Category Archives: book of irv

Example of the mechanism of unconscious rage

“You know, some people, and I was one of them, as I can see clearly now, are so full of rage that it seeps out whether they intend it to or not.  In cruel humor, in merciless sarcasm, in turning away at exactly the right moment, refusing to answer or make eye contact.  Mostly, I suppose, in a complete refusal to see the thing from the hurt person’s point of view,”   said the skeleton of my father from his grave a stone’s throw from quiet Cortlandt Road just north of Peekskill.  

“I’d have to say that’s the most powerful and effective way to do it– wait until someone is hurt and then simply coolly and methodically negate whatever they say to try to express it.  Works every time, Elie, as you know.” 

Works, of course, as far as effectively causing severe pain, is what you mean.  

“Well, sure, that’s the whole point of righteously raging, to inflict harm on someone who desperately needs harming,” said the skeleton.  “Like I said, the beauty part is that it often oozes out with no conscious awareness that you are expressing rage.  When the other person starts whining, you can be righteously indignant instead of sympathetic, since you are truly not aware of having done anything hostile.  Your righteous indignation will greatly increase the harm you are inflicting.”  

Wow, I see the great advantage in that.  If your goal is to be an unaccountable asshole who can spew rage at anyone at any time for any reason.  

“OK, you’re being mocking.  But why not just transcribe that little poem you scrawled in your notebook on the A train the other night?”

I will give no quarter
there is nothing
you can say
that will force me
to see things
from your point of view
I will stand firm
I will win
even if this battle
kills us both

“You got that exactly right, Elie.  I don’t know if it’s a poem, just because you put it on lines, but it hits the mark, I think.   An enraged person would literally rather kill and be killed than back down from rage.  If not physically, and murderous rage is the province of psychotics, or whatever you want to call them, then certainly verbal rage kills psychologically, psychically.  It kills all trust and kindness in the relationship, and any future we may have as friends or family, to utterly negate your right to express what I refuse to let you express.  Phew, that’s hard stuff.”

The icing on the cake of rage is the refusal afterwards to take responsibility for the damage your anger has caused.  That’s the beauty of what Harry Shearer calls the if-pology.  “IF your weak ass feelings felt bruised, if you are such a contemptible weakling that you need to hear it from me, THEN, I’m sorry you are so weak and needy and I apologize for whatever it is you think I did to you– from the bottom of my heart, you needy fucking pussy.”  

“The cherry on top, certainly,” said the skeleton.  “Read that little coda to your subway ‘poem’ the other day, tough guy.”

As for
your expression
of guilt later,
I have
little good use
for it
might as well
keep it for yourself,
you will need it later
anyway

“An expression of guilt, without remorse… nice thing to lay on somebody you just did something shitty to, I need you to help me feel like a good person, I feel so guilty… though I’ll do the same thing next time… and feel just as guilty next time, because I’m a really good person…” the skeleton watched a couple of crows wrangling over by the sole mausoleum in the bone yard.

“Well, I don’t know how far you’ve come from your days as an enraged infant, an enraged seven year-old, an enraged adolescent, an enraged thirty year-old… we have no way to measure such progress, really, since you can’t see directly into a person’s heart….”  

Don’t ask my neighbors in this apartment building about the late night tourettics of their misogynist, klansman neighbor…  

“Yeah, well, if a man doesn’t have a right to scream obscenities at the top of his voice in the middle of the night– what rights does a man have, Elie?  The bigger question for me, I suppose, is how, after literally decades of raging at you, you were able to be as kind as you were to me as I was dying.  I mean, if anyone had a right to be a little snide, or sarcastic, or cruel, let us say, it would have been you.  I certainly gave you openings when I lifted the whip over myself about what a clueless, heartless, obstacle strewing horse’s ass I’d been to you and your sister.”  

Funny, that ‘horse’s ass’– I never heard you use that phrase in your life, yet you used it several times to describe yourself in the last conversation of your life.  

“Well, I knew I was being recorded for posterity, I suppose, and didn’t want to strew things like ‘complete fucking asshole’ and ‘fucking merciless dick’ and things like that across the official record.”

Understandable.  As for my mildness as you were expressing regrets that would only be extinguished by your fast approaching death… I had spent years getting to that point.   I had no desire anymore to be the word-slinger who could outdraw any witty asshole and shoot them to the ground.  You know what you call that kind of virtuoso?  A witty asshole.  I didn’t want to win an argument at that point, particularly an unwinnable argument.  I just wanted to be respected and heard.   I suppose if I had any hope at all as I drove to the hospital that last night, I would have hoped to hear what I heard– my father finally taking responsibility for what a tragically, senselessly destructive father he’d been.

“Well, you got a bit of that, I think,” said the skeleton quietly.

Yop.

My Uncle’s Draft Obituary

Sekhnet recently came across some folders I took from my uncle’s filing cabinet after he died.  I was delighted to find the folder with the dementedly detailed obituary he’d handed me in the living room of his recently departed brother’s condo to place in the New York Times, the one I instead placed on a table after skimming the first few paragraphs glorifying their grotesque childhood in Peekskill.

I was relieved to find it and placed it somewhere safe where it is now hiding, probably in plain sight.  Sekhnet brought me the folders the other day, but that piece was not among the papers, 99% of which are bound for the shredder.  This was there instead, an earlier draft, no doubt, and much more svelte.  I have added a few footnotes with corrections.

Draft Obituary for Irving I. Widaen

Irving I. Widaen [1], a career New York City educator who helped develop student programs of inter-racial understanding, died Thursday, April 29 at Northwest Medical Center, Margate, Florida, of cancer of the liver.  He was 80.  

A former resident of Flushing, New York, he had retired to Coconut Creek, Florida.  Burial was in the cemetery of the First Hebrew Congregation, Peekskill, New York, where Mr. Widaen was a continuous member.  

Mr. Widaen was born June 1, 1924 in Manhattan and moved as a child to Peekskill, New York.   He graduated from Peekskill High School in 1941 and soon after served in the U.S. Air Force as a crew chief [2] stationed in the U.S. and abroad.  Following his discharge from the service he enrolled in the Maxwell School of Public Affairs [3] where he received a bachor (sic) of arts degree.  He received a master of arts degree in American history at Columbia University and pursued doctoral studies as a student of noted historians Henry Steele Commager and Richard Hofstadter, among other faculty.

He taught history at the Manhattan Vocational Trade School [4] and Martin Van Buren High School and won the esteem of many high school students.  He subsequently moved to the headquarters of the New York City Board of Education, served as Coordinator of pupil personnel guidance programs [5], specializing in the design and implementation of school programs promoting inter-racial understanding.  He developed sensitivity workshops, using team building, and humor approaches helping acrimonious student factions to understand and resolve their racial animosities.

