Category Archives: book of irv

Shitbox v. Loxbox

The tiny car Harold Schwartzappel pulled up in on 190th Street to rescue me from a deluge may have been a Fiat, or a Renault, or possibly a Peugeot, whichever company made a cheaper model circa 1964.  My father referred to Schwartzappel’s car as a shitbox, and compared to the well-appointed cars my father always drove, it did seem like a tin can as I got in and slammed the flimsy door.   

The engine of the shitbox had been rebuilt by Harold, if I recall correctly.   My father knew almost nothing about car engines, though he’d worked in his uncle’s garage for years.   The first car my father had was a big, bulbous orange and white Pontiac my parents called the Loxbox.  I recall sitting in the back seat of the Loxbox as a young kid.  The seat was upholstered in soft leather.   I don’t think the Shitbox was upholstered at all.

My father was happy to drive around in the American Dream, while Harold, a confident tinkerer who spoke several languages and played many musical instruments, made do with his Shitbox.

Learning fear or resilience

Neither of my parents ever learned much about resilience from their parents, something I can easily understand the reasons for.  My mother’s parents were the sole survivors of their two large families, the last of their 12 combined siblings survived hell only to be marched to a Ukrainian ravine on the edge of town where they were each shot in the back of the head one August evening in 1943. 

My father’s parents experienced something similar, my grandmother and her older brother, my tough, intrepid great-uncle Aren, were the only two survivors of their family, from a hamlet in the marshes south of Pinsk that cannot be found on any map of the world.  There was an aktion, a coordinated massacre of virtually all the Jews of the Pinsk area and, as in many areas the Nazis overran, little Jewish towns were erased from history.   

Like my mother’s parents, my great-uncle and his sister came to America decades before the mass murder.   I know nothing of what happened to my paternal grandfather’s family, or even where they came from in Europe.

You learn that powers arose not long before you were born who decided your entire family needed to be exterminated, and then rolled up their sleeves and did it.  It’s an unsettling thing to learn as a kid.  What the fuck? you think.  I still think that.  Like slavery, like seven year-old American prostitutes, like a century of public lynching, the genocide of Native Americans, like all unspeakable things done by certain humans to other humans, all you can wonder is ‘what the fucking fuck?’.   Nothing unique in any of this evil, the history of humanity is still being written in our blood, on endless scrolls, by killers who believe they are doing what must be done.

The new field of epigenetics studies the genetic changes produced in survivors of severe trauma, genetic changes that are then passed on.   Having your entire family massacred is surely a severe trauma, even if you weren’t there to see it.   Passed along with these changes in the body’s DNA are traits like fear and resilience.  Some, in the face of terror, resolve to be brave, to fight, to hide, to survive, to live to take revenge by thriving.  Most, in the face of a mob of murderers coming to kill them do not fare as well.

In the 1970s certain right-wing American Jews seized on the slogan “Never Again!” to unite in a hard-nosed organization to smash the stereotype of Jews going meekly to the slaughter.  I understand the impulse, I really do, but unless you want to become a violent bully so that you won’t be bullied, more context, as always, is needed.   

Take any group of bookish, peaceful people who have no guns, lie to them about their destination, give them false hope of survival as you shepherd them toward their slaughter and– well, you can see that determined men with guns will have no problem getting folks like these to line up anywhere they are told to line up.    There were young Jews who, once they saw what was happening in places like the Warsaw Ghetto, took up weapons and killed a few Nazis, but they mostly died as anonymous martyrs, leaving behind many thousands killed in reprisal.  Your classic no-win situation: outgunned by a trigger-happy enemy only too happy to kill a thousand for every one of them killed.

My family never discussed any of this history directly.  My grandfather was a frightened man, understandably so.  My grandmother was the tougher one, but she also drank increasing amounts of vodka as she got older.  My grandfather, I learned to my surprise, was also capable of downing huge draughts of vodka. I observed this once, unseen, toward the end of his life.   He picked up the bottle and drank it like he was drinking water.  He didn’t even wipe his lips afterwards, just screwed the cap back on and put the bottle away.   

My father’s parents I never met, both died before I was born.   I visit their graves when I visit the cemetery north of Peekskill where my father and uncle are also buried.   I knew their son very well, my father, and though he took a few principled stands over the years, it is hard to see him as a resilient man.  He took things hard.  He locked his fears inside of himself.  He suffered mightily from severe psoriasis, which grew more inflamed whenever he was under stress.  He raged as an over-the-top tough guy in the safety of his little family.  He felt bad about these things as he was dying.

I can’t say where I fall on the spectrum between despair and resilience.  What I have learned of resilience I have had to learn on my own, my parents knew little about it.   I’m remembering my father’s advice when I asked him about becoming a member of The National Lawyers Guild.  This would have been in the year 2000, when I was admitted to practice law in New York State.

The Lawyers Guild, founded in 1937, is a progressive legal organization with roots in labor struggles, anti-Klan activities and The New Deal — also some more radical strands.   My father, as a college student after World War Two, was drawn to Communist ideas.  After all, why should certain people continue to be born booted and spurred to ride the rest of us?   Jared Kushner?   Really?   His feces emit no bad odor, reportedly, but he is, in virtually every way, very much like a duller version of you or me, is he not? 

My father was raised in extreme poverty, during the Depression and FDR’s New Deal, he came by his egalitarian beliefs honestly.   He believed in the struggle for justice, even as he was hampered by the terror instilled in him early.  I will never know if he attended the 1949 Paul Robeson/Pete Seeger concerts outside of Peekskill.  He would have been a student at Syracuse University by then, or possibly just starting graduate school at Columbia.   

