A.K.A.

I think I ought to tell you that I’ve been living incognito for most of my life. When I was nine, I was an aspiring rodeo rider. Here’s the picture: Levis, western style yolk shirt, imitation Stetson, and braids. I’m galloping along the High Line Canal that flows through the prairie near my house; my scruffy, barrel-sprung little quarter horse, Gypsy, is dutifully playing her part.

My name fit me then. When I hit high school my dream changed. I want to be unique, desirable, a muse. In short, I wanted to upstage those silly cheerleaders who were swamped by dates with football heroes. I wanted to be the edge that boys fell off. Peggy was a name that had tomboy dud stuck to its back. I needed something exotic to be the heroine in the romantic novel of my life.

I found it, the name not the novel, at my sister’s college graduation. She went to some fancy college in the East. The family drove cross-country in our Ford two-tone station wagon to witness the event. It was incredible. The dorms looked like mansions and the landscape looked like the Amazon rain forest, compared to Colorado. My sister’s best friend was Greek. Greek! She has an accent so. . . foreign. . . so sexy. She smoked cigarettes nonchalantly. Right in front of my parents! She talked about some guys, Sartre and Camus. She was so cool. Her name was Meris. That’s Greek for “the sea.”

I abducted the name outright. When I got back to Arapahoe High School, I became Meris. It was a placebo affectation. I became the bohemian artist almost immediately. The braids? Gone: ironed straight. The ears were pierced with big hoop earrings. Heavy eyeliner circumscribed my eyes, and tight hip hugger jeans showed off my vital statistics. I read existential novels. And, that was just the beginning. It was the sixties.

Names, I learned, are powerful and sometimes deceptive. I collect name specimens. Sometimes I scroll through them like the credits at the end of a movie. Those names are the window to the fantasy, the reason for the fantasy. Names can tell the whole story without the story.

This manipulation of my persona continued through college and art school. Life was a cocktail of visceral gratification of sex and drugs, music and art. Men were mostly boys and they had names like Ron, Steve, Mike, Bill, Dan. . . Mauricio was one of my favorites. I put him on my mental Rolodex. You can see why.

Did you think the continuing story was going to be Meris migrating to SoHo and captivating the art world? I had a bourgeois breakdown instead. I wanted the comfort of a regular job to support my art habit. Regular meant being an urban elementary art teacher. I acquired a couple of extra names. The education bureaucracy called me Itinerant, as in expendable, and the kids called me Art, as in “Art is just the name of the guy.”

Teaching in the inner city is like wearing a nicotine patch if you’ve never smoked before. I did become famous in a way. The art teacher, purveyor of that golden hour of fun twice a month, is a major celebrity to the twelve and under set. Of course there is frustration, exhaustion, and tension, as any celebrity will tell you, but teaching was a jackpot for my index.

Italian kids dominated my first school. I felt like I was surrounded by characters in a Fellini movie. My favorites? Filomena (nicknamed Bunny) Tirocchi. Angelo DiFazio. Elvira Berdarducci. In sixth grade, poor Elvira got knocked up by her father. But, she came to school every day so that she could be with her sixth grade boyfriend. She had to withdraw during her sixth month because she couldn’t fit into her school desk. So much for Wonder Bread existentialism.

Because my name was Itinerant, I also taught at another school. The students are mostly generic white with a sprinkling of black kids bussed in after the riots. It’s 1971. My Rolodex is filled with Motown names – Aretha, Germaine, Michael – and black consciousness names – Malcolm, Rasheed, Jamal. Then there was Tode: chocolate brown, small, vacant, and a lead baby. I didn’t know it was pronounced Todd. What’s a middle-class alias to do?

Did I mention that I married Mauricio? My lexicon of names increased exponentially with that one simple ceremony. I went to Colombia to meet the family of staid oligarchs. Ironically, they had sabotaged their proper names: Enrique was called Profe – short for professor, Maria Clara was call Melotunas, Teresa was called TeTe, Leonor was called Palo, and Rafael was called Pooky. Maria Ignacia Josefina Rita Margarita Julia Herrera de Barreto, Mauricio’s mother, was called Julia.

In the seventies I had to pack up my Conestoga art wagon and pioneer another school in the south of the city. Here the students were mostly Hispanic and Asian. I’d had Berlitz interval training in Colombia, so I was looking forward to practicing my Spanish skills. Little Lally was my favorite in the Limited English class. She was all curls, powder pink frill, and patent leather. A miniature Latina siren. Autumn, the class was painting pumpkins. When the red hit the yellow and swirled into a Kindergarten miracle, she shrieked with ecstasy. I was canonized on the spot. Later I found out that Lally was a nickname. Lesbia was the name on her report card. Isn’t it true? You’re never prepared for some names.

