“Well, you may have a point there, Elie, about the faces of the demons we fight,” said the skeleton of my father.  My father, during his life, was always silent about the particular demons he was up against, although he made mention of the demons every one of us must grapple with.

That mad, but brilliant, classmate of mine in law school told me about the “Repetition Compulsion.”   It is a compulsive need to relive, and re-litigate, painful personal transactions of the past.   You find yourself drawn to types who have some salient aspects of the people who bludgeoned you early on.  As you were my bludgeoner-in-chief, it’s not surprising I found myself in close contact with people who exhibited your most personal traits. 

“So these people were brilliant,” said the skeleton.  

Brilliant assholes, pinched and needy, bent on ‘winning’ at any cost.  Worthy adversaries, until they were not.  

“Youch!” said the skeleton.  

I’ve got to be honest here, dad.  It’s all I can do, particularly in a world like ours, where the media increasingly gives equal weight to the comments of the studious and thoughtful and to the careless stylings of talking, shit-smeared assholes.  

“Well, talking, shit-smeared assholes tend to rule, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “It’s a matter of opinion anyway, who is smart and who a shit-smeared asshole.  One man’s shit-smeared asshole is another man’s no bullshit, straight shooting president.  Ask the 39% if you don’t believe me.”  

Granted.  I think of the long struggle with my good friend Friedman. Implacably unhappy fellow, aggressively so, actually.   I don’t know that he was beaten as you were, physically, but he emerged from childhood with serious and stubborn wounds.  He was a guy who felt he could never win, I suppose, so everything in his life was a contest and he had to prevail.  He pursued these little victories reflexively, he always had to negotiate and get the best of every interaction.  The story arc of every transaction with people he met was identical– high hopes, betrayal, sullen, smoldering anger he would not admit was anger.  It wearied me to death, slowly, over decades.  Nothing could ever be good enough for an unhappy soul like that.   He was eternally seeking some impossible ideal of perfection, eternally disappointed, betrayed over and over and over.  

“Sounds familiar,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah.  Anyway, in the end, he was reduced to silence.  It took me many years, I had my own wounds to deal with, but finally I boiled his insoluble misery down to a single issue.  To my grim gratification he was speechless, didn’t have a word to say in defense of his indefensible world view, the things he expected from his friends, the impossible burdens he tried to make them carry.  We sat in a Florida diner, a deluge pelting down outside, and he just looked at me, very hurt and not a little bit angry.   That’s the expression of one of my demons, irrational disapproval that needs not so much as a whiff of a justification.

“Well, you always said you were not sorry you went to law school, though law was the wrong line of work for you and you are still deep in debt for loans for the tuition, it did teach you to organize your arguments,” said the skeleton.  “I realized I was over my head during that last one in the den, where I fought you desperately, knowing I was completely fucked.”    

It’s another argument for the people can change position.  If not change, we can refine our talents, anyway.  

“I won’t argue that,” said the skeleton.  “What other demons you got, besides Friedman?”  

Well, there was an angry woman I stayed friends with for decades.  Very smart, great sense of humor, talented, but terminally angry and never satisfied, always feeling she was on the short end of things.  Whipped her feckless, out-gunned husband mercilessly every time we had dinner with them.  In the end, she turned her anger against me.  When I responded with a long note about how hurt I was by an email she sent chiding me for self-pity and depression, I never heard from her again.  It’s like she was waiting for me to tell her I was done with her, as if she’d been waiting for years for me to confirm that she was unworthy of friendship.  Maybe she had been waiting, biding her time for a moment of weakness on my part.   It would have been an easy matter, if she hadn’t meant to hurt me, to have simply apologized for a harsh, arguably cruel, email.  She was apparently incapable of it.  Or maybe she thought I didn’t deserve an apology, that I was an unredeemed asshole.  In any case, her face, bored and superior, is up there when I picture my demons.  

“I can see that,” said the skeleton.  “It’s hard to explain to those who go along to get along, but there comes a point where a trusted friend reveals a face that you cannot unsee.”  

My mad friend Andy’s smug face comes to mind.  

“A face only a mother could resist smacking, although not my mother,” said the skeleton.  “Well, as I understand it, the thing with Andy was his self-hatred, his deep feeling of unworthiness.  I don’t know, truly, how you emerged from your war-zone childhood with so little self-hatred, but for those of us who are consumed by it, I assure you, there is nothing more painful.”  

I can dig it.  It goes to Groucho’s ‘I’d never join a club that would have somebody like me as a member.’    The capacity to be witty is one thing, and I always enjoyed Andy’s wit, the capacity to have insight, and act on it with integrity, is quite a different thing.  

“Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “One man’s insight is another man’s… eh, you show me a man who finds himself insightful I’ll show you a man…. what does Sekhnet always tell you?  Put a bushel over that light of yours.   It’s unseemly to speak of yourself as insightful, talented, intelligent.”  

Fine, I get that.  The only insight I really cherish is the one I picked up as a kid at that finishing school for anti-Semites you sent me to.  Hillel’s statement of the Golden Rule.  What is hateful to you, do not do to someone else.   I consciously try to live by that.   I don’t claim to have ever had any insight remotely comparable.  I’m just laying out a few particular, identifiable demons here, dad.  The faces attached.  

“Well, I get that.  Andy had the best demonic last word, delivered to you by a third party.  He made it known that he knew he owed you an apology, but that he was ‘too stingy’ to give it.   The mark of a… what is that hideous word you like to use on such occasions, a true cunt, in the unredeemed sense of the word.”  

True dat, dad.  I admit that I was wrong, that I hurt you, that my subsequent attack on you was unfair, that I owe you an apology but… nah… not to you. I’m too stingy.  Let that be the last word on our long friendship.  

“Talk about a shit-smeared asshole,” said the skeleton, suddenly distracted, sinking back into his grave without so much as an adios.

Adios, padre.