“You are really missing the mark so far with your attempts to lay out a talent for malice.   You’ve hardly really explained it, let alone illustrated it.  Frankly, I’m disappointed.  I thought you’d attack it with more gusto, having a bit of the old talent for it yourself,” yawned the skeleton from his eternal lounge on the hill.  

We’ve talked about this many times, part of the ongoing debate about how much we can really change our natures.  

Your position was always that our basic natures, our predispositions and reflexes are hard-wired and can’t be fundamentally changed.  Our upbringing, you said, only hardens these innate characteristics.  If, for example, you harbor some fond hope of being nurtured by your earliest caregiver and instead she whips you across the face every day, there will be immutable lifelong consequences.    The sensitized impulse to rage against this hurt whenever even slightly provoked, and the provocation might be imperceptible to anyone not so programmed, never leaves you for a moment.  

My position was that we can make significant changes in our lives, difficult and subtle as this process may often be.  We change ourselves by learning to master the reactions we regret, stay away from situations and relationships that set us off.  By learning to take  a breath when our reflex is triggered, instead of reacting first, we can avoid some of the worst of what has always followed.  By learning how to react better we can improve the way others react to us, breaking the cycle we find ourselves locked in.

“How’s that mastery changey thing workin’ out fer ya?” said the skeleton, in a surprisingly pert Sarah Palin impression.  

At the moment, and to be entirely truthful, it feels a bit thin, even as I know it is an often subtle matter and one requiring constant attention.  I still wake up sometimes, in spite of years now of trying to master the urge to strike back, flooded with fight or flight chemicals, thinking about an unavenged assault by some despicable coward, some intolerably weaselish violation I could have easily thrown back on them doubled but refrained from doing in the name of some higher impulse I imagined at the time.  That mastery changey thing is not workin’ out fer me at all at the moment; I have the strong urge to inflict pain.  

“That’s my boy!  That’s what I’m talking about!” chirped the skeleton happily,  “Come on, have at ’em, there must be some deserving target you can scald with rage today.  How about that Irish cunt of a manager at Tekserve, now wasn’t he a useless and manically provocative glowering turd after they negligently disabled your work computer?  What about a damning Yelp for the owner of that pretentious shit hole on twenty-third street?  A  tart, corrosive portion of condensed slime poured publicly, and irrefutably, over the reputation of that place would not be out of order, would it?  Oh, let’s not forget the guy who ran that useless depression clinic at that hospital on the East Side?  Come on, a self-important psychiatrist, with grant money up the wazoo, non-responsive to the excellent case you made for the galling lack of supervision, the fraudulent conversion of almost nine hundred of your dwindling dollars for less than useless amateur ‘therapy’?  Perfect, imagine the letter you could write to reduce him or her, or the entire twitching hierarchy, to quivering rage…”

Well, you make a good point.  Those folks deserve to be held accountable, no doubt.  But strangers, no matter how deserving, are not the proper targets for my spleen, even if I was determined to put aside my vow to do no harm and extrude some bile today.  Those jerks at Tekserve and the hospital are truly random jackasses, a few out of the millions out there, conducting shoddy but well-promoted businesses, prospering in a climate of inattention, unaccountability and a credulous belief in credentials and hype. The guy who runs that clinic probably has a PhD from Stanford, Harvard or Brown, you know the type, the tireless and undeserving self-promoters you always hated so much.   I can picture the impeccable corporate ass-kisser shrink as an unctuous, ambitious student, unequaled in the classical French art of analingus, no doubt.  But these people are random strangers, and it is truly pointless to vent at them.  Even if my smooth stone hits them squarely in the eyeball, or in the nuts, who gives a crap?  

“A talent for malice is a terrible thing to waste, Elie,” observed the skeleton.  

I thought of you recently when I watched the documentary ‘Best of Enemies’, the story of the televised Gore Vidal-William F. Buckley, Jr. debates during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.  Both men were true masters of malice, they took a deep, personal delight in slowly plunging a sharp stiletto into the carefully selected ganglion of an adversary.  They truly savored the moment, slowly twisting the blade.  Vidal won the early rounds and as Buckley got more frustrated he became an easier and easier target for Vidal, who had done his careful homework while Buckley, apparently, counting on his genius for a quick riposte, took Vidal lightly.  

We are then treated to that magic live TV moment when Buckley is reduced to hissing ‘faggot’ through a feral sneer and Vidal smiles serenely at Buckley and then at the audience at home, his work now done.  The filmmaker later shows a much older Buckley, in his last television appearance, looking haggard and miserable and telling the interviewer he’s lived long enough, that he looks forward to his death.  When Buckley dies Vidal is unable to hide his glee, publicly wishing his old enemy a pleasant time in hell.  

“Marvelous,” says the skeleton, “I remember those wonderfully hateful debates fondly.  Talk about your slingshot stone hitting the guy in the nuts.  I remember that moment when Buckley lost it and that sublimely smug, superior little grin on Vidal’s face.  And that ugly slip couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, or a more despicable spokesman for the forces of well-bred reactionary politics that have always run this place, or, in the case of Vidal, to a more provocative faggot, for that matter.”

Marvelous?  I don’t know.  Entertaining, true, but where is the marvel in that kind of vicious one-upsmanship?  It’s not what I’m going for any more, now that I know better, after years of incessant warfare.  I want peace now, not malice, no matter how elegant or irresistible.  If there’s a door to the room I’d rather find my way to it and go somewhere else than stay in a stinking room slugging it out with a vicious, sweaty moron hell-bent on somehow prevailing, the more the plain facts are all arrayed against him, the more desperately he will flail away.  I’m done with vampires, dad.

“OK, I’ll grant you all that, and healthy decisions, one and all.  But you come here today with a head of steam, after another night’s sleep too short by three or four hours,” said the skeleton, “how about you tell your dear old dad what is bothering you so much?  I never listened when I was alive, true, but I am all ears now, to the extent a skeleton can be all ears, at any rate.  Come on, Elie, dish.”

‘Dish’?   A man of constant surprises, my father; who knew he’d filed away the old gay term for “give me the good gossip, girl”?  I know his favorite gay sex advice columnist was Dan Savage, I mean, who could really compete in that category, but still, I can’t really picture Dan ever using the term.  ‘Come on, Elie, dish.’  Kudos to the gaunt fellow in the dirt bed.  Nicely played, Skeleton Irv, sure, why not?  

While there’s no point at all to expend effort engaging maliciously with aggravating assholes I’ve met in passing, I suppose I could take a few moments to put a long-overdue stake into the heart of another unredeemed vampire I once befriended.

OK, so I’m having lunch with your nervous friend the other day, the son of those old friends you had me throw out of your house into the snow one night more than twenty years ago.  We were not seated for more than a moment, when, out of the blue, I suppose because such talks are naturally divergent affairs where thoughts pop up, are mentioned, and any one of them may become a subject of conversation, he says “not to harsh your buzz…” and then does exactly that by beginning to describe the vacation in a Florida love nest a former very close friend is now supposedly enjoying.  

It only took a sentence or two from him before I questioned his point in bringing this fellow up, especially when we were about to eat.  I reminded him that I had no interest in this person whatsoever, especially about his sex life, except perhaps to wish him venereal disease.  The tiny bone that had been placed crosswise in my throat by my friend’s unthinking reference to this uncomically disabled clown having sex in a Florida house his clearly desperate fellow-cult member girlfriend apparently owns seemed to remain long after he’d apologized and we went on to other things.  

Later in the meal, in reference to this ongoing outpouring of words trying to describe my father’s life and times in a way that will hopefully both illuminate and remunerate, he mentioned this same once-good friend.  “He’s been reading it and he thinks it’s probably a good thing for you to be writing it,” he said.  

I believe I nodded at this, don’t recall saying anything, except perhaps to mutter a ‘fuck him’ and opine that when one has shown a stranger many years of nothing but sincere friendship, and is repaid in the shitty coin that is the self-hating friend’s only currency, it is no mystery that only hatred and coldness would remain afterwards.  

To my friend’s credit he didn’t make any reference to my attempts to practice ahimsa or the strange incongruity of a man of my professed beliefs being so unforgiving.  It was as if he anticipated what I was going to say next, which was some recognition of those very things.  I told him that the worst of it, and what tore things irreparably, was that my final act of friendship, reaching out as soon as I’d recovered myself after his final betrayal, with the arguably generous impulse to hear him out, was rewarded by a cowardly attempt to bully me over the phone, followed by his last words in an email six months later:   I do owe you an apology but am being stingy about giving it.

