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Labels: Mack Daddy

Published in the National Post, March 2003

Parents David Eddie and Pam Seatle renamed their youngest son Adam. "Most people seem to have adjusted."

For eight months, his name was Benjamin. Benjamin Wilson Scott Eddie. His two older brothers called him Ben or Benjie, sometimes Benjie-boy. "I love little Benjie-boy, Mom," one or the other would say. As time passed, he even started to respond. "Hey, Mom, Dad, I said Ben, and he turned his head!" We did the paperwork. Name: Benjamin. Name: Benjamin. First name: Benjamin.

And then ... we changed our minds. The thing was, Benjamin just wasn't sticking. It didn't come trippingly off the tongue. We'd look at him, and it was almost as if we couldn't remember his name: "Hello, little ... Benjamin. You're so cute ... Ben." It didn't suit his face. It didn't suit his personality. We named him Benjamin, but he wasn't a Benjamin. So we changed his name and prepared to meet the scorn of our friends and neighbours.

People think naming a kid is easy. Well, I don't know if that's even true, but when a couple are about to have a kid, improper nouns like "amniocentesis," "epidural" and "ultrasound" tend to crowd out the consideration of proper nouns. The name can be a bit of an afterthought.

But when all else recedes into the past, the name, in the words of Led Zeppelin, remains the same. I know people in their thirties and forties, grown men and women -- middle-aged men and women -- who are still mad at their parents about the name they got. That definitely kills me. I can't stand the thought that after all the (as I now know, being a parent myself) horrible sacrifices, dreadful compromises and ridiculous amount of labour required to raise a kid, it can all be trumped by a dumb name.

I think part of the problem with Benjamin, as a name, is it was a compromise in the first place. My wife, Pam, normally quite conservative in her tastes (though not in husbands, thank God), named our first two boys Nicholas and Jonathan. Solid, boring names. Her principle for naming kids is that the name should be something you feel comfortable screaming across a crowded playground. (Solid advice, I've often thought, as I stroll through the park, not only for children but the owners of dogs. My own principle, though, is it should be something that sounds natural after the words "Supreme Court Justice" or "Nobel laureate.") "Nick! Get back here! J.J.! Stop that immediately!" Euphonious. Mellifluous. Rolls right off the tongue. Other parents wouldn't even glance up from their papers.

But then for our third child she got a wild hair -- or, to put it more genteelly, a bee in her bonnet, about Phineas. It was mainly the short form, Finn, she was after. "Finn! Finn!" she pictured herself yelling across the crowded playground, one foot attractively propped on a sandbox, while the wind tousled her hair. "Come back here, Finn!"

So attractive was this picture in her mind, I believe, that she didn't really think the rest of it through. We both loved the character of Phineas from John Knowles' novel A Separate Peace. And I had no problem with Finn. Finn was fine. But I didn't think our kid would thank us, in the end, for calling him Phineas. Kids can be cruel, even if you have a normal name. A friend of mine grew up with a kid named Hugh Brown Smith. Perfectly normal, right? What could kids make out of that?

Throughout the most impressionable, vulnerable years of his life he was known as Huge Brown Shit.

If we named him Phineas, he might sue us, for mental and social distress, if he were a litigious Phineas. Or, if musically and lyrically gifted, able to drop mad rhymes over Jeep-shaking beats, he might become a rapper, call himself something like PH Negative and make an angry album called The Phineas Eddie Project:

My parents named me Phineas

Go ahead and laugh

They thought it was ingenious

It cut my social life in half

"How about Elliott?" I asked Pam. "Supreme Court Justice Elliott Eddie. That has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?" Too fey. "How about Andrew? Or Adam?" She was lukewarm on Andrew, and there was some guy named Adam in high school, or something, who bugged her.

We both dug in our heels. It was one of those Mexican standoffs where we both gaze with steely resolve into each other's eyes and say: "I am not backing down on this one." Usually, I lose these. I even lost on circumcision (they're uncut), which I could not believe. After all, shouldn't that be my domain? But Pam used a potent combination of tears and an innate stubbornness to break my will. But I knew I would never give in on Phineas. Phineas was out. Finally, we decided on a compromise: Benjamin.

