My father always projected an image of strength when he spoke about himself.  His hair, his barber Saul* had told him, was strong enough to break his scissors.  His threshold for pain, he always maintained, was extremely high.  The potent gases he produced, gases that rendered his strongest friends helpless, were but one more proof of his powers.  He had convinced our mother that he had the strongest ego of any man she’d ever met.  She told us as much.  My sister and I scoffed, protested, dismissed the laughable notion as worse than ridiculous.

The strongest man in the world suffered as much as anyone I’d ever met.  He was also one of the most sensitive people I ever knew.  He would be the first to admit that everyone has demons, even as he positioned himself to be a demon to the little sprouts he was raising.  Most things are beyond human control and frustration at our powerlessness is what drives us to desperate acts of unintended cruelty, he might have said.  

Actually, he probably did offer that very insight during an angry lecture at some point.  That point would have been when one of his children tried to ask him for his help.  Any display of vulnerability by people old enough to express themselves fully was very discomfiting to him.

He was perfectly correct about the demons.  Every human has at least one or two lurking, stalking, expert saboteurs waiting for the perfect moment to spring forth and insist that there will be no sleep for you this night.  Demons, by their nature, are elusive, hard to describe, they tend to recede in the cool light of day.  If they even can be compared, why would one bother?   Each person’s demons are perfectly designed for them, ingeniously suited to disturb in their uniquely customized way.  Your demons are fairly easy to vanquish, I can tell you exactly what you need to do to overcome them.  My demons– well, those are some undefeatable motherfuckers. 

My father had the unenviable advantage of possessing major demons whose origins were uncommonly easy to spot, though he kept the sources zealously hidden.  He had other ways of battling them, he intimated, and it was pointless to reveal anything about them in any case.  His efforts to always appear strong caused him to literally crack at the seams from time to time.  His skin would begin to come apart, bleeding from many fissures.  He’d eventually need to be hospitalized.  In the hospital he’d surrender himself to be taken care of in a way he never could be cared for in his own home, where he fought an eternal war never to be weak, never to need anyone.    

He was no different from many men of his generation in that need to appear strong, always in control.  It was not part of the culture for men of that time to spill their guts like weak little sob sisters, admit fear, express a need to be understood or appreciated.  It was simply not part of being a man, acting all sensitive.  Before the age of the metrosexual man, men who seemed to openly crave understanding were seen as weak, effeminate, girlish.   Even in the modern age of such men, too much of that is still seen as the mark of a whiner.

“The army didn’t make anyone a man,” my father used to say with disdain.  “That’s an idiotic cliche.  If you weren’t a man when you went in, you weren’t going to be made into one by the army.”   The implication of this was clear– he had been a man at eighteen when he was drafted into the Great War.  

There is a lushly gradated photo of this young man, a perfectly lit bust in a pale dress uniform, looking out from under a curiously tilted enormous looking dress hat, taken probably when he was nineteen.  It is a beautiful shot I will share with you.  We can look into his eyes and see that, indeed, a picture is worth a thousand words.  He has inscribed it to his mother “Love, Sonny.”  Here, have a look:

While we were preparing for my father’s funeral, I found a shoe box full of photographs of him in the army.  In the black and white photos  he looks trim and fit, with shiny jet black hair that would break a barber’s scissors.  In almost every shot (with the exception of the obviously posed studio shot above) he is smiling, laughing, smirking charismatically.  Truly, by the looks of it, a man enjoying the happiest days of his life.  He looked like he didn’t have a care in the world.  A GI at home with his comrades in some kind of cool summer camp, surrounded by other men who just plain liked him.

Somewhere in those photos, most likely, is Darius White, reputedly from Eagle Crotch, Arkansas, whose dismissive catchphrase, and the reason my father brought him up, was “ah, bat-shit!”   Nobody seemed to mind being called a “Draftee Bastard” by the enlisted men and, as far as my father’s recollection, the anti-Semitism, while there, wasn’t too bad either.  If the United States Army Air Forces had been integrated during our country’s heroic war against racism, some of my father’s best friends would have undoubtedly been the “night fighters” he never got to serve with.  

Viewing the snapshots of his life, outside of that one where he is grinning like Moe of the Three Stooges, with his arms around his little brother, about four in the photo, and another kid my uncle identified for me as Herman, and one frozen moment on a picnic blanket, wrestling a shiksa he was no doubt also doing some undocumented nude wrestling with, the army photos undoubtedly show the happiest days of his life.  

On the other hand, I had an eye-opening experience a while back, after looking through all of my mother’s maybe 15 large family photo albums.  There is a series of photos, spread across two pages, where I am beaming in each one.  My face is illuminated by the ineffable pleasure of being alive.  In one I’m standing between my parents’ living room and dining room with my arm around a cousin I haven’t seen in thirty years, a cousin whose father was famous for his Cheshire cat smile, and we are about as happy as two people could ever look.  I have my little aunt under one arm in another photo, and I am glowing with good will, optimism, happiness.  

None of this seemed like me at all.  Concerned, I did some research and realized with shock when these photos had been taken.  During the darkest winter of my life, when I was turning thirty, a failure in art and life.  I’d watched a glib, superficial classmate from art-school suddenly become a wealthy, international superstar artist and it finally broke me.

My father was very concerned, naturally, to see his son broken.  I recall at one point he took charge, had me move back into the house, since I’d planned to travel and it wouldn’t be fair to the friend I’d promised to sublet my apartment to to force him to find another place to live because I was too fucked up to keep my word.  Too weak and indecisive to resist, I moved back into the house of demons where I had already spent many a sleepless night.

I walked, that’s one thing I remember doing.  Some days I must have walked ten miles or more.  I dreaded speaking to anyone, which is an odd thing for someone who has always loved stringing thoughts together and puffing them glibly out of his mouth.

One day my father had me type a letter for him.  He dictated it to me in the kitchen and I tapped it out on the great portable electric typewriter my mother later gave me.  I typed faithfully until a typo appeared in the word “sincerely” at the very bottom of the letter.  There was no white-out in the house and I apologetically informed him I couldn’t correct the mistake.  My father had a temper tantrum.  

Thinking of this reaction, it does not seem the reaction of a strong man, or even that of a generic adult.

A friend with an extra bedroom in his apartment called and urged me to move in.  I did, and not a moment too soon.  I continued walking, and avoiding people, but I played more guitar in that empty, resonant apartment than I ever had before.  

One afternoon at a bithday party in Queens that spring, at the home of an older artist I’d become lifelong friends with since meeting her at age eleven or twelve, (it was her birthday, only reason I’d agreed to go),  a pretty girl asked me if I would call her.  She was wearing a white dress, seemingly with nothing under it, and I had been trying to be inconspicuous while craning my neck to see down the open neck of it for a better look at more of her caramel colored skin.   I was at a loss for how to answer her.  

I finally said, “well… it would be hard, since I don’t have your number.”  She found this funny somehow and wrote out her number for me, which I managed to call a day or two later.  A couple of nights after that we were sitting at the edge of the fountain at Lincoln Center making out like two hungry teenagers.  

“You’ve got to come home with me,” I told her, suddenly knowing what to say again.  She protested, there was a guy named Michael Rappaport who was in love with her, she wasn’t sure.  

“I’m not Rappaport,” I said taking her by the hand and leading her to the subway.  In my apartment afterwards I could not even faintly remember why I had been so depressed, for months, a couple of days earlier.  Everything in the world suddenly seemed possible, easy even.  

My father, knowing better, would have scoffed at this fleeting illusion.  He’d have been strong enough, presumably, too look right through it to the essence of things, the inextinguishable horror and powerless disappointment that would always be there for people like us. 

* Saul may well have been an Auschwitz alumnus, though I will never know.  He was a European Jew with an interesting accent and a very low key affect.

I read a hardcover copy of Peter Guralnick’s excellent, at the time brand new, biography of Sam Cooke during a visit to my recently widowed mother in Florida.  I probably read the bulk of it sitting in the padded swivel chair my father had spent hours in every day, in the guest room where the computer was.  I recall my father’s reluctance to get a computer and my mother’s excitement to acquire one.    

(I can feel already that this will be a quick, twisty ride down tortuous roads, rather than a focused slice of anything, but so be it today.  I am overdue to get out of this chair anyway and it can’t be helped.)

My mother wound up having little interest in, or use for, the computer, but my father wound up really enjoying it.  He quickly discovered he could read the New York Times on-line, as well as the Jerusalem Post and several other publications he liked to read cover to cover every day.  He could follow Syracuse’s sports teams and get news about who was drafting their stars.  He spent hours every day at the screen, in that very chair, even tapping away with a single crooked, arthritic finger to compose the occasional short e-mail.  I got a steady stream of lawyer jokes from him during my three breezy years in law school.  

