Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (56 page)

Jones:
It’s just for protection. It’s like if a guy threatens one of us, there’s nothing we can do on our own, but by getting a bunch of us together, we can defend ourselves. We don’t have guns, and we don’t do drugs or rob people. Can we talk about something else?

Helm:
Sure. Do you like your students?

Jones:
Yeah, they’re all right. They’re kind of funny. It’s like, they say they come for the teachings, but when they get into the interview room, they talk about other stuff.

Helm:
What other stuff?

Jones:
They mainly talk about the opposite sex. Men talk about problems with their wives, and women talk about their husbands and boyfriends. I don’t get it. It’s like, I have little enough time as it is with school and Little League and my chores, and they want me to be a shrink or something. And I’m only 13! I mean, I’ve got girlfriends and all, but what do I know about relationships?

Helm:
So what do you tell them?

Jones:
I talked to my dad about it, and he gave me a stack of business cards from one of his friends, a psychologist. I just hand my students one of the cards when they start talking about relationships. I put my name on the back of the card, and whenever my dad’s friend gets a new client he takes me to Dairy Queen. It’s cool.

Buddhism is no big deal; it’s like being a doctor. There’s suffering, you diagnose it, give someone a prescription, and hope they go to the drugstore. No one in America wants to go to the store, though. They all want to be pharmacists and sit around discussing different types of medicine. What’s with that? Take some medicine and come back next week. I mean, don’t get me wrong—Buddhism is choice.

Helm:
So you’re fully qualified to teach?

Jones:
Sure. I mostly teach
Tonglen,
giving and receiving. It’s what I think works best at times when people are trying to kill you or too many changes are happening at once, which seems to be the case in this country. You’re basically a giant filter, like on an air conditioner. You suck in the bad air and breathe out the pure air. I see myself like an air-conditioning repair dude. I teach people how to filter and cool things down.

Helm:
So if you can cool things down, why do you need to be in a gang?

Jones:
It’s a samsara and nirvana thing. If some guy disses me I can just tell myself that he really doesn’t exist separate from me, you know? It’s like he’s dissing himself. That works fine. But what happens when he stops talking and starts beating on me? You need to be able to take care of yourself so you don’t get killed. We live in samsara, and spacing out about nirvana doesn’t help anyone.

Helm:
Don’t you see any contradiction in that? The Dalai Lama, for example, constantly teaches nonviolence, despite having been terribly oppressed all his life.

Jones:
(laughing):
Oh yeah, right. The Dalai Lama is an awesome old dude and a killer teacher. But he’s got, like, a dozen bodyguards around him when he’s traveling. What do you think would happen if some butthead pulls a gun on His Holiness? Do you think those dozen bodyguards will practice nonviolence or bust some karate move on him? No way, man. A bodyguard sees this dweeb with a gun and he’s gonna pop a cap in his ass.

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AND NOW…Another Anonymous Star: MARNI NIXON

Starring roles:
The singing voice of Deborah Kerr in
The King and I
(1956) and An
Affair to Remember
(1957), Audrey Hepburn in
My Fair Lady
(1964) and Natalie Wood in
West Side Story
(1961).

Background:
One of the world’s most popular unknown singers, known as “The Ghostess with the Mostess.” Sang in movie choruses. Her career began when someone heard she had a talent for mimicking other people’s voices, and hired her to dub Margaret O’Brien’s voice in the 1949 film
Secret Garden.

Highlights:
On her gift for mimicry: “It’s a combination of intuition and imagining what they sound like. You take it from the quality of their existing voices and facial structure. Audrey Hepburn’s speech pattern is much different from Natalie Wood’s, for instance. I would try to stretch the membranes in my mouth to approach a particular shape. I imagined I could somehow change the tone and quality.” Her hardest job:
My Fair Lady.

• On dubbing: “Back then it was a dirty secret. I was threatened, you know. People told me if anybody knew, I wouldn’t work in this town again. And then it became an ‘in’ thing to know who was doing it. But now it’s not a big deal, and I hope I’ve had something to do with changing people’s attitudes about it.”

Ever met someone whose name matches their profession? Like a Dr. Bones, or an attorney named Ms. Law…or a guy named John who writes
Bathroom Readers?
It’s an interesting phenomenon that’s not—it turns out—all that uncommon. Here’s
a Wall Street Journal
article on the subject.

W
HAT’S IN A NAME?

What’s in a name? Plenty, if it turns out to be your lot in life.

Once upon a time, the Butchers, the Bakers, and the Tailors took on names that advertised their professions. Today, business ought to be brisk for a hairdresser named Barbara Trimmer, for a chef named Susan Spicer—and for her younger brother, Tom Spicer, a specialty-herb broker. Life should be a song for Daniel Harp, who teaches music. “Consciously or unconsciously, they’ve got the essence of branding,” says Alan Brew, a corporate-name consultant.

BRANDED

But no. Talk to some of the aptly named people like Judge Aaron Ment, Connecticut’s chief court administrator, or Bob Crooks, a used-car salesman in Illinois—and you discover that being saddled with a vocationally appropriate or, in Mr. Crooks’s case, a slyly judgmental name, isn’t necessarily a blessing.

