“Listen, I didn’t mean to bum you out yesterday with my reflections on friendship,” said the skeleton.  “I mean, realistically, what are your odds of being caught in a lifeboat with a group of friends?  More likely you’d be there with strangers, and we all know all bets are off when it comes to killing and eating strangers.”  

You didn’t bum me out, though my one-day editor might wonder what it had to do with your life, why it’s in the Book of Irv.

“Well, it reflects my lifelong feeling about the transience of friendship, and how, in the end, and all along the way, people always do what’s best for them, no matter how much guilt they might deal with after the fact. That’s the essence of being comfortably middle class, Elie, –not that anyone can be truly comfortable in the insecure middle class, mind y0u, the future all riding, literally, on the twitch of a roulette wheel– finding a way to deal with the guilt of not really being in the fight, it’s like survivor guilt.  On the one hand, you worked hard, you feel entitled to the comfort you’ve earned.  On the other hand, even though you didn’t take your money from anybody’s hand, or food out of anyone’s mouth, there’s a certain terrible sorrow you can’t consider too often involved in living in a world like the one we live in. Your success proves you personally were not doomed, but there are literally billions, all around, who are.

“You read the New York Times every day and once or twice a year they make an appeal to your conscience, show you pictures of wretched, doomed children.  You cry and open your checkbook and send some money.  It makes you better than most people, and, really, what is anyone supposed to do about institutional poverty going back ten and twenty generations?

The skeleton paused to consider what looked like a couple of vultures, turning lazy arcs in the sky to the north of the cemetery.

“What did your former buddy the judge tell you about contracts?  You make a contract with somebody when things are at their best, you are full of hope for the partnership.  Then, later, when things turn to shit, you hope the original terms are fair to both of you– or, actually, you hope the terms are construed in your favor and totally fuck the other party.  He said it of friendship, right?  You give your friend every benefit of the doubt, though over time the doubt may overwhelm and smother the benefit.

“Did you ever foresee a day when someone you shared so many good times with, someone you trusted, confided in, considered a good friend, would become a stranger?  I doubt it.  It seems unimaginable, doesn’t it, that you would end up with nothing but malice for your old friend Andy.  He’s dead to you, as you yourself freely admit.  Yet for many years, decades, in fact, such a thought was unthinkable.  Now you understand how things worked out with Harold.

“The seeds were there all along, in the crisp light of hindsight.  Was Harold a genius, literally?  I’d say he was.  Was he one of the funniest people I ever knew?   At one time.  But you see, Elie, as you yourself have learned, someone is only funny as long as they do not appear to be an arrogant sadist.  It’s a fine line we walk with other people.  That’s the point.  It’s like that great line from that Isaac Babel story you love, go get the tattered book off the shelf, it’s worth quoting accurately.  I’ll wait.  

Babel’s narrator writes:  A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time.  The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist.  The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.  

“It’s like that with friendship too.  If you have to turn the lever a second time, all bets are probably off.  And we are born into this world like Babel’s phrases, both good and bad at the same time.  In the end, I’m afraid, it’s like your friend’s father always said, ‘you’re born alone, you live alone, you die alone.'”

Those are the words of a pessimist, dad.  Pessimism is something to be afraid of, in the end.  

“Well, you can get out the rollers and the drop cloths and paint a nice patina of cheerful, hopeful bullshit on everything in your life, believe the best of everybody.  Or you can be ready.  In a heartbeat, Elie, it all changes”

The two vultures were now perched on the top of my father’s double wide headstone, looking oddly interested in the conversation, turning from my father’s skeleton to me.

Look, obviously I hear what you’re saying.  

The vultures kept looking at me, they did not seem satisfied with my response.  

“You’re struggling today, I understand.  Bringing in prop birds, a sort of macabre Heckle and Jeckle.  I get it.  This must be hard work, Brownie.  All I can say is keep going.  You must not rest until my story is told.”

Tell us more about Harold.

