Divine Nickers

" ..three kinds of players in the cutthroat world of competitive nicknaming: the hicks, those Appalachians of appellation; improvisers of a style likened to the rat-a-tat of a Thompson gun in their titling, men like West Apple Johnson and Saco Sam Miltfill, who ran the circuit for years, coining thousands of nicks still used today, and not one of them capable of writing their own Christian name; then are there the learn'd men, the university wits who took up the back alley game of nicking to test themselves in mastery of the true word of this young countryside -- men like Dr. Alex Messersniff, from a long line of linguists, and an acolyte of Theodius Cram, he took his skills to the nick competition; his books, his theories, he tested against the ingenuity of this cousin'd brethren of the hillside, and often beat them at their game.

-- The final grouping is but the one man: Norman Clay Church. In his own lifetime he was a mythology in the ginmills and opi-dens of the nicking underworld, for in his uncanny gift were the souls of men disrobed of self-serving accouterments. What's in a name indeed..." 

 

-- ELBERG WITHERSPOON 

EXCERPT: 

THE 1931 WORLD TOURNEY OF NAME GIVING --MANHATTAN, KANSAS

-- So it was Norman Clay Church returned to the tourney for the first time in seventeen seasons. Old now, pocked, smelling of whiskey sweat, still the young ones looked on his entrance into the hall with excitement: this man was better suited a painting on the wall than sit with them, and share beans and cigarettes, and drink with them. 

It came that a Mississippian called Tom Dunn approached him, made to publicly test Church in a pre-tourney spat. Here is how it has come down to us:

--"I say Norman, you look like the old canvas banners illustrated with your visage, but perhaps I am seduced to this thought by the smell of you - Old Hat! I call you, Yeasty Carnival Butter!"

-- The crowd of men went silent as senators to Caesar. It was something kin to decrying God. Tom Dunn, feeling the room near convulse, attacked on, "Your capillaceous and royal-hued nose shows your business in the last years -- a Bourbonic Plague, I name thee, Sir!"

-- Small laughter spoke out of the halo of men. Tom Dunn meant to kill the old man here before Norman could be a threat in the tournament that would soon begin, and where men would test themselves as to who could brand the other with the finest insult in the language; (even a washed up) Norman Clay Church was not a thing to feel sympathy for. Cheer him for what he was, and he might think himself it again, if for just a little while. 

"You, Norman, come to us, we as your children, my good man; but after all these years, you've come as but a sad shell spent in a shot awry -- I name thee Piss-skin of the Forest! A bullet of urine, missing every tree!"

-- Here it was that Church, with the arthritic spiders that were his hands, rolled a smoke, lit it, and contemplated Tom Dunn, while all the rest waited his reply.

-- Norman said, "You have drempt this since you were a boy, Tom. But as I am old you thinks I am ripe. I am not so ripe. I am as sour and tough as an old cock o'the yard. Heed me, I will crow soon enough, and when I do, you will, in the auditory, relinquish your other senses to me: I will have you smell the fecal waters of the Nile; I will have you spy the trees of a Gaulic winter closing in on you; I will have you taste your own cold panic as it sweats inward and condensates on the roof of your mouth. You will feel your liver for the first time with this poison I have for you. Know this: I will name thee, Boy! You ladies loan, you wizard fart, you tankard of peppermilk; I name thee Tomcat Foldpants, for in this is the parallel of such a voracious nature as thou hath!  Your appetite hath made you womanly, and all around are you merited for a folder of other men's garments!"