Cocaine's Son (15 page)

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:

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.

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

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 joint? 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.

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?”

“What?” I said, making no effort to stifle an angry laugh. “Are you kidding me?” I realized right away this was the wrong way to respond.

“No, I’m not kidding,” he answered. “Can you just give me the goddamn directions?”

“It’s in the same place it’s been every Saturday morning you’ve come to it for the last year,” I said. I gave him the address and flipped my phone shut.

When my father walked through the front door a few minutes later, his face was flushed and his breath was short. I had to remind myself these were symptoms of his garden-variety anger and nothing worse. “I don’t understand why you had to talk to me like that,” he said.

When we took our seats in front of Rebecca, the morning’s incident was the first and only thing my father wanted to discuss. “Why does he have to be so snide about it?” he said to the room, finding no apparent difficulty in talking about me as if I weren’t present. “Why can’t he just give me the directions and tell me how to get here?”

“Dad,” I said, “this isn’t what the therapy process is supposed to be for. If we’re going to use every session to debate whatever petty argument of the day, how are we ever going to get to the stuff that’s really important?”

“You know,” he said, continuing his train of thought, “he has always been a willful child. Even when he was a little boy. Did you know that when he was growing up, I’d be driving in my car, and he’d be sitting in the backseat, and he would lean up to the front to change the radio stations? I’m the one who’s driving, and he’s the one choosing the stations! Nothing has changed.”

“Dad,” I said, “I was six years old when that happened. Maybe seven. I can’t account for what I did when I was just a kid. I’m not that person anymore.”

“Look,” my father said, “right now you can’t understand what I’m talking about, because you are the son, and I’m the father. But
someday, when you have kids of your own and you are the father, you’ll know what I meant today.”

“Oh my God,” I said, looking to Rebecca for any sign of sympathy or consolation. “Is that not the ultimate cop-out? How am I even supposed to respond to that?”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Rebecca said in her quiet voice, holding up her hands. “Let’s stop this for a second and sort it out. David, what I’m hearing from you is that you want your father to stop criticizing you for things you did a long time ago, in your past, and to start seeing you as an adult. Is that right?”

I murmured a grumble of assent.

“And Mr. Iss-i-koff,” she added, “what I’m hearing from you is that you want David to recognize that you’ve got a perspective he cannot appreciate yet, that there are certain things he won’t understand until he becomes a father himself. Is that right?”

“It’s interesting that you bring that up,” my father replied. “Becky, is your father still alive? What’s your relationship like with him?”

Rebecca was startled by his nonanswer. “I’m … not sure how that’s relevant,” she answered. Her attempt at authority was unconvincing.

“Because I wonder if you would ever consider going into therapy with your father,” he said. “I think you both might benefit from it.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” I said. “We’re not here to work the refs, Dad. To debate the moderators. It’s not getting us anywhere.”

“I’m not allowed to ask Becky about her own father?” he asked.

“Dad, you just suggested that
our
therapist go into therapy.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“You don’t believe me?” My father began to eye the video camera that had silently and without acknowledgment been recording all of our sessions. “Here,” he said, “give me the videotape and we’ll play it back. I’ll show you what I said.”

I could see him preparing to get out of the chair. He was really going to do it. “Dad,” I said, “that’s not what it’s for.”

“Hey,” he said, “that’s
me
on there. Those are
my
words. I’m not allowed to play it back?”

Rebecca interceded. “We’re not playing the tape back,” she said. “And really, Mr. Iss-i-koff, let’s leave my life out of this.”

“I thought this was supposed to be a place where we could talk about whatever we wanted to talk about,” my father said. “Well, this is what I want to talk about.”