Cocaine's Son (6 page)

“Let him die with dignity,” he was urging her, as if my grandfather’s fate were already preordained. “Let him die at home.”

What did I care? I had a party to get to. Even better, I had the guarantee that someone would be on hand to chauffeur me to and from the event.

It was the day of the party. I was dressed up in my nicest jeans and my cleanest T-shirt. I had spent many minutes at the bathroom mirror, eyeing my new nose from every possible angle to make sure the old one wasn’t growing back and convincing myself I could really do this. I waited for the furor of my father’s most recent battle with my grandmother to subside, so I could let him know it was time for him to ferry me to my momentous event.

He was sitting on his side of the bed he shared with my mother, still dressed in the undergarments he wore to sleep the night before and probably for several days previously, staring down at his feet as if performing arithmetic on his toes, and breathing slowly.

“Dad, come on, it’s time to go,” I reminded him.

He answered as if talking in his sleep. “Okay,” he said. “Just give me a minute.”

I waited, wandered the house, gazed upon my nose a couple more times in the mirror, then reentered the room. He was sitting right where I had left him, no more clothed than the last time I saw him.

“Come
on
,” I whined. “I’ve got to get to the
party.
”

I stood over him while he applied his pants to his legs, like he
was spreading a resistant lump of peanut butter over an endless terrain of bread. He put his arms through his shirtsleeves, slipped a single button through whichever buttonhole he could find, and called it done. He started fumbling around for his car keys.

“Are they in your pants?” I asked him.

“Oh yeah,” he said.

“Don’t you need your glasses?” I added.

“Right.”

I bounded down the stairs and to the door, telling my father to follow me when he stopped on the landing and seemed to forget where he was supposed to be going. I buckled myself into my car seat and prepared for adventure.

It took me a while to notice that there was something strange about the way my father was driving. He was ambling along the local streets at a cautious, imperceptible pace instead of hurtling through them at maximum velocity. And his precise control of the vehicle was not in evidence; he steered the car as if it were a boat, wobbling side to side on an inexact trajectory. Though we had the road to ourselves, he sometimes slowed down as if another car were in front of him; I had to remind him to keep his foot on the gas pedal to keep the car moving.

He was making a right turn off the local road and onto a four-lane highway when, without warning, he missed the turn almost entirely. He took it too wide, ending up in the oncoming lane with the flow of traffic pointed at us, a red traffic light the only barrier that stood between us, them, and a head-on collision.

“Jesus Christ, Dad, what the hell are you doing?” I screamed. He had enough sense to navigate the car to the shoulder, still pointed in the wrong direction, before the oncoming traffic was upon us.

Once I was sure we were out of danger, I looked at my father. With the engine still running and the car still in gear, his head was slumped on his chest. He struggled to keep his eyes open.

“Dad,” I said, “you’re high right now, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Come on,” I said. “Out of the car.” I extracted him from his seat and helped deposit him in mine, then took his place behind the wheel.

I thought about the freedom and power I possessed in my two hands. I could still drive myself to the party, leaving my father to hopefully fall asleep in the car and not drive himself away and kill himself in a separate, successful accident. I could drive us back into the city, back where maybe things weren’t perfect but where I was at least happy, where nothing this awful had ever happened to us. Or I could take off for parts unknown with my father by my side, the two of us winding our way through America like Ryan and Tatum O’Neal in some modern-day update of
Paper Moon
. If I sped away with him, what state would my father and I end up in before anyone realized we were missing?

What I heard, when I allowed these impulses to run their course, was the first stirrings of a voice within me that had spent many months practicing its lines in private and now, though it was not quite ready for a performance, was sufficiently prepared to give a convincing rehearsal. It told me,
Be responsible! Be an adult! Do what you think a man would do in this situation! Even if you’ve never seen an example of what a man does! Invent one for yourself! Follow that person’s lead! Whoever he is!
It was a quiet voice, but it spoke with conviction. It led me all the way back to the house, where I helped my father into bed and he fell fast asleep.

I felt I had to call Ellen and explain to her why I wouldn’t be at her party. I didn’t want her to think I was one more insensitive,
adolescent jerk who was always begging off important social commitments with preposterous excuses. I reached her at the restaurant, where it sounded like the parent-free festivities were already under way. But I couldn’t seem to summon the voice.

“My dad is a drug addict,” I blurted out to her, the first time I’d revealed this to anyone outside my family. “He’s been one my whole life. He always lets me down right when I need him the most.”

“Whatever,” she said. And that’s how my candor ruined what could have been my second relationship.

I took my road test a few weeks later and failed it. When I took a retest a few weeks after that, I failed that, too.

College loomed on my horizon like an amusement park, a massive Ferris wheel that presented me with a new and tantalizing opportunity in every car as it whirled and turned. It promised academic excellence, impeccable faculty, and bountiful resources to conduct my studies. It vowed a student body composed of young strivers all equally committed to their scholastic pursuits, to challenging one another’s potentials and to furthering one another’s goals, and a bucolic campus securely tucked away from the corrupting influences of authority figures and parents. It pledged access to a fresh pool of brave and experimental female colleagues, unaware of my previous reputation and facial features and open to myriad forms of sexual congress the likes of which I had only read about in the letters columns of the magazines in the farthest reaches of my father’s closet.

