Some from life. . .
Some homeless people (c’mon, you name your homeless). . .
**
Moon boots
Grody Jody
The Painted Horse
Sad Sack
**
To distinguish (and follow up on emilyforce). . .
**
Corner Dave
Carpenter Dave
Jewish Dave**
College kids. . .
**
Shorts
Sleeves
Space Punk
Clay Face
Q-Tip
Belushi
**
Current locals. . .
**Walking Man
Low Butt Jogger
Movie Store Guy ** aka, Red.
I love that one!
Let’s see… in our neighborhood, we have:
The Cultists - a weird insular family that lives across the street, and usually has ten or more cars full of family members over all weekend.
Charlotte’s Daddy - the rarely-seen guy who lives next door whose name we can never remember, but his dog is named Charlotte.
The Frats - the other next-door neighbors. Again we know their dog’s name (Dudley) but not theirs.
Dreadlocks - the guy who lives around the corner who has a fabulous set of long locks.
The Bicycle Troll - a homeless guy who lives under an overpass near our house, known for riding a bicycle piled with his worldly goods. (He’s a troll because he lives under the bridge, not because he’s ugly or scary.)
Good to know that my co-workers and I aren’t the only ones who do this. I work in a bar, and it’s the same deal - we know most everyone’s names. But when someone new starts coming in, or one of us knows the person’s name, it’s difficult to try to explain to someone who you’re talking about. So we say, “PBR* in a can guy” or “That older couple, ya know, one drinks Highlife, the other drinks Coors Light.”
*Pabst Blue Ribbon, for the beer-abbreviation illiterate.
High Pockets - He wears his pants hitched up so far it looks like his pockets are under his arm pits.
Don’t Do That - Walks around saying “don’t do that!” to himself.
Flower Guy - Lives in the nursing home next to where I work. He cuts across our parking lot every day going to the hospital on the other side of where I work. He always carries flowers to and from the hospital.
AAAAAAHHHHHH!!! - Kid who lives behind me. He has a trampoline and every time he jumps on it he screams AAAAAAHHHHHH!!! the whole time he jumps.
And one from the old days.
Ugly Large Pregnant White Guy - I once shared a house with three friends. Two doors down, there was, at least we thought, this really ugly large pregnant lady who went out to get her mail everyday wearing a night shirt and fuzzy mules. Then we learned the ugly pregnant lady was a man. The name just stuck.
My husband and I call the family on the corner “The Happy Chinese Family” because once we were driving by and the whole family was in the driveway helping dad barbeque. They all had enormous smiles on their faces and it looked like a Chinese commercial for Weber grills.
My friend at work and I have an assortment of nicknames for our co-workers:
The Egg Man or Humpty Dumpty: An employee in another office in my building who has a bizarre egg-shaped body and long thin legs. But that’s not the end of it. One morning at the breakfast buffet in our cafe, one of my co-workers caught him piling scrambled eggs on his plate like some just told him they would cure cancer.
Homeless Woman (or HW):Woman in customer service who dresses like she pulled her clothes out of a sewer
Stinky Bathroom Woman: One to avoid because there’s always various horrible noises, smells, splashes whenever she’s in the bathroom. ALWAYS.
The Mad Flusher: We don’t know who this person it, but she disguises her toilet noises with a series of endless flushes until she knows no one is in the bathroom with her.
Lumbergh: The president of our company. Bears a striking resemblance in many ways to Bill Lumbergh from Office Space.
Frankenstein: A guy in the sales department who clomps around like Frankenstein and talks very low.
Spongebob or The Cougar: A female VP who looks like a blonde Spongebob Squarepants. Think short little legs on a weird square body and a big mass of bleach blonde hair on top of it. She’s fiftyish years old and wears clothes that belong on a teeny tiny 16-year old, flirts shamelessly with all the hot young men and truly believes she’s the company hottie.
