go.Jimmy.go

My phone rang the other night, and when I glanced down at the screen, one word was staring back at me:

Bones.

Immediately, I relaxed.

Most unexpected phone calls aren’t exactly cause for celebration. There was a time when an evening call usually meant something work-related—someone locked themselves out of a computer, a server went down, or some other technological catastrophe had occurred that apparently only I could solve.

But Bones?

Bones I’ll answer.

Bones, as it turns out, is my brother Louie.

He’s been called Bones for so long that I sometimes wonder how many people actually remember his real name. The nickname has been around for decades, bestowed upon him because, back in the day, my brother had roughly the same physique as a coat hanger.

Before Bones, though, he was Gooey.

That one dates all the way back to childhood, when “Louie” apparently proved too complicated for our developing vocabularies. Somehow it came out “Gooey,” and for a while, Gooey he was.

Eventually Gooey gave way to Bones, which brings me to an important question:

What’s in a nickname?

In my family, quite a lot.

You would think the most obvious nickname for anyone with the last name Wood would be Woody. And yes, plenty of us have been called that over the years. Even my grandfather, Willard Appleman, was nicknamed Woody.

We Woods were never ones to settle for the obvious. We preferred nicknames that required explanations…. or therapy. For instance, My mom’s nickname was Big Dog.

I had several nicknames when I was growing up too. The earliest one I can remember was Bipper.

To this day, I have absolutely no idea why my father decided to call me that. Then again, this was a family in which my uncle nicknamed his own son Chump, so perhaps asking for logic is expecting too much.

Bipper eventually gave way to White Cap, courtesy of my brother, because as a kid, my hair was ridiculously blond. Not blond in the normal sense. We’re talking practically reflective. So my brother decided White Cap was an appropriate name for me.

Eventually, White Cap disappeared and was replaced by something far more sinister. It was when my brother discovered my nickname Achilles’ heel.

My middle name.

Edward.

For reasons I can no longer adequately explain, I absolutely hated my middle name when I was a kid. I always wanted something cool like James Michael or James Steven. Anything but James Edward.

My brother quickly realized this and did what any loving older brother would do:

He began calling me Edward every chance he got.

Naturally, I begged him to stop, which naturally guaranteed that he never would.

I complained to my parents. I threatened retaliation. I’m pretty sure there were plenty of occasions when I had thoughts of swiping all the marshmallows out of his Lucky Charms.

Nothing worked.

I was Edward, and soon other kids in the family started calling me Edward too. My brother would even introduce me to his friends that way.

“Denny, I’d like you to meet my brother, Edward.”

I wanted to kill him.

Eventually, though, something strange happened. I started getting used to it. Over time, Edward was modernized—or perhaps hipified—into Eddie, and somewhere along the way I actually started to like it.

Funny how that happens with nicknames. The ones you hate the most sometimes become the ones you remember most fondly.

And our family had plenty of them. Over the years we’ve had Lard, Nark, Hermie, Eye, Bop, Rosie, Pumpkin, and probably a dozen others I’ve forgotten.

I’ll leave it to you to imagine the stories behind those nicknames

But perhaps the greatest nickname battle of them all began with Bowlman.

When my brother was in high school in the mid-80s, he went through a period where he occasionally enjoyed a certain herbal recreational activity. I wasn’t into that particular pastime, but I did recognize an opportunity when I saw one.

I began calling him Bowlman.

Or more simply: Bowl.

For the uninitiated, a “bowl” isn’t just something you pour your Lucky Charms into. It’s also slang associated with a marijuana pipe.

Needless to say, my brother wasn’t thrilled with his new nickname. Especially when I started calling him Bowl around our grandmother.

“Why does he call you Bowl?” she’d ask him.

And suddenly my brother would have to perform verbal gymnastics worthy of an Olympic medal trying to explain the nickname without explaining the nickname.

His solution?

Tell Nan that I was Bowl.

Oh, hell no. Absolutely not!

“I AM NOT BOWLMAN! YOU ARE!”

This became an ongoing argument between us.

There was no way I was going to bestow the greatest nickname in family history on him only to have the guy turn it around on me. Brotherly love has its limits.

But that didn’t stop him. Every time one of his friends would come over to the house, he told them that I was no longer Eddie. From now on they were to call me Bowl. Likewise, I did the same to him when my friends came over.

Eventually, my brother and I grew out of a lot of things. The nickname, however, was something that has survived.

That’s the funny thing about nicknames. Given enough time, they stop meaning whatever they originally meant. They become something else entirely—a private language between people who have known each other long enough to remember where all the bodies are buried.

Figuratively speaking, of course.

Today, my brother and I will still call each other Bowl, even in mixed company. Nobody questions it anymore. Half the people who hear it already know the origin, and the other half probably have no idea what we’re talking about, and that’s perfectly fine.

Because today Bowl isn’t really about marijuana or embarrassing my brother in front of my grandmother. It’s about being kids. It’s about having stupid arguments, inside jokes, and the strange little words and phrases that somehow survive decades after the people who invented them have grown older.

I’ll admit that if you see me out somewhere and call me Eddie, I won’t shed a tear. Call me Bowlman and you’ll probably get a laugh.

But when it comes to the great childhood nickname war between my brother and me, I still maintain that I won.

And I have proof.

My brother’s grown-up kids call me Uncle Bowman.

My grown-up daughter?

She still calls him Uncle Gooey.

Game. Set. Match.

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My new novel, The Seventh Echo is available now from
Adverse City Publishing
© 2026 James Wood