April 15: Awful presents
Like everyone, I've hit some
home runs in the gift-giving department. One Christmas, I gave my
sister's kids a replica of the exact same Fisher-Price garage and
village set that she and I played with when we were youngsters. Later
that day, my dad asked me how long I'd been planning to do that. "Since I
was 10," I said.
I've also given some awful gifts. I never got punched for giving a bad present, but I have gotten some strange looks. Okay, so maybe my mom and dad didn't need a big bulky adding machine from the garage sale down the street. But it was the thought that counts.
As for me, I've received tonnes of awful gifts over the year. I've done some thinking and I was able to narrow them down to the top ten. Here they are.
10.
Item: Deck of Braille playing cards.
Occasion: Christmas, 1987.
Who gave it: My brother.
I feel bad about picking on my bro here because he actually gives awesome presents. For Christmas, he made me a fountain pen. That's because he knows how much I love fountain pens and he went ahead and created one in his woodshop. I won't let anyone else write with it. It's one of my most treasured possessions.
So I feel a little cruddy when I single my kid brother out for giving me a deck of Braille playing cards. He wasn't trying to be mean; it was actually a very sweet gesture. He gave me the cards for Christmas of 1987 when I was 14 and he was nine. He knew that I was really into magic, especially card tricks, and he was worried that blind people might not get to enjoy my performances. So he brought me a Braille deck so I could amaze the likes of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.
Alas I never got to perform a card trick for a blind person, but the existence of the Braille deck made me feel bad for the visually impaired who will never get to appreciate a good magic trick the way other people can.
Sigh.
Love ya, kid bro.
Now it's time to get nasty.
9.
Item: A book about Primitive Man.
Occasion: Ninth birthday party, 1982.
Who gave it: Robbie Yates.
When we were nine, we pretty much wanted the world. Matt said he wanted a Commodore 64. Jay said he wanted a Rubik's cube and Pac-Man for his Atari. JP said he wanted a Lando Calrissian action figure. Well, him and Yoda.
Me, I just wanted to learn everything I could about primitive man. That's why I was so delighted when Robbie Yates showed up at my ninth birthday and gave me this gift right here:
Man, I was thrilled. I was so happy that I punched Robbie Yates right in the eye. Then I took that book on Primitive Man to my bedroom, where I threw it under my dresser. It stayed there until I was 21 and we were having a campfire in the backyard and we needed kindling.
Seriously, did Robbie Yates think I was an anthropologist or something? When I was eight, all I could talk about were magic tricks and Star Wars and aliens and the cartoons that showed on TV on Saturday morning. Why in the world would he buy me a book on Primitive Man?
It was years later when I discovered the truth. That book on Primitive Man was not sold as a single item. You couldn't find it in a bookstore. Instead, you'd find it in the party section of a department store. The book on Primitive Man was sold in sets of 10 for $4.99. The idea was to stick them in loot bags (remember those?) to be given away at the end of a party.
So Robbie Yates had gotten his book on Primitive Man in a loot bag at a birthday party somewhere and had decided to regift that shitty book to me. Great! Wonderful! Shows you why Robbie Yates and I aren't close anymore.
8.
Item: Three copies of The Cars album, Heartbeat City (on cassette tape.)
Occasion: My 12th birthday, 1985.
Who gave it: Matthew Thill, Matthew Vermunt, Stuart Smith.
It was probably my fault that I got three copies of Heartbeat City on that cold day in early January of 1985. I'd invited a whole bunch of people to my birthday party, which was to take place at the Southland Leisure Centre, where we would go swimming. The kids I'd invited had been asking me what I wanted and I stupidly told them all the same thing: The Cars album, Heartbeat City. I'd seen the video for You Might Think on Video Hits and I thought it was almost as cool as anything David Lee Roth had done (I didn't need his Crazy from the Heat because I'd already bought it through the Columbia Record Club.)
