Cocaine's Son (21 page)

We were driving over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, a narrow twenty-four-mile-long suspension bridge that sits obliviously atop six hundred square miles of restless and capricious water. As I watched for any rain that would fall and compel the lake to swallow us up, my father began to tell me about something that had happened to him a few weeks ago in the Catskills.

He had been swimming at the gym and was toweling off in the locker room when an Orthodox Jew at a nearby bench took notice of him and approached him.

“Are you Jewish?” the man asked my father.

Despite the invitation to trouble that such a question usually portends, my father nonetheless answered it honestly and in the affirmative.

“Were you circumcised?” the stranger asked him. Again without stopping to contemplate the motives behind the line of questioning, my father answered yes.

“Really?” the man responded. “Because to me it looks like they didn’t finish the job.” Then he added: “Do you mind if I check for myself?”

The imaginary version of my father I held in my mind’s eye absolutely floored me by consenting to the man’s request. The Jew beheld my father’s naked body and inspected his penis manually and concluded that his initial observation was correct: there was still a small amount of foreskin remaining.

“No,” he said. “The circumcision was not done correctly. It was not completed.” He suggested to my father that the problem be rectified as quickly as possible, and my father, in a voice no doubt as calm and composed as the one in which he related the story to me, declined, and the conversation was ended.

“Now,” my father said, turning to his only son, whom he loved, “why do you think this man did that?”

I could think of many reasons why an unfamiliar man might lurk in a locker room with intentions of placing his hands on my father’s manhood, most of them stemming from nasty, apocryphal rumors about the sexual habits of Orthodox Jews that got spread around the secular summer camps I attended. But when I explained this to my father—that just because a man grows a long
beard and wears tefillin and asks to touch your penis, it does not necessarily make him a person of faith—he disagreed.

“David, don’t you understand that the Jewish faith teaches that you cannot get into heaven unless you’ve been circumcised?” His voice cracked, and his eyes welled with tears of pride. “He wasn’t doing it for himself, he was doing it for me. It was a mitzvah.”

As with any story in my father’s possession, it turned out that this was not the first time he had told it, or the fifth, or even the twenty-fifth. He had already recounted it to just about every friend and colleague he could get on the phone, mostly men his own age, and so far every single one had sided with his interpretation of the story (or so they told him, or so he told me). It was difficult enough for me to listen to on its merits: among its details about penises, and my father’s penis, and observant Jews, and observant Jews touching my father’s penis, there was nothing that I ever wanted to hear about again. It reminded me that there was a gap between me and my father wider than Lake Pontchartrain and at the same time no wider than my father’s last remaining piece of foreskin.

We spent the night in a motel room on the outskirts of Orleans Parish, next door to a Denny’s that was fully stocked and furnished but had not been open in months because it could not hire enough employees to keep itself in business. Our accommodations weren’t particularly inviting, either. “Well, we didn’t get killed last night,” my father declared as we checked out. “I thought we’d get butt-fucked for sure.”

That morning marked my first visit to the campus of Tulane University and my father’s first in over fifty years. The residential areas seemed no worse for Katrina’s onslaught; the dormitories were weather-beaten, though my father assured me they looked no different in his day, and beaded necklaces and Mardi Gras
masks hung harmoniously from trees, but maybe they had always been there, too. In ninety-degree weather, the students strode the grounds in shorts and T-shirts bearing proud slogans like
I STILL GO TO TULANE
and
GO FEMA YOURSELF
. With its Gothic quadrangles unabashedly modeled on Princeton’s, unabashedly plagiarized from Oxford and Cambridge, Tulane was stirring in me a pleasant sensation I rarely felt about my college experience; I believe it’s called nostalgia.

The same could not be said of my father, who became more deeply lost in his memories, the farther we trod. To him, the campus was a pastoral 110-acre reminder of days consumed by classes, studies, and ze fukshuns of Dr. Goto, a high-stakes card game called Bourré, and evenings spent riding the bus to my grandfather’s fur business in the French Quarter, working with the greasy, musky skins until midnight or one in the morning, riding the St. Charles streetcar as near as it would bring him to campus, then walking the remaining miles back to his room.

My grandfather paid him erratically for his obligatory services; on occasional weeks he gave him fifty dollars and most weeks nothing at all. My father had no dress clothes—“Not a fucking sport jacket from Alexander’s,” he said—and no car to drive on the weekends, when most students abandoned the campus and left him in solitude. Though he never achieved the rank of sophomore, my father said he had learned a valuable lesson at Tulane: “You can’t have too much money, and you can never be too much in control of your own life. You can never trust anybody.”

He took out his cellphone and wandered off to call my mother, to repeat to her how he was made to work long hours at my grandfather’s shop and never had a car or any spending money. I stood where I was and called Amy to tell her that in the days leading up to this trip, I had convinced myself I was doing a good deed for my
father, giving him the emotional support for a journey he never would have taken on his own, but now I realized I’d made a mistake, that this whole thing was an act of cruelty. When my father returned, he ran out the afternoon pointing angrily at the bookstores and student centers the university had lacked in his day, then stretched himself beneath one of the ancient oak trees on the main quad that refused to be moved by time and tide. I hadn’t seen him look so worn down in a while.

