Cocaine's Son_ A Memoir Part 5

"But you wouldn't," she pleaded. "Don't you understand? I'm not going to run away from you because you've got problems."

"Not. Right. Now," I said, ending the call.

That did not go well at all. So I picked up my cellphone again and dialed my mother, hoping that she of all people would absolve me of my frustration and give me permission to end this misguided experiment.

"Mom," I said, "I can't do this anymore. He's not listening to the therapist. He's not listening to me. He won't listen to anyone."

"What can I tell you?" she said evenly. "He's a difficult, difficult man."

She called me back later that day to tell me she had been shopping in Wal-Mart and found a greeting card that she thought summed up the situation perfectly and that I would be receiving it soon.

A few days after, a simple cream-colored envelope arrived in my mailbox. Inside was a card with an ill.u.s.tration of Winnie the Pooh, in his au naturel A. A. Milne era, before Walt Disney compelled him to wear human clothes, holding hands with Piglet in a windy storm. A caption read, Be brave, dear friend. You're stronger than you think... Be brave, dear friend. You're stronger than you think...

On the inside, it continued (And you can hold my hand anytime you want) (And you can hold my hand anytime you want).

My mother had added a message of her own in her whispering, minuscule script, dated the same Sat.u.r.day as the day I had fought with my father. It looked like she had spent many minutes carefully considering her words, and it was as much as I had seen her write in years: Dear David-Did I tell you this was the perfect card.

Life is not perfect-Do not expect perfection Even from those you love, As much as it hurts you, & as much as it frustrates you.

Do not isolate yourself-you do not have to be alone because of disappointment & you can do anything "together."Because we care, we Love you always,Mom Hers was the only signature that appeared on the card, but it was enough to ensure the therapy sessions would continue for at least a few more weeks.

V. The Hall Here is roughly how every conversation my father and I have ever had about baseball has ever unfolded: HIM: So are you at work right now?

HIM: ...

HIM: So did you see that the Yanks traded for Johnny Damon?

Here is what I remember about the time, several years ago, when I took my father to see Game 2 of the 2000 World Series between the Yankees and the Mets. I remember purchasing the tickets on eBay, offering the seller an additional two hundred to shut down the auction immediately even though I had placed the highest bid. I remember the feeling of anxiety that ama.s.sed like lead pellets in my stomach when I saw that the tickets had no holograms, watermarks, or other fancy anti-counterfeiting features, and I believed right up until the moment when they were accepted at the gate of Yankee Stadium that I had purchased fakes. I remember how terribly cold it was that night and how distant from the action our seats were, and how, when Mike Piazza had a piece of his broken bat lobbed at him by Roger Clemens, it looked like Clemens was gently tossing it in Piazza's direction. I remember how the Mets outfielder Benny Agbayani's boast that his team would take the series in five games was rendered null and void when the Yankees picked up their second win that night, and how amazed I was at the ease with which we caught our subway ride home despite the size of the crowd that had turned out.

I just don't remember anything my father or I said to each other, if we said anything to each other at all.

A few years later, on the advice of our therapist, we came to the Baseball Hall of Fame. A bunch of nothing in the middle of nowhere is how I'd describe it. We arrived on a cool summer afternoon, expecting to find it overrun with other pilgrims, drawn by some magnetic pull transmitted through testosterone. Instead, Cooperstown was a small rectangular patch of asphalt, sidewalk, and parking meters furnished with a couple of vintage trolley cars and what was once a Woolworth's. No ma.s.sive crowds awaited us within the hall's una.s.suming brick exterior, though the building was well visited that day, entirely by men: contingents of college dudes; fledgling fathers shepherding their young sons; loners with oversize earphones wrapped around their heads, probably listening to baseball games while they ogled baseball artifacts in the baseball shrine to baseball's greatness. Everyone we saw was wearing at least one article of paraphernalia supporting his favorite team; I had dressed in a T-shirt with the logo for Metroid, a 1980s-era Nintendo game, and I wasn't the least bit out of place. The whole operation was not dedicated to preservation so much as to taxidermy; the spirit of the sport did not reside there so much as it stuck like a bug on flypaper.

