People who feel powerless are sometimes prone to abusiveness, in addition to self-destructive behavior.  The only feeling of power they have access to is the power to inflict pain on a creature even more powerless than they are, or to do something to alter their state of mind.   Given the choice between endless pain and momentary relief from that pain, most will opt for the relief, however fleeting and otherwise regrettable.

“Dassum shit,”  said the skeleton of my father, “but, sadly, a universal truth.” 

Your mother, for example.   

“May she rest in peace,” said the skeleton in Yiddish inflected Hebrew. 

Look, the only image I  have of her is of an enraged religious hypocrite, a tiny psycho who mercilessly whipped her first born son in the face from the time he could stand.   

“Not an entirely unfair image of her, given what little you know,” said the skeleton.   “On the other hand, Elie, you realize that for purposes of this particular exercise in spinning your wheels while tap-dancing on a treadmill, I am more of a cardboard cut out of a skeleton than the actual mildly endearing character you have taken some pains to create over the last couple of years.” 

That goes without saying. 

“Then why say it?” said the skeleton.   

I know you are, but what am I? 

“Look, on a given day,  given that you are not going to earn so much as a copek, what is the best you can expect of yourself?”   

To get enough sleep and to be the best version of myself I can be, I suppose.   

“Fine, so like the good advice on that sign in the City College gymnastic rooms– work good hand-stands everywhere — you are working every day to keep your tools sharp?”   

As sharp as I can. 

“OK, fine.  You gave this piece a title.   So?”   

There is a little buzz, recently, about the opioid addiction crisis that kills more than a hundred Americans a day (no reason to dredge up the mere twenty or so U.S. military veterans, thank you for your service, who kill themselves every day).  The opioid crisis has become news because white people are dying in large numbers now.   It’s killing mostly working class and poor white people, not the children of the very rich, mind you, but still.  It’s not like it’s a deadly drug epidemic confined to ghettos where you can just bring in the national guard to keep that shit contained where it belongs.   

“Trump country is opioid country,” said the skeleton.   

The famous drug experiment about the nature of addiction was putting rats in cages and giving them a choice between water and drug water.  The drug water would get them high, and eventually kill them, but all the rats chose the drug water and eventually every one of them killed themselves with it.

This was held out as irrefutable proof that given the choice between the deadly pleasure of an addictive drug and a healthy drink of water every little experimental mammal would choose the drug that gave them pleasure.  There was another experiment where they had the rat’s brain hooked up to an electrical switch.   Put your paw on the button and get an instant orgasm.  Every rat died, of heart failure, with its paw on the button.   These experiments seemingly confirmed that some substances, by their very nature, are irresistible, physically addictive, soul-robbing and eventually deadly. 

Another experimenter, noting that the rats in these experiments were all kept in solitary confinement and given the single choice of drug/no drug, tested this theory by constructing a rat playground and doing the same test.  Rat Park, as he called it, was a place where everything a rat could want was found in abundance: ample space, tasty food, toys, exercise, other rats to interact with and have sex with.   The rats in Rat Park had the choice of water or drug water.  Few rats in Rat Park had much use for the drug water.   No rat in Rat Park ever died of a drug overdose.  They had too much else to do.  The experimenter concluded that drug addiction was a product of despair, of lack of a better choice. 

“Well, think of that kid you walked home in Harlem, the hell of his drug addict mother’s life, his baby brother’s life, his own.  What were the odds of him becoming a studious high achiever and moral exemplar for his siblings vs. pursuing a life of whatever short-term pleasure he could find?” 

Of course.   The thing is, according to Johann Hari, who described the Rat Park experiment in his excellent book and talks, a follow-up to the Rat Park experiment was never funded, it was never repeated anywhere.   There is no solution to the larger social injustices that lead to virtual mass solitary confinement and the choice of drug/no drug.   The people caught in that situation, millions of us here, billions worldwide, are totally expendable.  People who talk about this are sneeringly dismissed, by hardy Nazi types, as Social Justice Warriors, SJW, LOL!

“Look, Elie, tens of thousands die in America every year because the pharmaceutical industry spends untold hundreds of millions to influence public policy, to ensure that their profits remain as robust as humanly possible.   Big Pharma spends far more than the oil industry.   The fucking NRA spends a tiny fraction of what Pharma pays out every year in campaign funding, and the NRA holds the Grand Old Party hostage.  Any Republican who speaks the first half of the sacred Second Amendment– A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State... gets primaried out of office at the next opportunity.   The NRA version of that Amendment is, simply, ‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’.    As you know, a hundred thousand or so dead Americans a year, from guns, opioids, lack of health care, is a small price to pay for freedom and democracy.” 

