drive cross-country on a whim, or live in a yurt? Will we have pets? All the answers reside in us somewhere, in parts of ourselves we cannot tap in to yet, and that give us unmatched greatness.

  There is just one more stop left on this history tour that I need to see, and now the destination is obvious to me. I am standing outside the entrance to a garden, sweating pleasantly in the first tuxedo I have ever owned, while from inside a musical quartet strikes up a string arrangement of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Two men pull back the latticed garden doors to reveal, dreamlike, all my friends and relatives present and future. The sun is so high in the sky that they are all using their paper programs as fans and visors, and they stare at me like I’m an alien, or maybe they are aliens who have never seen a human.

  Before I can enter, my parents approach from either side to escort me to the altar. Holding my mother’s hand is like grasping a cloud; we make the slightest of contact and she glides effortlessly down the aisle as if the whole day is a pageant for her. My father clutches my other arm with the subtlety of a steel bear trap; he stumbles with every few steps we take, never quite able to anticipate our pace, and drives his shoulder into mine as if he has forgotten that he and I are not quite the same width. We reach the end of the aisle and I kiss my mother, and then, in front of everyone whose opinion matters to me, what the heck, I kiss my father, too.

  And then—well, you know what happens at weddings. Amy enters with her parents, and the aliens watch her progress to the altar. The rabbi recites his liturgy, removing, as requested, any reference to God or the laws of Moses; Amy’s brother reads a Shakespearean sonnet (her selection, classy and delicate) and my best man reads a passage from Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (my choice, ironic and ominous); a tiny bug flies unseen into the ear of our rabbi. We are married.

  Only here is how the ceremony ends. In the same moment that I reach my arms around my new wife and kiss her for the first time—and I do not learn this until later, because in the moment I am otherwise occupied—my father leans in to my mother and gives her a sweet and unself-conscious kiss. It is an endearing if slightly strange moment to see captured in a photograph, which is how I saw it for the first time: you don’t know where to look, and when you realize you’re being allowed to peer into two highly personal and intimate moments, it’s almost easier to focus on Amy’s bouquet, or the big white lifeless column standing stolidly in between the two couples.

  Some former, backward-looking version of me might have been angry or embarrassed that my father, in a typically oblivious, Dad-like way, had co-opted what was supposed to be my moment. But aside from the check for five thousand dollars that he would press into my jacket pocket a few hours later, I can’t think of a more us
eful gift he could have given me to begin my new life. For all his years of trying to illuminate the eerie, inescapable parallels between our lives, sometimes inadvertently creating those correspondences in the process, he had proved his point with one indelible image. If at this moment I was pure, limitless potentiality, he was the resolution of it—one possible but hardly inevitable terminus on the pathway. Here I was at roughly the same age as my father when he made all the terrible choices that would pit him against his family for the next three decades. For all the love and hatred, passion and anger, that I had shown him, these feelings meant nothing if I could not surpass him in the circumstances where he had fallen short, and if I could not at least match him in the areas where he had succeeded.

  What guaranteed that one of my many habits and vices would not fester over the months and years to become a debilitating, soul-sucking affliction? Nothing. How did I know that, amplified, magnified, and repeated over time, my addiction to videogames, my excessive masturbation, my temper, or that weird relentlessness I get sometimes wouldn’t do me in? I didn’t. Where was it certified that the newborn who would someday sit atop my shoulders, with the same look of bewilderment I wore when I sat atop my father’s, would not grow up to resent me for reasons I can only begin to imagine? No place. Who could say for certain that, even if I did everything right that my father did wrong, I would still turn out to be a decent husband or parent? Nobody. How much more did I know now than when my father undertook these same responsibilities? Zero. Where could I look to find the accumulated wisdom of the past generations of fathers and husbands, that mapped out what to do in any moment of uncertainty and made every mistake of the past utterly preventable in the future? Nowhere.

  Who could decide whether the last thirty-two years of my life would be allowed to dictate the course of the thirty-two to come? Me. When would I know for certain that I had lived up to the challenge that my father’s life presented, and fulfilled the potential that this day offered?

  The only answer I can supply is the motto my father spoke to me so many times before, the watchword of the prideful Jewish parent: When you have children of your own, then you’ll know.

  Those are the words that break the spell, that lift the curse, that end the recursion and allow time to move forward. A guy and a girl get married, a DJ plays, somebody drinks too much, somebody has the steak, and somebody else has the fish. Onward.

  On a winter’s day, I returned to my parents’ home in Monticello. A recent cold snap had created gleaming icicles that dangled perilously from power lines and forced the trees to bow reverently as a bus drove me past them. For a town whose main attractions were a Wal-Mart and a racetrack with electronic slot machines, it was as austere and sanctified as I’d ever see it. The house, however, was disheveled, with clothes piled on top of couches, blood pressure machines piled on top of calculators, boots piled on top of beach towels on top of firewood. My father was still immersed in his nostalgia-preserving computer, though he was also excited about his new iPhone, as well as a recently purchased GPS, which I thought was especially silly. “When do you ever go anywhere that you don’t know where you are?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I can use it, like, to find drugs. I just type in ‘drugs,’ and it takes me right to them.” Everybody laughed at that.