My friend agreed that all this was bad and said he no longer had any doubt about the sincerity of my eternal malice toward this fellow.  I nodded and told him I had no more thoughts about my one time close friend, outside of knowing how easily I could calmly punch him in the face at this point if he ever spoke to me again.  And that I trusted that all of this should now be about as clear to my companion at lunch as I could possibly make it.  

At some point, earlier in the conversation, in connection with the love nest in Florida, I’d casually revealed a confidence this guy had shared with me, the self-regarding jerk-off, and realized only later that, since he has been reading this stuff, I might well have an adorable, even irresistible, opportunity to sling a smooth stone smartly into his fancy testicles, if my annoyance over having to hear about him at lunch would not leave me in peace by the next day, which has now arrived.  

“Oh, man, this is getting good!” smiled the skeleton.

I add that this confidence was not revealed to me after a disclaimer of any kind about keeping this possibly embarrassing personal detail between us.  I always honor those agreements, even with people I have no need or obligation to protect anymore.  But this hideous detail was told to me matter of factly, and the fact of the matter is that I have no idea why I had to hear it at all, though it was one of those uncomfortable things one cannot unhear.

“Well, come on, then, deliver the kill shot, don’t keep us hanging,” urged the skeleton.  “You see you can’t change this part of your nature, and it flows perfectly from the early part of your life.  I was sadistic to you.  You gave me endless chances to hurt you and I couldn’t resist.  You have to be fair, though.  What is more irresistible than a vulnerable person begging for the very thing you never got?  That’s what malice is all about, Elie, choosing the perfect time to do the most lasting harm, to inflict the deepest possible hurt.  It’s the essence of malice- causing maximum pain.  Take a break from that ahimsa business, it’s not helping you at the moment anyway.  Unleash your inner Irv, go ahead, show them what the talent for malice is all about,” the dead man urged his still-living son.

Fine, here you go.  If you want the full emotional effect, read this first, and then this. The latter caused a reader to remark that it was a good thing the guy depicted in these two didn’t own a gun.  The second could certainly stand alone as a demonstration of my talent for malice and a fitting tip of the cap to my dear old dad, a master of the art form.  Here’s a last tip of the cap to you on this subject of the talent for malice, pop.

To my friend at lunch I mentioned, in passing as we moved on from the ill-raised subject of these long-time doomed lovers in their ticking time bomb of a romance, (she, much younger than he, had told him from the start that she wants to get pregnant and would be looking for a father closer to her age than to her father’s)  that I wondered if our friend was finally able to ejaculate during sex with her.  He’d told me about the marathon fucking sessions and how he could never come.  He’d have to go home to relieve himself afterwards, in the privacy of his own thoughts.  I don’t believe I bothered to add, then or to my friend at lunch, that I’ve read that this kind of sexual dysfunction is an expression of the deepest kind of rage and self-loathing.

“Wow, he never told me that,” said my friend, “I guess you guys had a much closer relationship than I’ve ever had with him.”  

Sad to say.  And all the more reason I do not hesitate now to picture myself bashing the smilingly enraged fellow directly in his superior unmistakably English face.  I entertain this violent image only for as long as it takes to cleanse my mental palette, which I have hopefully done here, though I feel no better having followed this ugly impulse.

“That’s my boy!   Good to have you back,” beamed the skeleton proudly.  “That, son, is a talent for malice, finally painted in glorious detail.  And really, though, don’t you feel better now?  I know I do.”

There’s no feeling better about malice, old man, no matter how torrentially one pours it on.  It is one of the worst, most destructive things in the world, an endless sucking sinkhole, no matter how much one might otherwise appreciate its particular application.  One masters one’s talent for malice only to his own detriment.  

“Ah, don’t be so hard on yourself, Elie.  Wasn’t that you telling me just the other day that the world is not black and white?”

I wake up hours before the alarm lately, not rested but propelled to the keyboard with some new idea for how to continue working on this puzzle.  The room I work in is dark, the puzzle pieces are tiny, and few, most of the puzzle is missing, its outlines hazy, melting into shadow.  Still, there seems nothing more crucial as I enter my seventh decade than assembling this puzzle into a form I can show you, a person I’ve never met, and pointing with a small smile to its most subtle sections. 

In one way there couldn’t be a more mad project, I suppose, because, if you look at it dispassionately, what is it that drives a person to speak to people who are nothing but abstractions, truly?  In a more immediate way, though, I can’t conceive of anything more important than this assembling of my own understanding of things that have long vexed me.  It is the tiniest flicker of a fresh insight into how to wrestle with this difficult puzzle that pops my eye lids open long before I’ve had enough rest lately.

“Only a neurotic would conceive of assembling one’s own understanding of his vexations as an important project,” says the skeleton, with a quiver of his native suspiciousness.  “More to the point, how is putting together the puzzle of my tormented life going to help you assemble any understanding of anything at all?”  

You might as well ask grandma what the point of all that vodka she took in and poured out through her sweat was.

My father and his mother-in-law loved each other like devoted child and doting parent, they admired and protected each other fiercely.  He always called her Mom. At the same time, my grandmother was prone to drinking huge quantities of vodka and my father, a teetotaler, never touched a drop.  He used the word ‘teetotaler’, as quaint to me as ‘dipsomaniac’, which may have described grandma, with her urge toward intoxication.  

“They were having a few drinks, you know, getting loose and laughing, but I’m a teetotaler, so I drank root beer and made a few cracks from time to time,”  he said, describing a colleague’s retirement party, and then explained to me that a teetotaler was someone who didn’t drink alcohol.  Google can reveal the origin of the word in a couple of taps, but I would rather picture the twenty-six year-old teetotaler’s mindset in America in 1950.  

There has never been any shame attached to a hardworking American coming home and kicking back with a little booze, a cocktail after a long day at the office, a couple of beers with the guys after the whistle at the salt mine blew, a bottle of wine with dinner.  Some of our greatest writers and thinkers were no strangers to hangovers, the most charismatic slugger of his generation hit more than a few home runs hung over.  

Even during that thirteen years of national hysteria, spanning my father’s childhood and the Great Depression, when ambitious criminals made their fortunes selling illegal alcohol, a newly banned substance that millions loved, there was never much widespread shame attached to coming home and having a few drinks, or drinking at a party.  We are still living in a century-long, bloody trillion dollar failed experiment in prohibition of most competing intoxicants, and shame has long been systematically attached to smoking the preferred weed of Mexicans, jazz musicians, Negroes and degenerate whites, but that pathetic hypocrisy is a sickening subject for another time.  The point is, people have long loved to savor a substance, like alcohol, that gives them a relaxing buzz and alters their thoughts and mood accordingly.  

Not my father.  He was a teetotaler, as he would proudly tell anyone who asked why he didn’t want a little sangria, or a cold beer.  In my experience he never had so much as a beer.  At Passover, when we are commanded to drink four cups of wine during the long ceremonial meal celebrating our people’s journey from physical and spiritual slavery to freedom, that elusive and slightly intoxicating state, my father nursed a single cup through the service, having a sip each time the Haggadah told us to drink the next cup of wine.  

My best theory: being in control, and at peak readiness for the ambush that was always waiting for him, was uppermost in my father’s mind at all times.  It made sense.  His trusty sword was always at the ready, it was nothing for him to make a few quick arcs in the air with it and nonchalantly disembowel anyone who came at him.  He was ready, and it was important to him to keep himself sharp.  Who knows what a couple of ill-chosen drinks might do to his matador’s reflexes in a world of constantly charging bulls?  

“Well, you say that with a certain mockery, but everybody has their demons, and their own ways of dealing with the relentless fuckers,” said the bones of my father, his now claw-like hand pushing a dusty shard of a tiny puzzle piece across the dirt.  “To you, I’m sure, it makes more sense to have a few puffs of that nepenthe and improvise with your guitar, dreaming of things that never were.  A chacun son gout, as the Frogs say, but for me– I valued clarity of mind above all else, why mess with that?”  

Fair enough, I say.  On many subjects that clear mind served you very well.  A pretty good argument can be made, on the other hand, that a certain stiffness of habit closed off entry to many other important human experiences to you.  In the end you came to regret your often rigid view of things.  Seeing the world clearly as an eternal battle between black and white, ignoring the million gradations, in the end, and as you realized, is not a very clear way to look at life.  To put it more starkly, it would be fair to say you regretted being closed minded as you were measuring out your last few breaths.  

“Well, that’s fair to say,” he said.  “I’m trying to see how getting drunk would have improved my chances for understanding things any better.  You’d have to admit that’s a fair question.”  

The question is fair, and it’s a good one.  And it shows me again how you taught me to think of things from as many sides as I am able, in spite of your reflex to reduce things to a deathbed regrettable “my way or the highway”.  

