My father had a talent for malice.  He could inspire deep emotions in people, which made it easy for people to love him and hate him.  It’s been said many times and it’s worth saying here: you cannot truly hate someone you don’t know well. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.  

If your feelings are stirred enough to love someone you may find it an easy leap to hatred when the time comes.  The betrayal of trust/withdrawal of sympathy brings malice.   My father, frequently betrayed and disappointed by those he trusted, was a master of malice.

He could move people, stir their emotions.  He was probably the best funeral speaker I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of a very talented rabbi friend of mine.   My father’s ability to touch a place deep within people gave him charisma.  He drew people to him, at work, in his life.  He had style and was verbally adroit.  He engaged people easily.  He could express deep things with casual ease, create a quick familiarity.   He’d form fast, deep friendships with people who’d laugh at his quick ironies and nod over the heavy insights he sometimes dropped into the conversation.

“Your father is a heavy cat,” said Russ, my father’s hipster friend, a bass player and lifelong recreational drug user.  He gave me my first taste of cocaine, from the pitted blade of his old penknife, when he came up from what the adults were doing around the dining room table.  During dinner he’d asked if he could stop up to rap later, I nodded, then went to brood and listen to the B side of My Goal’s Beyond.

“Is that Dave Liebman on soprano?” he asked.   I looked at the album cover and told him it was.  He knew Dave, had played with him, liked his style.   “Your father is a motherfucker, and a heavy cat and I know he can bust your balls– I know he does bust your balls, and it’s a father and son thing and I do it with Adam and Hal and I can’t give you a good excuse for it.  But you know how much I love him, and Arlene loves him, too.”  

And they did, and I knew.  They loved everything my father said, and they always had animated conversation and a lot of laughs.  Whatever my father said was taken in with knowing expressions.  He basked in the glow of their fond attention, as they dug each trenchant, sharp or wickedly subversive turn.   They were my parents’ best friends and I remember  how much the four of them always  laughed.   They talked politics too, and of things important to them all, but it’s the laughter I remember most.   Arlene and Russ were night owls, and they’d often hang out well past midnight, howling and talking, Arlene chain smoking and the house taking on that exotic cigarette smell of the adult world back then.

After Russ died I spent a few days up at their place near the Delaware Water Gap. Russ used to drive the 80 miles to the city for gigs, it took him about an hour in his VW bug with the bass lying down in there somehow.  Arlene was a fast driver too and it was nothing for either of them to pop into the car and show up in the city, or for a late dinner in Queens.  Arlene and I walked on a rolling hill she told me, in the voice of a tired activist who’d lost, developers had recently bought.  

“Russ and I smoked many a bowl walking on these hills,” she told me, taking out a short-stemmed corn cob pipe.  I knew she hadn’t smoked for years, but she filled the bowl and we paused at a beautiful spot and I cupped my hands around hers as she lit the match.

“You know how much I love your parents,” she said, as the sunset began.  I told her I did.  “Well, I tell you this for whatever use you can make of it.  You may not find it immediately useful, but I think you may have a use for it at some time.  I know you blame yourself for your parents being so unhappy, and they blame you for it too.  It’s natural for you to feel that  you’ve let them down, or that you’re a disappointment to them, and that you’re the reason they’re so unhappy.”

” You know, you are so talented and sensitive and the Mozart IQ and all that and you’re 25 and you haven’t cured cancer and you haven’t been recognized as this generation’s Picasso.  It’s not you, Elie, you really have nothing to do with it, as hard as that might be for you to understand.  Your parents are just both very unhappy people.  They have a lot of great qualities and you know how much I appreciate them, they’re my best friends.  But they’re unhappy, both of them, it’s just the way they are, and it really has nothing to do with you, except that you have to bear the brunt of that unhappiness.  And I wish you didn’t have to, and I hope you won’t have to.  I think you won’t have to, if you really take in what I’m telling you.”

We finished the bowl and almost immediately I felt like Arlene had pulled the chain and a light bulb had gone on in a room that had always been dark.  It was like the moment when Eli told me how the infant Irv had been terrorized by his insane violently angry mother.  A twice in a lifetime moment of sudden understanding, a moment I am very grateful for.