All the relics you would expect to see were there, ripped from their familiar contexts: the b.a.l.l.s that were hit or missed when records were established, the bats used to wallop them, the gloves that caught them, and the batting helmets they ricocheted off. Some patrons stood with silent reverence at the exhibits, and others took futile photographs through gla.s.s display cases-trying to capture images of artifacts that represented long-ago acts and the men who achieved them-of caps and mitts and locker room doors. How far could the adulation go? I wandered the grounds with all the curiosity of a baseball fan who, upon hearing the news that the old Yankee Stadium was to be razed, mourned only for the loss of the rare concession stands that served chicken fingers with French fries.

My father appreciated these items more but enjoyed the trip less. He had been having trouble with his knees, locked in a vicious cycle where his arthritis was making it impossible to exercise regularly, which in turn exacerbated the arthritis and the muscular atrophy, none of which was conducive to a day of walking and standing around looking at sports memorabilia. He lagged behind me and sometimes skipped entire rooms when the pain was too great. When I forged ahead, I could still hear him huffing and puffing, the cadence of his voice rising and falling as he cajoled a pa.s.serby or an off-duty tour guide into a casual conversation that soon became a one-way rant about baseball or fatherhood or the fur business. I could hear him slapping his shorts or the sides of his legs to emphasize some unheard point, each one driving some pinp.r.i.c.k of irritation deeper into my skin.

That I could not reproduce the physical feats of the men commemorated in this building, could not even play the game they perfected or any other like it, could barely identify who many of its greatest heroes were or what teams they had played for, seemed to me largely the fault of one man. Sure, he had bought me a few bats and gloves in his time, even offered to take me to the park every once in a while to throw a ball around, but by then I was already too set in my ways-too entranced by videogames and television screens and the sedentary satisfaction of sitting at home doing nothing. Even if he could not teach me to play sports, he could have shown me how to talk about them competently, so that the language of earned-run averages, slugging percentages, and fielders' choices that all my friends seemed to speak fluently by third grade did not haunt me like a foreign tongue for the rest of my life. Even now, when he was presented with a belated opportunity to induct me into this most essential masculine tradition, what was he doing? Talking to other people and struggling with his own physical malady.

When we reached the gallery where the Hall of Fame players are honored with vaguely funereal plaques, my father was in too much pain to walk. He sat on a bench, never rising to inspect a single tablet or to see if any of his own boyhood heroes were immortalized here. As he sat down, and when he at last rose to leave the room, he announced, "They ought to put me in the Hall of Fame." With this repeated declaration of endurance, our trip came to an end.

On our drive out of Cooperstown, my father noticed a few signs for a concert, a rare joint appearance by Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson at the local minor-league baseball park, scheduled for later that night. "You wanna go?" my father asked sincerely. We easily could have done it and were already in the right place. We'd just have to get ourselves a pair of tickets and kill a few more hours in Cooperstown. But how would we pa.s.s the time? Where could we go that wouldn't require my father to stand and walk? How would he behave at the concert? What if he couldn't understand Dylan? How would he react when Willie used his set to protest the war in Iraq? What if someone offered us a joint? What if I wanted to smoke it? What if he he wanted to smoke it? wanted to smoke it?

"Nah, that's okay," I said. "I gotta be back in the city tonight."

Somewhere between Cooperstown and Monticello, we stopped to eat at a barbecue stand, a Southern-style restaurant that served its food on long sheets of brown paper. No one preserved my grease-stained paper or rib bones, picked clean of every last morsel of meat. But I came away feeling that I, too, deserved a place in somebody's hall of fame.

VI. The End Another Sat.u.r.day morning began with my usual pre-therapy ritual. I was in the lobby of the inst.i.tute, making steady progress at my crossword puzzle and my bagel, waiting for my father to arrive. Lately, we had been asking Rebecca when we would know it was time to conclude our therapy for good; my father had become so enamored with the process that he had begun evangelizing to his friends about it. He had recently told me about a conversation he'd had with a childhood friend, in which the friend confessed that he'd had a falling-out with his own son, who was about my age. "I told him he should go to his son and get him to go into therapy with him," my father told me with proud, resolute faith.

"Dad," I said, "don't you think we should worry about ourselves first?"

