Jon was born to the kind of parents who would freely add or sacrifice letters, silent or otherwise if necessary, to create the illusion of free-thought and novelty in the drudgerous and sacred act of child name giving. This was the kind of mostly silent protest you could count on from father, Jon often said, as he straddled the tipping point between repentant liberalism and smash-mouthed yuppiedom. In a battle that would rage for the better half of a lifetime, the artlessly-named boy would consistently play the role of collateral damage.
In becoming a charter member of the suit-and-tie, high-yield-bonded Reagan Youth, father had sold out just in time to catch the wave of unrestrained Capitalism trickling down from Wall Street and winding its way to California, the land of a nation’s savior. Mother would be added later, somewhere on father’s ascent to a respectable life. She would be blonde and tastefully trashy, somewhere between Madonna and Tammy Faye Baker. She would be selected for her looks, her quiet personality and loud fashion sense—as flamboyant and mute as a decade of discerning gentlemen required.
Prescient in his youth, father had seen the whole rocky, decadent mess that was his teens and early twenties imploding and was quick to jump ship. Suburbia would be his life raft. Funny, he was known to muse in his later years, that all it took was one take-charge act to make him a take-charge kind of guy, a go-getter.
But often, while going and getting, he was given to pangs of conscience. He could often be found recalling his football days, the flowing hair, the flaring pants and the weed. Cheerleaders were to be hunted like game then boy. Jon of course didn’t know what father meant, but it seemed to take him back. The years had done much to ingratiate father's youth to the man he had become. Sure, being a pot-smoking football player in a decade rife with THC and contact sports made him a human cliché, but clichés are only clichés to those outside the clique, and no one father knew gave a shit about outsiders anyway. In those days, like today and every other day, a person was only as good as their public perception, and he was a perceived god to those whose perceptions carried weight.
This collective hallucination was milked for the better part of 9 years. Time itself stopped in father’s trek to manhood, the past was accepted for the blissful haze it was—idyllic. The future was put off as long as possible. In the milky twain he managed a strange synergy. He mainlined Pink Floyd and Ted Nugent in equal doses, freely mixing acid grooves with jagged, arena-sized misogyny. His young life was a hinterland carved in the lull between cultural revolutions: constantly referencing that golden period of childhood fondly called the sixties, while allowing events to snowball toward the cocaine-laced sobriety that would usher in the decade of Jon’s birth.
Shit, God, Those were some damn good days, he would often say.
Good though they were, father understood at a certain point that the days of youth had to be put aside. He had made the tired assertion everyone makes after a certain age when life achieves the exhaustion of moving endlessly nowhere. Needed to give his ahhss a good kick-stawt—aahnd quick. Though college imprinted on father the colloquialisms of the Midwest, he was originally from much farther East and the hard-nosed range-speak rattled cacaphonically against his soft, faintly elongated Massachusen vowels.
Yeah, it was time to grow up. His prescience was marked by a realism that, on occasion, allowed him to pull back the resin-coated curtain of lethargy and see certain things: things like his future and things like the past. It was during one of these moments that he recognized the seventies for the muddled decade it was. And he realized too that he had played the part perfectly, proudly displaying his eight track tapes in order of listening frequency: Kiss and the Bee Gees to top the list.
The indeterminacy of the path he traveled had left him exhausted and it was time for a change. The watershed event father would revisit endlessly throughout his years—his passing into hyper-capitalistic manhood—roughly coincided with another life-changing occurrence: the departure of his sixteen year old neighbor to military school. One of the summers home from college, Ricky Jeffries had become father’s most trusted friend, despite being six years father’s junior and had the enviable position as the only steady hold left in the neighborhood.
So full of coincidence, this life, Jon’s father was known to muse.
The new life, which had been traded straight-up for the old, not much worse for the wear and at a respectable interest rate, was far more stark and angular. Father now walked in a world where women’s business wear had shoulder pads built in; everything was square, the haircuts as much as the people who wore them. Never cared much for that pointy-look, liked my girls curvy, Jesus God I loved’m curvy, he would say, years later as he slid into the impotent madness of middle-age. Still, he went along, got in line and paid his dues. His wife was all the time at his side, the entire six odd feet of her, platinum blonde, boxy and severe. It’s all cocaine and daily shaving from here on out, he realized—and it never did quite compare to the rarefied air of adolescence. His memory was a tug of war, continually bringing him back to those early times because they stuck with him no matter what he tried, the memory of his feathered hair clinging to life in the back of his mind. As years passed and stories continually recycled themselves, father would admit there was something gripping about possessing true greatness in one’s youth and for that he was obliged to remember. He kept to himself the realization that, from such greatness, one can only hope to weave a brilliant and cascading tapestry of failure.
Once, in the days after the abrupt end to his trading, Father returned from a seaside tryst with a metaphor he would write into the legal pad he wrote such metaphors in. The past, like one’s first love is also like the tide, but a tide that only goes out, forever and ever and you stop being able to see it so after it you run but you never get close enough to it again, and by the time you realize you’ll never really see it the way you used to see it, you turn around and the land’s gone too. So you turn back around and keep chasing. College had left him profoundly affected by the writings of Jack Kerouac, and the memoirs found next to his charred remains would point to some very beat literary sentiment—painfully long groups of comma-spliced phrases carefully masquerading as a stream of consciousness.