My uncle had a copy of Howard Fast’s account of the bloody mass assault that prevented the planned benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress from happening.  I first saw the brown paperback on a bookshelf in the apartment he shared with my aunt in the assisted living facility in Bethesda.  My uncle had already passed away.   I asked my aunt, quite dotty by then, if I could borrow the book.  I read it and have it still, but by the time I read it there was nobody alive who could tell me if my father, or my uncle, had been at the ill-fated concert, or the one held a week later, with increased security provided by labor unions and American communists.  These events are now collectively known as the Peekskill Riots .   

Paul Robeson, former All-American college athlete (he played two seasons in the NFL while at Columbia Law School in the early 1920s), lawyer (briefly), actor and singer, was an outspoken black man who, after a political awakening during the Spanish Civil War [1] eventually found himself at the center of the Cold War.   He may or may not have been a member of the American Communist party (which was never legally banned, that I know of).   I recall he visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s and afterwards, and advocated peace with The USSR, a place where he was never called ‘nigger’.   

But for all the racists and reactionaries in Peekskill and its environs, there was no doubt that this black commie troublemaker should be strung up as an example to the others.   They burned crosses and lynched him in effigy the night of the first concert, the one that didn’t happen. During the month I was born the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was putting the last nails into the outspoken Robeson’s professional coffin, for being critical of American racism, and economic exploitation, and praising the Soviet experiment.  The U.S. government really fucked Paul Robeson up, but the Klan and American Legion thugs who converged on the planned concert north of Peekskill never got their hands on him.

The haters had to content themselves with ambushing, stoning and beating up people who came to the concert, as the cops looked on in amusement.  That Pete Seeger, a local white guy who’d be blacklisted as a possible commie a few years later, was among the performers there made it irresistible for local racists, antisemites and other authoritarian types to go to the  outdoor concert grounds to break  heads.

The following week the brotherhood crowd were better organized.  Thousands of young idealists in t-shirts formed a human wall around the perimeter of the concert area.   The concert, to raise money for a civil rights group, was held.  It was only afterwards, in nearby Cortlandt, on the narrow road near my father’s grave, now called Oregon Road, that elated concertgoers on their way home were ambushed and pelted with rocks the size of fists.  The gauntlet they had to run went on for miles.

I’ll never know if my father was there either night.  What I learned shortly after he died was that he had spoken to Parent/Teacher groups in New York City public schools about Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that stated the obvious about the destructive nature of racial segregation.  In New York City the man who’d soon become my father was pelted with crap, cursed at, snarled at by white parents and teachers appalled by the speaker’s support of the landmark, and largely symbolic– it must finally be said– Supreme Court ruling.  He went to the next school with a police escort.  These strike me as brave, principled actions, but I will never know any more details about them than what I learned from my mother as I was preparing his eulogy and have written just now.

It was 2000, I was looking for work as a new lawyer, and I was somewhat half-hearted about it.   My father, in a stream of lawyer jokes he sent me during law school, included the one about why they were using law students instead of rats in lab experiments.  The NIH defended the practice as follows:

1. The lab assistants were becoming very attached to their little rats. This emotional involvement was interfering with the research being conducted. No such attachment could form with a law student.

2. Lawyers breed faster and are in much greater supply.

3. Lawyers are much cheaper to care for and the humanitarian societies won’t jump all over you no matter what you’re studying.

4. There are some things even a rat won’t do.

I’d wind up practicing subsistence lawyering  for ten years, maintain my license to this day, but it was ten years of bitterness, I can assure you.   Early on I heard about the National Lawyers Guild and called my father to discuss joining it.   I rarely sought his advice about anything, as he always pointed out on the rare occasions that I did, but I called him about joining the Lawyers Guild.   

His fear came directly through the phone, even as he applauded everything the Lawyers Guild did and the principles they advocate for.  He was worried, though, that by joining the Lawyers Guild I might be putting myself on a blacklist that would prevent me from getting paying work.  Cheney and Dubya Bush were already president and a dark day for America, and the world, was starting to fully dawn.  Our nation was about to head to the dark side, to do what must be done, in the shadows, as the evil Mr. Cheney told the mass media, with his characteristic smirk.   

I did not join the Lawyers Guild.  I didn’t get involved in the legal fight against encroaching tyranny, nor did I water the tree of liberty with so much as a drop of my blood.  I am thinking now that had I been given a few lessons in resilience, I might not have been as susceptible to my father’s paranoia, understandable though it was.   Just ’cause you’re paranoid don’t mean they ain’t trying to kill you, as the great Satchel Paige observed. [2] 

 

[1]  Robeson: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”[158]

After the mass lynching of four African Americans on July 25, 1946, Robeson met with President Truman and admonished Truman by stating that if he did not enact legislation to end lynching,[184] “the Negroes will defend themselves”.[184][185] Truman immediately terminated the meeting and declared that the time was not right to propose anti-lynching legislation.[184] 

[2] Jeeves ascribes this observation to Joseph Heller, in Catch-22, to wit:   just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

 

Family

Visited with cousins of my father’s yesterday, the only ones I know of.  Gene is closing in on ninety and we hadn’t seen him and his wife for over a year.  He used to call my mother “you old bag,” although, it turns out, he was three months older than her.   He called my mother an old bag with love, they’d been childhood friends, growing up in the same building on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx.  The old bag made it to eighty-two, by a day, and always smiled benignly whenever Gene, now a much older bag than she lived to be, called her an old bag.   

Gene was in a pivotal position to observe the events that eventually lead to my life.   If not for his mother and my mother’s mother being good friends, and Irv being Gene’s cousin … forget about me, my parents would never have met.

Gene’s mother, Dinch, at 15, had come over on the Korfus die Grosse, with her cousin Chava, the 17 year-old who’d later become my father’s mother.  This was right before World War One, on the ship’s last voyage before the war, according to Gene.  Chava used to visit her cousin Dinch in the Bronx, making the long trip from Peekskill with her two boys.   