My bagel and my crossword puzzle were complete, and it was nearly time for our session to start, but my father was missing. My cellphone began to ring-and it was him; from the background noise, I could tell he was in his car, which meant he was still several minutes away, and I was instantly anxious. Rebecca had warned him before about being late to our appointments; she had told him that she would not let meetings run long to make up for late starts.

"David," he said over the phone, "I can't remember where the inst.i.tute is. Can you tell me how to get there?"

"What?" I said, making no effort to stifle an angry laugh. "Are you kidding me?" I realized right away this was the wrong way to respond.

"No, I'm not kidding," he answered. "Can you just give me the G.o.dd.a.m.n directions?"

"It's in the same place it's been every Sat.u.r.day morning you've come to it for the last year," I said. I gave him the address and flipped my phone shut.

When my father walked through the front door a few minutes later, his face was flushed and his breath was short. I had to remind myself these were symptoms of his garden-variety anger and nothing worse. "I don't understand why you had to talk to me like that," he said.

When we took our seats in front of Rebecca, the morning's incident was the first and only thing my father wanted to discuss. "Why does he have to be so snide about it?" he said to the room, finding no apparent difficulty in talking about me as if I weren't present. "Why can't he just give me the directions and tell me how to get here?"

"Dad," I said, "this isn't what the therapy process is supposed to be for. If we're going to use every session to debate whatever petty argument of the day, how are we ever going to get to the stuff that's really important?"

"You know," he said, continuing his train of thought, "he has always been a willful child. Even when he was a little boy. Did you know that when he was growing up, I'd be driving in my car, and he'd be sitting in the backseat, and he would lean up to the front to change the radio stations? I'm the one who's driving, and he's the one choosing the stations! Nothing has changed."

"Dad," I said, "I was six years old when that happened. Maybe seven. I can't account for what I did when I was just a kid. I'm not that person anymore."

"Look," my father said, "right now you can't understand what I'm talking about, because you are the son, and I'm the father. But someday, when you have kids of your own and you are the father, you'll know what I meant today."

"Oh my G.o.d," I said, looking to Rebecca for any sign of sympathy or consolation. "Is that not the ultimate cop-out? How am I even supposed to respond to that?"

"Hold on, hold on, hold on," Rebecca said in her quiet voice, holding up her hands. "Let's stop this for a second and sort it out. David, what I'm hearing from you is that you want your father to stop criticizing you for things you did a long time ago, in your past, and to start seeing you as an adult. Is that right?"

I murmured a grumble of a.s.sent.

"And Mr. Iss-i-koff," she added, "what I'm hearing from you is that you want David to recognize that you've got a perspective he cannot appreciate yet, that there are certain things he won't understand until he becomes a father himself. Is that right?"

"It's interesting that you bring that up," my father replied. "Becky, is your father still alive? What's your relationship like with him?"

Rebecca was startled by his nonanswer. "I'm...not sure how that's relevant," she answered. Her attempt at authority was unconvincing.

"Because I wonder if you would ever consider going into therapy with your father," he said. "I think you both might benefit from it."

"What does this have to do with anything?" I said. "We're not here to work the refs, Dad. To debate the moderators. It's not getting us anywhere."

"I'm not allowed to ask Becky about her own father?" he asked.

"Dad, you just suggested that our our therapist go into therapy." therapist go into therapy."

"No, I didn't."

"You did."

"You don't believe me?" My father began to eye the video camera that had silently and without acknowledgment been recording all of our sessions. "Here," he said, "give me the videotape and we'll play it back. I'll show you what I said."

I could see him preparing to get out of the chair. He was really going to do it. "Dad," I said, "that's not what it's for."

"Hey," he said, "that's me me on there. Those are on there. Those are my my words. I'm not allowed to play it back?" words. I'm not allowed to play it back?"

Rebecca interceded. "We're not playing the tape back," she said. "And really, Mr. Iss-i-koff, let's leave my life out of this."

"I thought this was supposed to be a place where we could talk about whatever we wanted to talk about," my father said. "Well, this is what I want to talk about."

"Even if it comes at the cost of alienating everyone in this room?" I asked.