See, I was dumb enough to think my friends would consult each other before asking their moms to buy me my gift. They did no such thing. And that is why, when I opened the present Matthew Thill got me, I was looking at this:
Cool, I thought. Later, after everyone goes home, I can stick this in my ghetto blaster and groove to Drive or Magic or Why Can't I Have You (which sort of made me think about a girl in our class named Jennifer, but that's another story altogether.)
Then I took hold of Matthew Vermunt's present, which was shaped exactly like a cassette tape. Matthew V had a worried expression on his face, so I was disappointed, but not surprised, to open it and find this:
"It's okay," my mom said. "You can keep one in your room and one in the car."
I grinned but didn't say anything. That was a pretty cruddy solution. It was like getting my arm cut off and my mom telling me I could use it to feed a hungry dog.
Then Stuart handed me his gift. He wasn't even going to try to surprise me.
"It's the same thing," he said.
He was right. It was this:
"Maybe you can give one of those away as a present sometime," my mom said.
Great! Now mom was recommending I hurt one of my friend's feelings. In my mind, each of those Cars cassettes was unique in that they were picked out by different people. I believed this even though I knew they were all the same. It's not like I could put one of those tapes in my walkman and say: "Oh come on, this is the tape Stuart gave me. I want the one Matt gave me instead. The acoustics are much nicer."
And that is why I kept all three of those Cars cassettes and two of them remained in their shrink wrap forever and I don't know where they are anymore but I do have Heartbreak City on my iPod and I listen to it now and then and you might think I'm crazy, but baby, it's untrue.
7.
Item: An orange
Occasion: Welcome back to school present, 1982.
Who gave it: Todd Jones.
There was this kid in my Grade 3 class who was, shall we say, special.
Good kid. Nice kid. Sweet kid. But he believed friendship was like a greased pig. Once you had it, you had to hold on tight or it would run away.
Poor Todd Jones. He really wanted to make friends with me. And I was his friend. His problem was he thought he had to give me stuff so I would stay friends with him.
Christmas of 1981 comes and goes. Then it's 1982 and time to go back to school. Todd Jones hands me a hard ball wrapped in green paper.
"Welcome back to school, Steve," he says. "This is my present for you."
Todd had given me an orange. One of those paper-wrapped easy-to-peel oranges they sell around Christmas. The orange is now orange and black and is at least as hard as rock. Eating it would be like eating erasers.
I thanked Todd and I put the orange in my backpack and told him I would eat it later.. That was a lie.
6.
Item: Iron Maiden jacket patch
Occasion: Christmas, 1985.
Who gave it: Ozi.
In Grade 7, my best friend Ozi believed that everyone in school fell into two categories - heads or preps. Preps listened to Duran Duran and Tears for Fears. Heads listened to Motley Crue and Iron Maiden. I asked what you would call someone who liked Duran Duran and Motley Crue and he said that would never happen.
Ozi was a head. To demonstrate this, he grew his hair long and he had a Led Zeppelin patch on the back of his jean jacket. Eventually, he became distressed that I, his best friend, was not a head just like he was. "No one thinks you're cool," he told me once on the way back from school. "The preps think you're a dork but even worse, the heads think you're a dork and that's really bad."
But Ozi had a solution - the Iron Maiden patch.
He bought the Iron Maiden patch at Tropicana, a headshop in downtown Calgary, with 50 cents from his allowance. This he gave to me for Christmas of 1985.
"Get your mom to iron it on to the back of your jean jacket," he said.
"But I don't like Iron Maiden."
"How do you know? You never listen to them."
"I never listen to Lawrence Welk either but that doesn't mean I want to put a Lawrence Welk patch on my jacket."
Ozi and I argued for a while. In there, I told him that you don't buy gifts for people based on what you think they should like, you buy them things based on what they like. I also told him that it would be a little funny asking my mom to iron this on to my jacket:
I mean, heavy metal is supposed to be anti-establishment and rebellious. How rebellious can you be when you have to ask your mom if she will help you put a picture of a grinning undead demon on the back of your jean jacket? That's like saying "Mommy, I want you to tell me I can be bad."
