“Well, you’re certainly not alone there, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father cheerfully.  “Didn’t your man George Harrison have a song where he sang ‘nothing in this life that I’ve been trying could equal or surpass the art of dying’?”

Yeah, on All Things Must Pass.

“All things that live and feel must pass,” said the skeleton.  “The miracle, of course, is that we live as though we and everyone we love are not fated to go the way of all flesh.  We consider our own death only when we’re losing a loved one, or are sick ourselves, up against a life-threatening illness, or surrounded by dying people.  Or depressed.”   

Or standing, for example, in a ravine on the northwestern edge of Vishnivetz, with murderous, drunken haters banging drums and playing brass instruments out of tune.   

“Yes,” said the skeleton, “there’s always that.  There’s certainly no shortage of that in this blessed world.”

My sister and I once discussed the revelations you had during the days you lay dying, the self-reflection, apologies and regrets you expressed to me the night before you died.  I wondered if you would have come to these things sooner, lived your last weeks or months differently, if one of those geniuses had diagnosed your fatal condition earlier, rather than in the ER six days before you died.  I thought you likely would have.  Your daughter was not so sure, she felt it probably would have waited til that last night, no matter how long you knew for sure you were on the Death Express. 

“Well, you know, I wasn’t able to say anything to your sister of any consequence before I died,” said the skeleton. 

You didn’t have any time with her alone. 

“Not only that.  It was just impossibly complicated.  I felt I’d let her down, in many of the same ways I let you down,  but it seemed she was clinging to the few times I was unequivocally on her side.  When I paid the downpayment on her house, when I reassured her at the lowest points of her life.  I don’t know, I wasn’t able to sort out my feelings enough to say anything of any consequence to her.”   

Well, don’t beat yourself up about it.  If you could have done it differently, you would have.

“Hah, the very thing you kept telling me that last night, as I was trying to make you my Father Confessor.” 

Look, in our case, although we were adversaries, there was a long, rich history of at least trying to have an honest conversation.   

“That’s debatable,” said the skeleton. 

There you go.  We had decades of debate, often angry and contentious, but a conversation it was.   

“An attempted conversation, perhaps,” said the skeleton. 

Whatever.  We had a history of trying to talk past our differences. 

“You did,” said the skeleton.  “I was pretty much consistent fending off that shit, as you recall.” 

My point is that we had a lot more practice struggling toward real understanding than you and my sister did. 

“You don’t get a point,” said the skeleton, “have you forgotten how this works?”   

There are times I wish I could forget more. 

“Now you’ve said a mouthful,” said the skeleton. 

Nothing in this life that I’ve been trying, could equal or surpass the art of dying. 

“It’s not a bad thought to keep in mind, if you don’t get too morbid about it, I suppose,” the skeleton moved his lower jaw around in a disquieting way. 

What the fuck is that? 

“Nothing,” said the skeleton, “just going for a cheap laugh.” 

Is it better to know you have a year to live than not to know?

“It’s better to know,” said the skeleton.  “We only get so many years to get this shit right.  Nothing focuses the mind like a good whiff of your own approaching death.   Boswell quoted Samuel Johnson to that effect,’depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’.  Thus saith Jeeves.  I found it to be very true, though I had far less than a fortnight to deal with the certainty of my own demise.” 

If you had a year, with the knowledge of your fatal liver cancer whittling away your remaining days, would you have come earlier to the realizations you did just before you died? 

“A $64,000 question, Elie, I have no fucking idea.  How would I know?”

Fair enough.   

“A sense of fairness is a precious thing, Elie.  I can see that so clearly now.  A precious and very rare thing — simply being fair.  You live in a world where everything is contested, every inch of moral high ground is viciously fought over.   It’s hard to even see the extent to which that operates, while you’re swimming in a sea of it.   Everybody wants to be treated fairly, but extending fairness– whooo, that’s one of the hardest human tricks.  Reminds me of that great Mose Alison song ‘everybody crying ‘peace on earth’, just as soon as we win this war.'”

I’ve been waking the last few days crushed by a sense of futility.

“Welcome to my world,” said the skeleton of my father, from his grave at First Hebrew.  “Although, in my case, of course, that crushing sense is caused by a ton of soil and rocks on top of me these days.  It’s not easy to crawl up to the surface to bullshit with you every other day, you know.”  The skeleton gave either a wide smile or a broad grimace of agony.

“But, seriously, Elie, you know, most people in your position would have been waking that way every day for the past, oh, say, six or seven years.  If you don’t go to work, don’t have an income, don’t interact with people who appreciate your work, how long can you feel productive producing things that nobody ever sees, let alone pays you for?”

Yeah, obviously.  I’ll tell you something, though, and it took me years to develop this crucial ability.  I’ve rarely been troubled, lately, by the indifference of the overwhelmed.  Their lack of response has nothing to do with the quality of my work.   I feel productive every day as I sit here typing, refining, clarifying, or even drawing or playing music.   It’s like a mind/body thing — feeling as though you are tapping into your deeper potential every day just feels good.  Feels productive.   

“Well, lucky for you, then,’ said the skeleton.  “You know, the challenge to feel productive is the reason most people crave work, and a busy schedule, and why they book structured vacations, and religiously read their daily newspaper and so forth, to have that feeling of being productive while keeping a thousand demons at bay.  Not everybody, left to their own devices, has the inclination to be creative, or observe things closely, or ponder hazy connections, or express their fears and hopes, or whatever it is that seems to drive the people we formerly referred to as ‘artists’.”

I’m starting to be consumed by thoughts of death.

