“Well, you know, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, as a couple of vultures turned lazy loops in the picture postcard sky over his grave, “what I should have been doing, all those years, instead of justifying my insane rigidity, was developing some fucking insight.   Instead of understanding the importance of real intimacy with those I loved, and empathy, which makes every mercy possible, I was pushing an eternal agenda of self-defense, trying at all costs to make myself feel safe.  I was obsessed with being ‘right’.  That, I see now, is the mark of someone who will only become wise too late, if at all.”  

Better late than never, isn’t it?   

“Well, in my case, it was a few hours before I died, when I was trying not to be crushed by a lifetime of regrets.  How’s that for too fucking late?  Too late for your sister, who never heard a word of my regrets.  How could I tell her?  She just sat by me, knowing I was dying.  What could I say?   In your case, I don’t know, maybe because you always fought me…  I think it was a kind of shock to me how gentle you were in a way.  I mean, you had a right to be mean to me as I was trying to feel better about my misguided life at 2 a.m. the last night of my life.”  

Friedman asked me, right after you died, if I’d told you to go fuck yourself.  “Did you let him have it?” he asked.  I was completely bewildered by the question, I literally had no idea what he was talking about.   That room at the hospital where you died really was like the cathedral, or temple, that Eli’s cousin Shep Nuland described in How We Die.  I felt it, a kind of awe, as soon as I walked in.  I knew immediately that none of this was about me– it was about you.  

“Well, as a dying person that’s what you hope for, it turns out.   In our lives we often don’t see each other, we talk by rote, responding to what we think the other person is about to say, based on our past perceptions of the person rather than on what they are actually trying to say.  We often don’t hear each other, see each other, feel more than a shadow of what the other person is feeling.  You lie there dying, helpless at last, and you hope for the chance, once before you go, for someone just to really listen, to ask short follow-up questions when they don’t understand, to hear you.  I have to give it to you, Elie, I felt heard as I was trying to make my peace.”  

Luckily for both of us, I guess, I’d just reached a point in therapy where I truly grasped that if you could have done better, you would have.  I came to that point maybe a month or two before I got the call that you were about to die.  It wasn’t like I truly forgave you for being such a destructive father, but I really understood that it wasn’t my fault, or my pain to carry anymore, that you were a very damaged person.    I had started to learn to let go of my anger at the wasted potential of someone who was, in many ways, a very fine man.  

“Piece of shit as a father, perhaps,” said the skeleton, following the flight of the vultures with sightless eyes.  

Fair enough.   The thing is, a piece of shit who nonetheless instilled very important values in both of his children.   My love of animals, and connection to them, my anger at those who torture and kill them for fun or profit.   My hatred of racists and bigots of all kinds, as well as my reflex to oppose bullies.   My engagement with the world of ideas, with history, my love of conversation.  My love of soul music, Sam Cooke.   Animating themes of my life.  How do you reconcile those things: piece of shit father who taught me much of what I value most?  

“Well, there’s a fucking mystery for you, Elie.   I suppose that’s how the world works, really.   How much of it is clean, a fair transaction where both parties wind up with what they want out of it?  If you’re lucky, you get it once or twice in your life.  I only wish I’d had the insight to realize how important gaining real insight is.  Isn’t that what this book of me is really about?  You’re searching for insight, to put your own life, as well as mine, into perspective.”

I heard an interview with a former Marine sergeant who’d come back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD.   We think of that nonchalantly, oh, guy was in a war zone, his friends were killed, he killed a bunch of people, including a couple of children whose bodies he saw for the first time after he’d riddled them with bullets, yeah, naturally he’s got PTSD.   We say it like it’s nothing, a statistic, a problem.  But the individual who suffers from it is in very real agony, often puts a bullet in his own head.    