I am thinking of that hardcover copy of the Cooke biography, though.  I got it from my brother-in-law, who had a talent for acquiring unmarked, hardcover copies of brand new books of interest.   He sometimes loaned them to my father, who read voraciously, as does my brother-in-law.  But it occurred to me today that I got that book from him.  Made me think, and then think again.  

Anyway, out of this chair now and into the street, to walk in the fresh air of the city of my birth.

It’s fairly easy, most of the time, to be honest in general terms; it is in the sticky particulars of interpersonal matters that honesty can become tricky.  

For example, it would be impossible to paint a truly accurate likeness of my father without going into the details of his relationship with my brother-in-law.  In the intricate back and forth of this twenty year relationship you could actually get to see my father at work, his strengths and weaknesses illuminated from many angles.  In fact, I can’t think of another relationship that would show as clearly how my father went about his business, where he drew non-negotiable lines, how he actually operated, the highly practical, yet still uncompromising way he sometimes managed to finesse his discomfort.

Even in this carefully vague outline, you should be able to spot the trouble.  Assuming my sister loved her father, which she did, and assuming she loves her husband, also true, you should be able to imagine her apprehension, about now, if she were reading these words.  I feel like I would have to send anything involving my brother-in-law to him to read before I could ever think of passing it by my sister, let alone sending it out for anyone else to read.  This presents other problems, while portentously adumbrating a host of still other problems.

I take a cautionary tale from Pat Conroy, if such a tale is even needed.  I’d never read Conroy, who I first heard interviewed and reading his wonderful My Reading Life only after his recent death, but I like what I’ve heard.  He seems like a writer of integrity who loved stories and language, wrote directly, and, to hear him tell it, always searched for the deeper truth.  He also fought lifelong battles in many ways similar to the ones I had fighting to overcome years of struggles with my father, though his father practiced his uncompromising version of fatherhood in a much more physically violent form.  A wonderful bite of Conroy, from his website, is at the bottom of this post.

When he published The Great Santini, which portrayed his demanding, violent father quite frankly, his parents got divorced, Conroy’s own wife divorced him and his father’s side of the family stopped talking to him.  Never spoke to him again.  Dead.  His father, a brutally tough Marine who expected as much from his sons as he did from the fighter pilots he trained, and hit them as hard whenever he deemed it necessary, referred to himself as “The Great Santini”.   In that book and movie (neither of which I’ve seen) his brutality and abusiveness is apparently unflinchingly portrayed.  

Conroy’s father, needless to say, was not thrilled about what he heard about the book and didn’t read it for a long time.  He rightfully feared what his first born author son would have to say about him.  My father had a similar reaction whenever my mother told him I’d written something wonderful.  He’d sniff it, read it cautiously, looking for any tell-tale adjective that proved how much I hated him.  

With Conroy’s success as the writer of The Great Santini, and then having his book turned into a successful movie, his father eventually came around, though it took many years.  The making of the movie The Great Santini was apparently an early turning point.  Conroy’s father was greatly mollified when he was called to the set to spend time with Robert Duvall who would play him in the movie.  

“I made Duvall a star,” he used to brag and he played up his Santini persona for the rest of his life, parlaying it into modest fame and a bit of money.  He actually had a radio show in the South where he gave tough advice on parenting, leaning toward unapologetically kicking the child’s ass as needed.  “Spare the rod, you know the rest,” may have been his motto.

Conroy’s success went a long way toward making peace, when they were both adults, with his unforgivably harsh father.  Still, Conroy had a few mental breakdowns along the way, severe enough that he was out of commission and his life seemingly hung in the balance.  

I have had only one breakdown of any note, and while I felt like I was out of commission for a few months, my life never hung in the balance.  It was thirty years ago and I cherish it, in a way, as a very dark, almost fond, memory.  Proof of the sickening old adage “sweet are the uses of fucking adversity.”  I learned a couple of very important life lessons during that dark winter, things I live by to this day.

Honesty is an excellent thing, until somebody gets hurt.  My sister has from time to time done a passable imitation of Jack Nicholson telling a lip-pursing Tom Cruise that he can’t handle the truth.  “You can’t HANDLE the truth,” she would bark at appropriate times. My sister is a very good mimic.  She can do scenes from My Cousin Vinny switching seamlessly between an excellent Joe Pesci and a dead-on Marisa Tomei.  Her Fred Gwynne as the judgmental southern Judge is more than passable too, now that I think of it.

But I digress, which is what I often do.  I digress.  One story leads into another, but the benefit of words on a page is the ease of going to the top and tracing the stories back to see what you were originally on about if anyone gets entangled in the digressions.  I don’t need to do that in this case, I know very well where I started just now, and what I am still tap-dancing around.  

More about this topic another time, when I am not so pressed to leap into some kind of action after a full sedentary day spent reading and writing.   In the meantime, read this Conroy bit, it is beautifully written:

When I was thirty years old, my novel The Great Santini was published, and there were many things in that book I was afraid to write or feared that no one would believe. But this year I turned sixty-five, the official starting date of old age and the beginning count down to my inevitable death. I’ve come to realize that I still carry the bruised freight of that childhood every day. I can’t run away, hide, or pretend it never happened. I wear it on my back like the carapace of a tortoise, except my shell burdens and does not protect. It weighs me down and fills me with dread.

The Conroy children were all casualties of war, conscripts in a battle we didn’t sign up for on the bloodied envelope of our birth certificates. I grew up to become the family evangelist; Michael, the vessel of anxiety; Kathy, who missed her childhood by going to sleep at six every night; Jim, who is called the dark one; Tim, the sweetest one – and can barely stand to be around any of us; and Tom, our lost and never-to-be found brother. My personal tragedy lies with my sister, Carol Ann, the poet I grew up with and adored…

I’ve got to try and make sense of it one last time, a final circling of the block, a reckoning, another dive into the caves of the coral reef where the morays wait in ambush, one more night flight into the immortal darkness to study that house of pain one final time. Then I’ll be finished with you, Mom and Dad. I’ll leave you in peace and not bother you again. And I’ll pray that your stormy spirits find peace in the house of the Lord. But I must examine the wreckage one last time.

— From the memoir

There is something wonderful, and meditative, about having a catch.  Throwing the ball back and forth is a good way to loosen up the arm and works just as well as a metaphor.  I remember as a kid watching Mantle and Maris tossing the ball to each other in long arcs over the lush grass expanse of the Yankee Stadium outfield; later seeing Dwight Evans in right field in Fenway tossing a hard ball back and forth to a beefy security guard who wore no glove.  It looked like they’d been doing it for years.

The catch takes on a harmonious rhythm, requires not a word and it is also the world’s simplest metaphor for what people want in general: I throw you the ball, make it easy to catch, you throw it back so I can catch it and I throw it back to you.   What could be simpler, really?  The satisfying pop of the ball into the glove, if you’re throwing a ball that wants a glove, a tasty bonus.

I remember one early summer evening my father suggesting we have a catch.  I popped up, got the gloves and a baseball and we tossed the ball back and forth for a while in the street in front of the house.  I must have been nine or ten.  We threw the ball to each other straight and true until it got too dark, even with the street lights, to see it well enough to throw and catch from that distance. A lovely memory, and all the more precious because it happened just that one time, as far as I can recall.

I remember another catch with my father, when I was a few years younger, in the driveway, that was more typical of fun times with dad.  I had not thrown a ball ten thousand times yet, as I would do in the next few years.  I still threw with that spastic imprecision that celebrities sometimes demonstrate throwing a ceremonial first pitch when nerves make the sixty foot toss to the professional catcher, trained to catch or stop virtually anything, impossible.

If you had heard only the soundtrack, and ignored my father’s much deeper voice, you would have thought he was the seven year-old.   He had to keep chasing the ball, several feet each time, as it went over his head, past him on the left, past him on the right, into the hedges.  He complained each time, as though I was a demanding and sadistic teacher giving him an aggravating test in a language I knew very well he didn’t understand.  

Finally he’d had enough with the bending, and stretching, having to chase the ball a few feet (his back was to the garage, so he didn’t have that far to chase it) the frustration of trying to have a catch with someone who clearly didn’t even know how to throw a ball. Or, worse, knew very well how to throw, but was just being a little asshole about it, making his father suffer.

It’s this metaphor of not having a catch that sums up what gave the old man the most regret when he was dying.  Finding me without hostility, calm, accepting, probing gently when I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, he lamented at one point that he hadn’t been mature enough to have these kinds of conversations with me fifteen years ago.  I was close to fifty at the time.  

