Cocaine's Son (10 page)

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 publishing 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 piña 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 space, 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 massaged 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 shift 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 passive 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.

“I have something there to show you,” I said. “Trust me, you’ll like it.”

“Okay,” she said with a devilish chuckle. I liked this newfound
boldness that my untested drug supply had provided me, and she did, too.

If Jana thought we were headed home to smoke pot and look at pictures of her recent trip to the Great Barrier Reef, I made it clear this wasn’t my intent. From my dining table, I retrieved my wad of foil, where it still sat next to the napkin holder. “Look what I just bought,” I said to Jana as I unwrapped the foil and displayed its chunky, chalky contents.

“Oh my God,” she said with sly surprise, and as decorously as one would butter a dinner roll, she produced a nail file from her purse and began shaving away at the crystals, creating little piles of powder that she gathered into lines with another American Express Gold Card. With a snort, the first line disappeared up her nose, and then a second, and a third, and then finally, she let me try a couple, too.

This time it worked. The effect was unlike anything I had experienced in any previous state of consciousness: I did not feel dizzy, dazed, or distant; I was not hallucinating or mixing up my senses. I felt like I had been plugged in to myself and, in doing so, had tapped in to an aquifer of adrenaline and testosterone that was laying dormant for over a decade, accumulated through a lifetime’s aversion to organized athletics, gym workouts, or any activity more strenuous than videogames. I was happy and proud to be me, infinitely confident and unafraid of anything, and brimming with more energy than I knew what to do with. But I knew exactly where I wanted to put it.

Jana was lying on my couch, looking back at me through needful, half-open eyes, and suddenly, her body started looking like an elaborate instrument panel that I had rarely gotten my hands on but which I knew exactly how to use. I started peeling off her clothes as if they were made from tissue paper, latching on to an
ample breast with one hand while pawing at her pubic mound with the other, all the while in utter disbelief that
she was actually allowing me to do this to her
. As I immersed my face between her legs, her tiny moans and gasps gave way to a soft, uncertain entreaty to stop. Whether or not I wanted to heed it, she abruptly sat up and ran into my bathroom, where she began throwing up.

Within a few minutes, Jana returned to the room, unashamed. “See what happens when you get me too excited?” she said before climbing into my bed and passing out. She had taken off her remaining clothes and was dressed in one of my old college T-shirts, which barely came down to her waist. At its hemline, a few small hairs poked out from underneath, a teasing reminder of the anatomical bits that had been both my inspiration and my undoing on this night.

We woke up late the next morning, groggy and sick, and traded shy, embarrassed laughs as we passed each other going to and from the bathroom. I saw Jana with decreasing frequency over the months and years that followed, and we never spoke of this incident even once.

Here is how a house of cards begins to collapse. You build its foundation on a layer of unstable ground and add each tentative tier with a meticulous process of indifference and neglect, observing in disconnected fascination as each wobbly story is assembled atop a previous one, well beyond the point where your empirical understanding tells you that the fragile structure should be able to support itself. Then, with an inevitable tug, it starts to buckle and heave, and you watch with a mixture of defeat and amazement as it goes down and the familiar pieces you used to construct it come hurling back at you, as the whole enterprise
spreads wider and sinks lower without ever finding a boundary or a bottom.

Months had passed since my meaningless rescue of my father from his self-imposed flophouse exile, the memory of the event added to our backlog of personal tragedy to be discussed and reexamined as soon as we found a mutually convenient time, which would be never. I had a new magazine job, an editor’s title and my own private office, and a hip new East Village apartment, where I was relaxing one night only to have my modest tranquillity interrupted by another phone call at another odd hour. Proving that I had learned absolutely nothing from the previous episode, I answered it.

“I need to talk to you about something,” my father told me, and right away I knew I was in trouble. I ran through the mental checklist that I had honed over the years, prepared for scenarios like these when he should call me out of the blue, designed to determine whether I was talking to someone who is sober or high: is his speech slurred or stuttering? Is his train of thought circuitous or disconnected, or does he drop out of the conversation for long periods of time? Does he only want to talk about his sex life? He passed all of these tests and yet something still seemed off, as if he were talking to me through a paper cup. Out of a kind of fatalistic curiosity, I allowed him to continue.

“I want to talk to you about your aunt Arline,” he said, referring to his older sister. “She was up here to visit your mother and me a few days ago in the mountains. I don’t know what kind of life she has down there in the city. I think she should move up here. I think it would be good for her.”