During his years at the Board of Education and following his retirement from the Board, he served as Director of the Nassau/Suffolk region of Young Judaea, a national Zionist youth group.  He later went on to direct Young Judaea’s national summer program, administering their senior camp, Tel Yehuda at Barryville, New York.  In his capacity as camp director, he traveled extensively throughout the U.S. recruiting youth for the camp program. [6]

With a partner he met at Tel Yehuda [7], he opened the first Glatt Kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens [8] which he operated for several years before retiring with his wife, Evelyn [9], to Coconut Creek, Florida.  In Florida, both he and his wife served as reading/teaching mentors in the Broward County school system.  

Mr. Widaen had a life-long commitment to the welfare of children and youth, social justice, animal rights, and the environment.  He loved animals and he and his wife always kept a dog as a pet.  He had a keen interest in sports, reading, current events, and traveled extensively with his wife throughout the U.S.

At his funeral service, Daniel Neiden, a family friend [10] conducting the service, noted: (insert major brief comments regarding Irv’s life) [11].

My uncle then lists the surviving family, whose names I omit to preserve their privacy.

NOTES

[1]  The “I.”, we learned while preparing his gravestone, should have been an “A.” because it stood for Azrael.  Irv was named after his  maternal grandfather, already deceased by 1924.   We were always told his name was Israel I. Widaen, but that was not so.  His parents had both been illiterate in English, so there you go.

[2] The highest rank the ‘crew chief’ attained was corporal, as far as I recall, though it’s possible he had been promoted to sergeant by the end.  His crew maintained the Army’s air craft.  A man with no discernible mechanical skills, he got his job, he said, because he could read the manuals to the more skilled mechanics when they ran into trouble they could not fix with mechanical talent alone.  

[3] The Maxwell School was apparently part of Syracuse University.

[4] He taught Junior High School social studies there, if memory serves, at the school where he met long-time friend, and eventual enemy, Harold Schwartzappel.

[5] His title at the Human Relations Unit of the Office of Intergroup Relations was “Coordinator of Pupil Programs”.  

[6]  He went on to become national director of Young Judaea.  He served in that capacity for several years, while also directing the summer camp.  When he asked for pay commensurate with the year-round double job, the wealthy volunteers of Hadassah who oversaw Young Judaea made a counter-offer– less money than his combined salaries.   He left their employ somewhat embittered.  When he died they immediately solicited donations in his name, the heartless bitches.

[7] Benjie Lang, surrogate son and life-long friend.  

[8]  Tain Lee Chow  

[9] this first mention of his sister-in-law may indicate that the strong dislike my mother felt for my uncle was not entirely unrequited.

[10] Neither of my parents ever met Mr. Neiden until my father’s funeral, at which time only my mother had a chance to form any impression of him. She agreed he had a beautiful singing voice and had read the eulogy I’d written wonderfully.  He did a similar lovely service at my mother’s unveiling six years later.  

[11] presumably a few lines from my eulogy of my father.

Too self-evident to say

“You know, one side of me was always angry that you were trying to force me to say what was too obvious to need saying.   Maybe there was a point to your demand.  It changes the conversation to say that the only reason to oppose an anti-lynching law is because you want the right to keep lynching people.”

“Mah constituents will not be bound by a federal anti-lynching law, suh, nor will ah betray them by voting for one!”  

“But everyone should have openly and repeatedly said what those people were demanding  — the right to murder and terrorize.”

A Life Summarized — the skeleton protests

“Leaving aside the enormous hubris of your project of writing the definitive biography of me,” said the skeleton of my father, “let’s put the shoe on the other foot, shall we?  How would you like your life summarized the way you’re trying to do with mine?”  

I would hope the summary would start off at 800 pages or so and get boiled down to a rich, flavorful reduction of about 300.  I’d hope it would be written by somebody who had a right to hate me but who loved the best of me nonetheless.  That it would highlight things like my sense of humor, my almost conceited sense of humility, my inviolable sense of fairness and relative openness to a well-reasoned argument against my position, that I tried my best to practice what I preached, treated people the way I’d like them to treat me, listened well and things like that.  If all that was in there, fine, then, add in my inability to make a living, my self-righteous streak, my exasperatingly inexplicable procrastination, my poor housekeeping, my tendency to get very angry when I’m being fucked against my will, the torrent of unconscionable words that fly out of my mouth when I’m in that state.  

“As if your overflowing toilet bowl of a mouth were your worst flaw,” said the skeleton.  “Look, all I’m saying is it’s very easy for you to sit there, living a penurious life off the money I worked hard for and left you, tapping out this critique of my life.”  

It’s very easy for me.  Clearly.  I finished the entire job in about twelve hours, done.  Sent the randy little tramp over to the agent who sold it, tarted it up a bit more, to the publisher, who assigned a marketing expert editor to make the whole thing a bit more titillating.  Yes, very easy for me, dad.  

“You know very well that’s not what I mean.   Look, for one thing, you’ve never endured the ultimate test of a person– parenthood.  Until you’ve faced the challenges of raising a child, how can you really judge somebody who has?” said the skeleton.    

I’ll give you a half of a point for that one.  And while I’m giving points, I’ll point at six terrible parents we both know, nightmare parents who destroyed their children utterly.   And let’s not forget the loving, excellent parents who did everything right and raised children who turned out monstrous in one way or another.   Look, there’s four of those perfect parents, right over there.   Is how good a parent you are really the ultimate test of what kind of human being you are?  Maybe so, I’d have to think about it, I really don’t know.  Surely, though, it’s a bit feeble as a critique of your definitive biographer, that he never raised children, don’t you think?

“I don’t know.  I’m just defending myself here, as anyone having their portrait carved for eternity would.   I suppose if you don’t call this my ‘authorized biography’ I really have no right to complain.  You are giving me a voice here, which is pretty sporting of you, I have to admit.  I just… it’s just the idea of someone writing the definitive story of my life.  It just hit me and I had sort of a ‘what the fuck?’ moment.  You know, who died and made you king biographer?”  

You did, pops.  

“Stop with the ‘pops’, would you?  You never said it when I was alive and it’s a bit of an affectation, wouldn’t you say?  It comes off as disrespectful too, and undermines your credibility.”  

If you say so, pops.  

“Fuck off, then, you little wise ass, and transcribe my brother’s draft obituary, better.  Would you do that?”  

Sure, I’ll do it right now.  

“Yeah, just like you’ll take the garbage out.  I told you, with a pained smile, how pleased I was that you never gave me shit about taking the garbage out.  You remember that?  Every time I asked you if you’d taken the garbage out you told me very pleasantly that you hadn’t yet, but that you would do it.  Service with a smile.  Except I always wound up taking the garbage out myself.  Didn’t I?”  

