“You know, when you collect these last few posts and add them to the ms. you’ll have close to 700 pages of this ambitious Book of Irv,” said the skeleton of my father.  “Then, I understand, you’ll begin assembling them, organizing it by subject matter into chapters, cutting, pasting, weeding out the redundant passages that you’ve written multiple passes of, like yesterday’s, combining the best of them and so on.  How will you know when you’re done?”

A fair question.   I have to grant you part of what you always said about me:  “you’re not afraid of hard work, you can lay down right next to it and drop into a sound sleep.”  What you described above is hard work, Brownie.  

“Heck of a job, Brownie,” said the skeleton cheerfully.  

How will I know when I’m done?  That’s a $64,000 question.  I guess I’ll come to the part of the process where I’ve always hit the wall– getting the help of amiable and essential insiders I should have been lining up for my entire lifetime.  

Had I been the kind of person you always hated, the guy who figures out what he needs, works a room, drops business cards like Johnny Appleseed, glad-hands, winks, cultivates political alliances, makes sincere-looking expressions as potentially valuable strangers complain, I’d have a useful connection or two.  If I’d been that guy, I’d have people I could tap to read the first draft, and other people to introduce me to agents, and publishers, I’d have a connection.  One good connection is worth ten small strokes of luck.

“Yeah, well, sorry about that.  I always did hate those careerist types and I guess I imparted that strong distaste to you,” said the skeleton.    “I should have urged you to go to Harvard instead of City College, I suppose.”

Piss down the drain.   And the rest of that is down the road anyway.  I need to do all those things to get the ms. into readable shape before I can do any of that searching for how to get it into print, get paid something.    While I’m doing that I will produce discrete chapters, like the one on religion I’m planning to do this week and send to your nephew.  I will hopefully be able to get some short pieces published while I’m working on the next draft of the book.  When I have a couple published I should have a much easier time getting readers for the ms., an agent, etc.  That’s my plan, anyway.  

As for the short answer to your question, I’ll know we’re done here when someone I respect reads the manuscript and tells me she shed a few tears, had a couple of laughs and it made her think about her own life, imagine the ordeals her father must have endured.  I suppose that and a $64,000 check, payment in full for the proverbial question.  

“Well, strength to your arm, then, and best of luck,” said the skeleton.  

Gracias, papa.

The art of persuasion is, mainly, the art of properly framing the issue.  The frame you set the story in makes the story look the way it does.   

“Bingo,” said the skeleton of my father.  

“And by the way, my apologies for giving you the silent treatment the other day when you were up at our grave.   As much as I enjoy these chats, you know, I couldn’t resist giving you the bony cold shoulder on that wet, frigid day as your cousin planted his mother’s ashes in the grave my brother paid so many thousands of dollars for over the course of more than fifty years.

“I know you weren’t really expecting a cheerful greeting, Elie, but still, I wish I could have given you a sign, like knocking the rocks off the top of my gravestone when you put an arm around it for that photo Sekhnet told you not to smile for.  It’s all poignant shit, but beside the point, and ready to be snipped away and left on the cutting room floor.  At any rate, I didn’t mean to cut you off, geh ‘head.”  

The person who frames the conversation generally controls the conversation.  You had a particular genius for framing and constantly reframing conversations, on the fly, to suit the brow-beating you were intent on delivering.  

“Nice of you to say so,” said the skeleton, “if only I could have used my powers for good instead of evil…  

“Look, I had to do that to you and your sister, you understand.  You posed a constant, existential threat to me, the threat of revealing that I was actually a monster, even with my excellent and laudable intentions, a destroyer who deeply knew the value of nurturing and just couldn’t fucking do it.  So it was essential for me to always frame what we were talking about so I had the advantage, the moral high-ground from which to strafe you guys.  I’m not proud of that, Elie, but it’s an important facet of my personality and tactics you do well to point out.”  

Heh, yes, I know that.  After all, I am framing your story now, even as we speak.   Think about it, if only you knew at thirty-five what you first figured out as you were dying, what you know so well now that you’ve had almost twelve years in your grave to meditate on.  

“As if a pile of dry bones can fucking meditate…” said the skeleton wistfully.

Yes, of course, I suppose this whole conversation is an exercise in poetic license.  But, now, an example of the framing I was talking about.   It took me forty years, and law school, I suppose, to acquire the skill to consistently fight past your framing, but in the end, framing is a fairly crude, almost mechanical technique, even if you were infernally fast on your feet in shifting the frame whenever necessary.  That adroitness, dad, was a gift.  

“Well, in the end, you were able to beat me at my own game,” said the skeleton.  

But it took more than forty years of senseless fucking war.  Once I “won”, I gained nothing but the certainty of how tragic your desperation to win had always been.  

“Well, as Reagan said to Carter over and over, ‘there you go, again…’.  I know the example you’re going to bring up.”  

It’s a beauty, in its crudeness and simplicity.  Yom Kippur, around twenty-five years ago now.  Met you at Hillcrest after services, at the end of the fast.  The hypocrisy of the whole ritual of fake atonement chafed me like a wet, crusty diaper every step we took toward the house.  

“A truly disgusting image,” said the skeleton.  

