Category Archives: book of irv

Chapter 60 Be the change you want to see

If you find yourself in a fight with someone close to you, feel threatened and believe there is no way out, you will fight to the death, or flee forever. If you are in conflict with a loved one, and knowthat experience and adult insight offer you more tools to resolve conflict than you had as a child, there is hope of healing.

In the first instance, the fatalistic belief that nothing ever changes for the better will keep you at war. In the second, there is a real chance for peace, if the other side also believes in learning from past mistakes, accepting human foibles, acknowledging the importance of reciprocity, mutuality, adjusting better to the other person’s actual needs.

My father, for whom the pain involved in trying to make his life less painful, a life rooted in hellish abuse and deprivation, was unimaginably intense, always argued that people cannot change themselves in any fundamental way. Those who “work” in therapy, he said, are merely deluding themselves, real change on a deep level is not possible. You cannot change your inborn nature, he always insisted.

I argued against this hopeless proposition, pointing to the improvements people I’ve known have managed in their reactions to frustration, sorrow, guilt, bitterness, the need to blame others. I offered my own changes for the better, my improved control of my temper, for example. He always dismissed the so-called change as self-delusion, which he could always prove, for many years at least, by goading me until I finally lost my temper. That was his triumphant proof that nobody can really change for the better. See, you claimed you can control your temper, but I can make you lose it, you haven’t learned to control shit! Even when I eventually learned not to lose my temper, it was only an act I was performing, one he could easily demean as superficial, self-deluded performance art.

Relentless in his unshakable opinion, as anyone arguing for fatalism must be, my father always argued that people might succeed in changing some superficial aspect of their behavior, but their fundamental nature was as innate and unalterable as mortality itself. His position, I have to say now, is a supremely depressing, deterministic one.

It is also characteristic of someone who cannot be wrong, no matter what. My father was right for himself, as I realized recently. He could not change, the first step involved was crippling to him. The same goes for anyone stuck in the narcissistic person’s tragic trap – either seeing themselves as perfect and never wrong or abjectly, humiliatingly unworthy of love and self-respect.

For someone who lashes out in pain and believes experience plus insight can lead the way to changes that will result in less pain, change is a tangible goal. You can learn to control your angry reactions, for example, and with practice you can become better at it. This step forward can lead to another, and so on. We are all works in progress, if we’re willing to work with our limitations, talk things out and learn new things. Except for those who truly cannot change because acknowledging the need for change involves looking at things that are terrifying to them.

Someone who lashes out in pain and cannot be wrong must believe themself perfectly in the right whenever they are in pain. They are in pain simply because they are the victims of some fucking devil. That devil must be killed. There is nothing that can be done except to identify, isolate and kill the source of pain.

If your emotions are inflamed, in a conflict with the wounds of a traumatic past reopened, and you can change, you have a chance to learn to redeem a ruptured relationship. If your emotions are on fire, in a painful conflict, and you are certain that change is impossible, you are simply fucked up and beyond the reach of redemption. All that is left is retribution against the devil who has wounded you.

If you also cannot be wrong, you must convince everyone else in your life that the person you are in a conflict with is 100% in the wrong and irredeemable. If a person is a piece of shit, has done horrible things to hurt you, and people can’t change, as you know deep in your heart, that’s all she wrote, set and match!

From time to time I try to imagine the accusations against me that caused a group of friends of fifty years to unanimously agree that I was beyond redemption. How atrocious my crimes must have been! The anger could not have been more unyielding if I’d molested all their children, repeatedly, while brutally blackmailing them all into eternal, shameful silence, while I’d been poisoning everyone’s food and drink for decades while lying with every fetid breath I exhaled as I pretended to be funny and angrily denied I was the living incarnation of Adolf Hitler, with a field of corpses to prove it and very proud of myself for what a sly pretender I am.

For someone as evil as this, unless they apologize to everyone they’ve been raping, assaulting and trying to kill for years, admit their heinous crimes and despicable nature and beg for the mercy of the jury, there is not even the remotest possibility of forgiveness. Welcome behind the scenes of the greatest, deadliest shit show it has ever been my horror to participate in!

I also note how painful it must be to live in a world that is as hopelessly, painfully rotten at death as it was during the earliest painful memory. The belief that people cannot change is truly undefeatable in people unalterably deformed by crippling past pain.

When my father insisted that people can’t change, he was speaking with 100% conviction. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that someone like him, someone so deeply damaged that he could not be wrong, on pain of feeling utterly, contemptibly, self-loathingly humiliated and undeserving of love or respect, could not change. Being certain you cannot change will effectively prevent any effort to do so and keep you convinced, since if you can’t do something nobody else can, that people, all people, are incapable of making meaningful changes in their lives to have more peace and less war to the death.

As for somebody who makes a little positive progress toward a less painful life? KILL THEM!

