Cocaine's Son_ A Memoir Part 2

This was what he had been telling me repeatedly, incessantly, until the day he and my mother conveyed me to the location where my trajectory departed from theirs, depositing me at the mysterious machine whose inner mechanisms would be known only to me but from which their vantage point appeared like a great black box working its unknown effects on their son to alter him into something different and unfamiliar, and they suddenly went mute. Unlike the other sets of parents we saw that day, who chaperoned their children with grace and appropriate distance, my mother and father did not take their cues to depart as soon as they saw I had been delivered safely with all of my belongings; they continued to hover and rotate around me like satellites until I told them they could leave. I unlocked the door to my ancient dormitory, saw its brick walls decorated with green oxidized stars to memorialize the occupants who had died in world wars, and felt a stuffy, humid draft begin to creep in through the stone flue.

I was idealistic enough those first few weeks to believe that any other freshman would be as unfamiliar as I was with the school and its structure and that any new person I encountered could be converted into a friend through conversation. But there is a way that two people look at each other when they meet, even pa.s.sing strangers whose glances align for an instant. In that moment, their eyes can convey warmth and kindness, indifference or revulsion, calculated and communicated in a fraction of a second. When I looked at my new cla.s.smates, I thought I was putting out a message of curiosity and openness, but I must have been communicating desperation and vulnerability, because what I saw directed back at me was ambition, aggression, and antipathy. My college tenure would be spent vying to maintain my averageness against an infinite number of compet.i.tors with an infinite range of skills developed from an infinite number of backgrounds, and it would be a losing battle. They came from their country clubs and cotillions, conservatories and community-service projects, preparatory schools and magnet programs, with preexisting connections and private instructors, old friends who came with them to school and more than sufficient charisma to make new ones. I showed up with four Beatles CDs and the same Janis Joplin poster that had hung on my wall in high school.

So for a time I fell in with my three roommates, who all wanted the same thing I did and, who like me, had been led to believe by urban legend and John Hughes movies that by simply being in a place where lots of women also happened to be and behaving as we normally would, gravitational forces would naturally draw them to us. But over the months and semesters, after many Sat.u.r.day nights spent scanning the dog-eared freshman facebooks we had dutifully purchased on our move-in day, poring over the female faces and wondering what the bodies attached to them might look like, and renting every movie from every library on campus and watching it in the solitude of our cold and drafty den, we had not made much progress. We began to go our separate ways: one roommate found his peers in an a cappella singing group, and a second was absorbed by his friends in the school orchestra; the third never quite got his act together and trolled the dormitory halls telling our female neighbors things like "You know, I've never watched a woman put on her makeup before."

That left only me, and it meant that down the mean streets would have to go a young man who was not himself mean. I knew where the women would be, and to get to them I would have to get myself to the parties, fraternity and sorority houses, keggers, mixers, dimly lit dormitories, and back-alley taprooms that sat just outside the jurisdiction of campus police. There, I felt, I was certain to find women-women who wanted to be with actual men who looked like they strode right out of baseball cards and deodorant ads, instead of hairless, prep.u.b.escent cherubs from Raphael paintings with tiny corkscrew p.e.n.i.ses. There, I believed, this same youthful innocent who had not yet consumed an entire can of beer would be corrupted into ingesting much more illicit substances. It was paralyzing to think about, and it was all I thought about. I was trapped inside my mind, and my mind was the only place I allowed myself to live.

They were extraordinary, the false realities that I could invent, the elaborate fantasies that I could concoct from the thinnest of circ.u.mstances, and they became more delirious and desperate when some actual women came into my social circle. There was the little Jewish girl with the short chestnut hair and almond eyes whom I met on an off-campus hiking trip, whom I circled and circled but could never bring myself to dive in on. There was the coed, only heard on the phone and never seen, who was set up with me at random for a campus-wide computer-dating dance, for whom I bought an unasked-for bouquet and made an unsolicited dinner reservation, and whose distaste and bewilderment I completely understood when she called to back out of the whole arrangement at the eleventh hour. There was the tall and flaxen-haired roommate of a friend of a friend whom I was too scared to make a move on when I walked her home from a party one night, but whose cafeteria meals I was perfectly at ease cras.h.i.+ng and whose dorm-room door I was completely comfortable standing outside at any time of day or night, whether she was home or not. The little Jewish girl with the short chestnut hair and almond eyes even came back to me a second time, ready to let me take another shot at whatever she had to offer, but all I had learned in that time was how to sit actionless in intimidated awe of her, and she drifted away again.

That was just my freshman year.

