EXCERPT
Crack addict dad comes clean in new book
October 6, 2010
Christopher Shulgan
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
This is a coming-of-age story that involves a baby, a father and crack cocaine.
Basically those are the three main characters. Putting it that way makes it look like I’m mining the experience for the shock value. It’s just plain nasty to juxtapose “baby” and “crack.” I know that better than anyone – I lived that juxtaposition. But I’ve been struggling with how to begin this weird tale of drugs and fatherhood. I’ve written and rewritten this story’s first paragraph so many times without feeling that I ever got it right. So one night right before the drop-dead date for any more changes, I spent the whole of an evening staring at my computer screen and trying to figure out what the first sentence should say. I decided it should say what the whole story was, in one sentence. And as weird as it is, that’s the sentence I came up with. The one that fits. This is a memoir about two years in my life when I had a long-overdue coming of age. One that involved a baby (mine), a father (me), and my problems with crack cocaine (f*ck).
Looking back on our pre-child era I guess we made the decision to have children fairly cavalierly. The we being me and my wife, Natalie. I had the idea that I wanted to have kids one day. I wanted to wrestle with them the way my wonderful father wrestled with wonderful me. I wanted a 2-year-old who spent Sunday mornings in bed alongside me, behind a spread newspaper’s weekend edition. Who tagged along with me to bin-lined aisles of hardware stores as I had once tagged along with my dad. Camping and cavorting and comparing and conversing. I wanted to teach my progeny of the brilliance of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska.” To model each individual motion in the footwork a football lineman executed in the seconds after the snap. To teach him the semaphore-like arm motions required to turn a strip of sewn silk into the necktie’s Windsor knot.
But I wanted all this the way one wants a Lamborghini, or a cottage on a lake: as something one gets at some distant point in the future. Then one day Natalie told me she had stopped taking her birth control pills. Actually, she didn’t even tell me. She was talking to her sister on the phone and I overheard. “Wait, what?” I said. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“That we’re stopping using birth control.”
“I did. And we’re not stopping birth control. I am. Do you realize I’ve been taking the pill for thirteen years?”
And at this point I was thirty-one and Natalie was twenty-seven and we had some friends who had started popping out the little critters and we figured maybe we’d let biology take its course. And then it didn’t. As the pill’s estrogen dose faded Natalie stopped menstruating. Which was a bit weird. Then the really weird thing was that she was lactating, which is to say, her breasts were producing milk. We appreciated the fact they were so eager, but we hadn’t had a kid yet, so actually that was a bit worrying, and then once Natalie saw a doctor about it, holy crap, it turned out that it was a lot worrying, this premature lactation could be caused by all these terrible things and in fact, it was caused by a terrible thing. Maybe a year after we began these MRI scans and specialist appointments and late-night Google research of terms like “craniopharyngioma,” the various MDs decided the cause was a cyst in Natalie’s pituitary gland. The cyst increased Natalie’s production of a hormone called prolactin, which in turn inhibited her production of estrogen.
There was some scary discussion of surgery that would have involved, oh Christ this is terrible to think about, but it would have involved getting to the pituitary gland from deep inside Natalie’s nostrils. They wanted to insert the scalpels and shunt and the rest of the instruments up through Natalie’s nose. Equipped with such visuals the two of us spent quite a few evenings holding each other on our bed with the lights off. And then it turned out the cyst was responding to the drugs Natalie was taking. Her cycle returned. The milk dried up. Shortly after, the doctor said, it was safe to start trying for the goal that had started this whole mess. We started trying for a baby.
Maybe it was the fact that we’d been forced to wait a while – by this time it was early summer, 2005. Or maybe we just overdid it. Both of us are fairly focused individuals. Pretty soon I discovered getting-pregnant sex isn’t the worst kind of sex. I don’t think. Surely there are worse kinds. Sex with animals, for example. Sex with enormously fat people. But so far as sex involving one person who really does manage to be just generally astonishingly attractive (to clarify: Natalie), and then any other person who isn’t an animal or enormously fat (me), getting-pregnant sex is pretty bad. It’s the notion of the goal that mucks things up, I think. Sex in my experience never has an ulterior motive. Sex is the point. Sex is the motive. Except when it comes to getting-pregnant sex. Then there’s an ulterior motive. The end justifies the means, here, but the end also somehow sullies the means. For example, one time I found myself apologizing to Natalie for taking so long. And I thought: we’ve made this thing so odious I was apologizing for prolonging it. And still nothing took. This getting-pregnant thing was taking so long that Natalie decided I should go and get checked out.