Chapter 54 Self-soothing behavior

Many of us, particularly if we suffered as children, develop behaviors to soothe ourselves when we feel up against it. Some methods of dealing with stress are more productive than others. While I have bad habits that make me feel a bit better than not doing them, I have one that feels productive. I always take comfort from expressing myself clearly. It is a great relief to feel heard and understood.

I enjoy conversing with someone, or writing clearly to someone, who grasps what I have to say, adds their personal observations, allows me to reflect and refine my thoughts and feelings. This essential human give and take is a beautiful thing, and at the root of much learning. Expressing myself as clearly as I can, while listening as closely as I can, facilitates this exchange. The next best thing to this human back and forth is writing and its mirror twin reading.

I was sensitized to not being heard early in life. My parents alternated listening to me anxiously with studiously ignoring what I had to say. This strategic, selective silence was more the practice of my father than my mother. With my mother, who could flail and fight with the worst of them, I always knew that in a calm moment afterwards I could approach her and, most of the time, be heard. I was even able to persuade her from time to time, which is no small thing for a child to receive from his mother. Understanding after angry disagreement is one of the great balms of love.

This balm is something neither of my parents experienced much growing up. My mother clearly got it a bit more than my father, but my father got pretty much zero understanding from his angry, religious fundamentalist mother or from his father, a damaged cipher unable to protect his son, himself, or anyone else. The little brother he bullied throughout their lives clung to him as the big brother was dying, but prior to that time there seemed little love or understanding between them. My father found understanding, appreciation and love in his wife, my mother, and that was the greatest blessing of his embattled life.

The damage inflicted on my father throughout his childhood rendered him largely helpless against frustration and rage. I understood, shortly before he died, that he’d truly done the best he could, based on the monumentally shit hand he’d been dealt in life. I think of the rage I was regularly faced with at the dinner table. My father’s vehemence and abuse was a shadow of the horror my he’d gone through, but bad enough for me.

Unconsciously I knew that to respond with rage, which I sometimes did, would be final, terminal, irrevocable and the harm of it could never be revisited or undone. Over time I resisted going to that rage zone when my parents were furious. I eventually became pretty good at masking my rising emotions and reining in my anger. I have noticed over the years that for a type prone to humiliation it is humiliating, when in a rage, to be confronted with superficial calmness. They are out of control, and calling out their enemy for a good Western saloon-style fistfight, and their would-be opponent remains mild, unruffled, expressing honest confusion about the disproportionate rage blazing around them. Talk about humiliation.

What could be more provocative, for someone ready to deliver a righteous punch to the face, the gut, followed by kicks in the stomach, than a mild reply? They are enraged and you remain enragingly, humiliatingly composed as they circle for the attack. I realize now, given the set-up, that I couldn’t help becoming that way. I had no choice but to learn that survival skill when my father made me his adversary from before I even had words.

It is no surprise, given that background, that using words to present my view as clearly as possible would become supremely soothing to me. A good talk reminds me of the basic goodness of the world. The most painful type I still have to face sometimes is the righteous, angry person who will not let me speak. They insist on the right to silence me in spite of the many years I’ve listened to them as a good friend, brother, colleague, in spite of many excellent talks we’ve had over the years. What gives someone the right to tell another person they may not speak is another, hideous question.

We meet people like this sometimes in life, we may become close friends, having no reason to suspect how badly they will act in a moment of pressure. We don’t discover, til a moment of supreme tension, that a friend or other loved one may be so damaged in their souls that they truly cannot listen to someone else’s pain. In fact, another person expressing hurt and expecting sympathy is infuriating to them, given the right circumstances. Nothing is more hurtful for this type, at a vulnerable moment, than to be reminded of the fragile emptiness of the shell they created to make themselves feel better and more important, than others.

This is a certain type of asshole, the snarling, angry one standing on their right to anger. You can easily picture them in a lynch mob. Nothing you can say will make the slightest impression on their anger because they will never acknowledge wrongdoing of any kind without blaming you, somebody else, everybody else. They also always insist on one condition for any conversation once there is a conflict: you shut the fuck up about your goddamned feelings. The one condition I can’t agree to.

There is a deathly pain associated with being silenced. When you are prevented from speaking by someone else, it is a direct negation of your humanity. It presupposes the right of one person to make the other person shut up. Enforcing silence requires force, or the credible, frightening threat of force. Once you have shown your mercilessness to the others, say be ostracizing one critic, there is no reason to demonstrate your power again, unless strictly necessary. Your reputation as an indomitable competitor not above a quick kick to the shorts precedes you in your social milieu. Brutalize one and the rest tend to fall in line.

So on a bleak day, thinking about the silence of longtime, now former, friends, their unshakable, righteous enmity, to the death, I console myself by presenting my thoughts and feelings as clearly as I can.

I set the basic idea down quickly, once it’s in my head. I read it again, trying my best to make like an innocent reader seeing it for the first time. I clarify things that could be confusing. I elaborate on things I didn’t develop, condense whatever seems tedious. This work is a pleasure, considering my words and their effect, as I refine them into successively better reflections of myself and my views. When everything is combed through and smoothed down into its simplest form, I put it up in an online journal, another example of my soul doing its best to make my notion of a good life tangible on a given, otherwise shit, day.

