This one also comes with a promotional animation I made:
The Character
It all started with a book, as these things always do. I was reading the biography of Miyamoto Musashi, arguably the most famous samurai that ever existed, and I came across a very interesting character. He was an old, very wise samurai called Kakubei, an old name, no longer used in Japan anymore. I liked the character a lot and the name struck some deep-rooted, ancient memory in my DNA (I have 0% Japanese DNA, but nonetheless). In the book, Kakubei told his nephew not to fuck with Musashi, who would undoubtedly kill him if challenged, but, alas, wisdom and youth is wasted on the young as we all know, so the nephew did not heed Kakubei’s warning and, in classic Epic Story fa went to challenge Musashi.
At that point in his life, Musashi had had enough of killing and only fought with a boken (a wooden practice sword); still, he was one of the best swordsmen around and of course killed the nephew with a blow to the head. I remember yelling at the book “They told you so, dickhead! Kakubei told you not to fuck with Musashi but nooo, you had to challenge him, you idiot! Well, now you’re dead, that’s what you get!”
This is the part in the story when you would expect the bloody vendetta to begin, where the Miyamotos and the Capulets (or whatever the hell the nephew’s surname was) started to hate each other for all eternity, be sworn enemies and make the streets of ancient Kyoto run red with blood. But Kaubei kept his cool and was smart and wise throughout the whole ordeal, I liked him even more for it. Basically he was a very interesting yet minor character in the book; there were some other things I liked about him but I can’t remember them because I read that book more than 25 years ago and my memory these days will throw a tantrum, kick and scream and refuse to breathe if you ask it to remember more than a couple hours past.
My ex-wife was pregnant with our first son at the time I was reading this book and I started, jokingly, referring to our unborn child as Kakubei. She hated it. She told me, “Stop calling him that!” But I couldn’t help myself, I did it if only just to needle her. I would put my head on her belly and speak to our son and call him Kakubei, “Kakubei how are you doing in there? When you’re born you’re going to be a true samurai”. It drove her crazy. So of course, being the sensitive husband that I was, I kept at it.
The Foreshadowing
It got to the point that I actually suggested to my ex-wife that we call our son Kakubei. She got apoplectic, red in the face, outraged, incredulous, offended, etc. My ex-wife is a very patient, loving, caring person, so to see her like that sort of scared me. She said “We are not naming our son Kakubei! Nobody will be able to pronounce that! You can forget that shit, over my dead body will I have a son named Kakubei!!!”
Being the sensitive, empathetic person that I am, I sensed a slight opposition to the idea. “How about a middle name, then?” I inquired hopefully. “Absolutely not! Not even as a third name or a fucking nickname, no Kakubei anywhere near my son!”
“So… we’ll think about it, yeah?” I said.
The birth
Fast-forward a couple of months and her water broke around 2 am. We called the doctor and were told to come to the hospital when her cervix was dilated to 8 centimetres or some shit like that. I don’t know for sure, I was very nervous and scared and wasn’t too sure what a cervix was; fortunately she was calm and knew all the details, instructions, etc in that intuitive way women have of knowing things that are beyond the ken of mere males. Two hours later she woke me up again and told me it was time to go. In a panic I was trying very hard to suppress, we went. The hospital was an hour drive’s away because this was L.A. and she wanted to give birth in the hospital she attended Pregnagym at. Pregnagym was supposedly a gym for pregnant women, where they taught her exercises that wouldn’t hurt the baby, but I suspected it was a secret cult where they brainwashed women because my ex-wife kept coming home with some really outlandish ideas like redoing the kitchen and installing a swimming pool in our garden which would cost only $20,000. Or maybe this was just L.A.
We didn’t live in L.A. though, we lived in Simi Valley, the first town in Ventura County which borders the monster that is Los Angeles County to the North East. So the drive was long. I kept asking my ex-wife how she felt, how the baby was doing and what was going on. Eventually she told me to shut the fuck up and drive and stop nagging her. So we drove in the terrifying dark and silence.
At the hospital, after checking all our insurance details, triple-checking our IDs, checking that we had non-expired credit cards in case the insurance didn’t cover something or other, checking that we had an active bank account with a minimum balance, checking our mortgage to make sure we weren’t defaulting on it, checking we had enough close relatives that could be turned into indentured servants in case we missed a payment, checking that my current employer was financially liquid enough to be sued in the event we were both sent to debtor’s prison; basically performing a thorough and intimate cavity search of our finances, which is the most important thing when you give birth in the US; we were finally admitted in so one of the nurses could take a look at us. The doctor was nowhere to be seen. The nurse took one look and said my ex-wife wasn’t dilated enough so we should “chill” in a room. Chilling in a room meant my poor ex-wife had to battle the contractions while I stood around like some useless piece of meat, not knowing what to do, so after exhausting all my interior decorating ideas, I kept helpfully asking my ex-wife how she felt, even though it was obvious she was in constant pain, until she told me, again, to shut the fuck up and let her breathe, at which point, being the sensitive and useful husband that I was, I quietly sulked in a corner for a while.
