Category Archives: book of irv

The Hardest Trick of All

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 1:00 AM, bitemyass@gmail.com wrote:

The Hardest Trick of All

“You’ve been giving serious thought to the best way to live this third chapter of your life since mom died,” said the skeleton.  “I know one large feature is that you’ve turned aside from fighting, to a surprising extent, I have to say, even though your mate, a natural born wrangler, can’t seem to resist testing your resolve regularly. 
 

“Of course, since you’re going to read this to Sekhnet, let me define ‘wrangler’ precisely, so you can possibly avoid an ass-whipping.  A wrangler wrestles unruly steers and horses into the corral.  Sure they can be quarrelsome, but the main qualities a wrangler needs are strength, fearlessness, toughness and a stubbornness equal to a bull’s.  Heh, maybe you get your ass whupped anyway,” said the skeleton with a grunted laugh.

 “I get that you’re taking to heart Erik Erikson’s insight about this third chapter in life being about regrets or some kind of fulfillment, I believe he calls it Generativity vs. Bitterness.  You wrote about it, you could throw a footnote in here for the reader,” he said.  

(He didn’t know about hyperlinks, though he may have clicked a few toward the end of his days)

 

“Look, you’re trying to do the hardest thing in the world, the hardest trick of all.  I salute you in this noble quest, even as I recognize the idiotic hubris of the attempt.  You want to critically examine our lives and come away with some kind of insight to move you toward a productive last chapter of your life.  I applaud it, dead man though I also am.  

“Here’s the trap, as I see it, you’re trying to view life through the lens of critical history, a lens that, certainly when used to look at, say, the descendants of African hostages long experience here,  gives ample reason for pessimism.  Your challenge is maintaining some vital force that will allow for action.  At your age, at 60 now, it’s harder to have the energy, of course, but it’s psychic energy I’m talking about, which you need to see as a renewable resource.  

 “And that, my boy, is the trickiest trick of all, continually renewing your faith in a world that has become more and more about a system of domination that does not want the wrong kind of faith.  You had a good idea, working creatively with doomed kids.  Didn’t work out too well for you, you are up against billionaires with megaphones, after all and those hard-charging opinionated winners always dominate any discussion they get into.  No matter.  You have to keep moving forward.  I see what you’re hoping to do with this book, and I hope you succeed, for both of our sakes, but here’s the trap I hope you don’t fall into.  The rabbit hole that turns out to be a worm hole, or black hole.

“Don’t let your ambition blind you.  Your plan for this book is super ambitious, you want it to be a game changer, for you, for your program, for anyone who reads it. You want to tell the story of my life, set in historical and political context brought forward into today, told by a narrator I influenced greatly, if often perniciously, even as my once illuminating idealism turned to darkness and bile.  The narrator is determined to not suffer the same fate as the abusive father was doomed to by the father’s abusive mother.  

 

“It’s possible that for all the narrator’s seeming insight, the tragic missing insight is that the narrator has already been, and remains, long fucked.  By not competing against his peers all along he is a no-name flash in the pan who writes a fine book too late, published by an obscure outfit with no money to publicize it, it sinks like a stone a week after publication, and the writer is worse off for having written, discounting the princely $7,000 he was paid for the work.  

 

“Until, of course, five years after your death, when the book is exhumed by an influential person, reissued, suddenly celebrated as the important work it was all along,” the skeleton paused, seemingly to take a whiff of the stink of a decomposing animal dead somewhere nearby.

 

Being Right vs. Being Lucky

“You know, Elie, I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days,” said the skeleton.  

What’s that, dad?  

“You’re spending too much time talking to a dead man recently.  Look, not that I don’t enjoy our conversations, but, I mean, do you think it’s healthy for this chat to be the highlight of your day?” the skeleton turned his head, as though looking around.

You mean as opposed to my mediocre diet, my relative lack of exercise, the less than ideal amount of sleep I get, my solitary life, the lack of a new network of needed doctors thanks to the vagaries of Obamacare, things like that?  

“Yeah, you’re right.  Listen, what I was really thinking about was the need to be right, where it comes from, how it does its idiot work.  My mother, who you learned from Eli whipped me in the face and sealed my fate before I was two, was a powerless, angry woman.  All she had was being obeyed, by anyone she could bend to her will.   I cannot imagine the terrifying shithole she was born into.   Talk about born under a bad sign, the filthy little hamlet off a river outside Pinsk was literally stomped out, rubbed right off the map of the world.  Never existed.

“The Jews who eked out an existence there?  Fuck ’em, who gives a shit?  Poor people, Jews, grind ’em up, pfooo! good riddance, rabbi.  I cannot begin to imagine all the nightmare elements that went into making my mother a little tyrant.  I never thought much about these things when I was alive, for fear of what thinking about them might do to me.   People who claim to love you can use you as a slave?  Your family can just be stomped into the mud without a trace?   What kind of arbitrary, brutal life are we born into?

“That was one reason I loved animals so much, as your mother also did.  I think we transmitted that to you and your sister.  A dog will return whatever treatment he gets, will always give you the benefit of the doubt.   It’s like animals cut to the chase, to the essential thing we all need in life: caring for each other.   It was my pleasure, although I didn’t enjoy it, of course, giving those insulin shots to Sassy every evening.  The dog was a complete sad sack, you remember.  Nobody particularly liked her, she’d hide under the bed, cower from people for no reason.  We knew she had no reason to cringe because we’d raised her from a newborn pup, she never had anyone do anything mean to her.  Still, she was an odd dog, very paranoid.  Your mother said she was mentally ill, maybe she was, I guess it’s possible a dog can be mentally ill.  

“The thing was, Sassy trusted me and I took care never to hurt her.  You know, I’d pinch the skin on her back, make a little fold, and the needle was very thin, I don’t even know how much she felt it.  But she seemed to know I was doing this for her benefit and was always very calm and trusting when I’d give her the shot.  I think now how natural it felt to take such tender care of her and could kick myself again for being so unnatural so much of the time, like in those battles you describe around the dinner table.”

Well, there’s nothing natural about being natural a lot of the time, I suppose.  Our society is based on being unnatural, of course, on a false and desperate notion of winning and losing that makes us the best possible, most driven, consumers.  We’re in the hands of cannibals, no different in their essential natures than they’ve ever been, like true believing functionaries of the Nazi or any other ruthless single-minded party.  You mention the need to be right– that’s the only game in town, a town that can, as far as we can tell, be rubbed out under a jackboot with or without notice.