“Harold and I met when we were both starting teachers.  We taught in a very tough New York City Junior High School in a terrible neighborhood.  You know there are more assaults in Junior High than anywhere else.  The hormones kicking in makes that age group prone to lashing out.  They don’t know what’s happening to them, and they are still really kids, but suddenly the girls have breasts and the guys are starting to grow mustaches.  This school was a full-time battleground, the kids were poor, mostly from the projects, and the principal, as you’d expect, was a completely incompetent hectoring bureaucrat.  

“I remember meeting Harold in the teacher’s room.  You remember the preps, right?  You’d get 45 minutes off, it was in the contract, every day you’d get your prep period. You’d never prep anything, you’d spend your whole 45 minutes wondering how you got into this shit hole which seemed to have no bottom and infinite shit flying at you from every direction.  So I guess Harold saw the look on my face, and he comes over laughing and we start to talk.  He was a life saver.  

“I remember I asked him how he coped with the angry, savage, vicious students and he took me aside and told me his secret.  In hindsight, it shows what he was like from the beginning, I mean, can anyone condone this kind of behavior?  But at the time, I remember feeling admiration for his guts, and finding his hard-boiled way of telling the story very funny, even though there’s nothing at all funny about it now, now that I hate the guy.  He was showing me his style, and how little he gave a fuck, and these both struck me as very cool at that time.  

“He told me that when it got really bad he’d get very quiet.  He’d walk over to the door of the room and pull the little shade down over the window in the door.  He’d glance out the window to make sure nobody was outside who was going to be a witness.  Then he’d roll up his sleeves, take the kid who was challenging him and beat the shit out of him.”  

Nice.  

“Yeah, and the thing was, as you learned with some of those very tough little kids in Harlem, they were too macho to report him in most cases and also, he found, it made them respect him.  It actually proved to the kid, in a sick way, that you cared enough about him to deck him.”

Sean Pedroso, I thought, but did not say.  

 “Look, I realize how little you remember about Harold.  I mean, you must have been ten or eleven when he put a price of $75 on our friendship and I told him it was worth much less than that.  Tell them the story about that rainy day when he swooped by in that little shitbox he used to drive, the one he rebuilt over and over.”

I was on 190th Street walking toward the turnpike, I was a little ways down the street when the sky opened up and it started to pour.  Suddenly a horn honked, the street was still a two way street back then and the car was headed to the turnpike.  I looked over to see Harold leaning toward the passenger window, calling for me to hop in.  

He gave me a big smile, asked where I was going, and took me there.  

“As skinny as you are, I figure you could dash between the raindrops, but why work that hard when we have this motorcar here?”  Glancing around the interior of that little car I realized at once why my father called it a shitbox.

The ride lasted maybe two minutes, and I thanked him, probably made my way back through the rain, but I remember that short ride fifty years later.  It clearly made a big impression on me, those moments with my father’s friend the genius.  

I also remember him calculating a distance once by asking me how far it was to the horizon.  There is a specific distance over flat ground.  It might be 26 miles.  He knew the number and described how to figure out how far this distant point was by estimating its relation to the distance to the horizon.  For all I know, it was complete bullshit, but I remember I took it as proof that Harold really was a genius. 

“You never heard him quote long passages in German, or speak Italian, or play the oboe?  Harold was literally a Renaissance Man, he was a genius many times over.  He was also, I came to understand, an insane, petty and merciless prick.”  

So I came to understand.  

The buzzards gave each other a look, shook their heads, stretched out their great, stinking wings, and took off.  

Yeah, I’m out of here too, dad.  

“Have a blessed day,” said the skeleton, as arch as he was when he was alive and walking among us.

“Well, look, Elie, it’s easy enough to be sociable and make friends if you have the tools. I had the tools: I had decent looks, you know, when I was younger, I was droll, I was well-read and could discuss current invents, I knew history, I followed sports. I was irreverent, engaging and plain-spoken, things that come off as charming and will make you seem interesting in a social setting,” said the skeleton.

“Plus, and this will strike you as funny, probably, but I had the most important qualities too, I was very sensitive and empathetic.”