Arlene is long gone now too, as is my mother.  Russ was the first to go, I don’t recall that there was a funeral, as such, though I remember hanging out at the house up there for a couple of days.  I recall that my father was there, and my mother and sister.  The reason I don’t recall a funeral is because I don’t remember my father speaking, which he would have.  There’s nobody to confirm this now, though I can run it by my sister, who might remember.  

The past is largely the work of the imagination now, something I’ll try to conjure as much as I can in the next few weeks.

I was accused the other day of letting my father, The Dreaded Unit, off the hook for being the destructive monster he was, with few exceptions, for his entire tortured life. He was also an idealistic, sensitive, highly intelligent man with enflamed ethics and a great sense of humor. He was both a good man and a terrible man. I aim to present him as both of those things, as fully as I can. I am starting by describing what made him a good man, the subtle details of that. I haven’t begun to lay out his darker side.

That said, I am sensitive to charges of a white wash, cover-up, spin-job, flim-flam, sell-out. I’m sensitive because I hate these supremely common “inevitable” things more than most people do. I get that from my father, who also hated dishonesty wherever he encountered it. Our own dishonesty is always the hardest to see, of course, but few things are more maddening to me than the deliberate withholding or distortion of information, keeping the facts from people who need them the most. It is the first law of criminals and tyrants: tell them nothing they can use against us.

Unlike my father, who could insist to his traumatized eight year-old with all apparent seriousness that the murder of dozens of his family members had nothing to do with him, I try to take people’s feelings seriously, and I don’t run from the facts. Facts are slippery bastards, beyond question, and subject to endless recasting, but I’ve always believed there is a larger truth, an unvarnished version of the facts much closer to the complicated truth than others. Everybody probably believes some variation on this, I suppose, none more than the habitual liar, now that I think about it, but I digress.

I’ve been setting out these stories of my father’s life to put his shortcomings in their most tragic light. I want the reader to care about him, to show what he could have been, what he intended to be, how close he often came to that ideal of himself, rather than just the implacable destroyer he also was.

It’s like putting together a tricky puzzle, on a sticky table, in a dark room. I’ve been operating with the idea that focusing on his humanistic values makes his brutality, which the reader will grasp in stages, all the more tragic and horrible. Focusing on what was best in him, setting his best qualities out clearly has been my work so far. But then I am told that I am letting him off the hook. So let me take a few moments to show you the sturdy, razor sharp hook and how firmly he is hung by it. He described the hook as well as anyone could in those hours of his last night on earth. And I ain’t no holocaust denier, for better or worse, I’ve not gotten to where I am by backing away from difficult truths.

The rage my father displayed when listening to robots prattling about serving him better, instead of putting a human on the phone to help him resolve what he’d called about, was his default setting. He flew into a rage very easily, sometimes over almost nothing. Flying into a rage very easily is not the mark of a highly evolved person. Jewish sages considered being easy to enrage, unless offset by a capacity for quick forgiveness, as the mark of a wicked man. No-one could mistake Irv for a forgiving man. Life is full of outrages, true enough, and indignities are plentiful, but towering shows of temper do little but torture oneself and those around one, do they not?

Showing you the hook now, in a few paragraphs, is not easy. Not because I’ve ever had any hesitation about laying out my father’s childish, stubbornly defensive cruelty, but because it’s a huge subject. I don’t have a ready snapshot that stands in for the rest, though there are tens of thousands in the album. My father’s enduring legacies were rage and despair, let there be no mistake about that.

He was funny, and bright, and sardonic in a way that often came off as hip, if slightly menacing, to friends of mine who encountered him during his life. The most insightful of them could recognize what an overbearing bully the old man was, how his hipster act was just another part of being better than them. He despised many of my friends, people weak and stupid enough to be in a club that would admit somebody like his son as a member, though he could also put a cheerful face on his malice and he had a good deal of warmth and charm to use, when he felt like bringing that to bear. That surface cheerfulness, and his wit, misled a few about the darker essence of the man.

But what kind of book would I have, dear critic, if I told you the prosecutorial story of my father the unredeemed asshole? It would be a boring exercise in false therapy to present my father as a vicious, destructive prick and mentioned only grudgingly any redeeming qualities and values, though they clearly influenced my sister and me to a tremendous and often disabling extent. It’s the struggle to grasp and tell the whole dark story with clarity, like the uphill struggle to do anything difficult and meaningful, that makes the manuscript worth wrestling with. It’s the same struggle that will hopefully produce a book readers will look forward to reading.

