Cocaine's Son

by Dave Itzkoff

  “You don’t sound so good,” she said.

  “This hasn’t gone at all like I thought it would,” I said. “When we get back to New York, I am coming straight home to you and I am never leaving. I don’t want my life to turn out like this.”

  “It doesn’t have to,” she said.

  My father and I woke up on our last full day in New Orleans, transformed into a pair of grifters with no obligations or commitments, no permanent address, no possessions, and no imperative to do anything except whatever was necessary to sustain us until the next day. I was exhausted, but my father was becoming more energetic and manic by the minute, and when it came time for us to finally leave Louisiana, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to convince him to get on the plane.

  Today we had nothing but time on our hands, so my father took us out to Raceland, a rural community about forty miles southwest of New Orleans, serviced by two local highways and perhaps a single traffic light where they intersected. He had brought us here looking for a family named the Fonsecas, a clan of fur traders he and my grandfather had done business with for generations. He seemed to think that if we simply cruised up and down the streets of Raceland long enough, he would eventually recognize their ancestral home on sight. Raceland is a small town but not that small, and after several passes back and forth on Highway 1, we could not find the house, nor anyone who seemed to know where they might live, except a pair of drunks in a run-down gas station who gave us completely contradictory directions. “If we could just find a sheriff’s station,” my father kept repeating.

  Abandoning any pretense of effort or challenge, I pulled out my phone, typed the name Fonseca into a search engine, and came up with their address instantly. We turned a single corner and there was their house, more or less exactly as my father remembered it. “I should have known,” he said, resentful that he had been unable to recall a single obscure detail from a life he led over twenty years ago.

  In his heyday, my grandfather had done business primarily with the Fonseca patriarch, Douglas, and his wife, Una, while my father became close friends with their son Michael, a rugged, handsome man who looked like a longer-haired Cajun clone of Elvis Presley in his photogenic Viva Las Vegas screen-idol era. In the time my father knew him, Michael had three different wives and three children with them; the first wife went on to become a famous cosmetics artist in Hollywood, while the last became a crack addict–turned–born again Baptist. Michael had a reckless streak to put my father’s to shame, and for a brief period after my grandfather split up the family business, my father and Michael attempted to run a partnership of their own. Michael would arrive at fur auctions dressed in rabbit-skin vests, leather pants, and alligator boots and try to outbid everyone on everything. My father soon learned how it felt to dissolve a partnership he knew in his heart was never going to work.

  Also like my father, Michael had a voracious appetite for drugs, but unlike my father, he had a much greater hunger to consume them intravenously. During the 1990s, Michael contracted hepatitis C and fled from Louisiana to Wyoming, where he died.

  My father believed that the only surviving members of the family were Michael’s younger sisters, Michele and Daniele. But when we rang the doorbell to their home, we were met by Daniele’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Amanda, a little harlequin of a girl dressed in a faded Felix the Cat T-shirt and a pair of military fatigues. She explained that her parents were out grocery shopping and would be back soon. My father told her that he was an old friend of her late uncle Michael’s and that once, when Michael was on the verge of being divorced by one of his wives, my father insisted Michael get down on his hands and knees and beg her to take him back. In telling the story, my father made himself cry. Amanda did not invite us into the house.

  When Daniele returned home with her husband, Jody, she recognized my father right away. An ample, affable woman, she had vivid memories of the many instances in which her family’s history overlapped with ours; just as Adelphia did, she still called my grandfather “Mister Bob.” Her house contained the same pool table at which Mister Bob had challenged her father to many a late-night game, and the same couch at which Mister Bob used to fall asleep, a lit cigar dangling from his mouth, until he was woken up by the sting of ash burning a hole in his shirt.

  Daniele seemed genuinely delighted by our surprise visit; she told us stories of how my grandfather had taught her to sing “Bei Mir Bist du Schon,” and how she had once owned a Siberian husky named Maddy G., a combination of my mother’s name and my father’s first initial. Then she called up her older sister, Michele, who lived nearby in Thibodaux, to tell her we were here. Michele arrived soon after, a stylish woman in a pant suit and a pair of designer sunglasses atop her head, toting her eleven-year-old daughter, Maddy, and a steel cigarette case proudly stamped with the words TRAILER TRAMP.