I took it out a few times.  Plus, I almost always dragged the empty garbage cans back to the side of the house the next day.

“You’re a fucking piece of work, Elie.”  

Aren’t we all, dad?

Enraged Asshole

“Well, look, Elie, rage is the most terrifying and destructive human emotion.  We can all relate to that, I suppose, from both sides.  Horrible as it is to be the recipient of rage, rage unleashes a phantom surge of powerfulness, but really, as we’ve discussed, rage is a response to intolerable powerlessness.  Real rage comes from the deepest shame.  

“We can’t bear shame, which is intensely painful, so we lash out.  We can’t strike at the thing that causes us shame, most of the time, so we find someone weak to attack, someone we can beat to a fucking pulp.  Something that can’t kill us after we smash it in the face.  That’s why most people reserve rage for their loved ones.

“You have it in national politics now, the politics of rage and shame, a response to enforced powerlessness.  People are angry, for many reasons, many of them valid.  You live in a country where you’re now forced to buy private health insurance.  You buy it.  You’re having chest pains, left arm hurts, your doctor advises you to get to an Emergency Room.  You present your insurance card at the ER.  A month later a bill comes for many thousands of dollars– your sole responsibility to pay.  

“The contract you signed with your insurance company informs you quite clearly, on page 75, that where your insurance is accepted is a matter you are solely responsible to determine before accepting any medical services, even if you are on a stretcher, or unconscious, even if you’re admitted to the hospital as a cardiac patient.  There are a million aggravating things like that for most people in a hundred areas of American life.  

“So you rage.  You are powerless.  You don’t have an army of millionaire lobbyists making laws for your benefit and protection.  That power belongs to the super wealthy ‘persons’ called corporations.  Period.  Work for a corporation and you may be OK in certain ways, although you will also be subject, many times, to the arbitrary will of a powerful psychopath.  Work for yourself?  Better have a lot of money before you start out on that path.  

“Anyway, there is a tremendous amount of free-floating rage out there in America.  You see it immediately as soon as you get behind the wheel of a car.  Some of your fellow drivers clearly don’t give a fuck if you, or they, die.  You can read about it in the paper every day, more Americans shot to death.  Road rage.  Disputes that get out of hand.  It’s not the guns that kill people, of course, Elie, it’s the rage.  A law against rage?  Hah!  Fuck you!

“Anyway, you have to get outside now, so I’ll leave you with this.  The president you have now is a brand, like all of them are, like President Hope and Change was.  This guy’s brand is anger, anger and winning.  He is angry about everything, always, even when he wins.  He’s angry that millions of dead Mexican rapists fraudulently voted against him, depriving him of a victory in the popular vote that the media fraudulently claims he lost.  What is his solution?  He momentarily fixates and rages.  An angry denier, perfect man to lead the greatest nation the world has ever known, wouldn’t you say, Elie?”

The cancerous, zombie chickens of American Exceptionalism coming home to roost, dad.

The New Feudalism

“So, you seem unduly upset to be living under a new feudalism.  That’s really as silly as a serf back in the middle ages being upset about it.  It’s the world you live in, Elie, much as it might chafe your ass to pay fealty to the legally created psychopaths that are your lord and master.  Pay your bills and be quiet,”  said the skeleton of my father from his grave outside of Peekskill.  

“On the other hand, you really should write up your insight about the nuts and bolts of how the new feudalism actually works, on the ground.  I like that idea about contract law replacing constitutional rights, but I didn’t go to law school, you did.” 

It hit me the other day, the actual mechanics of how this new feudalism actually works. Current contract law trumps many of our other rights as consumers in the American market place.  In corporatocracy, corporations dictate the terms of all contracts, making them favorable to themselves, disabling the consumer to the fullest extent allowable by laws they lobby for, while retaining an outsized voice in how those contracts are construed by courts– or even if a consumer has a right to take the contract to court.  I give our accomplished Chief Corporatist John Roberts a lot of the credit for this, as I will elaborate on in a moment.  

Students in civics class learn that our rights as U.S. citizens flow from our original contract with our government, the Constitution.  The constitution enumerates the rights and responsibilities of every citizen, and every branch of government, under our laws.  Every law we are subject to must pass Constitutional muster, in other words, must not infringe on rights guaranteed to us as U.S. citizens.   The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what is constitutional and which laws must be struck down as unconstitutional, as every American student learns.

“The little inside joke of all this, of course, is that a group of lawyerly men appointed for life, joined in recent decades by a few lawyerly women, decide, unappealably, what rights of yours a white man is bound to respect,” said the skeleton.

Indeed.  You had a century where the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted to protect the rights of newly freed former slaves, was not enforced.  The Supreme Court ruled, a decade after the end of the Civil War, that ‘the day of the Negro as the special favorite of the law is at an end.’  

“Well, you know, favoritism has always been frowned on in this country, especially for those who don’t deserve it, especially by those who don’t have to worry about such things,” said the skeleton.  

There was, as you know, never even a federal anti-lynching law, even the revered FDR couldn’t sign it.

“He had to put it in a drawer, the pocket veto, as they call it, he’d have lost all the swing-voting klansmen Democrats of the South who voted for his New Deal if he’d taken control of their Negros away from them,” said the skeleton.

Naturally, we’ve had any number of pieces of shit serve on the Supreme Court over the years.  There’ve been some good ones, some smart ones, some mediocre ones and some outright foul pieces of shit.  

“That’s democracy, you take your political appointees as you find them,” said the skeleton with a noncommittal shrug.

So here’s what I realized the other day.  The bulk of our rights under law are controlled by the terms of the one-sided contracts we sign with the corporations who provide services to us.  We are routinely required to sign a take it or leave it agreement before we can receive virtually any service from a corporation.  

There used to be a doctrine in the law that you cannot sign away, in a contract, a right you have under the law.  There was also something, also considered quaint today, called a contract of adhesion.  The contract of adhesion was a take-it-leave-deal imposed by a powerful party on a party with no bargaining power.  Courts at one time could throw out such contracts on the grounds that they were contracts of adhesion.

I was looking for that case you told us about, where parents of Ivy League graduates had sued to get their tuition money back on the grounds that the university had broken an implied promise to impart wisdom, enlightenment and good character to their spoiled children.

“Why do you assume the children were spoiled bastards just because their wealthy, litigious parents tried to weasel out of paying for their Ivy League educations?” said the skeleton.  

I’m a hater, dad.  When it comes to litigious rich fucks, I simply lack basic tolerance.

“Not very Christian of you, son,” said the skeleton.

