Cocaine's Son

by Dave Itzkoff

  He let go of the heavy, half-installed contraption, leaving it to hang awkwardly from the quarter-attached mount. He descended his ladder, sat down on the couch, and began wringing out his tired arms.

  I reluctantly removed the one locked-in screw and detached the fan from its electrical wiring. I set it down on the floor and looked up at the large hole in my ceiling, with lengths of wire sticking out of it, and neither a lamp nor a fan to fill it.

  “Goddammit, Dad,” I said. “This whole fan was your idea. I never wanted to do it in the first place. Now I have nothing. I don’t have a fan. I don’t even have a lamp to light this room. What am I going to do now?”

  My father laughed. “David,” he said, “it’s not a big deal. You can hire somebody to do it for you. You can do it tomorrow.”

  “I think you’d better leave,” I said. We didn’t watch any baseball together that day. I was too defeated to return either of the ladders I had borrowed, so they stood all day in my living room beneath the ceiling hole like some art installation.

  On Sunday I went on Craigslist and found a handyman who, for fifty dollars, installed the ceiling fan. He screwed the mount in place while I balanced the fan on my head with a pillow. I quickly discovered that even at its medium setting, the fan spun so quickly that it blew loose papers around my living room, and over time it was too much of a hassle to keep its fake-wood-finished blades free of dust.

  A few months later, I joined a gym where a weight machine called the overhead press became my nemesis. After over a year of training on it, I was never able to lift over twenty-five pounds above my shoulders, and with each of the 3,744 reps that I estimate I did in that time, I thought of the goddamned fan with every strenuous goddamned lift. A few months after that, I moved out of the boxy apartment, making no effort whatsoever to disconnect the fan and take it with me. I hope that whoever lives there now does a more diligent job of dusting its blades than I did.

  IV. The Card

  There are only two practical driving routes from Monticello to Manhattan, with the only major difference between them being the choice of the Tappan Zee Bridge or the George Washington Bridge. At most hours of the day, on most days of the week, either option should deliver a traveler to his destination in a consistently reproduceable amount of time; a Monticello resident with a regularly scheduled Saturday-morning appointment in Manhattan should, with minimal practice, have no trouble arriving for this engagement as punctually as Mussolini’s celebrated trains. Still, the trip presented my father with the occasional challenge.

  One morning I was sitting in the lobby of our therapist’s office, working systematically through a bagel and a crossword puzzle. I allowed myself one bite of the bagel for every five crossword clues solved as I waited for my father, and I tried to guess the identities of the other families I occasionally saw enter and exit. Which parent had the substance-abuse problem? The mother? The father? Both of them? What was the substance—or were there substances plural? How much did their child or children understand about what they were going through? Were they closer to reconciling than my father and I seemed to be? It was satisfying to imagine that they were much, much further away.

  It was ten minutes before the start of our session, then it was starting time, and then it was ten minutes after, and then twenty. Finally, my father ambled through the institute’s front door with a look on his face that seemed to ask: Have I seen this place before? After giving me a perfunctory, jittery hug, he walked up to the young black man who manned the security desk and laid out an array of quarters.

  “Let me ask you a favor,” my father said to him. “I’m parked outside at a meter that’s going to expire in another couple of minutes, while I’m upstairs with the therapist. At about half past, could you go outside and put some money in it for me? It’s the red Taurus just outside.”

  It was as if my father had walked into a bank and asked a teller to do his laundry. I did not like that he was asking the man to do a job that fell well outside his clearly designated responsibilities; the fact that he was an old white man asking a young black man didn’t make it any more comfortable. All I had to do to register my discontent was let out an exasperated sigh.

  My father heard it. “What?” he snapped at me.

  “This isn’t his job,” I said. “It’s not his responsibility to put quarters in your meter.”

  “Hey,” my father said, “let him answer for himself.”

  The receptionist gave no response, yes or no. He just stared blankly at the quarters my father had presented to him.

  “I’m saying he shouldn’t have to do this, and you shouldn’t put him in this position,” I said, and so saying, I swept the quarters off the countertop and into my pocket.

  My father and I rode together in the cramped elevator, pressed up against each other and saying nothing. He barged headfirst into Rebecca’s office, and before she could chastise us for being late, my father extended his hand, instructing her to wait.

  “I have something I’d like to talk about,” he said. “We were just downstairs, and I was running late, and I didn’t have time to put enough money in the meter. I asked the guy behind the desk if he would feed the meter for me, and my son”—enunciated as if he were saying “my tumor”—“gets mad at me. I say what business is it of his if this guy is willing to put the quarters in for me? But what do you say, Becky? Who was right, and who was wrong?”

  Rebecca started to answer in a sterner voice than she typically demonstrated. “You shouldn’t ask the guard to do that for you, Mr. Iss-i-koff. That’s not what he’s here to do.”

  I should have let her finish, but I interrupted: “What does this have to do with anything? Do you understand that we’re not here to have Rebecca settle every argument we ever get into? Of all the things we could be talking about in the … thirty minutes we’ve got left, how does this relate to you and me?”

