What's a Drongo?

Drongowski

Just look at my name for a second. It won't bite. I promise.

Say it with me: Dron-gow-ski. If you're Russian you can pronounce it Druhn-govf-ski and I will be fine with it.

When your last name has ten letters, people get confused when they look at it. They end up adding letters that aren't there, resulting in some pretty strange gibberish. I've been called everything from the earnest Dragon-kerchief-ski to the tongue-in-cheek Drunk-Cows-Ski. As an added bonus, my name has been spelled incorrectly on everything except my college diploma, my tax documents and my sales awards. What does this say about the priorities of the world we live in?

I needed a nickname. My father tried to call me J-Bird, but that one never made it outside the family. There had to be something better.

If you look at my name, you can see how I got the name Drongo. It started in grade school but it didn't really catch on until college. At that point I had to pick an email address and "drongo3" was shorter than "jeff.drongowski." The name stuck and I've been Drongo for years.

I like the name Drongo. It's catchy, it fits me and it's a lot easier for people to spell than Drongowski. Perfect, right? I even have a doctor who calls me Drongo P.I. and pretends that I'm a secret agent, ready to kill him at a moments notice. He came up with that on his own by studying my name tag. If that's not proof of a good nickname, I don't know what is. All was right with the world.

Until.

One day I met a guy named David from Australia. We started talking and exchanged email addresses. When he looked at mine he started belly laughing right away, even slapped me on the shoulder.

"That's brilliant, mate," he said.

"Um... what's brilliant?"

"Drongo3. I love it!"

"I don't get it." He stopped laughing, trying to figure me out.

"It's like, idiot cubed, right? Genius." Uh oh.

Urban Dictionary defines Drongo like this: Dumbass, idiot (Aussie slang) "You've really mucked that up, ya drongo!"

I did a quick Wikipedia search and found out that it was also a "family of small passerine birds of the Old World tropics." They also had a very helpful picture of a Spangled Drongo.


So to sum up, my nickname, the name I've been going by for over ten years now, can be boiled down to Idiot-Bird. I've learned to embrace it. There's a certain poetry to it and, I'm sure my father will agree, it fits me.

My war on tobacco.

My parents used to smoke. My mother did it in secret, after my sister and I had gone to bed. My father did it right out in the open. He would come home from work and dump the contents of his pockets on the desk in the kitchen. Keys. Wallet. Change. Pager. Lighter. Benson & Hedges. I would stare at them as I walked past, entranced by the rich packaging. I would stand with the refrigerator door open and look over at them, milk spoiling by the second. They were there every day, and I would often open the box and count them, just to keep score.

One day I learned that smoking was bad for you. Could kill you, in point of fact. I sat in my little desk with my big head spinning. Death by cigarettes? Really? I looked at slide after slide of disgusting lungs and mortality rates on charts. I heard the word "addiction" for the first time. I thought of my parents, two very smart people, sucking death into their bodies every day. It was a big thing, this smoking revelation. It turned the desk in my kitchen into a hospital bed. When the teachers were through with their presentation I vowed to take action, to bring this fight home with me.

At first, I could only bring myself to steal a few cigarettes at a time. I'd wait for my parents to settle into the couches downstairs and I would tiptoe into the kitchen, pocket two or three cigarettes and slide into the guest bathroom. I broke them into little bits, flushed them and watched the tobacco swirl around, disappearing forever.

This went on for some time, until I couldn't stand watching him smoke anymore. I told him I wanted him to stop smoking, that I didn't want him to die. I don't remember what he said to me, I'm sure he tried to make me understand that it wasn't that easy, but the packs of Benson & Hedges stayed on the desk in the kitchen.

Every day I stared at the box. Every day I took more cigarettes and flushed them. Once or twice I broke a bunch in half and left them in the box. I vaguely remember I got a lecture about wasting money that I answered with Ghandi-like civil disobedience.

Then the box was gone.