Dinch was married to Stamper, a man I’ve seen pictures of, always nonchalantly referred to by my mother as a Communist.  They never had much money.   Gene told me that his family moved often during the Depression, apartments were plentiful and landlords would give a couple of months free rent as incentive to move in.  For some reason, (providence, most likely,) they wound up settling in that apartment on Eastburn Avenue, the place Gene and my mother called home.   If not for Dinch living in the same building as my mother’s family, my young father never would have seen my mother, perched haughtily in her kitchen window that overlooked the courtyard on that doomed little Avenue.

Doomed because a power broker in New York City hated poor Jews and other poor people and said “fuck these people.” Little Eastburn Avenue, three blocks long in its prime, as Gene told me last night, was cut down the middle by Robert Moses and his Cross Bronx Expressway.  That expressway gouged down the middle of the working class borough destroyed the Bronx, most people agree.  It certainly fucked up Eastburn Avenue.

Gene, proud of the many accomplished Americans from his Bronx neighborhood, was a large man in his day, over six feet tall with large hands and feet and, for many years, an ample belly.   Some kind of very aggressive cancer, possibly stomach, slimmed him down tremendously twenty or more years back, maybe thirty.   He is quite gaunt to this day.   My mother was very worried about Gene, the prognosis for him was dire.   On the other hand, my mother’s fatal diagnosis came something like twenty years before her death.  Yesterday, Gene was noticeably smaller, which happens when you live long enough.

“When your father went to Columbia he’d come over every week or so for a good home cooked meal.  That’s when he saw your mother,” Gene told us last night over vegetarian Chinese food in Teaneck. 

During these visits his cousin Irv spied the dark haired Evelyn who, for her part, wanted nothing to do with the hayseed from Peekskill.   She was still angry with her mother, who, in her typically overbearing way, had broken up a relationship with a dashing fellow named Art Metesis.  Art had a nice car, dressed well and was a stylish high roller who loved to dance, and drink.  The young woman who would become my mother was crazy about him.  They got engaged.

My mother’s mother, Yetta, would not have her daughter marry somebody like Art Metesis, under any circumstance.  As had happened with my father a few years earlier, the strong-willed mother busted up the romance and that was that.  Art did not take it well, he was apparently not very stylish with his rage when Yetta told him not to let the door hit him where the good lord split him and to take a long fucking hike and leave Evelyn alone. 

The engagement to Art over, my mother brooded, naturally.  Yetta suggested she take Gene’s cousin Irv up on his invitation to go out.   My mother wanted nothing to do with the bumpkin from Peekskill.  Eventually she relented and Irv won her over.   I told the bones of this story at my mother’s memorial, and my uncle, at the start of a short, heartfelt speech, introduced himself, endearingly, as the other little bumpkin from Peekskill who used to visit their cousins, Evelyn’s upstairs neighbors, in the Bronx.

Sally, Gene’s wife, when the subject of what I’ve been doing the last year and a half came up (“are you making a living?” Gene asked, as always), asked me if I was interviewing people about my father’s life.  I told her that most of those who knew anything about him were gone.  She nodded with a sad, knowing smile.  Over the years Gene told me most of what he knew, all interesting, but not terribly much.  It occurred to me last night that Gene may have met that mysterious grandfather of mine.   

“Oh, sure, I knew your grandfather,” he said, slowly working on a tiny corner of the bowl of noodle soup he’d take home.  “He could never make a living, Aren used to support them.”

As far as I could make out, from the moment or two of gentle follow-up that followed, he was likely merging long-ago memories of my grandfather, Harry, with my great-uncle Aren.  It seems likely that Aren would have driven his little sister and the boys down to the Bronx to visit their cousins Dinch and Gene and Gene’s little sister.   It doesn’t seem certain to me that Chava would have invited her detested mute husband along on these visits. 

I told Gene about Eli’s poetic description of my father’s father: “two eyes, a nose and a mouth” with a zip of the finger across that straight line of a mouth.  I told Gene Eli said my grandfather was totally deadpan all the time.  Gene had nothing to add to that, actually didn’t even reply to it, though he did recall visiting Aren at his Nelson Avenue Garage in Peekskill.  We talked about Aren for a moment and then went on to other subjects.

I’m thinking about context a lot nowadays, even more so now that we’re all living in an ever more distracted, desperate nation in decline where context has been abandoned for blind, knee-jerk, red hat/blue hat partisanship.   This limited man we have as our current president does not seem to know about anything that happened before, is not curious about anything but what makes him feel like a winner.   A sad symbol for a nation where millions of its hypnotized citizens do not seem at all concerned about, or even aware of, the erasure of history itself.

Last night was not about researching my father’s life, it was about visiting with and listening to an old couple who have lost just about all of their friends (as well as their younger daughter, Emily, who died young of cancer).  Their need to talk was palpable and Sekhnet and I have known, and hung out, with several people over ninety and there is no discomfort in it for us.   We were pleased to listen, and I knew the evening wouldn’t lend itself to the ideal interview.

There are a few details above that need to be folded into any account of my father’s life, or mine.  I am trying to make intelligible things that are not really intelligible, as my grandmother Yetta might have said, if she had known the word ‘intelligible.”  A life may or may not make any sense, but a book about that life can be made to make a certain amount of sense.  That’s my sense of it, anyway.

 

The Long Riddle

There’s a great book, by the brilliant Jeanne Safer, that describes the many benefits of looking back at a deceased, problematic parent’s life for the excellent lessons we also learned from them [1].   It’s hard to see these valuable things while the difficult parent is still around.   After death, however, things become more clear.  Their life is now living in memory and visible for the first time as a whole: a character and a story with a beginning, middle and end. 

