Cocaine"s son: a memoir.
by Dave Itzkoff.
Chapter 1
He was such an elusive and transient figure that for the first eight years of my life I seem to have believed my father was the product of my imagination. The adult world that I traveled through was populated almost exclusively by women: there were the teachers who trained me on the multiplication tables, the state capitals, and the three branches of government; their aides and a.s.sistants; the babysitters, nannies, and housecleaners; the plastic-gloved, hairnetted cafeteria workers who called me Pepito as they ladled out my hot lunches; the school nurse who schemed to deplete me of my saliva with her tasteless wooden tongue depressors; and a jumpsuit-clad handywoman named Celie who spent fruitless hours wading through the school trash to find the loose tooth I threw away, fearing its escape from my mouth meant I was falling apart. There was my sister, who came into existence two years after me; a pair of fragile but living grandmothers, sundry aunts, great-aunts, and cousins. And there was Mom, who sat above them all on this pyramidal structure of progesterone. But there was only one Dad, or so I was told.
It required the combined energies of these many women to discharge the duties normally provided to me by the indefatigable and infinitely resourceful Mom; each had her specialized skills and knowledge, but Mom equaled, encompa.s.sed, and surpa.s.sed them all. By day, she was not only the Chooser of Clothes, the Maker of Breakfast and the Conveyor to and from School, the Holder of Hands and the Kisser of Cuts and Bruises. She was the Giver of Language, who provided names for the distinctive vagrants who wandered our block-Rudolph, with his bright red nose, and Froggy, whose raspy voice carried all the way up from the gutter to our twenty-fifth-story apartment on East Fortieth Street, with what was then an un.o.bstructed view of the East River-and the Tutor of Numbers, who showed me how the digits of Manhattan"s streets grew bigger from south to north and from east to west. She taught me that the person whom others called Maddy but whom I knew as Mom were one and the same, and she reminded me that there was another person named Gerry whom I knew as Dad, and that Mom and Dad each had a mom and a dad, too.
By night, she tirelessly rubbed her cool, foul-smelling jellies into my chest when it was filled with phlegm, operated the dials of a mysterious hissing device called the vaporizer, and ma.s.saged my feet when the pain from their bones, growing and stretching without my consent, caused me to cry. At dawn, she rose again to implore me not to be frightened by the apocalyptic rumblings of the newspaper trucks roaring forth to make their morning deliveries, backfiring like pistols as they went.
She was my co-conspirator when I sought extra sick days to stay home and watch game shows; she was my chief defender when, as she observed me on my first attempt to purchase my own food at McDonald"s, I was pushed out of line by a grown-up female customer. ("I told her she was very rude," my mother explained, and for a time I believed this was the most devastating thing a person could be called.) And when she did not feel like dealing with the world, she was my date to a thousand matinees, to movies for which we would always arrive late and then stay in our seats and watch a second time so we could see them in their entirety. Many years pa.s.sed before I learned that a movie could be watched just once at a theater.
All she asked in return was that I abide, to the letter, by a byzantine system of laws, regulations, and taboos known only to her and forever in flux. Don"t play Spider-Man on the weblike netting that extends over the side of our terrace and into the inviting blue sky. Don"t leave the dinner table until you"ve taken five more bites of your food-so determined because I was five years old, and the following year the penalty would go up to six bites. "Hand, hand, fingers, thumb!" she would call out when we approached the edge of the sidewalk, requesting that we lock digits before she escorted me across the street. Sometimes she would stand with me at a distance from the curb, watching the cars whiz by as the traffic sign changed from WALK WALK to to DON"T WALK DON"T WALK and back. And sometimes, when the sign would blink its final and back. And sometimes, when the sign would blink its final DON"T WALK DON"T WALK warning, she would get an excited gleam in her eye and clutch my tiny fingers forcefully and exclaim "Let"s go!" and we would race off into the intersection, always making it to the other side just in time. warning, she would get an excited gleam in her eye and clutch my tiny fingers forcefully and exclaim "Let"s go!" and we would race off into the intersection, always making it to the other side just in time.
There was something melancholy about her rules, their preoccupation with the manifold ways that I could be injured and their foreboding certainty that I would be lost the moment she took her eyes off me or a situation arose that she hadn"t prepared me for. Even her rules of thumb for shopping at the neighborhood supermarket were a little sad. "Don"t ever get attached to anything here," she would say. "The minute you start liking it, they replace it with something else."
