“Look, I understand how ugly all that war unto the death business was when you were growing up, but if you really hope to sell this manuscript to a literary agent, and ultimately to a publisher who will give you an advance, and, hopefully, the legitimacy of having written a book, no matter how modestly it might sell, you need to keep it light, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father.

Right you are, dad, but let’s unwind your slick use of the passive voice here for just a second.  It’s best, when making your point, as every first year law student is explicitly instructed, to gloss over anything that detracts from your argument.  At the same time, look unflinchingly at the other side of the argument, as you also taught me.  “I understand how ugly that war unto the death business was when you were growing up,” is nicely done, I’ll give you that.

“Nice to see how generous you’ve become, now that I’m dead,” observed the skeleton.  

Don’t mention it, dad.  Ugly the “war unto the death”, certainly was, no doubt about that.  It was a grim enough business as we were “growing up”, for sure.  But let’s not insult the reader by pretending that you were not the C.E.O of that grim little enterprise.  My sister objected to my overkill recently when I thoughtlessly characterized the violent nightly scene around the dinner table as Auschwitz.  She was right to object, it was overkill, disgustingly so.  She agreed it was fair to compare it to the muddy No-Man’s-Land between the barbed wire and trenches of World War One.  The sounds of dying horses, the stench of death, blood and the excrement of thousands of filthy men, whiffs of chlorine and mustard gas rolling in the distance, the occasional cackle of machine gun fire.

“Well, that’s fair, I suppose,” said the skeleton.  

The fact that I can be certain, eleven years after your death, that you remember that catch we had fifty years ago, speaks as much as anything to the rareness of that kind of interaction between a father and his children.  

“Look, what do you want me to say?  Am I still on trial?  Did I not take full responsibility for the obstacles I was too foolish to avoid placing in you and your sister’s paths?  I apologized, hours before I took my last breath, did I not?  What more can I do?  Do the goddamned demands never end?  I’m dead, for fuck’s sake.  What is it you want from me now?”  the skeleton’s smile looked more sardonic than sincere, in light of his mood. 

The same thing I always wanted, the same thing you never got, as a kid, even as an adult, except fleetingly, if intoxicatingly, in those moments when Arlene and Russ leaned lovingly toward you to drink in everything you had to say.  

“Aren’t you getting a little tedious with this One Note Samba, Johnny One Note?” asked the skeleton, as weary, in death, of this line of talk as he always had been during his eighty years of life.  

Certainly, look, I can see that.  I’ll lose some of the repetition in the rewrite, but I haven’t fully made the point yet.   You were born in extreme poverty, your chances for a life better than your parents’ miserable lives were almost nil.  You had almost no expectation of leading a life where anyone would actually listen to you.  Then, as a result of an almost unrepeatable series of events, you were plucked out of your misery and sent off to sing bawdy songs with other young men, engaged in a war to defeat, not somebody cynically portrayed as Hitler, but the actual fucking Hitler.  

“Fuck him, one more time, there’s something we can all agree on.   Even Jeb Bush enthusiastically said he’d take his one shot in a time machine to go back and kill the baby Hitler.  Too bad they didn’t follow up and ask if he’d be willing to abort the fucking fetal Hitler, that tap-dance would have been good TV,” said the skeleton.  

Yep, yep. So you’re in the army now, and then, 36 months later, on the G.I. bill, in Syracuse University and on to Columbia, distinguishing yourself at both schools and filling yourself up with new dreams of the future.  Affordable homes were made available for veterans and everyone else in this unprecedented era of widespread prosperity and optimism and so you were able to afford the cozy cottage where you raised your children in middle class comfort.  You were in the right place, with the right talents and a strong work ethic, at the right time.  You and many of an entire cohort, that Greatest Generation.  

“Well, FDR and World War Two were very lucky breaks for me.  The New Deal really was a New Deal, it changed the game, truly.  FDR was a political genius, and he grasped in that crucial moment that unless a democracy gives its people a true safety net, an alternative like Communism, which was very attractive to millions of us here, becomes irresistible.  Of course, then, as now, there was plenty of hate, there was segregation, the long century of state-sanctioned terrorism casually referred to as ‘Jim Crow’, Native Americans were treated like the Nazis treated the Gypsies, so were Japanese and many other Americans.  Homosexuals could be thrown in jail if they tried to be bold by coming out of the closet, women, after their great contributions to the war effort, and proving they could do all these jobs as well as men, were shoved back into the kitchen.  There was plenty wrong with post-war, Cold War America, but it’s undeniable that the opportunities I got are not often available to poor people anywhere.  You’re right, the circumstances were historically almost unique,” said the skeleton.

Not to minimize your hard work, your tireless dedication to two difficult jobs.  

“No need to put me on a pedestal, you know as well as I do that I commuted to the night job on Long Island as much to get away from the misery in that house as I did to earn whatever pittance they were paying me,” said the skeleton. 

I wouldn’t put you on a pedestal, you know that.  OK, listen, try this on.  A middle class kid has an expectation of being listened to, no?  Wouldn’t you say a child in a private school, whose parents are some kind of acquisitive pricks able to afford the $30,000 tuition to send their precious little seed to an elite elementary school, expects to have his or her opinions listened to seriously?  

“Yes, of course, and any servant insolent enough not to listen attentively to the opinionated musings of the entitled little prick would be enthusiastically caned and then sacked,” said the skeleton.

Right.  Contrast this expectation of having your precocious opinions about the shape and consistently of your little turds given serious consideration with the expectations of youngsters in the School to Prison pipeline.  

“Well, Elie, in fairness to that School to Prison pipeline for poor kids, it does give them an opportunity to be productive members of society.  They become, by their violent crimes and petty misdemeanors, consumers of and  job creators for all the industries associated with privatized prisons.  You know, not only corrections officers but delivery van drivers, cooks, laundry operators, G.E.D. outfits, manufacturers of prison uniforms, a host of prison support jobs in parts of the state that often have almost no jobs.  In fact, if there were more reasonable job opportunities society-wide, say tens, or hundreds, of thousands of decently paid home care attendant jobs instead of the off-the books exploitation of the poor people who presently care for the old and infirm, the demand for prison cells with their three hots and a cot, would be far less.  There’s a nice Catchuh-22uh for you,” said the skeleton.

Couldn’t have put it more succinctly myself, I said, as the skeleton continued to impassively grin.  

“I see where you’re going, of course.  The child born into American poverty has virtually no expectation of anything better, no less of anyone listening to her.  She has a hard life at home, amid the privations and frustrations of poverty, even if her parents are exceptions to the general rule and show her nothing but love and respect, and then she shuffles off to a school that is, in virtually every case, more like a factory for failure than anything resembling a place to set her imagination on fire, as education should, with the many fascinating possibilities the world holds for her.  The world holds jack-shit for her, let’s speak plainly.  There are no jobs for her, outside of menial ones, if she can be persistent and obsequious enough to get and keep one of those.   There are no opportunities for someone who is a third, fourth, fifth, tenth generation poor person, except for the outlier who is then held up as damning proof that any of them could have been born a genius, if only they had the guts and persistence to pursue their American Dream.  These genetic losers can get fired up at some political rally and go home and get drunk.  If they are lucky they won’t wind up beating the shit out of the kids they had when they were fourteen and fifteen years old. Ten in every million will wind up with any chance to escape more than a step or two from poverty.   Makes me glad to be done with the whole business, when I think about it,” said the skeleton.

It’s a funny thing, as I woke up, cold under the blankets, hours before the alarm, the thing that made me get out of bed was the thought of continuing this conversation with my long-dead father.  I’d been bitter, waking after so little sleep, noting it was an unseasonable 27 degrees outside and the slumlord hadn’t bothered to put on any heat overnight, nor in the morning, for that matter.  Ironic, since during the entire mild winter, on days it was fifty or more outside, my thermometer often read ninety in here.  Most days it was a sauna, impossible to wear so much as a shirt while sitting at my desk at any time, day or night.  But this morning it is bitterly cold in the apartment.  I tried to remember the last time I couldn’t sleep because I’d been too cold to sleep.  But now, drinking hot coffee, wearing a hat and three shirts, the top one fleece-lined, I’m back in business.

“A conversation?” said the skeleton, from his frosty bed, “you mentioned the thought of continuing this conversation?”  

Yes, actually, it was that thought that got me out of bed.  And, let’s note again, how an interested party will see the one word among dozens, or hundreds, that interests him.  

“That insight can make a man millions of dollars in advertising,” noted the skeleton, “finding the magic words that press the buttons.”  

Well, the magic words are something to be aware of, for sure.  And the other side of that, the magic words to not say; one haphazardly placed adjective can blow up the whole beautifully constructed house of words.  

I once wrote a very measured letter in a ticklish bureaucratic situation that was about to turn fatal for me.  My friend read the rewrite and began nodding with approval.  Then, at the last line, he laughed, and stabbed at a word I hadn’t been able to resist, hadn’t even noticed I was placing there.  In the letter’s very last phrase I called the bureaucrat’s response cynical, and that one adjective gave away the game.   I thanked my friend, who was still laughing, and removed the word before I sent the letter.  Not that it helped much in the end, they were supremely cynical motherfuckers.  