“Update your resume, toot sweet,” said the skeleton.

Our cat has lost a lot of weight, he’s in the final stages of chronic kidney disease.  He’s actually skinny now.  He has been retreating more and more, hiding in one of two new coffins he’s staked out, doesn’t come up on the bed to nuzzle Sekhnet as was his lifelong habit.  Yet he wants to live, keeps trying to eat, even when he just vomits afterwards.   

“That’s some heartbreaking shit, the steep decline of the Baron and the way he clings to life,” said the skeleton. “All the more so because you have friends who say, ‘fuck, it’s just a cat’.   Didn’t one of them urge you to put him down, so you could join them for a little holiday?”

Well, I guess this is one I won’t be reading aloud to Sekhnet…

“Oops.”

While the cat is wasting away, and is generally too nauseated to even accept the bribe he demands after we stab him in the back with the needle from the kidney treatment bag every night, I have been pondering my own medical situation.  

“Look, Elie, none of this belongs in the Book of Irv (which I note you are now subtitling “First Do No Harm”– even contemplating the pretentious Primum non nocere) but I have to point out something that you no doubt realize.   You are in a tight spot, serious progressive kidney disease of unknown cause, treatable in 1/3 of patients, spontaneous remission in 1/3 (no clue if you’re still a candidate for that, no doctor has any idea, either) and kidney failure in 1/3.  You don’t necessarily have to like your odds.  But keep in mind, until that first chemo treatment you were regularly riding your bike 13 miles at a time and feeling much better each time you did.  It’s three months now with virtually no exercise, that’s got to take a psychological toll.   You have to give yourself a break.”

The trick is how you actually do that.  You know, I keep thinking, whenever I consider this non-lucrative disease I have, one that inspires no pharmaceutical research and therefore no funds for any kind of research, of those fucking geniuses in Florida that treated you as, unbeknownst to any of them, you were dying of liver cancer.

“Well, look, Elie, it’s two completely different situations.  You have a disease of unknown origin that corporate medicine treats as best it can, using the dartboard approach, knowing that 2/3 of patients are beyond the reach of their treatments anyway.  If all goes badly, you’ll just need a kidney transplant.  They’ve got millions of third world people looking to sell a kidney.  It’s only a matter of money to fix, even in the worst case scenario.   

“What I went through, not to compare, was a more than two year weekly rotation of doctor visits, cardiologist, hematologist, endocrinologist– none of whom had any clue I was dying of liver cancer, which is a completely different story.  Those cocksuckers could only have flourished in a place like Florida.  I had an appointment with Moomaswamy for the following Monday.   Unfortunately for me, I was in the hospital by then, with only two or three days left to live.  Had to cancel that appointment with the genius of cardiology.”

The skeleton grew quiet and neither of us broke the silence for a full minute.

“I was, obviously, not pleased to learn, six days before I died, that I had been dying of liver cancer for God only knows how long, but that’s life, Elie.  We are in the hands of motherfuckers, and, ultimately, in our own hands.”

True dat, we are ultimately in our own hands.  I was not able to learn this from you, except indirectly, but our own hands must be strong, and soft, and gentle.  The way you were able to reassure me and my sister when we were really shaken up demonstrated your capability.   It’s too bad you were never able to turn this ability toward holding your own life in a more merciful, life-sustaining way. 

“Yeah.  Like I said, that last night of my life, my life was over by the time I was two years old.”

Mom once told me she felt like life was a giant buffet, and everybody was filling their plates with all this delicious looking food, and she was standing there without a plate or a fork.   

“Her life, in many ways, was over by the time she was two,” said the skeleton.   

I have no idea where I get this feeling that I’m living at the bottom of a grave, in the words of Mr. Hendrix

“Funny,” said the skeleton, “especially considering who you’re talking to.” 

Humorous, I suppose, that I turn to an imaginary skeleton, the posthumously evolved spirt of my dead father, to try to cheer myself up on a day when I wake up crushed by a sense of futility.

“Nothing humorous about it,” said the skeleton, “it makes perfect sense.  Look, I’ll leave you with this thought: is there anybody you’ve ever met who you would change places with for a minute?”

You know the answer to that one.  

Last winter, in the context of talking about the endless ms. I’m working on about my father’s world, a friend told me about a memoir of a holocaust-era family history she’d picked up.  It was written by a Jewish fellow our age, who, like us, had grandparents who came to America shortly before the Nazis began their determined effort to cleanse the genetic pool of Jews.   

“That’s a nice way to put it,” said the skeleton of my father.  “Some very fine folks, among the Nazis, as your current president might say, very cultured, committed people.”

I’m trying to write like your New York Times. 

“Effort appreciated.” 

So she goes into the other room and brings me this book, a thick, glossy paperback, seemingly unread.  I tell her I’ll get it from the library and begin to jot down the title and author, but she insists I take her copy.  She tells me she’ll buy another.   We go back and forth a few times and I thank her and take the book.    I probably got as far reading it as she had, realized she’s probably not buying another copy.   Not that it was bad in any particular way, this search for answers about what happened to his relatives during the Nazi’s Thousand Year Reich.

“The Grey Lady is not snarky like that, Elie,” said the skeleton.   

Yeah, I know.  Too dignified and evenhanded to gratuitously mock fucking Nazis that way.  Anyway, the author of that book got a nice advance from a major publisher and went on a research trip back to the old country.  A different memoir than the one I’m working on, but related, in the search for what happened to a world that is gone.  As I read, one thing became clear at once and soon blinded me to whatever merits his book may have had.

