by Jay Onrait
If you’re the kind of parent thinking about putting your son or daughter in hockey school, first sit them down and ask them this question: Does the idea of two hockey practices without shinny, followed or preceded by two one-hour sessions of dryland training, sound like how you’d like to spend your summer vacation days in thirty-degree heat? Because I’m just not convinced that these kids have any idea what they’re getting into. Sorry, hockey schools across the country, the secret is out: You’re running prison camps for kids, and people are paying you handsomely for it. Dictators around the world should probably fly to Canada in July and take notes.
When I land at the Kelowna International Airport these days (“Who had the balls to call it that?” asked comedian Jeremy Hotz upon visiting the city), I am greeted warmly by my niece and nephews, and the fun begins. My sister is two years younger than me, and like many people of her generation she loves the Food Network and food shows and has taken a liking to cooking at home. My sister really takes the reins in the kitchen around the holidays now. And what a spread she had planned for us on Christmas Eve of 2010.
When we were younger, my family would make frequent trips to Edmonton for a little family getaway. We didn’t call it Edmonton, though. We called it “the City.” It was the closest big city to my small town, and calling it by its name just seemed like a waste of time for everyone. It was clear which city we were talking about. We weren’t talking about Des Moines.
The culinary highlight of the weekend in the City would be a trip to “Bourbon Street” at the West Edmonton Mall. Anchoring the Bourbon strip was a seafood restaurant called the Pacific Fish Company, where we would gorge on mountains and mountains of huge crab legs. As a thirteen-year-old I was pretty much convinced that crab legs were the most delicious things on the planet. All that sweet meat dipped in hot butter was a really special treat. As I got older, like many seafood lovers I began to eat less crab and more lobster, but I never forgot how delightful it was to stop by Pacific Fish for those crab legs with my parents.
My sister never forgot either. “Let’s do crab legs on Christmas Eve!” she said to me with great enthusiasm over the phone weeks before I was to arrive in Kelowna.
“Sure,” I replied. Gorging on seafood the night before Christmas like good Catholics and then passing out in a peaceful slumber while waiting for Santa to arrive? What could be better than that?
On Christmas Eve my parents and I made our way over to my sister’s house. My sister and her husband now live in Kelowna, so the holidays are a breeze. My sister does all the cooking, or most of it. We help clean up and then retreat back to my parents’ house for a peaceful Scotch or three without the grandchildren distracting us from our boozing.
As we sat down for our meal I was delighted to be transported back to my childhood. Erin had taken care of everything: a delicious salad, steamed potatoes, and of course the crab legs, which had been secured from Costco that very day. Yes, Costco. I once shocked my best friends by revealing to them that I thought Costco’s meat department was underrated and that they should be buying steaks there. You would think I had told them to buy their steaks at a military supply store. Though I suppose at this point Costco sells military supplies as well. Those of us who love Costco are well aware that it is a great place to get steaks and seafood at great prices. That last sentence was in no way my attempt to appeal to the good people at Costco to stock this book in their stores. (At a reasonable discount, of course.)
I began cracking open those delicious crab “gams” and digging out all that tender meat inside while my dad opened the wine and my mom drank it. I am a real “dipper,” so I was drowning every piece in butter. The whole experience was an absolute delight, and I congratulated my sister on a job well done. After dessert and a bit of port as a digestif, Mom and Dad and I went home for our Scotch. We promised to return bright and early the next day to watch the kids open their presents, and my sister was already planning a massive breakfast of eggs Benedict. My sister is like Giada DeLaurentiis without the boobs!
Back at Mom and Dad’s, Food Network Canada was running a marathon of one of my favourite shows: The Best Thing I Ever Ate. What a great show! Food Network stars describing their favourite dishes in their favourite restaurants—it’s the very definition of food porn. It’s also the perfect thing to watch with your parents over the holidays if the World Juniors haven’t started. But around episode three, I started to realize something inside me wasn’t quite right. I don’t know if I had eaten too many crab legs or just caught a bug on the way to Kelowna. Whatever it was inside me that was turning my insides out, I was about to pay the price for it.
The next twenty-four hours of my life would largely consist of me expunging fluid from my anus with the consistency and liquidity of chocolate milk. First it was a violent bout of diarrhea, followed by a furious bout of vomiting, and reverse and repeat, over and over. It was completely and totally unbearable. That feeling you get when you simply can’t wipe your ass anymore because it’s so violently charred that it looks like charcoal in your barbeque at the end of the summer. You feel like you’ve been repeatedly punched in the chest because you’ve been heaving into the toilet for hours. As my parents quietly continued to watch Best Thing, I made return trip after return trip to the bathroom to relieve myself of whatever bug I had contracted that evening. Pooping and puking. Pooping and puking. Over and over and over until I was convinced I had no fluids left whatsoever and my insides must look like fruit leather.
