![[simpleton]](img/simptitle.gif)
Nomenclature
January 22, 1998
New ones Monday through Friday
The Name Game
Who do these people think I are?
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Trace-the-junkmail is the sport for the hermetic apartment dweller. We're all
getting sold out all the time; the only question is how. When you get a direct mail
solicitation with your name on it, you know your name has been sold, with thousands
of others, in the middle passage of subscription lists and store buying records.
For the
low-volume consumer/inveterate cheapskate like me, the game is relatively easy. I
part with money so rarely that I can (sometimes) hazard guesses as to how brand X
got my name. My participation in a Money survey probably explains why I
received the
glossy Wall Street Collections Ltd. catalogue. No doubt my signature on a Free Mumia
petition tipped off the ACLU (and probably the FBI) to my existence. A subscription to
Wired slides effortlessly sideways into an offer
for Fast Company,
as my name on the Foreign Affairs subscription list alerts the barely
distinguishable Foreign Policy that I might be an easy mark. But by what consumer
research did the direct mail masons determine that I - who would go to the ends of the
earth to avoid Japanimation's
round, dewy eyes,
squeaky voices and
rape scenes -
might be interested in an offer for 1,000 Anime videos?
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Every time I move, I get the good news through the mail that "A remarkable new
book is being published - and you, TK TK are in it!" (Since a
little digging will reveal
my real name, I prefer to leave that work up to you, and go by one of my aliases.
"Race Steelman," with its 50s flavor of East Coast lifeguarding, seems a good choice,
as does the 70s porn starrish "Dirk Sundance" or perhaps "Dutch Kelley," which seems
to ring with World War II fighter ace gusto. But I'll settle instead on the more
ambiguous "Felix Montanez").
The remarkable new book is, of course, The World Book of Montanezes,
and Robert A. Montanez, i.a.,
is justly proud of having tracked down 7,863 Montanez households worldwide. Though he
cautions that "we're probably not related," Robert tantalizes me with details about
Darby Montanez, the first man to bring our great name to the New World,
who arrived in Nova Scotia from the Emerald Isle in 1749. Am I interested? You betcha!
Sure it deflates my enthusiasm a bit to learn that this is just one of many heirloom books
available from Bath, Ohio-based
Halberts - and that, as far
as Halberts is concerned I might just as easily be a
Ruxton as a Montanez -
but I can't help thinking that that $49.95 cover price ($34.50 for the Pre-Publication
Offer!), is almost within my break point.
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![[your whole family will love it!]](img/cav-book.gif)
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But not quite. You see, the Montanez side of the family isn't really my favorite anyway.
I get along well with all my relatives, but given the choice, I'd rather spend time
with the ones on my mother's side. And they already have their own book.
There's also this little issue of what the name itself is worth. The characters who have
borne my last name in movies have been almost exclusively undesirable - a corrupt New
York bigwig in the James Cagney vehicle Great Guy, a doofus prison guard in
Natural Born Killers. In the Canadian classic Porky's there is actually
a character who has my first and last name - a real Felix Montanez! But he is the kid
everybody else hates. Movies being at least partly a reflection of the collective
unconscious, I can only conclude that my name is one North Americans don't generally
warm up to.
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![[land of truth and liberty]](img/cav-liberty.gif)
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Even worse, my name, it turns out, is as common to the internet as "Nilesh Patel"
must be to the Bombay phone book. There's a
Felix Montanez who does ground-breaking reporting on the future prospects for
home food shopping for American Demographics. An interesting concept, but I
completely disagree with his conclusion - that
home
food shopping will grow as people
grow more disenchanted with supermarkets. If anything, the disenchantment with supermarkets
stems from the general lack of fresh food. People want more physical connection
to the food they buy, not less. Any fool can see that, and it's depressing to
think of people assuming I hold such wrongheaded opinions.
But a bad opinion is nothing compared to the humiliations of song parodists. A friend once
sent me a clipped newspaper ad for Great Hyatt Packages, touting the skills of an
entertainer named Felix Montanez. The ad read:
[Felix] uses "Brilliant Word Play" in Stories and Songs with obtrusive props.
Now that's all I need: A prospective editor - weighing whether to hire me or an equally
qualified black, latino or female candidate - does a search on my name at Infoseek, and
the first thing that pops up is this imposter's
parody
of 99 Red Balloons!
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And there are others. There's the
Starfleet doctor some
role-playing Trekky wrote into his chart of characters. There's the
Pastor at Northside
Community Church, Northglenn, Colorado. You can
email
Pastor Felix Montanez, if you've got any spiritual questions. I know I've got one:
WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH MY GOD DAMN NAME?
Here we have the flipside of the electronic privacy argument. Who cares if hackers
can unleash identity mayhem, when people who share your identity are
wreaking such havoc already? How do I prove I'm not the Starfleet doctor?
Maybe I don't want to. Maybe there's an upside to this. Maybe the song parodist will
someday cop a Yankovic-size hit, allowing me to swoop in and take the credit. Maybe I'll
snag a crafty Pulitzer on the back of my namesake at American Demographics. And at
the highest level, having Saint Peter confuse me with a Priest may not be such a bad
thing after all.
More to the point, given the proliferation of restrictive employee agreements, a little
brand confusion may be just the thing to help me keep my extensive freelance activities
off the radar screen at my day job. Talk about plausible deniability. I didn't write that -
this other Felix Montanez did it! It's an ongoing Good Kirk/Bad Kirk punchout, in which
Spock and Bones, phasers at the ready, can only stand on the sidelines and raise perplexed
eyebrows.
Who wouldn't want that kind of personal mobility? Here we are in Dante's circle of the
thieves, each of us momentarily stealing the other's form and identity. Well I intend
to be the fastest lizard in hell.
And so do I.
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