All in all, I don’t mind being over 40. Sure, making mortgage payments has not been nearly the ball of laughs the bank led us to believe it would be, and if television advice is to be followed I should be lying awake at night worrying about my fiber intake more than I currently am. I should also be worried about eliminating free radicals, though a large net dropped over the city of Madison would do the trick without requiring me to drink exotic juices which taste like tainted cranberries. But I can’t complain. Middle age for me is about achieving small victories, like some measure of financial solvency, impending fatherhood, and discovering that there is not, as my brother Craig had led me to believe, any such thing as a home prostate exam.
     So I like my age. I don’t feel, as many people do, that the high school years were the best years of my life. It’s hard for me to be nostalgic about acne. But you know what I do miss? College, and in particular one aspect of college, and that is nicknames. It’s tough to acquire nicknames in middle age because we don’t do anything stupid enough to get them. If we did have them, a typical exchange would go something like this:
     “Hey, going to the neighborhood pot-luck, Man Who Lost Everything in the Stock-Market Crash?”
     “No, I don’t think so. My daughter has a soccer game, Guy Who Edges His Sidewalk Three Times a Week.”
     But twenty years ago, at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, my friend Tom and I were The Rednecks, and living with us on our dormitory wing of mostly Natural Resources students were Slime, Hodag, Johnny Quest, Sloth, Crispy, Dirty Dan, and Uncle Milty.
Slime
     My fellow Redneck Tom and I received our introduction to Slime when we first moved in, as he fired up a chain saw to construct a bed out of pine logs. The three of us split the cost of a case of Rhinelander beer, which, if memory serves, was $4.20. “Green Death” was our beverage of choice in those days, and if you brought enough returnables back to the liquor store you could get beer and a couple of bucks back for Ramen noodles, and thus had the makings of a dinner party.
     Slime spat Copenhagen between his teeth, was a cribbage player par excellence, and drove a rusty International Harvester Scout littered with empty tobacco tins, shotgun shells, and deer skulls. His attire tended to Army surplus, though there was period when a girl he was dating—the type who dotted her i’s with hearts—attempted a radical Slime makeover by forcing him to wear ridiculous yachting outfits.
     Slime played a significant role in one of my many romantic failures at the time. I was at a campus watering hole chatting to a comely girl from my Soil Science class, and to my delight she seemed to find me amusing, if not attractive. At this point Slime entered the tavern carrying a pizza. Upon being informed that carry-in food was not allowed, he exited and prepared his pizza for concealed carry by wadding it into a ball. He re-entered, seated himself between me and my romantic interest, and began munching on his giant pizza ball.
     I’d forgive Slime for that, but I don’t know where he is now. Still, I would not be shocked to open the door one day to find him standing on the stoop with a deck of cards and a couple of bottles of Rhinelander beer.
     “Play some cribbage, Redneck?”
Hodag
     I think of Hodag, my late friend and waterfowling partner, quite a bit. We were roommates during our senior year at Point, and on the ceiling above his bed he had tacked a poster of a scantily-clad model touting one beer or another. Hodag claimed to have a special relationship with this model, and sometimes I’d hear him talking to her late at night:
“No, no,” he’d say. “I don’t want to kill my roommate.”
     One fall morning during post-college years found us picking up goose shells behind his farmhouse after the morning flight had ended. We wanted to continue hunting, so we packed his boat with duck decoys and headed up to the Horicon Marsh.
     In those days I was severely poverty-stricken and existed primarily on oxygen, with a little bit of venison thrown in every now and then. Because of blood-sugar concerns, Hodag always had food on him, and on that day on the marsh it was an enormous bag of dried fruit. I think now that he must have been aware of the powerful laxative effects of dried fruit, because he kept offering it to me:
     “Here, Redneck. Have some more dried fruit.”
     In the end, I finished the whole bag and frantically scurried into a local establishment, waders and all, after shooting hours had ended:
     “Please tell me you have a bathroom in here.”
     Alas, those days are over, and nobody calls me Redneck any more. Still, I see some hope for a nickname after all. You see, our neighborhood is full of very nice people, which is not good. Every neighborhood needs an ogre. When I was a kid, it was the local undertaker, who was rumored to stoke his air rifle with salt pellets to fire into the backsides of young miscreants. Never mind that later in life I found Mr. Salt Pellet to be a cool guy of the highest order. As kids we were terrified of him, and showed our terror by antagonizing him at every opportunity. Once, my brother Craig and I and fellow hooligan Ted slid over his fence during a backyard barbecue and darted among the guests to the food. Craig and Ted grabbed as much chicken as they could hold and I grabbed a bowl of Jell-O, and we scrambled back over the fence and to our hideout along the Fox River before the pellet gun could be brought to bear.
     Now, Jell-O is a reliable enough accompaniment to a cookout, but the gastronomical joy to be found in eating it increases exponentially with its illicitness. That joy is equaled only by the profound disappointment upon finding out, in the dark, that the bowl of Jell-O you thought you heisted was, in fact, chicken fat.
     I remember that incident now, and I think I have my nickname. I have been feeling a bit crotchety lately. What’s that? Stirrings outside?
     “Hon! Fetch me the gun, and the salt pellets! Git offa my propitty, you punks!”
     Yeah, Old Man Helker. It has a certain ring to it.