I always wanted a nickname, a moniker to set me apart and give voice to the familiar fondness that everyone who knows me feels towards my special character—you know, that way I have, that unmistakable something about me.
Oh him, they would say, everyone knows him. But instead of him, they would say Patch or Babe or TJ. And what they would mean is our Patch or our Babe or our TJ.
A nickname, it has always seemed to me, is a way of embracing, by word, another person’s character. Nicknames are bestowed on people who are like mascots to their friends, individuals whom others rely on to be just the way they are.
Only this, I have learned, is not how others see me.
In the fifth grade, I took a silver marker to a new brick-colored bookbag and, with stars and wavy lines, announced the nickname I deserved by merit of the color of my hair: “Rusty.” In quotation marks no less.
The choice was inspired by my admiration for the late Rusty Staub, the ginger-haired player-coach of the New York Mets and a memorable designated hitter in the 1980s. But we don’t get to choose our own nicknames, a fact my older brother taunted me with when he noticed that I had turned my bookbag into a press release for my new handle.
“Rusty, good old Rusty,” he kept saying in a voice that made him sound like a dimwitted cartoon character, though any dimwittedness was being imputed to me. After a few days, I grew tired of his abuse and covered up the “Rusty” on my bookbag with more silvery magic-marker ink, which only led him to tease me more, saying now, “Oh my, where’s Rusty?” “Whatever happened to good old Rusty?”
Many times in my life a nickname would have been useful because, in my generation, Davids are as common as male-pattern baldness. When I joined the staff of The Weekly Standard years ago, I became the fourth David working there. About 20 people in all worked there at the time, and a fifth of them were named David. So the inevitable happened, and I was referred to by my last name.
Something similar happened when I joined an Irish football team. The team was recruiting heavily and, the first night I showed up, four new guys had come, and three of us were named David. I was again referred to by my last name.
I don’t mind being called Skinner, and sometimes I offer it up when more than one David is present, but it reminds me that I simply don’t have the kind of jocular personality that lends itself to being nicknamed. Just the opposite: Most people decide on their own that I should be called David instead of Dave. I should probably be grateful that no one (other than children and grocery clerks) calls me Mister.
Recently, however, I was reminded of the one time when some acquaintances gave me a nickname, which they used only in secret and never to my face.
Having just moved to Washington, I was trying to get out and meet people as often as possible. I began hanging out with a crowd to which I was connected by a single new friend, a fellow journalist. This crew was mostly Southern, as was my friend, and on the whole they struck me as good looking and cool and some of them just a little standoffish.
Being around them made me feel a little more neurotic and clueless than I usually feel, but because I had few other options I ended up going to most of their parties and hanging out with them whenever the group was getting together.
After many months, I learned that some of them referred to me as OT.
“Like overtime?” I asked my journalist friend, who couldn’t quite explain why or how this had happened.
“No,” he said, “OT as in Oliver Twist.”
Was it my shabby clothing? My freckled face, which sometimes gives me the look of a Little Rascal all grown up? Was there something forlorn or poverty-stricken about me?
I was more puzzled than hurt by this nickname. It seemed to be some kind of English department putdown from a couple of not-so-literary people who had never really hidden their opinion that I did not belong, but it amused me that someone had bothered to give a name to whatever it was about me that they enjoyed mocking.
It still amuses me, and when a sock of mine has developed holes or a shirt has lost its shine, my wife will say, “That’s kind of OT. Don’t you think you should throw it out?”
But for some reason, I always struggle to throw such things away.