I remember thinking: fifteen years?   A pretty modest thing to settle for when weighed against the first thirty-five viciously adversarial years.  I also recall realizing pretty quickly that I’d have taken fifteen years, or five, or even a few months, to have the kind of discussion we were finally having as the last sands of his life were passing through the hourglass like on the opening sequence of that soap opera my grandmother loved.

“Like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

“Well,” says the skeleton philosophically, “while you are alive you can turn the hourglass over, as you are doing now in remembering and setting out these details.  That’s one reason I always loved history, the do-over aspect of reading and getting new insights from it.  It really never got tired for me.  You know how the story ends, Malcolm with a chest full of bullets, his hands up, urging the arguing Muslims to calm down, realizing a split second too late they are the agents of misdirection, creating a diversion to draw everyone’s attention to them as the man with the shotgun plants himself in front of Malcolm, the other two begin shooting with pistols.  You know how it ends, but you can’t stop reading, the way you are plowing through that book on Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X now.  You know Ali is going to cut Malcolm dead on that street in Accra, with Maya Angelou watching in horror as the boxer sides with the murderous hypocrite and abandons his about to be martyred friend to death, but you still can’t stop reading.”

And it’s true, these memories that move us are the materials of our life and our only pathway to understanding, what we are given to work with.  A frustrated parent too preoccupied to realize the child throwing the ball badly is not doing it on purpose to be a prick.  The kid doesn’t know how to throw the ball yet, too young, doesn’t have the motor skills yet.  Maybe you take five steps toward the kid, instead of standing beyond the range of the kid’s puny arm, insisting madly that he do it right and stop acting like a little asshole.

“Well, this is the kind of catch that’s much easier to have sometimes when the person you’re trying to have it with is no longer there,” says the skeleton.  “I mean, you realize now that it was nothing personal, it’s not that I chose to act like such an asshole when you and your sister were young.  I mean, nothing personal as to you and your sister, I would have done the same to any offspring, no matter who they might have been.  Of course, it happened to you so you have no choice but to take it personally. And you did something I never came close to managing to do, you found a way to forgive someone who had done vicious things to you over the course of many years.”  

Rattle on, bone head.  Forgiveness is something we do for ourselves, primarily.  It’s not personal either.  I would have forgiven anybody who was supposed to be my father who acted the way you did, to the extent I was lucky enough to partially forgive you in the few months before you suddenly went into the hospital to die.  That limited forgiveness was enough, I soon saw, to enable you to say necessary things you had never come close to being able to say.  Death and a son who was mild and not glaring at you were both in the room, gently helping your final confession along.

I have written more than 60,000 words so far in this draft, told a few dozen anecdotes, and have done little, so far, to illustrate in a way that would touch anyone’s heart the core of violence and destructiveness in you, dad.  It’s not my intention in this exercise to reveal precisely why it was so fitting when my sister named you the Dreaded Unit.  It will become necessary, at some point, to lay out a few wrenching scenes that show your full brutality.  You were always the D.U., true, but you were also always the little kid with the eternal torment of knowing he could never forgive anyone for anything.  Most of all yourself.

That’s the part that’s the most alien to me, being unable to forgive yourself and, at the same time, being unwilling to change anything about yourself, and I thank whatever great spirit there is to thank for such things that I am not tormented by that particular sickness: self-hatred.  

In my mind I hear third-grade students I once taught remarking on my patience, being referred to in another school (I was told by a colleague) as “that teacher who likes kids.”  I recall the comment of a great guitarist I played with about how much he appreciated the space I left in the mix of our two guitar jam.  The old friend who took a moment to single out and thank me for the way I always listen carefully to her concerns.  These three things, by themselves, are enough reason not to hate myself.   Certainly my father had as many as that. 

There is the case to be made that the life I live, particularly the ragged outward signs of it, demonstrates that I live a life of some kind of perverse self-denial, reflecting anger at myself.  I suppose one could argue that, from a superficial examination.  If I loved myself truly I’d tackle this five foot tall mess all around me, throw out ten or twenty contractor bags, force the landlord to make repairs, etc.  I’d make money and have a job that showcased my most specialized skills and paid me well for them.  I’d be more ambitious about promoting myself (it would be hard to be less ambitious).   I’d take more care in my wardrobe, instead of having comfort as my main criteria when I select what I wear.  I’ll grant all these things, though I still don’t understand how someone can hate themself. 

This book is about my father, but, naturally, one can’t write about a subject so close without also writing about oneself.  I am giving you a view of a man you never met, and in my telling I am also showing you the imprint he left on my life.  That is the deeper purpose here, to show by the son the man left behind what the essence of the real father was.   If you laugh at some of the anecdotes it makes me glad.  My father was a very funny bastard.  But if at the end you do not also cry, to understand the fathomless tragedy of this talented man’s life, and, while I speak of my father’s life I’m aware that the same can be said of mine, I will not have told this story properly.

My father’s favorite singer was Sam Cooke.  He bought every new Sam Cooke album as soon as it came out, carrying the disk home in a flat bag from the Sam Goody’s in Brooklyn he passed on his way home from work.  We would listen to the sides over and over on the turntable in the living room. Nobody ever sang better than the smooth, soulful Sam Cooke, and nobody before him, apparently, with the possible exception of Frank Sinatra, ever had a better handle on the business side of their musical careers. 

There is much to say about this remarkable man, a supremely graceful musician who never sang a wrong note, or a note without its full emotional impact, a master pop songwriter and producer, a nurturer of young talent,  a cross-over artist often credited with inventing soul music, an icon.  I read and recommend the great biography by Peter Guralnick, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, which came out very shortly after my father died.  

It may have even been released a week or two after my father died (first hit on google informs me it was published three years after Irv died, another site says it was released about a year after, the third gives the publication date, very authoritatively, as a few months after he died.  Fucking internet…).   Many times while reading it I thought what a shame my father had never gotten a chance to read the wonderfully detailed account of his musical idol’s life.  I need to peruse a copy of it to find and accurately set out the scene I’m about to describe from almost eleven year-old  memory.

It was a scene that struck me with particular poignancy.  After Cooke wrote and recorded the classic “A Change Is Gonna Come”, which became an anthem of the Civil Rights movement, a symbol of the struggle almost as famous as King’s “I Have A Dream” speech,  he sat with his guitarist listening to the playback.  He turned to him, I believe it was his longtime friend and collaborator Leroy Crume (though, if it was his guitarist, google suggests it may have been Clifton White, who played on most of his albums including the beautiful Mr. Soul)  (and, if it wasn’t a guitarist, it was most likely S.R. Crain who sang back-up on the recording) and said “this is good, isn’t it? You think my father would like it?”  

And his friend said to him “Sam, your father would love it.  He would be very proud of you.”  Sam died two weeks before the track he performed live only once was released as a single.    

NPR tells a nice story of the origin of the tune, and they quote Guralnick, but without that anecdote, which, I have to say, reading it shortly after my own father’s death, got to me a bit.  I have not been able to verify on-line that his father, Reverend Charles A. Cook, was actually gone by the time he wrote and recorded the tune, but that’s the internet for you.

I thought of Sam Cooke just now because I read today that he was seated ringside at the Cassius Clay- Sonny Liston fight in Miami in February 1964.  Malcolm X was also at ringside, already cast out of the Nation of Islam by Elijah Muhammad, and hoping that a victorious Cassius X, a man who fondly regarded him as a wise older brother and good friend, would  be his ticket back in.  Sam Cooke and Malcolm exchanged greetings before the fight and were both with the victorious new twenty-two year-old world heavy weight champion at his private victory party at the Hampton House Hotel.  

The three opted to stay at the colored Hampton House for the party, also attended by football great and Richard Pryor friend Jim Brown, rather than a more upscale party originally planned for the Fountainbleu, Miami Beach’s swankiest hotel.   Cooke, at the height of his powers, had, in fact, managed to talk his way into a suite at the strictly segregated Fountainbleu, having his manager make a scene until Cooke got his suite there.  But the celebration took place in the colored part of town where the new champ was much more comfortable.

Before the year was out, after an infamous summer of riots, Cooke would be dead at 33, shot by the night manager of the seedy Hacienda Motel in Watts as he banged on her office window, wearing only a sport jacket, screaming that a hooker had stolen all his clothes and his wallet.  His last words, according to the woman who killed him, were “lady, you shot me!”

My father mourned this death, even as he gave a dark laugh when he described the crude attempt, by the Amsterdam News, I think it was, to draw some clothes on the naked, dead body of Mr. Soul.