My father’s story is complex, on one level, but also brutally simple.  On the one hand, he was a brilliant, compassionate and complicated man.  He was also capable of monstrously abusive behavior towards his family.  

He would stipulate to “complicated”, by the way, he’d acknowledge that each of us has demons that pursue us, but that’s about as far he’d ever go looking deeply inward.  Until he was literally hours from  his death.  In those final hours he had terrible regrets about having seen the world as a black and white zero-sum war zone.  He lamented the lost richness of life, the colors, tastes and smells he had willed into nonexistence.  

My father’s life and death posed riddles large and small.  The most riddling of these riddles was how an intelligent, funny, humble, sensitive man could at the same time be a tyrannical brute to his family.   During lulls in the fighting we sometimes joked that sitting around the dining room was like being in a World War One battle, everyone crouched and angry in their stinking trench, machine guns firing, shells pounding away, bombs falling, chlorine gas rolling in…  

“At least it wasn’t mustard gas, mustard gas makes you blind,” said a man with few teeth, and then he gave a weird cackle.  “That’s what Hitler got a face full of before they carted him off to the hospital in Pasewalk right before the World War was ended by traitors.  You remember Pasewalk, that’s the little Pomeranian town where the smart-ass upper-class uber-patriotic Jewish psychiatrist lambasted the gas blinded Hitler as a malingerer, calling his blindness hysterical and “cowardly” — blah, blah, just another story to explain why Hitler was so happy when he finally got the machinery up to start mass killing Jews.”

My father would never drive a German car.  He could tell you, for every major German industrial product you might mention, exactly how they profited from the Nazi regime.  One maker of world-renowned automobiles built the pressurized tanks for the poison gas used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, which was also the site of an immense chemical factory employing death camp inmate slave labor, owned by a huge outfit that now owns Monsanto as well.   That pharmaceutical giant paid the SS $1 a day for each slave worker marched over from Auschwitz, a nice deal for keeping production costs low and profits high.   

I can see my father’s life now as a whole.  It began in dire poverty, in a small town, with a father who had no work during the Depression, Jewish immigrants in a town where the Ku Klux Klan family ran the hardware store.  He experienced extreme trauma regularly during his infant years, being frequently whipped in the face by his tiny, angry, religious mother.   His father kept out of it.  Liberated by World War Two we see him, beaming, fit, dark hair and flashing eyes in a series of black and white photos.   He smiled for the first time in his life in those army photos we found after he died. They’d never made it into a photo album, there was a small pile of them to be assembled from a shoebox of other photos. 

He had, or had not, been at the Paul Robeson/Pete Seeger concert in Peekskill back in 1947.   Within a few years both of his parents would die young, be buried in the pauper’s section of the First Hebrew Congregation cemetery and he’d be working for the NYC Board of Education, as a history teacher with a bent for social justice, and married to the woman who would become my mother and his wife of almost 54 years.

Starting in 1956 I had a front row view of the long riddle that was his life.

 

[1] Death Benefits by Jeanne Safer

Essential Image for The Book of Irv

My brother-in-law, who used to like to argue with my father, described his father-in-law’s effortless fighting style.  He painted the picture of my father, lying on a couch, reading the paper, a sword in his other hand, nonchalantly parrying each point and, whenever he chose, driving his rapier home.   It is a wonderful image.   

We can forget, for a moment (jury, please disregard what you are about to hear) that my brother-in-law generally employed an emotional style while his father-in-law’s was cool and analytical.  It’s a particularly apt image of my father fighting my brother-in-law, who my father regarded as an intellectual lightweight, but it’s also a great image of the old man’s almost bored comfort with argumentation.

What about when he felt he was being opposed by an intellectual foe closer to his own powers?  I got a chance to witness this up close, two years before he went to meet his maker.

In the den of his Florida apartment, confronted with a piece of evidence he could not talk his way past, by a son who not was only a lifelong adversary but now a trained lawyer as well, I saw what he could do when cornered.

Granted, he had almost nothing to work with, would two years later, as he was dying, admit as much.  But watch how nimbly he moves, up on his toes, cunning, hyper-alert, constantly moving.  His eyes dart left and right as he improvises.   He dances like Slobodan Milosevic in front of the World Court, with the adroitness of a brilliant but demented ballerina.  He’s got nothing, but still he fights, back to the wall, battalions nipping at his flanks.   There is virtually nothing left to argue, and he is completely surrounded, but this does not stop him.   He holds off the enemy with ad hominem attacks since he’s got nothing else to fight with.   Then, exhausted by it all, he goes for the kill.  And in that moment loses the long war, but that does not matter to him in that moment. 

He’d deeply regret this behavior when he was dying, but while he was alive he felt there was nothing he could do about it.   The essence of tragedy, really.

Intro (# 4 or 5 — Book of Irv)

ii

I had an adversarial relationship with my father.   My sister named him The Dreaded Unit (D.U.), not inaccurately.   He embraced the name, often signing his neatly printed notes “The D.U.”, but he was also a great humanist, a broken-hearted idealist, reflexive champion of the oppressed, friend of the underdog, a man with a dark, wicked sense of humor, a great lover of animals and of soul music.  He was also a keen student of history and could speak flowingly on a variety of subjects without notes of any kind.

I should explain our adversarial relationship, since the roots of such things are important and you will want to know up front who is writing this book you are thinking about reading.  I started our long war myself as a week-old infant, staring implacably into my new father’s face from my crib with wide, black, accusatory eyes, never making a sound.  

