Author Archives: oinsketta

What’s up with the constant fucking writing, anyway?

I can’t get away from it, however quietly these words fall in the woods.  It makes no sense to write, in a sense, if the writing is not read by readers.  We write by imagining the reader when there is no actual reader.  Writing is part of that oldest human longing: to connect with another.   I suppose that’s what most posting on the internet is driven by — the seeking of connection, the desire to have a conversation.   

Kurt Vonnegut always wrote to his perfect reader, I think it was his sister.  He always imagined her intelligent face reading the words he was writing and he wrote in a way that would tickle and provoke her.  If he knew she’d be happy with it, it was ready to send out to those who sometimes buy such things to publish.

Not saying it was any easier then than it is today for someone like the hardworking Mr. Vonnegut to find readers who would pay for his writing.  To be sure, it was very hard.  We know his work only because he persisted, kept writing, being rejected, rewriting, waking early to write, writing after a long day as a hack in some public relations department, making connections and gaining the support of people in the publishing world who championed his writing, what today would be called “his brand”.  I’m not saying there was anything easy or inevitable about Kurt Vonnegut’s great success, or anything unmerited about it.

I’m just imagining living in an era where there are dozens of popular magazines that millions of people read every month.  Actual paper periodicals that tens of thousands of people would pick up periodically, buy and read.  These magazines published all kinds of writing for every imaginable audience.  When a writer (and not everyone felt entitled to be a writer back then) found an audience, that magazine would apparently pay enough, buying four or five pieces a year, for the writer to pay all his bills and spend as much time as possible writing.  

The publishing world of a few decades ago was more diverse, not quite as uniformly bottom-line focused and demographically-driven as it is today.  There was seemingly a bit more variety out there being put into print, as far as I can tell.

I clearly need to focus my research and outreach techniques and come up with a platform-based, metric-driven targeted and leveraged five to seven pronged marketing plan, if I intend to be able to call myself a writer rather than another of the twenty million pretentious clones with a blahg.  If I can’t sell these words, most people would not blame anyone for saying I’m largely wasting my time on a hobby, day after day, year after year.

But for now, a brief exercise in pettiness:

I found one guy who pays $250 a pop for easy-reading 1,000 word real-life based Baby Boomer pieces he puts on a corporately owned website he curates.  He bought the first couple I sent him, then started behaving like a petty, quibbling gatekeeper hack.   One was very moving, and beautifully written, he wrote, but, ironically, a bit too personal; the next one, while undeniably harrowing, oddly did not move him, was somehow too impersonal.   One he accepted for publication and later wrote that he could have sworn he’d told me he’d changed his mind about publishing.  His prerogative, really, as the man with the checkbook.

Left a bad taste, that particular jerk-off and his shoddy practices and mercurial tastes, I told a friend.

“You mean the guy who paid you for your writing,” my friend said.

“Yeah, that arbitrary, language-challenged, assbiting assbiter,” I remember thinking.

 

 

Eulogy for My Father

My father was diagnosed with final stage liver cancer in the Emergency Room of a Florida hospital, six days before he died.  This failure of several frequently visited Florida specialists to make the fatal diagnosis, leaving it to an E.R. doc to make when there was almost no time left on the clock, confirmed what he always said about Florida doctors, that they were the worst in America.  

He found himself unexpectedly on his deathbed, a tube draining ugly looking fluid from his body, with a lot of work to do in those last few days of his life.  It was a bad break, as Lou Gehrig phrased the news of his own ALS diagnosis, but, like The Iron Horse, Irv was determined to get some small, important task done before he breathed his last breath.  He had the good fortune of a visit late the last night of his life that allowed him to do much of what he had left to do.  Which was mostly express his inextinguishable regrets, to apologize, for the first time, and try to explain why he had felt doomed from the start.

After he died I began to write the eulogy, as we arranged to fly his body from Florida to his grave on that hilltop outside of Peekskill, as Sekhnet booked a flight to fly the rest of his small family up to New York to stand around the grave as he was lowered into it and buried.  The man who would be conducting the service, and reading the eulogy, advised me to write a straight chronology of my father’s life.  That advice seemed sound, and I followed it.  I will look for the eulogy and place it here somewhere.    

