I ask my sister about Beaver Dam, which she vaguely recalls.  She could not have been much older than two when we played.   She mentions the time our father tossed us into deep snow drifts on the side of the house after a record snowfall that came down when we were little.   I tell her about Azi’s memories of our father as a fun-loving older cousin who affectionately wrestled with him when Azi was little.  Hearing stories of her father’s playfulness before we were born confirms my sister’s theory.  

“We did it to him,” she says, “when we were born, that was the end of any chance of happiness for him.”  

I marshal my usual arguments, quote him the last night of his life about his life being essentially over by the time he was two.  She agrees, seems convinced, realizes that our existence could hardly have been the decisive factor in her father’s happiness or unhappiness, then adds:  “we were the last nails in his coffin.”  

That was part of his genius, making us feel like it was our fault he was angry all the time.  My sister quickly agrees when I mention Rodney Dangerfield’s “your father and I wanted a child so badly — imagine our disappointment when we had YOU”.  

“No, that’s true,” she says, “we were eternal disappointments to him.  I think you more than I was, since he was basically a misogynist and you were always more important to him than I was.”  

I am in danger of veering into personal terrain that is not mine to veer into, so I will stick to my perceptions here.  

I grew up unable to understand my parents’ readiness to get mad and their frequent harshness.  I had nothing to compare it to.  Like most kids, I figured on some level it was normal, just the way the world is.  Dad gets home from a long day at work, mom has had a long, trying day at home with the kids muttering “wait til your father gets home….” and then he walks in the door and she unloads a day of frustration on him.  

“Don’t call ’em my kids,” he scowls, “they’re your kids too,” then, because he has to somehow deal with this shit after a long day of work, he forgets everything he knows about sensitivity training, developmental psychology, group dynamics –it’s pure survival mode in the cold, deep water.  

“You empty-headed little thief,” he says to his little daughter, who once pilfered a quarter off a pile of change.  “What did I tell you about playing with that fucking snake?”  This sends a shudder through the little girl and the mother, both are phobic about serpents.  “If you play with a fucking rattlesnake you’re going to get bit.  Don’t I always tell you that?”   For my part, I remain coiled, vigilant, shaking the rattle on my tail.  

If you get the shit beat out of you every day by an angry bully, like the young Pat Conroy did, you know what is giving you the nightmares, the proneness to depression. If your father is an artist who never uses the crude instrument of a fist or a belt, who constructs an alternate universe where you are always wrong and he is always the victim of his child, somehow, it may take you many more years to realize what you are up against.  It is natural, somehow, to blame yourself.

I have idly thought from time to time that I’d have preferred beatings, which would have stopped by the time I was fifteen, the first time I saw real fear in his face when I stood abruptly during one of his dinnertime tirades and glared at him like I was about to lunge across the table.  Idly is the only way to think of such things, since nobody prefers beatings.  

I just think it would have made things clear: on the subject of his anger, dad is out of control.   He’s nuts.  One day there will be a law to make people like him stop doing this kind of shit.  There could never be a law against the subtle art of my father’s rage.  

Your parents are your first teachers about the world.  It happens, often, that your parents don’t really know shit worth teaching you about the world.  They are struggling themselves, victims who have never overcome the things they were born up against.  Add to it the mass-murder of virtually every relative in their parents’ generation and you have a potent brew.  

“You’re in a chipper mood today,” observes the skeleton.  

I am not in an unchipper mood.  I am carving a gigantic block of marble, these tiny fragments need to be removed to complete the portrait of you.  You recall what my boy Michelangelo used to say about carving a portrait out of a block of marble?  

“It is easy to carve a man out of marble, just cut away the parts that don’t look like the man,” said the skeleton, looking off into the distance.  

Look, that’s how I tolerated friends who barely concealed their rage at me over the years.  I can have this breezy chat with a father who psychologically bludgeoned me every day from the time I was in the crib.  

“You were a very angry baby,” the skeleton reminds me.  

No shit, Shylock.  Look who I had for a father.  

“Point taken,” says the skeleton.  

I think of my longtime friend, and now longtime former friend, Mark, a depressive young genius who could never be happy.  It took me many, many years, but in the end I realized his disappointment in me had little to do with me.   He could never be satisfied with anything in his life.  If the club would admit somebody like him as a member, the fucking club had to be destroyed.  In the end, and it was gratifying in a sick way, I reduced this man of a million convoluted words to sullen silence.  When I was finished with my final argument there was nothing left for him to say.  He had no defense.  I sat and watched him glower and quietly suck his teeth across the table in that Florida diner against the black sky as sheets of rain fell on the parking lot outside.  I enjoyed the sound of the slashing rain against the windows, the silence of this angry man who had for years tried to blame me.

“Well, I never saw how you could have been friends with such a relentlessly selfish prick to begin with,” said the skeleton.  

You always told me I was a poor judge of character.  I could go down the list.  The insane guy, now in a cult, who mooched off me for years.  Who once told me, as I laid down a perfectly serviceable piano part, “one thing for sure, you’ll never be a piano player.”  It was years, and a series of unmistakably escalating provocations, before I finally cut that guy loose.   You taught us we didn’t deserve any better, taught us to tolerate being treated badly.  

“You sound like a bitch,” said the skeleton.  

Nice.  If you weren’t already a skeleton I’d kick your ass for you.  You know why people like me sound like bitches?  Because the macho man keeps his mouth shut and uses a fist, if it comes to it.  

“I didn’t say you weren’t entitled to sound like a bitch,” said the skeleton.  “And as for your threat to kick my ass, you remind me of that brash young relief pitcher who claimed he could strike out Ty Cobb on three pitches.”  

I remember that.  When the sportswriter challenged him he said “no doubt I could do it on three pitches, Cobb would be over a hundred years old, for Christsake.”  

“There have been some clever bastards among us, Elie,” the skeleton said.  

Indeed.  Cleverness for its own sake, I don’t know about that these days.  I’m looking for something beyond the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling.  

“Ah, Freidrich Neitzsche, Hitler’s favorite philosopher,” said the skeleton. “‘A joke is the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling’, yes, indeed.  Sekhnet taught you that one.”  

Yes.  And let us point out, as if it needs pointing out, that Hitler understood Nietzsche’s philosophy as well as he understood the teachings of Hillel.  

“And let us also stipulate that for all of Nietzsche’s brilliance and insight he had a complete breakdown at age forty and was cared for by his sister for the rest of his life,” said the skeleton.  

But we digress.  It is necessary, if we are to present an honest portrait of you, to show your monstrous side as accurately as possible.  

“Yes, please, my monstrous side needs to be shown accurately, of course,” said the skeleton.  “After all, why leave your father to rest in peace and dignity when you can piss on the skeleton a decade after he’s gone.”  

Don’t, dad, you sound like a bitch.  

“Touché ” said the skeleton.