Authors: Benjamin Kunkel
But now in light of my own recent actions and, even more, my damaging reluctance to carry them out, I tried experimenting with the conclusion that dad’s scotch-and-golf-oriented generation wasn’t so different, in terms of courage, from my more weed-and-rock-climbing one; that it was a pretty unusual life that didn’t travesty the better nature of the person inside it; and that dad’s very dad-like knowledge about many things, and intermittent basic decency, and astounding handiness, made him not such a bad person at all, despite any reservations I may have had about the rate of his scotch drinking, and any sorrow I may have experienced at having become, thanks to him, and along with Alice, another child of divorce.
“What makes it all particularly amusing—” he was saying.
“Yeah but do I really want to know this?”
“—is that Burns had just been quoted, in the
Times,
about ten days before, as one of the last physicians prescribing Croxol—”
“So would you say seven iron here or—”
“—despite a certain frequent side effect. Of explosive diarrhea! Which he said—in the
Times
—had been exaggerated!” Explosive laughter.
“Dad, man.”
“Can’t you just picture him because—”
“I hate this. Don’t you know that yet?”
“Because what is Croxol prescribed for?” He waited a beat. “For morbid embarrassment.”
“Hmm . . . The gods’ sense of humor.” This was in order to suggest that my education hadn’t been totally for not. Or is it naught?
“Precisely! Precisely right. Just how to characterize it.”
It was touching—he was proud of me. I wondered if I should seize this opportunity to make my confession. But it was turning out that the story of Dr. Burns’s comeuppance was only the overture to a much longer conversation about the role of pharmaceuticals in our American society.
Dad had raised his eyebrows and was tapping his index finger on his cranium. “This,” he was saying, “is the new frontier.” The Croxol fiasco notwithstanding, he had decided to make pharmaceutical concerns pretty central to his recovering portfolio and he felt it was one of the smartest things he’d done.
“But aren’t you bankrupt, I mean . . . ?”
“I was.” He stopped walking and looked off—I did too—into the hazy distance. “I was, as you say, bankrupt. Had to put the house in your mother’s name. True. But no one in commodities made it through 2000. You know that much.”
I did know but never, even after lengthy explanation, did I get exactly why. I knew money had been managed for institutional clients, and that it had been invested at high risk, generating high returns, in gambles on foreign-exchange rates, actual commodities, interest rates, and so on. You took an average directional movement of this, and some relative strength indicators from that, and figured in some four-day average true ranges, and you fed this stuff to the computer until arrows came on-screen telling you to get in or out, and this meant being, until 2000, a hero among commodities traders, profiled in
Barron’s
and elsewhere, and a mystery to your wife and kids, all of whom liked complaining that you weren’t a good listener but then turned into, like, hypocrite deaf-mutes the moment you tried to explain to them the baroque system your semidipsomaniacal genius had devised one evening when you were supposedly in your office reading literature books.
Dad said, “I’m speaking to you as a private individual now. The drug companies are the place to be.”
It was like I was being taken into his confidence as a potential investor in my own right. Dad’s confidence in the pharmaceutical industry gave me some faith that the Abulinix might be starting to work and I said, “There’s probably, dad, something that I should—and that might be of interest on a somewhat different, but also related—”
“People have so much money these days, Dwight—have you noticed this? They’ve really bought up most of the goods they’re going to want.” This was the place where Alice would have noted in chilling tones that it was in fact a tiny minority of the global count that dad was including in his category of
people.
And I would have said, “You know what he means, Al,” because it just seemed like too much for dad to have
two
kids who felt that the best response to the available pleasures was a constant awareness of those unable to enjoy them.
“But that’s outer goods,” dad was saying. “There we’re sated. Consumer electronics, SUVs. In fact this is one reason the economy’s so sluggish. There’s a lot of excess manufacturing capacity in this world, this”—he pointed to my golf clubs with one of his—“this world of what you and I would call physical
things.
But the market for what are essentially inner goods—this has only begun to be tapped.”
