I did one thoughtful thing that sunny spring day in the First Hebrew Congregation cemetery on the outskirts of Peekskill, and one unthinkably thoughtless thing.    As the eulogy I’d written was being beautifully read by a man who called himself a Jewish Druid, a guy who chanted in a soft, haunting voice and read wonderfully, like the trained actor he was, I noticed my niece sobbing by herself a few steps from the grave.  I had my arm around my mother, my sister and her husband had their arms around their young son, and, for some reason, my niece was standing alone.  I whispered to Sekhnet to stand with my niece and she went over and put her arm around her.  Everyone felt better.

Afterwards, as we headed to the cars, I did the stupid thing.  At the bottom of the hill my father’s good friend and surrogate son Benjie waited to greet me.  Benjie and my father truly loved and appreciated each other.  They’d met when Benjie was the young dining room manager and then business manager of the camp my father directed, Tel Yehudah, a Zionist camp by the Delaware River in the heart of German Bund territory.   Several years later both finally quit around the same time, both had been treated disrespectfully by the Hadassah women who held the camp’s purse strings. 

They remained good friends for the rest of my father’s life and were, for a time, business partners, proprietors and operators of the first Kosher Chinese restaurant in Queens, Tain Lee Chow.   Benjie was a large, extroverted religious Jew with a good sense of humor and a zest for life.   

He sometimes led singing after dinner in the camp dining hall.  The meal was followed by a long prayer of thanks for the food, called the Birkat HaMazone, sung to a nice bluesy melody.  Many of the old-style Jewish prayers are set in that pleasantly melancholy minor key.  After the Birkat there was a spirited session of songs, all kinds of songs, but mostly Zionist related songs; Hebrew songs from Israel, old and new, songs sung by the original kibbutz pioneers, the early Israeli army, songs of romance, songs of longing for the Sea of Galilee and other personified regions of the Holy Land.   Several bawdy songs were included in the rotation and Benjie often answered a curtain call to do his special number “There’s Lipstick on Your Tsitsis (Shame on You!)”.   

The singer of the song, after building up what could only be a sacreligious misuse of a sacred garment (the fringes of which hang at a religious Jew’s waist) and the violation of several of God’s commandments, bursts out with the innocent explanation.   It brought the house of teenagers down.  Benjie loved to perform.  When the old worn-out songbook was reprinted, it was under the title Benjie Sings.

Benjie also loved to eat.  Though he carried an oversized stomach and did not appear to be athletic, he could hit a softball a mile.  He regularly parked pitches by trash-talking pitcher Mel Reisfield deep into the woods, over the outfield and beyond the dirt road.  He’d take a slow trot around the bases, his yarmulke bobbing on his head, tsitsis flapping, making cracks at Mel, to the delight of the crowd.

Benjie was a witty man who liked a laugh.   He was not averse to mixing it up with anyone who sassed him.   My friend Melz once sassed him.  Melz was working as a kitchen boy at the camp one summer and Benjie was tasking the kitchen boys with some job none of them wanted to do.  Melz made some crack and Benjie, in his inimitable way of speaking, told Melz “Melzer, don’t give me this shittttzzzzzssss.”   Benjie’s way of speaking was not inimitable, it was irresistibly imitable, actually;  distinctive, is what I should have said.  His dismissive remark to Melz was a widely imitated phrase for years afterwards.  We would all say it to each other whenever the occasion arose, or out of the blue, making the final syllable sizzle like a burger on a hot griddle.   Benjie, of course, had no idea his throwaway line had become immortal. 

He waited for me at the bottom of the hill, after the burial of my father and his great friend.  He extended his hand and as I took it I thoughtlessly said “Benjie, don’t give me this shitttttzzzzsssss.”   He had no idea what the hell I was talking about, as he certainly hadn’t given me any shit.   A look of utter confusion was on his face.   I didn’t take a moment to remind him of that long ago throwaway line to Melz, cars were leaving, other people were waiting to tell me how sorry they were, I had a sense there wasn’t time.  Or maybe I just wasn’t thinking.   

I said, sincerely, “you were the son he never had.”   He nodded and said with equal seriousness “and he was the father I never had.”  I nodded.   We completed our handshake and headed to the cars to take us to the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill center where the corned beef and pastrami sandwiches were piled, alongside the coleslaw and cold cans of Dr. Brown’s with the beads of water on their aluminum sides.   