One of my most grievous failings is that I will sell myself out and do all kinds of unrealistic stupid shit in order to make other people happy. Wearing the Iron Maiden patch on my jacket would have made Ozi happy but it would have made me feel like a sellout. The Iron Maiden patch became a sort of de facto poster on my wall and Ozi grumbled for a few weeks but eventually he accepted that I wasn't going to be a convert to his way of thinking and then we were friends again. (Probably shortly after the time I bought him a Menudo patch and told him he had to wear it because I'd spent money on it.)
5.
Item: Garfield bookmark.
Occasion: Secret Santa present, Grade 5 1983.
Who gave it: RK.
If your elementary school was like mine, then you probably had to suffer through the whole Secret Santa thing. That's when you draw another student's name at the beginning of December and you have to go the whole month being extra nice to them. At the end of the month, you give them a small present (there's usually a stipulation that the gift cannot cost more than $10.)
We started doing Secret Santa in Grade 3 and it lasted up until Grade 9. As further evidence as to what terrible priorities my brain has, allow me to list what I received every year of Secret Santa.
Grade 3: A Smurf.
Grade 4: A giant candy cane.
Grade 5: The aforementioned Garfield bookmark.
Grade 6: After Eights chocolates.
Grade 7: A book of mazes.
Grade 8: Life Savers.
Grade 9: Ovation chocolates.
I will impress you even less by singling out two people who are on my Facebook Friends list - people who I drew in the Secret Santa. Shawn Linklater, I drew you in Grade 3 and I gave you a water game thingee. Tracy Wamsteeker, I drew you in Grade 8 and I bought you an issue of Tiger Beat. Sorry about that. I had no idea what to get you and my mom finally picked something out on my behalf.
But let's go back to Grade 5. RK drew my name and this did not make her happy because she was a popular model girl and I was a geek. She did not give me my gift during the present exchange. Instead, she waited until everyone else was gone and then she handed me this little blue envelope. "Please don't tell anyone it's from me," she said.
I never was a big fan of Garfield. I always preferred Snoopy. Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, was intelligent and he used the comics to explore matters of theology, philosophy and psychology. Jim Davis just drew a fat orange blob, made jokes about how the fat orange blob liked lasagna, and made eight billion dollars marketing the fat orange blob to everyone in the world.
Jim Davis and RK are why I hate Garfield to this day.
4.
Item: Used Twisted Sister tapes, walnut shells with funny faces drawn on them, and a yellow piece of fabric with the words QUIET RIOT on it.
Occasion: Various birthdays and Christmases 1985-1987.
Who gave it: Ozi.
I don't know if my good friend Ozi was just a cheapskate or if I was just too freakin' generous. I imagine we meet halfway in the middle but that doesn't mean I was thoroughly unimpressed with some of the cruddy presents I'd received from him when we were teenagers.
Ozi was a big fan of the movie Tron, so I was really excited when I was in K-Mart one day and I saw a Tron Atari game in the bargain bin. I bought it to give him as a Christmas present and my mom was furious at me. She thought it was really inappropriate that I spend more money on my friends' Christmas presents than I did my own family. I tried to explain to her that the Tron game was in the bargain bin and that it only cost me $4. That didn't matter to her. She said I couldn't give it to Ozi as a Christmas present and that I'd have to wait to give it to him for his birthday instead. I did not understand this logic and I still don't today. My dad told me that mothers have thinking processes all their own and this is one of the truest things anyone has ever said.
But the $4 price tag of the Atari game is completely irrelevant. What's important is that (a) I spent my money on Ozi and (b) I made a little effort to find something he would like.
And that's why I was mad when Ozi just gave me his old Twisted Sister tapes for my birthday one year. He either decided he didn't like Twisted Sister or had made copies on his ghetto blaster. When I told him I was a fan of the heavy metal group Quiet Riot, he got a yellow piece of fabric from his mom's sewing kit, wrote QUIET RIOT on it, and then cut it thin so I could wear it as a bandanna. I think I wore it once or twice but then I stopped because I thought it looked stupid.
The worst was the birthday when he gave me some walnut shells that he had drawn faces on with a magic marker. He tried to convince me it was a good gift by holding the shells in his hands and making them talk funny. Didn't work. It was a crappy gift and we both knew it.