No.  Anyway, searching in vain for the case, and the judge’s great language, I came across a law review note, written by a graduating law student, analyzing the law. It was written in 1976, when the doctrine of contract of adhesion was still something courts took seriously, and contains a good definition of a contract of adhesion, to wit:

One contract doctrine working in favor of the student-plaintiff is that of contracts of adhesion.44   This doctrine cuts against the general rule of freedom of contract and allows a court to refuse to enforce contracts that are excessively one-sided. “Standardized contracts .. .drafted by powerful commercial units and put before individuals on the ‘accept this or get nothing’ basis are carefully scrutinized by the courts for the purpose of avoiding enforcement of ‘unconscionable’ clauses. ’45 … While the doctrine is most often applied when there is a near monopoly on a supply of goods or services,” it has also been applied when there is what could be called a “de facto monopoly”-a large number of suppliers offering the same harsh terms. (source)

In contract law there is supposed to be a ‘meeting of the minds’ between the parties, some kind of ‘mutuality’, particularly if the parties are of unequal power. Each party, in classical contract law, must give the other some concession, called ‘consideration’, in order to make the contract legally binding.  The legal niceties of constitutional case law are complicated and boring, but the dispute turns on the precise technicalities of each of these ‘terms of art.’

“Okay, you completely lost me, Elie.  I’m with Shagsbee– first thing we do, kill all the lawyers,” said the skeleton.  

Well, that sounds like a good start, but, as always, the devil is in the details.  Also, of course, that character Shakespeare has say that is a villain who wants all the lawyers out of the way so he and his friends can ride roughshod over the populace without lawyers taking action to enforce inconvenient laws.

A concrete example, then.  John Roberts was a well-paid corporate attorney and a very accomplished lawyer before becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  One of his great innovations as a high-priced corporate lawyer was the ‘arbitration clause’ which became standard for contracts with large corporations.  In consideration of being provided such and such service, the customer agrees to forego the normal right to take the corporation to court and instead must participate in arbitration in the event of any dispute.   

It seems like a small thing.  Arbitration is faster than a lawsuit, it is designed to expertly resolve particular issues that would fall within a contract dispute.  

“What happened to my right to sue?” asks the consumer who now has one less arm as a result of the services received from the corporation.

“You waived that right, explicitly, right here,” says the lawyer, pointing to the applicable language in the contract.  

“But this is obviously an unconscionable contract of adhesion I was forced to sign. Any judge should strike the whole thing down.   Plus, I thought I can’t waive any legal right I have by signing a clause hidden in a twenty-five page mouse type contract,” protests the injured consumer.

“Tell me about it,” says the lawyer.  

“So, nu?” says the wounded customer.  

“The arbitrator doesn’t care about any of that, in fact, the arbitrator has no authority to even hear you complain about it,” says the lawyer.  

“What the fuck?” says the consumer.  

“You make a valid point,” says the lawyer, as the billable minutes tick off on the clock.  

In addition to things like John Roberts’ arbitration clause, we now have the provision in virtually every contract, that if a court finds any single provision, or even multiple provisions, of the contract unenforceable, the rest of the provisions of the contract remain in full force and effect.  

“Full force and effect,” says the lawyer, now also missing an arm and part of one leg.  

In the very rare event that your important federal case eventually gets up to the Supreme Court, guess who at least two to four of the justices will rush to defend?

“Wait,” said the skeleton, “I know.  The legally created fictional ‘person’– the psychopathic corporation.  Am I right?”

As right as you get to be today, old man.

A Genteel Taste of Poverty

“OK, while we’re on the subject, and since there will no doubt be a detailed chapter of my life story about poverty, a subject I am an expert on, let’s dance this one out a bit, shall we?” the skeleton of my father said, extending a bony hand in a courtly gesture to a dance partner.  

“You have never lived in poverty, let’s stipulate to that from the beginning.   You grew up in a cozy little house, not far from winding, tree-lined streets with mansions on both sides.  You’ve been ‘broke’ many times, as they say, by choice– thinking of yourself as some kind of artist for the first half of your life– and although you avoided it until the age of 40, you have been in debt, like most Americans, for a third of your life now.   The ‘poverty’  you’ve experienced is the elected poverty of a privileged middle class person, you have had only a whiff, the smallest possible nibble of the bitter thing that is poverty in the richest nation in history.”  

That nibble has been enough for me, continues to be more than enough for me.  

“I don’t dispute that, Elie, I’m just pointing out at the start that being treated like a powerless asshole– which all Americans in our corporate culture pretty much are, let’s be brutally honest about it, shall we?– is only one part of the horror of poverty.  You focus on that because you are being fucked around by the embattled Welfare State in terms of not receiving adequate medical care and so forth, the many long battles you’ve had to even learn what rights you actually have under your beloved Obamacare, and finding out you have virtually no rights a white man is bound to respect is maddening, I understand.  But you experience but one of the many torments of poverty, I assure you.

“If the so-called War on Poverty had been fought with anywhere near the zeal and expense of the War on Drugs, or, God forbid, the War on Terror, it could have been won generations ago.  Some presidential wit, it may have been that bright bulb Reagan, announced that the War on Poverty was over, that Poverty won.  He was as good as his word, though it would fall to another popular Republican president, Bill Clinton, to truly make good on those words.  

“I know some of your readers will take exception to this, good liberals that they are, but our first black president, as he was then called, the Honorable William Jefferson Clinton, was like that fisherman Malcolm X talked about.  Not everyone who throws food to the fish is a friend of the fish, Brother Malcolm said, sometimes that food is on the end of a sharp hook, tied securely to a line and fishing pole.

“Refer your liberal friends to the right wing legislation the charismatic compromiser Dollar Bill Clinton signed:  Welfare “Reform”,  NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall after lucrative corporate mergers illegal under that FDR-era law– lucrative, economy-crashing mergers it would cost the taxpayers a trillion to bail out,  “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, the later overturned Defense of Marriage Act that banned homosexual marriage, the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill that fueled the privatized prison industry and led to even more mass incarceration of the poor.  Anyone can ask Jeeves about Clinton’s conservative accomplishments, they are legion.”

Jeeves is gone, dad, nobody knows anything about Jeeves any more.  That Ask Jeeves search engine is long gone.  You should just say “google it”.  

“Well, you can ask Jeeves about that, I suppose.  I don’t really stay up to date about technology.  I’ve been dead for twelve years you know, as of this April 29th.  Might be a good deadline to fix, the twelfth anniversary of my untimely passing, to have some publishing irons in the fire.  You’ve got to eat a pound of dirt before you die, Elie, and a writer has to eat a pound or two of rejection letters before beginning to collect the ducats and the literary prizes.”  The skeleton of my father nodded, to emphasize the indisputable truth of these statements.  

Yes, sir.  Consider it done, April 29th is my deadline to have literary irons in the fire.  

