I’d wake up in terror frequently as a kid, heart pounding after a nightmare.   I developed a lifelong reluctance to fall asleep during those years.  I’d lie awake in bed with elaborate fantasy scenarios playing out in my imagination.

“Well, the escapist fantasy is understandable, it was better than thinking of those guys in the attic, over your bedroom, maneuvering that giant wheeled guillotine up there,” said the skeleton of my father.  “You thought one night to reverse head and feet, to avoid being decapitated, you turned around in bed, then realized, with a shudder, that your feet would be chopped off, which was almost as bad as losing your head.  Curled up in a tight ball didn’t help either, you realized that being chopped in half was pretty fucked up way to go too.”

I guess my choice was an image like that, and the bad dreams that followed, or the even more horrifying recognition that I was a little kid in the hands of a real life madman.  

“A real life madman?  Isn’t that a bit harsh?” said the skeleton with an exaggerated sniff.  

Harsh it is, harsh it was.  As a kid you have no way to make sense of constant hostility focused at you.  I suppose the nightmares were my way of somehow trying to make some kind of sense of  it.  I can only imagine the nightmares you used to have as a kid.

 “I have no memory of them.  My waking life was nightmare enough,” said the skeleton.  “You know, I take your point about the nightmares, I never thought of them that way.   You recall I used to reassure you when you woke up drenched in sweat.   It’s fairly easy to reassure a frightened child that he’d only had a bad dream, that he was awake now, everything was okay.  The underlying reality that gives rise to nightmares — you’d better live a long life, dedicated to steady interior research, if you expect to get any useful insights into that.  I gave you a gift the night before I died, did I not?”    

Yeah, you did.  

“I knew it was important to you that I acknowledged that I’d felt you reaching out to make peace with me many times over the years, and that I, not you, had been the immature asshole.  You, from an eerily early age, were trying to be the flexible adult, I was always rigidly trying to be the invulnerable two year-old.   That’s an unnatural situation for a child to be in, a disorienting role reversal.   I knew it would be useful to you to hear me admit you’d been right all along in your approach, and that I’d been the fucking idiot.”

Hence those early years of frequent nightmares, other faceless terrors.  I was surrounded by fearful shit, hostility that defied any rational explanation but was always presented with the irrefutable evidence of its rationality and I had no ability to grasp that irreconcilable contradiction, until I got older, and got more and more angry about it.  

“Well, there is an undeniable use for anger,” said the skeleton.  “It provides adrenaline, it fuels the ability to fight.  It may never allow any insight, or the possibility of positive change, but in a pitched battle, it can be helpful to remain angry.  Look, the many bad things that can be said about anger aside, it’s preferable to depression.”

Depression is anger turned against the self, they say.  Which makes a certain amount of sense, if you think about it.   Anger grants no quarter, no pardon, no excuse or mitigation.   Anger is unipolar– I am right, you are an asshole. Imagine that force turned against yourself.   Every thought is immediately answered by an internal voice that tells you, harshly, “shut the fuck up!”    

“Your brilliant, borderline psychopath classmate in law school gave you the exact term for that, ‘internalizing the victimizer’.  That’s how it’s done, Elie.  You hear the voice over and over as a kid ‘everything you touch turns to shit’, ‘you may win this battle but you’re going to lose the war’ — all the rest. It becomes a self-running script you start unconsciously reading to yourself whenever you face a stressful situation.  

“There’s a common cure for that, of course.   Work.  If you think keeping yourself constantly on the clock doesn’t work, think again.  It worked for me, no time for self-pity or self-examination, I had a second job I had to get to. Your mother, who you believe was depressed for much of her life, got up every morning, made breakfast, took a shower, went off to work.  She didn’t fall victim to it again, in a big way, until I checked out and she spent five years mostly alone at the end of her life.  Which, of course, anybody could understand would be depressing.  It’s lonely to be a widow.”    

Yes.  At the same time, a few days before she died, when I managed to get her an appointment for physical therapy– which they’d denied on the bullshit grounds that she was too demented to recall the therapist’s instructions– she was visited by a nurse and two other women from the hospice.   They went into the bedroom to speak with her.  I was in the kitchen, out of earshot.  Suddenly I heard them all laughing.  The nurse came out with a big smile as they were leaving and said “whatever you want to say about your mother, she is certainly not demented.”   They were still chuckling as I let them out on to the catwalk.

 “And the relevance of this little reminiscence?” said the skeleton.  