Neither of us was crazy about it. It wasn't bad (always pronounced with a little lilt at the end, to indicate hopeful optimism). It was OK. But as time went on, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that although we'd named him Benjamin, filled out all the paperwork to make him Benjamin, he just wasn't a Benjamin.

I started pushing for a name change after a few months, but she was worried about how it would play with the chattering masses.

"Who f---ing cares? The main thing is we give him the right name, right?"

In the end, she agreed. She was reading a book called Expecting Adam, which somehow convinced her she actually loved that name, that it would suit him far better, and that's what we should call him after all.

I breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you for being so flexible."

"But won't everyone think we're crazy?" she fretted. "Flaky?"

"Don't worry about it. We'll just stare them in the eye and act like it's the mature, normal thing to do (a good, all-purpose strategy for all embarrassing situations, I've found). Let me do all the talking."

Our first social act after the name change was a pre-Christmas party at a neighbour's house (Adam nee Benjamin was born in March; we changed his name shortly before Christmas). Our neighbours, who have become our friends, pretty much, were incredulous and smirking, but obviously stopped short of mocking us to our faces.

"Why?" was the main question.

"It wasn't suiting him. He just wasn't a Benjamin," I said, affixing them all with a gunslinger gaze. "We had to do it."

They bought it. A couple of people, in fact, even stepped forward and declared that they never felt Benjamin suited him -- that it was, in fact, a boring name. Music to our ears -- though not so much for our neighbour, Ben Walmsley, who was hosting the party. He made a face and got some more beers out of the fridge.

In fact, everyone -- friends, neighbours, family -- adjusted quickly. They understood. Or so they told us, anyway. Obviously, it's impossible to know what's being said behind your back. For the purposes of researching this article, I asked one of my most candid and blunt friends what people were thinking.

"Everyone thought it was the right thing to do," he said. "Though I will say eight months was probably the last moment you could do it. If it'd been after a year, you might have had Social Services knocking on your door."

Fair enough. I can live with that. (And we were lucky here: Our disorganization actually aided and abetted our indecisiveness; we hadn't filed some papers and were spared the hassle of going through the whole process of a legal name change.)

Now, a few months later, most people seem to have adjusted. It's funny: Kids, who have a reputation for being so flexible and adaptable, are the last to adjust. Kids will still call him Benjamin, and we have to gently correct them. But it's happening less and less often. And every time I hear it, I become firmer in the conviction we did the right thing. After all, it's better to be indecisive and ultimately right than decisive and wrong. Isn't it? If not, I reserve the right to take back that statement at some future date.

PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Redman, National Post

Labels: Adam née Benjamin

Published in Toro Magazine, April/May 2003

Native Torontonian Rick Marin was living the bachelor's life in the Big Apple when he signed a reported US$300,000 book deal and quit his job at The New York Times. Here, Marin talks to his old friend David Eddie about the result, Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor (Hyperion), a much-discussed entry in the "dick lit" movement, which is angling to cash in onthe Bridget Jones windfall. Miramax owns the film rights to Cad, but there will be no sequel. Marin just got married.

The word "cad" is somewhat retro. When was the heyday of the cad, and who were some of your models?

It's amazing how many people ask me, "What does 'cad' stand for?" They think it's an acronym! I think of the heyday as the '50s and '60s. Narrow suits, skinny ties, and unlimited expense accounts - that, to me, is cad style. Peter Sellers chasing Goldie Hawn in There's a Girl in my Soup. Any of the Connery Bonds. Now, I guess, Hugh Grant might be something of a cad role model.

There is actually a great Hugh Grant quote at the beginning of your book. It reads, "People say, 'Dig deep into your emotions,' and I find I don't have any depth or any particular emotions, so it's tricky." Was that bit from Hugh Grant an inspiration?

It was! My mother sent it to me, from an interview. I thought, "This is my message." He was talking about acting, but I think it applies to men in general.

