Cocaine's Son: A Memoir

158 Pages·2011·0.87 MB·English

by  Dave Itzkoff

ALSO BY DAVE ITZKOFF
Lads: A Memoir of Manhood
While all of the incidents in Cocaine’s Son are real, certain dialogue has been reconstructed, and some of
the names and personal characteristics of the individuals have been changed. Any resulting resemblance to
persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Copyright © 2011 by Dave Itzkoff
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York.
V B and V & “V” C Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
ILLARD OOKS ILLARD IRCLED
This work is based on an article originally published in New York magazine on July 24, 2005.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Ice Nine Publishing Company for permission to reprint an excerpt
from the lyrics to “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” by Robert Hunter, copyright © Ice Nine Publishing Company.
Used with permission of Ice Nine Publishing Company.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Itzkoff, Dave.
Cocaine’s son: a memoir / Dave Itzkoff.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52439-3
1. Itzkoff, Dave. 2. Cocaine abuse—United States. 3. Children of drug addicts—United States—Biography.
4. Drug addicts—Family relationships—United States. 5. Fathers and sons—United States—Biography. I.
Title.
HV5810.I89 2011
362.29′84092—dc22 2010040501
[B]
www.villard.com
Jacket design and illustration: Lynn Buckley
v3.1
For my mother,
who kept us together
When I was just a little young boy
Papa said, “Son, you’ll never get far
I’ll tell you the reason if you want to know
’Cause child of mine, there isn’t really very far to go”
—
ROBERT HUNTER
Contents
Cover
Also by Dave Itzkoff
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Acknowledgments
About the Author
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 assistants; 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,
encompassed, and surpassed 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 unobstructed 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 massaged 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 passed 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 to and back. And
WALK DON’T WALK
sometimes, when the sign would blink its final warning, she would get an
DON’T WALK
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 soundtracks she
had accumulated for me and my sister, and a well-worn copy of Free to
Be … You and Me that promised a new country of green fields and shining seas;
past the psychedelic copy of 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 ; past the Bette Midler albums
CUT HERE
and the cast recording of A Chorus Line, with their exotic descriptions of adult
activities and hilarious, forbidden words like “tits” and “ass,” until she stopped
at a record by a fuzzy-haired young singer named Janis Ian called Between the
Lines.
Tucked far away in my bedroom, I could hear the soft guitar bossa nova of the
title 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
glasses from his beaky nose so I could see the sincerity in his wide, round eyes,
“don’t you know that sex 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 God 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 glass 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 glass 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 glass 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.’ ”