There are complete fucking asshole fathers I have met, of course. The world has no shortage of such unredeemed creatures. The guy who punched his young son in the face in front of his friends, beat his wife, snarled everywhere he went and caused a bank teller in Fort Lee to burst into tears and run for the manager while teen-aged me watched, standing next to his son, waiting for the truculent old fuck to take us to a silent lunch. “I’m not dealing with him!” the bank teller wailed as she ran for the manager, my friend’s sadistic father watching with no expression. I’m sure there’s a backstory on him too, some tragic circumstance that molded him into the vicious bastard he clearly was. Hitler had a backstory, a sadistic father who beat him daily, but the backstories of these types hold only so much interest to me.

A mother who slaps her children in the face every day at the kitchen table. A strangled grunt and “whap!” across the kid’s face at breakfast and dinner every single day of childhood. Does the child have every right not to forgive such a mother? Of course. But there is more to the story of that parent than that. In the case of my father, the rest of the story, his many clearly admirable traits, the important work he did superbly, makes his life especially tragic and compelling to me.

Jewish law and tradition, which weaves through my father’s story and my own, even if neither of us in the end had much connection with the rituals, the congregation, the community of other Jews, often makes a subtle, sometimes merciful, point. Above everything else there is an appreciation of nuance in the greatest of our teachers. A friend told me about an illuminating interpretation of the commandment to honor thy father and thy mother. It does not command a child to obey a parent and certainly not to love a parent who is cruel or otherwise un-nurturing. It commands us to honor them and to recognize a duty to those who brought you into the world. What does honoring them mean? It means not letting them go hungry when they are old, not leaving them in an undignified situation.

I think that is part of what I am trying to do in this Book of Irv. I am giving my father the chance, as a decomposing skeleton, to express some of the things he was unable to make clear in life, until a few tottering steps in the right direction hours before his death. I am imagining the potential of the man, my father, in light of his beliefs and the regrets he expressed with seeming sincerity as he was giving his confession to me that last night on earth. I am treating his life with the empathy he was unable to show, except to dogs, abused animals, the gigantic masses of people who are inexorably fucked in our increasingly wealthy world. I am forging the links between his childhood poverty and abuse, his beliefs, and the crucial, often crippling, values he imbued deeply in my sister and me.

If you like, I am using the regrettably merciless fuck’s life to illustrate why I believe what I believe, why I pursue such a likely impossible life path, why trying to live with integrity is so important to me. I am trying to be the change the tyrannical, soft-hearted old man would have liked to have been in his own life. The book is as much about me, really, and my reactions and realizations, as it is about my father.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, have pointed out that forgiveness is primarily for ourselves, to relieve ourselves of the burdens of hatred, anger, injustice. Forgiveness is not an occasional act but a permanent attitude, said MLK, and I don’t doubt that. It is hard, Jack, hard, I know that too. Verging on the impossible if the person who did the damage is unrepentant, defiant, blaming the weakness of the victim for the perceived harm.

Although I was mild and comforting to him as the old man was dying, I don’t know that I can ever completely forgive my father for being such a needy and childish adult, the perpetually wounded two-year old so insistent on being right that he would burn all those around him. I don’t know if it’s possible to forgive someone who wasted most of their great potential in constant, unslakable anger. All he was left with as he was dying was regret and a son, far more merciful than him, to listen compassionately.

But if you have the impression I’m somehow letting my aggravating, bullying father off the hook – think again, dear Sekhnet.

The mechanized  systems all corporations began using toward the end of my father’s life drove him insane.  Within a minute his face would take on a Clint Eastwood cast, jaw set, eyes narrowed malevolently, ready to snarl and kill.   Mechanized receptionists are aggravating to most people who find themselves at their mercy, but they especially aggravated him.  

His favorite moment from Sanford and Son, which he recounted more than once over the years, was an exasperated Fred Sanford, played by the great Red Foxx, speaking into his phone after a long spell on hold.  “Is this a human or a machine?…. well, I’m a human too.”  He’d recall the moment with a fond laugh, a story of a quaint time when humans still picked up the phone to help other humans solve their problems.  My father longed for those quaint times whenever a robotic voice told him how important his business was to them.  Few things got him into a rage quicker than the upbeat hold button robots corporations began to use to save money.

