by Dave Itzkoff
When I had proposed this biographical project to my father several months before, he agreed without hesitation, but in the days leading up to this visit, he was growing increasingly anxious. “What if I don’t have any interesting stories to tell you?” he asked. “What if I can’t remember all the details so well? How am I going to know which parts of my life I should focus on? Do you want to know only about the drugs, or should I just cover everything? Because there’s a lot of tough stuff in there.”
“You don’t have to worry about any of it,” I told him. “Let me be the one to figure out how everything fits together. I’ll ask the questions, and you answer them. All you have to do is be yourself. I know you can do that.”
He was fully in character when I arrived that morning, still dressed in yesterday’s underwear clinging to his sweaty skin, spread across his living room couch, where he had spent the morning nodding off to the din of barking political commentators on a wide-screen television.
“How are you feeling?” I asked him.
“Still living,” came the reply. As I strode into his living room, he lifted himself off his couch to embrace me, leaving behind the imprint of his body on the couch. “How do I look?” the man of the house asked. “Do I look like a porcupine?”
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 assemblage of short, staccato quills of silver hair that poked up from his scalp like the snow-glossed blades of grass 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 lust object was the scanner he used to digitize the contents of his photo albums. 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 assured 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 embarrassed 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 circumstances? “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 album 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-class 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 sexually 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, they reminded him. 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 quantity 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-encompassing 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 assailants 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 nobody 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 assailants and the Hilton hotel, Dr. Nichols delivered the same assessment that every other friend, casual acquaintance, and passerby 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 coke 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 analytic 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 institutionalized 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 classic tome of new age philosophy, 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’ ”).
Around this time my father became so proficient and attentive in his drug use that he assembled 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 albums to snort cocaine to were the Spinners’ Greatest Hits and Emmylou Harris’s 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 bass 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 debasement taking place as it plays, is too terribly resonant for me to contemplate. There are biblical references throughout the album, 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:
