Call Me Loyd.(nicknames)(Essay)

My nickname when I was in junior high and high school, in Kansas City, was Loyd, my father's name. It was given to me inadvertently, in 1967, by my seventh-grade math teacher, who had taught my father thirty years earlier and sometimes forgot which of us he was calling on. In my father's day, the math teacher's nickname had been Tarz, short for Tarzan, because he was built like Johnny Weissmuller; by the time I had him, his nickname was Wheezer. He looked like Lyndon Johnson, with tremendous gravity-stretched jowls and earlobes. Age must have lengthened his scrotum, too, because he was always careful to lift his testicles out of the way before sitting in a chair or leaning back against the front of his desk. Sometimes, my friends and I, as we took our seats for math, would pretend to lift our testicles out of the way, too.

Wheezer supervised one of my study halls. One day, an eighth grader put a running tape recorder inside a locker in the back of the room, and every five or ten minutes the tape would scream, "WHEEEEEEE-ZER!" There would be pandemonium; then, gradually, everyone would settle down; then it would happen again. Wheezer never identified the responsible jerk--his term for any troublemaker. One day, before homeroom, he wrote the heading "First Class Jerk" on the blackboard behind his desk, along with a list of defining traits, and Ralph Lewis raised his hand and asked, "Sir, is a first-class jerk a jerk in the first-period class?" Wheezer glared at him for a long time, then said, "Guy, you're a jerk." He kept a jar of candy on his desk, and before math tests he would let each of us take a piece, calling it brain food.

My science teacher that year we called either Wayne (his real first name), Fleet (his real middle name), or Chutes (short for Parachute Pants). He wore baggy gray flannel trousers and pulled them up so high that they seemed to belong to a different clothing category: his bow tie and his belt buckle almost touched. He made us memorize the names of all the bones, muscles, and major nerves, assignments that infuriated me because they seemed lazy and pointless. One day when we were studying the muscles, Chutes held up one hand, raised his index finger and slowly moved it back and forth, like a low-speed metronome, and said, "Kinesiology: kineese-, movement; -eeology, the study of." We cracked each other up with that line for days, and, even now, almost forty years later, I sometimes repeat it to myself. When we were in high school, a few of us drove to a pharmacy we'd heard about, in a suburb where none of us lived, so that we could use someone's older brother's driver's license to try to buy a bottle in the liquor department at the back of the store, but we found Chutes working the cash register and had to pretend that we'd come for something else--maybe cigarettes, which, in those days, grownups didn't care about very much. Chutes had demonstrated the dangers of tobacco in science class by lighting one of his own cigarettes and blowing the smoke through a Kleenex, making the paper turn brownish, but his concern had to do mainly with the possible effect on our "wind," important to him because he coached track.

Chutes did most of his own smoking in his office in the gym, or in the faculty lounge, which was sometimes so clouded that you could barely see all the way from the door to the coffeemaker; teachers who smoked pipes smoked right in class. My seventh-grade English teacher, whose nickname was Ashcan, was famous for having once set his tweed jacket on fire by absent-mindedly stuffing a lit pipe on top of a book of matches in his pocket; he was also famous for having once become trapped, flat on his back, between his desk and the rear wall of the classroom, after tipping too far in his chair. My eighth-grade French teacher--who had the same first and last names as a celebrated poetess--would occasionally smoke a cigarette while standing in the doorway of her office, which adjoined her classroom. She would hold the cigarette behind the door, where we couldn't see it, and duck her head around to take puffs. She told us that the streets of Paris were superior to the streets of Kansas City because they had names instead of numbers, although, apparently, she had no quarrel with the numbering of arrondissements. One day, when she had stepped out of the classroom for a moment, several of us lifted her desk, intending to turn it a hundred and eighty degrees, and accidentally tipped it over--a stunt that made her cry and got us in trouble with the principal, whose nickname was J.J. and whom we imitated, constantly, by grabbing one another on the shoulder with a Vulcan nerve pinch and barking "Wanna borrow two-fifty?" (the price of a haircut).