Ozi is no longer with us and this is something I mourn everyday. 'Lest anyone think I am speaking ill of my best friend, I will say that he turned into a very warm-hearted and generous man.
3.
Item: Remote control from a car (without the car.)
Occasion: Absolutely nothing.
Who gave it: Todd Jones.
Remember Todd Jones? The kid who gave me an orange?
Well one day, he walked up to me and gave me a remote control from a car racing toy he had at home. The idea was you hooked the remote up to a race track and when you squeezed the trigger, the car would go faster.
The problem is there was no car. No track. Just a remote with a severed cord.
I asked Todd what I was supposed to do with it.
"You can race cars with it," he said.
"But I don't have any race cars."
"Then you can pretend."
Oh if only life were that easy, Todd-o. Man, if pretending I had a car was just as cool as actually owning one, I don't think the smile would ever leave my face.
2.
Item: Wham poster book
Occasion: Christmas, 1985.
Who gave it: Aunt Margaret.
This would have been an awesome present if I wanted to spend the rest of my junior high school life getting beat up every single day. Not once a week or every second Wednesday, mind you. I'm talking EVERY SINGLE DAY! If there was just one item that told the school bully to use me as his punching bag, then the Wham poster book was definitely it.
The Wham poster book contained dozens of posters of George Michael and the other guy who isn't important. In the posters they were smiling, hooking their thumbs in their jeans, pointing to their crotches, wearing pastel-coloured clothes, smiling some more, wearing white pants, and dancing. Seriously, when George Michael came out of the closet upteen years later, I was not surprised. I had the Wham poster book to thank for that.
I knew the Wham poster book was the shittiest present ever about two seconds after opening it. My Aunt Margaret gave it to me during our family's sojourn to her house for Christmas dinner. I was only half angry at Aunt Margaret. Wham was, after all, at the height of its popularity. Careless Whisper and Wake me up before you go-go were all over the radio. The problem was that I was not a 12-year-old girl. I was a 12-year-old boy.
This didn't phase Aunt Margaret at all. She urged me to take the Wham book to school and stick the posters inside my locker. The fact that I am alive today is proof I did not do this. What I should have done was kept the Wham book for a year so I could give it to Tracy Wamsteeker in Grade 8 when I drew her name for Secret Santa, but I did not do that. My relationship with the Wham book was very much like a Baptist's relationship with a Ouija board - namely, get it the frig away from me as fast as possible.
When Ozi came over to my house shortly after Christmas, I showed him the Wham book. He suggested we use it as a dartboard.
And so we spent an enjoyable Sunday afternoon throwing darts at George Michael and the other guy who isn't important.
1.
Item: Bag of pee.
Occasion: No reason whatsoever. June of 1982.
Who gave it: Todd Jones.
Todd Jones culminated a spectacular year of shitty gifts by peeing in a baggie, sealing it with a Twist Tie, and giving it to me.
I had no idea how to react. I couldn't punch him because I was holding a bag of pee. Also, I was too nice to punch anyone. Plus, I knew that Todd Jones wasn't trying to be nasty. He just really wanted to be my friend and he felt that friendship demanded the ultimate sacrifice - his pee.
Get this - the pee was not fresh. Todd told me that he'd actually peed in the bag the previous night. This was premediated peeing. Somehow, he had peed in the bag, managed to hide it from his parents, let the pee rest overnight while he slept, and then snuck the pee bag into his backpack without his mom seeing. The bag of pee then survived a bus ride to school and the entire morning of classes. It was then, at recess, that Todd Jones presented me with his pee.
I thanked Todd and then I - well, I'm afraid I don't remember. Being handed a bag of someone else's pee can be a traumatic experience unless you're a medical laboratory technologist (which is something my high school girlfriend once wanted to be.) I think I probably excused myself and threw the pee away. I then spent the rest of the day worried that Todd would ask for his pee back ("I have more I can give you - I just had apple juice.")
