Cocaine's Son (12 page)

If you could be a new person to someone who never knew you, could you be that same new person to someone who had known you for your entire life?

The first session with the new therapist was scheduled on a Saturday morning, in an inconspicuous brownstone I had passed many times on my wanderings in the East Seventies, near a subway station I frequently used and a deli where I often stopped for sandwiches, never knowing of the harrowing, heart-wrenching drama that was going on right next door while I waited for my Reubens and potato salads. Past its front door and beyond a security desk, a ground-floor living room was furnished mostly with diversions for children: tiny plastic chairs, half-filled-in coloring books, mismatched toys, and sullen stuffed animals. I was alone, so I worked on a crossword puzzle until my father arrived, and together we rode up to the townhouse’s top floor in an elevator so cramped that we could not fit together in the car without my father’s belly pressing up against me.

We were welcomed into a small private room smelling of fresh paint by our new therapist, a woman—by my father’s demands, as he refused to see another male therapist after our previous meeting—who introduced herself as Rebecca but whom my father addressed as Becky. She was an Asian woman of roughly my height, slight and unimposing, with a short haircut. She was young, no older than thirty, and had a master’s in social work and was working
toward a doctorate, a degree that would presumably be awarded to her upon her successfully reconciling me and my father.

Her first words to us were tentative but well rehearsed. “What we do here is a kind of modified version of couples’ therapy,” she said in a soft but formal voice that betrayed the slightest of accents. “Now, maybe you do not think of yourself as a couple, but in a way, you are. It’s true, a lot of the people we see here, they are married or dating. Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. They chose to be together, and they can choose to break apart if they want.

“You are family. You did not choose to be together. You cannot choose to break apart. But you did choose to be here today. That tells me that you value each other, that you value your relationship. That you want to work on it together to make it better.

“A lot of relationship problems,” she continued, “are communication problems. So that is what we’re going to focus on in here, communication. We’re going to work on active listening, which unfortunately sounds like what a lot of people think of when they think about therapy. You say to someone, ‘I hear you when you say … 
this
.’ Or ‘When you say that, it makes me feel … 
this
.’ It can be weird to get used to. But sometimes when things haven’t been working for a long time, we convince ourselves that they are working anyway. And then we don’t know where they first went wrong. So we must start from the beginning, from the simplest, most basic steps, and build up from there. You are a father, and you are a grown son, and maybe you do not want to think about starting something new, starting all over again. But you have to start from the same beginnings in order to end up in the same place.”

There were two additional conditions that Rebecca revealed to
us about her therapy sessions. First, she said she wanted us to write up a contract that would spell out all the goals we wanted to achieve during our time with her, so we could track our progress and determine when our therapy was complete. I liked her optimism—she seemed to believe the process could actually conclude well, without one of us quitting or dying. But this condition made my father exceedingly nervous, even after she told him he would not have to supply his suggested language for the contract until next week.

“I think I’m gonna need my wife’s help with this one,” he told her with a nervous chuckle. “I haven’t written a complete sentence since grade school. They would ask me to write what I did on my summer vacation—I would turn the paper in blank.”

Second, Rebecca explained that all of our sessions would be videotaped, so that each week she could share these tapes with a panel of trained psychologists who were instructing her—a kind of therapy for the therapist, to remind us what tender and inexperienced hands we had trusted to tend to our mutual mental health. It was a direct violation of the one rule I had established for myself a few days earlier: do
not
let someone videotape your therapy sessions. And yet I allowed it to pass without the least bit of protest, because a person of authority had suggested it, and because I was too busy silently studying the other details of the room: the plastic dinosaur toys on the bookshelf, the halogen lamp that leaned a few degrees away from perfect verticality.

At Rebecca’s request, I once again performed my recitation of the recent events that had landed us here: the original phone call from my father (injurious), his frame of mind and the substances he may have been on (mysterious), the aftermath (apocalyptic). By now I had my presentation of the story down cold, knowing exactly
what to emphasize in order to elicit maximum sympathy from my audience.

“Why do you think this bothered you so much?” Rebecca asked me as the camera continued to roll.

“I’ve just never heard him talk like this to me before,” I said. “Either he didn’t mean any of it, which would be pretty bad, or he did, which would be worse. I don’t know what to root for here.”

I expected her to say that I was right and he was wrong and be done with it, but she wouldn’t give me such easy satisfaction. “David,” she asked, “what does your father usually talk about when he gets high?”

Now, that was an interesting question, one that I couldn’t recall anyone asking me before. But I didn’t have to think long about my answer.

“Usually, he wants to talk about his sexual anxieties,” I said. “How much fear he had about sex when he was growing up and how he never wanted me to go through the same thing. How he didn’t want me to be afraid of sex and how, when I was younger, he even offered to hire a prostitute for me if I wanted.”

Hearing this, my father began to choke up. Having been made to listen to my remembrances of the terror, unease, and confusion that he had instilled in me at a tender age, he now was crying tears of joy. After all these years he had been struggling to make himself understood, using drugs to give himself the courage to do so, it turned out that not everyone was dismissing his tirades as the rantings of a lunatic. There had been someone listening all along, trying to connect the dots as best he could, from the time he was a little boy to the day he sat down, as a man, with his father in a series of therapists’ offices.

“It’s true, it’s true,” my father said, weeping.