“You want a gentle taste of poverty?  You tell  your closest friends, middle class people living decent middle class lives, some of the horrors of the medical mistreatment you’ve received under Obama’s compromise with the powerful corporations that provide medical services to Americans at two and three times the cost the rest of the industrialized world pays.   You begin to describe the latest horror and they cut you off, say you told them already.  They get it.  It may be a different horror story entirely, there is no shortage of detail and new detail, but they get it, they can only hear it as part of the same unlistenable song, which it also is.  Yes, the latest, sharpest, galling bone in your throat, to you, but to them– the same distressing bone.  You made a poor choice not working hard and buying a decent home and having decent health insurance provided through your work.  Now you want their sympathy because you’re too good to live a life like the one they all chose?  

“Here, in a word, is the most destructive part of poverty, something you’ve tasted in the most diluted form, corrosive as that taste may have been to you: hopelessness.  Try that on for a couple of days, the feeling that nothing you do, no matter how hard you work, will make the slightest difference in your life or in the life of anyone you love.   As a thought experiment it has the feel of torment, but the imagined feel of torment is much different than the torment itself.  

“What does a poor child learn from day one?  As often as not that mommy is always upset, short-tempered, preoccupied, that daddy, when he’s around, is cranky, prone to outbursts.  That’s a caricature, of course, just as not all super-rich people are greedy, self-absorbed assholes, not all poor people fit this stereotype.  I’m just giving an example.  What the child in generations of inherited poverty imbibes with his mother’s milk is a deep sense of hopelessness.  

“That child may be deeply loved, many poor children are, hard as that is for some people to believe.  Your sister taught several very poor immigrant kids who were clearly well-loved.  They were kind to other kids, and gentle, and polite.  When she met the parents, they were the same way.  It may be significant that they were immigrant kids, from Central America, rather than kids born into a tenth generation of violent American poverty.  Why is poverty violent?  Ask Mother Goose.”

Mother Goose?  

“Well, you tell me Jeeves is dead.   I hope you don’t have bad news for me about Mother Goose.”  

No, she’s as well as she’s ever been.  

“I’m just making the point that poverty lays out a program for a kid’s life.  In the slums poor kids go to the worst schools, as you know, you used to teach in some of those schools.  They learn from ancient textbooks, the ones wealthier public schools discard.  The physical plant of the school is often in bad shape.  The neighborhood they walk through is filled with drug dealers, murdered pit bull puppies, the constant threat of a stray bullet, a rabid gang member, an altercation and early, sudden, violent death.  Check out the life expectancy for a child born in the roughest slums versus the average American life expectancy, check out the infant mortality rates in slums.  

“But you see, man, this is all statistics, cold, imagined horrors.  None of this shit touches anybody who does not have to live it.  Hunger.  You can’t imagine the torment of being hungry because your parents don’t have the money to feed you enough.  In my case, my mother, may she rest in peace, insisted on giving some of the little money we had to charity.  Unbelievable, really, poor as we were, and we were grindingly poor, she felt she had a religious obligation to help the less fortunate.  There were none less fortunate than us, but look for logic in religion and you may be searching for a lifetime.”  

A couple of seagulls screamed as they flew by over the graveyard off Cortlandt Road and the skeleton turned to consider them.  Hudson River seagulls, a long way from the ocean, but there you go.  Just part of the miracle of nature.  

“That’s God right there,” said the skeleton pointing up. “You know, you were always mystified about how African slaves, enslaved by white Christians who cited the Bible for their right to own slaves, could become devout Christians.  People take comfort where they can get it, and the notion of an eternally merciful Jesus waiting for them when they died, and a better life in the faithfully imagined world after this one, was about the only comfort they were going to get.  Plus, massa would give them an hour or two to worship Jesus Sunday instead of picking cotton under the lash of overseers not as keen on Jesus, perhaps, as their employers.  You got to like those hours off on Sunday morning, don’t you, Elie?”

Yep, you certainly have to like that, dad.  

“Look, we’re not done talking about poverty, and powerlessness, and the soul crushing weight of hopelessness, obviously — but you have to scurry on down to the Civil Court now to answer a personal appearance ‘subpoena’ threatening you with fines and imprisonment for an alleged failure to return the questionnaire you are 99% certain you sent back weeks ago.  You can’t fight City Hall, son, few should be more keenly aware of the many reasons for that than you.  Just get dressed, walk down there, humbly turn yourself in and wait for them to tell you what they plan to do next.  You’ll just have to be a Christian about it, my son.”   

Yes, father, something I always strive to be.

The skeleton made a clicking sound with the side of his mouth, the two-click sound you associate with encouraging a horse to get a move on.

Expect No Sympathy and You’ll Be Happier when you Get None

“Look, obviously I can’t give you any advice, as much as I know you wish I could.  I really can’t advise you, Elie, sad to say.  For one thing, it’s easy for me to say anything, I’m dead,” said the skeleton of my father, gesticulating at the gravestones around him.  “For another, you would never take my advice when I was alive.  You recall…” 

Yeah, one of the few times you really showed vulnerability.  You almost sniffed as you complained that my sister and I had never asked your advice about anything.  We were standing outside the kitchen, you had your back to the living room.

“Well, that’s true, Elie, and it hurt like hell that my children never once came to me for advice,” the skeleton said.  Then he waited.  

No idea what you’re waiting for.  Do you think something is going to change about that truth?  Do you want me to lay out a few of the best reasons we never came to you for advice?  Do you remember how amused you were by that lawsuit filed by some litigious college graduates, around 1970?  You read an excerpt of the NY Times article to us at the dinner table, or quoted it, maybe.  You probably told us the story then got the article to read the judge’s remarks.

“Yeah, the judge in that case was great.  The graduates had sued the university to get their tuition back because the college had not imparted wisdom, good character and enlightenment to them.   They styled their suit as a breach of contract, I think. The judge reamed those snot-noses a few new assholes, and his language was beautiful.  Yeah, that’s apropos of what we’re talking about, I suppose.  

“We are not guaranteed wisdom, long life, happiness, sexual satisfaction, jack shit, really.  There is luck, and genetics, work, connections, lack of connections, fairness, nepotism, who you know, who you blow, blah blah blah, this list of almost random factors is as long as your list of complaints against the merciless status quo.

“There are countless myths about reinventing yourself, the triumph of the determined will, people who rose from obscurity to become the biggest, most powerful and overbearing assholes who’ve ever lived, myths enough to make you vomit.  We have the American Exceptionalist myth of the lone brave man with the gun seeking his fortune in the wild west, killing whoever desperately needed a’killing, and ending up fantastically rich and powerful.  

“These are mainly myths about materialism and glory as the only cures for what ails a person, simple myths for people who naively believe that a limitless supply of money, or the esteem of a million strangers, is the end of all human troubles.  You know where the real pay-off is, I’ll say that for you, Elie, and you keep going for it. I have to give you that.  That desire of yours to get to the bottom of things is as much a blessing as a curse, I suppose, to see the glass half full, or as much of a curse as it is a blessing, to put it just as fairly, if more somberly.

