A man is more than the sum of his names
When I think of the term "manly," I think of my friend Travis.
It’s weird that I don’t think of myself. I’m just not that guy.
I’m the guy who gets excited about artsy chocolate truffles, can tell you what a pecan duja is, and who you can find saying phrases like, “Wow, that cilantro foam on the deconstructed caterpillar roll was amaaaaaze-balls!”
So, when I think of manly, I think of my friend Travis.
If dictionaries used pictures, there would be one of him under that word. It would show his strong jaw covered by a lumberman’s beard and his leathery-as-fuck skin from all the time he spends in the sun. A beef-fed, corn-finished Georgia country boy who owns a small cabin near a lake.
Under the picture, you could read, “See also Redneck Metrosexual.”
The first time I heard him refer to himself as a redneck, it shocked me. I didn’t think of him that way. The way he likes to explain it to me is that rednecks can be progressive and inclusive, too, and you can see that in the use of the term "Y’all." It doesn’t get more inclusive than everybody.
The lake is close enough to his cabin for him to walk to with his fishing rod, but he can also take his Jon boat, which is like a dinghy but for rednecks. So he takes his Jon boat and cruises for an hour to the dam, visiting boat friends and sipping on Crown Royal.
“You know, Carlos, boat friends!! You hang with them and do boat things, but you wouldn’t do anything else with them outside the lake.”
I didn’t know.
The cabin, of course, has enough artillery to defend the Federal Reserve Bank, and it will be used when the government finally comes to take his grandfather’s rifle — the man he was named after.
Travis and I worked together. We either met in Atlanta, where our company was located, or at a convention somewhere across the country. When the meetings were over, we sat down with a glass of WhistlePig and traded stories.
I always wanted to hear about his hunting escapades; he was less interested in my stories of hunting for naps, fruit in season, and farmers’ markets.
On his last adventure, he and two of his buddies caught a 12-foot and 760-pound alligator.
Almost all his stories go like that: Travis hunting deer; Travis almost getting killed by a wild boar and having to unload his 9mm on it because he is a slacker when it comes to oiling his rifles; Travis in the Alaskan frontier hunting… Polar bears? Narwhals?… Whitewalkers? I don’t know what you hunt for there or, more importantly, why you’d go there.
Once, I asked him if he had ever noodled for catfish.
If you don’t know what catfish noodling is, it’s when ‘git’er done’ folks wade into muddy lakes and go around punching the edges until a catfish chomps down on their arms, and they pull the disgusting fish out.
These catfish can reach up to 100 pounds.
Travis answered, "I don’t mess with that shit. That’s how you lose arms."
Which is funny because that is exactly what I think about hunting alligators.
I like Travis because I believe that, beneath the rough and gruff, lies a sensitive man.
Of course, that’s what I tell myself about every single rough-around-the-edges person I meet, and maybe it’s the reason I always end up being friends with people like him.
There is no questioning where you stand with a person like that; they’ll fucking tell you — right to your fucking face. That’s why Travis only has three friends.
One day, I called him and found him in a vulnerable place.
It was the afternoon after he had gotten his vasectomy done.
He knew he didn’t want kids.
He knew that it needed to be done.
But when the rubber meets the road, or in his case, when the electric cauterizer meets the vas deferens, he didn’t want more rubber.
It seemed to me that from everything weighing on him, the end of his family’s name loomed the heaviest.
It might seem silly to some people that you can be upset over a last name, but I get it.
I have experienced such emotions with my last name.
I have some good memories with my dad’s side of the family, but not enough to feel like a representative of the name. I know it comes from the Basque region because I have a cousin who is obsessed with our genealogy. He traced it back to a place with an actual plaque bearing our name, and he sent us a video.
“Dear Cousins, I am sending you this video with this plaque that has our name: Garbiras.”
It was unclear if the plaque memorialized the street, the mound he was standing on, the sewage utility hole underneath it, or if the sheep looming in the background was related to us.
But he sure was happy he found our name on that plaque in the Basque Country.
I’m not attached to my last name, and there is no reason for me to be.
I remember being a kid and struggling to tell people my last name because it was hard to pronounce.
But it is my name, and I won’t change it.
When I met my wife, she had a similar attachment to her last name, and when things started getting serious, she told me she had no plans to change it. I got it.
Twenty-five years as someone, and here I come with plans not only to change a very important piece of her identity but also to burden her with the clerical nightmare of changing all her legal documents and credit cards.
That’s no way to start a marriage.
I can't take credit for my egalitarian stance.
In college, I had to study so much feminist theory that Gloria Steinem would've looked at our curriculum and said, "Whoa, estrogen much?"
The fact that my soon-to-be wife wanted to marry me and legally become my property was shocking enough.
Why would she do that?
At that moment, I felt like a modern man, unencumbered by chauvinistic views of the past.
That only lasted until we started talking about having babies, and my wife shared with me her plan to give our babies her last name.
"I will carry them for nine months. Why should they have your name?"
Which makes sense.
Except. It doesn't.
Eventually, I caved in because I love my wife so much, and she knows it.
We compromised and punished our unborn children with the longest hyphenated name possible, Rege-Garbiras. An early message to the kids that things in this family are quirky.
It might have been all in vain.
When she was younger, my daughter Jovie started referring to herself as Jovie Rege-Cotijas as if I was related to the infamous man who patented the style of cheese, as if my name was Don Carlos Cotijas.
The disrespect.
She could've easily punned my wife's name with gems like reggae, ragged, and rickety. But she didn't. She came up with a pun on her father's last name so clever that it eluded the boys at my school for 12 years.
To give my daughter more credit, in her five years of existence, she had only eaten cotija cheese once, and she retained the word long enough to apply it to a similar-sounding word.
She has also employed similar retention to use uncommon words in the right setting, like when she put little green balls of Play-Doh on a bigger orange ball of Play-Doh, looked at it, and said, "It's a Pollock."
Or when she was FaceTiming my mom and told her, "Let's pretend your name is Punani!"
I have to tell you, I never used that word, and I'm so curious to know who the hell is walking around my daughter saying, "Punani," or calling my mom one.
So I understood when Travis experienced that feeling sneaking up on him about his name.
We live in a society that pressures men to do extraordinary things in the name of family and to bring children into the world who would do the same.
When we should be focused on letting people be people, a world where being a good, honest person is more than enough.
Besides, just because Travis doesn't know it, it doesn't mean there aren't many little Travises running around hunting alligators, deer, and boar. They just don't carry his name, and as such, they are not his financial responsibility.
That's something he can enjoy while coasting on his dinghy, sipping on Crown on a muggy Georgia afternoon with his boat friends.