“Please listen to all options before making your selection since our menu options have changed to serve you better.   We listened to you and made this system even better, to serve you better!  To repeat this entire message at any time, including this part, please press 9 at any time.  Press one to be placed on hold while being told your business is important to us; press two to be placed on hold while being told, candidly, that you a powerless, fungible widget considered only as part of our profit calculus, someone we are free to treat with mechanized disdain; press three to be politely told to go fuck yourself, for detailed instructions on going to fuck yourself, please press four….”

I wrote the bulk of this while on hold with the New York State of Health Official Health Plan Marketplace, trying to keep my blood pressure under control.  Today’s call, only one hour and ten minutes (less than half of that time on hold one of the seven or eight times I was placed on hold) may well have solved the relatively unambiguous and well-documented problem I have spent less than eight or nine hours so far trying to solve.  That is my hope, anyway.

“Thank you for your patience, Eliot,” the last helpful one said after placing me on a brief hold for a fourth time.  

“You were lovely, Gloria,” I told the young bureaucrat toward the end of the call, after snarling at her at one point, only about 40 minutes in, in spite of myself.  Then I briefly described the broken system, designed to insure uninterrupted profits for the insurance industry under a law written by a health industry executive, Liz Fowler,  on brief loan to the government.   That there is no process for solving patient problems like mine is no accident, that process would be overwhelmed by thousands of consumer complaints to a system not designed to consider them, since there is no profit in that to anyone.  She admitted to me by the end of the call that she too had been screwed by this imperfect system, designed not primarily to protect patients but the corporate bottom line.  We got off the phone the best of friends.

My father was rarely able to accomplish this highly skilled result.  It was a constant frustration of his, the cheerful fuck-yourself-in-the-face triumph of bottom-line corporate cocksuckers, always taken at the expense of humans like him and Fred Sanford.

“Everything you love will be taken from you.  Piece by piece, and finally all of it.  The passive voice will be used, it will be nothing personal.  They will do it inexorably, the worst, most innocuous, seemingly normal  people you can imagine,” cooed the skeleton of Irv from his snow covered grave.

“The more trivial the kick to the balls, the more it will hurt, sometimes” the dead man said, nodding with great understanding.   “There is the kick itself and what it represents, the larger insult and injury of it.  Each kick is a stand in for the final one– we are taking the breath from your body and you are now dead, bitch.”

“You wrote a beautiful piece about your mother recently, she would have laughed and cried to read it.  Her ashes are sitting in that cardboard box still smiling now, they really are, she’s qvelling.  You sent it to a few people and they all loved it.  It was soulful, honest, heartfelt and funny, I can put it that way.  A hack editor slash mediocre writer slash publisher bought it for $250 but never published it — or paid you for it.  You followed up.”  

“He wrote back that it was indeed beautiful, but, perhaps, I know it sounds funny to say it, the witless fellow said,  too personal.  He wrote that he thought he’d told you it was too deep for him to publish on his superficial site.  So you did good work, work you should have been proud of, had printed on-line with a link to send happily to your friends as you try to move forward through life and– a pile of shit animates itself like a golem and takes a greasy shit on it instead.  You want a few endorphins and a token cash payment, pussy?  Here, take this heaping token of my fucking esteem, I don’t need it in my colon anymore.”

My father always had a way with words.  

“You remember those bitches at Haddassah?  When I was National Director of Young Judaea, and director of Tel Yehudah, they showed how much they valued my work, these upper middle class and wealthy volunteer executives, by countering my request for a raise with an offer that was less than I was making.  You remember that, don’t you?”

I did remember it, well.

“And you recall my impotent rage, and how my psoriasis flared up, and how I told those fucking Haddassah ladies to take their abusive counter-offer and shove the job up their collective asses.   Benjy, who ran all the business operations for the camp and had saved the organization tens of thousands of dollars, had a similar experience and he quit around the same time.  Then we opened Tain Lee Chow and the rest is history.  But the point is, people who by rights should have no right to even have an opinion often become the Deciders, like that insane dry-drunk imbecile Dubya.  You know I’m right,  I know, and I know I’m pouring salt, along with sympathy.”

