Anger, unchecked, poisons everything, eventually.  My father learned this too late, hours before he died.   Unprocessed anger exerts a relentless downward force on the shape of a human life, I have seen it in action many times, felt it in my own life.  Why is a fifty year-old or seventy year-old filled with enough anger to distort their view of the world?  It would take a long time to explain, in the individual case.  You would have to know details an angry person would not be apt to reveal.  Anger, as we have seen, makes a person intractable and unwilling to compromise, let alone share.

Anger can gather slowly, building its case over many years, but once it reaches a certain point it turns a relationship irreversibly toxic.   Anger is poison.   Taking it in a small dose every day will not make you immune to its venom, it will eventually turn everything you look at irredeemably sour and then begin killing everything you once loved.

I watched the laughs my father shared with several highly intelligent friends turn to silence, watched the friends turn to ghosts who were never mentioned again.   I couldn’t know, at nine years old, what I would learn decades later– that most friendships also have a life span.   It is rare to have lifelong friends, and it takes a certain optimism and willingness to overlook faults to keep friendships alive.  

Irv had neither optimism nor a willingness to overlook faults, yet he managed to have a couple of lifelong friends, Arlene and Russ, whose friendships were only ended by their early deaths, and his surrogate son and business partner Benjie, a close and beloved friend until Irv’s own death.  We see in these relationships my father’s ability to be a good friend.

I understand now what my father was too bitter to really explain to me when I was a child.   We start off full of good will towards a person we like, and as we find things we have in common, and enjoy each other’s company, point of view, sense of humor, begin to do each other favors, we develop a friendship.  Many things can come into the picture to dampen these feelings of generosity toward one another.  The feeling that creeps in and always administers the final blow is anger.  And as we give the coup de grace to a dying friendship we always feel completely justified.  Always.

I think of our puny, vulnerable early homo sapiens ancestors, at the bottom of the food chain, on the run, terrified, enraged, banding together to survive.   You can fast forward through history to this very moment and you will find the masses of people, while individually decent and often quite loving, capable of every insanely human cruelty our terrified prey animal ancestors committed.  We are right to call these primitive emotions.  Among the earliest, for a hunted group, is the survival imperative to draw a thick, indelible line of hatred between us and another group member who betrays us in a moment of need.

I remember my father’s rage at his best friend Harold, a man with a genius IQ and an endless store of subjects for intelligent discussion, a man of great humor and jest.  Harold put a price of $75 on their friendship, humiliated my father and caused him to lie clumsily to his beloved mother-in-law, and she knew her son-in-law was lying.  My father’s hatred of Harold after that last straw was absolute.  My father would dismiss the idea of hatred, seeing it as an admission of weakness, but the effect was the same.  Harold was dead to him.

Fifty thousand years earlier it would have been a large stone down on Harold’s head, enough times to make the body stop twitching.   It is literally this way when the feeling of betrayal is upon us.   We have more civilized ways of killing, and it’s generally done symbolically, but the former friend is just as dead to us, if the betrayal is hurtful enough.

And, of course, the beauty part is that there is no arguing with a righteously angry person.  My father had to endure an excruciating series of moments when my grandmother found the Chinese furniture items Harold had fawned over and purchased for the ridiculously low price of $75.  “Why is that furniture in the attic, Irv?” asked my grandmother, clearly confused and hurt.  

My father, unused to lying outright, had to invent a clumsy cover story on the spot when Yetta, full of hurt, asked him to explain.  The truth, if simple, was unspeakable to my father in that moment:  Harold had changed his mind, my father had sullenly paid him the $75 back — after Harold’s fatal argument that he’d been cheated, somehow–  and, my father, unwilling to part with things his mother-in-law greatly loved, stored them in the attic.  She had never gone up there.  

And then one day, looking for something else, she apparently pulled the chain that lowered the folding wooden steps, climbed up and was shocked to find her beautiful things covered with dust in that filthy attic.  Harold then had to die, if he was still partially alive at that point.  It was not only that one incident, of course, the $75 price tag on their friendship was only the last straw of Harold’s vicious pettiness.  He was always a cheap fuck and now that my father hated him the old story about Harold pulling down the blinds on the classroom door and beating the shit out of Junior High School students who defied him was a lot less funny.  In fact, it was as good a snapshot as any of the arrogant, brutal piece of shit in action.

I do my best to preserve the old friendships I have left.  I cherish each one and guard it as best I can.  I call friends I haven’t heard from in a long time, I extend the benefit of the doubt to those I’ve always shared warmth and laughs with.   I have also come to understand that an emotional juncture may come and mutual harms can easily be exchanged that a friendship cannot recover from.

“After all, Elie, does it make a difference to you, on any level, if the person you considered a good friend ignores your reasonable need out of a deeply felt general obliviousness or is sending you a personalized message that your feelings are not important enough to pay attention to?” asked the skeleton.  “How effective is this defense: he didn’t act like an asshole because he meant to hurt you, that’s just the way he acts?   If he’d realized that doing what he did to you was hurtful, he’d feel terrible.  Poor baby, you dig?  No, Elie, there comes a time when you pick up a large stone and just bash their useless head in.  Done.”

“You like the ship metaphor, I’ve noticed, throw ’em over the side, let ’em wave goodbye, or give you the finger, from your wake as the sharks close in.  You know, at some point, when you see they have made your life toxic, that it’s a matter of survival.  We do what we need to do to survive.  Bukowski’s list of that swarm of trivialities that kill quicker than cancer and is always there has a line for people who insist they’re your friends.   Got to be smart about that, we don’t get many people in our lives who can become true friends.”

The larger question remains, dad.  How do you live to be eighty without dealing with a terrible temper and a lifelong sensitivity to a perceived slight? I will pick this sticky one up another time, I have to get on with other things now.  

“Go out into the world and live, my child,” said the skeleton in an ineffably wispy manner.