“The white indentured servants made common cause with the black slaves and Indians during the early days of our great experiment in democracy,” said the skeleton.  “It seemed obvious enough to poor whites that they were in the same boat as the other servants and slaves, as well as with the Indians whose land was being stolen by the wealthy whites.   Black and white servants became romantically involved, escaped slavery together, often found sanctuary with the Indians, with whom they made common cause.  

“This caused a major concern for the wealthy new land barons, you understand.   The idea of poor people of all races united and looking for some measure of justice gave the status quo the heebie jeebies.   ‘How to keep everything for ourselves?’ wondered the wealthiest and the greediest.

“You read about it in Zinn’s Peoples’ History, Virginia, in the 17th century, actually put it into law– the white man’s superiority over the Negro.  A white indentured servant got much better treatment than the average African slave.  You couldn’t strip him naked when you whipped him, for example.  When you freed the white man after his indenture you had to give him 100 acres to farm, and a mule, and ten barrels of corn meal, a musket, some money.   Every white servant knew this was coming to him at the end of his years as a common nigger, and he got it under Virginia law even before the year 1700.   The wealthy ‘planters’ created a culture down there that enlisted poor whites to oversee their fellow slaves, where the white man could look down on his inferiors, no matter how low the white man’s station in life.

 “That’s what segregation was all about.  Even the poorest white trash could walk into a bathroom with plumbing, tile on the walls and floor, doors on the toilet stalls.  The Colored bathroom?  Hah, sometimes those creatures would just have to do their business behind a bush.  You know, not every place had a bathroom where a Negro could sit on a regular toilet, wash their hands in a regular sink.   So ‘separate but equal’ was like a hilarious joke told over and over again by winking whites, it was a way of saying everyone got what they deserved.

“The examples are countless.  How does the great democracy, who welcomes the poor and starving of all nations to participate in this experiment in human equality, justify forcing the natives off their land, sometimes in death marches, destroying the buffalo herds that are their sustenance, making treaties they will violate over and over, eventually just killing the fuckers en masse?   Manifest Destiny.  Ask any junior high school student what gave the descendants of white Europeans the right to march over Mexicans, Indians and anyone else in their way and they’ll tell you:  manifest destiny.  

“The phrase was invented by a newspaper man, caught on quickly.  Our destiny is manifest, look, it’s right here, plain as the nose on your face, see?  Destiny is in our hands.  Like a team one game behind with four games to play, just keep winning, that’s all we can do by way of controlling our destiny.

“Being right, it’s all most powerless people get, Elie,” said the skeleton, slowly shaking his head. “The people you talk to, they are all smiling at you as they think ‘he’s a smart guy, he can seem to justify his beliefs, articulate his values… but he’s a loser.'”  

I’ve always been that way, dad, clever with words, able to articulate my values and beliefs.   With those things, and a paid Metrocard, I can get on any subway I like.   We are judged on one scale here, as you know, what we are worth.  And that is measured the only way it can be, in the honest coin of dollars and cents.  

“Well, it’s all most people can understand.  It’s as manifest as Manifest Destiny.  Is it better to be rich or poor?  Ask anyone and you will get the same clear, entirely reasonable answer.  If your goal is something you can show clearly to the world, how much easier is your life than struggling to advance abstractions?  Just say ‘Manifest Destiny’ shoot the savage in the face, force the women and children into an icy river to drown and build your railroad.   People who hesitate, who think too much, people like you… well, what is the point?”  

Ah, you pose a question I cannot answer today, father.  I think I will lie down with that familiar black dog and rest my eyes for a while, as I ponder my manifest destiny.

 

The Sometime Impossibility of Restraint

“Look, I realize I’m dead and it’s only through you that I have any voice at the moment, and it’s really not my place, or even plausible, for me to get worked up about things that happen more than a decade after my death, but goddamn it,” said the skeleton, as worked up as I’d seen him in a while.  

Far be it from me, dad, to deprive you of your posthumous right to speak.

“All right, then, put the words in my mouth,” said the skeleton grimly.  

“Another maniac legally buys a powerful assault weapon and enough bullets to kill hundreds of people, if all goes well for the sick fuck.  American exceptionalism, it’s every fucking enraged, murderous, suicidal American coward’s right, unless he has a felony conviction or a clear and convincing history of mental health issues that will allow a given state to make it hard for him to get an assault rifle, to have as many assault weapons and clips of deadly ammo as he can afford.

“You know the Second Amendment, that speaks of the federal government not infringing on the right of the States to have well-regulated militias, has been interpreted by unappealable right-wing geniuses to mean every individual American can have any weaponry their sick little hearts desire, with no regulation by the government that gives them that right.

“Let’s go to the text, you play the right wing Supreme Court justice and interpret the plain language of the Second Amendment:  A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. [1]

“I had to laugh, but it was not a pleasant laugh, when I heard the FBI director talk about the need for a deep, transparent inquiry into the motivations of this sick piece of shit– I’m sure it will be as transparent as it will be deep.  No investigation is necessary, and it burns me in my grave to listen to the same dumb show, the same mindless theatrics, the same mind rotting falsely complicated bullshit, dancing around the only point worth making, the one that’s shooting American people directly in the face every day, literally.  

“Why did this maniac go into a gay club and kill as many people as he could before his suicide by police?  What possible motive could a man who insists he is not a homosexual have for going into a place where homosexuals gather and murdering as many as he can?  It is certainly a perplexing question, eh, mass media?  Eh, pundits and politicians?   Why, oh why, would an, admittedly, angry but otherwise perfectly normal American guy with no criminal record or history of mental illness go into a gay club and start spraying death in every direction?  A real head scratcher.

“Let’s look at his ideology for clues to his possible motivation and what the larger meaning of this could be for all of us, shall we? It’s imponderably mysterious, after all.  Hmmmm, Muslim name, could be a terrorist, we are at war with Terror, after all.  Look, right before he left home to kill he signed up to friend ISIS on facebook.  Aha!!!!  

“No.  You don’t need any investigation whatsoever.  What you need to do is what Australia did after a particular gun massacre that was the last straw.  What we should have done immediately after that sick fuck in Connecticut shot his mother in the face, ‘thanks for the gun, mom, love you!‘ and trotted off dressed like Sylvester Stallone as Rambo to murder as many five year-olds as he could with his new toy.  That mass shooting was probably five or six hundred mass shootings ago.   When is it enough carnage?  Do what any country that is not homicidally insane does:  take away the fucking guns, make it hard for the average terrified law-abiding moron to buy all the murder weapons he feels he needs.  You want to hunt deer, go right ahead, buy any hunting rifle you want, you get a few shots, one at a time, and kill all the deer you want, if that’s your sick pleasure.  

