People are often curious as to why I have only one letter for my given name. (D being my given name and Sanuk being my family name because that is how we roll in the Thailand of the South.) Some presume a lack of follow-through on the part of my parents which is not the case here, though they could be held to account for other such acts of omission. By birth, my name is, in fact, Darryl. Having been born in the early 70’s, this name served me well while Darryl Dawkins was shattering backboards and communicating with Juicy Lucy on Lovetron. Things did not go so well as Darryl Hannah became more and more popular.
By the time I reached what had previously been known as “Junior High” but had just recently been renamed “Middle School,” the torment of sharing a name with a girl had become unbearable. Since I was switching school districts anyway, I decided to drop the “arryl.” For simplicity’s sake, I have often maintained that this was the point at which I became merely a letter, and I chalked it up to youthful folly which had persisted too long to be corrected. In point of fact, this is not true. In dropping the “arryl,” I adopted “ee” so that, as was customary in my Old just-south-of-Kentucky Home, I became Dee.
During my last year of High School, Dee lived with a friend of the family and priest of our village temple. (He held that position as a successor to my great-grandfather and namesake, but that is another story for another time.) He ministered to me as my parents separated and I was set adrift. Being the youngest and the only child not at least of university age, I would have had to choose a parent or grandparent to live with had he not taken me in. Although he was present and responsible, I was pretty much on my own. His house was in the city near our village, and I often found myself at various coffee shops and restaurants near the Robber Barron University campus.
On one of these nights I was smoking cigarettes and reading an essay on Jeremy Bentham in the International House of Pancakes on 21st Avenue. Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy was engaging, and I was excited by the process of being engaged in philosophical thought. I liked the idea that we were not constrained by our previous experiences but could devise systems to better organize our individual and collective lives, systems that would increase individual happiness and communal prosperity. These ideas appealed to me as a young person experiencing the seemingly chaotic nature of the world for the first time, both in the city I observed and in my own family.
Sitting in the IHOP, I imagined myself as a real intellectual in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin. I wanted to know, to really understand the braided threads of the intellectual history of western civilization. I wanted the waitress to think I was a student at the University. The essay is in a book called The Western Intellectual Tradition which still sits on my shelf. It’s co-authors are Bruce Mazlish and Jacob Bronowski. On the cover and in the introduction, Mr. Bronowski is referred to as J Bronowski. To me, J Bronowski was the coolest guy in the world, so I dropped the “ee” and became, simply, Sanuk D.