This creepy, aggressive behavior soon forced him to move the crib from his side of the bed to my mother’s side.  Not nine weeks later, upping the ante dramatically, I threw a precocious and violent temper tantrum, scaring the shit out of my poor parents. The pediatrician laughed, he’d never seen such a contumacious little ten week-old as this rigid, purple bastard lying on his table.  My senseless fight against my parents escalated in a straight line from there.   When I abruptly learned to speak, at ten months, all hell broke loose between my father and me.

On the last night of his life, from his deathbed in a Florida hospital, my father apologized for being such a desperate, clueless, angry man.  He acknowledged that he’d felt me reaching out to him many times over the years, but that, sadly, he had been too fucked up to respond to his son’s natural human impulse.  He took the entire blame for our contentious relationship, then he died.

Ten years later, when I began this short memoir of my father’s life, 1,200 pages ago, I had little idea where the project would take me.  I thought that almost fifty years of prosecutorial back and forth with a highly intelligent, highly principled adversary, often related to the enormous social upheavals going on around us, would make an interesting memoir.  

A few pages in, by complete surprise, the skeleton of my father popped out of his grave to give me shit about something I’d written about his childhood. This struck me as a stagey, hokey literary device, a literary rubber crutch, but I wrote down what he said anyway, figuring I could always lose it in the rewrite.  

I didn’t lose it in the rewrite.  The skeleton was soon back, virtually every day thereafter whenever I sat down to write.  The fucker was waiting for me some days, in his new interactive persona as the skeleton.  On those days he was always cheerful, urging me on, collaborating breezily in the telling of his story, adding details I’d forgotten to mention, bringing up things I could not have known.   The focus of the writing soon shifted from attempting a straight narrative of his life to our ongoing dialogue about his life, my life, the beautiful, complicated, perplexing world we are all required to live in.  

I came to see that there was the D.U., my father during his life, an implacable enemy who would resort to brutality to achieve his ends, and the skeleton of my father, a personality much closer to the great friend and mentor my father was always capable of being.  It struck me that, along with the realizations he’d had right before he died, he’d also had a decade to mull everything over.

I then… blah, blah, blah.    

“OK, Elie, tear it out of the typewriter, crush it into a ball and go for a buzzer beater,” said the skeleton.  “The game clock is winding down, Knicks down by one point, Widaen alone at the top of the key — four… three… two…”

The Skeleton ventures a final word

“Thinking about the last couple of chats, where you bring up self-hatred versus self-love, you speak about it a little glibly, I think, no?” said the skeleton of my father.  “We humans love simplicity, that’s why the black and white worldview is so seductive to us — we can be 100% right and the people who don’t agree with us are evil fucks we can feel virtuous taking flying shits on.” 

I grant you all that.  Obviously, it took me many years, many of them fairly painful, to come to the point of view about our relationship that I have come to now.   

“Granted, but, look, Elie, it goes beyond that.  We are talking about the nature of certainty, what we know, what we think we know.  You’re living in a time when the basic nature of knowledge itself is under attack.  It’s like one of those jokes that killed vaudeville:  the guy’s wife finds him in bed with a bimbo and he says ‘it’s not what it looks like!  Who are you going to believe, darling, me or your lying eyes?’   It’s like your war criminal buddy Rumsfeld said, ‘we have the things we know, and the things we know we don’t know, and the things we don’t know we don’t know, and I know you are but what am I?'”

“It’s like the nature of history, what version of the past we accept is based on a belief system that will determine what facts you accept as facts.  If you think it’s evil that one man can own a hundred others, have them whipped, rape them, etc. you will have one view of The Peculiar Institution.  If you believe that Africans kidnapped and brought over on ships to serve as slaves were better off on a Christian plantation than in the state of sin they lived in back in Africa, you will have another view. 

“If your very rich Planter father was ruined by the end of slavery, and your brother was killed standing up for your family’s right to own people, you will, in your old age, find yourself, with other white southern former debutantes, determined to support the writing of history that makes both men look like idealistic martyrs for a glorious lost cause.  You get William Archibald Dunning and the fucking Dunning School of history at my alma mater, The Birth of A Nation and the rest of that Klan coddling history.   Take a look at this footnote, Elie, and tell me who has the better analysis of what happened after the Civil War? [1]” 

“Of course, that analysis will be agreeable or disagreeable to you depending on your interests, and the beliefs shaped by those interests.  Not to say there are not many facts that are beyond dispute, there certainly are such facts.  They are increasingly slippery in the age you live in.  You have an alienated populace, powerless and lazy, who increasingly watch zero sum reality TV game shows where the entire draw is believing that watching an artificial, loosely scripted TV show gives them a voyeur’s view of someone else’s ‘reality’.  So it’s fascinating to them, you know, getting to tune in to ‘reality’ and watch people vie for meaningless things and watch every one of them lose and one of them win it all.”   

“You will have a young genius harness technology to tap into alienated people’s need to feel connected to each other.  A hermit can suddenly have 1,000 virtual friends, a virtual farm with virtual animals and crops, a virtual conversation with ten million like-minded people.   The young genius will be challenged to monetize this great platform he’s built and will come through brilliantly.  The guy’s thirty-three, his ubiquitous platform, and the algorithms that drive it, were instrumental in deciding the last presidential election, and he was worth $74,000,000,000 last time you checked, making the octogenarian Koch boys and their combined lifetime $100,000,000,000 look like a pair of pikers.”

“So we have winners and losers, which is exactly what your frenemy Mr. Hitler was always selling to his beloved countrymen.   You have Aryans, pure blooded supermen like the club-footed runt Goebbels, and you have enemy polluters of the Aryan race, Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Christian Scientists, immigrants, socialists, what have you.   See, very simple.  Today you have millions of Americans who suspect foreign thieving rapists are trying to sneak in by the millions to steal our wealth and rape our purebred Christian women.  It’s the same shit over and over, Elie, that’s the tragedy of history.  You think this fuck you have by the nuclear button has ever read a history book, outside of a few of the speeches of Adolf Hitler that he supposedly kept on a gold table next to his bed?”   

