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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, shut up!” said my mother.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(to be continued)

“Oh, shut up!” said my mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A chipmunk ran across the skeleton’s grave.  

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

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

Merci.  

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

 Point taken.  

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

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

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

“You two are monsters,” our mother said.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You made mom cry now.  You happy, dad?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Point taken,” says the skeleton.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t, dad, you sound like a bitch.  

“Touché ” said the skeleton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a cliche used to describe the pathetic:  “his father was so mean to him!”  said with sideways marionette’s quake of the head and a mocking little wave of the hand.  “Her mother was a nightmare,” is sometimes said with a touch more sincerity, but, in general, hearing an adult talk about how mean a parent was brings a smirk to the cheek.  

“Well, you hit on something there, Elie.  That’s why I said the other day that I don’t hold anything against my parents,” said the skeleton cheerfully.  

“Look, there’s no doubt that I was a bastard to you and your sister, and that I did terrible harm to both of you, and put obstacles in front of you in this uphill world that made things a lot harder for both of you.  I accept all that, and like I told you right before I died, I was sorry about it.  But beyond that, as an adult, you have to find a way to move on.   You can’t keep blaming your painful childhood.”  

Well, of course, you can keep blaming your painful childhood, many people do that, consciously or unconsciously.   But I take your larger point, it’s like forgiveness.  We learn that forgiveness is not primarily for the person you forgive, though it also makes that angry, guilty asshole feel better.  Forgiveness is a gift we give mainly to ourselves.  The understanding that while you cannot change a bad thing that was done to you, you can digest it to the point where you can let it go, exhale it as some other gas.   We can learn to become like the plant that breathes in toxic gas and exhales oxygen.  We must do this for ourselves and for the larger sake of peace among those we love.  

“Uh… OK.  You’re getting a little abstract and poetic here, but I get the point,” said the skeleton.  

Plus, there are also certain things that at the time were hurtful that you can later see through more mature eyes as having been inevitable.  You remember that ass-whipping you gave my sister and me in the Badlands?  

“Heh, yes, I remember that very well.  And I have to say, you and your sister brought that on yourselves.  It was one of the few times I ever lifted a hand to either of you,” he said.  

All true.  Yes, and my sister feels the same way, so do I, in fact, even at the time we didn’t really hold it against you.  It was one of those things that, looking back on it, had been inevitable.   I don’t remember if I told the story here already.  

“I don’t think so,” said the skeleton, “and, anyway, you have to start gathering these 330 pages into themes and bunches and pruning them and adding things where more detail is called for.  Write the poor little story, what do you have to lose?”  

You were still working as a teacher back in, we’ll say, 1962, and so you had those blessed ten weeks off every summer.  Somewhere I probably still have the bit I wrote about What I Did on My Summer Vacation from the beginning of second grade.   We’d gone to the AAA on Hillside Avenue and while my sister and I gathered up tons of glossy tourist brochures, you sat with someone from Triple A and they took a green marker and made lines down a series of spiral bound map books they called Trip Tix. The long pages were bound at the top, like a meter maid’s ticket book.   The Trip Tix laid out the route exactly, mile by mile, and had notations for every historical site, or site of interest to kids, along the 3,000 mile drive.  There was also a fat book for every region we’d be passing through, with selected hotels and restaurants, each with a notation about how they felt about young children and dogs.  We were going to be traveling with Patches.  

“A brilliant dog, Patches.   She’d proven her smarts on the street as a very artful and independent little pup before she decided we were going to take her in.  You remember she used to come back from Union Turnpike munching on a chicken carcass she’d find behind the bar?”  

She was a smart dog, alright.  I remember one time she was not so smart, though, or at least, not very prudent.  

“Yosemite National Park,” said the skeleton.  

Yup.  We were stopped in a line of cars on that leafy road.  

“I remember it vividly,” said the skeleton.  

I know, this is for the reader.  Several cars were stopped in front and behind us as we came upon a small group of roadside bears, up on their hind legs, begging. There were signs all over the park about not feeding the bears, and every ranger reminded us of that warning, but some of these shameless hustlers still managed to get fed.  You and mom were obeying the law, as you most often did, and the car windows stayed rolled up.  A gigantic dark reddish brown bear was standing by mom’s window, to us it looked like a grizzly bear, it seemed to be about seven feet tall, and Patches, who was on mom’s lap, lunged toward the bear.  

