My favorite nickname was given to me by some boys in jail. I used to visit them once every 2 weeks my fourth year of college, trying to talk with them about school and family and all the things in their lives they could give another try once they were out. But the truth was, I was a middle class half white girl from the northeast who studied foreign affairs and medieval French literature, and they were boys from three Norfolk and Richmond gangs who had been charged with assault, drug offences, and statutory rape. One skinny kid with a stutter, Jerome, had even shot a cop. He told me the one French word he knew: pardon.

I was 22 and did not have a clue as to what I was doing. And yet, every two weeks, I did manage to get the room of 15 to 18 year old males talking about the mundane and the spiritual alike. We told jokes, admitted fears and failures, debated whether it was better to live wild or live long. I also learned their system of names – the names their mothers had given them, the names they had for each other, and the names they gave themselves.

After six months, I had apparently earned my own. Malechai, big, quiet kid who was head of one of the Norfolk gangs stood up and announced, “The boys and I, we decided to give you a name.  As a matter of fact, we all agreed on it,” waving his arm to indicate that the Tidewater boys and even Richmond were in. I said I was flattered, what was it? “It’s Sweet, Sweet Kim.” He paused before sitting back down. “Don’t sweat. We’re not ‘giving you a name’ giving you a name, you know what I mean? You are your own operation, you know that.”

It was soon May. I was about to graduate, leave Charlottesville, take a job in Japan.  I prepared to make my last visit to the detention center to say goodbye to the boys. There had been some turnover that year, and I had already lost some.

Malechai was there, though. He didn’t come to the table, just stood back against the wall. I wrapped up my visit and said my goodbyes. Malechai followed me to the door.

“Your folks coming down from New York for your graduation?”

I said yes.

Then Malechai spoke softly, said he was getting out in a week. He wanted to come by to my graduation party and meet my parents, tell them what a nice young woman I was and how I had given him and his boys so many important things to think about while they were away. He dropped his voice, asked quietly, “Do you think I can do that? Do you think I can stop through and say hello to your mom and dad, Kim?”

The jail-visit program prohibited sharing personal contact information with “the inmates.” But Malechai was looking me in the eye. Was I going to trust him enough to cross paths in the world outside? Or was I going to walk out, into safe anonymity?

I wrote down my address. I gave him the paper. “This is for you, Malechai. Just for you. I’m there until June.” Malechai held the paper in his hands, staring. He finally looked up and said, “I’ll be seeing you.”

Graduation weekend came and went. In two weeks, I would move to Japan.

The day before I left Charlottesville, I got a letter in the mail.

It was from Malechai. He wanted to apologize for not having come by for my graduation party and not having met my family. He was supposed to be released that Tuesday, but got into a fight defending Tyrone Walls from the Tidewater boys and he ended up “hurting one of the kids real bad” so his time was extended. He said he felt bad about that, but felt even worse about asking to meet my mother and father and sister and brother and grandmother, too, and then not showing up. He hoped I wasn’t disappointed. He wished me well in Japan. He would be home in Norfolk in no time and would say hello to his mother for me.

There was a PS.  It said, “Next time I write, I’m going to send you a late graduation present. It will be a bracelet that says ‘Sweet, Sweet Kim’ on it. Do you remember your name? It’s a long one, I know. So I guess I’d better make it a necklace.”

I never got a necklace from Malechai. But I keep the name close to my chest, all the same.

by KTS
San Francisco, CA

“Why did you call me Helen?” It is a question I have asked my parents probably thousands of times and they have a deliciously pretentious explanation for my name, and as I’ve grown I have proudly started to perpetuate it. Helen, a Greek name meaning light, (as well as being the face that launched a thousand ships), was chosen for the fact that I was born two months prematurely weighing two pounds two ounces, light by anyone’s definition. It suits me, as one of those no-nonsense, pragmatic names that can carry you through any stage of your life. My mother tells me of their determination to find a name that wouldn’t go out of fashion by the time I was eighty three. Having grown up amongst a generation of Kylies, Staceys and Billy-Jos, I understand the logic behind it. I like having a name that instantly belies my gender, but not my age.

I will be honest and admit, with no offense to my parents, that when I was younger I wanted to be a Becky or a Holly or a Vicky, anything with a y really. There was a girliness to those names, a softness that as an eight year old drowning in my own precociousness, I wished I had. There were no shortened forms of my name, no jolly nicknames. I was a constant, and, at the time, it was maybe too mature a name for my nature. It needed nurturing.

As for my middle name, never has it seemed more fitting. Louise means warrior, and from the second I was born it feels as if I have had to fight. As a child, I was a regular at accident and emergency, riddled with severe asthma attacks and often arriving on the verge of turning blue. A year and a half ago, I shattered a disc in my lower spine, and currently, spending a day out of the house has turned into a battle. There was no small amount of prophecy on my parents’ part.

The adult me loves my name, and revels in its practicality. I may never win any prizes for glamour but, like my real life self, my name offers a steeliness and a strength of character that I have worked hard to develop. There is tough love in the name Helen.