Yes.  The maddening thing is that there is no possibility of even having the discussion, based on the actual merit and harms of each position.   By way of government response we have a pompous little asshole, our nation’s highest law enforcement official, pronouncing that no matter how stupid, outdated or erroneous the law, we will enforce it to the strictest degree to make sure our people are protected from the evil of a selected drug.   

“Well, of course we will.  And that allows ongoing selective, color-blind enforcement of the politically motivated law and the continued disproportionate incarceration of black and brown citizens and their literal disenfranchisement in many states.  No vote for felons, bitches.  What’s mysterious about any of this, Elie?”   

No mystery, dad.  Just… fuck. 

“Stay sharp, boy, and keep your eyes on the prize,” said the skeleton, pantomiming a sleepy oriental pulling on an opium pipe, as he slouched back into his soft grave.

“Well, you know, Elie, the idea of closure is pretty much a fantasy,” said the skeleton of my father.  “I mean, it happens once in a while, I’m sure, but it’s so often featured in popular drama that we’re led to believe it’s something to expect.  Closure is like hitting the perfect bullseye in a darkened room, it’s the dazzling exception, not the rule.   At least that was always my experience.  If you’re looking for closure here, you may be at this for the rest of your life.”   

He had a point.   

“I know you’d rather continue this conversation than do the hard work ahead of you to get paid, get this book finished and out into the world.  I don’t blame you for that– though, of course, when I was alive I’d have been the first to give you shit about your inability to finish your project.   And having a long history of incomplete or failed projects, it would have stung you like a squadron of angry wasps.   I’m not going to do that, it’s not my point here.  Two years is not a long time to work on a first book, particularly as ambitious an undertaking as this one.”

That’s kind of you, dad.  Better late than never, I suppose, even if I do have to put the words into your mouth myself.   

“Well, that’s the way a lot of things work, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “Maybe that’s your closure right there, writing a better ending than life handed you.  Although, to be honest about it, I think our last conversation gave you a better ending than you yourself could have written.”   

It was a kind of closure, actually.   To be told, with virtually your last breaths, that I had been right, or at least trying to do the right thing, all along, while you’d been the angry adversary too frightened to be a human being.  Nice dramatic arc to that senseless struggle, eh?   

“I told you how much I regretted having seen everything as black and white, as a zero sum game.  It’s the worldview of a fucking moron.  I should have been smarter than that,” the skeleton shook his head on a rattly neck.

“Well, anyway Elie, we’ve got to wrap this up.  I’ll leave you with a very simple example of how easily anyone of our deadly conflicts could have been avoided.  Take our long bitter argument over whether people can change or not, obviously if I was not being an eternal two year-old, of course people can change, many things about themselves, we see it all the time. And of course, there are also inborn dispositions, innate talents and disabilities, a disposition to be unafraid, or easily deterred.  The tendency to get frustrated easily — you can learn to do better but the tendency will always be there, waiting for a moment of weakness. 

“It was idiotic of me to fight for some ridiculous absolute victory in a complex argument with a lot of validity on both sides, instead of just allowing for the human nuance that can, and should, be part of every intelligent exchange between two people.  You made some excellent points, I made some, why not take the best of the two points of view, learn from each other, instead of strafing and dropping bombs?” 

You’re preaching to the choir director, pops.

“So look, one tangible result of this long war we had, the history of our tormented family, the screaming atonal opera around the dinner table every night, is that this book you’re working on has to be a bestseller, in your mind, or you will have failed again.  Failed in telling my story, failed in doing something amazing and award-winning.    Hitler will have won, our large family massacred and consigned to the septic tank of history for nothing, no fucking McCarthur grant for you, genius boy.  That’s partly on me.”   

Not any more, dad.  You’re resting in peace now.  All that shit is on me, and I’ll take it.  Put it in a to-go bag, would you?   

“Taking it home to Whippie the Slave Dog, are you?” said the skeleton.

Yep. 

“Tahn-gah-NYEE-eekah!  Tuss-KEEEE-geee!   Brrrritish Emmm-pire!” said the skeleton, in an outburst of unfathomable glee. 