  At the outset, there was a natural give-and-take to the afternoon’s conversation. Michele and Daniele were not oblivious to Michael’s drug problem—“his demons,” they said—but they had fond recollections of his generosity and charisma and the beautiful, poetic letters he wrote to them that they later discovered were cribbed from Cat Stevens songs. Michele did not shed a single tear as she described seeing her brother for the last time, dying of liver disease and bone cancer in a Cheyenne hospital, too proud to let any of his other family members see him in such a state. “He thought he was invincible,” Michele said. “That’s how he was to the end.”

  My father was upbeat as he recounted some of his favorite stories about abusing drugs under Michael’s supervision: the time the two of them got high on peyote with my mother and Michael’s girlfriend at the time and drove off, stoned, to meet my grandparents for dinner at a nearby seafood restaurant; the time Michael introduced them to animal tranquilizers, which made my mother curl up into a ball and declare erroneously, “You gave me heroin!”

  Eventually, my father reverted to his familiar overbearing form. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said with a sense of urgency, “because I’ve got to tell you as much as I remember.” Only, what followed was not a single story but the tangled and messy web of the numerous narrative threads he’d been stitching all week: how his father had split the business with him, thus providing him the motivation to beat his drug problem; how he had fruitlessly counseled Michael to beg forgiveness from his soon-to-be ex-wife; and how he had discovered his father’s glass eye but was able to confront him about it only when he was high. Everything he saw or heard provided the trigger for another story or moral lesson—how much he appreciated a good salad; how children who do not grow up around dogs or cats go onto live lives vastly inferior to those who do—and nothing provoked these reminiscences more than the sound of his own reminiscing. While Daniele and Michele listened to him politely, their daughters sat on a nearby couch and watched television, pricking their ears and giggling each time my father raised his voice or said a dirty word. Jody said nothing but eyed the scene warily while walking its perimeter like a prison guard, waiting to take action the moment a captive tried to make a run for the wall.

  It wasn’t as if these people did not have tales of misfortune to equal or exceed my father’s. Months after they lost Michael, their mother, Una, died, and a few months after that, their youngest brother, Douglas Jr., an off-road racing enthusiast with a drug problem of his own, died from injuries he sustained in an ATV accident after spending a week on a respirator. He wasn’t even the first member of his family to bear the name Douglas Jr.; he had inherited it from a sibling he never knew, an elder Douglas Jr. who was killed in a car crash on Mardi Gras, the holiest day in the New Orleans calendar, in 1966. Michael had been riding in that same doomed vehicle, but he was thrown clear of the wreckage and only had to spend the next year in a full-body cast.

  The Fonsecas were not the only family whose lives were forever altered by that event. This was the accident in which my father lost his kid brother, David. He was the boy who slept in the cot next to my father’s in the bedro
om they shared with their older sister; the kid who broke his leg when my father encouraged him, too soon, to take the training wheels off his bike, and for whom he used to get down on his knees so they could box at the same height; and the optimistic high school senior who, in the winter of 1966, had just seen his older brother get married and was looking forward to graduating so he could join him and their father in their new business partnership.

  On the night of Mardi Gras, David was among a group of young men that included Michael Fonseca and the first Douglas Jr., driving on a two-lane, two-directional highway from a party in Raceland to another party in New Orleans. In attempting to pass a car, their driver had steered into the oncoming lane when the vehicle ahead of them started to accelerate. A second car was headed straight at them in the oncoming lane, and their driver had just enough time to swerve so that they were hit from the side and not head-on. The driver and Michael survived the crash; the other passengers were killed, probably instantly.

  My grandfather, who was in New Orleans at the time, was the first to learn of the accident. He then called my father, who was in New York, a newlywed for all of three months and still living with his wife in his parents’ home in Bronxville, and instructed him to tell my grandmother what had happened. When my father found her to tell her in person, she was out walking her dog and was momentarily delighted by the unexpected encounter with her son. But when she saw his pained expression and realized he’d been crying, she knew that something horrible had occurred.