When she really wanted to feel sad, she turned to the hi-fi we kept in our living room. Digging deep into the milk crates she used to house the family record collection, she flipped past the cheerful Sesame Street Sesame Street soundtracks she had acc.u.mulated for me and my sister, and a well-worn copy of soundtracks she had acc.u.mulated for me and my sister, and a well-worn copy of Free to Be...You and Me Free to Be...You and Me that promised a new country of green fields and shining seas; past the psychedelic copy of that promised a new country of green fields and shining seas; past the psychedelic copy of Sgt. Pepper"s Lonely Hearts Club Band Sgt. Pepper"s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with its construction-paper insert of a fake mustache and epaulets that I was not allowed to cut into even though the page clearly said CUT HERE CUT HERE; past the Bette Midler alb.u.ms and the cast recording of A Chorus Line A Chorus Line, with their exotic descriptions of adult activities and hilarious, forbidden words like "t.i.ts" and "a.s.s," until she stopped at a record by a fuzzy-haired young singer named Janis Ian called Between the Lines Between the Lines.
Tucked far away in my bedroom, I could hear the soft guitar bossa nova of the t.i.tle song, and through the walls I could just about make out the lyrics, about desperation and Friday-night charades, and high school girls with clear-skinned smiles who married young and then retired, and a quietly chilling refrain about what it means to learn the truth. I knew my numbers well enough to count how many years it would be until I reached that apparently terrible age of seventeen, and how many had elapsed since my mother had been that old. But I could no more imagine what I would think or feel then, or how she thought or felt, than I could comprehend how adults put on their jackets all by themselves without laying them upside down on the floor in front of them. I had watched school years come and go, and the seasons transition from winter to summer to winter again, but I hadn"t been on the planet long enough to know that when things changed, sometimes they didn"t change back.
What I could understand about the song was that my mother appeared to have less in common with the awkward girls lamented in its lyrics-ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces-than with the beauty queens its singer coolly set herself apart from. I knew, to look at her, that my mother was beautiful, and I knew it long before Sigmund Freud told me to think that. If I looked around our apartment, I could see that its other male tenant, wherever he was, had turned it into a shrine to her, filling it with framed photographs from every era that he knew her: a trophy from some long-ago fishing trip, as he stood with one arm around a giant marlin and the other around her, her sun-dappled skin wrapped tightly in a bikini; a goofy relic from a costume party when she wore a rented wedding dress and he wore a T-shirt meant to look like a tuxedo. They did not yet have me in their lives, and still, somehow, they were happy.
In the camphor-scented residences of my grandparents, I had seen the most tangible and luminescent tribute to her divinity: the tear sheet from an old modeling campaign she had done for Johnson & Johnson shampoo, in which she was asked to do no more than tilt her head to one side and hold a brush to the shimmering oscillations of hair that flowed in jet-black waves from her head. Her carefree manner in those pictures seemed utterly incompatible with the stifled sobs that accompanied her Janis Ian listening sessions. What could someone so pretty be unhappy about?
Long after my mother had put me and my sister to bed, when the sirens had stopped screaming and our darkened apartment was filled with only the murmur of our refrigerator and the occasional rasp from Froggy down below, he would come home. I would hear him first at the front door, the metallic tinkling of steel against steel as a key wandered its way into the lock and turned the tumblers, then the sighing of floorboards giving in to his weight as he lurched and lumbered from room to room, shuffling from the foyer to the living room and stopping at my bedroom door. A trembling hand would tousle my hair, and an ample body would wrap his arms and legs around me and envelop me in its warmth, so close that I could feel his stubble against my own bare cheek and a warm tickle ran up my neck each time he exhaled. He took rapid, erratic gulps of air, and he would say to me, "Davey, are you up? Can I talk to you?"
"Hi, Dad," I would answer.
I would listen as he would talk, and talk and talk, about whatever was on his mind. One topic usually prevailed. "You know, David," he said, removing his gla.s.ses from his beaky nose so I could see the sincerity in his wide, round eyes, "don"t you know that s.e.x between a man and a woman is the most beautiful and natural thing there is? It"s okay to want it. It"s okay to want it from a woman. You"ve got to let them know that you want it. That"s how G.o.d made the game. But He knew that He couldn"t make the game too easy, right? Or else where would be the challenge? Do you know that it took me years to figure this out? For years I suffered-oh! how I suffered!-when girls would reject me. Do you know that your mother is the first woman who didn"t turn me down? She showed me that it was beautiful and wonderful. I don"t ever want you to be scared. I don"t ever want you to suffer like I suffered."
Less frequently, he would tell a recurring story about his father. "Do you know, David," he told me on many occasions, "I was once rummaging around in the glove compartment of his car and found a gla.s.s eye? And I knew it was his, but for so long, I was too scared to tell him. Finally, one day I got up the courage to tell him, and I said, "Dad, I know you wear a gla.s.s eye, and I want you to know I don"t think any less of you." And do you know what he said? He said, "Gerry, if it hadn"t of been for that gla.s.s eye, I could have been president." And I hugged him and I kissed him"-by now he was shivering and choking on his own tears-"and I said, "Dad, you always could have.""