First let’s reframe your sneakily tendentious question a little.  If your goal is to end the discussion, reducing the other side to absurdity is one of the standard ways to go.  The question is not whether it is better to be unshakably sober at all times or sloppily drunk.  The proper question is whether it is better to refuse, on principle, to join the festivities, to hold oneself always slightly apart because of some moral standard you hold yourself to, or to be able to relax and share some harmless relaxation, as much for the sake of full participation and putting everybody else at ease as for anything else.  

Your buddy Russ, a life-long drug user, told me once that he didn’t get much of a kick from marijuana any more.  His preferred drug at the time, apparently, was cocaine, the hopped up drug of success and achievement for many people back then.  “I’ll take a toke just to keep the pipe going as I pass it around,” he told me, “but that’s not really the buzz I’m looking for these days.”  He told me this as he was proffering some of his preferred drug on the end of the tiny blade of an old pocketknife.  Coke was never my thing, a drug that made you nervous, vigilant, eventually paranoid.  I prefer gentler kinds of intoxication, but that’s just me.  

“Look, I never held that against Russ, he liked to get high, I never judged him.  It just wasn’t for me, losing hold of reality like that,” the skeleton said.  “You know, he was probably high half the time he was laughing his ass off at our house, but it didn’t change my enjoyment of our times together.  And, more to the point, I didn’t need to be high to love our times together.  You do get that, don’t you?”  

Focus, for just a moment, skeleton, on the phrase Russ used “to keep the pipe going”.  He didn’t particularly like getting high on weed anymore, it didn’t do it for him, didn’t scratch the itch.  But he’d puff on the pipe when it was passed to him for the sake of keeping it going for the guys around the circle.  There is a social element to sharing an intoxicant, like drinking a toast.  The man at the hard-drinking beloved departed’s wake who won’t lift a glass with everybody in their good friend’s memory?  

“The origins of anti-Semitism, right there.  To polytheists it was nothing to add a conquering god to their pantheon of deities.  ‘Zeus kicked our ass fair and square, a powerful god, we’ll put him on the altar above all of the gods we continue to worship’.  Jews, the first monotheists, we presented a problem.  We could not bend our stiff necks to a false god, we’d rather die.  Our enemies have always been happy to oblige us in that.  Flowing from that problem of clinging to the one true God, and reducing all other cherished beliefs to bullshit, millions were put to the sword, washed away in a two thousand year long tsunami of blood, splashing away now, even as you wrestle in that dark room with the puzzle that was your vexing father.”

You are still one stiff-necked motherfucker, my father.  I would be nothing if I could not give you that.

“You know,” said the skeleton, “that at this point I can’t actually talk.  You’re aware that this conversation is taking place in your own mind, that it’s imaginary.  The dead cannot really speak, you know, outside of the little remembered voices they leave behind in the souls of those they’ve acted upon.  I’m not talking about voices we imagine we can hear after reading a hagiography of a guy like Gandhi, you know, the Mahatma, the Great Souled myth man, I’m talking about the remembered voices the actual man left in the minds of those two nieces he slept with naked to prove he was finally beyond sexual desire.”  

Whoa, slow down there, bonester.

“There’s a darling I look forward to watching bleed to death on the editing room floor,” said the skeleton.  “This dialogue you are engaged in with me now, you are aware that you are creating it?”  

Well, I could hardly not be aware of it, as you know if you think about it for even a second.  

“Human memory is a famously feeble and selective thing.  What I think you’re trying to do is construct a healthy dynamic where we could have actually had the conversations you are trying to have with me now.”

We are just now capable of having the conversations you wished for as you were dying, you might say.  If we’d started fresh that next morning in the hospital after our long chat, with another chance to have a real exchange, and the day after that, I think the realizations you were struggling toward would have become more than the irreconcilable regrets and self-lacerating apologies you expressed as you tried to explain your life to me during that last night of it.  

“Well, I don’t know about that.  I would have liked a few more chances to actually exchange ideas, you know, but at that point, it was a bit late in the game for me.  It’s hard to die knowing how badly you’ve bungled key things that people with any shred of human insight know to do naturally.  I was lying there thinking of all the damage I’d done to the people I loved, and it all seemed senseless to me, my entire embattled life, a great waste of the potential I didn’t even know I had until I got into the Army.”  

Exactly why I am struggling to put these things together now.  I can feel the end beginning to reach for me and I need to say the things I haven’t managed to say, in this little hiatus before the segment ends and the beaming little cartoon pig stutters “th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”.  I remember laughing off my sister’s concerns about turning forty, almost twenty years ago, whew.  I told her how the numbers are just milestones, arbitrary round milestones.  Yet now that my sixtieth birthday is advancing towards me on rocket-powered skates I’m feeling those six decades.  At sixty you actually begin to think in terms of decades.  Literally, decades, ten year chunks of a life gone by, seen in the rear-view mirror of life.  And as the cliche has it– they rush by in those chunks.  A blink ago I was forty, still thinking I had a lot of time.  Now I am aware of the time I no longer have.

“That’s the nature of this ‘merciless arrangement’ as Joseph Conrad had it– go look it up, Elie, it will make you sound smart, google will give you the actual quote in five seconds.  ‘Droll thing life is– that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.  The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself– that comes too late– a crop of inextinquishable regrets.’  There you go, the old Polack could really string the words together, n’est-ce pas?”

Fuck, he could have written those words for you, dad.

Do you remember, when you turned sixty mom had me make an invitation to your party, which was in the back yard on 190th Street?  I made collages from old photos, you at all different ages, your head on cartoon bodies.  I had a drawing of mom, with her beaming photographed face as the head, holding you like a struggling puppy, with your face from an old photo.   You stood nearby in an army uniform, with an 8 mm camera to your eye, filming the goings on, the several variations of you I had cavorting on the card.  You remember that?

“Yeah, it was a great invitation.  You had me saying ‘be there or be square’ and the RSVP card had several boxes to check; I’ll be delighted to attend, I’ll attend but I won’t be delighted, I won’t be there, please take my name off your mailing list.  Funny shit, my man.  You did have a sense of humor back then.”

Well, we grow out of these things, dad.  Now I’m serious as one of these undiagnosed cancers that are slyly nipping at me.  

“Why don’t you make an appointment with a fucking dermatologist?  Didn’t I also have several of them removed from my nose, while I was dying of the liver cancer they first diagnosed six days before I died?  Don’t fuck around with this.”  

You’re right, and it’s a long story, and there’s no excuse, even though there’s a complicated and aggravating reason I haven’t been able to make the appointment the last few months.  But, anyway, I have to wrap up here for the moment, I missed a call from your grand-daughter, we’ve been playing phone tag, and I want to get back to her.

“What’s that little redhead up to?” asked the skeleton with a smile.

“She texted me just now: Omg completely forgot to call yesterday don’t kill me :(((“

“Tell her you’re sorry you got her text a moment too late, fuck, if only she’d texted you a few hours earlier.  Tell her that the hit men are already on the way.  Hasta la vista, man.  Back to my dirt nap.”

“Did you catch the scores?” my father would ask me, fairly regularly during the baseball season.  I’d tell him the Yankees lost, and so did the Mets, I’d give him the tallies.   He would always ask me “how’d the Tigers do?” That I never had any idea, no matter how often he asked, seemed to be an eternal disappointment he needed to have reaffirmed regularly.  I felt momentarily bad about it each time but I simply did not register how the Detroit Tigers did when I caught the scores on the radio.  

I don’t mean to trivialize his hurt or his need to regularly confirm that, on this very basic level, I seemingly had to show him over and over that I simply didn’t care about his feelings.  Ignoring the fortunes of my father’s favorite team, playing home games in a city six hundred miles away, was not something I did consciously, but it also showed a certain returning of the favor.

“OK, I get that.  I get that now that I’m dead, of course.  All things are made clear to the dead, wait til you see it, you’ll love it, not that there’s a damned thing you can do about any of your great insights once you’re resting in peace.  My advice, keep doing what you’re doing while you can still do things.  Try to do better, try as hard as you can not to do to others things that you hate being done to you.  Two wrongs don’t make a right and an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind in the end,” said the too-late-wise skeleton.  

It was hard for me to remember to listen for the Tigers score because they played half the time in Detroit and, outside of the fact that Hank Greenberg, the New York City born, Bronx raised Jewish slugger played for the Tigers during my father’s childhood, they were just another team forty years later, a team whose fortunes meant nothing to me.  Except, of course, that I knew my father continued to root for his childhood team, as most lifelong fans do.  