“‘Guns don’t kill people,’ the NRA keeps insisting, ‘the wrong people with guns kill people.  It’s not the guns themselves.  The guns are fine, the guns are moral, peaceful, wonderful.  It’s bad people with guns, you see, which is why we need every good person to purchase and strap on as much weaponry as their cowardly little bodies can carry, and bandoliers of ammo, to make sure heroic good people are armed to the teeth to kill the bad people before they can misuse their wonderful new morally neutral guns.  If every kindergarten teacher in the country had top notch guns, and wore them fully loaded at all times, far fewer of their infinitely precious little charges would be slaughtered by bad people misusing their guns every year,’

 “No, Elie, what we need to do is line up the CEOs of the NRA and their entire army of well-paid lobbyists, put them in front of a high wall, with a firing squad of freedom loving gun nuts armed to the teeth with assault rifles, full clips of hollow point cop killer bullets, with guns to their heads to force them to shoot, and make a red and black Jackson Pollock on the wall behind those fucking death-profiteering monsters, paint Guernica in their inhuman fucking blood…”

 Look, dad, obviously I share your horror, your outrage, but don’t get worked up like that.

 “Or what? I’m going to bust a blood vessel? You may have noticed, I’m a fucking skeleton. What’s going to happen to me beyond this?   I can finally speak my mind, thanks to that ingenious apology to my son as I was dying. Heh, I knew I’d get some long-lasting benefit from that apology,”   the skeleton laughed, coughed once, and then went into a coughing fit.

 Look, obviously, I agree.   We need to literally kill those who insist they’ll shoot you in the fucking face if you try to take the billions upon billions of dollars they make every year from selling fear and death.  Being shot in the face with a gun is the only language they understand.

 “No, truly, literally. I know we employ a certain amount of hyperbole in our family, but what you are saying is literally true. What did that rabid, smirking Charlton Heston say about his right to his guns?   ‘You’ll pry this gun out of my cold dead hand’.   Fine, fair enough, let’s do it.  Done, that was easy.   Next!

 “I used to love that intro to Gunsmoke, Pop’s favorite show. ‘There is just one way to handle the killers and spoilers, and that’s with the U.S. Marshal… and Gunsmoke!’

“Your fierce Sekhnet is not against torture as long as it’s used only on deserving torturees.  Our list would have guys like Dick Cheney, that chuckling, criminally insane Rumsfeld, John Yoo.  I’m not against a good massacre either, as long as you’re killing the killers and the spoilers,” said the skeleton.

Got that out of your system, dad?  

“No,” said the skeleton, “but it helped a tiny bit.  Jesus, I wish I had a fucking gun right now, I’m telling you….”

 

[1] In Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016), the Supreme Court reiterated its earlier rulings that “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding” and that its protection is not limited to “only those weapons useful in warfare”.[15]

Child Labor and Anti-lynching Laws

“What do your croaking, amphibious friends say ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’?  New day, same shit.  I know you were startled the other day to learn there was no federal law banning child labor until I was fourteen,” said the skeleton, sitting up on a remarkably cool, fresh mid-June morning in the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill boneyard.

“Speaking of boneyards, don’t forget your mother’s yahrzeit tonight,” he said, “it should have really been last night, but since God is a mean drunk at a party, you’re the only one trying to keep score.”  

I’ll light one for you too, if I manage to remember when I get home.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” said the skeleton philosophically.  “but, yeah, I saw you literally stop in your tracks and make a note of that law, passed in 1938, under FDR’s New Deal, that established a federal minimum wage (a pathetic near-starvation pittance then, as now) forbade an employer from requiring more than 40 hours of work a week and banned child labor.  A bill banning child labor had been sitting around since 1924, the year I was born.   I was fourteen years old when FDR signed that bill into law, could have already spent my whole life at a full-time, sixty, seventy hour a week job.  

“The only childhood job I ever mentioned to you was the indenture at Tamarka’s every weekend when my brother and I, as part of our mother’s lifelong debt for her passage in rat-infested steerage, would dig our fingernails into her fucking rubber tree as we dusted the enormous leaves.  Tormenting that plant was our only outlet, our powerless, silent slave-like way of venting.  The plant, for its part, truly did not seem to give a crap about our sadistic treatment.  You know how stoic plants are.  Tamarka’s rubber tree was stubborn, too.  The more we tortured it the heartier it seemed to become.

“But, yeah, 1938 it finally became illegal, nationwide, to lock children in a sweatshop or send them down into a mine.  At the same time there was a federal anti-lynching law the blacks and people like Eleanor Roosevelt were trying to get passed.  FDR, always the pragmatic visionary, realized he’d lose the support of the Dixiecrats, those racist, Ku Klux Klan loving Southern Democrats– the same ilk that all turned staunchly Republican overnight after LBJ betrayed his race and the South– and when have those reactionary “rebel” pricks ever not been betrayed?–  anyway, FDR quietly pretended he didn’t know about any anti-lynching law.  

“You can’t sign a federal law against lynching and expect the votes of the lynch mobs.  And there are a lot of voters in those lynch mobs and they tend to think in rather black and white terms, if “think” is even a word you can use in connection with a lynch mob.”

A surprisingly cool breeze toyed with the trees and shrubs, playfully touseling their leaves.   A car purred by on the country road just outside the cemetery gates, crunching the gravel at the top of the road down to the graves as it passed.  The skeleton paused as the birds came in like a tiny chorus to make music of the silence.  

“Nice,” said the skeleton, “more prose for the cutting room floor, but it’s good to set the scene a little now and then.  And to let the reader breathe a couple of beats. To let the whine breathe a little before you decant it.  You know I was always a lightning fast reader, but even I always appreciated breaks on a page.  Books where the author simply forges ahead in endless paragraphs and each page is like a heavy black slab– a grim prospect compared to Elmore Leonard’s pages, or Vonnegut’s.”

I was wondering just now if putting my words in your mouth is such a good idea.

 “Well, you know, I really wouldn’t have an opinion on that, Elie,” said the skeleton with a wry, skeletal grin.