This Marine, TJ Brennan, recently wrote a book about invisible injuries, like his traumatic brain injury.  He tells Dave Davies “my tbi manifests in a very physical way for me, though it’s invisible to a lot of people, so it’s easy for people to discount invisible injuries…. they’re very, very real to the person suffering from them, like depression, or mental health problems.  They’re invisible to others, but they cripple your life.”   I heard this while biking down the beautiful Hudson river bike route to Sekhnetville.  I had to stop to make a note of it.  

“It struck you as a moment of insight.  Good for you.  I get it– you were abused as badly as a kid who gets the belt buckle every night but in a way that never left a mark on your body.   Same injury on your child’s soul, Elie, with the benefit that the person who inflicted it can say ‘you’re fucking insane, you little drama queen, I never laid a fucking finger on you.’  The same goes for anyone else you might try to complain to, whiner.”  

I have nothing to add to that, except for this great, insightful thing  I heard from the filmmaker who worked with Bill Genovese, the much-loved little brother of Kitty Genovese, as Bill doggedly worked through the brutal murder of his sister fifty years ago.   The result of their collaboration was a great documentary called The Witness.   They started off figuring it would be a six month project, maybe a year.  It took eleven years to complete.  

James Solomon, the filmmaker, lost his own older brother, the person he admired most in the world, at some point during the filming, giving him sudden, deep empathy with Bill Genovese’s obsessive quest to reclaim the life of the older sister who had loved him so much.  Her life had been erased by her horrific, sensationalized murder.  Bill, to the puzzlement of his family, was determined to get to the bottom of her murder, to remember and recreate her life, beyond her victimhood in the last moments of that life.   In a wonderful interview with Brooke Gladstone, Solomon says:

Over a half century this man is determined to reclaim his sister, her life, from her death.  What Bill does, in the film, is reveal a person that we all would feel, gosh, I really wish I knew her.   It’s, in my estimation, the ultimate love story.

“With all respect for you, Elie, you really have no idea what it’s like being a parent unless you’ve tried to raise kids,” said the skeleton of my father from his soft, shady grave at the top of the hill.   “You will never truly feel how much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have your child tell you to go fuck yourself.  I understand that it’s easy to dismiss some of the things I told you over the years– that you stared at me accusingly from your crib when we brought you home from the hospital, that you had a full blown, irrational temper tantrum at ten weeks — but, at the same time, there is some truth in those things.  

“It’s well-known that children are born with recognizable temperaments, there are easy babies and difficult babies.  Some kids are very fidgety, and fussy about food, and cry all the time.  You were like that.  Some kids are more relaxed, more placid by nature, and eat well and go to sleep easily and they are much easier to get along with.  Your sister was a much easier baby than you were.”  

All true.  And there are some kids who are quiet, eat well, go to sleep easily and are whipped in the face by their mothers for reasons unrelated to their otherwise easy-going little baby personalities.   There are parents who simply have no ability to resist whipping their kids in the face.  What happened to these people to make them so vicious?  We’d have to study the individual cases, but you’re aware that something horrible happened to them to make them that way.  

“Well, there’s no doubt about that.  But, unless you’ve actually tried to raise children, you don’t get it on a visceral level, which is the hardest part about being a parent,” said the skeleton.  

On some visceral level my experience being raised by two parents who were often angry, and clueless, and, shall we be delicate about it and say, sometimes a little strained in the empathy department, factored into my decision not to have children.  

“With the beautiful side effect that you can now pass judgment, from your theoretical high chair, on everybody who has done the difficult thing and raised kids.  I don’t think you and your sister turned out too badly, and I like to think your mother and I had something to do with that,” said the skeleton.  

No doubt.  I think we turned out pretty well too.  Look, that’s part of my exercise in writing this book.  An inventory of all the humanistic values you instilled so deeply in us both, while being, in many ways, beyond humane consideration much of the time when dealing with your wife and children.

 “You should let your mother speak for herself,” said the skeleton.  

Well, that’s true, but there’s a problem.  She was cremated.  

“What?!  When did this happen?!” said the skeleton.  

