There was a single word that best described him, a word I had long resisted but which I begrudgingly accepted, and that word was "old." For years, I could conveniently regard him as fat, which he genuinely used to be, as much as 250 or 300 pounds at his 1990s-era peak. Then he lost over a hundred pounds in a single year, using a punishing exercise regimen I never would have predicted he would maintain so diligently. After he lost all that weight, the physical characteristic that most defined him was either-take your pick-the a.s.semblage of short, staccato quills of silver hair that poked up from his scalp like the snow-glossed blades of gra.s.s outside, or a thin crimson scar underneath his left eye, the obstinate reminder of a minor surgical operation that he never bothered to have closed up.
It was not just his newly thin face, with its once flattened-out features consolidated and hardened, the skin taut and angular where it used to be paunchy, that was no longer immediately identifiable to me. It was the complete person, suddenly mindful of his health, determined that his survival on this planet be allowed to continue as long as possible, and aware that he himself might play some role in his own preservation. It was the man who seemed to be perfectly comfortable with his advancing age, who appeared to have all the competing spheres of his universe in harmonious balance, and who, in reverent tones, repeatedly declared to me in conversation after conversation that he had never felt so at ease in all his life.
The feeling that his expressions of contentment stirred in me was not relief but irritation. I knew I should be pleased that he had, over a period of decades, meandered his way to inner peace, and grateful that, as his heir, I might be genetically predisposed to achieving the same. But when I was being truthful with myself, I caught myself thinking he simply didn"t deserve to live a life so blissfully free of suffering. I felt all of this every time he so much as picked up the phone to ask me if I"d caught the Yankees game or if I"d heard from my sister lately.
My mother was seated at a nearby breakfast table, eating cereal. "He was up all night playing with the computer," she explained without looking up from her bowl.
Swatting away my mother"s remark as if it were a fly, my father led me into his private den. It was here that his recently acquired top-of-the-line PC resided-the one he had compulsively upgraded with all manner of anti-virus software and anti-spyware detection programs, memory boards, hard drives, and video capture cards. His latest technological l.u.s.t object was the scanner he used to digitize the contents of his photo alb.u.ms. By day he organized these files into virtual portfolios, and by night he ruminated over faded photographs of himself from his childhood, pictures of my mother in the earliest years of their marriage, when they still went on vacations, pictures of me and my sister when we crawled on our knees and sucked on pacifiers-even pictures he had taken of other people"s children at the bungalow colony whose lake he fished on during the summer. If it was fragile and innocent and would someday be gone, rest a.s.sured that my father had recorded it somewhere.
Surrounded by these implements that offered him instantaneous, on-demand, and perpetual evocations of his past, we sat across from each other in plastic folding chairs; I had a legal pad and a pen in my lap. "Okay," my father said, "where do you want to start?"
We started at the beginning, in 1940, in the Bronx neighborhood of Pelham Parkway, in the apartment building at 2167 Cruger Avenue where my father was raised and lived until he was sixteen. What he remembered most about the neighborhood was how closely knit families were in those days: how his friends (who called him Gerry) lived not only with their parents (who called him Gerald) but with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and anyone else who shared their last names whom they could fit into a three-room tenement. As he enumerated each of his surviving friends, he dutifully recited the apartment number, public school, and ultimate location of retirement, whether to Long Island, Florida, or Aspen; for the elders, the medical condition that led to deaths.
His other favorite memory from this formative era was throwing up on his walk to school every single day. It was a story I could easily reconcile with the man my father became-oblivious of punctuality, unnerved by the thought of being asked questions he was unprepared to answer, and endlessly fearful of the unknown. It was much harder for me to comprehend how that timid little schoolboy matured into a young man who had graduated high school by the age of sixteen and who, that following summer, was attending college in New Orleans, playing cards and throwing dice in its backroom gambling parlors; who, by age twenty-one, had joined his father in the family fur business and, within twelve months, was turning greater profits than in any year when my grandfather ran it alone.
