Free Cocaine's Son by Dave Itzkoff Page B

like I did. I don’t want you to suffer like I suffered. I don’t want you to be afraid of the things I was afraid of. I don’t want you to have hang-ups. I want you to know that sex can be a wonderful experience.”
    It was the most perplexing thing. Every outward sign toldme that he was stone sober, and yet he was talking like he was high.
    “Dad,” I said, “you don’t have anything to worry about. I don’t want you to think that I haven’t had sex—I have.” I added, “I’ve lived. I mean, I’ve done things. Some things that I’d probably be embarrassed to tell you about. I don’t want you to think that you did anything that kept me from having these experiences, that prevented me from enjoying them. It doesn’t help to be so focused on the future. But we can still control what happens to us
right now.
”
    It wasn’t clear he had heard me. He reached into a pants pocket and, in broad daylight, pulled out an envelope that was stuffed with a wad of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills; at a glance, I thought it must have contained at least a thousand dollars, maybe more.
    “David,” he resumed, “I want you to know that the business is doing well. I’ve made a lot of money. I want to give this to you, and I want to give you some money every month, like an allowance, that you can spend however you want. I never want you to worry about not having money when you need it.”
    “Dad, what does this have to do with anything?” I said, still fixated on the sum of money dangling from his hand. “I don’t need this money.”
    “Go on,” he said, “just take it.”
    I didn’t take it, although there were many bone-dry, dead-broke days after this when I wished I had, when I would fantasize that I had asked my father to put his allowance plan in writing and have it authorized by a notary public, because that money was never tendered to me on any future date, and the allowance plan was never discussed again.
    If this was the origin story of our adult relationship, its moralwas dependent on who was deemed the story’s protagonist. My father left that day satisfied that he had shown to himself and his son that, whether or not his assistance was needed, he would always be prepared to offer it, or so he thought. And as I watched him go home, I was more certain than ever that I did not need his help to make it in the world, or so I thought.

I used to have this tradition, when I first moved back to New York and was living on my own, of waking up early on Sunday morning, packing a small pipe with some marijuana, and smoking it while I watched
The McLaughlin Group
. The ritual had nothing to do with the show itself—getting high hardly made the frenetic, deafening political chatter any more comprehensible or tolerable. I did it just because I could. I thought it was a show of strength, a kind of daredevil act to see how close I could come to the boundary between the weekend and the weekday and still fuck myself up, then head back in to work on Monday morning, showing no lingering effects of the lonely debauchery I’d engaged in hours earlier. But really, it was an act of weakness, a last-ditch effort to stave off that feeling of paralysis that inevitably set in around four or five o’clock on Sunday evening as it became increasingly clear that, no, the world was not going to come to an end and, yes, I would have to go back to my job the next day and work there for five consecutive days before I got two in exchange to spend as I wished(usually smoking pot). I reacted to the onset of each working week like I imagine a condemned man waits to be led to his execution: with utter cowardice and a headful of preposterous fantasies about how he might still avert the foregone conclusion of his foregone conclusion.
    I don’t practice this particular tradition anymore.
    I had been working in Manhattan for about a year, still trying to make my way in the magazine industry, already working at my second menial assistant’s job