Poop thief: We don’t know who this person is, either, but she/he stole the fake poop off my friend’s desk.
Ebola Susanna: A co-worker who is forever bringing in various germs, flus, colds, and viruses and will never take a sick day.
Stinky: A coworker who always reeks of cigarette smoke and claims he only smokes a few a day.
Tony Danza: A manager who bears a striking resemblance to you know who.
Smoking Hot guy: An employee in an adjacent office who’s, you know, smoking hot.
You reminded me of another bad habit we have at the bar. There are a lot of Bobs that come in. There’s **Laughing Bob ** (an old war Vet who’s usually very quiet, but if you get him laughing, you can here him 5 miles away), **Big Bob ** (self-explanatory), **Midget/Stinky Bob ** (very short, disabled, and smelly - lives off of his Social Security and Disability checks), **Bob’s Bob ** (Midget Bob’s brother-in-law), **Gay Bob ** (another self-explanatory one), and BoBox (pronounced “bo box” - no idea why).
It must be funny, because I keep giggling about it.
On my way to work, I see:
Linda Smith: Well, I doubt that’s her real name, but she looks just like a lady I work with named Linda Smith.
Haunted Mansion Guy: an elderly hunchbacked black man with a walking stick who is always walking in the tall weeds alongside this little road…it reminds me of the tableau in the Disney ride where there’s the cemetery keeper holding up his lantern and he has his bony dog with him. I don’t know why, it just does.
Dancing Kid: A kid at a bus stop by himself, boogying around with headphones on.
This is a great thread! I’m really enjoying picturing all the interesting people in your neighborhoods.
What’s a monterey?
Frog Lady - woman who used to come into McDonalds when I worked there aeons ago. She was maybe 4’ tall, about 400lbs, inch-thick glasses, had lots of facial hair and warts and was probably the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen. I’m sure she had some sort of genetic problem but I don’t know what it was. She would order massive amounts of food and eat it all in one sitting. Everyone at the McDonalds referred to her as the Frog Lady and everyone knew who you were talking about if you said it.
:eek: That wasn’t Frog Lady! You were seeing Professor Umbridge incognito as a muggle!
My wife reminded me of Bendy Girl, who lives a couple of doors down. This is a young girl, maybe 12 or 13. When we’re driving down the street, we’ll see her out in her front yard, bent all the way over, ripping out grass, or picking up piles of leaves, and throwing them away, and repeating it. This would not be unusual if we only saw her do it once, but she does it all the time. Other girls play with kids or watch TV. This one stands in her yard, bent over, ripping out the grass. She also has a Bendy Mom, whom we have not seen doing the same thing, but the name stuck.
I remember a homeless guy who would hang out in the concourse of the World Trade Center whom I named “Please Sir Please Ma’am” because he would chant “Please sir, please ma’am, help me get something to eat” over and over again. Sometimes some wise guy would give him something to eat, but, as my sister observed, you can’t buy a vial of crack with a turkey sandwich so he’d continue his chant.
At one time I had to give various friends and work colleagues the folowing titles to keep them sorted out.
Big Dave, Viking Dave, El Davo, Sad Dave, Boring Dave, Small Dave, Bike Dave, Beardy-Dave. There were also three Daves who are/were identified by their surnames.
Oh, and Handjob Dave, who broke his arm punching a door.
Most of these Daves would answer to those titles. Including the last, who was really proud of his 
And then there was
LBSOP (Long Blonde Streak Of…) really tall, thin guy who made a noteable first impression, who made a significant journey to our local monthly club meetings and whose name we eventually learned was… Dave.
I think there’s some sort of Dave epidemic.
Daves aside, The job I was doing was security and CCTV work on some local low-rent apartment blocks. Names abounded for residents and local authority employees alike. We used to pass the time holding ugly bastard competitions, giving residents and visitors ratings out of 10.
Yes, it was a crap job and we generally hated our “clients.”