Sometimes he wanted to pa.s.s on bits of philosophy and wisdom he had picked up in his travels, whose usefulness he knew I would not grasp right away. "You know that when somebody dies," he would say, "they aren"t really gone, right? As long as we keep them in our hearts and remember them, they live on forever, don"t they?"
When his lesson had ended, my father would prostrate himself on the surface created by my and my sister"s adjoining beds, and he would fall asleep, snoring loudly. Eventually, I would drift off, too, and when I woke up in the morning, he would be gone, leaving me to wonder if I"d dreamed it all.
Just as I believed that everyone lived as we did, in bustling, overcrowded metropolises, surrounded by b.u.ms and decaying brownstones and high-rise apartment complexes that stretched into the clouds; and that everyone went to a private school and was transported there each day by a private van that picked him up and dropped him off at his front door; and that everyone was Jewish to the extent that we were Jewish and knew who was not not Jewish because they not only exchanged gifts on Christmas but also went to church, or because they were black, I believed that all families operated as ours did. There was a mother whose job it was to do all the household ch.o.r.es, to cook and clean and raise the children and give them their Oreos before bed, and there was a father who did whatever he did, at whatever hours he did it, and was thus ent.i.tled never to be questioned about it. Jewish because they not only exchanged gifts on Christmas but also went to church, or because they were black, I believed that all families operated as ours did. There was a mother whose job it was to do all the household ch.o.r.es, to cook and clean and raise the children and give them their Oreos before bed, and there was a father who did whatever he did, at whatever hours he did it, and was thus ent.i.tled never to be questioned about it.
Somehow I knew that I was the only boy whose father confided in him as mine did, who trusted his son so completely and had such faith in his intellect and maturity that he would make it his mission to prepare his offspring, aged five or six or seven, for these stark grown-up lessons in s.e.x and death and missing eyes. Meanwhile, all my peers would have to wait to discover these things when an indifferent world and callous experience forced the lessons upon them. Separated though we were by some thirty-seven years, I thought my father saw in me an equal and a second self. I thought I had a special friend.
Unlike any other person I had known so far, my special friend was not the same man at all times of day. There was the exuberant, affectionate husband and father who referred to the marital bed he shared with my mother as the "Our Bed," a reminder that my sister and I were always welcome in it, too. He had no shortage of diminutives for me, either: in his lexicon, I was the Ace; I was his Pal; I was the Wild Man; I was the Edge Man, so called for my preference for sitting at the farthest, most dangerous precipice of the Our Bed; I was Pizza Head, for the time I fell noggin-first into a pizza he and my mother were eating on the Our Bed.
I was the Chicken Man, who had his own theme song, set to the tune of the Beatles""Nowhere Man": He"s a real Chicken Man And he comes from Chicken Land Another nickname he gave me, Chicken Itzy, was so pervasive and so deeply embedded in my consciousness that when I first encountered the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza in a middle-school history textbook, I had to stop and wonder if my father had built those pyramids there and named them after me.
This father was so endlessly attentive with me, so imitative and appreciative of anything I did or said, that when one of my enunciations amused him, it forever became a family catchphrase. "Out de door!" he would say when he left the apartment for the day, just as I did, or "Hat on!," meaning it was time to pack up one"s things and go. Using his own special made-up vocabulary, he would call out the scrunched-up facial expression I made when I got sleepy ("The kid"s got mouse eyes!") or the way my hair stood on end when I first woke up ("The kid"s got pull-"ems!"). Until I learned to p.r.o.nounce the word correctly, he referred to his spectacles as his "guh-la.s.ses," and when I would reach up and try to grab them off his nose, he would playfully warn me, "Guh-la.s.ses are not not a toy." When I succeeded and his gla.s.ses went spilling to the floor and I knew I"d been bad, he would make an exaggerated grimace and sing me a silly song to calm me down: a toy." When I succeeded and his gla.s.ses went spilling to the floor and I knew I"d been bad, he would make an exaggerated grimace and sing me a silly song to calm me down: Big trouble Big bad trouble He was not always absent from my life. He could be counted on for at least an occasional appearance at crucial events, to watch me at the second-grade pageant as I stood in a toga made from bedsheets, behind a podium wrapped in construction paper and decorated with the legend S.P.Q.R S.P.Q.R. spelled out in gold and purple glitter, and recited from memory Marc Antony"s funeral oration from Julius Caesar Julius Caesar. Later, that same man would emerge from the back of the school gymnasium to give me a congratulatory bear hug, his rumpled clothing hanging off him like dead leaves and his breath so pungent that it arrived at my nostrils long before he leaned in to bestow upon me a congratulatory kiss.
