“Okay,” said the skeleton of my father, “I can see you’re determined to imagine the conversation we would’ve had if I’d been alive after that talk where I expressed my regrets, apologized for the first and last time, had the insights I should have had decades earlier.  All right, I’ll go with that.”

 Mighty white of you, dad.  

“Well, it’s the least I can do,” said the skeleton, “and as you’re fond of saying, ‘I’m always happy to do the least I can do.’  I’ll pick up the White Man’s Burden here.”  

Along Cortlandt Road, a stone’s throw from my father’s grave, a car with a bad muffler farted loudly by.  

“Poetic, Elie,” said the skeleton.  “Anyway, listen, I think somebody should address the pathos of this situation — of you sitting alone in a room inventing a conversation with your father that you believe should have happened, one you think others might be interested in reading.  Obviously you can’t address the poignance of that yourself.”  

That goes without saying.  

“Well, like I told you as I was dying, I never saw anyone really express affection, show love of any kind in the home I grew up in.  I simply had no example of how it was done, no clue how to do it myself.   I was raised in the most dire psychological experiment you can imagine.   We lived in grinding poverty.   My mother despised my father, my father lived in fear of my mother’s rage.  My brother and I were on our own in a way you and your sister would be hard-pressed to imagine, as bad as you may think you two had it.”  

Suffering isn’t a competition.  

“No, it’s not.  That’s not the point I’m trying to make.  You remember how impressed you were with Martin Buber’s I and Thou?”  

I do, in fact.  I thought it was an illuminating way to view the world.  Buber said you could address all creatures in a mutual, relational way, which he called I-Thou.  An I-Thou relationship treats fellow beings as unique individuals with a soul, the equals of yourself.  This relational view sees others as fellow reflections of God, souls to connect with and interact with.  It is also possible, and more common, to see people, animals and things as a series of instrumentalities, as ‘its’, things to be used without regard to their needs.   The relation in this case is one way: I-It.

The I-Thou relationship is a mutual recognizing of and addressing the equivalent of yourself in the other.  The I-It relationship is a practical, materialistic one in which the other is not a sentient self, like you are, but a mere instrument for your use, an instrument without a soul or any legitimate needs of its own.

“Well, the I-It relationship extends far beyond the crass materialism that is so familiar to us all in our consumer culture, it’s also the way an adversary sees an opponent, in the most ruthless scenario.   You can’t be indifferent to a war against people who are just like you, who suffer the way you do, whose innocent children cry out in a way that breaks your heart.  To wage war you first have to demonize and dehumanize the enemy, make them into an alien Other, faceless Its you or your allies can bomb, burn, gas, drone, machine gun, machete, whatever.    That’s the first order of business before you can kill people en masse, reduce them to an abstract thing to be despised.  It works on the individual level too, of course.

“My mother, in order to whip me the way she did, couldn’t see me as fully human, as a little soul the equal of herself.   She’d have to view me as a thing, an object, a stubborn, inanimate obstacle to her happiness, a whipping boy, literally.   What does the human long for?  That look of recognition of his human-ness in the eyes of someone he cares about, an appreciation of his uniqueness.  

“This is becoming complicated, and I’m aware I’m blurring a simple enough concept, but getting this across seems crucial to understanding the tragedy that was my long life.  It’s really the essence of all human tragedy, Elie.”    

A car turned off Cortlandt Road and crunched down the long gravel driveway not far from my father’s grave.  The driver and her passenger were about to visit a grave, leave two stones on top of a granite slab inscribed with a dead loved one’s  capsule biography. Their arrival made no difference at all to me or the skeleton, neither of us were actually even there.

“You know, I think about it now, how cruel I was to you and your sister, and it seems like a miracle to me that somehow your little souls weren’t crushed.”  

Don’t worry about that, our little souls were crushed.   The good news for me was a kind of optimism I got from somewhere, a faith in the healing powers of a little soul.   They call it neuroplasticity now, sometimes, the brain’s ability to heal the lesions and neural disruptions caused by adverse childhood experiences, by trauma.    

“I’m glad you got that from somewhere.  What’s the most important thing a parent can give a child?   A sense of safety, a sense that they are loved, and heard, and protected.   I never knew how to impart that to you guys, Elie, though I know that you and your sister, at least sometimes, felt those things from me.   Maybe mom did a little better, I’m pretty sure she did, at least in your case.  I like to think I was okay in an emergency, you know, that your sister and you were reassured by me sometimes, knew you could count on me when it mattered most.”  

Yeah, you were good at that.  You kept calm and philosophical when we were afraid or upset, you could be very reassuring.  I mean, sometimes.  

“Of course,” said the skeleton.  “Most of the time I was the one strafing you two with a metaphorical tripod mounted machine gun, which, now that I think of it, I think you have to admit is better than if I’d used an actual machine gun on you two.”

Granted.   We’re both grateful for that, it goes without saying.  

“Well, obviously you are going to have to dig deeper into this issue.  You see, this book you’re trying to write is the direct outgrowth of your natural and eternally thwarted desire to have a real dialogue, an I-Thou conversation you deserved to have.   It’s no accident my story is emerging in the form of a dialogue.  I was…” the skeleton sniffed, turned his head on a creaky neck, “well, you know how I was.  Like I told you, I never experienced that kind of connection with either of my parents, with anyone in my family, really, with the possible exception of Eli.”  

Who scared the shit out of you.  

“Yeah, he scared the shit out of me, but I also always felt loved by him.”

That’s no small thing, dad.  

“Yop, I know.”

I just heard Salman Rushdie call journalism, or memoir, that interprets or re-imagines events through an idiosyncratic, personal lens, creative non-fiction.   I suppose that’s what I’m writing as I toil over this memoir of my father’s life.  

“Creative non-fiction, my ass,” said the skeleton of my father, woken from his slumber by the familiar sound of me tapping the keyboard.  