Years later I think of what a tender moment that was, both of us recognizing the healthy, loving father-son relationship these two good friends managed to have.  I also feel like a bit of a schmuck for not explaining why I told Benjie not to give me this shitttttzzzzzzsssss.  Maybe I’ll print out and send him this piece, as I haven’t actually spoken to him since the day before my mother died. 

“Yeah, you’ll send it right after you send the sample of this ms. to the prospective agents, I’ll wager,” said the skeleton of my father, cannily seizing the last word, snatching it out of Sekhnet’s mouth.

Q:  You have written a massive, more than 1,100 page, manuscript over the last two years attempting to conjure your father’s life. 

A:  Was that a question?  Seriously?   Click here rather than wasting my time with foolishness. 

Q: Are you always such a testy motherfucker? 

A: No. 

Q: Do you always answer questions monosyllabically? 

A: Infrequently.  May we begin the interview now?   I expect you have at least one intelligent question today. 

Q:  You write the bulk of this ms., which is supposed to be a memoir, in the form of an imagined conversation, between yourself and the skeleton of your father who has been dead for twelve years.  Was this done intentionally?   

A:  What?  I wrote this in the form of a conversation between myself and a fucking skeleton?   What?!!! 

Q:  I’ll assume you’re being playful here, in your awkward way.   Why write a memoir in the form of a dialogue?   

A:  Dialogue is a beautiful thing, and sadly rare, a dying art form in our 140 character world.  When you deal with a difficult person, as my father was — along with his many fine qualities — the thing that can help the most is a good talk.   If you can find a way past the person’s defensiveness there is usually a lot of common ground that can be traveled together in honest conversation.   I don’t advocate this for the average difficult person you may meet, the less seen of them the better, but in the case of a parent or close family member, a candid exchange of views is key to healing wounds.  My father was supremely defended, he had a quick wit, an agile defensive mind, a keen intellect he could focus completely on the battle at hand, he was the master of reframing arguments on the fly to keep his adversary off balance.  

Q:  Sounds like quite the asshole.

A:  Major league, Hall of Fame asshole.   The thing was, he didn’t become that by accident.   He was warped early on, by poverty and brutality.   Not to excuse him, not at all.  Hitler, after all, was his overbearing, autocratic Prussian bureaucrat father’s punching bag.   Most people would go back in a time machine and give Hitler’s pregnant mother an abortion, if we could.   One thing has nothing to do with the other, just to say —  insight into how a person became an asshole can improve a relationship. 

Q:  I get that, but why write a massive book about a massive asshole?

A:  Well, here’s the devilish thing.  It’s easy to reduce a bullying person to just that– a fucking bully.   You know, the guy is a brutal fucker, end of fucking story.   

Q:  I would appreciate less fucking cursing, we are a family blahg. 

A:  I’ll try to fucking keep that in mind.   The book is more about the tragedy of wasted potential, squandered opportunity to be loving, and to be loved.   Someone asked me the other day if I loved my father.  I hesitated for a second then said it was more like love/hate.    You know, it’s human nature to want to love your parents.  We come from them, we go to them when we are scared, we get many qualities, good and bad, from them.   

Not everybody starts out with the same amount of empathy.  My father had every quality that makes a good friend.  He was capable of great empathy, he was sensitive, he was smart, funny, sometimes had great insights.   The tragedy of his life was that these things were often overshadowed by his incurable rage.   Deep down I think he believed that life had fucked him and there was nothing he could do about it.   

Q:  Fucked him in a way that was not consensual?   

A:  In a way that was not consensual.   He had nothing to say about his mother whipping him in the face from the time he could stand.   

Q:  That does not sound pleasant. 

A:  Really?   (dirty look)

Little Irv was raised in what he always referred to as “grinding” poverty, and I have heard from his cousin, whose father was a Communist and who grew up quite poor, also during the Depression, that next to my father’s family, he grew up rich.  Not only that, his father, my grandfather, for who I am named, never held a steady job.  This was a great source of shame for my father, that his illiterate father was incapable of making a living.   

Q:  I can only imagine his shame on discovering that his highly literate son was equally incapable of making a living.   

A:  Well, there’s an eternal mystery for another time, though, obviously, you’re right.  My father started life with several strikes against him.   His entire life was a struggle against that sickening unfairness he was born into.  You know, many people struggle against the demons of their childhood for their entire lives, repeating the same destructive patterns decade after decade.   We often fight these out with surrogates, find ourselves attracted to people who conjure these forces we were forced to fight as children.  It’s called “Repetition Compulsion”, reliving the same trauma over and over in different forms.  If we were bullied as kids we’ll be drawn to bullies and inevitably clash with them.   

