IN THE SUMMER OF 1980, Stephen Pfeiffer checked into a room at the Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove, Florida, near Miami, and began freebasing cocaine with a friend of his, a man by the name of Michael Borkin. They got so high that they started lighting twenties and throwing them up at the mirrored ceiling. They filled the hot tub with fifty thousand dollars in cash and lit it on fire, then crawled through the smoke toward the terrace. One of them dropped his silver-plated .44 along the way. Both climbed over the railing and scaled down the façade of the hotel, from terrace to terrace, twelve stories down, into the arms of police. On the following page are two news photos of the descent. In the first, the two men are nearing the end of their climb. Pfeiffer is at the top, without a shirt. In the second, the two men have reached the ground—and the police.
When he called my father, Pfeiffer was less interested in whatever legal trouble he might be in than the idea that the mafia was after him. That’s why he’d burnt the money and climbed down the front of the building: to get away. He wanted my father to convince them to forgive him and let him live.
It was the summer after my freshman year of college. We were sitting at the big, round dining table in the middle of the afternoon when my father told me this story. “The coke makes him crazy,” he said, laughing fondly. He was incredibly indulgent of his clients, as if they were prodigal children.
Mutiny Hotel jumpers scaling down the side of the hotel, 1980. Tim Chapman, photographer. Tim Chapman Collection, HistoryMiami Museum, 2013-334-80-36-13.
Mutiny Hotel jumpers clinging to an awning while being apprehended by law enforcement, 1980. Tim Chapman, photographer. Tim Chapman Collection, HistoryMiami Museum, 2013-334-80-36-11.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“I made some discrete inquiries on his behalf. And then I told him the truth, that it was all in his head.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Yeah, he was already coming out of it by then.”
I mostly sat around the dining room table that summer. I don’t know if I’d gotten out of my pajamas since getting back from college in June. On move-in day in September, my father had dropped me off and run back to the car, weeping. And I’d stood on the corner watching him go, feeling as if I might drown. I didn’t want to be around normal people, who would hate me. I wanted to be back at home, with him and the clients.
Pfeiffer had first shown up five or six years before that, when I was still in middle school. I’d come home in the afternoon, and he was sitting at the same table with my father: in his late twenties, maybe, not large but muscular, boyish, with high cheekbones and startling blue eyes that had an arctic cold to them. He looked directly at me while he talked, never shifting his gaze, as if he needed to keep an eye on me. There was something hushed about him, careful, and there was also something suppressed. It felt as if he might reach out and with a gentle but decisive pressure of his fingers crush my head.
“Your old man is a genius,” he said that first day. “I’ve never seen anyone talk to a jury like that.”
I already knew this to be true. I’d grown up sitting in the hard wooden benches of courtrooms, beneath the high ceilings and tall windows, watching my father stand up in that church-like area near the judge’s platform and tell stories that made the jurors see the goodness in his clients so that they could forgive them. He would show them how appearances deceived: somebody who looked like a criminal could be an orphan, or a devoted father, or husband—an innocent man.
“It’s about creating an emotional bond with the jury,” said my father. “While at the same time creating reasonable doubt.”
“I knew he was the only one who could win this,” said Pfeiffer. “The only one in the world.”
My father seemed to expand in his chair, delighted with Pfeiffer’s praise. He had been going to court each morning with an unusual air of bustle, his hair brushed back, carrying a file of papers with him, and he’d just won a big acquittal for Pfeiffer at trial. Weapons charges, he’d told me.
“How’d you do it?” I asked him.
“It was simple, I just said that the machine gun wasn’t his.”
After that, Pfeiffer was around a lot, the living proof of my father’s genius. He dropped by the apartment to chat in that incredibly polite and well-mannered way. He went out to dinner with my parents. He came to school events, graduation parties. Many years later, when my sister, Perrin, got an MFA in painting, he came to her shows, standing with a glass of white wine in a plastic cup and examining the art on the walls—always with a vague air of irony, as if this civilized undertaking were a silly fabrication he was too smart to believe in.