Giving teachers nicknames is a way of weakening their terrible authority, probably. Assigning a nickname is usually flattering to the recipient, however, even if the nickname itself isn't, and if I were a teacher I'd rather be a Wheezer or a Chutes than one of the faceless, unremembered ones known only by their real names. My friends and I had teachers and coaches we called Flipper (real last name, Flappan), Stublet (not very tall), Stank (hygiene problems), Bat (short for Wombat; real name, Wambold), Dawg (short for Schoondog; real name, Schoonover), Papa Joe (longtime gym teacher), Easy Ed (beloved basketball coach), Myhoo (real last name, Mayhew), Woodchuck (real first name, Charles). There was a Latin teacher whose real last name was Wucker, an unfairly easy target; we called him Ed (his first name), Tony (what his wife called him), or Wuck. My American-history teacher we called Gil, his real first name, but I knew from reading old yearbooks that he had once been called the Fox. (A student of his in the mid-sixties, who had been famous for his Fox impressions, and whose high-school nickname had been Josh, later returned as a teacher in the same department and was known to his own students as Squirmer.) Gil, by the time he taught me, had poor eyesight and almost no peripheral vision and was therefore easy to play tricks on. There were students in the class named Yeckel and Eager, and Gil, who couldn't see very far beyond the front of his desk, often amalgamated them into a single student, whom he called Yeager, leaving the two of them to decide which should answer any question directed to the merged entity. My chemistry teacher we called Fred, his real first name. I once met him unexpectedly coming around a corner and, without thinking, said, "Hi, Fred," surprising both of us. He used colored chalk in class, and, in the course of a typical day, would gradually become coated with pastel dust: hands, pants, jacket, nose, forehead, hair. There was a math teacher named Mr. Meyers, whom we called Mr. Mars after the way he drawled his own last name. Mr. Mars once gave me a detention for smoking a cigarette in the bathroom while I was serving a detention for a different offense. On another occasion, he suggested that it would be funny if the student newspaper referred to Neil Newhouse, an upperclassman, as Nail Oldbarn.

The person with perhaps the best nickname of anybody I've ever known was an early childhood friend of mine, Bumpy Macomber. The Macombers lived diagonally across the street from us, in a house that supposedly appeared briefly in a movie concerning juvenile delinquents. (A teen-ager comes running out of the Macombers' front door and jumps into a car belonging to another teen-ager, and they drive away.) Bumpy's real name was William. His father, also William, had been called Bumpy, too, during some earlier part of his life, perhaps when he was in the Artillery, but had handed the nickname down to his son, like a treasured pocket watch, and was now just Bill. Bumpy's parents were generally known to be the best-looking grownups in the neighborhood, and probably for several miles. They, unlike my parents, slept in a double bed, which I often saw unmade, and their house was the only one I knew where you could find a copy of Playboy just lying on a coffee table. I was aware, because Bumpy had told me, that his father considered my father to be somewhat boring, and there was evidence to support his opinion: my parents never did a thing that the Macombers did pretty often, which was to dress their kids in pajamas, load them into the back of their station wagon, and take them to a drive-in movie. I spent the night at the Macombers' house once, the summer after first grade, and Bumpy's parents asked me if I was sure it would be all right with my parents if I stayed up with everyone else to watch "The Tonight Show." I was with Bumpy the afternoon he determined, by repeatedly banging it against his family's white upright piano, that the black plastic shell of a Magic 8-Ball concealed a breakable jarlike glass vessel filled with a dark fluid closely resembling ink. Bumpy had two younger sisters, the younger of whom, Lizzie, called my mother Mizzenowen.

Until my family moved a half mile away, in the fall of second grade, Bumpy was usually either my best or my second-best friend. We started a boys' club whose only rule was that you had to swear you would never get married, and we had a fight with a neighborhood girl, who had claimed that, because she was one year younger than I was and two years younger than Bumpy, we would die before she did. Recently, I saw an old black-and-white photograph of Bumpy, his sisters, me, my sister, and Freddy Wells--my next-door neighbor and backup best friend, whose father was a pilot for T.W.A.--and suddenly realized that we grew up not just a certain number of years ago but in the lost, archeological past, when people didn't look or dress anything like the way they do now. In the photograph, Bumpy, Freddy, and I are wearing improvised cowboy outfits that no modern boy would be seen in, and all six of us look like children from history, from a time when brand consciousness was limited to a preference for either Keds or PF Flyers.