  “Hey,” my father said, “it’s my money, my time, and I’m going to talk about whatever I want to talk about.”

  “Fine, but you’re going to do it without me,” I said. I exited the room and, in what felt like one continuous motion, descended the institute’s long staircase, blew past the same receptionist I had been defending minutes ago, and walked out the front door.

  One subway ride elapsed, and I was walking the blocks back to my apartment when my overriding sense of certainty and righteousness began to wear off. My cellphone rang, and I could see that the call was from Amy. We had been seeing each other more frequently, long enough for me to have told her that I had been going to therapy with my father and long enough for her to have known that this was the regular time of the week when I normally would be in a session. My outsize frustration that she would call me at a time when she knew I would not be reachable was outweighed by my desire for human contact, and I mistakenly took the call.

  “Hi,” she said cheerfully, not yet realizing that she was talking to a crazy person.

  “Why are you calling now?”

  “I—I was just going to leave a message,” she said, startled. “Aren’t you supposed to be in therapy right now?”

  “I am,” I said. “I was. I left.”

  “Is something wrong?” she asked. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Let’s just say it got really bad in there today and leave it at that.”

  “You sound so sad right now,” she said. “Can’t you at least tell me what happened?”

  “I will,” I answered, “at some point. But not right now. I don’t think you’re ready to hear it. I don’t want to freak you out.”

  “But you wouldn’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t you understand? I’m not going to run away from you because you’ve got problems.”

  “Not. Right. Now,” I said, ending the call.

  That did not go well at all. So I picked up my cellphone again and dialed my mother, hoping that she of all people would absolve me of my frustration and give me permission to end this misguided experiment.

  �
��Mom,” I said, “I can’t do this anymore. He’s not listening to the therapist. He’s not listening to me. He won’t listen to anyone.”

  “What can I tell you?” she said evenly. “He’s a difficult, difficult man.”

  She called me back later that day to tell me she had been shopping in Wal-Mart and found a greeting card that she thought summed up the situation perfectly and that I would be receiving it soon.

  A few days after, a simple cream-colored envelope arrived in my mailbox. Inside was a card with an illustration of Winnie the Pooh, in his au naturel A. A. Milne era, before Walt Disney compelled him to wear human clothes, holding hands with Piglet in a windy storm. A caption read, Be brave, dear friend. You’re stronger than you think …

  On the inside, it continued (And you can hold my hand anytime you want).

  My mother had added a message of her own in her whispering, minuscule script, dated the same Saturday as the day I had fought with my father. It looked like she had spent many minutes carefully considering her words, and it was as much as I had seen her write in years:

  Dear David—

  Did I tell you this was the perfect card.

  Life is not perfect—Do not expect perfection

  Even from those you love, As much as it hurts

  you, & as much as it frustrates you.

  Do not isolate yourself—you do not have to

  be alone because of disappointment &

  you can do anything “together.”

  Because we care, we Love you always,

  Mom

  Hers was the only signature that appeared on the card, but it was enough to ensure the therapy sessions would continue for at least a few more weeks.

  V. The Hall

  Here is roughly how every conversation my father and I have ever had about baseball has ever unfolded:

  HIM: So are you at work right now?

  ME: Dad, I’m at home. You called me here.

  HIM: …

  ME: …

  HIM: So did you see that the Yanks traded for Johnny Damon?

  Here is what I remember about the time, several years ago, when I took my father to see Game 2 of the 2000 World Series between the Yankees and the Mets. I remember purchasing the tickets on eBay, offering the seller an additional two hundred to shut down the auction immediately even though I had placed the highest bid. I remember the feeling of anxiety that amassed like lead pellets in my stomach when I saw that the tickets had no holograms, watermarks, or other fancy anti-counterfeiting features, and I believed right up until the moment when they were accepted at the gate of Yankee Stadium that I had purchased fakes. I remember how terribly cold it was that night and how distant from the action our seats were, and how, when Mike Piazza had a piece of his broken bat lobbed at him by Roger Clemens, it looked like Clemens was gently tossing it in Piazza’s direction. I remember how the Mets outfielder Benny Agbayani’s boast that his team would take the series in five games was rendered null and void when the Yankees picked up their second win that night, and how amazed I was at the ease with which we caught our subway ride home despite the size of the crowd that had turned out.

  I just don’t remember anything my father or I said to each other, if we said anything to each other at all.

  A few years later, on the advice of our therapist, we came to the Baseball Hall of Fame. A bunch of nothing in the middle of nowhere is how I’d describe it. We arrived on a cool summer afternoon, expecting to find it overrun with other pilgrims, drawn by some magnetic pull transmitted through testosterone. Instead, Cooperstown was a small rectangular patch of asphalt, sidewalk, and parking meters furnished with a couple of vintage trolley cars and what was once a Woolworth’s. No massive crowds awaited us within the hall’s unassuming brick exterior, though the building was well visited that day, entirely by men: contingents of college dudes; fledgling fathers shepherding their young sons; loners with oversize earphones wrapped around their heads, probably listening to baseball games while they ogled baseball artifacts in the baseball shrine to baseball’s greatness. Everyone we saw was wearing at least one article of paraphernalia supporting his favorite team; I had dressed in a T-shirt with the logo for Metroid, a 1980s-era Nintendo game, and I wasn’t the least bit out of place. The whole operation was not dedicated to preservation so much as to taxidermy; the spirit of the sport did not reside there so much as it stuck like a bug on flypaper.