Some days he would come home br.i.m.m.i.n.g with energy and wanting to take me to the neighborhood tropical-fish store, where he would wander the aisles for what felt like hours and chat up the salesmen about the largest tanks they sold and the latest innovations in water-filtration technology, while I sat on the floor and stared at the fish, wondering if they knew that I appreciated how it felt to be confined in a tiny box all day, and wishing that I could be for one moment that toy diver blowing bubbles from inside his colossal diving suit.
One night my father returned to our apartment and decided then and there that he was going to drive from New York to the home of a business client who lived far north in the Adirondacks, near the Canadian border. I decided that I wanted to go with him, because I knew it would get me out of school, and he allowed me to go, unfazed by my mother"s disapproving scowls. On a pitch-black winter"s night, we rode up I-87 together for hours, not in my mother"s dilapidated Lincoln Continental that got only AM radio and was always breaking down on the way to Hebrew school, but in my father"s pristine BMW, in which the leather seats always smelled vaguely of carsickness. We were two intrepid explorers, castaways with nothing between us except an open road and a single ca.s.sette of a whiny, adenoidal troubadour singing of knights in armor and silver s.p.a.ceships and only love can break your heart and ominous intonations of what"s going to happen when the morning comes. Twice I fell asleep and twice I woke up just in time to watch my father lose control of the car on slippery patches of ice as we spun out into banks of snow. After the second wipeout, the car could no longer drive forward, and for only a couple of miles did my father insist that he was going to complete the trip driving in reverse. A tow truck provided us with our ride home.
What did he do to keep me in a steady supply of Dr. Seuss books and videogame cartridges, to pay for my private school and his BMW and his tricked-out fish tanks? Nothing glamorous and nothing different from exactly what his father had done and his father"s father before that: he sold fur. Not the coats but the skins themselves, torn from the bodies of coyotes and foxes, beavers and minks and lynxes, turned inside out or pounded flat, treated, and preserved. He did not perform those tasks himself; he bought the pelts in small or large quant.i.ties, waited for markets to shift, and then sold them to other traders at a profit. To do this required that he go to a storefront every day and handle the skins, inspect the merchandise when it came in, and present it to others that might buy it from him. When he returned home, he reeked of flannel and denim and the musky oils that dripped from these hides, and of something else. I have smelled many unbearable odors since, and learned to distinguish the difference between the smells of tons of discarded food left to fester in the sun; vomit that has crystallized on the sidewalk; and men on subway trains soaked in their own urine. Still, I have never figured out what that additional scent was.
The fur industry of my grandfather"s age had thrived to where it was the equal, in size and prestige, of the garment district it bordered on Manhattan"s West Side. But by the time of my childhood, it was sequestered-so fate ordained-to a few dilapidated buildings in the shadow of Madison Square Garden. On the days I was brought to my father"s office, I would walk hand in hand with my mother past an off-track-betting station, a couple of parking lots, several gray and cheerless edifices where various unknown trades were conducted, finally to a building with a large, wide window that bore the legend GERALD ITZKOFF FUR MERCHANT GERALD ITZKOFF FUR MERCHANT (and a smaller window that, for the sake of nostalgia and superst.i.tion, still read (and a smaller window that, for the sake of nostalgia and superst.i.tion, still read BOB ITZKOFF & SON BOB ITZKOFF & SON).
My visits here consisted of waiting for several hours while my father finished his workday. I listened to him screaming over the phone at his clients and his rivals; screaming at the day workers who did the manual labor, retrieving the fur from storage and tying it up in bales; and screaming at my mother, who had recently begun to help him with the bookkeeping. Here, he was a different man from the one who sat at our breakfast table, armed with a thousand running jokes that equated going to work with committing suicide, who from nowhere would quote Edward G. Robinson"s mournful death rattle from Little Caesar Little Caesar-"Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?"-and who responded to my mother"s demands that he get in the shower already by miming a noose being drawn around his neck. Here, he was not the same person who had become so fixated on a short, poetic proverb, possibly of his own invention, about the meaninglessness and futility of all life"s efforts-"Nothing means nothing"-that he would sometimes recite it under his breath without even realizing he"d said it.
Here, he was dynamic, aggressive, compet.i.tive. He wanted no one else to win except the people he was partnered with, and those who rivaled him he wanted to see utterly vanquished. He made it no secret in all his telephone calls around the office, and the ones that followed him home late at night, and his monologues in which he would talk himself through his plans of attack and profess his invincibility, often ending with him declaring: "We"re gonna get "em, do you hear me? We"re gonna get "em. gonna get "em."
