‘Call Me Nemo’: The unsettling story of Mark David Chapman’s childhood nickname
In most cases, it’s unfair to entirely judge someone based on their most despicable act as a human being. Then you get someone like John Lennon‘s murderer, Mark David Chapman, and suddenly, you reassess.
To be clear, this isn’t simply because the act of murdering Lennon is unforgivable. However, even in the unlikely scenario that someone were a saint their entire life, apart from that one moment that they murdered the most famous and beloved musician in the world, that would still be enough to effectively override the rest of the good they did in their lifetime. Chapman was anything but a saint, and everything he did in his life pointed towards him doing something like this.
The man was a delusional failure who wasn’t just completely obsessed with the idea of being famous, but believed it was owed to him for his sheer brilliance. Chapman believed he was built different and deserved to be recognised all over the world. Then, when he couldn’t do that in any constructive way, he just thought, “Fuck it, I’ll kill someone the world loves.”
Infamously, it didn’t have to be Lennon either, just someone at his level of fame. Ronald Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor and even Paul McCartney were also considered as possible victims. The truly disturbing part of the history of Chapman, however, can be found in the book he was reading when he was picked up at the scene of one of the most famous crimes of the 20th century, which he called “his testimony”.
That book, which he has been obsessed with his entire life, is JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
What was the nickname of Mark Chapman?
One of the key themes of The Catcher in the Rye is childhood innocence and the feeling of knowing you’ve lost yours a lot sooner than anyone should.
The title comes from the main character, Holden Caulfield, imagining himself as the protector of a group of children playing on a cliffside. He would hide in the rye with an eye on the kids, and if any of them got too close to the edge, he would swoop in and save them.
This was the character that Chapman found kinship with. Not just because of his hatred of so-called “fakes” and “phonies”, but also because of a love of childhood purity that he would never outright tell the reader about. It seems that this was something Chapman related to Caulfield about because when Chapman was a teenager, he was a camp counsellor for a YMCA in DeKalb County, Georgia. It sounds like a nightmare scenario for any parent, but apparently, Chapman was a model counsellor.
Not just for the parents or the faculty, either. Bafflingly enough, the kids absolutely adored Chapman. We’re not just taking his less-than-trustworthy word for it, either; this is based on multiple accounts from the people who knew him at the camp. He was even once awarded ‘Outstanding Counsellor of the Year’. When he went up to retrieve the accolade at the end of summer ceremony, the kids chanted their nickname for him, taken from the protagonist of Jules Verne’s Moby Dick.
“Ne-mo! Ne-mo! Ne-mo!,” they chanted, celebrating the man who would, nine years later, become one of the world’s most hated people and completely deserve it.