“Well, you know, Elie, one very important question you still need to answer remains  unaddressed.   You have to figure out why anyone would give a shit about a poor Jewish kid from Peekskill who, by pure luck is rescued by The Second World War (no combat), the GI Bill, hard work, attains American Dream.  In his comfortable suburban home he was The Dreaded Unit to his children and not very tender with his wife, so what?”  said the skeleton of my father.  

“I mean, why would a reader give a shit about my life?  I was pretty much nobody.   I was not the best man, but there were many, many worse men than me.  Statistically I was like millions of other guys of my generation, the so-called Greatest Generation.  I came of age when America was fighting a just war, the last just war, against manifest evil, actual Nazis and Japanese militarist fanatics.  Every American who fought in that war was entitled to a middle class life, if he didn’t throw away the chance.”  

“That post-war period, during the early Cold War years, was the largest growth of a middle class probably ever in human history.  When it was over, people became very, very bitter.   In the end, when the populace gets de-spirited and bitter enough, you get someone like Trump.”  

“Another way to think of it is as a monster story, and I have to admit I was a monster as a father to both you and your sister.   We discussed this right before I died, you understand I became aware of how fucked up I was when I used to machine gun you and your sister at the dinner table.  I couldn’t really see it for all the years I was desperately fighting for my life, but I saw it as I was dying, as you know.”  

“Still, it’s not your classic monster story anyway, you’d have to write it really masterfully to get the nuances of my monstrosity.   I  wielded a metaphorical machine gun, strafing in a subtle manner, leaving no dramatic physical wounds.  I could justify everything, very convincingly, and I inflicted my damage with the relentless cruelty of that.   I ground you two down, my ground game was awesome.  You and your sister were going to lose the war, that was the main thing.”  

“I was, if I might say it about myself, an eccentric monster.   My subtle monster story might fascinate a few freaks, the sophisticated, creative ways my sadism expressed itself, the entirely psychological palette I used to such great effect. But it’s not a story built for more than a small, specialty niche demographic. Nobody will be very impressed by what a monstrous dick I was to you and your sister.”  

“In the scheme of monstrous pricks, I’d hardly rate, though I know to you and your sister what I inflicted was just as bad as what the first rate monsters do.  In any random group of fathers, there are a few who commit truly horrible abuses against their kids.  I never crossed that line, I like to think, though I certainly know I did my damage, serious damage.”  

“Maybe a better way of thinking of my story is playing the angle of how almost universal this intense childhood pain you’re talking about is, my childhood, your childhood, my mother and father’s childhoods.  It’s a matter of degree, of course, but few children escape traumatic experiences altogether.   Childhood involves a certain amount of trauma for all but a few fortunate kids.”  

“There is something scary, scarring, enraging, humiliating, traumatizing, in almost every child’s life– think of all the ways a kid can be scarred for life.  They call these Adverse Childhood Experiences now, and there are quite a few such experiences on the list, with lifelong effects.   Poverty comes with its own set of them.  Hunger is one, being constantly hungry can really fuck with your mind, as well as your body.  Being beaten is certainly an adverse childhood experience, especially if the one beating you is your father or your mother.   Kids are raped, how do you recover from that one?   Others are viciously told just to shut the fuck up every time they open their mouths.   A parent who is intoxicated all the time, or two parents who are constantly at war.   The ways to traumatize a kid are limited only by your sick imagination”

“I never knew what trauma my poor father must have gone through to leave him ‘two eyes, a nose and a mouth’ as the poetic Eli described him to you.”  

Eli finally explained to me why your father was named Harry and his brother was also named Harry.  I was confused when introduced to Uncle Harry, who was my grandfather Harry’s brother.    

“They were half-brothers.  They had two different mothers.  My grandfather married a woman with two or three boys, one named Harry.  His son was also Harry.  So my father was the second wife’s step-son, and not a very welcome Harry in a family that already had a kid named Harry,” said the skeleton.  

According to Eli she was the classic evil step-mother.   She was reportedly fond of whacking her step-son Harry in the head with heavy objects.  She would slug him with a cooking utensil, a thick book, a wooden board.  He adapted, apparently, by keeping a straight face and looking straight ahead.  He rarely spoke, Eli said, and when he did, it was in a tentative, ironic manner that Eli described as drily comical, infinitely subtle.  

“Well, it was certainly infinitely subtle.   Eli must have been the only one who would describe my father as ‘drily comical’.   It makes sense, what Eli said about my father being hit in the head frequently when he was a kid.   He was completely unable to cope with this world, my father.  He was illiterate, unsophisticated, overwhelmed by the demands of the material world.   It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he’d had concussions, traumatic brain injury, something like that.  People thought he was retarded, that’s why when I went to kindergarten as a big, blind dummy who couldn’t speak to anyone everyone just figured, ‘well, his father is a retard, what do you expect?'”

“The retard doesn’t fall far from the retard tree, as they say.  I know we don’t say ‘retard’ anymore, it’s considered a pejorative term for low IQ people.  Moron used to be a word, a descriptive term for a certain range of low IQ people.  However you want to say it nowadays, my father, to all outward appearances, was a dullard.”  

I’m going to have to stop you there, dad.   I know you don’t have to get up tomorrow, dad, but I do.  I’m tired as hell, so I will bid you a good nap and, God willing,  I’ll catch you on the other side.  

“Goodnight.  Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”