By Any Other Name

I was poking my fettuccine with a fork at the Cheesecake Factory on a cold November night while he explained the process for remembering all of his previous boyfriends. “Take the first initial of your last name, for instance mine is ‘B’ and give each of them a nickname that begins with that letter.” I don’t remember how the subject came up, but enumerating our previous love interests on a first date seemed dangerous.

“For example, ‘The Boozer,’” he said. “He was my first.”

I had less of a list of boyfriends and more of a handful of encounters; two or three fingers would have sufficed, really. I had been out of the closet for about six months and during that time I went out on a few dates. One guy even kept in touch with me, if you could accept a single misspelled text message as communication: “sorry, ben busy.” Buy a fucking vowel.

“Then there was the Biscotti,” he said. “He was sweet and I think he truly loved me.”

It wasn’t difficult to see why any person might fall in love with him. With his looks, all he had to do was smile and hearts melted. The middle aged woman at the table next to us was pretending to point out an item on the menu to her friend, but she was in fact, making a sloppy gesture towards my date. I could see her mouthing the phrase, as if she was talking to a deaf person, “Not that one, The-Good-Looking-One. Over There.” Bitch.

“The Bald eagle was next,” he laughed. “He lived in Lexington and put hair product on the twenty or so hairs on his head.”

As he continued to describe the bald eagle, I began to worry that we dated the same guy and then he mentioned him by his actual name. Correction, he had dated the bald eagle. I only had physical relations with him and then he flew out of the door. The guy who spent an hour applying gel to the sparse hairs on his head could not apply that same amount of attention on me. As he continued to describe all of the previous men in his life, I envisioned introducing him to my family and friends. I imagined them looking confused as they glanced over my shoulder while I mouthed the words, “No, The Good Looking One. Right Here.”

“Box-boy sold cardboard boxes for a living and collected washing machines as a hobby.”

My heart sunk. My two or three encounters were his full-fledged relationships. I was the crazy in their universe and they were the throw-aways in his. As he continued to go down his list, I began to wonder how I might be remembered, The Blunder, The Bozo, The Bitch.

When he walked me to my car, I thought about asking him what my nickname would be, but it was time to manage the crazy. Maybe I would come up with a way to remember him. If I were to choose the first initial of my last name, “D,” there would be plenty of options, Dazzling, Dreamy. Dammit, I was already hooked.  This was Dangerous.

I asked Paul once when he decided to stop collecting nick names and settled on me. Maybe it was because he finally found someone who could only be described with glowing B words: Beautiful, Beguiling, Bewitching.

“Was it because you finally found someone whose name begins with B?” I asked.

“Who are you?” he smiled.

Douchebag.