Cocaine's Son

by Dave Itzkoff

  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.

  But who could protect us when he was the one we needed defending from?

  In the same way I believed our happy family was alike to all other happy families, I extrapolated that every coupling of a mother and a father must have some regularly scheduled moment, most often on a late Saturday afternoon, after the father has spent the morning snoring a hollow, staccato snore able to drown out the traffic, the bums, and the Con Edison plant below, when the parents will initiate a titanic argument in which walls will be rattled, doors will be slammed, and fragile household artifacts will be shattered. This was all normal, I thought, and an obligatory part of adulthood, that the mother cries and locks herself in the bathroom, and the father kicks at the door, shatters the mirror on its other side, and in an effort to coax her out, hurls the ceramic pumpkin in which
his wife saves her quarters for the laundry machine.

  In my family, such fights persisted until my mother screamed and called my father a junkie, a funny-sounding sort of word that reminded me of her broken-down Lincoln. A few minutes later, my father would storm into my room, the collar of his undershirt stretched halfway to his waist, possibly with scratches across his face, and wearily instruct me: “Look at me. Look at what your mother did to me.”

  This must be what happens in every family, I assumed, because it is what happens in mine.

  It must happen as surely as those unpredictable and out-of-nowhere instances when my father was home at midafternoon on a weekend or even on a weekday, tottering around the apartment like a bear that had come out of hibernation, when he’d lose his temper because my videogames were too loud or I’d asked for his help with my fractions or my Roman-history crossword puzzle and I couldn’t remember that “governor” was the title both Americans and Romans gave to the person in charge of an entire state.

  “You know this one,” my father would insist.

  “No, I don’t!” I’d shout petulantly.

  “Yes, you do,” he would hiss back with menace in his eyes.

  I’d laugh and call him the silly word I had just heard my mother use: “You’re a junkie,” I’d say, because past observation had taught me that it was an instant victory. It was the one rebuke for which he possessed no comebacks.

  His eyes would fill with fire, and his hot breath would emanate from his flaring nostrils as he grabbed me by the wrist. “What did you just call me?” he would shout. “Do you even know what that word means?”

  Next he would storm out of the room and seek my mother. “Do you hear this, Maddy?” he would shout at her. “You hear the way he talks to me? Where do you think he gets it, huh? From me? From his private school? Well, let me tell you, there’ll be no more of that. No more private school for him—he is out. Out of school, out of here, out on the street, for all I care!”

  “Stop it, Gerry! Stop it!” she would shout back at him. This would be followed by the sound of his bare, heavy feet trammeling across the floor, and he would reappear in my room in nothing more than his underwear and grab me by the arm.

  “You hear me?” he’d shout. “You’re out of here.” He’d open our front door and deposit me in the hallway, slamming the door shut as he hobbled back inside.

  Eventually, my mother would come out and retrieve me. But what was I supposed to think until then? Should I have concluded that this was an act intended to remind me that beneath his docile exterior, he possessed power and was capable of taking things away from me at any moment? Or should I have prepared to gather up my belongings in a bindle and make my way from town to town, shining shoes and painting picket fences as I went?

  These people, my parents, had taught me how to speak and what to think and what to fear, that turtles die if they aren’t fed regularly and that you can’t just walk down the street saying “Hi, man!” to every person you see. How was I supposed to know when they weren’t being fully honest with me?

  Back when the question of who I should call my best friend seemed like the most crucial dilemma I would face, I granted that title to a boy named Justin. He was identical to me in many ways: we were both small in stature—“shrimpy,” I believe was the term at the time—both phenomenally fond of videogames, even when they consisted of crude monochrome blips that bobbed up and down on the TV screen, and both had fathers who never seemed to be around the house (although his father, I knew, had a much cooler occupation than mine: he was a dentist, and he owned a liquor store).

  The most important function Justin served was keeping me company through Hebrew school, a tedious obligation that had somehow insinuated itself into my life without my agreeing to it or asking for it. The rigors of attending a regular school five days a week were demanding enough; in first grade, after I left one school building, I would travel to another, where I was told, after having spent my entire life up to that point memorizing and mastering the only alphabet I assumed existed, that there was a second one I was responsible for learning.

  Before I enrolled at Hebrew school, and even before I started at private school, my preschool and kindergarten education came from classes offered by an extremely liberal, extremely Reform synagogue in midtown Manhattan. There, any pedagogy about Jewish faith or history was doled out gently, mixed in with the grape juice and finger paints, nap hours and folk-guitar sing-alongs. The depictions of the fabled, far-off land of Israel that were occasionally presented to us had no relation to the world I inhabited—why did everyone appear to live on barren, heat-drenched farms like the planet Tatooine of Star Wars, and why were they always in need of our money to plant trees? The legendary heroes whose exploits we were told of hardly seemed heroic at all, always doing exactly what they were told by God, even when His orders were utterly inscrutable.

