One night, at an hour that was normally my bedtime, I got all dressed up, and my mother and father and I drove into New York City, down to the Half Note, a jazz club on Hudson Street. I was thirteen, maybe fourteen, and had never experienced any nightlife. I had heard jazz all my life, on records or the radio, my father beating out time on the kitchen table, the steering wheel, letting out a breathy yeah when the music soared and flew. When the musicians were cooking, when they really swung, it transported him; he was gone inside the music. I couldn’t go there with him, but I thought I could understand it. It seemed that anyone could, hearing that music: Bird, Diz, Pres, Sweets, Lester, Al, Zoot. It was my father’s music, though he never played a note.
I knew the players, for about the only friends my parents had were musicians and their wives. When I was a little kid, I’d lie in bed listening to them talk their hip talk in the next room. I knew I was the only kid in Washington Heights to be overhearing words like man and cat and groove, and jokes that were this irreverent and black. I knew they were cool and I loved it.
At the Half Note that night, the three of us walked through the door, and the owner appeared, all excited to see my father, and, in the middle of this smoky nightlife room, he kissed my hand. This was real life, the center of something. We sat down. In front of us, on a little stage, were Jimmy Rushing, a powerful singer, and two sax players, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, whom I’d known all my life. And there was a whole roomful of people slapping the tables, beating out time, breathing yeah at the great moments, shaking their heads, sometimes snapping their fingers, now and then bursting out with, Play it, man, or, Sing it. When the break came, Zoot sat down with us and ate a plate of lasagne and didn’t say much except for a few dry asides that were so funny I couldn’t bear it. Too funny to laugh at. And there was my dad: these men were his friends, his buddies. They liked the things about my father that I liked — how funny he was, how uncorny, unsentimental, unafraid to be different from everyone else in the world: how unafraid he was to be on the edge.
As a child, I didn’t know that my father and many of the musicians who sat with their wives in our living room, eating nuts and raisins out of cut-glass candy dishes, were junkies. It wasn’t until I was twenty-one, a college senior, that my father told me that he had been a heroin addict, casually slipping it into some otherwise unremarkable conversation. The next day, my mother filled in the story: My father had begun shooting up in 1946, when my mother was pregnant with my brother, who is nineteen months older than I. He stopped when I was around thirteen.
I never suspected a thing, nor did my brother. We never saw any drug paraphernalia — although in the crook of my father’s elbow there was a mysterious purplish spot, which he said had something to do with the army. His vague explanation seemed lacking, but even in my wildest imaginings I never came near the truth. In the fifties, in the white, middle- and working-class communities where we lived, no one discussed drugs, which were synonymous with the utmost degradation and depravity. My parents succeeded in hiding my father’s addiction from us, but, as a result, we could never make sense of the strained atmosphere, our lack of money, our many moves. The addiction was the hidden thread that tied everything together. But we didn’t know that such a thread existed, so decisions seemed insanely arbitrary, my mother’s emotions frighteningly hysterical. My father was often away, staying out late or not coming home at all. My brother and I fought often and violently. My mother was terribly depressed, sometimes desperate. I regularly found her sitting, eyes unfocused, collapsed amid the disorder of a household she was too overwhelmed to manage. She would beg my father not to go out at night. As I got older, I tried to figure out what was going on. An affair? This was a logical explanation, but it didn’t fit.
My father was a man of socially unacceptable habits. He was fat, he picked his teeth, he burped, he farted, he blew his nose into the sink in the morning, he bit his nails until he had no nails and then chewed his fingers, eating himself up. He was a high-octane monologuist, a self-taught high-school dropout who constantly read, thought, and talked politics and culture, gobbling up ideas, stuffing himself as fast as he could — with everything.
He was from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and earned his living dressing windows in what were called “ladies’ specialty shops” — independently owned women’s-clothing stores in and around New York City. He went from store to store in his display-laden station wagon, visiting them every month or so when they changed their windows. Being a window dresser was a touch creative, but more important it meant he didn’t have to fit in; all he had to do was get the job done.
How did a bright Jewish boy from Brighton Beach become a junkie in the late forties? It was partly the crowd he hung out with: white musicians deeply under the influence of Charlie Parker, and of Parker’s drug, heroin. Stan Getz, Al Cohn, George Handy — all were junkies and all were my father’s friends.
My father began with marijuana — at age fifteen. Although drafted during World War II, he never made it overseas; he was, I was told, “honorably discharged” from boot camp in Georgia for health reasons: he was deemed too weak to fight, having lost weight because of the heat. I’ve always found the story rather odd, if only because, in the army pictures I’ve seen, he looks so happy and active (even if a little thin), clowning in front of the camera with his friends. Perhaps the story is true, but it seems unlikely.
