Cocaine's Son (11 page)

I was talking to my mother in a stolen moment when I could be certain she wouldn’t try to pass the phone to my father or allow him to listen in on the conversation when she made the suggestion. “I think you and your father should go into therapy,” she said.

Setting aside the accusatory, slightly satisfied way she said this, something about her advice sounded right to me. For all the times I had tried to make my father understand that the past didn’t matter—that previous disputes between us were no reason to conclude the bond between us was broken beyond repair, and previous reconciliations no reason to assume that it would always remain intact—now was my chance to show him that I meant what I said, or that I meant what I always intended to say anyway.

We didn’t have to be one of those parent-child pairings who spent their adult lives wondering what
happened
to their dynamic without realizing that it was always, perpetually
happening
—whatever it was that we once had, we could always get it back, and
we could always create it anew. We didn’t have to treat our relationship so delicately, as if it were some exotic electronic device with a baffling array of buttons, any of which threatened self-destruction if you pressed the wrong one. We had to experiment with using this device, and any time we could not figure out how it was supposed to operate, all we had to do was unplug it and plug it back in again. And we could do it over and over, as many times as we needed to, until we got it working the way it was meant to.

“Yes,” I said to my mother. “Yes, I will. Yes. Can you arrange this for us?”

As soon as I agreed to do it, I became extremely frightened about the process I had just consented to. The harder I tried to avoid cliché in my life, the more inevitably I ended up fulfilling it. Now here I was, perpetuating the tradition of being so impotently unable to solve my own problems that I had to turn to a total stranger for help, doled out in one-hour increments. And once I had been in therapy, I could no longer say that I’d never been in therapy; my personal belief that I was the sanest member of my family would be that much harder to hang on to.

By agreeing to participate in therapy with my father, I was basically admitting that I was just as messed up as he was.
This guy
, I always knew, needed therapy. But me, too? Really? For all the things I had ever done to excess, at least I had the good sense to do them in private, in a way that didn’t interfere with anybody else’s life. But once I was poked, prodded, and picked apart in that therapist’s office, what horrible and long-denied truths about myself would emerge after the superficial layer of infallibility was peeled off of me? What if, for all the suffering I blamed him for inflicting on me, I had perpetrated as much pain on him?

The psychiatrist’s office was in a big midtown skyscraper of steel and glass, and his waiting room was all right angles and oak
finishes. I arrived there well before my father, and if I thought I was nervous, he looked positively panic-stricken. He rarely came to New York anymore, having moved his fur business nearer to his summer home in Monticello a few years earlier, and in that time he appeared to have forgotten how to live among civilized society. He showed up in a T-shirt, sweatpants, and a windbreaker, probably the first things he’d grabbed when he woke up that morning, or maybe the same clothes he’d worn to bed the previous night. His hair was ghost-white and mangy, and he was unshaved, and every part of him twitched and tingled at its highest state of alertness, like he was about to be interrogated by the police for a crime he knew he’d committed. When he saw me already waiting, he spoke my name and reached out to embrace me or shake my hand, but I rebuffed him.

The psychiatrist was a thin man in a suit, with a full chestnut beard and a gentle but clinical demeanor, and he consistently mispronounced my father’s name.

“Mr. Itz-off,” he began, “do you want to tell me why the two of you are here today?”

“Well,” my father said, turning to me, “maybe you want to—?”

I recounted the story of his confrontational phone call, the insults leveled at me, and the mystery of what substance or substances had elicited them from him. “Do you know,” I said, “that he still hasn’t apologized to me for this? And I still don’t even know what he was on at the time.”

“Is this true, Mr. Itz-off?” the doctor asked. “Did you say this to him? Were you high at the time?”

“I don’t know,” my father answered, which surprised me more than if he’d admitted it or denied it outright. “I suppose it’s possible. I’m sure if that’s how he remembers it, then it probably happened.”

“Probably?” I said, incredulous. “Do you see,” I said to the therapist, “how he’s already trying to absolve himself of responsibility for his own actions?”

“I’m not saying it didn’t happen,” my father continued. “I just can’t imagine what I might have been on. That’s not how I talk when I’m high. If I said it, I didn’t mean it.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “Usually, the things you say when you’re high, you mean them as intensely as possible.” I started to cry. The therapist silently extended a box of tissues in my direction.

Seated in his chair, my father clutched at the zipper of his windbreaker like it was a rosary and attempted to change the subject. “Do you know what a willful child he can be?” he said, extending at me a finger that he had been gnashing on moments earlier. “Do you know that three years ago, I moved my business up to the mountains? Three years ago, and in all that time,
he
hasn’t visited my new offices.”

“Dad,” I said, “what does that have to do with
anything
?”

“Is that right?” the doctor asked me, trying for the moment to placate my father. “Have you never been to his new offices?”

“It’s true,” I said. “His offices always make me really uncomfortable.”

“And why do you think that might be?” the doctor asked.

“Because,” I said, “they are always run-down and ugly. They always smell terrible. And they have always been places where he goes to get high.” I started to cry again.

My father gave me a dismissive wave of his hand. His breathing was heavy, and he was constantly crossing and uncrossing his legs. I had reached a conclusion that had been building up in my mind like a bomb, and I decided to detonate it.

“You know what?” I said. “I think you might be high right now.”

My father leaped to his feet with such force that it rattled the diplomas and citations on the therapist’s walls and shook the trophies in his display cabinets. “It’s not true,” my father insisted. “I am not.”

“Calm down, Mr. Itz-off, calm down,” the doctor said, but his repeated urgings made my father angrier still.

