The Name Dropper

 
While having a famous father-in-law is not literally the least interesting thing about me, most days it hovers suspiciously close to that designation. Maybe that’s the reason I try to keep it on the DL whenever possible. No one would ever know were it not for my wife’s last name. Were her surname Wood or Smith, the tiny portion of my marriage I struggle with would vanish. But Beatrice already sustained the appendage of her birth name for over 40 years when we married. Not obscuring her lineage behind a stage name during her short-lived acting career, never adopting a hyphenated version during her first marriage, Beatrice made peace with her name long before meeting me: how could I request she change it? And yet, just yesterday, I overheard the familiar seesaw during her phone call addressing a faulty popcorn popper with Williams-Sonoma: 
 
No, ending with “a,” not “er.” 
 
(beat)
 
Yes, he’s my father. 
 
Does Beatrice sound as if this is the 67,348th time she’s had this exchange? Nope. Her matter-of-fact response never shifts inflection, tempo, or clarity. If she ever wearies of the discourse, her delivery never belies it. 
 
Beatrice doesn’t embrace repetition. Routine makes her squirm. She will tire of a shampoo halfway through a bottle if we’ve purchased the economy size. If we have sushi on Thursday and I suggest teriyaki on Saturday, she says, We just had Asian food.
 
Why does Beatrice never tire of explaining her famous name?
 
I know a thing or two about name changes. While many trans people change their names, I’m one of the unicorns who’ve changed it twice. During grad school, I changed my first name to better reflect my evolving gender identity. I introduce myself to everyone I meet by my new name, and I expect old friends and family extend the effort by switching my I.D. in their phone and computer contact lists, though I forgive my 90-year-old mother-in-law when she forgets my rebrand and pronouns, sparing her the analogy of a knife jab between my ribs when I hear my deadname. 
 
The Urban Dictionary defines deadname as: 

The birth name of somebody who has changed their name. Most commonly attributed to trans
people, but can be attributed to any person who has changed their name.

 

*

 
I changed my name via abbreviation, maintaining my first slim initial and amputating the other seven letters as if they were the underlying tissue of a top surgery; my single-letter name pleases me for its simplicity, but is not without issues. I’ve fielded an uncomfortable amount of raised eyebrow judgements that my name, for a writer, lacks creative thinking. Yes, I too admire names like Elliot, Cyrus, and Jazz, but my newly chosen name articulates private feelings that I was more editing than reinventing. However, I’ve learned the hard way just how many electronic forms require inputting two letters minimum. This is true of many banks, my current apartment lease, and even a recent walk for suicide prevention I was unable to register for. It’s frustrating enough to make me wish I’d chosen something different. . .but could I go through it again? 
 
I changed my last name three decades before my first, during the summer between completing college and beginning a career in advertising, the way certain former classmates sandwiched in their nose jobs. This first name change was meant to cement distance between myself and my father. Back then, a legal name change warranted hiring a lawyer. I hadn’t expected the rush of relief I felt—akin to when flashing lights in my rearview mirror prove ultimately meant for someone else’s vehicle—when receiving my re-issued birth certificate in the mail; I stood a long while staring at the newly christened me, marveling at the historical re-write. The official paper, sent by the U.S. Department of Records, was a tri-folded, stamped, blue-and-white document stating I had been born without a father, under a different surname. Like magic, an attorney disappeared half my DNA. At the time, I considered it a legal falsehood. 
 
I marched my falsehood to the Department of Motor Vehicles that day, forever changing my driver’s license. I wielded the falsehood at the U.S. Post Office, where they issued me a virgin passport (eradicating previous trips to Europe, the Bahamas, and Mexico). Eventually, my falsified records legally spread through the hospital where I was delivered, and the one where my thumb got stitched up following a woodworking mishap, along with every doctor’s office I’d ever visited for so much as a consultation on a rash. In places like the public library, I started anew, presenting my refurbished driver’s license and garnering a “first” library card. No longer would I be the reader who checked out all of Kurt Vonnegut’s works, in chronological order, during high school. I became forever disassociated from the fifth grader smitten with prestidigitation who borrowed every book written on Harry Houdini. I pruning-sheared old charge cards, mutating myself into a crisp customer with no history of purchases at Brooks Brothers, Saks, Neiman Marcus. I flashed to the interior of my closet, imagining my cable knit sweaters and tweed jackets evaporating one by one in a Dorian Gray-esque sort of removal. The Whitney Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, and MOMA took me on fresh, like I was a recent transplant to the city I’d lived in all my life, eradicating all the Biennials and costume exhibit openings a prior version of myself attended. Even my college, whose motto includes the word veritatem, sent me a modified diploma and altered the name on my transcript for when I sent it on to grad schools. 
 