My father idolized Greenberg, a Jewish giant who ignored the anti-Semitic slurs of virtually everyone in baseball and hit home runs like Babe Ruth.  In 1938, when my father was fourteen, his hero threatened Ruth’s single season home run record by clouting 58, with a 59th wiped away in a game that was rained out before it became official.  When my father was eleven Greenberg had become the first Jew ever to win the Most Valuable Player award. Plus he lead his team to the world championship that year.   He was the first Jew ever elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and remained the only Jew inducted until Sandy Koufax joined him a generation later.   I always knew about my father’s great identification with the Jewish superstar, though, after my father died, I was a little shocked to discover, printed beneath his photo in the 1941 Peekskill high school yearbook, Irving “Hank” Widem.  

Catching the Tiger scores, however, was beyond me.   It felt like actually driving those ten to twelve hours to Detroit to get the score of a game I didn’t care about at all and carrying it back to my father at the kitchen table.  He’d read it in the paper the next day anyway.  But he always asked and I don’t think I ever told him the score, though I might have once or twice.  He always reacted with the same mild, fatalistic hurt.  His facial expression said “sure, why would you do anything nice for me?  Why be considerate of this tiny thing your father asks you about almost every day of the long baseball season?”  

His facial expression had a good point.  Why would  a kid, relegated to the role of eternal adversary before he even knew his first words, feel the need to be considerate of his prosecutor father’s tender feelings?  Added to that, could anything be more trivial than a mid-season baseball score, that most transient of statistics in a season that had expanded to 162 games a year during my early childhood?    

I suppose, on the other hand, that the evanescence of these scores made my ignoring of them all the more poignant to my sentimental father.  The score of an individual game lives for a brief moment of a single day as something new, then is almost always forgotten.  To not even register the numbers 4-2 when they are spoken over the radio?  What could be crueler confirmation of indifference?

I guess the only way I could have been crueler would have been by not answering “how’d the Tigers do?” at all.  Silence as response was something my father had a strategic genius for deploying with devastating effect. In our last real conversation, two years before the gentle one he participated in from his death bed, he told me snippily, and irrationally, “you have to respect my right not to respond to this letter.”  

“Respect?” I said, “I acknowIedge that you once more don’t intend to answer, but I am not obliged to respect a father’s decision not to say a word on a vexing matter his son has taken great pains to express as clearly as possible, in a letter written three months ago, now delivered four times.”

“I never got that letter,” my father had told me the first time I asked him about it.  I sent another copy, emailed a third copy.  The copy I handed him in the den in Florida that day was a fourth copy of the original letter.

“Oh, that letter,” he said with feigned nonchalance, “yeah, I read that letter.”  

I made the universal Jewish sign for “nu…?”,  “and therefore…?”

He paused, his jaw tightened.  “You have to respect my right not to respond to this letter,” he said.

It was as though I’d just asked him, expectantly, “how’d the Tigers do?”

For a number of years, whenever taking leave of a friend or colleague, or sometimes saying goodbye to my sister or me, my father would say “keep the faith”.  I assumed this was a sign passed back and forth between fellow-travelers on the road to freedom.  I thought of it as a remnant of the struggle against slavery, perhaps, or emanating for an imagined African past when powerless people were autonomous brothers and sisters in their own land.   He said it with a smile, and a bit of irony, but I think there was sincerity there too, as he said it all the time for a while.  

He had other phrases he used often, but none that carried even a molecule of the hope and longing of “keep the faith”.  Anytime he was pressed to guess what was in a wrapped box he was handed he’d say “a combination egg and beat slicer.”   Whenever asked how he liked a presentation he’d been dragged to against his will he’d generally say “it was better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick”.  

He’d sometimes utter nonsense words in response to nothing in particular.  “Tangan-yeeka, Tuskegee, British Empire!” would suddenly burst out of his mouth sometimes, without apparent sense or explanation.  “Lumumba died for freedom,” would pop out of his mouth from time to time, its possible connection to anything recently said completely mysterious.  A line out of context, perhaps from Lenny Bruce, with an arch German accent “haf you rrrrrrelatives in Chermany?”.  “Jonathan Trrrrask,” would also rattle out of his mouth sometimes, rolling the ‘r’ with great relish.   “Up your nalgas with a meat hook,” was another one I recall.  It was only decades later that I learned the Spanish word nalgas meant buttocks.

“Keep the faith” had, among all these throwaway phrases, a ring of truth and sincerity to it.  It was, looking back, almost like he was reminding himself of the vital importance, and extreme difficulty, of keeping the faith, whatever that faith might be, however vital it was to keep it, in the face of a world that seemed designed to destroy all faith.  In the final years of his life it seemed that most of his faith had been turned to bitter dust.

“Well, you watched the trajectory of your father’s faith over the course of your life, and it was a pretty sobering trajectory,” said the skeleton.  “When I heard Malcolm X speak, in his last phase, once he’d come fully awake and cast off the blinders of Elijah Muhammed, there was a faith there so strong you could actually grasp it, you could hear it in Martin Luther King’s speeches.  There was a faith in the undeniable power of truth.  It makes me feel like crying now, even as I’m out of the game, to think of the loss of faith and hope as time marches on without truth amounting to a hill of dung.”  

“Was America’s long persecution of its minorities a Human Rights issue, rather than the more innocent-sounding Civil Rights matter, as the post-Mecca Malcolm insisted?  Of course it was.  Was King going to Memphis to support the striking garbage men, after eloquently opposing the immoral war in Viet Nam a brave, if foolish thing to do — if he intended to live to see his grandchildren?  Once King became a critic of the machinery that keeps everyone in line, rather than meekly getting his head kicked in for the right to sit at a segregated lunch counter, they had to kill him.  Once you begin uniting former enemies around the suffering they endure from their common oppressor your death is inevitable.  The certainty of the murder of anyone speaking too much truth got to me, beat me down in the end.  Not that I was ever in danger of being killed, the worst I experienced was being called a fucking commie kyke and threatened by parents who didn’t want niggers bused into their kids’ school, but I felt the surging power of their hatred, got a nice whiff of it.”  

“You know, looking back over my long life, I had little hope of anything as a child.  My options were about the same as a kid in the projects, only I was a Jewish kid in a small town, part of a little insular minority of kykes, and there was only so much trouble I could get into.  I can only imagine the horrors and dangers faced by poor kids in a city Housing Project somewhere.  Then I had a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck, World War Two, my ticket to a larger world and higher education.  I never had any hope of leaving Peekskill, and then, I’m a former sergeant in the Army Air Force that helped defeat Hitler, having deep discussions with Richard Hofstadter about the nature of history.”

“And I had a period, around the time I met your mother, when I felt like I could conquer the world.  I had a Masters Degree in history and a firm grasp of the historical moment, with a sense that I could help bend the world toward justice.   The euphoria of those days is hard to describe to you, since you saw the gradual disappearance of virtually all hope in me by the time I was old.  Picture the world in 1950, Fascism defeated, or so we all believed, a wave of prosperity that was truly raising all boats, a shining era of once every hundred years optimism.  Everything seemed possible.  You got a little taste of that at the tail end of the Viet Nam war years when you’d cut High School and participate in a mass demonstration somewhere against the draft.  Of course, as always, poor kids wound up in a jungle swamp over there getting their asses shot off, but the sense that by uniting, marching together, showing unshakable conviction, you could change the world, or at least political decisions, was palpable.”  

“I remember when you went to Central Park in 1970 for the first Earth Day.  Imagine if those millions of marchers worldwide had actually begun to influence policy makers, oil refiners, war profiteers, toxic industrial polluters, the alternative energy industry then in its infancy, back in 1970.  The first thing Reagan did when he got into the White House in 1980 was rip down the solar panels Jimmy Carter had put on the roof.   The right wing was at war against anything that would curtail its masters’ corporate profits.   It’s 46 years later and amid rising temperatures and escalating natural disasters all over the world, droughts, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes in places that never had them, we have billionaires pulling out their biggest guns to create the false belief that ‘climate change’ is actually some kind of scam foisted on the public by an illegitimate Muslim president who hates our freedom and wants to kill job creation.  The ignorance that is sold to credulous Americans every day is enough to make you take a meat hook to your own nalgas, Elie.”  

You’re singing to the choir, dad.  

“Well, it’s a hateful song.  I was singing another song for many years.  It was a much better song that this one.  The key might be to somehow keep on pushing, though I can’t tell you how.  You had a great idea for that program with public school kids, having them run an autonomous collaborative workshop.  This program really could demonstrate important and heartbreaking things about the potential of kids marked for a life of early death.  You were pushing a huge rock up a steep hill, and I don’t think running out of strength to keep pushing it is any kind of shame.  Still, it’s a shame.  You live in an America with one value: materialism.  I know you don’t need me to tell you that. Still, I see you struggling against it.  I wish I had not been so locked in my own deathly battles for the time we were on the earth alive together.  I know that’s a lame wish from a skeleton on a hill in the countryside, but I wish I could have been less of a hindrance and more of an inspiration to you.  Being a true inspiration is hard work, my brother.”  