College called out to me like a carnival barker, coming on to me with its well-honed and irresistible sales pitch, declaring that it was everything I hoped for. Anything I wanted it would find for
me, and anything I wanted it to be it would become. Once I walked through its gates, it promised I could shed my previous identity and construct a new one according to my wishes. It guaranteed me that the arena I was about to enter, and each one following, would be a perfect meritocracy, where I would be judged solely on my ability to perform a task and my will to see it done. Here was a world where whatever I had been before didn’t matter—all that was important was what I wanted to be.
Put aside all previous shames and abandon all embarrassments
, it whispered. College assured me that it was the path between me and my ideal self, and it swore to me that the desire to travel this route was all I needed to complete the journey.

College was a liar.

I arrived on the campus of Princeton University at the end of the summer of 1994, delivered there one August morning by my uncharacteristically and antiseptically quiet parents. Of all the schools I had applied to and been accepted into, from Dartmouth to the University of Southern California, Princeton turned out by accident to be the closest to us geographically: it was only a two-hour drive of undifferentiated New York and New Jersey highways, a straight southward shot past outlet malls and shopping centers until one hard right turn took you past the soccer, lacrosse, and rugby fields, the mansions of the upper-class eating clubs and the Center for Jewish Life, and then you were there, on its chockablock campus of Gothic quadrangles, Ionic-style Greek temples, one Frank Gehry–designed library, and a rusty Henry Moore sculpture. The change in scenery was abrupt, and the minimal road trip afforded no time to adjust.

Aside from a family visit we had made to Princeton almost a year earlier, back when I had no idea what I wanted in a college other than for it to be different from high school and far, far away
from it, my parents had largely kept themselves out of my college application process, never asking to review essays or standing over me to make sure my submission materials were mailed out on time. My father, in particular, had committed himself to a superstitious vow of silence, refusing to put his thumb on the scale even by encouraging me to consider certain schools or by offering his opinions of the ones I had applied to; he was afraid his slightest attempt to influence my opinion could have traumatic and unintended consequences down the line. What if he made it clear he favored one school over another and I didn’t get in? What if I chose to attend a university based on his preference and I later discovered I disliked it? What if he told me not to go somewhere and I went there anyway to spite him? What if his actions in any way led to his disappointing his son? Wouldn’t it be better, then, not to act at all?

On this day of all days, I expected my father to be teeming with paternal advice, eager to guide my transition and take advantage of this last opportunity—for the next four years, at least, and possibly forever—when he would be the sagest, most seasoned adult male in my sphere of influence. If nothing else, I thought I would hear the final iterations of one or perhaps two stories he had lately been recounting to me from his personal experience, stories that were his personal favorites because they were germane to my situation and because I was old enough to hear them; because they seemed to offer general life lessons without suggesting specific courses of action that could later be contradicted or proved fallacious; and because no story in our family gets told only once.

The first story told of my father’s own attempt at attending college—the first time he dropped out of school, not to be confused with the second time he bailed on his bachelor’s degree. In
1956, at the advanced age of sixteen, he enrolled at Tulane University in New Orleans, where one of his very first lectures was in a calculus class taught by an instructor named Dr. Goto. As my father and his fellow students took their seats, Dr. Goto, a small Japanese man with a three-piece suit and a briefcase, was working his way from one end of the classroom to the other, filling every square inch of chalkboard space with inscrutable formulae made even more cryptic by his cramped handwriting. Any hope that the lack of clarity in the professor’s printed expression would be compensated for by a lucid and mellifluous oratorical style were quickly dispelled when Dr. Goto, who, in the years following World War II and the Korean War, had come to teach calculus to American students in the Deep South, began speaking at ninety miles an hour about “
Ze fukshun!
” and “
Ze dewivative!
” In especially animated tellings of this story, my father might exclaim “
Ze fukshun! Ze fukshun!
” a few more times and add, “Nobody knew what the fuck he was talking about.”

At that moment, my father said, “You shoulda seen all the kids that picked up their textbooks and made a beeline for the door.” He, however, was not one of the students savvy enough to exit the class. He stuck out the semester, and for his efforts, he was rewarded with a failing grade, the first of several unsubtle nudges that would eventually prod him out of school before his freshman year was completed.

That was one tale he had been telling me a lot lately. This was the other: as a teenager growing up in the Bronx, my father once traveled from his home turf in Pelham Parkway to neighboring Parkchester, where he and a friend climbed to the roof of the friend’s apartment building to eat fried chicken and to smoke pot. After getting high, the boys began to get silly, and their loud antics and the chicken bones they were hurling to the streets
below aroused the suspicion of the building’s tenants, who called the police and had the boys arrested.

The story did not end with the punitive ear-twisting that my father received from his mother when she bailed him out of jail.

When my father was summoned before the draft board some years later, all that the army knew of him was his name, his age, and his arrest record, which showed he had been busted for marijuana possession, so they naturally assumed the worst about him. “We employ some of the best doctors in the nation,” the army told him. “We could help you kick your drug habit for good.”

“I’m sorry,” he answered, probably stifling a grin, “but I’m a hopeless addict.”

For as much as I knew of my father’s drug history then, this was easily my favorite story about it, and the more I have learned about him since, the more enamored of it I have become. No one in the story gets hurt, and it’s kind of funny, though the joke is funnier if you know its true punch line, that my father really did grow up to become addicted to a far more harmful substance. Also, it seemed to offer an embryonic display of the verbal craftiness that would serve him well in later life. For all I knew, the incident may have been the only thing that kept my father from being conscripted and killed in one of our nation’s earlier ill-considered wars of choice—which would mean that I owe my existence to my father’s drug use.