For a truly disgusting thing.  Here is the holiest day of a religion whose moral teachings you tried to instill in my sister and me, The Day of Atonement, and there is no hint of remorse for anything you’ve ever done, not a thought of atonement.  You just fasted, and stood, and sat, and stood, and read responsively in a well-dressed crowd of the very people of whom Jesus reputedly said “woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”  

These good people were a cross-section of climbing middle class types, living a few blocks from people who’d managed to acquire some measure of real wealth, pretending, once a year, to be pious, God-fearing Jews.  They took a day off from their carping, grasping secular lives to mortify themselves, whether they needed it or not, not before those they had wounded but in front of a judgmental God who, if He even heard their prayers, is senile at best.  

I used to think God went mad with grief over centuries of heart-break, watching what humans did to each other, to the world He created.  If He had been all-knowing and all-powerful and full of mercy at one time, He’d been broken by the viciousness of the worst of his Creation.   I’m no longer committed to that youthful metaphor.  God is the fantasy crutch religious fanatics use to beat nonbelievers to death with.  “God is a concept, by which we measure our pain”– John Lennon.

“Yeah, we get it, on with it, MacDuff,” said the skeleton.

On Yom Kippur we’re expected to make amends, go to people we’ve hurt and tell them we’re aware that we hurt them, and that we regret it, and to ask their forgiveness and promise to do a better job being decent in the coming years.   Instead, for the vast majority of modern Jews, Yom Kippur is a long, somber synagogue service and quick stepping it home after a day of fasting and praying, bad-breathed and longing for a drink of juice, some food, caffeine.  

So we are walking along Union Turnpike, God has already sealed each of our fates for the coming year, and snarling silently between us, as always, this senseless enmity.  

“Seenas Cheenam, my mother, may she rest in peace, always called it when my brother and I went at each other.  ‘Groundless Hatred’ I suppose is the translation from the original Hebrew, which she pronounced in Yiddish.  She was a deeply religious woman with no clue, and I, in turn, in spite of my great understanding, and every reason to know better, had no fucking clue,” said the skeleton.  

So we walk along Union Turnpike in the gathering darkness, get to 190th, cross over, and finally I can hold it in no longer.  I say to you “I am willing to listen to your fatherly advice, but if you can’t filter out the hostility, I am not willing to continue this charade.  You use s0-called fatherly advice as a delivery system for your rage and I’m not having that any more.”  

You say you have no idea what I’m talking about.  I quote your recent statement, when grudgingly agreeing to cut me a check for a final course towards my teaching certificate, after my unemployment ran out, toward the end of my savings.  

“Well, I’ll give you the $169, not that I feel obliged to, and I don’t like the way you asked me, but you have to admit it’s pretty pathetic for a thirty-six year-old man to have to beg his father to pay for his course.   You’re unemployed for a very good reason, you have no respect for authority and you feel you’re too good to work.  You’ve always had that, you know, a genius shouldn’t have to work.  I know your friends are kiss-asses you’ve surrounded yourself with to tell you what you want to hear, that you are special, and sensitive, and talented and so forth.  But I’m your father, and I’m always going to tell you the truth– the reason you can’t hold a job is the same reason you’ve never had a girlfriend for very long and don’t have one now — you’re lazy and selfish and you think the world owes you a living.”  

My father’s face shows no sign of yielding.  I’ve quoted him accurately, everything he said is true, what is the fucking problem? We are in the house now, my mother greets us and asks if we’re hungry.  The food smells great, we are hungry.  

My father says “I really have no idea what you want from me.”  We sit across from each other in the living room as my mother goes back into the kitchen.  

“I want you to think before you give me your advice.  I want you to consider what will help me and what is just venting anger at me.  I want you to make an effort to filter out the anger and tell me the thing you believe I need to know.  I’m willing to listen, I’m not willing to be abused.”  

“Well, this is pretty abstract, I mean, I really have no idea what the hell you’re talking about…” he says, eyes shifting as they always did at such times.  

“OK, let me try to make it more concrete.  When you paid for that course at Lehman last month you attached the condition that I accept your opinion of me: pathetic, surrounded by spineless, ass-kissing friends who flatter me, unable to keep a job, or a girlfriend, for the very real reason that I am some kind of lazy, self-centered asshole.”

As far as my father can see, I’d stated basic, indisputable facts pretty succinctly.  He waits, dukes up, wary, ready to counter my next move.  

“So, let us assume, for the sake of this discussion, that all of that is true.  I won’t dispute any of it.  But what proportion of my total being is encompassed in that unflattering description?  Maybe 25%? I mean, aren’t we leaving out things like my basically generous disposition, sense of humor, self-deprecation, general acceptance of people, willingness to listen, my intelligence, integrity, kindness to animals, a lot of other things? You’re reducing me to the sum of my faults and expecting me to accept that picture as the totality of who I am.  I’m not having that anymore.”  

“You know, I really don’t get what you expect me to do about any of that,” says my father, with every appearance of deep conviction.  

“Let me try this again.  I am willing to listen to your wisdom about life, but only if you’re not using the conversation to force the poison pill on me that condemns me as a failed human being.  I am more than the sum of my weaknesses, everybody is.  I agreed for the sake of argument that I’m all those negative things you laid out– but there is an argument to made for each one being less than 100% true.  For example, I am one of the vast majority of teachers, something like 80%, that the system loses to attrition in the first few years.  Most teachers quit the fucking system if they find any remotely better way to make a living.  It’s not necessarily a referendum on my character that I am not currently teaching in New York City Public Schools.”  