But this revised reality disoriented, curtailing the liberation I hoped my new name would bestow. Instead of a lighter-hearted me, I felt obligated to uphold a fiction of my own creation, hiding my dead name (back then, the two words had not yet been compounded) like a boxer ducking and weaving in avoidance of body blows. On too many occasions to count, some random former high school acquaintance would enter the same bar or restaurant I was in, catapulting me into panic as my past and present worlds risked collision. I hid behind menus, habitually rubbed my eyes, wore sunglasses indoors, rather than jeopardize exposure. My approach to changing my last name mimicked entering the Federal Witness Protection Program. 
 

*

 
At first, Beatrice’s last name was just a part of her, of less significance to me than her favorite color (red) or her favorite film (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). But when I told close friends we were dating, if I used her last name along with her first, there was always a pause and head cock, then that extra question, the one that had zero relevance to the woman or our relationship. Wait, is she related to— and it felt like something, for the second time in my life, I wished to evaporate. 
 
When we began traveling together, I used only my name on hotel and car reservations, avoiding guest reception or Avis rental agents posing the question. If I slipped and mentioned Beatrice’s name, an unwelcome specter buckled themselves into the backseat of our midsize. . .or checked into our Non-Smoking Deluxe Queen with us, an ancillary interloper within our burgeoning private world. 
 
I’ve dealt with this my whole life, Beatrice would shrug and say. . .(an exaggeration, as her father didn’t need a disguise to escort her around Disneyland until she was 12; her family wasn’t featured in People Magazine until she was 13).
 
When we moved in together, I learned a well-known name increases plumbing, electrical, and landscaping fees. I’d call the same plumber I’d used in my old house for the exact same shower leak and receive a bill 50 percent higher. A $75 electrical outlet installation became $150. Lawnmowing escalated from $100 to $300. I attempted concealing our identity when I contacted a pool company to elongate our little pool. Oh, cute hot tub! friends said, eyeing the pool that came with the house we’d bought. The real estate agent termed it a plunge pool—which, to me, is like accidentally dropping a stack of dishes and calling it mosaic prep. Alone, I met the pool representative, filling out paperwork in my name, alluding to Beatrice only as my partner. Listening to me explain my interest in swimming laps and my disinterest in plunging, the pleasant rep gave me a ballpark estimate to expand our pool. When I followed up by phone, I was quoted a price higher than that ballpark. By higher, I mean double. Before hanging up, the rep mistakenly called me by Beatrice’s last name. And there it was. It’s a small town, and we’d been found out. So our pool remained short. Laps require tying one end of a yellow rope around my abdomen, securing the other end to a nearby tree, and swimming in place. 
 
While I’m grateful for every moment of my writing career, I cannot summon similar fervor for the gratuitous link I’ve acquired to my father-in-law’s career. When I’m with him in public, people talk to me as if I’m his celebrity handler. In restaurants, fans approach our table, asking my permission for his autograph or selfie. Ask him, I offer each time, as if it’s a new concept I’m formulating as I speak it. 
 
During his recurring role in a series with a large millennial fan base, I rushed into my local hardware store with a pressing mousetrap need and dealt with exuberant employees razor-focused on how the episode where my father-in-law is made to explode (graphically splattering his organs throughout a room) was technically accomplished. Since the inception of his weekly podcast, strangers interrupt me when I’m reading at the local coffee joint or intercept me while grocery shopping:  
 
Has Goldie Hawn had plastic surgery?
 
Is Marlo Thomas really as kind as she seems?
 
Is Tony Fauci funny in-person?  
 
You idiot—can’t you see I’m not a famous person? I simply fell in love with and married someone with a famous person for a father. Now leave me alone so I can get home and tie myself to a tree to swim laps! I scream inside my head.  
 
Once, in the middle of a doubles tennis match, one of the opposing players asked me: Hey, is your father-in-law around or traveling? I’m producing a Moth Radio segment and want to get him for the show. 
 
Y’know, I don’t bring his calendar to the tennis court, but I really should start, I didn’t deadpan; instead, I smiled and replied, Sorry, no idea.
 
Folks never inquired about my father. Neither sought-after nor well-liked, he was a womanizer and philanderer, propositioning my babysitters while driving them home. My father pressed up against wives of his friends in elevators while their husbands waited in the lobby. One of his affairs produced two children during the handful of years between my brother’s birth and mine. Another affair burgeoned into a secret second family he raised while still married to my mother. Setting up his mistress in a house in the suburbs, my father recycled my sleds and bicycles to my secret half-siblings, telling me only he knew some kids who would like these.
 
My father was a racist. He used the N-word with frequency and gusto. If he yelled it loudly at a New York Jets game, causing another spectator to look askance in his direction, he’d double down: You heard what I said—want to hear it again? When our housekeeper Millie spilled gravy at a dinner party, he said, Careful, Millie, or I’ll send you back to South Carolina to pick cotton.
 
