1.           The truth was I didn't even know what the word meant before I went online and put it in Real Live Player. And it showed me, when I pressed the forward arrow, how to say it exactly right. So, I went and practiced it a whole lot. I mean, a whole fucking lot. I mean I did it there right in front of my laptop a whole bunch of times. But it was the kind of word to do in front of a mirror.

 

When you can say to anyone what's on your mind in front of a mirror and keep a straight face, if that's what you want a straight face, you can do it in front of a whole crowd of people. Like when the president used to say about how much he deplored and denounced things, or how he rejected and repudiated them, you fucking know that he was practicing somewhere before he got to be able to talk like that in front of 10 billion people like that and keep a straight face, like when you tell a little kid who's a boy to lift the toilet seat when he's taking a pee, especially over at a friend's how because it's more embarrassing there to have to talk about it and explain it than at your own house.

 

You get to this point when it sounds not just perfect, but when it sounds natural. You go to a bar and you say, "Charlie, that's barely two fingers," and who gives you the usual scowl and tips the neck of Four Roses a little bit more, and you smile back because you really deserved that. Now, point is: you didn't grow up like that; you weren't born you like that. You learned that. You learned to make it sound like it was a natural step beyond perfection, so that something you've actually learned comes across as everyday to whoever you're talking to, whether it be a bartender on the Lower East Side, or some head up his ass Larry Summers type who's giving the nigger some honorary PhD from Harvard while you're discussing over pine nuts, biscotti, and the views off Bailey Island some reverse trompe l'oeil cherries moment in Dali's childhood marking the point in time when his uncle knew what the fuck he was, like all that's normal normal people like you normally do.

 

I hadn't even known my own name what it meant for that matter. I'd thought it was cool [or whatever contemporaneous argot, "sick," "bad," makes sense now; see Plato's discussion on dialect and usage vis-à-vis, "Hardly can a man be good" in the Protagoras]: Xerxes. It even looked like Malcolm X with that double-X thing going and all. And who the fuck else in my neighborhood was called Xerxes? You didn't know who he was to know he was a ruler. If they'd named a candy bar called Xerxes you knew it'd give you power to conquer the world all day long, and you'd fight other Halloween kids for it to have it. It was a good name to have.

 

The only trouble it'd ever caused me was with Xerox. But everybody knew what Xerox was. So it just didn't work. The whole esoteric, past-thing, Herodotus who-is-this-guy in my face thing did. Always. Cut forward to a club, a girl goes so what's your name, and you go, Xerxes; she goes either afraid on you like that right then, or is impressed. I can't say the same thing about my last name: de Felicio. I mean, come the fuck on, guys! Many many years before I knew that getting a blow-job was a good thing, or what the fuck one really was to start with, and that being called one was really not such a bad thing, it was a bad thing. Hey you, Jerk Off Fellatio. Yeah.

 

Hard times. But you learn real fast. I knew some kid and his name in fact was Peter Hardwick. What the fuck this little blond kid from Australia sporting a page-boy called that was doing there in Williamsburg I'll never know. Yeah, he said, 'cause my dick is always hard. This was from when he was eight. Then he left, but it was a good lesson. Not one that I could apply yet for some years to come. Little Peter. Are you Spanish? Are you Italian? Black. That one people just moved a half-step away from because they knew you were joking.

 

You weren't joking. Xerxes Melville de Felicio. I'll say more about the middle later, but not now. Point being, my own name meant practically nothing to me, nothing in the way I actually knew of. Did I know that I was talking about Xerxes' second great invasion of Greece in the Persian War of 480 B.C.? [Second Persian Invasion] Did I know that I was to be part of the founding literary story, to be the first Western prose narrative? That shit I didn't know for many many years, sisters and brothers. Me, I just had this Avenger-like bad-ass name that you probably wouldn't want to fuck with me on account of. And I didn't even know what it meant or was. It was just "X" sounds like "Z" and that made it in the playground or the streets cool, and you were a half-idiot if you spelled it or thought you spelled it with a "Z."

 

So, I had built-in survival. I'd get into anything and you never do anything to a man unless you know who by name, bro, you're dealing with. Said, "Xerxes," and that commanded respect. The middle part, like I said, maybe I'll come to later. The last part, it was like being called Sweetdick, and was nobody's help for time to come. But it was just stayed away from.

 

Now when I got off the prize-winners' stage, I hadn't had anything else ringing in my ears except this one thing: what the announcer said: "Newly arrived, but not newly known, Mr. Xerxes de Melville Felicio." Now I didn't give a shit about getting the "de" part of my name mixed up; these people are doing that sort of shit all the time. Is there a space before "de" and "Felicio?" I mean, you get uptight about that sort of shit and you're uptight about two dimes and a nickel in the parking meter not giving you the same amount of time to park as a flat quarter. Don't care. And sometimes, they go overboard and put too much on the "i": "de Felicío." Nobody has time for this sort of shit; I never cared about it.

 

Just keep it breezy, Xerx! And sure as pumpkin pie, I did. Otherwise, I couldn't have made it up here in front of all these motherfuckers and won. I hadn't remembered a word of my acceptance speech which I'm sure thanked all the people who deserved to be thanked for and was funny and made the established folk squirm a little bit and made them feel somehow up to date with a world they were really out of date with and the young people who follow me full of fucking smiles like the rats of Robert Browning follow him [see 1284 legend of Rattenfänger von Hameln; History of the Pied Piper]. And, as I was taking my corner seat, stage right, in the front row beside the other Fellow winners, I heard what must have been the reply to a gentleman's question easy enough to re-construct, though I was without earshot of the words themselves: a well-dressed Caucasian, middle-aged woman with wide-set gray-blue eyes and a short string of pearls leaned over in the second row right behind where I was sitting my ass down and, attempting to hide the words behind the finger-shield of her left hand, she said to him in her hand-cupped ear of his, "He's some arriviste."

 

How to say "Arriviste."