Malcolm would be shot dead almost exactly a year after greeting Sam Cooke at the fight and the after-party, after being marked as a traitor worthy of death by The Messenger, Louis X (Farrakhan) and others inside the Nation of Islam (with assists from the FBI, NYPD and others).  Clay would become Muhammad Ali not long after the fight, and, under orders from The Messenger, shun his former mentor Malcolm X, regarded by the hypocrite Elijah Muhammad as a traitor, liar and hypocrite, a man worthy of death.  

Once Ali, who my father also got a big kick out of and quoted at the table,  turned his back on Malcolm in blind obedience to the so-called Messenger, the rest, as they say…

Truth exists in various shades and titrations.   If truth could be had pure and unfiltered, and it’s hard to say if it could be, people would revolt, as they do, by adding in other truths to filter out the hard ones.  Is it true that animals have souls?  What is a soul?  Put more concretely, do millions and millions of animals like cows and pigs suffer greatly from confinement in tiny pens, separation from their babies and being herded to violent, bloody deaths so that we can have affordable meat?  

OK, sure, yes, they do, it’s true, they may very well suffer greatly.  And we, of course, wouldn’t like that either, being penned into tiny cells, having our offspring seized at birth, being herded to our murders. We wouldn’t like that at all.  If we related too much to the feelings of animals destined to be meat we’d make the inevitable comparisons to Auschwitz and we’d be appropriately outraged.  

So, in order to make the plain truth less horrible, more palatable, if you will, we add in other truths, and slightly adulterated truths: their meat is delicious, in proper portions and cooked the right way it is very nutritious, humans have always eaten animals,  many animals eat other animals, our digestive tracts were designed to assimilate the proteins of meat, our teeth enable us to eat meat, people need to eat meat to survive, animals have much less self-awareness than humans, grass fed cows and free range chickens at least have a nicer, more natural life, etc.

My father joined PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) after his retirement when he had time to reflect on this industrial cruelty to animals.  Although  he continued to eat meat (I believe he stopped eating cow, and he had only once tasted pig), he ate meat much more sparingly and with a sense that it was wrong.  

I’m not saying vegetarians are more moral than carnivores and omnivores, we have the easy example of Mr. Hitler to debunk that idea, but in order to eat and enjoy meat we have to forget that the dish on our plate was once part of an animal that felt affection, and sorrow, and fear.  And, more than that, an animal that had lived a life of unimaginable pain and despair in order to be sold to us as meat for as low a price as we are able to pay.  

I make all the necessary arguments when my shrimp dish arrives in a restaurant, and I’m challenged to reconcile eating once sentient sea creatures with my moralistic refusal to eat birds and mammals.  I make some causal, slightly sheepish remark about their lack of higher consciousness– though I know the argument to be complete bullshit.

I do this because our kind can never do anything in good conscience without justifying it, no matter how feebly.   This brilliant piece by David Foster Wallace says it all, in the moment he describes the supposedly unfeeling lobster’s clear preference for not being boiled alive.

Anyway, away from this uncomfortable animal/meat truth metaphor, and eschewing further practical arguments against the industrialized mass-killing machine that gives us affordable meat (preservation of the rain forest, reducing our carbon footprint, more efficient use of farm land, reducing diseases caused by diets of fatty meat, eliminating world hunger, etc.) and leaving aside the strong case for not eating fish either, let’s have a look at a controversy I’ve touched on regarding my father and his blond former friend and colleague.  The subtle but undeniable nature of the truth may emerge, Rashomon-like, from their contrasting views of the terminal event in their friendship.

My father was very close to Gladys.  My sister would probably agree that he loved Gladys, from the way he talked about her at the dinner table.   They got each other, had similar dark senses of humor, could talk on the phone for long stretches, although they didn’t do it often, and laugh at terrible things.   Gladys had divorced her husband after she got tired of being beaten on, but not before taking a frying pan to the man’s head.  My father loved this image.  I suppose part of him wished he’d grabbed the violent little tyrant who called him Sonny and given her head a couple of playful passes with a light skillet.  

Gladys had sadness in her life.  “Irv, I’m a barren woman,” she’d told my father, explaining a lot in a few words.  My father and Gladys got each other and deeply appreciated each other, it was an uncomplicated mutual friendship.   It might have been the deepest friendship either of them ever had.

My father and his blond friend had a more complicated relationship.  Unlike Gladys, she both idolized (at first) and competed with my father.  My father both supported and undermined her at every turn.  It was simply his way, how he had learned to do it.  She was a talented folk singer with a beautiful, pure voice and my father encouraged her to sing, although surely never without a quip about how neurotic she was to be so self-conscious with such a beautiful voice.  This way he was able to compliment her and make her feel even more self-conscious at the same time.

I heard her perform before fairly large audiences a couple of times and she was great.  My father invited her, a young WASP, to a Young Judaea function where she sang for an appreciative audience of Jewish teenagers.  I remember that performance very well, my sister and I were sitting on the floor a few feet from her.  She moved that crowd with her guitar, her beautiful voice, her passion.  She led sing-alongs in the second part of her show that brought smiles to every face and it was inspiring to hear all those voices joined in hopeful song.  

It was only later that I found out that she’d vomited shortly before the performance and was covered in cold sweat as she began singing those songs of social commentary and protest I remember so well.  I can still hear her beautiful voice singing “here’s to you, my rambling boy, may all your rambling bring you joy…”

In hindsight it seems inevitable that the two, once so close, would have a falling out, just as it seems inevitable now that my father and Gladys, who had a much more uncomplicated friendship, never would.   Inevitable, also, that irreconcilable sibling rivalries would rear up among these three surrogate family members, with my father in play.  My father was a man who always took sides in the zero-sum world he lived in.  

The three were at a conference where they would be presenting their work to some large, important audience.  They had divided up what each of them would present and how they would present it.  The conference was a big deal, as I recall it was sort of the culmination and validation of their years of work as the Office of Intergroup Relations at the Human Relations Unit of the Board of Education.  The conference was at a hotel somewhere, and very prestigious, as I remember it.

It’s not hard to imagine the case of nerves each of them must have had right before they took the stage in that big auditorium.   That there was some controversy over how they’d present their talk is undeniable now.  There was disagreement afterwards over what the exact agreement had been.  Evelyn (why pretend that’s not her name, or that she had no name?)  got up to present her talk moments after either Gladys or my father had completely undermined the points she was about to make.  

According to my father, that was Evelyn’s insane perception and her insistence on being right and far from what had actually occurred.  The “agreement” she remembered was nothing more than what she had wanted to present all along, the very points they’d argued about.  She had rejected the good counsel of Gladys  and my father, become more and more contentious, and insisted on doing it her way, no matter what the rest of the group thought, no matter what the consequences for the group might have been.  

It was, according to my father, part of her pathology, an escalation of her war to be right no matter what. That she quit the Unit soon after was, to my father, the proof that she was creating a pretext to feel like the innocent victim and to leave in righteous anger and start her next career, as a therapist, a career in which she could never be told she was wrong by anyone, unless that person was insane.

Evelyn’s story is equally straightforward.  They had discussed how they’d present their work and each agreed to present a certain aspect of it.  Everything had been agreed to beforehand.  Evelyn had written and practiced delivering her remarks in accordance with that understanding.  She was doing what they all agreed she should be doing.  She even ran the speech by Gladys and my father shortly before the conference and they both told her it was good to go.  

Then, right before she took the podium, one of them, in their remarks, cut the legs out from under her by undermining everything she was about to say.  They  had changed the script on her with no time for her to make any adjustments.  Her speech, in this sudden new context, was now ridiculous and humiliating to deliver.

As she got ready to speak she was flooded with the terrifying feeling of having been betrayed by two people she loved and trusted.  She could not remember a worse betrayal, she said, since early childhood.  Her childhood, as she told it, was as horrendous as my father’s had been.  In both cases it was their mad mothers who had made their early lives hell.  As she took the platform, she felt like she was again standing in that hell.

I assume that both of these stories, Evelyn’s and my fathers, are essentially true. It’s not that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, either.  Was there a misunderstanding?  Apparently so.  Was there anxiety, and rivalry, and the ultimate taking of sides?  Yes.  But undeniable truth is there in both accounts, and it is not somewhere in the middle.  

This Solomon-like splitting of the baby so characteristic of our dualistic culture is one of the root causes of human idiocy, it seems to me.  The truth is not to be found by a judicious balancing of both sides, though truths may weigh on both sides of an argument.  The truth is in large part what was honestly felt by each of the parties, what motivated them to act as they did, and to feel justified.  In this case, I don’t see anyone as lying or even distorting.  

