I could have been named Andrew Schlong. Or Andrew Pud, Andrew Pecker, Andrew Ding-a-ling. On the day when names were handed out, mine came with an extra little slap in the face.

It’s pronounced whiner. Which, of course, only makes matters worse. Not only does my last name connote every man’s unmentionable little friend; it also announces to the world that I am a wretched blob given to fits of peevish wankery.

So I cordially invite you to have a laugh at my expense. Go right ahead. No, please — have two. Just don’t think you’re being funny, or at all original. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before.

When I was a kid, my last name was the equivalent of wearing a kick me sign taped to the back of a dork T-shirt. I couldn’t have done any worse if I’d gone to school wearing a dunce cap, moon boots, and a cowbell around my neck.

You might have had the anxiety dream where you appear, perhaps naked, in front of an audience whose entertainment comes solely at your expense. For me that was no dream — the most mortifying moments of my young life came when my dunderheaded principal introduced me as “Weener” to an auditorium full of snickering peers. Twice.

By second grade or so, I’d figured out that a name like Weiner is like some sort of EZ-Diss kit for the half-witted and mean-spirited. No imagination? No problem! Just say the name in the most hideously mocking voice possible, then repeat as necessary.

This pettiness lay dormant for a few happy years, only to make a comeback in the high-school locker room. There, even the meatiest of meatheads was quick to light on the comedic potential of my name.

All of this has been misery, but at least I had company. Over the years I’ve come to know a Harold Dick, as well as an undeserving young man who suffered the world-historical misfortune of being named Dong. Together we form an unlucky fraternity.

Once I'd heard each possible insult, say, 30 times, agony gave way to sweet, sweet apathy. I won’t lie and say I learned to love my last name. But like a stutter or a birthmark, it gradually went from being the subject of paralyzing mortification to something I hardly ever thought about ... until recently.

It turns out that several years ago, a team of research psychologists in California sat down with 27 years of death certificates and determined that people with favorable initials — ACE, VIP, WIN, or, and I’m not making this up, GOD — lived on average four and a half years longer than people with nonsense initials like WFB They were also less prone to have died by accident or suicide. What’s more, people with unlucky initials like APE, DUD, or ILL died nearly three years earlier than the control group.

The researchers theorized that reading or hearing one’s own initials meant little at any given moment, but that over a whole lifetime these little ups or downs could have a cumulative effect on one’s self-esteem. Parents, be warned: don’t give your children the initials DIP or ASS, and, for the love of Gawd, don’t let them grow up to be psychologists.

All this weird science made me wonder whether my name had affected my self-image. So I decided to do a little experimenting of my own. Reaching for the phone book, I looked to see if anyone else in this city shared my name. The other Andrew Weiner turned out to have moved, but a quick Web search yielded some two dozen more, in places as far-flung as Greer, South Carolina, and Minnetonka, Minnesota.

My reasoning — if you want to call it that — was as follows. Given that these men were all perfect strangers who shared my exact name and nothing else, they were the ideal control group.

When it came time to contact my doppelgangers, I enjoyed two of the most surreal conversations I’ve ever had in my life. Both began like this:

“Andrew Weiner?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Andrew Weiner.”

“No — I’m Andrew Weiner.”

And so on. But neither hung up on me. Evidently our common burden was enough to overcome any reservations they might have had about sharing personal information with a complete stranger.

The first Andrew Weiner I reached is a professor at the University of Kentucky. A minute into our conversation he held the phone up so I could hear him announce to his dinner guests: “Guess who it is? It’s Andrew Weiner!!” Guffaws followed.

But as it turned out, Professor Weiner was plainly unhappy with his last name. He told me the predictable stories about schoolyard baiting, but in such a way that you could tell he still hadn’t quite gotten over it. Just when he thought he had outrun his enemy, the Saturday Night Live skit about Doug and Wendy Whiner had prompted further rounds of unprovoked taunting from tactless strangers.

“All in all,” he went on to say, “I wouldn’t have had the name if I had a choice. I would’ve gone for something plain, like Ward or Warren.” Professor Weiner thought long and hard about changing his name, but decided it would be too much of a headache. Whenever things get bad, he takes consolation in a letter he once read in Ann Landers’s column about a girl named Ms. Hooker who suffered a terrible adolescence, only to fall in love with a man named Elmer Tramp.

My other frère du nom is roughly my age, living in New York City. Once I convinced Andrew that I was for real, he told me how much he likes his name. I knew he was serious when he described at some length the unique monogram he makes from the initials A and W.

“My name is memorable,” he explained. “Who would want some nondescript name like Smith? Plus you have good nicknames: I’ve been called Wienerschnitzel, Ween, and the Ween Machine.”

Whether or not Wienerschnitzel is a good nickname, his outlook was refreshing. It got me to thinking: had it all really been as bad as I remembered? But before I could do too much more soul-searching, this total stranger summed it up more pithily than I ever could have: “If your name has a real negative impact on your life, you probably have other problems.”

Andrew Weiner probably has other problems. His e-mail address is weimar99@yahoo.com.

Issue Date: March 22-29, 2001