I always realized you were sensitive, though the empathetic part is a little funny, of course. Even though I saw your empathy in action many times, just not toward us very often.

“Well, one can’t be everything to everyone,” said the skeleton. “But, on a deeper level, remaining mutual friends with somebody always requires a certain suspension of belief, on both sides, about the entire reality of the person you’re choosing to stay friends with. You know we are all admirable and despicable as human beings, and to your credit, recently, you try to focus on the admirable, whenever you’re not busy speaking ill. I feel it’s a losing game, in the long run, but I think it’s great that you’re trying to sustain this benevolent view of the flawed people in your life.”

Pater, I take your life as a graduate seminar in how to live my own life. If I learn nothing from the history of your troubled quest, I am doomed to repeat it. Do you hear me, there in your permanent dirt bed?

“Loud and clear, my son. Look, I understand what you’re trying to do. I already told you I admire the effort you’re putting in. Maybe you really have become a better person than I was ever capable of becoming. I hope so. Still, since you’re apparently giving me my say on this subject, I’ll say the following:

“It’s easy, as we have noted, for anyone with a little wit and just about any amount of native charm, to gather a group of friends in his life — everyone is constantly looking for friends, after all — providing he’s willing to be an actor and pretend, at times, that things are other than they actually are, fundamentally. My take, of course, is ultimately pessimistic– we can pretend all we want that we are actually intimately close to these loving people but if it comes down to the lifeboat after four or five days on a flat sea, these dear friends are looking around to see which of their closest friends is ripest for the picking.

“It’s like that great cartoon in Playboy, in one of the magazines I hid in that cabinet down in the basement that you were always so paranoid I’d find out you were intently inspecting. (What, did you really think that as I was poring over those fascinating articles in the basement bathroom that I’d be looking for forensic clues that my teenaged son had been poking around in those glossy mags?) Anyway, you remember the cartoon, obviously, on the lifeboat, all the scraggly survivors are perusing menus and the waiter, like Jeeves, in the impeccable tuxedo is standing attentively by, towel on his forearm, poised to take their orders and the guy asks the waiter “how is the cabin boy prepared?’

“No matter how highly you think of them, if you are brutally honest, you can see the faces of your friends who would be the last ones alive on that drifting lifeboat. Most of them would, to their credit, be chagrined as they chewed their ceviche d’Eliot but only the most noble of them would hesitate, if they had to eat you to survive, before tucking into your sashimi. Some would be elbowing the others out of the way to get their share, it’s human nature, the same thing that allows us to march off in columns chanting and slashing with broad swords.

“And I say this as a compliment, you probably would be about the last person on that lifeboat to dig in. I don’t think you’d ever have the heart to eat, for example, Sekhnet sashimi, even to preserve your life. I mean, we can never really know what we’d do in that situation, of course, until we’re in that boat. But I think, if we polled your friends, they’d agree, you wouldn’t be elbowing your way to the trough, you’d take a lot of coaxing before you’d consider eating the dead Sekhnet just to stay alive.

“They might finally marshal enough arguments (assuming there was more than enough to go around), ‘look, she died of a heart attack, she’s already dead, she’s going to putrefy anyway, there aren’t enough of us to finish her before the sea vultures and sharks start swooping in, waste not want not, it’s a sin to waste food, she’d want you to eat her, think of how exceedingly generous she always was, she’d be happy that you lived on because of her, she’s actually quite delicious,’ and they might convince you in the end, but you’d be crying as you ate, and certainly not fighting any one for her scraps.”

Maybe so. Though it doesn’t make me a better person than any of them, just more squeamish about where I draw the line.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” said the skeleton.

I had good friends you always despised because you considered them slick charmingly insincere self-promoters. or morally deficient in some other way. You predicted they’d do very well, materially, and even feel guilty when certain facts of their lives were presented too openly, and you dismissed them as human beings. Already judged and found guilty for their future adult selves, even at nine, thirteen or fourteen. It always shocked me a little.

