The Authentic Life: nick-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.

The first time I heard of a “Coffee name” was when my Irish friend Diarmuid used one while picking up a take-out pizza. When I asked him why he told the cashier his name was David he said no one in America could understand the way he pronounced his real name, so he used a name that people could grasp, a coffee name. “Feckin’ eejits,” he punctuated it. The idea intrigued me. Here was the chance to change my name; to change who I was, if only for a complete stranger.

Bill, that’s my name. It’s simple, compact and entirely common, none of the traits I want to project. People with more exotic names use Bill for their coffee name. It’s been in my family for generations, although technically it’s William. But, my mother shortened it to the more common nick-name. She may have lopped off some of the letters but the number of syllables remained the same; “Bee-uhl” that’s how it’s pronounced in the south. Like something you might hear at a pig-calling contest.

To be completely honest, this was not the first time I thought of changing my name. Many men who come out of the closet jettison their nick-names and trot out their fancy, stylish full names to go with their new fancy, stylish selves. Jeff will become Geoffrey, Stu becomes Stewart and Bob becomes Robert or the spicy, salsa version: R-r-r-r-oberto!

But I wanted something more than William. I wanted a name that projected the real me, you know? When I told my friend Diarmuid this, his suggestion was “How about Precious?”

The Irish have a dark sense of humor.

I was pondering this while standing in line at a popular lunch spot one day. The “sandwich engineer” was asking for a name to go with the order. Here was my chance to come up with a new name and try it out. I mentally flipped through a rolodex of names when the young attractive man behind the counter asked me “Can I have your number?” Flustered, I looked at Diarmuid and then turned back to the young man. “I mean name, can I have your name?,” he corrected himself, equally flustered. “It’s David,” I stammered. “Feckin’ eejit,” my friend muttered.

I began to think that maybe people became their names and not the other way around. Maybe Jeff was always Geoffrey and Stu was always Stewart, just waiting for the right time in their life to percolate into their real names. But William seemed too formal and aloof and if I was going to choose a completely foreign name I might as well change my sex, which was my mother’s initial fear when I first told her I was gay.

And then I met Paul; dependable, handsome Paul. Two months into our relationship he left for a business trip that interrupted our affair. “I miss my Willy,” he said to me on the phone. Willy. I knew then that this was the name I’d hear for the rest of my life. That’s when it hit me, the key to finding my name was not changing it for a stranger, but for someone I loved.