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jeffsharlet on Instagram: "Robert Sharlet, not yet my father, putting himself through college as a taxi driver after seeing Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus as a freshm…"
Robert Sharlet, not yet my father, putting himself through college as a taxi driver after seeing Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus as a freshman on a football scholarship and, per his telling, the next day giving up his place on the team, his scholarship, and his nickname—Rocky—to read books. Not long after this he’d drop out to write a novel — never finished — which meant military service, which led him to the Army Language School in Monterey, where he tried to meet Henry Miller and failed and learned to ride a motorcycle from Joan Baez but did not understand at the time who she was or would be, and also he learned Russian, which gave him a career and a life and inspired his younger brother to also drop out of college for Army Language School, only they assigned him Vietnamese, so he became a torturer, that was the job they gave him, and then a dissident, that was why they chased him, but by then it was too late, he was dying, Agent Purple, big brother to Orange, no shit, that part’s certified, and then he was gone, which is another way of saying dead, and Robert Sharlet, who spoke at possibly the first teach-in on what the U.S. calls the Vietnam War—on the pro-war side—mourned him by teaching what was possibly the first college course on that war, on the my-little-brother-who-is-dead-now-was-right-and-I-was-wrong-side, and also, per Jewish custom for which he did not give a damn—“I have lived a secular life!” were among Robert Sharlet’s last words, delivered as a fuck-off to a hospital priest who offered to find a rabbi, as if dying was a joke involving a bar and maybe a duck, which it is—named his only son for his dead brother. That’s me. Jeff, not Jeffrey. I don’t like the single syllable, the assimilation Robert and Jeff’s father Irving, nee Irwin, sought with both names, the “ff,” god I hate this name. But that’s why it’s Jeff, not Jeffrey, for the mutineer I never knew, for whose death day Robert Sharlet extended his only religious practice once a year, a little electric yarzheit candle, a wire in the shape of a mogen David, glowing orange, over which he’d cry. I am my father’s tears. #apocryphaView all comments