I don’t suppose you remember that time I called you “weird”?    

“No,” the skeleton said, “I don’t remember that.  I remember that time you called me a cunt, though. That made an impression.  You could call me a lot of things, but I don’t think ‘weird’ is really one of them.”  

Ah, but I did, and I remember your reaction very well.  It was a great reaction.

 “What was my reaction?” he asked.  

I can only call it weird.  You got this strange expression on your face, slightly amused and slightly insulted, you were smiling, but it was a very bizarre smile.  The smile was, dare I say it, quite weird, I’d never seen that exact expression on your face.  You kept saying ‘weird?  weird?’ and it was almost like you were about to start twitching, like a haywire cyborg about to start malfunctioning.  You must have said ‘weird’ five or six times, sort of turning the word in your mouth like it tasted funny.  You were still saying it as you walked past me out of the kitchen.

“Hmmm, I have no recollection of that,” he said.  

You also have no recollection of that great moment with Sekhnet, the first time I brought her to meet you and mom.  To me, that’s the funniest part of the whole story.  

“What story?” asked the skeleton.  

We drove up to visit you outside of Burlington, when you rented that place on top of the mountain.  You’d never met Sekhnet and we spent a weekend up there.  There are those great photos from that weekend.  You’re wearing a red jacket and baseball cap, mom is holding Ginger, who was still a pup, no older than 15 or 16 years old.  

“She was a good dog,” he said.

Yes, and she had a good, long run.  Anyway, at the end of the visit, which had been perfectly nice, we’d packed up the car and the four of us were sitting in a dim little sun room saying goodbye.  You made one of your patented barbed comments to mom, one of those ‘epitaphs on the tombstone of a feeling’ type jokes that Nietzsche spoke of.  Sekhnet has always been fond of that quote, said it enough times that I remember it.

“Thus spoke Sekhnet,” mused the skeleton.

So you made this remark to mom, a typical one, like “Evvy, if I had your nose full of dimes, I’d never have to work again,” you know, a lovingly friendly but mean little throw-away of the type you liked to toss off, and mom’s nostrils flared the way they used to when she was about to cry, and her eyes got misty, but she smiled gamely, the way she did at such times.  And Sekhnet, seeing this pain on mom’s face, looked quickly from mom to you and back.  Having seen the satisfied smile on your face, and the painful one on mom’s, she jumped into the breach.

“You know what the problem is, Evelyn?” she said to mom, “you didn’t start whacking him early in the relationship every time he said something like that.”  And she illustrated what should have been done from the beginning by thumping you in the chest with the back of her fist.  

“I would have remembered that,” theorized the skeleton.  

You’d think so, yeah.  Your hands went up, like a praying mantis, and you had this great shocked look on your face, something like mom’s smile a moment before, except without a trace of tears.  And mom began laughing, and looking at Sekhnet with admiration and love.  We all laughed, at how quickly the tables had turned, as you acted the part of the man who’d just been dissed, but who could take it.   I always thought of that as the first moment of their great relationship.

The funniest part of the story, like I said, was that less than a year later, neither of you had the slightest recollection of the incident.

“That is funny,” he said, “and another illustration of the basic unreliability of the so-called ‘historical record’.  What goes on there is what certain people sort of agree actually happened, and even in that agreed on set of events, there is great disagreement as to what things truly meant, how significant this or that was, etc. I guess you could say human beings are basically fucking idiots, the more intellectual ones just much higher functioning, more skillfully self-justifying, fucking idiots.  You could make a very strong case for that proposition.”  

I suppose you could, if you were being judgmental about it, the evidence is pretty overwhelming.  I guess it’s also human nature, to sand away the memories that cause discomfort.  Denial is another word, I guess, but also a judgmental one.  It’s just one of those things people do, I suppose, to keep their worldview intact.  Even if that worldview is weird, insane or self-destructive.  I guess especially if that’s the case.  The unlearned lessons of history, and so forth.  

“It takes a certain amount of courage to keep things in mind that make us uncomfortable.  We all like comfort, and being right, and we build our lives around somehow maintaining the illusion of it, even if our efforts wind up killing us,” said the skeleton.

True dat.  I was reading the transcript of our last conversation, the part of it I got recorded, the part where you said you wished you’d been capable of having a real conversation with me ten, fifteen years earlier.  

“Well, I would have happily settled for that, wouldn’t you?” he said.

I would.  It’s funny, all I really wanted as a kid was to have conversations like this.  

“Well, that’s really all everybody wants, Elie,” said the skeleton quietly.  “To be heard and to hear what the other person is honestly saying, to say things to keep the dialogue moving forward, toward greater and greater mutual understanding,  throwing the ball back and forth like that.”

You remember that catch we had one early summer evening on 190th Street?

“Yop,” said the skeleton with a small catch in his voice.

“Well, as much as I admired your initial impulse to paint a nuanced portrait of the, shall we say, ‘complicated’ man who was your father, this last one really is a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?” said the skeleton from his hilltop bed in the quiet boneyard in Cortlandt.  “I know you’re making your case, but are you seriously blaming me because you feel like you acted like an overbearingly judgmental asshole to a timid girl who was intimidated by many things, as far as I can see?”

Yes.

“Well, it’s a little pathetic, in a piece entitled The Harm My Father Did, to have this vignette of a girlfriend singing out of tune as your big gun.  You know, I should have acted less like a jerk that day, when you brought that girl over to your sister’s, OK, fine, guilty as charged, but I don’t think it’s fair to blame me for how you acted when you accompanied her and, because you somehow had my psychological set-up or something, made her too self-conscious to sing.  You were a grown man, for Christ’s sake, and long out of the house, you don’t find it a bit sad to try to hold me responsible for your behavior?”

No, I don’t.  The only sad thing is that it took me more than thirty years to have the beginning of any insight I could use to start overcoming the destructive things a childhood of abuse had instilled in me.  

“Oh, here we go,” said the skeleton, shaking his head.  

You can’t have it both ways, as you know.  I admire those able to appreciate nuance, and who try to turn the thing and view it from as many angles as possible, and I try to see all sides myself.  I credit you for teaching me to strive for fairness, in fact.  But you really can’t have it both ways.   If your apologies as you left the stage are to be believed, and I prefer to think they were sincere, you had a lot of regrets about the obstacles you placed in front of my sister and me in a world that’s difficult enough to make one’s way through as it is, as you said.  If you want to argue about everything that I see as an obstacle, or a manifestation of the struggle to surmount an obstacle, I have a simple, elegantly Irv-like solution for you.  I’ll just stop writing your goddamned parts.

The skeleton was silent, looked like he was trying to suck his teeth and glare a bit from under lowered eyebrows he no longer had.   In the next moment he had that too jolly by half grin they all seem to have, and still said nothing.

We were standing on line at the buffet at Chris Coughlin’s wedding to Eddie.  My father was holding his plate and my sister and I were beside him with our plates.  Chris had long been a widow, her husband, Bob, a policeman who’d died young from cancer, had inherited the house next door where the Coughlins had raised Bob and his two brothers.  Chris, who had raised her and Bob’s two beautiful daughters in that house, loved my father, who she found smart and hilarious.  My father was very fond of Eddie, a retired NYC cop, Viet Nam vet, youthful, handsome and a cheerful raconteur of the kind of brutal, darkly funny stories my father loved.

A rookie cop was elbowed by a perp during the arrest.  There was dried blood under the cop’s nose when he hustled the still angry handcuffed man into the precinct. His partner pushed the perp towards the desk sergeant who was going to book him. “What the fuck happened to your nose?” the desk sergeant asked the rookie.  

The young cop explained that he’d been bloodied during the scuffle, he’d caught an accidental elbow.   “What the fuck?” the desk sergeant said, “‘an accidental elbow’?  Get the fuck out of here.  I’m not booking the piece of shit like that.  Bring him back in a turban.”

“A turban?” the rookie cop asked.  At this point my father cracked up while telling the story Eddie had told him the day before.  

“Dean, Johnny, show our young colleague here the proper procedure for an ‘accidental elbow’ booking, would you?”   The two veteran cops stepped forward, grabbed the handcuffed perp, and shoved him through the door to the back, out of sight.  They grunted for their young colleague to follow.

“And they tuned him up,” said my father, using the dry, brutal phrase Eddie had used to describe it.  “You know, they ‘went up ‘side his head’ as my boys at Evander Childs used to say.  They beat the shit out of him and wrapped his bloody head in a bandage, a ‘turban’, and brought him back out to the desk sergeant for booking.”

 “Ah, there we go!” said the desk sergeant.   “That’s how we do it!  Are you ready to be booked now, sir?”  My father smiled broadly to show how satisfied the desk sergeant had been at the end of this successful teachable moment.

