As Frankie the Caterer, who outweighed me by maybe forty pounds, held me off balance against the cupboard and began throwing punches toward my face, and grunting as he did — and, I have to say, the grunting pissed me off as much as anything– I started to get really mad.  

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in this position, and I hope you never have, but it really does make you angry to be treated that way.

 “You’re hilarious, Mr. Talking to the Reader Amateur Hour,” said the skeleton.  

I’m not kidding, it really is infuriating when somebody tries to beat the shit out of you.  I hadn’t been in any fist fights, and had avoided all beatings, in spite of my long habit of speaking disrespectfully to bullies, but instincts took over.  I emulated Ali’s Rope A Dope, covering my torso and face with forearms and fists.  Off balance as I was I could get no leverage to hit back.  This arrangement worked in my favor as well, because Frankie couldn’t get much leverage to put any real power behind his punches, which were landing mostly harmlessly on my arms.  

About the only thing I could do was yell, and since there was no point pretending we were friends at this point, the things I yelled would have curdled the milk in a respectable woman’s tea.

My yelling really served no good purpose, except to curdle the milk in the tea of the respectable ladies who owned the place, Daughters of the American Revolution, directly above us, and alert them that some enraged, toilet-mouthed black man had evidently broken into their beautiful mansion and was violently assaulting the off-duty policeman, their friendly caterer Frank.  

“His name is Frank, isn’t it?  That greaseball?” said one of the women, referring, with the political incorrectness that is the birthright of such women, to Frank’s Italian ancestry.  

“The wop?” said another, “I believe his name is Francis, or possibly Frank.”

We were getting nowhere fast, Frank and I, and since the music was loud in the dining room, and we were behind closed doors at the far end of the kitchen, nobody but the Daughters of the American Revolution directly upstairs were hearing any of the perfectly offensive, frightfully disrespectful things I was yelling.  Frank kept grunting and hitting, I kept snarling.  Then five or six of Frank’s colleagues came running into the kitchen and pulled us apart.

Two of them restrained me, nobody restrained Frank. There was a little pause, as these off-duty policemen stood in a little half circle figuring out their next move, how to stage the scene correctly so that everything played out the way they needed it to.  The guy with the mouth like a fucking perp — well, it would be easy enough to pin the assault on him, he was clearly the aggressor, but they were sort of thinking about how to best proceed.  

My mind was working fast too at that moment.  I was being held, my arms pinned, and Frankie, who hadn’t managed to get a good shot in, was standing a few feet away, still mad as hell.  I knew, somehow, the chances were pretty good that as long as I struggled, and was being held by two guys, I’d give Frankie the chance to finally bash me in the face.  I could see he wanted to and was probably most comfortable pummeling a man his friends were holding.  Policemen famously make loyal witnesses who will not rat out a brother on the job or off.

Instincts, again.  I let my body go slack and said quietly to the guys holding me, “I’m OK, let me go please.”  I sounded so reasonable, and was putting up no resistance, that, to my surprise, they released me.  I noticed the suddenly confused expressions on everybody’s face.  

Then I said to Frankie “after what you just tried to do to me, what’s to stop me from doing the same to you?”  I could see it perfectly in my head, a crisp punch to the cheek, spinning his head, followed by a hard shot to the stomach, he doubles over, pound him to ground, kick him once, leave.

As soon as the last syllable was out of my mouth I realized nothing stood in the way.  I punched him in the face.  It was not the heroic Hollywood punch I’d imagined a millisecond before, but it was a solid, if slightly tentative hit.  They started moving in, I realized the rest of my plan would have to be abandoned.  I moved quickly, telling everyone it was over, leaped nimbly over a long waist high metal table (my legs were strong from bike messengering and I was trim), landed lightly on the other side, bowed, like the admirer of Bruce Lee that I was, and left the kitchen.  

I joined the party, began excitedly telling somebody what had just happened.  Found a friend of my bother-in-law’s who was a lawyer, told him I might be needing him later, said the same to his friend the shrink.  Just then my father rushed over in his tuxedo, red-faced, with the keys to the car in his hand.

“I don’t know what the fuck is the matter with you, I don’t know what you’re on, but this party is over for you.  Take the car and get out of here, the police are on their way,” he said in one hot breath.

“Excellent,” I said, not taking the car keys he was thrusting at me, “I’m going to file assault charges when they get here.”   

“The cops are on their way, and you’re getting out of here now,” he insisted.  

“You’re telling me to flee the scene of an assault when I am the victim of the assault?  What the fuck are YOU on?” I yelled back.

 “Lower your voice,” he hissed, steering me toward the vestibule outside the ballroom.  

“They already called the police, they’re on their way.  Frank is a cop.  I don’t know what the fuck is the matter with you!” he motioned to the front doors, elegant double doors with narrow panels of intricately cut glass inlaid in them.  

“Let’s talk outside,” I said and pushed the door open with the back of my open left hand.  

“You balled up your fist and smashed the glass on the door in a fit of violent rage!” insisted my father afterwards, and forever after.

Showing the cuts on the back of my left hand, a tiny scar is there to this day, did nothing to disabuse him of this image of his enraged out of control son violently ruining the expensive wedding, deliberately smashing the glass with the back of his weaker, guitar fretting hand, and then, typically, trying to rewrite history to make himself the victim.

What followed was me being detained by police in a coat room for  the remainder of the wedding, my incriminating bloody left hand wrapped in a cloth napkin.  I was eventually questioned and told the story to a cop who nodded and said, “curse, shove, punch, yeah, I got it.  Look, this happens all the time at weddings, sad to say.  People have a couple of drinks.  I once punched out my brother-in-law at a wedding, and we’re good friends, we laughed about it later.  Emotions are high, this happens at weddings, unfortunately.”  