I understand that.  I take every drop of inspiration I can get, from wherever I can get it.  Keep the faith, dad.

“Look, I understand how ugly all that war unto the death business was when you were growing up, but if you really hope to sell this manuscript to a literary agent, and ultimately to a publisher who will give you an advance, and, hopefully, the legitimacy of having written a book, no matter how modestly it might sell, you need to keep it light, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father.

Right you are, dad, but let’s unwind your slick use of the passive voice here for just a second.  It’s best, when making your point, as every first year law student is explicitly instructed, to gloss over anything that detracts from your argument.  At the same time, look unflinchingly at the other side of the argument, as you also taught me.  “I understand how ugly that war unto the death business was when you were growing up,” is nicely done, I’ll give you that.

“Nice to see how generous you’ve become, now that I’m dead,” observed the skeleton.  

Don’t mention it, dad.  Ugly the “war unto the death”, certainly was, no doubt about that.  It was a grim enough business as we were “growing up”, for sure.  But let’s not insult the reader by pretending that you were not the C.E.O of that grim little enterprise.  My sister objected to my overkill recently when I thoughtlessly characterized the violent nightly scene around the dinner table as Auschwitz.  She was right to object, it was overkill, disgustingly so.  She agreed it was fair to compare it to the muddy No-Man’s-Land between the barbed wire and trenches of World War One.  The sounds of dying horses, the stench of death, blood and the excrement of thousands of filthy men, whiffs of chlorine and mustard gas rolling in the distance, the occasional cackle of machine gun fire.

“Well, that’s fair, I suppose,” said the skeleton.  

The fact that I can be certain, eleven years after your death, that you remember that catch we had fifty years ago, speaks as much as anything to the rareness of that kind of interaction between a father and his children.  

“Look, what do you want me to say?  Am I still on trial?  Did I not take full responsibility for the obstacles I was too foolish to avoid placing in you and your sister’s paths?  I apologized, hours before I took my last breath, did I not?  What more can I do?  Do the goddamned demands never end?  I’m dead, for fuck’s sake.  What is it you want from me now?”  the skeleton’s smile looked more sardonic than sincere, in light of his mood. 

The same thing I always wanted, the same thing you never got, as a kid, even as an adult, except fleetingly, if intoxicatingly, in those moments when Arlene and Russ leaned lovingly toward you to drink in everything you had to say.  

“Aren’t you getting a little tedious with this One Note Samba, Johnny One Note?” asked the skeleton, as weary, in death, of this line of talk as he always had been during his eighty years of life.  

Certainly, look, I can see that.  I’ll lose some of the repetition in the rewrite, but I haven’t fully made the point yet.   You were born in extreme poverty, your chances for a life better than your parents’ miserable lives were almost nil.  You had almost no expectation of leading a life where anyone would actually listen to you.  Then, as a result of an almost unrepeatable series of events, you were plucked out of your misery and sent off to sing bawdy songs with other young men, engaged in a war to defeat, not somebody cynically portrayed as Hitler, but the actual fucking Hitler.  

“Fuck him, one more time, there’s something we can all agree on.   Even Jeb Bush enthusiastically said he’d take his one shot in a time machine to go back and kill the baby Hitler.  Too bad they didn’t follow up and ask if he’d be willing to abort the fucking fetal Hitler, that tap-dance would have been good TV,” said the skeleton.  

Yep, yep. So you’re in the army now, and then, 36 months later, on the G.I. bill, in Syracuse University and on to Columbia, distinguishing yourself at both schools and filling yourself up with new dreams of the future.  Affordable homes were made available for veterans and everyone else in this unprecedented era of widespread prosperity and optimism and so you were able to afford the cozy cottage where you raised your children in middle class comfort.  You were in the right place, with the right talents and a strong work ethic, at the right time.  You and many of an entire cohort, that Greatest Generation.  

“Well, FDR and World War Two were very lucky breaks for me.  The New Deal really was a New Deal, it changed the game, truly.  FDR was a political genius, and he grasped in that crucial moment that unless a democracy gives its people a true safety net, an alternative like Communism, which was very attractive to millions of us here, becomes irresistible.  Of course, then, as now, there was plenty of hate, there was segregation, the long century of state-sanctioned terrorism casually referred to as ‘Jim Crow’, Native Americans were treated like the Nazis treated the Gypsies, so were Japanese and many other Americans.  Homosexuals could be thrown in jail if they tried to be bold by coming out of the closet, women, after their great contributions to the war effort, and proving they could do all these jobs as well as men, were shoved back into the kitchen.  There was plenty wrong with post-war, Cold War America, but it’s undeniable that the opportunities I got are not often available to poor people anywhere.  You’re right, the circumstances were historically almost unique,” said the skeleton.

Not to minimize your hard work, your tireless dedication to two difficult jobs.  

“No need to put me on a pedestal, you know as well as I do that I commuted to the night job on Long Island as much to get away from the misery in that house as I did to earn whatever pittance they were paying me,” said the skeleton. 

I wouldn’t put you on a pedestal, you know that.  OK, listen, try this on.  A middle class kid has an expectation of being listened to, no?  Wouldn’t you say a child in a private school, whose parents are some kind of acquisitive pricks able to afford the $30,000 tuition to send their precious little seed to an elite elementary school, expects to have his or her opinions listened to seriously?  

“Yes, of course, and any servant insolent enough not to listen attentively to the opinionated musings of the entitled little prick would be enthusiastically caned and then sacked,” said the skeleton.

Right.  Contrast this expectation of having your precocious opinions about the shape and consistently of your little turds given serious consideration with the expectations of youngsters in the School to Prison pipeline.  

“Well, Elie, in fairness to that School to Prison pipeline for poor kids, it does give them an opportunity to be productive members of society.  They become, by their violent crimes and petty misdemeanors, consumers of and  job creators for all the industries associated with privatized prisons.  You know, not only corrections officers but delivery van drivers, cooks, laundry operators, G.E.D. outfits, manufacturers of prison uniforms, a host of prison support jobs in parts of the state that often have almost no jobs.  In fact, if there were more reasonable job opportunities society-wide, say tens, or hundreds, of thousands of decently paid home care attendant jobs instead of the off-the books exploitation of the poor people who presently care for the old and infirm, the demand for prison cells with their three hots and a cot, would be far less.  There’s a nice Catchuh-22uh for you,” said the skeleton.

Couldn’t have put it more succinctly myself, I said, as the skeleton continued to impassively grin.  

“I see where you’re going, of course.  The child born into American poverty has virtually no expectation of anything better, no less of anyone listening to her.  She has a hard life at home, amid the privations and frustrations of poverty, even if her parents are exceptions to the general rule and show her nothing but love and respect, and then she shuffles off to a school that is, in virtually every case, more like a factory for failure than anything resembling a place to set her imagination on fire, as education should, with the many fascinating possibilities the world holds for her.  The world holds jack-shit for her, let’s speak plainly.  There are no jobs for her, outside of menial ones, if she can be persistent and obsequious enough to get and keep one of those.   There are no opportunities for someone who is a third, fourth, fifth, tenth generation poor person, except for the outlier who is then held up as damning proof that any of them could have been born a genius, if only they had the guts and persistence to pursue their American Dream.  These genetic losers can get fired up at some political rally and go home and get drunk.  If they are lucky they won’t wind up beating the shit out of the kids they had when they were fourteen and fifteen years old. Ten in every million will wind up with any chance to escape more than a step or two from poverty.   Makes me glad to be done with the whole business, when I think about it,” said the skeleton.

It’s a funny thing, as I woke up, cold under the blankets, hours before the alarm, the thing that made me get out of bed was the thought of continuing this conversation with my long-dead father.  I’d been bitter, waking after so little sleep, noting it was an unseasonable 27 degrees outside and the slumlord hadn’t bothered to put on any heat overnight, nor in the morning, for that matter.  Ironic, since during the entire mild winter, on days it was fifty or more outside, my thermometer often read ninety in here.  Most days it was a sauna, impossible to wear so much as a shirt while sitting at my desk at any time, day or night.  But this morning it is bitterly cold in the apartment.  I tried to remember the last time I couldn’t sleep because I’d been too cold to sleep.  But now, drinking hot coffee, wearing a hat and three shirts, the top one fleece-lined, I’m back in business.

“A conversation?” said the skeleton, from his frosty bed, “you mentioned the thought of continuing this conversation?”  

Yes, actually, it was that thought that got me out of bed.  And, let’s note again, how an interested party will see the one word among dozens, or hundreds, that interests him.  

