If you are whipped in the face by your mother during your earliest memories, which I hope you never were, certain bad results are inevitable.  Many people have early childhood traumas that twist them in ways they will rarely understand, but I can’t think of many worse than violent betrayal by your main caretaker.  Being whipped in the face by the mother who is your first teacher of life and love is about as hard a start as a child could have.

Try not to smile at the next picture you see of a mother animal of any kind with her tiny replica next to her.  Baby animals are born to be cute and seeing them, tiny versions of their mother, next to mom almost always uncreases the brow.  Now advance to the next frame and watch the mother viciously bite the baby animal, blood flowing, the baby screaming.  Not cute anymore, is it?

“You are flailing today, Elie,” notes the skeleton impassively, though with that persistent grin.  “That bit about Malcolm X you wrote the other day, with its long encyclopedia entry in the middle, and the mini treatises on Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, or lack of jurisprudence, and the Voting Rights stuff, threw you off your game.  I am less than half formed in these pages.  Tell them something they don’t know already.  The insight that a baby whipped in the face will bear its suffering throughout life is not worth the dirt under my left scapula.”

He’s right, of course.  I am just taking a moment to note again that in the case of a baby whipped by its mother it’s easy to see why anger would become a lifelong problem.   Express any sort of outrage to your mother that she would whip you in the face, at two, and things are likely to go a lot worse for you.   Nothing warps the impulse to be happy more surely than unfairness shoved down your throat over and over when you are young.  The indigestible anger goes into some hidden place in the psyche, waiting for its chance to burst out and rage.  

And yet, in most ways, in most situations, my father appeared in control and completely sane, even when he was insisting on things that were completely insane.  In the same way that Malcolm X could make an excellent point in the same lecture where he described the creation of the white devils by a scientist named Yakub, or during an ugly emotional reaction to an event, like his unrepentant celebration of the deaths of 120 southern whites when a flight to France went down, my father, who often justified completely mad crap,  could often be dead on with his insights.

Here is a case study, cannibalized from an earlier post on this blahg.  This is about the brilliant, blond folk singer and social activist my father greatly loved, his friend and colleague from The Human Relations Unit, whose fall from grace, when it came, was as swift and absolute as any I can recall.  

My father’s colleague and close friend became very close to the family when I was a boy.   We spent a lot of time with her.  My sister and I found this brilliant and talented woman funny, and caring, and she seemed to relate to us as a peer.  She was like a very cool big sister to us.  My mother was very fond of her too. Then, seemingly out of the blue, my father was done with her, for reasons he was too disgusted to detail for his disappointed family.  One day she was just gone and we never saw her again.

Many years later my father and I spoke about what had happened to their close friendship.   “She is pathologically competitive,” my father said, his face very much like Clint Eastwood’s iconic mask of hatred when he is confronted by an on-screen enemy.  “She will fight to the death over everything and never gives an inch, especially when she’s wrong.   Her reflexive self-justification makes her impossible to deal with, even after years of therapy and supposed introspection, she still has no insight into how damaged and enraged she is.  She is always primed to fight and she fights even the smallest things to the death.  She’s one of the most maddening and provocative people I’ve ever met, and I finally just had enough, after a particular incident at a conference we did with Gladys.”  That the same could be said for my father, minus the years of therapy, did not need to be spoken by me at the time.

My father had come to another breaking point with a good friend, part of the pattern of his life that troubled me greatly growing up. It seemed to me he never gave these close friends a chance to make amends.  It took me decades to see that things sometimes advance beyond the point where amends are possible, much as it saddens me to see this.   When things become ugly enough between two people trust is torn and it can become emotionally impossible to make amends.  Anger puts each of them on the defensive, they become the worst versions of themselves and can justify their heartless behavior down to the snarl.

Back to the point then, what happens to anger that is swallowed? My father executed a sentence of death on this woman my sister, mother and I felt so close to.  He felt 100% justified.  Decades later I was talking to Sekhnet about how close I’d felt to this one time friend of the family’s and she urged me to look her up on the internet.   I found her easily.

We had a mutually delightful reunion by email which led to Sekhnet and me spending several days in her guest house in Santa Monica during a trip to California.  In her version of that conference my father had alluded to as the last straw, it was my father and Gladys who had set-up, sabotaged and betrayed her. “Unbelievable!” she’d laughed, when I gave her my father’s version.

A great animal lover, she had a rescue dog, a lovely, skittish black lab, smaller than your average black lab– possibly still not full grown at the time.  She named the dog Boo!  Boo! was immediately very friendly with Sekhnet but seemed afraid of me.  Our host explained that Boo! had been abused by the man who owned her and that the gentle dog was skittish around men.  By the end of our stay my cooing at Boo! to come over and not be afraid turned into “get off me, Boo!” as the affectionate dog would not leave me alone, licking my face and sitting on me whenever I was within reach.

Had the story ended on this lovely note it would have been a wonderful tale of redemption.   My father had been wrong about many things, as he sadly admitted on his death bed, and his banishment of this wonderful woman was just another of them. In fact, I once put the two of them on the phone and they had a very cordial chat, reminiscing for a long time, as my father made her laugh again.  A beautiful story, if that had been the end.   Except, the story did not end on a lovely note.   

An unflinching advocate of social change when I knew her, a crusader for the underdog and righteous fighter for the oppressed, she had become, several decades later, a deeply conservative supporter of Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, Glen Beck and a host of other characters that would have made her earlier self recoil.  

She told me she had converted to Judaism and, as a Jew, she valued these brilliant uber-conservatives as the best friends of Israel.  I questioned whether these people were really friends of Israel at all, as they seemed to me to support the worst of Israel and for all the wrong reasons.  She asked if I’d be willing to have a dialogue about politics, which she’d had a revelation about after 9/11, as a favor to her, since we had such excellent communication and all of her other liberal former friends had cut her off (and she had new ones who were, like her, political independents of the far right).  To my eternal regret, I agreed.

The correspondence did not go well.  She and I found no common ground, and worse, for me, whether she had a coherent answer or not (and I eventually tried to reduce our Bush era correspondence to two questions:  why Iraq?  How do you justify torture?) she was vehement.  She insisted she was right, whether her answers made sense or not.  All of the experts she believed in told her that if we did not rain death and torture on those who hate our freedom they’d literally be upon us in our beds, literally cutting our throats.  Besides, we never tortured anyone, she insisted, and we only water-boarded three people (which she didn’t consider torture, in any case) and only because they desperately needed it and there was, presumably, a ticking time bomb and it was us or them.

A difference of opinion, we might say, and not something that should lead to the end of an otherwise wonderful friendship.  Our disagreements escalated.  My detailed emails were dismissed for their hopelessly misguided liberal bias, the larger points unanswered.   It soon became an exercise in masochism for me.  

It was also another sad illustration of how feeble even the most well-marshaled and diplomatically deployed facts are against the torrential power of strong emotions.  We had liberated Iraqis from a modern-day Hitler?   Really?  Ask the millions of Iraqis fleeing their homes during the American occupation how liberated they felt.  I was missing the point, she told me.  I eventually had enough.  

We had a long falling out, I came to see her exactly as my father had described her– pathologically competitive, incapable of giving an inch of ground and irrationally spoiling for a fight.  

After years of silence I sent her a piece about Ahimsa that I’d written, she wrote back very moved, and grateful for the chance to renew a warm and mutually beneficial friendship.  She agreed 100% that we would no longer discuss politics, that it was a third rail we would never allow to electrocute our friendship again.

Except, even though she continually renewed her promise not to send political emails, darn it,  she could not resist once in a while (often accidentally, she claimed) sending me something she really thought might change my mind.  She’d apologize most of the time when I reminded her I didn’t want provocative political emails and she promised each time not to do it again.  

But she simply couldn’t help herself, darn it, sometimes a given piece was just too convincing for me not to be convinced by.

During all the turmoil over the deaths of unarmed black young men at the hands of police she sent me a piece that complained about how these same agitators who protest against the police conveniently ignore the hundreds of times more deaths black young men inflict on each other.  An opinionated and simplistic response I found not only irrelevant, but idiotic, inflammatory, and not even well-written.  A self-appointed American pundit compares killings by the police, sworn to serve and protect, with killings by violent criminal gangs, sworn to get rich or die trying? This is your response to protests against police killings of unarmed civilians?  Really?

