Cocaine's Son (14 page)

“Dad,” I interrupted, “I know all this stuff is important to you, but we’re supposed to be here to talk about us.”

“In all fairness, Mr. Iss-i-koff,” Rebecca added, “you have been talking for a long time now. Maybe you should let David say something.”

My father recoiled as if she and I had both pulled knives on him. “Hey,” he cried, “isn’t this supposed to be a place where I
can talk about anything I want? Don’t I have enough going on in my life that now I gotta fight with you two? I’ve got a daughter who doesn’t even acknowledge that I’m a person, I’m dealing with this prostate thing, I’m losing my house.” He paused, and then with all of his might: “My
plate,
” he bellowed, “is
full.
”

He brought his hand down as if to punctuate his declaration with a loud slam, but there was no table in front of him, so he ended up slapping himself on his leg. I closed my eyes and let a few tears slip out and caress my cheeks.

“David,” my father asked hoarsely, “why are you crying?”

“I can’t stand to see you get like this,” I said. “It just reminds me too much of when you used to get high.”

“Do you think that I’m high now?”

“No.”

“Have I ever once gotten high in the last five years?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Someday,” he said, “you’re going to have to learn that you can’t hold everything against me just because I used to do drugs.”

The box for the ceiling fan and lamp assembly contained eleven pieces: two teapot-shaped parts that joined together to form the motor, four plastic blades with a fake wood finish, a remote control, and four ceramic fixtures to hold the lightbulbs (not included). Its retail cost at a Home Depot in Kiamesha, New York, was about ninety dollars, but its actual cost to me, as a gift from my father, was zero. He told me these things were a snap to build, and that he had previously set up several of them in his Monticello home, and I believed him. We never imagined that in the course of putting one together, we would dismantle each other.

The whole enterprise of installing the ceiling fan in my apartment had been my father’s idea. He had decided on a previous visit to my boxy fifth-floor walk-up that the cool breeze generated by my air conditioner did not carry well enough from my bedroom to my living room, in the same way that he decided my upstairs neighbors, a pair of bone-thin NYU undergraduates who barely filled out their flip-flops, made too much noise as they trampled across their floor (“Are you living underneath Frankenstein?” he wanted to know). It had been a long time since my father and I had collaborated on a project requiring physical exertion: the last time had been in the 1980s, when he helped me install a hard drive in my computer, after he came home to find me attacking the device with a hammer. Since then, I told myself, I had matured.

The ritual began in my living room on a Saturday afternoon one summer after our therapy session and our customary lunch at the Ukrainian diner. We attached the fan’s four blades to the motor unit and removed my old light fixture with graceful, professional ease. We brimmed with deceptive bravado, believing the task would be completed well before the afternoon’s Yankees game. We would be done soon enough to watch Derek Jeter put our own crude displays of dexterity to shame while an energy-efficient fan circulated the air and cooled our exposed knees.

Our first challenge was mounting the assembled fan to the newly created hole in my ceiling, which yawned above us somewhat higher than we’d anticipated. From the basement of my brownstone, I retrieved a ladder, but my father and I could not stand on the ladder simultaneously, and one of us needed to hold the mount steady while the other person screwed it into place.

“Do you have another ladder?” my father asked.

“
Another
ladder? I’m lucky I had
one
.” I went back downstairs and walked across the street to a Spanish bodega, where I borrowed a second ladder from a Bangladeshi clerk who did not even ask what I needed it for. I bought a lot of soda and Ring Dings from that place.

I had carried two ladders a total of eleven flights of stairs, and my father and I were now standing atop them at the same height, only to discover that we had a problem with the division of labor. While I held the mount, my father attempted to screw it into place with an electric screwdriver. But he could not balance the screws on the tip of the tool and drive them up into the ceiling. Each time he tried, the screws would fall to the ground, roll around on the floor, and get lost underneath furniture, to which my father would say, “Whoopst.” Not “Whoops,” as everyone has ever said since expressions of embarrassment and dismay were first invented, but “Whoopst,” with a T at the end. “Whoopst! Whoopst!” he would say, and laugh at his own mistake.