“I’m
not
gonna calm down,” he said. “I’m not. I’m not gonna be accused of being high when I’m not.”

“I have to say,” the doctor said, “your behavior has been very erratic from the start of this meeting. I would like to recommend that you take a drug test.”

“Fine,” my father said, rolling up his sleeves. “Let’s settle this. We’ll see who’s right. Give me a cup and I’ll take it into the bathroom.”

“Not now, Mr. Itz-off,” the doctor said. “After the meeting.”

“No,” he demanded. “I want to take care of this now. You don’t have a cup? Fine. I’ll go piss in my hands.” He held out his palms as if begging for charity.

Thus our first joint therapy session came to a close. After writing the doctor a check for his four-hundred-dollar fee, my father approached me outside his office doors. “I’d like to talk to you alone,” he said. “I’d like to settle this, you know, between ourselves.”

“No,” I told him. “I don’t want you riding down with me. I don’t want you following me. You wait for me to leave, and then you take your own elevator.”

A few days later, I learned from my sister that on his drive home from this appointment, my father got into a car accident. He walked away uninjured, but his SUV was totaled. It was agreed that we would not see this same doctor again.

After further research, my mother came back to me with a new suggestion. On the advice of my aunt, the same one whose unwillingness to relocate herself to the Catskills had inadvertently triggered the fight, she had located an institute on the Upper East Side that specialized in therapy for families dealing with substance-abuse problems. She made an appointment for me and my father there, and I found myself blithely looking forward to this visit as if the previous attempt at psychotherapy had never occurred. But I was bothered by a couple of inscrutable omens that preceded it.

First, after having recommended this new institute for me and my father, my aunt abruptly reversed course and sought desperately to talk us out of going there. Her argument hinged on the fact that the facility charged only seventy-five dollars for each session. How good a job could its staff members do, she said, if they got paid so little? Wouldn’t we be better off, and get higher-quality attention, if we went somewhere more expensive?

Then, on some sleepless night, I happened to turn on the television in time to see a cable documentary about this same institute. Three couples had agreed to be videotaped during their therapy sessions and in follow-up interviews: a boyfriend and girlfriend, a husband and wife, and a mother and daughter. One by one their relationships unraveled: the boyfriend and girlfriend were both cheerful, severe alcoholics, missing work and losing jobs to go on benders for days at a time; by the end of the show, they had broken up without diminishing their addictions in the slightest. The mother was no longer on speaking terms with her daughter at the documentary’s end and did not even know where
she was currently living. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out what happened to the husband and wife. I remained resolute in my belief that my father and I would somehow beat the odds. I just had to remember not to let anyone film our sessions.

Encouragement was coming from other places as well. A few months before, I had created a page for myself on Friendster, a website where people were invited to set up profiles for themselves, fill them with photographs and lists of their favorite books and movies, and see how many other people’s profiles they could connect themselves to. Then I abandoned the project, having concluded that online social networking was a passing fad. But even when left unattended and ignored, this little Web page was doing more for my dating life than I ever could. One day, through absolutely no effort on my part, I received an email message from a young woman who said she had read something I had written and enjoyed it so much that she had sought me out and discovered we had a friend of a friend of a friend in common and, by the way, would I want to meet her for a drink some night? She probably felt as excited and frightened and ridiculous writing that note as I did reading it.

But I could see from the photograph on her page—as easily as she could see from the one on mine, in which I wore a T-shirt with the slogan
TIJUANA: CITY OF TOMORROW
—that this person posed no obvious threat. She had adorned her profile with her actor’s head shots: two professional black-and-white pictures, one Smiling, in which she wore a big white sweater and looked like a model in an I-learned-to-live-with-herpes advertisement; one Serious, in which she wore a black tank top and showed a lot of skin. She had short blond hair and intense eyes that felt like they were looking directly at me from my computer screen, and I was very, very curious.

Our first date did not promise much; we met at a bar, and she said she was glad I wasn’t as short as I’d described myself. We drank and talked, and I walked her home at the end of the night, expecting so little that I did not even react when she leaned in and kissed me good night.

We agreed to see each other a second time, and this meeting was very different. It had an energy to it, one I could sense right away when I met up with her at a Ukrainian diner in my East Village neighborhood. I told her how clearly I could see her in the light of the restaurant and how pretty she was that night, and she said, “Oh,” and shyly smiled. Her name was Amy, and she was the first woman I had ever known who did not become angry or suspicious when I told her she looked good. She must have been nervous, because she ordered a plate of French toast and a glass of bourbon for dinner. We ate and drank and talked, and walked around the neighborhood and kissed. And at the end of the night, she clearly wanted me to invite her up to my apartment, but I told her no, not yet.

“I want to be the kind of person you deserve,” I told her. I wasn’t sure why I said it, except it sounded good—like the sort of thing you say to someone who needs further convincing to sleep with you, not to someone you’re trying to talk out of the proposition.

So Amy put her arms around me and clutched me to her so tightly that I could feel her leather jacket crush and crumple itself upon my body. It was the action of someone who badly needed to be held and who knew how badly I wanted to hold her. There would be plenty of weeks and months to come for our resistances to wear down and our false fronts to erode, and for all the terrible and embarrassing truths about ourselves that we hid from each other in these earliest encounters to make themselves known.
But for now, and for everything awful and unwanted that we knew about ourselves, what we represented to each other was possibility—a window, however small, in which we might be able to make just one other person see us as the people we’d always wanted to be seen as, the people we always believed we could be.