“Well, you’ve done the same yourself since then, made the same judgments I did. It’s only where you are experientially at that point in your life that allows you to see certain things. I’d seen these guilty avowedly liberal types many times over by the time I was an adult, people who could literally exploit slave labor and enjoy prostitutes, young boys, whatever the insupportable vice, and then be disarmingly guilty and philosophical about it when confronted.

“Guys like Thomas Jefferson, to this day one of history’s most beloved and gifted spokesmen for freedom and human equality. Don’t you think the Author of Liberty would blush to the roots of his red hair to be told, plainly, what a despicable fucking hypocrite he was, along with what an undeniably eloquent, beloved opponent of tyranny and slavery in all its forms? He’d probably dash right out to the stables for a vigorous ride, return with the horse bloody and wild-eyed, his slave groom calming the hysterical animal, as every one of his biographers seems to have noted about the Sage of Monticello, our gentlest, wisest founding father.”

Don’t get me started on the fucking Author of Liberty, dad. But you know the funny thing, you’d probably have been friends with him if you were a Virginian back then.

“Yeah, maybe. If I wasn’t, say, a Negro,” said the skeleton. “On the other hand, manumitted Negroes were not allowed in Virginia a day beyond the one year anniversary of their manumission, so I couldn’t have actually been a Virginian and a Negro back then anyway, except during that short window, which would have been too quick to have become real friends with the famously cool Mr. Jefferson. It took him years to form his lifelong friendships.

“Look, I know you’re better off loving a warm, humanistic, well-read, thoughtful, funny person, instead of despising them because they may also be, of necessity, a slightly insincere self-promoter, or even a complete hypocrite. Better to love a very lovable guy, even as you realize his lucrative livelihood, even if motivated by the highest ideals, is a bit… well, you wouldn’t want to do it.”

Or we can just say “judge not, lest you be judged” or whatever that phrase was.

“Who said that? Jesus, the imaginary messiah of the eternally warring Christian sects?” said the skeleton.

I have no idea. I can recall, word for word, five hundred jingles and TV theme songs from childhood, but I couldn’t give you a single accurate Shakespeare quote or even one of my favorite proverbs.

“Well, that’s just one more reason why Donald Rump is going to be the next president of these Untied States,” said the skeleton. “Hah, it’s funny, that still looks like a typo, even though I said, and meant ‘untied’.”

Hitlerious, dad. I’m outta here, yo.

“In hindsight, I think it was a mistake to tell you that story,” said the skeleton.

What?  That’s my favorite story of all the stories you ever told me.  

“Well, putting it in the context of your life, maybe not such a good story to be your favorite,” said the skeleton.  “I think it had a disproportionate impact on your work ethic.  Sekhnet made a reference to that the other day, poor exhausted Sekhnet, telling you that your parents had done you no favors by instilling no sense of responsibility in you, no work ethic.”

Not fair.  She was exhausted, and although she stuck to her guns about my deplorably casual work ethic, I also eventually forced her to start back pedaling a tiny bit, parsing my clever distinctions.

“But there was a certain uncomfortable truth there, too.  Admit it,” said the skeleton.  

Fine.  But it’s still a great story, no?  

The dog comes upon the starving wolf on a country road.  The dog says “man, you look like shit… what happened to you?”  

The wolf says the hunting has not been going well, he hasn’t eaten in a few days and he’s starting to get weak from hunger.  The dog says he’s got food back at home, more than he can eat, invites the wolf back to eat as much as he wants, all ready and waiting for him in a big bowl.  With plenty more where that came from.

They trot off.  After a moment that wolf notices some fur rubbed away, the skin showing on the dog’s neck.   He slows down, the dog slows down.  The wolf asks the dog what’s up.

“‘What is that?  You got psoriasis or something, how did your neck get that way?’,” said the skeleton. 

The dog laughs and says it’s nothing.  Must have gotten some fur rubbed away by the collar.

“The wolf slows down even more, says ‘the collar?’  The dog says, ‘oh it’s nothing, it’s a ring that goes around your neck for the leash’,” said the skeleton.  

“The leash?” says the wolf in horror, stopping completely.  

