“The reason I ask is because in recovery I’ve had occasion to see a lot of people on meds, and Isadora has the same…how shall I say? She’s withdrawn. Listless. Her face is puffy. She’s reading Prozac Nation.”
“She’s not on meds.”
“Has she ever been?”
Esther’s eyes searched the ground for how to frame an answer. “No,” she said. And then: “Well, yes. A while ago.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Look,” Esther said angrily. “You abandoned your daugh-ter! So, don’t get high-minded with me! I know who you are. Don’t come here like the great man in recovery. I saw you once upon a time. I know.”
“I apologize if I’m coming across to you that way. That’s not my intention. I’m just surprised by the changes in her. She’s not the girl I last saw.”
“Of course not! She’s older. She’s a teenager. They’re always moody and withdrawn like that.”
“But she was such a happy little kid.”
Esther’s face flushed, her eyes turned guilty. “Having no father does that to a little girl.”
I didn’t respond. Could tell that my silence unnerved her. I was after the truth.
Finally, she blurted out. “She has a problem with violence!”
“Violence?”
“She’s emotionally disturbed. I had to take her to see psychiatrists.”
“When?”
“She’s still seeing someone.”
“When did this first happen?”
“After your first trip to see her. It’s why I had to cut off any further access. After you left, she became insane.”
Tears filled my eyes. I hung my face sadly, open to hear it all.
“She cried all the time. She yelled. Her grades fell. She couldn’t understand why you had to go. She began to attack me.”
“Attack?”
“She hit me.”
“Hit?”
“Yes! HIT!” Esther sneered. “Your daugh-ter began to attack me with her fists.”
“Well, what did Yaacov think? I mean, did he try talking with Izzy?”
Her eyes grew shifty. “I dropped him.”
“Why? He seemed nice enough.”
“He was a shiftless loser.”
“Okay. So, no Yaacov. But still, I mean, she was nine. Were you afraid she was going to hurt you?” I grinned. “Like those horror movies where some kid becomes demonic—The Exorcist, or something?”
“LAWF!” she blared out in her most stentorian stage voice. “LAWF! Because you’re a man and after all, what does it mat-ter to you if a little girl, your own daugh-ter, violently assaults her own MO-THER!” She leaned forward. “But I am her MO-THER! She is supposed to have respect. She has none.”
“Okay, but you don’t send someone to shrinks because they don’t respect you. You become worthy of respect.”
She deflated. “You don’t understand,” she said tiredly. “She was completely out of control.”
I looked around me at the squalid conditions of the flat—the trash pile in the corner of the porch, still there after all these years, the shabby thrown-together furnishings over which hung the awful smell of cat urine, sardines, and ammonia. Considered what it must feel like to awaken daily to someone like Esther ruling your world. Hell, I’d take a swing at her myself, I thought.
“So, what did the shrinks have to say?”
“She’s emotionally disturbed.”
It’s not that I didn’t want to believe this about my daughter, couldn’t bear the truth about some shameful fact that I’d wish to hide from others and myself. It’s that I sensed, intuited, objectively, that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Isadora that sane parenting wouldn’t remedy.
If Isadora was striking out, as Esther claimed, she did so with good reason. Her mother was mad but she was the adult in charge nonetheless. She had used her position to emotionally blackmail me for years, barring me from contact with Isadora. Now she was spinning a narrative about Izzy that was false, destructive, and unsparing.
Needing to know all the facts, aware that Esther still stood between me and my daughter, I played along.
“Well, what sort of remedy did the psychiatrists prescribe?”
She paused, looked down, away, trying to sort out from her racing thoughts how exactly to frame it.
“Institutionalization,” she said flatly.
Stunned, I whispered: “How long?”
“A year,” she said.
Fury leaped in my chest like a hooked marlin, writhed and twisted before crashing back beneath the surface calm. In my face it may have flashed from angry eyes but just as quickly sank. A perfectly beautiful child was undergoing legal torments orchestrated by a lunatic mother, and I, a visitor, here by her permission only, could do absolutely nothing about it.
