The Untragic Death of Henry Gladfelter

When I was eighteen I tried to change my name for the second time. I had started out in life as a Robert and then, at thirteen, as part of the declaration of independence that went along with my bar mitzvah, I began to refer to myself as Rob. I’d flirted with Bobby but in the end Bobby seemed chirpy and diminutive; it lacked gravitas. The same with Bob, a name I did not like at all. I did not like Rob much either, but I preferred it to dull, palindromish Bob, and to the stilted formality and ­bland-Jewish-boyishness of Robert. Rob at least had a little velocity, a cool, suggestive note of thievery and transgression. This Rob fellow, whoever he was, may have been a nice Jewish boy, but he wasn’t only a nice Jewish boy. He was also a dangerous character, someone who stole trivial items from hardworking shop­keepers for no reason, as I did, and performed unspeakable acts upon himself in the privacy of his room, as I did, and brazenly walked out of other ­people’s bar mitzvahs when things got boring—which is to say, all the time—and strolled out to smoke in the parking lot with those other dangerous characters, the Daves (né Davids), the Matts (né Matthews), the Steves (né Stephens) I smoked with.

My parents of course continued to call me Robert. So did my brothers. So did my teachers. So did almost everyone else. This in some form or other went on for a long while.

At eighteen I went away to Cali­­fornia and began what seemed to me a new and more interesting life. As part of this new life I decided to dispatch with the whole tedious Rob/Robert issue for good. I asked people to start calling me Butch. I mean Jesse. Honestly, I wasn’t wild about Jesse either, but it was my middle name, and I’d run out of alternatives. I may have been a dangerous character, but I wasn’t so brazen as to go out and steal—rob, rather—a new, utterly fraudulent name for myself: I had my own integrity to consider, even if this integrity of mine was not quite visible to me, or, for that matter, existent, at the time. So Jesse it was.

Or rather, wasn’t. Because here was the thing about my experiment in renaming myself (and renaming ourselves is a way of becoming—pace Ralph Ellison—our own fathers, which seemed a pretty good idea at the time): the problem ­wasn’t so much that ­people couldn’t re­member to call me Jesse (though in fact very few people could remember to call me Jesse), the problem was that I couldn’t remember to call me...