Growing Up With A Funny Name

"Lunch is gonna taste awful!"




I had my first name legally changed in 1999. According to the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social security Administration, my name is Alexander Kelley Dupuis.

But it wasn’t always.

I’ve been blogging for four years, but actually, I was blogging before there were any such things as blogs. I’ve kept a journal all my life.

There were no blogs in 1988. There was no Internet in 1988. But I wrote the following essay in Brasilia, Brazil in the late summer of that year.



I’m going to let you in on a little secret here. Actually, it’s not a secret at all, but a matter of public record. My whole family knows it; anyone who’s known me since I was a child knows it, the State of California knows it and I’m sure the federal government probably knows it, although I have made every effort to expunge all evidence of it from my personal records ever since I entered on duty with the government.

It’s simply this: “Kelley” isn’t my first name. It’s my middle name. I tell people it’s my first name and when they ask me what my middle name is, I tell them I don’t have one. If I’m pressed for my full legal name on an official form, I fill it in surreptitiously, covering the page with one arm so the guy standing next to me won’t see what I’m writing in that space marked “First,” right after “Last” and just before “Middle Initial.”

One time a highway patrolman pulled me over to give me a speeding ticket on Interstate 5 between Sacramento and Red Bluff, California. He wanted to be friendly, and after looking at my driver’s license he addressed me by my legal first name. “Please, be a nice guy and call me ‘Kelley,’” I said.

That’s right: you can take my license, you can run my plates, you can slander my name all over the states, (as long as it’s “Kelley.”) You can write me for going 70 instead of 55, but please, please don’t ever call me “Wirt.”

That syllable makes my neck flush. Every time I hear it (which is seldom anymore, thank God) suddenly I know how Hester Prynne felt. The very sound of it opens a floodgate of bad memories. I had it hung around my neck at birth and there it stayed until I was 15 and finally decided that I was tired of being made to feel like a visitor from another planet every time roll was called in home room. I exerted my adolescent will and forced everyone to the still relatively-unusual but at least not extraterrestrial sound of my middle name.

The transition was actually made quite smoothly. I think I had a lot of sympathizers. My father certainly sympathized; in fact he went so far as to tell me that he had wanted “Kelley” to be my first name to begin with. It comes from one of my dad’s old Border Patrol cronies, Rex Kelley.

My first move to make the change official came when I put in for my Social Security number. I filled out the form as “Kelley Dupuis,” and as far as the SSA is concerned, that’s my name until me and my SSN go up the chimney.

Now, I’ve told you how I came to be called “Kelley,” so I’ll tell you how I came to be called…that other thing. It seems my father just deferred to my mother on the subject. I was the second of three children and he had chosen my older sister’s name, so I guess he figured it was my mother’s turn to choose. She chose badly. She proceeded to stick me with the surname of a Protestant minister she admired, Dr. Williston Wirt. I doubt she had any idea that “Wirt” is the German word for “Tavern-keeper,” and that yoking a name like that to so thoroughly French a surname as “Dupuis” was perfectly idiotic. My mother is innocent of any foreign language, such that I remember one night over dinner she asked my father, who speaks both French and Spanish, the meaning of this word “merde” she kept coming across in novels. My mother wouldn’t say “merde” if she had a mouthful of it, and at the answer she blushed furiously. No, she couldn’t have known she was naming me Barkeep, but she wanted to give a warm fuzzy to the minister who had held her hand through a divorce in an era when women seldom divorced.

It should surprise no one that as soon as I became old enough, I became Catholic. And when I was baptised and they told me I could take a new name, I did. Later I just made it legal, taking my ecclesiastical name as my actual name.

The question I never got around to asking my mother was this: if she was so bound and determined to give Dr. Williston Wirt a warm fuzzy by sticking me with his absurd name, why “Wirt?’ Why not “Williston?” At least that way the kids on the playground would probably have called me “Will” or “Willis,” neither of which is the greatest name in the world, but either of them beats the hell out of “Wirt.” They are at least names used by other people who live on this planet. I’m sure either one would have saved me innumerable taunts, scuffles and fistfights.