I could still smell it on him so I knew he didn't quit. I rifled through the cupboards and his jacket pockets but didn't find anything. I went through the garage and his bedside table. Nothing. Then I went to mow the lawn and spotted them in his car. The doors weren't locked, so the cigarettes disappeared. He never mentioned it, but he did sit me down and tell me he was going to quit. If I had any coordination, I would've done a back flip in the yard.

He went cold turkey and switched to candy. Instead of a box of Benson & Hedges there was a bag of Lifesavers. Every time I heard the wrapper I would add a few minutes onto his life and smile. I had won the war, and I was proud.

That's how I remember it.

My father doesn't remember any of this. He doesn't remember the pleas for his health, the broken cigarettes or the civil disobedience. He tells me he always considered coffee to be a harder habit to break, that he just decided to stop smoking one day and did. No fanfare, no withdrawal and no happy little boy.

Knowing this, I have to look back and wonder if my war on tobacco was all in my head. Have the years taken a few little gestures and magnified them into drastic measures? Could this just be another symptom of the storytelling disease that has taken over my life?

I do have some very vivid memories of tobacco swirling around a toilet, of my mother hiding a cigarette when I came downstairs, unable to sleep. I remember sitting in the car when I was supposed to be mowing the lawn, staring at the pack of cigarettes. I put a cigarette in my mouth and studied myself in the rear view mirror, pretending to smoke and drive. I remember feeling like an adult as I picked a tobacco leaf off my tongue. I also remember putting the pack of Benson & Hedges at the bottom of the garbage can and spreading some old newspapers over it.

I can't prove that any of these things happened, but I don't think that it matters. What matters is that neither of my parents smoke anymore, and that it's a better story the way I tell it.

Another birthday without me.

My nephew, Tyler, turned fifteen today. When I packed up a van and left Michigan, he was nine. I was there the day he was born. I was not there the day he turned ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen or fifteen. I was represented by a gift certificate, a check, a video game or a phone call. This hurts me. I know it hurts him, too.

How do you stay in touch with a teenager who doesn't like the phone? Video games. Last summer I bought an Xbox 360 because he bought one and they come with headsets. Since then I've killed people in the worlds of Halo, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto just to stay in his life. My guilt is a trail of burnt, dead bodies on the internet.

(Hold on, I should take a moment and admit that I do, in fact, like video games. Always have. This Xbox thing is no great sacrifice. Let's move on.)

My niece, Hollie, doesn't mind talking on the phone but she's better at text messages and snarky Facebook comments. She just turned seventeen and she's about ready to go off to college. She was twelve when I left, she can't possibly be ready to go to college, can she?

When you move to the other side of a continent, you either hate your family or love your dreams. Ugh. "Dreams." I've grown to hate that word. It makes me think of American Idol speeches. Unfortunately, everyone else seems to love it.

"Follow your dreams!"

"Never give up on your dreams!"

"Keep true to the dreams of thy youth!"

In grade school I wanted to be a novelist. In college I wanted to be a poet and a playwright. After nine screenplays, a couple of minor options and a bigger one they wrote about in Variety, I am a screenwriter. When I moved to California I didn't know anybody and I didn't have much of a plan. I was slowly dying in Michigan because I felt like my life was secretly happening somewhere else. After five and a half years of looking, I found it in Hollywood. You know what? I love it. It has a fantastic woman in it. It has a great dog. It has a healthy bank account and no debt. The price for all of this is an empty chair at many, many birthday parties.

I've given up all these birthdays to follow my dreams and I'm not done yet. Every time one rolls around I'm reminded that I better get back to work. I better do one more rewrite, flesh out one more pitch because I'm paying for this time with every candle they blow out without me, and I'll never get them back. My only hope is that my family can understand how important this is for me, and that they don't hold all those candles against me.

Happy Birthday, Ty. I hope you have the courage to follow your own dreams, no matter what they cost you.