I don’t name a lot of things. My car has no name. My house has no name. None of my guitars has a name. Some people would think I was completely impoverished. No, make that many people.
I first discovered the need to name when I took a liking to a certain hat many years ago. I wore that hat in what could be called true cowboy style — I never took it off. Well, I didn’t wear it to bed or in the shower, but everywhere else you found me you found it. People began asking me if my hat had a name. When I told them that the hat was nameless, they would begin what I called the hat dance.
First, they believed that the hat had a name and that I wasn’t sharing it. Then, they became angry because if they spent 90% of their waking hours with a hat, it would have a proper name and why couldn’t I be like other people and not be so weird. They would say that I had no heart and didn’t love my hat enough to give it a name. Just before they would walk away, there would be the acceptance that I had indeed resisted the urge to anthropomorphize my hat.
The question became a conversational gambit for the small talk impaired. Right after the “Hi, how are you”s would come the inevitable “what’s your hat’s name?” Had I not been a penniless student at the time, I would have bought the hat business cards and taken to introducing it around as the hat-with-no-name. Instead, I came up with a cheaper solution — a smart alec reply.
“If I gave the hat a name, then it would have top billing!”, I would protest. That witty reply fell flat about everywhere I dropped it, but I am nothing if not dogged in my loyalty to it.
My car didn’t have a name either, for a while. My friends drove Betsies and Ediths and Sams while I made do with a generic no-name Volkswagen that had the nasty habit of opening its passenger door when I made a left-hand turn. It was during one of these exciting moments that my friend, Bill Postel, christened my car. After we stopped to wipe off the seat, he finished the job by naming my car “The DeathTrap.”
Here was something my friends could appreciate — a man who had a name for his car. I knew I had arrived when one of the car-less girls at the college radio station came up and asked if she could borrow “The DeathTrap” to run up to the convenience store. My car had a name. It must be friendly. Tell that to the guy who bought it from me only to have the engine toss a rod on the way home. Silly me, I neglected to tell him that the car had a name.
The belief that when you name something you have control over it comes to us from ancient times. In the Bible, God was always renaming people to show his ownership of them. Parents do the same thing to children. Listen to parents at the end of their persuasions as they scream a child’s full name to let them know that they really are serious this time.
I have no better example of this than the feckless male practice of naming their reproductive organs. Most men (and all women agree with them) have no control over it. None at all. So, they name it in the hope that the appearance of control is almost as good as the real thing. As you may have guessed by now, mine was nameless for many years.
I was unaware that I had neglected this vital rite of passage until one night when I was the designated driver for a van-load of drunk radio people. My all-female crew were chattering away as we rolled back into town on US 41. One of them told of a recent floating party on the Suwannee River (and they were way down apon it, too) where the weekend had come to the obligatory skinny dipping event.
“All of them had names for their hoonies!” she screamed and all the others screamed, too.
Very quickly, eyes rested on the sober sales manager who was driving the van — the only male in the vehicle. Since they were drunk and the radio station was too small to have a sexual harassment policy, they asked. They didn’t believe. Surely a woman down the line had done for me what I had not done for myself. Things were getting uncomfortable, so I took control — I named it.
Right there in front of them, I named it after the station’s receptionist who was riding shotgun in the van. She admitted it to be a singular honor. She didn’t admit to much else after that. One of the other girls began teasing her over it, so I threatened to have a name change if the subject wasn’t dropped. Virility intact, I hastened back to town clutching the forlorn hope that they would be too drunk to remember my act of wild abandon.
It must have been the secondary alcohol fumes. How else do you explain that your member is named for a stranger you never knew in the biblical sense?
No. I’m not telling you. She got married. He has lawyers. I avoid tattoo parlors.
Merrill Guice was raised by opposums in the swamps of South Georgia. He holds forth (and holds a fifth) on his website at www.thegoosesnest.com