I wandered the cold concrete building, peeling large, jagged flakes of paint off the surfaces as I went, bounding up and down precarious metal staircases made slippery by decades of musky, gunky buildup, hiding among the burlap bales that towered over me in the refrigeration units, drawing on walls already decorated by the retinue of employees who had worked here for months or weeks before they disappeared with their wages.
Sometimes on my explorations, I would open up a cabinet or a panel and find the decomposing bodies of dead rats. Other times I would reach into a drawer and discover magazines, reminiscent of those he kept hidden around the apartment, with crinkled, yellowing pages populated by photographs of radiant, naked women whose ready poses and unfamiliar anatomies stirred strangely pleasant sensations in corresponding and similarly untested parts of my body. Often these pictures would be embellished with great dollops of purple and orange matter, the encrusted remains of what I intuitively knew was my father"s blood. I could glance only briefly at these tableaus before being overcome by a humbling feeling that I was gazing at something sacred, an admixture of the distillated essence of my father and a little bit of me that, when combined with the holy vessels depicted in those photographs, held the secret to creation itself.
It was around this time that I went through a phase when similar urges made me want to reach out and grab for my mother"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and my father became my great protector when I needed him to shield me from her sudden ferocious retaliation. It was not just my unknowing molestations that set her off; her fury would follow when I hadn"t obeyed one of the rules she had explicitly set forth, or when I transgressed an invisible boundary she had forgotten to convey to me. Maybe I"d neglected to wash my hands and face after coming home from an afternoon spent scavenging the trash cans for Oscar the Grouch; maybe I"d sat backward in my seat at the dinner table, just to see what would happen if I did it, or maybe I"d pulled my knit cap over my face in protest when I refused to watch the St. Patrick"s Day parade after she"d fought her way through the Fifth Avenue crowds to get me a good look at the procession.
The openhanded blows would come swiftly across my face, sometimes just a single bolt of lightning, sometimes a flurry of hailstones. Once I"d absorbed that first stinging swipe, the rest landed numbly with no impact. But sometimes my father would be there to catch her by the wrist before a single slap had landed, so her own momentum would send her falling backward. Sometimes he wouldn"t be there at all and the blows would keep coming and coming, and I"d stare at the front door of our apartment, hoping that at any moment it would be thrown open by my father, who would swoop in, his forearms extended and bulging like a comic-book character"s, and rescue me.
But who could protect us when he was the one we needed defending from?
In the same way I believed our happy family was alike to all other happy families, I extrapolated that every coupling of a mother and a father must have some regularly scheduled moment, most often on a late Sat.u.r.day afternoon, after the father has spent the morning snoring a hollow, staccato snore able to drown out the traffic, the b.u.ms, and the Con Edison plant below, when the parents will initiate a t.i.tanic argument in which walls will be rattled, doors will be slammed, and fragile household artifacts will be shattered. This was all normal, I thought, and an obligatory part of adulthood, that the mother cries and locks herself in the bathroom, and the father kicks at the door, shatters the mirror on its other side, and in an effort to coax her out, hurls the ceramic pumpkin in which his wife saves her quarters for the laundry machine.
In my family, such fights persisted until my mother screamed and called my father a junkie, a funny-sounding sort of word that reminded me of her broken-down Lincoln. A few minutes later, my father would storm into my room, the collar of his undershirt stretched halfway to his waist, possibly with scratches across his face, and wearily instruct me: "Look at me. Look at what your mother did to me."
This must be what happens in every family, I a.s.sumed, because it is what happens in mine because it is what happens in mine.
It must happen as surely as those unpredictable and out-of-nowhere instances when my father was home at midafternoon on a weekend or even on a weekday, tottering around the apartment like a bear that had come out of hibernation, when he"d lose his temper because my videogames were too loud or I"d asked for his help with my fractions or my Roman-history crossword puzzle and I couldn"t remember that "governor" was the t.i.tle both Americans and Romans gave to the person in charge of an entire state.
"You know know this one," my father would insist. this one," my father would insist.
"No, I don"t!" I"d shout petulantly.
"Yes, you do do," he would hiss back with menace in his eyes.
I"d laugh and call him the silly word I had just heard my mother use: "You"re a junkie," I"d say, because past observation had taught me that it was an instant victory. It was the one rebuke for which he possessed no comebacks.
His eyes would fill with fire, and his hot breath would emanate from his flaring nostrils as he grabbed me by the wrist. "What did you just call me?" he would shout. "Do you even know know what that word what that word means means?"
