I am not your niece

When I was born, despite a team of confident physicians informing my father of my gender, my father named me Jesse.

The name Jesse is unisex – just like fetid gas station bathrooms. I get that. Nevertheless, to those who see me and correlate my name or my peacock-ish red hair to their female relatives – I am not your niece.

It’s not the comparison between me, who is a writer first and a man fourth, and your female relatives, whose name or hair I perhaps share, which bothers me. The sigh comes from my inability to impress upon you that I, like every other person, exist entirely separate from anyone you know, will know, have known, or wish you knew – like Jesse James.

Do not make rhymes from my name. Do not sing the song “Jesse’s Girl,” or “Jessica” and, whatever you do, don’t belittle my masculinity with the feminine variation of my name just because your muscles are bigger than mine, your calves tighter or your truck tires altogether larger than me.

As a white man with no clear ethnic lineage other than Irish and Scottish, I’m already dealing with an ethnic identity crisis. Essentially, I’m a European mutt. My ancestors traveled around the country popping out my forefathers, foremothers and forebrothers with anyone who looked vaguely appealing until, about 400 years later, I popped out looking patriotic with red hair, blue eyes and white eyelashes.

I was confident as a kid despite my sore thumb head. Like a thin, violet eyed insomniac Johnny Depp. Or something.

My father purchased my first phone for me on my fourteenth birthday. Picture a pack of Wrigley’s spearmint gum that could dial four numbers with an additional button for the police and the image would land somewhere in the zone of the LG Migo from Verizon Wireless.

He probably couldn’t even imagine I would flirt using a phone the size of a frog.

In terms of functionality, it was more like carrying around a pager than a phone – except even the most primitive pagers have more than five buttons. The phone had the numbers one through four boldly stamped into its green, egg shaped shell. To register numbers, I had to hold the number one until the phone beeped then proceed to press the number one until I reached the number I needed. If someone had a nine in their phone number, they certainly weren’t getting a call from me.

The one-inch screen barely managed to display the time and battery.

Being the savvy technonaut I was, I tried to hit on girls twice my age with a phone twice as small as anything currently on the market – remember the Motorola RAZR?

I volunteered at a heart disease run at Jacksonville Beach in the summer of 2010, which meant that I watched other people put together booths while I ate granola bars, sipped from tiny water bottles and yawned.

I did, however, participate in the run. Two women, in particular, who were both in their early 30s, seemed nice enough to chat up during the run. Their speed appeared in that agonizing limbo where velocity indicates you should be running but you’re walking instead, so it was difficult to keep up with them.

When they would slow their pace, I would catch up, huffing in my long blue “Stamp out heart disease” shirt, and try to pick them up. Both women wore patience on their face. One had long, ropey dreadlocks I could have probably hung from. The other had a stiff and muscular jawline hidden under curly, brunette hair.

I already had four numbers registered in the phone when I finally dissolved their will enough to let me grab their numbers. So they stopped and waited while I fumbled with the phone long enough to peck their numbers in.

When I asked the first woman her number, she said the area code – “904” – and I realized for the first time I had no idea how to type a zero into the phone.

To make matters worse, the one with the dreads turned to her friends and uttered the sentence that, still, to this day, makes my blood boil.

“Doesn’t he look like your niece?”