Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (49 page)

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.

We also did dumb stuff. Went to see
Pirates of the Caribbean
. She dragged me to see
The Color Purple,
almost the only whites in an audience of mainly black women, some quite large and big-breasted, who for every song performance jumped from their seats to sway and clap. Izzy did too, laughing and loving it and glancing at me disconcerted as I sat there so curmudgeonly, refusing to join in this daytime TV–level middlebrow activity, until I found myself on my feet too, because Izzy was, clapping and cheering because she did, and to my great astonishment feeling like a brassy big-breasted uplifted black woman, full of soulful Oprah love.

She had a camera. It turned out that photography was her other artistic fixation. We went around Manhattan shooting everything and stopping every five seconds on the sidewalk to study the image, marveling at specific effects, Izzy asking for my critiques, considering my views.

One evening, at twilight, we found ourselves at 9th Street and Avenue A in the East Village, Tompkins Square Park.

“Daddy,” she said. “Isn't this where you ended up in your drinking?”

I could barely bring myself to look at the park in her presence. “Yes,” I said numbly.

“This is where you would go to drink when I was little?”

“Sometimes.”

She wanted to see which bench I'd slept on, but the park was closed and the benches welded with metal hoops that prevented using them for a bed. Along the park wall, though, were blacked-out drunks and junkies all in a row, like napping nightmare adult kindergartners, pants down around their naked unwashed bottoms, angelically vulnerable in their incapacity and strangely awesome in their sheer proximity to annihilation. Some looked just days away from a pauper's grave.

“That pretty much was me,” I said, nodding their way.

“No. I don't believe it.”

“No. Really. That was me.”

“I don't believe it. You could have stopped drinking if you wanted to.”

“No, Izzy, I couldn't.”

“I don't believe it. You could have.”

“No, I couldn't have.”

“Yes, you could.”

“Izzy, I'm telling you, I—”

Suddenly, I heard the voice of Old Ray telling me to remember that she was seventeen, to just agree with anything she said.

“Uh, maybe you're right. Maybe I could have. Sweetheart, I need to get to a meeting. Why don't I drop you at your grandma and then I'll meet you afterward.”

“Can I come?”

“You want to come to a meeting with me?”

“Yes.”

It was close by. And we found front-row seats. The speaker talked for twenty minutes about how he had been unable under any circumstances to stop drinking, no matter what. Then, one after another, recovering drunks raised their hands and shared that until
getting into recovery they were unable to stop drinking.

Halfway through the meeting, a light went on in Isadora's face. She raised her hand. Was called on. I stared, amazed. She said: “My name is Isadora. And this is my father, Alan. He's been sober many years. I'm here for him. I just want to say that until now, until hearing your stories, secretly I never really believed that he couldn't stop drinking. But I now know that he's telling the truth and it's a miracle. He is sober today because of you, and if not for this, I would not be sitting here with my daddy today. I want to thank you people with all my heart.”

 

On our last night, she was to meet her family in Ossining. We rode the train north on the Hudson River line as I pointed out spots along the bank where I had hopped freights in my youth, building bonfires and watching barges drift by. Now I had passed here not only as a touring author but as a father with his grown daughter. Once again, it was time circling memory into strange new loops of continuity, offering glimpses of the eternality of things.

At the station in Ossining we had to say goodbye, and once more it was unbearable. We grew angry with each other. I saw how helpless we were before our need for each other. It made me so sad that we had to pay such a high price for something so natural as family love. But it hurt. All my fears erupted out of me and met all her loss, and we hissed and turned away in disappointment, unable to say goodbye.

 

By 2007, Isadora had completed her first year in the Israeli Army, during which she had been bombed by terrorist rockets. Since she was now serving in Tel Aviv, I flew out to see her. We arranged to meet off base, in a café in the center of town.

She appeared out of uniform, in a springlike dress cinched at the
waist and patterned with flowers, with her hair, restored to natural blondness, combed back and her face fresh, lightly made up, and lovely. As always, my heart in my throat, I hugged her. We sat down and looked each at other, waiting.

Then she said: “Daddy, I have something very important to tell you.”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

She hesitated, fidgeting with a bracelet. Looked up at me.

“This is very hard for me, Dad. It's so important. I…”

She looked away. Then back at me. “Daddy, I'm gay.”

Relieved, my lower lip decompressed. I had thought God knows what. Some fatal illness or something. “Well, how perfect, then, that I live in San Francisco! Your cred there has just shot way up.”

She gaped at me, shocked. “Daddy? Did you hear what I just said?

“Yes, you're gay.”

“But you—You mean—You don't—?”

“What, honey?”

“You don't care!?”

“Why no. I'm very proud of you, actually. In fact, I'm kind of happy for you. Have you noticed how lonely heteros are? I mean, they have no community. Queers are so, you know, kind of hip. I think you're the cutting edge. I'm actually a little jealous. I'm sick of being hetero myself. It's so fucking boring!”

“DADDY!” She jumped up and threw her arms around my neck and hugged me so hard I almost toppled over backward.

I laughed, blushing. “Honey, what's all the excitement about?”

“DADDY! YOU'RE SO CRAZY!” She shrieked with glee. “I can't believe you! I thought you would be crushed! I should have known. You're not like others!”

“Why would I be crushed?”

“Well excuse me, Mr. San Francisco Outlaw, but have you noticed that most people want to have straight kids so they can be, you know, have, normal families and things and….”

“Well, but I'm not like them. I don't care about normal. What the hell is that anyway? Half my friends in San Francisco are gay and queer. They're some of the brightest and most talented people I know. Without our gays San Francisco would be like, like, I don't know—like Dallas or something.”

“You are
too
much, Daddy!” She just couldn't stop laughing. An explosion of relief. She became wildly expressive, happy, involved, gossipy. Told me all about her girlfriend and then confided that she had once had many. Wanted me to meet them all. Would I? I would? “Oh, Daddy, I'm so excited. I can't wait.”

Then the conversation took a serious turn. She told me that she had been molested by the Bosnian, Yaacov. Her mother had known about it but feared losing his love, so she looked away. Isadora told me how she could not bring herself to speak about it to anyone. How when she tried to tell Esther, her mother had told her she was crazy and dragged her to therapists, to be institutionalized. How she had never had a lover her own age. Her first real love had been a grown woman, with whom she carried on an affair when she was fifteen.

“Daddy, I've got a real girlfriend now. She's my age. I want you to meet her! She's so great!”

“I can't wait. You are so brave. You are my hero. I'm so happy that you're gay. Don't ever let anyone make you feel there's something wrong with that. What's wrong is them, not you. You're the most wonderful, beautiful daughter any daddy could ever hope to have, and I love you with all my heart. Come here.”

She leaned forward and I held her, her head on my shoulder. My little girl. My Isadora.

She had to return to the base. But this evening she would come by with her girlfriend and they would take me to a club.

 

That night, she arrived in a tiny military car with her girlfriend, another soldier, both out of uniform, dressed in slinky Tel Aviv club-hopping lesbian chic. While they sat up front, chatting and screeching and singing and laughing and looking over their shoulders at me, I sat hunched in back, grinning like a dope, amazed. How had I gotten here? Squeezed in back of a tiny army car with my queer Israeli soldier daughter and her lover, on our way to an all-night lesbian dance club. I was so happy for her, proud, honored to be the one member of her family she trusted enough to come out to. I closed my eyes to smell the perfumed air of this perfect moment of perfect freedom. Clean and sober, and with the joyful voice of my daughter in my ears, I thanked God from the bottom of my heart.