When I was working at Blockbuster, we had two guys named Brian. One was black and one was white. So without any creativity whatsoever, we nicknamed them Black Brian and White Brian. Those nicknames were awful. We needed new ones. We didn’t go out of our way to come up with new nicknames, they just came from everyday goings on at Blockbuster. White Brian became Albert’s best friend and then became Homo for reasons that need not be discussed. But Black Brian became Smurge.

Brian had just finished running what had seemed like thousands of tapes (putting them back on the shelves) and he went over to the cooler that housed soft drinks for customers and buying employees. After scouring the choices, he decided to try the new soft drink that we just received. I think it may have even been the first day we started selling the soda. It was a florescent green color and was basically Coke’s attempt to grab the generation y crowd that Pepsi had with Mountain Dew. That soda was called Surge.

Brian grabbed the soda, took it to the register and paid his $1.07. He slowly turned the cap on the top of the plastic bottle as if to smell the aroma of the new drink. He eye balled the slime green color and meticulously placed the bottle to his lips. It was as if it had to be perfect bottle to lip placement. He took a drink every so gracefully and then gave that “ahhhhh” sound and wiped his mouth with his shirt. Brian then said to no one in particular, “Damn this Smurge tastes good,” obviously not reading the label of the drink that in large letters specifically said SURGE. He enjoyed the soda so much that he finished the entire bottle in just his second gulp.

My cousin Davey was helping us run tapes that night and had been witness to Brian’s two gulp performance. I guess he was fascinated with Brian’s fascination of a soft drink. But when he heard the Smurge reference, he started to giggle and ran over to me and could barely catch his breath. I almost thought he was going to pee his pants as he said, “Black Brian said Smurge!”

I asked him what the heck he was talking about. He said, “Brian grabbed the new soda, took a drink, and said, ‘Damn this Smurge tastes good!’.” I then bowled over with laughter. Why? I don’t know. It was a simple mistake. But back then, we used to crack on each other so much, I guess I saw it as an opportunity to crack on Brian.

Brian was an interesting dude. He reminded me in one sense of Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man character. He knew how to do many intricate tasks and was the first person to tell me about the possible Y2K bug. He could build his own computer, but the simplest of tasks such as giving back proper change or reading Surge was hard for him.

Thus, the nickname of Smurge was born. Brian was never called Brian ever again, unless it was to his face. I would ask my manager who I was working with on a certain night and he would say Smurge. He wouldn’t say Brian. I think he even wrote Smurge on our schedule once. If I saw him and talked to him, I would call him Brian. But if he wasn’t there, it was almost as if his mother and father thought Smurge was the perfectly good name for their son.

I always wondered what that guy was doing nowadays. He could be working for freaking NASA, or working for McDonalds. I can see it now. As he gets off of work, he grabs himself a soda, goes into his car, takes a big drink, and says, “Damn this Smeven Up tastes good!”

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