Nickname prompt

What’s in the name? Come closer and find out.

Joining the nickname prompt train.

With thanks to AL (Wire Editor Newman) and this story:

and Lu Skerdoo with this story:

who, between them, managed to put me in a line-up of the usual suspects, and, here we are.

There’s something about working in a team that lends itself to acquiring nicknames. I don’t why that is. A sense of personal community, perhaps? The feeling that, by assigning nicknames to one another, we’re somehow more closely bonded?

I had plenty of nicknames, if you could call them that, throughout my school years. They most definitely were NOT driven by any sense of community or belonging and were, instead, all about derision and ostracism. They made me feel pretty bad but they also inspired me to grow one hell of a backbone. Those names were very rarely used directly to my face!

But the nickname I got later is the one that stuck and, as it turns out, the one I kept.

Stretch

This one came first, and no, it’s not the one I kept.

I played polo for a while and, like most events in my life, it came about quite accidentally. I’m tall (ish) at 6’. My pony at the time was relatively small (only 14.1hh) but she was a high country pony and tough as nails and feisty as hell. I wanted to play polo. She did not. The nickname Stretch came about, not because of my height (I was one of the tallest players on the team) but because my pony insisted on side-stepping away from the ball every time I made to swing and therefore I’d have to stretch to reach it. Sometimes, if the pony didn’t also leap upwards in the same instant as leaping sideways, I even managed to hit it! Mostly, I rode interference or did marginally better on borrowed ponies.

Snake in the grass

At age eighteen, I ran away from home and joined the Army. I’d have joined a circus but there didn’t happen to be any in the country at the time.

I loved the Army. It was like the home and brotherhood I’d never had. I loved the logic and discipline and order of it all. And I loved my fellow recruits, although not all of them.

It doesn’t take long, when you throw a bunch of people together and force them to rely on each other, before the nicknames start to come out. They come about because of origin or personality quirks or specific incidents or physical traits or attributes.

There was Ox. He was 6’4” and built, well, like an Ox. His last name had Ox as a component, too but I forget now what it was. There was an Australian who’d arrived at boot camp with dreads. He was Surfie. There was Papa, because he was the one you could always count on to mediate the squabbles or spare you a fag. And Smurf because, well, smurfy. Bear. Jingles. Drum.

And then there was Twig, who always reminded me of Radar from M.A.S.H. and who was kind of our unofficial mascot, and The Yeti, AKA FarmBoy, and no, neither of those names was given to him because we liked him.

The Yeti was one of those big, dumbarse bully types who’s stupid enough to be a bloody nuisance and smart enough not to get caught. And, aside from all the other dumbarse shit he pulled, for some reason, he had it in for Twig. Perhaps because Twig was the unspoken favorite. Or perhaps, and just as likely, because Twig was an easy target, especially if the rest of us weren’t around.

At the time of this tale, I didn’t yet have a nickname, as such. There were a few I went by, but none had stuck. Until this happened.

Barracks were laid out in a series of U’s off the road, and the base of the U, the unit facing the road, was the one that had the laundry, the showers, the gun room, and the coffee! Recruits that were bunked in the barracks perpendicular to the road used the facilities in the central barracks.

On this particular occasion, I was headed to the central barracks for coffee, I mean, swamp juice. Entering the main doors in the middle of the building and turning left, I saw a crowd. The Yeti had Twig by the throat and was dangling him up against a wall and about six or seven of the central-barracks boys were jostling around them trying to convince The Yeti to put him down. It didn’t seem to be going too well because nobody wanted to actually get in and get physical seeing as how we were due a barracks inspection and violence in the barracks is kind of frowned upon.

Now, I’m not a violent person by nature. In fact, one of my nicknames to this point had been Libra, on account of one) I am, in actual fact, a Libra, and two) I tend to be more of a negotiator and peace-maker than an antagonist.