We returned to the city via St. Charles Avenue in search of a hotel in the French Quarter, with my father playing the role of navigator and myself in the pilot’s seat. I found it hard not to lose my temper when a traffic light would turn green and he seemed not to know which way to go, or when his lack of guidance nearly steered us off the end of Canal Street and into the mighty Mississippi. It was no different, I figured, than when my father was driving and he would routinely snap at me or my mother or whoever was seated in the passenger seat when he was in desperate need of directions or stuck in traffic behind a grimy station wagon teeming with Hassidim. He left me in the car for some length of time while he cased a waterside Hilton hotel, only to emerge and declare that he didn’t feel like staying there. Next he had me drop him off at the Hotel Monteleone, which had served as my grandfather’s de facto residence and whose letterhead decorated almost all his correspondence during his time in Louisiana. It did not take my father long to step in, step out, and conclude that this was not where we would be spending the night.

The only tangible possession I have to remember my grandfather by is a postcard he sent me in 1988, when I was twelve years old, a few months before he died. On its front is a photograph of a young woman in a bikini, kneeling provocatively on a sandy
beach as an alligator approaches her from behind, its jaws widening in preparation to bite her on the ass. Beneath the picture is a caption that reads, “WOW! We alligators sure have fun in Louisiana.” On the back of the postcard, my grandfather inscribed the following message:

I cannot recall my grandfather making that specific promise to me, but this single piece of correspondence says a lot about how I remember him. He was a randy, lively person, among the few offspring of Russian Jewish immigrants to have picked up a conversant vocabulary of Cajun curse words and Creole slang, the sort of man who wouldn’t allow the rest of his family to order dinner at a restaurant table until he’d had a chocolate milk shake first, and who got his laughs by inviting his young grandson into his study, sitting him on his lap, and confessing that he was the man who had assassinated John F. Kennedy.

In fact, during his lifetime, my grandfather was a persistent and diligent letter writer, and my father has saved hundreds of pages of the mail he wrote on a daily basis. Among the communiqués that my father holds most dearly, if not quite fondly, is a set of letters my grandfather wrote to him in 1964, a few years
after they became business partners, which circumscribe an incident now known as the Primeaux Affair.

Belus Primeaux was a West Louisiana furrier who had written to Bob and Gerald Itzkoff about some goods he wanted to sell them, right around the time that my grandfather was headed south to Louisiana for the winter. When my father attempted to convey this offer to my grandfather, my grandfather mistakenly concluded that my father was somehow withholding other crucial information. The misunderstanding inspired my grandfather to compose this first letter, dated simply “Wednesday, 1964,” in the same elegant cursive that graces the back of my alligator postcard:

History has lost my father’s reply, but its contents can be reasonably deduced from the relevant portions of the next letter that my grandfather sent him, dated November 16, 1964:

Again, my father’s reply is absent from the sequence of exchanges. When my father writes to me now, usually in the form of a short email, I let the note sit in my inbox for a few days before I
reply to it, if I do at all. No such luxuries were afforded to him when he communicated with his father; prompt responses were demanded and extracted from him by force if necessary. Every letter they traded was a wide-open venue to air any grievance, no matter how consequential or petty, to be discussed in the language that came most naturally to them, before the sieve of rational thought could filter out their impulsive emotions.

From the perspective of anyone other than my father, it is possible to read those letters and be both astounded and amused by them; even within our extended family, the Primeaux Affair has become a kind of inside joke, an affectionate snapshot of my grandfather at his most intractable and idiosyncratic. But to the man to whom the letters were addressed, it is impossible to contemplate them and not be seized by an intensely personal and incommunicable pain, not be transported back to a time when he was a son and not a father and could not make his intentions known to the one man he wanted more than any other in the world to understand him.

What I got from my grandfather was a bawdy postcard; what my father got from him was a philosophy of life. He was taught to be disciplined, to hold values and have convictions—to have convictions
in
conviction, to know that there were times when a man must hold on to what he believes even when no one else around him will believe him. He learned that there is a man called Father whose job it is to tell you things, especially when you don’t want to believe them, and when this man called Father tells you something, it can be counted upon and it must be believed, because the opposite condition—not believing in Father—means not having certainty, and that is a circumstance too horrible and terrifying to contemplate.

After surveying the hotels of the French Quarter, my father and
I settled in—by chance, at the same hotel where I had stayed during that bachelor party and done terrible things over the side of its Bourbon Street balconies. When we checked in, my father made a beeline for the bathroom. He seemed to think its tiled walls and not-quite-airtight door offered him some degree of soundproofing as he engaged in a heated cellphone conversation with someone I quickly deduced was my mother. Though I could not hear everything he said, a sufficient measure of his unrestrained invective escaped into the bedroom for me to figure out the subject of his tirade.

“… I am
not
doing this with him again, Maddy! Never in a hundred million years! …”

“… He is
ungrateful
. He is wild and he is unrestrained. You can’t control him! …”