Authors: Dave Itzkoff
I don’t practice this particular tradition anymore.
I had been working in Manhattan for about a year, still trying to make my way in the magazine industry, already working at my second menial assistant’s job and living in my second minimalist apartment. But if I believed that I had left my family behind in suburbia completely, there were still occasional reminders that we were bound by blood and a lexicon of sardonic shorthand.
We are sometimes happily reminded of this union by the fact that my mother’s and father’s birthdays occur within a few days of my own, and the closest weekend to all three is the rare occasion when my parents can be persuaded to travel down to the city to celebrate with me and my sister. On one such Saturday afternoon, my sister and I arrived at a restaurant near the big, empty studio apartment I was renting on an Upper East Side block whose desolation and epic distance from the bustling center of town put the “End” in East End Avenue. At our lunch table, we found only our mother waiting to meet us. Her face was sunken and funereal, and she barely lifted her head to make eye contact. When we asked where our father was, she answered, “He’s gone crazy.” This was a long-standing family euphemism, by which she meant he was somewhere else in the city, and he was getting high. The three of us ate our lunch quickly and quietly, my sister and I split the check, and we kissed our mother goodbye.
Then it was Sunday, and I began the day as I usually did, sifting through my drawer of sin, second from the top on the right-hand side of the rickety IKEA wall unit that my mother had helped me
put together, where I kept all my musty dime bags and resin-clogged hash pipes, finding the least filthy pipe and filling it with the least crumbly pinch of green-brown herb from the least desiccated bag, lighting it up and letting its scorching smoke race through my lungs, scraping as it went, and amble out through my nostrils. With my brain enveloped in a comfortable fog, I was about to turn on the television to watch John McLaughlin harangue Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page when my telephone rang.
With some concentration, I was able to recognize the jittery, ethereal voice on the other end as my father’s. “I need your help, David,” he said. “I need you to get me home.”
This was a proposition I had to think about for a second. When I had been called on in the past to rescue my father, I had ignored his plea without even considering the circumstances and for no good reason other than the ironclad aphorism
You got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out
. No matter what trouble he was in now, I was in the worst possible shape to come to his aid. I was more than a little bit high myself, starting to feel anxious about a short freelance article I had pitched to
The New York Times
and was planning to report that night. Which would be harder to live with: leaving my father to fend for himself in his current condition, or explaining to a new editor that I would sometimes have to abandon assignments on a moment’s notice to bail out a junkie parent?
There was something, though, about my father’s repeated use of the word “need.” He did not say “you must” or “you have to” or “you will.” The imperative being communicated was
If you do not do this, no one else will
. (A possibly implied corollary was
I have already asked for help from other people, and they said no.
) There was something climactic and final about the whole dramatic scenario. Maybe this was what he had needed all along. Maybe if I were the
one who at last redeemed him, he would never need redemption again.
“Just tell me where you are, Dad,” I answered. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He gave me the street name and told me to look for a red door. Then his voice faded into silence. I went into my bathroom and splashed myself with cold water until I convinced myself that I was sober, then went outside and hailed a cab downtown.
I was wandering through the slums and schlock shops of Seventh Avenue, navigating between the long shadows cast by Madison Square Garden and irritating, penetrating shards of sunlight. I was so close to where my father had kept his office for over thirty years but could not remember ever walking this forgotten block, populated with ancient import-export wholesalers whose dusty windows still promised wholesale fabrics and novelty linings even as they were populated with nude, decapitated mannequins. Among the storefronts I found a heavy steel door swathed in a layer of chipping red paint: the gateway to a flophouse where my father had traveled from his respectable suburban home for the privilege of paying twenty bucks an hour to snort cocaine in private.