“Personally, I think you’re conveying me fairly.  Sure, some days, like today for example, you might be putting a little too much of your own thoughts into my quotation marks, but, at the same time, I think it’s fair.  These are all the kinds of things I would say.  

“Look, in 1938, almost a decade into the Depression– and don’t forget, we’d already had a bunch of very severe economic depressions in this great experiment in democracy, there was a calamitous one, for example, right after the Civil War, as you might expect, this one lasted much longer and happened at the dawn of mass media, when the radio came into play, and so news of how badly everyone was suffering was nationwide, plus the newsreels we all saw every week told the same story — the heroic FDR is quietly downplaying the importance of allowing federal enforcement of the Constitution, the right not to be hanged by the neck for the amusement of a crowd snarling ‘nigger’ as your feet kick in the air, for fuck’s sake.   This is the way it’s always been, Elie. 

“We had a photo of FDR on the wall, he was a hero to all poor people.  Blacks loved him, like they would later love JFK and that brilliant, charming fraud Bill Clinton, the great centrist Democrat who made it safe for easy-going Republicans to vote for the cool guy, our first black president.  Blacks loved Clinton, for some reason.  One of those abusive relationships, I suppose, where true, the guy beats me, and arguably sometimes makes me have sex against my will, let’s not call it rape exactly, because I know he loves me, and he’s always very contrite afterwards….”

Pull yourself together, dad.  Such lamentations are for the living, not for skeletons. We all know Mr. Clinton was the best Republican president since Ike.  

“I saw a sign, during the 1956 election, carried by some pugnacious cretin, I don’t remember where, that said ‘Vote for Ike, not the kyke.’   Shades of ‘Vote for Cuomo, not the homo’ when Ed Koch ran against Mario Cuomo.  Do you know who the kyke was in the 1956 election?”  

I guess it had to be Adlai Stevenson.  

“Your mother and I, of course, voted for that brilliant kyke-like fellow, though, of course, he was only Jewish to an anti-Semite.  The thing was, he thought like the best of the Jews, which is to say, like the best of any people, and there are billions of them alive on the planet today, who believe in fairness, justice, equality, decency, intelligent debate and problem-solving based on the facts, all those quaint things that the people most greedily intent on appropriating everything in the world, wealth, power, unfair advantage, immunity, the right to do what is hateful to them to anybody, at any time, with no consequence to them or their vast wealth…

“Wow, Elie, I have to take a breath.  I never spoke in sentences that had no ending, that’s one of your tics.  Phew.   Yeah, plus ça change and shit.  Ike was really not all that bad, in retrospect, compared to the blandly evil crew that followed, even as it took him a while to finally put his foot up Joseph McCarthy’s hideous ass, which the ranting alcoholic senator used for shitting from, likely at long intervals that left him cranky,  as well as for roaring out his accusations from about people who hated our freedom.  He used the same crusty orifice, is what I’m saying.  

“Plus ça change, Elie, now we have dozens of his kind, bloviating on the radio and TV and becoming millionaires, their hateful views resonating with millions who have been screwed by the same conscience-repressed fucks who have never hesitated to kill, impoverish or do whatever else had to be done to preserve their privileges.”  

Their privileges and immunities, dad.  Well, as always, it has been a privilege, father, to spend this time with you, and my fortunate immunity, as well, to say sayonara, even in the middle of a chat.  

“Aw, you’re going already?  You just got here…” said the skeleton, as he fell back into his nap with that inscrutable expression the dead so often have on their faces.

 

Feed Me After Them!

I made the mistake, recently, while talking with my sister and recalling the terrible skirmishes over our family dinner table, of making a grotesque comparison.  This proneness to hyperbole, something my sister and I both have to be on guard against, we got from our mother, a poet and exaggerator of bunyanesque proportions. 

“No,” my sister said firmly, and I realized at once she was right, “you can’t say Auschwitz.”  I know it was a disgusting metaphor, and also inapt and she was quite responsibly drawing a line and not letting our conversation get completely out of hand.

“That’s true, sorry.  That was bad,” I said, and we paused for a moment.

“OK,” I said “it was like the no-man’s land between the trenches in World War One. A muddy expanse between barbed wire, with random machine gun fire, the groans of dying horses, biplanes swooping in to strafe us, chlorine gas rolling in over the hill, and we had no gas masks.”

“That’s fair,” she said.

This poison gas reference didn’t offend her, chlorine, although nasty business, was not always deadly, like Zyklon B.  The reference to rolling chlorine gas was proportional, and just part of warfare in those years, and helped to convey the scene of horror we faced every night over our flank steak, tossed salad and Rice-a-Roni.  

Onto this hopeless, senseless battlefield stepped our tired father every evening, still rumpled from his desperate late afternoon nap and mentally preparing, right after dinner, to drive out to his second job, as a kind of community organizer among Jewish teenagers in the Nassau-Suffolk region of Young Judaea.  

It would often start right away, as my mother was serving dinner.  There would be a grumble, a snarled response, voices would rise quickly, escalate, then the flash point and it would be open warfare.  I would yell something intolerably mean back at my sister and she would slash, with her lightning quick reflex for the jugular, and our mother would leap in and we’d both jump on her and pummel her into submission.  My father usually exhibited a certain reluctance to enter the fray, odd, in hindsight, because he was the main architect of the larger war and its most vocal supporter.  He’d often begin with a heartfelt appeal to our mother.  

“Feed me after them!” he would  plead, lowing like a wounded bull.  “Jesus Christ, I’ve asked you a thousand times, Evvy” he had a bit of the hyperbolist too, “feed me after them.  I’m begging you.”    

This rare show of vulnerability in our father, he only made this plea when he was beside himself with despair over the whole situation, would act like a tonic on my sister and me, and we’d turn our full attention to him.  It would take literally no time, then he was in the middle, swinging away with every verbal bludgeon that came to hand.  While pausing for a breath he would sometimes moan again “Evvy, for the love of God, feed me after them…”

Our mother, to her credit, would never consider splitting up the family at dinner that way.  After all, it was the one time of day we were all together.  For another thing, it would be twice as much work for her, after a day slugging it out with her two difficult kids.  The daughter had been such a placid, easy baby.  The boy was always trouble, it’s true, but these days it was hard for my mother to decide which poison was worse.  

