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What’s In a Name?
By Nathan Graziano
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Note
from Defenestration: This story is related to Nathan’s previous piece, “Pete
And My Peter,” which can be read here: http://www.defenestrationmag.net/prose/ngraziano.htm
I am Ham.
Actually, my full name is Hamlet. My father—who never picked up a book,
much less Shakespeare, in his life—was sold on the name after he heard it used
in dirty joke. He’s loud and stubborn, and my poor mother, who is one of
the most passive women alive, conceded her choice of Mark—after the
Apostle—and went ahead with naming me Hamlet. The cards were stacked
against me from the start.
Growing up in South Boston with a name like Hamlet was an open invitation for
anyone in the schoolyard to kick the shit out of me. It wasn’t until the
third grade when my parents moved to a new town in Western Massachusetts that I
wised up and started introducing myself as Ham. Small consolation.
But the name was short-lived. When I got to junior high, I had an incident
in gym class that renamed me, yet again. I was crossing the monkey
rings with my arms extended and torso exposed when I inadvertently popped a
boner. I have no idea what triggered it. Puberty, I guess. I
even remember what I was wearing: a pair of navy blue sweatpants and a black Def
Leppard Pyromania T-shirt. A group of girls sitting in a circle on the
floor mats were the first to notice. They started screaming, laughing and
pointing at me and my sad chubby. I glanced down, and the rest was history. In
a graduating class had 150 kids, maybe, a handful of them knew my real name.The
rest referred to me by my nickname—the one that stuck with me after what was
notoriously referred to as “The Monkey Ring Rod.”
They called me Woodrow.
Although I’m not a bad-looking adult, I was a downright gawky teenager;
thinner than a bicycle spoke with scattered patches of thick, purulent acne on
my forehead and chin with had a shaggy brown mullet to boot. Between my
awkwardness and the nickname, I would’ve gone my entire high school career
without losing my virginity if it weren’t for Carla Kay.
Carla Kay. What a wonderfully alliterative name for a girl who was, hands
down, one of the easiest lays in Southern New England. Her father had run
off with a history teacher at our high school her freshman year—a guy named
Joe Carbone—and Carla subsequently went off the deep end. She started
stripping at parties and allowing the guys to line up to take turns at her. That’s
how I lost my virginity senior year; I was the seventh guy in line. Luckily
for her, I was quick and came in under a minute. I remember her lying on
the bed and smoking a cigarette as I dressed. “You’re a real stud, Woodrow. You’ll
make some girl real happy someday,” she said.
After I slept with Carla, I fell completely and obsessively in love with her and
tried to woo her with verse. I wrote pages and pages of terrible rhymed
poetry and slipped them on loose leaf anonymously into her locker. In spite
of the fact that she had a face like a trout, I’d go on and on about her lips
being like candy apples, her nose being the soft silhouette of a mountain on a
clear day, and her ears being two daffodils sprouting up from the verdant grass
that was her hair. It was painfully bad, but ate up the time when I
wasn’t masturbating thinking about her
One day, she came up to me in the hallway and called me out. “Woodrow, are you
writing those poems for me?”
I choked, blushed and vehemently denied it.
“It’s too bad,” she said. “They’re pretty good.”
I never came clean with Carla Kay about the poems, nor did I sleep with her
again. Instead I started focusing my attention on college. I’d seen
movies, heard stories of lascivious coeds and pillow fights. College was
supposed to be an all-out orgy.
That summer I took Acutane to clear up my skin and started working out, putting
on a little bulk. I was prepared to kill Woodrow and reinvent Ham.
And Ham, I am.
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Nathan Graziano was shocked when he found out President
Bush wasn't going to nominate him for Supreme Court Justice. Although he's
never been a judge, he once won a raffle at a fraternity party and got to take a
stripper's G-string off with his teeth. It's been a steady ride downhill from
there. He lives in Manchester, New Hampshire and has published a few books along
the way. More information on those can be found at www.nathangraziano.com.
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