I think now, as I did then, of how enormous a task it is to deliver a meaningful eulogy.  A good eulogy puts a life, episodic while being lived, suddenly whole in death, into a neat frame, complete with the illusion of coherence.   Life is a complicated series of often contradictory entanglements where moments of mercy are not always the rule.  People are hard on themselves, hard on others, then, often at the very worst possible moment, they suddenly die.  

“Well, that’s a pretty good nutshell,” said the skeleton.  “You know, you try to live the best you know how, but often that best is not very good, you wind up doing great damage in spite of your most noble intentions.  I intended to teach you and your sister that if you are honest, and weigh things fairly, and show kindness to the helpless among us, the way we always took care of our dogs, well, you know, the rest will kind of take care of itself.

“What I wound up teaching you was a little different, I guess.  I taught you what my mother taught me, the unmistakable fatalistic lesson of her upbringing.  You can be honest, weigh things fairly, show kindness to the weak– that’s all well and good.   But I have demons inside me that are not impressed by what you might call a good character.  In fact, your good character only pisses my demons off, enrages them enough to stomp off with a lynch mob.  Who the fuck are you to have good character?   I got your good  character right here! 

“And you are one and a half years old, younger, and you watch this violent beast inexorably rise up in your mother, watch her turn over and over again into this monster mother and all you can do is think ‘Jesus, no… not again….’ and try to comport yourself with as much dignity as an infant can muster, steel yourself for the whipping that is about to erupt.  

“And then, sure as night follows day, boom!! Across the face, then again, and let’s do that one more time, and one more and once more, and then, goddamn it, this is not helping, again, again, again!!!!  You worthless little fuck, goddamn it, you can’t even make me feel better when I whip you as hard as I can in the fucking face!!  

“So, as I told you that last night, I don’t feel good about what I did. My mother, may she rest in peace, didn’t feel good about what she did.  I have to think she didn’t, though I’ll never know for sure.   A mother does not feel good knowing she has failed in the sacred task of helping to create a compassionate child.  

“Now, even though I’m long dead, I am treated to the almost daily ritual of watching my own son muse in writing, trying to somehow understand and alchemize the cruelties I inflicted, unwittingly, unwillingly, deliberately, directly, as he looks for deeper meaning in it than just a cycle of misery.   There is no end to these musings, Elie, and you see that now, I trust.  

“You have enlisted me to narrate my own life– there’s something very macabre there, even as it’s also fitting.   It’s like having Eichmann narrate a documentary about his important work during the war.  Though, of course, I’m no Eichmann.  

“I’m more like Barack Obama, really, if you think about it.  How many of your friends, especially those who only met me a couple of times, remember me as a cool, funny guy?  It happened just a few weeks ago, someone’s face lit up when the subject of fathers came up and she said ‘I remember your dad, he was a cool guy!  You’re so lucky.’  I got a kick out of Sekhnet’s face as you nodded, with that smile of a thousand ironies.  

“And of course, I’ll be very charming, eloquent and sincere as I accept that Nobel Peace Prize, while I keep my eye on the real prize– projecting power, propagating an absurdity like American Exceptionalism, pursuing whatever murderous policy is necessary to protect my legacy and the great wealth of the blessed nation that has made me the luckiest man on the face of the earth.  Then I’ll go buy a backhoe to rake in my serious Tubmans when I step down as impeccable dignified, tastefully comedic front man for the greatest nation the world has ever known.”

I was walking with somebody yesterday who told me he’s been reading these pieces I’m putting up here in cyberspace.  My first thought was the line I heard from an aphid-sized Louie CK the other night.  He called blogs transcripts of conversations nobody wants to have, even the computer they’re typed on is going “ewwwww…. power failure please….”   The audience and I laughed at the truth of this, picturing photos of the fabulous immortalized lunch someone had, the huge turd they later launched like a glorious ocean liner for that long, final voyage.  

“What did the fellow think of your project?” asked the skeleton.

 You know, I didn’t ask, I really have no sense of how he felt.

“You didn’t ask?” said the skeleton.  “I don’t see how that’s possible.   The guy told you he’s reading the manuscript you’re working on, have been devoting the last nine months to, and it never occurred to you to ask him what he thought about it?  What his feelings were about it?  What?”