Eddie had described the horrified face of the rookie at that moment and left his own feelings about the whole matter manfully to the side.  My father loved these kinds of stories, even as they violated just about everything he believed about social justice.  

Chris had just exchanged wedding vows with Eddie and we were waiting on line to be served some food that looked and smelled delicious in the large trays over the warming sternos.

“You’ve often told us that angry words do the same damage as slaps and punches. Do you still consider physical and verbal violence equally harmful?” I asked our father.  He said he did.  

“Then would you consider me and my sister to have been victims of child abuse?”  Again he agreed, probably pausing to admire my intuitive use of the passive voice in that otherwise brutal sentence.  

“I’d have to say you were,” he said, also employing the passive voice, it occurs to me only now, almost thirty years later.

The thing I remember most clearly about this moment is the angry look my sister shot me as my father admitted he’d been an abusive father.  It would have been hard for the man who cursed angrily at his children almost every night, a man who prided himself on his ability to be honest under fire, to have denied it.  I suppose he could have said it was perfectly understandable for a father who had impossibly high expectations for his children to vent a little, call the girl an empty-headed, vain little liar and thief, or the boy a venomous cobra whose terrifying face was also, to make things even more scary, twisted and contorted with hate.  He might have made an argument for that, he was capable of it, but to his credit he quietly admitted the truth and said nothing to mitigate it.  And my sister stared a volley of daggers my way, along the steam trays of food we were about to have piled on our plates by smiling caterers.

I’ve thought of that look several times over the years, trying to understand the reason for her anger in that moment.  She had been a victim too, had later expressed her admiration for me standing up to the verbal assaults, told me I’d had it much worse than she did because I always resisted.  In my memories she had some glorious and memorable moments of resistance herself, and the sharpest teeth and claws, and quickest wit, of any of the poor bastards assembled on that tiny battlefield each night for dinner.  We all remember things differently, I suppose, particularly traumatic things.  

I saw a great interview with humanist political scientist type Henry Giroux, speaking to Bill Moyers about our culture of cruelty.  He described some of the unspeakably cruel things we now nonchalantly regard as routine.  Have a team of cynical lawyers liberally redefine the word ‘torture’ in a secret memo and America is now free to deniably torture anyone any time it has a theory that might make torture necessary.  Innocents killed by robotically fired missiles are just collateral damage, not actual children and old people.  Protesters on campus?  Roll in the tank, armored car, hardcore military surplus contraptions designed to put down insurrections.  Many campus police forces, and most municipal police forces, now have this sort of armored overkill in their arsenals.  Illegal poker game going on?  Break down the door with a battering ram equipped riot squad, men in helmets, bullet proof vests, carrying shields, machine guns.  That’s how we do it, yo!  “Everyone face down on the fucking floor, if you don’t want your guts hanging off the fucking chandelier.  Do it!”  Angry black guy tells a cop to go fuck himself, half of America understands why the cop was totally justified in shooting him to death. 

Giroux plays Moyers a clip from a campus protest at a California university, either Berkeley or Davis, if memory serves.  “Look at this, Bill,” he says and we see a line of students, sitting with arms linked, blocking a road on campus, in protest of something.  They are not chanting or provoking in any way we can see, but they are also stubbornly not moving when commanded to do so.  One security guard walks back and forth along their line, with a large canister of something with a spray hose at one end.  He shoots a jet of something into the faces of the kids.  He does this in a very unexcited manner, like a gardener spraying something on his plants.  The spray is reddish and the kids being sprayed are reacting somewhat hysterically when it hits them.

“That’s pepper spray, Bill.  And, look, he’s doing that like it’s a normal thing to do,” says Giroux. 

“Nicely done,” says the skeleton, “I casually sprayed burning chemicals in your faces every night and your sister, I suppose, had some kind of Stockholm Syndrome where she identified with her oppressor.”  

Thanks, I thought you’d appreciate it.

If your father comes home smelling like whiskey, and in a foul mood, and begins snarling and then shoves your mother, you will have no mistake about what’s going on.  You jump up as the first slap hits your crying mother and take the first punch.  Dad kicks you as you slump against the door, turns his rage back on your mother. You’re on dad’s back, literally, and he’s not going to let a sixty pound bastard interfere with the pressing work he is determined to do,  He throws you off with a violent shrug and offers another kick and a few oddly casual flicks with the back of his hand across your face (he’s quite drunk, after all).  This gives your mother time to crawl across the room, but not quite enough time, because dad has her by the ankle.  

The neighbors have already called the police, and nobody is actually going to get killed in the apartment that night, though, by the sounds of it, nobody could predict that.  Horrible as this is, there is little ambiguity to any of it.  

In the hands of a skilled practitioner, however, words can be wielded in such a way that the victim will believe there is no violence going on at all, only truth being told.  There is much more room for subtle nuance in the arsenal of the verbally violent than in the much less ambiguous tool kit of the hitter, kicker, puncher.

“He had a genius for reducing people to the sum of their faults,” my sister observed recently.  “And making you feel like you were the one who was wrong.”

“Nobody did it better, ” I agreed.

I thought of a book called “Words that Hurt, Words that Heal” by a rabbi named Telushkin.  It made a big impression on me when I read it about 20 years ago.  He compared an intemperate, angry word to an arrow let loose from the bow in a moment of anger.  No way to call it back, and it will find its mark, always hit directly in the heart, no matter how badly aimed.  It was the intent to shoot an arrow into the heart, as much as the actual flight of the arrow, that carried the irreversibly painful message.  

In that moment when the bow is drawn there is only a fraction of a second to stop yourself from committing a cruelty you can not undo, Telushkin pointed out.  He also described words that heal.  These words recognize the vulnerability we all share, and like words that hurt, the speaker’s desire in uttering them is immediately and unmistakably clear.  In the case of words intended to heal, the offer of empathy and comfort.  He had many memorable anecdotes and metaphors in the book.  I read it eagerly, this beautiful illuminating music sung to the choir.  

“Well, isn’t that nice for Rabbi Telushkin?” my father’s skeleton said bitterly. “Look, I understand all this, I really do.  And, you know, you yourself have appreciated that for a man who has been whipped as a baby to use words alone to brutalize his kids, no matter how hurtful those words were, is an improvement, and sign of restraint,  on the part of that damaged, brutalized person.”  

Absolutely.  I take nothing away from you, vicious fuck though you also, undeniably, could also be.  Your struggles are the inspiration for mine.  I am only trying to take things to the next level.  Not hitting is better than hitting.  Wielding words like truncheons and swords, while also bad, is better than whipping a baby in the face with a rough, heavy cord.  I’m going for the next level.  I’d like to use my words to help heal.  You have nothing against this plan, I assume.

The skeleton smiled.  “Strength to your arm, son.  Make us both proud.”  He paused.  

“Or I’ll rain a hail of razor tipped arrows down on your pitiful, unarmored, little second-story ass and you’ll never so much as think of sitting down again.” He yawned.  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a long nap to return to.”

It’s probably past time to begin laying out the devilish details of what made my father such a dreaded man so much of the time.   He was tragic, yes, but also cruel, with intellectual gifts, and emotional disabilities, that made him capable of terrible destructiveness.  He expressed this most consistently in the airtight case he could always make for reducing anyone to the helpless, hopeless sum of their faults.  

Reducing someone to the sum of their faults is generally something we do only when someone’s faults have become unbearable to us.  My father was all too ready to do it any time, he wasn’t prissy about needing a deep cause, he did it from the outset with both of his kids. He had several main weapons that made him so effective at this, along with a supremely calm and subtle touch much of the time.  He also had the sadist’s gift for perfect timing.

This uncharitable tendency to make others feel like shit often bubbles up from a withholding personality.   Someone who lacks emotional generosity will rarely do anything to make anyone else feel good.  It is apparently more satisfying for this type to make people feel like shit by ignoring or belittling their needs and slighting their vulnerabilities than to take even minimal care of the other person’s feelings.  I guess it operates under the general principle of ‘misery loves company’, in making you feel bad about your life they get to feel a bit better about theirs.  Fortunately for these ungenerous types the opportunities for such withholding are almost unlimited, especially with kids, although it works as well for people of any age, particularly when delivered at moments of greatest vulnerability.  

I guess the unconscious theory these types cling to for justification is a kind of karmic one: nobody deserves better than I got, and I got jack shit outside of my dear mother’s energetic lashes across the face, I got less than jack shit, you fucking needy fuck, with your entitlement to the middle class life I’m literally busting my ass to give you, you ungrateful little bastard.  I suppose, on one level, my father’s case boils down to that.  My father was in so much pain so much of the time, high threshold for it or not, that he had little generosity to spare for the needs and demands of his children.

“Thanks for dinner, dad,” I’d always say when we emerged from a restaurant.  One good habit my parents instilled in us was to say thank you when someone did something nice for us.   We had a neighbor, Bob Coughlin, who reportedly got a kick out of asking three year-old me “whatta ya say, Elie?” and being told “thank you!”