They are telling the story as they each perceived it and there is not even anything inconsistent in the two versions, except for the placement of blame and what is emphasized and what is left out.  I can readily accept the basic truthful contours of both versions of this story.  

In other cases there is much more truth on one side than on the other.  Often this is most inconvenient, of course, and gives way to emotional screaming instead of actual intelligent discussion.

While it’s true that most scientists who study the climate predict dire events including disastrous sea level rise, and that many attribute much of the effect to the carbon human industry pumps into the atmosphere, there are other scientists who downplay the human role in global warming.  The truth, as presented on fair and balanced outlets like Fox News, lies somewhere in the middle, we are told.  The “debate” is shaped by its framing: there may be reasons to be alarmed but the alarmists must not be allowed to prevail over skeptics who deserve to have an equal say in the debate.  

Which is probably as close as a profit driven corporate entity like Fox can ever come to the the truth of a given issue, given the demographics, the sponsors, the particular market place for their ideas.  As a result, instead of an earnest search for solutions to vexing problems we get this “both sides of the debate must be heard” kind of infotainment. In the post-Fairness Doctrine age in which we live, Americans remain the most obstinate deniers of human involvement in climate change of any nation on earth.  Climate change may be already dramatically playing out across the globe, but we suspect the motives of those who keep trying to make it front page news.

In fact, current day Evelyn will send you a series of learned articles actually proving that the whole climate alarmist thing is financed by people like Al Gore and George Soros who have a devious political agenda of their own.  Though I disagree with that position, and it’s pointless to argue with someone who believes it with unshakable faith, her reflex to be right does not necessarily invalidate her view of what happened at that long-ago conference with my father and Gladys.

Nor, of course, does my father’s story seem lacking in truth.   We see things as we must and in light of our lived experiences.  Is it possible to be an honest, gentle, sensitive person who protects the weak, loves babies and animals, is a champion of social justice and also be a brutal and destructive prick capable of doing exactly what Evelyn accused him of, and worse?   Absolutely.  

You will see a vivid illustration of this when I describe my father’s vicious behavior toward my shy, vulnerable one-time girlfriend, Francoise.  She was a beautiful caramel colored girl, the daughter of a French mother and an angry black G.I.   His treatment of her the first time they met (and the only time) is a hideous example of a white ‘race man’ dedicated to racial equality, whose best friends were blacks and a hipster who hung out with blacks (who ended up driving himself into a fatal one car crash when his daughter was about to give birth to an arrogant black guy’s baby), behaving like Archie Bunker, Lester Maddox and George Wallace, rolled into one silent, glowering Jewish guy with mutton chop sideburns.   I will untangle that last, long non-sentence for you in the coming days.

If you are whipped in the face by your mother during your earliest memories, which I hope you never were, certain bad results are inevitable.  Many people have early childhood traumas that twist them in ways they will rarely understand, but I can’t think of many worse than violent betrayal by your main caretaker.  Being whipped in the face by the mother who is your first teacher of life and love is about as hard a start as a child could have.

Try not to smile at the next picture you see of a mother animal of any kind with her tiny replica next to her.  Baby animals are born to be cute and seeing them, tiny versions of their mother, next to mom almost always uncreases the brow.  Now advance to the next frame and watch the mother viciously bite the baby animal, blood flowing, the baby screaming.  Not cute anymore, is it?

“You are flailing today, Elie,” notes the skeleton impassively, though with that persistent grin.  “That bit about Malcolm X you wrote the other day, with its long encyclopedia entry in the middle, and the mini treatises on Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, or lack of jurisprudence, and the Voting Rights stuff, threw you off your game.  I am less than half formed in these pages.  Tell them something they don’t know already.  The insight that a baby whipped in the face will bear its suffering throughout life is not worth the dirt under my left scapula.”

He’s right, of course.  I am just taking a moment to note again that in the case of a baby whipped by its mother it’s easy to see why anger would become a lifelong problem.   Express any sort of outrage to your mother that she would whip you in the face, at two, and things are likely to go a lot worse for you.   Nothing warps the impulse to be happy more surely than unfairness shoved down your throat over and over when you are young.  The indigestible anger goes into some hidden place in the psyche, waiting for its chance to burst out and rage.  

And yet, in most ways, in most situations, my father appeared in control and completely sane, even when he was insisting on things that were completely insane.  In the same way that Malcolm X could make an excellent point in the same lecture where he described the creation of the white devils by a scientist named Yakub, or during an ugly emotional reaction to an event, like his unrepentant celebration of the deaths of 120 southern whites when a flight to France went down, my father, who often justified completely mad crap,  could often be dead on with his insights.

Here is a case study, cannibalized from an earlier post on this blahg.  This is about the brilliant, blond folk singer and social activist my father greatly loved, his friend and colleague from The Human Relations Unit, whose fall from grace, when it came, was as swift and absolute as any I can recall.  

My father’s colleague and close friend became very close to the family when I was a boy.   We spent a lot of time with her.  My sister and I found this brilliant and talented woman funny, and caring, and she seemed to relate to us as a peer.  She was like a very cool big sister to us.  My mother was very fond of her too. Then, seemingly out of the blue, my father was done with her, for reasons he was too disgusted to detail for his disappointed family.  One day she was just gone and we never saw her again.

Many years later my father and I spoke about what had happened to their close friendship.   “She is pathologically competitive,” my father said, his face very much like Clint Eastwood’s iconic mask of hatred when he is confronted by an on-screen enemy.  “She will fight to the death over everything and never gives an inch, especially when she’s wrong.   Her reflexive self-justification makes her impossible to deal with, even after years of therapy and supposed introspection, she still has no insight into how damaged and enraged she is.  She is always primed to fight and she fights even the smallest things to the death.  She’s one of the most maddening and provocative people I’ve ever met, and I finally just had enough, after a particular incident at a conference we did with Gladys.”  That the same could be said for my father, minus the years of therapy, did not need to be spoken by me at the time.

My father had come to another breaking point with a good friend, part of the pattern of his life that troubled me greatly growing up. It seemed to me he never gave these close friends a chance to make amends.  It took me decades to see that things sometimes advance beyond the point where amends are possible, much as it saddens me to see this.   When things become ugly enough between two people trust is torn and it can become emotionally impossible to make amends.  Anger puts each of them on the defensive, they become the worst versions of themselves and can justify their heartless behavior down to the snarl.

Back to the point then, what happens to anger that is swallowed? My father executed a sentence of death on this woman my sister, mother and I felt so close to.  He felt 100% justified.  Decades later I was talking to Sekhnet about how close I’d felt to this one time friend of the family’s and she urged me to look her up on the internet.   I found her easily.

We had a mutually delightful reunion by email which led to Sekhnet and me spending several days in her guest house in Santa Monica during a trip to California.  In her version of that conference my father had alluded to as the last straw, it was my father and Gladys who had set-up, sabotaged and betrayed her. “Unbelievable!” she’d laughed, when I gave her my father’s version.

A great animal lover, she had a rescue dog, a lovely, skittish black lab, smaller than your average black lab– possibly still not full grown at the time.  She named the dog Boo!  Boo! was immediately very friendly with Sekhnet but seemed afraid of me.  Our host explained that Boo! had been abused by the man who owned her and that the gentle dog was skittish around men.  By the end of our stay my cooing at Boo! to come over and not be afraid turned into “get off me, Boo!” as the affectionate dog would not leave me alone, licking my face and sitting on me whenever I was within reach.

Had the story ended on this lovely note it would have been a wonderful tale of redemption.   My father had been wrong about many things, as he sadly admitted on his death bed, and his banishment of this wonderful woman was just another of them. In fact, I once put the two of them on the phone and they had a very cordial chat, reminiscing for a long time, as my father made her laugh again.  A beautiful story, if that had been the end.   Except, the story did not end on a lovely note.   

An unflinching advocate of social change when I knew her, a crusader for the underdog and righteous fighter for the oppressed, she had become, several decades later, a deeply conservative supporter of Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, Glen Beck and a host of other characters that would have made her earlier self recoil.  

She told me she had converted to Judaism and, as a Jew, she valued these brilliant uber-conservatives as the best friends of Israel.  I questioned whether these people were really friends of Israel at all, as they seemed to me to support the worst of Israel and for all the wrong reasons.  She asked if I’d be willing to have a dialogue about politics, which she’d had a revelation about after 9/11, as a favor to her, since we had such excellent communication and all of her other liberal former friends had cut her off (and she had new ones who were, like her, political independents of the far right).  To my eternal regret, I agreed.

