From Tabusintac to Tokyo | Page 6

honey, Scut emerged in high dudgeon and with murder in his red-rimmed eyes. Since Shan and I were just across the hall, he demanded to know if we had seen who it was that put the fish in his bed. Not wanting to be kicked to death, both of us professed complete ignorance, something our professors would have agreed with.
We, of course, could only imagine the fun of getting down and hot, pulling the sheets back and perhaps even lying in the bed on top of or next to a dead fish. Talk about deflating one's expectations!
The show seemed to be over when Scut and his new best friend went off to her room to continue their interrupted tango. Scut made the mistake of leaving the fish in the overheated room so the smell, previously pungent, became decidedly overpowering. Some time later, Scut's roommate, Putter arrived (most of us lived in double rooms).
Putter was pretty drunk and was accompanied by an equally drunk friend, another guy from our residence. By this time, the smell in the small room would have knocked a buzzard off a gutwagon. Undeterred, the guys turned on all the lights and proceeded to get into a fight over who was going to get the fish. The fish became the rope in a tug of war between these two morons. Of course, the one with the tail had something better to hold on to and he ripped the fish out of his buddy's hands and smacked him in the head with it. Memory fails me at this point, possibly because I was laughing too hard.
Putter, having decided to go to bed, threw the fish out the window into the snow, following it with Scut's mattress, blankets and sheets. When Scut returned the next day, he had a hard time putting all this stuff back together; we only got one set of sheets a week. His mattress was particularly hard to locate as it had migrated to the roof our lounge for some reason.
I walked softly for a couple of weeks as I was certain someone would put that incident together with the thawing fish in the lounge and come up with my name. But nothing happened.
Scut did inadvertently get his own back years later as he called me collect late one night. He and another residence boy named Roach were very drunk and decided to call me to conjure up the good ol' days. The only memorable image of Roach I can recall is him walking down a residence hallway wearing nothing except a sock and an erection. He was looking for a condom, or failing that, a balloon.
Thankfully, I never heard from either of them again.

Dining For Disaster
It's axiomatic that all cultures reserve a special place for food in their daily and social lives. For something as simple as a cuppa joe, we schedule and juggle our time to meet at predetermined locations to share conversation and libation.
Meals require even more effort and the social ramifications increase. One is expected to show up on time, sometimes dress to certain standards and bring one or many bottles of wine as a thoughtful gift to the hosts. And of course, the food is just an excuse to get together with friends to enjoy a meal, share stories, to discuss or seduce, to seal an agreement or act as a prelude to a severance of relations (frequently unintentionally).
I was first introduced to dining for pleasure as opposed to sustenance while at the University of New Brunswick. I lived in Bridges House, one of the men's residences. The young, eager, bright-eyed students in each residence were kept more or less in check by a Don.
Each residence had its share of maniacs and troublemakers who were at university to get some form of education, alcohol poisoning or a social diseasea€|sometimes all three. The Don's job was to act as a mentor and prison warden. Imagine a building housing up to 100 young adult men. It doesn't take much to start a riot.
In our case, the Don was Locutus. When we met him, he must have been in his forties but looked to us adolescents to be older than Father Time. He was immediately dubbed "Grandpa Munster". With the tender sensitivity of males of our age, we didn't bother to hide this from him and he took it in good humour. In point of fact, Locutus was a great Don; firm when he needed to be and understanding and helpful as appropriate. You crossed this guy at your peril, but he was generally pretty tolerant.
Not that Bridges House was that hard to manage. The 100 or so inmates of the building were known as being kind of wimpy. We had a large number of serious engineers in the house. Engineering students don't