“All this is beside the point really, I wanted to hammer home the point tonight that empathy is rare enough in this world, in this competitive, zero-sum society in particular, and empathy that leads to any kind of meaningful help is ten times as rare as the ordinary kind of rare empathy you can once in a while encounter.  You see somebody in trouble, your impulse is to help, that’s a good thing– Kant called it the ‘categorical imperative’, that you could will your action become universal knowing categorically that it would make the world a better place.  What’s Jeeves give you on that, Elie?”

Act according to the maxim that you would wish all other rational people to follow, as if it were a universal law. 

“Yeah, so a decent impulse to help a guy struggling to wheel his wheelchair in the pouring rain– because anyone in his position would need the push and anyone walking and able to give the push should do it– should be the norm.  It’s not, but we can agree that the world would be better if people did this simple thing, with no argument.  Guy’s struggling in a wheelchair, it’s raining, you are in a pancho-  push the guy to the nearest shelter from the rain.  You’d want him to do it for you, it’s a good thing, better world if everyone did it.

“Hypotheticals are easy, of course.  Real life– your friend suffers from severe depression.  Hah, there goes your hypothetical.  Life is complicated and few people acquire any real insight.  Insight, we laugh about that now, don’t we, Elie?  Your lifelong insight was that I was being a complete asshole when we fought, when I lashed out, using my well-honed adult skills to batter a boy.  How much did that insight that I was wrong help you?  

“Did it feel good when I admitted, the last night of my life, that I’d felt you reaching out all along, and that you’d been right and human to reach out to your father, and that I was entirely to blame for the long senseless war?   I know it probably felt good at the time, but as I’ve been slimming down here, surrounded by the fertile upper Westchester earth, I’m sure that admission has taken on a more and more hollow tone.”

That’s a fair way to put it.

“Well, look, you’ve heard it over and over from every unhappy person you’ve ever known — lower your expectations and you will experience less disappointment.   If you stop expecting the expression of true feelings from people there will be no sting when people are a bit false.   This is kind of a cliche, you know, protect yourself from the cruelty of the world by expecting no less than cruelty.  Hey– look, that person didn’t whip me in the face!  My lucky day!  

“The fact is, you are pissing uphill, Elie.  It may be a better thing than pushing that giant boulder up the hill, as you were for several years with that idealistic educational workshop you developed, but you are still pissing uphill.  What I mean to say is that nobody you know can offer you what you actually need the most.  This is a sad reality of life, most worldly success comes from a lifetime of steadily making useful contacts with well-connected professionals.  

“If I may digress for a moment, it’s hard for me to understand why you would post this draft in progress on-line in the first place.  For another thing, if you persist in doing that, why not at least post a copyright notice with your actual name instead of the name of your late lamented cat Oinsketta?  I suppose you put the posts on line in hopes of getting feedback, it’s a natural enough impulse, especially in this social media universe.  Talk to our marketing people, Elie, and you will see the laughable folly of your approach.  

“The point is, I applaud you in this effort.  There are some fine pages here, and you do me an honor.  You have already moved some hearts with a few of these stories.  Do not expect anything from your readers.  Seriously.  For one thing, they have no fucking idea what these many pages are intended to add up to.  How could they?  These pages are a random jumble and bear no resemblance to a book.  With a book, the first page either hooks you or you open another book.  A book is a promise, made in an intriguing enough way that the reader invests the time to read it, a story that unfolds in a reasonable order.

“So don’t wait for anybody to tell you any of this is good, or important, or that it moved them or might make an interesting book some day, if you can get an agent, an editor, a publisher and all those other things lined up.  It’s like poverty, Elie, that’s the best analogy I can give you.  You can’t explain it to or talk about it satisfyingly with someone who has never tasted it directly.   We can all agree it’s a horror, but unless you’ve actually lived it for any amount of time, it’s an abstract horror in the same unknowable category as many other terrible things.

“You’ve had a tiny taste of the enforced powerless of being, what used to be called, and still is by folks who lack the good breeding not to pronounce the entire banned word, ‘niggers’.  I put the word in quotes because it’s a sickening word.  I hear you say it all the time now when you wax tourettic out of frustration and it makes me cringe.  I know you don’t say it because you’re a racist, but snarling the word ‘nigger’ because you’re being treated like one does nobody any good.  I understand where it comes from, and I empathize more than you know.  I also understand that the power of a hateful word comes from the hate it still conveys, and most of our old curses are completely fucked out as far as conveying real rage. ‘Nigger’ is the exact word for the sickening powerlessness you’re talking about, but it is also a sickening fucking word.

“But there’s the crux of the thing: until you are held totally powerless, treated with complete contempt, in a permanently galling situation where you have ‘no rights a white man is bound to respect’, in whoremaster Roger Taney’s immortal summation of the Founder Fathers’ original view of the Negro, you cannot truly empathize with somebody in that situation.   Your friends can be sympathetic for the pain you express, but no eloquence on your part can enable them to truly understand, let alone actually empathize with, the death of a thousand cuts that is living 200% above the American poverty line.  They can feel your pain, but only an abstract shadow of it.

“If the Wall Street casino doesn’t take another big hit in the next couple of years, you can eke out a few more years of subsistence.  Personally, I think it’s stupid for multiple reasons for you to try to live like this — many fine writers held down jobs and wrote their asses off before and after work — but I get that you can’t work for anybody but Buddha, and he doesn’t pay anyway.  

“The thing to keep in mind is that nobody you know can help you write this book.  It may feel good that a reader tells you they liked this line, or that post, or were moved by such and such a story.  I understand a writer needs a bit of that, any worker needs to have a little praise to motivate further good work.   You had a link to that sisyphic work discussion, put it here, would you?  Gracias, that’s a nice fellow.  

“Most friends will wish you well, tell you a bit they liked, offer line edits, point out a phrase they think is not as elegant as it might be, express confusion about your larger plan, hazard a guess, support your idea, as basically incoherent as it still appears to be. The best you can hope for is the occasional attaboy, and it’s a shame, we can all agree, but– at the same time, a shame you just have to shut the fuck up about if you’re going to turn these ramblings into a book, you read me, Elie?”

Like a book, pops, like a book I can’t put down.

 

Intro January 23, 2017

I am trying to structure the book of my father’s life, to fully describe his often dark, tragic life amid flashes of his tremendous potential.   My father’s story would be inspirational, if it wasn’t so damned sad.   There is inspiration there, but a very subtle form.