“Yeah,” says my father, jumping on this chance to reframe what we’re talking about, “but not every teacher gets fired from every single school he ever worked at.  You’ve been, literally fired from every job you ever had, inside and outside of teaching, do you realize that?  What does that say about you?”  

“It says that I’m less able than most people to accept being treated like an asshole by a boss who, everybody else knows, has the prerogative to fire you if you get the last word,” I say.  

“Oh, so now it’s a virtue that you can’t take a normal amount of shit like everyone else who has to eat a certain amount of shit to make a living,” says my father.  

“No,” I say, “I agree it’s a disability.  I don’t say it’s a virtue, it’s something I need to work on.  But we are getting far from what I need you to understand.”  

“You’re not explaining it very well, you know, you just want the right to be outraged and attack me for my so-called abuse when all I’ve ever wanted is what’s best for you,” says my father, playing another favorite card from the bottom of his deck.  

“Well, then let me explain it again.  I’m willing to hear your advice, and appreciate any insight you have to offer, but I’m not willing to be reduced to the sum of my faults.  If you can’t manage to separate those two things, I’m not continuing this false and destructive relationship with you.  We’re done, if you can’t manage to lose the constant hostility you disguise as fatherly advice,” I say.  

At this point he’s had enough.  “Well, what we should really be talking about is your titanic fucking anger.  You get into a self-righteous rage and just fucking explode, that’s what we should be talking about, your fucking need to be right and rage whenever you feel like it.”  

“Do I appear to be enraged right now?” I ask with exaggerated quietness.  He clamps his jaw.  

“What does that have to do with anything?” he asks.  

“Would you say you’re a man of more than average intelligence?” I say.  

“I suppose so, what does that have to do with anything?” he says.

“Well, I’ve had to explain the same relatively straightforward thing to you now several different ways and you still act like you don’t understand,” I say.    

“What does that have to do with anything?” he asks, clearly not thinking things through.  

“Well, don’t you think it might be frustrating to have to explain the same relatively simple idea now three or four different ways, and have a father of above-average intelligence keep acting like he has no idea what you’re talking about?”  I say.  

“What’s your point?” he says pointedly.  

“Do I look enraged?  Am I raising my voice or acting angry?  So my temper, however fucking terrible it might sometimes be, is not the issue here.   The issue is that another Yom Kippur has now passed with the same result– zilch.  I’m not even asking for an apology from you.   I’m telling you what I’m prepared to accept from you going forward and what I’m not prepared to accept.”

He makes a grudging acknowledgement that he gets what I’m saying, says he’ll try to do better, we go in and break the fast.

He’s as good as his word, for the next ten years or so he manages to filter out most of that rage.  When I point out in his Florida den years later that even he’s changed, by way of showing the possibility that humans can actually change, he laughs with Dick Cheney-like mirth.  

“No, I didn’t,” he said, “I pretended to change, just like you asked, on a purely superficial level.”  

“Well, that made a big positive difference in our relationship,” I pointed out.  

“Not really,” he said, “because below the surface act, which you demanded I perform, I never felt any differently about you.  If I ever told you how I really feel it would do such irreparable harm that we could never have any kind of relationship.”  

After a moment I told him he’d won, that we’d do it his way, never talk about anything deeper than a baseball game, health or politics. Paid a hell of a price to win, I think.  

“Yop,” said the skeleton, “and I kept thinking about my willingness to pay that insane price as I was dying, hoping you’d be as gentle as you wound up being to a father who’d treated you like that.”  

All we can do is hope for the best, dad.

In trying to tell the whole, complicated, often contradictory, story of, say, your tragic and difficult father, you sometimes come up against the question of how far you should go.  You should go as far as you possibly can, I believe, clearly set out as much for the reader’s consideration as possible, never leave them hanging for information they need to decide for themselves.  

I seem to have only one other rule for myself: do no harm to any loved one involved who might one day read the pages.  

This rule is not absolute.  I have described my only uncle, for example, with little apparent sympathy.  I wondered if these pages might offend his son, so I ran them by him.  He gave me a hearty thumbs up for the accurate portrait.  My cousin was the person I was concerned about possibly hurting in that case.  My uncle, being dead, is not going to be offended.  

Eli, years ago, exacted my promise to wait until everyone in the stories he told me was dead before writing about them. At this point everyone in Eli’s stories is dead.   Still, there are people alive who might be offended by certain true things I might report.  

Nothing, I see now, hurts with more force than true things set in a harsh light. I weigh this as I try to tell the truest story I am able to tell, lit from as many angles as I can.  Every specific detail I can supply is necessary to make my father’s story as true to life as I can make it.

There is a character or two I am unable to include in this story of my father, which I regret, because their relationship would shed tremendous light on the old man’s struggle to be a good man, in the teeth of his often overwhelming anger.   I must, sadly, tell the story around these characters.  But the vast majority of the crucial characters are fair game, and unoffendable, being dead.  As long as I give the most nuanced version of events I can, I don’t feel like I’m being unfair to anyone’s memory.

This rule about doing no harm, clearly, almost never applies to people who’ve forfeited my good will by raging at me.   In those cases, fairness to myself overwhelms any duty I might once have felt toward them.  While some people may have no problem being the recipients of snarls, particularly if followed by even a mumbled apology, no matter how pointedly defensive, I am not one of these.  

