(II) The Reluctant François
François sits at his desk, his feet flat on the linoleum, back rigidly upright. The fluorescent lights above fishbowl on the tile below, deepest at the center–their hum is hiding beneath the low chatter in the room. He bounces his head from his left shoulder to his right, and then spins it about, waiting for a crack. The louder the crack the more unpleasant, the more unpleasant the more satisfying. His fingernails are clipped, his face and neck shaved, his nose hairs trimmed. Though there is no tie knot at his neck, he keeps tugging at his collar as if there were one. His anxiety is stale and pungent, like old fruit threatening fermentation. Sometimes he is comfortable in the relative safety of his anonymity; today he feels exposed, like that anonymity is menaced.
As if on cue, Mike Anderson saunters through the door frame and glares at François, as if to purposefully poke a hole in that hospitable, nameless invisibility. With jeans tucked behind his sneakers’ tongues, François infers that the athletically built blonde must be proud of his shiny purple-and-red Puma sneakers. Purple-and-red Puma sneakers. Tucking his tongue behind his teeth, François tips his head and cracks a sliver of a smile, because now he knows. Mike grimaces and gingerly takes his assigned seat, as if by reluctant choice rather than legislated necessity.
François forgets him, as the man is eminently forgettable. Mike Anderson. Mick Andrewson. Mark Andrews. "Remember that kid who sat beside me in Sociology? What the fuck was his name?" The eleventh grade doesn’t seem like an actual thing. It sounds made up, François thinks, though he figures that’s because everyone says that they’re a Junior, never mentioning a number. Perhaps it’s the number itself–prime numbers can make things seem fucking bizarre Martial artists come in prime numbers–Three Ninjas, Seven Samurai. He sits there, eyes closed, repeating to himself: "Eleventh grade. E-lev-enth grade. Eleventh. Grade." Maybe because it corrupts the neat roundness of ten. "El-ev-en-th g-ra-de." It starts to make sense, as all things can do with practice. "Eleventh grade." He feels the attention before his neighbor speaks: "Fucking weirdo Starter Dick."
(This from the aforementioned Mike Anderson, who doesn’t know that François was in a neighboring bathroom stall two periods prior. François prefers to go unnoticed; this is why he puts his feet up against the side of the stall when others enter the restroom. (A bit juvenile, he knew, but essential for a person well-versed in the multifarious shenanigans that the privy is privy to). This is also why, when Mike administered himself hand soap, slammed the door behind him, and locked it, he didn’t know that he had an unwilling audience to his masturbation session. Third stall from the end, never again. Third stall from the end, never again. Third stall from the end, never again. François knows that repetition is the key to memory. The slick lathering sounds did not particularly perturb François, though he suffered a curious twitch in his left eye through the performance. Near the denouement, as Mike rose to the tips of his toes in his fashionable new purple-and-red sneakers and his breath became shallower and somehow wetter, François cringed as quietly as he could, shutting his eyes so tight they were just piles of wrinkles).
François does not open his eyes, but murmurs one more time, "Eleventh grade." He then raises his voice to respond to Mike’s casual cruelty. Starter Dick. "Please, call me Starter Richard." This might be funny from someone else; for the most part, his classmates do not allow François to be funny, so they can not, will not, and do not laugh. François is actually marginally sincere; he’d rather be Richard than François. At least I play with mine at home, Mike. He does not say it aloud, for a calm and practiced fear of retribution. The antiquated clock was the type in which the minute hand cocked back before leaping forward. François cannot hope to maintain the back-and-forth, for a lack of emotional endurance. Four minutes until class. François knows that once class begins, he could shrink back to a more comfortable size. Luckily, Mike just chuffs like a penned horse and sits back. "Baby balls with the big boy mouth." How ’bout I put these baby balls in your big boy mouth, Mike, you fucking pervert asshole? You into that? You into that shit?
The exciting gossip circulating the hallways is the arrival of a new student. François knows nothing about the new arrival except the gender, a girl, which always provokes a good deal more conversation amongst the student body than the arrival of a boy. And since no one really ever conversed with François, he got to do a lot of listening. Generally speaking, with the enrollment of a new student, their fellow students offered each other an easily predicted pattern of questions. For a girl, the boys asked each other, "Is she hot?" followed by, "Is she easy?" For some, those questions were identical. The girls would ask each other, "Is she hot?" followed by, "Is she a slut?" For some, those questions were identical. François considers gender politics: a sudden sneeze snaps out; Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Big wet snort: is it gone? Can’t know without a mirror. He keeps his head down, and ventures a tentative hand up to his nose on a distinctly gross fact-finding mission.