"David," my father said, "I'm sixty-five years old. I'm pretty much fixed in my ways at this point. I'm not going to censor myself. I'm not going to change my basic nature for you or for anybody."

"So then," I said, "what was the point of any of this? Why did you ever agree to come to therapy if you never had any intention of coming out of this thing any different than when you started?"

And-Wait a second, holy s.h.i.t, now I remember. I finally remember those twelve horrible words, that one stupid, simple rhyme that proved to me the whole project was lost. He put his hand on mine, turned to me, spoke my name, and said: A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still "Really?" I said. "So that's your answer? That's it? What the f.u.c.k is that?" It might have been the first swearword I'd used in a year's worth of sessions.

"Hey," my father answered, "you can't talk to me like that. In here, we may be peers, but you have to understand something: I'm your father, not your friend."

The funny thing is, I knew exactly what he meant. But all at once everything dropped: the air dropped out of my lungs, the floor dropped out of the room. My heart and my stomach dropped out of my chest, and the clouds dropped out of the sky. I knew how to hear those words so they sounded sane and rational, and I knew how to construe them to sound like the meanest thing he'd ever said to me sober. And in that moment I also knew which way I wanted to interpret them.

The whole process had been revealed as a worthless sham. Maybe I couldn't fight my father with words, but if I didn't give him any words to work with, he would have nothing to fight against. I slumped in my chair, lowered my head, and resolved to myself that I wouldn't speak again for the rest of the session.

My tacit vow had startlingly little effect on the trajectory of the remaining conversation. Words whizzed by; my father reiterated his a.s.sertion that I was an exceedingly prompt son while my sister was never on time, and that my sister spent all her money while I saved half of what I made. He retold the anecdote about his friend who had told him of a desire to see his son have s.e.x with his wife; and he repeated the story of discovering his father's gla.s.s eye and my grandfather weeping that were it not for his handicap, he could have been president.

Then, mercifully, we ran out of time. I can't be sure, but I doubt Rebecca ended the session with any remark more conclusive or profound than "See you next week."

My pledge of silence continued during the traditional post-therapy diner lunch, but it did not stop my father from conducting a conversation with himself.

"Did you see the game last night?" he asked. "You know, the problem with Torre is that he just wants to prove how right he is. The genius. Always has to meddle. He will not let these guys pitch-will not let them pitch. I say, if you're going to bring a guy in as a reliever, let the man pitch. Let him face a few batters, notch a few outs, build up his confidence. This one's always ready to pull out his pitcher over one bad pitch. Joe Torre the genius. He's no genius, I say."

And then: "You want to know how crazy your mother is? She's pulling the car out of the garage the other day, and she sc.r.a.pes the whole side of the car along the wall of the garage. Instead of backing out slowly, she has to peel out all at once-she hears the sound of the metal sc.r.a.ping against her car, and she tries to accelerate even faster. It's like I always tell her, 'Maddy, if you're not sure which way the car is going to go, just go slowly.'"

And then: "I gotta say, David, I'm pretty happy with my life up in the mountains. A lot of people say they like warm weather all year round, but me, I like the seasons. I like it when the sun goes down earlier in the day and the air gets colder. I like that things should be cyclical. It lets me know I'm alive. And that's why I could never move to Florida."

I hadn't spoken a word since ordering my club sandwich. At last my father noticed that I wasn't acknowledging his monologues. "Well," he said, "aren't you going to say anything?"

"No," I said, breaking my vow. "Not until you apologize."

"What did I do?"

"You know know what you said in there." what you said in there."

"David," he said gently, "I thought we had an agreement-what we say in there, we leave in there. We don't take it out here."

"I know you said you wanted an arrangement like that, but I don't remember actually agreeing to it. I don't know that I can abide by it. I can't flip a switch and be two different people. I can't just forget what you said now that I know your mind."

As my father had said to me before, he said again, "We've got to find a way to talk to each other in there. We've got to find a way to signal to each other when one of us is hurting the other one's feelings."

"Dad," I said, "what do you think this has all been about? You already already hurt my feelings. I don't know what more you could say to hurt them worse. And I don't know that I can hear you say anything like that again." hurt my feelings. I don't know what more you could say to hurt them worse. And I don't know that I can hear you say anything like that again."

