You are on page 1of 5

CHAPTER 1

The Early Failure Years


(or How I Failed to Have a Name)

I
was born in a hospital. I was told that my mother
was given nitrous oxide for the birth. As in, she was
totally sedated. The whole labor, totally out of it. My
father used to say it was used for the conception as
well. Just kidding, he never said that. I just wanted to
make a salty joke and blame it on my father. Anyway,
they used strange methods back in the sixties. Maybe her
sedation affected me. I do feel dizzy all the time, and I’m
incredibly lazy, which might have all been connected to
not having heard the agonized screams of my mother as I
came into the world. Just entering the universe to a really
quiet room, but for the nasal mutterings of a Jewish obste‑
trician complaining to a nurse about the cost of his land‑
scaper, can have a lasting effect on one’s personality.
The place of my birth was Worcester, Massachusetts.
Worcester isn’t known for its good hospitals, so I imagine

8 8:59 AM 9781524742164_FailureIs_TX.indd 9 2/27/18 8:59 AM


H. JON BENJAMIN

I was mishandled. I don’t have any visible signs of that,


except for two huge indentions in my skull. I assume for‑
ceps were used. I read once that the name Elliot became
popular in the late nineteenth century because that was
the name of the forceps used in childbirth: the Elliot for‑
ceps. Can you imagine naming your child after the steel
instrument that pulled them out of your vagina? That
shows a real lack of due diligence. When you name your
child after a medical device, it is a pretty telltale sign of an
unhappy marriage. Not many women naming their kids
Eppy today, after the epidural. Just saying. Also, that will
be the last time I will write “just saying,” based on how I
cringed after writing it.
I was named Harry Jon Benjamin. Harry after my pa‑
ternal grandfather and Jon after the misspelling of John.
It appears that there was some discord over my name, so
an untidy agreement was made between my parents
where they would maintain my first name on the birth
certificate but call me by my middle name.
The Harry has always been a buried secret, like an
identity Easter egg, and that mystery has had its own odd
effects as well, probably due to the fact that my dad’s fa‑
ther died at a really young age, so passing on his name
would be like passing on a curse. But they still gave it
anyway, with the caveat of deciding to never utter it. So,
as a result, I am just subtly cursed by the ghosts of my
ancestry. It’s a very Jewish tendency to honor and excise
the past simultaneously. ( Jewish voice) “He’s named after
his grandfather, God rest his soul, a name that will never

10

9781524742164_FailureIs_TX.indd 10 2/27/18  8:59 AM


FAILURE IS AN OPTION

ever be uttered in this house, God forbid!” That’s what’s


in my name. A real Jewish cocktail of guilt, pride, and
necrophobia.
Still, Jon is a pretty solid mainstream name, so I could
blend in, until teachers read out the spelling. It’s never fun
to get made fun of for the fact your name is spelled wrong.
Like, “Your mom’s so dumb, she spelled John wrong.” Or
“How dare you sully the memory of  John the Baptist,
who baptized Jesus and whose head was cut clean off by
King Herod just ’cause his vindictive daughter asked him
to!” Anyway, no one is ever completely scarred by a name,
except for, maybe, that guy named Tiny Ichicock.
My earliest memories are of my parents cleaning. My
father owned an electrical supply store that sold lighting
and bulbs and circuit breakers, etc., so as a family, we had
access to a lot of c­ utting-​­edge electrical equipment. You
know how in the fifties, there was a rush to be the first
home on the block to purchase a TV set? It was momen‑
tous, a real sea change for families. That “moment” came
for us in the form of the NuTone Central Vacuum System.
Because of my father’s position, we were definitely the
first home in our neighborhood to install the vac system,
which held the promise of changing everything for home
cleaning. It was basically a network of ports in the wall of
any room that could connect a vacuum hose to a central
unit in the basement. A comprehensive cleaning system,
like the 2001: A Space Odyssey of vacuum systems. A real
Valhalla for compulsive cleaners.
And shit, did they use it. In my memory, most of my

11

8  8:59 AM 9781524742164_FailureIs_TX.indd 11 2/27/18  8:59 AM


H. JON BENJAMIN

childhood was spent vacuuming or hearing the sound of


vacuuming. Giving my parents this technology was like
giving the Union forces the Gatling ­gun—​­you can do so
much more damage so much more quickly. And with
more frequency. The key element to the NuTone vac was
that you could increase the sheer amount of “cleaning”
opportunities in any given moment. As in, it encouraged
­rapid-​­response cleaning. Like, if one piece of lint was on
the floor, one could, or dare I say, should, plug in the vac
and deal with it like it was a medical emergency.
With the vacuum in place, our house was on its way to
becoming “clear.” As in, a perfectly s­ elf-​­contained clean‑
ing environment. A real biosphere of neuroses. The plain‑
tive wails of the NuTone vac system would wake me in the
morning and put me to sleep at night. A giant sucking
sound, if you will. And I never knew when and where it
was going to come. The threat was always nigh. I would
lie awake in bed and long for the simpler times, when
vacuums were manual.
From the eyes of this child, this was just the way things
were. Futuristic cleaning all the time and without any
foreseeable slackening. The sheer force of constant clean‑
ing was, of course, the veneer of order for a bubbling
chaos beneath, and new technologies would only serve to
stiffen that veneer. To this day, I can’t clean. And that
seems counterintuitive to the bulk of my upbringing,
which was consumed with it. Maybe it was rebellion, or
maybe I’m still in a state of shock, but to this day, I wipe
off a table as if you handed a baby monkey a wet cloth.

12

9781524742164_FailureIs_TX.indd 12 2/27/18  8:59 AM


FAILURE IS AN OPTION

I still get bizarre pleasure in watching people clean,


though. One of the first things I did after making some
money was hire a cleaning woman to come to my studio
apartment in New York City. She was young and cute,
but it was less sexual attraction than an attraction to the
cleaning. I would sit and marvel at it, which made for an
uncomfortable situation. There was always this very pres‑
ent energy coming from her, saying, “Why are you always
hanging around here in your small apartment and watch‑
ing me clean?” My intentions were very easy to misread,
and it was a hard distinction to communicate, like, “I’m
not gawking at you the way you’re thinking. I just like to
watch people clean. Because of my childhood. Seriously I
just need to watch!”

13

8  8:59 AM 9781524742164_FailureIs_TX.indd 13 2/27/18  8:59 AM

You might also like