Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

Bringing Down the House

He’s six. Diminishing the value of the house. That’s what he’s being told. Bringing it down with piss-splattered heating vents in the bathroom coated with rust and stink. Making it more difficult to sell by scrubbing the pattern off the wallpaper next to the toilet each time he sprays there and tries to clean it up.

They are in the green Volkswagen, and it’s not the first time his father has told him these things. That his piss is costing the family thousands of dollars is a fact as old as memory. He is quiet, as always when his problem comes up. His father talks in sharp, lean bursts that usually end with C’mon, Willie. Just get it together, or Jesus, kid, fix it. And then long stretches of silence. The only sounds in the car are the low hum of 1010 WINS on the radio and the click of his father’s pipe against his teeth.

They are on a highway heading home from Boston. They drive uncomfortably fast until the traffic congeals and the swearing and the steering wheel pounding starts. As his father turns the radio down and adjusts the heating vents, he imagines him before the great panel of lights and gadgets in the cockpits of the planes he flies. The ones filled with passengers who trust him to take them across the ocean, to London and Paris. There are times — like this — when he can’t imagine anything his father cannot do.

The traffic gets worse and his father grumbles at the cars in front of him. The boy stays quiet. He’s relieved that the attention has shifted away from him, from the reason they are in a car together today. They have gone to see a doctor — the one the Boston Red Sox use, his father said — to find out what exactly is wrong with him.

What precisely goes on at this doctor’s office, he will forget. Maybe he remembered in the car, ran it over in his head as they rode home, or maybe it had already slipped away. In any case, he will spend years trying to remember, but the only part that ever comes back will be the car ride itself. He’ll remember the old lines about wrecking the house and the strange, nearly sexual air of the day — so much talk about penises and pissing. Something clandestine and shameful about the whole trip, which had begun with his mother’s pinched announcement at breakfast that he and his father would be going to Boston to visit a doctor. He’ll remember how worried she looked and how far away. He’ll remember wishing the car would rattle at high speed right off the road and go up in a blaze. He will persist with that kind of wish for years — in school buses, planes, vans, trains. He’ll also remember — and this most vividly — a prediction his father makes. That very soon his friends — Timothy, Derek, Jennifer — and their parents will stop letting him into their houses for sleepovers or playdates. That it’s just a matter of time before they catch on, and once they do, there will be no way they’ll allow such a mess, such a monster, in their houses.

This last bit will stick. It will expand into a belief that they already know and are complaining to his parents and warning their children, his friends. He’ll worry, until they move away a few years later to a smaller town farther north and deeper in the woods, that secretly his friends and their families and even his teachers know about his problem and that there will come a day when they’ll make a spectacle of that knowing. He will imagine and sometimes think he’ll hear them say monster under their breaths.

And so they drive. His father presses on with talk of declining house values, promises of banishment. The radio mumbles low on the station that will still, years later, remain for him the source of the gloomiest, most desolate sound, and be the station playing in every car his father owns. As they get off the highway and begin to snake along the winding Connecticut roads toward home, there is silence and the occasional click of pipe against teeth. The world outside seems to be in on all of it: the trip to the doctor and the warnings afterward part of some long-considered, collectively agreed-upon plan of action. There is nothing physically wrong with you, his father eventually shouts, exhausted no doubt by the whole day. It’s just a matter of willpower. Of choice. God only knows what kind of permanent damage you’re doing down there. What kinds of things you won’t be able to do, later.

This last part must have been said on the way up the driveway or sitting in front of the garage because he will remember hearing the word damage as he looked up at the charcoal-colored ranch house, knowing that a new radiator and fresh wallpaper were nothing compared with what would be needed to fix him.