Please Adam Don't Hurt 'Em

By the summer of 1989, both MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were among the two biggest names in music. And while it embarrasses me to admit it, I was one of their biggest fans. I saw a lot of myself in these guys. Hammer was self conscious about his skinny legs and compensated for them by wearing parachute pants and so did I. Vanilla Ice was a white guy with rhythm and I was a white guy with rhythm. Really, it was a fandom arranged by destiny.

Also during this time, I had a friend named Tom. No one called him Tom, they called him Spike. Even our teachers called him Spike. As far as I know, this nickname was created from thin air; created because it was cool.

Tom and I had a pleasant relationship, but we were never the friends we could have been because his nickname would always come between us. Tom’s awesome nickname was the stick in the bicycle spokes of our companionship. I wanted to be cool, but every time my 94-year-old 5th grade teacher called Tom Spike, it reminded me that I was not cool. It hurt. It hurt like a dagger to my heart… a spike, if you will. I wanted to be Spike, but clearly, Spike was already taken. Being only nine-years-old at the time, I wasn’t very creative and for several months, it never occurred to me that other nicknames besides Spike might be cool too.

I remember the morning it dawned on me to marry my desire for a nickname with the admiration I had for Hammer and Ice.* Like Spike, I wanted a nickname that was rugged and dangerous. I wanted to be called something mean and scary. I settled on “Chainsaw” and set out to convince my mom that this was to be my new identity.

The exact reaction my mother gave me is unclear to me all these years later, but I think it involved a fair amount of laughing on her part and more than a few more alternate nicknames that she felt were more suitable; names like SillyBilly, Baby-Boy and Bonzo.

I remember thinking that I hadn’t made my desire for coolness clear to my mother because the nicknames she was suggesting were all wrong. People feared spikes. Spikes hurt; you could fall on one, or get speared by one in the shadows of the night or something. No one was going to fear a Baby-Boy or whatever a Bonzo was. I decided that to make my intent clearer, I would announce my intention to shave the word Chainsaw (capital “C”) into the back of my hair.

When MC Hammer’s penultimate album “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em” was released, my mother would specifically request that we listen to that cassette. I was always obliging, because I too enjoyed hammer-dancing down my hallway. It always seemed odd however, that Mom would set aside her Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin. Surely, I thought, my Mom had felt the thunder that was “U Can’t Touch This” and therefore, my assumptions lead me to believe by articulating that a nickname was something that needed to be accomplished if I were going to be happy. Vanilla Ice shaved his name into the rear of his casaba and look how happy he was?

He was to the extreme and rocked the mic like a vandal. Something grabbed ahold of him tightly and it flowed like a harpoon both daily and nightly.

How could my mother argue with that? I wasn’t asking for a tattoo of my nickname, just an awesome, awesome haircut that would separate me from the children. Heck, I wasn’t even asking for parachute pants.**

I pictured the first day of school with my new haircut. While most of my classmates would have a new bookbag or a nice shirt; I’d walk in with a swagger and sway and an announcement to the world that Adam was still playing in the summer sandbox of his youth. The man standing before you was Chainsaw! My thoughts after this point remain fuzzy. I think I broke into a spot-on Hammer dance. I’m sure the 9-year-old me would have found this a perfect time to break into a Hammer dance.

I never got a chance to break into my Hammer dance because neither my nickname nor my haircut ever came to fruition. *** I remained the mopped-toppy Adam; boring old Adam. People bowed to Spike; gave him their Hostess Twinkies at lunch; let him swing on the good swing at recess. But me? I was just the friend of awesome Spike.

I often wonder how my life would appear now, had my mom allowed me to buzz the word chainsaw into the back of my cranium. I spent a long time assuming my mom had made the right decision. After all, Hammer is bankrupt and Vanilla was almost thrown out of a hotel window by Shug Knight. I had made my peace with the entire ordeal until I found out Spike had become a real estate salesman in Malibu and could probably buy and sell me thrice over. His two tow-headed sons have already been drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers, despite only being six-years-old and he married the lovely Jenna von Oy (from television’s “Blossom”) or some other girl I had a crush on when I was that age.

I would risk getting thrown out of a hotel window for Blossom’s spunky chum, Six. I shoulda continued pushing for Chainsaw.

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* You know what? Hammer and Ice would have made a pair of pretty good nicknames too or maybe just Icehammer.

** Several months later, I asked for parachute pants.

*** I didn’t want anything as passionately as my Chainsaw haircut until the spring of 1991 when I begged my parents for a pair of overalls. When I got them, I wore them with only one strap attached, while the other strap swung stupidly behind me. I believe I wore that style throughout the summer and into the fall wherein, I traded my overalls in for an Ace of Base CD and a couple slap bracelets.