Yes, it was understandable that she was depressed, particularly toward the end of her death from that wasting, pinching, painful cancer.  At the same time, she still made a room full of women crack up.  

“Well, some of the funniest people in the world are the most in pain,” said the skeleton.  “Doesn’t take being George Dubya Bush to realize that, does it?”

No I suppose it doesn’t.   You were, are, a very funny motherfucker, dad.  And in the most pain.  

“Yop.”

“Okay,” said the skeleton of my father, “I can see you’re determined to imagine the conversation we would’ve had if I’d been alive after that talk where I expressed my regrets, apologized for the first and last time, had the insights I should have had decades earlier.  All right, I’ll go with that.”

 Mighty white of you, dad.  

“Well, it’s the least I can do,” said the skeleton, “and as you’re fond of saying, ‘I’m always happy to do the least I can do.’  I’ll pick up the White Man’s Burden here.”  

Along Cortlandt Road, a stone’s throw from my father’s grave, a car with a bad muffler farted loudly by.  

“Poetic, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “Anyway, listen, I think somebody should address the pathos of this situation — of you sitting alone in a room inventing a conversation with your father that you believe should have happened, one you think others might be interested in reading.  Obviously you can’t address the poignance of that yourself.”  

That goes without saying.  

“Well, like I told you as I was dying, I never saw anyone really express affection, show love of any kind in the home I grew up in.  I simply had no example of how it was done, no clue how to do it myself.   I was raised in the most dire psychological experiment you can imagine.   We lived in grinding poverty.   My mother despised my father, my father lived in fear of my mother’s rage.  My brother and I were on our own in a way you and your sister would be hard-pressed to imagine, as bad as you may think you two had it.”  

Suffering isn’t a competition.  

“No, it’s not.  That’s not the point I’m trying to make.  You remember how impressed you were with Martin Buber’s I and Thou?”  

I do, in fact.  I thought it was an illuminating way to view the world.  Buber said you could address all creatures in a mutual, relational way, which he called I-Thou.  An I-Thou relationship treats fellow beings as unique individuals with a soul, the equals of yourself.  This relational view sees others as fellow reflections of God, souls to connect with and interact with.  It is also possible, and more common, to see people, animals and things as a series of instrumentalities, as ‘its’, things to be used without regard to their needs.   The relation in this case is one way: I-It.

The I-Thou relationship is a mutual recognizing of and addressing the equivalent of yourself in the other.  The I-It relationship is a practical, materialistic one in which the other is not a sentient self, like you are, but a mere instrument for your use, an instrument without a soul or any legitimate needs of its own.

“Well, the I-It relationship extends far beyond the crass materialism that is so familiar to us all in our consumer culture, it’s also the way an adversary sees an opponent, in the most ruthless scenario.   You can’t be indifferent to a war against people who are just like you, who suffer the way you do, whose innocent children cry out in a way that breaks your heart.  To wage war you first have to demonize and dehumanize the enemy, make them into an alien Other, faceless Its you or your allies can bomb, burn, gas, drone, machine gun, machete, whatever.    That’s the first order of business before you can kill people en masse, reduce them to an abstract thing to be despised.  It works on the individual level too, of course.

“My mother, in order to whip me the way she did, couldn’t see me as fully human, as a little soul the equal of herself.   She’d have to view me as a thing, an object, a stubborn, inanimate obstacle to her happiness, a whipping boy, literally.   What does the human long for?  That look of recognition of his human-ness in the eyes of someone he cares about, an appreciation of his uniqueness.  

“This is becoming complicated, and I’m aware I’m blurring a simple enough concept, but getting this across seems crucial to understanding the tragedy that was my long life.  It’s really the essence of all human tragedy, Elie.”    

A car turned off Cortlandt Road and crunched down the long gravel driveway not far from my father’s grave.  The driver and her passenger were about to visit a grave, leave two stones on top of a granite slab inscribed with a dead loved one’s  capsule biography. Their arrival made no difference at all to me or the skeleton, neither of us were actually even there.

“You know, I think about it now, how cruel I was to you and your sister, and it seems like a miracle to me that somehow your little souls weren’t crushed.”  

Don’t worry about that, our little souls were crushed.   The good news for me was a kind of optimism I got from somewhere, a faith in the healing powers of a little soul.   They call it neuroplasticity now, sometimes, the brain’s ability to heal the lesions and neural disruptions caused by adverse childhood experiences, by trauma.    

