Iknow more about Werner Warner Weenis — yes, that was his name, although I often confuse it with Warner Werner Weenis — than I ever would want to know, wanted at one time to know, or should want to know. Only the convergence of the twain entwined our fates. Had Clare and I taken a different route, walked slightly faster or slower, been held up at a traffic light for longer or not held up for as long, everything would have been different, everything. I would not know his odd name. I would not be living in one room, with little to my own name but a dented colander and a radio I found on top of a garbage can. What a powerful effect for a man so ridiculously called, and whom, when he was alive, I knew for no more than two minutes, if that.
His parents, who are still living, were the kind of people who make you want to close your eyes as hard as you can, grimace, hold your breath, and wish they didn’t exist. The father, professor of philosophy Albert Weenis, was enthralled by Heidegger, Derrida, and Marcuse. The mother was a Latin teacher at a private school in the Bronx. Both Weenises came from wealth, which is what enabled them on a professor’s salary to live in a 10,000-square-foot apartment in the Beresford and indulge whatever harebrained ideological musing that caught their fancy. The Weenis wealth was derived from Professor Weenis’s father’s invention of a useless culinary tool that now lives in the back of a drawer in probably every kitchen in America, and, more substantially, from the inheritance of a textile fortune — rugs and calico. Perhaps it was Mrs. Weenis, Latin teacher, who after her husband insisted upon naming his son after Wernher von Braun, chose Warner as the boy’s middle name, because Werner Warner Weenis suggested veni, vidi, vici. But that is only a supposition.
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