'Tis but thy name that is my enemy

What's In a Name? Part 3

I hadn’t talked to them in months before I received their call. [[I am using the plural for privacy protection purposes. Shakespeare himself once employed this mode, in Hamlet: “’Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech.”]

I and the person who called were not particularly close, our values, our outlooks, approaches to and ends in life at extreme odds. But for over half a year, I’d been unable to reach them, not even by email. At long last, they called me on an ‘unknown number’.

They said their call was being “patched through” by “federal marshals,” and that I should be careful what I say, since they “likely are listening in.” They said they’d been placed in a federal witness protection program, because they’d “turned state’s evidence” against someone named Mike Muzio, with whom they said they had unwittingly gotten enmeshed in a financial fraud scheme. “I’m in deep protection,” they said. “Try to find anything about me online or anywhere else related to my case. You won’t find a thing.” And then: “It might be years until you and I see each other, or when I see my own child.”

It wouldn’t have occurred to me to doubt their story. To be sure, the person, terribly insecure, had always been full of bluff and bluster, a serial exaggerator. But this drastic turn of events that they were relating to me seemed too credible not to be true. Why would they lie about being in serious trouble with the law? One of their parents told me they had repeatedly rescued the person from one legal-financial debacle after another over the years, though they never learned a lesson, continuing to commit ones of increasing seriousness.

More than anything, I felt badly for them. “I’m so sorry,” I said. This caught them off guard. “Why?” they said back. I replied, “Because I want only the best for you, as always.” This gave them pause. It clearly wasn’t the response they were expecting, perhaps because they were accustomed, since a child, to the wounding, degrading schadenfreude of one of their parents.

My phone call correspondent said no more on the subject, so I changed the conversation’s course and told them that I’d garnered Greek citizenship. Several of my books are published in Greek by one of the country’s most prominent publishers, which also sponsored my citizenship application, and surely this is one of the primary reasons it sailed through. I told that that I wished they could journey to Greece with me and visit the tiny volcanic island of Nisyros, from which my grandparents immigrated to the U.S. through Ellis Island. I further told them that, after I shared with my dad the tidings about my garnering Greek citizenship, my father said that his parents, Philip and Calliope Philipou, would be so proud that I’d “brought the family full circle.”

This person’s response was the furthest from what I’d expected. “That name should have been mine.”

“Philip?” I said.

“It should have been mine.” They were angry. I was incredulous. There was resentment, bitterness in their voice. Until that moment, I hadn’t an inkling that they’d coveted the first name given to me at birth. “I should be the one named a Philip. If only I’d been given that name...”

As if their life would have turned out differently, for the better, if they’d been named Philip. As an erstwhile journalist, I instinctively began to take near-verbatim notes of our conversation, if nothing else, just to remind myself later of the surreal swerve it had abruptly taken.

“If you want the name Philip, change your first name to it. It’s a free country,” I said. “As Juliet said to a Romeo, ‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name.’ But don’t stop there. Go a step further and give yourself the name you want.”

My phone interlocutor ignored my remark. “You’re a coward and pussy for going by the name Christopher, just because you were teased about the name Philip in elementary school,” they said instead.

What the person doesn’t know, because I have rarely told the full story them or to anyone in my innermost orbit, is how I turned the tables on my elementary school bullies, slugged one with such surprising ferocity that his nose began gushing out blood - an I was never bullied about it again. The long and short of it is that, when the situation has warranted, I do indeed stand up for my given first name, Philip.

Another passage from the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene now came to my mind. Reversing the sequence of ‘my’ and ‘thy’ used by Juliet in her soliloquy, I went on to say: “Tis but my name that is thy enemy.”