“You never have to thank me for food,”my father always responded when I thanked him for a meal at a restaurant.  I’d recite it in unison with him after a while.

My sister once paid me the great compliment of asking me why I wasn’t like either one of our parents.  To her dismay she’d come to realize she had internalized some of our father’s main methods and motivations.  

“I’m the D.U.,” she told me in horror at one point.  The D.U. was “the Dreaded Unit” her perfectly apt name for the worst of our father, who embraced it happily.  

“Jesus,” I said sincerely, feeling her great pain to realize this unbearable thing, “what are you going to do about it?”  

“Being the D.U. means there is nothing you can do about it,” she said, foreclosing the possibility of anything good in that ingenious, lightning quick way the actual D.U. had.

To her credit, she took great pains to overcome this, and in many ways she did.  The reflex, however, remains deep in there, the ability to act in that dreaded way is intact, even if held down.

In choosing between them to find a role model, the choice was fairly stark, on a pure survival level.  Our vulnerable mother, an easily victimized person who was often reduced to tears or our indomitable father who cried only once in our mutual memory.  (He would cry one other time, for teen-aged me alone, while begging me not to become like him, to let people, especially my mother, show me love and affection– but this was way out of character for him).  It was not difficult for my sister to select her role model.  To her credit she fought against it, but she recognized his strong influence on her.  

“How come you’re not like either one of them?” she asked me once, and I remember being naively flattered by the question.  

“If those were the only two choices, I’d hack my own head off,” I told her without exaggeration.  And it’s true.  Yet I also know it’s a life’s work to escape the traumatic influences of your earliest years.  I was an infant accused of looking at his father accusingly long before I could speak.  The obvious question: was I some kind of a prophet?  How could I have known at a week old, a month old, that I would have reason to accuse this man of anything?  Self-fulfilling prophecy on my father’s part, I suppose.  

At ten weeks old, ten weeks, the story goes, I became stiff as your proverbial board, and red, my little fists clenched, and I screamed in pain, or rage, or both.  My parents rushed me to the doctor, in what would be scene two of this famous origin story.  The story was of the ineffable origin of my constant irrational anger.  The rigid, purple ten week-old is examined by the concerned pediatrician, this would be toward the end of the summer of 1956.

“And the pediatrician suddenly burst out laughing,” said my mother with a highly complex expression of mostly amusement on her face, “and he says ‘this baby is definitely having a temper tantrum!  My God, I’ve never seen it in a child this young, but this little boy is having a temper tantrum!'”  Relieved, my parents took me home and, as near as I can figure, told me to just shut up and stop acting like such a goddamn baby.  

I’ve often thought about what a casually arrogant dick this glib pediatrician must have been.  Let’s assume his diagnosis was correct– are there not some very logical and sort of inevitable follow-up questions for the parents of an enraged infant that a doctor bound by his oath to ‘first do no harm’ should ask?  

“Nothing wrong with this angry little fuck, I mean, he’s clammed up completely, look how fucking smug he is, won’t even give you a single reason he’s so fucking angry.  Fuck him, you know?  How is any of this your fault?  Nothing you can do, just luck of the draw, some babies are, unfortunately, just complete irrational little shits.”

My parents heaved a great sigh, realizing that they had simply produced a randomly enraged baby.  Some babies, it is well known, are by nature easy babies while others are just born cantankerous pricks, and that it often has nothing to do with anything the parents are or are not doing.  I can imagine their relief.   What, really, is the harm, you will ask?   It is the earliest origin story about my irrational anger and it sets the stage perfectly for the adversarial childhood that followed.  

If I was ever angry, well, what had that to do with my parents?  I was born that way.  The doctor said so!  Don’t look at us, look at the expert pediatrician, look into your own irrational fucking rage, you goddamn merciless fucking terrifying cobra!  The pediatrician laughed it off, why can’t you?

 My sister’s compliment aside, I have also always had to fight my father’s worst tendencies in myself.  I went through a period of many years when I used my sense of humor the same way my father’s mother used the rough, heavy cord of her steam iron against my young father’s face.  It was my reflex to use my quickness with a phrase to dash off a spontaneous, often hurtful, one-liner from time to time.  It was a deeper, darker thing than that.  

When I was in my twenties I met a pretty woman who was clearly anxious to be my girlfriend.  I had no objection, in fact, I jumped right in.  It became clear at once that this caramel colored former army brat, who had grown up in various places with her angry black G.I. father and her timid French mother, regarded me as the alpha dog in our little pack.  

She was not from New York City and was a bit unsophisticated about how to act in the Big Apple.  She was ready for anything I could show her, and I didn’t hesitate to use my influence on her.   How, then, exactly, was I like my father?  You will laugh as you learn, or perhaps, if not a sadist, you will grimace, or shudder.

Francoise had a beautiful singing voice, had studied classical singing in college.  Her tastes were, in the beginning, a bit corny, leaning toward the bland end of country music and the kind of middle of the road pop standards one might hear among the bubbles of the Lawrence Welk Show.  Over a short time she developed much hipper tastes and we began playing Motown tunes, songs of Philadelphia and clever jazz standards together.  I would accompany her on guitar, something I quickly began to love doing.  Now here’s the monstrous thing I learned from father and did so naturally it required no effort, or even awareness, on my part.

She had a great sense of pitch and a beautiful voice.  She sang professionally in church choirs, had sung on stage and was a fine singer.  I’d tune up the guitar, we’d begin to play, and, as often as not, she’d start singing slightly off pitch.  If the singer has good pitch there is only one reason she will not sing on pitch.  It is a tightness in the vocal cords, brought on by nerves.  The inability to relax the voice box starts a self defeating cycle of self-consciousness and fear.  I would sometimes make her so nervous, merely by my disapproving vibe (perhaps because we were doing a tune from Godspell I found insipid) that she could not find the exact note.  Then, of course, I’d have to point it out, and then it would become hopeless.  Sometimes she’d end up crying.

This may seem like a small, petty thing, but I assure you, it is not.  It stands in for being the kind of person who, instead of being generous while supporting a friend’s creative expression, makes them feel ruthlessly judged and monstrously inferior.  It is a great example of what an asshole I was to poor Francoise at the time.   I was not unique in this, “don’t quit your day job” is a standard quip offered to those trying out a new talent on friends, but it is no less deadly for being a fairly common thing.   That the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, the vulnerable young country girl would soon see first hand.  

I took her to my sister’s, to meet the family.  She and I had been together more than six months, there was some occasion when my parents would be over at my sister’s and I took the opportunity to introduce them all to each other.  She was nervous as we headed over there and I assured her everything would be fine.  Everything would not be fine.  My sister greeted her warmly, my mother was friendly, my brother-in-law engaged with her.  My father, the D.U., grunted hello and went directly into the other room, where he sat watching a football game the entire afternoon until we popped our heads in to say goodbye a few hours later.  He literally said nothing to her, or to me.

“Your father hates me,” she said miserably when we left.  

“My father hates everyone,” I told her as I stroked her back in the elevator.  She assumed he’d acted like Archie Bunker because he was a racist, hated that his son had brought a pretty brown-skinned woman to meet the family.  I assured her that it wasn’t a racial thing, that he merely hated that his son had brought a pretty woman to meet the family.  It disgusted him, no doubt, that his son got to hang out with a cutie like that, had the chance to do all kinds of things with such a fine young woman.  I don’t know what it was all about, exactly, but I can still taste the sickening taste of it.

It would take many years, but I  took pains to make myself conscious, to stop acting like that.  It is, as a general rule in relationships, far better to gently encourage others, especially when they put themselves out there, than to make them feel like vain, self-deluded idiots hopelessly setting themselves up for failure.

I spent a year, during law school, in the romantic embrace of a deeply damaged soul I think of affectionately as The Nazi Doctor.  She was tormented by a sense of her inadequacy that could never be lessened by any of her many accomplishments.  She was a surgeon, a pilot, a wine expert, fluent in German (her father had been German, a very unGerman German, according to her, kind of a free spirit– free enough to have two children with a black woman, anyway), she also spoke Spanish and Arabic and could understand French, she was a gourmet cook, an expert skier, on and on. Nothing she ever did, no matter how brilliantly, convinced her she was anything but inadequate.  That someone so hard on herself could also be so tender always surprised me, and touched me greatly.

“So, are you two thinking about getting married?” my mother asked me over the phone, toward the end of that year.  

“I don’t think so, mom,” I told her, “you know, she has a lot of great qualities, and I love her, but it would be like marrying my father with tits.”

“Oops, I guess I wasn’t supposed to hear that,” said my father, who at some point had silently picked up an extension down there in Florida.  

“It’s not the way it sounds,” I hastened to reassure him, though, of course, it was exactly the way it sounded.  In making my peace with the good doctor I had also been trying to resolve things with her psychological doppelganger, my father.   My relationship with the doctor featured some tremendous consolations, unthinkable, even disgusting, in connection with my father, but even those, in the end, weighed little.  A life intimately connected with someone like that as a partner was unthinkable, to anyone who gave it more than a passing, purely emotional, thought.

