I'm proud to say that I'm the one who gave Crystal Billy his nickname. Before I came along, he was just a Bill with a fairly intense relationship with meth, and while the designation may look obvious now, after the fact, his name and avocation had been keeping company for 10 years without anyone making the connection until I happened along and showed him my phone. "Crystal Billy, that's you," I told him.
"Why Crystal Billy?" he asked.
"Crystal Billy. Your name’s Bill, you like crystal.... Billy Crystal?"
"Oh, right. The City Slickers guy. I get it."
"Right. Crystal Billy. Ba-dang! "
The appellation took, after a fashion. He was generally referred to, rather than addressed as, Crystal Billy. As in, "No, I haven't seen your cloisonné pineapple keychain; did you ask Crystal Billy?"
In person, it was usually shortened to CB, accent on the C, like “Seabee,” or, more and more often, Crys, which of course just sounds like Chris and is not recognizably a nickname at all. That's the nature of nicknames, though. They evolve and develop of their own momentum and volition, usage sands off extraneous projections, and what finally emerges as permanent may not have any obvious connection to the person at all. I have known people called Fatty, Smelly, Stinky, Shorty, and Blackie who had none of those respective characteristics. Stinky Biever, who acquired the nickname at age 10, made it all the way to college before anyone noticed anything funny about the juxtaposition of his first and last. His sister walked into his dorm room at Virginia Tech and said, "Hey, Stinky," in the company of a couple of his friends, one of whom looked at the other and said, "Stinky? Stinky Biever?" incredulously.
Apparently he'd chosen not to share his childhood nickname at college, but you know sisters.
CB is umpteenth generation Fort Bragg and as such does not require any genealogical sleuthing to smoke out his forebears — they're all conveniently parked in the local cemetery, where he likes to sit sometimes and enjoy a bowl in the family plot among his personal ghosts. It was there that he and I were enwrapped in smoke and conversation one gray summer morning.
I found CB worth seeking out whenever I had a surplus of the ol' ricky-tick, if only for the depth and quality of his conversation. If there’s one thing you can count on from a tweaker, it's that he is going to talk. Volubly, voluminously, and ofttimes with exasperatingly insistent vivacity, they — we — go on, and on, and on… You get the picture. The trick is to fmd someone who will actually engage in conversation and not just babble semi-coherently about UFOs or their dead grandma or the chips in their heads. You want to steer clear of those with a ton of emotional baggage who view any pair of unoccupied ears as license to barf out all their childhood trauma, and also the dreamers full of big plans requiring capital and infrastructure and raw materials and manpower and jurisprudence and plenary indulgences when all they've got in their pockets is 80¢ and a Bic lighter. Those types will wear you down in a trice and take all the fun out of flooding your system with corrosive chemicals that triple the operational rate of your bodily processes and age you commensurately. I mean, really.
"So, I was over at that girl Jacey's yesterday," CB said between puffs, leaning against his greatgrandfather's extravagant crypt, "you remember her."
I nodded.
"She accused me at one point of having a shit-eating grin, and maybe I did, but I got to thinking about that and wondered, who would ever grin with a mouthful of shit? I think if you weren't actually retching and gagging, you'd be at least grimacing, right? Because shit is disgusting. It's been eaten once already. That's the limit, man. I've heard the phrase a million times and even used it before, but I never realized how crazy it is to think of grinning while you eat, like, shit. You know?"
See, this is what I mean. CB knew exactly the sort of conversational fuse to light to get things going.
"Okay, first, you can't really take these kinds of idioms literally, right? But then you sort of do to get at the root of them. Like we know that a 'shit-eating grin' is meant to denote a kind of smug self-awareness," I said. "Because when are people likely to say that you've got one?"
"When there doesn't seem to be anything obvious to be grinning about," CB said.
"Exactly. So maybe the shit-eating part means to convey that you look as if you're doing something that gives you real satisfaction but might cause shame or embarrassment, i.e., shit-eating, and I suppose we're to accept that it might be pleasurable to some people. But the actual, real-world disconnect between shit-eating and pleasure is, of course, vast to anyone but a dog, who will not only eat it but not feel any particular way about it, and that disparity is what gives the idiom its flavor. So to speak."
"Okay, I get what you're saying and it makes sense, but 'shit' in pretty much every sense is negative, right? If something tastes like shit, it's gross. If you’re up shit creek or in deep shit, you're fucked."
"Right. If you’ve got shit for brains, you're dumber than shit. If you’re a piece of shit, you're low-down and no damn good."
"Shitfaced, too drunk to function. A shitstorm is a lotta bad shit happening at once."
"Shit outta luck, they're out of whatever it is that you need. Pretty much the only thing that can turn shit around is the application of the definite article, because if you're the shit then you are like the badger's kneepads."
"The what?"
"Ah, I was just trying to get something started, like the cat's pajamas."
"The what?"
"Skip it."
"So my point is," CB said, getting to the crux of the thing, "shit being so overwhelmingly negative, how did this phrase catch on in the beginning? Some guy came upon his friend smirking to himself and somehow associated that with the eating of shit? Seems weird. It seems weirder that they both probably continued to say it, as did the people they said it to, and lo and behold however many years later we've got this disgusting metaphor that everyone says without thinking about."
"I think that many figures of speech don't bear thinking about and it's impossible to get at the root of them, as their progress tends to follow the oral tradition rather than the written. Let me ask you this. What were you doing when Jacey said you had a shit-eater on?"
"Reading a text from Corinne, who wanted some more of what only Big Billy could give her."
"And just how post-coital were you with Jacey?"
"Hadn't even gotten my pants back on yet."
"Well, there you go. Talk about your textbook examples, you definitely had an SEG. How did you respond?"
"I claimed it was a Joke of the Day notification."
"And when she asked to hear the joke, you…?"
"Choked, couldn't think of anything. I said, Oh, shit what time is it? I gotta get to work."
"And what time was it?"
"Roundabout two a.m."
"I should remind you here that you don't have a job, much less one that starts at two in the morning. Crystal Billy, never let it be said that you are anything less than the shit."
"Got that right," he said, with something approaching a coprophagous smirk.
After giving each of his ancestors a parting benediction and patting each headstone in turn, we exited the necropolis and went our separate ways, Crystal Billy presumably to try and get himself off of Jacey's shitlist before she had a shitfit, and I to go do some Internet research into the meaning and derivation of “shit-eating grin.” As expected, there was a literal shit-ton of information and a number of literary citations, but nothing definitive regarding the source or very illuminating on the subject. I did learn that “fish-eating grin” is apparently an acceptable “clean” version of the phrase, which is ridiculous, like TV censors replacing “motherfucker” with “melon farmer” or “Mormon father.” Just doesn't have the same punch.
A number of scholarly time-wasters drew parallels between “shit-eating grin” and “the cat who ate the canary,” which makes sense but like the former phrase does not stand up to literal scrutiny, as a cat could not give two figs about any judgment you might make regarding the demise of a canary, and smug is his default expression anyway.
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