He had flunked out of college twice (or possibly three times, he couldn"t remember), taken a job at a local bank, and threatened to enlist in the Merchant Marine before my grandfather invited him to join the business. The great irony was that this was what my father had wanted to do all along, but he was too embarra.s.sed or too weak to raise the issue with my grandfather. Until then, "I had no life, no direction," my father had explained to me. "I could never ask for what I wanted. I probably wouldn"t have gotten it. Or maybe I would.
"I was always striving to get somewhere," my father said. "Only there ain"t nothing out there."
He rarely exhibited these qualities now, but after a couple of years of dealing fur with my grandfather, my father had a sense of purpose, he had a steady income, and most significantly, he had confidence.
Case in point: at age twenty, in the years before fur, my father had been hanging out at the Playdrome Bowling Center in the Bronx, now demolished, when he first laid eyes on Madelin Klugman, a fifteen-year-old brunette whom he swears still possesses, at age sixty-four, the same cherubic face she had when she was seven. He became instantly smitten with her but was too shy to approach her. Three years later, post-fur, he received a hot tip from his cousin Heshie that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, Morty Mandelbaum, and this was his chance to make a move.
(Who was Morty Mandelbaum, by the way? Why, the very same dope fiend with whom my father had been arrested for smoking marijuana on a Parkchester rooftop the previous year. Why had she broken up with him? Because late one night he had driven her out to a seedy neighborhood and left her in the car while he went to buy pot. Did she know at the time that my father had been busted with him under similar circ.u.mstances? "Probably not," said the old dad.) On Cousin Heshie"s recommendation, my father, with uncharacteristic poise and promptness, phoned up his teenage crush and asked for a date, and when she said she was too busy to meet with him that week, he called her a second time and she invited him to meet her at a friend"s apartment in Manhattan. From that point on, my father said, "I saw her every night until I married her. Except when I was out late playing cards."
In the itinerary of twists and turns that comprised my father"s life, maybe this one was the most significant. To this point he had yearned with every ounce of strength and desire he possessed for love: to have love in his life and to have love radiated back to him as intensely as he projected it. Now he had found it, with a woman who, by his own estimation, seemed hopelessly beyond his grasp, and not only was the love good and fulfilling for its own sake, but he found that it amplified all the hidden qualities within him that he had been forced to bring to the surface in order to win it. Having love in his life affirmed his ambition; it bolstered his confidence; it broadened his sense of personal capability; and it imbued him with a previously unknown sense of courage.
My parents were married in 1965, and I like to imagine the decade that followed as their Martin Scorsese years-a montage set to a soundtrack of hit AM-radio rock singles, with each smash cut in the sequence signifying another rung ascended on the socioeconomic ladder. Begin with their brief post-honeymoon period as tenants of the guest bedroom of my father"s parents" apartment in Bronxville (set to the Chiffons""Sweet Talkin" Guy"); cut to their first real home in Yonkers (Love Affair"s "Everlasting Love"); cut to their Manhattan high-rise (Elton John"s "Tiny Dancer"); cut to their weekend house in New Jersey (the Rolling Stones""Wild Horses"). There were cars, there were parties, there were vacations in Mexico, and there were, of course, fur coats. There was money to spare, and after ten years, there was a baby on the way.
Also, there were drugs. Despite my father"s previous experiences and my mother"s earlier objections, they inhaled pot as if it were oxygen: they smoked it with their other newly married friends, smoked it with their lawyer and stockbroker pals on their lunch breaks, drove all the way to New Hope, Pennsylvania, to smoke it outdoors, sorted it and deseeded it on alb.u.m covers, and smoked it in the privacy of their own home. They were not hippies or anti-establishment types, or anti-anything, for that matter-just a couple of newly independent young adults for whom marijuana seemed like the latest innovation in their rapidly evolving middle-cla.s.s ethos, a novelty whose lifestyle benefits would eventually become as indispensable and as commonplace as food processors and permanent-press fabric.
