Adios, Scheherazade

It was bad enough in grammar school and high school, where all the jokes based on my name had to do with stupidity and having no head and things like that, but in the last few years, since the topless waitress craze — think how insecure so many Americans must be, that they want their food brought by women with bare breasts — the jokes on my name have become very obscene and even less funny than the old ones.

I’ve thought about changing my name, I’ve thought about it a lot, and if my father hadn’t died when I was two years old maybe I would have changed it by now, but as things are it would seem too disrespectful somehow, too much of a slap in the face of my father. I understand that’s ridiculous, honest, I do realize that, but it’s the way I feel.

Sometimes I wish my stepfather had adopted me before abandoning my mother. Edwin Harsch is a pretty good name. With a name like Edwin Harsch I might be owning the waterfront by now. But he didn’t, and of course after he ran out on my mother she wasn’t at all happy with the name or the fact that she had two daughters wearing it, and even now I think I’d get some static from her if I suggested switching to that name. She herself is using her maiden name these days, Mabel Swing.

What if I called myself Edwin Swing? No, I don’t think so. The only images I get out of that name are being hanged and turning fag, neither of which I find very appealing, despite having been tempted by the dumpling in the shower this afternoon.

When I was in high school I thought for a while of just using my first and middle names, and calling myself Edwin George. Maybe I should have. Edwin George. That isn’t a bad name. It would save me a lot of mammarian humor, let me tell you.

I suppose I’ll have to change my name now, what with the cops looking for me and all. I registered here as Dirk Smuff, my sex book pen name, but Dirk Smuff isn’t a name I can see myself carrying around for very long. Besides, it does belong to Rod.

What, then? A brand new name? Something totally different, something to help me switch to a better personality, a winner personality, get rid of this loser mentality.

Brock Stewart.

Oh, shit, that doesn’t sound right. That’s as phony-sounding as Dirk Smuff.

Or Ed Topliss, really.

Maybe Ed Stewart. Edwin Stewart, that’s bland without being weak. Ed Stewart is a GI sort of name, a nice-guy sort of name, a friendly reliable sort of name, a name for a guy who’s a winner in a quiet and non-pushy kind of way. No loser mentality for Ed Stewart.

Maybe it ought to be Edgar. Edgar Stewart. A little stronger, that.

Yeah, but it’s for me. Maybe it ought to be Edsel.

Wait a second. If I’m going to travel, I can’t use a phony name. I’m going to have to use my Diners’ Club card, and that has my name on it, right there in raised blue plastic letters, with my illegible signature scrawled above, and that means I’m going to have to travel under my own name.

How much effort are the cops going to put into looking for me? Statutory rape isn’t going to make that much noise in the world. They’ll contact my friends and relatives, they’ll probably put something in the paper — I didn’t see Newsday but there wasn’t anything in today’s Times — and they’ll check my house from time to time, but that should be about all. Oh, they’ll put out a wanted circular on me, I suppose, so if I’m picked up by the police somewhere else for some other reason they’ll know not to let me go, but I really doubt they’ll be blanketing the airports and railway stations and running house-by-house searches of the world. With any luck I should be able to travel for a few days at least on my card, and what with the speed of transportation these days in a few days I can be anywhere in the world. I can go to Ulan Bator, or Mérida, or Brazzaville. I can go anywhere.

No, I can’t. I don’t have a passport.

Well, I can go anywhere in this country and Canada, and that’s territory enough for anybody to disappear in, surely. Particularly with a Diners’ Club card to keep them alive until they get settled somewhere.

Having the Diners’ Club card is mostly a fluke, by the way. I noticed that whenever I got together for dinner in the city with any of the other guys, they always struggled over who was to get the check. Not because they wanted to pick up the tab, but because they wanted to pay the bill with their credit cards and then collect our share from the rest of us. I didn’t understand this, and one evening I asked Pete about it, and he said the reason was because the guy who got the bill onto his credit card could then use it as a tax deduction on his income tax. Business deduction, a business dinner with other writers. Perfectly legal.

Well, what the hell. I had to pay taxes, too, and I’ve always been very interested in ways to keep my money from the government, so I promptly sent in an application to the Diners’ Club, and the first thing you know they sent me a card and I was a member.