Cocaine's Son by Dave Itzkoff Read Free Book Online Page A

event.
    It was the day of the party. I was dressed up in my nicest jeans and my cleanest T-shirt. I had spent many minutes at the bathroom mirror, eyeing my new nose from every possible angle to make sure the old one wasn’t growing back and convincing myself I could really do this. I waited for the furor of my father’s most recent battle with my grandmother to subside, so I could let him know it was time for him to ferry me to my momentous event.
    He was sitting on his side of the bed he shared with my mother, still dressed in the undergarments he wore to sleep the night before and probably for several days previously, staring down at his feet as if performing arithmetic on his toes, and breathing slowly.
    “Dad, come on, it’s time to go,” I reminded him.
    He answered as if talking in his sleep. “Okay,” he said. “Just give me a minute.”
    I waited, wandered the house, gazed upon my nose a couple more times in the mirror, then reentered the room. He was sitting right where I had left him, no more clothed than the last time I saw him.
    “Come
on
,” I whined. “I’ve got to get to the
party.
”
    I stood over him while he applied his pants to his legs, like hewas spreading a resistant lump of peanut butter over an endless terrain of bread. He put his arms through his shirtsleeves, slipped a single button through whichever buttonhole he could find, and called it done. He started fumbling around for his car keys.
    “Are they in your pants?” I asked him.
    “Oh yeah,” he said.
    “Don’t you need your glasses?” I added.
    “Right.”
    I bounded down the stairs and to the door, telling my father to follow me when he stopped on the landing and seemed to forget where he was supposed to be going. I buckled myself into my car seat and prepared for adventure.
    It took me a while to notice that there was something strange about the way my father was driving. He was ambling along the local streets at a cautious, imperceptible pace instead of hurtling through them at maximum velocity. And his precise control of the vehicle was not in evidence; he steered the car as if it were a boat, wobbling side to side on an inexact trajectory. Though we had the road to ourselves, he sometimes slowed down as if another car were in front of him; I had to remind him to keep his foot on the gas pedal to keep the car moving.
    He was making a right turn off the local road and onto a four-lane highway when, without warning, he missed the turn almost entirely. He took it too wide, ending up in the oncoming lane with the flow of traffic pointed at us, a red traffic light the only barrier that stood between us, them, and a head-on collision.
    “Jesus Christ, Dad, what the hell are you doing?” I screamed. He had enough sense to navigate the car to the shoulder, still pointed in the wrong direction, before the oncoming traffic was upon us.
    Once I was sure we were out of danger, I looked at my father. With the engine still running and the car still in gear, his head was slumped on his chest. He struggled to keep his eyes open.
    “Dad,” I said, “you’re high right now, aren’t you?”
    “Yes,” he answered.
    “Come on,” I said. “Out of the car.” I extracted him from his seat and helped deposit him in mine, then took his place behind the wheel.
    I thought about the freedom and power I possessed in my two hands. I could still drive myself to the party, leaving my father to hopefully fall asleep in the car and not drive himself away and kill himself in a separate, successful accident. I could drive us back into the city, back where maybe things weren’t perfect but where I was at least happy, where nothing this awful had ever happened to us. Or I could take off for parts unknown with my father by my side, the two of us winding our way through America like Ryan and Tatum O’Neal in some modern-day update of
Paper Moon
. If I sped away with him, what state would my father and I end up in before anyone realized we were