I guess her dilemma was the same as the one my sister and I sometimes wrestle with.  Although she had dubbed our father the D.U., The Dreaded Unit, an uncannily fitting name our father seemed to take as an honorific, she always argues that our mother was by far the more dangerous of the two.  I grant her the points, but I always find the D.U. was capable of more damage when he was swinging two two-handed swords and bellowing his war cry.  

“It’s a matter of taste, really,” I will sometimes say.  

“Look, there’s no debate that the D.U. was very, very bad,” my sister will allow, “but she was much worse.”  And she will draw out the “much” like Rosie Perez, to emphasize by how large a margin she feels our mother was worse than the Dreaded Unit.  

“On a colorful side note,” said the skeleton, “you remember the Waner brothers, both Hall of Famers, who were nicknamed Big Poison and Little Poison?  Pitchers and opposing managers started calling these two hitting machines Poison and the names became part of baseball folklore.  Big Poison was a star when his brother came up to play beside him in the outfield, and they named his kid brother Little Poison, of course.  But Little Poison was actually bigger than Big Poison.  Ain’t dat some shit?”  

Sho nuff is, dad.

 

historical footnote from Wikipedia, which backs my father’s story, in the end:

Paul was known as “Big Poison” and Lloyd was known as “Little Poison.” One story claims that their nicknames reflect a Brooklyn Dodgers fan’s pronunciation of “Big Person” and “Little Person.” In 1927, the season the brothers accumulated 460 hits, the fan is said to have remarked, “Them Waners! It’s always the little poison on thoid (third) and the big poison on foist (first)!” But given that Lloyd was actually taller, this story would seem somewhat incongruous.

The Fundamental Loneliness of Existence

“Listen, I didn’t mean to bum you out yesterday with my reflections on friendship,” said the skeleton.  “I mean, realistically, what are your odds of being caught in a lifeboat with a group of friends?  More likely you’d be there with strangers, and we all know all bets are off when it comes to killing and eating strangers.”  

You didn’t bum me out, though my one-day editor might wonder what it had to do with your life, why it’s in the Book of Irv.

“Well, it reflects my lifelong feeling about the transience of friendship, and how, in the end, and all along the way, people always do what’s best for them, no matter how much guilt they might deal with after the fact. That’s the essence of being comfortably middle class, Elie, –not that anyone can be truly comfortable in the insecure middle class, mind y0u, the future all riding, literally, on the twitch of a roulette wheel– finding a way to deal with the guilt of not really being in the fight, it’s like survivor guilt.  On the one hand, you worked hard, you feel entitled to the comfort you’ve earned.  On the other hand, even though you didn’t take your money from anybody’s hand, or food out of anyone’s mouth, there’s a certain terrible sorrow you can’t consider too often involved in living in a world like the one we live in. Your success proves you personally were not doomed, but there are literally billions, all around, who are.

“You read the New York Times every day and once or twice a year they make an appeal to your conscience, show you pictures of wretched, doomed children.  You cry and open your checkbook and send some money.  It makes you better than most people, and, really, what is anyone supposed to do about institutional poverty going back ten and twenty generations?

The skeleton paused to consider what looked like a couple of vultures, turning lazy arcs in the sky to the north of the cemetery.

“What did your former buddy the judge tell you about contracts?  You make a contract with somebody when things are at their best, you are full of hope for the partnership.  Then, later, when things turn to shit, you hope the original terms are fair to both of you– or, actually, you hope the terms are construed in your favor and totally fuck the other party.  He said it of friendship, right?  You give your friend every benefit of the doubt, though over time the doubt may overwhelm and smother the benefit.

“Did you ever foresee a day when someone you shared so many good times with, someone you trusted, confided in, considered a good friend, would become a stranger?  I doubt it.  It seems unimaginable, doesn’t it, that you would end up with nothing but malice for your old friend Andy.  He’s dead to you, as you yourself freely admit.  Yet for many years, decades, in fact, such a thought was unthinkable.  Now you understand how things worked out with Harold.

“The seeds were there all along, in the crisp light of hindsight.  Was Harold a genius, literally?  I’d say he was.  Was he one of the funniest people I ever knew?   At one time.  But you see, Elie, as you yourself have learned, someone is only funny as long as they do not appear to be an arrogant sadist.  It’s a fine line we walk with other people.  That’s the point.  It’s like that great line from that Isaac Babel story you love, go get the tattered book off the shelf, it’s worth quoting accurately.  I’ll wait.  

Babel’s narrator writes:  A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time.  The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist.  The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.  

“It’s like that with friendship too.  If you have to turn the lever a second time, all bets are probably off.  And we are born into this world like Babel’s phrases, both good and bad at the same time.  In the end, I’m afraid, it’s like your friend’s father always said, ‘you’re born alone, you live alone, you die alone.'”

Those are the words of a pessimist, dad.  Pessimism is something to be afraid of, in the end.  

“Well, you can get out the rollers and the drop cloths and paint a nice patina of cheerful, hopeful bullshit on everything in your life, believe the best of everybody.  Or you can be ready.  In a heartbeat, Elie, it all changes”

The two vultures were now perched on the top of my father’s double wide headstone, looking oddly interested in the conversation, turning from my father’s skeleton to me.

Look, obviously I hear what you’re saying.  

The vultures kept looking at me, they did not seem satisfied with my response.  

“You’re struggling today, I understand.  Bringing in prop birds, a sort of macabre Heckle and Jeckle.  I get it.  This must be hard work, Brownie.  All I can say is keep going.  You must not rest until my story is told.”

Tell us more about Harold.

“Harold and I met when we were both starting teachers.  We taught in a very tough New York City Junior High School in a terrible neighborhood.  You know there are more assaults in Junior High than anywhere else.  The hormones kicking in makes that age group prone to lashing out.  They don’t know what’s happening to them, and they are still really kids, but suddenly the girls have breasts and the guys are starting to grow mustaches.  This school was a full-time battleground, the kids were poor, mostly from the projects, and the principal, as you’d expect, was a completely incompetent hectoring bureaucrat.  

“I remember meeting Harold in the teacher’s room.  You remember the preps, right?  You’d get 45 minutes off, it was in the contract, every day you’d get your prep period. You’d never prep anything, you’d spend your whole 45 minutes wondering how you got into this shit hole which seemed to have no bottom and infinite shit flying at you from every direction.  So I guess Harold saw the look on my face, and he comes over laughing and we start to talk.  He was a life saver.  

