Proper names
By M. John FayheeA couple months back, I received an email from an old friend I had not heard from or about in a quarter-century. She was a bit miffed about something-or-another I had written and wanted to express that miffed-ness (in very kind and perceptive terms, I should add). Which is fine and dandy, but, sadly, I had to take a forced march down memory lane just to remember who she was. After some mental sluice-boxing, her identity dawned on me. The confusion was not caused by synapses that don’t fire as predictably as they once did; rather, it stemmed from the fact that this wonderful woman had changed her name since I last saw her.
That marked the third time since I re-moved to New Mexico I have heard from or about people I once knew who no longer go by the name they went by the whole time I knew them 30 years ago. The friend who emailed me at least said I was perfectly welcome to refer to her by her previous name; the other two people apparently will now not even acknowledge their erstwhile appellations, which, if memory serves, were already new names from whatever their old names before that were. (Try to diagram both that sentence and that concept.)
The West, of course, has always been Ground Zero for redefinition of self. People have long come here from parts East and Midwest with the idea of leaving their old selves way, way far behind on the trash heap of their personal past. For some folks, self-renaming seems to be a perfectly rational part of that sort of skin-shedding. I mean, it’s not as though any of us had any choice whatsoever in the matter of our own naming in the first place.
My first name was the ill-considered result of a drunken-buddy agreement between my dad and his then-best friend: My dad, he slurred, if he ever had a son, would name him after his best bud, and vice-versa. To this day, it stuns me that dear old dad actually not only remembered, but lived up to, his end of the deal. Thus, I got a first name that not only have I hated since birth, but that never has “fit” me if that doesn’t sound too foo-foo. And I suspect that I am not the only one among us who looks at the top line of his or her driver’s license and wonders aloud what on earth our parents were thinking. It’s not just a matter of bad names (though there certainly is that); it’s also a matter of names that are flat-out not right. I once knew a couple, both of whom had renamed themselves somewhere along the line (Rosebud and Piñon, I think), who had a child, and they did not name that child. Month after month, this child, a boy, remained nameless. For the first half-year of his life, he was never properly addressed. The explanation was they did not want to lay something as important on their offspring as a name without getting to know the little bugger first. For all I know, they still haven’t named him, or, if they have, they just said to hell with it and went with Bob. Man, I wonder how that kid turned out. Probably just fine. That, or he’s a goth snowboarder.
Up until the seventh grade, I went by my given first name, and I never once felt comfortable in my own skin. Perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, my childhood could best be described as a long prison sentence in the making. When I hear people talk about what troublemakers they were as children — toilet-papering trees and horking candy bars and such — I snicker. I was a criminal whose various specialties included, but were not limited to, burglary, assault, thievery, arson, massive destruction of private property and general Clockwork-Orange-like recreational mayhem. The first time I visited the back of a police car, I was six. Three of my closest friends during that time eventually went to prison … for murder. I was in constant hot water with law enforcement, school administrators, family and neighbors.
My parents rationally decided that major action was necessary. They decided we had to move, a decision for which I will be eternally grateful. As we were moving, I came to a decision that was remarkably enlightened, given who and what I was: When we arrived in Virginia, I would no longer go by my first name. It was then that I became John. And it was then that my life metamorphosed. This is not say that I instantly became a saint, but it is to say that I stopped being a criminal. Did the name-modification decision have anything to do with me being able to pull such a monster self-redefinition off? Maybe not. But maybe. It could have simply been the change in scenery resulting from the move. But we had moved before, and my old Droogie self had always followed me wherever we went. When I detached myself from the name I should never have had in the first place, it did not. I had finally out-witted my dim-witted self by essentially changing the rules of the game.
Back in the ’70s, lots of people in these parts opted to punt their old names in favor of such sun-shiny hippie-ish appellations as Cinnamon and Apple Blossom. I have known a Sweet Medicine, an Uncle River, a Feather and a Gandalf. But the renaming of self, along with the naming of cars and domiciles, seemingly died out, or at least lost momentum, during the sober darkness of the ’80s. I even knew a few people who back in the day had changed their name to things like Moonbeam who swapped their names back to things like Stuart when Reagan was President. But, it seems like perhaps there is a self-renaming resurgence afoot.
The most-famous recent example of such nomenclatural modification transpired in Crested Butte, where a man named Neil Murdoch lived for 30 years, integrating himself into the community so thoroughly that it was hard for Buttians to think of their town without simultaneously thinking of Murdoch, who was very involved in the evolution of mountain biking in Crested Butte, even earning a place in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. Then, one day, seemingly out of the blue, the goddamned feds descended upon The Butte (oh, to be working for the local paper that fine day!) looking for a man named Richard Gordon Bannister, who had been wanted by the law ever since he jumped bail on a drug-smuggling indictment. “Who?” the good people of that wonderful town asked. Ended up it was Murdoch, who had run like the wind to points unknown a mere hour before the feds arrived, and he was not heard from again for five more years, when he was finally busted in Taos, where he had been living under the name Grafton Mailer. I have long wanted to ask Bannister if, during those 30 years in Crested Butte, if he actually became Murdoch, or if he remained Bannister incognito, in disguise, undercover. Did he have to go into character every time he walked out the front door for 30 years? Did he ever slip up and become, even if only for a moment, a man no one in Crested Butte knew? It’s my guess that Richard Bannister was a man long dead, and by the time Mailer was busted, Bannister had been buried twice, like Melquiades Estrada. I wonder who Bannister is in his own dreams.
One of my biggest problems with the people who are now moving to the Mountain Time Zone is that they are not thinking in terms of re-creation and rebirth the way they used to, the way John Denver sang about in “Rocky Mountain High.” They come here and resolutely try to remain who they were, most times with just enough success to fuck things up all around them, including themselves. Maybe new names ought to be required every time we make a major move. Anyone who either can’t or won’t take that leap is sent back to where their old name still has meaning. MG
Postscript: Anyone with interesting name-based or re-naming-based stories, please send them to me at mjfayhee@mountaingazette.com. Names can be withheld on request.