“Face twisted and contorted with hate”

This is how sick, damaged and destructive people who can never be wrong are. They will do anything to prove they can’t be wrong. For example:

Their eight year-old kid is upset and no matter how many times mom and dad assure the kid there is nothing to be upset about, the stubborn little bastard insists he’s upset. In fairness, this could be very upsetting to a certain type of parent, one who feels responsible for their child’s well-being but truly doesn’t know how to sit with upsetting feelings themselves, let alone help someone else with them. Imagine how upsetting it is to them to see their child upset! The natural thing for this type to do is escalate things until the upset person is way more upset than they are.

Now they are talking about the basic lack of courage in the child, his self-pity, his sadness, his completely irrational anger. These things are bad, each of them, and together constitute a pathetic excuse for a human personality. They are reflections of a lack of character. They are sad predictors of a miserable life of failure and blaming others for his problems. They remind the boy how angry he was as a newborn baby, furious and hostile, all the time, for no goddamned reason.

Eventually the kid starts glaring at his accusers. This reaction is what they were going for the whole time, though they couldn’t have put into words. Now that the kid is angry on top of being upset, he stares at his parents angrily. The moment is right to strike:

“Look at his face,” the father will sputter, “twisted and contorted with hate.”

My younger sister and I heard this phrase often enough that we both quoted it to each other and laughed about it, back in the years when we were still talking to each other.

To show a face twisted and contorted with hate (isn’t a contorted face always twisted, a twisted one always contorted? Isn’t the overkill of the one two punch a tell?) is different than protesting that your feelings are always dismissed, or calmly stating that as an eight year-old you need to be heard by your parents when you are upset. A face twisted and contorted with hate is the despicable face of a klansman at a lynching, a Nazi, some kind of hate-filled sick fuck who can’t be reasoned with. Certainly not the face of a child who deserves to be heard when he is upset, reassured with kindness.

My father apologized for his abusiveness the last night of his life, and it was good to hear, but the damage had long ago been done. I was close to fifty the first time my father apologized for being a monster as a father. The next evening he was gone.

We are left holding a heavy bag, full of the weighty things our parents were too overwhelmed to carry themselves. It is passed on, endlessly, until someone gets the insight to put the fucking thing down. In that moment she can finally untwist and un-contort her face and feel not a hint of hatred toward those who did their flawed human best to love her.

The subtle details of long-term damage

I just thought of something that happened to me more than sixty years ago, and it sheds light on my present day sensitivity about not having my feelings taken seriously. The lack of empathy shown after this long forgotten incident appears rather subtle, in a way, and petty to remember. Except for the deep impression it seems to have made, as I feel any time my feelings are dismissed by others.

My childhood best friend, Michael Siegel, who lived across the street and was two years older than me, had a vivid imagination and a great sense of adventure. He and I would roam the neighborhood, claiming new forts in the spaces between garages. We would travel surreptitiously from one fort to the next, navigating a dangerous war zone like two well-armed expert spies. Each fort had a name, Green Gate and Bramblebush are the only two I recall. We had to carefully navigate a low, spiky, barbed wire-looking brown coil hedge that looked like the Crown of Thorns, to find safety inside Bramblebush.

We also had the Waterbug Club, whose charter demanded that we jump through any sprinkler we passed on our way from fort to fort, or chasing the ball during our one on one baseball games in the street in front of my house. We did a lot of chasing, because the street sloped down to Union Turnpike, which was behind the home plate he’d painted in the street one day. Where the seven or eight year-old got a can of green pain, or how he painted home plate so perfectly, I never learned. When the sprinklers were running a river ran down our street toward the Turnpike, against whose inexorable flow we always hurried to build a heroic series of dams out of twigs and mud.

We used to regularly patrol the alleys behind the stores on Union Turnpike. These alleys, for some reason, always contained empty deposit bottles. There were the two cent regular Coke bottles and the larger sized ones which fetched a nickel. We were diligent collectors and eventually had over a dollar in our coffers. We decided to go to the candy store and spend the whole bundle on candy. In those days, 1961 or so, you could buy a ton of candy for a dollar. A Milky Way, Mr. Goodbar or bag of M & M’s cost a nickel.

Michael hatched the plan. The candy store opened early. On Saturday we’d get there as soon as the store opened, buy a shit ton of candy and eat it all. At five or six I didn’t have an alarm clock in my room, or even a clock, but Michael figured everything out. He must have known how to tell time and had an alarm clock. We’d tie a long rope to my ankle, I’d go to sleep with the rope hanging out of the window, and in the morning Michael would give the rope a yank, I’d wake up, get dressed and off to the candy store.