Irv Widaen was an obscure man who rose from extreme poverty in America in the unprecedented era of opportunity after World War Two.   It is very rare, in this country today, for someone to emerge from poverty to live any version of the American Dream.  It’s harder to come out of poverty here than in most wealthy countries.  Yet my father was no outlier, millions followed the path he did when he got out of the army in 1946.  It was still possible in those days to work hard, get a little government assistance, and move into a comfortable middle class home.

I don’t think my father was unusual in his attitudes as a college student at Syracuse and Columbia, which he went to on the GI bill.  He, along with millions, truly believed they were living in the dawn of a better world and were helping to bend the moral arc of history toward justice.  

In 1949, when he was twenty-five, a concert was organized in his hometown of Peekskill, NY.   It was a concert for brotherhood, a call to fulfill some of the goals of the recent world war, long overdue things things like ending racism in America.  Irv was part of a young generation that had just fought and defeated racist regimes who mass murdered their racial inferiors.  

The headliners at the Peekskill concert were Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger.   They were there to inspire the crowd to stand up to bigots, racists, to educate deluded haters.  Bigots, racists and deluded haters carried the day, however, lying in wait along the narrow entrance drive to attack those going to the concert.  Bloody heads, laughing bigots, indifferent cops; the concert had to be canceled due to the riot.  Reorganized, with a shoulder-to-shoulder human wall of young union men in t-shirts around the perimeter, it came off a week or two later without violence. 

It wasn’t until inspired concert-goers got into cars, passed out of the grounds and headed south, along Cortlandt Road, where my father, from his present-day grave, could throw a stone through a passing car window, that stones were thrown through car windows, stones the size of fists, raining down on the heads of those who believed in fairness, thought the Nazis had been soundly defeated by the end of the war.  

“You don’t win the war against Nazis, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, sitting up in his grave a stone’s throw from Cortlandt Road.  “You can only stop them once in a while, for a short time, when they are completely out of control and literally millions of their victims find themselves wide awake in a blazing nightmare.   I don’t need to remind you how many of the most vicious Nazis wound up living privileged lives in America as well-paid guests of our good anti-Communist government after the war.  You often say the Nazis won the war, and looking around at some of the current practices done in our names, and the methods employed, it’s hard to disagree.”    

The device of my father’s skeleton chiming in struck me as a bit stagy, the first time he sat up in his grave to voice objection to something I’d just written about his difficult childhood.  It startled me, the first time he spoke up.   I figured I could always write the skeleton out later during the rewrites, and went along with his running commentary.  He has refused to be written out of his own life story, insisting on his right to be a corrective against any bias I might bring to the telling.  So be it.  The truth is, I have come to greatly look forward to our conversations.

“Not so stagy now, is it, motherfucker?” said the skeleton of my father. “We’ll leave aside the question of how you expect to get this unlikely book, the critical biography of a nobody, authoritatively written by another nobody, son and grandson of nobodies, into print, past the marketing people, out into the hands of people you’ve never met, to, presumably, open a discussion that might resonate with many people: is a full recovery possible, from an early childhood of brutality and rage?  

“Me?  I did not recover from brutality and rage, though an argument can be made– even if a feeble one– that you took a couple of big steps.  At any rate, I’ll leave that to you to describe.   You know, we’ve had our disagreements about how much a person can heal himself, to put it mildly. you know, ‘disagreements‘.  You’re more optimistic than I was, I’ll say that for you, you poor bastard.”

As always, I appreciate the support, dad.  If I manage to organize, cut back and rewrite what I have here in the 800 pages written in the last year, I believe a book worth reading will emerge.  

“You’re more optimistic than I was, I’ll say that for you, you poor bastard,” said the skeleton, expression deadpan, yet also insanely gay.  

“I can’t help that grin, you bastard, I’m a skeleton… Jesus, Elie,” said my father, a man who had many subtle facial expressions while he was alive.  The sterner of those looks caused my sister to dub our father the Dreaded Unit, the D.U.  Now. twelve years after his death, his only face is the mad, beaming, yawning or silently screaming perpetual grin of the skeleton.

“You won’t truly understand it until you’re dead, I suppose.  No, I take that back, not even then.  You would have to have somebody else conjure you, animate your skeleton, in order to understand anything I’m telling you about death.”  

My father never spoke much about his actual past.   His reluctance to talk about personal things contrasted with how strongly he expressed his opinions on virtually all matters.   Many key moments in my father’s life are dark, matters of conjecture, leaving only what I can imagine, in light of how well I knew the man who was my father.   The long riddle of his life was how such a witty, inspirational moral teacher could also be such a supremely destructive weasel.    

As far as telling a tale that compels, sells, neatly ties together a hundred neat details, irresistibly, I may not actually be all that much more optimistic than my father was, the poor bastard.  

“Well, how far from the tree can the apple fall, Elie?  You have every reason for pessimism, I’ll give you that.  Still, while there is breath in your body, desire in your heart and interesting theories percolating in your head– you’d have to give yourself a puncher’s chance, would you not?”  

My father’s skeleton and I sit, as the occasional car motors by on Cortlandt Road, drinking in the profound silence these questions raise.

Most of all, Elie, do what you love

It’s been a year since I began the manuscript I hope one day will be the book of my father’s life.  I think it’s time to try to summarize the main story line, as I would before a Moth story audience. 

My father always insisted that, on a fundamental level, people cannot change.  It was an insistence both tragic and maddening, even as I can now see the kernel of truth there.  This belief was a self-fulfilling prophecy, as they say.  We argued about it over the years, as I changed, as he remained stubborn in his insistence that the only change one can hope for is on the most superficial level.  

It was one of his favorite themes, dismissing all hope that things could ever be different, no matter how much one changed one’s actions and reactions. His life had taught him harsh lessons it was his sad duty to impart to my sister and me.  He was dogged about removing the illusion that one might evolve past one’s genetic predispositions and childhood difficulties.  

On the other hand, he always insisted that childhood injury had nothing to do with a mature responsible adult’s life.  You take responsibility for your own life, and your own happiness, and you don’t blame your parents, or whatever bad luck may have led them to be less than the parents you might have hoped for.  This duty apparently started, for a young man, around the age of eight or so, when it was past time to stop acting like a child and time to start behaving like a goddamn man, for fuck’s sake.   

This much out of context generalized detail and emotional nuance, of course, would be hacked through by a director from the Moth, who would keep urging me to get back to the essence of the story.  Make it simple, it’s a story, people have to be able to follow it from start to finish.

My father was an idealist, extremely bright, well-read, quick-witted and funny as hell.   He was also, sadly for my sister and me, a man crushed by a brutal childhood who could not help replicating the cruelty that sometimes flows from such terrible childhoods.  

