Cocaine's Son

by Dave Itzkoff

  I was in the wilderness and the canyon was on fire

  And I stood on the mountain in the night and I watched it burn

  It is hard for me to play Pieces of the Sky now and not hear it as anything other than a purgative, a record my father used to extract his sadness and to help him shape and guide it. It is a sad man indeed who gets stoned to make himself feel sadder.

  Everywhere my father and I looked at the fabric of his life, without looking very hard at all, we found the stain of cocaine residue. Did I know, he told me, that just to prove to his own mother that he was not hopelessly addicted to the drug, he once shot up in front of her while she watched, aghast? Then he offered her the needle and asked if she’d like to try it for herself. (“I was only surprised,” he says later, “that she couldn’t see the benefit.”)

  But wait—wait—wait—“I’m going to throw this one at you,” said my father, poking me firmly on the shoulder with his index finger, “see how you handle this”: did I know that my father was high at my bris? In the apartment I grew up in, surrounded by his family, friends, and closest colleagues, on what should have been the happiest day in his life to that point, he was stoned—so stoned that people who were in attendance not only noticed but still remind him to this day. “I’m surprised they didn’t just shoot me,” he said.

  In a softer, more sincere tone, he added, “Is it any wonder I don’t think about these things too much?”

  We hadn’t even crossed the threshold of the 1980s, and already I could see that there wasn’t enough paper in my notepad to fit the astounding and unsettling revelations that were being delivered to me page after page. “Do you want to know only about the drugs, or should I just cover everything?” he had asked me earlier. What the hell’s the difference, Dad? Is there anything but drugs? Without the drugs, what story would there be?

  Maybe this was what my father had been trying to warn me about: not that he was afraid he had nothing to tell me but that what he would reveal to me would be overwhelming. You wanted honesty? Well, now you got it. At that moment I honestly wasn’t sure I could continue our conversation. Maybe there should be a natural limit to the amount of openness that can exist within a family. Maybe there is such a thing as too much honesty, even between a father and a son.

  My father surely sensed in my drooping, defeated body language that I needed a break. “Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.” We got up and walked a few feet from his den into a hallway, where he brought me to another of his beloved devices: a digital answering machine. He approached it and, without explanation, pressed the play button, setting loose a string of some fifteen or twenty messages, all left either by me or by my sister, each one beginning with more or less the same words:

  “Hi, it’s me—”

  “Hi, guys, it’s me—”

  “Hey, ’s’ me—”

  “Hi-iii! It’s me-eee—”

  My father wasn’t interested in the content of each message, when it was left, or under what circumstances; as soon as he heard the singsong greeting—so perfectly intimate and instantly familiar that his son and daughter long ago gave up the practice of identifying themselves by name—he hit the fast-forward key and skipped to the next one. “Isn’t that something?” he said proudly, as if contemplating our college diplomas.

  My parents took me out for dinner that night in their sleepy, economically depressed Catskills community, and over French-dip sandwiches and waffle fries, I asked them what had become of my father’s cousin Heshie, who had facilitated their first meeting and ultimately their marriage. What was he up to these days? They chuckled, and my father related a story he seemed fairly certain he had told me before. But trust me, had I heard the story previously, I would have remembered it.

  Several years ago, my father had been told by his aunt and uncle that Heshie was killed in a car accident. Months elapsed, during which time the aunt and uncle also passed away, and then my father received a mysterious phone call from the FBI. The agent asked my father if he was familiar with certain associates whom Heshie had been seen with before his demise. When my father asked what the man meant, he learned that his aunt and uncle had not been entirely truthful with him. At his death, Heshie had indeed been found in a car, but riddled with bullet wounds, inflicted most likely by the organized criminals for whom he was placing horse-racing bets, and whose winnings he had been less than meticulous about returning to them in their entirety. End of Cousin Heshie and his story.

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s too bad. I would have liked to hear his version of the day you got busted for smoking pot.”

  “Well,” my father said, “I still have my arrest record, if you’d like to see it.”

  It was like hearing my father tell me that he owned an original signed copy of the Declaration of Independence. Had he been in possession of this sacred parchment all along? The seed that the roots and trunk and branches of his addiction story had grown from—would I soon be holding it in my own trembling hands? “Can I see it?” I asked.

  “I suppose so,” my father said, “as soon as we finish dinner.”

  It was all I could think about as I excitedly wolfed down my meal and anxiously discouraged my parents from poring over that last pickle on their dinner plates or ordering one more cup of coffee for the road, as I hastened them back into their car and along the cracked and untended asphalt streets that led us back to their cramped home.