François’ tumbling thoughts are interrupted by a hand with three rings, none of them with stones, holding a tissue. "Hi, my name is Sonia, and you have a giant glob of booger halfway out your nose." Her voice does not tinkle or chime; it is a dump track on a gravel road, a bowling alley barfly asking you to buy her her third pack. It warbles, it cracks, it breaks: it cannot find register, and no octave will allow it to stay for an entire sentence before evicting it in horror. It is, quite simply, the ugliest voice that François has ever heard; he wants to rip off his ears and hand them to her, in return for her promise to never speak again. Sonja?
"Thanks a fucking lot," he mutters sullenly, surreptitiously wiping his nose, refusing to glance at his mysterious benefactor. Who the fuck is Sonja? He senses her sitting; her mass was above, and now it is even. The clock stirs–another step back, another leap into the future. Three minutes. Her disapproval of his ungracious response is palpable, though she says nothing. Feeling a bit of remorse, a wiggling worm tunneling through him, he marshals a bit of beneficence–"I love your name. It is one of my favorites"
Her repudiation is emphatic and immediate. "I hate it." She manages to begin in a rolling rumble and finish in a squeak. Assuming the conversation over, and having avoided eye contact or even having looked at her, François continues considering the clock. If time is money, watching the clock is volunteering your wallet to a robber. "My mother named me. She emigrated from Russia when she was thirteen; my brothers’ names are Grigoriy and Yevgeniy." François isn’t sure why she’s still talking about this and if she expects him to care, but he keeps his head yawed back and to the left, a wordless confirmation that he is still listening. Like the last three minutes of the television show before yours, just waiting for that familiar theme. "Come and knock on our door…" "Grigoriy and Yevgeniy, right?" She forces a laugh, inviting him to do the same, but he declines. Names aren’t funny. "Anyway, any time I hear my own name, I think of ducks, ya’ know?" François doesn’t think that she’s anticipating a "yes." Probably meant to elicit a question.
"Yeah, Peter and the Wolf," he tells her quietly, speaking softly so she has to lean way over in her desk; François is talking to her, and no one else. Words are too easily strewn about willy-nilly, François knows, and he has found that if he treats his words as valuable, so will others. Maybe. He still hasn’t looked at her; he can only imagine her appearance, her clothes, the volume of her makeup and the styling of her hair. He knows that looking at her would be an acknowledgment too great, too important, and <spanstyle=”font-family: Arial;”>François has learned to be terribly careful about who and what to acknowledge. Yet he is enjoying this interaction; there have been no insults, he has shown some esoteric knowledge that may or may not impress, and he isn’t so far engaged he can’t easily disengage.
"I’ve been blathering on about myself, rude as a Texas tornado! What’s your name?" she innocently inquires. "Rude as a Texas tornado?" Seriously? François sighs and rubs his forehead, bringing his forefingers and thumb together before allowing his hand to slide down to his cheek, a comfortable headrest. It is a classic pose of weariness. Hello, my name is François. I am seventeen years old, but surely you could’ve guessed that. I’ve never been to a football game and I have no fucking clue as to the school song, but you probably could’ve guessed that, too. I enjoy historical epics, but if you ask me, I’ll usually claim my favorites are anything by Fellini or Hitchcock. I read Nietzsche, but only because I feel compelled to by my age and confusion; I don’t understand it specifically, though I understand its tone perfectly; I think he was probably a huge fucking asshole, but I keep his wahnbriefe in a folder beneath my bed, and I think of that folder as monster and talisman. I love your name because a girl to whom I gave some sympathy brought it back to me at the bottom of a chlorine sea. She needed it, though she didn’t know. I have built myself against headwinds and hellfire hail; I love life, but not this one; I will love mine soon, I must, it’s coming, I know it, I feel it, it’s so close that I’m no longer here, and this is happening at some point in the dim and damnable past. "I’m François."