You got a better name for it?  

The skeleton pondered this for a moment.  

“No, I suppose not.  It’s actually exactly what you are doing.   There are many things you can never truly know, but in telling a good story you can’t leave these gaps.  A story with gaps is not a great story, as you are starting to understand. Hey, you can’t imagine what I’m thinking as I’m driving the Buick east into the Long Island night after our nightly battle at the dinner table?  Well, that’s an evocative image, anyway.  There’s something the reader can imagine as well as you can.   But you have to set it up right, give the reader all the background images to picture it for themselves.”  

You’re a writing coach now?  

“Fuck you, Elie, you’re the one who’s talking to me, I didn’t start this conversation,” said the skeleton.  

That’s what you say.  

“That’s what you say I say,” said the skeleton.  “You’re not fooling anyone here, Elie.  Don’t insult our intelligence.  Conversation, my ass.”  

As you wish, father.

In high school my sister came up with the name that would be our father’s handle for the rest of his life.   She referred to him as The Dreaded Unit, which she summarily shortened to “The D.U.”.    It was a name he went by, and even embraced.   He signed notes “The D.U.”  It pleased him, on some level, to be regarded as dreaded.      

The D.U. was not dreaded because he was strict, or a ruthless disciplinarian.  In fact, he was in many ways a permissive parent.  You could do what you wanted, pretty much, but there was a steep price to pay for that freedom.  He would flay you about anything you did that he disapproved of.  He disapproved of most of what his children did, by the looks of it.  He was demanding only in the sense that he demanded you listen to his denunciation of what an unredeemed piece of shit you were.  I angrily fought back, my sister rarely confronted his anger directly.   It is an open question which of us suffered more from his regular abusiveness.

In thinking about this dreadedness, I realize my father had a cardinal rule. He lived in a black and white world with one overriding issue: were you with him or against him?   He laid out his theory and either you agreed with his assessment, no matter how insane, or you were an asshole.   As he was dying this is probably what he regretted most, the asininity of insisting on ‘my way or the highway’ as a credo.    It is more fitting for an authoritarian or racist-type than for a humanist with the intellect my father had.    

It was one of the central contradictions of the man.  While he was capable of taking any side in an argument, for argument’s sake, and intelligently making a detailed case for the opposite of what he believed, he was in some fundamental way unable to see nuance, to compromise, to extend mercy or the benefit of the doubt, in the context of his family.  

It was a one rule game: I am right and you are wrong.  If you disagree with me, it proves you are a fucking idiot.  I will destroy you.   While he could be irreverent, and very funny, and seemingly hip, he was also very rigid in defending his beliefs.  

As I converse with his skeleton you will see little evidence of this rigidity.   The dead Irv is much more relaxed and insightful than he was while he struggled to remain the D.U. to his children.    That’s the central tragedy of his story– what he actually was, in his essence, compared with what he was able to show of himself in the intimate circle of his nuclear family.  It is the central tragedy, I guess, of anyone who is filled with self-hatred.

Simple rule: you’re in or you’re out, with me or against me.  He enjoyed the verbal jousting match he saw black kids playing on the street.  He called it The Dozens.  It was a rank out contest, an imagination-driven cutting contest where the sharpest wit won.  It was done in public, on a stoop, street corner, in a schoolyard, candy store, barber shop.  You could keep out of it, most of the time, by keeping your mouth shut.  Once you said something, you were fair game.  It had one other rule, according to the D.U.: “if you grin, you’re in.”  Laugh at something funny said at the expense of someone else, you’re next, motherfucker.  My father loved the whole thing.

I have noticed this with bullies, too.  If you sneer, watching them in action, it’s as good as shoving them, they will come after you.  I have been in this situation too many times to count, and, although as a lawyer I learned to control my facial expressions when I was in the presence of someone abusing their power to express personal sadism, I never learned to control my micro-expressions, those subconscious tells that flash across your face in a fraction of a second. Sadists are adept at picking these up, and they will torture you as much for a micro-expression as for a long, glaring sneer.  

What made my father the D.U., exactly?  His insistence that his rule was the rule, agree to disagree, disagree to agree, the rule is the rule, it will not, cannot be changed.  This was the essence of his dreadedness.  Where did it come from?  A paranoid worldview born in the extreme childhood traumas he endured all his life.   He could not open the door to examining these traumas, it was simply too painful.  

I write of this all calmly now, at the age of sixty-one, having had decades to process my interactions with The D.U.   In the end, living on a small stipend provided by his lifetime of hard work, and my mother’s, I have had as many hours as I need to ponder it all.   It has been a very fortunate thing for me, whether or not I succeed in snappily packaging and selling this manuscript to a literary agent, signing a book contract, getting paid, being interviewed by Leonard Lopate or Terry Gross.   I will always consider myself lucky for this opportunity.    

In my childhood, though, the D.U. was a fucking monster, an incomprehensible, implacable monster.  I have described the war zone at the dinner table every night.  For many years the D.U. worked two jobs.  He’d arrive home from work exhausted and fall asleep on the couch for an hour or two.  When he’d wake up, dinner would be ready, the battlefield prepared.  

Our mother might start things off, complaining about what pricks my sister and I had been to each other, to her.  We were often pricks to her, I realize. We mocked and bullied her.  She’d turn to the D.U. to do something about it.  

In reality, there was nothing the D.U. could do about it.  We were all playing by the insane rules he set, the only ones he knew.  He was powerless, sitting in his landlocked seat in the worst corner of the kitchen table, a counter behind him, a wall to his left, my sister and the refrigerator blocking his exit.  He would shuffle his feet in his slippers menacingly, like a rattler rattling  his tail.  He would make random threats of violence, retribution, of my sister and I losing the war, no matter how many battles we thought we were winning.   He would curse and rage.   I can see all this clearly, as well as the reasons for it, in ways I could not see until I was a middle aged man.  I spent years ruminating on the insane dinner time battles.  