“He’s a little bit scary, don’t you think?” I said to my mother.
She looked puzzled but interested, as if this were a novel insight. “I wonder why you’d say that. He’s very widely read. We were just talking about Camus.”
“He’s a pussycat,” said my father. “Unless he’s high. Then he can get a little difficult.”
“And he loves fine dining,” said my mother. “He’s going to take us to Le Cirque.”
My mother told me that Pfeiffer had grown up on the street as a runaway, which made his intelligence and culture all the more notable. But I’m not sure where she got that notion, or whether it was in fact true. More recently, someone told me he grew up in Astoria, Queens, and went to City College. The idea of the clients as orphans and runaways, wild children in need of parents, was important to us in a way that we did not ever examine. We liked seeing ourselves as the family in charge of the orphanage, full of beautiful waifs.
What I remember from those days feels dreamlike now. What I felt back then was a sort of giddy excitement: everything was good and we were happy, surrounded by grateful and loving clients. Somehow, that went side by side with a kind of nervousness or anxiety, a feeling that things weren’t in fact all right and needed to be fixed. My legs were always twitching, my fingers drumming. I suffered from stomachaches, and I couldn’t sleep. At odd moments, I was seized by bouts of intense, nameless sadness that made it impossible to move. At the time, I believed those episodes came and went without cause, as aimless as clouds.
Recently, another client from that time pointed me to a blog by a friend of his, a memoir of the drug trade during the ’70s and ’80s that includes incidents involving Pfeiffer. I read the entries with a confused melancholy made more intense by the breezy style, as if everything described were a harmless comedy. I recognized the desire to see events that way, but couldn’t fully enter into that mode anymore, with its pratfalls and jokes and oh-shit twists. It was like no longer remembering a language I’d once known how to speak.
Most of all, I was struck by how much I simply didn’t know back then, because I was a kid. It was as if I were walking through a huge warehouse in the dark with just a flashlight, and I was following that narrow beam, keeping my eyes on my father a few steps ahead of me, and I was unaware of what was in the vast black spaces to either side.
The blog is called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Grave. The author says he is finally writing because the statute of limitations has passed on everything he describes. Here is the section on Pfeiffer’s trial:
So in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Pfeiffer is on the scene in Manhattan, living in a downtown loft. He’s taken up with a Colombian coke smuggler named Nuvia. She was, in a lot of ways, a perfect fit for him—totally fearless, completely insane, and with an incredibly loud mouth that never stopped spewing obscenities. It was pretty funny to hear her curse people out with her Colombian accent . . . or at least it seemed funny until one day, she just disappeared.
Steve was around but Nuvia was gone. No goodbyes, no farewells, no Nuvia. Did I mention that they fought? Steve and Nuvia were two of a kind. Loud, profane, and in each other’s face. And, oh yeah, they both weren’t afraid of owning guns.
Until, about six months later, I get a freaky call from Dr. S [the dentist he shared with Pfeiffer and Nuvia], “I’m calling you from a payphone near my office . . . The cops were just here . . . Homicide cops . . . and they’re asking me to identify a set of teeth they found in a burlap sack in Jamaica Bay along with a full set of bones.”
Pfeiffer gets indicted for murder. Yes, murder.
Defended by Stanley Siegel (RIP by Alzheimer’s in 2002), Pfeiffer pleads not guilty. Siegel puts on a spectacular case, proving Nuvia was smuggling coke for the Medellín Cartel, and denying that Steve had anything to do with her disappearance or subsequent reappearance in the sack in the bay. The government put on a case with neighbors testifying about frequent fights, loud verbal abuse, and Nuvia often displaying facial bruising and black eyes. They covered Steve’s record, from time in prison to his dozen felony arrests that never went to trial to his paying Saltzman for her dental rebuild. After they rest, Pfeiffer actually takes the stand and testifies on his own behalf. Talk about having a brass set of balls!! He testifies and gets acquitted because they can’t rule out a possible role of the cartel that she smuggled for.
