Djelloul Marbrook

Do you have a secret name for yourself? I’ve had quite a few, but the one that sticks is Henry Hogwash. Henry and I have been through a lot. He showed up midway in my life when I saw that taking myself too seriously was at least as bad as a fifth of Scotch a day. Another Henry accompanied the poet John Berryman through his Dream Songs. He was a bit more morose than Hogwash and didn’t serve the poet as well as the poet served him.

When I was a kid my name seemed to anesthetize people’s tongues. It was a different America then. People with perfectly beautiful names were still anglicizing their names. You know that schtick, right? The way the good old boys in Washington still try to anglicize our body politic? Some members of my maternal family never even learned to spell it. Juh-loo was the best they could do. Just for the record, it actually sounds something like Jeh-lool. I was called Jello and Jules and a few other things that make me wince.

The consequence of all this, beside enjoying teachers at the start of a new class staring bug-eyed at my name, was that I began expecting someone else to show up in the mirror. Someone with a reputable Sunday school name, the kind of kid who didn’t make anybody blink. Over time I became pretty well convinced that the kid in the mirror wasn’t me. He was a tourist who’d go away some day. Maybe even somebody I wished would go away.

Henry brought some good news with him. All that angst, he said, is
hogwash. You’re not a bad guy. If you don’t look like your mother’s family, Henry opined, well, that’s their loss. Listen Hogwash, I said, they look, you know, regular, normal, acceptable. They look American. Oh, like Mohawks you mean? Henry said. Well, no, like… Yeah, yeah, I get it, said Henry, and it’s a dumb idea. I want you to get over yourself, he said.

Henry has always refused to appear in my mirror. That used to worry me. If you’re not going to show yourself, I’m not going to listen to you, I announced. Like I care, he said. I believe what I see, I shouted. Oh yeah, sure you do, that’s why you’re as crazy as hell in the middle of your life, he said. Your problem is you don’t believe what you see, he offered. You don’t get it, he said, warming to his subject, you don’t believe that what you see is what you get, because if you did you would’ve cut that kid some slack. That kid? You mean Jello? Juh-loo?

That’s when I coined another name for myself. Harrison Horseshit. Harrison is the suit I take out of the closet to argue with Henry when I know Henry is right. I hear the two of them in the middle of the night banging around the house wondering whether the guy in bed upstairs is worth all their trouble. Harrison never wins, but I enjoy the hell out of him when I’m being perverse, when I catch a small glimpse of what a horse’s ass I’ve been.

Hogwash is the man of the hour. I toast him when something good happens, or at least when nothing bad happens. If I write a good poem, Hogwash takes the credit. He deserves it. Without him the poem would be screechingly grandiose. Hogwash has a very clear idea of what I don’t know and he’s constantly on guard lest I put on airs. When I put on airs as a writer I sound like an Edwardian prig. I don’t know why I don’t sound Victorian. My best guess is that the boarding school where I grew up out in West Islip, Long Island, was run by an Edwardian couple. They were British, so I knew my Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy long before I heard of those colonials Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. My first reaction to Walt Whitman was that he should have dialed it down and was disquietingly full of himself.

The first inkling I had that we master each other’s names, no matter how difficult they may be, out of respect for each other, came when a Navy captain at the end of my boot camp training called out my name perfectly. Jeh-lool Marbrook, he said. I was so amazed a buddy had to nudge me out of the ranks. He was presenting me with an award for being company honor man, which meant that 115 of my peers had liked me, even if I was from Noo Yawk. Not only did this grand captain say my name right, but Navymen kept on saying it right. I’ll be damned, I thought. I liked it better than a promotion. In fact, it was a promotion.

But the name that had been quite good enough for the U. S. Navy did not pass muster at my first newspaper. So I became Del, only to find out that there would be just as many people mispronouncing Del as there had been mispronouncing Djelloul. Dale, they said. Mel. Delbert. Delmar. Once at church there was a nice guy named Phil who just couldn’t remember Del. So I started calling him Bill. After a while he stopped calling me anything. I was content and it relieved him of a seeming burden.

Given half a chance, there will always be people who have trouble with your name, even if it’s Sue. My advice is don’t trouble to correct the situation. If they thought they could get a half million from you they’d sure as hell say your name right. It’s not about the name, it’s about who we decide to respect. That’s why I remember that Navy captain. He said to himself, I don’t know who this kid is, but I’m gonna find out how to say his name because he’s one of us. So when they have trouble with your name, you’re not one of them. And you don’t want to be.