“You have stuff to add to this account, and even more to subtract, but, take a tip from a wise old skeleton and wait until you get your advance before you start that hard work.   You’ll have your hands full first just preparing a succulent enough slice to help you get an agent.”     

Righty-Oh.   

“Nighty night,” said the skeleton, with what could have been a wink.

“Demons, Elie, they are always with us,” said the skeleton of my father.  “You put faces to them, which is a very nice touch.   The specific facial expressions, and the emotions behind them, are a key feature of those merciless fucks.  There’s nothing like the look of a smug sadist daring you to defy him, with a gaggle of angry henchman waiting to kick your ass.  Nothing like it, my son.”     

Yes, that’s certainly true.   We should not, however, neglect to mention the angels we encounter sometimes.  Like that nurse in your death chamber.  Absolute perfect casting.   

“A no bullshit black woman with a heart of gold and a dry sense of humor to match,” said the skeleton.  “Mutual love at first sight, I would say.  It’s like they looked through the book of my life and some merciful genius picked her out– ‘here, you take Irv.’  An angel, no doubt about it.”   

I remember, when you complained to her about being stuck so many times for tests, while it was clear you were dying. 

“Well, in fairness to them, they got paid $1,000 every time they stuck me,” said the skeleton.  “As you and mom later found out when the hospital sent my bills, which fortunately Medicare paid.”   

And she said, when you complained about the endless drawing of your blood, “Irv, just give me the word.  You don’t want to get stuck anymore, I’ll make them stop.”   

“And she did make them stop,” said the skeleton.  “Jesus, you’re right.  She was an angel.  God, did she make me feel understood, and loved.”   

I’ll tell you something else about that angel.   I don’t think anyone ever looked at me quite the way she did when I left your room around 3 a.m. that last night of your life.  The door to your room had been open, it was otherwise silent on the floor, and she’d been sitting outside in the hall.  That look she gave me, I don’t know how to describe it.  It was pure, selfless love, happiness for you, I guess, and relief that you got to say what you needed to say, and that your son wasn’t an asshole in the end. 

“Well, sometimes we have the luck to meet one of these creatures,” said the skeleton. 

I can think of a few in my life.  I wonder how many you came across in yours. 

“Hard to say,” said the skeleton.  “You certainly don’t come across them often.  I wish you could remember that nurse’s name.”   

It haunts me to this day that I didn’t go back to the hospital to find her, hug her, give her some flowers, tell her she was an angel.  I can’t even remember if she hugged me as I left the hospital that last time.  I certainly felt hugged. 

The skeleton looked off toward the unseeable river beyond the graveyard.  Birds circled and a few of them screeched.  A car crunched by on Cortland Road.

“You have noticed by now, Elie, that we have to take our angels where we find them and let them into our hearts.  It’s as natural as a baby drinking milk, to take an angel into your heart.  We can’t help but do it,” said the skeleton.  “You had a couple that I know of, angel and inspiration both.” 

You’re talking about Florence, who was both of those things.   One of the great single strokes of luck in my life, making that trip out there that frosty night, bringing her Thai food, and bullshitting with her for a couple of hours.  Two days later she checked out.  Goddamn, talk about an angel.   

I should also mention your good friend Arlene.   She had an angelic moment on a hill near the Delaware Water Gap.   

“Do tell,” said the skeleton. 

We were walking on this lush, endless green field.  She told me that developers were already making plans to convert this perfect patch of earth into perfect homes for yuppies.  It was near sunset.  The place was beautiful.  She brought out a little pipe and we each had a few hits.  It was the only time I ever saw her smoke weed.   

“Well, Russ was a prodigious head, it’s no surprise that she would smoke a little grass,” said the skeleton.  

Then she spoke a few words that turned on a light in a dark room for me.  She told me that you and mom were two of her dearest friends.  I knew how much she loved you and how much you and mom loved her. 

“We did, we do,” said the skeleton. 

Then, like she was reaching up to pull one of those chains that turn on a light bulb she said she was going to tell me something I might not understand fully at the moment, but that I should just file it for later.   She told me, correctly, that I felt somewhat responsible for my parents’ anger and unhappiness.  Then she said I was not responsible for it.  She told me that you and mom were very unhappy people, and that your unhappiness was not on me.   I felt a slight lifting of a very heavy weight off me as she told me that.  Over the next few years the truth of it began to set me free, as far as one can be free in this world of slaves.   