Perhaps another time, I’ll share some more Pfeiffer stories because there are LOTS of them. From him flying us around in a Lear to pick up cash, to him swimming the Rio Grande with a bail of Mexican on his back, to him playing the key role in a bank robbery that “sort of just happened” a few years later. And he never . . . ever . . . told me if he did it or didn’t do it. Whenever her name came up, which was not frequently, he just smiled and shrugged.
I never knew any of that till now: not that it was a murder trial; not that Pfeiffer’s girlfriend was the one who had been murdered. Not that they had found a bag of bones in Jamaica Bay.
PFEIFFER MOVED TO BUFFALO, but came back to New York frequently, always staying in a gigantic suite at one of the big midtown hotels. My father would pretend to scoff at the lavishness but was impressed. “It’s two thousand dollars a night,” I remember him saying once. “The tub looks like a swimming pool.”
He would get a call late at night and say Pfeiffer’s in town, I’ve got to go, and then rush out the door with a tense sort of excitement. I have no idea when he got back, or what they did together—my father always turned it into a vaguely comic story of too much food and eye-popping restaurant bills. During summers, they met at the relatively unposh yacht club on Long Island where my father kept his sailboat and sat in the restaurant, Pfeiffer firing back vodkas, my father drinking a succession of Diet Cokes. They never got on the boat, though; my father adored his boat, or the idea of it, but it was very, very big, and he could not figure out how to get it out of the marina slip without running into the other boats. For the most part, when we went out as a family, we would just picnic on the thing while it rocked at the dock, eating antipasti from an Italian delicatessen nearby.
The only time I saw the other Pfeiffer, the one I could imagine climbing down the face of the Mutiny Hotel, was at a restaurant on Long Island over the summer. We endured a long drive from Manhattan and met him in the parking lot; he emerged from a pickup truck in jeans and no shirt, a woman in a bikini top and short shorts next to him. And for some reason, we couldn’t get into the restaurant. No tables, everything reserved. I remember thinking at the time that we had been blackballed. Standing around outside, discussing what to do, Pfeiffer and the woman lost interest in the problem and began making out with great gusto in a sweaty clinch. My parents shifted nervously from foot to foot. It was not the Pfeiffer who discussed Camus with my mother.
We never did have lunch. Pfeiffer had something he wanted to talk about with my father; they stood apart talking for a little while, and then my father walked back and we drove away.
Jealousy was part of what I felt during the ride back to Manhattan: the woman, the pickup truck, the naked torso. The fact that we would drive for hours just for lunch and then drive back without it, uncomplaining. But there was something more underneath, a kind of fundamental resentment: Being good was hard and thankless work; it involved loving difficult and demanding parents, carrying the burden of their expectations. Pfeiffer got away with simply being himself. It looked like a better kind of love.
WHEN MY FATHER CAME under investigation by the DEA, the first thing that happened was that he lost all his clients—which is to say that he lost all those people who had once made him feel loved and needed. He had always relished the late-night phone calls, the rituals of counsel: the phone ringing, racing to pick up, giving directions—Hang tough. Don’t say anything till I get there—pulling on his pants, a coat, shoes untied. Then off into the mysterious world of night beyond the apartment door. It had made him feel important.
Now, his former clients avoided him. If they didn’t, it was because, he suspected, they were wearing a wire—and so he avoided them. His isolation became total after his release from prison. By then, I was back from two years in graduate school in Japan, studying haiku. Though we were both living in the family apartment, along with everybody else, we hardly spoke. We’d pass each other in silence. He’d watch TV much of the day, smoking. Sometimes, he’d sit in the dark, weeping. There were big prescription pill bottles all around the house: the antidepressants his psychiatrist had prescribed. He shook out a couple and then offered me the bottle.
“No, I’m good.”
“Sure?” He held up the big white pill to show me. “This one makes you feel like Swiss cheese.” He popped it in his mouth and then held up a different one, blue. “And this one makes you feel like you’re dead.”
