Free Cocaine's Son by Dave Itzkoff Page A

the terrible imagery associated with this gag?
    [
beeeeeeeeep
] MADDY!
    And what was I doing sitting here, letting him push me around? Hadn’t I spent more than enough time waiting for him in this office? Why was he the only one whose time was valuable, who got to come and go as he pleased? I swore to the nonexistent Jewish God, if that fucking intercom went off one more time, I was walking straight out. I was leaving the office, getting right on the next train back to New Jersey, and never—
    [
beeeeeeeeep
] MADDY!
    I felt so right on the train ride back to school. I don’t know that I’d ever felt so right about anything I’d ever done, and it felt so good to feel so right. The righteousness was tingling up my spine and twitching in the tips of my fingers. I could hardly sit still, I felt so right.
    And when I got back to my dorm room and the half-dozen telephone messages left for me in the last ninety minutes, it was easy to tell which were from my father and which were from my mother.
    The messages from my mother sounded like this: “David, that was not nice, what you did. We were trying to find you and we didn’t know where you went. Please call your father back and apologize. You really startled him.”
    The messages from my father sounded like this: “David, please forgive me. Please,
please
forgive me. I didn’t realize how long I had kept you waiting, and I just feel terrible. Please call me back as soon as you get a chance, as soon as you can. Please forgive me. This is your father.”
    I thought about not answering his calls at all, letting him wallow a little longer in the feeling he hated most, of not knowing how I felt. (It felt good to be right, but it felt even better to know that I could inflict emotions upon him that no one else could.) But while my brain still blazed with those sensations of validity and my courage was at its peak, I decided to call him back.
    He still sounded a lot like his phone messages. “Please forgive me. I hope you’ll please forgive me. I’m sorry, David, I’m so,
so
sorry.”
    “I know you are, Dad,” I said, being careful not to cede any ground to him. “But I feel like this happens to us all the time. And it keeps happening to us, no matter what I try to do. If I accept your apology and say that it’s okay, how do I know that things will turn out different the next time?”
    “I don’t know, David. What do you want me to say? What can I do to make it up to you?”
    “I’m not coming back to your office. Can you come down to school to see me?”
    “Sure. When?”
    “What about tomorrow?”
    “I’ll be there.”
    It seemed almost unimaginable that in under twenty-four hours’ notice, my father would be anywhere that wasn’t his office, his couch, or his fishing boat. But true to his word, he showed up the next afternoon, looking adrift as he paced the living room of my dormitory, hands buried firmly in his pockets while he watched other people’s children race to and from their lunchtime appointments and wondered where his son fit in to all of this. We tried to hug inconspicuously, and as he leaned in to kiss me on the cheek, I scanned the room for anyone who might be watching.
    My father and I shared a mostly quiet lunch at a diner near school, where we ate and didn’t say almost exactly what we would have eaten and not said had the meal taken place the previous day. As we walked past the large public fountain lately being used as an impromptu swimming pool by seniors who had turned in their thesis papers, he stopped and put a hand on my arm, a processional of words gathering in his throat.
    He looked mostly at the ground and walked in small circles as he spoke. “David,” he said, “I want you to know I’ve been thinking a lot lately about us. About what it must have been like for you growing up, how I wasn’t there for you all the time and how confusing it all must have been for you.
    “David,” he said again, “I don’t want you to grow up