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ANDREW LENAHAN'S
STARBLIND
WRITING SECTION
ANDREW LENAHAN'S NAMES (1998)

It isn’t always an easy thing having a name like Andrew Lenahan in this ethnicity-conscious world.  Andrew, of course, does not mean much.  It is the shell of a name, an eternally unfinished portrait of me that melts, bleeds, and drips from its easel.  In the old neighbourhood, everyone, even my school headmaster, called me “Andy.”  I once asked my mother what the name meant.

Asking my mother something was never easy to do.  I remember her best as an extension of her old Singer sewing machine, tapping and pulling at fabric all day as huge wheels of cold black-varnished metal spun and whirred all around.  Mum was the frail part of the machine, the part that always seemed to need some rest.  She never seemed to notice her own fatigue.  Until the end she was merely waiting, working on her sewing for as long as she could last until one day a daughter would inevitably take her place in the cramped, sticky sewing-room.

“Mum?”

“Haven’t any time for talking, son.  Sewing don’t wait for talking, you know.  I gotta keep the machine going.”

I had heard every word before, so I ignored her.  “Who was I named for, Mum?”

She offered a bare but adequate reply.  “You was named for a saint…  Saint Andrew.  All good Catholics are named for saints, and that’s the rule.  Didn’t you ever know that?  Well, get going, I have to get back to this.”  The huge machine sighed as she returned to it.  At the time, I was too young to know what a saint was, but her churlish explanation was curiously satisfying at the time.  Still, I probed further.

“What about Lenahan?  Does that mean something too?”

“Sure it does, boy,” she replied over the mechanical noise.  “Lenahan means you’re Irish.”

She was right.  I’m Irish.  The world would never let me forget it.  Like the Native American warrior Black Elk, my name connects me to generations before me, and therefore gives me a certain amount of constant awareness of my own ethnicity, even a sort of pride.  It connects me to my people, not the surly drunkards of popular American perception, but the real Irish, builders of great castles and lovers of life who drink merrily from life’s deep chalice.  From Kennedy’s speeches to Joyce’s prose, their heritage is mine.  Were it not for my name, perhaps I would forget.

Of course, I never really could.  Where I come from, the neighbourhoods were close together and no one liked any outsiders.  Two blocks down our street bordered on Italian territory.  “Why don’t you ‘lend a hand’, Lenahan?” one snapped hatefully from behind a wire fence in a grimy alley one day many years ago.  Sometimes I could swear that fence prevented civil war from breaking out.  In good weather there were usually dozens of kids on either side, this day only two.  He shook it violently, shouting loudly of  “micks” and how we should all go the hell home.  Getting bored, he hurled a muddy old bottle over the fence and it cracked hard against the cold, rain-soaked sidewalk.  Whatever was in it looked like blood where it had spilt.  In return, I shook the fence as hard as I could and flakes of rust floated down over us like bloody snow.  He backed off then, more scared of himself than of me.

Years later, like the Mexican-American author Cisneros, I find myself wondering if a different name might better reveal “the real me, the one nobody sees.”  Those people whose opinions matter tell me “Lenahan” doesn’t fit me.  It’s too hard to spell, they say.  It’s too hard to remember.  What they mean to say is that my name is too ethnic.  My name is too Irish, even for an Irishman.  I might as well wear a green bowler hat with a huge shamrock tucked inside the band.  Still, they make up stories.  They lie to me.  “Hey, ‘Lennon’ would fit better on a marquee, babe.”  Apparently, to become American, to stand with confidence upon this soil, my name must become American too.

At an audition recently, the director asked me my last name as soon as I got to the front of the queue.  “Lenahan,” I said, “but I’m thinking of having it changed.”

                “Why?”

                “It’s too ethnic.”

                “It’s Irish, isn’t it?”

                “Yes.”

                He just laughed.  Somewhere, at that moment, I could swear I heard a glass bottle break.