Nick Name

              My friends, they call me Shorty, which might have something to do with the fact that I stand six foot seven. As a kid growing up in Georgia, they called me Jimmy the Fingers, not because I was constantly stealing anything I could get my hands on—which I was—but because I had a rare growth defect that left me with giant hands on a tiny frame. By the time I hit puberty and the rest of my body finally caught up, my family had moved to Florida, where, being from Georgia, I became known as Peaches McGee. It wasn’t long before I found myself on the outskirts of the Everglades, teasing an alligator, which didn’t take too kindly to my tickling, thus biting off all the toes on my right foot, scaring my parents all the way to Northern Michigan, where all the other kids on the high school swim team called me No Toe Joe. That name didn’t stick though. One day at lunch I won a dare by eating an entire gallon-sized tub of margarine, thus earning the name, Oily Pete. But Oily Pete didn’t last long either. Senior year, after getting caught making out with the Spanish teacher in the janitor’s closet, all the kids started calling me Stud Rodriguez. I became so associated with that moniker, that even the faculty at Richard M. Nixon High thought it was my God-given birth name and had it printed on my diploma. Not long after graduation, I was off to boot camp, where the drill instructor, because I had arrived from banks of Lake Michigan, I presumed, immediately labeled me Lame Shitigan. But before that name stuck, I was shipped off to Vietnam, where I was dishonorably discharged for accidental shooting my Platoon Captain in the groin during a game of backgammon. Well, if the boys back in my hometown didn’t catch wind of that and begin calling me Castration Carl. Now, you can’t stick around a place where you’re best known for removing the most treasured part of your fellow man’s anatomy, so it wasn’t long before I was off to Alaska, where I quickly married the fattest woman in Anchorage in order to stay warm. I must have looked like a toothpick next to her, because it wasn’t long before everybody started calling me Slim. It soon became apparent that my new wife’s large appetite was much larger than my bank account, so after a quick divorce, I was off to find new love in warmer weather. I moved to Texas, where everybody called me Alaska Bob, then to Tennessee, where they called me Tex, and then to Alabama, where they called me the Nashville Kid, and then to New Mexico, where they just called me Swamper. It was there that I met the love of my life, a midget named Mimi, had nine midget children, before moving to Oregon, starting an alpaca farm, and becoming forever known as Shorty. But now, suffering from a severe case of cynicism, with only few days left to live, it’s time to inscribe my tombstone, and since my entire life, nobody ever called me by it, I think I’ll go with my birth name, Nicholas Michael Name, or Nick Name for short.