Cocaine's Son (25 page)

Now, a hermetically sealed capsule suspended thousands of feet above the ground and hours away from the nearest landmass may not be the ideal location to pick a fight with a woman who has been your wife under twenty-four hours. So all I say to her in response is “Come on, you didn’t really think that was going to happen, did you?”

But what I’m really thinking is:
Are you fucking kidding me? Do you sincerely think that my father’s top priority on the day that his firstborn and (I would like to believe) most beloved child gets married is to score cocaine and snort it up before he walks me down the aisle? Do you imagine that this agenda item appears anywhere on his list of things to do for the day? Do you know so little about this man, and have his quietly heroic efforts in the name of sobriety done nothing to convince you that he is capable of keeping his addiction in check—if not for the last five years, then at least on the one day that means more than anything to his son?

And then I think:
Hold on a second—this woman does not really know my father personally. She wasn’t raised by him, didn’t grow up alongside him. What she thinks she knows is what I’ve told her about him—the depiction of him that I’ve presented to her, that she is attempting to defend me from in advance, for an offense he hasn’t yet committed. If her impressions of him are based on faulty information, where is she getting her information? If she can’t understand my father in the way that I want him to be understood, whose fault is that, really?

And then I think:
Just a minute, you goddamned hypocrite. How
can you, in your mind, right now, ask for clemency for your father when you yourself have sentenced him to imaginary deaths over and over again for the very same crime—the crime of being who he used to be? If you can’t admit to yourself, and mean it, that he’s not that person anymore, why should anyone else believe it? What makes you so special that you can hold it over his head forever? Don’t you think he understands that last bit of presumptive innocence went up his nose a long time ago? Don’t you think he bears this on his back every day, and if he can carry this around for thirty years, doesn’t that put the guy who spent three measly days up on the cross—whom we don’t believe in, by the way—to shame?

No part of me has any time to answer these questions. The farther our plane travels and the closer we get to our blissful arrival, the more I feel like something is coming apart—the harder the plane seems to be tugging on some sort of safety net, and the faster it feels like it’s unraveling from underneath me. A delicate web in which I always knew my place is coming apart strand by strand, and soon I won’t have any framework to exist in at all. I’ll just end up drifting in empty space, like the plane currently carrying me, with no origin and no destination. A hole is opening up in the fabric of my familiar world, and I dive in headfirst.

Now I am somewhere earlier in time, in the days before the wedding. I haven’t yet celebrated my wedding eve by smoking pot and eating bagels with my best man in a townhouse in Brooklyn Heights. I haven’t yet endured the following morning, fixated on the distant—yet feasible!—possibility that our rabbi will miss the last train that could get him to the wedding on time, and the lone person without whom the ceremony literally cannot be performed will be devastatingly late or perhaps fail to show at all.
And I haven’t yet spent an afternoon riding in a chauffered van to my own nuptials, wondering for the sake of argument what would happen if, at the next red light, I simply opened a door and ran to the horizon.

I am about to have my last telephone conversation with my father before the date in question. We’ve been speaking more frequently lately, for practical purposes. Two telephone calls ago, the exchange went like this:

“You know, Dad, it’s customary for the father of the groom to give a speech at the rehearsal dinner.”

“Shit. It is? Can you write it for me?”

“I don’t know about that. I can
help
you write it. I could try to help you think of things to say.”

“What should I talk about?”

“Probably a memory of me. Or of us. You could tell a story from when I was younger that shows how I’ve changed from then to now. Or a story that shows how I’m still basically the same. That’s what I’d do, anyway.”

“What if I can’t come up with anything?”

“You’ll think of something. Why don’t you take a few days and try to come up with some memories? I know you know how to do that.”

“What if it upsets you or embarrasses you?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. If you say sincerely whatever’s in your heart, I’m sure it will be fine.”

“Hey, just because you can easily imagine it doesn’t mean it’s easy for everyone to do.”

One telephone call ago, the exchange went like this:

“So how is the speech coming?”

“I think I came up with a memory, but I don’t know if it’s one I should tell or not.”

