Cocaine's Son (18 page)

How seriously did my parents take Dr. Nichols’s diagnosis? Seriously enough to compose a song about it. It was an original number that was later sung to me in a different context, called “Big Trouble,” set to the tune of the hit Jimmy Dean song “Big Bad John” and whose complete lyrics ran as follows:

My father’s symptoms did not get better of their own accord. He became emboldened and even more open about his habits. At the Friday-night dinners where he gathered with his parents, he sneaked off to the bathroom to get high. He was making so much money from his fur business and buying so much coke that, in those instances when he determined that his unseen captors were coming for him, he could easily afford to flush a half pound of the drug down the toilet and replace it later.

This was followed by a session with another psychiatrist named Dr. Goldman, who specialized in analytic psychology. Upon entering Dr. Goldman’s office, my father declared, “It smells like tuna fish in here.” To which Dr. Goldman replied, “What do you think that means?”

My father’s private meetings with Dr. Goldman yielded nothing more memorable or lasting than tuna fish, but it was he who wrote the order to have my father committed, which my mother signed and my grandfather dispiritedly seconded. On a night when my sister and I had been given over to our grandmother for safekeeping, my father’s visions of a traumatic, violent abduction were realized when the police came banging at his apartment door, stripped him naked and strapped him into a straitjacket, and hijacked him to Bellevue Hospital. He spent the next month there, trying to rationalize with his doctors that he would clean up his act if they’d release him back to his family. He was devoid of companionship save for the transients, schizophrenics, and other hopeless cases who were treated alongside him, and a lone visit from the father who co-signed his commitment papers, who told his haggard, depleted son, “You’re still the best-looking guy in here.”

Thirty days later, clean and sober, reunited with his wife and young children, and liberated from the fear that he would be ripped away from his loved ones a second time, my father resumed his drug habit. Within months he was institutionalized again, this time by his own volition, at the Long Island Jewish Hospital, a live-in facility that he was free to walk away from at any time. At least one of his fellow patients did that during his stay, skipping out in the middle of the night, but my father fulfilled his commitment to the program, contented by the freedom that came with wearing nothing but a hospital gown all day, by his roommates (including a long-haired guitar player who asked to be called Gandalf), and by the occasional visits from his friends, one of whom presented him with a copy of James Allen’s classic tome of new age philosophy,
As a Man Thinketh
(sample aphorism: “Man is always the master, even in his weakest and most abandoned state; but in his weakness and degradation he is the foolish master who misgoverns his ‘household’ ”).

Around this time my father became so proficient and attentive in his drug use that he assembled a personal soundtrack of the music he believed was most compatible with his frame of mind when he was alone and high. I think it says something about my father that his two favorite albums to snort cocaine to were the Spinners’
Greatest Hits
and Emmylou Harris’s
Pieces of the Sky
. His choice of the Spinners I can almost understand, even if it is the sort of record I could never imagine him listening to while sober; it has a certain soothing quality that’s exacerbated when one’s senses are chemically attuned to the deep, rich vocals and pulsating bass lines.

The Emmylou Harris selection I find more surprising, even for a lifelong country-music fan like my father. To a completely sober
listener, Harris’s sweet, piercing voice already possesses sufficient intensity to sweep your legs out from under you; how she must sound to a dedicated substance abuser when she applies that same sonorous power to a laid-back honky-tonk number like “Too Far Gone,” its metaphoric suggestions of loss and dependency amplified by a genuine act of debasement taking place as it plays, is too terribly resonant for me to contemplate. There are biblical references throughout the album, which always seem more compelling, somehow, when you’re intoxicated, and a vague, recurring theme of personal salvation. Strongest of all are the lyrics to “Boulder to Birmingham.” I wonder if my father appreciated the song because Harris wrote it for a friend, Gram Parsons, whom she lost to substance abuse, or because its descriptions of scenes of natural devastation perfectly mirrored my father’s mental state as he was listening to it:

It is hard for me to play
Pieces of the Sky
now and not hear it as anything other than a purgative, a record my father used to extract his sadness and to help him shape and guide it. It is a sad man indeed who gets stoned to make himself feel sadder.

Everywhere my father and I looked at the fabric of his life, without looking very hard at all, we found the stain of cocaine residue. Did I know, he told me, that just to prove to his own mother that he was
not
hopelessly addicted to the drug, he once shot up in front of her while she watched, aghast? Then he offered her the needle and asked if she’d like to try it for herself. (“I was only surprised,” he says later, “that she couldn’t see the benefit.”)

But wait—wait—wait—“I’m going to throw this one at you,” said my father, poking me firmly on the shoulder with his index finger, “see how you handle this”: did I know that my father was high at my bris? In the apartment I grew up in, surrounded by his family, friends, and closest colleagues, on what should have been the happiest day in his life to that point, he was stoned—so stoned that people who were in attendance not only noticed but still remind him to this day. “I’m surprised they didn’t just shoot me,” he said.

In a softer, more sincere tone, he added, “Is it any wonder I don’t think about these things too much?”

We hadn’t even crossed the threshold of the 1980s, and already I could see that there wasn’t enough paper in my notepad to fit the astounding and unsettling revelations that were being delivered to me page after page. “Do you want to know only about the drugs, or should I just cover everything?” he had asked me earlier. What the hell’s the difference, Dad? Is there anything
but
drugs? Without the drugs, what story would there be?

Maybe this was what my father had been trying to warn me about: not that he was afraid he had nothing to tell me but that what he would reveal to me would be overwhelming.
You wanted honesty? Well, now you got it
. At that moment I honestly wasn’t sure I could continue our conversation. Maybe there should be a natural limit to the amount of openness that can exist within a family. Maybe there is such a thing as too much honesty, even between a father and a son.