The fan was becoming too heavy for me to hold over my head. So I jury-rigged a temporary solution by placing a pillow on my head, putting the fan on top of the pillow, and holding the fan in place with the pillow on my head, while my father continued his hopeless chore of locking in the screws.

“Whoopst! Whoopst!” he said.

When I could not bear to hear him say “Whoopst!” one more time, we switched places. The head-pillow-fan arrangement seemed too undignified for my father, so he tried to hold it up with his hands while I operated the screwdriver. I also found it difficult to screw upward, but I was able to lock one screw in place and needed to secure only three more to finish our task. That was when, to my horror, I saw that my father’s arms were trembling.

“David,” he said, “I gotta let go.”

“Not now, Dad!” I demanded. “We’re almost finished. You have to hold on just a little bit longer.”

“David,” he said, “I’m sixty-five years old. I’m not a young man anymore. I know when I’m beat. I gotta come down. I’m coming down.” I was sweating profusely and my father even more so. We really could have used a fan to cool us off.

He let go of the heavy, half-installed contraption, leaving it to hang awkwardly from the quarter-attached mount. He descended his ladder, sat down on the couch, and began wringing out his tired arms.

I reluctantly removed the one locked-in screw and detached the fan from its electrical wiring. I set it down on the floor and looked up at the large hole in my ceiling, with lengths of wire sticking out of it, and neither a lamp nor a fan to fill it.

“Goddammit, Dad,” I said. “This whole fan was your idea. I never wanted to do it in the first place. Now I have nothing. I don’t have a fan. I don’t even have a lamp to light this room. What am I going to do now?”

My father laughed. “David,” he said, “it’s not a big deal. You can hire somebody to do it for you. You can do it tomorrow.”

“I think you’d better leave,” I said. We didn’t watch any baseball together that day. I was too defeated to return either of the ladders I had borrowed, so they stood all day in my living room beneath the ceiling hole like some art installation.

On Sunday I went on Craigslist and found a handyman who, for fifty dollars, installed the ceiling fan. He screwed the mount in place while I balanced the fan on my head with a pillow. I quickly discovered that even at its medium setting, the fan spun so quickly that it blew loose papers around my living room, and over time it was too much of a hassle to keep its fake-wood-finished blades free of dust.

A few months later, I joined a gym where a weight machine called the overhead press became my nemesis. After over a year of training on it, I was never able to lift over twenty-five pounds above my shoulders, and with each of the 3,744 reps that I estimate I did in that time, I thought of the goddamned fan with every strenuous goddamned lift. A few months after that, I moved out of the boxy apartment, making no effort whatsoever to disconnect the fan and take it with me. I hope that whoever lives there now does a more diligent job of dusting its blades than I did.

There are only two practical driving routes from Monticello to Manhattan, with the only major difference between them being the choice of the Tappan Zee Bridge or the George Washington Bridge. At most hours of the day, on most days of the week, either option should deliver a traveler to his destination in a consistently reproduceable amount of time; a Monticello resident with a regularly scheduled Saturday-morning appointment in Manhattan should, with minimal practice, have no trouble arriving for this engagement as punctually as Mussolini’s celebrated trains. Still, the trip presented my father with the occasional challenge.

One morning I was sitting in the lobby of our therapist’s office, working systematically through a bagel and a crossword puzzle. I allowed myself one bite of the bagel for every five crossword clues solved as I waited for my father, and I tried to guess the identities of the other families I occasionally saw enter and exit. Which parent had the substance-abuse problem? The mother? The father? Both of them? What was the substance—or were there substances plural? How much did their child or children understand about
what they were going through? Were they closer to reconciling than my father and I seemed to be? It was satisfying to imagine that they were much, much further away.

