Ping-pong Guy lives across the street 3 doors down. When he first moved in about 8 years ago, he and his buddies were always playing ping-pong in the garage. He dated and is now married to yep, you got it…Ping-Pong Girl whose name I just found out is Sherry and whose dog is Lucas. They really keep to themselves, and I’ve only spokend to them a handful of times in all these years.
I feel bad about Spud He’s got a nice face, but right in the middle it looks like someone just took a potato and threw it at him - his nose.
I remember back in my old neighborhood, there was a guy who looked just like Bob Ross (Who, if you don’t know his name, he’s Paint the Little Happy Trees Guy) who drove a bright purple 1995-ish Ford Taurus. The license plate said HAZE. His nickname? Purple Haze, of course.
I always see Drunk Guy riding the train home at 7:30 AM when I’m going home from work. The actual person varies, but there seems to be a drunk guy on the train at all times.
I suspect I’m known as The Dude since I tend to look like him when I’m out in public. My neighbors probably think I’m The Recluse since I rarely venture outside.
Years ago, my brother worked in an office that looked out on Hollywood Blvd, at street level. The Blvd. has a slight grade along that section, and every day at the same time, tall, thin black guy dressed in black, with a black hat and a cape, would cruise down the street on his skateboard with one arm extended upward at a 45 degree angle in front of him clenched in a fist. We called him Zorro.
In Los Feliz, there was a lady we would see walking all over the place who always wore mom jeans and a white buttoned shirt, tucked in. We called her The Walking Lady. Sometimes we would see her several times a day, always walking.
There is another lady in the Los Feliz/Hollywood area, who is still around. Saw her a couple of weeks ago. She always dresses in purple. Purple hat, purple shoes, purple stockings, purple dress. The Purple Lady. One time we saw her in her car. It was green. 
She is frequently in the CopyMat at Sunset and Wilcox, copying up a storm. Probably copies of her purple manifesto.
There is another guy in Hollywood that has a hat that has a bunch of branches sticking out of it. He is Bushman.
There is another lady, who goes all over the Hollywood/Los Feliz area dropping little piles of pigeon food, even in areas where there are no pigeons. The Pigeon Lady.
There used to be a man who would go into the Lucky (now Albertsons) in Los Feliz, wearing a plastic shopping back over his head. He would freak out and get angry when the checker would touch his items. Dude, don’t you think somebody touched your items when they PUT THEM ON THE SHELF?!? They eventually banned him from the store, which was fine as he was kind of scary and freaked out my girlfriend. Of course, he was Baghead.
Yeah, I know, not very creative names, but that’s what we call them.
I guess it is kind of comforting to know that we don’t have a monopoly on the mental cases in Hollywood, although we probably have a higher concentration than anywhere else in the world.
Is there a name for the kind of illness that a lot of the subjects of this thread suffer from?
Alas, the actual Thai pronunciation of that is “Chit-ra-lada.” It’s the name of the royal palace. (Although Thai has both the J and hard-Ch sounds, Ch is frequently transliterated as a J, for reasons unknown.)
Down at my gym, in amongst all the people working up a sweat on treadmills, crosstrainers etc, there is a woman who is always doing yoga. She is there pretty much every night, and is not too bad at it either. In my head, she is known as ‘Bendy Wendy’
At a coffee shop where I find myself hanging out from time to time:
Hong Kong Fooey. A white guy whose facial hair resembles a 1950s-era stereotypical image of a wise Chinese man. For some reason, he has a large clump of hair tied up in a ball on top of his head.
The Guru. With unkempt long hair and a beard, this guy is a dead ringer for Richard Stallman, right down to the body odor. Always reading a book, or in a deep philosophical discussion with a few other people. If he’s got a computer at home, it’s probably running some Linux distro.
The Amazon Pen Goddess. Probably a trophy wife in the recent past. Early 40s, 5’ 10", 125 pounds, long blond hair, and a bust that leaves one wondering whether it’s real or fake. Usually wearing high heeled boots and an outfit that probably set her back a couple thousand bucks at one of the nearby foo-foo boutiques. She always manages to get one of the rare, prized tables with a nearby plug, where she’ll set up a lamp and doodle for hours.
Little Red Haired Girl. Short, somewhat curvy, curly red-haired woman who always wears tight sweaters. She’s so adorable, you just want to hug her.
The Cat Women. Not to be confused with cat hoarders, these are the women what work in a nearby salon, all of which are gorgeous, and all of which wear black catsuit-like outfits. A blond woman who drops in for coffee every hour from the salon is Queen of the Cat Women.
