Cocaine's Son by Dave Itzkoff Read Free Book Online

me and fell to his knees.
    “David,” he said with great trepidation, “have you ever wanted to do anything—you know—about—you know—your nose?”
    “What do you mean, Dad?” I knew what he meant, of course, but I wanted to know what had finally compelled him to ask me about it now.
    “There was this one teacher tonight,” he said, and I immediately knew which one he meant. “He really likes you, he thinks you’re just a terrific student. And he sat me and your mother down, and he said, ‘I want you to know I think David’s a great kid. He’s adjusting fine so far. He’s doing well in class and starting to make some friends. Now all he needs is a nose job.’
    “David,” he continued, “if your mother and I paid for it, would you—you know—want to get one?”
    I knew my adolescence had made me ugly, and now that I knew my parents knew it also, there was no point in denying myself the remedy that would correct it. In a rite of passage as familiar as any bar mitzvah, I waited out the rest of the school year so I could have my nose job at the start of the summer, putting off the road test that would earn me my driver’s license to instead spend several days convalescing, drinking orange juice and laughing at pictures of Ringo Starr, whom I no longer resembled.
    Before my junior year of high school, I had picked out an event as my coming-out party, the debut of the new me and my emergence into properly adjusted teenagerdom. My new face had securedme an invitation to a summer party by a girl in my social studies class named Ellen Greenfield, a skinny, sweet little princess with long raven hair and the tiniest of bumps in her nose. (My theory at the time, confirmed by later events, was that she was conducting research for a future plastic-surgery procedure of her own.) The party was a no-parents-allowed affair that her parents were paying for, at a restaurant that was within groping distance of the suburban purgatory I had been confined to all these months, whose remote location had never done me any good until now.
    I thought I would finally get to be brave, the way I’d always imagined I could be brave. If I could envision myself as a confident person, without constantly calculating the pitfalls, without being perpetually distracted by visions of the ways in which things could go wrong—if I didn’t even know that events could turn out otherwise, I could will them to be so. I could see myself being the center of attention at the festivities, the subject of a newfound curiosity—a curiosity that I would parlay into admiration, which I would then use to get Ellen all alone, win her over with my resurgent confidence, and then—and then—well, I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next. All I needed to set this plan in action was a ride to the party.
    That same summer, my father became embroiled in a feud with my mother’s side of the family. Her father, my grandfather, had suffered a terrible fall and broken his hip, and this time it wasn’t a fall he was going to recover from. My grandmother was too old and infirm to take care of him, and there was no clear consensus about what should be done with him. My mother and grandmother were leaning toward moving him into a nursing home; my father was strongly opposed. He became so consumed with my grandfather’s fate that he could not find the time to bring himselfto work because he was in a perpetual state of argument with my grandmother. From anywhere in the house, I could hear the muffled sounds from my parents’ bedroom of his feverish telephone debates with an enfeebled woman believed to be at least eighty years old and who sometimes mixed up the names of her own children.
    “Let him die with dignity,” he was urging her, as if my grandfather’s fate were already preordained. “Let him die at home.”
    What did I care? I had a party to get to. Even better, I had the guarantee that someone would be on hand to chauffeur me to and from the