“I’m glad you got that from somewhere.  What’s the most important thing a parent can give a child?   A sense of safety, a sense that they are loved, and heard, and protected.   I never knew how to impart that to you guys, Elie, though I know that you and your sister, at least sometimes, felt those things from me.   Maybe mom did a little better, I’m pretty sure she did, at least in your case.  I like to think I was okay in an emergency, you know, that your sister and you were reassured by me sometimes, knew you could count on me when it mattered most.”  

Yeah, you were good at that.  You kept calm and philosophical when we were afraid or upset, you could be very reassuring.  I mean, sometimes.  

“Of course,” said the skeleton.  “Most of the time I was the one strafing you two with a metaphorical tripod mounted machine gun, which, now that I think of it, I think you have to admit is better than if I’d used an actual machine gun on you two.”

Granted.   We’re both grateful for that, it goes without saying.  

“Well, obviously you are going to have to dig deeper into this issue.  You see, this book you’re trying to write is the direct outgrowth of your natural and eternally thwarted desire to have a real dialogue, an I-Thou conversation you deserved to have.   It’s no accident my story is emerging in the form of a dialogue.  I was…” the skeleton sniffed, turned his head on a creaky neck, “well, you know how I was.  Like I told you, I never experienced that kind of connection with either of my parents, with anyone in my family, really, with the possible exception of Eli.”  

Who scared the shit out of you.  

“Yeah, he scared the shit out of me, but I also always felt loved by him.”

That’s no small thing, dad.  

“Yop, I know.”

I just heard Salman Rushdie call journalism, or memoir, that interprets or re-imagines events through an idiosyncratic, personal lens, creative non-fiction.   I suppose that’s what I’m writing as I toil over this memoir of my father’s life.  

“Creative non-fiction, my ass,” said the skeleton of my father, woken from his slumber by the familiar sound of me tapping the keyboard.  

You got a better name for it?  

The skeleton pondered this for a moment.  

“No, I suppose not.  It’s actually exactly what you are doing.   There are many things you can never truly know, but in telling a good story you can’t leave these gaps.  A story with gaps is not a great story, as you are starting to understand. Hey, you can’t imagine what I’m thinking as I’m driving the Buick east into the Long Island night after our nightly battle at the dinner table?  Well, that’s an evocative image, anyway.  There’s something the reader can imagine as well as you can.   But you have to set it up right, give the reader all the background images to picture it for themselves.”  

You’re a writing coach now?  

“Fuck you, Elie, you’re the one who’s talking to me, I didn’t start this conversation,” said the skeleton.  

That’s what you say.  

“That’s what you say I say,” said the skeleton.  “You’re not fooling anyone here, Elie.  Don’t insult our intelligence.  Conversation, my ass.”  

As you wish, father.

In high school my sister came up with the name that would be our father’s handle for the rest of his life.   She referred to him as The Dreaded Unit, which she summarily shortened to “The D.U.”.    It was a name he went by, and even embraced.   He signed notes “The D.U.”  It pleased him, on some level, to be regarded as dreaded.      

The D.U. was not dreaded because he was strict, or a ruthless disciplinarian.  In fact, he was in many ways a permissive parent.  You could do what you wanted, pretty much, but there was a steep price to pay for that freedom.  He would flay you about anything you did that he disapproved of.  He disapproved of most of what his children did, by the looks of it.  He was demanding only in the sense that he demanded you listen to his denunciation of what an unredeemed piece of shit you were.  I angrily fought back, my sister rarely confronted his anger directly.   It is an open question which of us suffered more from his regular abusiveness.

In thinking about this dreadedness, I realize my father had a cardinal rule. He lived in a black and white world with one overriding issue: were you with him or against him?   He laid out his theory and either you agreed with his assessment, no matter how insane, or you were an asshole.   As he was dying this is probably what he regretted most, the asininity of insisting on ‘my way or the highway’ as a credo.    It is more fitting for an authoritarian or racist-type than for a humanist with the intellect my father had.    

It was one of the central contradictions of the man.  While he was capable of taking any side in an argument, for argument’s sake, and intelligently making a detailed case for the opposite of what he believed, he was in some fundamental way unable to see nuance, to compromise, to extend mercy or the benefit of the doubt, in the context of his family.  

It was a one rule game: I am right and you are wrong.  If you disagree with me, it proves you are a fucking idiot.  I will destroy you.   While he could be irreverent, and very funny, and seemingly hip, he was also very rigid in defending his beliefs.  

