Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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Home | Oct 04 2002

One card I burned, the other I ate. This was in a place called World’s End. I had come with two friends and we were sitting by the water. The burned card came first. I orginally thought of doing it the other way around, but then decided I should finish with the thing that’s more positive, the taking-in thing.

It had been three years since I’d changed my name. I had kept it a secret at work, though, because… Well, I claimed it was because my name was on thousands of posters around the country promoting the program I ran, but really it was because I was dealing with business people all the time, corporate executives, and I knew they’d think me a freak for changing my name, which would make my job that much harder. So I stuck with my old name at work and became Michael Barrish everywhere else. Weirdly I never once made a mistake about what my name was. My old name became my “work name,” the name of the person I was at work, and my new name became the person I was elsewhere, the “default” me. So when I met people at conferences and such, I always knew which name to tell them, because that’s who I felt like at conferences; I felt like Michael Rosenblum, Scholarship Director.

That’s my old name: Michael Rosenblum.

(A funny thing. I’m writing this in Microsoft Word, which among its fifty million unnecessary functions has this little yellow box that appears whenever you type the beginning to a word or phrase it “recognizes.” An example would be the word Wednesday. As soon as you get to the “n” in Wednesday, a little yellow box appears that says, “Wednesday.” Doubtless this is supposed to save you from having to type all the letters in words like Wednesday, but all it does is annoy you and make you feel that idiots made this program and that you yourself are an idiot for using it. Anyway when I typed Michael Rosenblum a minute ago, the program guessed wrong after a few letters and flashed “Michael Barrish.”)

On the day I stopped being Scholarship Director, it struck me that Michael Rosenblum was now defunct. Not dead; defunct. Michael Rosenblum was still alive in some sense, only he no longer mattered. His spirit had been taken over, swallowed, by another. It had happened little by little, like the eating of the card. Very much like the eating of the card, in fact, which is how I got that idea.

I don’t remember how I got the idea to burn the other one. I regret it now. A card gets destroyed in the process of being eaten, so I didn’t need to complicate things by burning a second one. This is a problem with making up your own rituals: you run the risk of overdoing it.

Three years before all this, I realized what my name is. I was in a bank at the time, opening a new account. The bank representative was having me sign my name in various places and I was complaining about this to a friend who was with me, because for as long as I could remember I’d always hated signing my name. This has to do with my father of course, with my name being my father’s name, but it was about the Jewishness of the name, which I’d always resented. That is, I resented the fact that when people heard my name, they immediately thought “Jew.” Had I been given a choice in the matter, I would have preferred a name that made people think of things I considered more central to my identity, like “artist” or “intellectual” or “outrageously good in bed.” But Rosenblum is like a flashing neon sign that screams LOOK AT THE JEW.

For over a decade I tried to find a new last name, without success. The problem was a problem of meaning. My new name had to do what Rosenblum never could: it had to feel like me to me, and it had to represent me, as I thought of myself, to others. My biggest fear was that I would change my name to something like Michael Sunshine, then decide it was stupid. So I was determined not to change my name to something with any chance of ever seeming stupid.

The only serious candidate in all those years was Estlin. Estlin was e.e. cummings’ middle name, and e.e. cummings was my first love. Estlin, however, is awkward to pronounce—you get stuck between the syllables—and also rather Brahmin-sounding. So as much I liked the reference, I couldn’t go through with it.

Then in the bank, during my name-signing ordeal, my friend said, “What about Barrish?”

Barrish is my mother’s name. It’s also my grandfather’s name, the grandfather I was close to, the grandfather I loved.

I’ve probably said this elsewhere, but this moment was like the moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy discovers that she’s been carrying her ticket back home to Kansas the whole time; she just hadn’t realized it. And so not realizing it, she endured this convoluted Technicolor adventure replete with singing and dancing and almost getting herself and her companions killed.

Back in the bank I turned to my friend Liz and said, “Yes, that’s my name: Barrish.” In that moment I was back in my childhood, both in it and outside it, and I could see that the boy, the boy I had been, belonged not to his father’s family, which he hardly knew, but to his mother’s family, and in particular to his maternal grandfather. He was of his grandfather.

I told the bank person that I’d return after doing whatever one has to do to change one’s name, and then Liz and I walked along Mass. Ave., discussing what my middle name should be. The middle name I was born with is Jay, which according to my mother was chosen because it sounded nice. Michael Jay Barrish didn’t sound so nice to me, and anyway I didn’t want a name that sounded nice; I wanted a name that meant something. Liz tried to help me figure this out, but it was hopeless. Finding meaning is as difficult as finding love. And anyway meaning isn’t found; it gets made.

For me it got made on the southwest corner of Mass. Ave. and Prospect Street, which if you know Cambridge, you know is a busy corner. Liz and I were waiting to cross Prospect and I was telling her something about my grandfather and for some reason said his name, which I don’t often do, for in my head he is the name I called him as a child, which was “Pop-Pop,” or sometimes, to differentiate him from my other grandfather, “Pop-Pop Abbie.” Anyway I said his name, which was Abraham, and then I saw everything and started to cry. It was an immediate thing, I just completely broke down on this street corner with hordes of people hurrying past. When I finally managed to compose myself long enough to tell Liz what had made me cry, she began crying, which of course got me started all over again. It was like what I expect it be like if I ever have a child, I mean if my future wife, if I ever have a future wife, ever gives birth to our child, and I’m there with the two of them in the moments right after the child is born, and me and my future wife are crying because… well, for obvious reasons.

That’s what it was like.

My middle name, I told Liz, is Abraham.

“My name is Michael Abraham Barrish,” I said. “He’s inside me.”