Cocaine's Son (2 page)

“Hi, Dad,” I would answer.

I would listen as he would talk, and talk and talk, about whatever was on his mind. One topic usually prevailed. “You know, David,” he said, removing his glasses from his beaky nose so I could see the sincerity in his wide, round eyes, “don’t you know that sex between a man and a woman is the most beautiful and natural thing there is? It’s okay to want it. It’s okay to want it from a woman. You’ve got to let them know that you want it. That’s how God made the game. But He knew that He couldn’t make the game too easy, right? Or else where would be the challenge? Do you know that it took me years to figure this out? For years I suffered—oh! how I suffered!—when girls would reject me. Do you know that your mother is the first woman who didn’t turn me down? She showed me that it was beautiful and wonderful. I don’t ever want you to be scared. I don’t ever want you to suffer like I suffered.”

Less frequently, he would tell a recurring story about his father. “Do you know, David,” he told me on many occasions, “I was once rummaging around in the glove compartment of his car and found a glass eye? And I knew it was his, but for so long, I was too scared to tell him. Finally, one day I got up the courage to tell him,
and I said, ‘Dad, I know you wear a glass eye, and I want you to know I don’t think any less of you.’ And do you know what he said? He said, ‘Gerry, if it hadn’t of been for that glass eye, I could have been president.’ And I hugged him and I kissed him”—by now he was shivering and choking on his own tears—“and I said, ‘Dad, you always could have.’ ”

Sometimes he wanted to pass on bits of philosophy and wisdom he had picked up in his travels, whose usefulness he knew I would not grasp right away. “You know that when somebody dies,” he would say, “they aren’t really gone, right? As long as we keep them in our hearts and remember them, they live on forever, don’t they?”

When his lesson had ended, my father would prostrate himself on the surface created by my and my sister’s adjoining beds, and he would fall asleep, snoring loudly. Eventually, I would drift off, too, and when I woke up in the morning, he would be gone, leaving me to wonder if I’d dreamed it all.

Just as I believed that everyone lived as we did, in bustling, overcrowded metropolises, surrounded by bums and decaying brownstones and high-rise apartment complexes that stretched into the clouds; and that everyone went to a private school and was transported there each day by a private van that picked him up and dropped him off at his front door; and that everyone was Jewish to the extent that we were Jewish and knew who was
not
Jewish because they not only exchanged gifts on Christmas but also went to church, or because they were black, I believed that all families operated as ours did. There was a mother whose job it was to do all the household chores, to cook and clean and raise the children and give them their Oreos before bed, and there was a father who did whatever he did, at whatever hours he did it, and was thus entitled never to be questioned about it.

Somehow I knew that I was the only boy whose father confided in him as mine did, who trusted his son so completely and had such faith in his intellect and maturity that he would make it his mission to prepare his offspring, aged five or six or seven, for these stark grown-up lessons in sex and death and missing eyes. Meanwhile, all my peers would have to wait to discover these things when an indifferent world and callous experience forced the lessons upon them. Separated though we were by some thirty-seven years, I thought my father saw in me an equal and a second self. I thought I had a special friend.

Unlike any other person I had known so far, my special friend was not the same man at all times of day. There was the exuberant, affectionate husband and father who referred to the marital bed he shared with my mother as the “Our Bed,” a reminder that my sister and I were always welcome in it, too. He had no shortage of diminutives for me, either: in his lexicon, I was the Ace; I was his Pal; I was the Wild Man; I was the Edge Man, so called for my preference for sitting at the farthest, most dangerous precipice of the Our Bed; I was Pizza Head, for the time I fell noggin-first into a pizza he and my mother were eating on the Our Bed.

I was the Chicken Man, who had his own theme song, set to the tune of the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man”:

Another nickname he gave me, Chicken Itzy, was so pervasive and so deeply embedded in my consciousness that when I first encountered the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza in a middle-school history textbook, I had to stop and wonder if my father had built those pyramids there and named them after me.

This father was so endlessly attentive with me, so imitative and appreciative of anything I did or said, that when one of my enunciations amused him, it forever became a family catchphrase. “Out de door!” he would say when he left the apartment for the day, just as I did, or “Hat on!,” meaning it was time to pack up one’s things and go. Using his own special made-up vocabulary, he would call out the scrunched-up facial expression I made when I got sleepy (“The kid’s got mouse eyes!”) or the way my hair stood on end when I first woke up (“The kid’s got pull-’ems!”). Until I learned to pronounce the word correctly, he referred to his spectacles as his “guh-lasses,” and when I would reach up and try to grab them off his nose, he would playfully warn me, “Guh-lasses are
not
a toy.” When I succeeded and his glasses went spilling to the floor and I knew I’d been bad, he would make an exaggerated grimace and sing me a silly song to calm me down:

He was not always absent from my life. He could be counted on for at least an occasional appearance at crucial events, to watch me at the second-grade pageant as I stood in a toga made from bedsheets, behind a podium wrapped in construction paper and decorated with the legend
S.P.Q.R
. spelled out in gold and purple glitter, and recited from memory Marc Antony’s funeral oration from
Julius Caesar
. Later, that same man would emerge from the back of the school gymnasium to give me a congratulatory bear hug, his rumpled clothing hanging off him like dead leaves and his breath so pungent that it arrived at my nostrils long before he leaned in to bestow upon me a congratulatory kiss.

Some days he would come home brimming with energy and
wanting to take me to the neighborhood tropical-fish store, where he would wander the aisles for what felt like hours and chat up the salesmen about the largest tanks they sold and the latest innovations in water-filtration technology, while I sat on the floor and stared at the fish, wondering if they knew that I appreciated how it felt to be confined in a tiny box all day, and wishing that I could be for one moment that toy diver blowing bubbles from inside his colossal diving suit.

One night my father returned to our apartment and decided then and there that he was going to drive from New York to the home of a business client who lived far north in the Adirondacks, near the Canadian border. I decided that I wanted to go with him, because I knew it would get me out of school, and he allowed me to go, unfazed by my mother’s disapproving scowls. On a pitch-black winter’s night, we rode up I-87 together for hours, not in my mother’s dilapidated Lincoln Continental that got only AM radio and was always breaking down on the way to Hebrew school, but in my father’s pristine BMW, in which the leather seats always smelled vaguely of carsickness. We were two intrepid explorers, castaways with nothing between us except an open road and a single cassette of a whiny, adenoidal troubadour singing of knights in armor and silver spaceships and only love can break your heart and ominous intonations of what’s going to happen when the morning comes. Twice I fell asleep and twice I woke up just in time to watch my father lose control of the car on slippery patches of ice as we spun out into banks of snow. After the second wipeout, the car could no longer drive forward, and for only a couple of miles did my father insist that he was going to complete the trip driving in reverse. A tow truck provided us with our ride home.

What did he do to keep me in a steady supply of Dr. Seuss books
and videogame cartridges, to pay for my private school and his BMW and his tricked-out fish tanks? Nothing glamorous and nothing different from exactly what his father had done and his father’s father before that: he sold fur. Not the coats but the skins themselves, torn from the bodies of coyotes and foxes, beavers and minks and lynxes, turned inside out or pounded flat, treated, and preserved. He did not perform those tasks himself; he bought the pelts in small or large quantities, waited for markets to shift, and then sold them to other traders at a profit. To do this required that he go to a storefront every day and handle the skins, inspect the merchandise when it came in, and present it to others that might buy it from him. When he returned home, he reeked of flannel and denim and the musky oils that dripped from these hides, and of something else. I have smelled many unbearable odors since, and learned to distinguish the difference between the smells of tons of discarded food left to fester in the sun; vomit that has crystallized on the sidewalk; and men on subway trains soaked in their own urine. Still, I have never figured out what that additional scent was.