You are not the classic cad prototype. You wear glasses, you're obviously some kind of intellectual, and, in the book, you describe yourself slipping away from your dates to take hits on your inhaler. When most people think "cad," the tanned, smooth, George Hamilton type is what often comes to mind. Is part of your secret the fact that, like Ted Bundy, you don't look the part?

I actually considered calling the book "Canadian Psycho," because the cad can sneak up on you. Sometimes he's the guy you least expect. Caddishness is a personality trait, not a matter of looks. I'm an average guy. Average height, average looks, average charm. Well, perhaps slightly above-average charm.

What is a "George Hamilton," by the way? It sounds delicious.

The "Hamilton" is a cocktail I named after the Tanned One when I was interviewing him at one of his cigar bars and he ordered a tequila with cranberry and lime. The recipe is on my Web site, Cadconfessions.com.

I once wrote a piece for Mademoiselle on the topic "Why do men marry some women and not others?" If I wasn't being paid by the word, I could have summed it up in one word: sanity. You dump one woman in the book because she's too sane. Can a woman be too sane?

I ask myself in the book, "Are all women either too crazy or too sane?" I did once break up with a perfectly lovely chick because she wanted to settle me down to a nice, normal life on the Upper West Side, Manhattan's equivalent of suburbia. We were eating in restaurants our parents would have liked. Every night, I was being assaulted by pepper mills the size of baseball bats. I wasn't ready for that much sanity. I'm still not.

By the time this goes to press, unless you do something extremely caddish, you'll be married, in Italy no less. Are most cads just waiting for the right woman?

The bigger they are, the harder they fall for her. Mine is the perfect combination: crazy on the outside, sane on the inside. The most devoted husbands and fathers I know are ex-cads - because they've gotten it out of their system. Women think they can change a man, but he has to change himself, and he'll only do it for the woman he wants to spend the rest of his days and nights with.

One of my friends has a theory that, since our generation has put off marriage for so long, we have more exes than any other generation in history. The thing that always amazes me is that women tend to have as many exes as men. They go through all these men in the search for Mr. Right. Yet it seems impossible for a woman to get a reputation for caddishness. How is it they're able to retain the moral high ground while using and dumping as many men as we do women?

Because they own the terms of the debate. Bridget Jones, Sex in the City, and their ilk only give us the female point of view, which is that guys are jerks and women are blameless. I'm trying to rectify that, because women are culpable too. I've been with women who've told me that the CIA was trying to recruit them, that Jim Morrison came to them in their dreams, and that they loved me on our third date. I'm saying, "You know why I stopped calling? Because you're out of your mind!"

In your book, you talk about cads and "bounders." What's the difference?

A bounder is a jerk, and a jerk has no charm. A cad's saving grace is that he has charm, and a sense of humour.

In every relationship in the book, there's a "Check, please" moment. What are a couple of the more cringe-provoking lines women laid on you during your cad years?

"Are you the One - the one my mother told me about?" When a woman says that to me in the book, I say it belongs in my museum of all-time cringe lines, in the display case, right next to "Be strong for me."

In one of my favourite Seinfeld episodes, George asks Jerry not to be so funny for a while so George can impress his new girlfriend with his own sense of humour. "How long do I have to keep this up?" Jerry eventually asks. George thinks about it and replies, "Until consummation." I noticed that material is very important to the cad. Is material really the only thing the young parvenu from the provinces has in the big city?

Absolutely. He has no money, barely knows his way around. He has to dazzle with shtick. My default material was the Q&A. Helen Gurley Brown once advised her Cosmo girls, "Pretend he's Henry Kissinger and you're Barbara Walters interviewing him." I did that a lot, without the dress and the facelift.

Quite a bit of the book is set in Canada, where you come back to visit family and friends. A couple of people advised you to cut down the Canadian content. Do you think it has helped or hurt to leave it all in?

It would have felt too phony and unpatriotic to cut it out. Plus Canada's always good for a few laughs. Like the time I try to explain to an uncomprehending date who Wayne and Shuster are.