Q:  As you did for many years.   

A:  Yah, mon.   The worst part was the subtlety of some of it.   It might take twenty years to realize the mild-mannered, droll person you always thought of as a close friend was a vicious little tyrant waiting for their chance to express a rage that took you completely by surprise.   

Q:  I assume you’re referring to that insane cunt Andy?   

A:  No comment, except to say I object to your use of that fucking offensive c-word.   

Q:  Noted. 

A:  It is the subtle nature of the beast that made the conversation with the skeleton of my father necessary, I think.  If someone asks what was remarkable about my father I always start with the idealistic work he did intervening in NYC public High School riots in the sixties and early seventies.   Nothing shows his idealism and humanism more clearly than the rapport he built up with gang leaders, how he won over hard case after hard case by his wit, humor and empathy.   

Q:  He sounds like a great guy.   

A:  He was a saint.  Once he was dying he got the insight that had eluded him for the almost eighty-one years of his life.   He realized, for the first time, that his life could have been completely different if he hadn’t been so intent on prevailing all the time, if he had developed a talent for seeing nuance, for extending the benefit of the doubt, for doing the things in his personal life that he did professionally with the violent gang leaders he worked with in the sixties.    You understand his life as a tragic story, rather than the story of a monster.   

Q:  Well, he never killed anybody, or built any death camps. 

A:  No, not at all.  Most of all, he never learned to get past his rage and disappointment.   He never learned to forgive, anyone, including, and most tragically maybe, himself.

Q:  Your sister famously said, after he died, that she thought he’d never had a happy day in his life. 

A:  Maybe so.   When I think of him I always recall Kurt Vonnegut’s comment about what he feared his children might say about him after he died, that he had told such wonderful, funny stories but had been such an unhappy man.  My father was funny, and loved to laugh, sometimes laughed uncontrollably, but he lived a fairly unhappy life.   

Q:  Living a happy life is a difficult art, no?   

A: Without question.  Look around at the lives of quiet desperation you can see in every direction.   Hey, homo sapiens are murderous former prey animals.   We prey on each other.   Our lives here are ruled, to one extent or another, by fear.   We are right to be afraid, there are plenty of fearful things to fear, not least of all our inevitable deaths, but at the same time, we need to face our fears in order to live at some kind of peace with them, though it is easier to run from them, pose as though we are brave, belittle others for being afraid, and weak, and so forth.   

Q:  I assume that was what your father did for most of his life — run, pretend to be brave, belittle others for being afraid.   

A: I’m afraid so.   

Q:  LOL!   

A: “Your point is taken,” he said, the passive voice used.   In summary, the Book of Irv is the conversation with me that my father wished we could have had while he was alive.  It is a reclaiming of his life in light of the revelations he had while he was dying — it is the best of him.   As he was dying, and news that he was dying arrived suddenly, six days before the end (although he’d had the undiagnosed liver cancer that killed him for God knows how long) he went into spiritual overdrive, trying to make sense of his life.  This fearless moral inventory is something few people ever undertake.

Luckily for both of us, that last night of his life, he was able to organize the results of his fearless moral inventory and express them.  Also, I’d reached an emotional understanding that enabled me to listen to him without judgment, blame or anger.  Truly, it was easy on my end, as only empathy for the poor devil remained at that point.  I wasn’t going to lie to him as he was dying, but I was going to listen to everything he had to say without resistance of any kind.   My mildness encouraged him to speak openly.   I did my best to reassure him when I could, to help make his death as easy for him as I could.   I truly felt that I had entered a kind of sacred space when I entered the room where he was dying.  I’d read that first in Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die, and felt it immediately that last night in the hospital. 

A:  So, in other words, the skeleton you are talking to in this ms. is your father, after his deathbed revelations?  You are reclaiming the best of him in this memoir of the Dreaded Unit.   

Q:  Bingo.  The skeleton sometimes gets up on the wrong side of the grave and we see flashes of the famous prick he often was in life.  But for the most part, the skeleton continues the conversation my dying father started that night, a talk he lamented being incapable of having before that last night of his life.   

Q:  So you had a real conversation, finally.  That must have been a blessing for you.   

A:  Well, yes and no.  He expressed regret, apologized for the first time, acknowledged that I had tried to be the mensch while he had been the fucking baby.  It was a good starting point for a relationship. 

Q:  Sounds like a beautiful thing.   

A:  Yeah, except for the fact that he was dead.   