“The dog shrugs nonchalantly and explains that the leash, which attaches to the collar, is like a rope tied to a tether in the ground so that he can’t run off while he’s guarding the house all day, but that they let him off the leash to eat, and get a little exercise, and that in exchange for wearing leash and collar, and working all day, he gets all the food he wants and so forth.  The wolf pictures this, looks at the dog in despair and begins backing away,” said the skeleton.  

“Where are you going, man?  I got food, you’re starving.  What the hell are you doing?” asks the dog. 

“The wolf says ‘I appreciate the offer, my brother, and your generosity… but… I….,’ and he lopes off back into the wild,” said the skeleton with a faraway look.  

It was that faraway look that sealed the story for me.  I saw the longing in that story, how you were wishing for me a life of freedom you could never imagine.  I heard a world of possibilities for a higher truth in that story.  It did more to form me than any other single story I can think of.  

“It fucked you up, man,” said the skeleton.  “There are certain stories it behooves you not to take too seriously, no matter how passionately they were told to you, no matter how deep and aching the longing they expressed.”  

Now you fucking tell me, dad.

Passover was always a very meaningful holiday in our family home growing up.  My father took his duties as leader of the seder very seriously and conducted an intelligent discussion of the philosophical and historical issues raised during the yearly retelling of the story of our people’s flight from slavery in Egypt to wandering in the wilderness towards freedom.

“Well, that’s an accurate description of the procedure.  It’s a continual process, liberation.   You start off a slave, and you can never shake that slave mentality 100%,” said the skeleton.  “You strive to be free later, when massa’s in de cold, cold ground, but you always have the fears and emotional habits of the slave.  In your dreams you are still powerless, as we all largely are in our waking lives. If you are born a slave you will never personally become free, that’s why the generation that had been slaves all had to die, except for Moses and his brother, who’d grown up as princes.   The forty years of wandering in the wilderness was so that all the former slaves could die, and their slave mentalities with them.  Only then were the children of the Hebrews ready to become Israelites.

“During your lifetime you try to teach the next generation to be be free, unafraid, to tolerate no whipping. True freedom means everybody around you is also free.  Are you really free if all of your brothers and sisters are still slaves?  I took the message of Passover very personally: remember that you yourself were a slave to the Pharaoh in Egypt and his eternal ilk, and I think I transmitted that to you and your sister.”

To a dramatic, sometimes disabling effect, I would have to say.  Identify with the slave, the doomed, the powerless– beyond a certain point– and it will fuck you up.  

“Well, as in all things, a point of moderation must be found,” said the skeleton.

Easier said than done, of course.  I’m going to have to continue this with you a little later, I just want to point out a shabby bit of copy writing in a Haggadah my good friends use every year.  They take Passover as seriously as you did, and it bugs me every year when I read this line, and I never want to stop the seder to niggle over this one point, but what do you think?.

“Jews at the seder are free to robustly debate and agrue, not meekly acquiesce like slaves, but argue strongly, head to head, like adamant rivals.”  

“There’s a Jewish copywriter for you,” said the skeleton, his wry grin, or yawn, intact.

Adamant rivals, dad.  If that fellow had a thesaurus he would have found stubborn, obdurate, inflexible, unyielding, impenetrable, impermeable, next to his chosen word.  

“Even the chosen people do not always chose the chosen word well,” said the skeleton.

So true.  Look, I’d love to keep chatting with you today, dad, but I have an appointment in an hour and about seventy minutes of stuff I have to do to get ready.  

“Can you ever be truly ready?” asked the skeleton, unhelpfully.

Not at this rate, pops.

“Hitlerious, as you used to say, rage,” yawned the skeleton.  

What I mean is that in the cool dawn of a day long after the fact, looking at the rage and the actions it produced, you can see how ridiculous it was.  

“It sure isn’t ridiculous at the time, though,” said the skeleton.  

“Look, these talks we’re having now, in your head, as it were, they really make me ashamed of myself.  When I think of how I should have been doing this with my kids all along.”  