If I’d smacked my sister, or, as I did one afternoon, hung her favorite doll by the neck at the top of the stairs (a doll she pulled down and whacked me in the eye with), my mother would put this angrily to the D.U.   The D.U. would turn to my sister and, in a tone of paternal reasonableness, blame her.  “I’ve told you a thousand times, if you play with the cobra you’re going to get bit!”   I was the cobra in that scenario, no matter that I had a black eye from the doll’s foot.  My sister, in spite of her lifelong terror of snakes, was a pretty competent mongoose.

It was, like any war, a vicious affair that nobody could ever win.   “Look at him, sitting there glaring, like a fucking rattlesnake…”  I was waiting, on one level, for the day, at fifteen, when I stood up angrily and the D.U. actually cowered.  I was completely disgusted by his show of cowardice.  He was a big man, I was a skinny adolescent.  I guess part of his fear was knowing I had every right to take a swing at him.  I had the seat at the kitchen table right next to the door, and I often stormed out that door, while the war raged on.

After dinner, which almost always involved a screaming match and choking down the food on our plates, my father would often go to his bathroom in the basement.   He’d pause at the top of the stairs, as my mother became tense. “Irv, so help me, I’ll divorce you!” she would threaten, as a strained look came across his face.  

“Prepare…. for….” my father would begin, as the three of us raised our voices in protest, “gassing!”  He would then let loose a loud fart, chuckle, and head downstairs.  

“You’re a pig!” my mother would shout after him, not incorrectly.  

A half hour later my father would be in the Buick, driving out towards the tiny office of Nassau-Suffolk Young Judaea.  I can only imagine his thoughts as he headed east into the night.

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.  

Ecclesiastes 1:16-18; King James Version

“Nice,” said the skeleton, “I like a good biblical quotation frontispiece as much as the next dead guy.   Certainly there’s a more pretentious one you could select for this purpose:  the way of a fool is straight in his own eyes, but a prudent man harkens unto counsel, maybe.”  

Like a dog who returneth to his vomit, so is the fool who repeateth his folly.  

“I know you are, but what am I?” said the skeleton.  “Look, Elie, these are all well and good, if largely meaningless.  What was folly, to those comparing it to a dog eating his own vomit?   It was taking the Lord’s name in vain,  wearing improperly woven cloth, laboring on the sabbath, six hundred other things only an impious fool would do.  Many of them punishable by death under our merciful God’s own law.”

“‘Six days shall you labor and then, as I did, you shall rest on the seventh.  Don’t rest– you will be put to death.’    That’s why when you asked me if I wanted you to say kaddish for me after I died, I really didn’t give a shit.  Religion was a remnant of my dark, impoverished, abusive childhood.   I was forced to go pray by a woman who whipped me in the face every day, a very religious little woman she was, too.   I was about to finally be free of giving a shit about religion and everything else.  I could hardly muster a grunt, in answer to your question about saying kaddish, if you recall.”  

I do recall, it was mostly a shrug.  Sekhnet and I said kaddish for you for thirty days after you died.

“I know, and I was touched, even though I used to get a little dry chuckle, the only kind you get here with a mouthful of dirt, to see you praying without a yarmulke.  That was a nice touch, saying the old Aramaic prayer for the dead, without a minyan, without so much as a napkin for a skull cap.”  

I thought about that sometimes, but then, I realized you didn’t give a shit either.  

“People are funny, as Art Linkletter used to say, before his daughter stepped out of a high story window after taking some acid.   I guess he didn’t find people as funny after that,” said the skeleton.  “But, since you start with that somber quote from Ecclesiastes, what now, Elie?”  

I have been looking for insight here, something to illuminate and reclaim your life.   I haven’t quite found the organizing principle yet, but it has not been a fruitless search, not at all.  I’ve been surprised and encouraged by much of what I’ve learned.  

“You have to learn to teach yourself, the hardest trick in the world, particularly since the way of a fool is always straight in his own eyes and all that,” said the skeleton.  

We all stand on the shoulders of those who come before us.  You gave me a method, in your inimitable, often regrettable, way, by which to begin to learn to teach myself.   I eventually started to learn what I needed to know when I was a kid and had nobody to guide me.  

“You never came to me for advice,” said the skeleton.  

Can you blame me for that?  

“No,” said the skeleton, “I can’t blame you for that at all.  I was the last person who could give you any advice.”  

The most crucial advice I needed was what to do when you are being raised by an implacable adversary.  

“I know, and the implacable adversary was hardly the one to advise you on that particular concern,” said the skeleton.  “We have been over all this many times, and you have written about it here several times.   The ms. is now over a thousand pages, I would think, and it is time.  Time to cut some prime slices of it out and send it off, to get to the next stage of completing the book of my life.”

Agreed.

When my father was the director of Camp Tel Yehuda, Young Judaea’s summer camp in the heart of German Bund territory, along the Delaware River a few hours from New York City, he was sometimes called “Big Red.”   He was big, about six feet one, and heavy, over 230 or maybe even 240, at times.  He was red, as his sometimes severe psoriasis left his unscaled skin a sore, reddish hue.   He may have also had what they call rosacea, a condition that reddens the skin of the face.  

I heard him referred to as Big Red only once, by a friend of mine at camp who made the reference with a coy smile.   I smiled too.  Good name for him, I guess.   There was also a cinnamon flavored gum at the time called Big Red.  It came, unsurprisingly, in a red package, each slice wrapped in red paper.

Funny to think of it now, but at one time my father could have been called Big Red not for his rosy skin tone, but for his political views.   By the time he was an old man he was more concerned with holding on to what he had worked hard all his life to earn and keep than with the larger, unsolvable problem of social justice, but he never completely lost the impulse to identify with the weak, the marginalized, the oppressed.   He just passed that on to his children.

