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My Boy
By Adam Crowley
Mar 09, 2001 --My boy’s name is Mikha Peterson, which sounds odd and looks even odder because it’s both Swedish and misspelled. My boy’s name should be spelled Micah Peterson, but it isn’t.
The reason: Lady Luck disguised as a bottle of whiskey.
I never liked the name Micah; in fact, I’ve always hated it. It sounds more like a European stew than a person. I certainly detested having to listen to my wife scream "Mikha, Mikha, Mikha!" all day long. In fact, her dying words were, "I love you, Mikha."
She didn’t even know I was in the room.
The name Mikha makes me sick.
So, after my wife died, instead of calling my boy Micah, Mikha, or whatever, I took to calling my boy Bill. My father’s name was Bill, and I loved my father; he was a good man. For some reason, Mikha liked being called Bill; he took to the name, and this is why you know my boy today as William the Destroyer.
No joke!
That’s right, William the Destroyer, your king, is my son. Maybe if I had called my boy Sam or Rufus or Gregory, he would have grown up to be a better person. Who knows?
All I ever really wanted was a daughter, someone to garden and cook with. I wanted a Rachel, a Delilah, or a Rebecca. Basically, I was hankering for a baby I could give a biblical name, something that would blend well in a crowd; my wife, however, was nuts about Micah, and she was going to glue that name onto whatever she gave birth to, regardless of the sex.
"It means mysterious gift," my wife told me.
Thanks to Mikha Peterson, you can never say that I, his father, Thomas Peterson, failed to give something to the world. There was a time when I was worried about that. Such a foolish worry!
"With a name like that, how can he help but stick out?" my wife asked. We were eating breakfast on the floor of our kitchen. We didn’t have any furniture yet.
"I don’t see how he could help it," I said, " especially at school."
"If you stick out in this world, you make waves" – my wife nodded, as if to signify that she was saying something wise – "and if you make waves, you’re a real somebody," my wife said.
"Maybe," I said.
My wife’s parents had been Swedish immigrant nobodies, one of whom had been named Micah.
"My mother’s name was Micah," my wife said.
"Was she a wave maker?" I asked. When I asked this question, my wife began to cry, and then she ran out of the room. Only later did she tell me that her mother had fallen off the ship that was supposed to bring her back to America after she’d gone home to Sweden to visit a sick sister. Her mother drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, which is very deep.
The sister’s name was Mary.
No joke!
By the way, there are no longer any Swedish people on Earth; my son exterminated all of them in the fall of ’23. Every city, town, and village in Sweden has been blown flat, soaked in kerosene, and set ablaze. Not only were all the Swedish communities destroyed, but the roads that connected them to one another were demolished, too. Every road that once rolled its merry way across Sweden’s bumpy brow has been ground into a fine sand or impregnated with mines that are linked to atomic bombs; so there’s nowhere to go and no way to get anywhere in Sweden.
Don’t try!
All the Swedes living outside of Sweden were shipped to an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The island’s name was Lucky Bay, named by some wandering Spaniards in the eighteenth century. My son, William the Destroyer, sank Lucky Bay with a thousand torpedoes on June 14th, ’23.
No joke!
Listen: There is a town in Northern Maine called New Sweden, but it was named before my son was born, and there are no Swedes living there. Go figure? As far as I know, my boy doesn’t even know that New Sweden exists. Lucky New Sweden!
New Sweden sits in the center of a deep wood, and an enormous furrowed potato field surrounds it like a wrinkled shawl. New Sweden is beautiful.
The fields and forests of Old Sweden, however, are not beautiful. They have been buried under countless tons of salt, so they’re nothing to look at. Who did this? My son, William the Destroyer, little Billy boy.
No Joke!
Sweden is dead, dead like Lucky Bay, dead like my wife, dead like my wife’s momma, and dead like my wife’s momma’s sister.
My son went so far as to rename Sweden after himself: Mikhaland. The official phonetic pronunciation is Mike-ha-land. The penalty for mispronunciation is death. However, no one has been convicted of mispronouncing Mikhaland because no one talks about either it or Sweden anymore. Why would anyone want to? After all, Sweden is dead, and what’s Mikhaland but a graveyard? But I’m still talking about my wife, and I just can’t stop.
No joke!
It’s time to leave the dead alone. We need to stop playing with the past.
My boy plays with the past all the time, and he seems to like it. My boy hates Sweden and all things Swedish, I think, because he hates his mother so very much. She died soon after he was born, so he never got to know her very well. He just assumes she was a bad person, and I suppose that’s my fault.
When my wife died, I became very mad. I cursed my wife for dying and leaving me alone with my boy. In my mind my wife became a horrible thing, a witch that had lived only to ruin my life. I spent days storming around the house saying things like:
I hate your dead mother, Bill. I hate that witch!
Or
That Jezebel! She’s the reason I’m so mad all the time, Bill!
Or
If only your momma and her entire family tree were erased, Billy. Maybe then we could be happy!
No joke!
Actually, I loved my wife a great deal, I still do; it’s just that I went out of my head for a little while. This is something that happens to good people all the time, but I prefer not to talk about that too much.