Todd did not return to that school in Grade 4. I was vaguely grateful for this because I had no idea how to deal with him.
In a way, he reminds me of the late John Lennon.
All he was saying was give pee a chance.
I've also given some awful gifts. I never got punched for giving a bad present, but I have gotten some strange looks. Okay, so maybe my mom and dad didn't need a big bulky adding machine from the garage sale down the street. But it was the thought that counts.
As for me, I've received tonnes of awful gifts over the year. I've done some thinking and I was able to narrow them down to the top ten. Here they are.
10.
Item: Deck of Braille playing cards.
Occasion: Christmas, 1987.
Who gave it: My brother.
I feel bad about picking on my bro here because he actually gives awesome presents. For Christmas, he made me a fountain pen. That's because he knows how much I love fountain pens and he went ahead and created one in his woodshop. I won't let anyone else write with it. It's one of my most treasured possessions.
So I feel a little cruddy when I single my kid brother out for giving me a deck of Braille playing cards. He wasn't trying to be mean; it was actually a very sweet gesture. He gave me the cards for Christmas of 1987 when I was 14 and he was nine. He knew that I was really into magic, especially card tricks, and he was worried that blind people might not get to enjoy my performances. So he brought me a Braille deck so I could amaze the likes of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.
Alas I never got to perform a card trick for a blind person, but the existence of the Braille deck made me feel bad for the visually impaired who will never get to appreciate a good magic trick the way other people can.
Sigh.
Love ya, kid bro.
Now it's time to get nasty.
9.
Item: A book about Primitive Man.
Occasion: Ninth birthday party, 1982.
Who gave it: Robbie Yates.
When we were nine, we pretty much wanted the world. Matt said he wanted a Commodore 64. Jay said he wanted a Rubik's cube and Pac-Man for his Atari. JP said he wanted a Lando Calrissian action figure. Well, him and Yoda.
Me, I just wanted to learn everything I could about primitive man. That's why I was so delighted when Robbie Yates showed up at my ninth birthday and gave me this gift right here:
Man, I was thrilled. I was so happy that I punched Robbie Yates right in the eye. Then I took that book on Primitive Man to my bedroom, where I threw it under my dresser. It stayed there until I was 21 and we were having a campfire in the backyard and we needed kindling.
Seriously, did Robbie Yates think I was an anthropologist or something? When I was eight, all I could talk about were magic tricks and Star Wars and aliens and the cartoons that showed on TV on Saturday morning. Why in the world would he buy me a book on Primitive Man?
It was years later when I discovered the truth. That book on Primitive Man was not sold as a single item. You couldn't find it in a bookstore. Instead, you'd find it in the party section of a department store. The book on Primitive Man was sold in sets of 10 for $4.99. The idea was to stick them in loot bags (remember those?) to be given away at the end of a party.
So Robbie Yates had gotten his book on Primitive Man in a loot bag at a birthday party somewhere and had decided to regift that shitty book to me. Great! Wonderful! Shows you why Robbie Yates and I aren't close anymore.
8.
Item: Three copies of The Cars album, Heartbeat City (on cassette tape.)
Occasion: My 12th birthday, 1985.
Who gave it: Matthew Thill, Matthew Vermunt, Stuart Smith.
It was probably my fault that I got three copies of Heartbeat City on that cold day in early January of 1985. I'd invited a whole bunch of people to my birthday party, which was to take place at the Southland Leisure Centre, where we would go swimming. The kids I'd invited had been asking me what I wanted and I stupidly told them all the same thing: The Cars album, Heartbeat City. I'd seen the video for You Might Think on Video Hits and I thought it was almost as cool as anything David Lee Roth had done (I didn't need his Crazy from the Heat because I'd already bought it through the Columbia Record Club.)
See, I was dumb enough to think my friends would consult each other before asking their moms to buy me my gift. They did no such thing. And that is why, when I opened the present Matthew Thill got me, I was looking at this:
Cool, I thought. Later, after everyone goes home, I can stick this in my ghetto blaster and groove to Drive or Magic or Why Can't I Have You (which sort of made me think about a girl in our class named Jennifer, but that's another story altogether.)