Keep your shroud on, dad.  It was after she died.  She told me several times that she wanted to be cremated.  I kept telling her she’d have to wait until after she died.  Not long before she died she told me she was worried about being eaten by bugs and worms after she died.  I told her not to worry, I promised her I wouldn’t let the worms eat her in a grave, and so my sister and I had her cremated.  

“So what are you saying?  That only a fucking skeleton can speak from the grave?”  

Look, dad, we both know this whole thing is bullshit.  My mother will have to speak for herself later.  I’m not running a haunted on-line journal here.   You and I are having the conversations we should have had decades ago, while you were still alive and vital and could have done something about the terrible regrets you died with.  

“Yeah, and if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.  The thing you don’t get about being a parent is that it is about the hardest job there is in the world. Your odds of getting it right?   A crap shoot, Elie, truly.  You think you know what you will do the first time your kid starts screaming at you in rage.  You have no idea what you will do.  All the issues from your own childhood are sitting right there at the table with you and your child.   I thought I did a great thing, not beating you and your sister when I was angry.”  

I think so too, nobody would have blamed you for smacking us, though I’d have called Child Protective Services, as I sometimes threatened to do.  

“Look, do you think Child Protective Services would have intervened in our house?  You were well-fed and well-clothed.  The house was safe, clean and comfortable.  Neither of your parents drank or took drugs.  Neither of your parents hit you.   What do you think the city worker would have said, after listening to your complaints about a father with two jobs who called you a fucking cobra, a rattlesnake, told you that your face, twisted and contorted with hate, was oozing hatred in the form of your teenaged acne?”

She would have smirked and told me to stop fucking whining and wasting the city’s time and resources on my piddling, chicken-shit complaints.  

“Right, which is not to say she would have been correct to do this, the point is that verbal abuse, in an otherwise unimpeachably wholesome home setting, does as much damage as a belt or a fist.   We’ve been over this many times, how subtle my ass-whupping techniques were.   Your sister, how old was she when she realized how much I’d tortured and damaged the two of you?”  

She told me she was forty before she saw it with any clarity at all.

“Well, that was a long free ride for me then, wasn’t it?  I blamed you two for everything.  I made you feel like you were an ingrate and a whiner when you complained about being emotionally roughed up.  To this day, you will have a hard time really convincing anyone that I’d been much of a monster.  ‘Ooooh, your father was mean to you…. oooh, he called you names…. ooooohhh….’  The fact is, as you and I both know, I was a monster.  But I was a smart monster, a clever monster, a persuasive monster well able to defend everything I did on high moral grounds.  It wasn’t me at all, it was my adversarial little asshole of a first born baby, a difficult baby, an angry and implacable baby…”

Well, I’ll give you that.  I was an angry and implacable new-born.  I recall, actually, before I could even see clearly, that I recognized you as the enemy and was determined to somehow destroy you.  

“Sure, make a joke, why not?  I’m dead, what the hell can I do about it?”

Same as when you were alive, I suppose.  We’ll pick this up later, I’m going to eat a pertater.

“Hasta la vista, Angry Baby!” 

“You know, to borrow this whining seventy year-old brat’s babyish analysis, which breaks the world neatly into winners and losers, I spent my life trying to be a winner while feeling the whole time like a giant loser.   It’s such an idiotic and inhuman way to look at the world, Elie, winner vs. loser, and a recipe for frustration for the vast majority of us, who are manifestly losers.” The skeleton settled back against his tombstone, regarding the lush foliage all around him.    

“Hey, this graveyard, for example.  I am buried at a prestigious spot on the top of the hill, under a shady canopy of enormous trees.   I can see my brother’s grave a few steps away.   We paid a lot for these prime spots over the years, I can’t do the math for you at the moment, but it was probably tens of thousands of dollars.  Our parents are buried in that section at the bottom of the hill, with poor drainage, where the small tombstones are jammed together like crooked teeth.  Those are pauper graves, dug in the cheap real estate, with no shade on a hot day, where members too poor to pay regular dues were buried.”  