I read in a Sunday supplement a few years ago that someone had conducted a study and found that children who are given oddball names at birth have a greater likelihood of growing up to be criminals than those who aren’t. Or if not criminals, at least social outcasts of various kinds. Dweezil Zappa, Cher’s daughter Chastity and Grace Slick’s son God were all spared this because, as the children of celebrities they’ve had to be accustomed all their lives to being set apart. Besides, as old Frank Zappa himself once pointed out, in the San Fernando Valley a name like “Dweezil” or “Moon Unit” isn’t going to get you a second glance anyway.

But if you’re just an average kid, and don’t have a parent who regularly turns up in People magazine, having a strange name hung on you at birth is almost like being born with an eye where your ear is supposed to be. From your very first day of kindergarten you have it drilled into your head every morning that you are strange, fundamentally different from all the other kids.

I can still hear my kindergarten teacher, a red-haired beauty named Cydne Roberts (she’d be in her sixties now) calling roll. Seaside Elementary School, Torrance, California. Autumn, 1960. “Jimmy Anderson?” “Sally Burnett?” “Tommy Condit?” “Wirt Dupuis?”

Pardon me while I have a hot flash. Well, at least Miss Roberts knew how to pronounce my last name. It was bad enough being called “Wirt,” but as often as not on the first day of school I would also have to listen to my American teachers mangling my French last name: “Doo-pwah,” “Doo-pew,” “Doo-pewis,” “Doopis,” “Duppis.” These mispronunciations invariably prompted a chorus of giggles and head-turnings in my direction, which in turn would make me wish I were “on some Australian mountain range,” as Bob Dylan put it.

I spent a lot of time during my young years wishing I were on some Australian mountain range or the equivalent.

My teachers thought I had an attitude problem. Jesus, wouldn’t you? They were forever complaining to my parents about what a sullen little smart-aleck I was. Well, yeah. I mean, what the hell did they know about it? Their names were all Donna and William and Robert and Larry and Betty and Diane. They had never been cornered on the playground by little thugs named Frank and Billy and taunted with cries of “Ha-ha, Wirt the squirt.”

Were they kidding with that “bad attitude” stuff? They’re lucky I didn’t grow up and become the neighborhood chainsaw slayer. Children get spanked, as well they should, when they make fun of handicapped people. But I never saw a kid get spanked for making fun of another kid's name, and if you ask me, having a goofy name is just a subtler form of being disabled. Forgive my strong feelings about this, but I think the little bastards should be boiled in oil, especially if their names are Frank or Billy.

I’m not trying to say that my name lay at the root of all the problems I had when I was growing up, but there were a few areas where being thus set apart from my peers made me feel that I was at an authentic disadvantage from the start and hence, my confidence wasn’t what it might have been.

And you know what I’m talking about now. Yes. Girls. Until I was in my twenties I could never get anywhere with girls. I think in high school I went out on one date. I skipped my senior prom, stayed home and watched The Tonight Show. Of course, by the time I was a high school senior I had already made the transition to “Kelley,” but the damage had been done long before. Imagine what it’s like to be in the sixth grade and in the throes of the first great crush of your life, and when you finally manage to muster the courage to walk up to the object of your adoration and so thoroughly take the ultimate fate of the universe into your hands as to utter a syllable to her, say, “Hello” for instance: “Hello, Patty.” “Hi, Wirt.” The exchange might as well have been “Hello, Earthling,” “Hi, Martian.”

It set the tone for the entire next decade. Until my second year of college all my relationships with girls were one-sided. I thought unrequited love was just going to be the way it was for me. My first name wasn’t solely to blame for this, but it was the little ur-embarrassment at the bottom of it all. Even after I became “Kelley,” “Wirt” remained my nerdy little Doppelgaenger, shadowing me everywhere, ready to jump out from behind a bush at any moment and whisper in my ear, “Who do you think you are, talking to girls, freak?”

The other boys interested in Patty had names like Bobby and Wesley. Wesley was the one she really liked. His father was the coach of the Ream Field Navy boxing team, and Wesley talked and acted just like his father. A little tough guy. He was always warning me to stay away from Patty. You’re damn right I was afraid of him, the little asshole. He needn’t have bothered with the threats, though. Patty had no interest in anything so exotic as a boy named Wirt. She had health oozing out of every pore, in fact it had spilled over and created a second one of her—she and her sister Penny were identical twins. I never could decide which of them I was crazier about. But Patty was in my class, so I saw her more often. Incidentally if you want to know the meaning of true suffering, and I mean suffering right up there in the big leagues with Van Gogh and Dostoevsky, try having a horrific crush on twin sisters, neither of whom will give you the time of day.