“There is no end to the examples, as you are well aware.  It shocked you to find out that until I was twelve, if the economy had been better, I could have been legally rented out to work in any factory around, for as many hours as my parents wanted to rent me out for.  There was no child labor law, no minimum wage, no maximum hours of work, until FDR.  Think about that for a second.   And it’s not like FDR waved a wand, there were thousands of labor strikes when he was in office.  An ocean of blood had been spilled for decades, by desperate workers organizing and putting their asses on the line against hired thugs, before they were finally able to force a sympathetic president to do the right thing.   In this area, FDR did what he had to do to keep the lid from blowing off our exceptional capitalist nation, and only because the historical moment demanded it.  The Koch boys, of course, through decades of determined spending, were able to roll back many of those hard won workers’ rights with the help of freaks like Scott Walker that their money got elected and kept in office, but that’s the pendulum of history for you.” 

“Back to what I was saying before, though.   I appreciate that this long process of talking to what you imagine I’d have become, if I’d kept the realizations I had as I was dying, was your way of working out some important unfinished business.   I’m glad it has given you a feeling of greater understanding and even a bit of serenity.  I just question whether you can really say you always felt loved, respected, esteemed by me, in spite of the poison gas, the relentless propaganda, the nightly strafing, bombing, etc.”

You have every right to question.   

“Mighty white of you, Elie, particularly toward a man who, when you had a pressing question, often gave you silence by way of an answer,” said the skeleton.   

It just underscores my point, dad.  When somebody hates himself on a fundamental level, that’s what they fucking do when their child comes to them in need, asking for something the self-hater never got in his life.   I get the dynamic, I don’t see the confusion on your part. 

“It’s not confusion, I just think you’re oversimplifying, or rewriting history, if you prefer.” 

Yo, it’s like some jazz great, usually Satchmo in the legend, told a square who asked him to define jazz…

“Yeah, ‘if you got to ask, daddy, you ain’t never gonna know.’  OK, I respect your position.  And, anyway, you’re only at the end of draft one now.  You will presumably refine the whole stinking 1,200 pages into something that smells like a fresh, winning 400 page memoir of your troubled and troubling old man, the large family that was all but wiped out with no trace but what you have learned, the tumultuous history that swirled around all of us, personal and out in the world, the shit that continues to swirl.  I get it, I really do.” 

“I guess I have one last thing to add.  You have high hopes, I think you’d admit, about transmitting some of what you have learned about history and this life to the younger generations. You want to leave a little more light in the world than there was when you came in.   I admire that ambition and like to feel I contributed to it, in some small way.”   

I’m standing on your shoulders, dad. 

“Here’s the thing, though.  It’s easy to oversimplify.  That’s all I’m saying.  You know, everyone has their way of dealing with their fear of death, their fears of the past, of opening wounds.  You were not a brave kid, you were cautious, you had many fears, and nightmares.  I think you are a lot braver now, as a man on the cusp of dotage.  It takes more bravery to be uncertain, I have come to realize, than to wrap yourself in certainty.  Any idiot can be certain, most of them are.”

The skeleton looked around him with shadow eyes that could not see.  He appeared to be following the flight of two vultures, turning lazy circles in the sky above the bucolic country cemetery where his bones were interred.

 “Turkey vultures, Elie,” he said.  “I know you feel that difficult truth that is hidden is inevitably fertilizer for unresolvable future trouble.  I think you may be right about that too, but you cannot underestimate the power of shame in human affairs.   I understand why one relationship that would shed the most light on me as a person, on my M.O., had to be left out of the story of my life.  You are right to leave it out. 

“You are left with a tiny family, and if you did not leave that particular story out, fascinating, interesting, tangled, perplexing, illuminating as it undoubtedly is, important as it also is, you would have Sekhnet and your handful of friends, and no family at all.  So let it be, Elie.  I’ve done the math, there is no way it comes out well.  Write the rest of the book, there is plenty else there to tell.”

A turkey vulture landed on either side of the skeleton, who put an arm around each, and with what could have been a wink, bid me, and all of you readers, a fond farewell.

 

[1]    Historian Eric Foner writes that the Dunning School “offered scholarly legitimacy to the disenfranchisement of southern blacks and to the Jim Crow system that was becoming entrenched as they were writing,” and that “the alleged horrors of Reconstruction helped freeze the mind of the white South in bitter opposition to any change in the region’s racial system.” Foner adds that “the fundamental flaw in the Dunning School was the authors’ deep racism,” and that “racism shaped not only their interpretations of history but their research methods and use of historical evidence.”[4][14]:x–xi

For example, Dunning referred to the freedmen as “barbarous” and defended the racist black codes as “a conscientious and straightforward attempt to bring some sort of order” out of the aftermath of war and emancipation. Dunning wrote that the freedmen were not “on the same social, moral and intellectual plane with the whites” and that “restrictions in respect to bearing arms, testifying in court, and keeping labor contracts were justified by the well-established traits and habits of the negroes[.]” [15]

In Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Du Bois characterized Dunning’s Reconstruction, Political and Economic as a “standard, anti-Negro” text. Du Bois noted, “Dunning admits that “The legislation of the reorganized governments, under cover of police regulations and vagrancy laws, had enacted severe discrimination against the freedmen in all the common civil rights.” [16]

Dunning’s followers generally rejected Du Bois and his Marxist interpretation of the history of Reconstruction. Publishing in the midst of the Great Depression, DuBois believed that the poor, both black and white, had common cause against the rich. Part of his analysis of Reconstruction was an assessment of how the classes were aligned, and how the white elite struggled to keep power, withholding it from blacks and poor whites both.[17]

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Pull the Plug

One year on my birthday, well into my adult years, my parents took me to a restaurant.  It was probably a pretty nice place, my father and I may well have been wearing sports jackets.  Assume we were.  