“Arlene was a great woman,” said my father’s skeleton.   

The sun was going down now over the cemetery.  The blue of the sky melted seamlessly into that gorgeous gradient of orange by the horizon.  It reminded me exactly of the moment after I closed my father’s dead eyes.

“Well, you may have a point there, Elie, about the faces of the demons we fight,” said the skeleton of my father.  My father, during his life, was always silent about the particular demons he was up against, although he made mention of the demons every one of us must grapple with.

That mad, but brilliant, classmate of mine in law school told me about the “Repetition Compulsion.”   It is a compulsive need to relive, and re-litigate, painful personal transactions of the past.   You find yourself drawn to types who have some salient aspects of the people who bludgeoned you early on.  As you were my bludgeoner-in-chief, it’s not surprising I found myself in close contact with people who exhibited your most personal traits. 

“So these people were brilliant,” said the skeleton.  

Brilliant assholes, pinched and needy, bent on ‘winning’ at any cost.  Worthy adversaries, until they were not.  

“Youch!” said the skeleton.  

I’ve got to be honest here, dad.  It’s all I can do, particularly in a world like ours, where the media increasingly gives equal weight to the comments of the studious and thoughtful and to the careless stylings of talking, shit-smeared assholes.  

“Well, talking, shit-smeared assholes tend to rule, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “It’s a matter of opinion anyway, who is smart and who a shit-smeared asshole.  One man’s shit-smeared asshole is another man’s no bullshit, straight shooting president.  Ask the 39% if you don’t believe me.”  

Granted.  I think of the long struggle with my good friend Friedman. Implacably unhappy fellow, aggressively so, actually.   I don’t know that he was beaten as you were, physically, but he emerged from childhood with serious and stubborn wounds.  He was a guy who felt he could never win, I suppose, so everything in his life was a contest and he had to prevail.  He pursued these little victories reflexively, he always had to negotiate and get the best of every interaction.  The story arc of every transaction with people he met was identical– high hopes, betrayal, sullen, smoldering anger he would not admit was anger.  It wearied me to death, slowly, over decades.  Nothing could ever be good enough for an unhappy soul like that.   He was eternally seeking some impossible ideal of perfection, eternally disappointed, betrayed over and over and over.  

“Sounds familiar,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah.  Anyway, in the end, he was reduced to silence.  It took me many years, I had my own wounds to deal with, but finally I boiled his insoluble misery down to a single issue.  To my grim gratification he was speechless, didn’t have a word to say in defense of his indefensible world view, the things he expected from his friends, the impossible burdens he tried to make them carry.  We sat in a Florida diner, a deluge pelting down outside, and he just looked at me, very hurt and not a little bit angry.   That’s the expression of one of my demons, irrational disapproval that needs not so much as a whiff of a justification.

“Well, you always said you were not sorry you went to law school, though law was the wrong line of work for you and you are still deep in debt for loans for the tuition, it did teach you to organize your arguments,” said the skeleton.  “I realized I was over my head during that last one in the den, where I fought you desperately, knowing I was completely fucked.”    

It’s another argument for the people can change position.  If not change, we can refine our talents, anyway.  

“I won’t argue that,” said the skeleton.  “What other demons you got, besides Friedman?”  

Well, there was an angry woman I stayed friends with for decades.  Very smart, great sense of humor, talented, but terminally angry and never satisfied, always feeling she was on the short end of things.  Whipped her feckless, out-gunned husband mercilessly every time we had dinner with them.  In the end, she turned her anger against me.  When I responded with a long note about how hurt I was by an email she sent chiding me for self-pity and depression, I never heard from her again.  It’s like she was waiting for me to tell her I was done with her, as if she’d been waiting for years for me to confirm that she was unworthy of friendship.  Maybe she had been waiting, biding her time for a moment of weakness on my part.   It would have been an easy matter, if she hadn’t meant to hurt me, to have simply apologized for a harsh, arguably cruel, email.  She was apparently incapable of it.  Or maybe she thought I didn’t deserve an apology, that I was an unredeemed asshole.  In any case, her face, bored and superior, is up there when I picture my demons.  

“I can see that,” said the skeleton.  “It’s hard to explain to those who go along to get along, but there comes a point where a trusted friend reveals a face that you cannot unsee.”  

My mad friend Andy’s smug face comes to mind.  