By his late twenties, he was a heroin addict. Ten years later, he was taking amphetamines as well. He occasionally gave me some when I was in college to help me stay up all night writing papers; they were very strong. When he was about fifty, he was taking LSD, mescaline, peyote — whatever he could get.
At college, I received long letters from him, written when he was coming down from an acid or mescaline trip. Often he tripped alone in the living room of his and my mother’s New Jersey apartment, awake all night, listening to records, writing and thinking while my mother slept. I read pages of his blocky, slanted printing, about how the world is a boat and we are all sinking. So many pages with so many words. Usually, I threw them away without finishing them, scanning his stoned raps in front of the big, green, metal trash can in the college mail room, picturing him in the living room with the sun rising, wired up, hunched over the paper, filling up the pages, wanting me to know all the exciting things he had discovered. Part of me wanted to hear them and love him — and indeed did love him for taking the acid, for taking the chance. But another part shut down, unable to care. I would look out the mail-room window onto the college’s perfect green lawn, scenic mountains in the distance, little white houses with green shutters, the place of my willed exile, my escape.
One day when I was home from college on vacation, my father and I went into New York together. He was going to retrieve his car from a garage in the West Forties, take me to a friend’s downtown, and then pick up my mother at her midtown office and drive her home. We took the bus across the bridge, then got on the subway at 178th Street. After the doors shut, my father edged close to me. Putting his mouth up to my ear to make himself heard over the screech of the train, he said, I took acid before we left the house this morning and I’m just starting to get off. He was smiling, a naughty kid out in the big grown-up world. My heart sank. My father had swallowed a psychic explosive that might detonate, blowing apart him and then me if his trip turned bad. The train rocked furiously back and forth, its lights flickering, racing at sixty miles an hour through the pitch-black tunnel on the longest nonstop run in the city, from 125th to 59th Street. I knew that, at any moment, the subway car might become for him a sealed tomb on an endless nightmare ride. Acid makes you vulnerable, a sponge. It would take only seconds, a quick switch in his head, and he would be gripping my arm and saying, Susan, I’ve got to get out of here. Now, right now.
We reached our stop, and I stayed close, following him through the smelly, mobbed, low-ceilinged station where at every turn I saw something I feared might set him off: glistening hot dogs revolving under infrared lights; a legless man on a wheeled board, selling pencils. But at the garage my father understood the Puerto Rican mechanic’s broken English better than I did. He checked the bill and counted out dollars and coins correctly the first time. By contrast, the last time I had taken acid, I’d found myself in a little family grocery in Santa Fe, staring dumbfounded at the meaningless metal discs in my hand, unable to buy an orange popsicle without help, thunderstruck by the very concept of money, its simultaneous brilliance and folly. My dad was having no such problems. He was energized; he was having fun. He got behind the wheel and headed out into the river of cars, the honking, swerving cabs, the sticky stop-and-go jams. He dropped me off, waved goodbye, and headed back uptown to pick up my mother.
Watching him trip was like discovering that your father was an accomplished deep-sea diver or high-wire artist. Yet I knew that even the best tightrope walker slips. I limped up to my friend’s, exhausted.
Never marry a musician, my mother admonished me when I was growing up, in the same way, I suppose, that other mothers warned their daughters off criminals or schvartzehs or Jews. I suspected she had a point: life married to a man always on the road would be no picnic. I had heard about the hotel rooms and buses and daytime sleeping. I also knew she was implying something more complex; that these men were not to be trusted. She could say, Don’t marry one, because she had seen so many. What she didn’t say, and what I didn’t know, was that so many were junkies. Because I didn’t know what lay behind her warnings, they seemed mysteriously exaggerated.
The musicians who came to our house fascinated me: their pants with black satin stripes down the sides, their hip talk, their battered horn cases. My father could hear anyone on the radio and know who was playing. He’d say, That’s Pres, or, Listen to Diz swing. I loved the fame of these men, the fact that the world knew their names and their sounds, that there were pictures of them in Down Beat. I knew some, like Al and Zoot, but most of them I never met. They were part of the life my father lived away from us children. To me, these were names, or sounds on records, or sometimes faces in our photo album; they belonged to men leaning against lampposts in the Village, or sitting with their arms around attractive women on rocks in Central Park. Allen Eager, Tiny Kahn, George Handy, Stan Getz, Johnny Mandel, Georgie Auld — these names resonate in my heart like the Yiddish that I heard so often then.