I used to watch Wesley and Patty walk off the playground together at the end of the day. To this day I wonder what they talked about; Wesley just barely had the power of speech. But there they were: Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm, if you know that story. Well, yeah, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroeger also had a “name problem;” I suppose being named “Tonio” in northern Germany 130 years ago was as bad as being named “Wirt” in California during the 1960s. But if you had given me the choice, there would have been no contest. As “Tonio” I would have been called “Tony” on the playground, and I had a friend named Tony who was quite popular.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably rolling your eyeballs by now. ‘He’s too sensitive,” you’re saying. “He’s too thin-skinned.” “He’s making a big deal out of nothing.” Well, let me put it this way: if I had been a champion debater or a hellacious quarterback or president of the student council, perhaps I might not be writing this now. Indeed, perhaps I might not have switched to my middle name in the middle of the 10th grade. I wouldn’t have found it necessary. But I was a kid who was average or below average in almost every way. I got B’s and C’s in most subjects at school, and F’s in math. The only subject in which I ever got an “A” was English. I was a substandard athlete and, in the pecking order of elementary, junior high and high school, I ranked somewhere down there with stewed prunes. I’m not saying I would have been a big man on the campus if my parents had named me James or Robert, but if you don’t have any particularly outstanding abilities to begin with, being stuck with a wacky name on top of everything else certainly doesn’t help any.

So what do you do? Some people compensate for their liabilities by becoming overachievers. I have wondered, for example, how much taunting millionaire Armand Hammer had to put up with as a child. I like to think that amassing his tremendous fortune was one way of getting back at the little schoolyard scumbags who no doubt danced around him in a circle chanting, “Baking Soda! Baking Soda! You’re a loada Baking Soda!” Now he could buy any one of them ten times over and sign the check “Armand Hammer” with a flourish (and a $1,000 Montblanc pen.)

A lot of people try to overcome a handicap by excelling at something. I read somewhere that Somerset Maugham took up writing novels because he had a speech impediment. But some people allow it to beat them, allow their “otherness” to snowball and bring them to grief. As my high school psychology teacher used to say, “It isn’t what happens to you that’s important,” it’s how you react to it.” Boy, would I like to meet the optimist who cooked up that line of baloney! The same guy, no doubt, who came up with the cliché “When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.” I go with Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes on this one: when life deals me a lemon, I chuck it back and add a few of my own.

I wonder how many people actually succeed at turning their liabilities into assets? Stephen Hawking didn’t become a great physicist because he had Lou Gehrig’s disease, but in spite of it. But something like Lou Gehrig’s disease, or being born with no arms, or Somerset Maugham’s speech impediment for that matter, is an act of nature and there isn’t much you can do about it except carry on as best as you can. And I suppose the same can be said of being named “Marlwark.” But the difference, and what a difference it is, is that physical disabilities are acts of nature. Wacky first names are not.

Which leads me to my main point: WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH PARENTS? Don’t they realize what they’re doing to a child when they name it Dorcas or Cadwalladr? Sometimes I think it’s just sadism, pure and simple, and I find it disturbing that anyone could be rotten enough to give a newborn baby the appelatory equivalent of a hot-foot. But I’ve seen some cases that definitely smack of the seltzer bottle in the delivery room, such as the man named Dover whose parents named him Ben, and who moreover had a sister named Eileen. My mother had a friend who was unfortunate enough to have the surname Pigg, and her parents named her Ima. Who could hate a baby that much? Admittedly, babies are noisy and expensive and few people get a bang out of yellow poo-poo, but the kid didn’t ask to be born, and I think if you treat him/her like the rubber chicken in a vaudeville sketch, you’re not just a bad parent, but a sick s.o.b.