My father was a drunk. Never acknowledging alcoholism in the slightest, he would joke, clicking open the barrel of his revolver and spilling the bullets into his dresser drawer before bed, that his head was too fuzzy to remember if he left one behind in the chamber or not, then he’d point the gun at my mother and squeeze the trigger. 
 
And my father was connected to organized crime. On more than one occasion, a late-night phone call propelled him to reload his bullets, slip his gun back into the shoulder holster he wore between his button-down shirt and suit jacket, and exit our apartment. Say hello to my friend, Mr. Gotti, is how my father introduced me to John Gotti when he stopped by our table at Peter Luger Steak House, nudging me to stand up in respect while shaking the notorious murderer’s hand. Confused about my father’s role when it came to crime, I asked a friend of the family I had grown up calling uncle (though he wasn’t) what sort of mobster my father was. Lowering his tone to a hard whisper, he said, If you need to dispose of a body, you call Jerry. 
 
By trade, my father was a dentist, inheriting his father’s lucrative practice. Years later, I’d learn that dentists, more often than one might suspect, had mafia ties because Federal Reporting Laws mandate doctors report stabbings and bullet holes, but dentists aren’t obligated to disclose treating such wounds. 
 
Could this revelation that my father broke zero laws when extracting a .38 mm slug from someone named Jimmy-the-Rat make me feel any better about where I come from? Could it make me reconsider my earlier decision to drop his last name like a. . .smoking gun?
 

*

 
My father-in-law has a squeaky-clean image. People wish he’d run for office. During cap-and-gown season, he’s always booked for commencement addresses. So why don’t I accept the respite from my own lineage when people mistake me for one of his kids?
 
Please give my best to your father!
 
Father-in-law, I always correct. 
 

*

 
During my former career shooting commercials, I often worked with NBA players. Victims of their physical size, professional basketball players reveal their celebrity the moment they enter the room; no version of fake mustaches and wig disguises conceal their otherness. When Wilt Chamberlain and I first met over breakfast to run through his lines for a Foot Locker commercial, we were interrupted so many times by fans eating at nearby tables, I learned to book private rooms (where, besides pausing for one selfie with the waiter, we’d be left alone). In this way, fame and my proximity to it shrunk to navigable inconvenience. 
 
Infamy eventually reduced to something similarly manageable. My stomach no longer tightens when errant strands of my paternal DNA surface unannounced; my larynx doesn’t constrict when discussions careen toward my nefarious heritage. But my years of unease took a toll; concealment of trauma became additional trauma I gifted myself, lugging it around far too long, like a middle-schooler with a tuba. And now my tuba is my damned deadname. 
 
You know the scene in Peter Pan where Peter becomes separated from his shadow? The shadow, evading Peter and Tinker Bell, runs off independently until Wendy saves the day, sewing Peter’s shadow back onto the heels of his feet. Most days, it feels like my deadname is the shadow sutured to my skin; I can never entirely shake it from my being, can never sever the indissoluble stitches. And unlike Peter Pan, my shadow doesn’t complete me; instead, it unravels me. An early essay or poem will emerge, and there it is. Ditto a photograph I used to cherish of my and Beatrice’s wedding cake, that I no longer do. When I come home late to our city apartment and Carlos, the lovely nighttime doorman (whose shift begins at midnight and ends in time for him to take two trains home to get his kids to daycare), sprints to press the elevator button for me, holds the door ajar and says, “’Night ma’am” as it shuts, I can never imagine how to intrude on his complicated world to further heal mine. Government documents are malleable, good friends make the effort, but I’ve traversed enough terrain over enough time that I’d have to relocate to Mars to guarantee my gender identity the fresh start it so desperately craves. 
 
Life with Beatrice schooled me in accepting what I didn’t create and cannot control. Experiencing how she incorporates heredity into her life helped me evolve my inner child ashamed of their parentage, and ultimately allowed me to embrace my true gender. I learned becoming more open about who I am empowers me, making me more authentic and less vulnerable. This seismic internal shift led to, among other things, adopting a first name appropriately representing my gender. 
 
When considering the hoops and hurdles I need traverse to insert my updated name and pronouns into every corner of my past so that it doesn’t assault my present for the second time in my life, I find solace by meditating on solar panels we installed years ago to heat our tiny plunge pool. When I emulate those reflective grid panels—stand tall and beckon the sun’s fiery power, absorbing and collecting vast energy when things shine bright—I store it for future expenditure. And I’m free to draw on these precious power reserves when I most need them. Because so far, life keeps explaining it takes as much energy to move toward a thing as away from it. Some days it takes more.