“The story of a brutalized life can’t be grasped unless you understand the lifelong damage trauma produces.  They refer to this trauma-induced damage now as PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you can find it in the DSM that every shrink has on his desk, it’s now a well-known syndrome.  The trauma will trigger echoes throughout your life, put you right back into it, where you will have to fight for your life,” said the skeleton of my father.

“That’s one reason I had such undying hatred for pedophiles, the lifelong damage certain adults do by putting their own need for domination and pleasure above the life and well-being of a child.  Child molesters perform the archetypal atrocity — never aware of anything beyond their own raging desire, devoid of  empathy. 

“From the point of view of the survivor of an atrocity–  imagine living through the trench warfare of World War One, somehow surviving that sickening, senseless slaughter.  At the end you and the other survivors leave the battlefield crusted in filth, stinking, sticky with the blood of your friends who were slaughtered.  They have to cut the uniform and boots off you.  They give you a shower and a new uniform, a haircut and a shave, pat you on the back and send you home.  They have a parade for you when you arrive back home in your French village, or in London, or Berlin, or Fort Lee, New Jersey.  The stench never leaves your nostrils, and at night when you wake up from a nightmare, you will not be reassured to find yourself in your own bed,” said the skeleton.  “It’s like one of God’s curses from Levitcus 26, for the lucky ones.  ‘As for those of you who are left…’

“Eddie got back from Vietnam where he saw a lot of combat, he became a cop.  You remember Eddie, a handsome, dashing guy, a man’s man, charming, great sense of humor.  He used to say he had no patience for the whining vets who wanted to blame the government for their problems, that they should just man up and suck it up and stop blaming other people because they were fucked up and so on.  Then he marries the beautiful, smart, lovely and accomplished Christine, you remember, at their wedding you pinned me to the spot, made me admit I’d abused you and your sister, which I did… but anyway, do you remember how things ended with them?  

“With the most normal and lovable All-American hero and the love of his life, that super-couple everyone wanted to be around?  Things ended badly for them.  He was fucking everything that moved, I understand, with a wife like that.  He even tried to put the moves on one of her daughters.  She wasn’t a little girl, you know, she was in college, but… what the fuck was he thinking?

“It reminds me of what Lance Rentzel said when they asked him about reports he was cheating on Joey Heatherton: ‘why would I go out for a hamburger when I got steak at home?’  I know the quote’s attributed to Paul Newman, but I always imagine it was Rentzel.  Which would have meant Lance would have had to have said it prior to exposing himself to that ten year-old girl, whose family wouldn’t settle, and he not only fell from grace, his filet minon divorced him.  

“Anyway, you know, you always paint our family dinner table as a scene from the First World War.  You have biplanes strafing, barbed wire, coils of chlorine gas rolling in, the enormous piles of human shit, washed with piss, one forgets that thousands of men in muddy trenches have to shit and piss every day, and deal with lice, and crotch rot, and stink foot, and gangrene and all that other crap, that’s before they are ordered to go over the top with bayonets fixed and charge into the machine guns.  

“You were being poetic, I suppose, describing our family dinner table like something out of Ypres in World War One, but you were not completely wrong about it.  It was like that, in some fundamental way, you captured its essence.  It was a war.  I always called it a war, each meal was another skirmish, another battle.  I don’t dismiss the trauma of trying to eat your dinner every night at a table where your father is snarling and assuring you that you will lose the fucking war, no matter how many battles you may win, I am saying this to make a larger point.  

“When you are the victim of systematic and inescapable brutality, generations of our ancestors used as punching bags, and worse, or those poor bastards who find themselves on actual battlefields, facing sudden death from any direction for reasons they can only think of in terms of bravery, honor and defense of their fellow soldiers …

“Look, Elie, I’m talking emotionally now, you will have to comb and iron this into something more presentable, the point is, those who have not experienced these traumatic things will have find it impossible to understand what you are even talking about.  It’s like the way I always mocked you, ‘boo hoo, my father is so mean.  Grow up, you little wimp….’.  You don’t say that to a seven year-old.  I mean, you only say it if you are twisted that way.  The only thing that will twist you that way is having been brutalized.”

I understand the workings of this infernal machine very well, dad.  Now I do.  I understand it clearly now, though it was a little out of focus for me for the first few decades.  

“Well, you will be doing a great service if you can lay this out clearly for others to see,” said the skeleton, giving me my next assignment in this long voyage to tell his story.  “You have to make sure they can actually feel that moment, when you snap awake, in the middle of the original trauma that turned you into a monster, choking on all those feelings, with only a terror to survive.”  

And that moment of clarity and moral resolve when you choose not to be a monster.

 “Yes, do not neglect to describe that moment,” said the skeleton, urging me to go to sleep now myself.