The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  •

  My brother introduced me to coke, though that was not his drug of choice. We were opposites in school and in most aspects of everyday style and substance, including when it came to drugs. His depressant, my stimulant.

  In The Noonday Demon, Solomon writes about depression and the linkages with addiction and drugs: “Depression and substance abuse form a cycle. People who are depressed abuse substances in a bid to free themselves of their depression. People who abuse substances disrupt their lives to the point that they become depressed by the damage.” “Depressants such as…heroin relieve anxiety and aggravate depression; stimulants such as cocaine relieve depression and aggravate anxiety.” Bookends, my brother and I.

  Solomon continues: “Opiates…are extremely dangerous in part because of how they are consumed; and they are depressants, which means that they do not do great things for depression. On the other hand, they don’t lead to the kind of desperate crash that cocaine will bring about… Opiates blot out time, so that you cannot remember where your thoughts come from, cannot tell whether they are new or old, cannot get them to interact with one another. The world closes in around you… It is the experience of perfect not-wanting… Opiates are classed as depressants, but their effect is not simple suppression of feelings; it is a species of joy that comes of having your feelings suppressed. On opiates, you can give anxious depression the slip.” Whereas on cocaine, “I get to the point of being unable to string together a sentence again and I don’t care if I never string together a sentence again. I realize that the solutions to everything are simple and straightforward. Being high on cocaine breaks up your memory enough so that the past can’t haunt the future. The chemical happiness of a good hit of cocaine feels completely uncircumstantial… [I]f I could freeze life in that second, I would do so and stay there forever.”

  John and I were both divided and connected by our depression and addiction. We were also divided and connected through our dad’s depression and his compulsive gambling. Research referenced by Solomon shows that addiction pathways (such as for compulsive gambling) are in the brain “and that the object of the compulsion is not really significant…; addiction to behaviors does not differ significantly from addiction to substances. It is the helpless need to keep repeating something damaging that drives dependence, rather than the physiological response to the thing repeated.”

  Three peas in a fuckin’ pod.

  •

  “She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie,” sang Eric Clapton, “cocaine,” though it was transparent she sort of did, and proceeds to riff out. The Grateful Dead was flying high back then, too: “Drivin’ that train, high on cocaine…” But in my mind no band compared to the Eagles when it came to coke times.

  That contention might reveal more about me and my banal middlebrow sensibilities than it does about the granulated, empowdery culture at large. Guilty as charged. Don’t suppose saying that Hall & Oates was a strong backup in my mind for that distinction will garner me any more cred on the street. Didn’t think so (though everybody says the eighties are back now). Maybe I could attribute my middlebrow sensibilities to my devotion to a definitively middlebrow stimulant. Was that an era when there was always playing on the car cassette player or in the dive bar some song by the Eagles? It seemed that way. Maybe they weren’t the Temptations or Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding or Springsteen or the Allman Brothers or the Stones or Zeppelin, but with their brand of bluegrass slash country slash rock slash inhalable or injectable or stimulized LA, they captured the skittery jittery juiced-up mood—if not the, then my mood. In and of itself, that says everything about the drug: omniscience and absolute certitude on call. On a dark, desert highway… Welcome to the Hotel California… You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes… Witchy woman, see how high she flies… Victim of love… Lines on the mirror, lines on her face… Take it to the limit… Life in the fast lane… Try and love again… Freeways, cars, and trucks… Freedom, that’s just some people talkin’… Look at us, baby, up all night… You got your demons, you got desires, I got a few of my own… I am already gone …

  Chances are, you had to be there. But while bubbling and bobbing in that chemical brew maybe nobody was really there. There was somebody there who got my earnest attention when she said that whenever she heard the Eagles, she thought about me, and she made plain that she meant that in a very promising way, so imagine where that was going, beyond earnestly, for a minute.

  All in all, this was a horrible time of shag carpets and shag haircuts, when I was roughly the same age as my father when he got into all of his trouble. Feeling powerless before the drug, sometimes I looked for a way out and I’d go to Mass by myself, Newman Hall at UC Berkeley. It didn’t really work. Of course, as I settled into the pew, I was high.

  It takes a certain sort of out-of-mindset to do that next line knowing that you have no choice but to do that next line and it’s a very bad idea, that you’re going to regret it, that you are going to hate yourself, and that you have a choice but are too weak to resist. What are you chasing, what are you fleeing? Is it the same thing? Self-loathing: is it the byproduct or is it the purpose? Sure, anybody can cite the brain research that cuts a path through the numbness to the hot nerve of absurdity. You know what the drug did to the lab rats who gave up water, sex, food, everything, for a taste. Blessed lab rats. At least they died. A drug that creates the need for itself: it expertly, insidiously, chemically mimics whatever we hold precious in our lives. I’m talking to myself. That’s what the drug does to you. It’s a one-way, endless loop. Another name for addiction.