“What does it mean to any of us buried here?  Hah.  To the living it means trudging across the boneyard to the bottom of the hill, walking a ways on the gravel road, and picking your way through the tightly packed graves, to go from my grave to my father’s.   You have to walk over the graves of other Jewish losers to stand where you can put a stone on my mother’s modest grave marker, or my father’s.”  

“I keep wondering about these winners, as you struggle to keep yourself on the right side of the mental health line.  Without money, I know what a struggle life is.  The closer you live to the poverty line, the more the world fucks with you on an hour to hour basis.  The money we left you could only last if you have no material expectations for a middle class life.  That’s never been a problem for you, I realize, living on a subsistence income, you’ve never done otherwise.   But to most people, it’s mystifying that you’d be satisfied, living in a land of plenty, and amid constant clamor for your consumer dollars, consistently denying yourself the pleasure of buying all the cool must-have shit they’re continually updating.  I guess that’s one good thing I did for you, somehow.”

I date it to when you and mom devised that draconian punishment after I disobeyed you and went to see Fail Safe with Michael Siegel.  No TV for a year, for a six or seven year-old, shit, maybe I was even younger.  That was the beginning of sitting in my room, thinking of myself as the protagonist of that Chekov story, though I hadn’t yet read it, where the young lawyer bets the banker he can stay alone, with no human contact, in a room with unlimited books, music and writing tools.  The banker bets him he can’t do it for five years, the lawyer offers to do it for fifteen.

“Ah, The Bet, a classic story of doubling down, which is what a glorious winner is supposed to do.   Taking on impossible odds casually, with elan. You remember that great moment in Cyrano where he arrives to defend his friend, told that a hundred swordsmen are waiting for him.   ‘I’ve been cheated, there are no hundred here!’ he grumbles as he begins to dispatch a few dozen men with swords.  Look, these stories are one thing.  Look at the real-life ‘winners’ you know, Elie…”  

You’re preaching to the choir, boss.   I see them in their hundred room mansions, being chased by the devil from room to room.  I’m like Zora Neale Hurston, I refuse to play a game designed to fuck people like me.  

“Well, you do seem to be constantly doubling down on that refusal…” said the skeleton.  “But look, the president you have now, the self-proclaimed biggest winner, wakes up every day at the crack of dawn, in a rage.  He wakes up snarling, doubling down on his idiotic promises, and snarls through the day.  ‘You’re gonna win so much, you’re going to be tired of winning, believe me, believe me.’  Not a very good advertisement for winning, a winner who wakes up mad every day.  But as we’ve noted often in these talks, the supposed role of rationality is overstressed in human affairs.  Much of life is pitched directly at our ids, a shameless play to our lower impulses.  When challenged for being wrong, a winner doubles down.”  

No argument here, dad.  The only question, really, is, if you’re doing something you believe is valuable, how do you share it, publicize it, get paid a living wage to do it.  

“Well, we’ve talked about this, Elie, this is where hard work and grit come into play.   Two things that have never really been your strong suit.    On the other hand, a shit load of money can relieve one of the need to work hard.  You can buy people to work hard for you.  Look at how Trump got those 70,000 or so votes that swept him to victory in the Electoral College, though he lost by more than thirty times that margin in the general election.   Social media played as big a role as the corporate mass media that gave him the billion dollars of free publicity.  

“One of Steve Bannon’s great strengths was analyzing and exploiting social media, playing those lonely, angry internet nerds and geeks like a vast, out-of-tune string section.   Trump’s team bought hundreds of bots in Singapore or somewhere over there to re-tweet his brilliant aphorisms.   Each bot would re-tweet the latest shard of glittering prose hundreds or thousands of times. This in turn spurred an army of trolls, emboldened by the million hits to their candidate’s latest semi-literate 140 character utterance, to take to social media and do what trolls do.  