“A face only a mother could resist smacking, although not my mother,” said the skeleton.  “Well, as I understand it, the thing with Andy was his self-hatred, his deep feeling of unworthiness.  I don’t know, truly, how you emerged from your war-zone childhood with so little self-hatred, but for those of us who are consumed by it, I assure you, there is nothing more painful.”  

I can dig it.  It goes to Groucho’s ‘I’d never join a club that would have somebody like me as a member.’    The capacity to be witty is one thing, and I always enjoyed Andy’s wit, the capacity to have insight, and act on it with integrity, is quite a different thing.  

“Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “One man’s insight is another man’s… eh, you show me a man who finds himself insightful I’ll show you a man…. what does Sekhnet always tell you?  Put a bushel over that light of yours.   It’s unseemly to speak of yourself as insightful, talented, intelligent.”  

Fine, I get that.  The only insight I really cherish is the one I picked up as a kid at that finishing school for anti-Semites you sent me to.  Hillel’s statement of the Golden Rule.  What is hateful to you, do not do to someone else.   I consciously try to live by that.   I don’t claim to have ever had any insight remotely comparable.  I’m just laying out a few particular, identifiable demons here, dad.  The faces attached.  

“Well, I get that.  Andy had the best demonic last word, delivered to you by a third party.  He made it known that he knew he owed you an apology, but that he was ‘too stingy’ to give it.   The mark of a… what is that hideous word you like to use on such occasions, a true cunt, in the unredeemed sense of the word.”  

True dat, dad.  I admit that I was wrong, that I hurt you, that my subsequent attack on you was unfair, that I owe you an apology but… nah… not to you. I’m too stingy.  Let that be the last word on our long friendship.  

“Talk about a shit-smeared asshole,” said the skeleton, suddenly distracted, sinking back into his grave without so much as an adios.

Adios, padre.

My father’s grave is marked with a large tombstone that notes, in an ancient tongue, that he was an intelligent and modest man.   His father’s grave, in the low-rent section of the same small town cemetery, where the tomb stones are jammed together like a mouthful of crooked teeth, is marked by an epitaph calling him straight and simple.  There are no other grave stones, going further back than that.  The Nazis simply didn’t give the Jews they killed such amenities.    

“Well, look, Elie, I don’t blame you for being disgusted, and angry,” said the skeleton of my father, “though I think we can safely throw these paragraphs into the circular file.   You are talking statistics again, a few handfuls of terrified, powerless Jews run into the swamp to drown, shot in the head.  They happen to be our people, fair enough, but, I mean, what is your point, really?”    

When I said “fuck Hitler” a few weeks back, this is part of what I was talking about.  

“Well, I’m sure the corpse of that psychopath is twitching in rage at your disrespect, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “In your fucking face, Hitler!”  

Fuck Hitler, dad.  In all his forms.  Hitler was a rock star of genocide, as charismatic as Elvis, to those who loved him.   We have always had these types among us, they tap into that rage we all feel sometimes, transform it into an irrational movement, capable of the worst mob violence.   When I used to rail against the aptly named Dick Cheney I was walking a mine field.  I had to be careful not to make any Nazi references, because, of course, Cheney never set up a system of death camps, didn’t even make any racial laws.  Killed a lot of people, sure, but not in the organized, systematic way Hitler’s folks did.  The comparison was unfair, even I realized that, even as he oversaw the torture and deaths of perhaps a million people in his borderless, trillion dollar, permanent war against Terror.    

“The pundits still call it that, ‘The War on Terror’, just goes to show — the power of branding,” said the skeleton.    

Yes.  So in the time I have left I suppose I want to testify.  I want to stand against the bullshit that is force fed to us by the marketing geniuses, by those who make big bucks to make atrocities sound benign, to keep the wheels of the war and oil industries humming.  

“That’s a big job, Elie.  Those types have already won,” said the skeleton.  “And besides, what do you really hope to gain?  You don’t even know the names of any of Pop’s large family, Grandma’s.  You have three siblings of my mother, Chaski, Volbear and Yuddle, just their names and no trace of the hamlet they lived and died in.  On my father’s side, just like him, a complete blank, two eyes, a nose and a mouth, in Eli’s immortal phrase.   That’s all you have, that and the area that 3/4 of them lived in,  where they all died horrible deaths.   At least they were spared being forced into cattle cars and railroaded off to slave labor and brutal living deaths, until their actual deaths.”  

