Sissy just emailed me to say that Dave died. I had to send an email in reply, which read in part, "Which Dave? Dave the Chubby Chaser Who Killed His Mother with an Axe, or Dave Who Fathered Rainbow?" You see, we grew up in a small city--hardly the country, as my Brooklyn-bred friends decry--and while we knew just about everybody, eventually, there was usually more than one Dave, and many many Debbies. Last names would have helped but in the 70's and early 80's, when Sissy and I were fairly young and still had social lives, people seldom used them, and those of us who did were instantly branded snobs. Back then, loser men who were super afraid to commit would introduce their dates as "This is my lady." Ugh. As for fathering Rainbow, a lot of uptight attorneys in town had wanted to be hippies back in the 60's but never had the balls to cut loose and wear a dashiki: many of them became attorneys for the State and made up for their lack of freedom by giving their kids names like Orion, Rainbow, Harvest Fairchild (actually born in a van at the Country Fair) or Buckminster Fuller Quinoa. Let us not forget Freedom, whom I met when she was a two-year-old running around naked in the front yard. For the record her parents were very nice and she grew up to be a delightful human being.
People do ridiculous things and my family delights in the odd, so we created the nicknames--Jerry the Crazy Pervert, Dave the Chubby Chaser--as a way of keeping order. Obviously, you don't want to openly pine after someone who has a moniker that hints of a darker side (Dave Who Axed His Mother, for example) while other names--Mr. Honey--suggest sweetness and purity and a green light for lustful fantasies. I write "fantasies" as I never have actually dated anyone from my home town, really, other than a few abortive attempts at dates which were usually ruined by the ill-timed arrival of someone I knew crying and/or throwing up (once or twice, it was me). The nicknames changed as we knew more about the person--Mr. Honey had a penchant for marrying women who went crazy, so his nickname changed to Ted the Crazy Maker--and all of them reflect the very small-town sort of stunning insight into the worst of human behavior, boiled down to a simple name, that says it all to us. Never work for someone Sissy refers to as "Elizabitch" and for God's sake keep away from Grandma Debbie because at 49 she's a great-grandmother several times over and still fertile to boot.
I miss these nicknames, and the revelation into character that come from having grown up with a fairly limited cast of characters. Here in Beijing, the expatriate community comes and goes. A long-time friend might be here for three years, tops, then one of you goes. I find myself having Thanksgiving dinner with people I met only three months before. Now that my daughter has grown up and established herself in the US I am more rootless than ever, and as glad as I am for the chance to reinvent myself if necessary with a larger cast of characters, I am also aware that my personality is pretty well set. I have no idea what my nickname might be--it's probably Old Bitch from my refusal to cook green beans at yesterday's saturnalia-- and I understand why our rituals have become so important to us, like walking into Quiz Night at the local pub and having some idea that you will see roughly the same faces, even if you don't know the names. We're wanderers, here for a short time, and yet we come from people who tended to stay put and raise gardens and plant trees. Sissy has done precisely that, although she lives in a larger city than our home town. She still has many of the same friends she had 35 years ago but thank God newer ones too: and yet, when we reference the past, it is the nickname that sums up what we knew of other people and sets the tone for conversation. I am sorry to hear of Dave's passing--whatever Dave it was--not only out of compassion for his family and friends, and perhaps for Dave himself--but also I know that he takes with him his memory of me, and this diminishes whatever impact I made.
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People do ridiculous things and my family delights in the odd, so we created the nicknames--Jerry the Crazy Pervert, Dave the Chubby Chaser--as a way of keeping order. Obviously, you don't want to openly pine after someone who has a moniker that hints of a darker side (Dave Who Axed His Mother, for example) while other names--Mr. Honey--suggest sweetness and purity and a green light for lustful fantasies. I write "fantasies" as I never have actually dated anyone from my home town, really, other than a few abortive attempts at dates which were usually ruined by the ill-timed arrival of someone I knew crying and/or throwing up (once or twice, it was me). The nicknames changed as we knew more about the person--Mr. Honey had a penchant for marrying women who went crazy, so his nickname changed to Ted the Crazy Maker--and all of them reflect the very small-town sort of stunning insight into the worst of human behavior, boiled down to a simple name, that says it all to us. Never work for someone Sissy refers to as "Elizabitch" and for God's sake keep away from Grandma Debbie because at 49 she's a great-grandmother several times over and still fertile to boot.
I miss these nicknames, and the revelation into character that come from having grown up with a fairly limited cast of characters. Here in Beijing, the expatriate community comes and goes. A long-time friend might be here for three years, tops, then one of you goes. I find myself having Thanksgiving dinner with people I met only three months before. Now that my daughter has grown up and established herself in the US I am more rootless than ever, and as glad as I am for the chance to reinvent myself if necessary with a larger cast of characters, I am also aware that my personality is pretty well set. I have no idea what my nickname might be--it's probably Old Bitch from my refusal to cook green beans at yesterday's saturnalia-- and I understand why our rituals have become so important to us, like walking into Quiz Night at the local pub and having some idea that you will see roughly the same faces, even if you don't know the names. We're wanderers, here for a short time, and yet we come from people who tended to stay put and raise gardens and plant trees. Sissy has done precisely that, although she lives in a larger city than our home town. She still has many of the same friends she had 35 years ago but thank God newer ones too: and yet, when we reference the past, it is the nickname that sums up what we knew of other people and sets the tone for conversation. I am sorry to hear of Dave's passing--whatever Dave it was--not only out of compassion for his family and friends, and perhaps for Dave himself--but also I know that he takes with him his memory of me, and this diminishes whatever impact I made.
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It was Death Ray Dave, so named for his unerring ability to swoop in and break up marriages. He had a female counterpart, Pissy Missy, and my mother always hoped they'd get together, but alas, they never did. "They deserve each other," she'd sniff whenever she heard one or the other had broken up yet another marriage.
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