“Wait, what?” I said. “Don’t I get a say in this?”
“Yeah,” Natalie said. “You can say yes.”
I don’t really have anything to say about it. I’d actually prefer not to talk about it. Did I check out okay? Yes, you inquisitive jerk. Thanks for asking. We went back to trying. At this point Natalie was using so many pregnancy tests she was buying them in bulk from the dollar store. (Seriously. You can do that.) It was December 27, 2005, when her urine passed the test. We were just home from Christmas holidays. She yelped out,
“Chris!” and I raced up the stairs. She showed me the stick.
I said, “Is that good?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It means I’m pregnant.”
“Well that’s good, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “There was that wine on Christmas.”
“That doesn’t count, I don’t think.”
“Because it was Christmas?”
“No, because it’s too early in the pregnancy.”
“Oh you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course I don’t.”
“But probably you’re right. Okay then it’s good.”
“It is good,” I said. I hugged her. “Baby, it is good. It’s great.”
I should have been happy. No wait – I was happy. There was a cupboard in my soul where all the decent parts of me lived, and this cupboard featured birdsong and fluffy kittens cavorting over the prospect of a little creature’s kisses and hugs. There was happiness. And on top of that was relief. It was like, whew, my work here is done. It was astonishing. For the first time ever, I was relieved to be heading into a period that, compared to the one I’d just left, would feature comparatively fewer incidents of sexual intercourse.
A FEW MORE WORDS TO FILED UNDER, “WIFE’S PREGNANCY: SHULGAN’S REACTION TO.”
What’s interesting about this period is that I spent comparatively little time thinking about the problem that would fuck me up later. Probably it’s relevant to say that until that year, no one else among my close friends had ever had a kid. I was a magazine journalist about to mark my tenth year since graduating from university. My friends were other writers or editors, some photographers, some musicians or film types, a few bankers, a lawyer or two. During the previous decade we’d thought about kids not at all. And you know what? For the most part? Our lives were pretty great. We’d graduated just as grunge gave way to the computer-generated drum blasts of DJ culture. There were weekend-long music festivals where our strung-out selves caught just a few horizontal hours. Even during the last few years, as the culture swung back from DJs toward guitars, the all-night ethic persisted among our set.
Once the bands stopped around last call the game became finding the blind pig, the cold tea, the password at the unmarked door where entrance was almost victory enough to fuel you to 5 a.m. and Friday’s debauch gave way to Saturday’s sleep and Sunday with the Times, and recovery. Back then, five movies a weekend was a not uncommon event.
And then came pregnancy. Anxiety? Sure, I had some. My biggest problem in the first few days after I found out involved a bit of angst about autonomy and inhibited freedom. My fourth decade of life on this planet was well underway and impulse gratification had become my dominant mode. Living for myself was going quite well for me, thanks. How would I fare once I switched things over toward living for other people, to wit, tiny babies? I had to get serious. Was I ready to get serious? I wondered: was I ready to reproduce? Well, wait. I guess I had reproduced. My work was done. But was I ready for what came after? At that point, that was the extent of it, my own quiet soundtrack of angst.
WHAT ABOUT YOUR DRUG PROBLEM, SHULGAN?
Oh yeah, right. That. Would you believe me if I told you that I didn’t really consider it? At that point I considered my drug problem licked. It didn’t really occur to me. For the most part I considered myself to be on the straight and narrow, and I figured having a kid would even out the kinks, so after the birth I’d be even straighter and narrower. That was my thinking. And then I had my first hint that perhaps things wouldn’t be quite so simple.
Right around this period our friends, er, Billy and Saleem, say, had a baby. Several weeks after the kid arrived they had us over for dinner. The idea was a low-key affair. Spend some time with the baby, spend some time with the couple, get out of there. Even before kids, Billy and Saleem were tilted more toward the crunchy, progressive side than Natalie and I. Billy was so progressive he never referred to Saleem as his “wife” – he referred to her as his “partner.” (That threw me for a loop, the first time it happened. I was like – dude, weren’t you the guy in university who went around referring to prospective girlfriends as bitches?) Billy was never the sort of guy to do things halfway.