You’re right, dad. Some days, it’s just too big a job to even contemplate.  I need to find a fucking chain pharmacy that has the shingles vaccine, before I start my immunosuppressive therapy in a few days.   Shouldn’t be this hard, I’ve been to several pharmacies already, one hurdle after another– now apparently it has to be a CVS that has the vaccine in stock.  Should not be this fucking hard, “should”, of course, being a word one shouldn’t use in a nation that places corporate personhood over the personhood of humans.   Give Hitler some credit for that, he showed how it could be done.  

“All roads lead back to Hitler with you,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah.  And there’s a freshly painted sign on that road, I painted it myself.  It says “fuck Hitler.”    

“Sieg Heil, man,” said the skeleton, listlessly lifting an arm in the Hitler salute.

“So, if food isn’t love, what is food?” said the skeleton.

Look, fine, if you’re eating, and you see somebody who is starving, and you give them your food– food is love.   Nothing really more to the point you can do in that moment to express love.  Preparing a delicious meal for your loved ones, I’d say in that case the food is love.   Patiently spooning soup into the mouth of a weak, sick person– love.  Stuffing an overfed dog with steak?   I’m sorry, that just seems the wrong example.

“Well, maybe it’s a lot for me to expect you to understand, never having been hungry yourself,” said the skeleton.   

As you recall, my sister and I were pampered little middle class bastards.  It was a beautiful and horrible arrangement for you.  You could point to your virtue in never letting us know hunger or any kind of material want, and at the same time, you could be bitter because we had so little appreciation of the things we learned to take for granted.  You remember what you used to tell me when I thanked you as we came out of a restaurant?   

“You never have to thank me for food,” said the skeleton.

Food was many things when we grew up, few of them healthy.  Overeating was the norm, and eating in anger.  Literally, eating to choke down feelings. I recall you equated being able to put away a large quantity of food with manhood.

“Well, I saw that in the army,” said the skeleton.

I recall how proud you seemed to be when I downed maybe a half dozen hot dogs at the end of the Wading River Fourth of July parade.  I must have been eight or so.  The volunteer fire department had a big pot of free hot dogs and I kept going back.  The fireman would dip a long fork into the steaming water and pull out another one, put mustard on it, hand it to me.  I remember your smile, and your pride, at how many I ate.

Food, perversely, was also held up, mostly by mom, as a sign of personal bravery, a daring willingness to try things that looked and smelled repellant. She was not consistent with this in her own eating, but she always praised my sister, who was more apt to try new foods than I was.  “Your sister is a trooper,” mom would say, as my sister put something disgusting in her mouth.   

“Well, you had the last laugh on that one, didn’t you?” said the skeleton. 

We went for sushi after you died and I ordered eel.  Mom was horrified.  I got to chide her for not being a trooper.  Quite delicious, the way the Japanese prepare it, though I don’t know if, even at the height of my omnivore days, I’d have tried it boiled in a creamy sauce with onions.   

“Well, on the other hand, you were never trooper enough to try herring, Elie,” said my father.   As he said it I felt a sick feeling in my stomach.  Man, that stuff looks and smells disgusting.  Even my sister was not trooper enough to try herring.

My father had a very sentimental side, the flip-side to his often brutal roughness.   One night at dinner he was feeding Sassy, the overweight Cairn Terrier, from his plate.   Toto from the Wizard of Oz was a Cairn Terrier and after visiting with dogs at the Westminster Dog Show we’d chosen a Cairn after Winnie, a great West Highland White Terrier went on to her reward.   Sassy was the daughter of Dodie.  Dodie had been a great, spirited little dog and the only one of our dogs (all female) to ever have been mated.   A breeder brought a randy male Cairn around at some point (or perhaps we brought Dodi somewhere, I have no recollection) and a few months later Dodi gave birth to three little Cairn pups.  My sister and I were shocked at how savage Dodi suddenly became when we started to approach her adorable sleeping mice newborns in their nest in a big cardboard box.   

The pups were very cute, and sadly, we were resigned to them all leaving for other homes.   Brer, our favorite, was chosen first, some people came by and bought him immediately.  Then the little female went.  The other, large, flat-backed and paranoid, never found a home.  We wound up keeping her.  My mother named her Sassy.  There was rarely an animal less sassy.   Unlike our other dogs, who slept out in the open and were always happy to interact, Sassy spent much of her time squashed under a bed or couch.    She was heavy and naturally suspicious, frightened, it seemed.   