If you"re the sort of armchair rebel whose mouth instinctively folds into a smirk when you hear an authority figure describe marijuana as a gateway drug, consider what happened next. For years my unstylish parents, a furrier and a garment worker, had been toiling by tradition in midtown Manhattan"s fashion district, a neighborhood of co-existing squalor and sophistication, mixing it up with some very worldly people. Through one of my mother"s friends, a young clothing designer my father referred to as "a real fruit fly," they were invited to a party where they were introduced to another new recreational product that was becoming popular with their young urban demographic, this one called cocaine.
My father tried it out, seemed to like it, and upon subsequent samplings at later parties, discovered that he truly enjoyed it. It allowed him to let go of his social anxieties, to say things that he believed in his heart but that his conscious mind wouldn"t allow him to enunciate, and to feel s.e.xually emboldened around my mother. Unlike pot, which altered his consciousness to a point that he could no longer be sure was his own, cocaine seemed to reach a genuine part of himself that was always there but which he could not otherwise set free.
On a later trip to Florida, my father similarly talked himself into a group of young pilots and their girlfriends. This new set of thrill-seeking companions taught him how to parachute out of a plane, and they helped him mainline cocaine by cooking it up and injecting it directly into his bloodstream. The first time they tied him in to the intravenous gear, they strictly warned my father that they were going to allow him to do it only once. Of course, he liked the experience so much that he immediately wanted to do it again. No No, they reminded him. Remember, we said only once Remember, we said only once.
They did, however, help him purchase a pound of solid cocaine, which rode shotgun with him when he drove home to New York. Not knowing what to do with such a large quant.i.ty of the drug, my father hid a portion of it in the freezer, believing this would somehow keep it fresh, and then divided the remaining amount into smaller bags of one ounce each, which he concealed in tiny slits he cut into the couch in his living room. It was around this time, my father would later conclude, that he officially crossed the threshold from the dimly lit, curtains-drawn den of the casual drug user to the night-dark, windowless back room of the true addict. He ran a reasonably successful fur business and had a fairly happy marriage, but now he had found something he could devote himself to completely and love with all his heart. One year later, I was born.
My mother started taking my father to psychiatrists for his drug problem during my infancy; by that point his cocaine use was so pervasive and all-encompa.s.sing that there was no part of our family history that was not in some way built on its shifting, powdery foundation. He was getting high so often that he was staying awake for days at a time and having paranoid delusions that unknown a.s.sailants were climbing ropes up the side of our apartment building, preparing to enter through the windows and take him away. During one such panic attack, he dashed out of our apartment dressed in nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of jogging shorts; he ran all the way to a nearby Hilton hotel, where he checked in to a room and waited for the hallucination to subside.
("And I"m using, and I"m using," my father would later explain to me. "How come n.o.body threw a net over me?") At my mother"s request-probably more like her insistence, under pain of death or nighttime castration-my father went with her to meet a psychiatrist named Dr. Nichols at his private practice in the East Village. After he considered the same evidence I just recounted, the delusions and the a.s.sailants and the Hilton hotel, Dr. Nichols delivered the same a.s.sessment that every other friend, casual acquaintance, and pa.s.serby on the street had been offering my father: he needed to check in to a hospital and get treated for his addiction. Otherwise, said Dr. Nichols, "You"re headed for big trouble."
How seriously did my parents take Dr. Nichols"s diagnosis? Seriously enough to compose a song about it. It was an original number that was later sung to me in a different context, called "Big Trouble," set to the tune of the hit Jimmy Dean song "Big Bad John" and whose complete lyrics ran as follows: Big trouble Big bad trouble My father"s symptoms did not get better of their own accord. He became emboldened and even more open about his habits. At the Friday-night dinners where he gathered with his parents, he sneaked off to the bathroom to get high. He was making so much money from his fur business and buying so much c.o.ke that, in those instances when he determined that his unseen captors were coming for him, he could easily afford to flush a half pound of the drug down the toilet and replace it later.
