I have had three names in my life, and none of them was chosen by me.
The first one was given in Moscow. Igor. A perfectly good name, an old name, a name with weight. In school it was written on the top of my notebooks in blue ink. On documents it sat next to a photograph of a serious young man in a shirt that was too big. In the marriage it was the name a wife said softly when she was asking a question she already knew the answer to. In the business it was the name on the door, painted in gold, on a plaque that cost more than the furniture.
Igor was not a bad man. He was tired. He was ambitious. He was confused about most things and certain about the wrong ones. He thought he knew what he wanted and he was wrong about the shape of it, though he was right about the size. He wanted a life that felt bigger than it was, and he got one, and it broke him, and then he had to leave.
I do not hate Igor. That took years. For a long time after Moscow I could not say his name without feeling something sharp in my chest. Now I can. I understand him. I was him. He did the best he could with the brain he had at the time, and the brain he had at the time was not a good brain. That is not a tragedy. That is just a man.
The second name I do not use. I tried it in Paris. I do not remember who suggested it. It was shorter than Igor, softer, the kind of name that fits in a French mouth. I used it for two months. It did not stick. Not because people did not accept it — they did — but because I kept forgetting to answer to it. That is the thing about names. You can pick one, but you cannot pick the one your body answers to. Your body answers to what it has always answered to, until one day it does not, and you do not get to decide when.
The third name was not chosen. That is the important part. Igor had been fading for years. I tried the second name and it slid off. Then one evening in Oakland a man at the bar heard Igor and heard Garry, and something in me said yes. That is all. A yes I did not plan.
I do not know what Garry is. I know what Igor was, and I know what Garry does. Garry carries things at a bar. Garry wears a necklace made of corks. Garry sits on a plastic stool with a beer and watches the street. Garry talks to strangers when the mood is right and stays quiet when it is not. Garry does not have a business and does not want one. Garry does not have a wife and does not want to want one. Garry has a room above a garage with a fig tree outside the window, and a box under the bed with the rest of his life in it, and a set of habits he did not plan and does not examine.
That is not a philosophy. That is a description. I am telling you what is, not what it means. You can decide what it means. I have stopped deciding things like that.
People say to me sometimes, you know, you have really reinvented yourself. I do not like that sentence. I did not reinvent anything. I stopped fighting. That is different. Igor was not a mask that Garry took off. Igor was a room that was too small, and Garry is what happened when the walls stopped pretending to be walls. There was no moment. There was no ceremony. There were years of getting it wrong, and then there was a bar in Oakland, and then there was a man who answered to a name he did not choose.
That is how most people change, I think. Not in a flash. Not on a retreat. In the small arithmetic of not correcting people when they get your name wrong.
I did not set out to become Garry. I set out to leave Moscow, and then Bangkok happened, and then India, and then Laos, and then Hong Kong, and then Paris, and then Oakland. Somewhere in there, Igor ran out. I do not know when. I do not know which country did it. I only know that one day I looked at myself in a bar mirror in Temescal and did not recognize the man in the reflection, and I did not mind.
That is the whole story. If you were waiting for a revelation, this is not that kind of story. This is the story of a man who did not want anything for a while, and then did not mind, and then was fifty-five, and then looked up and realized he had been Garry for years without ever saying so out loud.
I am saying it now.
I do not know what comes next. I have never known what comes next. For the first time in my life, that does not bother me. I have a fig tree and a bar and a box under the bed and a necklace around my neck. I have a question mark where a plan used to be. That is enough. That is more than enough. That is, honestly, more than I ever expected to have.
If you have read all ten of these, then you know more about me than most people I meet in bars. That is strange. It is also fine. The camera was on, and I did not turn it off. That is the whole story of this website, and of me, and of how Igor stopped being Igor and became something else that does not need a name quite as much.
Anyway.
The bar opens at four.