Then I took hold of Matthew Vermunt's present, which was shaped exactly like a cassette tape. Matthew V had a worried expression on his face, so I was disappointed, but not surprised, to open it and find this:
"It's okay," my mom said. "You can keep one in your room and one in the car."
I grinned but didn't say anything. That was a pretty cruddy solution. It was like getting my arm cut off and my mom telling me I could use it to feed a hungry dog.
Then Stuart handed me his gift. He wasn't even going to try to surprise me.
"It's the same thing," he said.
He was right. It was this:
"Maybe you can give one of those away as a present sometime," my mom said.
Great! Now mom was recommending I hurt one of my friend's feelings. In my mind, each of those Cars cassettes was unique in that they were picked out by different people. I believed this even though I knew they were all the same. It's not like I could put one of those tapes in my walkman and say: "Oh come on, this is the tape Stuart gave me. I want the one Matt gave me instead. The acoustics are much nicer."
And that is why I kept all three of those Cars cassettes and two of them remained in their shrink wrap forever and I don't know where they are anymore but I do have Heartbreak City on my iPod and I listen to it now and then and you might think I'm crazy, but baby, it's untrue.
7.
Item: An orange
Occasion: Welcome back to school present, 1982.
Who gave it: Todd Jones.
There was this kid in my Grade 3 class who was, shall we say, special.
Good kid. Nice kid. Sweet kid. But he believed friendship was like a greased pig. Once you had it, you had to hold on tight or it would run away.
Poor Todd Jones. He really wanted to make friends with me. And I was his friend. His problem was he thought he had to give me stuff so I would stay friends with him.
Christmas of 1981 comes and goes. Then it's 1982 and time to go back to school. Todd Jones hands me a hard ball wrapped in green paper.
"Welcome back to school, Steve," he says. "This is my present for you."
Todd had given me an orange. One of those paper-wrapped easy-to-peel oranges they sell around Christmas. The orange is now orange and black and is at least as hard as rock. Eating it would be like eating erasers.
I thanked Todd and I put the orange in my backpack and told him I would eat it later.. That was a lie.
6.
Item: Iron Maiden jacket patch
Occasion: Christmas, 1985.
Who gave it: Ozi.
In Grade 7, my best friend Ozi believed that everyone in school fell into two categories - heads or preps. Preps listened to Duran Duran and Tears for Fears. Heads listened to Motley Crue and Iron Maiden. I asked what you would call someone who liked Duran Duran and Motley Crue and he said that would never happen.
Ozi was a head. To demonstrate this, he grew his hair long and he had a Led Zeppelin patch on the back of his jean jacket. Eventually, he became distressed that I, his best friend, was not a head just like he was. "No one thinks you're cool," he told me once on the way back from school. "The preps think you're a dork but even worse, the heads think you're a dork and that's really bad."
But Ozi had a solution - the Iron Maiden patch.
He bought the Iron Maiden patch at Tropicana, a headshop in downtown Calgary, with 50 cents from his allowance. This he gave to me for Christmas of 1985.
"Get your mom to iron it on to the back of your jean jacket," he said.
"But I don't like Iron Maiden."
"How do you know? You never listen to them."
"I never listen to Lawrence Welk either but that doesn't mean I want to put a Lawrence Welk patch on my jacket."
Ozi and I argued for a while. In there, I told him that you don't buy gifts for people based on what you think they should like, you buy them things based on what they like. I also told him that it would be a little funny asking my mom to iron this on to my jacket:
I mean, heavy metal is supposed to be anti-establishment and rebellious. How rebellious can you be when you have to ask your mom if she will help you put a picture of a grinning undead demon on the back of your jean jacket? That's like saying "Mommy, I want you to tell me I can be bad."
One of my most grievous failings is that I will sell myself out and do all kinds of unrealistic stupid shit in order to make other people happy. Wearing the Iron Maiden patch on my jacket would have made Ozi happy but it would have made me feel like a sellout. The Iron Maiden patch became a sort of de facto poster on my wall and Ozi grumbled for a few weeks but eventually he accepted that I wasn't going to be a convert to his way of thinking and then we were friends again. (Probably shortly after the time I bought him a Menudo patch and told him he had to wear it because I'd spent money on it.)