The only weak link of this plan was that we didn’t have a long rope. We managed to get a bunch of ropelike material, more like very flexible long plastic straws than rope, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. We tied enough of them together to make a long rope. We made a loop at one end, which I inserted my foot into, and I went to sleep, excited about the brilliant plan we were about to pull off.

I woke up the next day with the loop still around my ankle. Michael had come by early, as he promised, and yanked on the “rope”. The rope came apart in several places, as we confirmed later. Five and seven year-olds are not always intuitively expert knot tiers, it turns out. I was pissed off about the failure of this brilliant plan. I guess I shared my frustration with my parents.

They might have found it mildly funny, how pissed off I was, but what I remember is for years afterwards my father would bring up a similar moment of frustration I’d expressed. “You were inconsolably angry because it RAINED,” he’d say, shaking his head with a dismissive smile. The rain had apparently canceled something I’d been looking forward to. I was upset and frustrated because something I’d been excited to do had been washed out. “You were in a rage because it RAINED,” said my father, many times during my childhood, demonstrating the ridiculousness of my disappointment and the irrational anger it caused.

From my irrational feelings about an act of God it was easy to trace all of my other frustrations and anger to this same need to rage for no reason. As an old man now myself it is easy enough to see that my father had never experienced empathy as a boy. In his mind I was a spoiled middle class kid who expected his excited plans to work out. He’d survived so much worse, that my childish disappointment was something to dismiss, mock. The pain he’d been forced to endure rendered him incapable of ordinary empathy. Profoundly sad thing, that.

My father was a sometimes charming monster

He was not alone in this category of monster. Some of the most destructive monsters of all time were good looking, funny, smart and engaging. While you were admiring them they were not monstrous at all. They were wonderful, lovely, cool, special, easy to be around, fun.

Once they show you their monstrous side they are obliged to kill you. It is humiliating for them, the possibility they could be revealed as monsters. Better to take no chances, kill all the witnesses, kill them, kill anybody who tries to help a witness!

The Terror of Shame

A fear of shame being revealed drives desperation. Feel desperate enough and you will lie, commit violence, do anything necessary. The terror of having your shame revealed is behind most unreasonable demands, contempt and much of the violence in the world. Shame is the engine of abuse.

My father, according to my sister, led a shame-based life. She reached this astute conclusion shortly after he died. He wished for peace and justice, admired peacemakers and those with the courage to fight for justice, was a friend of the underdog — yet his shame made him maniacally oppress and abuse those closest to him. He couldn’t help it.

I don’t excuse his actions, everyone in pain who hurts others is responsible for their own healing, but I understand that the humiliation he suffered as a baby disabled him in a fundamental way. He lived his life in terror of ever feeling as helpless, and ashamed, as he did when his mother terrorized him as an infant. That his children had no intention of humiliating him never seemed to have occurred to him.

The need to dominate others arises in people with deep shame. As any despot or bully knows, as soon as you show vulnerability, you’re finished. So you need to ruthlessly dominate anyone you feel challenges your dominance, there can be no compromise with your indomitable will. Your need to be invulnerable blocks out all other human aspirations. The need to dominate others leads to a lonely fucking life, in my observation.

Shameful things, hidden, acquire a terrible power. If I know your shame, and hold it over you like a sword, I can torture you with it at will. How does one liberate oneself from shame? It’s got to be a long and painful process. Imagine your wife is holding some shameful secret of yours as a nuclear option with the kids, if you get too far out of line. Picture a guy who reacts as though whipped in the face when his wife playfully calls him a faggot. In a sense we are all playing poker here in the world, holding our cards close, trying not to tip our hands. Then, there are tells.

The right to be heard

Chapter 11 (from a work in progress)

If you are a humanistic person, you probably believe that every child is born with the right to be heard. It is one of those unalienable rights Thomas Jefferson enumerated in the Declaration of Independence (omitted from our Constitution for the practical, profit-driven reason that many men – and all women – were not created equal to their owners, nor endowed with jack shit). A child is born with a right to be heard.

Much of what the child has to say, granted, can be annoying as hell. First it’s crying and screaming about things the parents can only guess about, and unless they guess right, it will never stop. Hungry? Load in the diaper? Feeling neglected? Wet? Cold? Wanting a hug? Who the hell can tell? For some parents, this irrationally complaining baby’s incoherent crankiness will set the tone for the subsequent relationship.

“You were belly-aching from the time you were born,” a father will tell his needy son, once the boy is old enough. “I didn’t know what you were screaming about then and I don’t know what you’re upset about now. You have a room of your own, in a nice house, with heat, hot water, all the food you can eat, clothes, sneakers, toys, games – and you know how hard I work to give you all those things. And yet you complain. I have no idea what it is you think you’re somehow owed and not getting… (etc.)”

This may all be true, from the father’s point of view, but none of it is any help to the child, who still wants to be heard.

“What is your fucking problem, son? Use your words.”

“You don’t listen to me,” says the boy.