It was in the woods, walking over real and metaphorical roots, where I even stumbled once, over some particularly intrusive root that stepped up to meet me, as he extended his arm, made sure I was OK.   I learned that his father, apparently the same age as you, although very much alive, never turned from the leftist worker’s dream that you pursued for a while and then pretty much abandoned in search of the American Dream, that seductive mirage.

“Well, there’s another nutshell for you.  But he also told you his father was always a member of a community, in a union, standing with his brothers and sisters, taking his children to a Communist summer colony the way I took you and your sister to a Zionist one.   This world is goddamned complicated and the deck is stacked against any given individual, Elie, but one thing is for sure.  If you’re going to change anything, if real change is even possible, you have to stand with all the comrades you can find.  

“It sounds like your walking companion’s father had a sounder idea for how to put his beliefs into practice than I did, from the little we both know about his life.

“Of course, the devil, as always, is in the details.   How good a man is his father?  How generous and content is he in old age?  Is he embittered today that his dream for a much better world than this one has been irrevocably stomped under by a thousand armies of profit-driven mercenaries?  Did you find out how he’s doing with all that, in our new unipolar, post-ideological world order?  There’s a $64,000 question for you.  

“No need to answer, since you clearly don’t know.  All we can say is that his son appears to be a decent and thoughtful man with a good sense of humor, affectionate and with a strong spirit of adventure.  That tells you something about his father, doesn’t it?   Then again, you appear to be decent and thoughtful, animated by a certain love of fun.  What does that tell you about all this, Elie?”

It tells me that the hill I am walking up is actually a treadmill, dad, and that I’m going to go cast my eyes somewhere else for a while, for the good of my vision.  And, also, that it’s time to go back down and stir the sauce I’m making from tomatoes, garlic and oregano that Sekhnet lovingly grew on her farm out back.

Sibling Rivalry

I asked my dying father to say a few words to his daughter, right after he told me how proud he was of both of us.   His expression of pride in us took me by surprise, and I knew my sister would want to hear it amplified for her.  

You can hear his pause on the recording, as he gathers his thoughts.  His thoughts do not seem to be anywhere within reach.   I turn off the recorder.  He drinks some water.  I turn the recorder back on.

He begins succinctly prosecuting his ancient complaint about her complicated choice, a difficult one she’d made several years earlier, one that he could never understand.  He was reiterating that if he lived to be a hundred years old he would never understand how she could have forgiven the things she had.  I signaled for him to stop.  I reminded him that his views on the subject were well-known.   I asked rhetorically if he thought it was right to reduce someone to the sum of one choice you didn’t agree with.  

I asked him to say something that might make his daughter’s understanding of all this a little easier.    

We both had a pretty good idea that this was going to be his last real chance to talk to anybody.  I offered to leave the recorder on and go walk down the hall, if that would make it easier for him to say what I hoped he’d have to say to his only daughter. He told me it was no problem for me to stay, though his thoughts were clearly clotted.  He was, for the first time since I’d arrived, at a loss, actively trying to put his thoughts in order.  He seemed stumped.

It was tough sledding, impossible, really, to get anything out of him that my sister might be able to put to much use.  He was very close to his daughter, but also very punitive toward her.  He had a way of making her feel invisible, which is a terrible power for one person to hold over another.   It’s hard to imagine something more elementally cruel than erasing somebody.

That night each observation he made about her could have been said about himself with as much truth.   He was talking about his own bottomless insecurity, portraying it as her’s, something beyond cause and effect, a mystery no-one could ever understand or explain.   It struck me as very deep and ironic then, it strikes me the same way now.   Very deep and convoluted shit.

It is even more complicated to describe without details.  The details are not mine to make part of the official record. I respect and defend my sister’s privacy, even as, I, obviously, am not as private a person. 

You can hear me on the recording, like a border collie, patiently nipping at him, redirecting him again and again away from the one path he kept veering towards– that one decision he could not get past.   In the end, with my constant herding, taking his most educated guess,  he chalked up her utter inability to accept praise as the result of sibling rivalry.  

Yes, that was it, now that he thought about it, sibling rivalry, one hundred percent.  “She felt she could never live up to the impossibly high standards we had for you, which you could easily do but were too perverse to apply yourself to.”

I had an image of my father, as a boy, already irrationally convinced, as he would still be seventy years later, that he had been the “dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill.”  

“The dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill?” I asked, incredulous, “how is that possible?”   Many bad words applied to my father, but dumb was not among them. 

