I’m a private connoisseur of baby names. Beneath humble, socially acceptable wishes only for a healthy baby with ten toes and ten fingers lurk all sorts of indulgent yearnings, and some of them must find their way into that name. Often the name choice seems a natural, organic thing, adhering closely to parents’ personalities. Sometimes, delightfully, the name cuts against the grain.

I’ve got to start at my first time in reform school.  The Lyman School was on the Worcester turnpike about 30 miles from Boston.  The first time I went there, I came in with three other kids.  While we were in the office being registered, a kid we knew came up to us and said, “Tell them you’re Protestant.  That way, you get out from polishing the floors on your hands and knees every Sunday.”

There is among the men who earn the title of Marine a certain joy in self-destruction. I know; I was one of them. We were masochists. We thought of pain as a hammer that shaped us and molded us and it was how we defined ourselves. We never spoke of it in these words but we felt it all the same. In the absurd crucible of fire that was my time in the infantry, I enjoyed seeing parts of myself, parts I hated, destroyed.

Jacques Ferland, a gnomelike figure in a baseball cap and mirror shades from the dollar store, bounded up our steep front steps several times a week for years. He banged  [More…]