How I Earned My Nickname

My Only Friend

I was a weird kid. This is almost certainly obvious to anyone who has actually met me IRL, and it’s probably no shock to anyone who’s read my fiction, my zine, this blog, or literally anything else I’ve written, including my Twitter feed, which is clogged with photos of cats, rando announcements about haircuts, baseball, the weather, and, of course, self-promotion conducted with all the subtlety of a man burning down his house for the insurance money.

When it comes to my childhood, I often joke about how my whole life changed after a concussion, but it’s only half a joke. I suffered two concussions as a child. In the first I was wrestling with my brother, whose hideous strength is legendary, and he hurled me across the living room and the soft spot in the back of my skull hit the edge of a chair. This may or may not have been retaliation for the time I hid a pencil in couch cushions which my brother promptly sat on, and it may or may not have been part of a plot to murder me on the part of my brother who also once hit me in the head with a metal yard rake. So, yes, my home life was a chaotic mess of violence and poor diet choices because my exhausted mother allowed me to eat cookies for breakfast, but that’s not the point.

The second concussion occurred one summer when the fire hydrant outside my house was opened up for the kids. This was Jersey City, New Jersey in the late 1970s or very early 1980s; I don’t think there was a public pool anywhere nearby and our video game technology involved boxy sprites moving around a 13-inch black and white TV screen, so running around in the street in a bathing suit, risking stepping on broken glass, was as fun as it got.

Anyway, I was running around the freezing water when a red-haired kid the approximate size of four or five red-haired kids ran smack into me, knocking me down. My head hit the curb, and I was once again on my way to the hospital with a concussion. In retrospect, these injuries should have clued me in that I lacked coordination and was not going to be a professional baseball player long before I spent all those years playing Little League to the combined dread and amusement of my team-mates, but it did not.

After that second concussion, I swear I was different. My memory is awful and unreliable and I have subconsciously filled in the blanks with made-up shit, scenes from films and TV shows, and other strange detritus, but I’d swear I didn’t need glasses until after the concussion, that I got pudgy and slow after it, and became more introverted and read more books afterwards. Before that, I’d been a street kid, running around all day, playing with the other kids in the street and generally being athletic. After it, I withdrew and became the handsome but socially awkward devil you see before you now.

I can’t prove it, but I believe it.

Anyways, shortly after the concussion I joined the Cub Scouts because I like their cool fascist uniforms, and later aged up into the Boy Scouts. And the troop used to go on regular camping trips which usually involved driving deep into the dark wilds of New Jersey, where we’d freeze our asses off and eat hot dogs and after lights out the adults would sit around the campfire and get shitfaced while we snuck out and did the same. It was a glorious time.

It was also post-concussion, and I had some awkwardness. I got along okay, but I often felt like I had no real connection to the other kids in the troop, and sometimes felt like the odd man out. Once, while driving us to a campsite, our Scoutmaster pulled over and took us to a restaurant for some dinner, and I wound up sitting by myself. It was awkward, but I remembered being determined to play it off and brush that dirt from my shoulder, so I acted very nonchalant about. Ho-hum, I tried to project. Alone with my amazing thoughts again, no worries.

In order to sell this illusion of World Jeff Unconcerned with Social Awkwardness, I kept looking around as if everything in that diner was goddamn fascinating. I was an intellectual ocean unto myself, completely free of the bourgeois need for company. I found interest and stimulation in the decor, the construction, the typography of the menu, and the way the business was run.

Naturally, this fooled no one.

Unbeknownst to me, a fly had made its temporary home in my airspace, buzzing around my booth. If I noticed I pretended not to, because swatting at flies when you’ve been doomed to a solo meal by uncaring misanthrope boy scouts was not part of the image I was trying to project of World Jeff, Man with Complex and Satisfying Inner World Who Did Not Need Friends. Unfortunately, this made it look to outside observers who were not privy to my Amazing Inner World like I was having some sort of conversation with the fly, because I kept looking around as it buzzed here and there.

A few comedians began doing a breathless narration of my conversation with the fly: Oh, Mr. Fly, you are my only friend etc. Nothing very inspired, but damn it if I didn’t emerge from that diner with a new nickname: The Fly. As with most nicknames, it’s kind of cool until you know the backstory.

Now I’m off to contemplate why I decided to tell this story to the entire universe.