His German-Jewish grandmother had not only been charming, talented, determined and ambitious — which could have been said of my Russian-Jewish grandmother — but also a woman of great refinement who forged great business success in America.  She founded a very lucrative business empire, an eventual multi-million dollar corporation that advertises its famous wares to this day.   Her children, who took over the business, were wealthy and her grandchildren were born set for life.   The author of the book gratefully acknowledges these things, as he sets about thanking his Ivy League friends and connections, including, one presumes, the good folks at the major publishing house.   

“I can see why your mouth began to fill with bile as you read that, Elie.   But such bitterness is beneath you, and irrelevant — plus, actually destructive of your purpose here,” said the skeleton.   “Even if you hadn’t fucked off in High School, gone to City College, even if you had a favorite chair at the Harvard Club, somehow I can’t see you hobnobbing and networking with the children and grandchildren, and in the case of the Harvard Club, great-great-great grandchildren of rich people anyway.”   

You’re probably right.   I’m still not 100% sure why I reacted that way.   I lost interest in his story when I found out I was reading a memoir not of my people, poor Jews who were simply disappeared without a trace, (the two or three survivors here acting brave, never talking about it, drinking vodka) but the story of striving, refined, gifted Jews who persevered, grew rich and conquered America.   The story of blessed winners living the American Dream, like the privileged Jared Kushner’s richly rewarded refugee grandparents.  What kind of story is the story of my impoverished, invisible Jewish ancestors?  What kind of fucking story?

“The story you write,” said the skeleton.  “The story you pull together out of these 1,200 pages, and the pages you haven’t written yet.  Our story will be the story you tell.  You’re telling it, how can you wonder what the story is?”

Hey, fuck off!  Easy for you to be a wise-ass.  Your talent for it when you were alive was only the fucking beginning, I see.

“Leave me out of this, and while you’re at it, take yourself out on a nice date, get lucky and go fuck yourself,” said the skeleton, turning away.  

My mother told me that her father’s family was fairly prosperous, they sold food to the goyim, they were wholesalers.  In fact, Pop’s childhood home was in town and became one end of the Jewish ghetto when the Nazis showed up and drew the boundaries for where the condemned would live. 

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I learned that detail recently.  It was a jolt seeing my great-grandfather’s house mentioned.   Nobody alive knows his name, or any detail about him.  There are not many traces of my family back there.  A publisher would be wasting money on that research trip.  Shards of bones, or the place near the ravine where the bone shards used to skitter, would be about all I could find of my people.

Maybe what stopped me from reading that book by the highly literate scion was the memory of a one-time friend of mine, born the favorite grandson of a very wealthy man.  An excellent writer, several years older than me, he’d expressed fascination about the ms. I was writing, the grappling with my difficult father’s complicated life.   I told him I’d love his feedback and he told me cheerfully to send him some of the recent pages. 

After I sent him a few samples to read I had only one direct response.  It was his favorite cartoon from the New Yorker.  A guy saying “I’ve never exactly had anything published, but I’ve had many of my works professionally typed,” or something equally droll.

This man always worked, and publishes short, well-crafted pieces occasionally (he’d been a journalist and later a well-paid freelance corporate writer).  His main livelihood in recent years coming from a series of low paid jobs.  Doing good work, helping the wretched of New York City for a few years as a JASA Adult Protective Services case worker, more recently helping striving immigrants master reading and writing English.   

When I mentioned being hurt by his lack of response to the pages I emailed him, he told me he did not specifically recall any pages, and was sure, by the way, that if I had sent him pages, he had almost certainly responded.   That there seemed to be no email with any response from him was a mystery, he conceded.   It wasn’t long before things took a decidedly ugly turn, with his eventual multi-part if-pology making things much worse.  I thought that his unyielding defensiveness had to do, somehow, with the twenty or thirty million he has tucked away, in unfathomable secrecy, as this salt of the earth man continues to work minimum wage jobs past the age of retirement. 

I’ve been realizing increasingly, as I write these pages, as the base side of human nature expresses itself worldwide in fresh paroxysms of rage, hatred and violence, as our corporate democracy is finally led by the very best that inherited wealth has to offer, that humans are, for the most part, irrational and insane. 

The wealthy are certainly not exempt from this plague of madness, even as many of them ‘walk around with their ass on their shoulder’ (as they used to say in Harlem), even if many, no doubt, truly believe that their excrement emits no foul odor (as the New York Times might phrase it).   

My favorite Yiddish curse lately is:  may you be very successful, may you grow very rich, may you build a house of a hundred rooms.  And may the devil chase you from room to room.   I have a very successful, rich friend (self-made wealth, baby) to whom (NYT style book) this very curse is currently happening.   It’s the damnedest thing, literally.   We can rarely escape, in our deepest recesses, the things we fear the most.     

Which is an essential part of this Book of Irv, I realize now.  For all his success, his unlikely comfortable middle class life, his education, wit, restless intellectual curiosity, his deeply held humanistic principles, my father, when he got home, was an infant fearfully waiting for his mother to fly into a rage and begin whipping him across the face with the heavy cord of her steam iron.   As John Sarno’s shrink helped him understand: the worst wounds endured in childhood are as raw today when probed as when they happened.  The subconscious has no sense of time passing.

 “Ain’t dassum shit….” said the skeleton. 

Hoy, listen, I’m sorry I lashed out at you before. 

