It struck me as ironic when it occurred to me the other day, but it makes perfect sense really, that my father’s biggest fear was probably the thought of my sister and me turning our backs on him for good.   As brutal as he often was in the nuclear family setting, he had a sentimental side, a longing for a close family.  I don’t call him sentimental to mock him, it’s a tribute to his human side, really, that he felt this desire for intimacy with his kids.   “Friends will come and go,” he told us, “but your family will always be around.  Your family is always there for you.”  This was an aspirational message, a kind of hopeful plea to us, to see him as he wished he could be.  As to his friends, he demonstrated the first part of this message a number of times while we were growing up.

As children, my sister and I watched a succession of our father’s closest friends go.  People we laughed with and felt very comfortable hanging out with — suddenly gone.  He reached a point where he did not hesitate:  with a single bold stroke he cut their heads off and threw them over the back of the boat, to the sharks, to whatever.   They disappeared without a trace.  Of this practice, my mother said “the fall from grace is swift and absolute.”   These people were never mentioned again, except when I’d bring up a name sometimes.

I argued with him about this brutal practice and he told me, often through gritted teeth, that I didn’t understand.  I didn’t understand.   I have since had several very close friends repeatedly show an ugly enough side, during particularly vulnerable times for me, followed by defiant non-repentance, that I finally had no hesitation to draw my sword, lop their hideous heads off, and shove their lifeless bodies over the side.  I do not look back on these lost friendships with any sentimentality.   I am neither proud of this nor embarrassed by it.  Friends extend each other the benefit of the doubt in a contentious world.  We forgive each other’s mistakes unless they become an uningnorable pattern.   When the benefit of the doubt is no longer there, there is no doubt what needs to be done.

“Well, Elie, that’s a sad thing and also a necessary thing, to cut a good friend loose once you can’t trust them.  It’s a matter of survival.  In a murderous world like the one you live in, if you can’t trust a friend to stand behind you without worrying about their twitchy knife hand mistaking your back for the common enemy, well, you’re a bit suicidal,” said the skeleton of my father.

I get that now, obviously.  When someone shows you consistent hostility, even if they apologize between hostile acts, getting away from them is the best you can do.  It’s addition by subtraction, your life is immediately better when you get away from someone who shits on your feelings and sucks at your energy and vulnerabilities like a thirsty vampire.  It’s easy to be seduced by reassurances from someone you like, until the evidence of their ill will is overwhelming, and even then, sometimes  you’ll continue to take it, in the name of some ideal or another.

Look, not that you ever apologized to me and my sister, but you would show us flashes of kindness and humor between brutal showdowns.  Like we discussed about the monsters we accept in our lives, the demons we wind up compromising with, they show us just enough tenderness, at strategic times, that we remain hooked.  Recognizing you have the right not to be treated badly, ever, is liberating even as it imposes a certain burden.  

“Well, that’s a convoluted way of saying it.  I get what you’re saying, though, and, yes, now that I think of it, I did live in fear of you or your sister completely repudiating me.   You had a right to.   I later saw that you were capable of doing exactly what I had done, coldly amputating a long time friendship when the anger it provoked reached a certain point.  I did much worse to you than any friend you eventually cancelled.   The idea that I had earned your enmity was frightening to me.”

You know, I got to a point with someone like Friedman, a very close friend for decades, where I realized we were surrogates for trying to work out traumatic life issues that had nothing to do with each other.   I came to see us as locked in an eternal, draining, completely counterproductive battle.  What was this battle over?  Our respective wars with our fathers.   I got to the point, finally, where I realized — “hey, this aggravating, neurotic, constantly carping, stubbornly insight-challenged fuck is not my father, though he consistently plays him in this relationship, I have no obligation to him whatsoever.”   It was like a flash of illumination when I realized it was important to resolve these issues with my own father, but not with some amateur actor doing a bad imitation of my angry old man.  

“Not a very flattering thing, to have someone like that play me in the movie, I have to tell you.  Outside of his obvious intelligence, I never understood your friendship with that neurotic gargoyle.”  

That’s the thing, we don’t recognize the psychic role our friends are playing in our lives sometimes, until things get ugly.   I had a friend who went into a rage against me because, it turns out, I had never praised his teaching.  I was flabbergasted when he accused me of that unforgivable crime.   I was just like his fucking father, I was shocked to learn, another prick  incapable of ever praising him.   This guy mistook me for his father for the years of our friendship, finally lashed out at me in a way he never could against his own father.    Amazing.

“You had a nice collection of gold-plated neurotics in your day,” said the skeleton.  

I went to high school with a musical genius, the only one I ever met, a true fucking genius, who had lived a tortured childhood.  I guess he lives a fairly tortured adulthood too, for all I know, we’re only rarely in touch, and only through emails about a piece of music I’ll send him from time to time.  He had a great line in a song about his painful childhood where he sings of “monsters I call my friends”.   When you grow up in a nuclear wasteland, all of your friends tend to be fellow mutants.  

“Fair enough,” said the skeleton.  “And, look, as we discussed, you scratch virtually anybody you know and you’ll find the irrational twitching, the jerry-rigged neural wiring, the overloaded circuits, the reflex to lash out, to flee.  We were fucking prey animals, Elie, homo sapiens, as your friend Harari points out, and in our communal terror we developed weapons and armies that make us the top predators on the planet.  We are still twitching prey animals, alert for threat, poised for fight or flight.”  

Friendship is a little oasis from that fear, a place where we can let our guard down, share things, exchange stories comfortably, recharge our batteries and our faith in our fellow humans.  When it stops being that, it’s not really friendship anymore.  It’s something else, a temporary safe zone where we can lash out without fear of being punched, maybe.  

“Until the clock runs out and the old friends are capable of punching each other’s faces,” said the skeleton.  

Yop.