It was all in, or nothing. Saleem was the same. They were a good couple that way. Point is, I had some indication their baby would grow up in an all-organic cocoon. I just didn’t realize how all-organic a cocoon it would turn out to be. “It’s jute,” Saleem said when the four of us gathered in the doorway of the new nursery, explaining the beneficial properties of the natural fibre floor covering, primary among them being jute’s inert nature—the stuff didn’t “offgas.” At that point I’d never heard of “off-gassing.” It sounded kind of nasty and I wanted to ask about it except Saleem was onto her breastfeeding pillow’s raw cotton cover and then it was something about cloth diapers and the Burt’s Bees soap-slash-shampoo. We saw the video-enabled infant-monitoring system, the hand-woven sleepers and the sustainably harvested basswood toys. Oh, and at some point amid all that, Billy and Saleem remembered to show us the baby. Who actually turned out to be really cool.
If I had to rank the new acquisitions Billy had revealed to me over the years, I would say I was as impressed by his new daughter, if not more impressed, as I was by such earlier, purchased possessions as his Wii Fit or his high-definition projection television, which beamed football on the wall in glorious, vibrant 1080p.
This was the first time in years I’d been so close to a baby. I couldn’t get over how much like a person she was – only smaller. It was neat to take bits of her face and place them on her parents to see what matched and what didn’t. It was neat to hold an entire human being contained in a seven-pound sack of skin. Endless repetitive statements marvelled about the difference in scale: her fingers were so little. Her toes, so tiny. And her lips were like miniature wine-gum worms. Which I quelled the impulse to chew.
Eventually the baby talk grew stale. I dealt with the first hour; even the second was okay. But eventually the same punchline wore thin. Restated over and over, in slightly different words and phrases, that punchline was, isn’t she cute. Plus, something rankled about the tone of this discourse. Lots of comments went straight from Billy to Saleem, or Saleem to Billy. This conversation amounted to our old friends giving us a slide show of a recent trip they’d made, to the new land of parenthood. They were telling us about a destination we hadn’t yet explored, which was fine, except lots of their comments were things like, “We can’t even begin to describe it.” Or: “You’ll find out.” The implication being, we couldn’t understand, we wouldn’t understand, until we’d been to the land ourselves.
(And bear in mind, they didn’t then know Natalie was pregnant.) This started to feel a bit forced – as though Billy and Saleem were faking how much better their new status as father and mother was compared to their old status as only husband and wife. I was about to make some stupid comment intended to puncture the pretension – I had something cooking that linked the smell of the cloth diapers to “offgassing.”
Then there was a moment – I can’t remember exactly what happened. A spilled wine glass? I looked at Saleem and I saw the dark circles, the brittle quality to her laughter. Suddenly I recognized her vibe. How exhausted she was, the fragile way she carried herself – it reminded me of the way she was around 5 or 6 a.m., on those mornings I’d seen her coming down from ecstasy.
They so badly wanted to show us how special parenthood was. Parenthood’s supposed specialness was helping them get through this tough period. And if they needed to lord over us their new status, if that helped them get through it, then I was willing to let them do it, if only for the fact that tomorrow, I could sleep in until whenever I wanted, and they could not.
My first indication I was headed for trouble happened shortly after we’d cleared dessert. I triggered an excuse. Bad luck, I said, but I had to split – an editor friend of mine was having a party. I should go. Strictly for networking purposes.
“Networking,” Natalie said, rolling her eyes; she’d stay to talk more with Saleem. As I headed toward the scrabble of shoes by the door, Billy came up behind me. “Do you mind if I come?” he said. And something about the way he said it . . . There was a note there. He almost ended his question with a please. A short time later Billy and I were walking toward the party when he suggested we stop in at the bar we were passing.
“How is it?” I asked, meaning parenthood, and this new father regarded me for a beat too long before he said one word: “Great.” And switched the conversation back to me.
How drunk he was didn’t become apparent until after we were at the party, when I saw him sitting next to the attractive wife of my editor-in-chief. “I was just explaining why I couldn’t sit on Billy’s lap,” she said as I joined them.
Billy shrugged. “The offer stands,” he said, and lurched off toward the drinks. The wife watched him go. “At first I thought he was – what’s the word?” she said. “Challenged? I thought, how nice of Shulgan, to take his friend for a night out. Then he grabbed my ass, and it became less amusing.”