As I converse with his skeleton you will see little evidence of this rigidity.   The dead Irv is much more relaxed and insightful than he was while he struggled to remain the D.U. to his children.    That’s the central tragedy of his story– what he actually was, in his essence, compared with what he was able to show of himself in the intimate circle of his nuclear family.  It is the central tragedy, I guess, of anyone who is filled with self-hatred.

Simple rule: you’re in or you’re out, with me or against me.  He enjoyed the verbal jousting match he saw black kids playing on the street.  He called it The Dozens.  It was a rank out contest, an imagination-driven cutting contest where the sharpest wit won.  It was done in public, on a stoop, street corner, in a schoolyard, candy store, barber shop.  You could keep out of it, most of the time, by keeping your mouth shut.  Once you said something, you were fair game.  It had one other rule, according to the D.U.: “if you grin, you’re in.”  Laugh at something funny said at the expense of someone else, you’re next, motherfucker.  My father loved the whole thing.

I have noticed this with bullies, too.  If you sneer, watching them in action, it’s as good as shoving them, they will come after you.  I have been in this situation too many times to count, and, although as a lawyer I learned to control my facial expressions when I was in the presence of someone abusing their power to express personal sadism, I never learned to control my micro-expressions, those subconscious tells that flash across your face in a fraction of a second. Sadists are adept at picking these up, and they will torture you as much for a micro-expression as for a long, glaring sneer.  

What made my father the D.U., exactly?  His insistence that his rule was the rule, agree to disagree, disagree to agree, the rule is the rule, it will not, cannot be changed.  This was the essence of his dreadedness.  Where did it come from?  A paranoid worldview born in the extreme childhood traumas he endured all his life.   He could not open the door to examining these traumas, it was simply too painful.  

I write of this all calmly now, at the age of sixty-one, having had decades to process my interactions with The D.U.   In the end, living on a small stipend provided by his lifetime of hard work, and my mother’s, I have had as many hours as I need to ponder it all.   It has been a very fortunate thing for me, whether or not I succeed in snappily packaging and selling this manuscript to a literary agent, signing a book contract, getting paid, being interviewed by Leonard Lopate or Terry Gross.   I will always consider myself lucky for this opportunity.    

In my childhood, though, the D.U. was a fucking monster, an incomprehensible, implacable monster.  I have described the war zone at the dinner table every night.  For many years the D.U. worked two jobs.  He’d arrive home from work exhausted and fall asleep on the couch for an hour or two.  When he’d wake up, dinner would be ready, the battlefield prepared.  

Our mother might start things off, complaining about what pricks my sister and I had been to each other, to her.  We were often pricks to her, I realize. We mocked and bullied her.  She’d turn to the D.U. to do something about it.  

In reality, there was nothing the D.U. could do about it.  We were all playing by the insane rules he set, the only ones he knew.  He was powerless, sitting in his landlocked seat in the worst corner of the kitchen table, a counter behind him, a wall to his left, my sister and the refrigerator blocking his exit.  He would shuffle his feet in his slippers menacingly, like a rattler rattling  his tail.  He would make random threats of violence, retribution, of my sister and I losing the war, no matter how many battles we thought we were winning.   He would curse and rage.   I can see all this clearly, as well as the reasons for it, in ways I could not see until I was a middle aged man.  I spent years ruminating on the insane dinner time battles.  

If I’d smacked my sister, or, as I did one afternoon, hung her favorite doll by the neck at the top of the stairs (a doll she pulled down and whacked me in the eye with), my mother would put this angrily to the D.U.   The D.U. would turn to my sister and, in a tone of paternal reasonableness, blame her.  “I’ve told you a thousand times, if you play with the cobra you’re going to get bit!”   I was the cobra in that scenario, no matter that I had a black eye from the doll’s foot.  My sister, in spite of her lifelong terror of snakes, was a pretty competent mongoose.

It was, like any war, a vicious affair that nobody could ever win.   “Look at him, sitting there glaring, like a fucking rattlesnake…”  I was waiting, on one level, for the day, at fifteen, when I stood up angrily and the D.U. actually cowered.  I was completely disgusted by his show of cowardice.  He was a big man, I was a skinny adolescent.  I guess part of his fear was knowing I had every right to take a swing at him.  I had the seat at the kitchen table right next to the door, and I often stormed out that door, while the war raged on.

After dinner, which almost always involved a screaming match and choking down the food on our plates, my father would often go to his bathroom in the basement.   He’d pause at the top of the stairs, as my mother became tense. “Irv, so help me, I’ll divorce you!” she would threaten, as a strained look came across his face.  