I don’t know what went on between my father and these men. All I know is that, for my father, his junkie years were the greatest of his life. When I was older, he wanted to tell me about them, so I would understand why he wasn’t sorry about what he did. He wanted me to know about the great and wild people he had met, the music he had heard, the crazy underworld places he had been. He needed to explain that, while being a junkie sounded bad to other people, it had been really wonderful for him. But I couldn’t listen. For me, those years of his heroin addiction had been a time of fearful poverty, violence at the hands of my brother, and terror that my mother would cease to function. No, I said, I don’t want to hear. Each of us was furious: my worst times were his best.
As a child, I was convinced that if my father saw me walking down the street in an unexpected place, away from the clues that linked me to him — such as our apartment or my mother or my school — he would not recognize me; he didn’t know what I looked like. But I knew nothing about drugs, therefore I couldn’t know that he was stoned, high.
He would not have been a good father even if he hadn’t been an addict. By his own admission, he came to parenthood ignorant of love and acquainted only with hate.
My mother told me about my paternal grandmother, Esther, the wicked witch of Brighton Beach. According to my mother, my grandmother despised men. She lavished all her attention on her daughter, my father’s only sibling. She dealt in machinations, lies, and deceptions, feeding the fires of hate between father and son, sister and brother, so that for weeks this one wouldn’t speak to that one and that one wouldn’t speak to this one, even though they were all crushed together in the one basement room where they lived. When my father did well in school, his mother scorned him. She tore up a citation he’d won — and then spat on it. She never kissed him, except on the day he went off to boot camp: His mother and my mother, then his young wife, were standing on the platform, saying goodbye. Seeing the other mothers tearfully embracing their sons, his mother was shamed into touching hers; she pecked his cheek.
We sometimes took her to Ratner’s for dinner. Ratner’s was a kosher dairy restaurant on lower Second Avenue, where, twenty-four hours a day, an aged waiter with a heavy Yiddish accent brought you baked fish or kasha varniskes or blintzes or icy schav. Later, when the neighborhood became the East Village, I would return to Ratner’s for a plate of blintzes after seeing the Grateful Dead at the Filmore East next door. But at the time — age ten, eleven, twelve — I was trying to learn the rules of public behavior. My grandmother, the urban peasant, did not give a shit about public behavior. The peasant: belching, slurping, sucking the fish bones, picking her teeth with the corner of a matchbook, unbuttoning her blouse to adjust her straps. It was amazing to watch her truly not giving a damn about anyone or anything except the food in front of her. Across her broad face she wore a thick layer of dead white powder, with a bright red circle of rouge on each cheek. Her hair was so thin you could see her waxen scalp and the dark roots of each strand. It was dyed a shade that was probably meant to be auburn but was actually a bright, rusty orange.
When Esther belched, my mother said nothing. The daughter of immigrants herself, she was shy and scared inside, afraid to make a mistake. But I was ashamed, sitting there in silence, eating my baked fish and looking up at the huge, ugly oil portrait of old Mr. Ratner that hung over the cash register.
I really wanted to learn what to do — how to eat, talk, and act; I was seeking self-confidence the only way I could, from the outside in. But I was tethered with doubt and embarrassment. I suffered both from bourgeois afflictions that must have come from my mother and from the desire not to be held down by convention, which came from my father. My mother was a slave to rules she wasn’t sure of; my father knew there were rules and loved to break them; my grandmother didn’t even know rules existed.
Occasionally Esther spoke to me, addressing me brusquely in rapid-fire Yiddish. (Even though she had come here at sixteen, she never learned English: a fuck you to the New World.) Was she really trying to communicate with me, forgetting I didn’t know Yiddish? Or did she care so little that she had no memory of what I knew or didn’t know? At my look of incomprehension, her expression would turn to disgust: What use is this child if she can’t even speak? Feh! She would dismiss me with a wave of her hand. I felt as though I were nothing more to my grandmother than a body sitting on the padded aqua chair, a body with no one inside, much as I felt with my father. And again, if I had appeared before her without my parents, without those usual clues to my identity, she would have been unable to place me.
I didn’t trust grown-ups. They didn’t protect me; they didn’t even see me. To Esther, I was a speck, a smudge.
