Sylvester Stallone's Son

I was in a hotel in North Carolina when I saw it, with my sister, at the breakfast bar. We stocked up on bananas for the car ride and watched the news anchor, a foreign man at a foreign desk, announce that he had died. They showed clips from the movie.

“Isn’t that Sylvester Stallone’s son?” she asked – my sister, who has never seen Rocky.

We told my mom in the room while she was stuffing bananas in the cooler. She seemed shocked and sad. “Of what?” We didn’t know. “When?” The day before his wedding. She said nothing, just hugged my brother, but then we were all overtired.

I didn’t think about Sylvester Stallone’s son until I heard it in that poem; I mean, it was just a passing comment in the news, just a short segment, condensed down and squeezed between Brad Pitt’s new movie and the Kardashians’ new house.

But I think about him now. I do not know what his first name is because on the news they simply called him “Sylvester Stallone’s son,” even though he was an independent person and was engaged and had ideas and prospects and ambitions of his own. I think of how he must have felt, when people asked who are you and he said (                     ) Stallone and they said like Sylvester Stallone? and he said yes he’s my father, and maybe that person didn’t even ask him about himself anymore, just pounded him with questions about his famous father and squeezed him dry for the answers they wanted to hear. And how maybe when they left they told everyone they met Sylvester Stallone’s son today, not Joe Stallone or Mike Stallone or whatever his name may be, but Sylvester Stallone’s son, and just like that he was reduced to a single, vague noun. I think about how he’s immortalized on paper now, in somebody’s poem, but not because of who he was or what he did but because of who his father was and how there was a twenty second segment in the news.