This went on for hours but still no dilation. Finally the doctor came in alarmed at the holdup, I think he had a golf game that afternoon, and decided this would simply not do, he did not want to be late for his tee-off so he injected my ex-wife with Pitocin. This is an evil concoction, invented by impatient male doctors who have better things to do than hang around waiting for a woman to give birth, designed to augment labour, which, in practical terms means that the contractions are much more frequent and much more painful. My ex-wife wanted to have a natural birth and refused any sort of drugs, including an epidural, we’d even attended so-called natural birth training together which really consisted of the teacher telling the women that they had to try to breathe and withstand the immense pain of childbirth and the men to shut the fuck up and stroke their partner’s back and do anything they could to make them not want to murder somebody because of the relentless pain. We really didn’t need a whole course for this with 8 sessions or whatever it was, this could have been communicated in a quick memo but then the teacher wouldn’t get her payment I guess.
This agony went on for hours. My ex-wife in bed screaming at each contraction and me, looking at a machine that predicted the contraction and helpfully letting her know, “here comes another big one” as if we were spotting waves by the ocean and she wouldn’t have known it if not for my timely intervention. I think the massive pain was a pretty good hint but the nurse had actually given me instructions to look at the machine and let the mum-to-be know when a big contraction was coming. I think this was more for my benefit than hers, to keep me busy and thinking I was actually being useful so that fathers-to-be didn’t make as big a nuisance of themselves. Surprisingly, my ex-wife didn’t seem to appreciate all my hard work with the contraction machine. Women can be so ungrateful!
The doctor showed up again, ever concerned about the time and the inconvenience for him if we delayed further and decided to cut her up. Not a C-section but cut her vagina so the baby could fit through. Yup, the man took his golf seriously. I told him to fuck off and then consulted with my ex-wife. She said, “Whatever, just get this damn thing out of me!” “Alright, I told her but I really think you should go for the epidural or you’ll pass out.” In between screams and curses she told me to get it sorted, fuck the natural childbirth bullshit, fuck the doctors, fuck the hospital and fuck whoever invented such a painful and barbaric way to bring new beings into the world. Being the intuitive make that I am, I sensed she was in some discomfort and didn’t want to have a long discussion on the matter so I told the nurse, because the doctor had fucked off again to watch cat videos, that if they were going to butcher her, then they had to give her an epidural. There was some faffing about because the nurse said it was too late for an epidural and the doctor wanted to cut her up right now, we had some words, most of them unprintable, and she went off to get the epidural ready.
With the magic of morphine now coursing through her, she was feeling much, much better. My ex-wife, the nurse and I (in that order) pushed and pushed and pushed (well, the nurse and I watched, she giving instructions, me encouraging my ex-wife with helpful phrases like “push, push” which was really parroting what the nurse told her, while she did all the work) until we could see the baby’s head crowning. Out went to the nurse and in swept the doctor, whose name we didn’t even know, whose face we’d never seen without a surgical mask, annoyed not only because of this unacceptable delay but also because we’d interrupted his cat-viewing activities; cut her up, delivered the baby, cut the umbilical cord and rushed out to his precious golf appointment without saying much.
My Son
Yes, I know it’s a cliché, but seeing my son born was one of the most amazing experiences in my life. Thing is, I’m not really a people person and was a lot less so back then, I’m more of an animal person and of course I’d seen animals born before, especially puppies from our dogs. In fact, there is nothing more cute and cuddly to me than a puppy. If you offered me a choice between a baby and a puppy, I would pick puppy every time, no hesitation, back then children were an annoyance to me, best avoided; so I wasn’t really ready for how I felt seeing my son born. I actually don’t have appropriate words to describe it, I think it’s one of those things that you have to experience to understand, all I can say is that for one brief moment in my existence I suddenly understood the universe and my purpose in it. That purpose was to take care of this tiny lifeform, provide for them and their mum and make sure they turned out to be better being than I was.
Despite the fact that he came out screaming and purple and ugly and covered in all sorts of effluvia, with a misshapen head, I couldn’t help but feel love and wonder and amazement at the sight of him.
He was quickly towelled off and handed to mum who was exhausted and about to pass out after almost 12 hours of pushing, pitocin and pain. A little later another nurse came by to take him off to get properly cleaned up and asked me if I wanted to come. Of course I immediately said yes, I wasn’t letting my son out of my sight, as everyone knows, hospitals are notorious dens of thievery where babies are swapped, misplaced and sold to the highest bidder and I didn’t want to end up with some other bugger’s questionable offspring, what if he turned out like Trump or some horrible shit like that?
Off we went, the nurse carrying my child, me as a bodyguard, checking out all the exits and clocking every suspicious coat-wearing character I saw. What I thought would be a nice, warm, custom-made baby bathtub constructed of carbon fibre, space-age rubber and bits of the Space Shuttle with some complicated mechanism only trained nurses could operate, turned out to be nothing more than a vulgar, run-of-the-mill faucet in a metallic sink where the nurse unceremoniously dunked my poor newborn son under the running water. He fucking hated it! He started screaming and turned a bright red that I’d only seen in cartoon characters on TV and not just his face but his whole body turned that beetroot-red colour. It was incredible and quite funny, poor chap. Alarmed at my son’s chameleonic, mutant-like abilities I inquired of the nurse if this was normal or if he was having some sort of seizure and shouldn’t we call someone; she assured me it was normal, all babies turned red when they put them under the faucet she said. It did make me wonder why they didn’t build that space-age bathtub I had in mind.
