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ourselves up so they might like us a little more, try and sneak in a little
tag here and there just so we could get to touch them. Bobby Dyer
would try his damnedest to run, but his thighs would rub together and
his chest would tighten and he'd have to sit down on the side or else he'd
pass out.

            I stood around off to the side, headphones in my ears, looking
down at the grass and muttering the lyrics to the songs playing in my
ears. Chuck Schuldiner growled his angry philosophy through the head-
phones as I watched the pretty girls running from one end of the field to
the other, trying to deliver little plastic Rags from the other side back to
their own. The score was 5 - 7. Chuck groaned in agony, and I groaned
along, silently:

            Bigwords, small mind, behind the pain you'll find a scavenger
of human sorrow.

               ยง

            For a while, the name stayed within the confines of the locker
room. I got used to it, in a way. Every Tuesday and every Thursday, I'd
open the door to the locker room with raucous applause and boisterous
shouts of "Yo, Baby-Dick!" and "It's Baby-Dick!" and even "Hey BD!"
Jeff Greeley took to calling me "Baby-Cock;' and Mitch the Hipster
preferred "Baby-D" or sometimes "Babes;' for short. For about two
weeks, Troy Davis, who always used the locker next to mine, would
stand by my side and chant "Baby-Dick" in quiet, mock-reverential
tones. It got to be annoying, then it got to be routine, and then, in time,
it came to be expected that I would be "Baby-Dick." It was all right, at
this point, as I wasn't the only one with an embarrassing locker-room
nickname. For your convenience, I've included a handy chart, delineat-
ing the nicknames of each major player:

Given Name        Handle
Troy Davis        T-Dave
Bobby Dyer        Dumbshit; Dumb~hit Dyer;
                  Fat-Fuck Dyer
Todd Reynolds     Faggot
Darren Strong     Howard (as in Duck)
Mitch Phelps      Mitch the Hipster; Neckbeard;
                  Neckbeardicus; Neckbeard the
                  Pirate; Captain Neckbeard;

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