"I'm sorry," he said, apologizing not for what he had already said but for what he was about to say. "Because I've got to be able to feel I can say whatever I want in that room. I can't censor myself at this age. I'm too far along and too set in my ways."

We finished our lunch quickly and quietly, and he still needed directions from me to drive me home.

Our next two sessions had to be postponed because my father was traveling one weekend, and the next was the Thanksgiving holiday. We had told Rebecca that we would be in contact with her when we were ready to schedule our next appointment. But we never did. One Sat.u.r.day pa.s.sed, and then another, and our newly inert routine was cemented. Not once did my father ask me when our therapy schedule might resume.

One morning during the week, when I was working in my office, I got a call from Rebecca. Over the phone, her voice sounded smaller and more distant. "Have you decided when you'll be coming back?" she asked. "I think we still have a few things that we need to work on."

I answered her the same way I would have a publicist who was trying to push a story I wasn't interested in, or a pollster trying to get me to take part in a telephone survey. "There's, ah, a couple things I just need to sort out with my dad," I said. "As soon as I do, I'll get back to you." It was the last thing I ever said to her, and I doubt she bought it.

Chapter 7

Here's a story from my adolescence in suburban exile. One afternoon I returned home from a full day of school where I had said nothing to anyone, in preparation for another of the routine afternoon naps that pa.s.sed the time until the evening, and I found that my parents were already back from work. Their presence in the house before sundown was generally a bad omen: it meant that my father had been pulled away from what he most wanted to be doing, which was yelling into the phone and selling fur.

Earlier that morning they had left for work separately, my mother in her car and my father in his, and by the time he arrived at his office, he could no longer remember how he got there. He could not mentally retrace the uncomplicated route he drove every day of the week-the Palisades Parkway to the George Washington Bridge to the West Side Highway-and could not even recall sitting behind the wheel of his automobile, tapping its pedals with his feet to make it stop or go. He knew his name, where he worked, and who his wife was, but by the time she had driven him back, he had already forgotten how that happened, too.

He could still walk upright and speak clearly, and his personality and sense of humor were in no way altered, but he could not remember anything that had happened to him over five minutes ago. He would notice the group of gardeners working on our front lawn and jokingly ask, "Who are those guys? Mommy's boyfriends?" Then he would resume reading the same page of the newspaper he had been working on all afternoon before once again noticing the gardeners and asking, "Who are those guys? Mommy's boyfriends?"

Transient global amnesia, my mother was told over the telephone later, was what my father was most likely suffering from: a temporary condition lasting no more than a day, in which his long-term memory was unaffected but his short-term memory was impaired. It was explained that this was in no way a threat to his life and would shortly resolve itself without treatment, which it did, but watching him under its weak influence was as excruciating as seeing him suffer through a deadly illness-at least we would have to imagine; to this point, my sister and I had never seen him confined to a hospital bed or stricken with any ailment more severe than bronchitis. For the rest of the day, until he went to bed, my father sat at the kitchen table with the same simple grin, unaware there was anything wrong with him, able to read the distressed expressions on the faces of his family but incapable of recognizing that he was the one who was causing the distress.

Here's another story. On a winter night some months later, my father was driving on an icy patch of road near our home when he lost control of his car and wiped out on a highway divider. His car was completely wrecked, but somehow he emerged from the accident unharmed. A policeman who examined my father at the scene found him disoriented and slightly incoherent and suggested that he see a doctor, believing he may have suffered a stroke during or just before the crash. Actually, he was high on cocaine.

I was thinking about these incidents several years later, as I made the drive to reach my father in his modest house in the Catskills. Having failed at what was supposed to be a fairly conventional and time-tested method of reconciling two occasionally estranged family members, I decided I would try a strategy of my own devising.

I was going to sit my father down and make him tell me his life story. All of it, in as much unexpurgated detail as he could remember, with a special emphasis on his cocaine addiction, a history that stretched back even further than his history with me; which began casually long before my existence was even contemplated; which reached its frenzied, catastrophic zenith with eerie synchronicity right around the time I was born; and which continued for years and years and years-and then ended at a moment that was difficult to pinpoint precisely, for reasons I was still not completely sure I understood.