It struck me as ironic when it occurred to me the other day, but it makes perfect sense really, that my father’s biggest fear was probably the thought of my sister and me turning our backs on him for good.   As brutal as he often was in the nuclear family setting, he had a sentimental side, a longing for a close family.  I don’t call him sentimental to mock him, it’s a tribute to his human side, really, that he felt this desire for intimacy with his kids.   “Friends will come and go,” he told us, “but your family will always be around.  Your family is always there for you.”  This was an aspirational message, a kind of hopeful plea to us, to see him as he wished he could be.  As to his friends, he demonstrated the first part of this message a number of times while we were growing up.

As children, my sister and I watched a succession of our father’s closest friends go.  People we laughed with and felt very comfortable hanging out with — suddenly gone.  He reached a point where he did not hesitate:  with a single bold stroke he cut their heads off and threw them over the back of the boat, to the sharks, to whatever.   They disappeared without a trace.  Of this practice, my mother said “the fall from grace is swift and absolute.”   These people were never mentioned again, except when I’d bring up a name sometimes.

I argued with him about this brutal practice and he told me, often through gritted teeth, that I didn’t understand.  I didn’t understand.   I have since had several very close friends repeatedly show an ugly enough side, during particularly vulnerable times for me, followed by defiant non-repentance, that I finally had no hesitation to draw my sword, lop their hideous heads off, and shove their lifeless bodies over the side.  I do not look back on these lost friendships with any sentimentality.   I am neither proud of this nor embarrassed by it.  Friends extend each other the benefit of the doubt in a contentious world.  We forgive each other’s mistakes unless they become an uningnorable pattern.   When the benefit of the doubt is no longer there, there is no doubt what needs to be done.

“Well, Elie, that’s a sad thing and also a necessary thing, to cut a good friend loose once you can’t trust them.  It’s a matter of survival.  In a murderous world like the one you live in, if you can’t trust a friend to stand behind you without worrying about their twitchy knife hand mistaking your back for the common enemy, well, you’re a bit suicidal,” said the skeleton of my father.

I get that now, obviously.  When someone shows you consistent hostility, even if they apologize between hostile acts, getting away from them is the best you can do.  It’s addition by subtraction, your life is immediately better when you get away from someone who shits on your feelings and sucks at your energy and vulnerabilities like a thirsty vampire.  It’s easy to be seduced by reassurances from someone you like, until the evidence of their ill will is overwhelming, and even then, sometimes  you’ll continue to take it, in the name of some ideal or another.

Look, not that you ever apologized to me and my sister, but you would show us flashes of kindness and humor between brutal showdowns.  Like we discussed about the monsters we accept in our lives, the demons we wind up compromising with, they show us just enough tenderness, at strategic times, that we remain hooked.  Recognizing you have the right not to be treated badly, ever, is liberating even as it imposes a certain burden.  

“Well, that’s a convoluted way of saying it.  I get what you’re saying, though, and, yes, now that I think of it, I did live in fear of you or your sister completely repudiating me.   You had a right to.   I later saw that you were capable of doing exactly what I had done, coldly amputating a long time friendship when the anger it provoked reached a certain point.  I did much worse to you than any friend you eventually cancelled.   The idea that I had earned your enmity was frightening to me.”

You know, I got to a point with someone like Friedman, a very close friend for decades, where I realized we were surrogates for trying to work out traumatic life issues that had nothing to do with each other.   I came to see us as locked in an eternal, draining, completely counterproductive battle.  What was this battle over?  Our respective wars with our fathers.   I got to the point, finally, where I realized — “hey, this aggravating, neurotic, constantly carping, stubbornly insight-challenged fuck is not my father, though he consistently plays him in this relationship, I have no obligation to him whatsoever.”   It was like a flash of illumination when I realized it was important to resolve these issues with my own father, but not with some amateur actor doing a bad imitation of my angry old man.  

“Not a very flattering thing, to have someone like that play me in the movie, I have to tell you.  Outside of his obvious intelligence, I never understood your friendship with that neurotic gargoyle.”  

That’s the thing, we don’t recognize the psychic role our friends are playing in our lives sometimes, until things get ugly.   I had a friend who went into a rage against me because, it turns out, I had never praised his teaching.  I was flabbergasted when he accused me of that unforgivable crime.   I was just like his fucking father, I was shocked to learn, another prick  incapable of ever praising him.   This guy mistook me for his father for the years of our friendship, finally lashed out at me in a way he never could against his own father.    Amazing.

“You had a nice collection of gold-plated neurotics in your day,” said the skeleton.  

I went to high school with a musical genius, the only one I ever met, a true fucking genius, who had lived a tortured childhood.  I guess he lives a fairly tortured adulthood too, for all I know, we’re only rarely in touch, and only through emails about a piece of music I’ll send him from time to time.  He had a great line in a song about his painful childhood where he sings of “monsters I call my friends”.   When you grow up in a nuclear wasteland, all of your friends tend to be fellow mutants.  

“Fair enough,” said the skeleton.  “And, look, as we discussed, you scratch virtually anybody you know and you’ll find the irrational twitching, the jerry-rigged neural wiring, the overloaded circuits, the reflex to lash out, to flee.  We were fucking prey animals, Elie, homo sapiens, as your friend Harari points out, and in our communal terror we developed weapons and armies that make us the top predators on the planet.  We are still twitching prey animals, alert for threat, poised for fight or flight.”  

Friendship is a little oasis from that fear, a place where we can let our guard down, share things, exchange stories comfortably, recharge our batteries and our faith in our fellow humans.  When it stops being that, it’s not really friendship anymore.  It’s something else, a temporary safe zone where we can lash out without fear of being punched, maybe.  

“Until the clock runs out and the old friends are capable of punching each other’s faces,” said the skeleton.  

Yop.

