Love and Fury (6 page)

But I couldn't tell my father any of this; I knew very well what it would mean to him, what it would wake in him. Not long before, I had sat next to him watching, on his mammoth TV, a program called
Lock-up: RAW
, which as far as I could tell was a white supremacist's wet dream—and I'm using that term on purpose: the screen was filled with black men stripped naked and herded in a mass of flesh, past iron bars from one room to another, while a voice-over spoke of the warden's challenges keeping order and the guards' valiant efforts to not sink to the level of depravity of the prisoners. Whenever a prisoner happened to turn toward the camera, his genitals were hidden by a blurry disordering of pixels. “What the hell are we watching?” I asked him. “Let's find something else.”

“You never seem to be able to completely civilize them.” That's what my father said as he pointed the remote at the TV. My father who had been a counselor at the Boys Club in the black neighborhood in town. My father who laughed and smiled and greeted black friends warmly when we were in a bar or restaurant. My father for whom every black person he knew personally was an exception to the rule.

I could hear a strange, proud note in my father's voice when he talked about his illness. He kept saying that his body was shutting down. He liked to think of his bone marrow as a factory where red blood cells were produced. In addition to being proud, I think he felt somewhat relieved: he wasn't dying through any fault of his own. Like so many guys in that postindustrial rustbelt city, he was out of work, so to speak, but there was no shame in it—the factory, the steel mill, the truck plant, his bone marrow, had shut down. Nothing to be done about it. Not his fault.

Which suggests, to me anyway, that he still blamed my mother for her early death. It was her fault—three packs of Chesterfields a day—of course she would ruin her lungs. He had managed to quit. Why couldn't she?

He had not been overcome nor defeated: nothing had eaten him, neither tiger nor microbe. He was simply “shutting down.” The sidewalk around the house was heaving and cracking with weeds in clumps. The chain-link in the yard was rusty. The whole place, the whole life, was shutting down. Nothing to be done about it. It's nobody's fault.

I was the one looking for an explanation, for a scapegoat. Aunt Kitty had died in her nineties, Uncle Eddie was still alive at the time, ninety-four or ninety-five, and Uncle Don, another nonagenarian, was out in Oregon. My father could have had at least another decade, if only he'd eaten better; if only he'd exercised; if only he'd been treated for depression; if only. I was the one who still needed to find the world reasonable, intelligible in some larger sense.

I usually called him Tuesday nights since he would have his lab results then, “my numbers,” he called them. He had his notebook, a kind of scorebook not unlike the spiral bound books of box scores he kept assiduously during his years as a baseball coach, the notebook now filled with numbers tracing the rise or fall of platelets, hemoglobin, white blood cells, and so on.

There was something surreal about our phone conversations. That he was dying was acknowledged, and yet he was somehow invigorated by the struggle. It was as if this man, who had been a paratrooper in WWII, who had struggled to support a family that included two terminally ill sons, and whose wife had died nearly a quarter century earlier, recognized, even welcomed, his old adversary. It was as if this time, both fearful and curious, he wanted to get a good look at him, maybe get the chance to spit in his eye.

He wondered if death would come in the night, if it would come in his sleep. How much time do I have? He read his numbers for clues, charted their rise and fall from week to week, searched the Internet for explanations of what was happening to him. One Tuesday night when I called he seemed especially upbeat.

“So how are your numbers?”

“Pretty good. Pretty good. A couple of them went down but only slightly. Two of them even went up a little bit!”

“That sounds great. Maybe you hit some kind of plateau.”

“That would suit me fine. I don't feel sick. I'm tired as hell but I don't feel sick.”

“So what are you doing different?”

“I try to think if I changed my diet or something. I don't know. I'm eating a lot of chicken. Is chicken good for you?”

“Oh, sure. A lot of people swear by it. Chicken soup especially.”

“Soup?”

“Yeah. How are you cooking it?”

“Oh, I don't cook it. Your brother brings it home. You know, the good stuff. The watchacallit, Colonel Sanders chicken. A couple, three times a week on his way home from work.”

“KFC!” I laughed loudly. “Oh yeah, that's health food, all right.”

“Well, it seems to be working!”

When Damion moved in with us, we were already a full house. Veronica had been living in her college dormitory for a semester but chose to return home and commute. Robert had been living in Miami, supposedly going to school; in fact, he had failed some courses, stopped attending others, was living on money we sent him every month, and could not bring himself to come clean with us.

We had all been worried about him for some time. A couple of years earlier, Veronica, then a high school student, went to visit him. At the time he was still enrolled at Florida International University. He had his own apartment and she was going to stay with him there. She called me crying.

“Daddy, you have to get him out of here! I don't know what's happened to him, but you've got to bring him home!” What she told me then, about multiple identities, different narratives of his life offered to different people, drinking, steroid injections, a complex web of feints and dodges, was frightening.

I had been sober nearly twenty years by then, and I felt sure that I recognized the frantic self-invention covering the sucking wound of addiction. And I knew that as the firstborn son of an alcoholic, the odds of escaping some version of addictive illness were stacked against him. Still, I reasoned, he needed some room to find himself. I felt I had to be careful not to overwrite his story with my own, the easiest trap for any parent to fall into.

And yet, as the poor grades arrived, along with court summonses for moving violations, for stacks of parking tickets unpaid, and for fender benders, I found myself awake and staring at the ceiling many nights, feeling helpless and worried. I only understood how worried I was when the phone rang at two in the morning—a wrong number—and after I hung up I realized I'd feared it was the Florida State Police.