Not knowing our backstory beyond what I had already told her,
Rebecca was confused by my father’s reaction. “Why does this make you cry, Mr. Iss-i-koff?” she asked. I assumed that over time she would learn to pronounce our name correctly.

“Well,” he said, “it probably has something to do with David.” He handled the last word gently, as if placing it on a pillow. From the delicate, reverential way he intoned the name, I knew he wasn’t talking about me.

My father rarely talked about his brother, David, anymore. If the name came up in conversation, it was usually by accident; it was a side street he traveled only on unintended meanderings, one where he immediately reversed course and sped away whenever he found himself on it. The few family photographs in which I had seen David, looking young and vital with a dirty-blond pompadour and the slightest of overbites, like a Jewish John F. Kennedy, had been hung in my grandparents’ apartment but never in my parents’ home. The only relics of his that I had, passed on to me after my grandmother’s death, were a couple of Edward Hopper–esque paintings of deserted storefronts and seascapes, signed with the diminutive “Davi.” Whatever else my father possessed or knew about David, he rarely ever shared it for fear that what was left was so fragile it would dissolve in the sunlight.

“He was only eighteen when he was in the accident,” my father said to Rebecca. “He’d never really lived away from me or away from our parents. I don’t know what he’d experienced. I don’t think he ever even had a girlfriend.”

None of this meant, however, that my father had stopped thinking about David or stopped loving him. Indeed, he loved him so much that he named his first son after him, and he fought for that name, even after his sister had given it to her son, and after that son was discovered to be autistic, and after the rest of
his family had concluded that it was a cursed name and should be left alone. He loved David so much that he perhaps believed at times that his son really was his lost brother brought back to life, with all the same needs, desires, and anxieties that my father had been unable to help him fulfill, from when they shared a bedroom every night until the day my father went off to college.

“Dad,” I asked him, “are you afraid because you think David died a virgin?”

“Yes,” he answered with sudden and unexpected relief. “Yes.”

Rebecca must have been pretty satisfied with her work, because the two men who, an hour ago, had entered her room, with its toy dinosaurs, its video camera, and its slanted halogen lamp, on the verge of outright hostility were embracing for the first time in many months. Our new clarity had cost us all of seventy-five dollars, which my father paid for with a business check he had safely stowed in the front pocket of his flannel shirt like a good-luck charm. And did I mention this was only our first session?

My father was in such a positive mood afterward that he drove me home, and his exuberance was making him antsy. At every turn and traffic light, he asked me for directions through the city where he had lived for fifty years, from the recently expired parking meter on the Upper East Side where he had left his car to the Ukrainian diner in the East Village where we stopped to eat lunch, the same setting where Amy had ordered her bourbon-and-French-toast dinner on our victorious second date. No one had instructed my father and me to spend any additional time together outside our therapy sessions, but it seemed like a natural way to keep alive our forward momentum, a onetime act that could easily become a regular tradition if we applied a minimal amount of effort. I ordered the first of what would be, over the next several weeks, many roast-beef club sandwiches on white
toast with Russian dressing on the side, while my father ordered scrambled eggs, soft, and a cup of coffee with half-and-half and Sweet ’N Low, then a second cup the same way, to be brought out when the meal arrived. He spoke so rapidly that not even a waiter with a perfect grasp of English and a pencil and pad in his hand—a luxury we did not enjoy that morning—could have kept pace with him. He made his demands with such specificity that I feared our fragile harmony would be ruined if the order wasn’t fulfilled to his exact liking.

While we waited for our food, my father’s excitement metamorphosed into familiar agitation. “David,” he said as he stripped a paper wrapper from a plastic straw and tore it into tiny pieces, “we’ve got to think of a way to communicate with each other when we’re in that room—a way we can signal to each other when we’ve gone too far or when one of us has said something that offends the other person. Because if this is going to work, don’t I have to feel free to say whatever I want in there? But whatever we say in there, it’s got to stay in there and not interfere with our relationship out here.”

“Don’t worry about it, Dad,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll figure out something. Now that we’ve gotten things back on track, I don’t see why either of us would do anything to screw it up again. I can’t imagine what you could say in there that would set me off again.” At the time, I really couldn’t.

What did he say? How did it go?

What was that horrible, gut-clenching couplet he used to recite in the middle of every argument, as if to show that no bit of wisdom could be contradicted if it had meter and cadence—as if to prove that nothing that rhymed could ever be wrong?

Was it this?

No, that surely doesn’t sound like anything my father would say. But if that’s the wrong verse, why can’t I remember the right one? If I can retain everything from the complete lyrics of the Beatles to the opening stanzas of
The Canterbury Tales
, from the strange, synaptic wallpaper patterns in the hallway of my childhood apartment building to my complete history of telephone
numbers, why can’t I keep track of two simple, stinking lines of superstitious poetry?

I convinced myself that I’d always remember them, which is another way of saying I assumed I’d never be rid of them. But when I thought I was holding on to the words themselves, I was only savoring the intensity of my annoyance with them, congratulating myself for how much shrewder I was than the man who spoke them. Maybe I’ve lost them for good, and I’m surprised at how sad that makes me feel.

I was no more diligent about keeping track of the year that my father and I spent together in therapy. At the start of the process, I thought I might keep a diary that would chronicle our amazing journey—our rehabilitation from a pair of relatives who no longer shared anything more than some blood and chromosomes and an affinity for the Yankees and
Mad
magazine, to a loving and fully functional parent and child. But I got lazy.