“Well, you know, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, as a couple of vultures turned lazy loops in the picture postcard sky over his grave, “what I should have been doing, all those years, instead of justifying my insane rigidity, was developing some fucking insight.   Instead of understanding the importance of real intimacy with those I loved, and empathy, which makes every mercy possible, I was pushing an eternal agenda of self-defense, trying at all costs to make myself feel safe.  I was obsessed with being ‘right’.  That, I see now, is the mark of someone who will only become wise too late, if at all.”  

Better late than never, isn’t it?   

“Well, in my case, it was a few hours before I died, when I was trying not to be crushed by a lifetime of regrets.  How’s that for too fucking late?  Too late for your sister, who never heard a word of my regrets.  How could I tell her?  She just sat by me, knowing I was dying.  What could I say?   In your case, I don’t know, maybe because you always fought me…  I think it was a kind of shock to me how gentle you were in a way.  I mean, you had a right to be mean to me as I was trying to feel better about my misguided life at 2 a.m. the last night of my life.”  

Friedman asked me, right after you died, if I’d told you to go fuck yourself.  “Did you let him have it?” he asked.  I was completely bewildered by the question, I literally had no idea what he was talking about.   That room at the hospital where you died really was like the cathedral, or temple, that Eli’s cousin Shep Nuland described in How We Die.  I felt it, a kind of awe, as soon as I walked in.  I knew immediately that none of this was about me– it was about you.  

“Well, as a dying person that’s what you hope for, it turns out.   In our lives we often don’t see each other, we talk by rote, responding to what we think the other person is about to say, based on our past perceptions of the person rather than on what they are actually trying to say.  We often don’t hear each other, see each other, feel more than a shadow of what the other person is feeling.  You lie there dying, helpless at last, and you hope for the chance, once before you go, for someone just to really listen, to ask short follow-up questions when they don’t understand, to hear you.  I have to give it to you, Elie, I felt heard as I was trying to make my peace.”  

Luckily for both of us, I guess, I’d just reached a point in therapy where I truly grasped that if you could have done better, you would have.  I came to that point maybe a month or two before I got the call that you were about to die.  It wasn’t like I truly forgave you for being such a destructive father, but I really understood that it wasn’t my fault, or my pain to carry anymore, that you were a very damaged person.    I had started to learn to let go of my anger at the wasted potential of someone who was, in many ways, a very fine man.  

“Piece of shit as a father, perhaps,” said the skeleton, following the flight of the vultures with sightless eyes.  

Fair enough.   The thing is, a piece of shit who nonetheless instilled very important values in both of his children.   My love of animals, and connection to them, my anger at those who torture and kill them for fun or profit.   My hatred of racists and bigots of all kinds, as well as my reflex to oppose bullies.   My engagement with the world of ideas, with history, my love of conversation.  My love of soul music, Sam Cooke.   Animating themes of my life.  How do you reconcile those things: piece of shit father who taught me much of what I value most?  

“Well, there’s a fucking mystery for you, Elie.   I suppose that’s how the world works, really.   How much of it is clean, a fair transaction where both parties wind up with what they want out of it?  If you’re lucky, you get it once or twice in your life.  I only wish I’d had the insight to realize how important gaining real insight is.  Isn’t that what this book of me is really about?  You’re searching for insight, to put your own life, as well as mine, into perspective.”

I heard an interview with a former Marine sergeant who’d come back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD.   We think of that nonchalantly, oh, guy was in a war zone, his friends were killed, he killed a bunch of people, including a couple of children whose bodies he saw for the first time after he’d riddled them with bullets, yeah, naturally he’s got PTSD.   We say it like it’s nothing, a statistic, a problem.  But the individual who suffers from it is in very real agony, often puts a bullet in his own head.    

This Marine, TJ Brennan, recently wrote a book about invisible injuries, like his traumatic brain injury.  He tells Dave Davies “my tbi manifests in a very physical way for me, though it’s invisible to a lot of people, so it’s easy for people to discount invisible injuries…. they’re very, very real to the person suffering from them, like depression, or mental health problems.  They’re invisible to others, but they cripple your life.”   I heard this while biking down the beautiful Hudson river bike route to Sekhnetville.  I had to stop to make a note of it.  

“It struck you as a moment of insight.  Good for you.  I get it– you were abused as badly as a kid who gets the belt buckle every night but in a way that never left a mark on your body.   Same injury on your child’s soul, Elie, with the benefit that the person who inflicted it can say ‘you’re fucking insane, you little drama queen, I never laid a fucking finger on you.’  The same goes for anyone else you might try to complain to, whiner.”  

I have nothing to add to that, except for this great, insightful thing  I heard from the filmmaker who worked with Bill Genovese, the much-loved little brother of Kitty Genovese, as Bill doggedly worked through the brutal murder of his sister fifty years ago.   The result of their collaboration was a great documentary called The Witness.   They started off figuring it would be a six month project, maybe a year.  It took eleven years to complete.  

James Solomon, the filmmaker, lost his own older brother, the person he admired most in the world, at some point during the filming, giving him sudden, deep empathy with Bill Genovese’s obsessive quest to reclaim the life of the older sister who had loved him so much.  Her life had been erased by her horrific, sensationalized murder.  Bill, to the puzzlement of his family, was determined to get to the bottom of her murder, to remember and recreate her life, beyond her victimhood in the last moments of that life.   In a wonderful interview with Brooke Gladstone, Solomon says:

Over a half century this man is determined to reclaim his sister, her life, from her death.  What Bill does, in the film, is reveal a person that we all would feel, gosh, I really wish I knew her.   It’s, in my estimation, the ultimate love story.

“With all respect for you, Elie, you really have no idea what it’s like being a parent unless you’ve tried to raise kids,” said the skeleton of my father from his soft, shady grave at the top of the hill.   “You will never truly feel how much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have your child tell you to go fuck yourself.  I understand that it’s easy to dismiss some of the things I told you over the years– that you stared at me accusingly from your crib when we brought you home from the hospital, that you had a full blown, irrational temper tantrum at ten weeks — but, at the same time, there is some truth in those things.  