At some point during dinner, maybe while we waited for the appetizers, my father reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a few folded pages.  “You have a pen?” he asked me.  

I always have at least one writing instrument with me and I produced a pen. The papers he wanted me to sign were a Health Care Proxy and Living Will.  He’d had them drawn up and made me the proxy in the event he was incapacitated, and in a life or death medical emergency.   I said something like ‘what the fuck?’ and he explained.

“I thought you were the perfect person because if I was hooked up to life support you wouldn’t hesitate to pull the plug,” he said.  

 “If you were on life support right now, I’d pull the fucking plug,” I may have said.  I signed the papers, my father took them, folded them, put them back into his pocket.  

“Hell of a nice birthday present, dad,” I said, “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“As I’ve told you many times, you never have to thank me for something like that.  It’s my pleasure.”

Nothing else about that long ago birthday dinner is at all memorable.

Family Dynamics

There is a popular factoid out there, probably true, that most murder victims are killed by people they know.   It makes sense, if you think about it.   If you’re about to snap and take the extreme step of murder, why kill some random person if there is someone you know well enough to really hate?   Many murders, we are told, occur within the family.   Murderers no doubt feel justified killing some supremely provocative person close to them who has long been fucking begging to be killed.

Listening to a friend’s story last night about troubles in her family I thought of a familiar scenario.   The parents are at odds, the children are in the middle, or off to the side.   The kids naturally get drawn into the drama between the parents, forced to take sides, console, shoulder the blame for their parents’ misery, act as human shields when things get particularly ugly.

In most cases this is not a recipe for how to raise a murderer, except in cases where the parents frequently cut each other with razors, or beat each other bloody, during particularly rancorous fights.   Violence like that would up the ante, increase the chances of the child growing up with enough fear, insecurity and rage to become a killer himself.

Violence against others, widespread as it is, is less common, I think, than violence against the self.   In 2016 there were more deaths in the U.S. by opioid overdose, around 60,000 (a record for overdose deaths in the USA), than by gun violence, and that includes the tens of thousands of annual suicides by firearm the NRA angrily insists should not be included in gun death statistics.  You’ve heard the phrase “you are your own worst enemy”?   Dig it.   Be aware that you are one of the most dangerous motherfuckers out there, to yourself.  Keep an eye on that, my friend.

Much of what we suffer from is not our fault.   It doesn’t mean we don’t have to deal with our problems, mercifully, but it’s not our choice to suffer in many of the ways we do.   It’s not on us, bad as it also is for us, if we didn’t learn resilience from a family that had no clue about it.   We have to learn it by trial and error by ourselves, with great determination, over the course of decades.  If we are lucky we find a good friend or two who is on a similar journey, it helps greatly to compare notes and track progress.  Picture what kind of life skills you might acquire coming from this family scenario:

Mom is hardworking, reliable, tense, often short-tempered, or downright mean, to Dad.   Dad is not hardworking, but he is very affectionate, funny, supportive and sweet.   If you’re feeling afraid or insecure, you run to dad, who takes you in his arms, massages your shoulders, makes you laugh, makes you feel better.  If you need anything else, you go to mom.  Mom always comes through with whatever you need, no matter what.   Mom would walk through a hail of bullets for you.  The mystery is why this great person is often such a bitch to Dad. 

Picture the endless possible good reasons that Mom is such a bitch to Dad.   Dad gets drunk and rapes Mom once in a while, for example.  Or Dad is a serial adulterer and bad liar about it.   Maybe Dad wants Mom to catch him and that’s why his lies are so sloppy, so transparently stupid.   Maybe Mom has kept Dad out of jail by paying back money he stole in doomed embezzlement schemes, maybe more than once.  Could be huge gambling debts, or money stolen from a dead father’s credit cards.  Maybe he keeps getting popped for petty crimes of some kind and Mom keeps bailing him out, even the best shoplifters get caught once in a while.  Maybe Mom walked in while Dad was banging the baby sitter when you were a baby.   Maybe Dad, in a moment of rage, threatened to murder Mom’s family and then come back and burn her, her children and himself to death? Whatever fucked up scenario you can imagine, fucked up people, no matter how otherwise wonderful they are, regularly do very fucked up things.

But the statistics say that children of divorced parents have worse future life outcomes than the children of intact marriages, no matter how bad.  I’m not sure about the wisdom of that, but it’s a common belief.  I think there are marriages so toxic that everyone is better off, including, or even particularly, the children, when the hideous farce is over.  But say Mom believes that the best way to protect her kids is to project a healthy relationship between her and the husband she has many excellent reasons to be angry at much of the time.

Now this requires some complicated footwork.  The children must be shielded from their father’s dark side.   It would do nobody any good, reasons Mom, to have Dad admit that he is a serial embezzler, cheat, liar, fraudster, gambling addict, pornography addict, an immature person incapable of accepting fault, apologizing or changing, whatever the fucking thing is.  So Mom keeps the dark secret for everybody.  Nobody needs to know her issues with Dad.  It makes her ashamed, for one thing, which is a powerful reason for keeping secrets.  Some people refer to this kind of Mom as The Martyr.

In her house everything is always fine.   I grew up in a family where much was hidden.  At the same time, and though we fought viciously about it, there was some kind of commitment to being truthful with each other.   The honesty only could go so far, but we were all trying to be honest, as far as we understood things.   That value on honesty was a positive thing I took from a very hard situation.  It inclined me to search for explanations, for puzzle pieces that would help me make sense of the whole.  I am grateful for it, fucked up and painful as the surrounding circumstances were.   There was always an impulse to truthfulness, a value placed on candor, although it was also part of a terrible ongoing war in a very dark setting.

