Free Cocaine's Son by Dave Itzkoff

of my father’s parents in their prime, and the original business card that my grandfather sent out when he opened his own shop, with the caption WISH ME LUCK! , and many more photos of them in their later years. My grandfather in particular struck a compelling image, lean and assured, with narrow-set eyes that refused to divulge their color and a cigar always dangling from his half-smile of a mouth.
    The other pictures were almost exclusively of me and my sister: us as half-naked infants; bowl-headed toddlers racing around the old apartment or playing with toys my father loved as much as we did; gawky adolescents starting to become camera-shy; and then, except for a single picture of me at sixteen, pumping gas into my car for the first time, no more.
    There was something terribly dishonest about this presentation. All these events had occurred as surely as they had been recorded. But merely displaying the photographs as if they told the complete story of a family, or even represented the most salient points of its history, was profoundly untrue. There was a guiding hand at work here, deciding what to include and what toleave out, and what was omitted were moments that no one could capture, because the person in the family who customarily took the pictures was not able or present to photograph them. No photo album can completely represent the truth, but this array was an egregious lie, constructed by and for the benefit of the family member who had the most to gain from rewriting our history.
    The anger seethed and circulated inside of me the longer I waited for my father to finish his phone call, and the longer I waited, the louder he seemed to become.
    “George, let me tell you something, George—George—George—shut up, will ya? Right now is when we
wait
. We. Wait. Ain’t nobody ever sold nothing for more than a customer is willing to pay for it, right? Am I
right
? So that is why we
wait
. I don’t care if we have to sit on this merchandise for
two
.
Fucking. Years
. We got it, they don’t, and they’re gonna come around.”
    What was going on up there, a spiritual revival? Where did this ersatz Southern accent come from all of a sudden? Who was this suddenly boisterous, bragging, self-assured dynamo, and what had he done with the timid, self-conscious man who could barely string together two sentences when he was on the phone with me, for all the times he bothered to call me in college? Who was he faking it for, and why couldn’t he be like this with me?
    [
beeeeeeeeep
] MADDY!
    This was how he talked to my mother these days; this was the reward she had earned for her years of dutiful service, to be chained to him like a prisoner in the business she helped prop up during the years he could hardly run it by himself? Just because this was his business, what gave him the right to subjugate her like that, and what made him think he was entitled to have whatever he wanted at the moment he wanted it?
    “George, here’s the thing, George.
George!
A man don’t sell when everybody else is selling and buy when everybody else is buying. Not a smart man. When everybody else is buying, you got to ask yourself:
why
is everybody else buying? Who you gonna sell to when everybody already has what you got? When
nobody
wants it, that’s when you got to make your move. And then you got to wait till the market comes back. And trust me, George, trust me, it always does.”
    Didn’t he realize how he sounded when he talked like that, how rudimentary and obvious his wisdom was? Did his buddies know how he used to spend his weekday mornings, when he was sober enough to go in to work, whining and pleading with my mother not to send him to the office? Did they know of his relentless gallows humor and how he used to joke to his own son about yearning for the sweet release from drudgery that a leap from his twenty-fifth-story apartment window would provide—how his merely uttering the word “plummet” was enough to conjure up all