Aside from the downright crude, I particularly remember:
Mr.-Staypuft-with-a-bubble-perm
I don’t think the camera liked the poor girl.
The Stepford kids - again, partly due to the way the camera made them appear.
The invisible boy - too short to appear on the door mounted camera.
Miss WHY??? - a pretty, well dressed woman who worked in a bank. we could never work out what had led her to live here.
Genius the Boy Wonder - the youngest member of a large irish family (about 15-16) who would pull the exterior door’s handle repeatedly with some force for hours on end until the door lock was either released by someone leaving, or a member of the security team who was aware that he lived there, As he didn’t often stand in front of the door camera, this latter case didn’t happen often. If left to do this for more than 10 minutes, he would sometimes tap on the office window.
Mr. Twitcher - a local authority employee with a facial tic that just kept going, and going…
Is it a bird, is it a plane? no, it’s… Jumperman - a guy who was an outpatient who was known to have a tendency to threaten suicide or goad people into beating him up. in their wisdom, the council housed him on the 10th floor. After a four-hour “cry for help,” on (or rather, mostly off) his balcony he was relocated to a bungalow.
Craterface - acne had been unkind. The camera emphasised it.
Tramp man - whilst many of the residents could have passed for homeless - indeed one or two did so for spare change - Tramp man was one of the residents who actually had a job of sorts. Not that you could have guessed.
Film star one and Filmstar 2 - two residents whose names were the same as great film actors. Both residents were deemed medalists in the Ugly olympics by the staff. Before I knew his name i temporarily christened Filmstar one Scooby-Doo-Villain-bloke
and then there was Happy The Paperboy.
Happy was/is a bit of a well known figure in town. he stood in the town centre selling the local paper for a while, and then got about five or six routes for the local free paper. One of my freinds christened him Monk-Man because he was about 60, portly, florid, and would have made a good casting choice for any alcoholic mediaeval abbot.
However, I came to call him Happy because the guy was another who would/could never use the door buzzers. he’d just press buttons at random until he got in. this usually took him quite a while, at which point he would come and shout at us for not letting him in.
And yes, -not- letting people in was more crucial than otherwise.
No-Teeth Keith. Guess why. (Ok he had some teeth, but his front ones were missing.) This was the name that everyone called him by, incidentally, and so while I didn’t personally know him (he was a friend of a friend’s aquaintence kind of thing) it probably doesn’t count as a “nickname for a stranger” since his friends came up with it.
There was a guy back in college (late 70’s) that looked like an unshaved caveman who just rolled out of bed, no matter what the time-of-day.
He was lovingly referred to as ‘Ramapithecus’.
I think there’s a poster by that handle but there’s no connection.
Miss Pillsbury was a blind date I had one time. So named because she had the personality of a pound of flour.
Bimbette used to be a neighbor a long time ago. Actually very nice, but she was a tad sleazy in the appearence department.
Princess is a current neighbor. She’s a Black American Princess, and her car has a plate on the front that says ‘Princess Cutt’, hence the nick.
Chimp Lady was a former coworker whose face resembled that of a chimpanzee.
Hurricane Amber is VunderKind’s girlfriend. She’s always going at least 80 miles an hour.
MonkeyMan was a lane attendant where VunderKind used to bowl in a kid’s league. His arms were long like an orangutan’s…
To me, my BiL is Reverand George. He’s a mail order minister, and his answering machine message had him out auditioning women for the choir. The rest of the family calls him Butch, but I’ve been uncomfortable calling him that.
Most of ours are from the gym…
Another Dorothy - She’s real cute and has a haircut like Dorothy Hamill circa 1976.
Red Dragon - Tall, tall red headed woman that always wears Molly Hatchet shirts. You just know that somewhere in her house is a dragon incense burner.
Carrot - So named because she has an awesome body and when she gets on the track, it’s like hanging a carrot in front of a mule. Guys that haven’t run in years will get on the track and follow her.