As a soph.o.m.ore, I continued to fantasize about the graduate students for whom I checked out books at the art-library desk where I worked, and phoning up girls who said they already had boyfriends at other schools, until I befriended a young woman who lived on my hallway. After a few weeks of hanging out, doing homework in my dormitory living room, and sitting at the back of a chartered bus, swapping swigs from a hidden bottle of Goldschlager on the way to an R.E.M. concert, I had concluded in my messed-up, desperate noggin that we were in the midst of a relations.h.i.+p that was on the verge of getting physical at any moment. That lasted until she started telling me about the dreamy junior she had her eye on, at which point I viciously and abruptly broke up with her in my mind. I wrote savage eviscerations of her in my journal, fixated on rueful Bob Dylan songs, copying out the lyrics to "Idiot Wind" over and over on my binder in silent dedication to the latest unrequited crush to spurn my unarticulated advances, certain this music by a twice-divorced journeyman who'd known everyone from Woody Guthrie to Federico Fellini had been created to address the personal and specific needs of a nineteen-year-old virgin who'd lived his whole life between New York and Princeton.

I vowed to call her out on her perceived callousness, and when I never made good on this threat, I swore never to speak to her again or even explain how it was that she had offended me. I wondered then, as I do now, if she had the slightest sense of the turmoil she was wreaking in my life. Did some fraction of my agony ever get through to her, and did any part of it remain after I cut myself off from her? Or was she one more woman who wandered blissfully through the world, another unknowing a.s.sa.s.sin who killed men like me from afar without ever having to see the crime scenes?

It was the midpoint of my soph.o.m.ore year, and I had found a means of distracting myself from solitude, a medium that offered me access to the part of my brain that didn't know how big the world was and how tiny and inadequate I had become, something I could turn to at any time of day when I wasn't feeling the way I wanted to feel or when I didn't want to feel anything at all, and that was drugs.

I started growing my hair long, traded my gla.s.ses for contact lenses, and ditched the remnants of my high school wardrobe for CBGB T-s.h.i.+rts, in tribute to my Manhattan homestead, and a silver chain I wore around my neck with a padlock I had attached, in honor of the first-wave British punks I had recently discovered. These superficial changes eventually drew me into a whole new group of friends who worked at the college radio station and had members.h.i.+ps at the alternative eating clubs and dining co-ops; who turned me on to all the indie rock and cla.s.sic rock I had missed in my time spent playing my four Beatles records over and over again; who looked and dressed like Willie Nelson in the 1970s, disheveled and intimidating from afar but utterly harmless up close.

From the fateful night when I was handed a bong for the first time and, not knowing how to approach the apparatus, tried to fit it inside my mouth and asked if they made them any smaller, I became a different person. In those moments when everyone else at a party started shooting stealthy glances at one another and then disappeared to parts unknown, I was no longer the guy left behind to wonder where all his buddies had gone. I was a part of that group, who got to visit the shabby, half-lit rooms where all the action went down, always littered with unwashed clothes and half-eaten sandwiches and smelling vaguely of cats even when no cats were present. I got to watch the rituals, in which an acolyte would retreat to a corner and turn on a stereo softly playing American Beauty American Beauty or or Pretzel Logic Pretzel Logic, and a high priest would sit at the edge of a bed or stand over a dresser drawer arranging his relics and manipulating his paraphernalia, packing a bowl of marijuana so compactly and precisely that it looked like a newly mowed field in miniature. Then he would offer up the first hit to whoever looked like he was most in need of relaxation, and eventually, we'd all take a hit, and another and another and another and another, and we were happy and content to share the same air and smoke and saliva. If you overdid it one night and couldn't make your way back to your bedroom, you fell asleep right where you were on the floor, woke up the next morning, and wandered home in a delighted daze.

Having concluded my prepared statement, I'm ready to take your questions.

Did I, as a direct result of my new drug-consuming ident.i.ty, meet any women who, in their blissed-out state, found me more attractive or were willing to sacrifice a small bit of their dignity in exchange for access to, among other things, my stash? No.

Did this ident.i.ty give me enough of an edge to make me sufficiently beddable to a couple of girls who would have paid me no notice in my b.u.t.ton-down days? Probably.

Did I, as the son of an addict, who had seen firsthand the havoc that drug use could inflict on a user and his loved ones, have any hesitation about taking those first steps along a route that could lead me to the same cul-de-sac where my father resided at length? Didn't I hear in the back of my head an endless echo of that vintage 1980s television public service announcement in which the guy barges in on his kid doing some unidentified substance and demands to know where the kid got it, and the kid answers, "From you you, all right? I learned it by watching you," and then a Deeply Serious narrator comes on and says, "Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs"? Are you f.u.c.king kidding me?

How do I think my father would have felt if he could have seen me in these moments?

