Why We Suck_ A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid - Denis Leary [58]
I've got a friend who's a terrific hockey player-he basically drank his way out of a career on the ice-but clean and sober and in his thirties he's good enough that Cam Neely-who's in the Hockey Hall of Fame-skated a friendly outdoor ice game with him a couple of winters ago and said "that guy's great with the puck." And a guy who gets a hefty mixture of respect, admiration and fear from everyone he plays with. He never even got a nickname-that's how good he was. When guys can't even think of a nickname for you, it means you are pretty much physically and mentally flawless. This guy is from outside Boston and has a thick Massachusetts accent and sometimes the other guys might bust his balls about it, but that's about as far as it went.
Long story short-he recently took a puck to his left eye and temporarily went blind-when I say temporarily I mean he eventually gained his vision back, but for the three or four months during which he couldn't see out of that eye but kept on skating you know what his nickname on the ice was? Lefty. And when we started calling him that he started answering to it. With a smile. He finally had a nickname and one-considering the circumstances-that was also funny. Lefty. Girls wouldn't even think of UTTERING that nickname.
We got a guy named Steve we all call Stavros because he looks like he's Greek-even though his childhood nickname was Zippo because he used to set everything on fire, and we also call him Sniper because he can put the puck behind the goalie like he's a Lee Harvey Oswald and the net is John F. Kennedy sitting in a limousine.
We got three Jeffs and a Geoff-so all four had to become last-name nickname guys but one Jeff's last name was too long and sounded like a Polish guy who ran an Irish bar so we shortened it from McCluskey to Clucker.
When his brother joined up a few months later we boiled it all down to Cluck 1 and Cluck 2. We got a guy named Josh who owns a bike shop but was easily confused with another Josh who was friends with another guy named Mike so now we got Bike Josh and Josh Who Knows Mike.
I play hockey with another guy whose name is Jonny. The first time he played with us, instead of using white hockey tape on his hockey socks, he used postal tape. The kind that comes in a big wide roll that the U.S. Post Office uses to seal up large boxes when they ship them. His nickname that night became Postal. It's what we have called him ever since, on the ice and off. I don't even know the guy's real last name. None of the guys do. He's Postal. When he calls on the phone he says Hey it's Postal. When guys run into him at the mall they say Hey I ran into Postal at the mall. If he snapped and shot sixteen people at work and it was on the news, I'd call up a mutual friend and say Postal just went postal-turn on CNN, they got it live.
If there was a guy on a hockey team whose penis was accidentally sliced off and he continued to play and undress in front of the other guys, his nickname would soon become Dick. Or Ballsack. Or Barbie. And eventually he would answer to that name. Because that's what men do.
I find it hard to imagine women calling a friend who had suffered through breast cancer Titless. Or Nipples. Or Lefty.
When I was growing up-based on the spelling of my name-Denis became Penis which became Penis Man when I went to college. I also got DeeLeerious, D, Learjet, Queerjet, Peen and Pennis. My brother Johnny was called Jumpin' Jack Flash and Kiwi. Which is what everyone still calls him. Kiwi. The reason why involves a long story about him