My father surely sensed in my drooping, defeated body language that I needed a break. “Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.” We got up and walked a few feet from his den into a hallway, where he brought me to another of his beloved devices: a digital answering machine. He approached it and, without explanation,
pressed the play button, setting loose a string of some fifteen or twenty messages, all left either by me or by my sister, each one beginning with more or less the same words:

“Hi, it’s me—”

“Hi, guys, it’s me—”

“Hey, ’s’ me—”

“Hi-
iii
! It’s me-
eee
—”

My father wasn’t interested in the content of each message, when it was left, or under what circumstances; as soon as he heard the singsong greeting—so perfectly intimate and instantly familiar that his son and daughter long ago gave up the practice of identifying themselves by name—he hit the fast-forward key and skipped to the next one. “Isn’t that something?” he said proudly, as if contemplating our college diplomas.

My parents took me out for dinner that night in their sleepy, economically depressed Catskills community, and over French-dip sandwiches and waffle fries, I asked them what had become of my father’s cousin Heshie, who had facilitated their first meeting and ultimately their marriage. What was he up to these days? They chuckled, and my father related a story he seemed fairly certain he had told me before. But trust me, had I heard the story previously, I would have remembered it.

Several years ago, my father had been told by his aunt and uncle that Heshie was killed in a car accident. Months elapsed, during which time the aunt and uncle also passed away, and then my father received a mysterious phone call from the FBI. The agent asked my father if he was familiar with certain associates whom Heshie had been seen with before his demise. When my father asked what the man meant, he learned that his aunt and uncle had not been entirely truthful with him. At his death, Heshie had indeed been found in a car, but riddled with bullet
wounds, inflicted most likely by the organized criminals for whom he was placing horse-racing bets, and whose winnings he had been less than meticulous about returning to them in their entirety. End of Cousin Heshie and his story.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s too bad. I would have liked to hear his version of the day you got busted for smoking pot.”

“Well,” my father said, “I still have my arrest record, if you’d like to see it.”

It was like hearing my father tell me that he owned an original signed copy of the Declaration of Independence. Had he been in possession of this sacred parchment all along? The seed that the roots and trunk and branches of his addiction story had grown from—would I soon be holding it in my own trembling hands? “Can I see it?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” my father said, “as soon as we finish dinner.”

It was all I could think about as I excitedly wolfed down my meal and anxiously discouraged my parents from poring over that last pickle on their dinner plates or ordering one more cup of coffee for the road, as I hastened them back into their car and along the cracked and untended asphalt streets that led us back to their cramped home.

While my parents scavenged their overstuffed abode for the documents, I recited to myself all the events that had followed from my father’s notorious arrest: how he spent the night in prison at the Bronx County Courthouse, how he had to be bailed out the following morning by his humiliated mother, who then hired the son of a beloved local rabbi to be the lawyer in his defense. And how, though the case against my father was thrown out over violations of search-and-seizure procedures, he was not allowed to leave the state of New York for a period of time, which meant that instead of spending the summer in New Orleans selling
fur with my grandfather, as he’d planned, he’d have to remain in the Bronx, painting apartment buildings with his uncle Hymie. Some years later, when my father got his fateful call to appear in front of a draft board that took notice of the arrest, he was able to manipulate the blot on his record to his advantage, teaching himself for all time that drugs made his life thrilling and worthwhile, and that he was nimble enough to concoct alibis for any danger they might get him into, even if he lacked the foresight to anticipate those dangers.

I clung to these details like a rosary every time my mother or father finished searching an area of the house and returned empty-handed. Would I come this close to glimpsing my birthright only to discover that my parents had unthinkingly chucked it during some long-ago moving process, along with a king’s ransom in unused McDonald’s coupons and half-melted Hanukkah candles? Finally, my mother announced that she had found the artifact in an old jewelry box I had rummaged through untold times as a child, never knowing the real treasure it possessed.

There was first a typewritten paper arrest record, turned pink with time, which noted that my father “Did have in his possession a quantity of marihuana,” and at his arrest, he possessed no scars, marks, or deformities.

Beneath it was attached an old photograph of a young man standing in front of a stark white background, his head crowned by the outline of an absent staple that once held the picture to the typed report, giving him the unfortunate appearance of devil’s horns. The young man had an unmistakable look of fear on his face; he clearly knew he had committed an act of wrongdoing for which he was about to be punished—if not by the City of New York, then by a Jewish mother from the Bronx, which was arguably worse. Though the baby-smooth skin and the jet-black hair that
stood a full inch above his scalp, combed and Brylcreemed into obedience, did not endure, in his adolescent face there was already a chubbiness waiting to emerge, the suggestion of a double chin that would not fully assert itself for several more years. His eyes, to the extent that they could be seen behind the glare of bright lights reflected in the lenses of his thick black glasses, had a familiar smallness. Viewed from the side in an accompanying right-profile shot, my father appeared content, but head-on, he was so visibly uncomfortable with his surroundings and himself that the beholder cannot help but feel a little ill at ease himself.

Beneath my father’s face, a black clapboard held by an unseen hand at his shoulder line reported an arrest number, the legend
NYC POLICE
, and the date the picture was taken: December 5, 1962. This meant that my father was twenty-two years old—very nearly twenty-three—at the time of his arrest, not a teenager, as he always was in his recollections of the event. This made it almost impossible for the narrative to have unfolded in the way my father had historically described it: it was highly unlikely that a military physical would have followed soon after his bust, and even if one did, there was no conflict our army was engaged in at the time, no real danger from which my father would have extricated himself by posing as a drug addict.

“What does this mean?” I asked my father.

“Well,” he said, “shows you what I know.”