Gallows humor? Provocation? Aside from sardonic little moments like that one, he was generally so silent that it was hard to tell what he was thinking, and yet I sensed that he was getting crazier, crumbling in silence. One day he turned to me and said that the government was out to get him and he would have to run for his life. I tried to talk him down, but he wouldn’t listen to the obvious point, that the case was over and he had already served his time. His eyes were terrified.
The only connection he seemed to have with anyone was Pfeiffer: that bond had survived everything that had happened. My father called him from a pay phone downstairs, and they arranged to meet; Pfeiffer drove down from Buffalo. A day later, my father came back from that meeting carrying the old-fashioned flight bag, stuffed with money, that he hid under the shag rug. I still remember the pain of listening to his fantasy of escape: he was talking about leaving us, perhaps forever, and yet he seemed unaware of how much that would hurt me. In fact, he seemed strangely excited by the prospect, as if this were his chance to leave the past behind and become someone new, someone happy.
Sometimes, I imagine that dinner with Pfeiffer, the one where he gave my father the bag. The two of them in the Four Seasons—Pfeiffer is paying, and he likes that kind of name-brand elegance. Pfeiffer with his spooky cool, his icy blue eyes, his permanent air of irony. My father with his long hair, haphazardly brushed, wearing a sweater stretched to the limits by his bulk. He’s sweating, but he can’t take the sweater off because it’s concealing his dirty shirt, which he’s worn for a week. His hands shake from the lithium he’s been prescribed, so he keeps them under the table till the food comes, then eats with a kind of self-punishing abandon. I imagine him at his gustatory worst: he uses his hands; he gnaws the bone; he wipes the empty plate with his finger. They talk little till the food is gone. And then the telegraphic conversation of two men who have known each other for almost two decades, who are used to keeping words to a minimum. I imagine Pfeiffer as coolly accepting of the story my father tells, no matter how obviously strange: after all, he is used to the way the world looks refracted through mind-bending substances. Didn’t my father listen when the mafia was after him? Now is Pfeiffer’s chance to return the favor. “So what are you thinking?” he asks my father.
“I need to become unfindable.”
“Then here’s what we can do.” He sketches out the basic plan, and my father nods along as he listens. He’s barely left the house in months, so the thought of riding a bus to Buffalo makes the sweat pour down his face. The rest, the idea of flying to Panama or Colombia with a new passport, is a vague, disquieting pressure in his chest. He slips a case out of his pocket and takes a pill.
They are getting up to leave, and Pfeiffer hands him the flight bag, very casually. “Oh, yeah, almost forgot. This is for you.”
I’M NOT SURE WHY he decided to stay; it’s very possible that he was simply too broken to leave. Instead, he invested his cash in making himself comfortable. He began coming upstairs with Styrofoam containers of Chirping Chicken, bags of McDonald’s, packs of cigarettes. Later, there were other purchases, too: cashmere sweaters, fancy Italian shoes, a silver bracelet. The ability to walk into a store and say, That, seemed to make him calm, calmer than the antidepressants ever could. Still sitting in front of the TV all day, he looked less angry than sad. There were moments of rueful lucidity. I remember walking with him around the neighborhood and finding out that he knew all the homeless people camped out on the streets, that he not only gave them money and cigarettes but had whole conversations, notable for their complete lack of middle-class self-consciousness. I remember thinking that something had busted inside his head—in a good way—and he was now radically equal with everyone. In turn, everyone felt free to give him advice.
“How’s your back, Stan?” one man asked. He had his belongings in a shopping cart.
“Better,” said my father, handing him a cigarette, lighting it for him.
“You need to walk more.”
“I need to throw out the TV.”
“Get the license back yet?” He meant my father’s law license; he had a hearing coming up, at which I was supposed to testify, along with his psychiatrist. His lawyers were hopeful.
“I’m working on it.”