The correspondence did not go well.  She and I found no common ground, and worse, for me, whether she had a coherent answer or not (and I eventually tried to reduce our Bush era correspondence to two questions:  why Iraq?  How do you justify torture?) she was vehement.  She insisted she was right, whether her answers made sense or not.  All of the experts she believed in told her that if we did not rain death and torture on those who hate our freedom they’d literally be upon us in our beds, literally cutting our throats.  Besides, we never tortured anyone, she insisted, and we only water-boarded three people (which she didn’t consider torture, in any case) and only because they desperately needed it and there was, presumably, a ticking time bomb and it was us or them.

A difference of opinion, we might say, and not something that should lead to the end of an otherwise wonderful friendship.  Our disagreements escalated.  My detailed emails were dismissed for their hopelessly misguided liberal bias, the larger points unanswered.   It soon became an exercise in masochism for me.  

It was also another sad illustration of how feeble even the most well-marshaled and diplomatically deployed facts are against the torrential power of strong emotions.  We had liberated Iraqis from a modern-day Hitler?   Really?  Ask the millions of Iraqis fleeing their homes during the American occupation how liberated they felt.  I was missing the point, she told me.  I eventually had enough.  

We had a long falling out, I came to see her exactly as my father had described her– pathologically competitive, incapable of giving an inch of ground and irrationally spoiling for a fight.  

After years of silence I sent her a piece about Ahimsa that I’d written, she wrote back very moved, and grateful for the chance to renew a warm and mutually beneficial friendship.  She agreed 100% that we would no longer discuss politics, that it was a third rail we would never allow to electrocute our friendship again.

Except, even though she continually renewed her promise not to send political emails, darn it,  she could not resist once in a while (often accidentally, she claimed) sending me something she really thought might change my mind.  She’d apologize most of the time when I reminded her I didn’t want provocative political emails and she promised each time not to do it again.  

But she simply couldn’t help herself, darn it, sometimes a given piece was just too convincing for me not to be convinced by.

During all the turmoil over the deaths of unarmed black young men at the hands of police she sent me a piece that complained about how these same agitators who protest against the police conveniently ignore the hundreds of times more deaths black young men inflict on each other.  An opinionated and simplistic response I found not only irrelevant, but idiotic, inflammatory, and not even well-written.  A self-appointed American pundit compares killings by the police, sworn to serve and protect, with killings by violent criminal gangs, sworn to get rich or die trying? This is your response to protests against police killings of unarmed civilians?  Really?

But, see, she couldn’t help it, you dig?  She was still earnestly trying to convince me she was right, get me to see the truth, get me on board with those who see the light, no matter how many times I’d expressed how these attempts make me feel.  I was so willing to have frank dialogue about so many things… why so closed minded about politics?

To me, there is only one explanation for her seeming irrationality that makes sense.  This is one thing that happens to anger that is swallowed whole:  it comes out as an otherwise unexplainable tone deaf determination to be right that cannot consider the provocative effect it will have on the person it is directed to.  

The expression is very often directed at someone who had nothing to do with the original swallowed anger, which starts early in childhood, goes into a mass of general anger and creates the conditions for this kind of righteous moral tone-deafness.  And it’s “innocent”, you dig, and it conveniently becomes another proof that the person who gets upset over it is just an irrationally angry hot-head himself.  

I know that she was raised by a mother she tells me was insane.  I can imagine the pain of that upbringing, it is not so different from my own, although my father was masterful at presenting his insanity with wit and seemingly irrefutable logic.  Hey, Dad, you was like the narrator of the Telltale Heart!  

“TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story,” quoth the skeleton.

It wasn’t his espousal of the teachings of the vain and corrupt Elijah Muhammad that made my father interested in Malcolm X, of course, it was everything else.  At the time Malcolm was on the scene, shit was jumping off big-time in the Civil Rights movement my father was part of.  The need for radical social change had become urgent to millions of Americans.  The pendulum was still swinging toward hope and mercy, but it was poised to swing back toward intolerance and blame.   Malcolm was a compelling spokesman for the cause of human equality by the time he was marked for death.  

For most of his public career Malcolm prefaced his pronouncements with “as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches,” although this became harder and harder for him to say as time went on.  My father always wryly added “as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches” when telling some Malcolm anecdote, like his description of the mad scientist Yakub who created the race of white devils six thousand years ago.  Malcolm chafed more and more in the straitjacket the self-important Elijah Muhammad tried to keep him in.  It’s not hard to figure out why, if you do the simple arithmetic.  

Elijah Muhammad, a halting reader with a fourth-grade education, was a convert to a religion whose religious books he could not read.  He knew a single phrase of Arabic, the greeting “peace be unto you”.  He learned the simplified, idiosyncratic black nationalist Islam he taught from a mysterious drifter named Wallace Fard.   My father chuckled as he described the sci-fi aspects of the white looking Fard’s black-pride version of Islam with its blue-eyed white devils.  It is probably worth keeping in mind that Fard’s theology is no stranger than the creation myths and miraculous visions at the core of many other religions. 

Wallace Fard arrived in Detroit in 1931 leading a small, secretive sect called The Nation of Islam.  To his black converts he preached racial separation and self-reliance, along with his esoteric brand of Islam.  Fard taught that blacks were the original and superior race, and that they had been ruthlessly subjugated for 6,000 years by the evil white race created by the big-headed scientist Yakub in a centuries-long genetic experiment gone terribly wrong.  These mutant whites would be forced from power when death rained down from the Mother Ship to destroy Yakub’s hideous experiment, according to all-merciful Allah’s plan.

Elijah Muhammad served as Fard’s Top Minister  from 1931 until Fard disappeared without a trace in 1934.  To Elijah Muhammad, Fard’s most ardent follower and heir apparent, his master’s mysterious disappearance was the final proof that Fard had been the incarnation of Allah.  For the rest of his life Elijah Muhammad remained a disciple of Fard, holding himself out as the Messenger of Allah, someone who personally knew and spoke to Allah.   He soon discovered that his deep faith imbued him with new-found business abilities and he built up the Nation of Islam, making it a financially viable entity in multiple sites.

Its message of submission to a God who loved blacks and would deliver them from the white devils all around exerted a powerful attraction for members of a despised race who could find discipline, pride, and fellowship in an organization that preached all these things.  As sad as it may look in my capsule summary here, as fatal as its internal politics would prove to be to the evolving Malcolm, Malcolm often credited Elijah Muhammad with saving his life when he was in prison.   Many other members could say the same thing.

Malcolm’s faith, study and transformation into a Minister of the Nation of Islam undoubtedly did save him.  He went from an enraged inmate to a committed leader of Black Muslims, a man ready to do anything necessary to change the world.  And, crucially, The Nation of Islam gave him a platform from which to do it.

The Nation of Islam gained much wider membership once Malcolm X came into the fold and became its charismatic, telegenic face.  He joined and became a minister after corresponding with the Messenger from prison and converting to Islam  It was Minister Malcolm’s charisma, bearing  and organizational talents that allowed the small sect to grow into a fairly large national movement with storefront mosques in thirty cities.  

Elijah Muhammad preached a strict code of discipline and morality, with serious beatings and even death for violators. A Muslim must not drink, smoke, steal, covet, commit adultery.   The Messenger, although he succeeded in keeping it quiet for many years, had impregnated as many as seven young assistants over the years.  Young women he then expelled and banished as fornicators and adulterers.  He also lived the life of a pasha on the backs of his mostly poor followers.  His followers were forced to pay higher and higher dues to finance the lavish lifestyles of the Messenger and his sons.  

Elijah Muhammad also seemed to have had no coherent plan or vision, beyond demanding strict obedience to his interpretation of Allah’s will until the Mother Ship arrived, as prophesied, and blacks would once again rule the earth, after learning discipline and self-sufficiency.

Even while Malcolm was giving all credit to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and his pronouncements were faithfully bound by his master’s world view, even while forcefully expressing ideas that he would recoil at later in his life, his fierce intelligence and skill as a speaker were always apparent.  His poise and cool under fire were as undeniable as his charisma.  He was the image of a man of integrity in complete control of his life, no matter what anyone had to say against him.   My father identified with all of these things big time.  

Irv was a natural public speaker who could improvise a moving funeral oration with seeming ease.  He would gauge his audience and make adjustments on the fly, like Malcolm.  They both knew how to get the tears to flow and when it was time for quick laugh to break the tension, to reset the pace.

Malcolm was a tall, good-looking man with an electric, camera-ready smile or a convincingly implacable expression, depending on the needs of the moment.   My father, oddly enough, to think about it, was a tall, good-looking man in his day too.  He was self-effacing about his looks, particularly as he gained weight once he had a family on his shoulders and indulged his bad eating habits.  He more than once told someone over the phone who asked what he looked like that most women compared him to Rock Hudson.  He’d give a mild chuckle afterwards.  

