Cocaine's Son (23 page)

“Do you know, Adelphia, how much that man sacrificed for me?” my father asked rhetorically, his voice breaking, his eyes once again welling with tears, and his face in frighteningly close proximity to hers. “There is no one—
no one
—who helped me more than my father. He’s the only one who finally helped me get clean.”

Everything he had said up to this point I could dismiss as the harmless rationalizations of an old man, but this last statement struck me as patently untrue. It ignored the honor roll of pleading friends who had, over the years, begged him to seek help for his problem; the cooperation of other family members who had stood by him through other, more traditional treatments that did not work; and the immeasurable support of my mother, who could have simply walked away after any number of failed therapies, abortive institutionalizations, and foreseeable relapses, but never did. I said nothing, and the performance continued on.

As we followed Adelphia upstairs to the second story of her home, where she sat herself down in front of a smaller television set, at a coffee table strewn with blank lottery tickets, Social Security checks, and uncompleted government forms, my father began the next segment of his oration. This time he told her the story about rummaging around in the glove compartment of the family sedan and discovering my grandfather’s glass eye.

It was not until this particular recitation of the story that I learned my father waited to confront my grandfather about this until they had been business partners for many years.

The only reason he was able to open up to my grandfather so courageously and so completely is because my father was high on cocaine at the time.

Now, here’s the punch line: having related this tale to Adelphia, my father asked her, “Was it better that I could only tell my father how I felt about him when I was high, or would it have been better if I never told him at all?”

It was a neat bit of sleight of hand that my father had pulled off, one that his conscious mind might not even have been aware of. This was the sort of loaded, binary question a pollster asks when he already knows the results he wants to produce; and it lacked an obvious third choice: find the strength to tell your father how you feel without having to get high at all. But given the two choices offered to her, Adelphia came back surprisingly quickly with the answer I’m certain my father wanted to hear all along: “I think it’s better that he knew how you felt about him before he died,” she said.

Adelphia knew my father’s history maybe better than I did; she had seen it firsthand. In the years since they last saw each other, it was her life that had become a complete mystery, not his. But she was too tolerant of life’s torments to ever ask him to yield the floor, and he was too caught up in his self-perpetuating narrative to stop. He was going to keep reciting his mortal offenses to her until she told him that the life he had lived was its own act of contrition and that no further penance was required. And still I said nothing.

On Adelphia’s television, the courtroom reality show she had been watching was interrupted by a news bulletin announcing that a tornado watch was in effect for New Orleans and the surrounding
area. Within minutes the report was made redundant as the skies turned gray and let loose with a thick, persistent rain; one moment the street outside Adelphia’s house was dry and cracked and begging like a transient for sustenance—the next, it was so deeply flooded that cars could no longer drive, and pedestrians were attempting to ford it with gardening tools. In another hour or so, a television anchor announced that it was the most rain the city had seen since Hurricane Katrina—only five or six inches but enough to send me running to the windows every few minutes in attempts to convince myself that what I was seeing was actually happening. There was something pitiless about it, that anyone who had been made to bear these conditions once before should have to experience them again so soon.

Adelphia never stirred from her seat, not even when Esther came into the room to declare, “If it really keeps raining, we’re getting out of here, sister!” Nor was my father the least bit dissuaded in the slow and ceaseless recitation of his ongoing harangue. He told Adelphia he was unimpressed with the quality of leadership in the African-American community and that those who stayed behind in New Orleans when Katrina touched down and attempted to ride out the storm got what they deserved; they had no reasonable expectation for the government to provide for them in the aftermath, he felt. “If FEMA tried to give
me
a trailer,” he said, “I wouldn’t take it. I’d rather sleep on the floor.” Adelphia nodded in agreement, as she had through the previous portions of the sermon.