“Prepare…. for….” my father would begin, as the three of us raised our voices in protest, “gassing!”  He would then let loose a loud fart, chuckle, and head downstairs.  

“You’re a pig!” my mother would shout after him, not incorrectly.  

A half hour later my father would be in the Buick, driving out towards the tiny office of Nassau-Suffolk Young Judaea.  I can only imagine his thoughts as he headed east into the night.

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.  

Ecclesiastes 1:16-18; King James Version

“Nice,” said the skeleton, “I like a good biblical quotation frontispiece as much as the next dead guy.   Certainly there’s a more pretentious one you could select for this purpose:  the way of a fool is straight in his own eyes, but a prudent man harkens unto counsel, maybe.”  

Like a dog who returneth to his vomit, so is the fool who repeateth his folly.  

“I know you are, but what am I?” said the skeleton.  “Look, Elie, these are all well and good, if largely meaningless.  What was folly, to those comparing it to a dog eating his own vomit?   It was taking the Lord’s name in vain,  wearing improperly woven cloth, laboring on the sabbath, six hundred other things only an impious fool would do.  Many of them punishable by death under our merciful God’s own law.”

“‘Six days shall you labor and then, as I did, you shall rest on the seventh.  Don’t rest– you will be put to death.’    That’s why when you asked me if I wanted you to say kaddish for me after I died, I really didn’t give a shit.  Religion was a remnant of my dark, impoverished, abusive childhood.   I was forced to go pray by a woman who whipped me in the face every day, a very religious little woman she was, too.   I was about to finally be free of giving a shit about religion and everything else.  I could hardly muster a grunt, in answer to your question about saying kaddish, if you recall.”  

I do recall, it was mostly a shrug.  Sekhnet and I said kaddish for you for thirty days after you died.

“I know, and I was touched, even though I used to get a little dry chuckle, the only kind you get here with a mouthful of dirt, to see you praying without a yarmulke.  That was a nice touch, saying the old Aramaic prayer for the dead, without a minyan, without so much as a napkin for a skull cap.”  

I thought about that sometimes, but then, I realized you didn’t give a shit either.  

“People are funny, as Art Linkletter used to say, before his daughter stepped out of a high story window after taking some acid.   I guess he didn’t find people as funny after that,” said the skeleton.  “But, since you start with that somber quote from Ecclesiastes, what now, Elie?”  

I have been looking for insight here, something to illuminate and reclaim your life.   I haven’t quite found the organizing principle yet, but it has not been a fruitless search, not at all.  I’ve been surprised and encouraged by much of what I’ve learned.  

“You have to learn to teach yourself, the hardest trick in the world, particularly since the way of a fool is always straight in his own eyes and all that,” said the skeleton.  

We all stand on the shoulders of those who come before us.  You gave me a method, in your inimitable, often regrettable, way, by which to begin to learn to teach myself.   I eventually started to learn what I needed to know when I was a kid and had nobody to guide me.  

“You never came to me for advice,” said the skeleton.  

Can you blame me for that?  

“No,” said the skeleton, “I can’t blame you for that at all.  I was the last person who could give you any advice.”  

The most crucial advice I needed was what to do when you are being raised by an implacable adversary.  

“I know, and the implacable adversary was hardly the one to advise you on that particular concern,” said the skeleton.  “We have been over all this many times, and you have written about it here several times.   The ms. is now over a thousand pages, I would think, and it is time.  Time to cut some prime slices of it out and send it off, to get to the next stage of completing the book of my life.”

Agreed.

When my father was the director of Camp Tel Yehuda, Young Judaea’s summer camp in the heart of German Bund territory, along the Delaware River a few hours from New York City, he was sometimes called “Big Red.”   He was big, about six feet one, and heavy, over 230 or maybe even 240, at times.  He was red, as his sometimes severe psoriasis left his unscaled skin a sore, reddish hue.   He may have also had what they call rosacea, a condition that reddens the skin of the face.  

I heard him referred to as Big Red only once, by a friend of mine at camp who made the reference with a coy smile.   I smiled too.  Good name for him, I guess.   There was also a cinnamon flavored gum at the time called Big Red.  It came, unsurprisingly, in a red package, each slice wrapped in red paper.

Funny to think of it now, but at one time my father could have been called Big Red not for his rosy skin tone, but for his political views.   By the time he was an old man he was more concerned with holding on to what he had worked hard all his life to earn and keep than with the larger, unsolvable problem of social justice, but he never completely lost the impulse to identify with the weak, the marginalized, the oppressed.   He just passed that on to his children.

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.