  All the relics you would expect to see were there, ripped from their familiar contexts: the balls that were hit or missed when records were established, the bats used to wallop them, the gloves that caught them, and the batting helmets they ricocheted off. Some patrons stood with silent reverence at the exhibits, and others took futile photographs through glass display cases—trying to capture images of artifacts that represented long-ago acts and the men who achieved them—of caps and mitts and locker room doors. How far could the adulation go? I wandered the grounds with all the curiosity of a baseball fan who, upon hearing the news that the old Yankee Stadium was to be razed, mourned only for the loss of the rare concession stands that served chicken fingers with French fries.

  My father appreciated these items more but enjoyed the trip less. He had been having trouble with his knees, locked in a vicious cycle where his arthritis was making it impossible to exercise regularly, which in turn exacerbated the arthritis and the muscular atrophy, none of which was conducive to a day of walking and standing around looking at sports memorabilia. He lagged behind me and sometimes skipped entire rooms when the pain was too great. When I forged ahead, I could still hear him huffing and puffing, the cadence of his voice rising and falling as he cajoled a passerby or an off-duty tour guide into a casual conversation that soon became a one-way rant about baseball or fatherhood or the fur business. I could hear him slapping his shorts or the sides of his legs to emphasize some unheard point, each one driving some pinprick of irritation deeper into my skin.

  That I could not reproduce the physical feats of the men commemorated in this building, could not even play the game they perfected or any other like it, could barely identify who many of its greatest heroes were or what teams they had played for, seemed to me largely the fault of one man. Sure, he had bought me a few bats and gloves in his time, even offered to take me to the park every once in a while to throw a ball around, but by then I was already too set in my ways—too entranced by videogames and television screens and the sedentary satisfaction of sitting at home doing nothing. Even if he could not teach me to play sports, he could have shown me how to talk about them competently, so that the language of earned-run averages, slugging percentages, and fielders’ choices that all my friends seemed to speak fluently by third grade did not haunt me like a foreign tongue for the rest of my life. Even now, when he was presented with a belated opportunity to induct me into this most essential masculine tradition, what was he doing? Talking to other people and struggling with his own physical malady.

  When we reached the gallery where the Hall of Fame players are honored with vaguely funereal plaques, my father was in too much pain to walk. He sat on a bench, never rising to inspect a single tablet or to see if any of his own boyhood heroes were immortalized here. As he sat down, and when he at last rose to leave the room, he announced, “They ought to put me in the Hall of Fame.” With this repeated declaration of endurance, our trip came to an end.

  On our drive out of Cooperstown, my father noticed a few signs for a concert, a rare joint appearance by Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson at the local minor-league baseball park, scheduled for later that night. “You wanna go?” my father asked sincerely. We easily could have done it and were already in the right place. We’d just have to get ourselves a pair of tickets and kill a few more hours in Cooperstown. But how would we pass the time? Where could we go that wouldn’t require my father to stand and walk? How would he behave at the concert? What if he couldn’t understand Dylan? How would he react when Willie used his set to protest the war in Iraq? What if someone offered us a jo
int? What if I wanted to smoke it? What if he wanted to smoke it?

  “Nah, that’s okay,” I said. “I gotta be back in the city tonight.”

  Somewhere between Cooperstown and Monticello, we stopped to eat at a barbecue stand, a Southern-style restaurant that served its food on long sheets of brown paper. No one preserved my grease-stained paper or rib bones, picked clean of every last morsel of meat. But I came away feeling that I, too, deserved a place in somebody’s hall of fame.

  VI. The End

  Another Saturday morning began with my usual pre-therapy ritual. I was in the lobby of the institute, making steady progress at my crossword puzzle and my bagel, waiting for my father to arrive. Lately, we had been asking Rebecca when we would know it was time to conclude our therapy for good; my father had become so enamored with the process that he had begun evangelizing to his friends about it. He had recently told me about a conversation he’d had with a childhood friend, in which the friend confessed that he’d had a falling-out with his own son, who was about my age. “I told him he should go to his son and get him to go into therapy with him,” my father told me with proud, resolute faith.

  “Dad,” I said, “don’t you think we should worry about ourselves first?”

  My bagel and my crossword puzzle were complete, and it was nearly time for our session to start, but my father was missing. My cellphone began to ring—and it was him; from the background noise, I could tell he was in his car, which meant he was still several minutes away, and I was instantly anxious. Rebecca had warned him before about being late to our appointments; she had told him that she would not let meetings run long to make up for late starts.

  “David,” he said over the phone, “I can’t remember where the institute is. Can you tell me how to get there?”