“BY FAR!!!!” he snorted, without a shred of doubt.  

I see him in that dim room on Henry Street in Peekskill that I picture, a freeze frame from a nightmare, dust motes hanging in the airless shaft of light, the ceiling impossibly high overhead.  He is reaching for the raw chopped meat, which is in a bowl.  

His hand clenches around it, his other hand clutching his weak, undersized younger brother by the back of the neck.  He shoves the raw chopped meat into his terrified little brother’s mouth, stuffs his mouth full.   Paul sputters, his eyes wide behind thick glasses, chokes, tries to spit the raw meat out.

“Best ass whupping I ever had,” says the skeleton with a laugh.  “You know, for a kid who had the shit beat out of him every day for no reason, it was a beautiful thing to finally get whipped for something despicable I’d actually done.  I suppose I cried a little, but even at the time I was thinking ‘goddamn!  I can’t wait to tell my kids about this one!’   

“And, yeah, as far as the biggest obstacle your sister faces in her life– it all goes back to sibling rivalry, without a doubt.”

Patches

Before I was born my parents took in a local waif, a part spaniel mutt they named Patches, for her black and white patched looking coat.  Patches had lived on the street as a puppy and had acquired street smarts, as some creatures who have to live by their wits do.    My mother told me Patches had adopted them, rather than the other way around.  She was a very smart dog, I remember that.

“Yeah, she was very smart,” said the skeleton.  “And when you were little you used to try to ride her and pull her ears.  She wanted no part of that shit.  When you came into the room, Patches and Pop would immediately head to the other side of the room.   You used to sit on Pop’s lap and start pulling his nose.   They both quickly learned to avoid you.  It was funny as hell to observe: as soon as you’d toddle into the room they’d both get right up and move as far away from you as they could.”

Shortly after I was born my parents moved from the garden apartment in Arrowbrook to the house on the tree-lined street where my sister and I grew up.  Patches had the run of the new neighborhood.  She wore a collar with a vaccination tag and a tag with my parents’ name and address, but never a leash.  She didn’t need one.  My mother would let her out, if the weather was good, and Patches would make her rounds, the metal tags clinking as she went.

She used to visit the dumpster behind the bar where she would occasionally score part of a chicken carcass she’d drag home with her.  She found other delicacies from time to time, there was butcher shop nearby, and they liked her there.   She was a friendly, likable dog, like the Artful Dodger.  

On summer days, when the Good Humor truck came down our street, she’d run with the other kids at the sound of the Good Humor man’s bell.  As the kids ordered their ice cream the Good Humor man would set out a cup of vanilla ice cream on the side of the street for Patches.  As the dog lapped up the ice cream my mother would come out and give the Good Humor man a dime, or send my sister or me out to pay Patches’ tab.

She was a good dog and truly part of the family, rather than a pet. My father sometimes pointed out that she had been there first, before me, the first born.  Patches had been their trial run for raising a child.   As a street smart waif she was able to give them a lot of help in that sometimes tricky endeavor, whereas my sister and I were not so independent.

I have no idea what Patches said or did to Eli’s ferocious Boxer Taffy that ended her up with her entire head between the big dog’s jaws.  Eli leaped into action, grabbed Taffy by the neck, cuffed him with one of his hard hands and pulled Patches safely away.  I remember Patches was covered with slobber, and my mother was hysterical, but Patches was unhurt and did not seem overly concerned afterwards.

Life Lesson from Eli

Eli had a house near White Plains, where his Boxer, Taffy, once took our spaniel mutt Patches’ head in his mouth before Eli pulled Taffy away.  I was maybe seven or eight, walking with Eli in the small orchard he had there when he reached up and pulled down a ripe apple or pear.

 “Here,” he said in his sandpaper voice, “try this, these are delicious.  I grew them myself.”  

I pointed to a bruise on the side of the fruit and he took it back, drew a pocketknife and made a small, quick circle that removed the blemish.  

“Here you go,” he said, and I ate the fruit, amazed at how simply the problem had been solved.  It was pretty good, even though I can’t remember fifty years later if it was a pear or an apple.  It might even have been a peach.

