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My Name’s Not Nick (Preview - in progress)
People have always called me Josh, which is not unusual when you consider that my given name is Josh, and I go by that name in all of my professional dealings. It’s on my Driver’s License, all my credit cards, my luggage, hell, it’s even my e-mail address! The reason I mention this is that I have always wanted a cool nickname, but I have never gotten one from anyone. I give out nicknames like candy at Halloween, so thanks for coming, Snickers.
I am really not sure why I've never been given a nickname. I really hate it when people call me stupid nicknames like sport, champ, buddy or fella. My name’s not fella! But I wouldn’t mind being called Schlongo the Magnificent, Johnny Wadd or Big Daddy. A few years ago I told this to my wife and our friend Natasha. They started referring to me as T, as in “token teabag” because I was the only guy in the threesome. I really liked that, and I used to get cards addressed that way and it always makes me laugh. The three of us went on a vacation to Seattle and Vancouver and kept a journal of our trip (inspired by my sister, who does cool stuff like that all the time). [Put in scans of book where I am referred to as T.]
It was fun while it lasted, but then we moved back to NYC and the name faded from use. When I was into the X-Files I thought it was so cool how they were called Mulder and Scully and most people didn’t even know their first names. [The show jumped the shark for me when they did the movie. I thought the movie was OK, but it didn’t answer a goddamn thing and it was when I realized that there was no huge back story, it was just all allusions, all sizzle and no steak, jiminy.] When my wife started a new job, after a few months, they started calling her Saitz around the office and she loved it. No one in my entire life has ever referred to me as Saitz, and my wife gets called Saitz with months of getting the name, by strangers at work. I’m still Josh, but that’s cool with me.
Most people try to give their kids whatever they didn’t have as kids, and I am no different. I want my kid to have two parents who love each other, a stable address, healthy food and most of all, I want him to have nicknames by the bushel.
Before he was born, we talked about the baby as a theoretical entity. I am sure some day he will read this and think that we’re either the coolest people in the world or the biggest dicks around. It was always named just “babybug” since my wife is the Julibug. My wife would say things like, “When we have a babybug, we’ll go on vacation to Vermont, right?” and I would agree. Once we found out about the pregnancy, the cluster of cells became Zyggy the Zygote. I would say hello to Zyggy at the gym and sometimes I would kiss it good night.
The first sonogram was kind of weird. It looked like a seahorse resting on the side of a fishbowl, so we would talk about how the seahorse was growing. I read some web sites about sea horses and it made it seem even more abstract. By the time we had the next sonogram, my wife said that it looked like “Skeletor Devil Baby.” There was no He-man to challenge him in any way.
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