Next he would storm out of the room and seek my mother. "Do you hear this, Maddy?" he would shout at her. "You hear the way he talks to me? Where do you think he gets it, huh? From me me? From his private school private school? Well, let me tell you, there"ll be no more of that that. No more private school for him-he is out. Out of school school, out of here here, out on the street street, for all I care!"
"Stop it, Gerry! Stop it!" she would shout back at him. This would be followed by the sound of his bare, heavy feet trammeling across the floor, and he would reappear in my room in nothing more than his underwear and grab me by the arm.
"You hear me?" he"d shout. "You"re out of here. out of here." He"d open our front door and deposit me in the hallway, slamming the door shut as he hobbled back inside.
Eventually, my mother would come out and retrieve me. But what was I supposed to think until then? Should I have concluded that this was an act intended to remind me that beneath his docile exterior, he possessed power and was capable of taking things away from me at any moment? Or should I have prepared to gather up my belongings in a bindle and make my way from town to town, shining shoes and painting picket fences as I went?
These people, my parents, had taught me how to speak and what to think and what to fear, that turtles die if they aren"t fed regularly and that you can"t just walk down the street saying "Hi, man!" to every person you see. How was I supposed to know when they weren"t being fully honest with me?
Back when the question of who I should call my best friend seemed like the most crucial dilemma I would face, I granted that t.i.tle to a boy named Justin. He was identical to me in many ways: we were both small in stature-"shrimpy," I believe was the term at the time-both phenomenally fond of videogames, even when they consisted of crude monochrome blips that bobbed up and down on the TV screen, and both had fathers who never seemed to be around the house (although his father, I knew, had a much cooler occupation than mine: he was a dentist, and and he owned a liquor store). he owned a liquor store).
The most important function Justin served was keeping me company through Hebrew school, a tedious obligation that had somehow insinuated itself into my life without my agreeing to it or asking for it. The rigors of attending a regular school five days a week were demanding enough; in first grade, after I left one school building, I would travel to another, where I was told, after having spent my entire life up to that point memorizing and mastering the only alphabet I a.s.sumed existed, that there was a second one I was responsible for learning.
Before I enrolled at Hebrew school, and even before I started at private school, my preschool and kindergarten education came from cla.s.ses offered by an extremely liberal, extremely Reform synagogue in midtown Manhattan. There, any pedagogy about Jewish faith or history was doled out gently, mixed in with the grape juice and finger paints, nap hours and folk-guitar sing-alongs. The depictions of the fabled, far-off land of Israel that were occasionally presented to us had no relation to the world I inhabited-why did everyone appear to live on barren, heat-drenched farms like the planet Tatooine of Star Wars Star Wars, and why were they always in need of our money to plant trees? The legendary heroes whose exploits we were told of hardly seemed heroic at all, always doing exactly what they were told by G.o.d, even when His orders were utterly inscrutable.
There were only two exceptions to this rule. One was my namesake, the biblical David, who proved that the most lopsided height differential could be overcome with a single act of epic violence. The other was Judah Maccabee, who spent eleven months of the year boxed away and forgotten, to be trotted out in that month when the secular department stores began to hang their Christmas decorations, to remind us of days long ago when men, much different from the kinds I knew and the kind I was sure I would grow into, took up swords and shields to drive out their oppressors and reclaim what was theirs. This was my favorite time of year, and not just because it ent.i.tled me to a king"s ransom in presents. To my mind, the Hanukkah miracle was not that some h.o.a.ry lamp burned for eight days on a single day"s worth of oil, but that there were Jews who, for once, had stood up for themselves and won.
For unspecified motives, my parents sent me to Hebrew school at a Conservative temple, and this was the reason for all my troubles. We had never set foot in a synagogue as a family, and yet once a week I was donning a yarmulke to sit next to Justin in a cla.s.sroom that was smaller and shabbier, and whose students were twitchier and nastier, than private school had prepared us for. There, the congregation"s rabbi, a rotund and cheerful but ultimately stern man who called everyone by Hebrew name, taught us the subtle differences between the jagged letters vav vav and and zayin zayin, the imposing, ax-handled dalet dalet and its tailless cousin and its tailless cousin resh resh. His weekly lessons came from a pair of well-worn paperback workbooks that, no matter how inviting their cartoon ill.u.s.trations of men gardening and farming and women cooking and cleaning might be, we were not to doodle upon or we would have to pay for them at the end of the year. Coinciding with the start of the regular school term, our Hebrew-school calendar began with the harvest feast of Sukkot and the alien fruits used in its celebration, the husky, unappetizing lulav lulav and the lumpy, malformed and the lumpy, malformed etrog etrog. Within a couple of weeks, we had moved on to the high holidays and the traditional ritual of being shamed by one"s rabbi for not attending temple regularly.
