Stinky

I saw a giant rat scrambling down the side of my neighbor's drain pipe as I was out on the balcony for a midnight smoke. Just for a second, barely longer than the time it takes to flip on the light.  Maybe it's the same rat that chewed through one of Auntie's moon cakes.  She had to cut off the spoiled corner.

Somehow the rat reminded me of my first banking associate.  We analysts called him Stinky because he had incurable halitosis.  A butt of our jokes, it didn't help that he was Polish and slightly rotund. When he gave us models and pitch books to do on Friday afternoons, we came up with all sorts of dark nicknames and jokes – muttered under our breaths and blackberried to fellow analysts of course.

That fuckin' Pole. Fuckin' lazy Pole.  No wonder they bent over for the Germans.  Why doesn't he spend the weekend doing this shit? Fuckface.

What's he going to this weekend? Get drunk off his ass? Just like a Pole. What a blowhard.

God, how long has he been here? The guy's got no life. Buttmuncher.

But somehow the more innocuous name "Stinky" stuck, along with variations like "Stinker", "Frogbreath" and "Stank".  If we see him lumbering towards us, we usually said, "Dude, I smell something funky – stinkbomb is gonna go off." And often, we'd slide in sly comments to him like "See that new gum commercial over the Super Bowl?  Icy fresh!"

Perhaps we saw that he was as bitter as us in a job that he hated.  Perhaps we saw that he was good at his job. Whatever it was, common misery or grudging respect, we learned to tolerate, and at some point, even to like the poor bastard.  Stinky became a pet nickname instead of a derogatory slander.

Time passed - we left the firm and Stinky remained to stinkify another crop of yuppie-lovers.  I don't know what happened to him – maybe he lost it, maybe he gave in and is still kissing some small man's ass.. but to this day, when the other analysts and I email each other, we still reminisce about Stinky.