  There were only two exceptions to this rule. One was my namesake, the biblical David, who proved that the most lopsided height differential could be overcome with a single act of epic violence. The other was Judah Maccabee, who spent eleven months of the year boxed away and forgotten, to be trotted out in that month when the secular department stores began to hang their Christmas decorations, to remind us of days long ago when men, much different from the kinds I knew and the kind I was sure I would grow into, took up swords and shields to drive out their oppressors and reclaim what was theirs. This was my favorite time of year, and not just because it entitled me to a king’s ransom in presents. To my mind, the Hanukkah miracle was not that some hoary lamp burned for eight days on a single day’s worth of oil, but that there were Jews who, for once, had stood up for themselves and won.

  For unspecified motives, my parents sent me to Hebrew school at a Conservative temple, and this was the reason for all my troubles. We had never set foot in a synagogue as a family, and yet once a week I was donning a yarmulke to sit next to Justin in a classroom that was smaller and shabbier, and whose students were twitchier and nastier, than private school had prepared us for. There, the congregation’s rabbi, a rotund and cheerful but ultimately stern man who called everyone by Hebrew name, taught us the subtle differences between the jagged letters vav and zayin, the imposing, ax-handled dalet and its tailless cousin resh. His weekly lessons came from a pair of well-worn paperback workbooks that, no matter how inviting their cartoon illustrations of men gardening and farming and women cooking and cleaning might be, we were not to doodle upon or we would have to pay for them at the end of the year. Coinciding with the start of the regular school term, our Hebrew-school calendar began with the harvest feast of Sukkot and the alien fruits used in its celebration, the husky, unappetizing lulav and the lumpy, malformed etrog. Within a couple of weeks, we had moved on to the high holidays and the traditional ritual of being shamed by one’s rabbi for not attending temple regularly.

  My difficulties were compounded when I graduated to second grade. My attendance was doubled to twice a week, and the responsibility for my education was handed off to the rabbi’s wife, the first of many instructors I would meet who savored the license that the occupation provided to constantly tell children they were wrong. My classmates were the same distracted, unengaged malcontents with whom Justin and I had sat through first grade, and who, in a year’s time, had still not learned to distinguish among the serrated, angular Hebrew characters that hung like faceless portraits from the classroom walls. The lesson plan from the previous year—Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, endless guilt—was repeated without variation, only this term we were let in on a great and terrible secret: everything we had been taught about Hebrew was a fraud, because the written language used no vowels. This was not the last time that my discovery that an essential historical fact about Judaism had been withheld from me would make me very, very angry.

  In the meantime, Justin and I had each other to keep sane and share that window of time in the afternoon after regular school ended but before we were shipped off to the gu
lag. On one typical appointed Hebrew-school day, we were in my apartment, playing videogames and awaiting my mother’s return from work so we could be transported to our fate. However, the door to my parents’ bedroom was shut tight, which meant my father was home and fast asleep. I silently decided that this was the day I was going to make my stand.

  The telltale clicking and clacking of a key in our front door announced my mother’s arrival. In a singsong voice, she said, “It’s time for Hebrew schoolie,” which was about as tantalizing as it could be made to sound.

  Justin dutifully put down his game controller and began gathering his belongings. But I didn’t look away from the screen.

  “No,” I said.

  “David,” my mother said, becoming stern. “Don’t make me turn off this TV set.” After a moment she did so anyway.

  “No,” I repeated. “I don’t want to go to Hebrew school today.” Justin looked perplexed. Had I miscalculated that Hebrew school was as irritating to him as it was to me? Or had he never seen anyone talk back to his parents?

  My mother took my two Hebrew-school workbooks from a living room shelf and brandished them like weapons. “You’re going to Hebrew school, and that’s final,” she said.

  But how could I tell her that it wasn’t final? How could I articulate to her that the teacher was mean and the kids were idiots, that I got yelled at no matter what I did even when I knew I was the best in the class, and that deep down I suspected the more vehemently and dogmatically someone tries to instruct you in something, the less likely it is to be true, and besides, I’d rather spend the time playing more videogames?

  “I don’t want to go to Hebrew school today,” I said as forcefully as I could, which meant as loud as I could. “Now or ever.”

  From deep within the apartment, another doorknob turned, followed by a pair of heavy footsteps erratically but deliberately heading our way. My gambit had worked. The father had been roused.