5.
Item: Garfield bookmark.
Occasion: Secret Santa present, Grade 5 1983.
Who gave it: RK.
If your elementary school was like mine, then you probably had to suffer through the whole Secret Santa thing. That's when you draw another student's name at the beginning of December and you have to go the whole month being extra nice to them. At the end of the month, you give them a small present (there's usually a stipulation that the gift cannot cost more than $10.)
We started doing Secret Santa in Grade 3 and it lasted up until Grade 9. As further evidence as to what terrible priorities my brain has, allow me to list what I received every year of Secret Santa.
Grade 3: A Smurf.
Grade 4: A giant candy cane.
Grade 5: The aforementioned Garfield bookmark.
Grade 6: After Eights chocolates.
Grade 7: A book of mazes.
Grade 8: Life Savers.
Grade 9: Ovation chocolates.
I will impress you even less by singling out two people who are on my Facebook Friends list - people who I drew in the Secret Santa. Shawn Linklater, I drew you in Grade 3 and I gave you a water game thingee. Tracy Wamsteeker, I drew you in Grade 8 and I bought you an issue of Tiger Beat. Sorry about that. I had no idea what to get you and my mom finally picked something out on my behalf.
But let's go back to Grade 5. RK drew my name and this did not make her happy because she was a popular model girl and I was a geek. She did not give me my gift during the present exchange. Instead, she waited until everyone else was gone and then she handed me this little blue envelope. "Please don't tell anyone it's from me," she said.
I never was a big fan of Garfield. I always preferred Snoopy. Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, was intelligent and he used the comics to explore matters of theology, philosophy and psychology. Jim Davis just drew a fat orange blob, made jokes about how the fat orange blob liked lasagna, and made eight billion dollars marketing the fat orange blob to everyone in the world.
Jim Davis and RK are why I hate Garfield to this day.
4.
Item: Used Twisted Sister tapes, walnut shells with funny faces drawn on them, and a yellow piece of fabric with the words QUIET RIOT on it.
Occasion: Various birthdays and Christmases 1985-1987.
Who gave it: Ozi.
I don't know if my good friend Ozi was just a cheapskate or if I was just too freakin' generous. I imagine we meet halfway in the middle but that doesn't mean I was thoroughly unimpressed with some of the cruddy presents I'd received from him when we were teenagers.
Ozi was a big fan of the movie Tron, so I was really excited when I was in K-Mart one day and I saw a Tron Atari game in the bargain bin. I bought it to give him as a Christmas present and my mom was furious at me. She thought it was really inappropriate that I spend more money on my friends' Christmas presents than I did my own family. I tried to explain to her that the Tron game was in the bargain bin and that it only cost me $4. That didn't matter to her. She said I couldn't give it to Ozi as a Christmas present and that I'd have to wait to give it to him for his birthday instead. I did not understand this logic and I still don't today. My dad told me that mothers have thinking processes all their own and this is one of the truest things anyone has ever said.
But the $4 price tag of the Atari game is completely irrelevant. What's important is that (a) I spent my money on Ozi and (b) I made a little effort to find something he would like.
And that's why I was mad when Ozi just gave me his old Twisted Sister tapes for my birthday one year. He either decided he didn't like Twisted Sister or had made copies on his ghetto blaster. When I told him I was a fan of the heavy metal group Quiet Riot, he got a yellow piece of fabric from his mom's sewing kit, wrote QUIET RIOT on it, and then cut it thin so I could wear it as a bandanna. I think I wore it once or twice but then I stopped because I thought it looked stupid.
The worst was the birthday when he gave me some walnut shells that he had drawn faces on with a magic marker. He tried to convince me it was a good gift by holding the shells in his hands and making them talk funny. Didn't work. It was a crappy gift and we both knew it.