“Nay wahr-ries, mayyyt.  I’m beyond holding a grudge now.  Bunk dat shit, homey.   You certainly know that I am not the same person, now, that I was when I was alive and dreaded.   In fact, I’m not even the same person, or skeleton, if you want to be more precise, that you began talking to almost exactly two years ago.”

Ain’t dassum shit?

My father showed, by his decades-long close friendship with Benjie, that he was perfectly capable of being an appreciative, supportive, loving friend.  This certainly struck my sister and me over the years, watching our father befriend young people not much older than we were, seeing how much his young friends loved and admired him.   We watched this as he launched sorties against us every night at the battlefield of the dinner table.

“Well, they saw me at my best, Elie, what’s the mystery there?   I never outflanked them, strafed them with machine gun fire or deployed poison gas or brutal propaganda against any of them, unless they desperately needed it.  Once it was open warfare, all bets were off how about much they loved me after that,” said the skeleton of my father. 

I didn’t say it was a mystery, I said it was striking to us.  The reminder of how easily, it seemed, you could not be a mean and unreasonably critical person.  The potential was right there in front of all of us the whole time, our little noses rubbed in it, you might say.  I had a friend or two who thought you were a great guy, wished their father could have been so cool.   

“Well, another person’s father always looks cooler, don’t they?” 

Not necessarily, it shakes out all kinds of ways. 

“But wait, you said ‘a friend or two’?  What’s with that?  You had more than one or two friends,” the skeleton said.   

Yeah, well, as you say, I chose as my friends select ass-kissing sycophants likely to second my distorted view of whatever I was forcing them to agree with.  But, on a more serious note, most of them saw more of your hectoring side than you might have shown the crew and customers at Tain Lee Chow. 

“You know, it’s funny you should use that image, of Tain Lee Chow.  Benjie, your mother and I owned that place, yet Benjie worked behind the counter most of the time and I stood between the kitchen and the serving area frying noodles all day.   Funny, the memory of that time is about as happy a memory as I have from my adult life.   It was great to be part of that little team, to be my own benevolent boss, and I used to, literally, take home brown paper bags stuffed with cash,” the skeleton looked off as nag-shaped clouds chased each other in the skies above upper Westchester. 

“Your mother used to tell me I stunk of Chinese noodles,” he said.   

She’s right. 

“Well, as you and Benjie observed with such marvelous compression at my funeral, he and I were the father and son each of us never had.   He had a hard time with his father, didn’t respect him much, felt his father never gave him the respect he needed.  You know, these relationships are two way streets…”

Wow, really?  I never realized that.   

“You’ll lose that in the edit, Elie,” said the skeleton, “it’s beneath you.   Anyway, for a variety of reasons– the orthodox Judaism, the sense of humor, the acuity as a businessman, the confidence, the mutual deference in certain matters — Benjie and I just hit it off.  We naturally deferred to each other in our respective areas of expertise.  We could both be stubborn, as you know, but for whatever reason, we were able to compromise with each other in ways I couldn’t with you and your sister.  For example, do you remember that Benjie was totally against opening a kosher Chinese restaurant?   He wanted our joint venture to be a steak house.”

I remember mom describing that conflict.  She and Benjie often squared off, neither of them took any shit from the other.  She used to get angry describing his face when he set himself against her, with those “little blue piggy eyes”.   

“You did well to carve ‘heart of a poet’ into her gravestone .  I never noticed his eyes were piggy, or little, for that matter, but, then again, he never showed me that face.  He and I, I don’t know how to explain it, we gave each other the benefit of the doubt, I guess.   Benjie and your mother used to fight all the time, and she eventually left the restaurant after one particularly bad one, but they loved each other too.” 

Although it was a bit more love/hate, wasn’t it? 

“That’s fair.  Anyway, we all got things from that relationship that were important to us.  We were willing to explore all options when we came to an impasse.  Benjie, for example, had never tasted Chinese food, which was a big reason he was against the idea of opening a Chinese place.  We all went to Moishe Peking for dinner, that was in Manhattan.   He loved the food.  He had nothing to compare it to, never having eaten at House of Won, or Fan Fan, or any of those other trayf emporiums, but to him it was delicious.   As a businessman he recognized the value of offering something nobody else in Queens had– kosher Chinese food.   He agreed after that and we never looked back.  Once he was in, he was in 100%.”

It’s true that you got things from each other neither of you had.  He had a head for business, you didn’t.  He had confidence in his ability to make money, and you had your life savings, and confidence in his abilities.   If not for your support, he probably wouldn’t have opened any restaurant at all.   If not for his business acumen, you’d never have attempted it either.   The place was a great success, and gave all of you a certain amount of nachas,  and bags of cash, not to mention a liberating sense of autonomy after years of working for those Hadassah bitches.   

“Very true.  That’s the essence maybe, of a great relationship.  The complementary nature of it.   What I have, you lack a little, what you have, I can’t find in myself,” the skeleton paused.   

“Not you personally, Elie, I mean, in a perfect world, I mean, it could have gone that way… but a good relationship, I mean, an actual mutual friendship…. there’s a give and take…” 

Yes, of course, I get it.  Maybe the fucking tragedy of this world is how close to a perfect world it is, and how brutally far from perfection.   

“Which is one reason most murders happen between loved ones,” said the skeleton. 

Yeah, homicidal love, one of the funniest, most fucked up kinds of love there is. 

“Yop,” said the skeleton, pointing up into the sky where one of the nag-shaped clouds had caught another and seemed to be fucking it horsey style. 

