Cocaine's Son (7 page)

The moral of his first story was clear:
If this was the best I could do
, my father seemed to be saying,
just think how low the bar has been set for you, my son. Look at how little you need to accomplish in order to surpass me
. If I simply showed up for my first lecture, I was already my father’s equal. If I completed a single course with a passing grade, I was his hero. And if, after four years, I returned to that man—the onetime genius who had graduated from high
school two years early only to flunk out of college in under one year—with my own bachelor’s degree from an Ivy League institution, I was his king.

The point of my father’s second story was more ambiguous. He wasn’t strictly saying that he gave me his permission to take drugs; oh, no, the part of his life that overlapped with the entirety of mine had been one long argument against that. And though he loved to spend his summers in a cabin upstate in Monticello, New York, fishing in the morning and watching FOX News in the evenings, I don’t think he was advocating a libertarian worldview that one should always seek to undermine authority and misrepresent oneself to government agencies.

No, I think the lesson he hoped this legend would teach me was a more general one: that it was okay to try new things and important not to be afraid of them; that it was permissible, even necessary, to make mistakes, get silly, throw chicken bones off rooftops; that it was only through the acquisition of experience—no matter how awkward or self-thwarting it might be—that a boy becomes a man. Experience cranked the engine of time, and on occasion time transformed our humiliating defeats into minor victories.

This was what he had been telling me repeatedly, incessantly, until the day he and my mother conveyed me to the location where my trajectory departed from theirs, depositing me at the mysterious machine whose inner mechanisms would be known only to me but from which their vantage point appeared like a great black box working its unknown effects on their son to alter him into something different and unfamiliar, and they suddenly went mute. Unlike the other sets of parents we saw that day, who chaperoned their children with grace and appropriate distance, my mother and father did not take their cues to depart as soon as
they saw I had been delivered safely with all of my belongings; they continued to hover and rotate around me like satellites until I told them they could leave. I unlocked the door to my ancient dormitory, saw its brick walls decorated with green oxidized stars to memorialize the occupants who had died in world wars, and felt a stuffy, humid draft begin to creep in through the stone flue.

I was idealistic enough those first few weeks to believe that any other freshman would be as unfamiliar as I was with the school and its structure and that any new person I encountered could be converted into a friend through conversation. But there is a way that two people look at each other when they meet, even passing strangers whose glances align for an instant. In that moment, their eyes can convey warmth and kindness, indifference or revulsion, calculated and communicated in a fraction of a second. When I looked at my new classmates, I thought I was putting out a message of curiosity and openness, but I must have been communicating desperation and vulnerability, because what I saw directed back at me was ambition, aggression, and antipathy. My college tenure would be spent vying to maintain my averageness against an infinite number of competitors with an infinite range of skills developed from an infinite number of backgrounds, and it would be a losing battle. They came from their country clubs and cotillions, conservatories and community-service projects, preparatory schools and magnet programs, with preexisting connections and private instructors, old friends who came with them to school and more than sufficient charisma to make new ones. I showed up with four Beatles CDs and the same Janis Joplin poster that had hung on my wall in high school.

So for a time I fell in with my three roommates, who all wanted the same thing I did and, who like me, had been led to believe by urban legend and John Hughes movies that by simply being in a
place where lots of women also happened to be and behaving as we normally would, gravitational forces would naturally draw them to us. But over the months and semesters, after many Saturday nights spent scanning the dog-eared freshman facebooks we had dutifully purchased on our move-in day, poring over the female faces and wondering what the bodies attached to them might look like, and renting every movie from every library on campus and watching it in the solitude of our cold and drafty den, we had not made much progress. We began to go our separate ways: one roommate found his peers in an a cappella singing group, and a second was absorbed by his friends in the school orchestra; the third never quite got his act together and trolled the dormitory halls telling our female neighbors things like “You know, I’ve never watched a woman put on her makeup before.”