“And so, she did the year?”
“Yes” is all Esther said.
“And she got a clean bill of health?”
“Yes.”
I let it go at that. Asked no further questions. It was all plain enough to see. I would need the faith and perseverance to wait until Isadora was of legal age. Only then could I finally reach out, once she was free of Esther.
But there was one moment that even Esther could not suppress, when I saw Isadora as she truly was.
My friend the Israeli author Etgar Keret organized a poetry reading for me in a Tel Aviv nightclub. I asked if it would be all right for Isadora to join me onstage. Of course, said Etgar. I asked Isadora if she would read some of her poems onstage with me. She smiled and agreed.
The club was packed with young people. Isadora and I took the stage, stood side by side. We took turns introducing ourselves, I in English, she in Hebrew. I said that I was her father, I was in recovery, and we lived apart, I in San Francisco, she in Israel. But we were trying to be together, to know each other better, she said. And because we were both poets we were reading poems together for the first time.
The audience clapped and whistled appreciatively.
Onstage, she was transformed. She is beautiful, has a quiet authority and naturally likable disposition. She is also a born performer. I asked her to read first, and without hesitation she ran through a poem of great power and insight that earned thunderous applause. I followed and got a big hand too, whereupon Isadora and I bantered a little between us, and then she read, and then I, each discerning the audience’s mood, picking our poems accordingly, like a couple of old pros who’d been reading together on the circuit for years.
Between us flowed a natural performing symbiosis: poetry and performance are in our blood. At one point, as she belted out a terrifically moving piece about what it felt like to grow up without a dad, I thought: God, thank you. She’s my flesh and blood, reading poems onstage with me. This is an absolute miracle. I can’t believe it! The Shekinah smiled and whispered: “Believe it.”
Then I read a poem about my sadness at not being with my daughter all those years. And felt some great healing take place in both of us on that stage, an unbreakable bond forged by a moment of truth. We were conducting, with poetry, before a public, the kind of conversation that we had desperately needed to have and couldn’t for all those years. It wouldn’t make up for her losses. But it was a start at reclaiming our love. And to the audience, we were an example. They felt us and understood. We were frail, imperfect, trying as best as we knew how, with poetry, to forge our father–daughter love, and asking the audience to be our community of witness. We got a standing ovation from the crowd.
When it was over, Etgar said. “That was absolutely amazing.”
BOOK ELEVEN
82
WHY AN ANGEL? BECAUSE I BELIEVE THAT, IN TIME, that is what we become in sobriety, if we last long enough, to the end. Not the winged kind, no. Not some haloed cupid or sword swinger but a kind of flawed angel, without wings, that belongs to no religion but rather to a species of human heartbreak unlike any other known.
Alcoholics and addicts are unlike any other
people I’ve ever met. I am unlike most people. A blazing mutant of some kind. A wondrous freak. In my mind lurks an urge that will be with me to the end, to put a bottle to my lips and drink myself to death. A judge and jury that I wake up to each morning has pronounced a verdict of guilt on me for no crime that I have committed, just for being alive, and has sentenced me to death, not by guillotine or rope but by a single drink.
It is the strangest thing, this sentence of death, this disease I have which tests me to the max and each day holds my existence accountable to the very universe, a god no religion can know as we drunks know it.
A god of drunks who goes with us into our prisons and gutters, bedrooms and businesses, flophouses and alleys, hospitals and mansions, and patiently waits with hand on our shivering shoulders as we groan through yet one more night of near death, waits to see if maybe this time we’ve had pain enough, loss enough, enough hangover, illness, fear, to ask for help.
And yet many cannot ask, and die right before the god of drunks, who I think must weep helplessly when this occurs.