Maybe it happens at cop family weddings, where men are used to acting like men on TV, they don’t use passive aggression or withering wit to express their hostility, they act like men, use their fist, a beer stein, a bat, whatever I can use to fucking bash your brains in, big mouth.  My family had never seen this kind of thing, at least if we don’t include the rude treatment they probably got from the people who murdered them en masse back in Eastern Europe.

I myself wasn’t used to it.  What followed was grotesquely familiar, though.  I was generously given the lion’s share of the blame for the ugly incident, blame my parents griped about forever.  The lawyer friend of my new brother-in-law had negotiated a deal– Frank, a gentleman, would voluntarily drop the assault charges against me if I waived the right to file any charges I might be thinking of bringing against him.  “It’s a good deal,” the lawyer assured me.  After all, five police witnesses had seen me punch the caterer in the face, which I’d also admitted to doing, the rest was my word against the caterer’s.  I took the deal, but I wasn’t particularly gracious about taking it.

Talking to people in the weeks after the wedding, I found that virtually nobody there had been aware of how I had successfully ruined the party.  Each one expressed shock when I told the dramatic story.  My sister had been unaware of it at the time too.  

“You deliberately ruined your sister’s wedding,” my parents kept insisting.  “You provoked and assaulted the caterer for no reason.  You have a violent fucking temper!”  They were like two dogs with a bone, they would not let it go.  It enraged them over and over again, that I had simply, maliciously, decided to violently provoke and attack an innocent and decent person in the middle of the happiest day in all of our lives.  Never mind that I’d never been involved in a fist fight in my life, outside of this one.  I was long overdue for a good ass kicking from somebody, the way they saw it.

They both readily understood how somebody could want to punch me in the face over and over.  This struck me as one betrayal too many, the distilled compounding of a lifetime of my parents’ both taking everyone else’s side over my own, my point of view being dismissed as mere blame-shifting justification.  If a stranger tried to punch my lights out, he must have had a damned good reason.  

Having read my detailed account you might be inclined to think my parents could have employed a bit of nuance in analyzing things, might have realized that few conflicts in life are 100% one person’s fault, but you’d be missing the point by thinking that way.  

“Very clever,” said the skeleton, “you know the real reason you are writing this book.  To get the last fucking word, to prove to everybody that you’re right and the rest of the world is wrong.  You want to pontificate and hand down the final wise word on everything, years after the rest of us are dead and can’t defend ourselves.”

That must be it, dad.  So the ending is like this:  I went to my parents house a couple of nights later, after a day of riding my bike in lousy weather to make a few dollars.  I confronted them about their implacable refusal to listen to my side of the story.  They did not like being confronted.  My father was smug, my mother was enraged.  

“That’s all you know how to say ‘suck my dick! suck my dick!  suck my dick!’,” she worked herself into a frenzy, saying it over and over, like a Tourretic parrot, in a high pitched imitation of her violently insane son.

“Suck my dick,” I told her, using the regrettable, dismissive phrase for perhaps the last time in my life.

My father weighed in.  “You conveniently leave out the most important part of the whole incident,” he said.  

When I asked the obvious follow-up he said, “you had no right to be in the kitchen in the first place.  Once you went into the kitchen everything that happened was your fault.  You were wrong, but of course, you could never admit that.”  

At this point, if we’d been a cop family, fists would already have been flying, my mother would have broken a platter across the back of my head, neighbors would be rushing toward the house.

Instead, finally having heard enough, the maddening futility of the whole exercise exhausting me, I walked over to my father on the couch and held up one finger.  

“The most important fucking thing about the incident was the violence that occurred, and escalated, from verbal to physical.  If you think they are exactly the same, think again.”  He glared at me.

“Don’t make me get up from this couch,” he warned, like he was talking to a five year-0ld.

 I watched my father’s eyes watching my finger as I brought it smartly across his nose.  

“Don’t make me get up from this couch,” he growled, not moving a muscle.  

“You’re a cunt,” I said, moving toward the door to leave.  

My mother started screaming about this.  Her screams sounded like the screams of someone being scalded to death.

My father maintained his cold, steely demeanor.  “I’m writing you out of the Will, you’ll get nothing from us,” he told me.  

“Fuck you and fuck your will,” I said.  

“Give me the keys to the house,” he said, “you’re not welcome here anymore.”  

“I’m keeping the fucking keys and coming by to terrorize you whenever I feel like it,” I informed him over my mother’s screaming.

I left and rode my bicycle towards the train station on Hillside Avenue.  It was raining now and I put on my rain gear.  On the way to the train I passed the home of Florence and Mike, two good friends of Arlene and Russ.  Florence was an excellent artist, a great soul and one of my favorite people in the world.  I was one of her’s too.  Mike was a good guy, very bright, idealistic, an excellent piano player devoted to Bach, as was Florence.  

I knocked on their door, went in and told them the story.  They were very sympathetic, predicted that it would take a while but that all this would eventually blow over.  We had a couple of laughs at some point, I think, and I rode off to the train feeling a lot better than when I left my parents’ house.

What I remember most clearly of all of these thirty year-old events is the feeling I had the next morning when I woke up.  

The rain, which had become torrential by the time I got back to my apartment, had stopped.  When I opened my eyes after a long sleep the sun was shining outside.  Birds were singing.  I was struck by an incredible feeling of lightness I’d never felt, not before or since.  It was literally like a heavy weight had been lifted off my shoulders, my neck, my brow, my chest, my back, my arms and my legs.  I was euphoric to be free of my parents.  The feeling of relief was almost palpable, I could practically taste it.  