But, see, she couldn’t help it, you dig?  She was still earnestly trying to convince me she was right, get me to see the truth, get me on board with those who see the light, no matter how many times I’d expressed how these attempts make me feel.  I was so willing to have frank dialogue about so many things… why so closed minded about politics?

To me, there is only one explanation for her seeming irrationality that makes sense.  This is one thing that happens to anger that is swallowed whole:  it comes out as an otherwise unexplainable tone deaf determination to be right that cannot consider the provocative effect it will have on the person it is directed to.  

The expression is very often directed at someone who had nothing to do with the original swallowed anger, which starts early in childhood, goes into a mass of general anger and creates the conditions for this kind of righteous moral tone-deafness.  And it’s “innocent”, you dig, and it conveniently becomes another proof that the person who gets upset over it is just an irrationally angry hot-head himself.  

I know that she was raised by a mother she tells me was insane.  I can imagine the pain of that upbringing, it is not so different from my own, although my father was masterful at presenting his insanity with wit and seemingly irrefutable logic.  Hey, Dad, you was like the narrator of the Telltale Heart!  

“TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story,” quoth the skeleton.

It wasn’t his espousal of the teachings of the vain and corrupt Elijah Muhammad that made my father interested in Malcolm X, of course, it was everything else.  At the time Malcolm was on the scene, shit was jumping off big-time in the Civil Rights movement my father was part of.  The need for radical social change had become urgent to millions of Americans.  The pendulum was still swinging toward hope and mercy, but it was poised to swing back toward intolerance and blame.   Malcolm was a compelling spokesman for the cause of human equality by the time he was marked for death.  

For most of his public career Malcolm prefaced his pronouncements with “as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches,” although this became harder and harder for him to say as time went on.  My father always wryly added “as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches” when telling some Malcolm anecdote, like his description of the mad scientist Yakub who created the race of white devils six thousand years ago.  Malcolm chafed more and more in the straitjacket the self-important Elijah Muhammad tried to keep him in.  It’s not hard to figure out why, if you do the simple arithmetic.  

Elijah Muhammad, a halting reader with a fourth-grade education, was a convert to a religion whose religious books he could not read.  He knew a single phrase of Arabic, the greeting “peace be unto you”.  He learned the simplified, idiosyncratic black nationalist Islam he taught from a mysterious drifter named Wallace Fard.   My father chuckled as he described the sci-fi aspects of the white looking Fard’s black-pride version of Islam with its blue-eyed white devils.  It is probably worth keeping in mind that Fard’s theology is no stranger than the creation myths and miraculous visions at the core of many other religions. 

Wallace Fard arrived in Detroit in 1931 leading a small, secretive sect called The Nation of Islam.  To his black converts he preached racial separation and self-reliance, along with his esoteric brand of Islam.  Fard taught that blacks were the original and superior race, and that they had been ruthlessly subjugated for 6,000 years by the evil white race created by the big-headed scientist Yakub in a centuries-long genetic experiment gone terribly wrong.  These mutant whites would be forced from power when death rained down from the Mother Ship to destroy Yakub’s hideous experiment, according to all-merciful Allah’s plan.

Elijah Muhammad served as Fard’s Top Minister  from 1931 until Fard disappeared without a trace in 1934.  To Elijah Muhammad, Fard’s most ardent follower and heir apparent, his master’s mysterious disappearance was the final proof that Fard had been the incarnation of Allah.  For the rest of his life Elijah Muhammad remained a disciple of Fard, holding himself out as the Messenger of Allah, someone who personally knew and spoke to Allah.   He soon discovered that his deep faith imbued him with new-found business abilities and he built up the Nation of Islam, making it a financially viable entity in multiple sites.

Its message of submission to a God who loved blacks and would deliver them from the white devils all around exerted a powerful attraction for members of a despised race who could find discipline, pride, and fellowship in an organization that preached all these things.  As sad as it may look in my capsule summary here, as fatal as its internal politics would prove to be to the evolving Malcolm, Malcolm often credited Elijah Muhammad with saving his life when he was in prison.   Many other members could say the same thing.

Malcolm’s faith, study and transformation into a Minister of the Nation of Islam undoubtedly did save him.  He went from an enraged inmate to a committed leader of Black Muslims, a man ready to do anything necessary to change the world.  And, crucially, The Nation of Islam gave him a platform from which to do it.

The Nation of Islam gained much wider membership once Malcolm X came into the fold and became its charismatic, telegenic face.  He joined and became a minister after corresponding with the Messenger from prison and converting to Islam  It was Minister Malcolm’s charisma, bearing  and organizational talents that allowed the small sect to grow into a fairly large national movement with storefront mosques in thirty cities.  

Elijah Muhammad preached a strict code of discipline and morality, with serious beatings and even death for violators. A Muslim must not drink, smoke, steal, covet, commit adultery.   The Messenger, although he succeeded in keeping it quiet for many years, had impregnated as many as seven young assistants over the years.  Young women he then expelled and banished as fornicators and adulterers.  He also lived the life of a pasha on the backs of his mostly poor followers.  His followers were forced to pay higher and higher dues to finance the lavish lifestyles of the Messenger and his sons.  

Elijah Muhammad also seemed to have had no coherent plan or vision, beyond demanding strict obedience to his interpretation of Allah’s will until the Mother Ship arrived, as prophesied, and blacks would once again rule the earth, after learning discipline and self-sufficiency.

Even while Malcolm was giving all credit to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and his pronouncements were faithfully bound by his master’s world view, even while forcefully expressing ideas that he would recoil at later in his life, his fierce intelligence and skill as a speaker were always apparent.  His poise and cool under fire were as undeniable as his charisma.  He was the image of a man of integrity in complete control of his life, no matter what anyone had to say against him.   My father identified with all of these things big time.  

Irv was a natural public speaker who could improvise a moving funeral oration with seeming ease.  He would gauge his audience and make adjustments on the fly, like Malcolm.  They both knew how to get the tears to flow and when it was time for quick laugh to break the tension, to reset the pace.

Malcolm was a tall, good-looking man with an electric, camera-ready smile or a convincingly implacable expression, depending on the needs of the moment.   My father, oddly enough, to think about it, was a tall, good-looking man in his day too.  He was self-effacing about his looks, particularly as he gained weight once he had a family on his shoulders and indulged his bad eating habits.  He more than once told someone over the phone who asked what he looked like that most women compared him to Rock Hudson.  He’d give a mild chuckle afterwards.  

The photos of him as a young man show a confident looking man with thick black hair and nice features.  Rock Hudson was not a ridiculous stretch, or sometimes it was Cary Grant, though my father always made the comparisons with characteristic self-mockery.

But the main thing I think my father identified with in Malcolm was the rage, and the ability to intellectually channel that rage into an articulate, undeniable argument.  Both men did this somewhat destructively at times, though Malcolm and his views continued to evolve, while the cornerstone of my father’s belief, and what doomed him to his miserable final years, was that people could not evolve.  But there was a similarity in their techniques, skill sets and basic beliefs and my father enjoyed watching the masterful Malcolm X at work.

My father admired Malcolm for the same basic reason he loved Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce — their audacity and unflinching honesty in presenting important things most people didn’t want to look at.   The facts, Malcolm kept saying, look at the plain facts in front of you.  Go to the home of the average white person, look at their lives, then to the home of the average black person, look at their lives.  What is mysterious about the claim that America is a deeply racist country?  

***

Martin Luther King was arrested on the eve of the 1960 presidential election for sitting at a segregated lunch counter.  For this crime he was taken to a jail deep in the backwoods of some redneck state.  The law in those days was that the states had the right to deal with their Negroes however they pleased.  The Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed American citizens federal protection from arbitrary and hateful state laws, had not been enforced in almost ninety years by then.  As the Supreme Court said,  when they put the Fourteenth Amendment into a deep sleep a decade after the end of the Civil War,”the Negro’s day as the special favorite of the law is at an end.”

Nixon, on hearing of King’s arrest and the move to a rural prison where King might be killed, apparently appealed directly to Ike about it.  Ike was probably playing golf and told Nixon they’d talk about it another time, maybe. Few people ever learned of Nixon’s prompt, unsuccessful behind the scenes attempts to get King out of jail.

Candidate JFK called King’s wife, Correta Scott King, and expressed his concerns.  The phone call made the news, King was soon released from jail.  King thanked presidential candidate JFK on TV.

