Sept. 2: Milk, spaghetti, and other things that come out your nose

For starters, spaghetti has never come out my nose. Milk probably has but I don’t remember it. However, I do remember one occasion when Coke came out my nose. My best friend, Jason, made it happen.

I was in junior high. The TV and the VCR were in my dad’s den, which was in the basement of our house in Haysboro. It was the start of the weekend. Jason and I had finished our Friday night routine, which was to hike over to Glenmore Landing, eat something at McDonalds, and then rent a movie at Video Show Place. We’d rented Christine, which was about a car that killed people.

So we’re downstairs and we’re watching the movie and I’m drinking Coke out of a glass stein and Jason says something really funny and Coke comes gushing out of my nose. My beverage was ruined. Through my tears, I looked into the glass and saw something that looked like a glob of margarine floating in it. You probably didn’t need to read that. I wish I could remember what Jason said. It probably wouldn’t be funny now.

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By the way, I returned the favour to Jason’s little brother, Jordan, about 10 years later. I’d become enamoured with a video game series about a demon hunter named Gabriel Knight. There were three games in the series. We were playing the second game, which was called The Beast Within. The plot concerned Gabriel Knight’s attempt to track down a werewolf that had killed some children in Germany.

I may as well get my geek on and show you a screenshot of Gabriel Knight, who is played by the American ex-actor Dean Erickson, who once guest starred on Frasier.

This is my suspicious face.

At one point in the story, Gabriel Knight has to earn the trust of a German police chief, named Komissar Leber, who was played by the American actor Nicholas Worth, who died in 2007.

Here is Nicholas Worth in his role as Komissar Leber:

Hitchcock is my twin brother

The three of us are sitting in front of the computer, watching Gabriel Knight and Leber discuss a murder case and whether or not a werewolf is involved. The discussion is intense, almost violent. Leber is onscreen, bristling, and I lean over to Jordan, point to Leber, and say: “Did you know you get to see him naked in the next scene?”

Jordan, who had been drinking grape pop, promptly barfed it all over the computer. Jason yelled - both at me and his brother, who was convulsing in laughter. He laughed because he knew there was no demand to see Nicholas Worth naked, that it would be next to impossible to justify a naked Komissar Leber in the Gabriel Knight story, and that I was a demented moron for thinking of such a stupid thing in the first place.

***

Listen: Jason made a career out of making me laugh. In Grade 7, he sat directly behind me in Mrs. Bates math class. Sometimes, he would play a character called John Toiletbowl, who was madly in love with Mrs. Bates.

Mrs. Bates would be yelling at us for our poor test scores and Jason, in the guise of John Toiletbowl, would sit behind me and quietly cheer her on. “Yeah, you tell ‘em, Mrs. Bates. I love you, Mrs. Bates. I’m poppin’ a chubby, Mrs. Bates.”

I never brayed laughter in Mrs. Bates’ math class but I sure struggled to keep a straight face.

***

Jason’s and my favourite thing to do was make funny radio shows with my tape recorder. We had a French teacher who was gloriously fat and, therefore - in Jason’s mind - prone to farting. We imagined this teacher as the host of a radio show, where he would berate people (mostly our classmates, whom we imitated poorly) while pushing out a never-ending stream of farts. The French teacher’s favourite thing to berate people for was their inability (or flat out refusal) to speak in French.

The radio show ALWAYS featured an interview with former Calgary Flames player Larry McDaniels, who, Jason decided, was always injured and, therefore, worthy of derision. In the interview, Larry was always nursing an extraordinary amount of wounded body parts. It was my job to inquire about these injuries and Jason/Larry would break out into this wild improvised story about Larry’s propensity for X-ray glasses and how he used them to check out “foxy chicks” when he was supposed to be playing hockey. Each story ended the same way: “I got a puck in the balls and I’ve never been the same since.”

I’m sitting here writing about this and I’m laughing my fool head off. If I was drinking milk, it would definitely be coming out my nose.