When you are expected to introduce yourself to a new person or a group, what do you say? Relatively few people logically start with the city or year they were born in. While this is the actual beginning, temporally at least, of their lives - most people tend to give their name and list their profession or their passion. It takes time to realize that the way you tell your own story might be a little different, a little unusual. For most of my youth, when we were going around the room making our introductions, I would say: “My name is Beep, I was born in a pink house on a waterbed.” That is the beginning of my story.
I really don’t know why the color of the house matters, other than it is about as unusual as being born on a waterbed. It tells you that what you are going to experience next is going to be unique. I am unique.
And so that is how my story begins. In Cottage Grove, Oregon, where the movie Stand By Me was filmed. If you haven’t seen the movie, you really should. Rob Rhiner made a masterpiece of Americana with that one. The scenes where the protagonists walk along train tracks between tree covered hills - that is all I know about where I was born other than my father’s stories of driving down dangerous logging roads with thundering trucks bearing down. My family was only in the house in Oregon for a short period of time, and by two years of age I had already traveled down to California and across the USA to the East Coast.
Here is the next part of my story: my parents didn’t have a name for me. My birth certificate says “baby boy.” When I was born, my lungs weren’t quite developed, and I made these little beeping noises in my sleep. My parents, so I was told, turned to one another and said “we have a little Beeper!” And so I was called Beeper, and it was shortened eventually to just “Beep.” A couple years after I was born, they officially named me Julian after Julian Bond the civil rights organizer and Julian Bream the classical guitarist. I went by Beep through high school until I moved to New York when I finally embraced the name Julian and started introducing myself that way.
When my Dad recalled my origin story with just the family around, he would add that it was the Sunshine Motel, in Colorado, in which I was conceived. He knew the time and the place when it happened and that felt kinda special to me. My parents were hippies. I was born in 1976, in December, and they set aside the placenta and afterbirth in a pot near the stove to the utter disgust of my sister and brother who bore witness.
A hero wants to feel like there is something special about their origin which aligns with some prophecy or destiny. I had a unique beginning and held out hope for some sort of fated glory for most of my life. So I started living. I was the child of a single dad in a rent controlled apartment, self conscious, driven and unable to get out of my own way.
When we moved to Massachusetts, my Dad was able to get full custody of my half-sister, my brother and me at the age of three. At the time, in 1979, this was a rarity for a man. He found an apartment through the Cambridge Food Co-Op bulletin board and that is where I grew up. I was a poor white kid in a city full of culture and I was lucky.