The photos of him as a young man show a confident looking man with thick black hair and nice features.  Rock Hudson was not a ridiculous stretch, or sometimes it was Cary Grant, though my father always made the comparisons with characteristic self-mockery.

But the main thing I think my father identified with in Malcolm was the rage, and the ability to intellectually channel that rage into an articulate, undeniable argument.  Both men did this somewhat destructively at times, though Malcolm and his views continued to evolve, while the cornerstone of my father’s belief, and what doomed him to his miserable final years, was that people could not evolve.  But there was a similarity in their techniques, skill sets and basic beliefs and my father enjoyed watching the masterful Malcolm X at work.

My father admired Malcolm for the same basic reason he loved Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce — their audacity and unflinching honesty in presenting important things most people didn’t want to look at.   The facts, Malcolm kept saying, look at the plain facts in front of you.  Go to the home of the average white person, look at their lives, then to the home of the average black person, look at their lives.  What is mysterious about the claim that America is a deeply racist country?  

***

Martin Luther King was arrested on the eve of the 1960 presidential election for sitting at a segregated lunch counter.  For this crime he was taken to a jail deep in the backwoods of some redneck state.  The law in those days was that the states had the right to deal with their Negroes however they pleased.  The Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed American citizens federal protection from arbitrary and hateful state laws, had not been enforced in almost ninety years by then.  As the Supreme Court said,  when they put the Fourteenth Amendment into a deep sleep a decade after the end of the Civil War,”the Negro’s day as the special favorite of the law is at an end.”

Nixon, on hearing of King’s arrest and the move to a rural prison where King might be killed, apparently appealed directly to Ike about it.  Ike was probably playing golf and told Nixon they’d talk about it another time, maybe. Few people ever learned of Nixon’s prompt, unsuccessful behind the scenes attempts to get King out of jail.

Candidate JFK called King’s wife, Correta Scott King, and expressed his concerns.  The phone call made the news, King was soon released from jail.  King thanked presidential candidate JFK on TV.

Some say that phone call to King’s wife won the 1960 election for JFK, who got the almost unanimous vote of those blacks who got to cast a ballot, along with those votes from the cemetery in Illinois.  JFK was elected by a razor thin margin of 120,000 votes nationwide.  He likely would have won in a landslide if the Voting Rights Act signed by Lyndon Johnson a few years later, which ended most of the shenanigans that prevented many blacks from voting in many states, had been in effect in 1960.  

The Voting Rights Act, by the way, that the Supreme Court ruled recently is unnecessary to enforce.  The 5-4 Majority held that federal oversight of fair elections is no longer needed even for states with the most egregious histories of racism.  The Majority wrote that even if these new laws made it virtually impossible for many poor people, old people, college kids, non-white people, to assemble the required three forms of acceptable ID documentation the laws now require for all voters, there was no Constitutional violation of the rights of citizenship involved. 

In the country where my father and Malcolm were born, those who were not “white”, or not “normal” got what they got and, you know, shut up about it.  I was born into the same country, almost sixty years ago, more than thirty years after my father and Malcolm were born into it.  During my childhood, blacks could still be killed with impunity in many of the states that now vote solidly Red in national elections, states that still lead the nation in executions and deaths by firearms.  It was not only in the former Confederacy that blacks were treated as second and third class citizens.  Our  unbroken history of racism is part of the unthinkable underside of the American Dream that was always there and that now intrudes on the sleep of more and more Americans as time goes by.

As I said, the sickening injustice of it burned my father, the thought that even someone as mild-mannered, and upright-seeming as the pious, eloquent and nonviolent Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King could be trussed up and taken to some holding cell for possible lynching merely for having the temerity to sit at a lunch counter where people their fellow citizens called niggers were not allowed to sit.  What?  Does it even sound possible that someone could be arrested for that in America?

It burned Malcolm, too, obviously.  King was risking his life to get the legal right to sit at a lunch counter with white racists who hated him?  What?  That symbolic act was worth being burned alive for?   What is worth dying for, Malcolm X said, is fighting for the right to be a full human being.  Or, as it was commonly phrased in those days, the right to be a man.

It seems like an abstraction, perhaps, fighting for the right to be a human being.  Being denied the right to be a man is no abstraction for a boy growing up in a town, like Lansing, Michigan, like Peekskill, New York, where the Klan has the final word on whether you and your father will walk down a given street or, perhaps, if you insist, we’ll beat the shit out of the two of you and burn your fucking house down in the middle of the night instead, how about that?  “Your choice, sir,” they’d say with a smile.  

I feel my blood percolating as I try to write this entry.  You know, we’ve come so far, in the more than 150 years since all Americans recognized the unalienable truth of Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal”.  In the more than 150 years since the bloody war to free the slaves ended, Lincoln was slaughtered, and the Constitution was amended to ensure freedom for all Americans.

Malcolm X told Alex Haley, while pacing that small room in which Haley interviewed the doomed Muslim, that being dissatisfied with grudging progress for the Black Man was like being called ungrateful when a knife was pulled partially out of one’s back.  “The knife is shoved in ten inches and the man pulls it out four inches and says ‘that’s much better, isn’t it’?   Well, you could see it that way, unless the knife is still stuck six inches deep into YOUR body.”  

As far as my father saw it, visiting high schools where blacks and whites were squaring off to kill each other near the sites of recent race riots, where the edict of 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education to end inequality of education by integrating the schools was proceeding with “all deliberate” snail-like speed, Malcolm was simply putting the plain facts out there, as simply and straightforwardly as possible.  Something had to be done about it, and he was going to keep putting himself front and center in the struggle to do it.

In 1964 the school I went to in Queens was integrated for the first time, after a fierce battle among parents and teachers during which my mother and her friends were called Nigger Lovers and, slightly more amusingly, Commies.  I recall one of my teachers, a haughty, opinionated francophile named Harriet Bluming, loudly and repeatedly expressing her racist view, in the cafeteria of our school, that newly arrived Negro kids misbehaving in the lunchroom would grow up to be on Welfare and blaming white people for all their problems.  Some of the young Negros snarled back at her, but she gave them no quarter.  

Meanwhile, as Bluming tongue lashed the unruly Negro ten year-olds, down in Mississippi, leftist lawyers from New York were making successful arguments that the never repealed 1872 Ku Klux Klan Act gave the federal government the right to enforce the law when a gang of men, including local law enforcement, hauled three Civil Rights workers off a state road and murdered them in the woods of Mississippi.  The good whites of Mississippi resented this unjustifiable intrusion on “States’ Rights”, of course, but the Fourteenth Amendment was enforced for the first time in almost a century.  It would be used in every Civil Rights case that followed.

When my father had a black colleague over at the house in 1964 it was considered a radical thing to do.  Our neighbors were shocked to see a Negro laughing and coming in and out of the house.  We integrated Pastrami King after my graduation from sixth grade a few years later, with the family of a brown-skinned classmate I was friendly with.  Posing with his arm around his colleague and friend Gladys in a photo I have, at some dinner where my father wore a tuxedo and has a black hand gripped in his other hand, was, tame as it seems now, something of a radical act in those days.  

Now, fifty years later, when we are a post-racial nation, as many “color-blind” whites like to insist we are, these things are still not natural for most Americans.  The younger generations, it’s true, are more tolerant, much more inter-racial, but millions of  Americans in the second half of their lives– not that much.      

How was it possible for an elected official to yell “you lie!” at the President of the United States during a nationally televised presidential address a few years ago?  Because the president was, a, well, he was, possibly a secret Muslim, not definitely a US citizen, a kind of socialist, a fascist, a man who cheated to become president, you know, an illegitimate president who came to office by a kind of fraud or shady electoral subterfuge, in a much different and more dangerous way than any recent predecessor, he was a different, a less respectable kind of president, he lacked the pedigree, he was….

“Christ,” says the skeleton of Malcolm X, “say the word.  The word is nigger.  ‘The president is a nigger’ is what he actually dog whistled.”

And as such, and being politically inexperienced, he had to be very careful, our first Black president, our post-racial president.  Very careful, you understand.  He had to remain supremely dignified, more so than Jackie Robinson, even.  A hard slide into a foul-mouthed bench jockey playing shortstop was out of the question. Our post-racial president walked with that heavy burden on his back, the weight of hundreds of years of racism, de jure and de facto.  He did a pretty good job, considering his hands and feet were tied for much of his first term, and for his second term.

And my father, choked as a boy on his family’s poverty, on being in a tiny, powerless minority of Jews in a town where the opinions of the Klan were much more universally respected than any others, identified 100% with the choking rage of another boy, born into poverty, part of a despised minority that could be beaten or killed with impunity, whose first memory was the Klan setting fire to his childhood home.   2016, gentle reader, almost a century of bold progress, and I am choking on the same goddamned things that choked them.

