"B" for Berkowitz

Having names in America is a tricky business. Many of our ancestors came here with an eye towards reinvention, which made it the perfect opportunity for a name-change. No matter how many times I'm asked, it still makes me smile: "Is Doucette 'French'"? Oh, hell no. "Doucet" is French as all get-out, but "Doucette" is a totally American creation, reflecting our past desires for assimilation and fitting in. Quickly. It's a dangerous prospect for an immigrant not to pass as an American citizen for very long. We know too many cultures of the world not to be hip to foreigners.

Belonging here is mostly a matter of choice that's not from any particular country, culture, ethnicity, or religion, related more to geographic proximity to the nearest overseas nation than anything else. San Francisco has a large Asian district because it is a western hub for Americans traveling to Japan. Miami has a vibrant Cuban community because of its relative close distance to that country; ditto with generations of Haitian boat people who landed in Florida. I can fly to Ireland from New York quicker than to any other major European country (besides Greenland and Iceland) and most American cities, which directly informs the strength of the Celtic-informed cultures of my ancestral home of "New Scotland" and the Northeastern seaboard.

But for parts of my family, their move towards an American identity was more circuitous and convoluted, with large doses of deceit mixed with insincerity. It was the perfect combo for my cousin and my old friend from college. Dave came from a Polish-American father with a phony Irish-sounding name, and both of them are heavy drinkers, just like their fathers before them. They briefly played together in a downtown darts league (my boyfriend and my two cousins who are siblings), until they blew that by fighting in the cobblestone streets of downtown New York City late at night, after one too many.

Still, we were blown away by the reveal that my cousin had changed his name without even telling us. He invited us to a party held by an Irish association that's a popular social club for many Irish-Americans, one necessitating proof of Irish ancestry, which was much harder than he could manage with a dark Indian mother who resembled Pocahontas more than Colleen. That was his gentile line from his maternal side: a mother with more native heritage than anything else, and she'd die an early death in his 20s from the drink before she'd openly divulge the truth about her ethnic origins.

We approached the table at the social club with the guest list, repeating my cousin's name a few times, only to get puzzled looks and shaking heads. Nope. He wasn't on the list! My cousin must have saw us from inside the banquet hall, because he yelled out as he ran over to us: "It's under 'Burke'!" Uh, duh. You could have told us you made the reservations in our name. How were we to know? He quickly checked us in, then pulled us aside. We didn't understand him. He didn't go by the name Berkowitz anymore. Okay...we were still waiting. He got impatient with us."You need an 'Irish' name to get into the club!" Haha! That's funny, 'cause Dave isn't even all that Irish. He's a Polish-Indian mixed with German and Italian.

No, no, no. We still didn't get it. Finally, he coughed up the truth. This time, he leaned in closer to us, seated across from him at the long banquet table with fresh beers, lowering his voice. "I changed my name." What?! Dave was furious with him. "You stole my fucking name so you could drink in a bar?!" Kenny wanted to bartend (i.e., drink for free) at the local chapter, so he felt it was worth it. Besides, it fit his personality perfectly to be a such an outrageous liar, but this was just so fucking surreal. I loved our Jewish family from my father's side. This was bullshit! It was like he cut off an entire branch of our big family tree, and we were bleeding all over the place from the cut. Fuck...what a dumb drunk fuck!

Dave jerked his thumb at me. "She's the one with the Irish grandfather, not you. And besides, she's been to Ireland. You haven't." And that was true. "Yeah, you're 'more Irish' than me." My cousin admitted to us. "That's true." It was a dubious distinction amid so many loud red faces that packed the Brooklyn hall. Uh, yeah, we're not exactly extinct, are we? Take a good look around. Still, he had a point. He was as European-American as probably half the fuckers in the joint, and he could drink most of them under the table any day or night of the week. Heck, genetics is a wild game. Maybe that big dumb fuck was onto something. Maybe he was an Irishman more than anything else all long. It was still funny, though: an Irish Norman name of French origin, stolen from an upstate Polish-Indian. It was just crazy enough to be American. 

By Any Other Name

You probably know by now that the American immigrant experience isn't some "la-di-da" fantasy concocted solely by rich Hollywood filmmakers and gay Broadway producers. The streets weren't paved with gold when my ancestors arrived here (nor are they now) because they built this city, and dozens of others like it, too. If it was paved at all back then, it was put down in the sizzling heat that is New York's hot summer sun, made with durable Rockland County gravel (hence the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockland_County,_New_York), padded with the well-trodden horse-shit from so many carriages, that fragrantly emanated from between the big paving stones in the heat.

My grandfather told me stories about "The El" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Third_Avenue_Line & (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line), a newly-elevated carriage service that rode high above the stink of the messy cobblestone streets that was turn-of-the-century New York City, in a pleasant riding experience that had velvet ropes for them to hang onto, while standing between the fancy crushed-velvet seats. Quite an experience for a native-born Brooklyn boy like my grandfather to have as a child, used as he was to the small family farms that still lined Brooklyn's streets back then, with double-wide avenues functioning as one big farm route that was conducive to trade between rural crop-producing Long Island and the borough of Manhattan: http://www.bklynlibrary.org/brooklyncollection/historic-brooklyn-photographs.