If someone comes at me too enraged to speak, particularly if my transgression has been minor (nothing, of course, is minor to the aggrieved), and then is not amendable to reason, they lose the right to complain if I’m compelled to set out every crucial detail of the conflict, so that someone else can understand the entire reason their actions were so hurtful.

“Oh stop with the fucking hurtfulness!” said the skeleton.  “You know, most people eat a lot more shit in life than you do.  You should grow up, Hurt Boy.”

My sister and I were never allowed to make our case, state our feelings, receive an apology when we were unfairly attacked or roughly treated.  We were finessed, misdirected, blamed again, shouted down by our wildly emotional parents: the brilliant prosecutor father, our brilliant poetic mother.  

Our basic right to be heard was almost never honored.  I understand this happened to you too, dad, in an equally brutal, far less intellectual way, as it also happened to mom.   It happens, in some form, to many, many people, the bulk of whom never complain– but there are always consequences to being mistreated this way.  It manifested in you as a need to be right at all costs, to dominate, to feel somehow powerful, even as a despairing certainty of your own powerlessness gnawed at your soul. 

It manifests in me as a need to not paper over my feelings.  I have the good fortune, which doubles as a handy curse, to have acquired the patience to find the words I need.   This ability now serves my need to express exactly what it is I find myself grappling with.  

I go as far as I feel I need to go to explain things properly to myself and to the reader, our way in the darkness illuminated by words, feeling their way along, trying to get to the bottom of the matter somehow.  How far I will go is limited only by my ability to describe the thing I am looking for, with the caveat about weighing what I discover to make sure I’m not hurting loved ones.

“Jesus Christ, Elie, let sleeping skeletons lie, would you?” said the skeleton of my father over his shoulder, annoyed again at a visit from his son on a chilly autumn day in the boneyard.  “I can’t take another long, bitter anecdote about nothing and I don’t feel much like having words put between my jaws today either.”  

Perfectly understandable, dad.  You know, at this point, after a couple of days on too little sleep, I am cranky, feeling a little crazy too.  

“‘A little crazy, too,‘ you say?  Too?  You mean, like me– a dead man trying to rest in peace whose fucking insane son won’t shut up and keeps putting imaginary words in his dead mouth?  Is that the other crazy person you’re referring to in this, eh, conversation?” said the skeleton.  

Point taken.  I got distracted yesterday and we never really touched on the larger point I was trying to get to with you.  

“Ah, the larger point we were going to discuss… You do realize…” said the skeleton.

Of course.  Do you remember that one moment, during one of our countless fights in the kitchen, when you were struck almost dumb when I called you “weird”?  

“No,” said the skeleton, “I remember that feeling the time you called me a cunt, but that was in the living room.  I don’t remember you calling me weird.  You called me weird?”  the skeleton showed a trace of his original flushed reaction to being called weird.

“Weird?!” you said, in an almost-squawk, with the closest to mom’s smile of hurt on your face I’ve ever seen.  You stood up, turned in an oddly chicken-like manner and said again “weird?”  You had a very peculiar expression on your face, like I’d touched a nerve that both hurt and tickled.  You were like a giant, incredulous bird, feathers ruffled, beak askew. “Weird?” you said again as you passed awkwardly behind me and out of the kitchen.

“Odd,” said the skeleton. 

I get that it’s time for me to roll up my sleeves and start organizing this material into as coherent a narrative as I can.  There is something neurotic, at best, about continuing to mine my memory when there is already a mountain of material to work with.  

“You said it, Charlie, not me,” said the skeleton, channeling his cousin Eli.  

It’s just been bothering me that I haven’t yet expressed very well the real genius of your technique.  

“Are there no earplugs for a poor dead man?” called the skeleton mournfully.  

(Look, it’s easy for you to be adorable now, everybody loves a talking skeleton.  

“Why dignify a throwaway line that’s going to be lost in the rewrite anyway?” asked the skeleton rhetorically.)

Maybe every father has inherent persuasive powers over his children.  I suppose that has to be true, at least initially.  The father lays something out, the children have no reason to doubt him.  That is probably the case.  Yet, I think you had more than ordinary powers in that regard.  You were able to opine quite convincingly about matters that did not bear much scrutiny.  You had a certain Walter Cronkite-like believability, even when you were spouting complete bullshit.  

“Well, at least my son hasn’t inherited any of that,” said the skeleton, doing his best to smirk.  

You instilled in your daughter and me, along with values well worth valuing, stories about us that were completely, wildly, unexplainably, false and destructive.  

“Yes, and I apologized abstractly about all that before I died, what’s your point?” said the skeleton testily.  

I have no point.  I’m painting a picture, trying to make it as detailed, nuanced, and lifelike as I can.   This is all illusion, you understand, brush strokes on a two dimensional canvas doing their best to evoke a deep, living, three dimensional world.    Our lives are a kind of illusion, these fleeting things we believe have some kind of permanence. We are each a ticking time bomb genetically programmed to explode. On a cellular level, every one of these amazing living machines of bone, nerve and muscle that are the vehicles for our consciousness, are born with the seeds of our demise already germinated.  Everything alive that we look at, one day dead, every one of them gone, in the blink of an eye.    The most wonderful paintings ever done only evoke this precious, dying thing in a way that gives a shudder of recognition, of wonder.