“I remember I asked him how he coped with the angry, savage, vicious students and he took me aside and told me his secret.  In hindsight, it shows what he was like from the beginning, I mean, can anyone condone this kind of behavior?  But at the time, I remember feeling admiration for his guts, and finding his hard-boiled way of telling the story very funny, even though there’s nothing at all funny about it now, now that I hate the guy.  He was showing me his style, and how little he gave a fuck, and these both struck me as very cool at that time.  

“He told me that when it got really bad he’d get very quiet.  He’d walk over to the door of the room and pull the little shade down over the window in the door.  He’d glance out the window to make sure nobody was outside who was going to be a witness.  Then he’d roll up his sleeves, take the kid who was challenging him and beat the shit out of him.”  

Nice.  

“Yeah, and the thing was, as you learned with some of those very tough little kids in Harlem, they were too macho to report him in most cases and also, he found, it made them respect him.  It actually proved to the kid, in a sick way, that you cared enough about him to deck him.”

Sean Pedroso, I thought, but did not say.  

 “Look, I realize how little you remember about Harold.  I mean, you must have been ten or eleven when he put a price of $75 on our friendship and I told him it was worth much less than that.  Tell them the story about that rainy day when he swooped by in that little shitbox he used to drive, the one he rebuilt over and over.”

I was on 190th Street walking toward the turnpike, I was a little ways down the street when the sky opened up and it started to pour.  Suddenly a horn honked, the street was still a two way street back then and the car was headed to the turnpike.  I looked over to see Harold leaning toward the passenger window, calling for me to hop in.  

He gave me a big smile, asked where I was going, and took me there.  

“As skinny as you are, I figure you could dash between the raindrops, but why work that hard when we have this motorcar here?”  Glancing around the interior of that little car I realized at once why my father called it a shitbox.

The ride lasted maybe two minutes, and I thanked him, probably made my way back through the rain, but I remember that short ride fifty years later.  It clearly made a big impression on me, those moments with my father’s friend the genius.  

I also remember him calculating a distance once by asking me how far it was to the horizon.  There is a specific distance over flat ground.  It might be 26 miles.  He knew the number and described how to figure out how far this distant point was by estimating its relation to the distance to the horizon.  For all I know, it was complete bullshit, but I remember I took it as proof that Harold really was a genius. 

“You never heard him quote long passages in German, or speak Italian, or play the oboe?  Harold was literally a Renaissance Man, he was a genius many times over.  He was also, I came to understand, an insane, petty and merciless prick.”  

So I came to understand.  

The buzzards gave each other a look, shook their heads, stretched out their great, stinking wings, and took off.  

Yeah, I’m out of here too, dad.  

“Have a blessed day,” said the skeleton, as arch as he was when he was alive and walking among us.

 

 

Friendship

“Well, look, Elie, it’s easy enough to be sociable and make friends if you have the tools. I had the tools: I had decent looks, you know, when I was younger, I was droll, I was well-read and could discuss current invents, I knew history, I followed sports. I was irreverent, engaging and plain-spoken, things that come off as charming and will make you seem interesting in a social setting,” said the skeleton.

“Plus, and this will strike you as funny, probably, but I had the most important qualities too, I was very sensitive and empathetic.”

I always realized you were sensitive, though the empathetic part is a little funny, of course. Even though I saw your empathy in action many times, just not toward us very often.

“Well, one can’t be everything to everyone,” said the skeleton. “But, on a deeper level, remaining mutual friends with somebody always requires a certain suspension of belief, on both sides, about the entire reality of the person you’re choosing to stay friends with. You know we are all admirable and despicable as human beings, and to your credit, recently, you try to focus on the admirable, whenever you’re not busy speaking ill. I feel it’s a losing game, in the long run, but I think it’s great that you’re trying to sustain this benevolent view of the flawed people in your life.”

Pater, I take your life as a graduate seminar in how to live my own life. If I learn nothing from the history of your troubled quest, I am doomed to repeat it. Do you hear me, there in your permanent dirt bed?

“Loud and clear, my son. Look, I understand what you’re trying to do. I already told you I admire the effort you’re putting in. Maybe you really have become a better person than I was ever capable of becoming. I hope so. Still, since you’re apparently giving me my say on this subject, I’ll say the following:

“It’s easy, as we have noted, for anyone with a little wit and just about any amount of native charm, to gather a group of friends in his life — everyone is constantly looking for friends, after all — providing he’s willing to be an actor and pretend, at times, that things are other than they actually are, fundamentally. My take, of course, is ultimately pessimistic– we can pretend all we want that we are actually intimately close to these loving people but if it comes down to the lifeboat after four or five days on a flat sea, these dear friends are looking around to see which of their closest friends is ripest for the picking.

“It’s like that great cartoon in Playboy, in one of the magazines I hid in that cabinet down in the basement that you were always so paranoid I’d find out you were intently inspecting. (What, did you really think that as I was poring over those fascinating articles in the basement bathroom that I’d be looking for forensic clues that my teenaged son had been poking around in those glossy mags?) Anyway, you remember the cartoon, obviously, on the lifeboat, all the scraggly survivors are perusing menus and the waiter, like Jeeves, in the impeccable tuxedo is standing attentively by, towel on his forearm, poised to take their orders and the guy asks the waiter “how is the cabin boy prepared?’

“No matter how highly you think of them, if you are brutally honest, you can see the faces of your friends who would be the last ones alive on that drifting lifeboat. Most of them would, to their credit, be chagrined as they chewed their ceviche d’Eliot but only the most noble of them would hesitate, if they had to eat you to survive, before tucking into your sashimi. Some would be elbowing the others out of the way to get their share, it’s human nature, the same thing that allows us to march off in columns chanting and slashing with broad swords.

“And I say this as a compliment, you probably would be about the last person on that lifeboat to dig in. I don’t think you’d ever have the heart to eat, for example, Sekhnet sashimi, even to preserve your life. I mean, we can never really know what we’d do in that situation, of course, until we’re in that boat. But I think, if we polled your friends, they’d agree, you wouldn’t be elbowing your way to the trough, you’d take a lot of coaxing before you’d consider eating the dead Sekhnet just to stay alive.

“They might finally marshal enough arguments (assuming there was more than enough to go around), ‘look, she died of a heart attack, she’s already dead, she’s going to putrefy anyway, there aren’t enough of us to finish her before the sea vultures and sharks start swooping in, waste not want not, it’s a sin to waste food, she’d want you to eat her, think of how exceedingly generous she always was, she’d be happy that you lived on because of her, she’s actually quite delicious,’ and they might convince you in the end, but you’d be crying as you ate, and certainly not fighting any one for her scraps.”

