Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

Family Reunion

Noah is the first thing I see when I step out of the elevator at the Maritime Hotel. Half crouched, on one knee, bearded and shaky, he appears both on the verge of sprinting and holding up his hands to protect himself from attack. And there’s something else — as if he’s been caught at something, as if somehow he is the guilty party. I haven’t seen him since the night at the Carlyle three days ago.

I sprint past him toward the lobby’s door. He calls and I don’t pause.

From somewhere else I hear: Billy!

Billy?

No one calls me Billy — no one but my family, friends from college, and people I grew up with — and I hear the name now as if it’s shouted across a dinner table from childhood.

Billy!

It’s my little sister, Lisa. I don’t see her but know it’s her voice. She’s twenty-five but already has a voice — smoke-choked and sad-shattered — that should have taken another twenty years to earn. It’s the kind of voice that to some sounds like a good time.

I scan the lobby as I move toward the main door, and there they are. My father. Kim. Lisa. My family. My family minus my mother and little brother, Sean. I can’t believe they’re here. My father would have had to come down from the hills of New Hampshire where he lives alone; my sister, Kim, from her husband and twin boys in Maine; Lisa from Boston.

I slow for a moment to make sure that the little man in the bright blue Windbreaker and gray New Balance running shoes, standing in the chic, dimly lit lobby of the Maritime Hotel, is actually my father. He has never once, in the twelve years I’ve lived in New York, stood on the island of Manhattan. He has never once seen where I’ve lived or the offices where I’ve worked. And, until now, he’s never met Noah. I wonder if I am hallucinating.

Willie, c’mon, the man stammers in a tight Boston accent.

It’s him. Looking like J. D. Salinger hauled out of rural seclusion and dropped into a big-city setting that could not appear less comfortable.

I can’t get out of there fast enough. As I reach the door, Lisa grabs at my jacket. I can smell her perfume and cigarette smoke as I shake her off and run toward Ninth Avenue. She follows fast behind, screaming at me to come back. A cab jerks up to the curb. I get in and yell, Go! which, thank God, it does. The sun blazes off the chrome and glass of oncoming traffic and I have to squint to see Lisa run into the street, hail a cab that barely stops as she yanks the door open and jumps in.

As I shout to the driver not to let the cab behind us follow, I cringe in shame at how cartoonishly awful the situation has become. Like so many other moments, this one feels lifted from an after-school special or Bright Lights, Big City. The cabdriver plays his part — rolls his eyes, drives on. Through the rear window, I can see my family and Noah scatter onto the street. It is midday in the city and the world rushes on around them. I am struck by how small they are, this is. How swiftly these unseen little urban dramas are done and gone. Doors click shut, motors roar, taxis squeal away, people disperse. Through the window, I watch them recede to dots. Light flashes from everything and I can barely see.