I did one thoughtful thing that sunny spring day in the First Hebrew Congregation cemetery on the outskirts of Peekskill, and one unthinkably thoughtless thing.    As the eulogy I’d written was being beautifully read by a man who called himself a Jewish Druid, a guy who chanted in a soft, haunting voice and read wonderfully, like the trained actor he was, I noticed my niece sobbing by herself a few steps from the grave.  I had my arm around my mother, my sister and her husband had their arms around their young son, and, for some reason, my niece was standing alone.  I whispered to Sekhnet to stand with my niece and she went over and put her arm around her.  Everyone felt better.

Afterwards, as we headed to the cars, I did the stupid thing.  At the bottom of the hill my father’s good friend and surrogate son Benjie waited to greet me.  Benjie and my father truly loved and appreciated each other.  They’d met when Benjie was the young dining room manager and then business manager of the camp my father directed, Tel Yehudah, a Zionist camp by the Delaware River in the heart of German Bund territory.   Several years later both finally quit around the same time, both had been treated disrespectfully by the Hadassah women who held the camp’s purse strings. 

They remained good friends for the rest of my father’s life and were, for a time, business partners, proprietors and operators of the first Kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens, Tain Lee Chow.   Benjie was a large, extroverted religious Jew with a good sense of humor and a zest for life.   

He sometimes led singing after dinner in the camp dining hall.  The meal was followed by a long prayer of thanks for the food, called the Birkat HaMazone, sung to a nice bluesy melody.  Many of the old-style Jewish prayers are set in that pleasantly melancholy minor key.  After the Birkat there was a spirited session of songs, all kinds of songs, but mostly Zionist related songs; Hebrew songs from Israel, old and new, songs sung by the original kibbutz pioneers, the early Israeli army, songs of romance, songs of longing for the Sea of Galilee and other personified regions of the Holy Land.   Several bawdy songs were included in the rotation and Benjie often answered a curtain call to do his special number “There’s Lipstick on Your Tsitsis (Shame on You!)”.   

The singer of the song, after building up what could only be a sacreligious misuse of a sacred garment (the fringes of which hang at a religious Jew’s waist) and the violation of several of God’s commandments, bursts out with the innocent explanation.   It brought the house of teenagers down.  Benjie loved to perform.  When the old worn-out songbook was reprinted, it was under the title Benjie Sings.

Benjie also loved to eat.  Though he carried an oversized stomach and did not appear to be athletic, he could hit a softball a mile.  He regularly parked pitches by trash-talking pitcher Mel Reisfield deep into the woods, over the outfield and beyond the dirt road.  He’d take a slow trot around the bases, his yarmulke bobbing on his head, tsitsis flapping, making cracks at Mel, to the delight of the crowd.

Benjie was a witty man who liked a laugh.   He was not averse to mixing it up with anyone who sassed him.   My friend Melz once sassed him.  Melz was working as a kitchen boy at the camp one summer and Benjie was tasking the kitchen boys with some job none of them wanted to do.  Melz made some crack and Benjie, in his inimitable way of speaking, told Melz “Melzer, don’t give me this shittttzzzzzssss.”   Benjie’s way of speaking was not inimitable, it was irresistibly imitable, actually;  distinctive, is what I should have said.  His dismissive remark to Melz was a widely imitated phrase for years afterwards.  We would all say it to each other whenever the occasion arose, or out of the blue, making the final syllable sizzle like a burger on a hot griddle.   Benjie, of course, had no idea his throwaway line had become immortal. 

He waited for me at the bottom of the hill, after the burial of my father and his great friend.  He extended his hand and as I took it I thoughtlessly said “Benjie, don’t give me this shitttttzzzzsssss.”   He had no idea what the hell I was talking about, as he certainly hadn’t given me any shit.   A look of utter confusion was on his face.   I didn’t take a moment to remind him of that long ago throwaway line to Melz, cars were leaving, other people were waiting to tell me how sorry they were, I had a sense there wasn’t time.  Or maybe I just wasn’t thinking.   

I said, sincerely, “you were the son he never had.”   He nodded and said with equal seriousness “and he was the father I never had.”  I nodded.   We completed our handshake and headed to the cars to take us to the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill center where the corned beef and pastrami sandwiches were piled, alongside the coleslaw and cold cans of Dr. Brown’s with the beads of water on their aluminum sides.   

Years later I think of what a tender moment that was, both of us recognizing the healthy, loving father-son relationship these two good friends managed to have.  I also feel like a bit of a schmuck for not explaining why I told Benjie not to give me this shitttttzzzzzzsssss.  Maybe I’ll print out and send him this piece, as I haven’t actually spoken to him since the day before my mother died. 

“Yeah, you’ll send it right after you send the sample of this ms. to the prospective agents, I’ll wager,” said the skeleton of my father, cannily seizing the last word, snatching it out of Sekhnet’s mouth.

Q:  You have written a massive, more than 1,100 page, manuscript over the last two years attempting to conjure your father’s life. 

A:  Was that a question?  Seriously?   Click here rather than wasting my time with foolishness. 

Q: Are you always such a testy motherfucker? 

A: No. 

Q: Do you always answer questions monosyllabically? 

A: Infrequently.  May we begin the interview now?   I expect you have at least one intelligent question today. 

Q:  You write the bulk of this ms., which is supposed to be a memoir, in the form of an imagined conversation, between yourself and the skeleton of your father who has been dead for twelve years.  Was this done intentionally?   

A:  What?  I wrote this in the form of a conversation between myself and a fucking skeleton?   What?!!! 

Q:  I’ll assume you’re being playful here, in your awkward way.   Why write a memoir in the form of a dialogue?   

