By any other name...
LL Cool J had the right idea
“The only thing we knew about Henry Porter was that his name wasn’t really Henry Porter.” -Bob Dylan & Sam Shepard, Brownsville Girl
William Shakespeare was right about a lot of things. But dead wrong about names: “A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” quoth the original hottie, Juliet, who ought to know. I think not. Most of the time, our names were given to us by someone else, usually someone who barely knew us. There’s a legend about Chinese people waiting 30 days to name a baby, but I would posit that even that isn’t really enough time to know what to name an intriguing new lifeform. But whether her parents waited thirty days or thirty years, what chance does a student I recently met, Anne Oying, have in life? *Not exactly–as I don’t want to fall afoul of the tender embrace of FERPA for breaking student confidentiality–but let’s just say it was close enough to “Ms. Oying” there to make me do a double take. And if you’re a couple of Oyings, one who grew up that way, maybe the other just married into the august clan, but what on Earth is anyone named Oying doing even considering naming their new baby Anne?
Rockstars, actors, bands and glib internet memoirists can all choose their own names, and often do. The Grateful Dead famously plunked a finger down in a randomly opened dictionary to pick their band name. Prince took on his own name, which was so cool it didn’t even have letters, just a symbol. The Ramones, of course, forever owned the name space by all of them taking on the name Ramone: Joey, Deedee, Tommy etc.
My first online experience was on this thing called CafeNet around 1988. Some enterprising entrepreneur had repurposed Pac-Man consoles into network access points, plunked them down in coffee shops in the Bay Area, networked them (this was of course before the internet, web, or really any of it) and let people have at it, feeding quarters to keep the connection alive. I was visiting my friend Syd who showed me one of these things in a coffee shop in the Haight where he was living. Turned out you could dial in, so I went back to New York and dialed up my first online experience. To log on to this network you had to choose a pseudonym. I chose Laszlo Jamf, a character from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, long my favorite book.
I grinned to hear the weird BEEP BOOP CHALALAANG tones and my heart raced as the system accepted my login and announced (in blinking white on green type) “HELLO LASZLO JAMF”. I clicked around a bit, eavesdropping on conversations, mainly about what kind of coffee people were drinking. These Pac-Man network things were placed in coffee shops, remember, I seemed to be the only one logging in from anywhere else. Not really that interesting, to be honest. Until something booped and a message popped up on my screen, all caps: “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?”
“Uh, Laszlo Jamf, huh, it’s a character in a book I read…”
“I know, fucker, I’m Laszlo. There’s only room for one of us in this town and it’s me, so log the fuck off.” Ten seconds after getting “online” and I was already being harassed by some aggro entitled douchebag on a power trip. Big fish, meet little pond. But, I was new there, figured it didn’t really matter. Gravity’s Rainbow alone has more than a thousand characters from which to cadge a nickname, so, screw it, I dumped Laszlo and went with “Major Marvy”, another Pynchon coinage. In a few weeks, I tired of talking about lattes and exchanged Cafe Net for the Well, a real onramp to the nascent internet. And they had a character limit, so Major Marvy was right out, but ladies and gentlemen, I snatched the ever so concise “marvy” and am living under that name to this day, on the Well and elsewhere.
Few things have riled the internet more than where this “X” came from. I lucked into working on a feature film a few years ago. The same IMDB we all use to look up who that supporting actor that we are THIS CLOSE to naming is used as a resume for film crew types. I felt like Navin Johnson rejoicing at finding his name in the phone book, then quickly crashed to Earth. The fifteen or so Chris Carrolls I’ve consistently received Gmails for should have been a clue, but on this networked planet of ours, there are no uncommon names. And a moniker like Chris Carroll, well, I think I would have ended up Chris Carroll (XV). Nobody puts Baby in a corner, I’ll show them: Christopher Carroll, Christopher J. Carroll, CJ Carroll (ugh), Chris Cross, every permutation I could think of already contained multitudes working on movies.
Reading an article by writer Robert X. Cringely (Remember that thing about making up names? Ya think?), I typed in Chris X Carroll. Available. Et voilá, a star is born. I mentioned my plan to Dr. Pepper, who surprised me by enthusiastically chuckling, “Black people will think you’re into Malcolm X and Catholics will peg you as a Pope Xavier fan.” Chris X Carroll it was, and is. The pseudonym lets me own my identity. Kind of like Stephen Colbert playing a character called Stephen Colbert, I’m not Chris X Carroll, but I play him on TV.
One thing about our apocryphal friend Ann O. is that she certainly didn’t give herself that moniker. Ladies Love Cool James, LL Cool J, now THAT’s a name you grant yourself. It’s a poem, an imperative, a command, a fact. LL is impossibly handsome which seems to lend him an ease I’ve noted in those with extreme self confidence. A big man, he looks down and grasps your hand like the most ebullient country club scion you’ll ever encounter. Everybody loves LL, not just the ladies. And it radiates, bounces around a bit, maybe vibrates a little differently, but he expects you to like him so you do. He’s the sweetest guy, which was kind of funny because when I met him was when his biggest hit was coming out of every open car window on the street. He was huge, and strong, and buffed, and just might knock you out. But his mama told him to, so that makes it all ok.
Funny moment (which I will cop to right now I can’t find the picture of) was when LL, who was playing a boxer in both his videos and persona, was joined in his dressing room by Mike Tyson, the heavyweight champion of the world. Tyson is not a big guy, considerably smaller than I am, as if drawn in a reduced scale. He looks tiny next to James, which is not something you expect from the epitome of a pugilist.
My assignment was to shadow LL Cool J for two days, during which he was to perform a stadium show, so I would accompany him on his tour bus. We would do “photo shoots” a couple times, but most of the gig was fly-on-the-wall style photo journalism. As I said, everyone loves L, especially the ladies, and they tell him. Whether they’re shouting their phone number at him from cars, trying to pass him notes, or hanging around backstage at his gig is a constant reminder of the power of a name. Is LL Cool J the most relaxed, happy, fulfilled guy ever, or did he become all those things by willing them into existence by planting a flag telling us exactly who loves him and how?
What chance does poor Ann Oying have? I don’t know, but having seen LL in action I wonder about the other side of the coin. Do Ladies Love Cool James because they must? A rose by any other name, particularly self chosen, is absolutely the sweetest smelling perfume a person could sniff. I’ll admit it, I’m jealous. All I did was add a little X, someday maybe I’ll have the chutzpah to just straight up LL Chris X. Mama said knock you out, and I always do what Mama says. Y’all better too.
I have an uncommon name, and I'm the only one (at least, so Google tells me) with my particular name. (I shared it with my grandmother, but she's dead now so just me!).
It pleases me, to be the only one with my name.