Picture the difficulty of growing up in a house where fundamental things are tightly guarded secrets.   If honesty is off the table, everybody has to agree not to seek the truth, or even imagine the many kinds of mischief and wickedness that flow from that agreement.    If there is violence that is hidden, treachery or exploitation that is covered up, the children in that house are unlikely get much insight into how to maintain an honest, intimate relationship.   They haven’t seen a healthy relationship between their parents, only a mysterious and perplexing riddle featuring a cool, laid back Dad and an indispensable, totally dependable and loving Mom, who unaccountably gives Dad an unending amount of shit.  

These children will likely be flummoxed when trying to form intimate relationships of their own, because intimacy requires mutual trust.  Mutual trust is not the same as a mutual agreement never to reveal secrets the couple considers shameful.  Trust is open, and impervious to fear, hiding shame is closed, and full of terror.   

I see this kind of shit, my brothers and sisters, the harm done to the children of people who decide to live this way, and it makes me want to weep.

“Uh… you’ve skated about as close to that line as you can comfortably skate, if you want to call any of that comfortable,” said the skeleton of my father.  

Yes sir.  Time to unlace the skates and get on with jotting down another great vignette starring you that I just recalled.    

“Well, get to it then, motherfucker!”

Final Puzzle Pieces

It struck me today, in considering what loose strings remain in my attempt to weave a coherent tapestry of your life, how these last few pieces fit together.

“About fucking time…” said the skeleton of my father.

I’m able to walk again in recent days.  I’m walking longer and longer distances.  While I was walking today it hit me.  It reminded me how walking seems to help the mind puzzle over things.

“Way to rub it in, putz,” said the earthbound remains of my father.

I’ve got to set this down fast, it’s complicated and elusive, yet elementally simple.

“Aren’t we all?” said the skeleton with a sigh. 

One essential connection eluded me.  You and I are having this fairly relaxed discussion, one we could have been having all along.  I never doubted my mother’s love for me, though she was also capable of flinging mighty mountains of dung at me.   The last piece of the puzzle was suddenly right there in front of my eyes as I walked up Broadway. 

I can’t explain it, and you did your best to obscure it, but I felt loved by you, on some level I can’t really describe.   If you have the love of both of your parents, you expect people to love you, find it odd if somebody takes a dislike to you.   If you have the implacable hatred of either of your parents, your odds go way down, you’re more likely to have your doubts.  If both of your parents hate you… I don’t even want to consider that.

I described the repetition compulsion — an irresistible need to replicate the same fundamental trauma over and over with new players in the old roles.  Many unhappy people do it in various forms for their entire lives and never see it.   I think of my old buddy Friedman, the best ready example.   Every relationship went through the identical dramatic arc: fascination, idealization, disillusionment, misunderstanding, betrayal.  It was uncanny, the motherfucker must have had a hundred of these in the years I knew him.

I noticed in my relationships with some of my closest friends a real, and eventually sickening, psychological resemblance to the abusive relationship I had with you, dad.  And I say “dad” with italics for purposes of that previous sentence, dad.   

“I get that,” said the skeleton.

I placidly took abuse from some of them that I would never have taken from you.  Doing this unconscious psychic work, I suppose.  I took an amazing amount of shit from the talented and self-hating Speed, for example, while he taught me guitar and music theory.  The music I was most drawn to, for him, was shit that was beneath contempt.  Nonetheless, he was unstinting in expressing his contempt.  After years, and learning a good deal from the musical savant, I finally had enough.   Same with Friedman. 

I realized shortly after you died: fuck, I have to take this shit from my father, there’s a psychic pay-off if I can get to the other side of it.  At the same time, there was no possible pay-off for taking shit from an implacably unhappy prick who had no insight into his own misery.  I was better off having someone like that as a stranger, addition by subtraction.   A beautiful thing, to remove a cancerous relationship from your life.

“You understood that fairly late in your life, but better late than never,” said the skeleton.  “You remember how much shit you gave me for doing the same thing?”   

You never explained the necessity of instituting that fall from grace in a way that made any sense to me.  You never took the time to understand it yourself, just went into a rage and began swinging your broad sword. 

“It was my way,” said the skeleton, with a hint of coyness. 

Yeah, so anyway, dig this.  My mad friend Andy, the one who fought with his wife, Hitler, over the Atavan? 

“A very bright and quick-witted fellow,” said the skeleton, “although the mirthful malice glittering in his eyes was also clear to me.” 

Anyway, Andy bore a striking psychic similarity to my uncle, your brother, Paul, the mild mannered enraged tyrant.

“Damn…”   

Yeah, look, he was one step away from being like you.   He turned out to be your bullied, bullying little brother.   That’s the cunning of the thing, why this last puzzle piece has been so hard to fit in with the rest.  Here’s what I realized.  The fact that I expect to be liked, even loved, is the most infuriating and intolerable thing of all to someone who fundamentally hates himself.  You loved me, but on some fundamental level hated yourself.  How does that work?  You have to destroy me. 

“I hated to do it, you know,” said the skeleton. 

I can’t account for how it turned out, after all the ugly confrontations, the senseless fucking carnage around the dinner table.  I knew that, somehow.  I think even without your deathbed regrets and apologies I knew that you held me in very high esteem, respected me, loved me.  The whole deal.   You remember you once asked us if we’d rather be loved or respected and we said ‘loved’?  You said ‘respected’, like the two were mutually exclusive.  A very reductive and idiotic way to see the world.   

“I stipulated to that as I was checking out, no need to get back into that.”

No need to get back into that.