He didn’t have to say it, because the conversation was already taking place in my head, but those same Haddassah bitches, or their daughters (it was twenty years later), somehow learned that my father was dead and were soliciting donations for the camp in a fund named for him as soon as his body was in the ground.  I got one of their solicitation emails immediately after the funeral, cc’d to me and hundreds or thousands others.  

During a time when mourning Jewish families are supposed to sit for seven days, unmolested and waited on, while the community visits, brings food and company, distraction and love.   Instead of empathy and nourishment (or even a personal note saying ‘sorry for your loss’) these creatures were doing what their type does: sucking blood, marketing, taking the dead body of a well-respected man they’d treated very badly, and putting it on a poster to solicit funds for the camp he directed for many years.

“I admire your restraint there,” said the skeleton who was once holding up my father’s body, helping him move through life.  “I know how you struggled not to be hateful, not to refer to them as ‘cunts’ and you didn’t do it.  There’s no word to describe these ‘creatures’, they… ah, you know what I’m saying.  Nice bit of restraint, though, and I also dig the sly reference to Voltaire’s footnote asking readers to note his discretion in not suggesting that the person in question was in fact the actual bastard son of the sitting Pope.”

Yes, there’s that, old man, our one defense, being wittier than the many syphlitic fondlers out there.

“A lot of good it did them on the edge of that ravine in Vishnivetz,” he said, shaking his skull.  

Well, moral superiority is not a boat you want to try to cross the ocean in.  I remember my old friend’s response when I cc’d her the email I sent to those bitches at Haddassah a couple of days after I buried my father.   She told me I was over-reacting, that they were showing their respect for him by using his name to solicit money, that the woman who’d signed the email was a friend of hers, and a very decent woman.  I once again had to exercise restraint.

“You always have to exercise restraint,” said the skeleton, “and it will cost you years of your life.  You remember I was sometimes hospitalized with psoraisis, my skin would literally burst open from the constant exercise of restraint.”

Your long battle with psoraisis I will recall in detail.  I just note here that you suffered from a very extreme case of it for decades, from the age of 32 into your seventies.  Then I remember in Florida, a few years before you died, mom was scratching your back, you were both lying on the bed, and she pulled up your t-shirt to give you a good raking.  Your skin was clear, for the first time in my memory there were no scales, no redness.

“Yeah,” you said, pointing to it, “since I’ve been retired and living in Florida, in a warm climate with no stress… the psoraisis is gone.”

Well, I guess it had served its purpose by then, dad.

“Yep,” he said, leaning to the side so my mother could reach the rest of his back.

“You seem surprised,” says the grinning skeleton of my father from his underground bed in Cortlandt, NY, “that telling the story of my life seems to have taken an inevitable swerve to the dark side.”   Now that he mentions it, no, I’m not really that surprised.  

“Picture me trying to write about my mother, may she rest in peace, or my father, may he rest in peace,” says Irv’s skeleton with that winning smile skeletons always have.  “I might as well try to write about my feelings about all the aunts and uncles, and mom’s aunts and uncles, who wound up murdered in pits, or starved, or dead of disease because, well, you know.”

He pauses a moment to let the subject fade.  “I want you to know, I applaud your effort to tell a nuanced story of my life, I really do, and to put my values in perspective, but, seriously, in light of everything, do you think such a thing can be done?”  You know, now that he mentions it, no, probably not.  

“And of course, Elie, you realize full well that I’m incapable of saying the things you are transcribing now, as plausible as they may otherwise be,” he says with the great sympathy he was generally able not to let himself succumb to.  

“As to the sympathy, well, some things are much easier after death.  Look, that long struggle I had during my life to never be wrong– done!  I can admit anything I told you on my death bed.   Read the transcript, I left those admissions for you to work from.”

Sure thing, pops, let’s go to the videotape.

For the person following this emerging portrait of my father (heh, you know who you are) I will say this about Tain Lee Chow.  It was a Glatt Kosher Chinese Restaurant, the first in Queens, founded and run by my father and the last, and most enduring, of his surrogate sons, a shrewd businessman named Benjy.   It’s an interesting but probably minor chapter in Irv’s life, after he retired, an experiment in being his own boss.  Benjy took care of all the details and my father spent most of his time in the kitchen, chatting with the crew, turning beef spare ribs, taking the noodles out of the oil.  That’s why he and his clothes smelled so strongly of Chinese Noodles when he got into the car.