“It was not to last long,” said the skeleton.

Some time thirty winters ago, during the darkest seeming days of my life, when I literally dreaded to speak and felt like I was living underground, miles from any light, my sister and her prospective husband asked me to be the Best Man at their wedding.  For some reason I cannot explain now I accepted.    I felt well enough the following fall to give the toast, which was heavy in irony, particularly when I said: “and now, without a hint of irony, I welcome my new brother into the family.”

There is a photo of me raising a glass, in my tuxedo.  Behind me is a smiling, slightly odd looking fellow, also in a tuxedo.  His smile is strained, if you inspect the picture critically in light of what happened shortly afterwards.  My parents laughed during my toast, but apparently their laughter was as sincere as this guy’s smile.   The guy, a complete stranger, looks ready to punch me in the face.  Not long after the toast he would do just that, back in the kitchen, in the middle of a circle of off-duty cops.  

“I see you’re making this story all about you,” said the skeleton dourly.  “You deliberately ruined your sister’s wedding and now you are writing the definitive account of you as the hero of the story.  Typical.”

No, don’t worry, the story is about you, your reaction to the whole ugly thing, the huge fight a few days after the wedding.  Have no fear.  

“I’m beyond fear, up here on Cloud Nine.  Another thing I want to talk about– this device of talking to me is getting a little tired, don’t you think?  I mean, I understand you feel we should have talked more, without the concertina wire topped walls I always put up, and I was a gigantic ass to keep rebuffing your many attempts to have these talks, painfully regretted it all on my death bed, wished it had been otherwise and blah blah blah.  I’ll even grant you that you’re right to feel this way about it.  I just think the device of our ‘chat’ has become a rubber crutch, and about as funny as one.  You show me a man who insists on conversing with a talking skeleton and I’ll show you a man no literary agent will ever take seriously.”

That all may be so, but it’s how I’m telling the story, at least for now.  

“Addressing the reader directly, as you so often seem to do, is the mark of an amateur, don’t you think?” said the skeleton.  

I am an amateur.  As is every writer who writes but doesn’t get paid for the work.  Dialogue is the most important thing I can think of, especially when I’m writing, since writing is essentially a conversation with the reader.   Dialogue was painfully missing at home during my childhood, which is one reason I was drawn to friends I could talk with for hours, even if they were otherwise poisonous people.   My sister and I still routinely talk for a couple of hours on our weekend calls.  All this is a side show at the moment anyway, I think the story of my sister’s wedding reveals some terrible truths that need a-revealin’.  

“You always were a vindictive little prick,” said the skeleton.  

You can’t make a damn omelet without breaking a few eggs, padre.

“You always liked to bust balls,” observed the skeleton.

Only yours, really, or anyone who reminded me of you, actually.  Turn about, fair play, all that rot, you understand.  

When the chicken was served at my sister’s wedding it was yellow.  The game hens were kind of a light beige color, really, and, if you cut into them, pink lymph oozed out over the knife blade.  Few things horrified my sister more, on her plate, than an underdone chicken.  

“Sure, we’re talking about the chicken now, not about how you deliberately ruined your sister’s wedding,” said the skeleton.

Every waiter at the Mark Twain Diner knew to hand the plate back to the cook if my sister’s chicken did not have crispy dark brown, almost black, skin.  If they brought it out to her at the table in that juicy jaundiced condition she’d make a face, ask if she really had to explain again how she couldn’t eat underdone chicken.  She ate her steak medium rare, but the chicken had to be well done.  We both liked our chicken nice and slightly dry, and delicious.  

The small chickens that were brought out for each guest at my sister‘s wedding were yellow.   They were basically sashimi chicken.

“So what, that’s not the point!  So fucking what?” said the skeleton.  My mother, if she was in this story, would be getting even more worked up than the skeleton at this point.

I went into the kitchen and past a table full of perhaps fifty more chickens on plates ready to be served, all that same sand color.

 “You shouldn’t have been in the kitchen in the first place!  You had no right to be in the kitchen, you conveniently omit this fact because it proves you were wrong in the first place,” said my father’s skeleton, echoing his case-in-chief at the time.  My mother’s ashes snarled a nice background part to my father’s growl.

The caterer had told me earlier, when I’d asked for ice, or something like that, to go into the kitchen and get it.  He already had indicated it was no problem for me to go into the kitchen.  

“Oh, sure, and that’s why you marched in there like you owned the place and provoked him to punch you in the face!” yelled my mother, who, although ashes in a fancy shopping bag, could not, finally, restrain herself.

You see, gentle reader, what I am up against.  

“Oh, shut up!” said my mother.  

That was their consensus at the wedding and in the days after the wedding.  In fact, to this day, if they could vote, they’d cast their ballot for ‘he deliberately ruined his sister’s wedding’ and they wouldn’t have to hold their noses to cast that particular ballot.  

With all respect for their certainty about my motives, my misguided purpose for being in the kitchen was to find a well-done chicken, and not finding one, look for the caterer, explain to him the bride’s preference and ask him to please put one into the oven and make it nice and well-done for her, that it would mean a lot to her.  I thought this small, easily made gesture would be easy to explain to the caterer and that he, seeming nice guy, would agree at once.  I was completely wrong on both counts, as well as in my conversational choices when things got tense.

I didn’t find the caterer in the kitchen.  What I did next was wrong, I realize now, but I could hardly be blamed for not foreseeing that it would lead inexorably to the flurry of grunting punches that were soon to follow.  I’d found a box of kitchen matches and devised a plan.  I’d put a chicken or two on a pan (might as well make one for me as well) and roast it for another fifteen minutes or so, bring it out to my sister perfectly done.  She’d be very happy, I thought, to be able to eat something she could enjoy at her own wedding.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked the caterer, appearing as I was bent over, peering into the oven, trying to figure out where the pilot light was.  I smiled and explained what I needed, what I would like for my sister.  