“Heart in mouth moment,” said the skeleton.

The bear wasn’t about to take this shit from some little pampered pooch in a car and it swung an enormous paw at mom’s window.  The paw was almost the size of the entire window, and you could see the gigantic, sharp claws and the huge light brown pads on the underside of it as it pounded against the glass.  

“It seems like a miracle the glass didn’t shatter,” observed the skeleton.  

It does, and thinking of it now, I suppose the very size of the paw may have been a decisive factor.  The weight of the hit was apparently distributed across the glass enough that the glass didn’t shatter.  Then again, Physics was the only course I truly had no idea what was going on in.  

“Lucky for you that pinko you had in high school thought you were a cool kid and passed you anyway,” said the skeleton.  

Well, as you know, I’ve always been an extremely lucky bastard.

“As were we all that day in Yosemite.  Jesus that was a scary moment,” said the skeleton.  

Indeed.   Anyway, it was a hot summer, literally thousands of miles in the car, sweltering in places like St. Louis, and I recall that huge bag of M & Ms we had in the car turning to mush.  We started saying “melts in the bag, not in your hand” as a riff on their ad: melts in your mouth, not in your hand.  

“Well, that was before the age of air-conditioned cars.  And it was the height of summer.  We stayed out of the heart of the Old Confederacy, where it was really, really hot, in more ways than one.  We were heading across country, after all, but we stayed out of the deep South deliberately too.  That AAA guide would have also needed to tell us which hotels allowed Negroes, and Jews, along with kids and dogs.  The Klan still ran much of the south and there were no federally enforced anti-lynching laws yet,” the skeleton shook his head.  “We were already post-racial back then, see, there was no need to protect the good Negroes who did what they were told.  If some angry asshole Negro got out of hand, too uppity, well, it was a state’s right to deal with a bad apple like that as they saw fit.”

I remember passing some share croppers’ shacks on the side of the highway somewhere down south.  Raggedy little black kids moving around outside these tar-paper hovels.  That may have been on a trip to Florida, though, I think it was in South Carolina.  

“Yeah, I remember you asking about those shacks, and I think you’re right, that was probably a couple of years later when we started going to Florida,” said the skeleton.  

Reminds me of another ass-whipping my sister and I almost got in Harold’s father’s place in Miami Beach where we stayed during that first trip to Florida.  I don’t know how you didn’t beat our asses that time.  

“I was always a man of great restraint,” said the skeleton, deadpan.  “Even when I was calling you a fucking cobra with a face twisted and contorted in hate I was being restrained.  Even as the spit flew out of my mouth and my face turned colors.”  

It goes without saying.

Back to the Badlands then.  We’d been in the car for weeks by then, and going a bit stir crazy, I was probably six and my sister would have been four.  We’d seen a lot of cool stuff, but there had also been hours upon hours in the back seat of the station wagon.  We were in a rangers’ station and the ranger was showing a slide show.  For whatever reason, the slides were projected in such a tiny size that, even lying on the floor right in front of the screen as my sister and I were, it was hard to see the details of things like the Tufted Ear Squirrel that the ranger was droning on about.  We started to laugh at the absurdity of these postage stamp-sized images at the front of this large, dark room and we couldn’t stop.  You hissed at us, very embarrassed, and it only made things worse.  We were delirious.  

“When you two started laughing like that, it could get bad very fast,” said the skeleton.  

Well, it did in the Badlands that day.  You’d been driving for thousands of miles by then, and it was hot, and your kids were out of control.  Even at the time, somehow, and in spite of how young we were, we seem to have recognized all that.

“If you don’t stop laughing I’m going to whip your asses,” you finally threatened, miles from the rangers’ station, when we still could not stop howling.  This, of course, only made us laugh harder.  And we couldn’t stop.  

You pulled the car on to the gravel shoulder of that desert road, yanked us out and pulled us to the back of the car.  You threw down the little panel in the back of the station wagon and shoved us toward it, seemingly yanking down our pants, and underpants, and drawing your belt out of the loops in one motion.  Our little hands were flat on the panel and our asses were extended in the proper orientation for a good ass-whipping.  I don’t recall the feeling of the strap across my naked ass at all.  What I remember, vividly, are the faces of the kids in the passing car as we were about to be whipped.  They were pressed against the glass and laughing deliriously as their car roared past.  I know my sister saw them too.  