 “Leave the poetry to your nephew, the boy of few words,” said the skeleton.  

I am working my way to the bottom of it, that’s all I’m saying.  I want to show what it feels like to be sitting at the kitchen table, at seven, eight, nine years old.  Across from you is the father who is your first model of how to act.  

He tells you gruffly, in connection to God only knows what, that it’s complete crap, the old cliche that the “army makes you a man.”  You consider this as he explains, “the army never made anyone a man.  If you’re not a man when you go in, you’re not going to be made into a man by the army.”  

You listen to this as if it’s as serious a thought as his description of our moral duty to be humane to helpless animals.  You have no way to discern one thing from the other when your father is telling it to you.

To a child, the parent sharing deep thoughts is a kind of oracle.  You tend to believe them, why wouldn’t you?  My sister told me recently that she was forty before she began realizing how much of what we heard was just the endless other-blaming anger of a man who should never have had children.   She has also said “we ruined his life.  If either of them had any chance of happiness before we came along, our arrival ended that.”  

I have another take.  It’s hard for me to give him a pass for being such an ogre of a father and I don’t think we have to share the blame for it.  Pain does not give you the right to be a prick to a child.  Sorry about that.  My sister agrees 100% with this idea.  Whatever happened to you, that’s your’s to deal with.  Once you take it out on another person, particularly a tiny, trusting one  — you lose any moral authority your pain might have given you.

“Well, again, very easily said in the rarefied air of your childless study, sir,” said the skeleton.  “You have no idea what the pressure of being a father and provider puts on a person.”  

I am focusing on how you practiced your art.  Not every father has the particular genius you displayed.  It is worth taking some trouble to set out as plainly and exactly as I can.  

“When you and your mother got home from the hospital we put your crib on my side of the bed.  I’d wake up and you’d be staring at me with those big, dark, accusing eyes,” my father always described his earliest memories of me.  “You were, from the beginning, a very angry kid.  You were just born that way, some babies are.”

It didn’t take me forty years to see the absurdity of this idea.  I saw it at once and every time I heard it repeated and insisted on.  I’d ask if he had any idea how ridiculous the notion of a newborn baby staring accusingly at his father was.  How would a two week-old form the consciousness required for an accusation?  “Oh, you absolutely did,” my father would reply.  “No question.”

My mother would generally leap in, to back up my father’s claim.  The next thing they’d cite was the irrefutable corroborating conclusion of a quack pediatrician who’d laughed to reassure the worried young parents that their beet red ten-week old with the tiny clenched fists was merely having an unbelievably precocious, and completely irrational, temper tantrum.  

“They should never have had children,” my sister always says these days.  “They had no business being parents.”  

Personally, I’m glad that they had my sister and me.  But my sister has a point.  

As a kid I’d get mad when my parents refused to back down from their absurd and childish insistence that their son was born enraged, ‘born with a hard-on against the world’ was the phrase they both used.  Yep, that baby hated the world so much, he wanted to fuck it.

Even as a young child, it was already impossible for me to believe they couldn’t entertain a single possible reason– outside of their bad luck to have been saddled with an irrationally angry, even vicious, baby– why their baby could have been unhappy enough to clench his fists, stiffen his body and cry inconsolably.  

Could I have been crying because I was cold, mom?  I asked.  You’re always hot, and pregnant women are famously warmer than usual, with that little furnace they carry in their wombs,  so you would have been very uncomfortable by June, and it was a warm spring the year I was born.  

Is it impossible that while you were enjoying a blessedly delightful cool breeze your baby, skinny and fussy, was freezing in the stroller and you had no idea why he could possibly be crying, and clenching his fists, and turning red?  And the longer he was cold, and the longer you didn’t feel his hands, or his ears, and see that, Jesus, the angry little bastard’s actually cold, the more righteously angry anybody unable to otherwise express that he needed something  he couldn’t get for himself would have become?   

“Hah,” said the skeleton,”you see, even now you’re getting angry just thinking about it.”  

You got the wrong ah-ha! out of that ah-ha! moment, dad.  You and mom were raised by brutal mothers who broke up your first love affairs and shoved all kinds of disgusting things down your throat.

“You leave our mothers out of this!” screamed the skeleton.  “No, I’m kidding.   Look, this is a reasonable point.  I’m dead, I’ve got no skeletal dog in this fight any more.   What you’re saying is true, much as I hate to admit it.  

“I lived my whole life afraid and angry and my high functioning intellect, complete with top shelf powers of expression and argumentation, was the survival mechanism I had to work with. You use what you have to defend yourself.  What I had was a high functioning intellect.  That’s the whole tragedy of this fucking world, Elie– the misuse of high functioning intellects.   Geniuses of persuasion selling misery and mass death like it was a magic cure.  

“You remember that line from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men?  He talks about how dumb guys are frequently nice, but how smart fellows are more often than not pricks?  You can find the exact quote on-line, have Jeeves fetch it for you, but the eternal truth of that has an intuitive rightness to it. 