I'm not going to say that he gave me his permission to behave this way or that I needed his consent to do so. My decisions were my own, and I would have made them whether he wanted me to or not. (Especially if he didn't want me to.) But I thought I had anecdotal evidence of how my father would have behaved in the same situation. Why else had he told me, and told me and told me, about his rooftop dalliances back in the Bronx, about smoking pot and getting caught and, above all, getting away with it, if he didn't want me to know it was possible for me to get away with it, too? What else had he been trying to teach me from his example other than it is permissible and necessary to experiment with things until you find the way that you fit most comfortably into the world? How else would I know that I had measured up to him until I had a story like that of my own-a moment I could point to and say, "This is who I was before and this is who I was after"? From him, all right? I learned it by listening to him. if he didn't want me to.) But I thought I had anecdotal evidence of how my father would have behaved in the same situation. Why else had he told me, and told me and told me, about his rooftop dalliances back in the Bronx, about smoking pot and getting caught and, above all, getting away with it, if he didn't want me to know it was possible for me to get away with it, too? What else had he been trying to teach me from his example other than it is permissible and necessary to experiment with things until you find the way that you fit most comfortably into the world? How else would I know that I had measured up to him until I had a story like that of my own-a moment I could point to and say, "This is who I was before and this is who I was after"? From him, all right? I learned it by listening to him.

He had his origin story, and now I had mine.

My college career was weeks away from its conclusion, but two more years spent getting high to Here Come the Warm Jets Here Come the Warm Jets by Brian Eno and by Brian Eno and Raw Power Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges had not been able to drown out the diligent part of my brain. As senior year dwindled to an end, its voice said to me with increasing resolve: by Iggy and the Stooges had not been able to drown out the diligent part of my brain. As senior year dwindled to an end, its voice said to me with increasing resolve: You must have a job before you leave this school-before you otherwise return home and are forced once again to depend on your father You must have a job before you leave this school-before you otherwise return home and are forced once again to depend on your father. So while many of my cla.s.smates were using those delicious days after final exams and before commencement to celebrate with revelries that were more extraordinary than any they had been able to think up during the past four years, I spent my mornings traveling up to Manhattan for job interviews, clad in a patchwork of dress clothes acquired for the college application process and grandparents' funerals.

On one of these trips, I promised my father I would stop by his office and have lunch with him after my interviews. I wondered if anyone had ever worn a suit to my father's office until the day I showed up in one. As I waited to be buzzed past a rusty metal cage that lay beyond an imposing metal security door, I peered at his workplace and its towering burlap bales packed with oily animal skins. It looked more like a dungeon than ever. It had become a place that family friends would send their teenage sons to work as punishment when they got fired from their summer-camp-counselor gigs for drinking on the job. While I waited for its proprietor, I sat down tenderly in a chair, trying to allow as little contact as possible between its static-charged, fur-retaining surface and my dress slacks, and still stood up with a field of unidentified fuzz clinging to my a.s.s.

My father was up in his second-story office, his figure appearing and disappearing in its wide picture window as he spoke on the phone, pacing. He had no need for formal clothes; he was dressed in his typical uniform of a shabby white smock over a greasy flannel s.h.i.+rt and jeans whose expanding waistline marked the months he had kept himself free of drugs. While he was barking out a conversation with some overseas confederate-they almost always seemed to be named George-my mother traveled upstairs and downstairs from my father's private suite to a chilly underground cellar where more bales of fur were stored. When he needed for his phone conversation some bit of information that only she knew, he would cry out for her on an intercom that bellowed from every room in the building, announcing itself with a maximum-volume beep before my father's voice overtook it with a rumbling cry of "MADDY!" From anywhere in the building, you could hear his voice a split second before its electronic echo crackled through the intercom, a pair of alarms that might be sounded at any moment.

It looked like I was going to be waiting a while before my father was ready for lunch, so I parked myself in a small first-floor cubicle delineated by particleboard. As a child, I had pa.s.sed the time in this same s.p.a.ce by snapping off small pieces of the part.i.tion to see what shapes they formed. After many years and many other similarly minded occupants, the part.i.tion had been reduced to a ruin, a knee-high shambles that no longer kept the outside away from the inside. The only valuable relic still contained within its imaginary borders was a wall-length corkboard flush with old family photographs.

It was easily deduced that my father had taken most of these pictures, since he was the person least represented in them: there were a couple of snaps of him and my mother in the earliest days of their marriage, when his hair and his gla.s.ses were at their thickest and most colorful. There were a few faded black-and-white shots of my father's parents in their prime, and the original business card that my grandfather sent out when he opened his own shop, with the caption WISH ME LUCK! WISH ME LUCK!, and many more photos of them in their later years. My grandfather in particular struck a compelling image, lean and a.s.sured, with narrow-set eyes that refused to divulge their color and a cigar always dangling from his half-smile of a mouth.

The other pictures were almost exclusively of me and my sister: us as half-naked infants; bowl-headed toddlers racing around the old apartment or playing with toys my father loved as much as we did; gawky adolescents starting to become camera-shy; and then, except for a single picture of me at sixteen, pumping gas into my car for the first time, no more.