“That insight can make a man millions of dollars in advertising,” noted the skeleton, “finding the magic words that press the buttons.”  

Well, the magic words are something to be aware of, for sure.  And the other side of that, the magic words to not say; one haphazardly placed adjective can blow up the whole beautifully constructed house of words.  

I once wrote a very measured letter in a ticklish bureaucratic situation that was about to turn fatal for me.  My friend read the rewrite and began nodding with approval.  Then, at the last line, he laughed, and stabbed at a word I hadn’t been able to resist, hadn’t even noticed I was placing there.  In the letter’s very last phrase I called the bureaucrat’s response cynical, and that one adjective gave away the game.   I thanked my friend, who was still laughing, and removed the word before I sent the letter.  Not that it helped much in the end, they were supremely cynical motherfuckers.  

I don’t suppose you remember that time I called you “weird”?    

“No,” the skeleton said, “I don’t remember that.  I remember that time you called me a cunt, though. That made an impression.  You could call me a lot of things, but I don’t think ‘weird’ is really one of them.”  

Ah, but I did, and I remember your reaction very well.  It was a great reaction.

 “What was my reaction?” he asked.  

I can only call it weird.  You got this strange expression on your face, slightly amused and slightly insulted, you were smiling, but it was a very bizarre smile.  The smile was, dare I say it, quite weird, I’d never seen that exact expression on your face.  You kept saying ‘weird?  weird?’ and it was almost like you were about to start twitching, like a haywire cyborg about to start malfunctioning.  You must have said ‘weird’ five or six times, sort of turning the word in your mouth like it tasted funny.  You were still saying it as you walked past me out of the kitchen.

“Hmmm, I have no recollection of that,” he said.  

You also have no recollection of that great moment with Sekhnet, the first time I brought her to meet you and mom.  To me, that’s the funniest part of the whole story.  

“What story?” asked the skeleton.  

We drove up to visit you outside of Burlington, when you rented that place on top of the mountain.  You’d never met Sekhnet and we spent a weekend up there.  There are those great photos from that weekend.  You’re wearing a red jacket and baseball cap, mom is holding Ginger, who was still a pup, no older than 15 or 16 years old.  

“She was a good dog,” he said.

Yes, and she had a good, long run.  Anyway, at the end of the visit, which had been perfectly nice, we’d packed up the car and the four of us were sitting in a dim little sun room saying goodbye.  You made one of your patented barbed comments to mom, one of those ‘epitaphs on the tombstone of a feeling’ type jokes that Nietzsche spoke of.  Sekhnet has always been fond of that quote, said it enough times that I remember it.

“Thus spoke Sekhnet,” mused the skeleton.

So you made this remark to mom, a typical one, like “Evvy, if I had your nose full of dimes, I’d never have to work again,” you know, a lovingly friendly but mean little throw-away of the type you liked to toss off, and mom’s nostrils flared the way they used to when she was about to cry, and her eyes got misty, but she smiled gamely, the way she did at such times.  And Sekhnet, seeing this pain on mom’s face, looked quickly from mom to you and back.  Having seen the satisfied smile on your face, and the painful one on mom’s, she jumped into the breach.

“You know what the problem is, Evelyn?” she said to mom, “you didn’t start whacking him early in the relationship every time he said something like that.”  And she illustrated what should have been done from the beginning by thumping you in the chest with the back of her fist.  

“I would have remembered that,” theorized the skeleton.  

You’d think so, yeah.  Your hands went up, like a praying mantis, and you had this great shocked look on your face, something like mom’s smile a moment before, except without a trace of tears.  And mom began laughing, and looking at Sekhnet with admiration and love.  We all laughed, at how quickly the tables had turned, as you acted the part of the man who’d just been dissed, but who could take it.   I always thought of that as the first moment of their great relationship.

The funniest part of the story, like I said, was that less than a year later, neither of you had the slightest recollection of the incident.

“That is funny,” he said, “and another illustration of the basic unreliability of the so-called ‘historical record’.  What goes on there is what certain people sort of agree actually happened, and even in that agreed on set of events, there is great disagreement as to what things truly meant, how significant this or that was, etc. I guess you could say human beings are basically fucking idiots, the more intellectual ones just much higher functioning, more skillfully self-justifying, fucking idiots.  You could make a very strong case for that proposition.”  

I suppose you could, if you were being judgmental about it, the evidence is pretty overwhelming.  I guess it’s also human nature, to sand away the memories that cause discomfort.  Denial is another word, I guess, but also a judgmental one.  It’s just one of those things people do, I suppose, to keep their worldview intact.  Even if that worldview is weird, insane or self-destructive.  I guess especially if that’s the case.  The unlearned lessons of history, and so forth.  

“It takes a certain amount of courage to keep things in mind that make us uncomfortable.  We all like comfort, and being right, and we build our lives around somehow maintaining the illusion of it, even if our efforts wind up killing us,” said the skeleton.

True dat.  I was reading the transcript of our last conversation, the part of it I got recorded, the part where you said you wished you’d been capable of having a real conversation with me ten, fifteen years earlier.  

“Well, I would have happily settled for that, wouldn’t you?” he said.

I would.  It’s funny, all I really wanted as a kid was to have conversations like this.  

“Well, that’s really all everybody wants, Elie,” said the skeleton quietly.  “To be heard and to hear what the other person is honestly saying, to say things to keep the dialogue moving forward, toward greater and greater mutual understanding,  throwing the ball back and forth like that.”

You remember that catch we had one early summer evening on 190th Street?

“Yop,” said the skeleton with a small catch in his voice.

“Well, as much as I admired your initial impulse to paint a nuanced portrait of the, shall we say, ‘complicated’ man who was your father, this last one really is a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?” said the skeleton from his hilltop bed in the quiet boneyard in Cortlandt.  “I know you’re making your case, but are you seriously blaming me because you feel like you acted like an overbearingly judgmental asshole to a timid girl who was intimidated by many things, as far as I can see?”

Yes.

“Well, it’s a little pathetic, in a piece entitled The Harm My Father Did, to have this vignette of a girlfriend singing out of tune as your big gun.  You know, I should have acted less like a jerk that day, when you brought that girl over to your sister’s, OK, fine, guilty as charged, but I don’t think it’s fair to blame me for how you acted when you accompanied her and, because you somehow had my psychological set-up or something, made her too self-conscious to sing.  You were a grown man, for Christ’s sake, and long out of the house, you don’t find it a bit sad to try to hold me responsible for your behavior?”

No, I don’t.  The only sad thing is that it took me more than thirty years to have the beginning of any insight I could use to start overcoming the destructive things a childhood of abuse had instilled in me.  

“Oh, here we go,” said the skeleton, shaking his head.  

You can’t have it both ways, as you know.  I admire those able to appreciate nuance, and who try to turn the thing and view it from as many angles as possible, and I try to see all sides myself.  I credit you for teaching me to strive for fairness, in fact.  But you really can’t have it both ways.   If your apologies as you left the stage are to be believed, and I prefer to think they were sincere, you had a lot of regrets about the obstacles you placed in front of my sister and me in a world that’s difficult enough to make one’s way through as it is, as you said.  If you want to argue about everything that I see as an obstacle, or a manifestation of the struggle to surmount an obstacle, I have a simple, elegantly Irv-like solution for you.  I’ll just stop writing your goddamned parts.

The skeleton was silent, looked like he was trying to suck his teeth and glare a bit from under lowered eyebrows he no longer had.   In the next moment he had that too jolly by half grin they all seem to have, and still said nothing.

We were standing on line at the buffet at Chris Coughlin’s wedding to Eddie.  My father was holding his plate and my sister and I were beside him with our plates.  Chris had long been a widow, her husband, Bob, a policeman who’d died young from cancer, had inherited the house next door where the Coughlins had raised Bob and his two brothers.  Chris, who had raised her and Bob’s two beautiful daughters in that house, loved my father, who she found smart and hilarious.  My father was very fond of Eddie, a retired NYC cop, Viet Nam vet, youthful, handsome and a cheerful raconteur of the kind of brutal, darkly funny stories my father loved.

A rookie cop was elbowed by a perp during the arrest.  There was dried blood under the cop’s nose when he hustled the still angry handcuffed man into the precinct. His partner pushed the perp towards the desk sergeant who was going to book him. “What the fuck happened to your nose?” the desk sergeant asked the rookie.  

The young cop explained that he’d been bloodied during the scuffle, he’d caught an accidental elbow.   “What the fuck?” the desk sergeant said, “‘an accidental elbow’?  Get the fuck out of here.  I’m not booking the piece of shit like that.  Bring him back in a turban.”

“A turban?” the rookie cop asked.  At this point my father cracked up while telling the story Eddie had told him the day before.  

