Cocaine's Son Read Free Page B

would be there to catch her by the wrist before a single slap had landed, so her own momentum would send her falling backward. Sometimes he wouldn’t be there at all and the blows would keep coming and coming, and I’d stare at the front door of our apartment, hoping that at any moment it would be thrown open by my father, who would swoop in, his forearms extended and bulging like a comic-book character’s, and rescue me.
    But who could protect us when he was the one we needed defending from?
    In the same way I believed our happy family was alike to all other happy families, I extrapolated that every coupling of a mother and a father must have some regularly scheduled moment, most often on a late Saturday afternoon, after the father has spent the morning snoring a hollow, staccato snore able to drown out the traffic, the bums, and the Con Edison plant below, when the parents will initiate a titanic argument in which walls will be rattled, doors will be slammed, and fragile household artifacts will be shattered. This was all normal, I thought, and an obligatory part of adulthood, that the mother cries and locks herself in the bathroom, and the father kicks at the door, shatters the mirror on its other side, and in an effort to coax her out, hurls the ceramic pumpkin in which his wife saves her quarters for the laundry machine.
    In my family, such fights persisted until my mother screamed and called my father a junkie, a funny-sounding sort of word thatreminded me of her broken-down Lincoln. A few minutes later, my father would storm into my room, the collar of his undershirt stretched halfway to his waist, possibly with scratches across his face, and wearily instruct me: “Look at me. Look at what your mother did to me.”
    This must be what happens in every family
, I assumed,
because it is what happens in mine
.
    It must happen as surely as those unpredictable and out-of-nowhere instances when my father was home at midafternoon on a weekend or even on a weekday, tottering around the apartment like a bear that had come out of hibernation, when he’d lose his temper because my videogames were too loud or I’d asked for his help with my fractions or my Roman-history crossword puzzle and I couldn’t remember that “governor” was the title both Americans and Romans gave to the person in charge of an entire state.
    “You
know
this one,” my father would insist.
    “No, I don’t!” I’d shout petulantly.
    “
Yes
, you
do
,” he would hiss back with menace in his eyes.
    I’d laugh and call him the silly word I had just heard my mother use: “You’re a junkie,” I’d say, because past observation had taught me that it was an instant victory. It was the one rebuke for which he possessed no comebacks.
    His eyes would fill with fire, and his hot breath would emanate from his flaring nostrils as he grabbed me by the wrist. “What did you just call me?” he would shout. “Do you even
know
what that word
means
?”
    Next he would storm out of the room and seek my mother. “Do you hear this, Maddy?” he would shout at her. “You hear the way he talks to me? Where do you think he gets it, huh? From
me
? From his
private school
? Well, let me tell you, there’ll be no moreof
that
. No more private school for him—he is out. Out of
school
, out of
here
, out on the
street
, for all I care!”
    “Stop it, Gerry! Stop it!” she would shout back at him. This would be followed by the sound of his bare, heavy feet trammeling across the floor, and he would reappear in my room in nothing more than his underwear and grab me by the arm.
    “You hear me?” he’d shout. “You’re
out of here.
” He’d open our front door and deposit me in the hallway, slamming the door shut as he hobbled back inside.
    Eventually, my mother would come out and retrieve me. But what was I supposed to think until then? Should I have concluded that this was an act intended to remind me that beneath his docile exterior, he possessed power