As great and hard as our real life experiences could be in this land of our birth, it was not always so for many other poor immigrant families, burdened as they were by a lack of education and native know-how. My ex's family was like that. Even though he had the privilege of his mother's ancient Indian lines—for precious government money, land rights, and serious tuition breaks—his father's Polish family fared less well in upstate New York, when it came to free handouts earned from the backs of our joint ancestral labors. It made them twitchy and greedy when it came to earning off of us as a people, competing in the wild marketplace that freedom brings. It makes people nervous about surviving here, you know? Winter's always coming.

Besides immigrant dreams that turned out not to be true, they also wrongly believed that the death-defying boat ride to New York during wintertime was bad, starving as they were then, with a few hastily-shoved potatoes in their dirty pockets, in between sudden squalls at sea and pulls off a bottle of homemade vodka. Uh uh, homies. It gets so much worse. Like, much much worse. My friend Linda's family were Muslims from Russia and Poland who had their name changed immediately upon arrival to Ellis Island, for the comfort of the paper-processing government workers who were basically illiterate. She knew that because her grandmother told her her own emigre story, and she told it to me, not that Linda was always truthful with me. Some families are just tricky like that, you know?

Her white Muslim grandmother married a Mongolian man before they emigrated further east, becoming "Janowski" for ease of travel through Poland and Russia, which was then changed once again to "Janow" here in America—to ease their arrival experience—and that's what my friend Dave's dad did, too, though he told it to me in the tone of a perpetually aggrieved, long-suffering people. "We had to change it, just to get work in 'the unions'. All the unions were run by the Irish back then!", he would explain to us over a dinner of kielbasa and German baked potatoes au gratin with bacon and cheddar melted on top (bless you, Ginger: you know upstate winters, mama!). And that's exactly what his grandfather, his father, and then, he did: they went from being proud, big, strong, Polish-American  "Budzanowski" Catholic boys (http://www.thetreemaker.com/family-coat-b/budzanowski/poland.html), to pseudo Irish-Americans, in a state that has one of the biggest Irish immigrant populations outside of "Eire": http://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/2013/03/15/americas-most-irish-towns/#59703e0a495e.

Anyway, it was a common enough story among Americans in this vast wilderness that can be the American experience. Anything can happen, at any time. Birth certificates could be falsely-made, and then just as easily lost. Names were quickly taken up and easily discarded, for a variety of reasons: for work, to escape notice as a convict on the run, or to hide the "blackness" behind the real origins of your "low" birth, like a poor native girl who just took on the faith of her loving husband, as Catholics assume during the Rite of Confirmation. 

I willingly chose to take on my grandmother's American name "Ann" in the French spelling (she was baptized "Angelina") to also honor St. Anne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Anne), my patron saint of Confirmation, so as to commemorate that time period forever through divine ordination onto my name, which officially makes my name "Marie Louise Anne Doucette". I pronounced it in French for an older friend of mine here at the local library, which was totally impenetrable to him, and then I said it again in perfectly unaccented English, because it can be that dissimilar with a change in pronunciation. 

I know how tricky names can be, as well as the risks involved with naming. It can (or could) mean life or death for some of us, still. It couldn't have been easy for my former in-laws to "pass" as Irish-born back then, but I did understand the economic and cultural pressures his family felt, to conform and survive as "strangers in a strange land". Luckily, he found his squaw in high school, and it isn't like Polish/Russian-born people are exactly "new" to the deep cold of a Northern climate, just our like indigenous people. We need(ed) the change of seasons to remain healthy, because our climate does a lot of good things to our bodies, for the continued health of our tribe. 

Anyway, we found each other through the ensuing centuries of assimilation and madness, because New Yorkers know their own. 
I found—in a very small isolated town buried deep in the rough, dense, wild mountains of New York—an Indo-European American Indian kinda like me. You can't mess with a destiny like ours, love, because we have a "forever" kind of thing goin' on. Trust on that, peeps. We are forever wild. For you. Come find us! We want you in it with us, for real. Be in it, with us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Preserve_(New_York)

Georgian Court

Welcome to Georgian Court.

Last week, while photographing a enigmatic stone house, I noticed a "For Rent" sign parked on the lawn of a 50s mod building. Stylin'! Prominently displayed on the brick front is a gorgeous, cheerful script of a logo, emblematic of the kind of "can-do" energy that sparked the post-war Baby Boom, fueled by an economy pumped full of spoils and profits from a war won well. 

Seems very quiet and quite safe.

In an effort to regain some of the normality that was lost during war time, conformity was key. A soldier in enemy territory stands out much more by not blending in, and it was a lesson learned well. After looking at the grounds, I walked up the small hill to a surreal picture of similarity: each and every apartment was exactly the same, and I mean, down to the very last detail. 

It's well-manicured. Each bush is the same.

There are no anomalies of any kind in the small, handkerchief-sized lawns; no wild, weird decorations, no decor at all, actually. Everything had a comforting, bland sameness to it, and that's exactly the point: to be the same, to have the same things, to live the same day over and over again, without any traumas, shocks, or surprises, as a relief to a post-traumatic life. In it's own way, it's a lot scarier than the dark, mysterious house next door, for the sheer effort it makes to present a unified front, like a artificially fake neighborhood in Disneyland, unmarked by any sort of identifying characteristics whatsoever. 

I bet nothing ever really changes around here.

There's a desperate quality in maintaining that kind of approach, which stands out in stark contrast to say, an overblown, badly decorated kitschy style. A slight, warm wind swirled through the leaves that day, as I left the apartment grounds exactly the way it has always been, and will always be, for here on out, until it crumbles to the ground. How's that for a good scare?

Creepy. Nothing moves but the leaves. Where the people at?