It was ten minutes before the start of our session, then it was starting time, and then it was ten minutes after, and then twenty. Finally, my father ambled through the institute’s front door with a look on his face that seemed to ask:
Have I seen this place before?
After giving me a perfunctory, jittery hug, he walked up to the young black man who manned the security desk and laid out an array of quarters.

“Let me ask you a favor,” my father said to him. “I’m parked outside at a meter that’s going to expire in another couple of minutes, while I’m upstairs with the therapist. At about half past, could you go outside and put some money in it for me? It’s the red Taurus just outside.”

It was as if my father had walked into a bank and asked a teller to do his laundry. I did not like that he was asking the man to do a job that fell well outside his clearly designated responsibilities; the fact that he was an old white man asking a young black man didn’t make it any more comfortable. All I had to do to register my discontent was let out an exasperated sigh.

My father heard it. “What?” he snapped at me.

“This isn’t his job,” I said. “It’s not his responsibility to put quarters in your meter.”

“Hey,” my father said, “let him answer for himself.”

The receptionist gave no response, yes or no. He just stared blankly at the quarters my father had presented to him.

“I’m saying he shouldn’t have to do this, and you shouldn’t put him in this position,” I said, and so saying, I swept the quarters off the countertop and into my pocket.

My father and I rode together in the cramped elevator, pressed
up against each other and saying nothing. He barged headfirst into Rebecca’s office, and before she could chastise us for being late, my father extended his hand, instructing her to wait.

“I have something I’d like to talk about,” he said. “We were just downstairs, and I was running late, and I didn’t have time to put enough money in the meter. I asked the guy behind the desk if he would feed the meter for me, and my son”—enunciated as if he were saying “my tumor”—“gets mad at me. I say what business is it of his if this guy is willing to put the quarters in for me? But what do you say, Becky? Who was right, and who was wrong?”

Rebecca started to answer in a sterner voice than she typically demonstrated. “You shouldn’t ask the guard to do that for you, Mr. Iss-i-koff. That’s not what he’s here to do.”

I should have let her finish, but I interrupted: “What does this have to do with anything? Do you understand that we’re not here to have Rebecca settle every argument we ever get into? Of all the things we could be talking about in the … thirty minutes we’ve got left, how does this relate to you and me?”

“Hey,” my father said, “it’s my money, my time, and I’m going to talk about whatever I want to talk about.”

“Fine, but you’re going to do it without me,” I said. I exited the room and, in what felt like one continuous motion, descended the institute’s long staircase, blew past the same receptionist I had been defending minutes ago, and walked out the front door.

One subway ride elapsed, and I was walking the blocks back to my apartment when my overriding sense of certainty and righteousness began to wear off. My cellphone rang, and I could see that the call was from Amy. We had been seeing each other more frequently, long enough for me to have told her that I had been going to therapy with my father and long enough for her to have known that this was the regular time of the week when I normally
would be in a session. My outsize frustration that she would call me at a time when she knew I would not be reachable was outweighed by my desire for human contact, and I mistakenly took the call.

“Hi,” she said cheerfully, not yet realizing that she was talking to a crazy person.

“Why are you calling now?”

“I—I was just going to leave a message,” she said, startled. “Aren’t you supposed to be in therapy right now?”

“I am,” I said. “I was. I left.”

“Is something wrong?” she asked. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Let’s just say it got really bad in there today and leave it at that.”

“You sound so sad right now,” she said. “Can’t you at least tell me what happened?”

“I will,” I answered, “at some point. But not right now. I don’t think you’re ready to hear it. I don’t want to freak you out.”

“But you wouldn’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t you understand? I’m not going to run away from you because you’ve got problems.”

“Not. Right. Now,” I said, ending the call.

That did not go well at all. So I picked up my cellphone again and dialed my mother, hoping that she of all people would absolve me of my frustration and give me permission to end this misguided experiment.

“Mom,” I said, “I can’t do this anymore. He’s not listening to the therapist. He’s not listening to me. He won’t listen to anyone.”

“What can I tell you?” she said evenly. “He’s a difficult, difficult man.”