Dad and I often had these very zeitgeisty conversations—they seemed to be an aspect of the father-son relationship. For a couple of years whenever we went golfing or skiing he’d initiate dialogue about how nice it was that we’d won the Cold War. It was like we’d chipped in together. “During the Cold War you felt like you had a reason to get up in the morning. Now what have we got?” The words had seemed to imply a certain sympathy with me, since my own reasons for getting up in the morning were unknown to us both, hence I was studying philosophy at Eureka Valley, in order to learn them.
We proceeded from hole to hole underneath the low Connecticut sky. “Ten years,” dad was saying, “and people won’t be so suspicious of drugs. Sure, the Arabs might be. But we’re chemistry. That’s what we are. We just have to wait for this realization to trickle all the way down. Food, exercise, sexual intercourse, warmth—all these things function like drugs. They modify your mood and perspective. That’s how it’s always been. Mark my words, this distinction between natural and artificial, when this is your brain but then it’s your brain on drugs—that will frankly come to be seen as so much twentieth-century superstition. It’s a last hangover from the—don’t tell Charlie I said this—but from the old religious concept of the ‘soul.’ ”
“But you and mom were always worried if
my
brain was on drugs.”
“Well Dwight”—and here he sailed a long straight beauty of a shot down the fairway. “Would you look at that.” If I’d been on mushrooms there would have been the lovely fading arc of a tracer in the air. “Well marijuana is not exactly a performance-enhancer. I trust you’re not still using that stuff.”
“Very rarely.” We went off to the rough to fetch my ball. “It can be pleasant and relaxing.” The phrase enjoyed a certain currency in our family. When mom had come into my adolescent bedroom one night to tell me what sex was, and how it would be okay if eventually I had it with someone I loved and even, when desperate, with myself, she let me know that it could be
pleasant and relaxing.
This was the same phrase with which dad had defended himself against Alice’s accusations of excessive drinking. And even Alice herself, during the great Lesbianism Scare of 1992, had suggested with heavy sarcasm that the girl-on-girl lifestyle could likewise be
pleasant and relaxing.
“Marijuana can have an effect on motivation, you know. Would you say you smoke the drug once a fortnight?” dad said, a pretty accurate guesser.
“More like in a blue moon.”
“The point is, to think of the person without thinking of chemistry is like thinking of a house without architecture. There’s no house that’s simply a house you go home to, then you add or remove the design. The design
is
the house.”
I could see this was a case you could make and knew that disbelief in a person’s innate character had a serious intellectual pedigree going at least back to Scottish philosopher David Hume. But it was also true that mom and dad had always encouraged me to be
true to myself
—a phrase actually used—and seemed to have an idea of what this kind of fidelity should entail. So it was kind of disturbing to have dad wiping the human face off the mirror as casually as a smudge.
I started to say it seemed like people would continue to subscribe to a certain vague regulatory notion of health, that this would have a conservative effect on would-be psychonauts, and that in fact the somewhat scary effort to reengineer the whole human personality was one of the reasons I was kind of down, these days, on Pfizer, where, in fact, as I really should have mentioned earlier—
“Clearly you haven’t seen what the pharmaceuticals are investing in R & D.”
I wasn’t getting through. A lot of times it seemed like I’d been well enough educated to be considered a decent audience for dad, but not a qualified interlocutor. If I brought up something he hadn’t thought of before, he ignored me. But if I said something he already knew, he’d say, “Sure. I know.” Like many men, he was impregnable.
He was reciting statistics when I interrupted him. “I wonder if anyone’s looking into a cure for the kind of mild, low-level autism that’s become such an epidemic in this country. Especially among white suburban males. And that’s been linked to lots of—”
“Well I don’t know Dwight. I hadn’t heard of that problem.”
“But now you have.”
He regarded me with some sort of dim suspicion. “And where did you read about this, this—”
“Wall Street Journal.”
I met his gaze. “Pretty small item.” I shrugged.
“Since when are you taking the
Journal
?”
“I think maybe is it Bristol-Myers Squibb? major Pfizer rival? that’s been looking into this, um, MLLA—”
He began to taste the concept: “Mild, low-level—”
“Right, autism. This like mild inability to recognize the basic mental reality of others. Total potential cash cow, they’re thinking. I think. Because it’s definitely an issue out there.”