My father admired Malcolm X, El Hadj Malik El Shabbaz, born Malcolm Little almost exactly a year after my father, on the day before my mother would be born three years later.  They were contemporaries.  They were both burned by the sickening injustice of the world they were born into.  

Both were eloquent, persuasive, quick-witted speakers.  My father must have felt like a pretty good amateur fighter when he watched Malcolm work.  He was inspired by and took pride in Malcolm’s indomitable quickness in the ring, the way he shined in the spotlight, his slick moves.  He delighted in watching the remarkably skilled self-taught boxer in the big fights.

I was eight and a half when I heard the news, on the radio, sitting alone in my parents’ bedroom waiting for something to come on TV, that several men had cut doomed Malcolm down in a hail of bullets in the Audubon Ballroom.  I remember how hard the news hit me that February evening.  I am sickened to this day about the cover-up and the fact that the bloody crime scene was mopped up immediately so that the scheduled dance could be held in the ballroom three hours after the assassination.  

February 21 would acquire further meaning for me as an early love of my life was born on that day, and so was my only aunt.   February 21 was also the day Spinoza had died, and, three hundred years later to the day, my grandfather, strong, gentle, frightened Sam.  Sam had a right to be frightened, his six brothers and sisters, all his nieces and nephews, possibly his old parents and any aunts and uncles still alive, and all of his surviving cousins, had been marched out of the house he grew up in, and the ones nearby, for a bullet in the back of the head and a mass grave in a ravine.  He was only alive because he’d followed his strong-willed fiancee to New York twenty years earlier.

When we talk about history, whether we mention the frequent atrocities or not, this is the kind of thing we are talking about.  My father could minimize the psychological effect of having all of your parents’ aunts and uncles summarily executed at the whim of some hateful fucks, just as he tried to minimize the whippings across the face he’d endured from his mother (her family similarly wiped out) when he was a very young child. Minimizing anguish can only do so much, the violence is always there. .    

All the atrocities one hated could be felt as one while Malcolm whipped some apologist for racism with irrefutable, brutal logic.  Malcolm, at his best, brought a feeling of catharsis to the discussion– to hear someone finally speaking clearly, and strongly about exactly what needed to be spoken of clearly and strongly.  

I learned from reading that part of Malcolm’s genius as a radio debater was his superb sense of timing.  I’m sure my father was very much aware of Malcolm’s clock management skills.  Malcolm X was Michael Jordan in the last thirty seconds of a radio debate.  He’d wait, timing his game winner to come at the buzzer and he rarely missed.  

Debating a black academic of some kind who took a superior tone, Malcolm goaded the man by referring to him throughout as “doctor”.  The man corrected him and finally, in exasperation, said “Malcolm, you know very well that I am not a doctor.”

“Oh,” said Malcolm with feigned innocence, “you speak so authoritatively on the subject of the so-called progress of the Negro that I just assume you have a doctorate in this subject.”  

The shot clock on the radio studio  wall now down to thirty seconds, Malcolm set up the last shot of the game.    

“Are you aware of how white academics where you work, in fact, all the white people where you work, refer to you, doctor, when you are not present?”  

His opponent, who’d been insisting Malcolm’s anger at American racism was not helping matters, gave some prissy demurral, asked how he or Malcolm or anyone in the world could possibly know with any degree of possible certainty, or even hypothetically, what was supposedly being said of him when he was not there.  

Malcolm dribbled for a moment, glanced at the game clock.  Then he sent one in a perfect arc, that hit nothing but net.  “Nigger,” he said, as time ran out.  

“How can you not love that shit?” asks the skeleton of my father from his grave in Cortlandt, NY.

A sense of humor is a funny thing to try to describe, of course, very personal and ticklishly hard to render in words.  What’s funny?   It’s like pornography to that famous Supreme Court justice whose name nobody today remembers: I can’t exactly describe it, but I know it when I see it.  

Very hard to describe somebody’s sense of humor, which is always seen in a sudden flash. It’s like trying to describe a unique smell, or the essence of music to a deaf person.  

Music is these wonderfully organized sounds that hit the eardrum in a beautiful way and stir ineffable emotions, you know what I’m saying?  Hey!  Are you fucking listening to me, deaf guy?  I’m trying to explain what music is here.  

Tell a funny story, and watch the confusion on the listener’s face as to why this story is funny, or even worth telling, and in the moment of defeat you’ll say, or just as often the tired listener will say “I guess you had to be there.”  And it’s usually true, you usually did have to be there.  

There’s the matter of timing, pacing, facial expression, and body language, when and where the supposedly funny thing happened, and who it happened among, the context, what the stakes were.  Take a funny bit by a great comedian, something that cracked you up, and write it out verbatim.  Chances are it’s not nearly as funny, if at all, as it was when performed by the talented comic.  I can assure you, it was fucking hilarious.  I guess you had to be there.  Are you even listening to me, you deaf bastard?

My father was fucking funny, is what I’m trying to tell you.  He was a lot of other things that were not funny at all, true enough, but he also had a keen, dark sense of humor and a quick wit.  It’s hard to give you examples, though.

My father, standing at the top of the stairs leading from the kitchen down to his bathroom, pointing his ass at his family, his wife threatening him, timing his exit to the predictably horrified reaction to his perfectly executed fart, is it really funny?  And if it is funny, is it “ha-ha” funny or just funny as in weird?

I consulted a psychotherapist on this particular instance of my father’s wicked sense of humor and her take was that “he came off as less funny than hostile and angry, at least as regards the farting part.”  She noted that “blatant public farting can serve as a means for people who feel ‘powerless’ in their lives to exert a measure of control/power over others.”  Bingo.  I recognize all that, that’s why he was doing it, but… I guess you had to be there.  I guess asking a fucking psychotherapist about humor is pretty funny in itself.   

Eli, that great, funny, savage older first cousin of my father’s, once tried to describe my grandfather’s sense of humor to me.  Eli was a great story teller, and very funny himself, but it took him a long time to dig up a few tiny examples that gave me a sense of my grandfather’s deadpan style.  He described Harry’s face with an unforgettably poetic image: “two eyes, a nose, and a mouth”.  That was it.  Eli zipped a finger across his lips, showed the mask, blinked once impassively to show what he was talking about.

“OK, I got one,” he said at last.  “I was trying to teach Uncle Harry to drive, you know, he was out of work and my father was going to hire him to work in the garage, but he couldn’t be much use unless he could drive and move the cars around.  So I took him out in the car in Peekskill, which is very hilly territory, if you remember what Peekskill is like.  And we’re going along and we come to a hill, and he starts losing power.  So I say ‘Uncle Harry, give it gas, give it gas!’ and he turns to me with that face and says ‘gas costs money’ and the car starts rolling backwards, and we’re going to get killed.  I shoved my foot on to the gas pedal and grabbed the steering wheel, and pulled the goddamn car over at the top of the hill and that was the end of the driving lessons, but that was him.  ‘Gas costs money.'”

Funny I am only now making the connection.  Gas costs money, unless it’s the gas that comes out of your ass, which costs nothing except the horrified look on your children’s faces when you tell them to ‘prepare for…. gassing’ and blast them with it.  I will get back to you with examples of my father’s sense of humor as I am able to dredge them up, so you will understand I am not making this up.

OK, I got one, though a minor one you probably really did have to be there for.  When my grandmother was dying at home, in my former bed, actually, she was in a lot of pain at the end and wouldn’t take her synthetic heroin except at precise four hour intervals.  She’d cry out in pain for two hours at a time sometimes, refusing her pill until it was exactly four hours from the last one, no matter what any of us said to assure her it would be fine to take one after only three hours if she was in agony.

She’d asked me to hang up a small painting on heavy paper I’d done for her, so she could study it on the wall.  I went downstairs to get a hammer and nail.  As I headed up the stairs with the hammer my father said “is that for the fly on grandma’s nose?”

You had to be there, perhaps, but I remind you, there are few things more important for the doomed than a good laugh whenever possible.

My friend mentioned that his children had taught him what to do when they received a text that asked them to do something they weren’t ready to do: ignore it.  “It was a great lesson, though it took me a long time to catch on.  Now I do it all the time whenever they send me a request to do something I’m not ready to do.  And the beauty is, they taught it to me and so they really can’t complain about it.” 

I offered him one of my father’s staples.  “You show me a man who doesn’t respond when his father texts him a request, I’ll show you a man who lost the right to whine like a fucking baby when his father does the same to him.”