  What I had hoped for on this trip was to see my father swimming, engaged in the activity that had been responsible for his remarkable weight loss of recent years. We were not an athletic family, because athleticism meant control—control over yourself and over your body. It meant your will was more powerful than all the combined forces conspiring to do the opposite of what you wanted.

  But I needed to take only one look at him to realize there wouldn’t be any swimming today. He had gained back most of the weight and then some; his belly had reacquired its familiar round shape, and he had added a pair of suspenders to his wardrobe. Plus, he said, he had a case of indigestion “to beat the band.” Seeking medical advice, he had called my sister, who told him that using over-the-counter remedies was a waste of time. “Yeah,” he had told her, “but consider the alternative.” It’s no use, she said, and he answered with a favorite personal maxim that meant roughly the same thing: “Nothing means nothing.”

  I did not come away empty-handed from the visit. My parents and I were having lunch in a diner, where I was recounting for them the family-appropriate exploits of my honeymoon, when my mother shared a story I had never heard. In the early days of their marriage, she and my father had traveled to Mexico, where they booked an afternoon fishing trip on a sailboat and were likely the only non-native, English-speaking Caucasians on the ship. When they were many miles from land, the sky was overtaken by a terrible storm that threatened to sweep the ship out to the ocean or wreck it completely. The coast was so far away that there was no time to get back before the storm hit, so the only option was to drop anchor and ride it out. But as the crew rapidly searched the ship, they discovered they had left the anchor behind, if they ever had one. The storm loomed closer.

  My mother, by her own telling, was panicked and useless. The resigned crew, as best as she could understand, was making peace with God. But my father somehow kept his calm. He summoned his shipmates and got them to gather all the chairs on board, tie them together with a length of rope, and secure the loose end of that rope to the ship before they threw the chairs overboard. The boat was now moored. When the storm came through, it took away my mother’s desire to return to Mexico any time soon, but it left the ship and its passengers intact.

  I thought about this story incessantly on my journey home, one more bus ride along that charmed route that was precisely a hundred miles, two hours, and two New York Times crossword puzzles in duration. How could I have gone my entire life without ever hearing this tale? When being provided with just one example of my father acting heroically would have been enough to offset all the instances in which he had behaved otherwise, how had some cruel cartel of fate, chance, memory, and my mother conspired to keep it from me?

  That, at least, was my old, linear way of looking at events. But if I saw them from another perspective, in the order I had experienced them—in the order that was most convenient and comfortable for me to place them—this decisive and selfless incarnation of my father was the most current version of him that I knew. In the chronological sequence of his life, it had occurred over thirty-five years ago, but to me, he might as well have walked in from the sea, his hair tousled by the wind and rain, a souvenir length of rope across his shoulders. If he could do it even once before, who could say that this bravery was not some innate quality of his? Who could say it would never show up again?

  What else could I change about his life and how I thought about him if I just reorganized the order in which I once believed events occurred? How much more of my own life could I validate if I just reshuffled the parts of his that most troubled me—if I tied them to the end of a rope and tossed them overboard like a bunch of tattered deck chairs? Then I could let go of the drug abuse, the prolonged absences, the uncertainty, and the anger. I could cast aside the shame and the secrecy, all the hurt accidentally inflicted upon me without thinking and without malice. I could say to myself that, as of now, I regret nothing—and accept, as my father had spent all those years telling me, that nothing means nothing.

  Not only could I do all of that, I could allow myself to admit that I was satisfied with how everything, everything, had turned out. I was happy for the loneliness that had shown me never to fear solitude and taught me the value of companionship. I was grateful for the anxiety that never permitted me to be satisfied with meager accomplishments and allowed me to make productive use of sleepless nights. I enjoyed the fights that had instilled in me the ability to construct arguments on a moment’s notice and think on my feet, and had demonstrated for me the application of power and the injustice of power applied selfishly. Now I had some power, too. My father had given me life, but I could give life back to him.

/>   I stepped off the bus and back into the wider world. In my own private way, I told my father that he could go on living, because I intended to do the same.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There’s an old saying that victory has one hundred fathers, and this book has many parents, natural and otherwise, to thank for its publication, too. It would not exist without Lauren Kern and Adam Moss, in whose pages at New York it was first conceived. It would have grown up all wrong without Nina Collins and Bruce Tracy, who taught it to walk and talk and sent it off to school. And it would never have matured without Ryan Doherty, Jill Schwartzman, and Daniel Greenberg, who guided it through some reckless phases with the perfect balance of discipline, attentiveness, and forgiveness.

  I could not have come this far without my loving and supportive family, or without Amy, who makes me want to be a father and glad I am not one yet.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAVE ITZKOFF is a reporter on the culture desk of The New York Times and the lead contributor to its popular ArtsBeat blog. He is the author of Lads and has written for numerous publications, including GQ, Vanity Fair, Details, Wired, Elle, Spin, The New York Times Book Review, and New York magazine, which published the essay from which this book is adapted. He now has a great relationship with his father.