The interior of the building was not particularly unsavory but was mostly barren, a makeshift waiting area with a couple of plastic chairs, wood paneling on every surface, and a lone clerk seated behind a layer of bulletproof glass, watching a black-and-white television that was probably not tuned to
The McLaughlin Group
. Beyond this area was a narrow hallway lined with doors; streaks of light could be seen underneath each of them, flickering tentatively as their unseen occupants scuttled around. On the opposite side of every door, some aching, appalling tragedy could be playing out anonymously, and there could be a hallway like this behind every door on the block.
I asked the clerk if there was someone staying here named Gerald Itzkoff, and without asking me who I was or why I was looking for him, he directed me to my father’s room.
I had never observed my father performing the complete ritual of getting high on cocaine, of consolidating his powder into fine white lines and inhaling them up his nose one by one, and on this day I still wouldn’t catch him in the act. His supply was exhausted; all that remained in the room were a few rolled-up dollar bills on a nightstand, a glossy porno magazine on the floor, and a frightened old man shivering on the bed, his nostrils cemented shut with a mixture of blood and mucus, his eyelids sealed closed by some bodily fluid whose origins I couldn’t even guess at. I had no idea how much coke he’d done or how long he’d been doing it, but he was coming down, and he was coming down hard. Though it was terrifying to see someone so familiar and generally functional in such a broken-down, helpless, and horrible state, I had no choice but to pretend that none of it mattered.
“Come on, Dad,” I said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
As he stood up and walked around the room, he seemed to be vibrating in place, like a tuning fork that had been struck. He could barely see me, and I didn’t want to touch him, but we worked out a system that allowed me to lead him out of the flophouse and onto the street by having him follow the sound of my voice. If I took my eyes off him or stopped calling out “Dad” every few feet, he would get distracted and try, very slowly, to shuffle away.
“David,” he said, “I can’t drive like this.”
“Yeah, no kidding, Dad.”
“You’re going to have to drive me home.”
He fumbled through the pockets of his putrid blue jeans, producing expired coupons and fishing licenses, scraps of paper on
which he had scribbled down phone numbers and sales figures, and hundred-dollar bills folded into a kind of accidental origami, but he could not find the claim check for the garage where he had parked. We were in a neighborhood where every corner that was not occupied by a bodega, a porno video store, or a half-finished construction project had been turned into a garage, and I would have to approach every single one of them, with this lumbering, stumbling, snotty, bloody beast following me, to ask if they had his car.
At the first parking lot we passed, a group of uniformed attendants was gathered outside. “Excuse me?” I asked the least threatening-looking of them, and they all looked up at once like I’d just interrupted their craps game.
“My father can’t remember if he parked his car here or not,” I said matter-of-factly. “Do you recognize him? He might have come here yesterday. He’s got a drug problem.”
The attendant gave a short, reflexive laugh. How else was he supposed to react? You stand around on a city street long enough, you see a dozen guys shamble by in tattered clothes, their skin burned by constant exposure and their beards mangy and overgrown from inattention; they push shopping carts full of soda cans, tote their possessions in bulging, overstuffed backpacks, try to carry on conversations with their reflections in the windows they pass, listen intently to the transistor radios they carry whose batteries expired in 1978, or sit motionless on the curbside with their head buried between their legs.
You have to laugh at them, because it is dreadfully, morbidly funny to see a human being to whom you have no connection reduced to the level of a windup toy. But you don’t want to know him, and you don’t want to know how he ended up that way. Because if you stop believing for a moment that his slapstick misadventures
have been orchestrated for any reason other than your personal amusement, you might find out this wandering old vagrant, was, hours ago, coherent and clearheaded enough to drive an expensive and dangerous American-made vehicle. You might find out he is actually someone’s
father
. You might find out he is
my
father.
I did not need to visit any more garages to know that this same scene would play out at every single one. I hailed a taxi in hopes that one would be willing—in a city where a request to drive from Manhattan to Brooklyn is regarded as an ethnic slur—to deliver my father back to Rockland County. Incredibly, the very first driver I stopped agreed to do so for the proper fare mandated by the immaculate copy of the Taxi & Limousine Commission manual he kept in his glove compartment, and he even waited and watched over my father while I ran to a bank machine to withdraw money.