“It’s well-known that children are born with recognizable temperaments, there are easy babies and difficult babies.  Some kids are very fidgety, and fussy about food, and cry all the time.  You were like that.  Some kids are more relaxed, more placid by nature, and eat well and go to sleep easily and they are much easier to get along with.  Your sister was a much easier baby than you were.”  

All true.  And there are some kids who are quiet, eat well, go to sleep easily and are whipped in the face by their mothers for reasons unrelated to their otherwise easy-going little baby personalities.   There are parents who simply have no ability to resist whipping their kids in the face.  What happened to these people to make them so vicious?  We’d have to study the individual cases, but you’re aware that something horrible happened to them to make them that way.  

“Well, there’s no doubt about that.  But, unless you’ve actually tried to raise children, you don’t get it on a visceral level, which is the hardest part about being a parent,” said the skeleton.  

On some visceral level my experience being raised by two parents who were often angry, and clueless, and, shall we be delicate about it and say, sometimes a little strained in the empathy department, factored into my decision not to have children.  

“With the beautiful side effect that you can now pass judgment, from your theoretical high chair, on everybody who has done the difficult thing and raised kids.  I don’t think you and your sister turned out too badly, and I like to think your mother and I had something to do with that,” said the skeleton.  

No doubt.  I think we turned out pretty well too.  Look, that’s part of my exercise in writing this book.  An inventory of all the humanistic values you instilled so deeply in us both, while being, in many ways, beyond humane consideration much of the time when dealing with your wife and children.

 “You should let your mother speak for herself,” said the skeleton.  

Well, that’s true, but there’s a problem.  She was cremated.  

“What?!  When did this happen?!” said the skeleton.  

Keep your shroud on, dad.  It was after she died.  She told me several times that she wanted to be cremated.  I kept telling her she’d have to wait until after she died.  Not long before she died she told me she was worried about being eaten by bugs and worms after she died.  I told her not to worry, I promised her I wouldn’t let the worms eat her in a grave, and so my sister and I had her cremated.  

“So what are you saying?  That only a fucking skeleton can speak from the grave?”  

Look, dad, we both know this whole thing is bullshit.  My mother will have to speak for herself later.  I’m not running a haunted on-line journal here.   You and I are having the conversations we should have had decades ago, while you were still alive and vital and could have done something about the terrible regrets you died with.  

“Yeah, and if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.  The thing you don’t get about being a parent is that it is about the hardest job there is in the world. Your odds of getting it right?   A crap shoot, Elie, truly.  You think you know what you will do the first time your kid starts screaming at you in rage.  You have no idea what you will do.  All the issues from your own childhood are sitting right there at the table with you and your child.   I thought I did a great thing, not beating you and your sister when I was angry.”  

I think so too, nobody would have blamed you for smacking us, though I’d have called Child Protective Services, as I sometimes threatened to do.  

“Look, do you think Child Protective Services would have intervened in our house?  You were well-fed and well-clothed.  The house was safe, clean and comfortable.  Neither of your parents drank or took drugs.  Neither of your parents hit you.   What do you think the city worker would have said, after listening to your complaints about a father with two jobs who called you a fucking cobra, a rattlesnake, told you that your face, twisted and contorted with hate, was oozing hatred in the form of your teenaged acne?”

She would have smirked and told me to stop fucking whining and wasting the city’s time and resources on my piddling, chicken-shit complaints.  

“Right, which is not to say she would have been correct to do this, the point is that verbal abuse, in an otherwise unimpeachably wholesome home setting, does as much damage as a belt or a fist.   We’ve been over this many times, how subtle my ass-whupping techniques were.   Your sister, how old was she when she realized how much I’d tortured and damaged the two of you?”  

She told me she was forty before she saw it with any clarity at all.

“Well, that was a long free ride for me then, wasn’t it?  I blamed you two for everything.  I made you feel like you were an ingrate and a whiner when you complained about being emotionally roughed up.  To this day, you will have a hard time really convincing anyone that I’d been much of a monster.  ‘Ooooh, your father was mean to you…. oooh, he called you names…. ooooohhh….’  The fact is, as you and I both know, I was a monster.  But I was a smart monster, a clever monster, a persuasive monster well able to defend everything I did on high moral grounds.  It wasn’t me at all, it was my adversarial little asshole of a first born baby, a difficult baby, an angry and implacable baby…”

Well, I’ll give you that.  I was an angry and implacable new-born.  I recall, actually, before I could even see clearly, that I recognized you as the enemy and was determined to somehow destroy you.  

“Sure, make a joke, why not?  I’m dead, what the hell can I do about it?”

Same as when you were alive, I suppose.  We’ll pick this up later, I’m going to eat a pertater.

“Hasta la vista, Angry Baby!” 

“You know, to borrow this whining seventy year-old brat’s babyish analysis, which breaks the world neatly into winners and losers, I spent my life trying to be a winner while feeling the whole time like a giant loser.   It’s such an idiotic and inhuman way to look at the world, Elie, winner vs. loser, and a recipe for frustration for the vast majority of us, who are manifestly losers.” The skeleton settled back against his tombstone, regarding the lush foliage all around him.    

“Hey, this graveyard, for example.  I am buried at a prestigious spot on the top of the hill, under a shady canopy of enormous trees.   I can see my brother’s grave a few steps away.   We paid a lot for these prime spots over the years, I can’t do the math for you at the moment, but it was probably tens of thousands of dollars.  Our parents are buried in that section at the bottom of the hill, with poor drainage, where the small tombstones are jammed together like crooked teeth.  Those are pauper graves, dug in the cheap real estate, with no shade on a hot day, where members too poor to pay regular dues were buried.”  