“You can’t blame your childhood, or your parents, or bad luck, you have to take responsibility for your own life,” he always insisted.   At the same time, he also insisted a person could not change on any fundamental level– what you were at five you would be a fifty.   Even as a child this struck me as an idiotic and self-defeating idea.   We argued about it, me a child, my father a grown man.  Later as two adults we continued to wrangle over this issue.  

“I’ve seen a tremendous change in you,” my mother once observed to me during a discussion my father and I were trying to keep civil, about the difficulty of change.

“Well, you can change certain things, on a superficial level,” my father yielded, “but the baked-in responses, those genetic traits hardened by experience, the reflexes you are born with, things like a bad temper, which you have, no matter how you try to conceal it with your lofty vows to remain mild and so forth, remain.  You cannot change on a fundamental level, certain things will continue to enrage you if you are wired that way, you can only change the surface aspects of your personality.”  

I told him that if anger was a problem in life, in our relationship, and I learned to control it enough to maintain a dialogue instead of being drawn into a fight, that was a significant change.  

“Superficial,” he said, dismissing any benefit not reacting with anger could have for anybody.  “Deep down, you’re still mad as hell, boiling mad, like you were when you were a baby, and at five and as a teenager.”  

I finally saw the futility of having this argument with my father.  He was very smart, and very skilled at the art of verbal war.  He was always armed and dangerous.  There came a point when his desperation to be right at any cost became clear to me.  

Paint that specific moment in the den in Coconut Creek,  hand-delivering that third copy of the heartfelt letter he kept denying he’d read, month after month.  

“Oh, that letter,” he said with the casual nonchalance of a charismatic psychopath,  “yeah, I read that letter.”  

He paused to fix me with a look and then said ” you have to respect my right not to respond.”  

The hideous, specific flavorful details are needed for a reader to grasp the full exact truth this story is tying to convey.

I realized at last that there was no benefit to arguing against something he would defend to the death, no matter how mutually destructive that thing was.  

I believe we can change things about ourselves if we are miserable enough about the thing that needs to be changed, determined enough to do better.  I have seen changes in myself and in old friends.  They are the result of long, hard work and such changes are always works in progress, but I see the changes and their benefits.  I can also see my father’s point of view– restraining the impulse to be enraged is not the same as no longer feeling anger.  Even though learning to restrain and tame the impulse is the first step to a less enraged, contentious life.  

Whatever the case about changing oneself, it is 100% certain that one cannot change anyone else, and so in the end I realized that my poor father was a lost cause and that arguing with him was only throwing fuel on a fire that should not have been burning in the first place.    

Not to say I stopped chewing on the perplexing riddle of what made this anti-racist, friend of the underdog, funny, humane, otherwise very smart, hip and likable man such a brutal dick.  I spent many hours with my father’s first cousin, Eli, an old man living in a little retirement cottage about an hour north of me.  I’d drive up the long, twisty parkway to listen to stories about our family and my father’s unimaginably awful childhood.  

Eli loved my father in a way he couldn’t love his own children, to whom he was often quite brutal and from whom he was mostly estranged.  My father loved Eli, who was 17 years older, as much as he feared him.  Eli was a warm, generous, very funny man capable of great savagery when angry, which was often.  There was no doubt of their mutual love and there was no doubt of Eli’s genuine desire to give me insight I could use to understand my destructive old man and get along better with him.  It was through Eli that I finally got helpful insight into my father’s tragic life.

Predictably, my father was defensive and angry when I reported the fascinating conversations I was having with Eli.  

“Eli’s full of shit!” he said with great conviction, “he has his own twisted version of history.  Yeah, listen to Eli, he’s a great historian, did he tell you how many times he would have become a millionaire if some asshole hadn’t screwed him?  Ask his kids about him, what a loving soul he is– Eli has never been wrong about anything, he’s always the victim, always the righteous man wronged by vicious assholes, even when he’s smacking his kids around…”  He went on in this vein for quite some time.

This reaction did not surprise me.  After all, it was a yelp of pain.  It made sense to me now, in the context Eli had imparted to me, quietly and deeply aware of the full pain and horror of what he was telling me.   Eli’s beloved aunt was my father’s mother Chava.  Eli witnessed Chava’s violent rages many times including when she turned them on her infant son, from the time he could stand.  

“She had a drawer next to where she sat at the kitchen table where she kept the cord to her iron.  You remember those old cloth wrapped electrical cords they used to have?  Heavy cords, with a rough burlap kind of wrapping.  She would reach into the drawer, grab that heavy cord and whip little Irv across the face with it.  I saw this myself.  After a while all she had to do was rattle the drawer and he would stand like this,” and Eli did one of his uncanny imitations, a terrified child, rigid and shaking, eyes cast to the ground.  

This image was like a light going on in a darkened room.  I was flooded with sympathy for the poor bastard even as I knew that my father would kill us both before he’d ever talk about something this painful.  He was simply incapable of it, I realized thinking about his life from the perspective of a face-whipped infant.  It explained many things I could never understand.    

The last few years of his life, as my father was becoming greyer and weaker, hollowed out by the undiagnosed liver cancer that finally killed him, I pretty much abided by his wish to stick to superficial conversation.   We could talk about politics, a subject we were largely in agreement about, or history, something that fascinated both of us, but most of the deeper conversations were out of bounds and I stopped trying to have them.  Predictably, in a story like this, I got a life-changing phone call during dinner with old friends.  

We were gathered around a table to retell a story my father had told us every year, about the spiritual journey from slavery to freedom that our ancient ancestors had undergone.  In every generation we must learn this lesson anew– because we were strangers harshly mistreated in a foreign land we must never tolerate the mistreatment of anyone, if we have the power to oppose it.  

“The D.U. is in the hospital,” my sister told me.  “The E.R. doctor knew within two minutes that he was examining a dead man, he touched his swollen stomach, looked at me and said if your brother wants to see him, tell him to get down here right away.”  

There were two doctors around the table who gently reassured me that ascites, the accumulation of liquid that gathers around the organs at the end stage of something like liver cancer, could result from several different things (all pretty much deadly, as I soon learned), and that I should go visit my father and not assume the worst until I talked to his doctors.  I was on a plane soon after.  

I drove to the hospital at around 1 a.m. on what turned out to be the last night of my father’s life.  He was ready to have the conversation he’d never had the courage to attempt.

“You know those conversations you had with Eli, he pretty much hit the nail right on the head, although he probably spared you the worst of it.  My life was over by the time I was two years old,” he began.  “I felt you reaching out to me many times over the years, and it’s my fault I was too fucked up to respond to you like a human being instead of a belligerent asshole.”

The book of my father starts with this conversation and imagines what we would have shared if he had not died the next day at sunset.   I have been in regular dialogue with his skeleton for the last ten months or so and am happy to report our communication is now excellent.

Thank you.

 (imaginary applause)