(Every day this November I’ll conduct an interview with an imaginary person.)
It’s a long story. Well—actually no. It’s not that long. I went to school one day wearing a Batman rain poncho. To this day I’ll maintain that it was a pretty badass poncho, and it did its job keeping me dry. But most eighth graders would rather blend in wet than stand out dry, and so they latched onto my attire as something to make fun of, and all day I was called Batman, Poncho, or Pancho Villa. I also heard a lot of shouts of I’m melting!—wicked witch style.
The next day it was sunny. Batman stayed home, and everyone settled on calling me Poncho. My friends held out for awhile, but honestly, it never bothered me. I had no particular affection for my given name anyway. Toward the end of the year I started writing notes to a girl I liked and I signed them Poncho, and when she started writing back—Dear Poncho—that pretty much settled it in my mind. Poncho had game!
How long ago was that?
Twenty-some years. Let’s not get into the arithmetic. I’ve got a birthday coming up.
But people still call you that?
Oh, yeah. Actually, it was my closest friends who kept the name going for me. Ninth grade was at a different school, and it was a lot bigger—there were a lot of new kids there. Not everyone knew Poncho.
When I started playing JV baseball, that created a whole new group of Poncho evangelists. And some of those guys went to the same college that I did. Literally everyone I knew was calling me Poncho, and no one that I still spent any time with had actually seen the thing that started the nickname.
Everyone—even your family?
Oh, no—not my mother. But my little sis did. At my ballgames, she’d scream her head off—Go Poncho!—whenever I came up to hit.
But my wife—we were dating for over a month before I brought her home and she found out that wasn’t my real name. Some of my friends had told her—swearing up and down—that it said Poncho on my birth certificate. So she asked me, why did my mother keep calling me Horatio? I laughed and laughed and she turned so red.
So Mari calls me that when she’s pissed, now. And my mother. And the DMV. That’s it.
Posted November 25, 2009, 8 pm