“Dean, Johnny, show our young colleague here the proper procedure for an ‘accidental elbow’ booking, would you?”   The two veteran cops stepped forward, grabbed the handcuffed perp, and shoved him through the door to the back, out of sight.  They grunted for their young colleague to follow.

“And they tuned him up,” said my father, using the dry, brutal phrase Eddie had used to describe it.  “You know, they ‘went up ‘side his head’ as my boys at Evander Childs used to say.  They beat the shit out of him and wrapped his bloody head in a bandage, a ‘turban’, and brought him back out to the desk sergeant for booking.”

 “Ah, there we go!” said the desk sergeant.   “That’s how we do it!  Are you ready to be booked now, sir?”  My father smiled broadly to show how satisfied the desk sergeant had been at the end of this successful teachable moment.

Eddie had described the horrified face of the rookie at that moment and left his own feelings about the whole matter manfully to the side.  My father loved these kinds of stories, even as they violated just about everything he believed about social justice.  

Chris had just exchanged wedding vows with Eddie and we were waiting on line to be served some food that looked and smelled delicious in the large trays over the warming sternos.

“You’ve often told us that angry words do the same damage as slaps and punches. Do you still consider physical and verbal violence equally harmful?” I asked our father.  He said he did.  

“Then would you consider me and my sister to have been victims of child abuse?”  Again he agreed, probably pausing to admire my intuitive use of the passive voice in that otherwise brutal sentence.  

“I’d have to say you were,” he said, also employing the passive voice, it occurs to me only now, almost thirty years later.

The thing I remember most clearly about this moment is the angry look my sister shot me as my father admitted he’d been an abusive father.  It would have been hard for the man who cursed angrily at his children almost every night, a man who prided himself on his ability to be honest under fire, to have denied it.  I suppose he could have said it was perfectly understandable for a father who had impossibly high expectations for his children to vent a little, call the girl an empty-headed, vain little liar and thief, or the boy a venomous cobra whose terrifying face was also, to make things even more scary, twisted and contorted with hate.  He might have made an argument for that, he was capable of it, but to his credit he quietly admitted the truth and said nothing to mitigate it.  And my sister stared a volley of daggers my way, along the steam trays of food we were about to have piled on our plates by smiling caterers.

I’ve thought of that look several times over the years, trying to understand the reason for her anger in that moment.  She had been a victim too, had later expressed her admiration for me standing up to the verbal assaults, told me I’d had it much worse than she did because I always resisted.  In my memories she had some glorious and memorable moments of resistance herself, and the sharpest teeth and claws, and quickest wit, of any of the poor bastards assembled on that tiny battlefield each night for dinner.  We all remember things differently, I suppose, particularly traumatic things.  

I saw a great interview with humanist political scientist type Henry Giroux, speaking to Bill Moyers about our culture of cruelty.  He described some of the unspeakably cruel things we now nonchalantly regard as routine.  Have a team of cynical lawyers liberally redefine the word ‘torture’ in a secret memo and America is now free to deniably torture anyone any time it has a theory that might make torture necessary.  Innocents killed by robotically fired missiles are just collateral damage, not actual children and old people.  Protesters on campus?  Roll in the tank, armored car, hardcore military surplus contraptions designed to put down insurrections.  Many campus police forces, and most municipal police forces, now have this sort of armored overkill in their arsenals.  Illegal poker game going on?  Break down the door with a battering ram equipped riot squad, men in helmets, bullet proof vests, carrying shields, machine guns.  That’s how we do it, yo!  “Everyone face down on the fucking floor, if you don’t want your guts hanging off the fucking chandelier.  Do it!”  Angry black guy tells a cop to go fuck himself, half of America understands why the cop was totally justified in shooting him to death. 

Giroux plays Moyers a clip from a campus protest at a California university, either Berkeley or Davis, if memory serves.  “Look at this, Bill,” he says and we see a line of students, sitting with arms linked, blocking a road on campus, in protest of something.  They are not chanting or provoking in any way we can see, but they are also stubbornly not moving when commanded to do so.  One security guard walks back and forth along their line, with a large canister of something with a spray hose at one end.  He shoots a jet of something into the faces of the kids.  He does this in a very unexcited manner, like a gardener spraying something on his plants.  The spray is reddish and the kids being sprayed are reacting somewhat hysterically when it hits them.

“That’s pepper spray, Bill.  And, look, he’s doing that like it’s a normal thing to do,” says Giroux. 

“Nicely done,” says the skeleton, “I casually sprayed burning chemicals in your faces every night and your sister, I suppose, had some kind of Stockholm Syndrome where she identified with her oppressor.”  

Thanks, I thought you’d appreciate it.

If your father comes home smelling like whiskey, and in a foul mood, and begins snarling and then shoves your mother, you will have no mistake about what’s going on.  You jump up as the first slap hits your crying mother and take the first punch.  Dad kicks you as you slump against the door, turns his rage back on your mother. You’re on dad’s back, literally, and he’s not going to let a sixty pound bastard interfere with the pressing work he is determined to do,  He throws you off with a violent shrug and offers another kick and a few oddly casual flicks with the back of his hand across your face (he’s quite drunk, after all).  This gives your mother time to crawl across the room, but not quite enough time, because dad has her by the ankle.  

The neighbors have already called the police, and nobody is actually going to get killed in the apartment that night, though, by the sounds of it, nobody could predict that.  Horrible as this is, there is little ambiguity to any of it.  

In the hands of a skilled practitioner, however, words can be wielded in such a way that the victim will believe there is no violence going on at all, only truth being told.  There is much more room for subtle nuance in the arsenal of the verbally violent than in the much less ambiguous tool kit of the hitter, kicker, puncher.

“He had a genius for reducing people to the sum of their faults,” my sister observed recently.  “And making you feel like you were the one who was wrong.”

“Nobody did it better, ” I agreed.

I thought of a book called “Words that Hurt, Words that Heal” by a rabbi named Telushkin.  It made a big impression on me when I read it about 20 years ago.  He compared an intemperate, angry word to an arrow let loose from the bow in a moment of anger.  No way to call it back, and it will find its mark, always hit directly in the heart, no matter how badly aimed.  It was the intent to shoot an arrow into the heart, as much as the actual flight of the arrow, that carried the irreversibly painful message.  

In that moment when the bow is drawn there is only a fraction of a second to stop yourself from committing a cruelty you can not undo, Telushkin pointed out.  He also described words that heal.  These words recognize the vulnerability we all share, and like words that hurt, the speaker’s desire in uttering them is immediately and unmistakably clear.  In the case of words intended to heal, the offer of empathy and comfort.  He had many memorable anecdotes and metaphors in the book.  I read it eagerly, this beautiful illuminating music sung to the choir.  

“Well, isn’t that nice for Rabbi Telushkin?” my father’s skeleton said bitterly. “Look, I understand all this, I really do.  And, you know, you yourself have appreciated that for a man who has been whipped as a baby to use words alone to brutalize his kids, no matter how hurtful those words were, is an improvement, and sign of restraint,  on the part of that damaged, brutalized person.”  

Absolutely.  I take nothing away from you, vicious fuck though you also, undeniably, could also be.  Your struggles are the inspiration for mine.  I am only trying to take things to the next level.  Not hitting is better than hitting.  Wielding words like truncheons and swords, while also bad, is better than whipping a baby in the face with a rough, heavy cord.  I’m going for the next level.  I’d like to use my words to help heal.  You have nothing against this plan, I assume.

The skeleton smiled.  “Strength to your arm, son.  Make us both proud.”  He paused.  

“Or I’ll rain a hail of razor tipped arrows down on your pitiful, unarmored, little second-story ass and you’ll never so much as think of sitting down again.” He yawned.  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a long nap to return to.”

It’s probably past time to begin laying out the devilish details of what made my father such a dreaded man so much of the time.   He was tragic, yes, but also cruel, with intellectual gifts, and emotional disabilities, that made him capable of terrible destructiveness.  He expressed this most consistently in the airtight case he could always make for reducing anyone to the helpless, hopeless sum of their faults.  

Reducing someone to the sum of their faults is generally something we do only when someone’s faults have become unbearable to us.  My father was all too ready to do it any time, he wasn’t prissy about needing a deep cause, he did it from the outset with both of his kids. He had several main weapons that made him so effective at this, along with a supremely calm and subtle touch much of the time.  He also had the sadist’s gift for perfect timing.

This uncharitable tendency to make others feel like shit often bubbles up from a withholding personality.   Someone who lacks emotional generosity will rarely do anything to make anyone else feel good.  It is apparently more satisfying for this type to make people feel like shit by ignoring or belittling their needs and slighting their vulnerabilities than to take even minimal care of the other person’s feelings.  I guess it operates under the general principle of ‘misery loves company’, in making you feel bad about your life they get to feel a bit better about theirs.  Fortunately for these ungenerous types the opportunities for such withholding are almost unlimited, especially with kids, although it works as well for people of any age, particularly when delivered at moments of greatest vulnerability.  