Here you go.  George is telling Slim about how his simpleton sidekick Lennie won’t ever fight back or be mad at George no matter what terrible thing George does to him.  Slim expresses disbelief that Lennie never gets angry, never?  And George says:

No, by God! I tell you what made me stop playing jokes. One day a bunch of guys was standin’ aroun’ up on the Sacramento River. I was feelin’ pretty smart. I turns to Lennie and I says, “Jump in.”

SLIM. What happened?

GEORGE. He jumps. Couldn’t swim a stroke. He damn near drowned. And he was so nice to me for pullin’ him out. Clean forgot I tole him to jump in. Well, I ain’t done nothin’ like that no more. Makes me kinda sick tellin’ about it.

SLIM. He’s a nice fella. A guy don’t need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to be sometimes it’s jest the other way round. Take a real smart guy, he ain’t hardly ever a nice fella.

“Yop, don’t take great powers of intellect to be a nice person, only decency.  Which, as you know, is implanted by people treating you decently and kindly when you are weak, and needy.   What was done to me, and what I did to you and your sister, was the opposite.  

“‘Oh, you need something from me, you needy little fuck?  I’ll show you need!’ and then, in my mother’s case, may she rest in peace, a whip across my little face.  In your case, an argument so insane nobody with any sense could hear it applied to him without getting mad.  When you react indignantly, there’s the proof that you are an irremediably angry, indignant little fuck.  

“Look, I get it.  That’s why your writer buddy’s recent display of his asshole was so distasteful to you. He encouraged your progress with this book, then ignored you, then pretended he hadn’t, then blamed you for being a needy pussy by not just continuing to follow up with him when you never heard back.  I understand, and no-one wants to hear anything more about that particular brilliant jackass, but there is a connection there worth making.

 “You had a moment in your chat with Howie’s widow the other night when you described my strategic use of silence as turning silence by way of response into kryptonite for you.  That was apt. The favorite weapons our loved ones used against us become like kryptonite, act on us with disproportionate devastation.  You’re certainly not alone in being hurt by a nonresponse, most people are, but you’re more than averagely sensitized to it wounding you deeply.

“You’d need something from me and express it, and I’d just … make it disappear.  You know, a little dab of silence’ll do ya.  So you’d ask again, now you’d be pestering me and your tone would take on a more desperate edge.  I’d take a breath, give you a little more silence.  Then, if you insisted on not taking the rather hurtful hint, and asked again with any trace of a whine, you were being a whining little pain in the ass, and I’d note that, and then you’d get mad and you’d become an angry fucking little pain in the fucking ass.  Then you’d say “fuck you, too, you’re a fucking pain in the ass” and mom would jump in and start screaming at how you had no respect for your parents.  

“Kind of funny when you picture the enraged little kid squeakily telling his parents to go fuck themselves, but not really ‘ha ha’ funny or any kind of laugh riot. Not that funny at all, really.”  The skeleton absently scratched the side of his jaw, at a loss for anything else to do.  

Well, dad, as Clint Eastwood says to his actors when they’ve done a take he’s satisfied with “… that’s enough of that, boys….”

The skeleton of my father, as often happened to the man when he was alive, woke up in a vaguely foul mood.  “I’m walking on the ocean floor, sideways, clicking my claws,” the skeleton warned.  

So be it.  You know, progress is rarely a straight linear thing anyway.  You take two steps forward, one back, you write a haiku about peace, step sideways, click your claws, gnash your terrible teeth.   I’ve been alive long enough to see this process many times.  It doesn’t mean we can’t or don’t change, it means we have to keep working on the process.  

“Funny to get a lecture about work from you,” said the skeleton. “But let’s leave that hilarity aside for the moment.  I understand that you really believe I was, in some real way, a little bit insane, and that you, from the beginning, were the more sane one.  Do I have that right?”  

I can go with that.  

“Why not?  You fucking wrote it,” said the skeleton, “like every other thing I ‘say’… but I suppose it’s too late for me to squawk about that.  In for a penny, in for 26,000,000 dollars.”

Thank you for that opening to vent some gratuitous viciousness.  You know, sometimes, once you’re pegged as vicious unfairly, and you’ve experienced it yourself enough, the impulse to have the last, mean word becomes irresistible.

“Oh, no,” said the skeleton, “I’m not fucking dealing with this right now.”  He turned his head to the side to indicate his determination not to deal with any of this.

It’s not about you, dad.  

“Oh, then, by all means, go ahead!” said the skeleton brightly.

 Insane and sane are such porous and inexact categories.  In a clinical sense I don’t think you were actually insane at all, or that I was ever close to being insane either.  

“Well, the narrator of the Tell-tale heart felt the same way,” said the skeleton, “and you know how much good that did him when the detectives showed up.  Very few insane people think they’re insane, that’s a common feature of insanity.  What’s your point?”

My former buddy the writer’s terrible burden, the unspeakable secret that made him wild when it was betrayed, even with the tiniest hint.   He’s affable, he’s salt of the earth, he’s hard working, he’s frugal, he believes everyone should pay their own way, that over-tipping is as bad as under-tipping and that you don’t count the tax when figuring the 15%.

“You really are a vicious bastard, aren’t you, for all the work you’ve done to remain mild,” said the skeleton, waiting with a smile for the truly vicious part.  

Well, look, I’m trying to paint a detailed picture in very murky light here, dad.  I have to use every tool I can think of to bring out the likeness– plus, like I said, there’s still bile in the back of my throat about my ungenerous writer friend and his one-way sensitivity.  How do you portray another person’s inner life?  You can only really see it in relation to others– your thoughts when you’re alone are unknowable.  I need to show you in action as much as I can figure out how to do.

