I’m kicking this one off with a moment of existential frisson that began in a Brooklyn doctor’s office one day ago.
As we were wrapping my annual six-minute physical exam, my primary care doctor of several years asked how my daughter was doing. I responded with characteristic elan.
“Good,” I told her. “But he’s a boy now.”
“She’s— What?”
“I mean — still is.” I stammered as I heard myself veer into some crap hard-right comic’s routine. “I mean, was born a boy. My son’s a boy.”
The doctor apologized and explained that she’d assumed Calder was a girl from the name on the form. And for the dozenth time, I wondered what the hell my wife and I were thinking saddling our precious child with such a hard-to-pronounce, gender-ambiguous, punk-ass whiteboy name.
This passed relatively quickly. Since the name has family and cultural significance — and since I know full-grown people named Zen, Yes, and Fortinbras — the anxiety went in search of different targets. I’m still glad to have co-produced the first boy in my family tree not to be named after an apostle, Celtic warrior, or heh-heh, a bearer of Christ. Which is likely the real source of my latest agita.
I’ve disliked my name for most of my life and wouldn’t dream of changing it. While I realize this fits an ethnic stereotype that’s often alarmingly apt in my case — that of Hibernian mopes who’ll deal with something wrong for their whole life — I also suspect this hang-up about names is as clear a generational marker as my allergy to Drake.
One of my sister’s kids transitioned from their assigned-at-birth gender. But when they changed from their gender-neutral assigned-at-birth name to another gender-neutral, I really felt provoked. This is all embarrassingly un-postmodern of me, but for some reason I still take a name that two terrified young adults picked out of a hat as Divinely sanctioned. Which makes particularly little sense in my case.
While they gave me the first name John, my parents decided to call me by middle name, Christopher, because I was born on Columbus Day weekend. And because St. Christopher was the Bearer of Christ. You can probably tell where this is going.
When I was still a toddler, the Roman Catholic Church decided that Christopher — patron saint of travelers, epileptics, and surfers — was “legendary,” in a bad way. One of my most treasured book dedications is from the late Glenn O’Brien, who inscribed his book Penance to me as follows: “Chris, So sorry St. Christopher was deaccessioned. Better luck next time!”
I’d live another couple of decades before Columbus Day became Indigenous People’s Day, and my actual birthday became the LGBTQ-affirming “National Coming Out Day.” All of which is fine, just fine, but that’s hardly where things ended.
While Christopher’s currency was devaluing, a certain martial artist made an early film appearance as Bruce Lee’s blond nemesis in The Way of the Dragon, launching a film, television, and meme career that still prompts new acquaintances to respond to learning my full name with a slow-dawning expression, spreading smile, and the obvious conviction that they’re the first person to ever ask — ooh, here it comes! — “Any relation to Chuck?”
And you know what? It’s hilarious! Every single time.
Where I grew up in Greater Boston, the name Chris Norris was actually so common that a slightly older kid in my school had it. When his buddies jacked me for a bunch of personalized pencils I’d received for my ill-omened birthday, then gave them to him, my attempt to confront them prompted what I’d have to call my first bonafide Kafkaesque experience.
“Whaddya mean, ‘youahs.” What, they gotcha name on ‘em?”
“Yeah! Right theah!”
“That’s his name, faggit.”
Gah!
This all reminds me of an arresting scene in 2003’s American Splendor, in which Paul Giamatti’s comic artist Harvey Pekar, possibly dying of cancer, confronts the significance of his own existence through a rumination of his name.
He relays how, when he got his first phone book, he was struck to see another Harvey Pekar listed in the same city. Ten years later, he noticed a third; later, a coworker expressed sympathy for his loss, having read an obit for yet another Harry Pekar, who had a son named Harvey, who also died six months later.
When, two years later, our Harvey Pekar notices a new Harvey Pekar in the phone book, he wonders, “Who are these people? Where do they come from? What do they do? What’s in a name?
Who is Chris Norris?
In the late-1970s, Christopher Norris was a sixth grader, a third grader, a well-known actress, and who knows what else. In Berkeley’s late-80’s Rhetoric department, Christopher Norris was a distinguished critical theorist who sometimes wrote about music and a wayward undergrad who also wrote about music.
In the 90s, Chris Norris was a music critic and journalist for two different publications with two different faces. Today, he’s a football coach, a professor of neuroscience, and a strategic adviser at StoryCorps known for his “innovative approaches to journalism,” and countless truck drivers, priests, cops, and sundry members of the lumpen proletariat. Some of whom must love Chuck Norris as much as I do.
