Nicknames. I’ve had a few of them over the years. You always remember your first, though.

I was twelve years old at the beginning of the 1989 school year. A seventh grader whose sole fashion statement was the nascent gel-hardened mullet I’d achieved by convincing the hairdresser that it was okay with my mom to let it “grow out a bit in the back.” My school was one of those permissive alternative institutions that housed students from 7-12th grade. This was the eighties and up until the year before I arrived students were still allowed to smoke inside the vestibule of the rear doorway. Alaskan winters are harsh and this was more of a humanitarian concession than a permissive one. The school was founded by hippie libertarians and it was still close enough to the seventies that nobody got their knickers twisted over that kind of thing.

During the first week of school I was walking through the student lounge; I was wearing a Hobie Surf shirt and my protomullet was well shellacked, glistening, I’m sure, in the fluorescence of the overhead lights. “Hey,” a girl said from one of the lounge sofas. She was not just any girl, but a 12th grade girl with a leather jacket and long black rock n’ roll hair and everybody called her Animal. “C’mere,” she said. I obediently shuffled over. Surfer shirt and pegged stonewash jeans. Keds. Sweet moulet. “You like Metallica?” She asked with her eyebrow arched. I had no idea who they were but it was clear that the stakes were high so I nodded in response that sure, I liked them. I quickly followed up, mentioning that I also really liked Guns n’ Roses and that I was growing my hair out to be more like, y’know, Axl. There were some eyebrow conversations between her and her cool friends: a girl with very tall bangs, a guy who had a forearm tattoo of a dragon (in high school, in the eighties), and a guy with Robert Smith hair, tights, and pointy shoes. They concluded that I could hang out with them.

I was in. I hung out before school, after school, lunch times. I even taught myself to smoke—Camel unfiltered for extra cool-guy points. By then the smoking area had moved all the way across the street. My favorite trick was to impress the older kids when I bummed one of their smokes by ripping the butt off with my teeth. Over the next few months I learned about Metallica, The Cure, The Violent Femmes, Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division. I learned about the Church of the Subgenius and JR “Bob” Dobbs. I learned about Discordians. I went to a real live punk show. It was a fruitful kickoff to my adolescence.

One afternoon at the smoking area a senior with a beard like a thirty year old man asked me, “Hey, do you have a nickname?” I was shocked. No. I didn’t have a nickname. I hadn’t even considered the possibilities. “Well,” he continued, exhaling a cloud of smoke, “You should pick one.”

My cheeks flushed. This was a ton of responsibility. I wracked my brain for something awesome, something that conveyed how goddamned metal I was. Something even half as rad as “Animal.” After a few pensive drags on my (really cool) unfiltered cigarette I had it: “Ozone.” The older kid nodded approval and said no more.

I don’t think anybody ever actually called me Ozone, no matter how many of my angsty stream of consciousness poems I signed that way. No matter how many tags I left on suburban streets, writing it super cool by crossing the O like a big zero and underlining the word. Ozone just never stuck.

The spanner in the works, you see, was Animal. We were hanging out in the lounge during lunchtime. She was playing a furious game of Egyptian Rat Screw with her best friend. Animal lost the game and took out her frustration by grabbing me around the middle and tickling me until just before I puked. Being a weedy twelve year old boy, I was an easy target for stray frustrations. I was also extremely ticklish. Within a fraction of a second I turned bright molten gasping-for-air red. To make matters worse, I was wearing a fluorescent oversized “Hot Tuna” shirt that amplified the effect considerably.

Animal’s best friend (whose name has been lost down the memory hole) looked at me and said flatly: “Holy shit, check him out. He’s pink. Like, all over. Even the shirt.” A slow snicker started that soon graduated to choking fits of laughter. Between guffaws she managed to say the word: “Pinky.” The shot had been fired. Animal turned to me with wild eyes and began shouting “Pinky! Pinky! Pinky!” Which, of course, became my nickname for the next four or so years.

And that was how I learned that you don’t get to pick your own nickname.