Irene the Plasticene - She’s had so much plastic surgery that she makes Michael Jackson look natural.
We have the usual assortment of odd-appearing random people in our neighborhood, and the WryGuy and I have nicknames for them.
There’s the Bike Guy, also known as Gallagher to my husband and John Sebastian to me - little skinny guy with longish hair and a moustache and one of those flat 70s style hats like the comedian Gallagher wears. He’s always on a bike, and has the chain-side pants leg neatly clipped. Haven’t ever really spoken to him at length, but he’s relatively friendly, gives a wave every time he sees us outside, and once retrieved my dog’s ball from the street for us.
“Listing John” is a big big burly guy who is often seen walking the teeniest little bug-eyed Chihuahua. We know his name is John, although I can’t remember WHY we know his name, and there’s definitely some kind of minor handicap - he sort of leans to one side when he’s walking. He’s not unfriendly, but he may be very shy, as any attempt to speak with him quickly results in him mumbling and hurriedly walking off.
There’s a guy I privately refer to as “Crooked Head” which is not at all nice of me, but I often see him walking, head always tilted to one side.
Our local grocery store makes a point of hiring mentally and physically challenged people, and most of them are instantly identifiable by their nicknames - “Whistling Jeff” (who may or may not be able to carry on a conversation, but is uncanny at making birdcalls and imitating cartoon voices), “The Stalker” (a guy who for some reason REALLY wants to talk to me, all the time, and who will follow me around the store asking me if I’m staying out of trouble - he does it often enough that other employees have taken to heading him off, to my great relief, when they see him traipsing along after me) and “That Really Big Guy With The Thick Glasses” (he’s slightly more challenged than many of the others, but is nice as can be, if a little loud.)
And there’s a guy I see EVERY TIME I go to the thrift store, which is fairly often. I just call him “Cowboy Boots Guy.” He’s very tall, very thin, and always wears the same kind of outfit - straight-leg jeans, a red jacket, a baseball cap and pointy-toe, high-heeled cowboy boots. I suspect he, like me, is an eBay seller trolling for bargains. I’ve never engaged him in conversation, but I’ve overheard him talking to other people and he seems nice enough. He probably thinks I’m a weirdo, since he always sees ME there, too!
In college, we also had Shovel Head- I’m not sure anymore if it’s because her head was shaped like a shovel or because it looked like she got hit in the face with a shovel (I guess either reason is viable). Complete “butterface” and I always felt sort of bad, because she was quite nice.
**Pass-Around Redhead ** hung out at our bar- she was one of those girls who hangs out with the theater crowd because they’re so… whatever they are. She could never bear to not be on the arm of one of them- even for an instant. I swear to you that it looked like they were passing her around.
Quadruple B was my ex’s nickname before we started dating and again after we stopped. I met her in the bar. She and her roommate spent a month sabotaging my chances with a girl they knew so she could have me, and we dated for the better part of a year, until, well, let’s just say we had personality clashes. Why Quadruple B? Bleach-Blonde Bar Bimbo, that’s why.
A couple more:
Jet Li, a waiter in a Chinese buffet I go to who looks like Jet Li. He’s actually a Filipino, and his real name is Cyrus.
The Seal, a neighbor who is active duty Navy. So named because when we met, he told me he changed his MOS from special ops to fireman when he got married, figuring it was safer for the fledgling family. Has a very cute baby daughter.
Burger Lady works in the Meat Department of the grocery store I go to. I always see her stocking the hamburger in the cooler.
The Quack is the family doctor. Has a mildly abrasive manner.
Dowagiac is a cafeteria worker where I work. I found out she grew up in Dowagiac, Michigan, which is close to the town in Northern Indiana where I grew up.
Granny Coke Bottle was phlebotomist who used to draw my blood. She wasn’t gentle; was near retirement age so she didn’t care; and had some of the thickest glasses I’ve ever seen.