There was something terribly dishonest about this presentation. All these events had occurred as surely as they had been recorded. But merely displaying the photographs as if they told the complete story of a family, or even represented the most salient points of its history, was profoundly untrue. There was a guiding hand at work here, deciding what to include and what to leave out, and what was omitted were moments that no one could capture, because the person in the family who customarily took the pictures was not able or present to photograph them. No photo alb.u.m can completely represent the truth, but this array was an egregious lie, constructed by and for the benefit of the family member who had the most to gain from rewriting our history.

The anger seethed and circulated inside of me the longer I waited for my father to finish his phone call, and the longer I waited, the louder he seemed to become.

"George, let me tell you something, George-George-George-shut up, will ya? Right now is when we wait wait. We. Wait. Ain't n.o.body ever sold nothing for more than a customer is willing to pay for it, right? Am I right right? So that is why we wait wait. I don't care if we have to sit on this merchandise for two two. f.u.c.king. Years f.u.c.king. Years. We got it, they don't, and they're gonna come around."

What was going on up there, a spiritual revival? Where did this ersatz Southern accent come from all of a sudden? Who was this suddenly boisterous, bragging, self-a.s.sured dynamo, and what had he done with the timid, self-conscious man who could barely string together two sentences when he was on the phone with me, for all the times he bothered to call me in college? Who was he faking it for, and why couldn't he be like this with me?

[beeeeeeeeep] MADDY!

This was how he talked to my mother these days; this was the reward she had earned for her years of dutiful service, to be chained to him like a prisoner in the business she helped prop up during the years he could hardly run it by himself? Just because this was his business, what gave him the right to subjugate her like that, and what made him think he was ent.i.tled to have whatever he wanted at the moment he wanted it?

"George, here's the thing, George. George! George! A man don't sell when everybody else is selling and buy when everybody else is buying. Not a smart man. When everybody else is buying, you got to ask yourself: A man don't sell when everybody else is selling and buy when everybody else is buying. Not a smart man. When everybody else is buying, you got to ask yourself: why why is everybody else buying? Who you gonna sell to when everybody already has what you got? When is everybody else buying? Who you gonna sell to when everybody already has what you got? When n.o.body n.o.body wants it, that's when you got to make your move. And then you got to wait till the market comes back. And trust me, George, trust me, it always does." wants it, that's when you got to make your move. And then you got to wait till the market comes back. And trust me, George, trust me, it always does."

Didn't he realize how he sounded when he talked like that, how rudimentary and obvious his wisdom was? Did his buddies know how he used to spend his weekday mornings, when he was sober enough to go in to work, whining and pleading with my mother not to send him to the office? Did they know of his relentless gallows humor and how he used to joke to his own son about yearning for the sweet release from drudgery that a leap from his twenty-fifth-story apartment window would provide-how his merely uttering the word "plummet" was enough to conjure up all the terrible imagery a.s.sociated with this gag?

[beeeeeeeeep] MADDY!

And what was I doing sitting here, letting him push me around? Hadn't I spent more than enough time waiting for him in this office? Why was he the only one whose time was valuable, who got to come and go as he pleased? I swore to the nonexistent Jewish G.o.d, if that f.u.c.king intercom went off one more time, I was walking straight out. I was leaving the office, getting right on the next train back to New Jersey, and never- [beeeeeeeeep] MADDY!

I felt so right on the train ride back to school. I don't know that I'd ever felt so right about anything I'd ever done, and it felt so good to feel so right. The righteousness was tingling up my spine and twitching in the tips of my fingers. I could hardly sit still, I felt so right.

And when I got back to my dorm room and the half-dozen telephone messages left for me in the last ninety minutes, it was easy to tell which were from my father and which were from my mother.

The messages from my mother sounded like this: "David, that was not nice, what you did. We were trying to find you and we didn't know where you went. Please call your father back and apologize. You really startled him."

The messages from my father sounded like this: "David, please forgive me. Please, please please forgive me. I didn't realize how long I had kept you waiting, and I just feel terrible. Please call me back as soon as you get a chance, as soon as you can. Please forgive me. This is your father." forgive me. I didn't realize how long I had kept you waiting, and I just feel terrible. Please call me back as soon as you get a chance, as soon as you can. Please forgive me. This is your father."

I thought about not answering his calls at all, letting him wallow a little longer in the feeling he hated most, of not knowing how I felt. (It felt good to be right, but it felt even better to know that I could inflict emotions upon him that no one else could.) But while my brain still blazed with those sensations of validity and my courage was at its peak, I decided to call him back.

He still sounded a lot like his phone messages. "Please forgive me. I hope you'll please forgive me. I'm sorry, David, I'm so, so so sorry." sorry."

"I know you are, Dad," I said, being careful not to cede any ground to him. "But I feel like this happens to us all the time. And it keeps happening to us, no matter what I try to do. If I accept your apology and say that it's okay, how do I know that things will turn out different the next time?"

