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

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    What I heard, when I allowed these impulses to run their course, was the first stirrings of a voice within me that had spent many months practicing its lines in private and now, though it was not quite ready for a performance, was sufficiently prepared to give a convincing rehearsal. It told me,
Be responsible! Be an adult! Do what you think a man would do in this situation! Even if you’ve never seen an example of what a man does! Invent one for yourself! Follow that person’s lead! Whoever he is!
It was a quiet voice, but it spoke with conviction. It led me all the way back to the house, where I helped my father into bed and he fell fast asleep.
    I felt I had to call Ellen and explain to her why I wouldn’t be at her party. I didn’t want her to think I was one more insensitive,adolescent jerk who was always begging off important social commitments with preposterous excuses. I reached her at the restaurant, where it sounded like the parent-free festivities were already under way. But I couldn’t seem to summon the voice.
    “My dad is a drug addict,” I blurted out to her, the first time I’d revealed this to anyone outside my family. “He’s been one my whole life. He always lets me down right when I need him the most.”
    “Whatever,” she said. And that’s how my candor ruined what could have been my second relationship.
    I took my road test a few weeks later and failed it. When I took a retest a few weeks after that, I failed that, too.

College loomed on my horizon like an amusement park, a massive Ferris wheel that presented me with a new and tantalizing opportunity in every car as it whirled and turned. It promised academic excellence, impeccable faculty, and bountiful resources to conduct my studies. It vowed a student body composed of young strivers all equally committed to their scholastic pursuits, to challenging one another’s potentials and to furthering one another’s goals, and a bucolic campus securely tucked away from the corrupting influences of authority figures and parents. It pledged access to a fresh pool of brave and experimental female colleagues, unaware of my previous reputation and facial features and open to myriad forms of sexual congress the likes of which I had only read about in the letters columns of the magazines in the farthest reaches of my father’s closet.
    College called out to me like a carnival barker, coming on to me with its well-honed and irresistible sales pitch, declaring that it was everything I hoped for. Anything I wanted it would find forme, and anything I wanted it to be it would become. Once I walked through its gates, it promised I could shed my previous identity and construct a new one according to my wishes. It guaranteed me that the arena I was about to enter, and each one following, would be a perfect meritocracy, where I would be judged solely on my ability to perform a task and my will to see it done. Here was a world where whatever I had been before didn’t matter—all that was important was what I wanted to be.
Put aside all previous shames and abandon all embarrassments
, it whispered. College assured me that it was the path between me and my ideal self, and it swore to me that the desire to travel this route was all I needed to complete the journey.
    College was a liar.
    I arrived on the campus of Princeton University at the end of the summer of 1994, delivered there one August morning by my uncharacteristically and antiseptically quiet parents. Of all the schools I had applied to and been accepted into, from Dartmouth to the University of Southern California, Princeton turned out by accident to be the closest to us geographically: it was only a two-hour drive of undifferentiated New York and New Jersey highways, a straight southward shot past outlet malls and shopping centers until one hard right turn took you past the soccer, lacrosse, and rugby fields, the mansions of the upper-class eating clubs and the Center for Jewish Life, and