A successful writer and journalist I know relayed how, when he was the proverbial cub reporter, his editor suggested that, for his byline, he provocatively drop one letter from his regular-ass first name and he credited much of his success to having listened.
Yes, branding. It’s important. If hip-hop taught us nothing else, it taught us that. In fact, some of the people I most admire began their road to greatness with a change of name, although these tended to be bestowed by peers rather than picked themselves. But as I said, changing my own name would feel like a base transgression.
In the U.S., we say someone’s named Bill Jones, while in England and Ireland they’ll say he’s called Bill Jones, and I like the way they sneak in a little suspicion about these so-called Bill Joneses. As if the name is a placeholder. Acting as. Doing business as. Operating under the name of.
I’ve had long relationships with people who know me only by my first name, John. Decades ago, I had at least one sexual relationship with someone who knew me only as “Norris.” And while I’m fine with all of this, I’d be lying if I told you that these three people are all the same. They’re not exactly. And though their names reflect nothing but my failure to correct what others call me, if I look too closely at the subtle differences between these people, I feel like a sociopath.
Wait: Is Chris Norris a sociopath?
The kid and I have been reading Ursula Le Guin’s brilliant series of fantasy novels that begin with The Wizard of Earthsea, in which every living thing has a hidden true name, a secret name that defines the creature’s essence. It’s a beautiful, deeply-sourced idea in Le Guin’s hands, since what allows a wizard to summon or control another being derives from hard-won knowledge of the other’s essence. It comes from knowing them, seeing them, and accepting them. And it’s a sign of great love and trust when one wizard tells another their own true name.
Writing this, I realized that I too acquired a new name. I got it about eleven years ago and, in the best heroic tradition, it was bestowed on me, unbidden, with a mandate to live up to my new appellation. That name is, of course, Dad. And depending on the time of day, it can make me disoriented or freaked-out, either well up with tenderness or surge with some weird protective violence.
The name draws ancient forces from me, which sure sounds like a magic word. I’d love to summon that kind of power from a public-facing name, but quieter contemplation leaves me unconvinced it was ever even possible.
A dialogue in Plato’s Cratylus founded a whole philosophical theory of natural names, known as Cratylism. Which is one crap name for a philosophical movement — and one reason you’ve probably never heard of it. When he’s captured by Polyphemus, Odysseus self-identifies as “nobody,” which the cyclops is apparently dumb enough to take for a proper noun, later crying “Nobody is murdering me!” — drawing the same derision from the gods that I drew from those pencil-snatching fucks at my old school.
I don’t know. Would a rose really smell as sweet if it were called a lungwort? A horehound? An illex vomitoria? I’m sufficiently stressed out about this issue that I’ve begun looking to digital natives for cues about all this. I admire the freer, looser relationships they seem to have with the names they use to interact with the world.
Lately, I’m especially attentive to the new names that I hear my kid — who’s actually cool being Calder — explore with a few of his friends. One sounds especially promising, though we’ll have to wait to see how it works out.
It’s a name my kid’s friend says he plans to give his own child. While I’ve overheard them muse over various handles, nicknames, and cognomens, I have to say the name, F-Bomb, has serious legs. Catchy, gender-neutral, from a rich linguistic tradition.
When I proposed that Dylan consider adding a titular “The” to the name F-Bomb—like a title — I instantly knew I’d played myself.
Dylan and Calder just smiled, looked at each other, and shook their heads. Some people you just have to humor, they clearly thought. As they set about devising a new name for me.
Oh man, touché. I actually quite enjoyed your narrative bellyache. Word to middle-name Chrises!
Hey Chris--This was a fun one. Hate it when people compare bellyaches, so Imma do just that. You think you've suffered angst about the people who share your name? Whenever folks hear my moniker they immediately think of the (exponentially more social and much better networked than me) former mag colleague turned right-wing nutjob and Devin Nunes hagiographer. Who just happened to maintain an address for decades that was only a few blocks from my home in Brooklyn. (A significant payment for a story I wrote once got sent to his address by accident, and it took weeks to sort out.) And don't even get me started on the female novelist. Not to mention the film editor, or the relief pitcher who of course sucked when he played initially for the Cubs, or the countless other LSs out there. And my parents had initially planned on christening me with my middle name: Chris! If only! Lee