A Creep by any Other Name

From WikiName

My name is Laura. I had an ex-boyfriend, Chris, who gave everyone he liked nicknames. So he called me “Rora” at first, obviously just a Scooby-Doo kinda way of saying my name, even though he looked more like Shaggy. I called him “Chris.”

That’s because I haven’t laid a nickname on anyone since the 8th grade, when I oh-so-wittily called a large homely girl by the name of Sue Ann Hauser “Fido Ann Bowser”, and the nickname stuck. Fifteen years later I still feel like a creep for that. I sometimes dream that Sue Ann died cursing me and vowing revenge.

When Chris and I got hot and heavy “Rora” became “Riproar.” I moved in with him and answered to Riproar for several steamy months. I would lazily consider changing my name to Riproar, legally, as we’d lay there in the rosy aftermath, chewing candy cigarettes.

Then, gradually, as pounding passion gave way more to warm and fuzzy, I became “Rippy” to him. Like a Muppet, but still anatomically correct. We were cozy in our little nest, even if we’d decided the cigarettes would give us cavities and gave them up. I couldn’t see his reflection in the mirror when he brushed his teeth, but he still brushed them. And Chris still put the toilet seat back down.

Then I met someone else, someone whose parents had given him a nickname as his birth name, and I moved out of Chris’s place. Once a creep, always a creep, I guess.

Chris called soon after to say, “Rip, I’m moving away to The Big Apple.” I said I was in the middle of dinner and that I’d have to call him back. But Rocky (whom Chris promptly nicknamed “Blotchy”) and I drove Chris to the airport, and gave him the name of a place in New York where he could get good suits wholesale.

I broke up with Blotchy on the way home from the airport because he never used his turn signal and was allergic to everything.

When Chris “The Nickname-Giver” has called from New York, sighing that he is still homesick, I remain Rip to him, and as far as I’m concerned so does our one-time love affair. “Rest In Peace”, that is, dead if not forgotten. I hear Chris is coming back this Halloween for some sort of special surprise reunion. I hope he’s bringing a wife or girlfriend. I won’t be at home, anyway, so he needn’t bother come looking for me.

Author: Riproar, or Laura Terry