Q: Hence, the Book of Irv.   

A:  Yes, ma’am.

My father was a big fan of Lenny Bruce.   He would recite portions of Lenny’s bits over dinner, when we were not all actively at war.

“Funny motherfucker,” said the skeleton of my father. 

He was drawn to Bruce’s anger and irreverence, as much as to his insight and wit. 

“I love the way you talk about me like I’m not sitting right here,” said the skeleton leaning back against his headstone, brushing himself off. 

I do it for your love, dad.   

“I loved Lenny’s brutal honesty, to be brutally honest about it.  He said things that needed to be said but rarely were back in the days of I Like Ike.  Same with Richard Pryor, although Pryor even more so than Lenny — Pryor was the true genius of that art form.  We live in a world we are forced to pretend is rationally arranged, for liberty and justice for all and the rest of those overflowing crocks of shit every school boy is forced to pledge allegiance to.  Lenny was like that kid who yells out, ‘look!  The Emperor has a boil on his balls!’ and winks.  We are given precious little of the truth here, Elie, and when it’s delivered with dryness and a great punchline — what could be better?” 

No argument here.   I’d take irreverence to solemnity any day when being force fed bullshit, particularly the murderous kind.   Like when reading reports like ones in the New York Times, your beloved Grey Skank — those chilling, morally-neutral articles and editorials that praised Obama’s wisdom and supreme skill in how he approached extrajudicial killings: measured, lawyerly in his deliberations, discreetly secretive.  

“Christ, Elie, you’d complain if you were eviscerated by a brand new drone- launched Hellfire missile,” said the skeleton. 

There you go.   Although, the point stands: reverence for something like the authoritative Paper of Record precludes an open and honest discussion, frames away troubling questions like ‘why the fuck are we secretly droning people in a dozen countries when the practice was so reviled when Israel first pioneered it, when it is a top recruiting aid for those who seek to use lethal violence against us, slaughters so many innocents, sets such a catastrophic international precedent for the future?’

“Those are not illegitimate questions, as one of your learned colleagues might phrase it, I suppose,” said the skeleton.  “Irreverence is an orientation, a stance Jews have often utilized, to use that supremely Yiddish word for ‘make use of’.  Jews have often utilized irreverence, it’s sometimes all powerless people have to give themselves a feeling of control.  I see your fucking false god and, while you’re bowing, I paint tits on it.  Which, in itself, is kind of ironic from a Jewish perspective.   Abraham, the patriarch Pop called ‘Avooma Veeny’, was ready to kill his own son to prove his faith in an all-merciful God.  Don’t forget, though, before that, little Avooma Veeny was an iconoclast, literally, smashing up idols in his father’s shop.”   

Irreverence is why you bought me MAD magazine, put out by the ‘usual gang of idiots’, every month for years. 

“Well I saw your eyes light up when I gave you that first one at the dinner table one night.   You remember how it was all rolled up?  I’d confiscated it from a high school kid who refused to put it away so I could teach him and his hapless little classmates what was then called Social Studies.” 

You kept referring to the kid as a moron, which I found almost as funny as the MAD magazine itself.  I kept picturing a moron, waving that rolled up MAD, and it made reading the rolled up pages the moron had been trying to read so much funnier, somehow.   I kept seeing him puzzling over that cudgel he made of the MAD, struggling to read the rolled up pages.  You told me you’d get me a subscription for Chanukah, though you never actually did.   

“Well, you made out on that deal.  I could have saved some money off the newsstand price buying the subscription, but then you probably wouldn’t have gotten it every month for the next ten years.”   

I just figured out why you’d buy it at the newsstand every month– so you could read it on the subway home from work.   If it had come directly to me in the mail, you’d have had to ask me to borrow it, which would have violated your creed of never needing to ask anyone for anything while, at the same time, putting you at the mercy of your merciless little son.

“Duh,” said the skeleton, “that moron in my Social Studies class had nothing on you, Elie.” 

Here’s a riddle for you, skeleton. 

“Hey, watch it… I’m still your father….” 

How is it possible that my sister has no recollection of how funny you were? 

“Well, much of the time I was as funny as a heart attack, or a root canal, or however you want to put it.  Humor is a subjective thing.  Picture the newsreel clip you saw of Hitler cracking up a room full of top Nazis.  You think you or I would find the Fuhrer’s wit quite as droll?  How about those people in Alabama a few weeks ago who found the punchline Kayla Moore triumphantly dropped so funny?”

