I made the mistake, recently, while talking with my sister and recalling the terrible skirmishes over our family dinner table, of making a grotesque comparison.  This proneness to hyperbole, something my sister and I both have to be on guard against, we got from our mother, a poet and exaggerator of bunyanesque proportions. 

“No,” my sister said firmly, and I realized at once she was right, “you can’t say Auschwitz.”  I know it was a disgusting metaphor, and also inapt and she was quite responsibly drawing a line and not letting our conversation get completely out of hand.

“That’s true, sorry.  That was bad,” I said, and we paused for a moment.

“OK,” I said “it was like the no-man’s land between the trenches in World War One. A muddy expanse between barbed wire, with random machine gun fire, the groans of dying horses, biplanes swooping in to strafe us, chlorine gas rolling in over the hill, and we had no gas masks.”

“That’s fair,” she said.

This poison gas reference didn’t offend her, chlorine, although nasty business, was not always deadly, like Zyklon B.  The reference to rolling chlorine gas was proportional, and just part of warfare in those years, and helped to convey the scene of horror we faced every night over our flank steak, tossed salad and Rice-a-Roni.  

Onto this hopeless, senseless battlefield stepped our tired father every evening, still rumpled from his desperate late afternoon nap and mentally preparing, right after dinner, to drive out to his second job, as a kind of community organizer among Jewish teenagers in the Nassau-Suffolk region of Young Judaea.  

It would often start right away, as my mother was serving dinner.  There would be a grumble, a snarled response, voices would rise quickly, escalate, then the flash point and it would be open warfare.  I would yell something intolerably mean back at my sister and she would slash, with her lightning quick reflex for the jugular, and our mother would leap in and we’d both jump on her and pummel her into submission.  My father usually exhibited a certain reluctance to enter the fray, odd, in hindsight, because he was the main architect of the larger war and its most vocal supporter.  He’d often begin with a heartfelt appeal to our mother.  

“Feed me after them!” he would  plead, lowing like a wounded bull.  “Jesus Christ, I’ve asked you a thousand times, Evvy” he had a bit of the hyperbolist too, “feed me after them.  I’m begging you.”    

This rare show of vulnerability in our father, he only made this plea when he was beside himself with despair over the whole situation, would act like a tonic on my sister and me, and we’d turn our full attention to him.  It would take literally no time, then he was in the middle, swinging away with every verbal bludgeon that came to hand.  While pausing for a breath he would sometimes moan again “Evvy, for the love of God, feed me after them…”

Our mother, to her credit, would never consider splitting up the family at dinner that way.  After all, it was the one time of day we were all together.  For another thing, it would be twice as much work for her, after a day slugging it out with her two difficult kids.  The daughter had been such a placid, easy baby.  The boy was always trouble, it’s true, but these days it was hard for my mother to decide which poison was worse.  

I guess her dilemma was the same as the one my sister and I sometimes wrestle with.  Although she had dubbed our father the D.U., The Dreaded Unit, an uncannily fitting name our father seemed to take as an honorific, she always argues that our mother was by far the more dangerous of the two.  I grant her the points, but I always find the D.U. was capable of more damage when he was swinging two two-handed swords and bellowing his war cry.  

“It’s a matter of taste, really,” I will sometimes say.  

“Look, there’s no debate that the D.U. was very, very bad,” my sister will allow, “but she was much worse.”  And she will draw out the “much” like Rosie Perez, to emphasize by how large a margin she feels our mother was worse than the Dreaded Unit.  

“On a colorful side note,” said the skeleton, “you remember the Waner brothers, both Hall of Famers, who were nicknamed Big Poison and Little Poison?  Pitchers and opposing managers started calling these two hitting machines Poison and the names became part of baseball folklore.  Big Poison was a star when his brother came up to play beside him in the outfield, and they named his kid brother Little Poison, of course.  But Little Poison was actually bigger than Big Poison.  Ain’t dat some shit?”  

Sho nuff is, dad.

historical footnote from Wikipedia, which backs my father’s story, in the end:

Paul was known as “Big Poison” and Lloyd was known as “Little Poison.” One story claims that their nicknames reflect a Brooklyn Dodgers fan’s pronunciation of “Big Person” and “Little Person.” In 1927, the season the brothers accumulated 460 hits, the fan is said to have remarked, “Them Waners! It’s always the little poison on thoid (third) and the big poison on foist (first)!” But given that Lloyd was actually taller, this story would seem somewhat incongruous.