“What does it mean to any of us buried here?  Hah.  To the living it means trudging across the boneyard to the bottom of the hill, walking a ways on the gravel road, and picking your way through the tightly packed graves, to go from my grave to my father’s.   You have to walk over the graves of other Jewish losers to stand where you can put a stone on my mother’s modest grave marker, or my father’s.”  

“I keep wondering about these winners, as you struggle to keep yourself on the right side of the mental health line.  Without money, I know what a struggle life is.  The closer you live to the poverty line, the more the world fucks with you on an hour to hour basis.  The money we left you could only last if you have no material expectations for a middle class life.  That’s never been a problem for you, I realize, living on a subsistence income, you’ve never done otherwise.   But to most people, it’s mystifying that you’d be satisfied, living in a land of plenty, and amid constant clamor for your consumer dollars, consistently denying yourself the pleasure of buying all the cool must-have shit they’re continually updating.  I guess that’s one good thing I did for you, somehow.”

I date it to when you and mom devised that draconian punishment after I disobeyed you and went to see Fail Safe with Michael Siegel.  No TV for a year, for a six or seven year-old, shit, maybe I was even younger.  That was the beginning of sitting in my room, thinking of myself as the protagonist of that Chekov story, though I hadn’t yet read it, where the young lawyer bets the banker he can stay alone, with no human contact, in a room with unlimited books, music and writing tools.  The banker bets him he can’t do it for five years, the lawyer offers to do it for fifteen.

“Ah, The Bet, a classic story of doubling down, which is what a glorious winner is supposed to do.   Taking on impossible odds casually, with elan. You remember that great moment in Cyrano where he arrives to defend his friend, told that a hundred swordsmen are waiting for him.   ‘I’ve been cheated, there are no hundred here!’ he grumbles as he begins to dispatch a few dozen men with swords.  Look, these stories are one thing.  Look at the real-life ‘winners’ you know, Elie…”  

You’re preaching to the choir, boss.   I see them in their hundred room mansions, being chased by the devil from room to room.  I’m like Zora Neale Hurston, I refuse to play a game designed to fuck people like me.  

“Well, you do seem to be constantly doubling down on that refusal…” said the skeleton.  “But look, the president you have now, the self-proclaimed biggest winner, wakes up every day at the crack of dawn, in a rage.  He wakes up snarling, doubling down on his idiotic promises, and snarls through the day.  ‘You’re gonna win so much, you’re going to be tired of winning, believe me, believe me.’  Not a very good advertisement for winning, a winner who wakes up mad every day.  But as we’ve noted often in these talks, the supposed role of rationality is overstressed in human affairs.  Much of life is pitched directly at our ids, a shameless play to our lower impulses.  When challenged for being wrong, a winner doubles down.”  

No argument here, dad.  The only question, really, is, if you’re doing something you believe is valuable, how do you share it, publicize it, get paid a living wage to do it.  

“Well, we’ve talked about this, Elie, this is where hard work and grit come into play.   Two things that have never really been your strong suit.    On the other hand, a shit load of money can relieve one of the need to work hard.  You can buy people to work hard for you.  Look at how Trump got those 70,000 or so votes that swept him to victory in the Electoral College, though he lost by more than thirty times that margin in the general election.   Social media played as big a role as the corporate mass media that gave him the billion dollars of free publicity.  

“One of Steve Bannon’s great strengths was analyzing and exploiting social media, playing those lonely, angry internet nerds and geeks like a vast, out-of-tune string section.   Trump’s team bought hundreds of bots in Singapore or somewhere over there to re-tweet his brilliant aphorisms.   Each bot would re-tweet the latest shard of glittering prose hundreds or thousands of times. This in turn spurred an army of trolls, emboldened by the million hits to their candidate’s latest semi-literate 140 character utterance, to take to social media and do what trolls do.  

“Look, I know you are revolted by faceBook, and I have to give it to you, that billionaire weasel who invented it, though he was on to something– monetizing the desire of people to connect to others– does appear to be your classic piece of shit.   Your hermit friend, the tortured, emaciated fellow you see in the library from time to time, has hundreds of close personal friends on faceBook.  By the looks of the way he clings to your company, he has only one friend, you, in real life, though to call your casual bumping into each other in the library a few times a year friendship might be stretching things.”  

A lot of things are stretched, dad.  An increasing number of things, more than I can explain.  Just in the twelve years since you died, brains have been radically rewired.  We are all like rats, hooked up to instant feedback machines.  I have a new phone, a genius, that gives me an alert beep any time anyone I know contacts me.  It is programming me to be an endlessly distracted, twitching rat.   I can turn off notifications, but then I might miss an email or text.  

“That would be a fucking tragedy, Elie,” said the skeleton, “I can see why you’d be reluctant to turn off notifications.   LOL!”  

It’s hard to explain.  When you were struggling with Mavis Beacon to learn typing, you found that software that translated speech to text.  It produced Mad Libs.  A few years later, I can talk into my phone and it flawlessly transcribes whatever I’m saying.  

“Ain’t dat some shit…” said the skeleton.  “How does this make your life better, actually?”  

You’re missing the point, dad.  This is the direction the fractured attention span of the world is going.  I can save valuable minutes, and my carpal tunnels, by just dictating my emails now.  It’s not about making my life better, actually, it’s about providing services that make it more convenient, tie me more inextricably to this little computer I carry in my pocket.  The better to know my habits, needs and preferences, the better to market to me. 

“They’re marketing to the wrong guy, Elie, we’ve just established what a shitty consumer you are.”  

OK.  That’s true.  But most people are perfectly suited for this kind of in your pocket continual reminder of the many, many great things money can buy.  And keeping in touch with the people they know, like my old friend who just sent me a beautiful video of the view from his kayak, shot ten minutes ago.