"I don't know, David. What do you want me to say? What can I do to make it up to you?"

"I'm not coming back to your office. Can you come down to school to see me?"

"Sure. When?"

"What about tomorrow?"

"I'll be there."

It seemed almost unimaginable that in under twenty-four hours' notice, my father would be anywhere that wasn't his office, his couch, or his fis.h.i.+ng boat. But true to his word, he showed up the next afternoon, looking adrift as he paced the living room of my dormitory, hands buried firmly in his pockets while he watched other people's children race to and from their lunchtime appointments and wondered where his son fit in to all of this. We tried to hug inconspicuously, and as he leaned in to kiss me on the cheek, I scanned the room for anyone who might be watching.

My father and I shared a mostly quiet lunch at a diner near school, where we ate and didn't say almost exactly what we would have eaten and not said had the meal taken place the previous day. As we walked past the large public fountain lately being used as an impromptu swimming pool by seniors who had turned in their thesis papers, he stopped and put a hand on my arm, a processional of words gathering in his throat.

He looked mostly at the ground and walked in small circles as he spoke. "David," he said, "I want you to know I've been thinking a lot lately about us. About what it must have been like for you growing up, how I wasn't there for you all the time and how confusing it all must have been for you.

"David," he said again, "I don't want you to grow up like I did. I don't want you to suffer like I suffered. I don't want you to be afraid of the things I was afraid of. I don't want you to have hang-ups. I want you to know that s.e.x can be a wonderful experience."

It was the most perplexing thing. Every outward sign told me that he was stone sober, and yet he was talking like he was high.

"Dad," I said, "you don't have anything to worry about. I don't want you to think that I haven't had s.e.x-I have." I added, "I've lived. I mean, I've done things. Some things that I'd probably be embarra.s.sed to tell you about. I don't want you to think that you did anything that kept me from having these experiences, that prevented me from enjoying them. It doesn't help to be so focused on the future. But we can still control what happens to us right now. right now."

It wasn't clear he had heard me. He reached into a pants pocket and, in broad daylight, pulled out an envelope that was stuffed with a wad of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills; at a glance, I thought it must have contained at least a thousand dollars, maybe more.

"David," he resumed, "I want you to know that the business is doing well. I've made a lot of money. I want to give this to you, and I want to give you some money every month, like an allowance, that you can spend however you want. I never want you to worry about not having money when you need it."

"Dad, what does this have to do with anything?" I said, still fixated on the sum of money dangling from his hand. "I don't need this money."

"Go on," he said, "just take it."

I didn't take it, although there were many bone-dry, dead-broke days after this when I wished I had, when I would fantasize that I had asked my father to put his allowance plan in writing and have it authorized by a notary public, because that money was never tendered to me on any future date, and the allowance plan was never discussed again.

If this was the origin story of our adult relations.h.i.+p, its moral was dependent on who was deemed the story's protagonist. My father left that day satisfied that he had shown to himself and his son that, whether or not his a.s.sistance was needed, he would always be prepared to offer it, or so he thought. And as I watched him go home, I was more certain than ever that I did not need his help to make it in the world, or so I thought.

Chapter 4

I used to have this tradition, when I first moved back to New York and was living on my own, of waking up early on Sunday morning, packing a small pipe with some marijuana, and smoking it while I watched The McLaughlin Group The McLaughlin Group. The ritual had nothing to do with the show itself-getting high hardly made the frenetic, deafening political chatter any more comprehensible or tolerable. I did it just because I could. I thought it was a show of strength, a kind of daredevil act to see how close I could come to the boundary between the weekend and the weekday and still f.u.c.k myself up, then head back in to work on Monday morning, showing no lingering effects of the lonely debauchery I'd engaged in hours earlier. But really, it was an act of weakness, a last-ditch effort to stave off that feeling of paralysis that inevitably set in around four or five o'clock on Sunday evening as it became increasingly clear that, no, the world was not going to come to an end and, yes, I would have to go back to my job the next day and work there for five consecutive days before I got two in exchange to spend as I wished (usually smoking pot). I reacted to the onset of each working week like I imagine a condemned man waits to be led to his execution: with utter cowardice and a headful of preposterous fantasies about how he might still avert the foregone conclusion of his foregone conclusion.

I don't practice this particular tradition anymore.

I had been working in Manhattan for about a year, still trying to make my way in the magazine industry, already working at my second menial a.s.sistant's job and living in my second minimalist apartment. But if I believed that I had left my family behind in suburbia completely, there were still occasional reminders that we were bound by blood and a lexicon of sardonic shorthand.

