11 I’m Dancing

I’m dancing.

The twist, actually—or something very much like it. And though I am mortified by the very thought of dancing in front of witnesses, I am not alone in this room. Around me, nine or ten Filipina nannies and their charges are also swiveling their hips and moving to the music in their stocking feet. My dance partner is a two-year-old girl in pink tights and a tutu. The red stuff beneath my fingernails is, I suspect, vestigial Play-Doh.

This, I am fully aware, is not cool. This is as far away from cool as a man can get. But I am in no way troubled by such thoughts. I crossed that line a long time ago. If anything, I’m feeling pretty good about myself—in the smug, Upper East Side, Bugaboo-owning, sidewalk-hogging, self-righteous kind of a way indigenous to my new tribe. I am, after all, the only parent here on this fine Tuesday afternoon, alone among the gyrating nannies, the little Sophias, Vanessas, Julias, Emmas, and Isabellas. My daughter, grinning maniacally as she jumps and twists about three feet below me, is very pleased that I am here. “That’s right, I do love you more than the mothers of all these other children love them. That’s why Daddy’s here—and they’re not. They’re getting their fucking nails done, having affairs, going to Pilates class, or whatever bad parents do…I’m here for you, Boo…twistin’ my heart out—something I would never ever have done for any other person in my whole life. Only for you. I’m a good daddy. Goooood Daddy!”

Later, if she’s good, there will be ice cream. I will seat her prominently next to me, facing the street in her Petit Bateau jumper, secretly hoping that passersby will notice how beautiful she is, how cute we are together, what a great dad I am. Holding her little hand, or carrying her on my shoulders, I will float home on a cloud of self-congratulation.

I’m through being cool. Or, more accurately, I’m through entertaining the notion that anybody could even consider the possibility of coolness emanating from or residing anywhere near me. As any conscientious father knows in his bones, any remaining trace elements of coolness go right out the window from the second you lay eyes on your firstborn. The second you lean in for the action, see your baby’s head make that first quarter-corkscrew turn toward you, well…you know you can and should throw your cherished black leather motorcycle jacket right in the nearest trash bin. Clock’s ticking on the earring, too. It’s somehow…undignified now.

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a “decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.”

I encouraged the psychopath in myself for most of my life. In fact, that’s a rather elegant description of whatever it was I was doing. But I figure I put in my time.

The essence of cool, after all, is not giving a fuck.

And let’s face it: I most definitely give a fuck now. I give a huge fuck. The hugest. Everything else—everything—pales. To pretend otherwise, by word or deed, would be a monstrous lie. There will be no more Dead Boys T-shirts. Whom would I be kidding? Their charmingly nihilistic worldview in no way mirrors my own. If Stiv Bators were still alive and put his filthy hands anywhere near my baby, I’d snap his neck—then thoroughly cleanse the area with baby wipes.

There is no hope of hipness.

As my friend A. A. Gill points out, after your daughter reaches a certain age—like five—the most excruciating and embarrassing thing she could possibly imagine is seeing her dad in any way threatening to rock. Your record collection may indeed be cooler than your daughter’s will ever be, but this is a meaningless distinction now. She doesn’t care. And nobody else will. If you’re lucky, long after you’re gone, a grandchild will rediscover your old copy of Fun House. But it will be way too late for you to bask in the glory of past coolness.

There is nothing cool about “used to be cool.”

All of this, I think, is only right and appropriate. Too much respect for your elders is, historically, almost always a bad thing. I want my daughter to love me. I don’t necessarily want her to share my taste for Irish ale or Hawaiian bud.

When you see the children of the perennially cool—on shows like Behind the Music—they look sheepish and slightly doomed, talking about their still-working rock-’n’-roller dads, as if they are the reluctant warders of some strange breed of extravagantly wrinkly and badly behaved children. Kids may not be old enough to know what cool is, but they are unerring in their ability to sense what isn’t.

No kid really wants a cool parent. “Cool” parents, when I was a kid, meant parents who let you smoke weed in the house—or allowed boyfriends to sleep over with their daughters. That would make Sarah Palin “cool.” But, as I remember, we thought those parents were kind of creepy. They were useful, sure, but what was wrong with them that they found us so entertaining? Didn’t they have their own friends? Secretly, we hated them.

Turning thirty came as a cruel surprise for me. I hadn’t really planned on making it that far. I’d taken seriously the maxims of my time—“Never trust anyone over thirty” and “Live fast, die young”—and been frankly shocked when I found that I’d lived that long. I’d done everything I could think of to ensure the opposite result, but there I was—and without a Plan B. The restaurant business provided a degree of stability in that there were usually people who expected me to get up in the morning and go somewhere—and heroin, if nothing else, was useful in giving me a sense of purpose in my daily movements. I knew what I had to do every day for most of my early thirties: get heroin.

Of my first marriage, I’ll say only that watching Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy—particularly the relationship between Matt Dillon’s Bob and Kelly Lynch’s Dianne—inspires feelings of great softness and sentiment in me. It’s a reminder that even the worst times can be happy ones—until they aren’t.

By my late thirties, I found that I was still lingering, and I admit to a sense of disappointment, confusion—even defeat. “What do I do now?” I remember thinking. Detoxed from heroin and methadone, and having finally—finally—ended a lifelong love affair with cocaine. Where was my reward for all this self-denial? Shouldn’t I have been feeling good? If anything, all that relative sobriety pointed up a basic emptiness and dissatisfaction in my life, a hole I’d managed to fill with various chemicals for the better part of twenty-five years.

At forty-four, shortly after writing Kitchen Confidential, I found myself suddenly with a whole new life. One minute, I was standing next to a deep fryer, pan-searing pepper steaks—and the next, I was sitting on top of a dune, watching the sun set over the Sahara. I was running road blocks in Battambang; tiny feet were walking on my back in Siem Reap; I was eating at El Bulli.