My father had his own version of the doctor’s tender touch.  The doctor touched me with infinitely delicate, butterfly lightness, the way she touched her beloved cat, Nachtl, who died while I knew her.  The gentleness of her skilled hands I can still feel, and the way it made me momentarily forget how damaged her soul was.  My father was not a toucher, but he could be similarly disarmingly gentle.  It did not happen all the time, or even often, but it happened enough over the years to show that he was capable of it.  His was at his best in an emergency, when, always calm, he could be very comforting.  That is part of what makes him such a tragic figure in my eyes.

He had all the qualities to make a great friend:  intelligence, sensitivity, honesty, humor, understanding, loyalty.   These are the qualities that make a great father too.  It was beyond him, most of the time, overwhelmed as he was, to exhibit the totality of these qualities to his children, or even to his wife, the love of his life.  

My mind suddenly flashes on that black and white photo of my young father, before he met my mother, locked in that whacky wrestling embrace with the blond haired Christian woman in Connecticut.  I’ve never seen him looking happier, more mischievous and full of life, than in that photo.  The shot must have been snapped some time before Eli was dispatched to break up that relationship in no uncertain terms.  Eli, not a man to trifle with, went on behalf of his beloved aunt, Tante Chava, my father’s mother.

Tante Chava, for her part, had never recovered from her older brother’s life shattering betrayal under similar circumstances.  She was being courted by a Jewish postman, with red hair like hers, and had no doubt never been happier than with the prospect of a life in America with this cute young man who loved her.  

“Well, that ape, my father’s second wife, wasn’t going to lose her little slave, you know what I mean?  If she’d got married to him she’d move out and there would go the full-time housekeeper.  So they busted that up right away, and, of course, it broke Tanta Chavah’s heart.  They eventually arranged the marriage to your grandfather, but, of course, there was no romance there.”

My mother, during her college years and intermittently afterwards, was a poet.  She saw the world through a poet’s eyes, with a natural talent for exaggeration she kept until the end.  On her tombstone I had them carve the Hebrew words for “heart of a poet.”  When she died I looked in vain for the blue journal I remember seeing as a kid, the book that contained her handwritten poems.  I eventually found a very small packet of poems, including an extremely passionate one to a lover.  I sent it to my sister.  

“Oh, my God,” she said after she read it, “that was hard to read.  That definitely wasn’t written to the D.U.”   It occurred to me then that it must have been written to Art Metesis, the flamboyant bon vivant who swept my mother off her feet, and stole her heart, and possibly also her maidenhead, before her strong-willed mother stepped in to put an end to that intoxicating romance.  She would not have this headstrong, dashing young man as a son-in-law.

This dizzying set of interlocking tragic thwartings of love and lust is only known to me because I paid close attention.  As much as anything else, I have had to become a sleuth, the only way to make sense out of perplexing circumstances otherwise so hard to understand.  I needed clues, and whenever I found an important one I filed it away in the permanent collection where I keep my most important memories.  

When my father told me, at the very end of his life, that he didn’t know how to express love because he’d never seen it done at home, I understood more than I could explain to him in that moment.  He did his best, which is what I told him, seeking to give him a little comfort as he tried to make his way from this world with a bit of grace.  I assured him that everybody was here, those he tried to love were all around him.  By this I suggested that we’d all got the message of how much he loved us.   

“Well,” he said weakly, and hopefully, “when you guys needed something, I like to think I was always there for you.”  A long silence follows this remark on the recording.  I wasn’t going to lie to the man, and was at a loss for another comforting thing to say about that particular point.  After an extended moment he says, wait, let me go to the primary source.

“…you can’t be sure about that,” he said, philosophically, pausing to catch what was left of his failing breath before going on to other matters.

When we put together the final puzzle of a man’s life, the most essential pieces, it strikes me now, involve how content he was with his life, how much joy he took in the things he loved, how he loved the creatures he loved, how he made others feel, the kinds of relationships he had.   The wealth he acquired, or failed to acquire, is a much smaller piece than the effect he had on those he came in contact with, it seems to me.  

My father was born under a series of bad signs, without question.  He did not have the wisdom, like so many famous self-made people we read about today, to choose to be born into a wealthy, or even middle class family.  His parents were extremely poor.  His mother, angry, religious and intolerant.  Also violent.  His father, utterly powerless.  The world must have seemed to him a very bleak place in the years before he was stationed, at 21, in a bucolic spot in recently defeated Nazi Germany.  

His little brother, who my father always said regarded the world through rose colored glasses, would get excited watching a guy load a soda machine.  “Oh, you should have seen it, Irv, it was so cool! He had all these different flavors, in different colored cans, and he rolled them down these wire racks, it was fantastic,” his brother would say.  My father rarely wore such glasses, and, anyway, those rose colored glasses didn’t really help my uncle with his uncontrollable rages.

With the odds stacked against him, I can see what Eli meant about how far he’d come.  The “dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill” can be googled today, as a friend recently did, and quickly linked with his thesis adviser at Columbia Graduate School, one of the most admired historians of the twentieth century.  Neat trick, Irv!  He rose, by merit alone, through the teaching ranks to lead a small team of idealistic men and women who intervened to make peace in riot-torn New York City High Schools.  He parlayed his night job, director of a small regional office of a Zionist youth movement called Young Judaea (whose website informs us is the nation’s oldest such youth movement) into the national directorship a few decades later, after he retired from teaching.   He gave his children the unworried middle class existence he’d never dared to imagine as a reluctant-to-bathe wretch in Peekskill.

It’s probably unfair to dwell too long on how content he was.  Contentment, after all, in some measure flows from a baked in genetic disposition, innate capacities for happiness vary greatly.  Though our choices in life play a role, a certain amount of external luck is also undoubtedly involved.  

The question of how content anyone is reminds me of the old snap quiz from Philosophy 101: would you rather be a pig satisfied or Socrates dissatisfied?   A trick question, since it doesn’t stipulate that the thing that gives satisfaction will be snatched away in the time it takes you to answer the question. You know, take the food, and randy companion, and mud away from the pig and… that’s a pretty miserable pig.  Leave Socrates alone on a chilly desert island, he still has his fabulous imaginative brain to keep him warm.  

I think of the faith in a better world my father carried like a torch through the first half of his life.   He was very interested in Tikkun Olam,  repairing the world, making this planet a better, more fair and merciful place to live.  I know he leaned way to the left as a college student and throughout my childhood, well into my young adult life.  I regret I never got his story of attending the Peekskill riot of 1949.  

He would have been 25 that summer, a student, either a Syracuse undergrad (where he was sympathetic to the arguments of campus Communists — note*) or Columbia graduate student.  He went to the Peekskill gathering, I’m 90% sure.  The concert was organized by Commie rabble-rousers featuring Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson, among others.  It was organized as part of the post-war push for brotherhood, human equality and the end of racism– all principles the Second World War had ostensibly been fought over.

The first time they tried to hold the event local Klan types assaulted the crowd while law enforcement stood by smiling, stuffing Red Man chewing tobacco into their cheeks, spitting long brown jets of the toxic spew.  Cars on the narrow road to the site were ambushed, overturned, windshields smashed, young idealists beaten, hit in the face with rocks the size of fists, by fists and also baseball bats.  Was my father there that day?  I will never know.

Several days later they reorganized the event and held the concert, with proper security in place.  Young men in t-shirts stood shoulder to shoulder forming a human wall against the return of the men who hated the push for brotherhood, human equality and the end of racism.  Mobs of haters generally prefer to terrorize the unprotected, and it was, in retrospect, foolish of the Leftists not to have organized security to repel people who were violent in their opposition to radical things like integration of the races, justice and liberty for all Americans.  The second concert went off without much violence.

Which one of the concerts was my father at?  No idea.  Maybe both, maybe one, possibly neither, though for sure he’d returned to Peekskill for it.  All I have to go on is a dim memory of my father mentioning it and the purple prose of Howard Fast giving his  forgotten account of the long-forgotten episode in the fight for freedom and true democracy.  These prose are contained in a book, Peekskill USA, that I am turning in my hands now, its cover confidently predicting it will become “one of the enduring classics of American reportage.”  Indeed.   Like my father’s early, deeply left-leaning political beliefs, an artifact, a mere nostalgic after-trace.

I think of my father with great sympathy now when I look back over the eighty year expanse of his life.  His loss of faith, as he looked around him at the lack of real progress, the erosion of his hope, the increasing fatigue brought on by years of driven over-work, endless battles with his ungrateful middle class children, the ascendance of an aggressive right wing in American politics, these things beat him down.  He certainly felt increasingly trapped by fate and in the end, died convinced his fate had been sealed by the time he was two.