So many lose heart and fall. I have seen so many of my brothers and sisters in recovery fall. I have seen so many beautiful people die. The poet found in his room OD’d with a needle in his arm. He was my best friend. The twenty-year-old drummer who killed himself over a romance gone wrong. Nice kid. The young artist who drank and was found murdered in her Tenderloin hotel room. She was so talented. The buddy who drank and wound up facedown in a river in Pennsylvania, drowned. The ones, so many, who jumped off the bridge or the roof or put a gun barrel to their heads and squeezed the trigger, or in private ate painkillers until found on the floor brain-dead, or perished young of a destroyed liver. That young nurse, a mother of three, who had everything, beautiful children, loving husband, looks to die for, a house with two cars in the garage, who also had this little problem that she couldn’t stay sober or stop smoking crack, no matter how many meetings she attended or what advice she tried to follow, and one day returned home to that garage, ran a hose, turned on the ignition, and gassed herself to death.
When you have seen as much of that as I have in my sobriety, in the last twenty years, how can I not regard my own reflection with amazement that I am still here. Why me? How did I get so lucky? Really, I don’t know. I want to think that I’ve done something right, but in truth, I know better. I do believe in a Higher Power and I do work the 12 steps and go to meetings and work with drunks of every kind and description, yet it doesn’t seem like enough, it never does. I never feel that I can repay what has been given to me. The love that has been shown. The patience and straight-shooting counsel that has saved my butt time and again. I have met in recovery men and women who are the greatest human beings I have ever known but don’t want their names advertised. Anonymous, quiet angels, invaded by death, propelled by light, who move among us with quiet grace and private suffering and seek each day to help those around them without fanfare or reward.
And so I look back on my life and it is divided in parts: my drunk years and my sober ones, and I can hardly believe the beauty, meaning, and victory that have attended my sober years. I have become someone I don’t recognize, and yet do. A man I dreamed of as a boy, the kind I admired then. A writer and a soldier, poet and artist, a monk and a public man. He is the father and the brother I never really had, who walks the streets of his city and is known alike in high and low places, greeted by politicians and hugged by the unknown homeless, friend to both the criminal and the cop, the outlaw and the spiritualist, well regarded by persons of every color and creed, occupation and social rank. And if asked by any who I most truly am, I can reply: “My name is Alan. I am an alcoholic. And it is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
Because when death sits on your shoulder each day, whispering, urging you to your end, there is no time to lose, so much light to grasp for, strive for, struggle to embrace. We are struggling with light. And yet we are only human after all, so terribly flawed and foolish, selfish and ridiculous. Sobriety can be so messy. At times, I have seemed to myself the most awful of persons. But even then I am ascending, even then I am going up a ladder of light with eyes wide open and hands outstretched, to clasp the next rung up. And I climb.
Then, in 2006, came an email, my very first from Isadora, to say that she was seventeen, about to turn eighteen, would be in New York any day, wanted very much to see me. Could I come?
I was on the next plane out.
Crashed in the East Village in the home of a friend who was away and said I could have it for as long as needed. Didn’t even know how long that would be. Isadora hadn’t provided many details because she didn’t yet have them, or even a phone number where she could be reached. But she had mine and she promised to call. “Dad. It’ll be okay,” she said. “Trust me.”
For almost the whole first day, I didn’t hear back. My head got to work. An alcoholic’s mind knows just where its opportunities lie, patiently waiting. After a few hours it told me that Isadora was lying on a gurney in a hospital emergency room, comatose, so pale, covered in blood, surrounded by incompetent doctors unable to revive her. In recovery, we like to say that the alcoholic’s head is like a bad neighborhood: never go up there alone. I ran to a 12-step meeting in the West Village, where I calmed down and was reminded that once upon a time, not too far from here, I had passed out in doorways, but I was now in town to see my little girl, hoofing about in a French sports jacket with cash in my pocket, and had even brushed my teeth with actual toothpaste that morning. She would call in God’s time, not mine.
