First Name, Last Name

Sean Cody, Randy Blue, Nic Marna

“Were you on the website ‘Sean Cody’?” my mother asked me, finger hovering over the top Google search result—underlined and purple, not blue anymore. I knew it was impossible, but I was worried the physical pressure on the screen would actually click the link.

If you have to ask…

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The coldest tile known to man covered the basement floor. It was the kind of cold you want to lay on if you have a headache or feel overwhelmed. Unfortunately, most of my time lying on the hardness was spent watching my brother play video games. Rugs did nothing to soften the blow, I don’t think my elbows ever recovered.

The chair in the office there was a prayer chair—that’s not the real name I don’t think, but that’s what it looked like. It was a chair that only had a seat and a knee rest. You were meant to sit on it leaning forward and it reminded me of church pews with those little pads for kneeling. If God only knew the things I was looking up while attempting to sit in that prayer chair.

The smell of plastic wafting off of the thick monitor attached to the shared family computer could overpower most department store fragrance aisles. The middle note was dust, I think. Maybe the smell was so strong because of the auditory assault it came with. Like somehow the mix of whirring, buzzing and Windows Vista theme song disarmed my other senses.

Me trying to sit in the prayer chair, which is actually called a kneeling chair… but like…

Sitting—kneeling—in the chair, my mother beckoned me over with a wiggly index. Viens ici tout de suite, it said, each word punctuated by another fold of the finger. On the computer in front of her, she had an Internet Explorer window open with a hoard of collected tabs. The browser’s big blue E told me to run, but the cold of the ceramic underfoot locked me in place. I was caught in a game of Freeze Tag against my will.

I feel the need to mention that I now understand the power of clearing browsing data, but at the unripe age of 8, or 9, or 7, or maybe 10—who’s to say—it was a different story.

The curious contents of my head were on display like a spread out accordion. Neopets, bodies, Sims cheatcodes, naked bodies, swim team schedule, naked bodies doing things to each other, and oh fuck I even took a quiz to find out if I was gay.

As my mother was leafing through the tabs like they were entries in her address book, I noticed a pattern. Every page plucked from the search history was a First Name/Last Name combination. It was as if she thought that was the secret to finding the porn. At that point in time, it wasn’t a bad hypothesis. It seemed like every gay porn website had an All-American-star-of-the-football-team-probably-bullying-anyone-who-isnt-a-jock kind of name.

I was face to screen with the likes of Sean Cody, Randy Blue, Corbin Fisher.

First name: I don’t know what that is.
Last name: It wasn’t me, I swear.

Of course, in between those, there were some innocuous ones. Web trails from school projects about athletes, authors and artists. Lemony Snicket, Michael Phelps, JK Rowling.

First name: That’s literally an Olympic swimmer.
Last name: Mom, she wrote Harry Potter.

What I think my mother was clinging to was the obvious pattern of the naming convention shared by all these websites. But I also think they caught her eye because the FirstandLast combinations sounded right—I’ve always been aware of good names.

Shakespeare once wrote:

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”

Romeo and Juliet (1597)

Well, Shakespeare was obviously never confronted to his mother mining for gay porn in the family computer’s search history. Nothing sweet about that Willy!

The quote is meant to say that names don’t matter, but I beg to differ. Some names just feel like they are fully formed already, you don’t need to wrap your mind/lips around them. It’s musicality, it’s mouthfeel, it’s something ironically unnameable.

I’ve thought about this a lot recently when I was picking my pen name.

Wait… did this go from Sean Cody to discussing pen names? Yes, and!!!!

Pseudonyms have been around for a very long time, and for so many different reasons. There’s a longstanding history of women writing under an androgynous or masculine pen name in order to get published (imagine a world with the Brontë brothers?). Then there’s the idea of mass appeal, like Joaquin Phoenix switching it up from Leaf, an arguably stranger given name. And there’s also the good old razzle dazzle names, I mean Catherine Zeta Jones would not be Catherine Zeta Jones™️ if she was just Catherine Jones.

I have various reasons for pen naming—some of which will become evident in book 4 or 5 (“Let me cook!” said my Big Trauma Book)—but the truth is I’ve never liked my last name. Countless mispronunciations, freestyle spellings left and right, and not a single ounce of sparkle.

Finding a new one was going to be a little treat!

At first, everything I tried on felt like I was wearing a weird hat. I pictured people eyeing it up and down online, cocking their eyebrows at it in a bookstore one day, thinking what the fuck is that hat he’s wearing? I was concerned with perception because I knew it was bigger than me just slapping a vanity plate on a beat-up Acura. I was buying a whole new car.

In an essay about names and ancestry,

Solitary Daughter

quotes Elamin Abdelmahmoud discussing his daughter having his last name. He said, “[a name] should be heavy, a weight you carry. All of us carry that unshakeable chain.” He’s speaking to something cultural that doesn’t apply to me, but his discussion of being entered into a shared history and lineage jumped off the page at me.

What I was doing, bolt cutters in hand, was breaking off a chunk of the chain. Ancestry and history felt—feels—important to me, but the link I was given didn’t.

I went back to the drawing board. Everything within reach didn’t fit, so I climbed into the branches of my lopsided family tree and found the one that sparkled the most. What was nestled there belonged to my mother’s great-grandfather. He was an associate of the Lumière brothers, a man with a killer moustache who dedicated his life to the arts. It felt right!

His photography studio storefront in Paris! Ok, fancy!!!

All this to say: Shakespeare be damned, I found a name I like and it’s okay if that matters. I can only hope that one day, a concerned mother will open tab after tab from a computer’s search history and my name will be squished between a bunch of gay porn.

Sean Cody, Randy Blue, Nic Marna