“Look, I know you are revolted by faceBook, and I have to give it to you, that billionaire weasel who invented it, though he was on to something– monetizing the desire of people to connect to others– does appear to be your classic piece of shit.   Your hermit friend, the tortured, emaciated fellow you see in the library from time to time, has hundreds of close personal friends on faceBook.  By the looks of the way he clings to your company, he has only one friend, you, in real life, though to call your casual bumping into each other in the library a few times a year friendship might be stretching things.”  

A lot of things are stretched, dad.  An increasing number of things, more than I can explain.  Just in the twelve years since you died, brains have been radically rewired.  We are all like rats, hooked up to instant feedback machines.  I have a new phone, a genius, that gives me an alert beep any time anyone I know contacts me.  It is programming me to be an endlessly distracted, twitching rat.   I can turn off notifications, but then I might miss an email or text.  

“That would be a fucking tragedy, Elie,” said the skeleton, “I can see why you’d be reluctant to turn off notifications.   LOL!”  

It’s hard to explain.  When you were struggling with Mavis Beacon to learn typing, you found that software that translated speech to text.  It produced Mad Libs.  A few years later, I can talk into my phone and it flawlessly transcribes whatever I’m saying.  

“Ain’t dat some shit…” said the skeleton.  “How does this make your life better, actually?”  

You’re missing the point, dad.  This is the direction the fractured attention span of the world is going.  I can save valuable minutes, and my carpal tunnels, by just dictating my emails now.  It’s not about making my life better, actually, it’s about providing services that make it more convenient, tie me more inextricably to this little computer I carry in my pocket.  The better to know my habits, needs and preferences, the better to market to me. 

“They’re marketing to the wrong guy, Elie, we’ve just established what a shitty consumer you are.”  

OK.  That’s true.  But most people are perfectly suited for this kind of in your pocket continual reminder of the many, many great things money can buy.  And keeping in touch with the people they know, like my old friend who just sent me a beautiful video of the view from his kayak, shot ten minutes ago.

“Well, it’s nice that your friend can send you a nature video, that’s pretty cool, but the rest reflects the tragedy of misguided mankind right there.   The complete triumph of ever more invasive capitalism.    What’s the latest thing?  Want to search for images of naked ladies in a private browser that doesn’t record your searches?   Google now makes you sign in, so they can know if you like black chicks, or Asians, small ones, gigantic ones, young ones or old ones.  This is important information for those who pander to your id.   To those who pander best, go the spoils.  Expert pandering is the difference between winning or losing.”  

Thanks, as always, for the insight, dad.  I’ll catch you next time.  

“Be there, or be square, baby,” said the skeleton, with what might have been a wink.

“You awake now, Elie?  You snooze you lose, time is money, chop chop!” said the skeleton of my father gaily.    

Yeah.  Let’s go harvest the ducats, father.

“While you were sleeping, I was thinking.  I may have your theme here.  We had a lifelong argument over whether people could change their natures in a significant way.   You’ve written about that controversy here, but how ’bout you wrap the whole story in that fundamental question?   It’s bullshit that people can change themselves in any meaningful way vs. it’s essential that tormented people change themselves.  We went hundreds of rounds on this question.”  

Yes, and I can make a vigorous case for both sides at this point.  If you’re talking on the level of our essential DNA, our genetic predispositions, our body type, our immediate reflexes to react one way or another, there is only so much we can change.  

“OK, fine, but that’s not the point.  You were talking about moral growth, something I gave a lot of lip service to while I was strafing you and your sister over flank steak and rice-a-roni and telling you, through gritted teeth, that you were going to lose the war.  I think what you were hammering at was the need to develop self-critical insight and what I was defending against was the same thing.  You can’t keep machine gunning your children once you realize what you’re doing.  I had to insist I was right, you see, because my entire personal life was defending myself against the terror of who I thought I was.   No matter how much outward security I had, no matter how much status I achieved, I was always the dumbest, and poorest, Jewish kid in Peekskill — and a physically and emotionally abused one at that.”  

Still unthinkable to me.  Poor, I get that, and I have no doubt of the deep scars poverty leaves.  The physical and emotional abuse is beyond question. But the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill still sounds like an insane statement.   