  While my parents scavenged their overstuffed abode for the documents, I recited to myself all the events that had followed from my father’s notorious arrest: how he spent the night in prison at the Bronx County Courthouse, how he had to be bailed out the following morning by his humiliated mother, who then hired the son of a beloved local rabbi to be the lawyer in his defense. And how, though the case against my father was thrown out over violations of search-and-seizure procedures, he was not allowed to leave the state of New York for a period of time, which meant that instead of spending the summer in New Orleans selling fur with my grandfather, as he’d planned, he’d have to remain in the Bronx, painting apartment buildings with his uncle Hymie. Some years later, when my father got his fateful call to appear in front of a draft board that took notice of the arrest, he was able to manipulate the blot on his record to his advantage, teaching himself for all time that drugs made his life thrilling and worthwhile, and that he was nimble enough to concoct alibis for any danger they might get him into, even if he lacked the foresight to anticipate those dangers.

  I clung to these details like a rosary every time my mother or father finished searching an area of the house and returned empty-handed. Would I come this close to glimpsing my birthright only to discover that my parents had unthinkingly chucked it during some long-ago moving process, along with a king’s ransom in unused McDonald’s coupons and half-melted Hanukkah candles? Finally, my mother announced that she had found the artifact in an old jewelry box I had rummaged through untold times as a child, never knowing the real treasure it possessed.

  There was first a typewritten paper arrest record, turned pink with time, which noted that my father “Did have in his possession a quantity of marihuana,” and at his arrest, he possessed no scars, marks, or deformities.

  Beneath it was attached an old photograph of a young man standing in front of a stark white background, his head crowned by the outline of an absent staple that once held the picture to the typed report, giving him the unfortunate appearance of devil’s horns. The young man had an unmistakable look of fear on his face; he clearly knew he had committed an act of wrongdoing for which he was about to be punished—if not by the City of New York, then by a Jewish mother from the Bronx, which was arguably worse. Though the baby-smooth skin and the jet-black hair that stood a full inch above his scalp, combed and Brylcreemed into obedience, did not endure, in his adolescent face there was already a chubbiness waiting to emerge, the suggestion of a double chin that would not fully assert itself for several more years. His eyes, to the extent that
they could be seen behind the glare of bright lights reflected in the lenses of his thick black glasses, had a familiar smallness. Viewed from the side in an accompanying right-profile shot, my father appeared content, but head-on, he was so visibly uncomfortable with his surroundings and himself that the beholder cannot help but feel a little ill at ease himself.

  Beneath my father’s face, a black clapboard held by an unseen hand at his shoulder line reported an arrest number, the legend NYC POLICE, and the date the picture was taken: December 5, 1962. This meant that my father was twenty-two years old—very nearly twenty-three—at the time of his arrest, not a teenager, as he always was in his recollections of the event. This made it almost impossible for the narrative to have unfolded in the way my father had historically described it: it was highly unlikely that a military physical would have followed soon after his bust, and even if one did, there was no conflict our army was engaged in at the time, no real danger from which my father would have extricated himself by posing as a drug addict.

  “What does this mean?” I asked my father.

  “Well,” he said, “shows you what I know.”

  Maybe the only time I had seen my father so unconcerned with his own discrepancies had been back when he was teaching me how to drive. When I would get bored or impatient with the minimal speed he allowed me in the high school parking lot, he would conclude his lessons by letting me take the car out on the highway, where I could park myself in the left-hand lane and put my foot to the floor, though I never could remember which off-ramp we needed to get ourselves home.

  “Are we getting close?” the speed demon would ask his father as cars and signs went whizzing by.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You got time.”

  So I would make no move, and within moments, our required exit would inevitably come bounding over the horizon. “Dad,” I would say, hurriedly dodging around the traffic to make our escape, “I thought you told me I had time to change lanes.”

  “Yeah,” he would answer, “but what’s time to you, and what’s time to me?”

  For the all times my father had been institutionalized as punishment for his cocaine habit and all the times he had been sentenced to therapy upon release, there was little he had learned and retained. That is, except for one brief mantra that he’d had repeated to him throughout these occasions, which was: No War Stories. He took that to mean he should never romanticize his drug-fueled escapades, shouldn’t exchange the anecdotes like currency with fellow addicts, and shouldn’t boast about them to temperate listeners in attempts to burnish his street cred. The retelling of the tales with any emotional affect whatsoever was somehow as terrible as desiring the substances that had given rise to them: a sign that the teachings of his many sobriety support groups had not been properly internalized and a first treacherous step on the road to relapsing.

  But were we abiding by the No War Stories rule? So far, my father seemed to believe that he was. What he had told me was neither a plea for forgiveness nor a puffing up of his chest; he wasn’t demeaning or glorifying his drug habit, just reciting things that had happened to him. But I could sense that he was approaching his limit: he had given me all that he could, or all that he thought he was capable of, or all that he could remember while seated in a folding chair in a Catskills cabin that was totally disconnected from all the times and locations where the real action had gone down.