 “Well, you lost me, but don’t get diverted from your vicious purpose here,” said the skeleton.

OK, so you have dinner with this writer once a year or so and he’s affable, a great story-teller, a raconteur, comme disent les grenouilles.   Many of his stories involve the blue collar work he’s been doing for the last decade or two, after his lucrative freelance corporate writing gigs finally dried up.  

He talks of his adventures as a low-paid case worker at an agency that helps adults who can’t manage their own affairs and are in danger of losing their homes, some truly crazy tales.  He sometimes has a story about his days training to be an Emergency Services worker in an ambulance crew.  He speaks with great pride of some of his writing students in the English-as-a -second language writers’ workshop he currently conducts at a community center.  He’s always working, thinks it’s dreadful to have idle hands and too much time on them.  I saw him turn pale when I told him all I was doing these days was writing.

“Well, he’s not unique in any of that.  Most people live to work and work to live and many of their ready anecdotes are about things that happen at work.  It’s where people meet other people, interact, etc.  Not everyone sits inside doing unpaid typing about events inside their head all day every day, making ponderous internet pronouncements, talking on the phone once in a while.  I mean, what is your fucking point?” said the skeleton, annoyed, among other things, at this delay in getting to the vicious part.

All true, here’s the rest.  To anyone sitting at the dinner table, he is the most regular, normal, good guy you could want to have dinner with.  He may mention the Superbowl he attended a few years back when his team, after a long drought, played somewhere down south.   It was a great game, a historic and dramatic victory.  He doesn’t mention how many thousands he paid for the ticket, or the trip to the game, flights and hotels being obscenely expensive in the host city where everyone wants to be for the big game.   A huge outlay of cash was involved to sit in a seat at a madly popular sporting event.  He makes minimum wage at the community center.

“You vicious fucking asshole!” I can hear his ex wife screaming, from the call center she works at.   I am about to betray her too.  

“Jesus Christ, Elie, this fucking story again?  I thought you’re done with this fucking story.  You keep promising you’re done with it,” said the skeleton.  “Talk about being insane….”  

Keep your shroud on, pops, I am getting close to my vicious yet salient point.  His ex is furious because I should have assumed that what she told me was in strictest confidence because it’s something her ex husband wants nobody to know under any circumstances.  This affable blue collar guy, you understand, it’s a terrible fucking secret.   

“OK, so you’re pulling back the curtain on a case you say illustrates being insane, or something to that effect,” said the skeleton.  

They had an amicable divorce with a mediator they both loved.  The soon-t0-be ex wife wanted to open a bookstore in New Hampshire after the divorce, it had been a lifetime dream of this brilliant, book-loving, intermittently terribly depressed old friend of mine. They’d been married for fifteen or more years, still loved each other, but had decided it was time to split up and that she was going to move out of the city to pursue a lifelong dream.   She was also going to write a novel, or collection of short stories, anyway, as she interacted with local book lovers by day.  

“OK, none of this sounds insane in the least, or even particularly interesting,” said the skeleton.  

No need to be surly so close to payday, dad.  They worked everything out beautifully and both felt very good about the arrangement.  

“OK, mazel tov for them, I’m very happy now.  They all fucking lived happily ever after,” said the skeleton.

Yeah.  The ex-wife got a lump sum payment of $75,000 which allowed her to open the bookstore and stock it with used books. When she told me how happy she was, I congratulated her, told her $75,000 sounded very generous.  

“Oh, it is,” she said, “unless you consider the $26,000,000 still remaining in his trust fund.”

She might as well have asked me if I ‘d like her to cut my penis off.  I could not have been more shocked.  I knew the guy for more than twenty years, he never gave a hint.  We split every check, he wished me the very best for my non-profit, but was one of only two friends who never contributed even $25 when I begged for donations.  

“So what?  Another rich asshole.  Don’t you know they have another fucking set of rules they play by?  What is the point of this fucking story?  What is the point of any of your fucking stories?”  the skeleton said this in a way that could be fairly described as a snarl.

Hard to answer that shortly.  If I could tell you in a sentence now I suppose I wouldn’t need the fucking stories themselves.

I guess when one person spends a life in therapy because another person has convinced them they are insane, it’s a fair question which of the two is the truly mad one.   You predicted that I’d spend years trying to undo the damage you were doing to me when I was a young kid.  You were a regular Nostradamus on that one.  You should be very proud that it took your daughter forty years to realize you had rigged the game like an ingenious mad man to ensure that your victims felt like perpetrators and that your prophecy came true.  Must make you very proud, dad.

“It does not make me proud at all, as you know very well,” said the skeleton, “now do us both a big favor and get the fuck out of here.”

This is going way back, I was probably in fourth grade at P.S. 178.  I was maybe nine or ten.   J0hn F. Kennedy was already dead, my father’s psoriasis was already an ongoing problem.  I knew by then that around thirteen years before I was born grandma and pop’s families back in Vishnevitz had been killed by the Nazis.  

My father had become angry when I kept inquiring about the Nazis, told me basically to be a man about it and stop whining.   In second grade I’d been my beautiful young teacher’s pet, though Mrs. Endleman could also tell I was a sensitive and troubled boy.  She wrote a beautiful letter to that effect to my parents.  In third grade I began acting out.  