Let us look at the things he loved, then.  He loved soul music, deeply.  He would mimic Sam Cooke’s phrasing with impeccable accuracy, tunefully and with a decent voice, in the snippets he sang to my mother at the dinner table. He loved the animals we always had in the house, dogs, mostly.  He was their primary caregiver, always.   He loved justice and mercy, even if he didn’t always practice it with his wife and children, or with himself, for that matter.   He loved a good laugh, and gave more than he got.   He loved to wrestle with the political problems of the day and did it hands on when he still had the strength to engage with it.  He was an avid reader of intellectual periodicals and a fierce advocate for his beliefs, though this fierceness faded until, by his final decade or two it would become hard to see more than a flash of it.

How he loved the creatures he loved, outside of the dogs, is a more difficult area to assess.  How he made them feel, also problematic, and it varied greatly depending on who you spoke to.  He lamented, hours before he died, that he never saw affection expressed in the home he grew up in and therefore had no idea how to do it.  Yet, over the course of his life, he was loved and admired by many people.  I need only to picture the shrewd, intelligent faces of longtime friends Arlene and Russ, turned to take in every word Irv said, nodding with great satisfaction or bursting out laughing, or both at once.   They loved him and he loved them.

Russ once had my family meet him and Arlene at an Italian restaurant he’d discovered on Northern Boulevard.  He assured my father that, unlike many Italian restaurants, this one did not serve dishes that were like “congealed snot”.  Outside the restaurant Russ, a much smaller man than my father, grabbed his old friend, pulled his face toward him and kissed him on the lips.  My father recoiled, laughing.  As we all laughed Arlene informed us that Russ was high was high as a kite on demerol for the gall stones that were torturing him.

“Admit it, you loved it, you son of a bitch,” Russ barked to his old friend.   

He loved and was loved by people throughout his life, in spite of his insistence that he didn’t know how to show affection.  He always managed to convey his feelings, quite dramatically.

(to be continued)

* in law school I read a case that defined the “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment’s right of free speech.  An utterance that amounted to an unambiguous “invitation to exchange fisticuffs”, wrote the unanimous court, was never the sort of speech the framers of the First Amendment thought worthy of constitutional protection.  The famous case where the fighting words doctrine was laid out is the 1942 Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire where the plaintiff was a loud mouthed crank who challenged a New Hampshire town marshal (“Goddamned racketeer”, “fascist”) who was trying to get him off a soapbox, if he didn’t like what he was saying, to basically make him get off his soapbox, where he stood on his phantom First Amendment legs. The cop didn’t, in fact, like what Chaplinsky was saying, nor his attitude, and these things would eventually result in the entire State of New Hampshire being sued by Chaplinsky.  And Chaplinsky eventually finding himself immortalized on the wrong end of a 9-0 Supreme Court decision during the early days of America’s involvement in World War Two.

What does this have to do with my father, you ask?  Somebody is clearly mistaken, and it may well be me, but when I discussed this case with my father (and it’s unlikely to have been Chaplinsky, I think now, reading on Wikipedia that he was a Jehovah’s Witness and not a Communist) his face lit up and he recalled the campus crank from Syracuse, his roommate had a passing friendship with the guy.  He was a Communist and a semi-professional rabble rouser, not even enrolled at the university, and had stirred up some shit on campus with his no holds barred invitations to exchange political fisticuffs.  My father chuckled as he remembered it, as he was always fond of this kind of thing and had obviously been fond of it then.    Could it have actually been Chaplinsky?  No idea.  Wikipedia does an excellent job on the Fighting Words Doctrine:

The fighting words doctrine, in United States constitutional law, is a limitation to freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. It held that “insulting or ‘fighting words,’ those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are among the “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of [which] … have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem.”

I remember being impressed as a young man by my father’s command of various subjects.  He could expound, fluently and in great detail, on any number of matters.  He was a voracious reader who remembered much of what he read (and heard) and could authoritatively call up various arguments and points of view at will.  He generally spoke without notes.  He taught me the importance of being well-informed about multiple sides of an issue to really be able to talk about it productively.  

This advice echoed what I later learned in law school (along with only using the passive voice when the facts were against you and you wanted to distance yourself from them:  ‘admittedly, the victim was stabbed’– as opposed to ‘admittedly, my client stabbed the victim’) — anticipate the strongest arguments your adversary can throw at you and be able to make the finer points of those arguments as strongly as your own, in order to learn best how to counter each one.

 Although my father was often an adversarial man, engaged in one long fight his whole life and rarely losing a round, I am not speaking now of how he used this skill in an argument.  I’m trying to describe his ability to analyze issues and synthesize his opinions from an understanding of multiple points of view.  It was his habit of looking at multiple sides of a question that made the deep impression on me.  He was aware, even as he generally saw the world in black and white, that there were all kinds of factors that went into making us believe what we believe.   He could articulate alternate theories to almost anything he said.  He saw the other side and could point out quite accurately why they believed they were right, then he’d show you why they were actually wrong.  

My father’s ability to clearly see the other position no doubt was an important component of what made him so formidable to argue against.  But what impressed me was his repeated demonstration of the importance of seeing multiple points of view for anyone seeking to understand something on a more than knee-jerk level.  Seeing things from multiple points of view is always better than having one unalterable, random view of the thing, if you want to understand it fully.

An example from the universe of music.  I have played guitar for many years and only recently, since taking up the ukulele a while back, have I started seeing the fretboard from another angle.  Seeing it differently has allowed me to notice new possibilities of an instrument I’ve played for more than forty years.  

The uke is basically a little guitar and anyone who plays guitar can easily, and with no introduction, make music with a ukulele.  But, while many things are applicable, there are certain things you can play easily on a guitar that are not immediately transferable to a ukulele, all of the root chords that use the guitar’s bass strings, for example.  So if you want to get proficient on ukulele you have to learn to use other positions, also transferable from the guitar, but not ones that would ordinarily come to mind.  

For guitar players, picture a first position D chord, slid up two frets (one whole tone in the scale) becoming an E chord, one more it’s an F.  Then picture the minor versions of these chords, the minor 7th, minor 6ths and so forth.   These are chords there is no good reason to play this way on a guitar, but which are indispensable for the ukulele player.   After mastering these on a ukulele the positions do turn out to be quite handy in arranging things for guitar. Now you are looking at the fretboard from the point of view of the high strings, locating positions from that vantage point rather than the way we all learn to find our positions, from the bass notes up.

This new view raises a number of new possibilities, along with different, sometimes very convenient, ways to finger the familiar chords.  So it is with anything we can understand from another point of view.  It is ironic, and also a blessing, that my father, during a largely adversarial life he regretted having lived in such rigid, uncompromisingly dualistic terms, taught me this deep lesson.  

“De nada,” says the skeleton.

My father was always very skeptical of sales related raps, advertising and its identical cousin political propaganda.  He would point out the obvious bullshit in the things that ran on television, the weasel words, the false, boastful claims that were just this side of illegal to make.  He had a great disdain for braggarts and I remember his delight reading me Darryl Knowles’s quote about Reggie Jackson “there’s not enough mustard in the world to cover that hot dog.”

He brought home the Remco Johnny Reb cannon one year at the designated time for a big gift, after my constant clamoring for it whenever I’d see the amazing, perfectly targeted ad on TV.  The dramatic battlefield scenes of young soldiers dragging the heavy cannon around, loading the barrel with the ramrod, firing at the wooden fort, helpless against its might, left my young jaw hanging.  His reaction to my bitter disappointment when I took the plastic piece of crap out of the box was great.  He looked at me like “what did you expect, man?”.  The look also said “I rest my case.” 

At its best, a good ad would give him a grim chuckle, though most often the whole exercise of this institutionalized bragging seemed to disgust him.  He himself was neither entrepreneurial nor self-promoting and I think he instilled a deep distrust of self-promotion bordering on ethical objection in both of his children.  Be honest, above all, was what he imparted.  Candor, unmitigated by careful calculation, we learn later, is the kiss of death in many business contexts.  

“I have to be completely honest with you, although, of course, I’ll get up to speed on your case quickly, I’ve never handled this kind of case before,” is the last thing a prospective client wants to hear from the lawyer he has just anxiously told his life-draining legal worries to.  

Wrong!  You absolutely don’t have to be honest at all, if it will potentially damage your business.  In fact, you are an idiot if you believe you have to be completely honest about being insecure, unsure, hesitant.   There is a way to finesse this lack of experience that sounds much more confident.  Like pausing, smiling and making no mention of it.  The impulse to lead with honesty can often be deadly in business.

“Capitalism runs on confidence,” says the skeleton grimly. “You could call it a con game in the truest sense, a gigantic ponzi scheme, it’s all based on gaining the customer’s confidence, exploiting their insecurity and their greed, or whatever it takes.  They are selling, more than any other single thing, the possibility of wealth.  It’s all a crap shoot, of course, something nobody can predict, it’s right there in the required fine print crafted by their legal teams, but the person people give their money to is the confident actor, the charmer who never shows fear.” 

If your reflex is to flinch every time your mother calls you by her pet name for you, if your father cannot protect you, or himself, it will be hard not to show fear.  Showing poise and confidence at all times will always be an act to someone whose first reflex is fear.  

“Well, that’s a little harsh and simplistic, Elie, everyone is an actor.  In life you have to be an actor,” says the skeleton. 

Of course that’s true.  And, speaking of actors, I find myself distracted now, wondering, for example, why I am not working on my father’s life as a screen play, leaping over the possible big $5,000 pay day for this book I’m working on, if I can succeed in selling it, when Hollywood will pay fifty times that for a movie script.  What could Hollywood be looking for, in the life of this one-time great idealist who watched his dreams of a better world erode over the decades in the trenches, became in the end a fairly bitter, anonymous old man?  Where is the story?  That can’t be it. Certainly you’re not suggesting that millions of Americans would fork over fifteen dollars a piece to see that depressing trajectory enacted on the screen.

“Well, let’s be honest about it, Elie, so far today you’re sitting around talking about the dodgy ethics of capitalism with a skeleton, not the kind of thing that puts fannies in the seats, if you know what I’m saying,” said the skeleton.

I do indeed.  More than you know.

“Do you know what Morgan Davis is, on the street?” my father asked my sister and me, one evening during a lull in our ongoing dinnertime wars.   My sister and I looked at each other, back at him, shrugged.

“Mogen David wine, ‘come on, man, we got us a bottle of Morgan Davis, let’s go’,” he said with a small cackle.  We laughed, too.  

I think now what a great demographically targeted ad that might be for the popular kosher wine.  

Look, obviously even my truth-bound father realized that somebody who told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth all the time would be intolerable.   He was a student of history, and politics, and also, not a sociopath.  Only a monster with no concern for the feelings of others insists on the absolute right to tell the truth all the time.  Can you imagine the damage somebody who is nothing but a strict truth teller could do to those around him?  

Besides, as we have already observed, there is nothing as simple as a “truth teller” except in the mind of an eight year-old.  There is only the relative degree of truth in the stories we tell each other, and ourselves.  Some versions are more truthful than others, more concerned with the hidden depths of the story than the shiny surface of it.

“A fool’s vexations are presently known but a prudent man concealeth shame,” says the Book of Proverbs.  What precisely is the excellent counsel of these words of wisdom?  Does it mean keep your mouth shut if something causes you shame?  Does it mean a wise person will hide any part of the truth that does not make him proud?   Shall I go into that dark booth and ask the smiling priest what it means, father?

I stumbled on the Book of Proverbs during a service somewhere, in some god-forsaken chapel where something was being celebrated, or lamented, at, (to me, anyway) always tedious length.  I have never been to any kind of prayer service where I could resist the mounting urge to take at least one very long bathroom break and, also, usually, a long, thoughtful tour of the empty building and the surrounding grounds.  I can’t sit still while people are praying, rising and being seated on command, murmuring earnestly in unison.  How my father managed to get through that long day at Hillcrest Jewish Center every year on Yom Kippur, on an empty stomach, no less, I will never know.

So in between “please rise” and “please be seated”, I’d sometimes search the back of the prayer book (where Pirkey Avot, “Sayings of the Fathers” was often to be found), or scan any Bible that was nearby, for whatever words of wisdom might be hidden there.  The Book of Proverbs, unsurpassed for pithy, fortune cookie-like aphorisms, was a favorite.  I’d sit and surreptitiously copy down any proverb or Saying of the Fathers that struck me as profound, troubling or both.  I’d noticed early on the withering looks my attempts at drawing pictures during the service always produced in the people around me, which is why I copied out these wise phrases stealthily.  Another favorite I recall jotting secretly: “As a dog who returneth to his vomit, so is a fool who repeateth his folly.”

The fool in all these examples, I quickly realized, was the person who refused to fear the Almighty, our eternally merciful, jealous, vengeful, petty God, the one who created us all in His image.  The basic idea is that only a disobedient fool does not fear the wrath of the loving Father who created us all, the giver of life, the bestower of every blessing.  It is apparently praiseworthy to be God-fearing, and foolish, prideful, and worse to have any hesitation to remain wisely afraid of the all-Merciful.

A prudent man, moreover, does not delve further than prudent into quibbling, faith-eroding questions like: why does the all-powerful, merciful Creator of the Universe allow the constant slaughter of innocents by people we may call Hitlers, large and small?  The answer is given conclusively, if also unsatisfyingly: God is all-merciful and in His mercy He gave man Free Will.  If man chooses to act like a violent asshole with his Free Will, how is this the fault of our all-merciful Father?  This wonderful shifting of blame from God to man for all the evil bad men do to good women, children, other men, animals, the earth itself, is called Theodicy, a kind of pious idiocy, it seems to me, but that’s only my opinionated opinion.

What my father’s opinion was on this subject, on the subject of religion in general, our’s in particular, I can’t be completely certain.  I know as he was dying I asked him about saying Kaddish for him.  Kaddish is the Aramaic prayer of praise to God and life that a first born male utters several times a day for a solid year to honor the departed parent whose soul has gone on to the World To Come.  I was prepared to say it for my father if it meant anything to him.  He waved it off, shrugged, said it really meant nothing to him.  

Since he was dying when he shrugged the Kaddish off, I said it every day for a month after he died, just in case, though I didn’t do it as required, in the presence of a minyan, nine other Jewish men, for a total of at least ten, the quorum for a real, honest-to God prayer service according to the rabbinic tradition.  For all I know, it may actually be one of the 613 actual commandments in the Bible, like the requirement to throw stones the size of your fist at adulterers and homosexuals until they are dead.

Which is why Jesus, the famously merciful Jewish rabbi of the never violent Christian tradition, stepped between a mob of true believers and an adulteress about to be stoned to death, according to the plain prescription of the Word of God, and said “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Why Jesus, a man without sin, didn’t start things off, is not recorded.  Of course, that’s not the point.  Nor did I know, as I asked my father if he wanted me to say Kaddish for him after he died, that he would, a few hours later, apparently shruggingly accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior.

What is meant by “a prudent man concealeth shame?”.  This curious admonition stood out to me among the proverbs, many of which are transparent commands to stop thinking so much and do what God and your superiors tell you, even as Pirkey Avot also warns a Jew not to become too intimate with the ruling authorities.  There are seeming contradictions in all these words of wisdom, and debates about the meaning of many of them, but that phrase translated as “a prudent man concealeth shame” always intrigued me, and, because I’ve always been a bit foolish, also vexed me.  

I was prone, as my father was painfully aware, to making many of my vexations presently known.  Wherefore, then, was I imprudent in not concealing the parts of them a prudent man would have concealed?  This vexed me, of course, as it does now.  It also vexed my father, who tried, as a general rule, to keep his vexations to himself except when he exploded from time to time.

My sister used a wonderful phrase that explained a lot about our father.  He was “shame-based”, she said.   He was also a prudent man, by and large, and, in accordance with the Proverb, took lifelong steps to conceal his life’s basis in shame.  Wherefore shame?    The simplest explanation is deep and dire poverty, a poverty so terrible it stood out in stark contrast to the widespread poverty of the Depression, so degrading it required its own singular adjective whenever he spoke of it, which was not often.  Grinding poverty.  

The other half of that shame no doubt involved the mother who cruelly whipped him in the face from the time he could stand, and sent him to Public School in Peekskill without a word of English so he could start off on the right foot, as a big, unwittingly hilarious dummy, the “dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill.”  

I knew about the grinding poverty, of course, but the rest of it I only learned of as a middle aged adult, and only because I sought out still living primary sources like my father’s seventeen years older first cousin Eli.   Without the rest of it, I would have had no chance for a glimmer of understanding about my father.  I write these words now, the way Pat Conroy tells readers he always wrote, “to explain my own life to myself” as, in this case, I try to explain my father’s life to a reader who never knew either of us.

My sister, I was surprised to learn recently, does not remember our father’s insistence on truthfulness.  Honesty, to him, as I remember it, was not only the best policy, it was the only policy.  Truthfulness, as we’ve noted here, as becomes clearer as I head toward old age, is sometimes a tricky business, not as straightforward as an eight year-old might believe.  

“If you tell the truth, we can deal with whatever it is,” I remember my father telling me.  “A lie will only make things worse.  Lies only complicate things.  If you are honest you don’t have to worry.”  Thinking of this now, it’s a foolishly oversimplified thing to tell a kid, on several levels, even if also a noble one.  At the time it made a big impression, and it has stayed with me for the rest of my life, so far.  But there are several problems with it.

For one thing, a lie will not “only make things worse”, it will also, sometimes, make a bad thing seem to disappear.  New Liars become committed liars once they see, to their great relief, and later to their occasional thrill, how well lies can work. People willingly believe them and a terribly worrying thing, a shameful thing, has been made to go “poof!” There’s a palpable sense of relief when the concerned party relaxes their face and smiles, so glad to hear the bad thing they suspected never actually happened (even though, if the truth must be told, it actually did happen).