  For many months my family mourned David’s loss; after my grandfather returned home from New Orleans, he locked himself into his dead son’s former bedroom and refused to come out. But my father, I am told, took it harder than anyone. Even as my grandparents began to recover from their grief, my father rebuffed their attempts to discuss David’s death and would walk—or run—away from them if they so much as mentioned his name.

  Yet as soon as he had a child of his own, my father found all of his seemingly intractable positions on the subject willingly and easily reversed. Above the objections of those family members who warned him that the name was cursed, he made the one meaningful stubborn decision that would offset a lifetime’s worth of meaningless stubbornness: he named his first son after his dead brother. It would never matter if his brother’s possessions and artwork decorated every square inch of his apartment or if they were nowhere to be seen; whether he visited his brother’s grave once a day or once every five years. Each time he called out his son’s name, he would be reminded of the boy he hoped would one day grow up to be his companion, his confidant, his apprentice, and his friend.

  Whether Daniele and Michele were thinking of this incident when my father came to visit, or whether they were simply showing Southern deference to an old man who liked to talk, they let him exhaust his supply of stories before he determined it was time to move along (with some gentle prodding from his chaperone for the day, who was feeling guilty for having inflicted him upon these unsuspecting if hospitable folk). Somehow he even bamboozled them into giving him their email addresses, a move they would soon learn to regret. “I’m going to delude you—not delude you, deluge you, with email,” he said, and I have no doubt he made good on the promise. Before I left, Michele assured me she’d look me up when she and her daughter visited New York the following month, but I really don’t blame her for not following through.

  At the Fonsecas’ doorstep, my father stopped to retell the story of how my grandfather had split up the family business, and as he sat in the passenger seat of our rental car, he was talking about how he’d coached Michael to reconcile with his wife, and then I started the engine and we were gone.

  On our last night in New Orleans, as we sat on our beds at an airport-adjacent hotel, eating fast food we’d picked up at a drive-through window and waiting for The Sopranos to come on television, my father was perhaps more excited than at any previous point in the trip. He stood up occasionally to pace the room and wring his hands. What he wanted to do most of all was talk to someone about all the petty fears and trifling secrets that he’d needlessly kept bottled up inside him for so long.

  “David,” he said, “do you think I could talk to you at some point about my sexual fantasies?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Just not right now.”

  When we boarded our plane back to New York, a tiny two-engine puddle-jumper of a jet, my father’s wheeled suitcase proved too large to fit in the overhead compartment. A flight attendant with a mediocre command of the English language asked him to tie a flimsy orange tag to its handle and leave the bag at the door by the front of the plane.

  Where could he mean? I thought. The cabin door through which we entered the plane? The cockpit door? That mysterious auxiliary door in the airport passageway, thirty feet off the ground, that seems to open out to nowhere? In front of the door? Behind the door? Even if I could not understand this person, my father evidently could, because he took his bag up to the front of the plane, placed it wherever he thought he was supposed to, and came back to his seat.

  All I could think for the next three hours and 1,300 miles, more wholeheartedly than any of the anger or frustration or relief I felt at the completion of our journey, was: Please let him have put his bag in the right place. Please let this man’s suitcase be waiting for him when he gets off this plane. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and in Row 18 of Continental flight 3056 to Newark Airport, there were none to be found, either.

  I had come unstuck in time. It’s not a phenomenon that afflicts only famous literary characters, venerated satirists, and survivors of the firebombing of Dresden; regular people can experience it, too. In fact, I believe that each of us is entitled to one entire day that affects us so completely, it immediately reorders the narrative of our lives, declaring itself the crucial chapter in the story that unlocks all the others. The moment becomes the center of our personal universe, and we revolve around it, continuing to live it and relive it long after the action of the day would seem to have been completed. That day for me was my wedding day.

