What’s My Name?
Once our names are etched across our birth certificates, that’s it. Our name is a done deal. Or is it?
“David Farley” about to speak to a packed house at the New York Times Travel Show.
My name is David James Farley. This is the name on my birth certificate but I haven’t gone by it for many years.
When I worked at a magazine in San Francisco two decades ago, I quickly learned there were about 17 other people named David in the office. The first few times someone hollered over our cubicles, “Hey David?” and there was a chorus of “Yes!” it was one of those moments when you take a surreptitious look around the room for the hidden cameras. So, in an attempt to distinguish myself from the army of Davids (and so I could get some work done without always saying “Yes!”), one day I cleared my throat at a staff meeting and announced that I was now to be known simply as “Farley.”
I was aware that having one name was a slippery slope to eventually adopting an unpronounceable symbol as a name. But, in an attempt to save my job, it was a risk I was willing to take.
Really, though, it wasn’t just that. I liked my new name, even if it may have caused confusion to the unfamiliar on the other end of an email when I would sign out simply as “Farley.”
I have a long history of nicknaming. Growing up, I had different monikers for my entire family. My sister Diane was Dietzer. My brother Bob was “Bobler.” My sister Cathy was “Little Cow.” It wasn’t a reference to weight or body type or anything like that, but because when I was young, I pronounced “Cath” as “Caf.” Calf. And since a calf is a “little cow,” she became known as a diminutive bovine. That is until some years ago, when, as a fifty-year-old woman, and after years—decades—of being referred to very publicly by her entire family as a “Little Cow” (or sometimes just “Cow”), she’d had enough. The last straw was when we threw a surprise birthday party for her. With many of her friends and work colleagues (some of whom she hardly knew) in attendance, the sister-soon-to-be-formerly-known-as-Little-Cow, grew red with embarrassment when she saw the banner my sister Diane, aka Dietzer, had hung across the room. It read: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY LITTLE COW!”
From about the sixth grade on (as in, still to the present day), I’ve referred to my mom and dad, respectively, as Mihms and Mr. Hoshidi. I don’t remember where Mihms came from but I liked the sound of it. Mr. Hoshidi was derived from a kid in my sixth grade class named Aaron Hoshidi. I have no idea why I decided to name my father after a 12-year-old Japanese-American boy but it somehow felt right.
My proclivity for nicknaming was really a way of gaining possession over people that I deemed important in my life. If you got a nickname, I was claiming you as my own, throwing a tethered verbal lasso around you and dragging you toward me. It was a security blanket to my insecurity; an impotent attempt to quell my fear of loss in a home that felt, through my teenage years, increasingly unstable. And as an adult I still do it. Girlfriends eventually get nicknames. The longer we’re together, the more they acquire. All my good friends have them. They even know each others’ Farley-given nicknames.
AKA Grover Farley
But then there were the names I gave myself. In college, I decided that the name Grover, when paired with Farley, had a nice sound to it. Grover Farley. My parents would begin their regular Sunday evening phone call to me with “Hi Grover.” Even the nametag I wore at the record store I worked at had “Grover” splashed across it for a while. At least until attractive girls started snickering at me, most certainly thinking of me as the milquetoast Sesame Street character. I quickly went back to boring “Dave.”
AKA Mokolembembe, trying and succeeding to look like a maniac.
Five years later, after taking a graduate seminar in the history of imperialism in Africa, I learned about Mokolembembe, a Loch Ness Monster-like creature that supposedly has haunted a lake in the Congo for decades. I can’t remember the day I thought it would be a good idea to adopt Mokolembembe as a name but soon enough, there was a large handful of people who knew me as a possibly mythical African beast. My family, long used to my proclivity for nicknames, got in on the act. Wrapped birthday gifts arrived with “Mokolembembe” scrawled across the attached tag.
All eight employees of the Bridge Theater in San Francisco, where I worked for about a year while I was in graduate school, knew me solely as this Congolese monster monicker. “Hey Mokolembembe, will you work the ticket booth?” a colleague would say. Still to this day, over two decades later, if I ran into anyone I’d worked with at the theater, they’d certainly say, “Hi Mokolembembe!,” possibly not sure what my official name is.
Can you find “David James” in the photo? Pssst: last one to your right.
Our names appear intrinsically tied to how we’re defined. They’ve been with us since the day we met the world. But as I’ve changed—or, rather, as the world has changed me—and as I’ve traveled the planet, studied the canons of literature, learned how to say “dwarf” in multiple different languages, I’ve grown out of my original name. I’m so far from “Dave” I might as well have created a gravesite for the name. When someone calls me “Dave” now, I feel like I’m back in eleventh grade. High school Dave had long hair and was in a rock band. At that time, he was known by his stage name, David James. Well, technically only when he was on stage. He didn’t read much; he didn’t travel; he had few ambitions except to be a rockstar and eat Taco Bell bean and cheese burritos with eyebrow-raising frequency.
Not everyone has the same compulsion to show a change in one’s personal and intellectual growth in the same way. Some people hang Impressionist paintings in their bathrooms. Others move to Brooklyn.
But as I’ve changed, I’ve often felt a need to leave behind certain things, to shed my name like a snake does its skin or a butterfly does its cocoon. One of those, I’ve realized, is the name people call me.
I wasn’t named after anyone in particular. My parents chose David at random and at the last minute. David is not a sacred name – at least not in my case – so why can’t I take control of how I’m called?
Until something else comes up, Farley is going to stick around for a while. Unless Sam, the Palestinian man who runs my local bodega in the West Village, has something to say about it. Sam takes great pride in rattling out every regular’s order the second they step foot in his shop. When I pop in, as I do a few mornings every week, Sam screams out, “Iced coffee with milk!” as if it were the winning answer to a question on a game show.
A few months ago, I was strolling through the neighborhood. And there was Sam, just finished with his shift and heading for the subway. It was odd seeing him out of context, without his white apron on and not behind the counter. It was strange for him to see me, too, as I watched him do a double-take the second he laid eyes on me. During his second look at me, his eyes narrowed in on my face, he slowed his walk, shaking his index finger at me, and said, “Iced Coffee with Milk.”
That’s how Sam knows me. He doesn’t know my “real” name – whatever that is. I’m simply the thing I come in to buy at his shop a few times a week (thank God my regular order is not something like lubricated lambskin condoms). And I’m okay with that. For someone with a proclivity for giving himself new names every decade, how could I not be?
It’s unlikely I’ll be adopting it as a regular nickname, though. I’ve already subjected my family and friends to enough. Besides, introducing myself to people at parties as “Iced Coffee with Milk” would just be weird.