My difficulties were compounded when I graduated to second grade. My attendance was doubled to twice a week, and the responsibility for my education was handed off to the rabbi"s wife, the first of many instructors I would meet who savored the license that the occupation provided to constantly tell children they were wrong. My cla.s.smates were the same distracted, unengaged malcontents with whom Justin and I had sat through first grade, and who, in a year"s time, had still not learned to distinguish among the serrated, angular Hebrew characters that hung like faceless portraits from the cla.s.sroom walls. The lesson plan from the previous year-Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, endless guilt-was repeated without variation, only this term we were let in on a great and terrible secret: everything we had been taught about Hebrew was a fraud, because the written language used no vowels. This was not the last time that my discovery that an essential historical fact about Judaism had been withheld from me would make me very, very angry.
In the meantime, Justin and I had each other to keep sane and share that window of time in the afternoon after regular school ended but before we were shipped off to the gulag. On one typical appointed Hebrew-school day, we were in my apartment, playing videogames and awaiting my mother"s return from work so we could be transported to our fate. However, the door to my parents" bedroom was shut tight, which meant my father was home and fast asleep. I silently decided that this was the day I was going to make my stand.
The telltale clicking and clacking of a key in our front door announced my mother"s arrival. In a singsong voice, she said, "It"s time for Hebrew schoolie," which was about as tantalizing as it could be made to sound.
Justin dutifully put down his game controller and began gathering his belongings. But I didn"t look away from the screen.
"No," I said.
"David," my mother said, becoming stern. "Don"t make me turn off this TV set." After a moment she did so anyway.
"No," I repeated. "I don"t want to go to Hebrew school today." Justin looked perplexed. Had I miscalculated that Hebrew school was as irritating to him as it was to me? Or had he never seen anyone talk back to his parents?
My mother took my two Hebrew-school workbooks from a living room shelf and brandished them like weapons. "You"re going to Hebrew school, and that"s final," she said.
But how could I tell her that it wasn"t final? How could I articulate to her that the teacher was mean and the kids were idiots, that I got yelled at no matter what I did even when I knew I was the best in the cla.s.s, and that deep down I suspected the more vehemently and dogmatically someone tries to instruct you in something, the less likely it is to be true, and besides, I"d rather spend the time playing more videogames?
"I don"t want to go to Hebrew school today," I said as forcefully as I could, which meant as loud as I could. "Now or ever."
From deep within the apartment, another doork.n.o.b turned, followed by a pair of heavy footsteps erratically but deliberately heading our way. My gambit had worked. The father had been roused.
He was, as usual, in his underwear, his hair was scattered in every direction, and his eyes were half shut. But to me, he was my Jewish hero: my biblical David, my Judah Maccabee, the rebellious protector of my faith.
"What"s going on, Maddy?" he murmured to my mother.
"Tell him," she said. "Tell him he has to go to Hebrew school."
"Well," he said wearily, "does he want to go to Hebrew school?"
I answered, "I don"t want to go to Hebrew school."
"So if he doesn"t want to go," my father said, "why are you making him go?"
"Because, Gerry, he has to learn that when he makes a commitment to something, he has to see it through. He won"t listen to me, but he will listen to you." She sounded exasperated.
"If he doesn"t want to do it for himself," my father fired back, "you"re not going to be able to make him do it. So just let him stay home." His voice was booming now. Justin was crying, and I was beginning to realize that maybe not everyone"s family operated like mine did.
"Uh-uh," my mother said, raising her voice to match my father"s. "You"re not letting him out of this. He has to go whether he likes it or not." She started waving the Hebrew schoolbooks at him, like she had at me.
Suddenly, he grabbed the books out of her hand. "Oh yeah?" he said, and in one continuous movement, he made his way from the living room to our terrace and swung open its sliding door. "If I say he doesn"t have to go," he shouted, "then he doesn"t have to go!" He took one step onto the terrace and flung the books over the side like Frisbees.
I raced to the terrace myself, to see if I could catch a glimpse of the books as they twirled and spiraled to the ground, but they had already fallen out of sight. I was beaming. Justin was bawling. My mother was fuming. I stayed home with my father. My mother took Justin to Hebrew school.
I stopped going to Hebrew school, and as I ascended from second grade to third grade, I became renowned around the apartment for my performance as Charles Darwin in the Dalton School"s production of The Great Naturalists The Great Naturalists, in which I sang a climactic tribute to the discovery of evolution called "Strange, How Things Change." But I could tell that things were not all right in the household.