Yes, Jolly Joker parents are exceptions. Most people regard the birth of an heir as something simultaneously more solemn and more joyous than an occasion for some great gags. I think much more often parents just don’t think, or their good intentions are misdirected. Who among us, on first viewing that adorable little bundle who looks like Yoda the Jedi Master for the first few days, is consciously thinking about what day-to-day life is going to be like for the little tyke when he’s in the seventh grade? Not very many, I’ll bet. Surely not my mother, who was thinking of Dr. Wirt and not of me. I think usually parents are thinking along the lines of A. What name would sound good with Smith, Jones or Garcia, or B. Are we going to name this child after Great Uncle Willard so he’ll put him in his will?

My sympathies, for understandable reason, lie more with aesthetic consideration. But that, too, has its pitfalls, as in this particularly ridiculous case in point, which, as Dave Barry used to say, I am not making up. A girl with whom I went to high school got married three years after graduation. Her husband’s name was Steve Bourgeois. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being named “Bourgeois” unless you’re planning to go after Mikhail Gorbachev’s job. But when her first child came along, this young woman decided that, having acquired a French name through marriage, she would give the situation a good, solid underscoring in the naming of her new daughter. She decided to give the poor little girl a name as French as a plateful of escargot swimming in butter. Unfortunately, in choosing the name, she displayed all the taste of someone who buys a portrait of Elvis painted on black velvet.

“Desiree.”

Can you imagine? “Desiree Bourgeois.” Remember that scene in Woody Allen's Radio Days when Julie Kavner, eight months pregnant, tells her husband she’s mulling the name “Lola” for their daughter?

“Lola? What do you, want her to be a stripper?” he replies.

Eek. In 1988, the year this essay was originally written, that little girl would have been 12 years old (Desiree, not the kid in the movie) and it’s my fervent hope that she had a happy childhood, but I’ll bet you a personalized license plate that that name didn’t help any. Not only did it sound like one-third of a Las Vegas lounge act, but you can imagine what those dumbbell teachers did with it on the first day of school each year from kindergarten to senior year. I can just hear the roll call now: “Jennifer Adams, Jennifer Anderson, Jennifer Ashworth, Jennifer Bentwell, and so on down through the Jennifers and Ashleys until they got to “De-sire Bor-jiss!” And I can picture the poor little girl shrinking to the size of a pack of Gitanes or a Renault Le Car from sheer mortification.

I can’t say what impact that horrible first name had on the early years of my life, probably not very much in truth. Because the truth is that kids in general are little shitheads and if they can’t turn you into an object of ridicule because of your name, they’ll find something else about you to ridicule. But I have made one rather comforting discovery in the past couple of years, and I don’t know why it never occurred to me before.

It’s simple: we are legion, we “midnight masqueraders” who go by our middle names. I am just one of millions who find their legal name so unpalatable that they have substituted something else for it. I have a friend whose legal name is “Elzey,” and if you call him that he just might punch your lights out depending on what sort of mood he’s in. His name, by his own say-so, is “Bob.” And where I work, at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, we have a Clarence who goes by “Gene” and a Julius who goes by “Art.” I don’t blame either of them, nor do I blame the foreign service officer I knew in Frankfurt whose driver’s license said “Clyde,” but who signed his name “Buck.” If my name were Clyde, I’d want to be called “Buck” too. And I’m just as sure that if his name were “Wirt,” he’d want to be called “Kelley.”

Then there are those who start out in life with such strikes against them that they might just throw in the towel and head for Superior Court with that petition before they get the diapers off. Remember Ben Dover and Ima Pigg? I can top those. Not long ago my supervisor walked into the office waving a local Brazilian newspaper and called my attention to an article about a spectacular traffic accident. He was laughing, telling us we just weren’t gonna BELIEVE this. He opened the paper, found the article, ran his finger over to the spot and said, “Here! Read that!”
“Arthur, this paper is in Portuguese,” I said. “I can’t read Portuguese.” (Arthur has a Brazilian wife and speaks the local lingo)

“You don’t have to read Portuguese,” he said. “Just look there! Look at the name of that witness they’re quoting!”

I looked. Bracketed in quotation marks was an eyewitness description of the accident’s aftermath by a local resident who saw the whole thing happen. He was identified as “Hitler Mussolini, 46.”

Unless he was hiding from his wife under an assumed name…well, and I thought I had problems.