jackie

So much of this is about just trying to get clean.  Covered in whatever the filth is, or internal, filled with well I want to say stink and corruption, but that's not it.  Whatever it is where clean is the answer.  Not my own filth -- I can own that.  It's mine, I made it, like a toddler's pride in toilet training.  Mine.  Honest anger is fine.  Likewise rage and hatred.  The theology may be challenging, but God hates sin, and rage is just the current word for biblical wrath. Emotions become sick when they are stagnant.  They should flow.  So I was wrong.  It is my own filth that's the problem.  I own it, and won't let go.  

I've played quite a few games with my name, in these pages, these anonymous pages.  So I looked just now, and I am actually surprised to see that in these hundreds of thousands and millions of words there are a couple of my horrible stories that I have not told.

I should have thought I had.  I mean, I told, finally, even, finally, the story of my boys -- the Joey story and the Jason story.  Took a few years to get there.  That's two of my handful of ongoing untreated PTSD cases right there.  Maybe three.

Until I was seven or eight they called me Jackie.  I've said that.  But at some point I decided to be called Jack.  I knew why.  I'd heard the name Jackie spoken with hatred so much, it was just too much.  But one of the siblings wouldn't go along.  It was, after all, my function to be hated.  So I trained him the way my father trained the dog.  Every time he said it I provided a negative reinforcement.  I'd kick him as hard as I could on the shin.  He learned pretty quickly, actually.  Lots of violence, but he did learn.  After that for a few years it was only when substitute teachers were taking roll, Jackie, and from kids who hadn't seen me for a while.

I just think it's telling, an apt metaphor, that I had to fight, with actual violence, for my name.  That's a metaphor, right?  

These past few weeks, in these pages, have not been cathartic.  I had that one insight, about gang rape, and this has got me to actually write down stories that I used to tell in quite a humorous way.  People laughed.  No doubt I made witty comments as I went along.  I could make witty comments now, about raping a pony or a young teenage boy.  I'm quite witty.  But my purpose in these later years isn't what it used to be.  

One of my father's tropes was to call us his offspring.  Not sons, but offspring.  The clever thing is that he told us why.  He was ashamed of us.  (I will always use the plural, in this context.  No individuality was recognized.  The two assholes would need a negative reenforcement, and all three of us would get lined up for the whipping.)  So he spelled it out.  Less than sons.  Less than men, young men, boys.  Offspring.  

Seems unnecessarily harsh.  

And after the other two had been kicked out, each at age 16, and I was the only one left, at age 16 my father decided it would be authentic and manly to tell me that he was sorry he had named me Jack.  Because Jack was his name, one of them, and it was a man's name, and if his hypothetical friends saw me and heard my name was Jack, well dad would be embarrassed about that.  You know, because I was, I'll pick a word, a disappointment? -- but that's not it.  No matter.  But it was harsher than disappointment.

It's kind of hard to think clearly.  No emotion, but like I'm skimming the surface ... oh, it's hard to concentrate.  Not hard, but like my mind is pushed away, like uncooperative magnetic poles.  Repulsed.  Interesting.  

Eight years later I became a father in Australia, and six months after that my father had yet another offspring, this time a son, 25 years younger than me.  I was no longer the little one.  Hurrah.  So here's the point.  Get ready.  Ahem.  Guess, dear reader, what name my father gave to his new baby boy.  Guess.  

Um, was it George?  No.  Uh, Vincent? Darryl?  No -- well I'll just tell you.  Jack.  

So he really did mean it, when he said that thing about naming me.  How can we fault honesty?  Being forthright is a virtue.  

Some few years later, when it was still possible, there was a sort of family Christmas get-together at my father's house.  Not my, our, mother.  The brothers, and I have to suppose their various families.  I suppose after I came back from Australia I tried to have some kind of adult relationship with him.  But here's the thing, another thing.  Get ready.  My father had started to call me by another name.  My first name, which I have never used.  You see why of course.  Two sons named Jack, that might get confusing.  

So at that get-together he was trying to use some other name, for me, and I said, quite clearly, with some emphasis -- "My name is Jack."  He would not have been used to being corrected, contradicted, confronted.  The memory is dull, but I expect I had brooded about this for, well, since I learned of it in Australia.  So I will have mocked the stupidity.  I certainly said, "Hi, I'm Larry, and this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl."  I expect I said that he did not have to right to change my name, take my name, give it to anyone else.  When it was his to give, he gave it to me.  I even had to fight for it.  Mine.

I'd expect that even my brothers, now adults, might have been on my side.  

The happy ending to that story is that at some point after this they started to call my new little brother -- however old he was by then, maybe seven or eight -- by his first name, which was also the name my father was currently using as his name.  

That's a happy ending, right?  I could finally stop fighting for my name?

In looking just now, after so many years, at the story of my boys, I find I did indeed tell the sorry-I-named-you-Jack story.  Don't bother with that link.  It's not straightforward, a very convoluted story.  Over-complicated.  Bad drama.  I'm here to amuse.

J