Some say that phone call to King’s wife won the 1960 election for JFK, who got the almost unanimous vote of those blacks who got to cast a ballot, along with those votes from the cemetery in Illinois.  JFK was elected by a razor thin margin of 120,000 votes nationwide.  He likely would have won in a landslide if the Voting Rights Act signed by Lyndon Johnson a few years later, which ended most of the shenanigans that prevented many blacks from voting in many states, had been in effect in 1960.  

The Voting Rights Act, by the way, that the Supreme Court ruled recently is unnecessary to enforce.  The 5-4 Majority held that federal oversight of fair elections is no longer needed even for states with the most egregious histories of racism.  The Majority wrote that even if these new laws made it virtually impossible for many poor people, old people, college kids, non-white people, to assemble the required three forms of acceptable ID documentation the laws now require for all voters, there was no Constitutional violation of the rights of citizenship involved. 

In the country where my father and Malcolm were born, those who were not “white”, or not “normal” got what they got and, you know, shut up about it.  I was born into the same country, almost sixty years ago, more than thirty years after my father and Malcolm were born into it.  During my childhood, blacks could still be killed with impunity in many of the states that now vote solidly Red in national elections, states that still lead the nation in executions and deaths by firearms.  It was not only in the former Confederacy that blacks were treated as second and third class citizens.  Our  unbroken history of racism is part of the unthinkable underside of the American Dream that was always there and that now intrudes on the sleep of more and more Americans as time goes by.

As I said, the sickening injustice of it burned my father, the thought that even someone as mild-mannered, and upright-seeming as the pious, eloquent and nonviolent Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King could be trussed up and taken to some holding cell for possible lynching merely for having the temerity to sit at a lunch counter where people their fellow citizens called niggers were not allowed to sit.  What?  Does it even sound possible that someone could be arrested for that in America?

It burned Malcolm, too, obviously.  King was risking his life to get the legal right to sit at a lunch counter with white racists who hated him?  What?  That symbolic act was worth being burned alive for?   What is worth dying for, Malcolm X said, is fighting for the right to be a full human being.  Or, as it was commonly phrased in those days, the right to be a man.

It seems like an abstraction, perhaps, fighting for the right to be a human being.  Being denied the right to be a man is no abstraction for a boy growing up in a town, like Lansing, Michigan, like Peekskill, New York, where the Klan has the final word on whether you and your father will walk down a given street or, perhaps, if you insist, we’ll beat the shit out of the two of you and burn your fucking house down in the middle of the night instead, how about that?  “Your choice, sir,” they’d say with a smile.  

I feel my blood percolating as I try to write this entry.  You know, we’ve come so far, in the more than 150 years since all Americans recognized the unalienable truth of Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal”.  In the more than 150 years since the bloody war to free the slaves ended, Lincoln was slaughtered, and the Constitution was amended to ensure freedom for all Americans.

Malcolm X told Alex Haley, while pacing that small room in which Haley interviewed the doomed Muslim, that being dissatisfied with grudging progress for the Black Man was like being called ungrateful when a knife was pulled partially out of one’s back.  “The knife is shoved in ten inches and the man pulls it out four inches and says ‘that’s much better, isn’t it’?   Well, you could see it that way, unless the knife is still stuck six inches deep into YOUR body.”  

As far as my father saw it, visiting high schools where blacks and whites were squaring off to kill each other near the sites of recent race riots, where the edict of 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education to end inequality of education by integrating the schools was proceeding with “all deliberate” snail-like speed, Malcolm was simply putting the plain facts out there, as simply and straightforwardly as possible.  Something had to be done about it, and he was going to keep putting himself front and center in the struggle to do it.

In 1964 the school I went to in Queens was integrated for the first time, after a fierce battle among parents and teachers during which my mother and her friends were called Nigger Lovers and, slightly more amusingly, Commies.  I recall one of my teachers, a haughty, opinionated francophile named Harriet Bluming, loudly and repeatedly expressing her racist view, in the cafeteria of our school, that newly arrived Negro kids misbehaving in the lunchroom would grow up to be on Welfare and blaming white people for all their problems.  Some of the young Negros snarled back at her, but she gave them no quarter.  

Meanwhile, as Bluming tongue lashed the unruly Negro ten year-olds, down in Mississippi, leftist lawyers from New York were making successful arguments that the never repealed 1872 Ku Klux Klan Act gave the federal government the right to enforce the law when a gang of men, including local law enforcement, hauled three Civil Rights workers off a state road and murdered them in the woods of Mississippi.  The good whites of Mississippi resented this unjustifiable intrusion on “States’ Rights”, of course, but the Fourteenth Amendment was enforced for the first time in almost a century.  It would be used in every Civil Rights case that followed.

When my father had a black colleague over at the house in 1964 it was considered a radical thing to do.  Our neighbors were shocked to see a Negro laughing and coming in and out of the house.  We integrated Pastrami King after my graduation from sixth grade a few years later, with the family of a brown-skinned classmate I was friendly with.  Posing with his arm around his colleague and friend Gladys in a photo I have, at some dinner where my father wore a tuxedo and has a black hand gripped in his other hand, was, tame as it seems now, something of a radical act in those days.  

Now, fifty years later, when we are a post-racial nation, as many “color-blind” whites like to insist we are, these things are still not natural for most Americans.  The younger generations, it’s true, are more tolerant, much more inter-racial, but millions of  Americans in the second half of their lives– not that much.      

How was it possible for an elected official to yell “you lie!” at the President of the United States during a nationally televised presidential address a few years ago?  Because the president was, a, well, he was, possibly a secret Muslim, not definitely a US citizen, a kind of socialist, a fascist, a man who cheated to become president, you know, an illegitimate president who came to office by a kind of fraud or shady electoral subterfuge, in a much different and more dangerous way than any recent predecessor, he was a different, a less respectable kind of president, he lacked the pedigree, he was….

“Christ,” says the skeleton of Malcolm X, “say the word.  The word is nigger.  ‘The president is a nigger’ is what he actually dog whistled.”

And as such, and being politically inexperienced, he had to be very careful, our first Black president, our post-racial president.  Very careful, you understand.  He had to remain supremely dignified, more so than Jackie Robinson, even.  A hard slide into a foul-mouthed bench jockey playing shortstop was out of the question. Our post-racial president walked with that heavy burden on his back, the weight of hundreds of years of racism, de jure and de facto.  He did a pretty good job, considering his hands and feet were tied for much of his first term, and for his second term.

And my father, choked as a boy on his family’s poverty, on being in a tiny, powerless minority of Jews in a town where the opinions of the Klan were much more universally respected than any others, identified 100% with the choking rage of another boy, born into poverty, part of a despised minority that could be beaten or killed with impunity, whose first memory was the Klan setting fire to his childhood home.   2016, gentle reader, almost a century of bold progress, and I am choking on the same goddamned things that choked them.

My father admired Malcolm X, El Hadj Malik El Shabbaz, born Malcolm Little almost exactly a year after my father, on the day before my mother would be born three years later.  They were contemporaries.  They were both burned by the sickening injustice of the world they were born into.  

Both were eloquent, persuasive, quick-witted speakers.  My father must have felt like a pretty good amateur fighter when he watched Malcolm work.  He was inspired by and took pride in Malcolm’s indomitable quickness in the ring, the way he shined in the spotlight, his slick moves.  He delighted in watching the remarkably skilled self-taught boxer in the big fights.

I was eight and a half when I heard the news, on the radio, sitting alone in my parents’ bedroom waiting for something to come on TV, that several men had cut doomed Malcolm down in a hail of bullets in the Audubon Ballroom.  I remember how hard the news hit me that February evening.  I am sickened to this day about the cover-up and the fact that the bloody crime scene was mopped up immediately so that the scheduled dance could be held in the ballroom three hours after the assassination.  

February 21 would acquire further meaning for me as an early love of my life was born on that day, and so was my only aunt.   February 21 was also the day Spinoza had died, and, three hundred years later to the day, my grandfather, strong, gentle, frightened Sam.  Sam had a right to be frightened, his six brothers and sisters, all his nieces and nephews, possibly his old parents and any aunts and uncles still alive, and all of his surviving cousins, had been marched out of the house he grew up in, and the ones nearby, for a bullet in the back of the head and a mass grave in a ravine.  He was only alive because he’d followed his strong-willed fiancee to New York twenty years earlier.

When we talk about history, whether we mention the frequent atrocities or not, this is the kind of thing we are talking about.  My father could minimize the psychological effect of having all of your parents’ aunts and uncles summarily executed at the whim of some hateful fucks, just as he tried to minimize the whippings across the face he’d endured from his mother (her family similarly wiped out) when he was a very young child. Minimizing anguish can only do so much, the violence is always there. .    

All the atrocities one hated could be felt as one while Malcolm whipped some apologist for racism with irrefutable, brutal logic.  Malcolm, at his best, brought a feeling of catharsis to the discussion– to hear someone finally speaking clearly, and strongly about exactly what needed to be spoken of clearly and strongly.  

I learned from reading that part of Malcolm’s genius as a radio debater was his superb sense of timing.  I’m sure my father was very much aware of Malcolm’s clock management skills.  Malcolm X was Michael Jordan in the last thirty seconds of a radio debate.  He’d wait, timing his game winner to come at the buzzer and he rarely missed.  

Debating a black academic of some kind who took a superior tone, Malcolm goaded the man by referring to him throughout as “doctor”.  The man corrected him and finally, in exasperation, said “Malcolm, you know very well that I am not a doctor.”

“Oh,” said Malcolm with feigned innocence, “you speak so authoritatively on the subject of the so-called progress of the Negro that I just assume you have a doctorate in this subject.”  

The shot clock on the radio studio  wall now down to thirty seconds, Malcolm set up the last shot of the game.    

“Are you aware of how white academics where you work, in fact, all the white people where you work, refer to you, doctor, when you are not present?”  

His opponent, who’d been insisting Malcolm’s anger at American racism was not helping matters, gave some prissy demurral, asked how he or Malcolm or anyone in the world could possibly know with any degree of possible certainty, or even hypothetically, what was supposedly being said of him when he was not there.  

Malcolm dribbled for a moment, glanced at the game clock.  Then he sent one in a perfect arc, that hit nothing but net.  “Nigger,” he said, as time ran out.  

“How can you not love that shit?” asks the skeleton of my father from his grave in Cortlandt, NY.

A sense of humor is a funny thing to try to describe, of course, very personal and ticklishly hard to render in words.  What’s funny?   It’s like pornography to that famous Supreme Court justice whose name nobody today remembers: I can’t exactly describe it, but I know it when I see it.  

Very hard to describe somebody’s sense of humor, which is always seen in a sudden flash. It’s like trying to describe a unique smell, or the essence of music to a deaf person.  

Music is these wonderfully organized sounds that hit the eardrum in a beautiful way and stir ineffable emotions, you know what I’m saying?  Hey!  Are you fucking listening to me, deaf guy?  I’m trying to explain what music is here.  

Tell a funny story, and watch the confusion on the listener’s face as to why this story is funny, or even worth telling, and in the moment of defeat you’ll say, or just as often the tired listener will say “I guess you had to be there.”  And it’s usually true, you usually did have to be there.  

There’s the matter of timing, pacing, facial expression, and body language, when and where the supposedly funny thing happened, and who it happened among, the context, what the stakes were.  Take a funny bit by a great comedian, something that cracked you up, and write it out verbatim.  Chances are it’s not nearly as funny, if at all, as it was when performed by the talented comic.  I can assure you, it was fucking hilarious.  I guess you had to be there.  Are you even listening to me, you deaf bastard?

My father was fucking funny, is what I’m trying to tell you.  He was a lot of other things that were not funny at all, true enough, but he also had a keen, dark sense of humor and a quick wit.  It’s hard to give you examples, though.

My father, standing at the top of the stairs leading from the kitchen down to his bathroom, pointing his ass at his family, his wife threatening him, timing his exit to the predictably horrified reaction to his perfectly executed fart, is it really funny?  And if it is funny, is it “ha-ha” funny or just funny as in weird?

I consulted a psychotherapist on this particular instance of my father’s wicked sense of humor and her take was that “he came off as less funny than hostile and angry, at least as regards the farting part.”  She noted that “blatant public farting can serve as a means for people who feel ‘powerless’ in their lives to exert a measure of control/power over others.”  Bingo.  I recognize all that, that’s why he was doing it, but… I guess you had to be there.  I guess asking a fucking psychotherapist about humor is pretty funny in itself.   

Eli, that great, funny, savage older first cousin of my father’s, once tried to describe my grandfather’s sense of humor to me.  Eli was a great story teller, and very funny himself, but it took him a long time to dig up a few tiny examples that gave me a sense of my grandfather’s deadpan style.  He described Harry’s face with an unforgettably poetic image: “two eyes, a nose, and a mouth”.  That was it.  Eli zipped a finger across his lips, showed the mask, blinked once impassively to show what he was talking about.

“OK, I got one,” he said at last.  “I was trying to teach Uncle Harry to drive, you know, he was out of work and my father was going to hire him to work in the garage, but he couldn’t be much use unless he could drive and move the cars around.  So I took him out in the car in Peekskill, which is very hilly territory, if you remember what Peekskill is like.  And we’re going along and we come to a hill, and he starts losing power.  So I say ‘Uncle Harry, give it gas, give it gas!’ and he turns to me with that face and says ‘gas costs money’ and the car starts rolling backwards, and we’re going to get killed.  I shoved my foot on to the gas pedal and grabbed the steering wheel, and pulled the goddamn car over at the top of the hill and that was the end of the driving lessons, but that was him.  ‘Gas costs money.'”

Funny I am only now making the connection.  Gas costs money, unless it’s the gas that comes out of your ass, which costs nothing except the horrified look on your children’s faces when you tell them to ‘prepare for…. gassing’ and blast them with it.  I will get back to you with examples of my father’s sense of humor as I am able to dredge them up, so you will understand I am not making this up.

OK, I got one, though a minor one you probably really did have to be there for.  When my grandmother was dying at home, in my former bed, actually, she was in a lot of pain at the end and wouldn’t take her synthetic heroin except at precise four hour intervals.  She’d cry out in pain for two hours at a time sometimes, refusing her pill until it was exactly four hours from the last one, no matter what any of us said to assure her it would be fine to take one after only three hours if she was in agony.

She’d asked me to hang up a small painting on heavy paper I’d done for her, so she could study it on the wall.  I went downstairs to get a hammer and nail.  As I headed up the stairs with the hammer my father said “is that for the fly on grandma’s nose?”

You had to be there, perhaps, but I remind you, there are few things more important for the doomed than a good laugh whenever possible.

My friend mentioned that his children had taught him what to do when they received a text that asked them to do something they weren’t ready to do: ignore it.  “It was a great lesson, though it took me a long time to catch on.  Now I do it all the time whenever they send me a request to do something I’m not ready to do.  And the beauty is, they taught it to me and so they really can’t complain about it.” 

I offered him one of my father’s staples.  “You show me a man who doesn’t respond when his father texts him a request, I’ll show you a man who lost the right to whine like a fucking baby when his father does the same to him.”

My father was prone to fits of laughter so strong he’d turn fire engine red as he howled and struggled for breath, wiping tears from his eyes.  These fits didn’t come over him very often, but he was susceptible to them for his whole life.  Some of the things that made him laugh this way didn’t have that effect on the people around him, but some of the things that cracked him up made my sister and me laugh too, and our mother.  

I have inherited this proneness to the laughing fits.  Sometimes I will try to explain why I am laughing so hard to someone, but it’s almost always impossible and it often makes things worse for me.  For one thing, my voice goes up a couple of octaves and I gasp to speak in a voice that sounds like I’ve just gulped helium.  For another, it’s a struggle to breathe, laugh that hard and make a subtle point at the same time.  I just have to ride them out, as my father generally did.  

One of the features of his fits was the breathless repetition of a partial phrase, repeated a few times, a fragment of an explanation of what was so funny that he was powerless to convey as the laughing fit gripped him.

One of the things my father was known for, around the dinner table especially, was an unfortunate ability to fart seemingly at will.   He’d often announce the imminent threat with the phrase: “prepare for … gassing!”  We’d brace ourselves.

“Irv, don’t you dare!  I’ll divorce you!” my mother would threaten, pointing at him with a serious look on her face to show she wasn’t kidding.   My sister and I would protest angrily too, but our indignation only egged him on.  

The tension wouldn’t last long, my father would smile and let out a loud blast. We’d all recoil, my sister, who sat next to him at the table, would move limply out of the way and my father would head down to the bathroom, chuckling.  

He’d sometimes tell us to prepare for gassing from the door in the kitchen that opened to the stairs to his basement bathroom.  After he said this he’d wait at the top of the stairs, poised, regarding us over his shoulder, shooting us an ominous look before impishly delivering his payload and heading down to the bathroom, smiling. These were the times, in the tense moment before my father made good on his threat, when my mother would call him a pig and snarl about divorce.

“Do you do this with your friends at work?” my mother asked him disgustedly once.

He started to laugh.  As a matter of fact, just the other day he’d been riding out to a high school in the ass end of Brooklyn with Phil Trombino.  I think he may even have warned Phil what was about to happen and Phil probably told him it was nature and what the hell, make yourself comfortable.  

“It was a cold day, so the windows were up, the heat and the defroster were on, and Phil was driving, and I let out a hot one.  It was a pretty bad one.  And Phil almost crashed the car into an oncoming truck.  He began pawing at his eyes,” my father started laughing, began to lose it, and with difficulty he said “he was… he was… pawing at his eyes, and Phil said…. Phil said….’man, Irv… you’re powerful!”  And he dissolved in a fit of laughter that lasted a while.  The rest of us laughed too, as much at his helplessness in the face of the story as at the story itself.

I still have the image of poor Phil Trombino pawing at his eyes.  “He was pawing at his eyes,” my father kept bawling as he hopelessly tried to pull himself together.

Somewhere in his travels between Class A, AA and AAA ball, Phil Trombino had a teammate from Puerto Rico, or maybe the Dominican Republic, who grew more and more depressed as the season went on.   Trombino comes down to us as a big guy with a big heart who was always ready to help, and seeing his teammate so depressed, he took him to breakfast and tried to cheer him up.

“It’s no good, Phil, I have to kill myself,” the ballplayer said.  “My wife’s got a new man, she don’t love me anymore.”

Phil asked how he knew this.  Did he hear it from his wife?

“That’s the problem, my wife don’t send me one letter since I come here,” said the disconsolate man. “I write to her every day. Every day, Phil, and  I beg her but she don’t write.”  Phil pondered this.  

As they left the diner his teammate pulled out a letter to his wife, stamped and ready to go.  “I write to her one last time,” he said, “she don’t write back to this one, I will jump under a goddamn bus.”

He walked over and dropped the letter through the slot of a tall red receptacle.  Phil began to smile.

“You been mailing all your letters home from there?” Phil asked.

 “Every day, I send her a letter in there every day, Phil.  No letter from her, not one!”

Phil put a large hand on his teammate’s shoulder and began to laugh.  “Well, you can stop worrying, man.  Your wife still loves you.  That’s the garbage can.  You’ve been putting all your letters in the garbage can, your wife hasn’t had a single letter from you.  That blue box across the street is the mailbox, man.  This here is the garbage can.”

History does not record the reaction of the long ago teammate, but my sister and I had a good laugh, along with our mother.   And, clearly, I never forgot the bones of this old story my father told us once over dinner.

I decided to use Phil’s name for at least two reasons, I realize now.  It’s a cool name and it recalls a couple of funny stories my father told my sister and me about his colleague and friend, Phil Trombino.  

I have nothing but good things to say about Phil, who I don’t believe I ever met in person or spoke to, so there is nothing for anybody to fear when I use his actual name.  

It’s a different case with the blond, folk-singing member of MENSA who became my father’s deathly enemy after their close friendship ended and she moved out of New York.   His story was that she was pathologically competitive, had this insane need to be right no matter what, and this became especially, and maddeningly, intense when she was wrong.  

Her version is that my father and Gladys set her up to publicly humiliate her, at the end of a long campaign of conspiracy and sabotage by my father and Gladys.  Gladys, a colleague at the Human Relations Unit and a beloved friend, and my father were, for many years, thick as thieves.

I have good reason to believe both of these stories.  I have stories of the former folk-singer in her later years, we were in touch not that long ago, but I would not want her name dragged into this Book of Irv.  I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t either.

I would also not use the unique and colorful last name of his good friend Harold, who put a price of $75 on their long affectionate friendship.  Harold and Irv were really the ideal, dark-humored brothers neither of them had ever had.  In addition to having a keen sense of humor and a deadpan style, Harold was held up to my sister and me as a living genius.

“He’s literally a genius,” my father explained it to us once.  “He can speak, read and write about six languages, all very well.  He’s a licensed electrician, can wire and build anything.  He flies an airplane, he can take a plane’s engine apart and put it back together.  He built that house they live in and he installed all the plumbing.   He’s a wine expert.  And he plays several musical instruments.”

“Violin, cello, piano, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, organ…,” my mother said, beginning to count them off,  “he plays about ten instruments, maybe more.  Saxophone also, I think, and clarinet, I think, and flute.  Yes, I’ve heard him play the flute.  He’s an excellent flautist,” added my mother.

Excellent player, genius, droll and likable fellow, but after putting a price of $75 on my father’s friendship nobody ever talked about him again in our house, that I can recall.  Except in the context of a great memory my sister and I have about his son’s hilarious and completely off-beat joke, I don’t think his name ever came up again at the dinner table where, in the old days, we’d see him from time to time when he’d stopped by the house in the car he rebuilt himself to drop off a book for my father or just say hello on his way out to the Island. 

Harold’s probably gone by now, he’d be over ninety if he was alive, but just the same, the way things ended with him and my father, it would only be hurtful to Harold’s family, if they ever read this, to learn the details of the ugly end without a chapter about the years of their great friendship, years I know little about, since I was too young to witness any but the last few.  My sister and I loved Harold and enjoyed his family.  We have a few hilarious memories of times spent with Harold, or Harold’s kids.

But Phil Trombino, I found it impossible not to type his name  when I mentioned the Italian member of the Mod Squad at the Human Relations Unit.   I did a google search, and his name popped right up.  Phil did play minor league ball, for seven seasons, it turns out.  Now I had a primary source.  Suddenly we learn that he was born in 1947, so he must have been a kid when he worked with my father.  “You could look it up,” as Casey Stengel used to say.  In 2016, of course, you can look it up, and it takes less than a second.  I went to look at the back of his baseball card.  

Phil Trombino was a lifetime .309 hitter as a minor league first and third-baseman and occasional outfielder.  He played in the minors from the age of 20 to 27 or so.  His last year in professional baseball was the year I graduated from High School.

This is what got me wondering about the time frame of the Human Relations Unit. The summer that I was eleven years old, prime time for the Office of Intergroup Relations, I would think, in 1967, Phil Trombino was the starting first baseman for the Iona College baseball team.  That season he hit .441, setting a school record that stood for years.  To this day it’s the second highest season average ever compiled by an Iona College baseball player.

My father once, while grudgingly giving in to my demand to put up a few hundred bucks for the last two credits I needed to complete my course work for my New York State Teaching Certificate many years ago, took the opportunity to sum me up unflatteringly.

“I’ll give you the two hundred dollars,” he said smartly after my long argument, “but I have to tell you, I find it pretty pathetic that a 37 year-old man has to beg his father for two hundred dollars because his unemployment ran out after he lost yet another good job.  You have never been able to hold a job.”  He went on in this way for a long lung-full.  

Not only was an adult man begging his father for money pathetic, he pointed out, but also several other very pitiful things about my life needed some prompt attention.  The saddest part, of course, was that I was so willfully blind to all my faults, no doubt even considered them virtues.  I avoided seeing myself as I really was because I surrounded myself with yes-men, sycophants, and a series of pliant and confused women who gave me what I wanted until they too, for obvious reasons, had to get the hell away from me.  He softened these hard truths with a few words of consolation.

“Look, I’m your father, and I’m always going to tell you the truth your friends are too spineless to tell you,” he said.

I was a grown man, and as he spoke I recognized this for the sharp-smelling hostile weasel shit it was.  It would have been easy enough to turn it all back on him, but I decided to wait a few weeks, since it was close to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and I knew it would make for a good discussion before we broke the fast.  Also, for one of the few times in my life, I was being practical first.  Let me get the check, pay the tuition, I reasoned, then we can talk about the nature of deeper truth.

It would be another fifteen years or so before the old man died, now almost eleven years ago.   The math somehow doesn’t add up to my current age as I do the math in my head now– 37 +15 + 11.  Somewhere I’m off, because the sum should be 59, not 63.  The timing of the course work was when I was 36 or 37.  The Yom Kippur talk was at least a year or two before I ever thought about applying to law school.  The point is not to get bogged down with the particulars.  It was more than 20 years ago, in any case.