And she did. She was with Esther at her grandmother’s lower Manhattan apartment. Would I meet her in Washington Square Park? Before hanging up she said: “Dad. It’ll just be you and me. I want to see you without Mummy. Just us. I’m seventeen now. We can have our own relationship.”
“Yes, sweetheart,” I said. She sounded so mature. A grown woman! That once tiny little angel puffing breaths in her swaddling blanket had just explained to me exactly how things would be from now on. I had not seen her in three years, but never like this: just us, completely on our own.
Before I’d left San Francisco, Old Ray, who had raised a son, advised: “Look. She’s seventeen. So, whatever she says, just don’t contradict her. Agree. Okay? You’ll be a lot happier. The point is not to be right but to be with her. Huh? Yes?”
I sat in the park at dusk, looking around—at the arch, the trees, the big plaza noisy as always with Village street life, young thugs and singers, lovers and the lost, junkies, mothers with strollers, roller skaters. As a seventeen-year-old, I had sat here hunched just this way, fingering an angry zit, intently looking around, a bit morose, with a brooding hunger, lonely and defiant, the suspicious rebel and poetic innocent, craving companionship, meaning, connection. Just like this. With hands folded so and knowing very little about people, what made them tick. And now to be waiting to meet my seventeen-year-old daughter here, where I had once been a teen, her age. It was time circling memory into strange new loops of continuity, offering glimpses of the eternality of things. Just keep in mind, I told myself, how important everything feels at that age, and honor her need to be met on her own terms, with respect, as an autonomous person.
And there she was. Long thick hair, dyed red. In a black short-sleeved three-quarter-length dress with cowboy boots. Isadora. A dramatic young woman. Her face proud and shy, just as mine was at her age. Grown, matured. Walking toward me self-consciously, filled with the specialness of the moment, which I could feel. And New York, for once, seemed to be filled with the comfort of gray blue fading light, magical, safe, uplifting, through which she moved like a dream.
Mad with love, I stood and waited. She carried a black book in her hand. We embraced.
“Izzy,” I said.
“Dad.”
I stepped back. “You’re so beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she said with great dignity.
We held hands. Just as naturally as that. For we had both been waiting
for years. Began to walk along.
“I can’t believe you’re here. I’m so happy.”
“Me too, Dad.”
Even though we can each be hair-trigger reactive, deep down we are long-haul emotional voyagers, Isadora and I, wise in the ways of ourselves, and we know how to wait, even seemingly forever.
We walked and were happy. Found a café. Sat quietly, looking around. We can let love sleep for years, knowing it’s there and will someday reawaken. As if time did not separate our encounters. The way she’d leaned against me in Ashdod only minutes into our first reunion, a simple preverbal ease, like now, that had always existed between us since they first laid her in my arms at the hospital, that reappeared every time we met again.
Smiling at each other. Ordered two Cokes. We sipped through straws, looking at each other. My daughter. Fatherhood is a blessing that nature reserves for the lucky, a way to be that is simple and true and doesn’t need instructions or explanation, so that our mutual closeness and love lives in the interstices of great solitudes, growing there like flowers from the cracks in a wall.
I asked about her writing. She showed me her black book. Decorated with a photograph of her, it was a sheaf of her poems in Hebrew. I tried to read one but my Hebrew was inadequate.
“How’s that for one of life’s little jokes? I’m a writer in English whose daughter writes Hebrew poetry that I can’t understand.”
“Here,” she said, taking the book. “Let me try to translate one for you.”
And so began a weeklong odyssey around scorching Manhattan summer streets, heads tipped together, working to translate her poems, in apartments, restaurants, streets, tossing out word candidates, pondering, judging, deleting, substituting this phrase for that, struggling to render into English her exact intended meaning, and then reading our joint effort aloud to see how it sounded: a Diasporic Jew and his Israeli daughter, the Exiled and the Redeemed, two writers, one progenitive of the other, doing what made us happiest. It was as if God put a song in my throat that had passed to her.
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 36