C. Martin Lawyer III, a legal-aid attorney in Tampa, Florida, tries to deflect the inevitable question before clients can even ask it: “My name is Martin Lawyer. Yes, I am an attorney. And, yes, Lawyer is my real name.” Even with that as prologue, some clients still don’t get it. One called his office demanding to speak to her attorney. When the secretary asked the attorney’s name, the annoyed woman responded: “I don’t know. He won’t tell me his real name. He makes me call him Mr. Lawyer.”

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS

“Sometimes I wonder if people don’t take me seriously enough,” says Dr. Glass-Coffin, whose maiden name is Glass and whose husband’s name is Coffin.

R. Bruce Money, a former banker and now a business professor at the University of South Carolina, says his first name is actually Richard, but he doesn’t use it because people might start calling him “Rich Money.”

Is it tempting to just legally change a troublesome name?

No way, sniffs John M. Hamburger, who says his family name predates the sandwich. But it is his fate to be president of a restaurant consulting and publishing firm in Roseville, Minnesota, and though he can trace his lineage back several generations to Germany, some people still break into nervous giggles when he makes business calls on restaurant companies.

FEIGNING INCREDULITY

Though he figures peoples’ reactions to his name are their problem, not his, he still has had to endure being called “Hamburg-lar” and “Cheeseburger.” But he has learned to turn the tables. When someone observes, “I bet you got a lot of jokes about your name as a kid,” Mr. Hamburger shakes his head, deadpan: “No, why would I?”

Are people with unusual monikers drawn to professions that suit their names? Lewis P. Lipsitt, a child psychologist and Brown University professor whose hobby is collecting names that fit, says he believes something is at work subconsciously. Beginning in childhood, having an unusual last name “could easily become a repeated reminder of an interest area that, by golly, could eventually become yours,” Dr. Lipsitt says.

TWO WAYS TO GO

Neal Goldsmith, a New York City psychologist, goes one step further. He speculates that people with job-related names may “either grow into or grow in opposition to” their names. “A man named Crook would be more likely than others to become either a cop or a criminal, and a person named Hamburger would be more likely to become a burger-joint owner or a vegetarian,” Dr. Goldsmith says.

But over and over again, people say their careers are just a coincidence. Reeve Askew, a chiropractor, Larry Bone, an orthopedic surgeon, and Shawn Buckless, a university fund-raiser, all agree that their names didn’t influence what they chose to do for a living.

Mr. Hamburger, the restaurant consultant, says that when he started out, he had a choice between working for a computer company and a restaurant company. “I chose the restaurant because it paid more,” he says.

Mr. Roach, [a Terminix] inspector, says the name-job connection might seem fishy, but it’s just a fluke. Still, both his mother and his brother also work for Terminix. “Destiny,” he says, “works in strange ways.”

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APPROPRIATE AUTHORS

A list of honest-to-goodness real books and their

your-name-is-your-destiny authors, from Russell Ash

and Brian Lake’s
Bizarre Books
.

A Treatise on Madness
, by William Battie, M.D. (1768)

The Cypress Qarden,
by Jane Arbor (1969)

Motorcycling for Beginners
, by Geoff Carless (1980)

Diseases of the Nervous System
, by Walter Russell Brain (1933)

The Abel Coincidence
, by J. N. Chance (1969)

Your Teeth
, by John Chipping (1967)

The Boy’s Own Aquarium
, by Frank Finn (1922)

Illustrated History of Gymnastics,
by John Goodbody (1983)

Running Duck
, by Paula Gosling (1979)

Writing with Power
, by Peter Elbow (1981)

How to Live a Hundred Years or More
, by George Fasting (1927)

Causes of Crime,
by A. Fink (1938)

Riches and Poverty
, by L. G. Chiozza Money (1905)

Crocheting Novelty Potholders
, by L. Macho (1982)

The Skipper’s Secret
, by Robert Smellie (1898)

“The world of pizza is a world full of anger, anxiety and anchovies” says pop historian Tim Harrower. Literary scholar Gwen Foss invested years of research to create a glossary of pizza-maker’s slang in an issue of
Maledicta, the International Journal of Verbal Aggression.
Here’s some of the more colorful lingo:

Alpo:
Italian sausage, also known as
dog food. Puppy Chow, Kibbles
’n’
Bits,
and
Snausages.

Beef darts:
A game played during slow times, in which employees hurl bits of raw beef against the walls.

Birthday cake:
A pizza with way too many items on it.

Blue quarters:
Another kitchen game in which coins are heated in a 550°F oven until they turn blue.

Bondage pie:
A pizza with S and M (sausage and mushrooms).

Carp:
Anchovies, also known as
guppies
and
penguin food.

Cheese off!:
A friendly expletive meaning “Go away!”

Crispy critter:
A burnt pizza.

Edgar Allen pie:
A pizza with PO (pepperoni and onions)

Flyers and fungus:
Pepperoni (because raw slices fly like Frisbees) and mushrooms.

Green slime:
Green peppers, especially those that become slippery and slimy. Also known as
lizards
and
seaweed.

Hemorrhage:
Pizza with extra tomato sauce.

Master-baker:
An oven tender.

Panty liner:
The absorbent cardboard placed under a pizza when it’s boxed.

Shroomers:
Mushrooms.

Spoodle:
A saucing tool that looks like a combination spoon/ladle.

Starver:
A customer who orders a pizza then tells the driver that they didn’t order one but offers to buy it at a discount.