Maybe so. Though it doesn’t make me a better person than any of them, just more squeamish about where I draw the line.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” said the skeleton.

I had good friends you always despised because you considered them slick charmingly insincere self-promoters. or morally deficient in some other way. You predicted they’d do very well, materially, and even feel guilty when certain facts of their lives were presented too openly, and you dismissed them as human beings. Already judged and found guilty for their future adult selves, even at nine, thirteen or fourteen. It always shocked me a little.

“Well, you’ve done the same yourself since then, made the same judgments I did. It’s only where you are experientially at that point in your life that allows you to see certain things. I’d seen these guilty avowedly liberal types many times over by the time I was an adult, people who could literally exploit slave labor and enjoy prostitutes, young boys, whatever the insupportable vice, and then be disarmingly guilty and philosophical about it when confronted.

“Guys like Thomas Jefferson, to this day one of history’s most beloved and gifted spokesmen for freedom and human equality. Don’t you think the Author of Liberty would blush to the roots of his red hair to be told, plainly, what a despicable fucking hypocrite he was, along with what an undeniably eloquent, beloved opponent of tyranny and slavery in all its forms? He’d probably dash right out to the stables for a vigorous ride, return with the horse bloody and wild-eyed, his slave groom calming the hysterical animal, as every one of his biographers seems to have noted about the Sage of Monticello, our gentlest, wisest founding father.”

Don’t get me started on the fucking Author of Liberty, dad. But you know the funny thing, you’d probably have been friends with him if you were a Virginian back then.

“Yeah, maybe. If I wasn’t, say, a Negro,” said the skeleton. “On the other hand, manumitted Negroes were not allowed in Virginia a day beyond the one year anniversary of their manumission, so I couldn’t have actually been a Virginian and a Negro back then anyway, except during that short window, which would have been too quick to have become real friends with the famously cool Mr. Jefferson. It took him years to form his lifelong friendships.

“Look, I know you’re better off loving a warm, humanistic, well-read, thoughtful, funny person, instead of despising them because they may also be, of necessity, a slightly insincere self-promoter, or even a complete hypocrite. Better to love a very lovable guy, even as you realize his lucrative livelihood, even if motivated by the highest ideals, is a bit… well, you wouldn’t want to do it.”

Or we can just say “judge not, lest you be judged” or whatever that phrase was.

“Who said that? Jesus, the imaginary messiah of the eternally warring Christian sects?” said the skeleton.

I have no idea. I can recall, word for word, five hundred jingles and TV theme songs from childhood, but I couldn’t give you a single accurate Shakespeare quote or even one of my favorite proverbs.

“Well, that’s just one more reason why Donald Rump is going to be the next president of these Untied States,” said the skeleton. “Hah, it’s funny, that still looks like a typo, even though I said, and meant ‘untied’.”

Hitlerious, dad. I’m outta here, yo.

The Work Ethic

“In hindsight, I think it was a mistake to tell you that story,” said the skeleton.

What?  That’s my favorite story of all the stories you ever told me.  

“Well, putting it in the context of your life, maybe not such a good story to be your favorite,” said the skeleton.  “I think it had a disproportionate impact on your work ethic.  Sekhnet made a reference to that the other day, poor exhausted Sekhnet, telling you that your parents had done you no favors by instilling no sense of responsibility in you, no work ethic.”

Not fair.  She was exhausted, and although she stuck to her guns about my deplorably casual work ethic, I also eventually forced her to start back pedaling a tiny bit, parsing my clever distinctions.

“But there was a certain uncomfortable truth there, too.  Admit it,” said the skeleton.  

Fine.  But it’s still a great story, no?  

The dog comes upon the starving wolf on a country road.  The dog says “man, you look like shit… what happened to you?”  

The wolf says the hunting has not been going well, he hasn’t eaten in a few days and he’s starting to get weak from hunger.  The dog says he’s got food back at home, more than he can eat, invites the wolf back to eat as much as he wants, all ready and waiting for him in a big bowl.  With plenty more where that came from.

They trot off.  After a moment that wolf notices some fur rubbed away, the skin showing on the dog’s neck.   He slows down, the dog slows down.  The wolf asks the dog what’s up.

“‘What is that?  You got psoriasis or something, how did your neck get that way?’,” said the skeleton. 

The dog laughs and says it’s nothing.  Must have gotten some fur rubbed away by the collar.

“The wolf slows down even more, says ‘the collar?’  The dog says, ‘oh it’s nothing, it’s a ring that goes around your neck for the leash’,” said the skeleton.  

“The leash?” says the wolf in horror, stopping completely.  

“The dog shrugs nonchalantly and explains that the leash, which attaches to the collar, is like a rope tied to a tether in the ground so that he can’t run off while he’s guarding the house all day, but that they let him off the leash to eat, and get a little exercise, and that in exchange for wearing leash and collar, and working all day, he gets all the food he wants and so forth.  The wolf pictures this, looks at the dog in despair and begins backing away,” said the skeleton.  

“Where are you going, man?  I got food, you’re starving.  What the hell are you doing?” asks the dog. 

“The wolf says ‘I appreciate the offer, my brother, and your generosity… but… I….,’ and he lopes off back into the wild,” said the skeleton with a faraway look.  

It was that faraway look that sealed the story for me.  I saw the longing in that story, how you were wishing for me a life of freedom you could never imagine.  I heard a world of possibilities for a higher truth in that story.  It did more to form me than any other single story I can think of.  

“It fucked you up, man,” said the skeleton.  “There are certain stories it behooves you not to take too seriously, no matter how passionately they were told to you, no matter how deep and aching the longing they expressed.”  

Now you fucking tell me, dad.

 

Adamant Rivals

Passover was always a very meaningful holiday in our family home growing up.  My father took his duties as leader of the seder very seriously and conducted an intelligent discussion of the philosophical and historical issues raised during the yearly retelling of the story of our people’s flight from slavery in Egypt to wandering in the wilderness towards freedom.

“Well, that’s an accurate description of the procedure.  It’s a continual process, liberation.   You start off a slave, and you can never shake that slave mentality 100%,” said the skeleton.  “You strive to be free later, when massa’s in de cold, cold ground, but you always have the fears and emotional habits of the slave.  In your dreams you are still powerless, as we all largely are in our waking lives. If you are born a slave you will never personally become free, that’s why the generation that had been slaves all had to die, except for Moses and his brother, who’d grown up as princes.   The forty years of wandering in the wilderness was so that all the former slaves could die, and their slave mentalities with them.  Only then were the children of the Hebrews ready to become Israelites.