The Misdeed
Later, another nurse came by with our son’s birth certificate, this was the official document that both parents had to sign and make sure that everything was spelled properly because it would then go to the county registrar and changing or amending it was not a simple procedure. She gave the document to mum of course because women are usually much more competent than men, even women who’ve just been through a 12 hour birthing ordeal. Being the sensitive husband and chivalrous knight in shining armour that I am, I snatched it from my ex-wife’s hands and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it, you just rest”. And I swear I wasn’t planning on doing this, it wasn’t like I’d hatched this devious plan and had been rehearsing it, it just came to me in the spur of the moment, I wrote down my son’s name as we’d both agreed to it which was Gonzalo (nobody in the US was able to pronounce that either) and then surreptitiously added Kakubei as his middle name. My gamble was that mum was so out of it because of exhaustion and morphine that she wouldn’t notice I’d snuck in the contentious name. After filling it out, I handed the paper to my ex-wife and told her “just sign right here, everything is taken care of.” She signed while the nurse eyed us suspiciously, I snatched the paper away again before mum had too much of a chance to look at it properly, gave it to the nurse and ushered her out of the room before she could comment on the name and spoil everything.
At Home
We were released from the hospital and this was the scariest drive of my life. We had this tiny, new creature in the back seat and I was petrified to hurt it by driving too fast or turning too quickly, I was so scared I asked the nurse if she could come home with us when she came out to check we had the proper baby seat for a newborn infant, she just laughed. But I was still terrified, this thing didn’t come with any instructions and I had no idea what to do. I was driving so slowly that people keep honking their horns at me and, this being L.A. insulting me and threatening to shoot me if I didn’t get out of the way. I kept yelling at them that I had a newborn baby in the car and that they could just fuck off. It was a long, fun drive.
We finally got home, ushered the baby out of the car and into the house as if he were made of nitroglycerin and the slightest jostle would set him off, exploding into a million pieces. Our dogs, we had two female boxers at the time, were great with him, they immediately understood that it was a newborn mammal and thus extremely fragile and were very gentle with him. In fact, the youngest doggie, Baturay, days later started lactating in response to our son’s hunger cries. I looked this up and learned that it was quite normal in a pack for other bitches to lactate when the alpha female dog gave birth. Cool.
The Notice
A couple of weeks went by and we busied ourselves with this new and strange life caring for this new, unknown entity who demanded attention and care 24/7. I soon had to go back to work because in the US, land of uncivilised heathens that it is, there is no parental leave for fathers! And mother’s get a very, very short time. Fortunately we’d agreed that my ex-wife would quit her job to take care of our son and I would go to work, join the rat-race and indenture myself to provide for everyone.
One day, a packet came in the mail, it was very official-looking. My ex-wife opened it and said “Oh look, it’s from the county registrar, it’s the official birth certificate, how nice.” I steeled myself. She read the thing and her expression changed from tired complacency to murderous rage.
“What the fuck is this?” She shouted at me. “What?” I asked innocently, “What’s going on?”
“What the fuck have you done?” She continued.
“What, what’s wrong?” I asked, stalling for time while I figured out an escape route.
“You named our child Kakubei in the fucking birth certificate!” She accused.
“Oh that.” I said. “Yes, well… let me explain.” But I didn’t get a chance.
“How could you do that? I told you we weren’t naming him after some fucking samurai in some fucking book you read! It’s absurd! And nobody will be able to pronounce his name!”
I was thinking that nobody was able to pronounce Gonzalo anyway so what was the difference? But of course I didn’t say that, being the selfless, helpful husband that I was, I said “Well, the thing is I showed you the paper with the name on it and since you didn’t object I figured everything was OK.”
“What? When?”
“In the hospital, after you gave birth.”
“I was drugged up to the gills, you mutherfucker! I wasn’t reading any pieces of paper in that state! Much less checking for traitorous scum like you not to surreptitiously sneak in forbidden names!!!”
“Well, don’t worry, it’s a really cool name.”
“I can’t believe you did this!”
This went on for a while and the only thing that saved me was that I happened to be holding our son Kakubei and using him as a human shield to ward her off. Eventually I was able to calm her down a bit telling her to think of the cool story our son would have to tell about his name and that we could always change it if it really offended her that much.
She was quite pissed off at me for some time but slowly came round to the name after holding off and refusing to use it for the first few weeks. By simple attrition it crept up on her because that is the only thing I called him and, eventually, she started using the name as well. We shortened it to Kaku to make it easier.
To this day, 25 years later, everyone still refers to our son as Kaku.
My first grandson ! I remember cuddling him sleep on the living room sofa so the tired parents could get some sleep, and a wild eyed father appearing at 4am because he had not found him in his crib…I can still feel his warmth.
Buena 👍