He talked to Pfeiffer sometimes, too, I assume, though I don’t know for sure. I’d gotten an apartment in Brooklyn and was living on my own—a place at the ungentrified end of Prospect Park, near Green-Wood Cemetery, with a window that looked out on the park’s dense foliage. I was sitting at that window one night when my mother called. “You have a credit card, right?” she asked.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Then you need to go to dinner with your father tonight.”
“I’ve eaten,” I said. It was after eight.
“No, you don’t get it.” Her voice was anxious. “He’s taking Steve Pfeiffer out, but he doesn’t own a credit card. You need to go with him and use your credit card.”
“Why don’t you use cash?” I asked.
“We don’t have any.”
The bag was finally empty. I felt an oppressive weight in my stomach, heaviness between my eyes, but I got up and took the subway to my parents’ place, picked up my father, and went with him to the restaurant, which was obviously astoundingly expensive. We met Pfeiffer there. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and I was surprised how much older he looked. The wolflike glamour was gone. He was soft and paunchy, wearing a golf shirt: a guy from Buffalo, middle-aged. The waiter sized us up with a glance and ignored us.
The people at the other tables seemed to glitter. I sat with a soda, feeling comically poor. We were lowlifes, two ex-cons and a tour guide, somebody who carried around a little red flag and told outrageous lies about the monuments and buildings we passed.
Pfeiffer, who was never pretentious, took it in stride. “If you don’t order wine in a place like this, they don’t take you seriously.”
“So order a bottle,” said my father.
“Will you have some?”
“You know I don’t drink.”
My father’s eyes were basically terrified, as if he were on a roller coaster climbing the track toward the big drop. His hands trembled, the effect of his medication accentuated by nerves. Pfeiffer said something and he laughed way too loud. It dawned on me that he didn’t want to be alone with him: the real reason I was there was to act as a buffer and an excuse. Pfeiffer kept getting paged throughout the meal; he’d look at the number and then leave for the pay phone. Each time he left, my father looked at me nervously, as if I might abandon him.
I believed the part about the credit card, but felt it didn’t stop there: I was serving some other purpose, too. They talked around me, very delicately. I listened, remembering how coded these conversations had always felt to me, no different now than when I was a little boy. They gossiped about people I didn’t know, but my father kept switching the subject back to the food, as if he wanted to avoid going deeper. “I’m not sure what I think of these potatoes. Here, try this.” He pushed his plate toward Pfeiffer.
“I like them. You can taste the truffles,” said Pfeiffer.
I thought about the flight bag. Back then, I had been terrified that my father would leave us, so terrified that I had been unable to think coherently, had walked around in a sort of trance. It was a fear like drowning, the fear that I would be washed away. There were moments when that viewpoint had reversed and I was frightened for him, that he was the one who would drown. I’d imagined him going insane and ending up a homeless person on the street in a foreign country. Still other times, I’d worried that he’d go into business with Pfeiffer.
At the end of the meal, I paid with my credit card and we got up to go. “Must get this young man home,” my father said, as if I were ten years old. He didn’t want Pfeiffer pulling him on to another stop.
I can see now that he was trying, very tentatively, to figure out some new and better way to walk between the clients and the law, the past and the present, his need to be loved and his fear of going too far in order to earn that love.
SEVEN YEARS LATER, IN the fall of 1993, I found my father sitting on a bench outside his apartment building, with his tie undone. I sat beside him, because I knew he’d gone up to Buffalo to say a final goodbye to Pfeiffer, who was dying of lung cancer. “How did it go?” I asked.
He stared off at the traffic, looking dazed. “He died.”
“But you made it in time?”
“Yeah.”
He had flown up to Buffalo, he told me, with Abe Dickoff, another former client, and they had found Pfeiffer’s house surrounded by tall grass, looking more or less abandoned. Nobody answered the bell, but the door was unlocked, so they walked in. The interior was a shambles, filthy; there was a horrendous smell. My father called out, got no answer, but he could sense someone present, lurking. And then he looked down and saw Pfeiffer crawling across the floor toward them, a skeleton covered in feces and bedsores. Dickoff picked him up and carried him to his bed. My father got a towel and cleaned him off. He was burning with fever, in extreme pain.