“I don’t want to make her sound like a diva, or demanding or anything, it’s just that she literally can’t eat chicken unless it’s well-done,” I said, “and it’s her wedding and I’d… you know, it would mean a lot to her, and to me.”

“You can bring her any chicken on the table, but you can’t use the stove,” he said quickly, distracted, his men busy serving the undercooked birds.  

“Thanks,” I said, “but, look, they’re all done about the same.  If I could just put one in the oven for a few minutes it would be ready in no time, I could stay here and watch it, I don’t want to give you any hassles while you’re serving.”

To his mind I was already doing that, and he made it clear when he said “look, I really don’t have time for this, I told you, take any one on the table, you’re not using the oven.”  

“I get it, but look, do you see one that is well-done?  I mean….” We had arrived at an impasse in the conversation.

He took pity on me and explained, in a human gesture I appreciated, as far as it went.  “Look, I have an arrangement with the women who run this place, I cook the meal in an outside kitchen and serve it here.  I do a lot of business with them, and they don’t want me to use the stove, and I’m not going to jeopardize that for one chicken for your sister.  So with all respect for your sister, take any one of these chickens, but I can’t let you use the stove.” And he turned to walk back into the dining room to continue supervising his staff, and smiling at my parents who had hired him.  

“He was a very nice guy,” insists the skeleton to this day.

I’m sure he was.  In retrospect, viewing the circumstances in their fragile totality, the shaky house of cards the festivities actually were, the many ironies in delicate equipoise, I should have put out of mind any thought that my parents were paying for my sister to be served an inedible chicken at her own wedding, a bird that would go, untouched, straight into the dumpster.  A small thing in the cosmic scheme, really, but I allowed myself to become emotional rather than cooly analytical about it.  Things happened quickly, though, and what I said next was probably not the best thing for me to say, but he was in a hurry and, in my own defense, it was succinct.  

“I know you’re in a hurry so I won’t waste any more of your time.  I understand what you’re saying.  You’re not going to help out here.  Your business is very important to you, I get it.  I work as a bike messenger, money is not that important to me.  I must say, though as a businessman you’re doing the right thing… as a human being, you’re a piece of shit.”  

Then I turned, hurled the box of wooden safety matches I was holding against the wall and headed back toward the dining room.

Unbeknowst to me, the caterer, Frankie, by name, was an off-duty cop.  He worked full-time by day and did this gig as a second job, probably took a little pep drug to keep him hopping at night and so when he yelled at me to get the fuck over here and I told him, over my shoulder, to suck my dick, I was already resisting arrest.  I was literally surprised to see this bull of a man charging me.  I turned, indignant, shoved him, told him not to even think about it.  He didn’t.  He shoved me up against a counter, held me off balance against his hip, as he’d no doubt learned in the police academy, and commenced to punching me in the face.

(to be continued)

“Oh, shut up!” said my mother.

“‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death’,'” said the skeleton quoting Exodus 21:17.

My father had a habit of puckishly placing people in uncomfortable situations.  It was more of a hobby, I suppose, motivated by his enjoyment of seeing people off-balance.  He would sometimes do this by making a cheerful, apparently friendly introduction in a social setting, quickly setting the stage for lingering awkwardness, then walking off chuckling to himself as his victims began to struggle.  

Once, when I was about eighteen, he introduced me to the strong-willed, talkative mother of a friend of their’s, a woman I’d met many times over the years.   He generally avoided this woman and had mentioned to me how unbearable it was to sit next to her for any extended period of time.  He introduced us at one social occasion as though she and I had never met, and made us each sound fascinating to the other.  He timed the intro for a moment before dinner was served, ensuring that I would be seated at dinner next to this long-winded woman he disliked.   I can still see his satisfied smile as he walked down to the other end of the table and left me at her mercy for the next few hours, peering over from time to time during the long meal to see the look on my face and enjoy his handiwork.

The introduction I remember best, and my father did it more than once, at a wedding, or bar mitzvah, usually, was the one he did for Cousin Dave and me.  Dave was his smiling first cousin, a man with a beaming smile my father referred to as beatific or Cheshire Cat, both apt.  Dave was Nechama’s little brother, the kid with the eidetic memory who would speed read a text book and then just have to pull up the appropriate page in his memory during an exam and read it, which he apparently did with the ease of scrolling through microfiche.  

I’d never seen a demonstration of Dave’s photographic memory, but it made sense.  He’d been in intelligence in the army, which in itself means little, but he’d also obtained a law degree, easily passed the bar and,  without ever practicing law and starting with very little capital, became very rich.   I heard he had parachuted into some South American jungle at one point and emerged with a huge supply of some mineral, perhaps uranium, that soon became fantastically valuable.  When I knew him he owned a bank, as well as a gigantic mansion in Deal, New Jersey and a luxury pied a terre on Fifth Avenue in New York City.  He later picked up a fabulous apartment overlooking the beach at the Jersey shore.

“Hey, Elie,” my father would say cheerfully over by a table of hors d’oeuvres,  “this is your cousin Dave.  Ask him how he reconciles owning a bank and being a lifelong Communist.”  Then he would sort of dance off and disappear into the crowd, leaving Dave and me to exchange facial expressions resembling those worn by babies with gas.  