Possibly he couldn’t tell if I was fucking with him or had instead given him some valuable information. Unfortunately an online consultation of the
WSJ
archive was likely to settle the matter.
“Could be I read it somewhere else,” I allowed. “There’s
so
much information online . . .”
He threw an arm around my shoulder, and when I looked to my side I saw up close what relatively hairless knuckles dad has—just some blond downy sprigs alert above the crosshatched flesh. “Well, thank you, Dwight.” I looked in the opposite direction, at the thin silky thatch of hair and the nose tipped with red like that of a kid come in from the cold. With his free hand he visored-up his shades, and there were the old periwinkle eyes, squinting and innocent. “I’m serious here. Thanks for the heads-up. That’s a very interesting piece of news you’ve given me. Old Bristol-Myers, eh? Because I have noticed just that problem, the problem of the low-level—”
“Yeah.”
“Even in a place like Lakeville. Salisbury . . . So the scientists are referring to a kind of inability to make what we would consider psychological contact with, with—”
“Bingo.”
“With others. Hmm. Old Bristol-Myers . . . Certainly sounds like they’re back on their game. Because what you’re referring to can, I think, be quite a serious problem.”
Dad returned the sunglasses to their position and there I was in them, reduced and convex, smiling and also beshaded—a huge friendly insect. He turned away and released me. “Hmm. And this low-level, this very mild form of autism, it afflicts Caucasians and males in greater than average numbers? Did the
Journal
suggest why?”
“It was a short item. I can’t honestly remember where I read it. I think the scientists must still be at an early phase.”
Around this point I began to feel a little cruel. I recalled mom’s accusation that efforts to get through to dad were often met by a busy signal, and how a year and nine months before, when she’d been screaming out near the pool, wielding a pewter candlestick and making some threatening gestures, he’d displayed great calm and an impressive talent for mimicry by making just the sound you hear when someone else’s line is engaged.
“I think we’ve all noticed this problem,” he said. “Even you have, I’m sure. Well, good for old Bristol. That it attacks who it does. Because that is precisely the target market. Isn’t it? White suburban men. I’ll be damned.”
Now I was feeling pretty sad. “It’s really a pleasure to play golf with you, dad. Maybe if we play more often I’ll get better.”
He barked out a laugh. “Sounds logical.”
Next hole, he turned to me and let me know that he was very proud of my being employed by Pfizer. Apparently this disclosure was the hole toward which he had driven his earlier, more speculative shots, and now he was just putting his way in. He said the pharmaceuticals were doing fascinating work, just as I’d indicated. “A vanguard industry.”
“You’re serious?” Things were feeling kind of tragic.
“Sure.”
Or maybe it was me getting fucked with now? But I told myself probably not. Besides, the stable behavioral patterns of your parents seemed important to believe in.
I reminded dad that I was actually only subcontracted to Pfizer and in point of fact employed by another firm providing tech support. “And the rumor is that pretty soon some guys in Mumbai . . .” Meanwhile I wondered if he was trying to win me over to his camp as opposed to mom’s with his ingeniously contrived praise of my (former) employer.
I told him I had some vacation days coming up, and that in part because New York interfered with my mind by its abundance of advertisements printed in a language I could read, I was considering going off someplace more quiet, less legible, to do a little thinking. “I hope I’ll have enough money, though.”
“You’re not intending to do some thinking about Pfizer?”
“Possibly about them. It. About us.”
“We are not about to enter the Zone again are we Dwight?”
I experienced a flashback to a childhood Thanksgiving. Probably dad did too. I’d loved cranberry sauce, the savory stuffing, and turkey itself with such equality of love that after a gabbled grace I’d been unable to begin eating, and the more ludicrous the spell of indecision became, the harder to break. I’d been salivating and paralyzed in front of my plate, plunged in what later came to be known as the Zone, until finally dad raised his fork at me saying “Eat! Eat! Dammit, eat!” So I’d shut my eyes, loaded my fork with mystery, and raised it toward the cave of my mouth. The tart surprise of the cranberries I could remember still.