“What are you talking about? I’m listening to you right now, son. All I ever hear from you is complaints, if it’s not something you can explain to me, it’s some gripe you can’t put into words.”

“You’re not hearing me, dad. When I talk I can see what I’m saying does not go into your head. You never hear what I say.”

“That’s insane,” says the father, “I heard what you said just now, right now, five seconds ago. You said I’m not hearing you, that your words don’t get into my head, that I never hear what you say. I heard all that. How can you say I never hear you?”

The son is no match for this adult and his implacable logic and soon gives up, still feeling he is never heard. Why does he feel this way? When he says he’s scared, his mother tells him he has nothing to be scared about. When he tells his father he’s cold, the father tells him the temperature in the house and explains why it’s impossible to feel cold at that temperature. The adults always unite to insist that they have heard everything reasonable he has to say.

You have the right to be heard. If someone claims to love you, and will not listen to what you have to say, take the brutal hint, stop talking and call someone who can listen. If there is nobody around, sit in a quiet place and put your words down on a page. You have the right to be heard, no matter what people who claim to be better than you might have to say about it.

When being conciliatory becomes a problem

A friendly readiness to compromise, be agreeable and conciliatory becomes a handicap only when you find yourself in a conflict with someone who has to win, no matter what.

This type quickly makes a deadly weapon of the benefit of the doubt that you keep extending to them. In this moment, it is very important to listen to what that unsettled feeling in your stomach, in your lungs, your muscles is telling you.

You learn agreeable behavior as a baby, as a matter of survival. You must be easy to get along with, easy to love. It is good to be easy to get along with, until you find yourself locked in a struggle with someone who sees the world only as domination or submission.

These motherfuckers play a game where only one person walks away alive at the end. Learn to see the deadly game as early as you can, learn to get away from them as soon as you can. If necessary, learn not to feel bad if you have to kick them hard or punch them in the face to get away from them. They will do much worse to you if you stick around and keep trying to reason with them.

Bad moves 101

I was raised by an angry, narcissistic father and an angry, but non-narcissistic mother.  While my father could never admit being wrong or doing anything that hurt you, my mother could eventually see things from the victim’s point of view, at least in my case.  

Her love is what saved my life, I realize now, in that constant war zone where my father fought my sister and me every night over our steak, salad and rice-a-roni.  My sureness in her love is what sustained me in an endless, senseless war with my father that I didn’t start and that lasted until the last three days of my father’s life.  

In the end, he saw he’d been mistaken and we finally came to a tragically too-late, but blessed, understanding, the last night of his life.  Before that time, like all narcissists, the idea of being imperfect was humiliating to him.  He could not bear to “lose” and would do any number of ruthless things to ensure his ongoing “victory”.

Twenty years earlier, as I was turning thirty, I began to realize that my dream of becoming a famous artist was actually my ambitious grandmother’s dream for me.  I had talent, but not the “vision” and drive that marks the great immortal artists whose work graces the world’s museums and the walls of those who can afford $20,000,000 for a picture to hang in their home.  

It turns out I was always more of a philosopher than an “artist,” another rarefied calling with a very secure career path.  I was always more interested in discovering deeper truths about this perplexing shitstorm we live in than creating work that the wealthy tastemakers, those who decided who were real artists and who were just regular people with a passionate hobby, traded in. The difference between an artist and someone who simply loved to create, I was beginning to realize, was that very rich people bought and sold artist’s work to decorate their lavish homes, while the hobbyist was just a poor bastard with delusions of grandeur. 

I was too critical and angry at the injustice of vast wealth and vast poverty to be an interior decorator for those entitled fucks but I had a hard time abandoning the dream of living like Picasso.  I became depressed.

I had a minor accident while making deliveries on my bike.  Cutting diagonally across West 57th Street  in a reckless, illegal move, ironically right in front of some prestigious art galleries I used to haunt, the handlebars of my bike were sideswiped by a young driver.  Many months later I was awarded about $7,000 when some shysters won a lawsuit suing the driver.  The accident had actually been my fault, but what the fuck, the kid’s father’s insurance paid.  I took the money.  

With that money I was going to finance my fourth film and then travel to Israel and then east, up to Nepal.  For whatever reason, both of those ideas became too daunting for me.  I’d already put the movie idea on hold and promised to sublet my apartment to a friend but found myself increasingly unable to make decisions.  Soon no decision was too small to cause me agony, in a short time I was paralyzed.  

I remember spending hours in a shoe store, trying on shoes, and in the end leaving with none.  The salesman was furious.  I felt like shit.

The day for the sublet was rapidly approaching, and my father, disgusted by what was happening to me, made the decision for me.  “You made a promise to Brendan,” he said, “you can’t screw up his life because you are having trouble making decisions.  You can move in here until you go to Israel.” 

I took the worst advice I’ve ever followed and moved back into my childhood home.  It was like a miracle, I woke up in my old room crushed with depression.  Things got worse and worse.