“Well, it’s nice that your friend can send you a nature video, that’s pretty cool, but the rest reflects the tragedy of misguided mankind right there.   The complete triumph of ever more invasive capitalism.    What’s the latest thing?  Want to search for images of naked ladies in a private browser that doesn’t record your searches?   Google now makes you sign in, so they can know if you like black chicks, or Asians, small ones, gigantic ones, young ones or old ones.  This is important information for those who pander to your id.   To those who pander best, go the spoils.  Expert pandering is the difference between winning or losing.”  

Thanks, as always, for the insight, dad.  I’ll catch you next time.  

“Be there, or be square, baby,” said the skeleton, with what might have been a wink.

“You awake now, Elie?  You snooze you lose, time is money, chop chop!” said the skeleton of my father gaily.    

Yeah.  Let’s go harvest the ducats, father.

“While you were sleeping, I was thinking.  I may have your theme here.  We had a lifelong argument over whether people could change their natures in a significant way.   You’ve written about that controversy here, but how ’bout you wrap the whole story in that fundamental question?   It’s bullshit that people can change themselves in any meaningful way vs. it’s essential that tormented people change themselves.  We went hundreds of rounds on this question.”  

Yes, and I can make a vigorous case for both sides at this point.  If you’re talking on the level of our essential DNA, our genetic predispositions, our body type, our immediate reflexes to react one way or another, there is only so much we can change.  

“OK, fine, but that’s not the point.  You were talking about moral growth, something I gave a lot of lip service to while I was strafing you and your sister over flank steak and rice-a-roni and telling you, through gritted teeth, that you were going to lose the war.  I think what you were hammering at was the need to develop self-critical insight and what I was defending against was the same thing.  You can’t keep machine gunning your children once you realize what you’re doing.  I had to insist I was right, you see, because my entire personal life was defending myself against the terror of who I thought I was.   No matter how much outward security I had, no matter how much status I achieved, I was always the dumbest, and poorest, Jewish kid in Peekskill — and a physically and emotionally abused one at that.”  

Still unthinkable to me.  Poor, I get that, and I have no doubt of the deep scars poverty leaves.  The physical and emotional abuse is beyond question. But the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill still sounds like an insane statement.   

“I could tell you more, but do you really want to veer from the work you might be able to get a  handle on today?” said the skeleton.  

Well, just to say that my theory is that you started school behind the eight ball, a year behind at least since you had to learn English while your little classmates laughed at you.  I also think your 20/400 vision was probably not discovered until after you were placed with other slow kids who couldn’t read.   In Peekskill 1930 I think the class was probably designated “The Retards Class” and the teacher probably addressed you all as such.  But you graduated Syracuse with honors and finished graduate studies at Columbia.  Isn’t there a scale where you weigh these factors and realize you couldn’t have been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill?  

“Well, that’s a fair question.  I’d say it takes some insight to connect the obvious dots like that sometimes.   That’s what our argument over change boils down to, the quest for insight and exploring possibilities vs. insistence that grim reality is immutable.  My failure was a failure of imagination and a lack of faith that anything could really change.  My life experience was that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how comfortably we lived, no matter how many people applauded me when I spoke, it made no difference.  Every night my demons were waiting for me, their pitchforks glowing red hot.   You see, that’s part of the whole pathology  of an adult who takes it out on his kids.”  

“It was easy for me to use the two of you as intellectual and emotional punching bags.  You two were always punching way above your weight class.  You remember Eli telling you about me getting angry at you one day, you must have been four or five, and I came over to menace you.  You said “Oh, big man, going to hit a little kid…” and Eli cracked up, as did mom and everyone else who heard it, and I lost my chance to smack you.”  

Well, to your credit, you were never much of a hitter.  Mom hit us more often than you did, or at least she hit me.  

“Yes, that’s true, but as we discussed, verbal violence, emotional abuse, is as damaging as a belt buckle or a fist.  Both attack your soul, your sense of personal safety, of ever feeling protected.  Abuse fundamentally alters your DNA, as that brilliant and striking pediatrician described in that TED talk you saw.  

“What causes one person to grow up and replicate that abuse and another to become a defender of the abused?   See, that’s a mysterious question, Elie.  Every abuser was once abused– you have that great George Grosz quote to that effect:  ‘to understand how a man can brutalize his fellow men you must study how he was brutalized’ or however he said it.  You can say, as I might have, that certain people are predisposed to a more heroic outlook than others, or that luck plays a role — something hard to deny, accident of birth, fortuitous meeting, wise mentor, and so forth — or you can say that each of us has the capacity to develop insight, to live more wisely, with less pain.”

Three large vultures soared over head.  The skeleton and I turned to watch them.  

“You know, as I was dying I thought what a shame it was that it would have to wait until after I was dead, if ever, to have this kind of conversation with you.  It’s easy to be a philosopher when you’re dead, Elie.  When we are alive, sometimes, it’s just one big fight, as your friend Albert King described his life of hard luck and trouble.”  

One of the vultures swung low, opened his curved beak and let out what sounded like a mocking laugh.  

“Fucking bird, what does he know?” said the skeleton.  “Carrion eating motherfucker!”

“Look, Elie, I know you have to leave momentarily or you’ll be late for your lunch date, but consider this organizing principle.   The difficult and unrecognized change you were forced to make in yourself in order to accommodate my refusal to change, even acknowledge the possibility of it.  It will take a bit of art, to avoid making this sound self-serving, how, as I was dying, I admitted you were right and I’d been a ‘horse’s ass’.  And, yeah, obviously, I also have no idea whose ass I pulled that ‘horse’s ass’ phrase out of.  I think it’s a good theme, that and well illustrated by how you were able to be so mild as I tried to make some kind of amends the best I could that last night of my life.”  

The lazily swooping vulture was now close enough that I could see his red face clearly.  It was not a good looking face in any way that I could see.   On the other hand, if I don’t get up and into the shower right now, I will be late for lunch.  

“Don’t be late for lunch, Elie, we’ll pick this thread up next time.”