Cocaine's Son (20 page)

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 competitor. 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 institution, 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 glass 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:

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 eyeglasses 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 button-down shirts, pleated slacks, and loafers, but for now they were camouflaged by long white work coats, spackled 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 raccoon fur and then returned the entire shipment, claiming that what he really wanted were badgers. “He’s embarrassed to say hello 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 Heller, a furrier who liked to deal a little coke on the side and became a coke 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 sturdy, bearded fur trader from Michigan, a latter-day Paul Bunyan, who’d come to pass 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 nobody 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 hello 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.

Another colleague, Brad Resnick, who rented a portion of my father’s upstairs office for some fifteen years, summarized for me how my father had been able to dominate his competitors. “They hated to come to him,” he said. “He’s the hardest person that God ever created. He’s an extremist, but he’s right.”

The environment of the auction helped my father remember the excitement and adrenaline of the fur business, but it also seemed to trick him into thinking he was still participating in it at full throttle. When he wasn’t avidly drinking soda, he was restlessly chewing gum, and when a conversation became especially heated, he would sometimes preserve his gum on the lid of his soda can, leaving the half-chewed wad on display until he had finished his discourse and was ready to start chewing it again. He would drift to distant ends of the auction house, become involved in exchanges that went on for a half hour or an hour at a time, and
then wander back to me as if in a daze, with no realization of how much time had elapsed.

So I left my father at the auction house, walked back to our hotel room, determined which Canadian television stations broadcast
The Simpsons
and
South Park
and at what times of day, and spent the rest of the afternoon transcribing an interview for a magazine article I was working on.

I slept poorly that night and woke up early the next morning with a cold, probably the result of my prolonged exposure to cigarette smoke and unknown elements in the uncontaminated Canadian atmosphere that were toxic only to the central nervous system of New Yorkers. My father was already up, unaware that I was awake; I could hear him preparing for a swim in the hotel pool. He was breathing slowly and deeply as he changed into a pair of trunks and a hotel-issue bathing robe. With each exhalation, he seemed to be urging himself to continue forward and face the day.

“How am I gonna do this?”

Breath.

“But I gotta do this.”

Breath.

“I can’t do this.”

Breath.

“But I gotta do this.”

Breath.

I was still in a state of partial wakefulness, so I can’t be sure if I heard his words correctly. But I’m fairly certain I didn’t dream them.

For weeks it felt as if we were making no progress. Our telephone conversations had become less frequent and more cursory, usually
about his health or his business or the weather he was getting upstate, and when I would remind him about our designs to travel widely and reach deep into his past, his response was always noncommittal. “I know, I know,” he would say.

Then, abruptly, he became passionately, vehemently insistent that we follow through on our plans. He had become fixated on a scene in a book I wrote that was set at a friend’s wedding, where I tried Ecstasy for the first time. In the rush of blood, endorphins, and enhanced feelings brought on by the drug, I confessed that one of my first impulses—after my overwhelming urges to go to the bathroom and lay every woman at the wedding banquet—was to call my parents and encourage them to take the drug with me. What stopped me was the realization, even in my agitated, over-sensitive state, that these were precisely the kinds of phone calls that my father used to make when he got high.

I was sitting alone in a hotel room in Memphis, working on a story and tinkering with a complicated cellphone I had recently bought, when my father called to tell me what he interpreted these passages to mean. The LCD display of my phone had gone blank, and as I stared at my own reflection in its darkened glass screen, I heard on its speakerphone my father’s digitized voice say, “When you’re high, it brings out the true part of you. The
best
part of you.

“I’m a work in progress, David,” he said. “I’m still not a thousand percent comfortable with myself—if I were, would I be talking like this? I always wanted to be the person I felt I was when I was high.” He sounded so certain that I was in agreement with him that I didn’t have the nerve to tell him he had misconstrued my point entirely.

A few days later, we were making our arrangements for a week-long trip to New Orleans. At my father’s insistence, we purchased
our plane tickets in advance but reserved no hotel rooms nor rental cars: these remaining essentials, he said, would be taken care of when we arrived and no sooner, and then only on a day-by-day, as-needed basis. It was a most un-Dad-like way to travel, and yet it bore all the unmistakable attributes of a Gerry Itzkoff production: carefree and spontaneous, disorganized, impulsive and unnecessarily risky, demanding total freedom and utterly ignorant of consequences. Which were the expressions of the true part of him?

At the start of May, we touched down in Louisiana with no compass, no street maps and no GPS, no itinerary, and no sense of where we would be sleeping that night. (Had we been the least bit conscientious about planning the trip, we probably would not have arrived in the middle of the New Orleans Jazz Fest.) In a rental car we hired at the airport that morning, I was driving my father along the same routes he once traveled with his father in vehicles laden with mink or muskrat skins so valuable and vital to their business they would drive them to the airport and load them onto planes themselves, as if transporting elderly, infirm family members or irreplaceable works of art.

My father thought he would be able to recognize these thoroughly traveled streets on sight, but they were unfamiliar to him now; the sea-level strips of pavement buffered on either side by untamed and unending swampland had long ago been supplanted by elevated highways that bypassed the bayous entirely. Not quite two years had passed since Hurricane Katrina tore through the area, and a protracted recovery process, only recently initiated, had done little to mask the scars of the devastation. Even the most heavily trafficked avenues were still cracked and caked with a thin, permanent layer of red clay, as if the storm had dispersed only a few weeks ago, and any street sign with more than ten or
eleven letters—not uncommon in a town whose every alleyway and cul-de-sac is named for an American revolutionary or a French monument—had been bent beyond readability by heavy winds. The damage was so rampant that after a few hours of driving, it became dull to point it out. My father was irritated that the population dispersion he had been promised by the news media did not make rush-hour traffic any less congested, and he was fearful that after he’d been away from the city for so long, none of its remaining residents would recognize him.

The circumstances of our last visits to New Orleans could not have been more different. Seven years ago, I had traveled to the French Quarter for a raucous bachelor party during which I was never far from a bar or a strip club. For my father, this was the city where he had at least twice attempted to attend college and at least twice dropped out, where he had learned the family business from his father, who spent six months out of every year apart from his wife and his children entrenched in the Hotel Monteleone, doing battle with the hundreds of other furriers who were once as plentiful to the Gulf Coast as piping plovers and whooping cranes, and sending home autocratic letters every day to his hapless dropout son. My father had spent nearly half of his own life here, and yet he had not been back in nearly twenty years, not since he came to sit at his father’s hospital bed, watch him slip into a coma, and never regain consciousness. After this visit, it was hard to say when he might be back.