The fact was, Dave had remained a lifelong leftist, as far as I knew.  I was a long-haired teenager at the time of those introductions and like many young people, particularly in the early 1970s when the wind seemed to still be blowing toward change and social justice, I believed in justice and equality.  Something insisted to many of us that in the wealthiest nation the world has ever known children should not go to bed hungry, infant mortality rates in poor areas should not be as high as in third world nations, our prisons should not be filled with poor people, polluting corporations should not be allowed to poison the air, water and earth itself so they could maximize their already unlimited profits, people should not be persecuted because of their ethnicity, their beliefs, how they looked.  These idealistic notions motivated a young person in those days to believe we could stop war, clean up the planet, redress centuries of persecution and brutal unfairness.  

“Please, Elie,” said the skeleton, “I’m trying to conduct myself with some modicum of dignity here.  It would be unbecoming if I had a laughing fit right now, especially about something so sad.”

In fact, if my father had started an actual conversation between David and me, and stayed around to add his own contributions to the discussion, the three of us could have had an interesting talk.  Dave was bright and friendly and ready to discuss big ideas.  But that was not Irv’s way, he preferred the hit and run style he practiced– set ’em up, step back and watch ’em wobble.  

I don’t know much more about Dave.  His second and last marriage was to a young Brazilian beauty many years younger than he was, from a wealthy cattle ranching family.  I recall seeing a photo of a strapping younger Dave and the pretty girl he was standing next to, around the time they met.  It was on the wall of one of their homes.  I noticed that she had perfect little breasts in those days, and they peeked out, unrestrained, from under a soft, clingy shirt that really caught the warm South American light perfectly.  

“And that photo was taken years before her first plastic surgery,” said the skeleton.

“As rich as Dave was, he never turned the air conditioner on, until somebody would complain.  You never outgrow the Depression.  He had so much money, but he lived in dread of a high electricity bill if he ran the air conditioner,” my father told me.

I am inclined today, as my father long was, to simply give up on the human race, on the insignificant prey animals who rose to the top of the food chain, who do not hesitate to grab more than they can use and wink at, or even commit, bloody murder to get what we want.  We have our ideals, the things we deeply believe are right, and we make our daily accommodations to whatever we have to do in order to live as comfortably as we can.  It is all I can do most days to avoid ranting in circles in this horrific loop — our potential to be creative, and merciful, versus what most of us are forced to do in our largely mercy-free Free Market Society.  I can only avoid that today by stopping this typing right now.

Though, at the same time, I know that’s impossible.  I’m like the guy who once hit a ball high over a wall who stands in the batter’s box dreaming of that ball’s flight and the ease and grace of my one-time swing.  That I am now more like the creaky ninety-nine year old Ty Cobb does nothing to diminish that dream.  

“Very nice,” said the skeleton, “that little graf is a perfect reminder of why they put a delete key on the computer keyboard.  Go outside and take a walk, would you?  If you put on enough sunscreen the sun won’t kill you.  Have a nice day!”

“Your father is the most secure man I’ve ever known,” said our mother to us once. “He has the strongest ego, you have no idea how comfortable with himself he is or how rare that is in a man.”   She was laying it on with a trowel.  

When my sister and I stopped laughing, the scoffing wisecracks began.

“We didn’t know you grew up on a desert island, mom.”  

“Are you teaching us a new meaning of the word ‘secure’– like lashing out in rage at your kids all the time?”

“Shut up,” said the skeleton.  “These precocious wisecracks of yours are pure invention.  Stick to what actually happened if you’re writing my biography, wiseass.  A false move like this will cost you all the credibility you’ve been trying to maintain throughout.”  

A chipmunk ran across the skeleton’s grave.  

“Oh, and before I forget, thanks for that catch on that unbelievable use of the word ‘nigger’ yesterday.  I explained explicitly at one point what my attitude toward that sickening word always was, as you knew very well.  Not that I feel much differently than you about the hypocrisy of that fucking “n-word”, it makes my blood boil too– you know, in a figure of speech,” he glanced down at his dry bones.  

“It was much more lifelike to have me conclude ‘Uppity Negroes, Elie, never satisfied with their lot,” something dark I might have actually said, rather than ‘Niggers, Elie,’ something I never would have said.  I think you’re getting the hang of this kind of writing.”  

Merci.  

“Although, of course, I’d be failing you as a father, protagonist, reader and critic if I didn’t point out how pathetic it is that you feel compelled to put compliments into my skeletal mouth,” said the skeleton.

 Point taken.  

My sister and I did not actually utter those wisecracks in response to our mother’s defense of our father as a kind of superman.  As we pulled ourselves together from our laughing fit we began making our little versions of the familiar Jewish sounds and motions of extreme skepticism.  Waving our hands to dismiss, even fan away the smell of, the absurd statements, we also made the ancient sounds, kind of like the cawing and hissing of disbelieving crows.  

“You bastards,” said our mother with a tight smile, her face readying itself to fight the tears that were beginning to come.  “It’s so sad that you refuse to see what a good man your father is,” then the tears began to flow and my sister and I toned down our dismissive dance a notch.

This is how it often was, my sister and I, taking a break from our own intermittent war, uniting to beat down our mother as we’d seen her own mother do countless times, as our father did whenever he found it to his advantage.  As young as we were we already had that merciless knowledge that every mob has: if you attack somebody prone to run they will take off and you can have an exciting chase.  Prey ourselves, we also acted like tiny predators when we smelled a weaker animal nearby.   

“You two are monsters,” our mother said.  

“Sure we are,” I said, “we were created by two of the most brilliant mad scientists the world has known.”  

“Oh, I’m one of the mad scientists,” said my mother, the tears giving way to a bit of pique.  She was quick this way, emotionally labile, as I later learned it was called.  

“Nice way to introduce the love of my life,” said the skeleton.