Obviously, my parents became increasingly concerned about my condition each time I returned to join them for a brief respite in the living room. I wouldn’t be back there to visit for long, just enough time to recap what was going on: “My stomach is in really, really bad shape,” I said, stating the obvious, “and seeing Guy Fieri eat rib tips on TV right now is not helping the cause.”
Right around my twentieth trip to the loo, my parents, and specifically my mom, started to become really concerned. They actually followed me to the bathroom. I had shut the door, and they could clearly hear me vomiting on the other side. “Are you okayyyyy?” asked my mom. Yeah, I’m great, Mom, I’m great. “Open the door,” she said. Why? I wondered. “Just open it.” She was not afraid of what she was about to see, but she should have been.
I opened the door.
There I was in all my thirty-six-year-old glory on the floor of the bathroom in front of the toilet. At that point I was wearing nothing but my underwear: white Calvin Klein boxer briefs (I had stripped down to almost nothing because I was sweating so badly). If that pair of underwear could talk they would have said, “Kill … me.”
For a brief moment I thought back to what it must have been like when I was born.
It was the early ’70s. My parents were baby boomers from Saskatchewan with very little money and big dreams. They were just trying to carve out a life for themselves. My dad wanted a baby boy he could send to hockey school to do wall-sits; my mom wanted a child she could nurture and raise and be proud of. It was the greatest moment of their lives! The possibilities and opportunities for their newborn son were endless.
Fast-forward thirty-six years.
There, before them on the bathroom floor, was their son sitting cross-legged in front of perhaps the most well-used toilet in North America that evening. They must have wondered, for a brief moment, if this was what it was like to have a crackhead for a son.
I stared up at my parents, who were looking down at me with faces of concern.
And I promptly shit my pants right in front of them.
Loudly.
Just imagine hearing the sound that an eight-year-old boy makes when he’s imitating someone with uncontrollable diarrhea: using his lips and two hands to imitate a loud, flapping, wet fart noise.
Now imagine that noise, for real. I filled those Calvin Klein briefs for a good five seconds until they looked like a sausage casing trying to contain its contents. I filled my already soiled drawers in front of the two people who had bro
ught me into this world. All the while, as this was happening, I continued to stare right into their horrified eyes like a poker player waiting for the guy across the table to make a move. The entire thing happened out of the blue and it was uncontrollable. I completely lost control of my bowels. Perhaps I was simply exhausted and could no longer control the movement of my rectum. All I know is, I was sitting on the floor in front of the toilet, with my parents looking down on me, and the next thing I knew I was crapping my pants. Loudly.
I looked up at my mom.
And I said … “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she replied.
Have you ever taken a moment to think of all the people you could shit your pants in front of and have them simply say, “It’s okay”? For most people the list is pretty short. For others the list does not exist at all. Maybe your husband or wife, but certainly not right after you’ve been married. Shitting your pants in front of your new spouse is pretty much grounds for divorce—they might even be able to get an annulment.
It was as if, for a moment, I had forgotten that my parents and I were human beings, and instead I was so sick that I thought we were horses.
You’ve seen horses take a shit while they’re walking and not even break stride, right? You’re walking down the street when two cops and their magnificent horses clop, clop, clop right beside you. How fun! Then one of them drops a basketball-sized turd on the road beside you. Not so fun anymore. Horses shit in front of each other as they’re eating. I’ve never lived in a barn, but I imagined that shitting in front of my parents was like getting a glimpse of life as a horse in a barn. Shitting in front of the rest of the horses in my family, and then continuing on with my day.
Mom and Dad, sufficiently aware that there was nothing more they could do but pretend this entire incident had never happened, returned to watch a show about food that must have been really awful after what they had just witnessed. I continued my cycle of physical hell through most of the night, so thirsty from dehydration I would have killed someone for a carbonated beverage.
The next day Mom told me I should probably throw out the bath mat I had been sitting on that night. And the underwear. She even thought the shower curtain should be replaced. I’m pretty sure she got an entire cleaning crew in after I left to fumigate and disinfect her guest bathroom. It was likely months before she even ventured in there.
The next year we played it safe and went with turkey.
I remember when I left high school for university. Like many teenagers who grew up before the days of the Internet, I kept an entire stack of pornographic magazines hidden under my bed. When I returned home one weekend to visit, I was horrified to find out that my old bed had been replaced by a new one. “We found a deal!” said my parents. There was never any mention of the sticky, disgusting pornographic magazines that they clearly had to have disposed of. They never mentioned it once, and I was very grateful for that.
They never mention the time I shit in front of them, either, and I’m grateful for that, too.
CHAPTER 5
The First Job
MY FIRST DAY AS AN intern with TSN was in January of 1996. I frankly couldn’t believe I was standing in the newsroom where legends of the Canadian sports broadcasting industry like Dave Hodge and Jim Van Horne plied their trade. I had beaten out a number of other broadcasting students across the country and was given a tidy $1,000 toward my education as well as a four-month work placement at Canada’s Sports Leader. Needless to say I was determined to get that internship. What sealed the deal for me was my experience volunteering at ITV two years previously. It made me realize that every effort you make trying to gain experience in this business can pay off in some way.