“Well, as President Kennedy said ‘life’s unfair’.  They got a free show of two kids being whipped bare-assed for exactly the same thing they were doing– laughing their asses off.”  

I remember hoping we’d pass their car further down that desolate road, pulled over, and get to see them getting their little asses whipped, but we didn’t.  

“Life’s unfair, Elie, and then you die,” said the skeleton, lying back down to continue his long nap.

The skeleton of my father sat up in his grave in the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill cemetery on that tree-lined country road, Oregon Road, in Cortlandt, NY (though you won’t find it reasonably placed on any map) and summoned me.   I have to admit, these conversations with a man long dead are starting to wear me out.  On the other hand, the duty to honor our father and mother does not end at the grave.  

“Exactly,” said the skeleton, “and that’s what I want to talk to you about.  It’s human nature, as you know, to look for causes for things, particularly things that trouble us.  That impulse to find a cause for vexations without explanation animates violent mobs and great thinkers alike.  It’s tempting, when you think you’ve found a cause, to believe that it explains everything.   Nothing explains everything.  That’s one thing that begins to sink in once you are dead, Elie.”  

I knew what he was driving at, of course.   It is one thing to step forward into a life of new insight, it is another to avoid stepping back into the dimness of your previous life.  

“We had this mostly senseless debate for most of our life together,” said the skeleton, “arguing about how much a person can really change, if at all, on a fundamental level.   It is a stupid argument, really.  Of course we can change things that bother us enough, of course we can’t change other things that make us most vulnerable.  It’s not all our choice, on one level, and it’s all our choice, on another. You can talk about the role of genetic predisposition, DNA, early childhood experience, circumstance, luck — humans are complicated biological machines. But I think it’s ultimately a mistake to blame someone else for the misery in our own life.”  

Interesting pivot, dad, back to where this discussion started so many years ago.  A mistake, you say, to hold others accountable for their destructive actions and the impact those actions have on us?  

“OK, I can see the problem with that.  Fine, let’s take this away from a discussion of intangible abstractions, then.  I don’t blame my parents for what happened to me in my life.   In particular, I don’t blame my mother,” the skeleton’s neck looked suddenly stiffer, if such a thing is even possible.  “I have to imagine she suffered terrible things to make her unhappy enough to whip her own baby in the face.”  

No doubt about that, though it’s two different things to imagine the terrible things she suffered and to hold her accountable for the suffering she caused.  One can only imagine the miseries of life in that doomed little hamlet Truvovich.  In fact, one is forced to imagine them, since the place and all its inhabitants are gone without a trace.  If not for the Russo-Japanese War, and your Uncle Aren drafted for a twenty year stretch by the Czar, Aren probably never would have run away across the ocean with Fischel Bobrow and a guy named Fleischman and wound up in New York City learning to vulcanize tires at the dawn of the automobile.  If Aren hadn’t arrived, Chava, my grandmother, would have remained in Truvovich and died with everyone else in her family as the shtetl was wiped off the world map forever by anonymous murderers.  

“Well, yes, thankfully she made it to America, courtesy of her brother Aren.  What we know of the lives of Jews in that part of the world, and seeing what their eventual fate was, we do not imagine a very happy life there even for a little Jewish girl who was born happy as a clam.   I don’t imagine that my mother was born with a great talent for happiness, and she certainly found very little reason for it here in America.  As to what made her so violent toward me, it’s really impossible to say.”  

Is it, though?  How do we find it impossible to say?  She suffered enough to make her violently enraged at her infant son.   The suffering must have been tremendous to make her whip a baby in the face.  

“OK, I don’t think I’m making my point.   It doesn’t really matter what made her that way, I guess that’s what I’m saying.  Would I have preferred a mother who didn’t act like that?  Of course.   Can I blame her for everything that I suffered in my own life?  I really don’t think so.”  

Interesting perspective, for a dead man.  I will have to mull this over a bit more and get back to you.  

“You do that,” said the skeleton, then he seemed to wink.  “You’ve had a lot of practice mulling things over, haven’t you?”