One thing people talk about a lot these days is my son. Everyone wants to know what he wants, what he desires, and what he is planning to do next. They have to, he’s king. I wonder if they’d talk about him as much if they knew what I do about him.
I bet not!
Listen: Both my son and my son’s misspelled name can be blamed on stupidity and booze, by dumb luck. Isn’t that funny?
When I was twenty years old, I impregnated my then girlfriend, Beatrice Ouellette, with a baby boy. I didn’t mean to, but then again, as a rule, no one who ever has an accident ever means to.
Suicides may be the exception.
Nine months later, September 28th, ’00, Beatrice had a baby, and I had to quit the University of Maine’s baseball team and the University of Maine, too. I was going to become a friendly face at Wal-Mart and support my family.
Lucky me!
By the way, baseball no longer exists, not as you would recognize it. It is now played with only one team, on a rectangle, with shotguns. Everybody loses.
I don’t play anymore.
No joke!
Here’s how I messed up the world:
Supra Dupra Beta Chi, a fraternity that used to be on the edge of what used to be known as The University of Maine but is now known to tourists from around the globe as Ground Zero, held a Super Bowl party my Junior year; in the past, it had been the biggest party on campus.
No joke!
I was invited to the party because I was on the baseball team. I was the Short Stop. These days, no one wants to be a Short Stop. The Short Stop is the only player on a baseball team who does not get a gun. Instead, he gets a shovel. He has to be a very lucky fellow to stay alive.
My backwards-looking boy made the new rules for baseball. My backwards-looking boy made the new rules for everything.
I went to Supra Dupra Beta Chi’s Super Bowl party with Beatrice, my now dead wife, and we ate too many chips and drank too many beers.
Thank you, Anheuser-Busch.
Sometimes, in the old days, Beatrice and I would make love, and sometimes we would just screw, it all depended upon our mutual moods. The night of the Supra Dupra Beta Chi Super Bowl party, we were tired and drunk, so we just screwed. We screwed under a pool table in the basement of Supra Dupra Beta Chi. It was cold down there.
After the party, I drove Beatrice home. She lived with her roommate, Debbie, in a horrible apartment above Pat’s Pizza. I kissed her goodnight, and she told me she loved me, and then I drove home.
I lived on the University of Maine campus at the time, in room 134 in Cumberland hall. The room had big widows and a broken heater, so it was always frigid inside. If only my then girlfriend had been frigid, too!
Incidentally, when my son visited the University of Maine in the fall of ’07 with his cy-Borg army, the first thing he did was blow up Cumberland Hall with a dump truck full of dynamite. My son has since blown up not only the entire University of Maine campus, but most of Southern Maine and a good deal of New England, too. You may know my boy as William the Destroyer, but there was once a time when he could barely swing a baseball bat.
Eight weeks after I screwed Beatrice under a pool table, I had dinner with her at Pat’s Pizza.
"I’m pregnant," she said to me over a cheese pizza. Her eyes were wide, and they were glazed, too.
"You are?"
"Yes."
"You’re sure?" I checked my watch.
"Yes, and I want to keep the baby."
"You’re sure?"
"Yes." She rubbed her belly, which, while only housing a microscopic fetus, suddenly looked pudgy to me. It looked swollen; little did I know that there was already a tumor in there. It was as big as an orange. The tumor would continue to grow for three more years and become as big as a dog before it would finally kill her.
To think that I called my wife fat!
"Will you need any help with the baby?" I asked.
"Yes," she said.
"Well, I’ll see what I can do," I said.
Beatrice was twenty-five. "It’s about time, anyway," she said. Her parents were dead, and so were mine, so there was no reason to be ashamed. I moved out of the dorm and planned to spend the rest of my life with Beatrice, my older woman.
Tough luck!
My life, I think, has been a long chain of accidents, some good and some bad, which, for better or worse, have made me the man that I am.
My wife, Beatrice, was in labor with my unborn boy for forty-two hours. Somehow, my unborn boy found a way to turn himself upside down inside of his mother’s womb; he pointed his head in the wrong direction. It was as if he wanted to test the waters of the world with both feet before he dived in head first.
You see, he just didn’t want to stick out.
Beatrice wanted to deliver the baby naturally; that is, she didn’t want to be a salivating fool when her first child came into the world. However, after the first ten hours, she changed her mind. Not only did the labor tire her out, but it also tired out the only available nurse, Doris Daigle. Doris was an alcoholic. When Doris became tired or upset, she drank.
When Mikha finally came into the world, his mother was so exhausted and high, and his nurse was so smashed, that no one noticed that his name was written down incorrectly on his birth certificate.
I suppose we could have had the birth certificate fixed, but we didn’t. Beatrice thought that the freakish name, really no more than gibberish, gave her son even more character.
"He’ll stick out! He’ll stick out!" she cried as she held him for the first time.
Boy, did he ever.
No joke!
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| Howard Gray | Apr 05, 2001 | Kittery, Maine | Truck Driver |
| What a funny story! I really enjoyed this one, and I hope to read something else by this author in the future. | |||
