Cocaine's Son Read Free

andwanting 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 cassette of a whiny, adenoidal troubadour singing of knights in armor and silver spaceships 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 booksand 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 quantities, 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 (and a smaller window that, for the sake of nostalgia and superstition, still read 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