I met him after Yom Kippur services at Hillcrest Jewish Center, as was my custom.  I always fasted, except for that year Seth Nagel urged me to leave Junior Congregation with him, and took me to King Yum, his treat,  straight from services, the two of us in our suits, Seth gleefully polishing off a big plate of pork, me hedging my bets with a small bowl of wonton soup, a couple of shavings of pork floating on the top.  Outside of that time, I always fasted, my sister always fasted, we both fast on Yom Kippur to this day.  Our mother didn’t fast.  My father was the only one who went to services and it was my custom, as evening approached and bad-breathed Jews weak with hunger hurried out of the shul, to meet my father in front of Hillcrest and walk him home to break the fast together.

We walked along Union Turnpike in the fading light, then turned to walk up the short hill to our house.  I don’t recall what we spoke of as we walked.  I remember that we sat across from each other in the living room, my mother in the kitchen, delicious smells coming from there, as I told him what I would no longer tolerate from him.

“This is the day when God supposedly seals the Book of Life, having inscribed the coming year in light of the psychic accounts left open and the ones settled.  I know you’re not big on apologies, and I don’t expect any.  I just need you to understand that I’m not going to tolerate your hostility disguised as fatherly advice anymore.  If you persist in that, we’re done, I’m gone.  I’m glad to hear any advice or wisdom you might have to offer, you just have to filter out the hostility, I’m not having any more of that.”

The old man looked sullen, and you could see in the way his eyes got tight and shifted that he was preparing himself for a mighty battle.  He opened with a familiar gambit.  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said, doing a decent impression of Clint Eastwood.

“I’ll give you a very recent example.  When you agreed to give me that money for the course at Lehman, and thanks again, by the way, you took the opportunity, as you said, to tell me all the hard truths about myself that my ‘spineless’ friends are too worm-like to tell me.” 

He braced himself, glowering and listening.  I went on to lay out all his criticisms.   “Now, even assuming that all those things are 100% accurate, and let’s say they are, what percentage of my total being do you suppose they represent?  20%? 30%?  Why not say 50%?  Do these faults cancel out the better half of me?  Do you suppose they cumulatively outweigh my compassion, sense of humor, readiness to help, my honesty, my defense of the bullied, my general decency, etc.?   Do they negate my talents or the way I try to listen and be the good friend I am to my invertebrate friends?”

I saw he didn’t have anything to say that made too much sense, so I closed.   “Whenever I put myself in a vulnerable position, whenever I ask you for anything, no matter how small, you can’t resist serving up the thinly disguised hostility.   We’re finished with you trying to reduce me to the sum of my faults.  I’m done with it.   The collection of my worst attributes is not the totality of my life.  No more.”  

Needless to say, he didn’t like any of this.  He wasn’t going to agree to stop doing something he’d never admit doing anyway.  He answered all this with a heavy hammer, the tongs gripped tightly in his other hand.  I met the hammer blows with my shield, held at the end of a strong, determined arm.  I pushed him back.  He hammered.  The meal to break the fast was ready to go, but my mother stayed in the other room, quietly, within earshot, listening.   I don’t remember where my sister was that Yom Kippur, probably with her husband somewhere.

“You know,” said my father crossly, “the real thing we should be talking about is your terrible fucking temper.”  He’d thrown a bolt of lightning at my shield, my response was a half smile.

“That’s a funny thing to bring up now, and I don’t see how it’s related to what we’re discussing,” I said.  

“Oh, is it funny?” he asked, “you’ve always had a raging temper, that’s something you find funny for me to bring up in the context of this angry outburst of yours?

“Well, I do have a temper.  So do you.  Why you are mentioning it now is a bit mysterious, unless you’re just trying to change the subject,” I said.  

“Would you agree that you’re a man of more than average intelligence?”  I asked him, taking a page from his Socratic book.

“I suppose,” he said, setting himself, “though I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”  His eyes began to move more.

“Well, would you agree it’s frustrating to have to explain something simple to someone of more than average intelligence several times, in several different ways, and have that person insist, no matter how clearly you present it, that they have no idea what you’re talking about?  Wouldn’t that frustrate most people?”

He grudgingly agreed it would, though he continued to insist he didn’t see my point.

“Well, I’ve just restated the exact same thing to you three or four different ways– that I will no longer accept your hostility crudely disguised as part of your fatherly advice- – and throughout this long, strenuous conversation you keep pretending not to know what I am talking about,” I said.

“And your point is?” he demanded, about to lose.

“Do I appear angry to you now?”

He gave a low growl, cornered as he knew he was.

“So why the hell are you bringing up my anger?” I said.  A moment later he agreed to do his best to filter out the hostility when giving me fatherly advice.  We sat down to break the fast. 

And for the next ten years or so, he was as good as his word, with a marvelous and terrible punchline waiting, for exactly the right moment, to spring out like a leprous lap dancer from a bachelor party cake.

Pushing through difficulties is tough sledding, for everyone, but more so for those prone to frustration and helplessness.  There is a genetic component to optimism, I would think; some are born with more of what scientists have recently identified as the “happiness gene.”   But much of our “can do” or “can’t do” attitude comes from the examples we had during our upbringing, the experiences that formed our characters, no?  

My father, for example, was raised in poverty by an extremely passive father and a mother who was in a constant rage.  Neither one was a role model for pushing through difficulties to solve life’s inevitable problems.  So, the constant example I had from him, who had his powerlessness and pessimism reinforced over and over as a kid, was, when something frustrating happens, vent Tourretically.   To his credit, he wasn’t a hitter.  But his outbursts of verbal rage were epic, and frequent.  Mostly, though, especially outside the home, he kept this predisposition to frustration and hopelessness inside, or mostly inside.

 His psoriasis was one manifestation of the difficulty of dealing with undigested anger.  He had a severe case of this scaly skin condition.  The skin over most of his body was red, scaly and itchy and he’d often scratch it.  The flakes would fall off his arms, his back, his legs and gather on the floor and other surfaces.  This led to frequent sponging, sweeping and vacuuming, by my mother and by him.  I will never forget the smell of the vacuum cleaners, which got hot sucking up these large, translucent, greyish-white flakes.  They smelled like a mixture of strained machinery and burnt skin.  

My father’s psoriasis periodically got so bad, his skin painfully cracked and bleeding, that more than one winter he had to be hospitalized.  In the hospital, with enforced rest, therapeutic treatments including sun, tar baths, cortisone shots, being slathered with balms and wrapped in plastic, and presumably massages, he would recover enough that his skin would heal and stop bleeding at the cracks.  His psoriasis was a torment he endured for most of the years my family spent together in that little house in Queens.

He was from that rugged Greatest Generation of men who didn’t seek the help of people with degrees in psychology.  Psychiatrists were for weak, self-pitying neurotics, as far as my father could see.  It was part of the job of a man to be a man and not whine about his troubles.  Psychiatrists and other therapists could do nothing for a man who wasn’t a man to begin with, my father contended.  That my uncle, his high-strung little brother, had been in psychoanalysis for many years, and remained sadly unchanged, only proved his point.  

My father’s view of therapy was not uncommon in those days.  In fact, I still see examples of the old stereotype about shrinks being the craziest and most troubled among us when I look around at some successful therapists I know.  Still, it seems to me, there is no substitute for gaining insight into what torments you if you hope to move forward in your life.

 “You are hilarious,” says the grinning old skeleton who was once my father, “you’re the prefect person to show others how gaining insight helps you move forward in your life.  Your life is a perfect roadmap for how to gain insight and move forward in the world, isn’t it?”  

“Let’s review.  You thought you’d be an artist, but you were too pure to play the only game in town if you want to be a successful artist: getting rich people to buy your work.  Rich people have always decided who the real artists are and who are just pretentious hobbyists.  Is that fair or good?  We can agree that it’s neither of those things, but unless you want to be a tortured soul like St. Vincent Van Gogh, mythically alternating the unfulfilled agony of your daily life with short bursts of rapture as you paint, and then dying in misery, abjectly unappreciated for your life’s work, you’d better learn to make rich people respect you and buy your work, hang it in museums.  That’s what you have to do if you want recognition as an important artist.  I agree this is an odious prospect, but that’s what being an artist is and has always been.  And, deep down, you knew that, and later, not so deep down.”

“Too much time on your skeletal hands these days, dad,” I say.  

“Glib,” says the skeleton.  “Anyway, you persisted in the artist dream, in the end you made a few short films, even had a couple of modestly sized audiences give you generous applause, until you hit a wall at around thirty years old.  You remember that, don’t you?”  