‘….one of our attorneys is a Jewwwww.’   

“Yeah, not exactly Rowan and Martin, but good enough for that room of Jew hating shiteaters.  Your sister herself is very, very funny, though that may be hard to remember, she hasn’t had cause to crack a lot of jokes lately.  And, don’t forget how cruel her humor was, a chip off the old crock.  She was like a knife thrower with expert aim.” 

Crackly Sam Psoraisis was one of the recurring characters that sometimes got a laugh out of mom. 

“A betrayal that made me warn her how you two would be dancing on her grave,” said the skeleton.   

Sure, but look, if we’re going to be honest here, and not merely irreverent…

“Irreverence is often the appetizer for honesty.”   

OK, we’ve had the poo poo platter…

“Served with a nice gust of air freshener,” said the skeleton. 

What’s with you today? 

“I know you are, but what am I?” 

Jesus, revenge of the ventriloquist’s dummy. 

“We can all see you moving your lips, Elie,” said the skeleton, “you’re not fooling anybody, and, besides that, you have a boil on your balls.” 

Dad, the beauty of writing is that I cannot be sidetracked when I write.  All I need to do is read the last few lines back and I see where you start doing your distracting stunts.   

“Ah!  Where I start doing my distracting stunts….” 

If we’re to be honest about it, my sister was just doing what she’d learned from you.   When you’re trapped in a corner, lash out with a good funny line. 

“That’s often a sound tactical move,” said the skeleton.  “Nietzsche called humor the ‘epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling’ as your friend Sekhnet informed you when you first started dating.  It’s more than that, of course.  Humor can be gentle too, a way of turning aside a harsh word, brushing a tear off a cheek.   More often it’s a way of fending people off, sure, but better to fend them off with a laugh that puts them on the back foot than with a punch in the face, no?” 

Better to pass a new tax law that favors the wealthiest and jeopardizes life for everyone else than to build and populate mechanized death camps for society’s millions of parasitic losers.

“Exactly,” said the skeleton, “I’m glad you’re able to be so rational about it, you parasitic loser.” 

Takes one to know one. 

“Touché , Elie,” said the skeleton, putting a hand to his chest and miming death from a rapier thrust.

The other night my dinner companions were talking about how hungry they were, as we waited for a table.   In similar situations my father often said “I’m so hungry, I could eat pork.”

Out of the blue, and with great manic cheerfulness, he’d demand in his best R rolling German accent:  “have you rrrelatives in Cherrrrrmany?”.

In relation to nothing in particular he might say “up your nalgas with a meat hook.”   Years later I’d learn the definition of nalgas [1].

Once in a while he’d burst forth with a string of words like “Tanganyika!  Tuskegee!  Brrrritish Emmmmpire!”  

He would raise his fist and say “Lumumba died for freedom.”  (He did, actually).

In closing a chat with a colleague from the Human Relations Unit, or any kind of ironic hipster he might run into, he’d say “keep the faith.” 

More than once, to my mother’s pretended amusement (she’d smile, tears in her eyes, nostrils flared) he’d say “Ehvvy, if I had your nose full of dimes, I’d never have to work again.”   

He said, more than once, “he has all the attributes of a dog, except loyalty.”

He had many occasions, since he provided me with much to complain about, to remind me “you’d complain if you were hung with a new rope.” 

If he was ever asked to guess what someone had bought him as a present he would immediately say “a combination egg and beet slicer.”   

Said in a disturbingly martial spirit, rather than with his usual ironic delivery: “you and your sister might win this battle, but you’re going to lose the war.”   What the fuck was up with that?   It was said about things like refusing to drink four glasses of cow’s milk a day.   

“Easy for you to make fun of a dead man, wise ass,” said the skeleton of my father snappishly.  “It’s just like you, too.  Wait until you’re dead, and your son writes a memoir of your life– oops, I forgot, you don’t have a son, do you? You have a cat you call the Baron.”   

The Baron is not my son, I had a paternity test done.  Besides, I work for the Baron.  What kind of father does that make me?   

“Don’t get me started, you ungrateful bastard,” said the skeleton.  “By the way, Elie, do you realize that the two bags of rituxan they infused into your arm recently cost more than twice what you paid for law school?”

Obviously, but you knew I knew that.   

“Droll,” said the skeleton of my father.  “Meditate some more, there are more of my memorable phrases you will remember later.  If not, I’ll try to remind you.  Now if you will excuse me….” and with that, his mouth still open, he ostentatiously fell asleep.

[1]