The Asian kids were part of the tsunami of displaced children that flooded our schools. Tiny, ancient souls silenced by napalm and camp terrors. They are ever so solemn and patient when I try to fit my angular voice into the spherical resonance of Thai, Cambodian, or Hmong pronunciations: Xiong, Sosathabna, Thipphava, and Zoua. I like to imagine that they all go home after school and hoot and howl with laughter over Western names like Peggy or Meris. Hoot and howl shamelessly like I did when Kha Kha enrolled in school. I often wonder if the poor kid survived middle school scatological warfare.

My first child was a black and tan Bloodhound. He remained nameless for a month while Mauricio - also a compulsive name master - and I fretted and haggled over the right name. Our saggy, sloppy, dear boy was named Bubba. As any good southerner will tell you that is what you call the first-born son.

Having survived the tribulations of parenting a willful, wandering canine, we decided to try parenting a homosapien. The name jousting lasted nine months. Mauricio put up names like Jose Maria, Baltazar, and Sancho. I was apoplectic. As far as I was concerned, Sancho was the fat dude who rode a donkey behind that skinny seventeenth century nut with old age dementia. In the end, the hospital nurse brought me breakfast and a card to fill out for the birth certificate. I wrote in Julia. When I’m feeling especially maternal, I call her JuJu.

In the eighties, the Africans arrived. Fleeing tribal conflict, lovable Mobolagi, sweet Omabola, and troubled Foday came to school. Five-year-old Foday was damaged beyond recovery before I met him. He was already violent and mean.

It’s amazing how the teaching habit can wear you out like frayed jeans washed and dried too many times. The daily routine, the mundane demands dull the sense of inquiry, adventure, and risk. I fight to keep the Meris in my life even if only sporadically. The creative flow is dammed to a trickle, but the prospect of the surge of inspiration held back is like a wish and a prophecy.

Ten years later another school. This school becomes my nightmare and my epiphany. The children are project waifs from disrupted, corrupted, bankrupted families, barely surviving the American cultural war. A day in this school is like participating in a scene from Marat-Sade. I’ve seen children as young as nine restrained and handcuffed by the police. Weapons brought from home are a given. Names like Desiree, Prince, Sir Joseph, Major, and Glory are used to spackle the cracks in low self-esteem. They are tough, brazen, and vulnerable as porcelain in an earthquake zone. Four letter invectives or bear hugs can erupt at any given moment.

Marcus grew up and changed before my eyes. He was dark and handsome as a movie star. He had a crush on me in kindergarten; he told me that I looked like Cinderella. The anger started to metastasize as he grew. By second grade he was wearing the colored beads of the Latin Kings. His eyebrows were shaved in vertical gashes gang style. In third grade our relationship was adversarial, verging on the hysterical. In fourth grade he snapped. I was steps away, too impotent to prevent him from a suicidal attempt to chop his arm with the machete blade of the paper cutter on my desk. Oh, my God! My child!

The lemonade-yellow pills are good for quelling the rage and fear that occupy my mind some days when I can’t shut off the whining replay of this documentary. But I am luckier than some teachers. Artwork provides the healing catharsis. It is the visual salvation of my soul.

Last week, on the front page of the newspaper, there was a picture of Marcus, age seventeen. He is dead. He shot himself in the head with a pistol, the same pistol that he was playing with when he accidentally shot his best friend in the head.

I think I ought to tell you that I’m a liar. I guess we all hide behind names that are wishes. Me? Margaret Ruth is on my birth certificate. I’m named after both my grandmothers. The names are impossibly heavy, Victorian, and biblical. How did I get so weighed down?

Recently, the children have been arriving with names that are hyphens and apostrophes: Trey-del, V-dal, Tea’quondra, Shi’wana, and Ja’neice. Are they metaphors for abbreviated lives? Maybe they’re more innocent, like lyrics that fit some beat I don’t know.

A new child enrolled in school last week. Her name is Thend, pronounced “the end.” Maybe. Thirty years is a long time to work at anything, especially the panoramic cinema of humanity. I’m seriously thinking about the sequel to my life in names.            

I’m thinking about gardening in Technicolor. Get these! Fritillaria (Checkered Lily), Hyancinthoides (Spanish Bluebells), Monarda (Bee Balm), Physostegia (False Dragonhead), Polygonatum (Solomon’s Seal). Yes. I’m going to start a new collection