On a break from talking about himself, my father began to tell Adelphia about me and the passage from my first book that he had been fixated on lately. He wanted to lecture her about the scene where I described my experience taking Ecstasy and his misbegotten interpretation of that moment. Though I had already committed
that incident to paper for anyone to read, I found it uncomfortable to hear my father describe my past drug use, in my presence, to a sixty-six-year-old woman whom I’d known only for a couple of hours, and who, for all her worldly experience, probably had no idea what Ecstasy was.

So I asked him to stop. “Dad,” I said, “can we please not talk about this right now?”

“Why?” he said. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to,” I said. “Isn’t that enough?”

Genuinely confused, he answered, “But you’re not my father.”

That was all I needed to hear. There had never been anyone who could tell him what to do or not to do, or convince him of anything he did not already believe, except his father, and that man had been dead since 1989. I excused myself from the room, went downstairs, and walked out the front door of Adelphia’s house. Before the storm, I had the good fortune to park our rental car on a hill next door, in front of a tenement house wallpapered in bumper stickers calling for the reelection of Representative William Jefferson, the nine-term Louisiana congressman who would be indicted on corruption and bribery charges the following month. I unlocked the car and sat inside, listened to the radio, and watched the rain subside and the flood recede.

Later, my father came out of the house with Adelphia behind him. They hugged and kissed each other farewell, and I stepped out of the car to tell her goodbye. “David,” she said gently, “be good to your father. Listen to what he says. He needs you.” I told her only that I would try. When my father asked me for the car keys so that this time he could drive, I allowed it.

At our fourth hotel of the week, while my father fell asleep to a late-night television broadcast of
Red River
, I sneaked out of our room to be comforted by the recurrent hum of the nearest
soda machine. Illuminated by its glow, I called Amy to tell her of recent events—the visit to Adelphia’s house, the rains, the constant fighting.

“You don’t sound so good,” she said.

“This hasn’t gone at all like I thought it would,” I said. “When we get back to New York, I am coming straight home to you and I am never leaving. I don’t want my life to turn out like this.”

“It doesn’t have to,” she said.

My father and I woke up on our last full day in New Orleans, transformed into a pair of grifters with no obligations or commitments, no permanent address, no possessions, and no imperative to do anything except whatever was necessary to sustain us until the next day. I was exhausted, but my father was becoming more energetic and manic by the minute, and when it came time for us to finally leave Louisiana, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to convince him to get on the plane.

Today we had nothing but time on our hands, so my father took us out to Raceland, a rural community about forty miles southwest of New Orleans, serviced by two local highways and perhaps a single traffic light where they intersected. He had brought us here looking for a family named the Fonsecas, a clan of fur traders he and my grandfather had done business with for generations. He seemed to think that if we simply cruised up and down the streets of Raceland long enough, he would eventually recognize their ancestral home on sight. Raceland is a small town but not that small, and after several passes back and forth on Highway 1, we could not find the house, nor anyone who seemed to know where they might live, except a pair of drunks in a run-down gas station who gave us completely contradictory directions. “If we could just find a sheriff’s station,” my father kept repeating.

Abandoning any pretense of effort or challenge, I pulled out my phone, typed the name Fonseca into a search engine, and came up with their address instantly. We turned a single corner and there was their house, more or less exactly as my father remembered it. “I should have known,” he said, resentful that he had been unable to recall a single obscure detail from a life he led over twenty years ago.

In his heyday, my grandfather had done business primarily with the Fonseca patriarch, Douglas, and his wife, Una, while my father became close friends with their son Michael, a rugged, handsome man who looked like a longer-haired Cajun clone of Elvis Presley in his photogenic
Viva Las Vegas
screen-idol era. In the time my father knew him, Michael had three different wives and three children with them; the first wife went on to become a famous cosmetics artist in Hollywood, while the last became a crack addict–turned–born again Baptist. Michael had a reckless streak to put my father’s to shame, and for a brief period after my grandfather split up the family business, my father and Michael attempted to run a partnership of their own. Michael would arrive at fur auctions dressed in rabbit-skin vests, leather pants, and alligator boots and try to outbid everyone on everything. My father soon learned how it felt to dissolve a partnership he knew in his heart was never going to work.

