birth certif

My birth certificate lists my father’s name as “America.”
I’m not sure why.
Maybe my mother didn’t remember my father’s name.
Or maybe she didn’t believe him.
My father had left Thailand sometime before I was born and my mother tells me that she never told him that she was pregnant. So he went off to Spain or Iran or wherever Ford-Philco had sent him to install microwave dishes and various communications hardware. Ford-Philco was a government contractor but some of their funding and some of their jobs came straight from the CIA. Like the month my father spent in Vientienne, Laos, bugging the U.S. Embassy.
It seemed a little strange to him, but he was just following orders. Just living it up overseas while the Vietnam war raged two hundred miles to the east.
An Ex-Marine, Mohawk/Polish kid born and raised in Detroit living like a king in a huge bungalow just outside of the U.S. Air Force base in Udon Thani, Thailand.
That’s where my parents met, I guess. She was his housekeeper. Or so they say.
I’m not sure how they communicated when neither of them spoke the other’s language.
In my mother’s broken English, my father’s name would have sounded like “bad” and “good” combined.
“Bah-dee”
Good/bad?
She must have thought it was a joke. He’s bad at being good? He’s good at being bad?
So my mother listed “America” as my father’s name.
She listed my first name, Tony, phonetically in Thai. Not a real word but two sounds.
“Toe-Nee.”
She didn’t realize that it was a nickname for Anthony and for years, teachers and acquaintances would ask or assume that my first name was Anthony.
Nope. It’s just plain Tony.
I always wondered where she got the name from—I guess she knew a G.I. named Tony or something. She’s never given me a straight answer and my father always gets a little pissed when the subject comes up. Maybe it’s an ex-boyfriend or something.