“During your lifetime you try to teach the next generation to be be free, unafraid, to tolerate no whipping. True freedom means everybody around you is also free.  Are you really free if all of your brothers and sisters are still slaves?  I took the message of Passover very personally: remember that you yourself were a slave to the Pharaoh in Egypt and his eternal ilk, and I think I transmitted that to you and your sister.”

To a dramatic, sometimes disabling effect, I would have to say.  Identify with the slave, the doomed, the powerless– beyond a certain point– and it will fuck you up.  

“Well, as in all things, a point of moderation must be found,” said the skeleton.

Easier said than done, of course.  I’m going to have to continue this with you a little later, I just want to point out a shabby bit of copy writing in a Haggadah my good friends use every year.  They take Passover as seriously as you did, and it bugs me every year when I read this line, and I never want to stop the seder to niggle over this one point, but what do you think?.

“Jews at the seder are free to robustly debate and agrue, not meekly acquiesce like slaves, but argue strongly, head to head, like adamant rivals.”  

“There’s a Jewish copywriter for you,” said the skeleton, his wry grin, or yawn, intact.

Adamant rivals, dad.  If that fellow had a thesaurus he would have found stubborn, obdurate, inflexible, unyielding, impenetrable, impermeable, next to his chosen word.  

“Even the chosen people do not always chose the chosen word well,” said the skeleton.

So true.  Look, I’d love to keep chatting with you today, dad, but I have an appointment in an hour and about seventy minutes of stuff I have to do to get ready.  

“Can you ever be truly ready?” asked the skeleton, unhelpfully.

Not at this rate, pops.

The Funny Thing About Rage

“Hitlerious, as you used to say, rage,” yawned the skeleton.  

What I mean is that in the cool dawn of a day long after the fact, looking at the rage and the actions it produced, you can see how ridiculous it was.  

“It sure isn’t ridiculous at the time, though,” said the skeleton.  

“Look, these talks we’re having now, in your head, as it were, they really make me ashamed of myself.  When I think of how I should have been doing this with my kids all along.”  

We’ve been over this, and, as I told you when you were whipping yourself about it on your death bed, to the extent that a man whose strength is almost gone can whip himself…

“It was more like tickling myself, but I take your point,” he said.

…I told you you’d done the best you can.  It doesn’t relieve you of responsibility for the damage you did, of course, but you can understand, with the face whipping you were forced to endure as an infant and all the rest, why you would become an adult filled, in equal parts, with idealism and rage.  

Your man George Grosz observed “in order to understand how a man can brutalize his fellow men it is first necessary to study the humiliation he underwent.”

“Insightful quote,” said the skeleton.

“Well, look, as far as your sister’s wedding, I think it’s safe to say now that, if we hadn’t been so furious at you, we wouldn’t have given Frank such a big tip after the wedding.  We also wouldn’t have apologized to him and your mother wouldn’t have pretended to laugh at his rather lame and witless attempt at a joke.  I realize now we might have been a little cooler toward him, if we hadn’t been blinded by anger at you.  We can agree that he acted unprofessionally, at the very least, in assaulting the son of the people who were paying him a generous fee for some salads and those virtually uncooked birds.  No matter what that provocative bastard had called him.”  

Well, it’s good to hear that, even if it comes more than a decade after your death. It also proves a larger point, I think.  People change.  I’m not mad about it any more.  Your betrayal at the wedding opened my eyes afterwards, and helped me realize how disabling the rage that had been instilled in me was.  I can tell the story now without a flicker of anger at my graceless dance partner Frank.  He was clearly a guy with his own issues.  I wish that punch I threw had knocked him down,  true, but at the same time, I can easily see it was for the best, the way it all worked out.  

Sekhnet was shocked, when I read her the exciting conclusion to How I Ruined My Sister’s Wedding yesterday, at how mean I was to you and mom in your living room that rainy night after the wedding.  She compared my behavior to her insane brother’s, and he had restraining orders against him taken out by his own mother and was living, when last heard of, on disability payments for his psychosis.  

“You were really bad!” she said aghast, and urged me to add some exculpatory sentences to introduce why I had acted so badly to my parents.  I added them, so now the reader can have a better context for why I assaulted my father and unconscionably told my mother to suck my dick.  

“Well, in your defense, it did snap her out of that fugue she had worked herself into– she literally couldn’t stop herself.  Your remark, horrible as it is to say to your mother, really did act like a slap to a hysterical person’s face.  The way it is in the movie, the person freaking out, freaking out, slap!  ‘Thanks, I needed that.’

“And, as for assaults, there could hardly have been a more restrained, less traumatic one, outside of the disrespect, than whipping one finger smartly across an enraged bully’s nose.  I know I was a bully to you and your sister, and your mother at times, and that’s probably the thing I am most ashamed of.  Instead of being an advocate and protecting you guys, and teaching you to stand up for yourselves, I was regularly uncorking my colon and relieving myself upon you.”  The skeleton waited uncomfortably as I took my time, like an Elmore Leonard character.  

“Funny you bring up Elmore Leonard, one of my favorite writers.  I didn’t read fiction, but I read every book Leonard ever wrote.  I introduced you to him and you also loved him.  I’d pass on my copy of the latest to you, and you’d hand me your library copy, with two weeks left on it, and between us we exchanged every book he wrote in those years.   Sam Cooke is your favorite singer, to this day.  Our politics and analysis of human history are quite similar.   Think of how much we actually had in common, but I was too fucked up to notice.”  

Most people, I notice, are too fucked up to notice the most important things in life, dad.  There’s no point being depressed about it once you’re dead.  

“Oh, I’m not depressed about it.  I have no consciousness at all now that I’m dead, actually.  Once you die, in fact, the brief spark that was Irv will wink out with your consciousness.  Once you and your sister both die, of course.  The grandchildren will remember me, but only vaguely.  They were kids when I died.  You know, you and your sister were very lucky to have grandma and pop until you were in your twenties.  Grandparents get a second chance to be good parents and it’s a much easier gig.  Like being an uncle versus being a father, much easier.  Responsibility is what crushes most people,” said the skeleton.

Tis, indeed.