Kathi and I met with a substance-abuse counselor, a former colleague from the years when I worked at an addiction and mental health clinic. He was an expert at staging and conducting interventions. He thought an intervention premature, maybe inappropriate. We all worried about overreacting. We needed more information, so we arranged to visit Robert in Florida. We spent a week with him. We took a trip down along the Keys. We returned home none the wiser and only a little less worried.

It would be another two years before the extent of our son's deceptions and the unsustainable webwork of his lies—the ones he told us, the ones he told his friends, and the ones he told himself—became known. He had recently rented an apartment with his oldest friend, who was in the Coast Guard and stationed in Miami. The friend called us one night. He spoke to Kathi.

“I'm worried about him. He doesn't seem to care about anything. He just hangs out with his friends or watches TV. He doesn't work or anything. It's like his life is going nowhere.”

“Well, we don't want him working too many hours a week. He's been falling behind in his coursework and we want him to concentrate on school right now.”

“School? Jesus. You think he's going to school?”

He had been quoting me, to the penny, his tuition, fees, books each semester. After his first year, he'd established residence in Florida: off-campus apartment, driver's license and registration, etc., because in-state tuition was much cheaper. I was depositing money—borrowed from home equity—into his account, along with an amount each month for his rent, utilities, and expenses.

Kathi and I were heartbroken and furious. She went online and bought him a one-way ticket home. We called him with an ultimatum: “If you want to continue to have a relationship with your parents, you will be on that flight.” Did we mean it?

I called my father that evening. “Well, that's the last you've seen of him,” he said. I didn't believe it but the prospect terrified me. I realized we were bluffing. Neither of us could have followed through on our threat.

Until then I had always thought of myself as the son in the story of the Prodigal Son. I was unprepared to play the father. Robert arrived at the airport. He was alternately flushed and pale, shaking and silent. I don't think any of us said a word either waiting at the baggage carousel or in the car on the way home. The whole edifice of lies now rubble, the next several days were a continuous wail of remorse, promises, confusion, grief. Racked by sobs, his head in his hands, Robert kept saying, “I don't know what's wrong with me. Something's wrong with me.”

I called my father, relieved we had our son home, and angry about all the money he'd taken under false pretenses.

“That money's going to seem well spent if you can get that kid straightened out,” my father said. “Don't be fooled. If you and Kathi handle this right, it could be your finest hour as parents. Just keep your eye on the ball. That boy needs you now.”

Robert of course resisted the idea that he was addicted to alcohol. “I know that's your idea, Dad. And I appreciate your concern, but that's you, not me. I don't know what's the matter with me, but it's not that. In fact, out of respect for your recovery, I won't drink at all while I'm living with you guys. Not even a beer.” And then one night he came home smashed and puked all over his room. From that moment on, he began rebuilding his life, seeing a counselor, going to 12-step meetings. There were times he despaired. “You can do this,” I said to him, squeezing his shoulders, our foreheads touching. “You can do this.”

I blamed myself. Why had I been so trusting and gullible? Why had we let him enroll in a school with thirtyeight thousand students when we knew he did best in a smaller, personally supportive setting? Why hadn't I responded with more urgency when I was so worried? Why do I talk myself out of things I know in my heart? It was my drunken behavior when he was still a toddler, my rages and inconsistent parenting before I sobered up, that had lain the groundwork for his suffering. I had passed this along to him, if not genetically—although that was likely—then by means of some behavioral or cognitive twist communicated by my early fathering. I had failed that beautiful child, and now this young man didn't know who he was and it was my fault.

You feel responsible. You're the parent. You can't help it.

The months of Veronica's pregnancy were tense. She and Damion mostly lived in her bedroom. Robert had committed himself to sobriety and was working hard to keep himself on an even keel. Kathi and I were both teaching full time, and I was also making extra money teaching in a low-residency graduate program. The house was a stressful chamber of unspoken worries, recriminations, angers, misunderstandings, and fear.

A friend reassured me, in a statement that now seems prescient, “Babies bring their own joy, Richard. Just remember that. Babies bring their own joy.”

The way I remember that morning is that I'd just gotten up and was making coffee in the kitchen, bleary-eyed and dull, as I am most mornings. The phone rang and Kathi answered it. I heard her scream. “Richard! Pick up the phone! Pick up the phone!” I grabbed the extension on the counter.

“Daddy!” It was Veronica and she was crying. Then there was a long and terrifying wail.

“What's wrong? Tell me! Tell me what's wrong!” I shouted into the phone.

It turns out those were my first words to the newest member of our family, who was being held shrieking to the receiver by his father, whose voice came next on the line, “It's okay, it's okay. He's just saying hello to his grandparents.”

A month after his birth, Veronica went back to college for the final year of her nursing degree, and Damion cared for their son tenderly and joyously. Still, the pressures of the situation, including the possibility that Damion would be sent back to prison, were always with us. He found a job but it was minimum wage. As a nursing mother, Veronica was exhausted and finding studying difficult.

It was important to Veronica that my father meet her son, who was named after his father and after mine: Damion Richard Michael Smith. People assume that the Richard is for me. It's not.

Over the years, after the six-hour drive became too difficult for him, we had tried to get my father to fly up to Boston for a visit. No dice. As a young man, a soldier, he had flown on a number of occasions, but, a paratrooper, he had never landed, and he was resolved to have nothing to do with flying ever again. And there was certainly no question of his visiting now. His diagnosis must have felt like being kicked from a plane, and the following months like the descent: first panic and free fall, then the continual attempt to orient oneself. How to judge? Nothing but clouds. Once in a while a glimpse of the ground, the earth. But how much closer than last time? How fast am I falling?