Speaking of which, there's a tragic figure in your book, a horribly pretentious, fingerless-glove-wearing, wannabe author named David Eddie, who's permanently mired in his hick backwater, Toronto. When you come upon him, he's swilling homemade wine in his crappy apartment in the "Jamaican section of Chinatown," listening to rap music and sitting on a couch "the Salvation Army might have rejected." Is part of the reason the cad has such success with women the fact that their only alternative is unfortunate failures like this Dave Eddie character?

I have no idea who you're talking about.

The woman who winds up winning the cad's heart makes him wait quite a while before succumbing to his cad-vances, in a country house somewhere in the Hamptons, I believe. Is it possible the others succumbed too early?

She wasn't playing hard to get. The thing about Ilene was that she saw through my caddish moves and, rather than falling for or being offended by them, was amused. That made her both a challenge and fun.

You write that men will date all types of women but marry only five: "The High-school Sweetheart (the jejune joint crush that never matures or gets old). The Trophy/Sexual Obsession (a possession he never truly possesses). The Organizer (or human Palm Pilot), the Audience (She flatters! She ego-boosts!). The Nurturer (three squares a day). And the Collaborator (the intellectual/creative rival and/or equal)." Which type are you marrying?

A collaborator with strong nurturing instincts.

Before the action in the book begins, the cad is quite badly stung by a woman he married, who moves in with someone else. Is the cad really just a sensitive guy who's been hurt and is afraid to commit? Or is an element of revenge involved?

The cad works hard to hide his sensitivity - and his bruised ego. If his marriage failed, he tries to erase the memory of that failure with a string of trophy vixens and, ultimately, by finding his true Mrs. Right.

I asked my wife (who read your book and loved it) if she had any questions, and she said, "Ask him if he thinks all men are as judgmental as he is." It's true that you reject a large-breasted Ph.D. candidate because of improperly shaved legs. As a bachelor, I would've jumped her and asked questions later. My wife wonders, though, do most men turn on a dime like that, or is it merely a symbol for something deeper?

Actually, it was the Shakespeare T-shirt with the phrase "Will Power" in Old English script that turned me off the Ph.D. candidate, despite her impressive ivory towers. So, yes, all men are that judgmental. No one wants to look at hairy thighs.

Women are loving your book, which is good luck for you, since women make up 80 percent of "frequent book buyers," who purchase a book or more a month. Look up "those who bought Cad also bought" on Amazon, and you get a list of chick books. How can that be? Chicks say they laugh through the first two-thirds of your book and cry during the last third. How did you pull that off?

Women have an insatiable curiosity about the depths, or lack thereof, of the male mind. They want to know what we're thinking, and we tend not to tell them. They also want to forgive us our trespasses. This book is truly a rake's progress. I think of it as a delayed coming-of-age story. In my case, Ilene, my fiancée, and I got involved at exactly the time my father died. That forced me to grow up and out of the protracted adolescence I call Bachelor Hell.

What's the best way to dump a girl?

The classic: Don't call. And if you see her coming down the street, hide behind a tree.

David Eddie is a producer for Citytv's BookTelevision.

Labels: Talking to Rick Marin: Interview

Published in Toro Magazine, April/May 2003

My girlfriend recently stumbled upon a stack of dirty videos I keep stashed in my closet. Trying to explain why I own Strap-On Sally 9 did not make for a pleasant Sunday morning. The bottom line is this: She now thinks I'm a pervert. How can I convince her otherwise?