One aspect, looking back, is that it seemed my father had won.  It turned out I was a weak, self-pitying, egotistical, grandiose, lazy, unrealistically dreaming young man filled with idiotically self-serving ideas about some imagined glorious life that had led me directly, and deservedly, into the dark abyss I found myself in.  There was no escape.  

I don’t remember my mother’s love in those days, though she was clearly heartbroken.  What I remember is my father’s scorn and that, although he was ashamed of what I’d become, he also had an odd sense of vindication.  My sudden inability to do anything, in spite of my talents, proved to my father that he’d been right about me all along, and look how wrong I’d been about it all.

One day he asked me to type a letter for him.  I was not a particularly good typist (it was only years later, getting a degree in creative writing, and typing hours a day, that I really began to type well — later, in law school I discovered, to my great surprise that I could touch type with no need to look at the keys) but my hunting and pecking was much faster than my father’s.   We had no correction tape or white out in the house, no way to fix a typo.  

My father stood beside me and dictated the short business letter.  I sat at the kitchen table typing carefully.  Amazingly, I typed the whole thing without a mistake.  Until the world “sincerely” which somehow contained a typo.  My father exploded in frustration, which was his way of dealing with things not being the way he needed them to be.

A friend called to check in on me and was alarmed by how despondent I sounded.  I told him the story of typing the letter.  He told me “you have to get out of there.  Today.  I have a spare bedroom in the apartment, you can stay there.  Whatever you do, get out of there.  You will die if you stay there.”

A few days later I was living in his spare bedroom, playing the guitar and recording melancholy songs I was coming up with on his four track reel to reel tape recorder.  I still dreaded every day light hour and was seeing a therapist twice a week.  It was a long, dark road back, but one day, shortly after moving back into my own apartment, I met and began having sex with a very cute young woman, and shortly thereafter a second one.  After a few weeks of this I chose the one I liked better, said goodbye to the other one, and took with me the lessons I’d learned during that long season of depression.   

Lesson number one, do not kick, whip or beat yourself, for any reason, and get the destructive voice of the internalized victimizer (in my case my father) out of your head.  It was a long project, over many years, but I no longer kick myself, and my father’s voice has changed to the humanistic one he displayed the last night of his life.  It has since evolved into the clever, insightful, merciful one that I’ve been in dialogue with ever since.  

Impossible letter #2 background (conclusion)

So you’re a smart, good looking young woman who has modeled herself after her dominant father, but living in a world of aggressively sexist assholes.  You can’t walk down the street in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s, without these assholes making wolfish comments, giving you the entitled, liplicking asshole looks that make your blood boil.   What you need is a strong, loyal man by your side to kick anyone’s ass who tries this shit with you.

That much is not hard to understand.  The requirements for this guy, aside from size and imposing physical strength, are similar to our father’s requirements for his mate:  good looking, charming, smart, good sense of humor, devoted and ready to do whatever I say.

Then we face the law of unintended consequences.  She found this man, a handsome, athletic giant, who told her he was separated from his wife when their whirlwind romance began.  He would do anything for her, wanted to sweep her away to Arizona, start a new life in Tucson.  She was a New Yorker with friends and a good job, not ready for this radical new start.   He eventually got divorced and they eventually got married.  He was good looking, smart, strong and devoted to making her happy.  The unintended part, unseen, and once seen, rationalized: the guy was sometimes a bit of a compulsive liar and probably a gambling addict.

What did he lie about?  His academic degrees, his former employment, money, why he lost his job, why he needed to borrow more money, why he couldn’t pay back the money he’d borrowed, why he came home with his clothes sliced to rags and his wallet and keys gone, why he lied about a previous lie, why taking that merchandise from his boss and selling it under the table wasn’t actually stealing, why shoplifting really isn’t stealing, why pretending to go to work every day for a year while taking cash advances on your dead father’s credit cards and handing them to your wife every week as your pay is really a victimless crime and so on.

Bottom line, he was bad with money.  At one point he made an excellent living, selling a lucrative yet legal product, but he also spent lavishly, extravagant orders and generous tips at restaurants, many expensive gifts and then, bad news, after a couple of years of living large, a few years scraping by, he finally had to declare bankruptcy.   

He did this a few days after borrowing ten thousand dollars from his father-in-law, the DU, for last minute expenses related to the upcoming closing on the dream house he and his wife were about to buy.  A lovely home with a beautiful back yard, where their soon-to-be born son would grow up playing with his big sister.  The guy was a practiced liar with the gift of looking disarmingly sincere, and vulnerable, when he lied.  He borrowed the ten grand from the DU on Monday, waited for the check to clear.  On Friday he told everyone he couldn’t repay the loan or buy the house, he’d declared bankruptcy earlier that week.

All of these details are humiliating to have set out in front of you, granted.  The only other option is to dummy up about all of it, as he always pressured me to do, about things like his refusal to pay me back money I’d loaned him, back when I still spoke to him. 