But seeing The Yeti with Twig like that kinda saw me seeing red. We’d already had a week of punishments due to some of The Yeti’s screw-ups (punish one/ punish all) and I’d also had a visit to the medics and I was cranky. I’m not good cranky. I tend to get a bit unpredictable.

I wandered on over to join the crowd around the pair and, by this time, Twig was starting to look decidedly desperate.

“Put him down,” I said, quite calmly I thought, which was impressive on my part because I really needed that coffee and I was really quite edgy.

“Why?” said The Yeti.

“Because, you dumb cunt (I don’t normally use this word but this was some serious shit and Twig was turning blue), L.T.’s due here any minute and we’ve been in enough trouble this week already. And, I said the fuck so, so put him the fuck down.”

He didn’t exactly let Twig go. He let him slide down the wall till his feet were at least touching the ground again and then he turned to me, his fat hand still around Twig’s neck, and looked at me with that dumb-fuck expression only stupid thugs can manage well.

As I said, I’m tall (ish), but I wasn’t at the time built very big and The Yeti was far taller and far, far bigger. Think way too many bacon and egg breakfasts. He was one big rolling tub of lard over natural farm-built muscle. (Hence the secondary nickname FarmBoy, because he was a back-country kid and back-country dumb). In any case, he did kinda make me feel a bit small. Not unlike facing a Yeti. Which I was.

“Or what?” The Yeti asked.

I don’t know to this day exactly what came over me or what exactly happened. All I know is, I was mad, like, really, really, really mad. As I said, we’d had a week of grueling punishments, on top of our usual training. And everybody was just standing there, doing nothing. And Yeti was dumb, and cruel, and ignorant. And I suddenly wasn’t feeling very much like either negotiating or forgiving.

Apparently, I hit him. Out of the blue. I hit him pretty damn hard. Twice. Once just below the sternum, which winded him and doubled him over. That one was a left. And then, as he doubled, I took him out with an undercut to the jaw. That one was a right.

Or so it’s said.

He let Twig go alright. Because he was out for the count and lying flat on his back on the floor.

For a moment, no more than maybe a second that felt like a whole lot more, there was silence. Twig was gasping and coughing and rubbing his throat. Everyone else just stood there.

And then it broke.

“Fuck me,” Surfie said. “Like a fucking Taipan. Outta fucking nowhere! What the fuck?”

“Get outta here,” Bear said. “You weren’t here. This dumb fuck slipped over in the shower and if he tells it any different, he ain’t ever going to walk again and we’ll make sure he knows it. Go!”

I went, and that’s how it was told and The Yeti never did say any different or, if he did, the senior staff chose to ignore him because they were pretty fed up with him, too. Barrack justice. They kind of count on it to keep the idiots in line and that’s why the punish one/ punish all policy in the first place.

And what has this to do with the nickname?

Taipan

As Surfie explained later, a taipan is a deadly Australian snake. In fact, it’s one of the deadliest snakes in the world.

The thing is, a taipan doesn’t look like much although it’s by no means a small snake, reaching lengths upwards of 2 meters. They’re nondescript in color (mainly brown) and have no rattle or hood or other distinguishing features. And they like to keep to themselves, preferring to get out of the way rather than get into a confrontation.

Until you corner them or stand on them or otherwise antagonize them at which point you can kiss your mama goodbye because she’s all over, Rover and you’re dead. The end.

Surfie asserted the encounter between The Yeti and I was just like that; nobody had really paid a great deal of attention to me and I’d really just kept myself to myself which was why The Yeti hadn’t really taken me seriously when I’d challenged him. And then, wham, just like that, The Yeti was down. And nobody (including me, I might add) had seen it coming.

So, from there on out, I was Taipan, which pretty quickly got shortened to Tai, and I’ve been Tai ever since.

I finally, three decades later, officially changed it by deed poll and added my foster Mum’s surname.

But that’s another story altogether.

You asked for it; you got it. It’s all in the name.

To all of you fabulous writers out there,

Kia kaha and aroha nui. 💞

Fighting! 👊