Indeed I do.  The world became grey, and tasteless, and dull.  I endured the dark days, which seemed endless, and played guitar at night, when I felt the weight lifted slightly after the world went to sleep.  Drawing music from the guitar gave me my only comfort, and small, life-sustaining whiffs of the mysterious creative force that is the source of life.  I didn’t draw much, but each of the few drawings I have from that six months or so is memorable.  

“Nobody’s saying you don’t have the talent to be a professional artist,” says the skeleton more quietly, “but it takes a certain temperament to compete with everyone else who wants that great honor, the plum job of expressing your feelings and getting paid and admired for it.  The successful artist must be lucky as well as  doggedly determined to put one’s work in the proper format and do whatever it takes to win the support of the rich people who will decide how much your work is really worth.  Kings, Dukes, Popes, the rich traders of Amsterdam, the Robber Barons, these have always been the arbiters of the ‘value’ of paintings, drawings, ideas, the artists themselves.”  

“I understood your dilemma, it’s not that I didn’t get it.  You can look at it from a Marxist perspective and say artists who make a living and gain fame in a capitalist system must agree to commercialize and brand themselves, have their work commodified, publicized, monetized and valued according to what the curators, tastemakers, and art collectors of the capitalist art market decide. You won’t get much of an argument from me seeing it that way, but, though you win the hypothetical argument with a now sympathetic dead man, unless you accept those ground rules and play by them, you also will never make a living, especially in a culture as unabashedly commercial as our’s is.”

“But, think about it, it has always been this way.  If the Emperor liked your work, you were made a member of the wealthy class and painted likenesses of the best of your time.  If you drew ingenious cartoons that showed these vain, avaricious, self-aggrandizing, exploitative pricks for what they really were?  Off with your head, you know.”  

“Then we have your short-lived teaching career, idealistic, loved by kids and their parents, mostly admired by your peers, but you couldn’t deal with the frustration of working for a series of all-powerful imbeciles.  Look, I dealt with the same frustrations when I worked for the Board of Ed, but I had a family to support, you and your sister, and I couldn’t afford to walk away, to tell one boss after another to fuck off.”

“You know, that’s the piece you never got, that you have to eat a lot of shit to live a life of integrity.  Is being subjected to arbitrary edicts from incompetent supervisors what you imagine when you dream of teaching?  Of course not.  Does obedience to the sometimes ridiculous orders of those ambitious former teachers who escaped the classroom to obtain more money, and power over their former peers, have anything to do with being an effective teacher?  No.  But if you want to keep your job, put food on the table for your family, have health care for everybody, and a pension, you learn to just be a man about it, be stoic about being treated like an asshole, for the most part.”

“I can say the same about your decade practicing curtsying to sometimes asshole hearing officers in the Housing Court.  Did you not finally have an outburst there too?  Of course, the young man in the robe could not criticize your performance or conduct as an attorney, but he did force you to defend your actions as a dog he kicked as hard as he could in the ribs, the face, the stomach.  Couldn’t stand it, could you?”  

“No, dad, I couldn’t stand it.”  

“And then, when your mother died and you inherited enough to live on, modestly, for a few years, you decided to combine your first and second loves, didn’t you?  An idealistic and fairly ingenious program for fostering collective creativity and optimism in the doomed children of the damned.  You worked very hard on turning the idea into a real program, and, I have to admit, for one person working on your own, you really did sort of impressively prove how well your theories could work in practice.”

“But there’s an unscalable distance between having a great idea that works and being able to get funding to sell it, isn’t there?  Trying to scale that impossible incline is a great and very satisfying job for a man living at 167% of the poverty line, with no connections to anyone who could actually help advance the cause, no?”

I can’t argue with any of that, nor could I have said any of it better myself.  

“The worm doesn’t fall far from the old apple tree, eh?” he says with a wry grin.

“Look, I know what you’re talking about and, although it pains me as your father to see the struggles you must go through to try to live a life of integrity, I actually appreciate what you are trying to do in quixotically painting this nuanced, three-dimensional portrait of me, of not reducing me to the monster I often was, in many ways.  Of course, we are both well aware that, by being afraid to face my own demons, I put many of those obstacles in your way, in your sister’s way.  And, as you recall, a few hours before I died I admitted as much and told you how sorry I was for doing that to you guys.”  

“Still, I stick by my point that a man has to be a man and not a whining worm, if you know what I’m saying.”

This reconciling of irreconcilable truths is the hard part I began this piece thinking about.  You can learn the lay of the land by heart, look at it truthfully, understand the failings, contradictions and missed attempts– and learn something from it, in spite of everything.  That’s my belief, anyway.  It’s fucking hard, without a doubt, to gain truly useful insights, but it’s a struggle that’s worth waging.  The alternative, to me, though much easier and infinitely more common, is worse.

It seems to me the danger of not struggling to understand is that you’ll eventually abandon all your ideals, one by one, and lower your expectations about your world and the people in it.   Sham democracy and grotesquely unfair rule by the most ruthless and greedy of the top tier of the top 1%?  Just the way the world has always been.  Centuries of racism at law, unappealably justified by learned justices who’ve been elevated to the highest court in the land and, in recent decades, claiming to be the impartial “color-blind” referees of our “post-racial” society ?   Par for the course, baby.  You want Justice, do you?  Here you go, rascal, suck on the way things have always been, will always be.

The eventual difficulty of selling this manuscript as a book, no matter how well I might eventually manage to rake together these reflections of my father, his world and beliefs, no matter how elegantly I may succeed in turning it into a compelling and life-affirming tragedy, has not stopped me so far from trying.   I have come to the hard part too, having focused for weeks on sympathetically telling the story of a kind, humble and humanistic man who, also, in a moment of weakness or two, actually set fire to his children’s lives.  A man who, though he loved her deeply, in a way nobody could doubt, was also consistently cruel to his wife, our mother.

I heard a quote from Pat Conroy yesterday, a writer I’ve never read but think I should read now, who died recently.  He said he wrote to explain his life to himself. 

“Bingo!,” I thought, for there is really nobody but the self better situated to explain that life to the person living it.  Those given to honestly delving into the materials of their own lives can learn important, perhaps life-changing, things.  That being said, making useful sense of one’s life is one of the hardest things imaginable.  It also strikes me as the single most important work anyone can do, if life gives them the chance to put in the time.

That difficulty of looking too closely at ourselves is one of the main reasons so many run, full-tilt, full-time, as hard as they can, to be as tired as possible after a day of striving, and hit the hay hard, practical about the need for strength for the next day’s run.  I try not to judge them and I don’t fault them.  For one thing, running full-time leaves little time or energy to consider things that can disquiet a person’s soul, but it’s never been for me.  

That being said, let’s see how I do telling this story, as I continue trying to push through the hard part, and selling you the heart of it, here.

Many people, I’m fairly sure, engage in this reduction– once the sum of the faults becomes heavy enough to outweigh the endearing qualities.    When the balance falls to mostly aggravating, or destructive, our tolerance for the peccadilloes, which may have once even seemed mildly amusing, will disappear.  

When our tolerance goes, the view of their better nature tends to also disappear.  It’s common sense to avoid people who become hostile where they were once sympathetic.  At the same time, it seems wrong to reduce a person’s complex humanity to the sum of their faults, even as this reduction sometimes can’t be helped.  

A funny friend, who also has a sadistic side, one day laughs too loudly when your child falls comically and lands breaking an arm.  It doesn’t have to wipe away all the good qualities of that friend, but it can.  That ill-timed donkey bray, which the friend can’t stop even when the kid is writhing in unmistakable agony, becomes a last straw if enough other straws have already accumulated.  Hard after that to see that funny friend the same way.  Especially once you add in the reflexive sarcasm, the times you loaned them favorite books and tools that went missing, the time they forgot a solemn promise, leaving you in the snow, with wet socks and a dead cell phone, to trudge a long, icy way back to civilization to figure out plan B.

It is tempting to reduce people to caricatures sometimes.  The media does this constantly in their maniacal sorting of winners and losers.  The world is so complicated, so fast, so relentless, that the islands of calm understanding that we hope our friends to be are very vulnerable places.  A good friend’s faults we can most often overlook.  An asshole’s faults are impossible to ignore or tolerate. Reason and understanding only take us so far, then the real action starts.  Emotions come into play, and, as my friend’s father, Ralph, used to say “let the games begin!”