This was followed by a session with another psychiatrist named Dr. Goldman, who specialized in a.n.a.lytic psychology. Upon entering Dr. Goldman"s office, my father declared, "It smells like tuna fish in here." To which Dr. Goldman replied, "What do you think that means?"
My father"s private meetings with Dr. Goldman yielded nothing more memorable or lasting than tuna fish, but it was he who wrote the order to have my father committed, which my mother signed and my grandfather dispiritedly seconded. On a night when my sister and I had been given over to our grandmother for safekeeping, my father"s visions of a traumatic, violent abduction were realized when the police came banging at his apartment door, stripped him naked and strapped him into a straitjacket, and hijacked him to Bellevue Hospital. He spent the next month there, trying to rationalize with his doctors that he would clean up his act if they"d release him back to his family. He was devoid of companionship save for the transients, schizophrenics, and other hopeless cases who were treated alongside him, and a lone visit from the father who co-signed his commitment papers, who told his haggard, depleted son, "You"re still the best-looking guy in here."
Thirty days later, clean and sober, reunited with his wife and young children, and liberated from the fear that he would be ripped away from his loved ones a second time, my father resumed his drug habit. Within months he was inst.i.tutionalized again, this time by his own volition, at the Long Island Jewish Hospital, a live-in facility that he was free to walk away from at any time. At least one of his fellow patients did that during his stay, skipping out in the middle of the night, but my father fulfilled his commitment to the program, contented by the freedom that came with wearing nothing but a hospital gown all day, by his roommates (including a long-haired guitar player who asked to be called Gandalf), and by the occasional visits from his friends, one of whom presented him with a copy of James Allen"s cla.s.sic tome of new age philosophy, As a Man Thinketh As a Man Thinketh (sample aphorism: "Man is always the master, even in his weakest and most abandoned state; but in his weakness and degradation he is the foolish master who misgoverns his "household""). (sample aphorism: "Man is always the master, even in his weakest and most abandoned state; but in his weakness and degradation he is the foolish master who misgoverns his "household"").
Around this time my father became so proficient and attentive in his drug use that he a.s.sembled a personal soundtrack of the music he believed was most compatible with his frame of mind when he was alone and high. I think it says something about my father that his two favorite alb.u.ms to snort cocaine to were the Spinners" Greatest Hits Greatest Hits and Emmylou Harris"s and Emmylou Harris"s Pieces of the Sky Pieces of the Sky. His choice of the Spinners I can almost understand, even if it is the sort of record I could never imagine him listening to while sober; it has a certain soothing quality that"s exacerbated when one"s senses are chemically attuned to the deep, rich vocals and pulsating ba.s.s lines.
The Emmylou Harris selection I find more surprising, even for a lifelong country-music fan like my father. To a completely sober listener, Harris"s sweet, piercing voice already possesses sufficient intensity to sweep your legs out from under you; how she must sound to a dedicated substance abuser when she applies that same sonorous power to a laid-back honky-tonk number like "Too Far Gone," its metaphoric suggestions of loss and dependency amplified by a genuine act of debas.e.m.e.nt taking place as it plays, is too terribly resonant for me to contemplate. There are biblical references throughout the alb.u.m, which always seem more compelling, somehow, when you"re intoxicated, and a vague, recurring theme of personal salvation. Strongest of all are the lyrics to "Boulder to Birmingham." I wonder if my father appreciated the song because Harris wrote it for a friend, Gram Parsons, whom she lost to substance abuse, or because its descriptions of scenes of natural devastation perfectly mirrored my father"s mental state as he was listening to it: 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 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. 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 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.") 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 h.e.l.l"s the difference, Dad? Is there anything but but drugs? Without the drugs, what story would there be? 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 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 b.u.t.ton, 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 circ.u.mstances; 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 pa.s.sed away, and then my father received a mysterious phone call from the FBI. The agent asked my father if he was familiar with certain a.s.sociates 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 doc.u.ments, 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 quant.i.ty 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 a.s.sert 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 gla.s.ses, 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 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?"