A:  Dialogue is a beautiful thing, and sadly rare, a dying art form in our 140 character world.  When you deal with a difficult person, as my father was — along with his many fine qualities — the thing that can help the most is a good talk.   If you can find a way past the person’s defensiveness there is usually a lot of common ground that can be traveled together in honest conversation.   I don’t advocate this for the average difficult person you may meet, the less seen of them the better, but in the case of a parent or close family member, a candid exchange of views is key to healing wounds.  My father was supremely defended, he had a quick wit, an agile defensive mind, a keen intellect he could focus completely on the battle at hand, he was the master of reframing arguments on the fly to keep his adversary off balance.  

Q:  Sounds like quite the asshole.

A:  Major league, Hall of Fame asshole.   The thing was, he didn’t become that by accident.   He was warped early on, by poverty and brutality.   Not to excuse him, not at all.  Hitler, after all, was his overbearing, autocratic Prussian bureaucrat father’s punching bag.   Most people would go back in a time machine and give Hitler’s pregnant mother an abortion, if we could.   One thing has nothing to do with the other, just to say —  insight into how a person became an asshole can improve a relationship. 

Q:  I get that, but why write a massive book about a massive asshole?

A:  Well, here’s the devilish thing.  It’s easy to reduce a bullying person to just that– a fucking bully.   You know, the guy is a brutal fucker, end of fucking story.   

Q:  I would appreciate less fucking cursing, we are a family blahg. 

A:  I’ll try to fucking keep that in mind.   The book is more about the tragedy of wasted potential, squandered opportunity to be loving, and to be loved.   Someone asked me the other day if I loved my father.  I hesitated for a second then said it was more like love/hate.    You know, it’s human nature to want to love your parents.  We come from them, we go to them when we are scared, we get many qualities, good and bad, from them.   

Not everybody starts out with the same amount of empathy.  My father had every quality that makes a good friend.  He was capable of great empathy, he was sensitive, he was smart, funny, sometimes had great insights.   The tragedy of his life was that these things were often overshadowed by his incurable rage.   Deep down I think he believed that life had fucked him and there was nothing he could do about it.   

Q:  Fucked him in a way that was not consensual?   

A:  In a way that was not consensual.   He had nothing to say about his mother whipping him in the face from the time he could stand.   

Q:  That does not sound pleasant. 

A:  Really?   (dirty look)

Little Irv was raised in what he always referred to as “grinding” poverty, and I have heard from his cousin, whose father was a Communist and who grew up quite poor, also during the Depression, that next to my father’s family, he grew up rich.  Not only that, his father, my grandfather, for who I am named, never held a steady job.  This was a great source of shame for my father, that his illiterate father was incapable of making a living.   

Q:  I can only imagine his shame on discovering that his highly literate son was equally incapable of making a living.   

A:  Well, there’s an eternal mystery for another time, though, obviously, you’re right.  My father started life with several strikes against him.   His entire life was a struggle against that sickening unfairness he was born into.  You know, many people struggle against the demons of their childhood for their entire lives, repeating the same destructive patterns decade after decade.   We often fight these out with surrogates, find ourselves attracted to people who conjure these forces we were forced to fight as children.  It’s called “Repetition Compulsion”, reliving the same trauma over and over in different forms.  If we were bullied as kids we’ll be drawn to bullies and inevitably clash with them.   

Q:  As you did for many years.   

A:  Yah, mon.   The worst part was the subtlety of some of it.   It might take twenty years to realize the mild-mannered, droll person you always thought of as a close friend was a vicious little tyrant waiting for their chance to express a rage that took you completely by surprise.   

Q:  I assume you’re referring to that insane cunt Andy?   

A:  No comment, except to say I object to your use of that fucking offensive c-word.   

Q:  Noted. 

A:  It is the subtle nature of the beast that made the conversation with the skeleton of my father necessary, I think.  If someone asks what was remarkable about my father I always start with the idealistic work he did intervening in NYC public High School riots in the sixties and early seventies.   Nothing shows his idealism and humanism more clearly than the rapport he built up with gang leaders, how he won over hard case after hard case by his wit, humor and empathy.   

Q:  He sounds like a great guy.   

A:  He was a saint.  Once he was dying he got the insight that had eluded him for the almost eighty-one years of his life.   He realized, for the first time, that his life could have been completely different if he hadn’t been so intent on prevailing all the time, if he had developed a talent for seeing nuance, for extending the benefit of the doubt, for doing the things in his personal life that he did professionally with the violent gang leaders he worked with in the sixties.    You understand his life as a tragic story, rather than the story of a monster.   

Q:  Well, he never killed anybody, or built any death camps. 

A:  No, not at all.  Most of all, he never learned to get past his rage and disappointment.   He never learned to forgive, anyone, including, and most tragically maybe, himself.

Q:  Your sister famously said, after he died, that she thought he’d never had a happy day in his life. 

A:  Maybe so.   When I think of him I always recall Kurt Vonnegut’s comment about what he feared his children might say about him after he died, that he had told such wonderful, funny stories but had been such an unhappy man.  My father was funny, and loved to laugh, sometimes laughed uncontrollably, but he lived a fairly unhappy life.   

Q:  Living a happy life is a difficult art, no?   

A: Without question.  Look around at the lives of quiet desperation you can see in every direction.   Hey, homo sapiens are murderous former prey animals.   We prey on each other.   Our lives here are ruled, to one extent or another, by fear.   We are right to be afraid, there are plenty of fearful things to fear, not least of all our inevitable deaths, but at the same time, we need to face our fears in order to live at some kind of peace with them, though it is easier to run from them, pose as though we are brave, belittle others for being afraid, and weak, and so forth.   