Also like my father, Michael had a voracious appetite for drugs, but unlike my father, he had a much greater hunger to consume them intravenously. During the 1990s, Michael contracted hepatitis C and fled from Louisiana to Wyoming, where he died.

My father believed that the only surviving members of the family were Michael’s younger sisters, Michele and Daniele. But when we rang the doorbell to their home, we were met by Daniele’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Amanda, a little harlequin of a girl
dressed in a faded Felix the Cat T-shirt and a pair of military fatigues. She explained that her parents were out grocery shopping and would be back soon. My father told her that he was an old friend of her late uncle Michael’s and that once, when Michael was on the verge of being divorced by one of his wives, my father insisted Michael get down on his hands and knees and beg her to take him back. In telling the story, my father made himself cry. Amanda did not invite us into the house.

When Daniele returned home with her husband, Jody, she recognized my father right away. An ample, affable woman, she had vivid memories of the many instances in which her family’s history overlapped with ours; just as Adelphia did, she still called my grandfather “Mister Bob.” Her house contained the same pool table at which Mister Bob had challenged her father to many a late-night game, and the same couch at which Mister Bob used to fall asleep, a lit cigar dangling from his mouth, until he was woken up by the sting of ash burning a hole in his shirt.

Daniele seemed genuinely delighted by our surprise visit; she told us stories of how my grandfather had taught her to sing “Bei Mir Bist du Schon,” and how she had once owned a Siberian husky named Maddy G., a combination of my mother’s name and my father’s first initial. Then she called up her older sister, Michele, who lived nearby in Thibodaux, to tell her we were here. Michele arrived soon after, a stylish woman in a pant suit and a pair of designer sunglasses atop her head, toting her eleven-year-old daughter, Maddy, and a steel cigarette case proudly stamped with the words
TRAILER TRAMP
.

At the outset, there was a natural give-and-take to the afternoon’s conversation. Michele and Daniele were not oblivious to Michael’s drug problem—“his demons,” they said—but they had fond recollections of his generosity and charisma and the beautiful,
poetic letters he wrote to them that they later discovered were cribbed from Cat Stevens songs. Michele did not shed a single tear as she described seeing her brother for the last time, dying of liver disease and bone cancer in a Cheyenne hospital, too proud to let any of his other family members see him in such a state. “He thought he was invincible,” Michele said. “That’s how he was to the end.”

My father was upbeat as he recounted some of his favorite stories about abusing drugs under Michael’s supervision: the time the two of them got high on peyote with my mother and Michael’s girlfriend at the time and drove off, stoned, to meet my grandparents for dinner at a nearby seafood restaurant; the time Michael introduced them to animal tranquilizers, which made my mother curl up into a ball and declare erroneously, “You gave me heroin!”

Eventually, my father reverted to his familiar overbearing form. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said with a sense of urgency, “because I’ve got to tell you as much as I remember.” Only, what followed was not a single story but the tangled and messy web of the numerous narrative threads he’d been stitching all week: how his father had split the business with him, thus providing him the motivation to beat his drug problem; how he had fruitlessly counseled Michael to beg forgiveness from his soon-to-be ex-wife; and how he had discovered his father’s glass eye but was able to confront him about it only when he was high. Everything he saw or heard provided the trigger for another story or moral lesson—how much he appreciated a good salad; how children who do not grow up around dogs or cats go onto live lives vastly inferior to those who do—and nothing provoked these reminiscences more than the sound of his own reminiscing. While Daniele and Michele listened to him politely, their daughters sat on a nearby couch and watched television, pricking their
ears and giggling each time my father raised his voice or said a dirty word. Jody said nothing but eyed the scene warily while walking its perimeter like a prison guard, waiting to take action the moment a captive tried to make a run for the wall.