The vow of silence on sore subjects required to maintain a sociable relationship includes a big IXNAY on any mention of the death threat when his wife finally called him out about his psychopathic untruthfulness.  

To be fair, the death threat was a one off.  The wife flew into a long overdue rage that had been building for years, after the surprise bankruptcy that ended the charade of closing on the never to be attained dream home.  He angrily shot back that he was going to lock her and the kids in the house (I think a bicycle lock and a piece of heavy machinery came into play in this threat to seal them inside– my nephew had been born by then, was a young baby) get in his car, drive the mile to his in-laws, murder both of them with their biggest kitchen knife, come home, kill the children and set the house on fire, burning himself and his wife to death. 

In fairness to him, he never did any of this, although the graphically detailed threat got everybody’s attention for a while. 

The little family was also teetering on the edge of bankruptcy number two and I offered to look over the family budget, see where they could make cuts to save money.  

There was no family budget, no accounts or receipts except for ones showing the interest rates paid by poor people who buy luxury items, like a giant flat screen TV, on the predatory terms imposed in payment plans.  I reacted badly to the obscene interest rates that doubled the price of the giant flat screen they were still paying for, years after buying it. I see now, thinking about it again, that it had to have been humiliating to be made to feel bad for just trying to live a decent life.

“You have to explain to your kids why you’re so angry at your husband, otherwise all they see is an irrationally angry mother always grim and stressed out, for no apparent reason,” I told my sister.   She wasn’t ready to reveal any of this, assured me her kids had no idea that she was so angry at their father.  I assured her that they were well aware of it.  

For one thing, she’d been sleeping with her young son, in his bed, for several years, until the kid threw her out one night, old enough to point out the obvious and say “this is weird, mom.”   

“They do know,” she told me one day, not long afterwards.   She’d been at the kitchen sink and heard the kids out front talking to the neighbors’ kids.  She’d heard them describe how much their dad loves their mom, but that their mom doesn’t love their dad.

I offered to be in the room when her husband explained to the kids why mommy had a right to be mad at daddy sometimes, as he’d promised her he’d do, at my urging.  Daddy, it should be pointed out, was always playful, gentle and affectionate with the kids, their best friend.  Mommy could be demanding, grim and dreaded if crossed, but daddy was a giant, humorous, always a loving pussy cat.  He loved to cuddle

I was in Florida for two weeks and offered to help my sister inform the kids of some of the reasons she’d been angry at their loving dad.   She agreed, but kept putting me off, in the end assuring me that he’d promised to talk to the kids with her, as soon as I left Florida.  No warning I could have given her would have made any difference.

A week after I got back to New York my mother called me.  “You’d better call your sister, I just heard from her, today was the day that R____ was going to tell the kids about his sordid past, it didn’t go well.  She’s driving a hundred miles an hour on 95, I’m afraid she’s going to crash her car.”

My sister, who was indeed very upset, told me the story.  Her husband started his mea culpa to the children by putting things in context for them.  “You know how your mother has a hard time forgiving people sometimes?  Well, years ago I made a little mistake…” and, as if proving his point about what an unforgiving monster their mother was, she exploded, raced out the door, gunned the engine and started speeding on the highway.

There are things in life you cannot fix, irreparably broken things you had no hand in breaking.  No amount of nuance you can provide will change a black and white world view into a gradient where everyone strives for the best, with needed compromise along the way.  In the world of someone who must win, and always be in control, everything must be viewed in terms of victory or defeat.  

Defeat is the most humiliating thing in the win/lose world and the fierce competitor will do anything necessary to avoid the shame of losing.  You can continue to love people, you can be willing to compromise, do your best to be supportive, understanding, accepting — bear in mind, none of this shit will help you when you are trying it with someone in conflict who can never be on the losing end of anything.

Mistakes.  These wrong things you accuse me of doing are simple human mistakes, when I make them.  When you do bad things, you evil fuck, well, you are completely in the wrong.  But my mistakes are merely the mistakes of an imperfect person with no hurtful intention behind them, you merciless, hypocrite fuck.

Get into a wrestling match with an alligator and you get what you get, sucka.

After my mother’s funeral in 2010 we were standing on Mott Street in Chinatown, on a sweltering, humid NYC evening.  Me, Sekhnet, my sister and my niece, sucking on cold bubble teas in the elbow of Mott Street.  My niece was about twenty at the time.  We were exchanging stories about this high strung woman, the older sister of the high school friend at whose house my sister and niece were staying.  The woman, a doctor, really was a bit of a cartoon character, a female Yosemite Sam.  I listened to a few funny stories and told about the one time I met her.   

Her brother and I had arranged to meet at a Queens restaurant he’d been raving about, his brother and sister would be there with him.  I sent him an email saying I was unlikely to be done with work in time to join them at the appointed hour, but that they should have appetizers and I’d hop on a train and be there as soon as I could.   I got there about thirty minutes after the appointed time.  They were sitting in a car in front of the restaurant, which was closed.   This was before the age when everyone had a smart phone in their pocket, and besides, I’d been on the subway for the previous half hour.   A woman stuck her head out of the front passenger seat and angrily told me that I was an inconsiderate fucking asshole.  I said “nice to meet you, Ellen”.

