My brother’s best friend is named Arthur, but he insists on being called by his childhood nickname, which is Fatso. I am not making this up; if you call him “Arthur” he gets annoyed. Since he is well over 300 pounds, and because no one that I know wants to deal with an angry fat man, everyone calls him Fatso. My brother’s sons call him “Mr. Fatso.”
Fatso’s name is both accurate and obvious, but it inevitably affects your overall perception of him. I’ve heard him complain that no one respects him, and I always think, “Duh!” If you really want respect, my thinking goes, don’t call yourself Fatso.
Whether we like it or not, our names affect how people treat us. For example, when we met one of my younger brother’s early wives, she introduced herself with her professional name: Sister John Paul. (Again, I am not making this up.) When she left the nunnery to marry my brother she reverted back to her Hippie name which was Mystique. It is not a stretch to understand that we treated Sister John Paul way differently than we treated Mystique. Sister John Paul was refined and quiet and had excellent penmanship and a lovely singing voice, while Mystique was simply bipolar. We compromised by calling her Sister Mystique, which she hated.
If the stories of Fatso and Mystique teach us anything, it’s that for better or worse, people morph into their names. I’m reminded of my friend’s daughter, Pricilla, who insists on being called “Sparkle.” If we all grow into our names, it means that Sparkle, who is now ten years old, has 8 years to prepare for her inevitable career as a pole dancer.
My fascination with names stems from my childhood embarrassment that my parents, like many first generation Americans, called each other “Mom” and “Dad.” I envied my Coral Ridge friends whose American parents called each other things like “David” or “Mary,” generally while guzzling gin. My siblings and I used to wonder what my parents called each other when they were dating, before they became “Mom” and “Dad.”
Curiously, for reasons I prefer not to scrutinize, none of us kids ever called our parents “Mom” or “Dad.” We all call our mother “Ma,” which is what she called her mother, and has always hated: “Call me Mother or Ma’am” she will say through clenched teeth. Even worse, for reasons unknown, our father became “Pappy,” which confused casual acquaintances into thinking our father was either a wizened prospector or a sharecropper.
For me, the business of names is purely personal. I generally don’t admit it, but in a moment of ethnic pride which I will always regret, my father had me christened “Guido.” To the everlasting credit of my mother, she immediately Americanized me into “Guy,” and the only people who have ever called me Guido were my elderly Sicilian grandmother, and the kind of friends who, when drunk, think this is amusing. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had remained Guido. Would I have one less eyebrow? Two more pinkie rings? More respect or just more ridicule?
Years ago, I worked for Air Canada in Montreal, where everyone called me “Gui” which, to me, had a thrilling, vaguely continental tone to it. I flirted with the idea of buying a smoking jacket and I even cultivated a tiny, waxed little mustache but alas, I came back to Florida and went back to being just your average Guy, which has very little mystique and absolutely no sparkle but is way better than being Fatso.