My mother’s life deserves its own book.  I’m not writing her story here, I’m introducing her as a supporting character, to shed another important light on your life.  She was your accomplice, unwitting accomplice in my opinion, witting one in my sister’s.  “They were bad cop and worse cop,” as she rightly observes.  

“You two really didn’t fall far from the tree, did you?” said the skeleton.  

It was the soil we were raised in.  Look, mom had a similar upbringing to yours, only she didn’t have a little brother to take it out on.  She never got to stuff raw chopped meat in anyone’s mouth, that I know of.  She was lonely, and very bright, and her mother was a tyrant.

“A cheerful and very charismatic tyrant,” the skeleton pointed out.  

Yes.  And like all of Yetta’s slaughtered brothers and sisters, everyone in her family… you know, now that I think of it, I have a history question for you.  

“OK, don’t wait to see the whites of my eyes, shoot,” said the skeleton.  

Howard Zinn recites the immigration numbers in the early 1920s when the Captains of Industry were importing strike breakers and so forth.  

“Ah, yes, in them good old days we hear so much about,” said the skeleton.  

He reports that in 1920 there were strict immigration quotas from different countries.  The quotas ranged from 100 a year from places like Palestine to 34,000 for English, Irish and Scottish immigrants to 51,000 for Germans.  The number from Russia was 2,000 a year.  How the hell did grandma and pop manage to get out in 1921 and 1923?  

“Ask Jeeves, man.  That’s a good question.  I don’t know the answer.  I suspect the quotas were lifted, or relaxed.  It’s hard to believe the two of them could have been so lucky.  They certainly didn’t have the money or connections to buy their way on to the list, that I know of — not that I can picture anyone in those sweaty masses huddled among the rats in steerage being in that category,” said the skeleton.  

Anyway, you get mom’s parents’ escape from Vishnevitz, twenty years before all the Jews who weren’t starved to death or dead of disease were marched to a ravine for a bullet in the back of the neck, beginning life in America as two lonely immigrants.   Mom, born in 1928 in the Bronx, was fifteen the summer night when all her still- living aunts and uncles and their families were massacred back in  Russia.  An only child who had Yetta’s yardsticks regularly broken across her ass, as the story goes.  

“You can’t reduce people to their upbringings,” said the skeleton, almost instantly regretting it.  

We’re prone to say ‘can’ or ‘can’t’ but, as you realized too, the fucking world doesn’t care about can or can’t.  You know, you can’t take people, march them in a line and shoot them into a mass grave.  Innocent two year-olds?  You can’t do that.  

“I’m afraid my boss would disagree,” says the man with the gun, shrugging.  “Come on, you’re holding up the line.  I mean, you’re perfectly right, you can’t do this– but move along, we don’t have all night, my precocious little Yid.”  

“The madness of the fucking world,” said the skeleton, “our history as a merciless, eternally hopeful species, written in the blood of innocents.”  

You made mom cry now.  You happy, dad?  

“You know me,” said the skeleton, whistling a snippet of one of his favorite romantic tunes from the 1940s.

I ask my sister about Beaver Dam, which she vaguely recalls.  She could not have been much older than two when we played.   She mentions the time our father tossed us into deep snow drifts on the side of the house after a record snowfall that came down when we were little.   I tell her about Azi’s memories of our father as a fun-loving older cousin who affectionately wrestled with him when Azi was little.  Hearing stories of her father’s playfulness before we were born confirms my sister’s theory.  

“We did it to him,” she says, “when we were born, that was the end of any chance of happiness for him.”  

I marshal my usual arguments, quote him the last night of his life about his life being essentially over by the time he was two.  She agrees, seems convinced, realizes that our existence could hardly have been the decisive factor in her father’s happiness or unhappiness, then adds:  “we were the last nails in his coffin.”  

That was part of his genius, making us feel like it was our fault he was angry all the time.  My sister quickly agrees when I mention Rodney Dangerfield’s “your father and I wanted a child so badly — imagine our disappointment when we had YOU”.  

“No, that’s true,” she says, “we were eternal disappointments to him.  I think you more than I was, since he was basically a misogynist and you were always more important to him than I was.”  

I am in danger of veering into personal terrain that is not mine to veer into, so I will stick to my perceptions here.  

I grew up unable to understand my parents’ readiness to get mad and their frequent harshness.  I had nothing to compare it to.  Like most kids, I figured on some level it was normal, just the way the world is.  Dad gets home from a long day at work, mom has had a long, trying day at home with the kids muttering “wait til your father gets home….” and then he walks in the door and she unloads a day of frustration on him.  

“Don’t call ’em my kids,” he scowls, “they’re your kids too,” then, because he has to somehow deal with this shit after a long day of work, he forgets everything he knows about sensitivity training, developmental psychology, group dynamics –it’s pure survival mode in the cold, deep water.  

“You empty-headed little thief,” he says to his little daughter, who once pilfered a quarter off a pile of change.  “What did I tell you about playing with that fucking snake?”  This sends a shudder through the little girl and the mother, both are phobic about serpents.  “If you play with a fucking rattlesnake you’re going to get bit.  Don’t I always tell you that?”   For my part, I remain coiled, vigilant, shaking the rattle on my tail.  

If you get the shit beat out of you every day by an angry bully, like the young Pat Conroy did, you know what is giving you the nightmares, the proneness to depression. If your father is an artist who never uses the crude instrument of a fist or a belt, who constructs an alternate universe where you are always wrong and he is always the victim of his child, somehow, it may take you many more years to realize what you are up against.  It is natural, somehow, to blame yourself.

I have idly thought from time to time that I’d have preferred beatings, which would have stopped by the time I was fifteen, the first time I saw real fear in his face when I stood abruptly during one of his dinnertime tirades and glared at him like I was about to lunge across the table.  Idly is the only way to think of such things, since nobody prefers beatings.  