“Dad,” I asked, “what does this have to do with me?”

“I need you to explain to her that she should do this,” he said. “I want you to convince her that this is the right thing for her to do.”

Had I applied some of the more rigorous and obscure criteria on my father-testing checklist—does he want to discuss an intensely personal situation involving his family? is he asking for help that he seems to think only I can provide? does he sound utterly convinced of his own unflinching standards of right and wrong?—I might have arrived at the red-flag moment that signaled to me:
Do not talk to this person unless you seek a frustrating, humiliating, ego-crushing conversation
. But the signs were so numerous and imprecise that half of them could still apply to my father when he was completely clean. Some days I felt like salvaging him from the messes he had created, and some days I wanted to leave him behind in the hourly motels of his own invention, and on this occasion I decided to rebel.

“I don’t see why I should get involved in this,” I said. “This is between you and your sister. I’m not going to do it.”

With preternatural calm, my father replied, “Then you are a coward, and you are a failure.”

It should be self-evident that hearing one’s own father refer to oneself as a coward and a failure would be completely devastating to anyone, and yet I still feel I should explain why I found the remarks so unsettling: not because I feared he truly meant what he said. What frightened me most were the retaliatory acts I had often cycled through and savored in my mind, that I was free to perpetrate on him.

I had not only contemplated but fantasized about what my life would be like if I were to cut him off entirely. It was the same punishment he had threatened me with, turned on its head—I had nothing tangible that he wanted or that I could withhold from him, only unquantifiable commodities like love, contact, and compassion. My campaign would cost me nothing to perpetrate, but it would devastate him fully. I would be giving up nothing
more than a sometime sounding board, a guy I could occasionally count on to hear out my plans for the future and then tell me all the ways they could possibly go wrong. He would be left to perpetually apologize to the rest of our family for my absence at gatherings and Thanksgiving dinners, to explain to his friends that he could not update them on my life because he did not know what I was doing, and to wonder, above all, how it was that he squandered the trust of this person who was once completely devoted to him—the boy of a thousand nicknames who used to believe that there was no rock so heavy that he could not lift it, no highway motorists so fast he could not outrace them, and no cocksucking traffic jam so fucking impenetrable and goddamn demonstrative of the fucking worthlessness of New York City that he could not curse it into a state of powerlessness.

There was no formal declaration of hostilities, only an abrupt cessation of concordance that took him several weeks to notice. First I had to explain my actions to his proxies. My mother called and, after an exchange of banalities, asked if there was any reason why I hadn’t spoken to my father in all this time.

“Mom,” I said, “didn’t he tell you that the last time we talked, he called me a coward and a failure? I don’t know what he was on, but I’m sure he was taking something or doing something. I don’t know if I’ll ever talk to him again.”

Her voice turned cold with recognition. “I can understand why you might feel that way,” she said, and I’m sure she could.

I next practiced the argument with my sister, who was deep in her studies at medical school. Some elements of the story had trickled down to her, but not the whole thing. “What’s going on, David?” she wanted to know, as if I were withholding the details of some fatal accident from her.

“I don’t know if I can be a part of this family anymore,” I told
her in my most self-aggrandizing tone. “I’ll always be there for you if you ever need money,” which was the one asset I inevitably equated with independence and self-reliance. “I’ll be there for whatever you need from me. I think from now on we’ll have to learn to take care of each other and look out for ourselves.” Whatever I said and however I said it must have been pretty convincing, because she started to cry.

These practice confrontations were not enough preparation for facing down the man himself. He caught me off-guard with another of his sudden phone calls, this time when I was at work.

He had the opportunity to say only one thing to me, but it was enough. “David,” he said, and I could just about hear the tears welling in his eyes, “are you going to stop loving me?”

In my private office, I could have closed the door behind me and said whatever I wanted without fear of being overheard. But I didn’t say anything in reply. I simply hung up the phone. In the moment it felt courageous. And when I look back on the course of my life—not just the times when I could have supported my father but elected not to, out of spite or anger or confusion, but all the sins I’ve been responsible for, all the stains that will never be fully cleansed from my soul, all the acts of deceit and larceny, guile and ruthlessness, I’ve committed in my own self-interest that I dare not ever confess—I think it may have been the cruelest and most terrible thing I’ve ever done.