“Where was his wife?” I asked.
“I kept calling but she didn’t answer.”
They were trying to figure out a plan when the front door opened and a man walked in; he seemed to have the run of the place, called himself a friend of Steve’s, and said he was helping take care of him. He seemed to know the wife, too. But when there were too many questions he got nervous and then quickly left.
My father found a card for a hospice taped to the wall and called the number. The nurse on the other end arranged for an ambulance and then told him to give Pfeiffer some morphine to take care of the pain: a month’s supply had been dropped off just a few days earlier. But neither my father nor Dickoff could find it, and Pfeiffer suffered until the ambulance came and moved him to the hospice, where he died late the following day; my father and Dickoff got the news halfway back to New York.
But before that, on Sunday morning, they had finally reached Pfeiffer’s wife, who met them at a diner by the interstate. She said she had a friend taking care of Pfeiffer during the day while she worked; she didn’t know where he’d gone off to.
“That makes no sense,” I said, thinking of the wrecked house, the missing morphine.
“Her arms were covered in track marks.”
“They were basically holding him prisoner for his morphine,” I said.
“Yeah, it seems that way.” He stared off at traffic.
He never brought it up again, not once during what would turn out to be the last decade of his life. That was an incredibly rare thing for him, because he was usually an obsessive talker, someone who circled back. I tried mentioning Pfeiffer a couple of times, but my father gave me a certain rueful, pouchy-eyed look that always shut me up and made me question my own motives. Why did I want to rub it in? Because Pfeiffer had intimidated me when I was a kid and I had resented it? Because I had been jealous of the semipaternal attention he and the other clients got? Because the clients had eventually pulled us out into treacherous waters, like an undertow working at our legs? I thought about it a great deal, brooded about it. The clients had been our superheroes, but it was ending all wrong. Big Vinnie Girolama, the Hells Angel with love and hate tattooed on his knuckles, died in a holding cell after a fight with police. There was a memorial mural on the blank wall facing the clubhouse with his name and dates and the motto when in doubt knock ’em out! I would pass by now and then, sometimes not even aware that I was walking down Third Street until I saw the clubhouse, the line of choppers, the mural. At times, the mural would work the way it was supposed to and make me wistful, sentimental; other times I would wonder how we could have let ourselves believe in a mirage. And then I would think about Pfeiffer: Pfeiffer giving my father a flight bag full of money after he got out of prison; years later, my father rescuing him from that house in Buffalo so he could die in peace.
When I sat down to write this, it made me nervous that I had only my father’s account of what had happened in Buffalo, based on just a single conversation, so I decided to ask Abe Dickoff for his version. He wrote me a letter:
IT WAS IN THE spring, Stanley called me and as soon as I heard his voice I knew it was time for us to go to Buffalo. We flew to Buffalo the very next day. My friend Stanley is a complex person. But we silently always understood each other and could sense what each other was thinking. I couldn’t tell what Stanley was thinking or feeling this day.
We arrived at Pfeiffer’s address. A quiet neighborhood. Rang the bell, banged on the door, but got no response. We considered calling the police but instead I pushed my way through the front door and climbed the staircase to apartment 1. I knocked and knocked but no response. The door was unlocked and we entered. I heard that unmistakable voice say, Who’s that, from the living room area but saw nobody. As I entered, I saw a body with Pfeiffer’s voice. He was naked, lying on the couch, covered in feces and moaning in pain. Stanley took over the conversation while I went to the kitchen to find soap and towels. I had to clean him up. He looked worse than a Holocaust prisoner and was in excruciating pain. I cleaned him up and he adamantly refused to let us dress him or call for assistance. It took hours of crying and negotiating with Pfeiffer to allow us to dress him. Stanley found paperwork for a hospice that was trying to get him to come to their facility. I then found remnants of large pain package patches, all empty. He told us that his so-called close friends took his heroin pain patches and left him to die. Horrifying. I dressed him but couldn’t move him. The pain was too much for him. Stanley called the hospice and told them what we had found. They recommended that we transport him to their facility, they couldn’t give us any more pain patches. I carefully lifted him but his screaming only got louder. Step by step to the staircase and out in the car. I laid him across the back seat. Stanley called his ex-wife and told her to meet us at the hospice. Upon arrival I carried him into the facility and was directed to a room and gently laid him down. I was asked to leave for a few minutes. Upon Stanley and myself returning, he was heavily sedated, talking slowly, opening and closing his eyes in and out of sleep or consciousness not sure about that.