She shrugged off my apologies. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I get it. He’s an alcoholic.”
“Oh, he’s not an alcoholic,” I said. “He’s just. . . .”
Huh – what was his excuse? “He just had a baby,” I said.
Funny – at the time, the excuse sounded lame. At the time I was too ignorant about parenting to realize the legitimacy of the excuse I’d offered. How ignorant I was, then. Kids? I didn’t think of them! I hadn’t thought of them! Not since – shit. When did I think of them?
SOME PEOPLE REACTED TO THE NEWS OF AN IMPENDING BABY WITH EXCITEMENT AND RESOLUTION
The news fills some deep-seated chasm in the soul and future mom and dad are able now to progress through life in a perpetual state of tranquility. Well, good for them. In my case, the opposite happened. I felt like a traitor, and every so often I had a bad case of traitor’s remorse.
Obsessing me was this short story I’d read years before, the title of which I couldn’t remember, involving the stalking of a family man by a former best friend. The family man has the usual accoutrements, the wife, the kids, the house, the lawn. And the best friend is stalking him because years before, perhaps over a camp fire, certainly under the influence of drugs and drink, the friends had made a promise to one another: Please, if I ever become one of them: Kill me. And the best friend is about to take the family man at his word.
That spring, as I walked around the city, I half expected some childless old friend to pop up from behind a nearby shrub, or a streetcar shelter, rifle butt cocked to shoulder, single eye peering through a long-distance scope that placed a red dot on my chest, just left of centre. I’d had conversations like the one recounted in the short story. What culturally informed, trend-literate geek hadn’t? As an intern at the daily newspaper where I’d landed as a features reporter shortly after grad school, I can remember proclaiming to one of the investigative reporters, amid a conversation about the limited lifespan of cultural literacy, how I’d always be cool. (Hey, it makes me cringe, too.)
Late-night conversations with gay friends grew intense, back then, on the topic of parenthood. My friend James and I denigrated what we perceived as the bovine timidity and crawl toward irrelevance of a mutual friend who’d had kids early.
“We’ve lost him,” we decided. And: “We’ll never become like that.” How banal, a life where one traded music, movies, and books for diapers, buggies, and creativity-encouraging playthings. How dull, we sneered. How cliché. And the suburbs? Might as well have been one of Dante’s circles.
A while back, an Internet video made the rounds. The video shows footage from a ceiling-mounted security cam, and it depicts a series of office cubicles, unremarkable but for the dog lounging in the midst of the frame. Seconds into the video the canine jumps up and runs about the office, all barks and bared teeth. You wonder: What the hell is making this dog freak out?
And then the frame shakes, the foamboard partitions tip and then fall, a light shatters, and things go dark. The cause is an earthquake, the occurrence of which explains the dog’s behaviour: The pooch predicted it. The pooch went crazy because it knew how crazy things were going to get. And that spring, a part of me was acting a whole lot like that dog.
Basically, every time I thought about my impending fatherhood, I wanted to go out and get wasted. To drink my face off, and gobble drugs by the pound. At the time, little recognition existed of the danger this situation represented. Recall that drug problem I mentioned? Recall I thought it solved? Well, I considered it so solved that having a few beers was fine. Also fine was having a lot of beers. My drug problem was so long in the past that on the fourth night after I learned we were going to have a baby, on an evening out that fell on New Year’s Eve, at a party where the stuff was around, I thought it was okay for cocaine to get me to 6 a.m. on that holiday of fresh beginnings and renewal, New Year’s Day. Well, cocaine was supposed to be off limits. That was the deal. That was the agreement between Natalie and me. But I chalked up that New Year’s as a one-time thing. Yeah, I wasn’t too worried about it. It was a slip-up, no big deal, the last three years had been mostly drug-free but for the odd accident and this time was no different.
Right? I told myself the same thing after another slip-up happened. Although even to me that one sounded hollow. Even I recognized trouble in the aftermath of wasted me going out to the old stomping grounds and finding the one poison I couldn’t control.
At the launch party Wednesday, Oct. 7, for his book, Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellions, Drugs and Parenting, Christopher Shulgan debates with Bunch Family (bunchfamily.ca) founder Rebecca Brown the question, "Is Fatherhood Lame?" Wrongbar, 1279 Queen St. W., from 6-9 p.m. For more information go to shulgan.com