I have names for all the regulars I see at the gym, e.g.:
Fat Old Letch The Big Russian (don’t know if he is, but he looks like he strangles bears on his off-nights). Lara Croft (Safari shorts? Really?) Hot spinning girl Pheobe (Always on the treadmill, runs with limbs flying in all directions) Miss Anorexia (Very unkind, but accurate) Sarah Connor (Have you seen this boy?) Pineapple-head (reference to Jason Lee (UK football fans of a certain age will know!)) Even hotter swimming teacher Bernice (…bobs her hair) Hashim Amla (astonishing beard, no moustache) Detritus
It passes the time. I wonder if anyone has a name for me…
There’s a frequent walker in our neighborhood who, instead of waving, invariably gives anyone passing him a thumbs-up gesture. He is known by my wife and me as Thumbs-up Guy.
OK, so it’s not mean, nasty, nor particularly creative. Sue me.
I named a few people I met on the bus. One was The Storyteller, who claimed to have been executed in the state of Oklahoma but was then pardoned because the execution attempts just made him high. He also claimed to have led a pack of wolves in Alaska and to have a seeing eye alligator.
Another was Crazy Charlie, who threatened the lives of republican politicians while on the bus. Periodically he’d disappear. I wonder why.
Of course I’ve given my birds loving nicknames like Adolf Hitler and Ulrike Meinhof.
My stepson plays on a soccer team here and when we went to see games, we would talk about things that happened afterward but I didn’t know anyones name, so we made nicknames for all of them, trying for politically incorrectness and imagining the team in a Bad News Bears type movie. So- among the lineup:
Butterball- a chubby guy
Kebab- the lone Middle-Eastern guy
Ping and Pong- the two Asian guys, interchangeable.
Whitey- an incredibly pale guy. Almost transparent.
So we’re sitting in this pizza place near my mom’s house in NE Pennsylvania this weekend, when this guy wearing a cowboy hat steps out of Ford. I’m the only one with a view of the parking lot.
“Oh, Pecos Bill is here,” I announce to my family. They scan the crowd and know immediately who I mean.