Cocaine's Son (19 page)

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,” he 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.”

What I saw were not slums but dignified old brick tenements, sturdy and well maintained, as immaculate as when my father and his family moved into them. Some had tightly woven metal fences to keep trespassers and handball players out of their alleys; others had stately mock-Tudor roofs, and gardens, and more trees on a single block than you will find in a Manhattan mile. Those who once inhabited the neighborhood might be surprised to learn that its character endured without them, perpetuated by another generation of shirtless boys who leaned out of windows to shout to neighbors in upstairs apartments, women who tossed
their losing lottery tickets into garden enclosures, and men who rinsed the dirt from their shoes in stagnant puddles of rainwater.

Turning a corner, I found myself in front of 2167 Cruger Avenue, a Gothic-style building called the Arnold Court. Its archway entrance featured an eerily generative decoration of descending vines that split off into ever more vines, inevitably evoking a family tree. A woman who saw me staring at the arch assumed I lived there myself, so she held the door open for me and let me inside. Standing in the drab, cavernous lobby, I could see the door that would have led into the old Itzkoff apartment, a 450-square-foot domicile where my grandparents slept on a foldout couch in the living room while my father and his brother and sister shared its only bedroom. I could also see a handwritten sign on the door from the current tenant:

I began to feel like I was intruding upon something I was never meant to see this way—I thought for some reason about the Old Testament proscription that forbade exposing the nakedness of a parent—and I decided I would explore no more today.

In a few weeks my father and I reunited at Newark Airport. We had never traveled together by plane as adults, and since he did not allow himself to take vacations, he flew only when it meant he had to be at the funeral of an out-of-town former client. On this occasion we were not headed anywhere nearly as foreboding, even though he sardonically stopped to point out the location of every emergency respirator we passed in the terminal, as if to say,
You may not need to know this now, but pay attention for later
.

We were on our way to Toronto, where our exploration of my father’s history would bring us to a fur auction that he used to
participate in regularly but had stopped visiting years ago. He still received the catalogs from the organization that was conducting the sale, the North American Fur Auctions, which dated back to 1670, making it older than the United States itself. I liked this bit of trivia because it seemed to confirm the epochal significance that the fur business held for the Itzkoff family.

It was the industry that gave them their foothold in this country—the one that my great-grandfather Morris, my great-uncles Louis, Nathan, and Hymie, and my grandfather Bob turned to after the family arrived from Russia in the early 1900s after failing to find work in New York and struggling to run a subsistence farm in Alabama, where the local population afforded them about as much respect as the slaves freed a half century prior. When the family returned to New York a few years later, it was the fur business that welcomed them back with neither reprimand nor apology, where Morris Itzkoff found employment as a tailor, and where each of his sons established his own shop in the raw-skin trade. Their new businesses endured so well and so long that each man was able to hand them down to their sons a generation later; the point where the fathers’ prosperity had peaked was where their children’s would begin.

In the years I had known my grandfather, who was among the first members of his family to be born in America and who died just before I turned thirteen, I always thought of him as a rugged man who enjoyed his horse races and a good cigar—the embodiment of American mobility fused with two-handed Eastern European self-sufficiency. But it wasn’t until he brought my father into his firm that the operation really began to thrive: over four decades after the fact, my father could still recount precisely that in the year when my grandfather made him a 25 percent partner, the company had assets totaling thirty thousand dollars, mostly
in fur and outstanding debts. By the following year, they were making more money than my father could keep track of—enough that he was able to pay for his first car, a 1964 Corvair convertible, entirely in cash. My father had turned out to be even more aggressive than his father, and while Itzkoff the elder spent most of the calendar year in New Orleans, buying up fur and resisting his son’s exhortations to purchase even more of it, Itzkoff the younger remained behind in New York, selling the pelts to any and every trader in Manhattan who would take them.