“Well, why don’t you tell it to me, and then I can decide.”

“Okay. Do you remember when I was teaching you how to drive, and you ran that red light that time, and I said, ‘Hey, what are you thinking?’ And you said, ‘I’m thinking about pussy’?”

“… Don’t tell that story.”

The last phone call almost doesn’t happen at all; I start by calling my mother to beg her to please be on time—no, as early as possible—to the venue on the day of the wedding.

“I’m probably going to get there first thing in the morning to get my makeup done,” she says. “But you know your father. He wants to take separate cars.”

“Don’t let him do it, Mom,” I say. “
Don’t.
”

“You can tell him yourself,” she says.

“…”

“Hiya, Davey.”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Howya doin’?”

“Counting down. You?”

“Still livin’.”

“You guys going to be there on Sunday?”

“Of course we’re going to be there. You think we’d miss it?”

“What time are you planning to get there?”

“Well, if it were up to me, I’d leave whenever I had to. But you know your mother—she’s got to get there early so she can have her face made up and put on her dress. I was thinking I might take my own car so I can—”

“
Please
don’t, Dad.
Please
. Can you just this once ride in with her? I know it means you’ll have to get up earlier, but—”

“Okay, Davey,” he says with mock oppression, to let me know he’s not really oppressed and to remind me that, yes, in fact, he sort of is.

“How you feelin’?” he asks. “You nervous? It’s okay to be nervous, you know.” This is his way of telling me that not only is it permissible to be nervous, but it is his preference that I be nervous—that the only way he can think to respond to an uncertain situation is to get nervous, and therefore, he cannot understand why anyone else placed in the same situation would not also get nervous. Thus he would be deeply suspicious if I were anything but nervous.

So I give him a taste of what he wants. “Okay, yeah, I’m a little nervous,” I say. “There’s just so many moving pieces that have to come together, it seems impossible that they’re all going to fall into place the way we’ve planned. One or two, you’d think, would have to go wrong. But am I worried that I don’t have the nerve to go through with it? Nah.”

“You mean you’re not going to get up early in the morning and go fishing?” he says with a chuckle. This is a reference to a true story—this is how he spent the morning of his own wedding: by himself on a fishing boat, utterly unaware of how much time had elapsed or when he was due at his ceremony, until his future wife and in-laws went to the lake where he was happily not getting married and escorted him to the service.

“Not me,” I say. “I just hope Amy makes it there, too.”

“Don’t you worry,” my father says with uncharacteristic certainty. “She’ll be there.”

“So how’s the speech coming?”

“Pretty good,” he says. “I think I’ve got a good story this time. It’s about Mommy and me and how you and Amy remind me of us. She’s been real good for you, David. I think she’s been good for you in a lot of ways.”

“Yeah?” I say. “How?”

“She’s evened you out,” he says. “She’s calmed you down.”

There is a lot bound up in such a short remark. It implies, first of all, that I am or once was someone in need of calming down but also someone capable of calming down—that in my father’s eyes, I could still be that irritable, angry, tightly wound person I didn’t want to be perceived as, and that he was at last able to see me as something other than that person fixed in his mind for most of my adult life.

It implies something else, too: in order for my father to have any sense of before and after, it means that he has to be paying attention. Here I was, all this time, thinking of myself like some kind of anthropologist conducting a field study, taking notes and recording my thoughts from a safe, objective distance, and never once did it occur to me, what if, from behind the bars of his cage, my subject were performing the same experiment on me? Talk about your fundamental attribution error. He who fights with his parents should be careful lest he thereby become a parent. And if you gaze long into your father, does your father not gaze back?

This is as close as I will get to a pep talk from my father before the wedding. I will receive no affirmation from him that on this day, in his eyes, I’ve finally become a man, no fumbling, clinical explanation of what I’m supposed to do on my wedding night. I have known for some time that one of his fondest desires was to see his son find a companion for life, and I trust that seeing that wish fulfilled must bring him some quantity of joy. But does the absence of having any more dreams for his son—indeed, the impending absence of having a son at all—fill him with any melancholy?