My father only once told me a story about himself and his mother. I was a college student at the time. The two of us were driving down the highway on a beautiful, clear, cold winter day. My father was behind the wheel. Here is what he told me:
Fourteen years earlier, in 1956, when he was thirty-eight, his father, who had been very sick, died in the hospital while my father and Esther were visiting him. My father took Esther home to Brooklyn, where she asked him for a favor: there were some terms in her will she wanted to review; would he read it out loud to her? (Even in Yiddish my grandmother was illiterate.) My father was tired and upset and somewhat puzzled that his mother wished to go over her will on the night of her husband’s death, but he agreed. (As my father talked, I pictured Esther unlocking the black metal strongbox with the key she wore around her neck and handing him the will. They would have been in her tiny living room, sitting on her overstuffed flowered chairs, knees almost touching, her heavy-featured face impassive, his eyes wary but hoping to please.) The will turned out to be simple: Esther’s house and savings were to go to Sarah, her daughter. Then he heard himself, the fly in the web, reading: And to my son, Sidney, I leave nothing, because he is no good.
My father stared at the road ahead.
Why, I cried, would she have you read that to her? What did you do?
My father’s voice was tired and bitter: She wanted to see what I would do, he said; she wanted to watch my reaction. Ma, I said, I gotta go home now. I’m tired and it’s late. I didn’t want to show her how bad I felt; I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. It wasn’t the money — I didn’t care about that. Let my fucking sister have the money. But why did she have to write that sentence? Why did she have me read it?
My father started to cry. He had never cried in front of me. His hands loosened their grip on the wheel, and the car began to drift into the opposite lane, across the unbroken white line.
Look out! I yelled. He grabbed the wheel and turned us toward safety. Look out, I had yelled, and he had. Look out, I had yelled, for what else could I have said?
In 1973, two years after my father told me about his addiction, he stopped in to visit me at my apartment on Charlton Street. He was distraught, not an unusual state for him. He said: Damaged merchandise are the words that I see in front of me when things get bad, and when I see those words I know it’s all over. Do you understand that? (He fixed me with his wild, wide-open hazel eyes.) Do you understand what I am trying to say?
Yes, I said, over and over. Yes, I understand what you are trying to say. But I knew he could scarcely see or hear me through the haze and buzz of electric clouds around his head.
Damaged merchandise. He was a window dresser; he spent hours making signs on thick, white, rectangular cards with a creamy, smooth surface, writing them out in front of the television the night before the job. SALE, they said, HANES HOSIERY, $1.99 A PAIR, or whatever. The next day, he propped the signs up in front of the displays: a bra folded carefully, skillfully, and laid out on the floor, cups pointing up and out; stockings draped over the Lucite stand, the card tipped in front. At Christmas, he piled mounds of fake snow, hung tinsel, attached big red bows, positioned empty packages wrapped in foil, red and green and silver. In the summer there were palm trees and beach balls. He was the window dresser, his station wagon filled with displays and rolls of no-seam paper, sprays of stiff flowers, thick cotton sockettes over his shoes to protect the floor, eyes bugged out, now seeing in his mind’s eye himself on sale, marked down, damaged merchandise, an item nobody, not even the most inveterate bargain hunter, would want.
He told me this, spelled it out for me, and I listened even though I didn’t want to. My father paced around my living room, ranting, his voice careening, echoing in the big, empty room that was his sad and lonely and frightened heart. It scared me to listen because I knew that I had been damaged, too: by his not seeing me, as he was not seeing me right then. The room was turning into a funnel, and I felt myself being sucked down into it. I acted very polite, trying to remain a whole person. I asked him some questions. I tried to change the subject. And then I don’t remember what I did. Maybe I yelled at him, or maybe I just asked him to leave, telling him I had to go somewhere. Or maybe I said, Oh, Daddy, it’s awful you feel that way. I was trying to hold on to myself, and no response I could have chosen would have been any better than another. Nothing could have woken him up to me.
In August 1988, my father was diagnosed with liver cancer, the result of chronic hepatitis, a disease associated with heroin addiction. The doctors correctly predicted he would live another five months. He tried chemotherapy, ate a macrobiotic diet, enrolled in an experimental holistic-treatment program. When I visited him in November, it was clear that things would not turn around.
Al Cohn had died of liver cancer as well — that same year. Zoot Sims had been done in by alcohol in 1985. In the weeks before my father died, he played their records, and only theirs, as if he could hear them calling to him.
My mother, who had stuck by him through everything, was still at his side. One day when the three of us were together, he was eager to share his latest revelation. A social worker in the treatment program had asked him what he would miss most when he died. It was an interesting question and I was interested to hear his answer. He said: I told her, Yeah, sure, I’ll miss my wife and my kids, but what I’ll miss most is the music. The music is the only thing that’s never let me down.
That this revelation would hurt us — my mother especially — never occurred to him. He never kept his thoughts to himself, even when it was cruel to express them. Neither my mother nor I said a word. The statement was the truth of him — not only what he said, but also the fact that he would say it to us, and say it without guilt, without apology, without regret.
This essay previously appeared in Granta.
— Ed.