The real beauty of my name, as with the scientific beauty of faces, lies in its symmetry. Helen Dring lies on the page beautifully, a perfect ten letters.

by Helen Dring
Liverpool, United Kingdom

My Polish last name is ten letters long. My Midwestern family has always pronounced it “jake-uh-bow-ski,” stressing the first and third syllables. Naturally, to me, it has been a simple, four-syllable name, as easy to say as Oppenheimer or O’Shaughnessy. Yet for others it’s been one of “those” names, as odd as Lipizanner, or worse, Blagojevich.

People forced to pronounce my name for the first time often give up after the first two syllables. Sometimes they pretend to stutter, saying, “Jakka, uh, Jakku, uh?” as if trying to remember the lyrics to a James Brown song. Or they try to stare my name to verbal life from the roster or clipboard in their hand waiting until the owner of this jacked-up last name chimes in to save them. Then upon being told, “It’s jake-uh-bow-ski,” people smile, saying with false sweetness, “Oh, of course,” before continuing down the list toward their next victim, usually a kindred spirit of mine with one of “those” names from China, or worse, India.

In the sixth grade, my name spawned the utterly stupid insult: Jack-off-a-bow-ski. It was a poor botched insult with a verb smooshed in there. The moniker was, in fact, so dumb that the kids who called me that quit it the same week they started. Maybe because it was too hard to say? Or maybe because they knew that they had not struck upon anything hurtfully cool. They seemed to understand that when you jacked-up someone’s name the result needed to be a short wicked-sweet noun or adjective full of meanness, like calling Heather heifer or Bobby blobby. It made no sense to waste a lot of breath on, “Here comes that Polish dork Matt Jack-off-a-bow-ski” when you could just yell, “Hey, watch out for blobby.”

My first week in college a professor doing roll call called me Matthew “Yah-ku-bov-ski.” I replied, “Actually, sir, it’s Jake-uh-bow-ski.” He said, “Actually, it’s Ya-ku-bov-ski.” I laughed. He was right after all. Why had I been making my name easier to say all these years? His way was a lot more fun. And being a professor, he sure knew how to make it sound harder than it really was.

So now, I can be Matt Yahkubovski, and if I introduce myself thus, you know I’ve either been drinking, or I think you look sympathetic to Polish nationals, or both. However people say it, I’m now content with my name’s odd power, and I revel quietly in the jacked-up-ed-ness it brings to the party.

by Matthew Jakubowski
Philadelphia, PA

Kids say, “Hey Craphouse”
I’d respond, “That’s juvenile”
“But that’s who we are”

by Albert Krathaus
San Francisco, CA

How can a person who is an Only Child - me - wind up in such a mess and at such a tender age, too?

Many years ago, after twelve years of marriage and a fitful, but singular pregnancy, my mother had me. She was ready with two boys’ and two girls’ names, picked out so she’d be ready to fill out the resultant hospital forms when she was called upon to do so.

But here’s the dicey part: The woman who was to become my godmother (and my mother’s best friend) was at the hospital keeping my father company while my mother was upstairs giving birth to me. She, herself, had a four year old boy, and she desperately wanted another child, hopefully a little girl, but it hadn’t happened. Indeed, it never did. My soon-to-be godmother liked the name “Susan.” In fact, she LOVED the name Susan. Somehow, in the melee that was the day I was born, the decision about my name came down to her because everybody else was either too busy elsewhere or so excited at my arrival. She told the nurse in charge of such things that she “thought” my mother wanted to name me Susan.

And so it was. For all of my first five years, I was called Karen, the name my mother chose. However, my birth certificate said I was officially Susan. It wasn’t until I got to kindergarten and my legal docs had to be produced that this became an issue. My mother, always one not to get too excited about such technicalities, never bothered to change it. Now, she couldn’t understand why the school was being so hard-assed about a simple thing like a mix-up with a name, for heaven’s sake. That Susan could have been Karen’s sister (and a different person altogether) made no sense to her because SHE knew who I was.

Of all people, she should have known better. When my mother was born, many years ago and when most normal births took place at home, the doctor and everyone else in the family in the house that day - and probably lots of neighbors and friends, too - got drunk shortly after my mother’s arrival on the planet. You see, she was the first female born in a family that already had six boys. My poor maternal grandmother had no girl’s name chosen. She just assumed she’d have another boy, and she had Anthony picked out. My mother became Anthony.

It wasn’t until years later, as an adult, when she had to go to the office where such records are kept that she discovered there was indeed two Anthonys. ( My mother has a younger brother named - you guessed it - Anthony.) She immediately knew what had happened because Anthony Number 1 was born on her birthday and Anthony Number 2 was born on her younger brother’s date of birth. Just as an aside, in what seems to be a crazy family tradition, and to make matters even more complicated, he was never called by his given name. He was called Boze, which is another story for another time. If somebody said something to me about my Uncle Anthony or worse, my Uncle Tony, I didn’t know who they meant. Uncle Boze, yes - Uncle Tony, no.

Anyway, I still have that document of long ago that says I was a Susan. I also have a document that says I’m now a corrected Karen. I would have made a happy schizophrenic.

by Karen Segboer
Warwick, NY