Cover

Title Page

Dedication

DEDICATION

For Lisa, Cole, and Emma

Who are they?

Epigraphs

EPIGRAPHS

Maybe out of everything I thought I knew, there was nothing I was more wrong about than my own life story.

—Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

So some of him lived but the most of him died.

—Rudyard Kipling, “The Vampire”

The swollen hollow of my wobbly heart.

—Bob Mould, “Thirty Dozen Roses”

If I Told You

IF I TOLD YOU

(2007)

I am not Art Barbara.

That’s not my birth name. But at the risk of contradicting myself within the first few lines of a memoir, I am Art Barbara.

Imagine my personage, the whole of me (I prefer that phrase to “spirit” or “soul”) exists in Plato’s World of Forms. That me, the one slicked in the amber of Greek philosophy, is Art Barbara. Sorry, Mom and Dad, the name you assigned was a valiant effort, but it does not sum up who I was, who I am, or who I will become.

Art Barbara is bold, declarative, striking, and upon first hearing it spoken your brow furrows, head tilts, and mouth smirks. Admit it; your face is in thrall and acting on its own. You might know a Barbara or even an Art, but you haven’t met, nor do you know, Art Barbara.

However, the initial “Oh” upon the shores of appellatory discovery soon gives way to incredulousness, to there-must-be-some-mistake. Let’s be honest, here (and you have my promise I will always be painfully honest) the name tries too hard. It is more than a little ridiculous, shading toward pathetic (a word derived from the Greek pathos, of course), particularly when spoken with a Boston or Rhode Island accent as the coterie of r’s disappear into obnoxiously long ah’s. Even without the accent, there’s a slant-rhyme clunkiness to the first two syllables, or three if you insist upon pronouncing Barbara as Bar-bar-ah as opposed to the shortened Bar’bra. Regardless, the combination of the first two syllables, the Art-Bar, forces the speaker to comply, to slow down and enunciate the harsh coupling before dumping an auditory body into the dark water of r’s and a’s. I make no claim to be an expert of phonesthetics (the study of inherent pleasantness of the sound of words, according to Wikipedia), but clearly Art Barbara is no cellar door.

I saw the name written on the bathroom wall of Club Babyhead, spring of 1991. The letters were capitalized, angular slashes of neon-green ink; a cave painting glowing in the lovely darkness of the early 1990s. I have never forgotten it. And by the end of this memoir, neither will you.

Isn’t time strange? Time is not linear but a deck of cards that is continuously shuffled.