What I do remember is the lesson, something I never observed in my own home.   Eli, a man with a famously brutal temper, was perfectly capable, if in the mood, of acting exactly as my father would have.   “Jesus fucking Christ!” he could have fumed, “I offer you a fruit from my own tree and all you can see is the goddamned bruise.  You are some fucking piece of work!” and he would have punctuated the denunciation by heaving the apple against a tree trunk.  It would have splattered and he would have stormed off.

Instead, without a word and in the most economical and practical possible way, he fixed the problem.  Pocket knife, open, quick circular motion, hand it back to the boy with a little smile — problem solved.  The very opposite of the frustrated helplessness that was taught where I grew up.

One reason, I suppose, that I have always carried some kind of knife with me, even if nowadays it is the smallest keychain Swiss Army knife they make.  You never know when an otherwise unsolvable problem calls for a quick cut with a sharp blade.  It happens more often than you would think.

“Maybe you never changed either, Elie”

“Maybe you never changed either, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “Did you ever stop to consider that possibility?”

I wonder if he and I will ever come to the end of this chicken and egg debate.  The man, if he were alive, would be 92 now, and still holding fast to his black and white still photo of an idea.

“Look, superficially you did change some things about yourself.  Let’s stipulate to that.  You express anger much less frequently, for example.  On the surface, that’s a huge change, though, if you’re honest about it, your rage is just as quick to boil, you’ve just learned better ways not to express it every time.   You can argue that you’ve changed yourself, and maybe your life is a bit better because you don’t explode as often, but on the inside, when you’re being fucked, in no matter how small a way, you’re instantly ready to lash out.”  

That readiness to lash out is an inevitable part of being homo sapiens.  We are frightened, threatened, fight-or-flight prey animals who have banded together in murderous, raping configurations to scramble, collectively, to the top of the food chain.  Our viciousness as a species makes rats cringe.   Learning to be outwardly mild, after decades of brutality, is no small feat for a human.  

“OK, fine, if it makes you feel better to think that you’ve had this important self-change, I don’t see the harm.  In a sense, you’re right.  But that’s not the point I want to make today.  You know, when you walked into that hospital room on State Road Seven where I was not long for this world, you seemed to be the only one who was ready for my death.  I don’t mean that the way it might sound, not like you were happy about it, but you seemed psychically prepared somehow.  

“I wasn’t able to really say much to mom, or your sister, or even my brother, who was button-holing doctors in the hall and asking if it was possible to get me a liver transplant even though the cancer was in its final stages and I was a day from death.  It was like none of them were ready to get down to the serious talk we needed to have before I was gone, it was too painful for them.  My brother was making feeble jokes, your sister had a hard time looking at me, mom was using all her strength not to cry.

“You were, I don’t know, present, looking at the situation squarely.   It didn’t surprise me, really, but I noticed it.  That’s why I told you you were the only one who knew what was going on.   Go to the transcript and get that line you quote so often.  Go ahead.

Here you go, from the transcript of that digital recording the last night of your life:

…So, it’s kind of a lifetime battle, I don’t know, I think now how much richer my life would have been if I hadn’t seen it as a battle—good versus evil.

I know we should have had this talk ten, fifteen years ago.  I couldn’t reach that level because I was really thinking that it was going to be a battle and that there wasn’t any way I could make it into a dialogue, and that’s my fault.  You’re supposed to have some fucking insight.

E:  Well, I just wish we had a recording of that last dialogue, because it was a classic duel.  I tried every way I knew to try to…

I understand that, look, I felt you reaching out but I couldn’t free up enough, you know, to tell you how much I love you.  It’s not my style.

E:  I know.

Elie, I need a little drink.

“When you put it like that, it’s very poignant shit.  And when I was drinking that little sippy cup of water, you made the mistake of  shutting off the digital recorder, which you told me could record more than 24 hours.  I think of it now, the recording time of that little thing was more than the time that was left in my life.  You didn’t flip it back on right away each time, so much of our talk is gone, the transcript is quite truncated.  You caught maybe a third of it.  Rookie mistake, not that anyone could blame you, coming from the analogue age where the instinct is to preserve tape.  But that’s not the point.  

“Maybe you didn’t really change that much, Elie.  I mean, as a child you were always very sensitive.  You were a generous kid with a basically decent character.   I can’t blame you because you grew up in a war zone.  You can’t blame yourself because your father was hunkered down across the table, in a trench, cluelessly lobbing grenades, snarling.