We were somewhere on the Henry Hudson Parkway, as I sat in the back of the cab with my father’s head in my lap, when I reached into a pocket of his winter coat and pulled out an overlooked stub: the claim check for his car. His eyes were still mostly shut, and before he fell asleep, he let a final utterance dribble from his lips: “You saved my life.”
From the front seat, our driver, who had deduced exactly what was going on, agreed: “You’re a good kid, to do this for your father.”
But how could it be that I once again found myself in this position: him, passed out in the back of a car; me, in charge of a situation I had no idea how to handle. If the shoe were on the other foot—if I were the one with the debilitating dependency and he were the one with the sober clarity—wouldn’t I want him to do everything within his power to get me cleaned up? To turn his
whole life upside down to make sure that mine was straightened out again? Forsake his business and the whole world he knew, if he needed to? If I was such a good kid, what was I actually doing for him? All I was doing today was sitting with him in a cab, and as soon as it reached its destination and dropped him off, I’d have my mother drive me straight home. I just wanted to get back to my empty apartment, report my story that night, get my
New York Times
byline, build my career. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice anything. When you got right down to it, I was a pretty goddamned lousy kid.
When I wanted my drugs, at least I didn’t go about scoring them in such an undignified manner. All I had to do was wait for a friend to throw a party, and then I’d show up and wait again until the witching hour when the timid teetotalers had gone home for the night and the drinkers had drunk their fill, when the pot pipes would be passed around and smoked in plain view of everyone who could still see straight. When a party could not be convened, I would call my delivery service: I would dial a beeper number, leave my phone number in return, and wait for someone to return the call, usually a gruff male voice that would state simply: “I’m returning a phone call.” Within thirty minutes to an hour, I would be greeted at my front door by a dreadlocked young man or woman with a gym bag full of tiny translucent plastic cases packed to the brim with a sticky green crystalline algae, so potent that one bowlful would send me reeling for four or five hours, and I was warned to never, ever smoke it in a joint.
The process was chic and civilized, so routine and stripped of embarrassment—not like the desperate, demeaning groveling that my father undertook when he wanted to get high, scrounging
from door to door and dealer to dealer, scrambling to find the cheapest, most isolated place where he could light himself up in private. It was a damn shame when that delivery service stopped returning my pages, for reasons I never found out. (Whom do you call for customer service?) But my supply problems were quickly rectified: I started buying from a friend’s roommate, a flabby ex–frat boy who liked to walk the apartment bare-chested in backward-turned baseball caps and boxers that barely constrained his hairy belly. He was gregarious, fond of high-fiving people for any occasion, and never worked at a day job or stopped watching his big-screen TV long enough to leave his apartment. He was always available, willing to entertain at all hours, and, for a price, provide access to a metal cookie container in which he kept his entire inventory: plastic bags full of marijuana and crumpled chunks of aluminum foil that contained something else.
One afternoon, in the course of a typical transaction, I impulsively told him that in addition to my customary bag of weed, I would also like to purchase one of the foil chunks. He slapped me five as he pressed one into my palm, and I hurriedly stuffed it in my pocket. After hastening home to my empty apartment, I laid out my purchases on the dinner table and tore into the foil as if a suffocating child were trapped inside it. Its contents were slightly different than I expected: not a pile of white power but a small chunk of solid cocaine.
I looked at it for a while, unable to unlock its mysteries or extract its narcotic properties with only my eyes. Was I supposed to smoke it? Was I meant to shove the whole thing up my nose and wait for it to take effect? Should I just leave it on the mantel as a conversation piece, to prove to houseguests that I owned a small chunk of cocaine? It was supposed to be a totem of the adult
experiences I was allowed to partake in, and instead, it sat there mocking me: the hardest controlled substance I had ever purchased, and I had no idea how to use it.