That left only me, and it meant that down the mean streets would have to go a young man who was not himself mean. I knew where the women would be, and to get to them I would have to get myself to the parties, fraternity and sorority houses, keggers, mixers, dimly lit dormitories, and back-alley taprooms that sat just outside the jurisdiction of campus police. There, I felt, I was certain to find women—women who wanted to be with actual men who looked like they strode right out of baseball cards and deodorant ads, instead of hairless, prepubescent cherubs from Raphael paintings with tiny corkscrew penises. There, I believed, this same youthful innocent who had not yet consumed an entire can of beer would be corrupted into ingesting much more illicit substances. It was paralyzing to think about, and it was all I thought about. I was trapped inside my mind, and my mind was the only place I allowed myself to live.

They were extraordinary, the false realities that I could invent, the elaborate fantasies that I could concoct from the thinnest of
circumstances, and they became more delirious and desperate when some actual women came into my social circle. There was the little Jewish girl with the short chestnut hair and almond eyes whom I met on an off-campus hiking trip, whom I circled and circled but could never bring myself to dive in on. There was the coed, only heard on the phone and never seen, who was set up with me at random for a campus-wide computer-dating dance, for whom I bought an unasked-for bouquet and made an unsolicited dinner reservation, and whose distaste and bewilderment I completely understood when she called to back out of the whole arrangement at the eleventh hour. There was the tall and flaxen-haired roommate of a friend of a friend whom I was too scared to make a move on when I walked her home from a party one night, but whose cafeteria meals I was perfectly at ease crashing and whose dorm-room door I was completely comfortable standing outside at any time of day or night, whether she was home or not. The little Jewish girl with the short chestnut hair and almond eyes even came back to me a second time, ready to let me take another shot at whatever she had to offer, but all I had learned in that time was how to sit actionless in intimidated awe of her, and she drifted away again.

That was just my freshman year.

As a sophomore, I continued to fantasize about the graduate students for whom I checked out books at the art-library desk where I worked, and phoning up girls who said they already had boyfriends at other schools, until I befriended a young woman who lived on my hallway. After a few weeks of hanging out, doing homework in my dormitory living room, and sitting at the back of a chartered bus, swapping swigs from a hidden bottle of Goldschläger on the way to an R.E.M. concert, I had concluded in my messed-up, desperate noggin that we were in the midst of a relationship
that was on the verge of getting physical at any moment. That lasted until she started telling me about the dreamy junior she had her eye on, at which point I viciously and abruptly broke up with her in my mind. I wrote savage eviscerations of her in my journal, fixated on rueful Bob Dylan songs, copying out the lyrics to “Idiot Wind” over and over on my binder in silent dedication to the latest unrequited crush to spurn my unarticulated advances, certain this music by a twice-divorced journeyman who’d known everyone from Woody Guthrie to Federico Fellini had been created to address the personal and specific needs of a nineteen-year-old virgin who’d lived his whole life between New York and Princeton.

I vowed to call her out on her perceived callousness, and when I never made good on this threat, I swore never to speak to her again or even explain how it was that she had offended me. I wondered then, as I do now, if she had the slightest sense of the turmoil she was wreaking in my life. Did some fraction of my agony ever get through to her, and did any part of it remain after I cut myself off from her? Or was she one more woman who wandered blissfully through the world, another unknowing assassin who killed men like me from afar without ever having to see the crime scenes?

It was the midpoint of my sophomore year, and I had found a means of distracting myself from solitude, a medium that offered me access to the part of my brain that didn’t know how big the world was and how tiny and inadequate I had become, something I could turn to at any time of day when I wasn’t feeling the way I wanted to feel or when I didn’t want to feel anything at all, and that was drugs.