  I know it’s sort of an obvious, cop-out choice, but that’s how profound a day it was for me. You don’t have to take my word for it: the power of the occasion was so great that it compelled one friend of mine to propose to his girlfriend on the day he came home from my bachelor party. I was sufficiently excited that I had won a cap gun at an arcade during the trip; he married her three weeks after my own wedding. Two weeks after that, one of my groomsmen proposed to his girlfriend. (She accepted.) That’s the kind of impact it had on people who were merely bystanders to the event.

  For me, the day lingers around me so completely that sometimes I feel like it is still happening to me; while I am seated at my office computer, my pulse quickens and the hairs on my arms stand at attention because I expect that at any moment, a tuxedo-clad maître d’ is going to burst into the room, put me on a golf cart, and send me off to a garden where a bride, a rabbi, and two hundred friends, relatives, acquaintances, and various other Jews in sunglasses await. Right now you are reading these words on a page, and I’m taking my first bite of wedding cake, or listening to my best man recite a Frank O’Hara poem at the wedding reception, or wondering petulantly why I have to visit all the tables of my new wife’s relatives and family friends before I can cross the dance floor and congregate with the wedding guests I recognize.

  Sometimes I experience different parts of the day simultaneously. I am dancing in my underwear in front of Amy in our bedroom, singing along to “Call Any Vegetable” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, hours before we leave for our rehearsal dinner, trying to pretend to myself that I am not the least bit anxious or uncertain about what’s soon to happen to us. At the same time, I am being woken up by a bleeping chime on my cellphone on the morning after the wedding, awaking to the fact that Amy and I have slept through the blaring alarm clock we set for ourselves an hour ago, and have only fifteen minutes to shower, dress, and assemble our belongings before a taxi co
mes to take us to the airport for our honeymoon.

  At some point between these two events, I am standing in the middle of a dance floor at a reception hall in the Bronx, dressed in a tuxedo and joined arm in arm with my new bride as we dance a competent hora at a wedding celebration we once vowed would feature no religious traditions or liturgy whatsoever. We are surrounded by two concentric spinning circles of my friends and relatives, and of hers, trying to draw my eyes in every direction at once. There go her mother, father, brother, aunts, and uncles, the cousin who wrote all the hit songs for the J. Geils Band in the 1980s; here come my aunts and uncles, cousins, the old silver-haired women from the bungalow colonies with their glossy animal-print tops and pointy fingernails till tomorrow, my sister, and my mother.

  “Where’s Dad?” I ask my mother in a moment when our two circles briefly align.

  All I hear her say is “You know your father” before the momentum of the dance whisks her away.

  I have time to contemplate this briefly: Do I? Did I gain enough insight into him to say why he’s not here at this exact instant? Is it enough to know that he sends his regards from his table at the outer perimeter of the banquet hall, where, in a few minutes, someone will accidentally set a napkin on fire, and where he is probably caught up in some compelling (to him) conversation while he shouts passionately into a confederate’s ear, or too shy, still, to join us in our clumsy choreography?

  The circles of dancers widen their gyrations, then they close in around me and they take me to pieces.

  Now I’m somewhere else entirely, floating in a metal cabin forty thousand feet above the earth, with nothing to distract me except blue sky above, blue water below, a nine-hundred-page Neal Stephenson novel in my lap, and a passable Michel Gondry movie on a screen in front of me. Amy and I are on our way to paradise, feeling like we just got away with robbing a bank. We are armed with a stack of the most diplomatic and obsequiously worded documents from her father, a former airline pilot, politely pleading to their intended recipients that their bearers please be upgraded to first class from coach because, even though you are a big, faceless airline company unaccustomed to acts of kindness and generosity, and paid minimal attention to their author during all the years he flew your airplanes and never collided with any landmark New York skyscrapers, this is his daughter and her new husband, and they are on their honeymoon. The letters prove unnecessary when a friend of Amy’s, still employed by this same airline, bumps us up to first-class seats without our asking. I got choked up a few times on my wedding day, but when this friend told us we wouldn’t have to spend a six-hour flight from Dallas–Fort Worth to Maui sitting in coach, I cried.