Q:  I assume that was what your father did for most of his life — run, pretend to be brave, belittle others for being afraid.   

A: I’m afraid so.   

Q:  LOL!   

A: “Your point is taken,” he said, the passive voice used.   In summary, the Book of Irv is the conversation with me that my father wished we could have had while he was alive.  It is a reclaiming of his life in light of the revelations he had while he was dying — it is the best of him.   As he was dying, and news that he was dying arrived suddenly, six days before the end (although he’d had the undiagnosed liver cancer that killed him for God knows how long) he went into spiritual overdrive, trying to make sense of his life.  This fearless moral inventory is something few people ever undertake.

Luckily for both of us, that last night of his life, he was able to organize the results of his fearless moral inventory and express them.  Also, I’d reached an emotional understanding that enabled me to listen to him without judgment, blame or anger.  Truly, it was easy on my end, as only empathy for the poor devil remained at that point.  I wasn’t going to lie to him as he was dying, but I was going to listen to everything he had to say without resistance of any kind.   My mildness encouraged him to speak openly.   I did my best to reassure him when I could, to help make his death as easy for him as I could.   I truly felt that I had entered a kind of sacred space when I entered the room where he was dying.  I’d read that first in Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die, and felt it immediately that last night in the hospital. 

A:  So, in other words, the skeleton you are talking to in this ms. is your father, after his deathbed revelations?  You are reclaiming the best of him in this memoir of the Dreaded Unit.   

Q:  Bingo.  The skeleton sometimes gets up on the wrong side of the grave and we see flashes of the famous prick he often was in life.  But for the most part, the skeleton continues the conversation my dying father started that night, a talk he lamented being incapable of having before that last night of his life.   

Q:  So you had a real conversation, finally.  That must have been a blessing for you.   

A:  Well, yes and no.  He expressed regret, apologized for the first time, acknowledged that I had tried to be the mensch while he had been the fucking baby.  It was a good starting point for a relationship. 

Q:  Sounds like a beautiful thing.   

A:  Yeah, except for the fact that he was dead.   

Q: Hence, the Book of Irv.   

A:  Yes, ma’am.

My father was a big fan of Lenny Bruce.   He would recite portions of Lenny’s bits over dinner, when we were not all actively at war.

“Funny motherfucker,” said the skeleton of my father. 

He was drawn to Bruce’s anger and irreverence, as much as to his insight and wit. 

“I love the way you talk about me like I’m not sitting right here,” said the skeleton leaning back against his headstone, brushing himself off. 

I do it for your love, dad.   

“I loved Lenny’s brutal honesty, to be brutally honest about it.  He said things that needed to be said but rarely were back in the days of I Like Ike.  Same with Richard Pryor, although Pryor even more so than Lenny — Pryor was the true genius of that art form.  We live in a world we are forced to pretend is rationally arranged, for liberty and justice for all and the rest of those overflowing crocks of shit every school boy is forced to pledge allegiance to.  Lenny was like that kid who yells out, ‘look!  The Emperor has a boil on his balls!’ and winks.  We are given precious little of the truth here, Elie, and when it’s delivered with dryness and a great punchline — what could be better?” 

No argument here.   I’d take irreverence to solemnity any day when being force fed bullshit, particularly the murderous kind.   Like when reading reports like ones in the New York Times, your beloved Grey Skank — those chilling, morally-neutral articles and editorials that praised Obama’s wisdom and supreme skill in how he approached extrajudicial killings: measured, lawyerly in his deliberations, discreetly secretive.  

“Christ, Elie, you’d complain if you were eviscerated by a brand new drone- launched Hellfire missile,” said the skeleton. 

There you go.   Although, the point stands: reverence for something like the authoritative Paper of Record precludes an open and honest discussion, frames away troubling questions like ‘why the fuck are we secretly droning people in a dozen countries when the practice was so reviled when Israel first pioneered it, when it is a top recruiting aid for those who seek to use lethal violence against us, slaughters so many innocents, sets such a catastrophic international precedent for the future?’

“Those are not illegitimate questions, as one of your learned colleagues might phrase it, I suppose,” said the skeleton.  “Irreverence is an orientation, a stance Jews have often utilized, to use that supremely Yiddish word for ‘make use of’.  Jews have often utilized irreverence, it’s sometimes all powerless people have to give themselves a feeling of control.  I see your fucking false god and, while you’re bowing, I paint tits on it.  Which, in itself, is kind of ironic from a Jewish perspective.   Abraham, the patriarch Pop called ‘Avooma Veeny’, was ready to kill his own son to prove his faith in an all-merciful God.  Don’t forget, though, before that, little Avooma Veeny was an iconoclast, literally, smashing up idols in his father’s shop.”   

Irreverence is why you bought me MAD magazine, put out by the ‘usual gang of idiots’, every month for years. 

“Well I saw your eyes light up when I gave you that first one at the dinner table one night.   You remember how it was all rolled up?  I’d confiscated it from a high school kid who refused to put it away so I could teach him and his hapless little classmates what was then called Social Studies.” 

You kept referring to the kid as a moron, which I found almost as funny as the MAD magazine itself.  I kept picturing a moron, waving that rolled up MAD, and it made reading the rolled up pages the moron had been trying to read so much funnier, somehow.   I kept seeing him puzzling over that cudgel he made of the MAD, struggling to read the rolled up pages.  You told me you’d get me a subscription for Chanukah, though you never actually did.   