I just think it would have made things clear: on the subject of his anger, dad is out of control.   He’s nuts.  One day there will be a law to make people like him stop doing this kind of shit.  There could never be a law against the subtle art of my father’s rage.  

Your parents are your first teachers about the world.  It happens, often, that your parents don’t really know shit worth teaching you about the world.  They are struggling themselves, victims who have never overcome the things they were born up against.  Add to it the mass-murder of virtually every relative in their parents’ generation and you have a potent brew.  

“You’re in a chipper mood today,” observes the skeleton.  

I am not in an unchipper mood.  I am carving a gigantic block of marble, these tiny fragments need to be removed to complete the portrait of you.  You recall what my boy Michelangelo used to say about carving a portrait out of a block of marble?  

“It is easy to carve a man out of marble, just cut away the parts that don’t look like the man,” said the skeleton, looking off into the distance.  

Look, that’s how I tolerated friends who barely concealed their rage at me over the years.  I can have this breezy chat with a father who psychologically bludgeoned me every day from the time I was in the crib.  

“You were a very angry baby,” the skeleton reminds me.  

No shit, Shylock.  Look who I had for a father.  

“Point taken,” says the skeleton.  

I think of my longtime friend, and now longtime former friend, Mark, a depressive young genius who could never be happy.  It took me many, many years, but in the end I realized his disappointment in me had little to do with me.   He could never be satisfied with anything in his life.  If the club would admit somebody like him as a member, the fucking club had to be destroyed.  In the end, and it was gratifying in a sick way, I reduced this man of a million convoluted words to sullen silence.  When I was finished with my final argument there was nothing left for him to say.  He had no defense.  I sat and watched him glower and quietly suck his teeth across the table in that Florida diner against the black sky as sheets of rain fell on the parking lot outside.  I enjoyed the sound of the slashing rain against the windows, the silence of this angry man who had for years tried to blame me.

“Well, I never saw how you could have been friends with such a relentlessly selfish prick to begin with,” said the skeleton.  

You always told me I was a poor judge of character.  I could go down the list.  The insane guy, now in a cult, who mooched off me for years.  Who once told me, as I laid down a perfectly serviceable piano part, “one thing for sure, you’ll never be a piano player.”  It was years, and a series of unmistakably escalating provocations, before I finally cut that guy loose.   You taught us we didn’t deserve any better, taught us to tolerate being treated badly.  

“You sound like a bitch,” said the skeleton.  

Nice.  If you weren’t already a skeleton I’d kick your ass for you.  You know why people like me sound like bitches?  Because the macho man keeps his mouth shut and uses a fist, if it comes to it.  

“I didn’t say you weren’t entitled to sound like a bitch,” said the skeleton.  “And as for your threat to kick my ass, you remind me of that brash young relief pitcher who claimed he could strike out Ty Cobb on three pitches.”  

I remember that.  When the sportswriter challenged him he said “no doubt I could do it on three pitches, Cobb would be over a hundred years old, for Christsake.”  

“There have been some clever bastards among us, Elie,” the skeleton said.  

Indeed.  Cleverness for its own sake, I don’t know about that these days.  I’m looking for something beyond the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling.  

“Ah, Freidrich Neitzsche, Hitler’s favorite philosopher,” said the skeleton. “‘A joke is the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling’, yes, indeed.  Sekhnet taught you that one.”  

Yes.  And let us point out, as if it needs pointing out, that Hitler understood Nietzsche’s philosophy as well as he understood the teachings of Hillel.  

“And let us also stipulate that for all of Nietzsche’s brilliance and insight he had a complete breakdown at age forty and was cared for by his sister for the rest of his life,” said the skeleton.  

But we digress.  It is necessary, if we are to present an honest portrait of you, to show your monstrous side as accurately as possible.  

“Yes, please, my monstrous side needs to be shown accurately, of course,” said the skeleton.  “After all, why leave your father to rest in peace and dignity when you can piss on the skeleton a decade after he’s gone.”  

Don’t, dad, you sound like a bitch.  

“Touché ” said the skeleton.

I visited my cousin Azi a few months back, a man I hadn’t seen in years.  My sister and I always marveled at how much he looked like our father.   The photos of him as a young man, on the walls of his home, posing with his beautiful wife and their three kids, showed an uncanny resemblance to Irv, his first cousin once removed.  (You can see the two of them, as adults, on my sister’s couch by clicking  here)

Azi, as my sister and I remembered him from our childhood, always seemed cheerful, had a good sense of humor, laughed easily and genuinely.   It is hard to imagine that, like his cousin Irv, he could possibly have a dark side.  My sister and I are both unable to imagine it.   Then again, one could have spent a day or two with my father and never have glimpsed anything but a fairly cheerful, droll, highly intelligent man.    Azi and his wife Sue were gracious and highly interactive hosts when we visited them in Israel in November.  Azi, like my father, seemed to be interested in, and knowledgeable about, every subject that came up.

“Sapiens  [A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari] is a great book,” said Azi when I mentioned a fascinating lecture I’d heard by the author, an Israeli professor who wrote the book in Hebrew, the language the American-born Azi read it in.  “You can’t just pick it up and read it like a novel though,” he pointed out.  “It’s more like taking a graduate course, you need to let it sink in.  Read a chapter, think about it, digest it a little, read the next one.”   When I listened to the audio version of the remarkable book I found he was absolutely right.

