I've Been Called a Lot of Things in My Time

Some guy once wrote, “What’s in a name?” Then he wrote something about how roses still smell nice regardless of what people call them. The precise wording is unimportant. What I’m getting at is...

What is in a name? I mean, it’s a good question.

The absolutely definitive answer is “probably a lot,” at least in certain situations. For instance, I’ve long felt that if Jesus Christ had been named Bernie Christ or Larry Christ, Christianity never would have caught on the way that it did. Could anybody seriously believe Marvin Christ was the son of God sent to earth to save us from our sins?

I think not.

Mary and Joseph really nailed it when they named the kid Jesus, although, to give proper credit, God may have suggested the name Himself. If L. Ron Hubbard’s success proved anything, it’s the importance of marketing.

This is the first picture ever taken of me when I was a baby. I’m glad I was able to find it.

That’s Mom and me in the middle, and Dad’s on the right. The chick in the plaid photobombed us. We didn’t even realize she was there until we got the pictures back from Walgreen’s.

The name my parents gave me, of course, is Paul, but I can’t say that I’ve gotten very much out of it. Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, and Paul Newman have all done far better with it than I have...although, since Paul Newman is no longer living, I guess I’ve got him beat on a technicality.

It occurred to me the other day, though, that I haven’t always gone by plain old “Paul.” At several points in my life I’ve been renamed, or, if you want to get fancy about it, I’ve been blessed with other monickers.

So let’s take a look at these monickers, since I’ve written this much on the subject and see no reason to turn back now.

The many names of Paul...

“Paulie”

My dad used to call me Paulie all the time. Mom didn’t do it all that much, but Dad and his brother, my uncle Ted, were invariably Louie and Teddy with each other, so it must have been a thing. My buddy Chris drops a Paulie on me sometimes, too.

Over the years, though, I’ve noticed that almost all of the people who opt to call me Paulie are women.

My friend Debbie, for instance, has just about always called me Paulie, with a charming Birmingham drawl that makes it sound more like “Pow-lee.” She uses it as a term of endearment, and that’s nice, I guess. But I also sense something gently demeaning about it, as if Debbie has forever thought that I’m really just a fourth grader trapped in an adult’s body.

It bothers me that she figured that out.

“Paulie-wog”

One person and one person only has ever called me “Paulie-wog,” and that was my late friend Mary DeCasper. Mary also called me Paulie, but often threw in the wog for good measure, as she was a certifiable goofball.

What I wouldn’t give to have her call me Paulie-wog again.

“Peter”

I was raised Very Catholic, not just regular Catholic like everybody else. Peter is my chosen confirmation name.

When you’re confirmed in the church, you’re supposed to take the name of a role model saint and publicly recommit to the teachings of an organization that you’ll be leaving as soon as you have a moment to consider how it actually operates. While you’re still there, though, you can pray to your saint in times of need, and you’ll supposedly get a response because said saint feels a special kinship with you.

It’s like slipping a twenty to the maître d’ to get a better table in the spiritual nightclub.

Here’s a little secret, though— I picked Peter as my confirmation name when I was 14 years old because I thought it was hilarious that I’d then be “Peter Paul,” which is the name of the company that manufactures Almond Joy and Mounds candy bars.

Here’s a ubiquitous TV commercial from the time that inspired me to do this.

I didn’t tell my parents or the priest anything about this, of course, but word’s out now. So I guess I’ll be going to hell when I die, at which point Paul Newman will once again be doing better than me.

“Crazylegs”

That’s me, holding the football, with my cousin Gary and my sister Christine in my aunt and uncle’s backyard in Cleveland when I was about 11 years old (look at my almost certainly K Mart-purchased Popeye t-shirt! I’d wear that thing now!)

At that point in my life, I was a football-playing maniac. You can see how comfortable I am cradling the ball. I practically had one attached to me back then.

Once, when I was in the fifth grade, I was playing a weekend pickup game with a handful of classmates in a huge rural backyard in Grassy, AL. (That’s right. The town is called “Grassy.” No nickname. There’s another community bordering it called Hog Jaw, and that’s not a nickname either! Someone actually decided to call it “Hog Jaw!”)

After we’d been playing our game for about thirty minutes, I had just run for a touchdown, and my team was about to kick off when one of the other guys shouted to me from the far side of the yard, “Do you realize we haven’t tackled you yet?!”

I thought about it, and he was right. I’d touched the ball four or five times and scored every time! “It’s your crazy legs!” he said. “You look like you’re going in one direction, then you end up going the other way! We’re gonna call you ‘Crazy Legs!’”

And they did, for a while anyway. Whenever we played that year, somebody would eventually call me “Crazylegs.”

I always liked this because I was a student of football history and knew that one of the superstar players of the 40s and 50s was Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, who toiled for the L.A. Rams.

Look at him! That’s a man’s man right there! Like many football players of the period, Hirsch could actually run in the air. You can’t ask for crazier legs than that!