We are sometimes happily reminded of this union by the fact that my mother's and father's birthdays occur within a few days of my own, and the closest weekend to all three is the rare occasion when my parents can be persuaded to travel down to the city to celebrate with me and my sister. On one such Sat.u.r.day afternoon, my sister and I arrived at a restaurant near the big, empty studio apartment I was renting on an Upper East Side block whose desolation and epic distance from the bustling center of town put the "End" in East End Avenue. At our lunch table, we found only our mother waiting to meet us. Her face was sunken and funereal, and she barely lifted her head to make eye contact. When we asked where our father was, she answered, "He's gone crazy." This was a long-standing family euphemism, by which she meant he was somewhere else in the city, and he was getting high. The three of us ate our lunch quickly and quietly, my sister and I split the check, and we kissed our mother goodbye.

Then it was Sunday, and I began the day as I usually did, sifting through my drawer of sin, second from the top on the right-hand side of the rickety IKEA wall unit that my mother had helped me put together, where I kept all my musty dime bags and resin-clogged hash pipes, finding the least filthy pipe and filling it with the least crumbly pinch of green-brown herb from the least desiccated bag, lighting it up and letting its scorching smoke race through my lungs, sc.r.a.ping as it went, and amble out through my nostrils. With my brain enveloped in a comfortable fog, I was about to turn on the television to watch John McLaughlin harangue Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page when my telephone rang.

With some concentration, I was able to recognize the jittery, ethereal voice on the other end as my father's. "I need your help, David," he said. "I need you to get me home."

This was a proposition I had to think about for a second. When I had been called on in the past to rescue my father, I had ignored his plea without even considering the circ.u.mstances and for no good reason other than the ironclad aphorism You got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out You got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out. No matter what trouble he was in now, I was in the worst possible shape to come to his aid. I was more than a little bit high myself, starting to feel anxious about a short freelance article I had pitched to The New York Times The New York Times and was planning to report that night. Which would be harder to live with: leaving my father to fend for himself in his current condition, or explaining to a new editor that I would sometimes have to abandon a.s.signments on a moment's notice to bail out a junkie parent? and was planning to report that night. Which would be harder to live with: leaving my father to fend for himself in his current condition, or explaining to a new editor that I would sometimes have to abandon a.s.signments on a moment's notice to bail out a junkie parent?

There was something, though, about my father's repeated use of the word "need." He did not say "you must" or "you have to" or "you will." The imperative being communicated was If you do not do this, no one else will If you do not do this, no one else will. (A possibly implied corollary was I have already asked for help from other people, and they said no. I have already asked for help from other people, and they said no.) There was something climactic and final about the whole dramatic scenario. Maybe this was what he had needed all along. Maybe if I were the one who at last redeemed him, he would never need redemption again.

"Just tell me where you are, Dad," I answered. "I'll be there as soon as I can." He gave me the street name and told me to look for a red door. Then his voice faded into silence. I went into my bathroom and splashed myself with cold water until I convinced myself that I was sober, then went outside and hailed a cab downtown.

I was wandering through the slums and schlock shops of Seventh Avenue, navigating between the long shadows cast by Madison Square Garden and irritating, penetrating shards of sunlight. I was so close to where my father had kept his office for over thirty years but could not remember ever walking this forgotten block, populated with ancient import-export wholesalers whose dusty windows still promised wholesale fabrics and novelty linings even as they were populated with nude, decapitated mannequins. Among the storefronts I found a heavy steel door swathed in a layer of chipping red paint: the gateway to a flophouse where my father had traveled from his respectable suburban home for the privilege of paying twenty bucks an hour to snort cocaine in private.

The interior of the building was not particularly unsavory but was mostly barren, a makes.h.i.+ft waiting area with a couple of plastic chairs, wood paneling on every surface, and a lone clerk seated behind a layer of bulletproof gla.s.s, watching a black-and-white television that was probably not tuned to The McLaughlin Group The McLaughlin Group. Beyond this area was a narrow hallway lined with doors; streaks of light could be seen underneath each of them, flickering tentatively as their unseen occupants scuttled around. On the opposite side of every door, some aching, appalling tragedy could be playing out anonymously, and there could be a hallway like this behind every door on the block.

I asked the clerk if there was someone staying here named Gerald Itzkoff, and without asking me who I was or why I was looking for him, he directed me to my father's room.

I had never observed my father performing the complete ritual of getting high on cocaine, of consolidating his powder into fine white lines and inhaling them up his nose one by one, and on this day I still wouldn't catch him in the act. His supply was exhausted; all that remained in the room were a few rolled-up dollar bills on a nightstand, a glossy p.o.r.no magazine on the floor, and a frightened old man s.h.i.+vering on the bed, his nostrils cemented shut with a mixture of blood and mucus, his eyelids sealed closed by some bodily fluid whose origins I couldn't even guess at. I had no idea how much c.o.ke he'd done or how long he'd been doing it, but he was coming down, and he was coming down hard. Though it was terrifying to see someone so familiar and generally functional in such a broken-down, helpless, and horrible state, I had no choice but to pretend that none of it mattered.

"Come on, Dad," I said. "Let's get you out of here."

