From Tabusintac to Tokyo | Page 6

hugging the fish. I had thought about gutting the fish in his bed, but hey,
I'm a civilized trickster. Besides the carcass smelled bad enough just as
it was and the aroma would permeate the bedding.
Having carried out this brief commando raid undetected, I retired to
Shan's room (coincidentally just across from Scut's) to drink and await
developments.
Some time later, Scut returned. And he brought a little girl buddy with
him! Yep, our boy was gonna get screwed! Shortly after entering the
room with his 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
disease…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