I’d had some trepidation about contacting Azi when we were planning our trip.  I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years, though he sent condolences immediately when my mother died (six years ago tomorrow).  He and Sue used to visit my parents whenever they were in Florida visiting Sue’s father.  I’d had a few pleasant meals with them over the years when we were in Florida at the same time.   The trepidation arose because of my partisan position in a long cold war in our family.  My father had chosen the losing side in that long war between his first cousins, as I too learned to do in most things.  My father loved his seventeen years older first cousin Eli.   The Eli faction had, for decades, had nothing to do with the Nehama faction.  Eli and Nehama hadn’t spoken for the last thirty years of Eli’s life.  Nehama, Eli’s half -sister, was Azi’s mother.

Eli’s mother died shortly after Eli was born, of complications from childbirth.  Eli was raised by his mother’s mother and his three aunts.   Eli’s father remarried and had two more children with his wife Tamarka.  These children were Nehama, a brilliant woman who lived to 102 and had been the first female graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and David, a genius with an eidetic memory who became a lawyer but never needed to practice law as he became the family millionaire.  Nehama married a rabbi, Ben Teller, and they had Azi and his older sister.  

Eli, a rough and charming character with a ferocious temper,  carried on a more than thirty year grudge against his half-sister Nehama; they never spoke after their father, my father’s Uncle Aren, died.  My father allied himself with Eli, I became good friends with Eli in the last years of his life.  It is thanks to Eli that I know the detailed history of the family that I have learned.  

“Well, Eli had his version of history, that’s for sure,” said Azi laughing when the delicate subject of some old story came up over Friday night dinner at their home in Neve Ilan.  I agreed at once, as I have finally learned to do, about a matter of opinion or speculation I might have reflexively taken sides about in former decades.  Eli, although a very candid man, had strong opinions and was not always the most reliable narrator.  Whatever the truth of this particular story may have been, it was easy for me to agree that there were other, completely plausible, sides to it.

I realized, a moment before I spoke and in time to say something else, that Tamarka, who Eli had described as “a bitch on wheels” and “uglier than an ape”, two sentiments my father endorsed, had been Azi’s grandmother.  It was this same Tamarka, I learned from Eli, who had broken up the romance between my grandmother Chava and the red-haired Jewish postman.  It was Tamarka’s rubber tree plant that my young father and his little brother dug their fingernails into, with vegecidal intent, as they dusted the leaves when they helped Chava clean Tamarka’s house.  Chava, it seeemed, would never work off her indenture to Tamarka and Aren; her children were also required to kick in to pay off her passage from Truvovich.  

It was Nehama and Dave who, along with their father Aren and Tamarka, made all decisions regarding my father’s future.  He was to go, along with his brother, to  trade school.  

“Yeah, NYA, Sheet Metal School, ’cause we were too dumb to think about going beyond trade,” said the skeleton, quoting himself from the last conversation of his life.

I was shocked at how much bitterness my dying father still seemed to have toward Nehama, a beautiful woman who sang in a high melodious voice and served my young sister and me ice cream sodas in chilled metal tumblers whenever we visited her as children.   Nehama and Ben lived very close to us in Queens when my sister and I were kids.  They moved to Jerusalem when they retired, around the time Azi, Sue and the oldest of their three kids emigrated to found a new moshav outside of Jerusalem.    It was largely my dying father’s bitterness that made me hesitate to contact Azi until a couple of weeks before we finalized our travel plans.  

Azi at one point expressed, in the gentlest way, his perplexity as a younger man to see the hard-edged enmity I always seemed to have toward my father.  In Azi’s recollection his older cousin Irv, who he remembers with great love, was a fun-loving playmate when Azi was a boy and a kind, brilliant and humorous man when they were both adults.  “We used to wrestle all the time when I was a kid,” said Azi.   When my father came out of the army Azi was a young boy.  My father always loved young kids and interacted with them quite naturally.  

“I remember he took me aside when he got engaged to your mother,” Azi said, clearly amused by the memory.  “He told me we wouldn’t be wrestling too much any more, that he was getting a new wrestling partner.”  

This reminded me of a game my father invented that my sister and I used to play with him when we were very little.   My father would lay on the double bed in his bedroom, take off his glasses and say “Beaver Dam!”.   This was the signal for my sister and me to jump on to the bed and begin trying to roll his huge body toward the edge, and over it, as a log in our beaver dam.   We loved this game, shoving the top of our heads against his ribs and pushing as hard as we could.  One of us would dive down toward his legs to push from there, get a grip on him, try to topple him on to the floor.    This freewheeling physical fun, accompanied by our father’s humorous sounds and commentary,  was probably similar to Azi’s experience with his cousin Irv.

I have no recollection of how many times we played Beaver Dam.  I do recall that at least once the two tiny, tireless beavers managed to roll this gigantic log on to the dam, over the side of the bed on to the floor.  I think my sister will immediately remember this game too, although she couldn’t have been more than two or three when we last played it.   What I remember clearly is how every session of Beaver Dam ended.

“Goddamn it!” my father would bawl to his wife, “he kneed me in the balls!”   This confirmed what my father knew from the beginning, when as a tiny baby I’d eye him accusingly from my crib, that I would do anything to hurt him.  He’d cry out to our mother that I had deliberately kneed, or kicked, or punched him directly in the balls.    

“Did you?” asked Sekhnet when I read her the account of the game.  “Maybe you did it unconsciously,” she suggested.    It’s possible, I suppose, though I have no recollection of intent to do anything but get leverage and roll the gigantic log on to the dam.   In the grappling I don’t doubt that he may have gotten a knee or elbow in the balls.  

“Well, it’s my own fault, really.   Everyone who plays Log in Beaver Dam knows that you wear a goddamn cup, since a knee or elbow in the balls from a flailing little beaver is pretty much inevitable.   But I was a young father and naive as a baby,” said the skeleton.