"What a fantastic name!" Sonia exclaims like the crashing of pots, her hands clapping together with a sudden pop. "I love France! Do you speak any French? You must, right?" I "must?" What? Do you speak fucking duck? Sonia is a good person managed by a good personality and will live a good life, François knows, but right then, he’d like to strip her of her name and replace it with an obscenity. The bell rings; class begins; <spanstyle=”font-family: Arial;”>François will not respond to her innocent remarks or answer her innocent question: this makes him guilty of something, he knows.
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Perhaps most troublingly, I had no easy way of circumventing "Francois." There are two simple ways around your name that don’t involve invention: the lawyer route, and the southern redneck/northeastern magnate route. Maybe Joseph P. Bigdick doesn’t enjoy "Joseph," so he might decide to practice law as J. Patrick Bigdick. Please, call me Patrick. Better yet, just call me Bigdick. Maybe Joseph dropped out of the seventh grade to run the family’s raccoon-hunting business (which isn’t a big deal, because they use every part of the raccoon). Howdy, the name’s J.P, and yes, that raccoon jerky is has only the good parasites. This also applies to the scions of old-money families from the northeast, about whom I cannot presume enough to imitate, though I imagine they introduce themselves in an accent stranded between the richest parts of New York and the richest parts of London on an incredibly annoying island. Fuckers. And they probably walk with a cane they don’t need and drive a car I can’t afford that has the bodies of orphans and nuns stuck in the grill, because rich people, by and large (by stereotype and large assumption), are fucking asshats.
These methods of skirting the nature of your first name require the right middle name. My father, a man I know only through photographs and anecdotes and the suit coat he was wearing when his landmine exploded in his chest at the not-so-ripe-old-age of thirty-two that my mother left hanging on the aged oak coat rack for seventeen years because she spent seventeen years reliving one day, well, he graced me with his strong, proud, Jewish name, situated ever so comfortably after François: Uriel. Even at a young age, I understood that F.U. was not a name to go by, and I had no desire to be F. Uriel, either. I kind of enjoy Furiel, however. Like an angry Muriel. Or course, there is the less easy but not particularly difficult legal route to changing one’s name, if one can imagine wielding that sort of transformative power. I will get to that.
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My name has always bothered me. This fact, in and of itself, seems to speak to others about me. That I am somehow preoccupied with appearances, or that I am vain, or that I am pretentious (as if being a kid in west Texas–not east Texas, not closer to Cajun country, no siree, because "common sense is for the boring"–as if being a kid in west Texas named François doesn’t immediately strike each and every Lord-fearin’ Texan as pretentious to begin with). I have never come close to having it legally changed, though. What else could so clearly confirm that I am too concerned with how I am perceived. Of course, having always been painfully self-aware, I do know how twisted the logic is of not changing one’s name because one doesn’t want others to think that one cares what they think. It’s pride too human to look at directly.
It is not a decision I came to easily or suddenly; when I was eighteen, I had reached the conclusion that I had no other choice. The day I was going to the courthouse, however, I found out that I had a warrant out for my arrest. Nothing serious, I assure you, but an eighteen year-old’s concept of serious orbits a distant sun. By the time I resolved the issue with the warrant, my mother was dead. I no longer felt myself morally free to finally shake the shackles of "François."
Names are incredibly important; anyone who tells you otherwise is probably blessed with some innocuous, paint-by-number name like Wendy Williams, and she also probably taught you in the first-grade that you should be proud of who you are, and "a name is just a name." I doubt Mrs. Williams named her child Hitler McHimmler. Actually, I know she didn’t. She named that little bastard Walt Williams. I know because he was in the grade above mine, and called me "the French faggot" all through the sixth grade, despite me repeatedly pointing out that I’d opted for Spanish class over French (’cause that shit really fucking matters when you’re twelve). Add in the pool incident, and, well–Que un pendejo. I fucking hated Walt Williams; I still kind of do. I hate his stupid name: Walt Williams. Walt Williams. Walt Williams. I abhor alliterative names; they’re either too forgettable or too memorable, and his is the latter. Walt Williams. Although, in a rare case of turnabout-as-fair-play, noting the similarity of his name to that of the most famous of American poets, I did write an ode in seventh grade English dedicated to him entitled "Leaves of Grasshole." He did not get the joke (though he sensed it, much to my immediate satisfaction and later, physical dismay (see: pool incident)), and I spent the rest of the school day in the office, as the teacher was predictably better-versed in the classics.