But an odd and telling detail of my early life occurred to me yesterday while listening to Jane Mayer give an account of the early life of the fucking Koch brothers.   Their father was a monstrous capitalist who imparted his values to his sons in part by leaving them in the care of a strict German nurse.  While toilet training them she insisted they defecate first thing in the morning, or else they’d get castor oil and enemas.  Makes sense, in light of that, that Charles and David grew up to be the ruthless, tight-assed fascist twats they did.

Irv, stationed in Germany right after the war, lived among the nation that had murdered everyone in his family who had not found refuge in the United States.  He came home, went to college on the G.I. bill, married my mother, Evelyn, and they eventually had a son.  Their son, by all accounts an unaccountably angry baby, had a nurse, a German woman.

How can this be, I wondered when I recalled the small handful of stories about her yesterday.  I put the few puzzle pieces I have together.  Though she was German, she must have been Jewish.  My father wouldn’t buy a German car, it was impossible he’d put me under the care of a German nurse, unless she was a Jewish refugee. Of course, there is no way to  verify this, but I strongly believe it must have been the case.  In any case, in their imitations of her she had a strong German accent.  Good enough, I say.

I know there were issues with toileting and the training of this angry baby.  For the rest of their lives my parents referred to shit as shize.  This was a corruption of the German word scheiss, as in “wir scheissen auf die freiheit” (“we shit on freedom”) a phrase I learned had been a slogan of fascist youth in the time of Hitler’s rise to power.  The New York Times translated it “we spit on freedom”, to no-one’s surprise.

Odder still, this German nurse apparently used to refer to me as der Fuhrer.   That cranky Jewish baby?  Hitler.  Funny, no?   (Correction a few years later:  der Kaiser!  She referred to me as der Kaiser, not the fucking Fuhrer….)

Why my working class parents, living on my father’s small beginning teacher’s salary, had a nurse for me is another question. Perhaps she was a baby sitter who took care of me a few times when my mother needed a break from her demanding son?  

It’s a slightly disquieting feeling, smelling strongly of the death that waits for all, to know there is nobody alive I can ask about most of the things I am writing about here.

I pull the car over to pick up my father and as he gets in I’m overwhelmed by how strongly he smells of fried noodles, what we used to call Chinese Noodles.  These deep fried noodles were sprinkled on top of a bowl of Won Ton Soup, dipped in duck sauce as an appetizer, some old-school Jews put them on top of their Chicken Shah Mein (aka Chow Mein).  Why my father smelled like Chinese noodles at the end of his working day I shall describe presently, just not right now. 

I pause to remind us all again that consistency is not a particularly human trait.  Dogs and cats may be pretty consistent, we are not. We bark or meow according to circumstance, and as much as we may claim to abhor barking or meowing, we will do either one much of the time if the occasion calls for it loudly enough.  More than that, our own contradictions rarely trouble us, even if the same quirk in others usually will.

The mark of an evolved mind, it is said, is the ability to hold two or more contradictory truths in mind at the same time.  The greatest recent example I’ve seen was performed by Jane Leavy in her great, supremely nuanced biography, The Last Boy; Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood.   On virtually every page we have evidence of what a heroic man, loyal friend and lovable character he was, along with as much evidence of what a despicable asshole he was.  On the same page, in the same paragraph.  And there is no contradiction, Mantle was apparently all of those things.  I try to offer this installment on my father’s impressive honesty and chilling denial in the same spirit.

My father loved Lenny Bruce.  He loved Malcolm X and Richard Pryor.  He loved them for their brilliance and originality and, just as much, for their unflinching honesty about intolerable injustices.  He hated hypocrisy and valued true honesty above most things, and he instilled those values in me and in my sister.  But not without a fabulous twist he himself had no insight into.

There were things he defended tirelessly and blindly.   He constructed towering, complex, unassailable cases for things that were absolute bullshit and would not hear the other side of issues he dismissed.  He prevailed in these hectoring arguments primarily by constantly refocusing the argument to narrower and narrower grounds, further and further from the point he was trying to avoid.  He had regrets about this as he was dying, his almost insane capacity for denial, the ultimate untruthfulness in a man who truthfully loved honesty.