The Compass Fuckers. Any one of the many, many yoga moms who are more-or-less indistinguishable; late 20s to early 30s, 5’ 5" to 5’ 6", slender, blond hair pulled through a baseball cap, and buttcrack-hugging black yoga pants. I call them Compass Fuckersrs because they all wear black North Face Denali jackets - so much North Face, a compass won’t work here.
That’s definitely not me (though my real name is Wendy)!
We had The Mad Flosser. When we first moved to Kansas City, we worked close enough to each other that sharing a car was no biggie, but it required precision timing to get us both to work on time. This always put us right behind the guy who would floss very dramatically at every stoplight.
There’s a guy at the gaming store I go to that I call That Guy, cause he looks like That Guy from beer and car commercials (i.e. five o clock shadow and a perpetually dazed look.)
A few more:
The Stock Photo: tall, trim, square-jawed man in his late 20s or early 30s, always wearing an expensive suit, and always typing away furiously at his Blackberry. He looks like he stepped out of some corporate stock photo.
The Odd Couple: blond Abercombie-looking male college student who is always with a female college student … who wears an abaya. When I see them, I can’t help but think “You know, this is a great country.”
The Clone Couples: any number of gay male couples where both partners are almost completely identical in their overall appearance; build, hairstyle, dress, facial structure and so on. “How do you now they’re gay?” The trademark inflection.
‘Lambchop’ = She had curly hair, no chin, and the brains of a sock-puppet
I give people nicknames all the time. Over the years many of them have actually stuck and became a nickname they used themselves. However, there is one that I’m absolutely going to be be sent to hell for. There is a guy I used to frequently see around the neighborhood where my office is. Nice guy, I believe he worked at one of the nearby restaurant/delis. One of his arms is short, about half the size it should be. What did I start referring to him as when talking with my boss (who is just as sick and twisted as I am?) Nemo.
Flip Flop was a constantly drunken woman who would sit and wait for the bus outside the apartment block where my grandparents used to live. She always wore, you guessed it, flip flops. We’ve always called those shoes “thongs”, so the name came from the noise she made as she flip flopped up to the bus stop every day. She used to carry one of those little flasks in her handbag.
My grandfather and I would sit on the balcony and watch her. He had seen her so many times that he knew exactly what she would do before she did it - that’s how tight her routine was. “She’ll start blowing her nose now, you watch”, he’d say. And of course, Flip Flop would then pull out a hankie and proceed to blow her nose for ten minutes. Good old Flip Flop, I often wonder what happened to her.
Another person we’ve met while walking the neighborhood:
Hello Ladies: We don’t know this guy’s name, but he says this to us every time we walk past his house.
Dragon Woman, The Floating Head, and Pale-Face Adios are all nicknames I’ve given to my stepmother. She is a stranger to me, so it counts.
Dragon Woman is pretty self-explanatory, and devised during my younger, more literal years.
The Floating Head transpired because everytime I see a photo of her she’s trying desperately to conceal her bus-sized body behind at least 4 people, and thus always ends up The Floating Head.
Pale-Face Adios (the name of a once-great racehorse) came about not because she’s a horse (or that she was once great) - but because her face is drained of colour and I wish she’d go away.
Other strangers of the category where you don’t know their real name, include Plague Master Nasty (yeah, really you don’t wanna know) and Tutankhamun - which covers the sideshow of both he who honks his horn for the 5.30am pickup and his mate who yells “COMIN’!”
Im not very creative. Mostly I just think, “Dumbass”
Thanks for reviving this. The WHAT man. He goes to the local gas station, and every few seconds yells What!?
Yep.
Quiet Homeless Guy: He hangs out by the local post office and never asks anyone for a thing, but people walk by and hand him stuff.
Classified Dragon lady: She is classified staff at my campus and is the terror of the faculty–but mainly because some of them don’t fill out their paperwork correctly, get it in on time, etc. so perhaps the name is not deserved.
God’s Gift to Women - or at least he thought so. I found out the women were laughing behind his back because he always seemed to wear white boxer shorts with big red splotches (hearts?) under his thin white pants. Apparently he never noticed, but the women did. Or maybe he did know and did it on purpose?
There was a guard at a checkpoint in Baghdad who was a soldier from Georgia (think Stalin, not Jimmy Carter). We encountered him daily.
He was the most expressionless human being I have ever seen. You’ve heard of poker faces? This guy had a poker body.
He would hold his hand up in a halting gesture as you drove up, and then rotate it about a millimeter. This constituted his waving you through. He never seemed to understand our confusion.
We dubbed him Smiley.