I must be on to something here, because for once, I am not forced to jump around in time, and events continue to occur in a linear sequence. I go to sleep at night, wake up the next morning in the same bed. I entertain Amy in my underwear, we work on
our speeches for that night’s rehearsal dinner, and somehow we have confidence that even though it is utterly storming outside—for a moment I wish old Adelphia were here from New Orleans to remind me that, indeed, these things do pass—we have checked enough weather websites on the Internet to assure ourselves that tomorrow will be as clear and sunny as any day we’ll soon see in Hawaii. Compared to some of the other leaps of faith we are about to take, that one seems pretty trivial. Still, I can’t resist screaming a hearty “Fuck off!” to the two women who try to steal the cab we have narrowly hailed in the pouring rain, because it helps to break the tension.

The rehearsal dinner turns out to be the largest gathering of people I am related to or otherwise intimately acquainted with since my bar mitzvah, and the first time in as long since I am the center of that many people’s attention, which of course is bizarre and unsettling. It’s as if the world has somehow shrunk to a small enough point that you are the closest thing to a celebrity that remains in it. Everyone is grateful for the feeling of rejuvenation and potential for rebirth that you bring to the room, because they could use it—they have no more joyous transitions to look forward to in their own lives.

There is my uncle, my mother’s brother, whom, the last time I saw him regularly, I called “Uncle Pussycat” for the short prickly mustache he had begun to grow; now he’s got a full white beard, and he’s old enough that no one can chastise him for attending tonight’s festivities in a Hawaiian shirt (authentic, purchased in Maui, as it happens). There is an old friend of my father’s from our bungalow-colony summers, who used to be strong enough, when I used to be small enough, to lift me up out of a pool and hurl me to its opposite end; now he looks like his spine can barely support his saggy weight, and his eyeballs can hardly support
their droopy lids. What happened to these people? Didn’t they once seem like gods, immortal, eternally youthful? Don’t tell me they expect me, a kid, and my child bride, to pick up where they left off. And don’t tell me they once thought about themselves what I think now: that this is never going to happen to me, that I’m never going to get old like they did and like they saw their parents do. They only thought they could prevent it from happening to themselves, but me, I know it. I can
will
it to be so.

It is after all fifty or sixty of us sit down to eat and our salads are served that things really begin to get interesting. One by one, we go around the room giving speeches—some prepared, some extemporaneous, and some prepared to look extemporaneous—that are testimonials to my character or Amy’s greatness or the institution of marriage itself. Never have I been in such a room, where so many people want me to look optimistically toward my future and are actually on the verge of convincing me to do so.

Each of my groomsmen and Amy’s bridesmaids share a miniature observation from which they extrapolate that we are perfect for each other and will remain together for time immemorial. My mother gives a speech in which she quotes George Sand—
George Sand!
A sixty-three-year-old woman from the Bronx with a high school education, who still occasionally mixes up Billy Idol and Billy Ocean, quoting
George Sand
!—reminding us all that “there is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved,” before she gets choked up and can barely finish.

Then Amy and I give our speeches, and quite frankly, we kill. Hers is a little more theatrical, mine a little more artless, but by coincidence, we have both chosen to tell the story of the same moment: a dinner we shared, about two years before this day, when she told me that she couldn’t imagine herself being married to anyone. Her account tells of how she got over that attitude,
while mine tells of how I bided my time while she got over that attitude, but in the end, at least, we came to the same place. I could recite in more specific detail how great these speeches were, but then I’d just be bragging.

There’s one person who hasn’t been accounted for. My father is visibly nervous as he stands up from his seat, shivering in place and wringing his hands, as if he’s fallen out of a boat and is trying to rinse out all the water he soaked up. “Okay,” he announces, “here we go.” Then his voice doubles in volume: “Into the valley of death rode the six hundred!” he shouts, extending a fist, accompanied by a sound effect from his mouth that to his ears perhaps resembles the Russian cannonade at the Battle of Balaclava. “No, wait—” he says. “What am I saying?” This is how he behaves when there is no pressure on him and absolutely nothing is at stake.