I have thought of Sassy’s withdrawn paranoia over the years, in the context of nature vs. nurture.  We were there when she was born.  Her two siblings were playful, spirited little dogs.  None of the three had any experience that would make them distrust humans.  But Sassy, when she was not eating, was finding a place to flatten herself and hide.  She often skulked when she was not hiding, as though fearful to be out in the open, and gave the appearance of a giant, furry cockroach.   She was heavy, and sometimes, when it was necessary to pick her up for some reason, her eyes would roll in terror.  To complete the depressing picture, Sassy’s mother, Dodi, a very cool little dog, suddenly took ill a few years after Sassy was born, and died in what should have been the prime of her dog life.

My father doted on Sassy the sad sack.   One night when he was feeding the overweight dog from his plate I snarled at him to stop it.   I was a teenager who frequently snarled at my father at this point.   Our relationship, in fact, was mostly snarling.  A mutual snarling society, so to speak.  It took very little by that time for one of us to begin attacking the other.   The accumulated grievances weighed heavily on each of us, waiting for the next small flash point.  I was disgusted that he was stuffing this overweight dog with scraps of steak from his plate.  My father’s response was unexpected.   

“Food is love,” my father said gently.  I replied harshly that love is love and food is food.  He was uncharacteristically unfazed by my harshness and went on to talk about how sharing food has always been a sign of love between creatures.   He quoted some writer about it.   I snarled some more and left the table in disgust, my regular way of leaving the loving dinner table.   

For the last few years of Sassy’s life, my father injected the diabetic dog with insulin.   Sassy appeared not to object as my father made a tent of the skin on her back and slid in the thin needle.   He did this every night, and it extended Sassy’s sad life by several years.   She lived to be fairly old, as I recall.

“Well, you see, Elie, nobody can truly understand the story of my life unless you manage to hammer home this point,” said the skeleton of my father.   He was referring to his childhood of grinding poverty, and violence.  

“The particularly bitter taste of my experience has to be well-known to the reader so they can perceive every detail through the lens of grinding poverty.  I’m not sure exactly how you go about doing that, you’re the creative writer who’ll have to figure it out.   I just can’t stress enough how important it is to convey the wounds left on me from my childhood of abject poverty.  

“And don’t forget, we were not only among the poorest of the poor, I was raised a Jewish boy in a small town where the Depression had hit hard.   I grew up in Klan country, as the re-scheduled Paul Robeson concert would dramatically demonstrate years later, again, as if it was necessary to demonstrate that, again.   My own mother whipped me across the face from the time I was an infant.  Conveying the full taste of all that is the only way to tell my story that makes any real sense.  The terror of that childhood has to be in every frame of the movie, if you know what I’m saying.

“How do you explain the ongoing torments of poverty in a nation where most people are not poor?   We walk past beggars sometimes, and homeless people,  but rarely get even a glimpse of the real, soul-crushing poverty that afflicts millions of Americans.   Most of us are simply shielded from it, the middle class.  Once a year, at Christmas, the New York Times runs a story about the hundred most desperate, miserable children in the city.”  The skeleton paused, turned his head on his bony neck, surveying the distance beyond the graveyard.  

“You got the tiniest taste of that shocking poverty only once, more than twenty years ago, and that probably makes you rare among your readers,” said the skeleton.

It really was a vignette out of a horror movie.  Picturing that third grade Harlemite’s world, truly … terrifying.   We arrived in the apartment building two blocks from the school mid-day.  The dim entry hall looked like a set from a disaster movie, broken glass and garbage.   Walked up the filthy staircase to the apartment.   Mother in a diaphanous nightgown eventually stumbles to the door, breasts swinging freely, most likely a drug addict.  There were definitely rats and every other manner of vermin in the apartment, and a baby was crying.   The boy’s mother couldn’t focus enough for a conversation, there was no point even saying anything.  

Walking back to school I felt that kid’s life like a sledge-hammer to my solar plexus.   I don’t know how anyone recovers from that, and, as terrible as his situation was, he probably had it better than many kids in that neighborhood, in this country, in the world. [1]  

“OK, if you saw that once, and felt that sledgehammer blow to the gut, even just that one time, then you have a small hope of understanding what I’m trying to explain to you.   Look, when you’re born poor you grow up knowing that no matter how much you may want something, you simply ain’t gonna have it, you’re powerless to get it, to do anything about it.   That enforced powerlessness, that sense that your lot is just your own tough shit, is truly a curse on a child, a lifelong curse.  