Chapter 8
For the all times my father had been inst.i.tutionalized 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 cla.s.s reunions he had been attending, organized by the editors of a newsletter called the Pelham Parkway Times 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, advertis.e.m.e.nts for condominiums in Boca Raton, and inspirational messages for their surviving cla.s.smates. (A sampling from one issue: "Think about this. You You may not realize it, but it"s 100% true. 1. There are at least two people in this world that may not realize it, but it"s 100% true. 1. There are at least two people in this world that you you would die for. 2. At least 15 people in this world love would die for. 2. At least 15 people in this world love you you in some way.") 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 feels like the end of the world." 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 spa.r.s.ely attended. My father a.s.sured 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 cla.s.smates 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 cla.s.smate 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 a.s.sembled in the Itzkoff family car, with my grandfather at the wheel and my father in the front pa.s.senger 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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, st.u.r.dy and well maintained, as immaculate as when my father and his family moved into them. Some had tightly woven metal fences to keep trespa.s.sers 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 a.s.sumed 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: Worker, I had an emergency at work, please come back tomorrow.
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 pa.s.sed in the terminal, as if to say, You may not need to know this now, but pay attention for later 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 a.s.sets 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.
The wizened old fur merchants of my grandfather"s generation took a particular liking to my father; they appreciated his youthful energy and his attentiveness, and they took him out to lunches and offered him their counsel even though he was technically their compet.i.tor. Those men were long gone, but my father never forgot their faces or their names and never stopped repeating aloud the lessons they had taught him.
What he could not remember quite as easily was the location of the auction. After we checked in to our room at a highway-strip hotel not far from the airport, I followed him across eight lanes of traffic to the campus of a corporate mall. What had caught his attention there was a tall clay-colored building that clearly bore the letters and logo of the HSBC bank, but which he decided was the headquarters of a commercial operation called the Hudson"s Bay Company. After several rings of a buzzer outside the building"s deserted lobby yielded no reply, my father remained as certain as ever that the auction was taking place upstairs, somewhere, without him. On his cellphone, he called the auction house, whose receptionist told him that he had walked one block in the wrong direction and offered to send a car to retrieve him. He declined and hung up. "We won"t make that mistake again," he said to me.
The correct address turned out to be a single-story warehouse directly behind us. Having traveled here thinking I"d bear witness to the last gasps of a dying inst.i.tution, I was stunned to see how modern the fur business had become. The facilities were clean, contemporary, and well lighted, with waiting rooms furnished by plush new couches that did not smell of cigarettes or alcohol or fur, and a fully stocked cafeteria and dining room. Through a gla.s.s window, you could see the auction itself-dozens of traders seated at individual desks, their cellphones flipped open and their laptop computers powered up as they communicated in real time with buyers from England, Greece, Russia, China, and South Korea, attention fixed on an auctioneer who stood at the front of the room, announcing each lot in a voice so methodical and mellifluous you"d think he was calling a square dance: For-tee-three in the front-yes lot one-fif-tee-a-one-be-fore you turn-a the pageI"m now bid for-tee-four-in the center, for-tee-fourFor-tee-five is bid-now six in the centerSeven in the center? No? Ho! Ho! Ho!
When that man banged his gavel, people in the room applauded.
Beyond this room, my father ushered me through a back door and into the fur business that I knew best: hardy, gray-haired men with eyegla.s.ses dangling precipitously from their ears, who had finished the day"s work and had gathered around tables to drink beer, play poker, paw at half-eaten deli sandwiches, and smoke musty brown Dutch Masters Presidentes. When they went home for the night, they"d be dressed immaculately in b.u.t.ton-down shirts, pleated slacks, and loafers, but for now they were camouflaged by long white work coats, s.p.a.ckled in occasional droplets of the same musky concoction that repeated washings could never completely extract from my father"s clothes.
