What’s In A Name?

Names are a potent item in human culture. In some societies, you won’t receive an actual name until you’ve survived the first year of life. In others, your name might change due to maturity or experience. Names are complex. You are most familiar with the concept of nicknames and aliases. During my time “on the road” and when I was performing, there were people that I only knew by their nicknames, stage names, or aliases. They, too, only knew me by my alias.

Years after it makes it hard to track friends down. An example is my friend Billy Pebbles, also known as Johnny Clay. I’m pretty certain that I never knew his real name. We discussed the whole thing of names once over several bottles of fine stuff that a friend had brewed. He had never named the brew, and so the topic of names came up while trying to think of something subtle to call a very not-so-subtle kick-ass brew.
Our nominal names came up, and we promptly changed the direction of the conversation. We both had stuff we wanted concealed, and names were a great way to hide them.

My kids know that I once was known as someone else, lived a “diverse” life, and made no bones about it. If they have attempted to parse the facts from fiction and fantasy about their father, I refer them to the book and movie Big Fish.

Back in the late eighties, keeping the stuff straight was a big internal brawl for me—an affray between identities. I had buried big parts of myself late in 1970 and 1971 as I embarked upon a “straight” existence of college, staid behavior, and conformity. I had been driven to this by some terrible events in life. While working in Washington, DC, as a consultant one summer in the ’80s, things shook loose, and parts of my former life flooded back in.

One night, on the stairs leading up to Georgetown, it all came back. I found myself with several years of integrating who I had been with who I had become. It has been a sometimes fun and often awkward process of self-exploration.
To an extent, the journey is like that of the goldfish I put into my pond. Most often, goldfish stay small in the little tanks we give them. But when put into the pond, the goldfish grew to almost koi fish size over the years.

Integrating the past and present has enriched me. No one calls me by my old alias anymore, and sometimes, I miss that.
If I lived in another culture, I could select a new name based on who I was becoming.

In the meantime, anyone who runs into a dude who was Billy Pebbles or Johnny Clay should tell him I have the five bucks I owe him from our last road trip.