Ozi is no longer with us and this is something I mourn everyday. 'Lest anyone think I am speaking ill of my best friend, I will say that he turned into a very warm-hearted and generous man.
3.
Item: Remote control from a car (without the car.)
Occasion: Absolutely nothing.
Who gave it: Todd Jones.
Remember Todd Jones? The kid who gave me an orange?
Well one day, he walked up to me and gave me a remote control from a car racing toy he had at home. The idea was you hooked the remote up to a race track and when you squeezed the trigger, the car would go faster.
The problem is there was no car. No track. Just a remote with a severed cord.
I asked Todd what I was supposed to do with it.
"You can race cars with it," he said.
"But I don't have any race cars."
"Then you can pretend."
Oh if only life were that easy, Todd-o. Man, if pretending I had a car was just as cool as actually owning one, I don't think the smile would ever leave my face.
2.
Item: Wham poster book
Occasion: Christmas, 1985.
Who gave it: Aunt Margaret.
This would have been an awesome present if I wanted to spend the rest of my junior high school life getting beat up every single day. Not once a week or every second Wednesday, mind you. I'm talking EVERY SINGLE DAY! If there was just one item that told the school bully to use me as his punching bag, then the Wham poster book was definitely it.
The Wham poster book contained dozens of posters of George Michael and the other guy who isn't important. In the posters they were smiling, hooking their thumbs in their jeans, pointing to their crotches, wearing pastel-coloured clothes, smiling some more, wearing white pants, and dancing. Seriously, when George Michael came out of the closet upteen years later, I was not surprised. I had the Wham poster book to thank for that.
I knew the Wham poster book was the shittiest present ever about two seconds after opening it. My Aunt Margaret gave it to me during our family's sojourn to her house for Christmas dinner. I was only half angry at Aunt Margaret. Wham was, after all, at the height of its popularity. Careless Whisper and Wake me up before you go-go were all over the radio. The problem was that I was not a 12-year-old girl. I was a 12-year-old boy.
This didn't phase Aunt Margaret at all. She urged me to take the Wham book to school and stick the posters inside my locker. The fact that I am alive today is proof I did not do this. What I should have done was kept the Wham book for a year so I could give it to Tracy Wamsteeker in Grade 8 when I drew her name for Secret Santa, but I did not do that. My relationship with the Wham book was very much like a Baptist's relationship with a Ouija board - namely, get it the frig away from me as fast as possible.
When Ozi came over to my house shortly after Christmas, I showed him the Wham book. He suggested we use it as a dartboard.
And so we spent an enjoyable Sunday afternoon throwing darts at George Michael and the other guy who isn't important.
1.
Item: Bag of pee.
Occasion: No reason whatsoever. June of 1982.
Who gave it: Todd Jones.
Todd Jones culminated a spectacular year of shitty gifts by peeing in a baggie, sealing it with a Twist Tie, and giving it to me.
I had no idea how to react. I couldn't punch him because I was holding a bag of pee. Also, I was too nice to punch anyone. Plus, I knew that Todd Jones wasn't trying to be nasty. He just really wanted to be my friend and he felt that friendship demanded the ultimate sacrifice - his pee.
Get this - the pee was not fresh. Todd told me that he'd actually peed in the bag the previous night. This was premediated peeing. Somehow, he had peed in the bag, managed to hide it from his parents, let the pee rest overnight while he slept, and then snuck the pee bag into his backpack without his mom seeing. The bag of pee then survived a bus ride to school and the entire morning of classes. It was then, at recess, that Todd Jones presented me with his pee.
I thanked Todd and then I - well, I'm afraid I don't remember. Being handed a bag of someone else's pee can be a traumatic experience unless you're a medical laboratory technologist (which is something my high school girlfriend once wanted to be.) I think I probably excused myself and threw the pee away. I then spent the rest of the day worried that Todd would ask for his pee back ("I have more I can give you - I just had apple juice.")
Todd did not return to that school in Grade 4. I was vaguely grateful for this because I had no idea how to deal with him.
In a way, he reminds me of the late John Lennon.
All he was saying was give pee a chance.
Oh that was bad
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