I had my favorite teacher, probably ever, Mary Richert.  My best friend that year was the first black kid in my class, Bryan Blackman.  Young negroes, as they were then called, began arriving by bus in that first year of integration.   Bryan and I hit it off right away, ran down the halls whenever we could.  One beautiful spring day, after an outdoor punch ball game in the school yard, we stayed in gym after the class headed back up to the room in an orderly line behind Miss Richert.  

The idea of going back up to class on such a perfect afternoon was very painful to us at that moment.  Bryan and I raced up and down the empty gym and practiced hook slides on the lacquered wooden floor.  There were bases painted on the floor of the gym, in the corners of a painted diamond, now that I think about it.  I got a nasty floor burn on the inside of my elbow on my last slide, executing a daring steal of third. I recall it stung like hell and took a long time to heal, but I didn’t really care.  

When we got back to class, sweaty and laughing, shirt collars open, ties off, our faces wet from a good long drink at the water fountain, Miss Richert, who loved us both, was beside herself.  Too angry to speak she stalked over to her closet and yanked out the grey metal box containing our permanent record cards.  She made a notation in pen on each of our permanent records.   Somewhere those records, if they still exist (and how could they not, if they’re permanent?), indicate exactly what she wrote.  We saw nothing but her rage as she made the slashing permanent notations as the class looked on in shocked silence.

We remained her favorites, though we continued to try her patience.  I learned decades later when I visited the school as an adult that our third grade class had been her first year teaching.   She was a wonderful woman with a great sense of humor.   She was a great teacher.  She was an inspiration to me.

In fourth grade, I guess it was, my mother began to pick me up early at school once a week, or maybe every other week.  The class would be starting to get ready for dismissal, copying the homework off the blackboard and so forth, but I’d get out before any of them could leave.  My mother and the teacher must have made arrangements, because the teacher just waved with a little smile as I left, maybe fifteen minutes, or a half hour, before the rest of the little prisoners.  I remember the weather was nice, I don’t recall having a winter coat or any other gear, so it may have been early fall, or possibly spring.  

My mother would hand me a snack and drive from the school to Sutphin Boulevard.  I always loved the ridiculous name of that boulevard, which I’d later come to know as a stop on the subway home from the city.  At Sutphin my mother would park and we’d walk over to the Bloyler Building and take an elevator, with an old fashioned folding brass grate, shiny where the operator pushed and pulled it, up to an office where my mother waited outside while I went in to speak to a woman who had a lot of questions for me.  

“I hear you like to draw, Eliot,” the woman said.  I did, as a matter of fact, and she handed me some drawing paper.  I had my favorite drawing pencils with me.  She had a lot of questions about what I was drawing.  I don’t remember many, but I do remember one, because it shocked me at the time.  “What kind of sick fuck?” I remember thinking when she asked it.

I drew a guy, kind of a skinny alien-looking character with bug eyes.  It was a character I was drawing often at that time.  She probably asked about his eyes, and I made up some answer for her on the spot.  Truthfully, I had no idea why I liked drawing his eyes that way at that particularly time, I just did.   I continued to draw.  As I drew a belt on his pants she asked me why I was drawing the belt there.   I told her it was to hold up his pants.  She asked why I drew it so low.  I told her I didn’t know.  Then she fixed me with a strange look and asked “are you ever afraid that somebody’s going to cut off your penis?”  

You could have blown me over with a feather.  The idea, truly, had never occurred to me, but it was one of those images you get that become hard to unsee.  Being killed by Nazis, sure, that thought bothered me a lot, but having my penis cut off?  What?  I told her I wasn’t afraid of having my penis cut off, damn it, but I also didn’t want her to get any ideas about it.  It was certainly not OK to me if someone planned to cut my penis off, I could tell her that for sure.  I had no idea where the hell was she going with this crazy line of questioning. 

I remember my mother crying when I gave her shit about this lady’s questions.  My father shook his head, already frustrated, defeated and starting to get angry.  There appeared to be no help for me.  I was winning battle after battle in the house and at school, but it was only a matter of time before I lost the war, according to my dad.  

He predicted a long life of whining to shrinks about how terrible my parents had been to me.   I told him he might have a point there, that maybe he should change tactics, start being less terrible.  He absolutely hated it when I had a smart answer like that.  Thinking back now, with the gift of adult hindsight, I understand why that was.

“You might win this battle,” he said with great disgust,  his teeth practically gritted “but believe me, you’re going to lose the war.”  

I dare say the man was nearly right.  Took a bit of shrapnel, inhaled some chlorine and was subjected to several brutal techniques during my extended captivity, but the war didn’t beat me, in the end.   In fact, it made me even stronger than the narrator of the Tell-tale Heart.   I can give you the names of half a dozen shrinks I talked to over the years who will tell you the same thing.  

“This piece was fine, until you ruined it with the cutesy ending,” said the skeleton, a piece of grass held pensively between his teeth.  

Grandma used to tell me the same thing sometimes about my drawings and paintings.  

“Grandma wasn’t wrong, Elie,” said the skeleton, returning to his drowsy nap.  

That’s the beauty of the rewrite, I thought, suddenly feeling drowsy as hell myself.