So there it was, the past. He never quite got over it, no matter how often he returned to it.
***
In this deceptively simple milieu Jon came to be, the son of a junk-bond trader and an inoffensive pair of ovaries, the product of designer drugs and teeth-gnashing regret. Thankfully there were more designer drugs than regret swirling in father’s brainpan on the day the name of he, the first-born, had been consecrated before the eyes of God and family. The boy would grow, over the years, to hate ‘Jon’ as a name in an abstract way, for all the things it came to represent for him. He also, however, recognized that it could have been worse. Jesus, God it could’ve been worse.
***
When Jon was old enough to enjoy the tall tales of his childhood, his father told him the harrowing story of how he, the first born, was almost named Pētr. The name was a throwback to father’s days as a Division II quarterback at some school in the Midwest. Father and his friends had gotten unbelievably high and decided they needed to give the American language a good kick in the ass. They agreed it was better than any language they had taken in high school—and certainly better than Russian or Chinese or Vietnamese or whatever—but it still needed something. Ideas were bandied about, soft criticism was lobbed, insults and apologies in more or less equal number.
This was a favorite node of comparison for father, one he returned to time and again during quiet moments alone in later years. The differences between the masculine ribaldry of his youth and his adulthood puzzled him. He would often wonder, when comparing decades, if the eighties’ unforgiving lifestyle had been more a product of the drugs of choice than the hardened greed of the age. The coke made him distant, something he never really felt in his starter jacket swaddled in the concupiscent curdled plumes of the dorm room. There was nothing warm or poetic about it. There was no sentiment. It created a lifestyle of distance, devoid of apologies. None of his associates or clients (victims, the judge would call them) ever read Wallace Stevens, which was clearly a symptom of a deeper inability to empathize. None of them knew how much depended on the red wheel barrel. For this father pitied them.
Empathy was never a problem in the dorm room, which is probably why nothing linguistically earth-shattering was accomplished that day, or on any other day. They generally agreed that this new tongue should be a re-imagining of Orwellian Newspeak but not, you know, so fascist . . . but not fucking communist either. The logistics were tough because they were trying to improve upon something they admittedly didn’t understand very well. It was beginning to become all too big a burden as they sat figuring out how to handle antonyms, when someone slaughtered and gutted the proceedings by asking just what was, you know, really, the difference between good and evil? Self-consciousness whipped through the room with gale force. So, hastily and a little ashamed, they just took out letters that seemed unnecessary and replaced them with the corresponding phonetic symbols, passed the thing around one more time and let their revisions fade into legend, let the grand creation become the thing they always returned to out of reverence for how awesome the act of creation itself had been.
Pētr Blāk was father’s roommate, best friend, product of the same hometown, and the most dependable hold at the time of their miniature linguistic revolution. He didn’t survive college and in death was directly responsible for Jon’s life. It was Petrs freshly shuffled coil that gave rise to the robust dope monopoly Ricky Jeffries had enjoyed. Pētr, then, in absence contributed to the narcotics vacuum caused by the sixteen-year-old’s disappearance.
Father had long felt that children’s names ought to be like the names the great men of America gave the great football stadiums of America: fashioned in reverential memoriam to the clouded lives of fractured men. With Pētr still warming through putrefaction the three or so feet adjacent his coffin, there was no question that calling Jon ‘Pētr’ was the sentimentally safe decision—the wounds were so fresh.
Through much of his wife’s 45 week pregnancy, in fact, it remained the unspoken choice until, on the day of his son’s eventual birth, father woke up and concluded, under the far-off nodding of Jon’s dotard mother—by now swollen to many times her original size and heavily-sedated—that Pētr was just too damn weird a name for someone as normal as his kid was going to be. Came to him in a dream.
That is, the choice had been made for him in one of his flashes of prescience. The vision was of the awkward and inevitable moment when one of young Pētrs (father and the Blākmīstr later decided to do away with extraneous punctuation as well) classmates, upon learning the standard—read: fascist—modes of English phonetic communication, would struggle with Pēts name (further truncated by childhood) and it would obviously come out sounding like ‘pet'. Father quickly concluded that Jon was just edgy enough to keep people on their toes without suggesting his baby boy was a closeted dominant-submissive or the vessel of more bestial predilections. Once more father felt he had, at the last minute, played both sides and won.
***
So it was Jon and that was that. And in the years that had transpired between the time his name was chosen for him—amid rabid decrees of post-fetal normalcy—and his sophomore year in high school, Jon’s parents had succeeded in turning him into a complete fucking train wreck—Jon’s words now, not his father’s.
***
She grabbed it, turned it over, put it back. Her fingers kind of danced over it for a minute, then she picked it back up. It was a Starbucks Card. "What a thoughtful gift," I said to myself, giving the gift of ready-made coffee.
My favorite:
