You have to go back generations to find anyone in my wife Allegra’s family who isn’t Italian. Farina on one side, Ruggiero on the other. So after she became pregnant, we began to talk—to haggle, really—about what our son’s name should be. Nino, Vito, Luca, Renzo. I couldn’t imagine these coming out of my Jewish mouth. But more than being conflicted about Italian boys’ names, I was conflicted about boys. I wanted to have a daughter. Or, at least, I was scared to have a boy. I did not enjoy boyhood, and I struggled to imagine my son, whatever he was called, having to go through it himself. I could barely imagine living through it again, even by proxy.
When I was young, I spent a lot of time considering how things worked. How were the pyramids built? Whose idea was Nightmare on Elm Street? Why is that man wearing a winter hat in the summer? I’d imagine the board meetings about products I’d see advertised on TV, thinking of all the mechanics involved from ideation to production. Knowing instinctively that every aspect of life consisted of a million moving parts was overwhelming if illuminating, like I had a dull type of X-ray vision. It also made me very sensitive. In second grade, my class was asked to submit holiday wishes to the local paper for potential publication in a special edition. Mine was chosen: “I wish that everyone could have what they wanted because if everyone had what they wanted then no one would want what anyone else has.” All those thoughts felt like a vise. It was around this time I started to bang my head against the wall. In my young logic, it was like I was trying to crack open my skull and prison-break my brain. It didn’t work.
There were pockets of boyhood happiness, usually when I could get out of my own head. I was lean and flexible, a naturally good tumbler, so I took up gymnastics. This was the early ’90s, and my coach would blast Ru Paul’s “Supermodel” in practice. I loved the song and learned all the words. I didn’t know what a drag queen was. When I knew I was going to miss a class, I told my friend Craig to send along a message to our coach: Tell him that I said “work it.” I got good enough that I outgrew my casual classes. My dad took me to visit an austere training facility where, if I signed up, I would need to commit to practice multiple days a week. Instead of turning something I loved into competition, I quit the sport.
I always looked for unique ways to feel grown-up, but, trapped in the suburbs, I didn’t have a lot of options. In sixth grade, I started to grow out my hair. For a little while, I wore it in pigtails. Two older kids cornered me at the end of the school day once. “Are you a boy or a girl?” they asked. I was a boy, of course, but apparently not the kind they’d seen. Kurt Cobain, who once wore a dress, was one of my role models, but he was not long for this world. I started to wear boxer shorts because they were more grown-up. I’d get them a little bit big, and have the bottoms stick out of my shorts so everyone would know my underwear of choice had an adult flavor. But I wasn’t quite grown up enough to do my own laundry, so when I bled on a white pair, my mom noticed.
The pediatrician asked me if perhaps I had been wiping too aggressively. I had not. A colonoscopy was ordered, and its findings showed my small intestine was deeply inflamed. I was diagnosed with colitis, a disease that’s both painful and embarrassing. Puberty is strange enough; it’s even harder when you have to give yourself medicated enemas. If I was beginning to find some tentative freedom of expression in clothing, style, and the use of my body, colitis redirected that energy into intense focus on what was or was not coming out of my butt. Before, I was trying to simply get out of my head. Now I wanted out of my body too.
I frequently fantasized about becoming Krang, one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ enemies. Krang was an evil genius who was a brain inside a series of clear containers, most appealingly installed in the torso of a mechanical giant. It seemed pretty ideal. Instead of a robot I got a temporary colostomy bag. I was already short, but medication further stunted my growth. In a cruel pun on maturity, instead of a cool beard, steroids caused peach fuzz to grow all over my face. I refused to shave it because that meant acknowledging it. When my rectum started leaking, I stuffed my underwear with a washcloth until my mom had an improvement: a sanitary pad. She stuck it to my underwear while I was on all fours in my bed, naked from the waist down, pretending not to exist.
I had a television in my room and watched a lot of MTV while convalescing. I moved from alternative rock to punk to the avant-garde and finally to hardcore punk. I bought my first Black Flag tape at a chain store in the mall. I saved the receipt, because somehow I knew it would be important. “Depression’s got a hold on me/Depression’s gonna kill me,” their singer, Henry Rollins, sang. It felt like if it didn’t kill him, he would surely kill you. It was how I felt, and this guy was screaming it. Not writing it down in a diary. Not telling his child psychiatrist. Bellowing it.
Kurt Cobain wore cardigans. Rollins wore shorts and no shirt and slowly covered his torso with tattoos, including ones for his own band. Was it ego or pride? I loved it either way, because I had neither. I used my bar mitzvah money to buy his foundational documents: Black Flag’s Damaged, on cassette, and his memoir, Get in the Van. He lived in a shed and cut up his arms in order to feel. He wrote letters to complex women he loved. When he performed, his insides leapt out of him. I was stuck in my bedroom, but maybe one day I wouldn’t be. I learned every word of Damaged. I had a poster of its cover up on my bedroom wall, Rollins punching his reflection in the mirror, breaking it into a million pieces. He felt like garbage and hated himself too! Plus he had a lot of muscles. I could not have invented a more appropriate role model if I tried.
The album Damaged ends with Rollins speaking directly to you. “My name’s Henry,” he starts off. “You’re with me now.” The song moves sludgily, as opposed to the vicious pep of the tracks before. In between lyrics, Rollins growls. Is he crying? Groveling? Melting? The song ends by closing out the world. “It's my mind where it's all dark and no one comes in/Nobody comes in/Damaged/My damage/No one comes in/Stay out!” I’d spent the first part of my adolescence searching for a unique way to be, trying to be playful. And then it got kneecapped. I didn’t choose to dissociate from the outside world, it kind of chose to dissociate with me. But here was Rollins making a choice to be how I was. It gave me agency, even if nothing changed.
