Cocaine's Son (3 page)

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 Saturday afternoon, after the father has spent the morning snoring a hollow, staccato snore able to drown out the traffic, the bums, and the Con Edison plant below, when the parents will initiate a titanic 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 assumed,
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 title both Americans and Romans gave to the person in charge of an entire state.

“You
know
this one,” my father would insist.

“No, I don’t!” I’d shout petulantly.

“
Yes
, you
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
what that word
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
? From his
private school
? Well, let me tell you, there’ll be no more
of
that
. No more private school for him—he is out. Out of
school
, out of
here
, out on the
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.
” 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 title 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
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 assumed 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 classes 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
, 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 God, 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 entitled me to a king’s ransom in presents. To my mind, the Hanukkah miracle was not that some hoary 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 classroom 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
and
zayin
, the imposing, ax-handled
dalet
and its tailless cousin
resh
. His weekly lessons came from a pair of well-worn paperback workbooks that, no matter how inviting their cartoon illustrations 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
and the lumpy, malformed
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 classmates 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 classroom 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 class, 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 doorknob 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
, 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 butts, 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.