It never ceases to amaze me how naive some women are when it comes to pornography. Every man - I don't care who he is - has something, somewhere, to hide. Once her eyes have been opened, though, remember her anger is jealousy and vanity-based: "Why does he prefer those porn bimbos over me?" There are two approaches you can take here. One route is to reassure her that you are extremely attracted to her, and explain to her that you simply get "lonely" when she's not around. (One of my friends suggests you offer to give up porn and take pictures of her, but that seems a little over the top to me.) Promise to give up, or at least cool it, on the porn, and then, because you never will, cover your tracks better. The other, and I think better, alternative is to ease her into the world of soft-core porn. No girl-on-donkey action - that won't work; but one of the pleasures of long-term monogamy is the discovery that some women are actually turned on by certain porn, and you can watch it together. Getting busted with your stash could be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Every time I'm at a bar with my friends, someone starts ordering shooters, and the next thing I know we're on the sixth round. I'm usually in for a night of praying to the porcelain god after round three, but if I turn them down, the boys jump all over me. How can I bow out without looking like a wuss?

Wave it off, smiling, and declare, "No mas." That's what Roberto Duran famously said to the referee in his 1980 title bout against Sugar Ray Leonard. Duran was macho, a Latino, and it was humiliating for him at the time; but the phrase has since evolved to represent, I think, the cry of a strong man who has fought a noble battle but can't take any more punishment on a particular night. Ideally, your friends will get this, and will realize that sometimes a good man, a strong man, can quit, say "Uncle," and still come out swinging next time. If not, take the drink and take your chances. Don't drive.

One of my good friends called me up recently and told me he'd gone on a few dates with my girlfriend of two years, whom I'd broken up with a couple of months earlier. Apparently, things are going well between them, and this buddy of mine wanted to make sure I was okay with them seeing each other. I've moved on, but it still seems a bit weird to me. What am I supposed to say?

I used to subscribe strictly to the Five Year/Foreign Country clause of the Guy Code in these matters: "Thou shalt not even think of dating thy friend's ex - nay, even if she be covered in cocoa butter and writhing in thy lap - until five years hath elapsed, and/or you happen to meet in a foreign country." But now I think that rule is too draconian, and, anyway, everyone always breaks it. My current position is that you need to look deep into your soul to decide if you are genuinely over her. If so, set her free. If you aren't, though, you should tell him it bothers you, and he should back off. He should wait at least the amount of time you went out with her, which is usually the time it takes to get over someone. In other words, if you went out with her for two years, he should wait two years and pray that she doesn't find someone else in the meantime.

Got a relationship dilemma? Send me a note: damagecontrol [at] toromagazine.ca

Labels: Damage Control

Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad

Novelist and journalist Eddie (Chump Change) is living a dissolute bachelorhood of bohemian squalor and interchangeable "sexually forthright, non-rocket-scientific young women" when he finds the love of his life in the form of a family-minded woman. He was wary of the crimp domesticity might put in his literary aspirations, but when son Nicholas comes along, the avowedly unemployable writer decides that he was "born to be a househusband." He may stay home while his wife goes to work, but he's not entirely housebroken: he uses the corner bar and neighborhood lingerie shop as day-care centers, longs to join the glitterati, muses about divorce on a hellish family vacation, exists for long periods in a haze of boredom and sleep-deprivation and wears the indelible social stigma of the stay-at-home dad.

— Publisher's Weekly

This title is available from Amazon.ca, from ChaptersIndigo.ca

Labels: Housebroken

This is a Henry Milleresque tale about a young writer (the author's alter ego, David Henry) who quits his job as a letter clerk at Newsweek and decamps New York for the friendlier environs of Toronto. There, amidst various escapades and seductions, he obtains a freelance job writing an observation piece about Toronto for Canada's premier political/cultural journal. This leads to a job as a newswriter for the CBC, which, in a gratuitous salute to Miller, the author dubs the Cosmodemonic Broadcast Corporation. Unfortunately, Toronto is not Paris, nor is the author's style as lively or as cynical as Miller's, though some of his protagonist's observations about modern civilization and the rise and decline of the written word are interesting. Eventually the protagonist's self-destructive urges, so clearly laid out at the outset of the novel, get the better of him, and he finds himself in that "fallen" state of freedom to which he has aspired all along--a rejuvenation of the Milleresque happy-go-lucky character.

— Frank Caso, Booklist

This title is available from Amazon.ca, from ChaptersIndigo.ca.

Labels: Chump Change