I started growing my hair long, traded my glasses for contact lenses, and ditched the remnants of my high school wardrobe for
CBGB T-shirts, in tribute to my Manhattan homestead, and a silver chain I wore around my neck with a padlock I had attached, in honor of the first-wave British punks I had recently discovered. These superficial changes eventually drew me into a whole new group of friends who worked at the college radio station and had memberships at the alternative eating clubs and dining co-ops; who turned me on to all the indie rock and classic rock I had missed in my time spent playing my four Beatles records over and over again; who looked and dressed like Willie Nelson in the 1970s, disheveled and intimidating from afar but utterly harmless up close.

From the fateful night when I was handed a bong for the first time and, not knowing how to approach the apparatus, tried to fit it inside my mouth and asked if they made them any smaller, I became a different person. In those moments when everyone else at a party started shooting stealthy glances at one another and then disappeared to parts unknown, I was no longer the guy left behind to wonder where all his buddies had gone. I was a part of that group, who got to visit the shabby, half-lit rooms where all the action went down, always littered with unwashed clothes and half-eaten sandwiches and smelling vaguely of cats even when no cats were present. I got to watch the rituals, in which an acolyte would retreat to a corner and turn on a stereo softly playing
American Beauty
or
Pretzel Logic
, and a high priest would sit at the edge of a bed or stand over a dresser drawer arranging his relics and manipulating his paraphernalia, packing a bowl of marijuana so compactly and precisely that it looked like a newly mowed field in miniature. Then he would offer up the first hit to whoever looked like he was most in need of relaxation, and eventually, we’d all take a hit, and another and another and another and another, and we were happy and content to share the same air and smoke and
saliva. If you overdid it one night and couldn’t make your way back to your bedroom, you fell asleep right where you were on the floor, woke up the next morning, and wandered home in a delighted daze.

Having concluded my prepared statement, I’m ready to take your questions.

Did I, as a direct result of my new drug-consuming identity, meet any women who, in their blissed-out state, found me more attractive or were willing to sacrifice a small bit of their dignity in exchange for access to, among other things, my stash? No.

Did this identity give me enough of an edge to make me sufficiently beddable to a couple of girls who would have paid me no notice in my button-down days? Probably.

Did I, as the son of an addict, who had seen firsthand the havoc that drug use could inflict on a user and his loved ones, have any hesitation about taking those first steps along a route that could lead me to the same cul-de-sac where my father resided at length? Didn’t I hear in the back of my head an endless echo of that vintage 1980s television public service announcement in which the guy barges in on his kid doing some unidentified substance and demands to know where the kid got it, and the kid answers, “From
you
, all right? I learned it by watching you,” and then a Deeply Serious narrator comes on and says, “Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs”? Are you fucking kidding me?

How do I think my father would have felt if he could have seen me in these moments?

I’m not going to say that he gave me his permission to behave this way or that I needed his consent to do so. My decisions were my own, and I would have made them whether he wanted me to or not. (
Especially
if he didn’t want me to.) But I thought I had anecdotal
evidence of how my father would have behaved in the same situation. Why else had he told me, and told me and told me, about his rooftop dalliances back in the Bronx, about smoking pot and getting caught and, above all, getting away with it, if he didn’t want me to know it was possible for me to get away with it, too? What else had he been trying to teach me from his example other than it is permissible and necessary to experiment with things until you find the way that you fit most comfortably into the world? How else would I know that I had measured up to him until I had a story like that of my own—a moment I could point to and say, “This is who I was before and this is who I was after”? From him, all right? I learned it by listening to him.

He had his origin story, and now I had mine.

My college career was weeks away from its conclusion, but two more years spent getting high to
Here Come the Warm Jets
by Brian Eno and
Raw Power
by Iggy and the Stooges had not been able to drown out the diligent part of my brain. As senior year dwindled to an end, its voice said to me with increasing resolve:
You must have a job before you leave this school—before you otherwise return home and are forced once again to depend on your father
. So while many of my classmates were using those delicious days after final exams and before commencement to celebrate with revelries that were more extraordinary than any they had been able to think up during the past four years, I spent my mornings traveling up to Manhattan for job interviews, clad in a patchwork of dress clothes acquired for the college application process and grandparents’ funerals.