Letter Perfect
Loving a JAB in the eye
By John Bridges
I have good initials. They spell something. They spell the word “JAB.” For the sake of my initials, and my initials only, I was the envy of every high-school senior in Alabama in 1968.
I remember 1968 as the golden year of the monogram. It was the year in which, at least in Alabama, so it seemed, literacy had finally triumphed. Public education had vanquished the vacant, empty stare of ignorance. Mothers were embroidering their daughters’ initials on pocketbooks; clothing stores were offering free monogramming on the cuffs of boys’ pink button-down-collar Arrow shirts.
Under the smoking tree, boys with great, greased waves of hair were still wearing zip-up leather jackets with cigarette holes in the linings. In the restrooms, their girlfriends were still wadding up toilet paper and stuffing it into their bras. But these were not the young people of Alabama who were going anywhere. These were not the cheerleaders or the Student Council officers or the football players or the members of the Beta Club. Under the smoking tree it was as if boys, and even their girlfriends, were angry at their very identities, as if they all wanted to fade into one another and be forgotten, as if they did not want to be noticed at all.
In the act of monogramming, however, the youth of tomorrow were proclaiming the health of their egos and the happy cooperative spirits of their superegos too. They were setting themselves out from the crowd, wearing their identities as proud, inimitable ornaments.
All the monograms were Old English, all capital letters. They were all embroidered in bright Kelly green. The people who wore them might as well have been a pick-up collection of Reed & Barton coffee spoons. Unless you looked at them very closely, and in the broad daylight, there hardly seemed to be any differences between them at all.
It was as if all of 17-year-old America had been seized with a fear of being lost in a grocery store. It was as if they truly believed that they might be struck by pickup trucks and wind up, unknown, in emergency rooms, suffering from the most horrible, head-swimming amnesia. It was as if, perhaps, a triage nurse would look down at their shirt cuffs or their blouse collars and say, “RJS. Do the letters ‘RJS’ mean anything to you?” It was as if, looking up from a bloody gurney, they might murmur, “RJS. Rhonda. Rhonda Jean Sherman! That’s me! Please, nurse, would you call my parents? I believe I have a dime in my shoe.”
On the other hand, it was also as if they expected, at any minute, to discover that all their clothes had been stolen from their lockers during gym class. Weeks later, they figured, they would be walking down the hall during snack break and recognize their own initials being worn on some other person’s wrist. They would be able to say, “Excuse me, but just what do the initials ‘PEM’ stand for? Would you mind showing me some second form of ID?”
Without an unpleasant confrontation, and without the necessity of legal action, their duly initialed property would be returned. A remorse-stricken sophomore would take off her ill-gotten Ship ’n’ Shore blouse, right there in front of the chemistry lab.
It was not, however, as if any teenager in 1968 was likely to experience a crisis of identity. It was not as if anyone in 1968 was likely ever to meet anyone he had not known all of his life. It was not as if a monogram was intended to be a conversational icebreaker. If anyone ever asked, “Gee, Gloria, what does that middle letter W stand for?” the only appropriate response was, “Unh-uh. That’s something only the right boy’s ever gonna find out.”
It was not as if monogrammed A-line dresses and button-down-collar shirts could be passed along as heirlooms. It was not as if boys expected to give up their cotton shirts before the collars were frayed and the cuffs had gone ratty. It was not as if girls expected their daughters to have the same initials they themselves had lived with for 17 years. By the end of the summer after the 12th grade, after the lingerie showers were finished and the wedding-gift towels had begun to arrive, they expected their own initials to be of absolutely no use at all.
But they wore their initials now, as if they were family crests, made important simply because they, the right-thinking youth of America, were wearing them. In Alabama in 1968, 17-year-old high school seniors had very little concept of haute couture. What they did know was that three initials, embroidered in the right place, were a sure guarantee that yours was not a London Fog windbreaker taken directly from the rack.
Still, not all initials were created equal. W’s were prized, as were M’s and V’s and O’s and S’s, because they looked so pretty together. They could be turned upside down and tangled together, and yet they suggested a sense of balance and exquisite proportion. P’s, meanwhile, were a problem, but not so much of a problem as K’s and certainly not so troublesome as F’s.
Best of all, however, were initials that implied planning and order in the universe—monograms like “HHH” could be read up and down and backwards and sideways. But better than even those were initials like mine, initials that spelled things, initials that gave birth to nicknames and clever in-the-hall, between-class conversation. They were initials no one, not even a 17-year-old girl, would ever be willing to change. For a 17-year-old girl in Alabama, the right sequence of initials could imply destiny, a marriage made in the heavens, a love affair preordained before the earth took its forms.
I never intended to give my initials to any woman. Instead, the summer before I went away to college, I had them embroidered on the butt of a pair of white slim-fit jeans.
Riding in a dormitory elevator the first week of classes, a sophomore phys ed major looked down at my rear end and said, “Did you do that to your own butt, or did somebody else do it?”
I said, “They’re my initials. They spell ‘JAB.’ Isn’t that great?”
The phys ed major said, “Has this got something to do with your mother?”
I said, “I bought the jeans myself. I picked out the color of the thread.”
The elevator door opened, and the sophomore phys ed major stepped out into the hall. As the elevator door slid close, he said, “I don’t know where you come from, kid. But if I was you, I think I’d be watching my ass.”
The elevator door opened, and the sophomore phys ed major stepped out into the hall. As the elevator door slid close, he said, “I don’t know where you come from, kid. But if I was you, I think I’d be watching my ass.”
