Life

I have recently changed my name to Kincaid from the name given me by my mom which is Kinkade. Someone close to me once said that a good pseudonym is an absolute necessity, and who am I to shun the opinion of a man who writes for Swank Magazine?! Actually, turns out old Jewel Biggerstaff wasn’t really a columnist like he said, but a set cleaner for High Society photographers, a janitor if you will. Can you believe that? An actual mopper! My sister was the one who clued me in on Big Jewel’s masquerade one night when she got home from some weird temp job. Evidently, she had gotten him to fess up when she saw him in a 7-11.

Anyways, I learned something from the whole affair. When ashamed of your work, change your name.

In one of my more recent jobs (and this was at a time when I was broke and had a lot of fire under my butt), I was acting like a real go-getter. I would just haul ass into the middle of the street as soon as the light turned red and start cleaning the windshield of whoever was first in line – didn’t even wait for them to ask. That’s hustle. But every once and again, some sour puss would tell me that he wasn’t going to give me a dollar on the grounds that he hadn’t asked me to clean his car in the first place. Sometimes, he’d try and tell me that all I did was make the glass dirtier. He’s say something like, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr…Mr…” and he’d search me up and down for a name tag. Then I’d get to feeling like a real bum and say, “Cliff. My name is Cliff.” Sometimes I’d say my name was Bruce, but you get the point. Anyways, it was when my creative writing teacher told me she was sick of reading my trash that I dropped out of junior college for good and changed my name to Kincaid. I only hope to keep up the illusion better than Mr. Biggerstaff, who in reality is my dad. But that’s a different story.