As he stood up and walked around the room, he seemed to be vibrating in place, like a tuning fork that had been struck. He could barely see me, and I didn't want to touch him, but we worked out a system that allowed me to lead him out of the flophouse and onto the street by having him follow the sound of my voice. If I took my eyes off him or stopped calling out "Dad" every few feet, he would get distracted and try, very slowly, to shuffle away.

"David," he said, "I can't drive like this."

"Yeah, no kidding, Dad."

"You're going to have to drive me home."

He fumbled through the pockets of his putrid blue jeans, producing expired coupons and fis.h.i.+ng licenses, sc.r.a.ps of paper on which he had scribbled down phone numbers and sales figures, and hundred-dollar bills folded into a kind of accidental origami, but he could not find the claim check for the garage where he had parked. We were in a neighborhood where every corner that was not occupied by a bodega, a p.o.r.no video store, or a half-finished construction project had been turned into a garage, and I would have to approach every single one of them, with this lumbering, stumbling, snotty, b.l.o.o.d.y beast following me, to ask if they had his car.

At the first parking lot we pa.s.sed, a group of uniformed attendants was gathered outside. "Excuse me?" I asked the least threatening-looking of them, and they all looked up at once like I'd just interrupted their c.r.a.ps game.

"My father can't remember if he parked his car here or not," I said matter-of-factly. "Do you recognize him? He might have come here yesterday. He's got a drug problem."

The attendant gave a short, reflexive laugh. How else was he supposed to react? You stand around on a city street long enough, you see a dozen guys shamble by in tattered clothes, their skin burned by constant exposure and their beards mangy and overgrown from inattention; they push shopping carts full of soda cans, tote their possessions in bulging, overstuffed backpacks, try to carry on conversations with their reflections in the windows they pa.s.s, listen intently to the transistor radios they carry whose batteries expired in 1978, or sit motionless on the curbside with their head buried between their legs.

You have to laugh at them, because it is dreadfully, morbidly funny to see a human being to whom you have no connection reduced to the level of a windup toy. But you don't want to know him, and you don't want to know how he ended up that way. Because if you stop believing for a moment that his slapstick misadventures have been orchestrated for any reason other than your personal amus.e.m.e.nt, you might find out this wandering old vagrant, was, hours ago, coherent and clearheaded enough to drive an expensive and dangerous American-made vehicle. You might find out he is actually someone's father father. You might find out he is my my father. father.

I did not need to visit any more garages to know that this same scene would play out at every single one. I hailed a taxi in hopes that one would be willing-in a city where a request to drive from Manhattan to Brooklyn is regarded as an ethnic slur-to deliver my father back to Rockland County. Incredibly, the very first driver I stopped agreed to do so for the proper fare mandated by the immaculate copy of the Taxi & Limousine Commission manual he kept in his glove compartment, and he even waited and watched over my father while I ran to a bank machine to withdraw money.

We were somewhere on the Henry Hudson Parkway, as I sat in the back of the cab with my father's head in my lap, when I reached into a pocket of his winter coat and pulled out an overlooked stub: the claim check for his car. His eyes were still mostly shut, and before he fell asleep, he let a final utterance dribble from his lips: "You saved my life."

From the front seat, our driver, who had deduced exactly what was going on, agreed: "You're a good kid, to do this for your father."

But how could it be that I once again found myself in this position: him, pa.s.sed out in the back of a car; me, in charge of a situation I had no idea how to handle. If the shoe were on the other foot-if I were the one with the debilitating dependency and he were the one with the sober clarity-wouldn't I want him to do everything within his power to get me cleaned up? To turn his whole life upside down to make sure that mine was straightened out again? Forsake his business and the whole world he knew, if he needed to? If I was such a good kid, what was I actually doing for him? All I was doing today was sitting with him in a cab, and as soon as it reached its destination and dropped him off, I'd have my mother drive me straight home. I just wanted to get back to my empty apartment, report my story that night, get my New York Times New York Times byline, build my career. I wasn't willing to sacrifice anything. When you got right down to it, I was a pretty G.o.dd.a.m.ned lousy kid. byline, build my career. I wasn't willing to sacrifice anything. When you got right down to it, I was a pretty G.o.dd.a.m.ned lousy kid.

When I wanted my drugs, at least I didn't go about scoring them in such an undignified manner. All I had to do was wait for a friend to throw a party, and then I'd show up and wait again until the witching hour when the timid teetotalers had gone home for the night and the drinkers had drunk their fill, when the pot pipes would be pa.s.sed around and smoked in plain view of everyone who could still see straight. When a party could not be convened, I would call my delivery service: I would dial a beeper number, leave my phone number in return, and wait for someone to return the call, usually a gruff male voice that would state simply: "I'm returning a phone call." Within thirty minutes to an hour, I would be greeted at my front door by a dreadlocked young man or woman with a gym bag full of tiny translucent plastic cases packed to the brim with a sticky green crystalline algae, so potent that one bowlful would send me reeling for four or five hours, and I was warned to never, ever smoke it in a joint.