My father was famous for cutting off long time friends.  “The fall from grace,” my mother used to say, probably quoting some famous source only she and Google now know, “is swift and absolute.” (see FN, at foot)  She said this in reference to people we were delighted to spend time with, close, dear friends of my father’s, of the family, who were often at the house, laughing, and who fell, in a lightning flash, into the darkness of silent oblivion.

I used to try to argue my father out of some of these death sentences, although, as an adult I wouldn’t reverse any of the several I’ve found it necessary to hand down.  My father insisted that I didn’t understand (I actually didn’t at the time) and he was always angry when I tried to play peacemaker.  

He explained to me once, through clenched teeth, that Harold had put a price of $75 on their friendship.   He gave me the details of this last straw, which certainly would have weighed little without the many precursor straws piled on over the years of their witty, fraught, slightly competitive friendship.  

Shame played into this estrangement too, as I suspect it often does.  My grandmother moved and, in getting rid of things she couldn’t bring with her, sold her Chinese style furniture, lamps and little tables and cabinets, to Harold, who admired the things.  He bought the lot for $75.  Then he had buyer’s remorse, told my father the stuff wasn’t worth $75, wanted his money back, would return the things.  

My father told him that Yetta, the beloved mother-in-law he always called “Mom” (or “Grandma” to my sister and me), had already moved to Florida and she wasn’t going to take back the Chinese junk.  There was no place for her to take it back to, anyway, even if she wanted to.  Harold, apparently, would not relent. After an increasingly bitter argument my father paid him back the $75, put the Chinese stuff in the attic (this would prove a fatal mistake) and probably told Harold not to hurt himself when he shoved the bills up his ass.  

I agreed this was fucked up and petty behavior on Harold’s part, but hardly grounds for his beheading.  Then my father gave me the punchline that had sealed cheapskate Harold’s fate, caused him to lop Harold’s head off with no apparent emotion. 

“Grandma went up to the attic for something and came down with this weird look on her face.  She asked me why the things Harold bought from her were in the attic.  He said he loved them, my beautiful things, what are they doing covered with dust in your attic, Irv?  I didn’t know what to tell her, and you should have seen the look of hurt on her face.  I made up some feeble story she didn’t believe, about Harold having his floors done, asking me to store it, trying to put a good face on it, somehow.”  This was the emotional blow that put the final seal on my father’s newly found hatred of Harold.

 “It wasn’t hatred, you still don’t seem to get it.  I didn’t hate any of them.  I was just done with them, as they were with me.  The friendship was already dead, I was carrying a cadaver of a friendship and the thing was starting to decompose.  I got tired of the stink of it, and then there were the vultures overhead, swooping, beady eyed and very determined.  You know what a vulture’s beak can do to a man’s shoulder?” asked the skeleton under the hill in Westchester.  

I’ve since come to understand all of this all too well.  Friendships seem to have life spans, periods where the mutual benefits make everything cool.  Real friends for life are very, very rare.  If you have even one or two, count yourself very lucky and take care to give the friendship water and light.  I understand how a series of sympathies withheld erode a friendship until there is nothing left but the formalities of wrapping the stinking thing up and tossing it.

Still, there are a couple of scenes from my father reducing people to the sum of their faults, something he often tried to do with me over the years, that haunt me. I am thinking of one with a couple, the parents of my best friend in elementary school, that culminated in a scene so cinematic it is almost biblical.  

Not only was this couple the parents of my best friend at eight, nine and ten years old, they became very close friends of my parents.  The families spent a lot of time together, knew each other very well.  We spent a lot of time at each other’s houses.  In some families we would have called each other’s parents “aunt” and “uncle”.  My parents were very good friends with my friend’s parents.  I won’t stop to paint the detailed portrait of that friendship, but it was deep and mutual.  They remained friends for decades, even as my childhood friend and I went our own ways for ten years or so, met and renewed our friendship during the college years.

Fast forward now over the decades.  The mother, a very active and dynamic woman who often told her long-suffering, droll husband to stand up straight (this tic, and the husband’s perfect facial response each time, delighted my father, who often barked out the line to us after a visit) was constantly in motion, visiting the sick, tutoring, counseling, offering her warm presence wherever needed.  My sister and I loved her.  

My mother had a major operation and was laid up in nearby Long Island Jewish hospital for a week or so.  My father was peeved that their friend apparently hadn’t found time to visit my mother.  I think that was the start of the end of things. Then, while my mother convalesced at home, five blocks from the home of this couple, the friend apparently hadn’t found time to stop by and see how my mother was doing.  I can’t confirm these details, but that was my father’s perception.  I don’t recall my mother contradicting it, though she was much more philosophical and didn’t seem to hold any kind of ill feelings about it.

“I was at the restaurant all day, your mother was alone.  You mean to tell me she couldn’t have stopped by with a bowl of soup, she couldn’t check in on her way home from any of her hundred missions of mercy to see how your mother was doing?  It made all her running around to heal everybody strike me as complete bullshit, she lived five blocks away and couldn’t find a few minutes, even once, to see how her old friend was doing?”  I had no answer, and it was a rhetorical question anyway.  

My friend got married and lived near where we all grew up.  His parents had retired to North Carolina.  My parents had become “snow birds” (a phrase hard for me not to reflexively translate to ‘shit birds’ somehow) commuting between Florida and New York to have the best weather of both worlds.  His parents had long rented the house my friend had grown up in.  My parents owned and hadn’t yet sold my ancestral home.  It was natural, since the house was empty all winter, for their friends to stay there on visits to their son and daughter-in-law, and soon, their first grandson.  They stayed in the otherwise empty house a few times.  

My father, down in Florida, began to chafe each time they spent a few days there. I’m not sure exactly what this was about, but I know he felt used, and manipulated into agreeing to let them stay.  My mother asked him what the big deal was, pointed out how convenient it was for their old friends, how little a thing it was for him.  Truly, I never saw what the big deal was either.  I don’t know what, if anything, brought it to a head, but I got a call from my father one night, when their old friends were at the house, asking me to drive over and tell them the free ride was over, get the keys back from them.

I’d drive over periodically to check in on the house during the winter, make sure the boiler had water in it, the pipes were OK.  It was not a tremendous inconvenience to drive out there, but I truly didn’t get the urgency to evict them on this particular wintry night.  I argued.  My father argued.  “Is it my house?” he asked me, and the rest followed from that.   I gave up the argument and drove out to the house.

It was well after dark when I arrived.  Caroline (the reader will note that I’ve hesitated to use her actual name so far) came to the door and put a brave face on it.  My father had already called.  I was sheepish as I told her, and Ralph, another adult I thought of as my friend, that I honestly didn’t understand what this was about.

“No, no,” said Caroline, “I get it completely.  Look, it’s his house and he doesn’t want us staying here anymore.  It’s not hard to understand. He’s right, it’s his house, and, I mean, I wouldn’t do this to my good friends, but he has every right to do whatever he wants with his house.  There’s nothing to understand.”  

Ralph was carrying their bags out to the car, I followed him out.  Snow was beginning to swirl in the air, it was already sticking to the dead grass and the cars. I urged them to at least stay the night, there was absolutely no reason to drive off into a snow storm.  It couldn’t possibly make any difference if they spent the night, headed off the next day.   My father was being a punitively judgmental asshole, the timing was arbitrary, unreasonable.  There was no reason for them to drive off into the teeth of a snow storm.

Caroline shook her head there in the driveway, as the snow fell. “No, your father is right, we really are bad people.  You know, he feels we’ve been using him, and I understand that.  He feels like he has no say, and he’s been uncomfortable the whole time, and I’ve kind of steamrolled him into this, because it’s so convenient for us… and, of course, we’d do it for our friends, you know, we’d let our friends stay, the house is empty anyway, nobody’s using it, we’re not harming it in any way, but that’s his prerogative, none of us has a right to judge him for exercising it…”  

In my dramatic memory she is crying as she delivers these lines, though I know she wasn’t, she was putting on her usual brave face.  Ralph, standing now on the passenger side of the car, was silent as Caroline protested about what bad people they were, what a righteous, if slightly misguided, man my father was.  

My entreaties were in vain, I hugged them both, took the keys, Caroline slid into the driver’s seat and I watched them drive off down 190th Street as the gathering snow continued to swirl.

(FN)  Google gives us this paraphrase, supposedly from a 1995 poem– probably not the source of my mother’s comment, which she made as early as 1968:  The fall from grace is steep and swift, and when you land, it does not make a sound, because you are alone. ”