  Never enough. Never high enough. Never enough product at hand. Never enough. Bindles and vials everywhere. Scales and baggies in the closet. Hundreds, and then thousands in my pocket, sales and buys conducted with a reliable clientele. Late at night I’d count out the cash and pore over ads for cars, deciding which BMW I would buy. Never did buy one of those. Usually profits went up my nose. What’s the business model again? A depressing, sleepless cycle.

  My father called gambling his “vice.” Was coke my vice? That idea also fits to a T. This is a mysterious idiom, possibly historically related to T-shirt, in which case, the T-shirt here would be made of horse hair. Then again, being obsessive-compulsive as I am, I could also view my addiction in terms of that anxiety disorder, too. For cocaine is a drug tailor-made for the OCD set. So that also fits to a T. Was coke my gateway to a life of crime? On some level, it could have been, but wasn’t. Just so you know, nothing really fits to a T with regard to coke. It was a terrible time, I am guilty, I am a sick man.

  I thought I heard wake-up calls from time to time. Meaning every night. Time to stop, this is killing you. This is called wasting your life. I pressed the snooze alarm, not that snoozing was an option.

  •

  My father never offered much in the way of fatherly advice, but I recall a few bons mots along lines like these, repeated over the years:

  Don’t take no shit from nobody.

  Don’t count your money in front of no windows.

  Don’t get clipped.

  Don’t cry.

  Don’t bet with a bookmaker. (Seriously? Seriously.)

  Mostly don’ts.

  What are some of the memorable lessons I acquired from my father?

  How to throw a baseball. (Efforts resulting in mixed if not negligible results.)

  How to ride a bike.

  How to eat spaghetti. (Forget the stupid spoon and don’t talk while you’re eating, you could choke.)

  How to file a fraudulent insurance claim. (Which I did without an ounce of moral compunction once, and possibly twice, when flat broke, in my early twenties. The old post-rear-ender whiplash boondoggle; chiropractors, ambulance-chasing lawyers, everybody knows about this.)

  How to drive. (He was a good driver and he tried.)

  How to check the oil level in the car and the tire pressure.
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  How to maintain a poker face, and how to speak in plausibly deniable English formulations.

  How to make a vodka gimlet. This qualified as useless information; bad drink.

  How to drive after the vodka gimlets, or when sleepy. (Open all the windows, obviously.)

  How to use masking and duct tape. (That is, on about every broken or frayed thing.)

  How to tie a tie and polish shoes.

  How to deal with my mother when she was pissed. (I would enjoy innumerable opportunities to practice this simple strategy, in which I almost emulated his example. For him, it meant going to the track. Since I didn’t go to the track, I took off.)

  Most valuable lesson he taught: I needed to be a better father. Not that he put it that way. You see, one exception to the rule of all his don’ts I learned the time I dropped off my son with him and my mother—Mario must have been five or six. I think I was coming down from the night before, and I had enough sense to have my boy, who loved them, hang with them. Their relationship with him was maybe the high point of their family life. I was, and am, grateful.

  He wanted to say something he regarded as important, I could tell: one, by the fact that he wanted my attention, and two, by the fact that he was talking. He said:

  “They grow up fast.”

  I was shaken. He was right. I wouldn’t lose my time with my boy as a child. I would get myself together. He was right. And I heard an echo of some other voice of understanding, and more than that, of loss. I heard him regretting the years he had lost with his own boys, who grew up fast, and without him.

  •

  Yet I doubt I instantly turned over a new leaf. But then I heard another sort of radical wake-up call. My supplier abruptly went out of business, which signaled to me that this was the time I myself should take the opportunity to hang up the CLOSED shingle.

  I had had a good run with Mickey ever since we got to know each other as incompetent waiters at an Italian restaurant and later as members of the blackjack team in Reno, Tahoe, and Vegas. He was a brilliantly street-smart guy with a soft heart but had no crisis of conscience busting up somebody he didn’t like or who disrespected him, out here in the world or in San Quentin, where he did a serious bit for dealing major weight of what he called H. You’d be nuts to pick a fight with him or flirt with his girlfriend. But what if his girlfriend comes on to you when he passed out drunk that time and you took her home? I am glad he never found out about that, and all men are mad dogs, in case any elves out there remain in the dark. He drove a beautiful, blue Corvette, and we would go to bars and he would hold forth on one subject or another—family, fatherhood, friendship, money, romance. “Don’t think,” he would opine, in a typical aside, “just ’cause the bitch fucks you on the first night you’re anything special.” I struggled to agree, but I wasn’t as smart as he was, and his track record with women was dicey, to say the least. So we had a little bit in common.

  He didn’t leave the business by choice, and I would very much miss him. That’s because Mickey was also my good friend, and that’s also because one night, while he was tweaking on crack, he was stabbed to death.

  It took me a long time to clean up, but maybe addiction is ultimately not in my DNA. Maybe survival is, maybe fear, maybe cowardice. I needed another line of work. Out of nowhere, I got a teaching job and never did another line. It took me a long time to realize how fortunate I had been. How come it didn’t feel that way?