“My point is: maybe that nonjudgmental, thoughtful person at my deathbed was your original self.  You hadn’t changed at all, just the sudden, dramatic circumstance of my rapidly approaching death brought that original nature back to the fore.”

Jesus, man, even when you wrap it in a compliment like that, I have to admire your relentlessness in hammering your point home.

 “Look, my point is that maybe one’s original nature sometimes gets bent beyond recognition by the infernal banging of the world.  So what you talk about as change is really just a reclaiming of what you were before your nature was distorted.”

I reflected the skeleton’s eyeless stare back at him.  

“OK, look, I realize this sounds a little insane, ‘a distinction without a difference’, as your law profs used to say.  In either case, change or reclaiming what is lost, there’s a lot of conscious work involved.  I guess what I’m saying is that we were both lucky you came to the point in your life that you did when you got that call that I was close to death.   I didn’t think there was a chance we’d be able to have a conversation, even at that point.”

Well, like you said, you felt me reaching out many times over the years.  And, not to sound judgmental, God forbid, but in true sick bastard fashion you remained hard and rigid, implacable in your anger, until you had hours left to live.  Funny how that was always phrased as my problem: being so fucking irrationally angry.   Why would a pit bull puppy be angry about being whipped in the face or electrocuted every time Michael Vick bribed him with a treat?

“I feel your pain.  Look, the same thing happened to me, obviously, not to make an excuse for the way I was.  You are engaged in a probably futile effort to make sense of my life.  As I was dying the only sense I could make of my own life is how fucked up I’d been, how badly misplaced my priorities were, how frankly stupid most of my high-minded methods were.

“I get that it’s your nature, Elie, and it’s one of those mysteries of life nobody can explain, you’re always seeking something beyond your grasp, beyond anyone’s.  You no doubt style it as a struggle toward insight, but really?  Those doomed eight year olds in Harlem got under your skin and you can’t separate their lives from America’s original unaddressed atrocity of slavery.  That’s something too big for anyone to grapple with, but it doesn’t stop you from brooding over it, working for years to create an unfunded program for them that you had no prayer of really putting into action.  

“Making sense of my life?  What kind of project is that for a grown man?  Making it your life’s work for what, eight months now?  I mean, not to offend you, but: what the fuck?

“Who does this, Elie?  I mean, a successful author sometimes writes a memoir of their father.  Their agent can sell it because people are curious about how the personality of the father of so and so influenced the writer who came to write this or that beloved or troubling work.  You, typically — and endearingly, I have to say– just skip over the successful writer step.  It’s wonderful the way you just cut out the practical middle man.  I mean, why let the impracticality or utter unlikeliness of the endeavor get in the way?  You take that George Bernard Shaw quote literally, when it can really only be uttered meaningfully by people with a ton of money:  “you see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?'”  You don’t realize Shaw put this line into the mouth of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, not that it makes any difference one way or the other.

“Seriously, it’s gratifying that you are trying to do this, Elie, it really is, and, at the same time, it’s terrible.  You need to get yourself a job, and go do it every day.   This quest for– I don’t know what– will only lead you to more sorrow.”

“Play is the mammalian way of learning social behavior”

Not to mention an important source of bonding between mother and offspring.  Not to mention fun.  Play is a more and more neglected art, sad to say, in a world grown more and more serious, pressurized, intent on the “bottom line”.  The feral kittens in the backyard play, and it’s cool to watch, even as we know how short their lives are.

Humans, always striving, have created a culture of excess, which makes our lives much easier in some ways than our ancestors’ lives were.  This convenience comes at a price, though.  A price we pay because– well, there is only one market in town.  That very expensive one we call The Free Market.

Here is a great section from the audiobook of Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant Sapiens: A Short History of Humankind.  He writes here about the transition in human consciousness, and our relation to animals, when we moved into the Age of Industrialized Agriculture to feed growing cities during the Industrial Revolution, which morphed quickly, thanks to mass production, into our current Consumer Age where thrift is no longer regarded as a virtue.  

I don’t own the copyright to this audiobook selection, clearly, but I heartily recommend Harari’s wonderful book.  Check out this seven minute fifty-eight second clip, it’s a good example of this fascinating work.  