Then there was the fur itself, lurking in the deepest reaches of the warehouse, a fluorescent cavern where the air was kept cold and thin by refrigeration units. While they waited to be sold, the skins sat piled up on pallets, stripped from the bodies of wild animals and pounded flat, staring with uniform vacancy through emptied-out eye sockets: snow-white lynx cats, chestnut-brown sable, sleek gray sable, coyotes and ermines, wolverines and squirrels, and beavers whose round pelts had been smashed into circular shapes as if they were giant pancakes. The mere sight of these mute artifacts-just the feeling of my sneakers slipping slightly on the concrete floor from the oils-was enough to transport me back to my father"s old, vacated offices on West Twenty-ninth Street.
There were certain former confederates whom my father hoped he would not encounter: "This weasel," he said to me, pointing not to an animal but to a man, a wayward former customer who had ordered 150 pieces of dressed racc.o.o.n fur and then returned the entire shipment, claiming that what he really wanted were badgers. "He"s embarra.s.sed to say h.e.l.lo to me. Such a schmuck." And still others wouldn"t be attending the sale at all, like David Karsch, a seventy-four-year-old former fur broker from Alaska who, days earlier, had pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to restrain trade, over an alleged attempt to rig the price of otter pelts.
Those fellow furriers whom my father did want to see consistently reacted to his appearance with an emotion I had no idea he was capable of eliciting: awe. Some of them wanted to know why he"d been absent from the auction for so many years; others seemed nervous that he"d come back with the specific intention of outbidding them on whatever skins they were planning to buy; and some appeared to be under the mistaken impression that he was dead. "I knew I"d see you sooner or later," one rival told him with feigned relief, "because only the good die young."
"You know people in this business," my father replied. "They only stop when they hit a brick wall."
The drug stories began to flow as freely as the auctioneer"s incantations. From my father"s lips, I heard tales of Baruch Steinschneider, an Orthodox Jew who liked to fire guns and drive four-by-four trucks and who could be seen the morning after an all-night binge "eyes red, gritting his teeth with a yarmulke on his head"; and Noel h.e.l.ler, a furrier who liked to deal a little c.o.ke on the side and became a c.o.ke dealer who liked to sell a little fur on the side, who died in prison of a heart attack after conviction for possession and trafficking.
Other longtime peers in attendance shared their recollections. Mason Haynes, a st.u.r.dy, bearded fur trader from Michigan, a latter-day Paul Bunyan, who"d come to pa.s.s along a tall but true tale of his own: "I came by your store," he told my father, as if reminiscing about some old fraternity prank, "the door was open, and there you were on the floor. I didn"t know if you were dead!" He punctuated the observation with a laugh.
My father chuckled, too. "I was just takin" a nap," he said.
Even the business adversaries who obviously hated my father"s guts had fond drug-related memories. Helmut Lebensalter was a husky, well-dressed gentleman with the carefully groomed facial hair and unplaceable European accent of a James Bond villain. He was looking over some skins at one of the inspection tables in the back of the auction house when he saw my father coming; he greeted him by asking, "Are you still manipulating the markets, Gerry?"
This initiated a long lecture from my father about the best point in a fiscal cycle to buy fur ("when n.o.body else wants it"), and why one should never invest in the market with borrowed money, and a reiteration of his philosophy that he would never leave the fur business alive. (I believe his exact words were "You must die-they must kill you. If you hear that I"m retiring, I must be sick.") "Did you hear the professor?" Helmut asked me, not really expecting an answer.
As my father walked away to say h.e.l.lo to another old client, Helmut turned to me and said quietly, "Ask him about the Egyptian Garden." I thought for certain he"d slipped me a coded message-a fragmentary allusion to some foreign trip they"d once taken or an outrageously lucrative deal they"d pulled off, but it turned out to be the name of a bar where they used to get high together.