  Poets have famously loved their drugs, doors of perception, visions of Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decreed, radically changing the sight lines, that sort of thing. Poets are by nature inclined to look for infinite vistas, views from the precipice of eternity. Hey, news flash. Spiritual masters all say such vistas, such views are omnipresent and accessible, if you’re looking in the right way. So I hear. But what drugs did for me was the opposite. They made me realize the absolute finitude of time. Time I was expending on nothing ultimately worth knowing or having. I’m not judging. Well, I am, but I’m judging myself. What’s more, they made me realize the finitude of me. Because for me, the drug high amounted to the prospect of an imminent toe tag. Once upon a time, not that I can clock it, not at all, I used to have an infinite number of nights left to live. And then, one night, cocaine was all over for me. Like a death. But a strange death, one from which I could get up and walk away from, like a minor-league Lazarus, so I did.

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  Q. Day of the alleged occurrence?

  A. It was cold weather.

  Q. No, I know it was cold, it was February?

  A. You asked me.

  Q. Was it raining, or snowing?

  A. No.

  Q. Rained at all, that day?

  A. I don’t know if it rained. I know it was cold.

  Q. Don’t remember if it was raining or not?

  A. Pardon me?

  Q. Snowing?

  A. Cold, not raining.

  Q. Not raining, wasn’t snowing?

  A. I was standing outside when it happened.

  Q. Was not raining or snowing?

  A. That’s right.

  Q. Was it raining or snowing when you met in the diner, that was an hour before?

  A. Not that I remember.

  Q. Try to remember?

  A. I came by subway.

  Q. I know you got out on the street, didn’t you?

  A. That’s right.

  Q. Was it raining at 4 o’clock, snowing at 4 o’clock, clear at 4 o’clock?

  A. We got into the car.

  Caza of Brooklyn with Radio.

  What Larks

  After my high-rolling blackjack career bounced into the ravine of busted, I worked as a general manager of Italian restaurants and later as a wine consultant. The so-called hospitality industry would not ultimately be for me, and I was no oenological genius like Robert Parker, all of which must be apparent by now. Nobody else ever asked me where I saw myself in five years, and neither did I, so don’t get any ideas, wise guy.

  Finally I accepted reality. I was tap city. Well, I remember having exactly thrity-five dollars in the checking account, the proud possessor of a maxed-out credit card, and gradually inured to the daily hectoring of collection agencies. I had a child to support. It’s the worst, most hopeless feeling. This also feels a little like death. Only expiration with ongoing consciousness and guilt and unpaid bills piling up.

  My graduate fellowship at Berkeley had run out long ago, and academic job prospects looked bleaker and bleaker by the day for somebody like me. I interviewed at colleges here and there, but insofar as transplanting thousands of miles away constituted a nonstarter (as I could not tolerate living so far away from my son), my professorial ambitions were DOA.

  Then in the fall of 1986 a renowned little independent high school in San Francisco hired me. In absolute terms, a professional comedown, perhaps, but I was grateful and set aside my pride. I went cold turkey: no drugs, no alcohol. I would come to realize quickly that my students were sophisticated and hilarious, complicated and joyous, demanding and generous, the quality of their thinking and writing rivaling the University of California undergraduates I had taught. Was adolescence my natural habitat? It might have been, because three years into my tenure the seniors elected me to give their commencement speech, representing the faculty—the first of two occasions I would be chosen to speak at the school graduation. In June 1989, Tiananmen Square and the political crackdown in China were on everybody’s mind that gray overcast morning in Julius Kahn Park. As I look over the remarks I made, I see things I would nowadays frame somewhat differently, but it’s folly to rewrite the past. I found myself saying things that mattered to me, about teaching and learning and growing up. The words feel dated here and there—crushing on Kathleen Turner and all—but that’s also all right, so am I.

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sp; My students turned me around, bestowed me with purpose and clarity, and my work gave me some essential stability. Despite their gift to me, that graduation speech day, I was a nervous wreck. You know, speaking in public is very different from teaching a class. A class is intimate, anything but public; I always felt at home in a classroom, as a student or instructor. In 1989, I was as yet unaccustomed to presenting before large groups. Also on my mind was that my son, due to enter this high school in the fall on financial aid, without which he could not have attended, had a championship Little League baseball game that day. I was crestfallen to miss it. When I returned home I discovered that he had pitched a no-hitter—and took the loss. Doesn’t that say it all about growing up? Also that day, something else of great significance happened to me. I met the woman who would before long become my wife. She was attending the ceremonies because her goddaughter was graduating. Who can plan for anything?

  This is what I said, over twenty-five years ago, on that cloudy San Francisco morning:

  •

  Let me begin with a confession. No need to scramble, it’s not going to be that kind of confession.

  Recently I have sensed burgeoning within me, like the mysterious monster that plays pop-goes-the-weasel in the Alien movies, a dark fantasy. The fantasy has nothing to do with time travel, or with pitching in the World Series, or with climbing in the Himalayas, or with doing lunch in Florence with Kathleen Turner—intriguing as all these fantasies may indeed be—especially that one about lunch.