Maybe He Did Win the War

Could be the weakness brought on by this cold, or flu, or whatever has me sneezing in flurries yesterday and today, but I have to entertain the idea, mad as it also is, that my father actually did win the war.  A capable double threat prosecutor-defense attorney, he blustered his way past reason and decency to sway many juries, and, in the end, by quickly dying with his children’s apparent forgiveness, may have snuck away the winner of the war.

“The cost was terrible, I’ll grant you, but that’s war for you,” said the skeleton with a macabre smile.  “You know, you grouse about it, refuse to accept it, but there actually are winners and losers in the world.  You can do either one with any degree of grace, but that doesn’t change the reality on the ground.  Some people win, most people lose.  Most people lose big time.  It’s simply the homo sapiens way, Elie.”  

That’s the kind of gross oversimplification behind which great national and religious slaughters are unleashed, on which, in turn, great fortunes are made.   You died lamenting that you had seen the world in black and white, wistfully thinking of how much richer your life would have been if you’d seen all the nuance, the beautiful gradients.

 “Well, you put it that way, I was always a plain spoken man.  It’s essentially right though, I did regret that black and white worldview I always rigidly maintained.   You can go back to the transcript and get the exact quote.  I notice you haven’t been to the transcript of our last talk, except fleetingly, during this entire process the last eight months.   Aren’t you going to thoroughly mine the scant primary sources you have?  

“It’s not like you, you’ve always been pretty scrupulous about accuracy and verisimilitude.  The one part of law school you actually liked was finding and citing great sources while constructing an argument– finding the authoritative bits and meticulously nailing them into the construction of your story.”  

Yeah, yeah, don’t remind me of law school.  That was one battle you won as you were cunningly winning the war, eye for an eye, a world of blind men looking for vengeance.   I seem to feel myself slipping away, even as I type I’m getting weaker and weaker.  It stands in for the ultimate slipping away, I suppose.  Hopefully it’s just this summer cold, an ugly animal.  

“Or maybe it’s finally dawned on you, we cannot change our essential natures.  Sixty years is a pretty good sample size for a human life, wouldn’t you say?  Do you still think a leopard can change its spots?  Can you suddenly become an energetic and skillful salesman, a closer, after a life of leisurely contemplation and avoidance of the hard-headed competition the workaday world is made of?   You understand this is a bare knuckles brawl you’re in, don’t you?  

“Your friends, and all of their adult children, for that matter, have all figured out the most basic parts of life: working, bringing in a decent income, having a nice home, raising a family, having a social life, enjoying the fruits of their labors.  You, on the other hand, having figured out none of these things, are sitting in a room having an extended chat with a dead man who beat you to a bloody pulp, in  a manner of speaking.”

No argument, at the moment, but I’m very, very tired.  It might be time for a nap before I whip you into shape in the rewrite.  

“I remind you, in fairness to you, that you often get this way around Labor Day,” said the skeleton.

Wrestling with Demons

Demons are slippery, no question about it.  Masters of ambush, they will come sprinting out of nowhere to put the sudden hurt on you.

“Well, look, everybody has their demons.  Everybody I ever met, anyway,” said the skeleton, thoughtfully chewing on a long piece of grass.

“Which, of course, is no comfort whatsoever.  It’s like the thought of your own death, especially when Death is getting close enough for you to smell his fetid breath, it’s no consolation to think: ‘well, everybody else is going to die too.’   That’s the nature of a demon– it’s perfectly calibrated to your personalized fear demographic,” the skeleton smiled.  

“As Alice Walker observed about your buddy Zora Neale Hurston ‘you’re up against a hard game if you have to die to win it.’  That’s the game I was up against, Elie, and dying didn’t feel like much of a victory, I can tell you from experience.”

Well, that’s kind of the bonus question here, isn’t it?  What is the most essential component of a good life?  

“It may sound funny, coming from me, but love is the most essential component of a good life.  That’s the only thing a human truly can’t live without.  A deep connection to at least one other person, an open-hearted attitude to those who come toward you.  Take that away, Elie, and the world is a meaningless and hostile place– and hopeless.  Think of people you have known who are incapable of intimacy– take me for example.  I never trusted anyone, really trusted them.  

“I always told you and your sister that the only person you can depend on is yourself, then I softened that by adding ‘and your family, of course.’  You can always depend on your family, I tried to impress on you, even as I knew that a family can destroy you more cruelly and completely than anything.  I knew that because my family had already completely destroyed me.  