“My brother and I were hungry, on a regular basis, as kids.  You’ve never been hungry.  Think about that.  When you miss your 4 pm snack you start to feel hungry and begin to forage.  But that momentary, easily cured hunger bears no relation at all to what I’m talking about when I say we were hungry.  

“Look, you’re getting a little taste of poverty right now, living on this strict budget and everything, but it is an extremely genteel poverty.   You live on a tiny income but can instantly pay for whatever else you might suddenly need or want.  You are experiencing only a tiny, attenuated fraction of what it’s like to live close to the poverty line, without a safety net.  And even that noble poverty you voluntarily live in is often so galling to you that you are compelled to cry out.”  

No, look, dad, I absolutely get that.   I get how galling it is to have your powerlessness rubbed in your face over and over, just because you don’t have the money not to have to take that particular kind of shit.   A small thing, like a scofflaw slumlord who prevents you and your neighbors from recycling will sting like a burn after a while.  If you’re born into and grow up in a situation where your very survival is in jeopardy day after day, it leaves a dark, heavy mark on your soul.  Adverse Childhood Experiences they call them now, traumatic things it is now known cause lifelong harm to the health, alter the DNA, decrease life expectancy dramatically.  Most of these adverse childhood experiences are encoded into a life of poverty, particularly painful in a wealthy nation like ours.  The poor die young for a lot of reasons.

“Yeah, but when you put it like that, somehow you run the risk of reducing the conversation to statistics, the usual numbers chat about poverty, the way it’s generally done, with percentages and shit, and an arbitrary line, drawn artificially low, determining who actually lives in poverty, all of which misses the real horror of actually being poor, by a long shot.  It’s like saying ‘20% of you are totally fucked,’ and if you’re not in that number… you know.  Actuarial tables are one thing, the details of the life of the child who’s hungry, sees rage and violence at home, is brutalized by his mother, screamed at, whose main caretaker is overwhelmed, unreliable, mean.   You can keep zeroing in and much of what you focus on are the magnified traumas of being poor, of trying to raise kids in poverty, without basic things every kid needs, of the despair that leads to these hard lives and early deaths.

“But, you know, Elie, when you think about it, that’s really the problem with the world.  Anyone, with a modest amount of empathy, would do whatever was necessary to save the life of a baby who was cold, hungry and alone.   It’s human instinct, when an abandoned baby is crying for help, to go see if there’s anything you can do.   In this world there are millions and millions of babies, born doomed to poverty in the wealthiest nation in the world, and everywhere else.  How are you going to square those two things, the human instinct to care and the equally human desire to protect your own fragile happiness?   The poverty rate, even if it’s 30%, doesn’t directly affect the lives of the more well-to-do 70%.  Why would the 70% care enough to organize and fight to eliminate a poverty that doesn’t afflict them?”

Fuck.  You’re right about this, it’s going to be very hard to adequately lay out the grinding poverty piece of this.  I’m going to have to give a lot of thought to how to figure that out.  

“Adios, then, muchacho,” said the skeleton, turning on his side to return to sleep. 

1]  One day, when I was teaching third grade in a Harlem public school, a boy put his hand down the panties of the retarded girl who sat next to him.  The girl may have cried out, other kids had seen it, there was no question about the boy having done it.  He denied it strongly, like a street character in an urban crime drama.  Shortly thereafter he slipped his hand up the girl’s skirt again.  I told him we were going to see his mother at lunch time.

We walked down Morningside Avenue (not to be confused with well-patrolled Morningside Drive) a few blocks, 118th, or 117th, down there in Morningside Depths.   Morningside Heights is where Columbia University is located, the faculty apartments opulent, the streets patrolled by police and by private security cars.  On the bottom of the steep cliff are quiet streets along Morningside Avenue.  The buildings are poorly maintained, their tenants are victims of poverty.   These events took place more than twenty years ago, closer to twenty-five.   These days I’m pretty sure Manhattan Avenue is a very pricey address, ditto Morningside Avenue along the park.  The building stock, the brownstones and small walk-ups, was nice, just maintained by slum lords.  I’m sure those valuable buildings are better cared for under gentrification.

What I saw at the top of those stairs that day was a scene out of a nightmare or horror movie, truly.   It explained a lot about the kid’s desperation to get something good out of his day.