As for lies only complicating things — how does making a bad thing disappear make anything more complicated?  We’ve all heard the old saw about “if you tell the truth you never have to worry about remembering a made up story” but, in a sense, all stories are to some extent made up.  Add to that the plain fact that most of the time nobody follows up on a lie, no day of reckoning ever comes in regard to most plainly untrue things.  And then there’s the matter of liars who actually believe they are not lying, even when they demonstrably are lying.

If you are honest you don’t have to worry?  You can just sit back, I suppose, and enjoy your hemlock, but as for honesty generally removing worries, au contraire, mon frere.  Sometimes, rather than setting you free, the truth will set you up, like a crooked cop bagging up and planting the bloody glove you dropped at the crime scene in your foyer, with your DNA and the victim’s soaked into it.

But as for me, and even as I may be in some ways lying to myself, as my father, I see now, lied to himself, I prefer the truth most of the time.  It’s important to me.  There is a version of every story much closer to the truth than what we get fed most of the time.  There are real issues, with real problems involved, sometimes intractably intricate ones, that can only be solved by honestly grappling with the actual facts, set clearly aside from blinding preconceptions about things like “liberty” and “justice” or “vengeance” or “pride”.

 That our most challenging problems can only be tackled successfully by a truthful investigation and a frank discussion is beyond dispute, but to hear most people talk, particularly here in the USA, USA, it is but one opinion among many.  Like the assholes we all have, there is no shortage of opinions, many of them just as appealing as the average asshole.

Some questions, I’m afraid, are unambiguously straight-forward and the answer is either true or false.  “Were you there?” is an example.  There are only two possibilities, a yes or a no.  Only one is true, although the clever person can answer “yes and no.”

“Yes, I was there, you know, but I was so tired, I just got back from a long business trip, and I was so out of it, that I was in a daze and so I didn’t notice anything around me.  Outside of the fact that I recall I was there, and technically, ‘yes’, I was there, I can honestly say ‘no’ I wasn’t actually there, not in anything more than insensate zombie form, so yes, and no”

“A blind man can see where you’re going with this,” says the skeleton, waking in a bad mood.  This apprehension is common among abuse victims, who often wake up fearing the worst, history about to rear its ugly head and whip them in the face at any moment.

“Oh, you smile now,” they say, “but so did mom before she let loose with that flurry of stinging lashes with the heavy, frayed, coarse, canvas-wrapped cord of the old steam iron.”

I get it, I’ve been there, I’ve woken up there.  I’m not going where the blind man can see I’m headed, not necessarily.  I hadn’t intended to even mention my father’s essentially denying the Holocaust, as to our once large, now brutally culled family.  In fact, I won’t even mention it now.  

My point was actually that my father’s insistence on his son telling the truth was, to my mind, one of the great things he gave me. I always try to be truthful, except in those white lie situations where someone asks me, with a smile of great vulnerability, how her ugly new hair style makes her look.  Does my quest for honesty make me judgmental and intolerant, when I am faced with people who habitually lie?  Well… I can’t lie, it often does.  I’m just saying, it’s more complicated.  It is not that the truth does not exist– it does exist.  There is a version of reality way more heavy with truth than the opposite view, in most cases.  It all depends on how honestly you can look at the situation.

“OK, so you, then, my son, tell me which is the truth, which weighs more heavily on its side of the scale?” said the skeleton.  

“You are a person who never cared about making a living, never competed to try to sell any of your fairly impressive talents, was never content to work in any capacity that did not somehow involve respecting your love of creativity and collaboration, you always lacked discipline and ambition, yet you made a fetish of honestly feeling superior to the need to go to work and to everybody who goes out every day and earns a living.   In short, too scared to compete to get remunerated for your talents and too proud to admit you are a coward, fashioning yourself instead as a humble man of great integrity resisting the gravitational forces of modern American capitalism.”  

“I’m sorry, dad, was there a question in there somewhere?”  

“Is your insistence on doing exactly what you want to do at any given moment: play music, draw, write, pontificate, day dream, a manifestation of a true belief worthy of respect or the outward sign of a lifelong sad, childish clinging to something– creativity for the sheer joy of creating– that never actually existed anywhere, ever?”

Good question.  Tricky question.  One thing I have to say before anything else: the honest answer can, I know it’s maddening to hear your son say it, truly be both things at once.  Were you a great man or a destructive man?   Was Mantle a great hero or a colossal asshole?  

Take the example of Peevyhouse v. Garland, dad.  The upright, supremely fit gay rascal prof in law school, Bratton, presented that eternal either/or (or both) contradiction superbly, better than I’d ever seen it done.  It was the most brilliant demonstration of the lawyer’s art, and perhaps the nature of truth and justice, at least as far as court cases go, that I’d seen up to that time.  

The Peevyhouses owned a farm that they leased to a corporation, Garland, who explored it for some kind of ore or other resource.  The exploration took the form of gouging the surface of the land, a sort of investigatory strip mining.  Garland promised, in the contract, that if they found nothing, they would restore the farm to its original condition.  They found nothing, but didn’t restore the farm.  Peevyhouse sued Garland for breach of contract.  

Day one Bratton made the case for Peevyhouse, the poor farmers screwed by the evil, lying corporation that destroyed their home, their beautiful farm, reduced their once lovely world to shit and then brazenly breached their clear, contractual promise to fix it.   Every student was enraged at Garland by the end of that presentation, ready to decide the case.  A clear, open and shut case of breach of contract.  Bratton told us to hold on to our nooses and be ready for part two the next day.  

Day two Bratton presented the case from Garland’s point of view.  The Peevyhouses were not farmers, nor were they a cuddly family, they were, in fact, rapacious professional predators.  They bought dozens of properties, entered into these kinds of leases for land they never even set eyes on, and had sued dozens of companies under various theories, settling many every year, in fact much more profitably than Garland’s small, mom and pop operation.  The cost to Garland to restore the land, which was unused in any case and of little value to Peevyhouse except as a lever to extract huge settlements in court, would virtually put them out of business.  It was the practice, in these boilerplate lease contracts (Garland had no legal department, Peevyhouse employed a crack squadron of high-priced shysters), to have the clause about repair but, in practice, everyone understood it would never be done.   You be the judge now.

Now you will say this is an example of not being able to decide the case until the evidence from both sides is presented, rather than one about the shades of truthfulness in any assessment of human affairs.  And you would have good point, even though, in practice, the evidence on both sides is almost never presented this completely for people to impartially weigh before deciding what is true, what is fair.  It’s impossible to arrive at fairness without going through the truth, I would say. 

“When did you become such a an agile, wriggling weasel?” the skeleton asked, with that constant grin that may or may not have been expressive of wry intent.  

The truth then, as far as I can see it: most people get their sense of productivity and a good part of their self-esteem from the work they do, the title they hold, the income they earn.  Here in America, as in much of the world, a poor person’s life is, literally, worth much less than a rich person’s life.  The value of each life can be most easily rendered in dollars and cents.  How much is he worth? is universally understood (here) to  mean: what is the total value of his assets?

It is also possible, I have discovered, to get a sense of productivity, purpose and self-esteem from the things you do every day, if you do them earnestly and as well as you can, if you hone them, even if you are not paid, even if no title is attached. The future is a worry for everyone, and in the end, most worryingly of all, each of us must die.  This is fearful business, particularly in a society that divides everyone into winners and losers and makes no promises of a decent life, or even a dignified death, for the losers.  Who are the winners?  The richest among us.  Who are the losers?  The billions of poor people, who keep breeding like flies. 

I prefer to see a third category, a category it has taken me years to define for myself, is only really coming into focus now, as I careen into the last chapter of this life.  The truth is rarely either/or, as much as we may be conditioned to see the world through a sort of fuzzy black and white dualistic lens.  

If you have enough money to pay your bills, and those of the immediately foreseeable future, and are therefore lucky enough to be able to put aside the faceless, endless anxiety of imagining yourself old and forced to eat cat food, shivering in a gutter somewhere for lack of funds to afford shelter, and you have things you love to do, and do pretty well, and you are content and feel productive doing these things every day, how does that make you a loser?  It doesn’t make you a winner, granted, but there needs to be a third category.  Maybe that category is “lucky bastard” or “conditionally exempt” or something.

“Agile motherfucker,” the skeleton says.  “I have to admit, you may be on to something with this detailed portrait of your father.  I said as much as I was dying– did I not?  How I wished I had not viewed everything in terms of money equaling success, how I defined my worth almost solely in material terms.  Maybe I did teach you something worth knowing, you poor bastard.  You poor, poor fucking bastard.  Good luck stringing out that modest lump sum reparation payment I left you and may your luck letting it ride on the crooked roulette wheel of capitalism continue to hold, though we both know the House will rake the rest of it away soon enough.  Bird Wins, baby*.”  

Peace out, pops.

*note to self:  add definition of “Bird Wins” from intro to Bird Wins