“Well, you made out on that deal.  I could have saved some money off the newsstand price buying the subscription, but then you probably wouldn’t have gotten it every month for the next ten years.”   

I just figured out why you’d buy it at the newsstand every month– so you could read it on the subway home from work.   If it had come directly to me in the mail, you’d have had to ask me to borrow it, which would have violated your creed of never needing to ask anyone for anything while, at the same time, putting you at the mercy of your merciless little son.

“Duh,” said the skeleton, “that moron in my Social Studies class had nothing on you, Elie.” 

Here’s a riddle for you, skeleton. 

“Hey, watch it… I’m still your father….” 

How is it possible that my sister has no recollection of how funny you were? 

“Well, much of the time I was as funny as a heart attack, or a root canal, or however you want to put it.  Humor is a subjective thing.  Picture the newsreel clip you saw of Hitler cracking up a room full of top Nazis.  You think you or I would find the Fuhrer’s wit quite as droll?  How about those people in Alabama a few weeks ago who found the punchline Kayla Moore triumphantly dropped so funny?”

‘….one of our attorneys is a Jewwwww.’   

“Yeah, not exactly Rowan and Martin, but good enough for that room of Jew hating shiteaters.  Your sister herself is very, very funny, though that may be hard to remember, she hasn’t had cause to crack a lot of jokes lately.  And, don’t forget how cruel her humor was, a chip off the old crock.  She was like a knife thrower with expert aim.” 

Crackly Sam Psoraisis was one of the recurring characters that sometimes got a laugh out of mom. 

“A betrayal that made me warn her how you two would be dancing on her grave,” said the skeleton.   

Sure, but look, if we’re going to be honest here, and not merely irreverent…

“Irreverence is often the appetizer for honesty.”   

OK, we’ve had the poo poo platter…

“Served with a nice gust of air freshener,” said the skeleton. 

What’s with you today? 

“I know you are, but what am I?” 

Jesus, revenge of the ventriloquist’s dummy. 

“We can all see you moving your lips, Elie,” said the skeleton, “you’re not fooling anybody, and, besides that, you have a boil on your balls.” 

Dad, the beauty of writing is that I cannot be sidetracked when I write.  All I need to do is read the last few lines back and I see where you start doing your distracting stunts.   

“Ah!  Where I start doing my distracting stunts….” 

If we’re to be honest about it, my sister was just doing what she’d learned from you.   When you’re trapped in a corner, lash out with a good funny line. 

“That’s often a sound tactical move,” said the skeleton.  “Nietzsche called humor the ‘epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling’ as your friend Sekhnet informed you when you first started dating.  It’s more than that, of course.  Humor can be gentle too, a way of turning aside a harsh word, brushing a tear off a cheek.   More often it’s a way of fending people off, sure, but better to fend them off with a laugh that puts them on the back foot than with a punch in the face, no?” 

Better to pass a new tax law that favors the wealthiest and jeopardizes life for everyone else than to build and populate mechanized death camps for society’s millions of parasitic losers.

“Exactly,” said the skeleton, “I’m glad you’re able to be so rational about it, you parasitic loser.” 

Takes one to know one. 

“Touché , Elie,” said the skeleton, putting a hand to his chest and miming death from a rapier thrust.

The other night my dinner companions were talking about how hungry they were, as we waited for a table.   In similar situations my father often said “I’m so hungry, I could eat pork.”

Out of the blue, and with great manic cheerfulness, he’d demand in his best R rolling German accent:  “have you rrrelatives in Cherrrrrmany?”.

In relation to nothing in particular he might say “up your nalgas with a meat hook.”   Years later I’d learn the definition of nalgas [1].

Once in a while he’d burst forth with a string of words like “Tanganyika!  Tuskegee!  Brrrritish Emmmmpire!”  

He would raise his fist and say “Lumumba died for freedom.”  (He did, actually).

In closing a chat with a colleague from the Human Relations Unit, or any kind of ironic hipster he might run into, he’d say “keep the faith.” 

More than once, to my mother’s pretended amusement (she’d smile, tears in her eyes, nostrils flared) he’d say “Ehvvy, if I had your nose full of dimes, I’d never have to work again.”   

He said, more than once, “he has all the attributes of a dog, except loyalty.”

He had many occasions, since he provided me with much to complain about, to remind me “you’d complain if you were hung with a new rope.” 

If he was ever asked to guess what someone had bought him as a present he would immediately say “a combination egg and beet slicer.”   

Said in a disturbingly martial spirit, rather than with his usual ironic delivery: “you and your sister might win this battle, but you’re going to lose the war.”   What the fuck was up with that?   It was said about things like refusing to drink four glasses of cow’s milk a day.   

“Easy for you to make fun of a dead man, wise ass,” said the skeleton of my father snappishly.  “It’s just like you, too.  Wait until you’re dead, and your son writes a memoir of your life– oops, I forgot, you don’t have a son, do you? You have a cat you call the Baron.”   

The Baron is not my son, I had a paternity test done.  Besides, I work for the Baron.  What kind of father does that make me?   

“Don’t get me started, you ungrateful bastard,” said the skeleton.  “By the way, Elie, do you realize that the two bags of rituxan they infused into your arm recently cost more than twice what you paid for law school?”

Obviously, but you knew I knew that.   

“Droll,” said the skeleton of my father.  “Meditate some more, there are more of my memorable phrases you will remember later.  If not, I’ll try to remind you.  Now if you will excuse me….” and with that, his mouth still open, he ostentatiously fell asleep.

[1]