The process was chic and civilized, so routine and stripped of embarra.s.sment-not like the desperate, demeaning groveling that my father undertook when he wanted to get high, scrounging from door to door and dealer to dealer, scrambling to find the cheapest, most isolated place where he could light himself up in private. It was a d.a.m.n shame when that delivery service stopped returning my pages, for reasons I never found out. (Whom do you call for customer service?) But my supply problems were quickly rectified: I started buying from a friend's roommate, a flabby exfrat boy who liked to walk the apartment bare-chested in backward-turned baseball caps and boxers that barely constrained his hairy belly. He was gregarious, fond of high-fiving people for any occasion, and never worked at a day job or stopped watching his big-screen TV long enough to leave his apartment. He was always available, willing to entertain at all hours, and, for a price, provide access to a metal cookie container in which he kept his entire inventory: plastic bags full of marijuana and crumpled chunks of aluminum foil that contained something else.

One afternoon, in the course of a typical transaction, I impulsively told him that in addition to my customary bag of weed, I would also like to purchase one of the foil chunks. He slapped me five as he pressed one into my palm, and I hurriedly stuffed it in my pocket. After hastening home to my empty apartment, I laid out my purchases on the dinner table and tore into the foil as if a suffocating child were trapped inside it. Its contents were slightly different than I expected: not a pile of white power but a small chunk of solid cocaine.

I looked at it for a while, unable to unlock its mysteries or extract its narcotic properties with only my eyes. Was I supposed to smoke it? Was I meant to shove the whole thing up my nose and wait for it to take effect? Should I just leave it on the mantel as a conversation piece, to prove to houseguests that I owned a small chunk of cocaine? It was supposed to be a totem of the adult experiences I was allowed to partake in, and instead, it sat there mocking me: the hardest controlled substance I had ever purchased, and I had no idea how to use it.

This was not the closest cocaine had ever come to my sinus cavities. Some had gone up my nose quite recently, in fact. Weeks ago I had been on a corporate retreat in Jamaica with my magazine colleagues, the last such time the publis.h.i.+ng industry was so flush with cash that it could afford to pack off its employees on Caribbean vacations that were somehow supposed to lead to higher-quality media products. It was on one of those nights when our group had gathered to drink pina coladas and carouse in the living room of a stately Jamaican villa. When a small reconnaissance party split off from that group to smoke pot in a bedroom, I followed them, and when a smaller group split off from that group to sneak into the bathroom, I followed them, too.

In the available s.p.a.ce, three or four of us were crowded around a toilet, where, on its tank, a female coworker was using her American Express Gold Card to separate a pile of cocaine into discrete, organized lines. She took the first snort, ran her forefinger under her nose, and ma.s.saged her nostrils. Another colleague did the same, and then another, and finally, there was only one line left on the tank and only me to inhale it. Without hesitation, I leaned in, trying to coordinate which nostril I would breathe through and which I would press shut with my thumb. It took more force than I realized to draw the drug into my nose, and when I lifted my head, there was still a small trail of cocaine residue that lingered like bread crumbs to mark the path. But my innocence was gone.

I waited for some profound s.h.i.+ft in my consciousness-to receive even the tiniest glimpse or taste of whatever it was my father found so enthralling that he had rededicated his life to its constant pursuit. Other than the mild intoxication I had brought into the bathroom with me, and the deepening shame with which I exited, I left feeling no different than when I entered.

The defeat was still fresh in my mind when I brought my first fragile cocaine rock home from the drug dealer in its swaddling foil clothes. A female friend of my named Jana had recently come back into my life. She and I had worked for the same magazine, though not at the same time: when I showed up there, she was leaving to live in Los Angeles; after a few months there, she packed up again and headed to Australia. She was a funky and free-spirited Jewish girl who knew she had this Jewish boy wrapped around her finger, and the fact that she did not need me in her world-that I was not a sufficiently compelling incentive to keep her from upending her life every few months and moving thousands of miles away-only made me want her more. On breaks from her adventures, she would occasionally return to New York and we'd pal around platonically, but between her fearless globe-trotting and my pa.s.sive hope that things would naturally fall into place, no more ever came of it. I was determined to change that on this visit.

We had spent the evening at a screening for a new George Clooney movie, which I knew would soften her up enough that she could be convinced to make the lengthy journey back to my apartment.

"How far?" Jana asked when I explained to her the distance between Sutton Place and East End Avenue. Even in my native New Yorker's mind, it sounded far. far?" Jana asked when I explained to her the distance between Sutton Place and East End Avenue. Even in my native New Yorker's mind, it sounded far.

"I have something there to show you," I said. "Trust me, you'll like it."