I guess the unconscious theory these types cling to for justification is a kind of karmic one: nobody deserves better than I got, and I got jack shit outside of my dear mother’s energetic lashes across the face, I got less than jack shit, you fucking needy fuck, with your entitlement to the middle class life I’m literally busting my ass to give you, you ungrateful little bastard.  I suppose, on one level, my father’s case boils down to that.  My father was in so much pain so much of the time, high threshold for it or not, that he had little generosity to spare for the needs and demands of his children.

“Thanks for dinner, dad,” I’d always say when we emerged from a restaurant.  One good habit my parents instilled in us was to say thank you when someone did something nice for us.   We had a neighbor, Bob Coughlin, who reportedly got a kick out of asking three year-old me “whatta ya say, Elie?” and being told “thank you!”

“You never have to thank me for food,”my father always responded when I thanked him for a meal at a restaurant.  I’d recite it in unison with him after a while.

My sister once paid me the great compliment of asking me why I wasn’t like either one of our parents.  To her dismay she’d come to realize she had internalized some of our father’s main methods and motivations.  

“I’m the D.U.,” she told me in horror at one point.  The D.U. was “the Dreaded Unit” her perfectly apt name for the worst of our father, who embraced it happily.  

“Jesus,” I said sincerely, feeling her great pain to realize this unbearable thing, “what are you going to do about it?”  

“Being the D.U. means there is nothing you can do about it,” she said, foreclosing the possibility of anything good in that ingenious, lightning quick way the actual D.U. had.

To her credit, she took great pains to overcome this, and in many ways she did.  The reflex, however, remains deep in there, the ability to act in that dreaded way is intact, even if held down.

In choosing between them to find a role model, the choice was fairly stark, on a pure survival level.  Our vulnerable mother, an easily victimized person who was often reduced to tears or our indomitable father who cried only once in our mutual memory.  (He would cry one other time, for teen-aged me alone, while begging me not to become like him, to let people, especially my mother, show me love and affection– but this was way out of character for him).  It was not difficult for my sister to select her role model.  To her credit she fought against it, but she recognized his strong influence on her.  

“How come you’re not like either one of them?” she asked me once, and I remember being naively flattered by the question.  

“If those were the only two choices, I’d hack my own head off,” I told her without exaggeration.  And it’s true.  Yet I also know it’s a life’s work to escape the traumatic influences of your earliest years.  I was an infant accused of looking at his father accusingly long before I could speak.  The obvious question: was I some kind of a prophet?  How could I have known at a week old, a month old, that I would have reason to accuse this man of anything?  Self-fulfilling prophecy on my father’s part, I suppose.  

At ten weeks old, ten weeks, the story goes, I became stiff as your proverbial board, and red, my little fists clenched, and I screamed in pain, or rage, or both.  My parents rushed me to the doctor, in what would be scene two of this famous origin story.  The story was of the ineffable origin of my constant irrational anger.  The rigid, purple ten week-old is examined by the concerned pediatrician, this would be toward the end of the summer of 1956.

“And the pediatrician suddenly burst out laughing,” said my mother with a highly complex expression of mostly amusement on her face, “and he says ‘this baby is definitely having a temper tantrum!  My God, I’ve never seen it in a child this young, but this little boy is having a temper tantrum!'”  Relieved, my parents took me home and, as near as I can figure, told me to just shut up and stop acting like such a goddamn baby.  

I’ve often thought about what a casually arrogant dick this glib pediatrician must have been.  Let’s assume his diagnosis was correct– are there not some very logical and sort of inevitable follow-up questions for the parents of an enraged infant that a doctor bound by his oath to ‘first do no harm’ should ask?  

“Nothing wrong with this angry little fuck, I mean, he’s clammed up completely, look how fucking smug he is, won’t even give you a single reason he’s so fucking angry.  Fuck him, you know?  How is any of this your fault?  Nothing you can do, just luck of the draw, some babies are, unfortunately, just complete irrational little shits.”

My parents heaved a great sigh, realizing that they had simply produced a randomly enraged baby.  Some babies, it is well known, are by nature easy babies while others are just born cantankerous pricks, and that it often has nothing to do with anything the parents are or are not doing.  I can imagine their relief.   What, really, is the harm, you will ask?   It is the earliest origin story about my irrational anger and it sets the stage perfectly for the adversarial childhood that followed.  

If I was ever angry, well, what had that to do with my parents?  I was born that way.  The doctor said so!  Don’t look at us, look at the expert pediatrician, look into your own irrational fucking rage, you goddamn merciless fucking terrifying cobra!  The pediatrician laughed it off, why can’t you?

 My sister’s compliment aside, I have also always had to fight my father’s worst tendencies in myself.  I went through a period of many years when I used my sense of humor the same way my father’s mother used the rough, heavy cord of her steam iron against my young father’s face.  It was my reflex to use my quickness with a phrase to dash off a spontaneous, often hurtful, one-liner from time to time.  It was a deeper, darker thing than that.  

When I was in my twenties I met a pretty woman who was clearly anxious to be my girlfriend.  I had no objection, in fact, I jumped right in.  It became clear at once that this caramel colored former army brat, who had grown up in various places with her angry black G.I. father and her timid French mother, regarded me as the alpha dog in our little pack.  

She was not from New York City and was a bit unsophisticated about how to act in the Big Apple.  She was ready for anything I could show her, and I didn’t hesitate to use my influence on her.   How, then, exactly, was I like my father?  You will laugh as you learn, or perhaps, if not a sadist, you will grimace, or shudder.

Francoise had a beautiful singing voice, had studied classical singing in college.  Her tastes were, in the beginning, a bit corny, leaning toward the bland end of country music and the kind of middle of the road pop standards one might hear among the bubbles of the Lawrence Welk Show.  Over a short time she developed much hipper tastes and we began playing Motown tunes, songs of Philadelphia and clever jazz standards together.  I would accompany her on guitar, something I quickly began to love doing.  Now here’s the monstrous thing I learned from father and did so naturally it required no effort, or even awareness, on my part.

She had a great sense of pitch and a beautiful voice.  She sang professionally in church choirs, had sung on stage and was a fine singer.  I’d tune up the guitar, we’d begin to play, and, as often as not, she’d start singing slightly off pitch.  If the singer has good pitch there is only one reason she will not sing on pitch.  It is a tightness in the vocal cords, brought on by nerves.  The inability to relax the voice box starts a self defeating cycle of self-consciousness and fear.  I would sometimes make her so nervous, merely by my disapproving vibe (perhaps because we were doing a tune from Godspell I found insipid) that she could not find the exact note.  Then, of course, I’d have to point it out, and then it would become hopeless.  Sometimes she’d end up crying.

This may seem like a small, petty thing, but I assure you, it is not.  It stands in for being the kind of person who, instead of being generous while supporting a friend’s creative expression, makes them feel ruthlessly judged and monstrously inferior.  It is a great example of what an asshole I was to poor Francoise at the time.   I was not unique in this, “don’t quit your day job” is a standard quip offered to those trying out a new talent on friends, but it is no less deadly for being a fairly common thing.   That the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, the vulnerable young country girl would soon see first hand.  

I took her to my sister’s, to meet the family.  She and I had been together more than six months, there was some occasion when my parents would be over at my sister’s and I took the opportunity to introduce them all to each other.  She was nervous as we headed over there and I assured her everything would be fine.  Everything would not be fine.  My sister greeted her warmly, my mother was friendly, my brother-in-law engaged with her.  My father, the D.U., grunted hello and went directly into the other room, where he sat watching a football game the entire afternoon until we popped our heads in to say goodbye a few hours later.  He literally said nothing to her, or to me.

“Your father hates me,” she said miserably when we left.  

“My father hates everyone,” I told her as I stroked her back in the elevator.  She assumed he’d acted like Archie Bunker because he was a racist, hated that his son had brought a pretty brown-skinned woman to meet the family.  I assured her that it wasn’t a racial thing, that he merely hated that his son had brought a pretty woman to meet the family.  It disgusted him, no doubt, that his son got to hang out with a cutie like that, had the chance to do all kinds of things with such a fine young woman.  I don’t know what it was all about, exactly, but I can still taste the sickening taste of it.

It would take many years, but I  took pains to make myself conscious, to stop acting like that.  It is, as a general rule in relationships, far better to gently encourage others, especially when they put themselves out there, than to make them feel like vain, self-deluded idiots hopelessly setting themselves up for failure.