This capacity for denial extended, amazingly, to a kind of Holocaust denial [see body of previous post– ed.] when he insisted my mother’s twelve aunts and uncles killed by Ukrainians, while Nazis nodded approvingly and smoked, were just abstractions.  No reason to be upset about strangers being killed face down in a mass grave, was his position to his upset young son, even though these strangers were undeniably his grandparents’ siblings.   It doesn’t get crazier than that, I think.

At the same time, he was a lover of the truth, particularly when it was dispensed sharply and darkly, with wit and irreverence.  He quoted Lenny Bruce at the dinner table, when he was in a good mood.   We all laughed with him and Lenny.   My father took great delight in this guy pointing to the strutting emperor, clothed only in his arrogance, and calling out, look, you can see his dick!  Look, there’s a mole on the side of his dick and one ball is twice the size of the other one!  Holy shit, how does he fuck with that thing?  

At the magic word “fuck” the cops storm through the tables to put him in cuffs, as he continues to riff, the band cracking up, the guys from the kitchen hanging out the door to listen.  They’re laughing their asses off until Lenny starts reading his trial transcript every night instead of doing his act, goes broke, is found dead, naked by the toilet, with the needle still in his arm.

Malcolm X, too.  Check out the statements he made, particularly in the final chapter of his dramatic life.  Like Martin Luther King, Jr. at the end (he remained Jr. to the end of his life, his father, MLK Sr. outlived him by decades) he was calling out monstrous institutions and fearing no man.  Marked for death he continued to speak out clearly about the things that mattered to him most passionately.  Not a Civil Rights movement, he argued after leaving the fanatical Nation of Islam, a Human Rights movement.  Take this to the United Nations, America is persecuting a large minority, formerly held as chattle slaves, denied the rights guaranteed to them in America’s own amended Constitution.  A Human Rights issue, he insisted, phrasing it correctly, putting it in its proper context.   Shots blew him apart, police and government involved in the cover-up, likely the killing too.

I understand that we are not consistent, and it is not the worst thing in the world to be inconsistent.  It is not like my father didn’t have the capacity to reflect and change his positions, it’s just he was extremely well-defended.  He had a lot to defend against.  Seeing his excruciating past too clearly, rather than focusing on becoming and remaining middle class, might have crippled him.  That was his fear anyway.  It is not an uncommon fear, open the door to the horrors you avoid and— arrrrghhhhhh!!!!!  Most people correctly work overtime in any job they can find to avoid winding up in that shadowy, terrifying room.

Irv always opposed capital punishment, except in the case of child molesters.  He believed their crime was the most heinous of any, was a compulsion, that they could not be rehabilitated and the only way to prevent the incalculable damage they did, and would continue to do, to people at the most vulnerable time in life, was by killing them.   I understood, and understand his passion on the subject, though we disagreed about his conclusion.  After all, it’s a short step to executing all rapists, violent sadists, guilty looking career criminals with court appointed lawyers working for pennies on the dollar, or random poor blacks, charged with crimes and at the mercy of a merciless system of justice.

We argued about the death penalty for these abhorrent creatures from time to time.  Then a neighbor of his, a friendly fell0w retiree with a good sense of humor who my father got to know when they’d walk their dogs together, was arrested for having sex with several neighborhood boys.  Apparently it had been going on for a while, in a house I’d visited many times when I was a boy.   The pedophile was the father of my first best friend.  A likable man, a former marine, I’d always thought he was cool.

My father told me the neighborhood boys were all crying when they took Shep away.  They loved him.  The police found Danish child pornography and anal extenders, I remember my father telling me.  It was kind of an open and shut case against the retired dentist.  The next time I was over at my parents’ house for dinner I put the question to my father.

“OK, dad, they’ve got Shep in the electric chair, all the documents signed and no pardon from the governor.  Can you pull the switch?”

I watched my father’s face as his mind worked.  It was a sophisticated mind that reflected honestly, if given the chance, and his answer was not long in coming.

“No,” he said, “I’d have to conclude that Shep is a very sick man, not evil.  No, I couldn’t put him to death.”

Thinking back on that moment now, it makes it all the more poignant that we didn’t have these kind of reasonable discussions more than a couple of times over the decades we knew each other.

The next one like it was many years later.  As far as I recall he was on his death bed in a Florida hospital.