The fur industry of my grandfather’s age had thrived to where it was the equal, in size and prestige, of the garment district it bordered on Manhattan’s West Side. But by the time of my childhood, it was sequestered—so fate ordained—to a few dilapidated buildings in the shadow of Madison Square Garden. On the days I was brought to my father’s office, I would walk hand in hand with my mother past an off-track-betting station, a couple of parking lots, several gray and cheerless edifices where various unknown trades were conducted, finally to a building with a large, wide window that bore the legend
GERALD ITZKOFF FUR MERCHANT
(and a smaller window that, for the sake of nostalgia and superstition, still read
BOB ITZKOFF & SON
).

My visits here consisted of waiting for several hours while my father finished his workday. I listened to him screaming over the phone at his clients and his rivals; screaming at the day workers who did the manual labor, retrieving the fur from storage and tying it up in bales; and screaming at my mother, who had recently begun to help him with the bookkeeping. Here, he was a different man from the one who sat at our breakfast table, armed with a thousand running jokes that equated going to work with committing suicide, who from nowhere would quote Edward G. Robinson’s mournful death rattle from
Little Caesar
—“Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”—and who responded to my mother’s demands that he get in the shower already by miming a noose being drawn around his neck. Here, he was not the same person who had become so fixated on a short, poetic proverb, possibly of his own invention, about the meaninglessness and futility of all life’s efforts—“Nothing means nothing”—that he would sometimes recite it under his breath without even realizing he’d said it.

Here, he was dynamic, aggressive, competitive. He wanted no one else to win except the people he was partnered with, and those who rivaled him he wanted to see utterly vanquished. He made it no secret in all his telephone calls around the office, and the ones that followed him home late at night, and his monologues in which he would talk himself through his plans of attack and profess his invincibility, often ending with him declaring: “We’re gonna get ’em, do you hear me? We’re
gonna get ’em.
”

I wandered the cold concrete building, peeling large, jagged flakes of paint off the surfaces as I went, bounding up and down precarious metal staircases made slippery by decades of musky, gunky buildup, hiding among the burlap bales that towered over
me in the refrigeration units, drawing on walls already decorated by the retinue of employees who had worked here for months or weeks before they disappeared with their wages.

Sometimes on my explorations, I would open up a cabinet or a panel and find the decomposing bodies of dead rats. Other times I would reach into a drawer and discover magazines, reminiscent of those he kept hidden around the apartment, with crinkled, yellowing pages populated by photographs of radiant, naked women whose ready poses and unfamiliar anatomies stirred strangely pleasant sensations in corresponding and similarly untested parts of my body. Often these pictures would be embellished with great dollops of purple and orange matter, the encrusted remains of what I intuitively knew was my father’s blood. I could glance only briefly at these tableaus before being overcome by a humbling feeling that I was gazing at something sacred, an admixture of the distillated essence of my father and a little bit of me that, when combined with the holy vessels depicted in those photographs, held the secret to creation itself.

It was around this time that I went through a phase when similar urges made me want to reach out and grab for my mother’s breasts, and my father became my great protector when I needed him to shield me from her sudden ferocious retaliation. It was not just my unknowing molestations that set her off; her fury would follow when I hadn’t obeyed one of the rules she had explicitly set forth, or when I transgressed an invisible boundary she had forgotten to convey to me. Maybe I’d neglected to wash my hands and face after coming home from an afternoon spent scavenging the trash cans for Oscar the Grouch; maybe I’d sat backward in my seat at the dinner table, just to see what would happen if I did it, or maybe I’d pulled my knit cap over my face in protest when I refused to watch the St. Patrick’s Day parade after
she’d fought her way through the Fifth Avenue crowds to get me a good look at the procession.

The openhanded blows would come swiftly across my face, sometimes just a single bolt of lightning, sometimes a flurry of hailstones. Once I’d absorbed that first stinging swipe, the rest landed numbly with no impact. But sometimes my father 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.