It wasn’t more than ten minutes when a nurse asked us to leave so Pfeiffer could rest. The nurse checked his vitals, turned to us and said he had passed on. Stanley wobbled to a chair in the room and wept. I kissed Pfeiffer’s forehead and went to hug Stanley. He was distraught and had no words, which is rare for Mr. Siegel. We left the room with no direction or idea on what to do next. In the lobby was his ex-wife with Pfeiffer’s twelve-year-old daughter who was the princess he always talked about. Stanley excused himself to the men’s room to wash up and gather himself. I sat with his daughter and his ex-wife for a few minutes and explained the short story. Stanley arrived and gently delivered the news. I fabricated a story of his last words that included his daughter and son.
Stanley and I delicately turned the mood from sorrow to admiration about how brave Pfeiffer was till the end. I suggested we go to dinner now before our flight. The four of us went to Ruby Tuesday’s and laughed at all the great moments had by all of us just knowing Steve. I excused myself for a moment, went next door to a bank, and withdrew $500 and an envelope. I gave it to his daughter stating your dad asked me to give you this. She cried and your dad reassured them we would take responsibility in making arrangement for his funeral.
Upon our return to NYC, Stanley and I didn’t have to reach too far for donations to assist with Pfeiffer’s final arrangements. Some donations were anonymous, others very sad over the loss of such a great man. I accepted the responsibility of his final resting place. He was cremated and the few thousand dollars left over after the expenses were given to his daughter. For the next year or so, Stanley and I spent a lot of time together. I loved your dad. We laughed at all the shenanigans that Pfeiffer, Stanley and myself got into.
On a personal note: your old man as well as Pfeiffer were and will always be my mentors.
There are inconsistencies here, obviously. In my father’s story, Pfeiffer is held captive for his monthly supply of morphine by his wife and others, who use it for themselves. In Abe’s version, the robbery is a single event, and the perpetrator is left blank. Instead, he focuses on Pfeiffer’s ex-wife (same person?) and daughter, who don’t appear in my father’s version at all. I asked him about these differences. About the morphine:
There was a seedy looking guy who walked right in. No keys needed. Dad called him out on his statement (taking care of Pfeiffer). He was covered in feces and evidence of morphine patches lay around the floor. The room was disgusting. The guy said he didn’t know what had happened here and had to leave. We found a business card with his Hospice caseworker’s name. I called. She confirmed what dad already knew, that someone was stealing his pain patches. He was left there to die. He didn’t even have the energy to dial a phone a few feet away from him.
And then about Pfeiffer’s wife or ex-wife: “We called his wife and she met us at the hospice a few hours later with Steve’s daughter. He was already gone. His wife looked typical of a junkie. No emotion. His daughter was maybe twelve or thirteen years old and visibly broken-hearted.”
I can understand why Abe chose to leave that out the first time: the version we tell other people is the version that becomes true. What I remember now is the end of the conversation with my father outside the apartment building, after he got back from Buffalo. “You rescued him,” I said, trying to make him—no, make myself—feel better. Less frightened. “Just like he tried to rescue you.”
“I guess,” he said, unusually reluctant to be soothed.
A nervous tremor ran up my back. “He was lucky to have a friend like you.”