As I listen to Black Flag 25 years later, the power is still there, but it’s tinged with nostalgia. Henry Rollins is a gray-haired man now, a musical enthusiast who does some acting and comedy, writes and performs spoken word. He was excellent as a body man in the Michael Mann movie Heat. He puts up a lot of funny Instagrams. He seems like a guy who used to feel bad but doesn’t anymore. I feel a wave of sadness, thinking about being so small and being so attracted to such angry music. But even if it was grim salvation, it was salvation nonetheless. You could be tough when you felt bad. And you didn’t have to feel bad forever.
A pair of surgeries in my teens curtailed some of the most pressing physical complications of my diagnosis. But its emotional gunk stuck around. Once I was on my own, in college and beyond, I sank further into myself, afraid of sharing my body with anyone. I cut relationships short before they got close; I dated women who treated me poorly. Any time I wasn’t at work I was horizontal, either in bed or on the couch. I fed myself exclusively with cut mango I bought at the bodega. I’d made it through a difficult adolescence, but adulthood wasn’t without its miseries. Around 30, I made an active choice to get better.
I’d taken a job with a lot of responsibilities and was scared I would crack. I’d become good at work, because I could do it without focusing on myself. But eventually work wasn’t enough of a distraction. My brain constantly felt under water, having not made much progress from the feelings I’d had as a boy. I started seeing a therapist again. He fell asleep in a few sessions. He also helped give me the leg up I needed.
Things came together when I met Allegra. She was very nice to me, and I was ready to not be angry anymore. We settled in easily, and though she had no interest in hardcore punk, she has nurtured my love of Henry Rollins. With some disposable income, I’d begun to buy by the ton Rollins Band shirts, merch for Henry’s project after Black Flag. Most of them featured an illustration of the enormous angry sun he has tattooed on his back, with the words “Search and destroy” written above its rays. He describes the pain of getting that tattoo—pain he chose—in Get in the Van. I bought every Rollins Band shirt I could.
I always wanted kids, but I was scared they’d have a difficult childhood like mine. Anything I could do to unburden them, I would. I know an American guy named Pascal who clarified his name by explaining that his parents were Francophiles. He’s in his 40s. I was insistent we give our son a plain name. If not, I imagined him feeling obliged to explain the nuances of his heritage every time he introduced himself, a mnemonic twinge of annoyance at his parents for making his life that much more fraught. I wanted him to be his own person from the start—to not feel any onus from his parents to live up to a persona he may not want to inhabit. It’s not only that I didn’t want his book to be judged by its cover, it’s that I didn’t want it to have a cover at all.
When Allegra said she wanted him to have an Italian name, all I could imagine was someone sticking out. If he was named John, no one would notice him. If he wanted to be a freak, he could figure it out for himself. It didn’t need to be preordained. Being a boy and being sensitive meant pain. Before he was born, before he even existed, I felt for him.
After a light dustup early in her pregnancy, we decided to put the name conversation on the shelf. Nine months of tension seemed unnecessary. But people asked about it constantly. We deflected, started saying we’d name him Frank Ocean Schnipper. Allegra kept her list of names and I kept mine, searching for plainness. In my dreams. Henry might be a nice tribute. Allegra didn’t hate it.
Allegra’s water broke late on a Tuesday night this past February. Our son’s birth was traumatic, with an emergency C-section and a good deal of blood loss. When they pulled him out, I was sitting beside Allegra in the operating room. She was in and out of consciousness and puking. The baby was in the corner, getting cleaned up by the pediatricians. I started crying hysterically behind my protective eyewear. After a few minutes, a doctor put this bloody globule wrapped in a blanket in my arms. I held him up to Allegra’s eye level. She didn’t really clock it. A few minutes later, they kicked me out to finish sewing her up. They wheeled her out around 4 a.m. and he started feeding, just like they said he would. He had a truly unbelievable amount of hair.
He seemed like a cool baby from the start. He slept well enough, didn’t cry too much, made funny faces. When the nurses swaddled him, we said he looked like a burrito, so we called him Baby Burrito for a day or two while we tried to figure out his name, ginger with each other after the trauma of his birth.
Allegra had come to accept that I would veto all the Italian names—that he’d end up with one of my boring choices. She’d warmed to Arthur, she said. But after weathering such a difficult initiation to the world, she felt he could handle something punchier. Renzo was the Italian name she liked best for a funky little dude. If she could have that, she said, I could do whatever stupid thing I wanted with his middle name. After what she’d gone through, she could have said she wanted to name him Adolf and I would have agreed. In a friendly brainstorm, we’d come up with something ridiculous—the outer limits of pizzazz. But it had stayed rattling around the back of our minds nonetheless. On his second full day of life, the baby took a shit that was like an entire tube of polenta being squeezed out a pinhole. It arced like a rainbow. What else could we do? Renzo Rollins Schnipper it was.
Last year, I actually interviewed Henry Rollins. I told him I had discovered Damaged in my early teens. He said that he felt bad for me. A month after Renzo was born, we took him to the pediatrician for a regular check-in. We had a list of typical questions about breastfeeding and sleep training. But we also wanted to know why Renzo would sometimes make a jerky movement—something I could only describe as headbanging. It seemed like a violent thing for such a tiny baby. The doctor told us not to worry, that the headbanging wasn’t unusual. “In fact,” he said, “he’s doing it to soothe himself.”