“But if you really want to hear stories about her, ask your father,” I said to my beautiful, smiling niece  “he knows her best of all, they were married.”

My sister made a desperate throat slash/ixnay IXNAY!!! gesture behind her confused daughter’s back.  I had no idea the father’s previous marriage and divorce was a deeply guarded family secret.  My niece opened her eyes wide and looked from me to her mother, back to me, back to her mother, totally confused.

“Mom, what?!   Was dad really married to her?”

My sister assured her that dad had never been married to anyone but her.  I stood in the street, at a loss for words.  I should have not been at a loss for words, and I rarely am, I must not have been ready for nuclear war with my sister at that moment.   She’d already nuked one of my major cities, true, by insisting that Uncle Elie was either crazy or a liar, or both, but I stood in the street, not ready to launch my counterattack.  I don’t operate that way, blasting first and cleaning up afterwards, for all of my skill at disemboweling desperate enemies with my sharp tongue.

As soon as I was alone with my sister I told her she had to straighten things out with my niece.  She had hammered an intolerable wedge between me and the niece I loved.  My niece now had to consider if her uncle was insane or just a compulsive liar who couldn’t help himself from spewing whatever gibberish came into his head.  My sister told me she understood, and she’d talk to her daughter, explain everything.   

Of course, there were a lot of conditions placed on that talk — both kids had to be informed at the same time (what this had to do with my nephew, who wasn’t there, was never explained) and they had to be informed at a time when their father wasn’t there, which he always was.  It would be tricky, she told me, but she’d do it as soon as possible.

I know what you must be thinking, dear reader, now that I’ve set out this story for you with the full illumination of hindsight.  “You know how your uncle is sometimes really angry and unable to forgive people who didn’t actually do anything to him?”

A year later, the next time we saw each other, my sister told me that she’d tried to keep her promise, but that the time had never been right to tell the kids what she’d promised to tell them, without their father there.  Seriously, though, looking at it in the context of the rest of this, how did I not yet understand the world my sister lived in?  I wasn’t ready to let her and her children go, couldn’t admit to myself that they were probably already gone.

When our father was dying, during the last night of his life, I asked him to record a little message for his daughter, in the event that they didn’t get a chance to speak before the end.   He hesitated for a long time, and everything he said afterwards applied to himself as much as to his daughter.  

Except that, naturally, he started off by saying he could never understand how she could stay with that colossal asshole after all the times he’d betrayed and lied to her.  I told him that his views on the subject were well known to everyone, but that perhaps he had something of a more helpful nature he wanted to say to her, before time ran out.  He had a very hard time formulating anything I could play for her.  

“No matter how much you praise her, it makes no difference, her need for affirmation is a bottomless pit,” said the brilliant man who’d insisted, moments earlier, that he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill — “by far!”. 

“I must I must have told her a hundred times what a phenomenally talented teacher she was, but it never made the slightest impression on her. It’s like a bottomless hole that can’t be filled.” said my father, a bottomless hole that couldn’t be filled, on the last night of his life.

“A hundred times?,” I said, not able to let that bit of dishonest hyperbole go, not in our last conversation. 

“Easily a hundred,”  he said. It was probably once, perhaps it was even twice, whatever it was it wasn’t a hundred fucking times. I let it go, aware that I was in his temple, the room he was dying in.

“His life was shame-based,” my sister said after he died.  “His whole life was an attempt to avoid feeling unbearable shame.”

Set and match, if you pattern yourself after someone you admire, in spite of the tremendous damage he did.

I went into a fury when my sister told me she hadn’t had a chance to set her daughter straight, claiming that since it was already a year ago that the kid probably had no memory of it anyway. When I blew up,  my sister burst into tears.  She sobbed like a little kid, I’ve never seen an adult cry that way.  She stood on the street, bawling and shuddering for a long time.  Then she promised again that she’d tell her kids that she’d lied, that their uncle hadn’t been crazy or lying when he casually mentioned an objective, taboo fact.

“Hi, Uncle Elie,” my niece said over the phone a week or two later.  “My mom wanted me to call to tell you that she told us that our dad was married and divorced before my parents got married.”

“Did she tell you why I needed her to tell you this?”

“No, we were both kind of confused about why it was so important to you…” she said.

“A hundred million people have been divorced, people get divorced all the time.  Why would I give a shit about you knowing that your father had been divorced?” I said.

“We were wondering the same thing,” she said.

I told her the story.  She’d forgotten all about it, just as her mom had predicted.  When I finished the story she said “now I understand why you were so upset.”

That may have been the last time I spoke on the phone with my smart, beautiful niece.  Ten years later, after periodic texts exchanged, with many heart emojis, I finally set out to write the impossible letter, to her and her brother.