“I could tell you more, but do you really want to veer from the work you might be able to get a  handle on today?” said the skeleton.  

Well, just to say that my theory is that you started school behind the eight ball, a year behind at least since you had to learn English while your little classmates laughed at you.  I also think your 20/400 vision was probably not discovered until after you were placed with other slow kids who couldn’t read.   In Peekskill 1930 I think the class was probably designated “The Retards Class” and the teacher probably addressed you all as such.  But you graduated Syracuse with honors and finished graduate studies at Columbia.  Isn’t there a scale where you weigh these factors and realize you couldn’t have been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill?  

“Well, that’s a fair question.  I’d say it takes some insight to connect the obvious dots like that sometimes.   That’s what our argument over change boils down to, the quest for insight and exploring possibilities vs. insistence that grim reality is immutable.  My failure was a failure of imagination and a lack of faith that anything could really change.  My life experience was that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how comfortably we lived, no matter how many people applauded me when I spoke, it made no difference.  Every night my demons were waiting for me, their pitchforks glowing red hot.   You see, that’s part of the whole pathology  of an adult who takes it out on his kids.”  

“It was easy for me to use the two of you as intellectual and emotional punching bags.  You two were always punching way above your weight class.  You remember Eli telling you about me getting angry at you one day, you must have been four or five, and I came over to menace you.  You said “Oh, big man, going to hit a little kid…” and Eli cracked up, as did mom and everyone else who heard it, and I lost my chance to smack you.”  

Well, to your credit, you were never much of a hitter.  Mom hit us more often than you did, or at least she hit me.  

“Yes, that’s true, but as we discussed, verbal violence, emotional abuse, is as damaging as a belt buckle or a fist.  Both attack your soul, your sense of personal safety, of ever feeling protected.  Abuse fundamentally alters your DNA, as that brilliant and striking pediatrician described in that TED talk you saw.  

“What causes one person to grow up and replicate that abuse and another to become a defender of the abused?   See, that’s a mysterious question, Elie.  Every abuser was once abused– you have that great George Grosz quote to that effect:  ‘to understand how a man can brutalize his fellow men you must study how he was brutalized’ or however he said it.  You can say, as I might have, that certain people are predisposed to a more heroic outlook than others, or that luck plays a role — something hard to deny, accident of birth, fortuitous meeting, wise mentor, and so forth — or you can say that each of us has the capacity to develop insight, to live more wisely, with less pain.”

Three large vultures soared over head.  The skeleton and I turned to watch them.  

“You know, as I was dying I thought what a shame it was that it would have to wait until after I was dead, if ever, to have this kind of conversation with you.  It’s easy to be a philosopher when you’re dead, Elie.  When we are alive, sometimes, it’s just one big fight, as your friend Albert King described his life of hard luck and trouble.”  

One of the vultures swung low, opened his curved beak and let out what sounded like a mocking laugh.  

“Fucking bird, what does he know?” said the skeleton.  “Carrion eating motherfucker!”

“Look, Elie, I know you have to leave momentarily or you’ll be late for your lunch date, but consider this organizing principle.   The difficult and unrecognized change you were forced to make in yourself in order to accommodate my refusal to change, even acknowledge the possibility of it.  It will take a bit of art, to avoid making this sound self-serving, how, as I was dying, I admitted you were right and I’d been a ‘horse’s ass’.  And, yeah, obviously, I also have no idea whose ass I pulled that ‘horse’s ass’ phrase out of.  I think it’s a good theme, that and well illustrated by how you were able to be so mild as I tried to make some kind of amends the best I could that last night of my life.”  

The lazily swooping vulture was now close enough that I could see his red face clearly.  It was not a good looking face in any way that I could see.   On the other hand, if I don’t get up and into the shower right now, I will be late for lunch.  

“Don’t be late for lunch, Elie, we’ll pick this thread up next time.”

“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.”