“You know, when I congratulated you on the absence of self-pity in your thesis Me Ne Frego, about how you fucked up your chosen career and were blacklisted for life, I was giving you the biggest compliment I knew how to give.  I don’t know how you’re going to figure out how to succeed at this late stage in your life, how you hope to get this Book of Irv into print with no connections to anybody who knows how to open any of the doors you need to get through, but I also applaud the work itself.   You are lining the demons up, describing them clearly, making them familiar as any other character in the story.  You are giving these demons their merciless humanity, which is no small undertaking.”  

It remains to be seen, how large or small an undertaking it will be.  And you’re right that noting an absence of self-pity is a huge compliment.   The pity of it all is that there is more than enough pity to go around.  The pity of it all could go around the world many times over.  

“You’re singing to the choir director, Elie,” said the skeleton, watching the sky for signs.

MAD Magazine

One day when I was about eight my father handed me a black, white and grey tube, printed on cheap paper one small step up from the crudest newsprint.  This was at the dinner table, and he handed it across to me with a little smile.  “I thought you might like this,” he said.  

I unfurled the pages that had been curled into a tube, which turned out to be a decidedly non-glossy magazine, opened to a random page and began inspecting it.  I was intrigued.   “What is this?” I asked him, and he explained.

“I had to take it from a moron in one of my classes,” he said, “I told him to put it away, and, of course, being a moron, he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, and so, here you go.”  He imitated the moron, who apparently could only communicate in a series of grunts and frowns.   “It’s called MAD Magazine.”  

Being at a still literal age I remember that I imagined the moron as an actual moron.  I wondered how he could read the magazine, maybe it was the pictures that had drawn him to it, made it irresistible in a Social Studies class he had no prayer of understanding.  There was no doubt the pictures were great, cartoons in various styles, all laid out like a delicious smorsgasbord for an eight year-old.  

The moron had peeled the glossy cover off the MAD, probably in sheer joy over his new issue, so my first issue was just the naked contents of the MAD itself.  I have nothing but fond memories of that first MAD magazine, of the magazine in general, of my father’s obvious respect for the “usual gang of idiots” who produced it every month.  I soon became a huge fan of the irreverent humor mag.

There was one piece in the moron’s tubular issue that particularly blew my mind.  It was called something like “if children designed their own Xmas toys” and it had a series of perfectly crude children’s drawings, with impossibly skewed perspective and naive, nature-defying angles.   They had created exact replicas out of these drawings, which were photographed in beautifully lit 3-D, and presented next to the kids’ designs.   It was mind-blowingly ingenious.

When my father saw how much I loved the magazine he offered to get me a year’s subscription as a Chanukah present.  That sounded great to me, but it never happened.  Boy’s Life, the scout magazine, arrived in the mail with my name on it for a while.  I remember reading an article by Cardinal’s third-baseman Ken Boyer, I think, called “How to Handle the Hot Corner”.  There was a great article by Bill Cosby called “High School Was A Load of Laughs” about how he learned to game the system by playing on the school’s varsity team and somehow qualifying for remedial gym.  It involved wearing black knee socks and acting like a spastic, to get into a gym class where he could goof off and not do anything strenuous.  This was presumably before he discovered an even bigger laugh:  drug your young classmates before feeling them up and nobody is the wiser.  

I never got a copy of MAD magazine in the mail.  There was no subscription for me.   Instead, every time MAD came on the newsstand my father bought a copy, which I’m fairly sure he read on the train home from work.  He had a very subversive sense of humor and MAD played to that big time.   My father would hand over a pristine copy of the latest MAD every month (he read it gently as could be, from the looks of it untouched by human hands).  I’d say thanks, and read it cover to cover, folding the inside back cover to see each clever Mad Fold-in.    This went on for maybe ten years.

I eventually sent a box of the years of MAD to a friend for his son. Hopefully, somewhere in these stacks here, is that original copy of the coverless magazine that the moron could not stop waving around in social studies class.  I’d love to see that feature on kids designing their own toys again.  

AH, the  internets!  

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By the great Al Jaffee, it turns out.  I also learn (not that we believe everything we read on the internets) this was supposedly in their January 1963 issue, making me, impossibly, six and a half years old at the time.  No wonder I was so literal about the moron!