  Still, I needed more from him. If he wasn’t going to give it to me willingly, knowingly, I had to find some other way to elicit the information without his realizing he was giving anything up. What he needed was context—to be re-embedded where these events had taken place, reconnected with the people who might remind him of more of his own history or perhaps even report it for him. (He could hardly be accused of telling war stories if someone else was doing the telling.) There was only one way to accomplish this: we needed to get out into the world, together.

  I started by following my father to the latest in an annual series of high school class reunions he had been attending, organized by the editors of a newsletter called the Pelham Parkway Times. This was a homegrown publication that the former denizens of his old Bronx neighborhood supplied with new and vintage photographs, reminiscences and obituaries, advertisements for condominiums in Boca Raton, and inspirational messages for their surviving classmates. (A sampling from one issue: “Think about this. You may not realize it, but it’s 100% true. 1. There are at least two people in this world that you would die for. 2. At least 15 people in this world love you in some way.”)

  On the morning of the gathering that would mark the fiftieth anniversary of my father’s graduation, he arrived in Manhattan to take me to the reunion, driving the same Ford Taurus that had been my car in college. He was suffering from a variety of physical ailments; his voice was going hoarse with even minimal exertion; and his back was hurting him badly enough that he asked me to drive him the rest of the trip. “It’s not the end of the world,” he explained. “It only feels like the end of the world.”

  When we arrived at the Long Island park that was the most convenient meeting point for the maximum number of Bronx expatriates, we could see it was very sparsely attended. My father assured me that when he first began going to these reunions in the 1980s, they drew hundreds if not thousands of his old neighbors; on each tree in the park hung a sign designating a different street from Pelham Parkway—Cruger Avenue, Matthews Avenue, White Plains Road—where former residents would congregate to ask, “You lived here, too?” Today all we could see were lonely trees with unattended signs. “Last man standing gets to drink the champagne,” my father said.

  From a distance, he was able to identify acquaintances who went by nicknames like Butchie and Cookie and Chickie and Moose; this one was the son of a much despised science teacher, and that one worked as a soda jerk at the old C&R drugstore. He described himself in relation to these people as a shy child, a condition exacerbated by a rapid-advance program that skipped him ahead two grades and his mother’s ceaseless refrains of “What are you doing tonight?” Even among the classmates who had pushed past that introversion to become his friends, none today made reference to his history with drugs. Possibly they did not know, or possibly they were willing to allow my father a peace that I still could not permit him, in the same way that he would from time to time notice a certain face in the crowd and identify its bearer to me as having once been an inveterate gambler, or a womanizer, or a drunk, only to stop himself in midremembrance to say, “He grew out of it. So what? No big deal.”

  An old classmate he disliked walked past us. “See that guy?” he said quietly. “He used to be attractive.”

  Another of my father’s old friends, Robert Nadelman, whose family lived next door to the Itzkoffs—close enough that the two boys constructed a tin-can telephone system that ran between their bedroom windows—reminded me of a tale I had not thought about in years. One morning my grandfather told my father that he would take him and his friends on a fishing trip. When the boys had assembled in the Itzkoff family car, with my grandfather at the wheel and my father in the front passenger seat, my grandfather asked my father, “Where’s your hat?” My father realized he had forgotten it and went back to the apartment to retrieve it—at which point my grandfather drove off with my father’s young friends in tow.

  “I thought your grandfather would just drive around the block,” Robert recalled to me, still laughing at the memory, “but he went straight to the lake and took us fishing. I bet your father never forgot his hat again.”

  As Robert went to mingle elsewhere, I saw that my father had become quite agitated and was starting to pace angrily. “Why did he have to tell that story?” my father muttered. “Why do people always want to remember the bad times? I have nothing but good memories of my childhood. When I look back on my life, it was all—perfect.”

  I asked if he would take me back to his old neighborhood, perhaps as soon as the next weekend. He declined. “It’s just too much,” h
e said. “It’s a lot to deal with right now. We’ll do it eventually, I promise.”

  Amy and I were living together now, and when I came home that evening and confessed to her what felt like a defeat, she urged my patience.

  “He’s scared, Dave,” she told me, not because she was trying to demean him but because she was trying to get me to see something I could not. “Think about how hard this must be for him, and how frightening. Think about how he doesn’t want you to see him this way.”

  “Amy,” I said, “I have seen him in much, much worse states.”

  “But not like this,” she said.

  “So what am I supposed to do until he decides he’s ready to let me see these parts of his life? Just sit around and wait? That day might never come.”

  “Well,” she said, “you might have to do some of it on your own.”

  The following Saturday, I wandered into Pelham Parkway alone. From my apartment, the subway ride took an hour and left me on a long stretch of the parkway that would lead me straight to Cruger Avenue. As I walked past recreation centers and single-story homes with gated windows and modestly decorated patios, I was reminded of another anecdote that Robert Nadelman had told at the reunion: at some stage of my father’s brief college career, he had driven home with a friend who, upon seeing the neighborhood for the first time, remarked, “Gerry, you never told me you lived in the slums.”