I thought that in hearing this story told to me and diligently writing it down, I could turn it into a coherent narrative. As I learned the many details of his life I did not know; heard him retell the tales he had told on a thousand previous occasions for their thousand and first time; had him correct all the inaccuracies I had mistakenly propagated in my erroneous accounts of these episodes; dispelled my mythologies; and exposed my biases, I thought I might be able to show my father a side of himself he did not realize he possessed. Maybe I could show him how close we had been in the times when we seemed furthest apart. Only, to compile this account, I had to start with a man whose own memory could not be trusted, who could lie to your face with a smile whether he realized he was doing it or not.

Traveling to my father in the Catskills is like pa.s.sing through a ripple in time. From my own unexceptional Manhattan dwelling, the hundred-mile trip upstate is almost entirely confined to highways, until I exit onto a two-lane access road where the unrelenting advancement of the years yields for its most faithful traveler, age sixty-nine, and appears to run backward from the perspective of the son half his age. On my left-hand side, I pa.s.s proud monuments to my father's past, still vital and only gently touched, if at all, by the progress of the present day: colonies of weather-beaten but st.u.r.dy bungalows, nearly identical to those where he spent his childhood summers, and where I later spent mine; the horse-racing track that recently welcomed its first supply of slot machines. From my right-hand window, I watch symbols of ambiguous potentiality recede from view: wide green fields forlornly planted with for-sale signs; dirt paths that branch off into countless unpaved tributaries, none of which I have attempted to explore to their unknown ends.

The route winds around the lake where my mother once photographed me at age six, surrounded by water and clinging to my father's towering legs for support; beyond the wooden sign advertising the summer vacation properties where my parents can now be found year-round, even in winter; and finally, to row upon row of undifferentiated cedar-colored cottages, one of which shelters my father and mother, their dog, their menagerie of ceramic ducks, and their collection of throw pillows st.i.tched with mottoes like EAT, SLEEP, FISH EAT, SLEEP, FISH and and OLD FRIENDS ARE THE BEST FRIENDS OLD FRIENDS ARE THE BEST FRIENDS. It's a long way to go to enjoy the privilege of believing your life is no different from anyone else's.

Other than the fear that I would not get home from my trip in time for a Sunday-night episode of The Simpsons The Simpsons, I had no trepidation about asking my father to reveal all the secrets and details of his life in a single weekend. Although I had not learned about his addiction until I was eight, from that moment on, there was no part of his personal history that my father ever kept secret from me. He may not be proud of the life he previously led, I thought, but nor would he ever deny how he led it. In fact-and you will simply have to take my word on this-were you to spend no more than five minutes in my father's company, he would probably confess as much to you, followed by some randomly selected anecdote from his substance-abuse highlight reel. The last time I had visited my parents, bringing Amy upstate with me so she could see their home, we were all eating bagels at the dinner table when my father spontaneously decided to tell us the decades-old story of the time a group of his business a.s.sociates introduced him to freebase cocaine. "We were all in a circle," he recounted, "and when you were done, you were supposed to pa.s.s it to the guy sitting next to you. And by the time he he was done, you already wanted it back." was done, you already wanted it back."

When I had proposed this biographical project to my father several months before, he agreed without hesitation, but in the days leading up to this visit, he was growing increasingly anxious. "What if I don't have any interesting stories to tell you?" he asked. "What if I can't remember all the details so well? How am I going to know which parts of my life I should focus on? Do you want to know only about the drugs, or should I just cover everything? Because there's a lot of tough stuff in there."

"You don't have to worry about any of it," I told him. "Let me be the one to figure out how everything fits together. I'll ask the questions, and you answer them. All you have to do is be yourself. I know you can do that."

He was fully in character when I arrived that morning, still dressed in yesterday's underwear clinging to his sweaty skin, spread across his living room couch, where he had spent the morning nodding off to the din of barking political commentators on a wide-screen television.

"How are you feeling?" I asked him.

"Still living," came the reply. As I strode into his living room, he lifted himself off his couch to embrace me, leaving behind the imprint of his body on the couch. "How do I look?" the man of the house asked. "Do I look like a porcupine?"