We’ve been over this, and, as I told you when you were whipping yourself about it on your death bed, to the extent that a man whose strength is almost gone can whip himself…

“It was more like tickling myself, but I take your point,” he said.

…I told you you’d done the best you can.  It doesn’t relieve you of responsibility for the damage you did, of course, but you can understand, with the face whipping you were forced to endure as an infant and all the rest, why you would become an adult filled, in equal parts, with idealism and rage.  

Your man George Grosz observed “in order to understand how a man can brutalize his fellow men it is first necessary to study the humiliation he underwent.”

“Insightful quote,” said the skeleton.

“Well, look, as far as your sister’s wedding, I think it’s safe to say now that, if we hadn’t been so furious at you, we wouldn’t have given Frank such a big tip after the wedding.  We also wouldn’t have apologized to him and your mother wouldn’t have pretended to laugh at his rather lame and witless attempt at a joke.  I realize now we might have been a little cooler toward him, if we hadn’t been blinded by anger at you.  We can agree that he acted unprofessionally, at the very least, in assaulting the son of the people who were paying him a generous fee for some salads and those virtually uncooked birds.  No matter what that provocative bastard had called him.”  

Well, it’s good to hear that, even if it comes more than a decade after your death. It also proves a larger point, I think.  People change.  I’m not mad about it any more.  Your betrayal at the wedding opened my eyes afterwards, and helped me realize how disabling the rage that had been instilled in me was.  I can tell the story now without a flicker of anger at my graceless dance partner Frank.  He was clearly a guy with his own issues.  I wish that punch I threw had knocked him down,  true, but at the same time, I can easily see it was for the best, the way it all worked out.  

Sekhnet was shocked, when I read her the exciting conclusion to How I Ruined My Sister’s Wedding yesterday, at how mean I was to you and mom in your living room that rainy night after the wedding.  She compared my behavior to her insane brother’s, and he had restraining orders against him taken out by his own mother and was living, when last heard of, on disability payments for his psychosis.  

“You were really bad!” she said aghast, and urged me to add some exculpatory sentences to introduce why I had acted so badly to my parents.  I added them, so now the reader can have a better context for why I assaulted my father and unconscionably told my mother to suck my dick.  

“Well, in your defense, it did snap her out of that fugue she had worked herself into– she literally couldn’t stop herself.  Your remark, horrible as it is to say to your mother, really did act like a slap to a hysterical person’s face.  The way it is in the movie, the person freaking out, freaking out, slap!  ‘Thanks, I needed that.’

“And, as for assaults, there could hardly have been a more restrained, less traumatic one, outside of the disrespect, than whipping one finger smartly across an enraged bully’s nose.  I know I was a bully to you and your sister, and your mother at times, and that’s probably the thing I am most ashamed of.  Instead of being an advocate and protecting you guys, and teaching you to stand up for yourselves, I was regularly uncorking my colon and relieving myself upon you.”  The skeleton waited uncomfortably as I took my time, like an Elmore Leonard character.  

“Funny you bring up Elmore Leonard, one of my favorite writers.  I didn’t read fiction, but I read every book Leonard ever wrote.  I introduced you to him and you also loved him.  I’d pass on my copy of the latest to you, and you’d hand me your library copy, with two weeks left on it, and between us we exchanged every book he wrote in those years.   Sam Cooke is your favorite singer, to this day.  Our politics and analysis of human history are quite similar.   Think of how much we actually had in common, but I was too fucked up to notice.”  

Most people, I notice, are too fucked up to notice the most important things in life, dad.  There’s no point being depressed about it once you’re dead.  

“Oh, I’m not depressed about it.  I have no consciousness at all now that I’m dead, actually.  Once you die, in fact, the brief spark that was Irv will wink out with your consciousness.  Once you and your sister both die, of course.  The grandchildren will remember me, but only vaguely.  They were kids when I died.  You know, you and your sister were very lucky to have grandma and pop until you were in your twenties.  Grandparents get a second chance to be good parents and it’s a much easier gig.  Like being an uncle versus being a father, much easier.  Responsibility is what crushes most people,” said the skeleton.

Tis, indeed.