Our current show producer, the now famous Producer Tim, and I were the only two interns brought in to the Sportsdesk newsroom in January of 1996, so I guess it makes perfect sense that our fates have been tied together. We worked on “the Row”: a row of work pods where all the show’s writers sat side by side, watching games, writing down everything that happened, and writing the highlights.
It’s safe to say that probably 80 percent of the employees currently working on the television side at TSN started on the Row. It’s the place where we find out if aspiring broadcasters can handle the pace of production.
I started my internship right after the holiday season sometime in early January 1996. I was twenty-one years old at the time, and I had already arrived at the place where I wanted to spend the entirety of my working life.
That’s when I first encountered Mark Milliere.
When it all comes down to it, I owe my career to the man. He is a hugely successful broadcast executive and one of the most distinctive voices in the network’s history. And I really mean distinctive voice. No one speaks quite like Mark. I can honestly say that everyone who works at TSN tries to do an impression of his hushed delivery at one point or another during their tenure. If I could describe it I would say imagine a combination of indifference, sarcasm, and quiet tones combined with a voice one register lower than Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys. I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone who speaks quite like him. I had several bosses at TSN but ultimately I answered to Mark, I negotiated my contracts with Mark, and Mark protected me from the higher-ups at CTV when they got mad at me for mentioning on air how bad I thought the show Pan Am was. Mark has probably saved my ass more times than he’d like to mention or remember.
Mark also had the power to fire me, and I always imagined that’s how my tenure with the network would end one day. One of our online producers at TSN.ca, who would like to remain nameless, imagines Mark would get a kick out of firing people using knockknock jokes:
“Hey, Jay,” he would come up to me and say.
“Yes, Mark?” I would reply.
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“You’re fired.”
Something succinct like that. Mark is a man of few words.
These days Mark’s title is executive vice-president of production, and he is basically in charge of the entire on-air look of the network and all the shows, but when I started back in 1996 Mark was one of several producers on Sportsdesk. He produced the 6:30 edition of the show, which was hosted by Jim Van Horne at the time. I met him on my first day at the network, or should I say, I was ignored by him on my first day at the network.
Wearing what was probably a T-shirt that featured a box of Trix on it or maybe the Brillo logo, I tentatively approached Mark, who was sitting at his regular desk in the middle of the newsroom typing away on the computer.
Gwen, the newsroom assistant, had already told me to ask Mark what my first task would be. Also known as “the first day of the rest of my life” (cue the Perfect Strangers theme).
“Hi, Mark!” I said cheerfully. “My name is Jay. I’m the new intern from Ryerson. Anything I can help you with to get started?” I was pretty good at introductions, even then.
Silence.
Not just silence, but a complete lack of acknowledgement. Mark was completely ignoring me. Not saying “Just hold on a sec, I’ll be right with you” or “Hey, man, come back in five minutes.”
It was literally as if I weren’t standing there at all. I might as well have been invisible.
Jim Van Horne was sitting in the desk next to Mark typing away as well. I looked over to him for something, anything, but he didn’t look up, either, nor did the person sitting on the other side of Mark.
It was as if I were in one of those movies where I die and then come back as a ghost, and I’m trying to get people to pay attention to me for several scenes. Later, I finally realize I’m dead and that I have to help my former fiancée meet a new man and move on with her life, or something like that. You know the film. It stars me and Ricky Gervais and Whoopi Goldberg and probably features a dog as the only character in the film that can see or hear me.
Finally, after what seemed like five minutes of standing next to this man looking like a complete idiot,
I sheepishly wandered back to the Row, where all the show’s writers sat and watched games. Given that it was an afternoon in the middle of winter, there were likely no live sports to watch, so I chatted away with everyone else, including Tim, not yet Producer Tim, still an intern like me. Tim had arrived earlier than me and had also been stonewalled by Mark, which made me feel slightly better but still very confused. Is it possible that I might be ignored by this guy for the entirety of my four-month internship? Was it my responsibility to hit him across the head to get his attention? My head was filled with anxiety when I was suddenly awakened from my daydream by a very distinct voice.
“Jay!” said Mark in about the loudest voice level I’ve heard from him before or since.
I spun around. He was talking to me! He was talking to me!
“Right here!” I said, just a touch overenthusiastically.
“Where the hell have you been? You were supposed to start fifteen minutes ago.”
Was this a joke? Was someone playing a joke on the new guy? I stared at Mark, who had the stone-faced expression of an angry parent. No, this was clearly not a joke.
“I’ve … I’ve been here the entire time. I came up to say hi to you fifteen minutes ago. Do you remember?”
Mark not only didn’t remember he didn’t care. “I need you to watch ABC news feeds for anything we might want to use in our “News and Notes” segment. Can you do that?” he asked.
I had watched news feeds while volunteering at ITV, so this was actually a job skill I had already acquired: watching TV. Truthfully, I had been preparing for this job my entire life.