The gaps between my father"s appearances had grown to two and then three days. My mother was around plenty, filling ashtrays and half-empty coffee cups with stubbed-out cigarette b.u.t.ts, scribbling lengthy notes to herself on yellow legal pads that she would hastily pull to her chest whenever I tried to glance at them, and sneaking into the bathroom with the telephone, its curlicued cord stretched taut across the living room as she tried without much success to talk in secret.
One afternoon I returned home from a day blissfully free of Hebrew school to hear the sinister strains of Janis Ian"s "At Seventeen" already wafting from behind the door. When I let myself into the apartment, my mother was waiting for me, sitting cross-legged on the couch, dead cigarettes strewn around her like ashen confetti and her makeup smeared by tears, as she clutched one of those notepads from which she began to recite a monologue she did not trust herself to deliver without cue cards.
"This is something your father and I have been going through for a long time," she said without looking up from her notes. "We have tried and tried, but I don"t see how it"s going to work out. We want you to know that we both love you very much."
This obtuseness was too much for an eight-year-old. "What, what is it?" I impatiently asked.
Finally, my mother looked up at me. "Your father and I are getting divorced," she said.
I started crying, though I"d known the announcement of my parents" divorce was a rite of pa.s.sage I"d someday have to undergo-something that happened to all my cla.s.smates, like getting the chicken pox or expanding your apartment into the one next door to yours.
"But why, Mom?" I wanted to know.
"He"s a drug addict, Davey," she said. "He"s been addicted to cocaine almost your whole life."
The information still wasn"t computing. Hadn"t my parents seen the public service announcements that played round the clock on our televisions? Didn"t he understand he could just say no? Didn"t she realize that an honest, thoughtful conversation would sort out the problem? "Why does he take drugs?" I asked her.
"How should I know?" she snapped back. "If I knew that, maybe I"d be on drugs myself." This was not a rea.s.suring answer.
I started to think about what life was going to be like from now on. There would be fewer incidents that would set off my mother"s temper, perhaps, and no special protector to defend me when they occurred. Maybe my mother would start dating again, even remarry, and we"d all be driving down Park Avenue in our new family car when we"d look over at one of the gra.s.sy dividers and see my father camped out among the bushes, surrounded by his few remaining possessions and his clothes ripped to shreds.
"Can I still live with Dad?" I asked my mother. The quavering look in her eyes told me this wouldn"t be possible.
I realized that everything was over. No more family, no more Mom, no more Dad. No more videogames, no more action figures, no more visits from Justin. I thought about that confrontation between my parents a few months ago, and I wondered what would have happened if, instead of tossing my Hebrew schoolbooks off the balcony, my father had hurled me over its side? Would I have plunged to the ground before anyone could take notice of me? Or could I have willed myself to resist the tug of gravity and floated up into the sky?
Chapter 2
For all the strange and shocking circ.u.mstances that had nearly brought our family to the brink of collapse, stranger and more shocking still was what happened next: nothing. Every afternoon I came home from school expecting to find my mother waiting in the living room with all our belongings packed into suitcases, ready to hit the road. Every time she introduced me to a man who seemed to be roughly my father"s age, I wondered, Will this be the person who replaces him, takes us in, and gives us a new home? Will this be the person who replaces him, takes us in, and gives us a new home? But the divorce that she vowed to extract from my father never came. With each morning that we woke up in the only apartment I had ever known as my home, my dread of an impending cataclysm subsided a little more, until the day my mother pulled me aside and told me, "Look, your father and I aren"t getting divorced anymore, so there"s nothing for you to be nervous about. You can stop wetting your bed now." But the divorce that she vowed to extract from my father never came. With each morning that we woke up in the only apartment I had ever known as my home, my dread of an impending cataclysm subsided a little more, until the day my mother pulled me aside and told me, "Look, your father and I aren"t getting divorced anymore, so there"s nothing for you to be nervous about. You can stop wetting your bed now."
There came a later day when I thought my father was going to dismiss the possibility of our family"s dissolution once and for all. Though he had been weakened and diminished by the recent upheaval and absent from the scene even more frequently than usual, he summoned the strength just once to gather us all-his wife, his son, and his daughter-around the dining room table to deliver what he told us was a crucial announcement. My sister and I leaned in close as we listened for what would surely be the formal declaration that our parents" hostilities had concluded. "Do you know," our father began with purpose and intensity, "that your mother and I haven"t had s.e.x in over a month?" We children made noises of revulsion as we sprang from our seats and fled the room.
Now I knew everything about my father, I thought. When he went missing for days, I knew what he was up to. And when we arrived home at the same time, crowded into an elevator with a few unsuspecting neighbors, and he"d put his hand on my shoulder and say in a soft, ragged voice, "When we get upstairs, I want to talk to you about something," I knew enough to tell him, "I don"t want to."