My legs, not being of NFL caliber, were merely sardonic in comparison.

“Kalil Chal Wakan”

I’m pretty sure I butchered the spelling on this one. I have it written on a piece of paper in a box somewhere, but I’m not about to rip the closet apart looking for it.

Around 1992 or so, I was writing a screenplay for a would-be independent film producer (don’t ask) that was set in and around the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Nebraska and South Dakota. She and I went out there one time to soak up the local color.

Our guide as we drove those endless highways—at one point I had to stop in the middle of the road for twenty minutes while we waited for a disinterested bison to move his ass out of the way—was a lovely, much-respected Lakota tribesman named Joe Brown Thunder.

Joe knew tribal history up, down, and backwards, and he had a great sense of humor.

I was pulled over for speeding at one point because there are literally no structures by the road for miles on end to clue you in to how fast you’re moving; it’s just flat land stretching to the horizon. If your eyes aren’t glued on the speedometer, you can start barreling along without even realizing it!

Anyway, Joe, who liked me for some reason, laughed really hard when he saw how upset I was as the cop strolled up to the car (the cop understood this displaced New Yorker’s argument and let me go with just a warning.) Later on, Joe thought it was even funnier that I was concerned I might step on a rattlesnake while he had us hiking up an historically significant hill somewhere in the far reaches of South Dakota.

At that point, he gave me an honorary Lakota Sioux name! Again, I’m almost certainly not spelling it right, but it was something close to “Kalil Chal Wakan.”

Joe told me it means “great but afraid.”

A couple of years earlier, a friend of mine watched Dances with Wolves with me, and when we were leaving the theater, she told me my Native American name would be “Drinks Coke A Lot” (I haven’t for years, but I used to drink gallons of Coke every week.)

If I had to pick one of the two, I’d choose Great But Afraid, but if “Great And Drinks Coke A Lot” were an option, I’d go with that.

Remember that absolutely horrendous, semi-autobiographical movie Richard Pryor wrote, directed, and starred in called Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling?

Well, I do. The week it was released in 1986, I was stunned by its lousy title. In fact, I thought it was just about the worst movie title I’d ever heard in my life. You couldn’t have forced me at gunpoint to go see it.

If Pryor was wrongheaded enough to call it that, I figured he made a mess of everything else, which, I discovered years later while trying to watch Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling on DVD, he did.

I was hanging out with some friends at the time when I started going off about the lousy title and had the bad luck of blurting out, “I want everyone to start calling me Paul-Paul Tatara. From now on I’m Paul-Paul.”

A guy I knew then—I haven’t seen him in almost forty years and will surely never see him—took up the challenge and proceeded to refer to me as “Paul-Paul” from there on out. Every single time I saw him or picked up the phone when he called the house, he’d say, “Paul-Paul!” He’d even call me that if he were referring to me during a conversation.

If I had known he’d so loyally comply with what I said, I would’ve told him he should give me all the money he had in his pocket whenever he saw me.

“Lucan”

This is my late, truly great friend, Benny Powell. You may recall that I quoted Benny in a recent article about Miles Davis. I’ll definitely be writing an entire piece about him one day.

Suffice it to say at the moment, though, that Benny played trombone for Count Basie for twelve years and had a long career as a jazzman, a music educator, and a session musician after he very amicably parted ways with Basie. You can hear Benny on recordings by such luminaries as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Frank Sinatra, among many, many others.

He and I were having lunch at a diner on Ninth Avenue one afternoon when he started talking about how he played tons of sessions out in L.A. in the 70s, where he laid down music for shitty TV shows. It was easy work and he made a killing doing it.

Benny had better things to worry about than what lousy cop or hospital show he was goosing along while he blew charts on an assembly line, but he said for some weird reason the only title that stuck in his head over the years was a stupid thing called Lucan.

“I remember Lucan!” I said. “It was about a kid who was raised by wolves!”

Benny burst out laughing. He said I was the only person he ever mentioned it to who knew what the hell he was talking about. Then he said, “That’s your jazz name! Your jazz name is ‘Lucan!’”

And so it is. My jazz name is Lucan.

And here’s the opening of Lucan. Benny’s trombone is buried somewhere in the horn section.

Benny was probably a little high on weed during that session, by the way. He said he used to toke up to do junk like this, enjoy the buzz for a couple of hours, then get the hell outta there.

He told me he did much the same thing during the ten years that he played in the orchestra for The Merv Griffin Show, except then he got to ogle gorgeous singers and actresses (he mentioned Lola Falana one time) who had dropped by to promote their latest projects.

Benny was cooler than every cool person you and I have ever known balled up into one. He actually knew Sammy Davis, Jr.!!

I was a considerable step down.

There’s no good way to end this, so I guess I’ll just go with a commercial and rake in some money before I sign off.

Sorry about the quality. You’d think this would have been remastered by now and entered into the National Film Registry.