by Jay Onrait
Our third stop on the 2012 Kraft Tour was Bathurst, New Brunswick. It ended up being one of our best-ever crowds, around 3,000 people lining the water just off the downtown strip. We were treated like royalty from the second we arrived. They whisked us around town and took us to the Big D diner for lunch. A classic old-school burger joint that first opened in 1969, it was the kind of place where waitresses in roller skates would bring food out to your car as you waited. They are still bringing food to your cars at Big D, but the roller skates are long gone. We also stopped at McLean’s Fish Shop and were promptly shown the proper way to crack open and eat a lobster, the owner promising to ship me lobsters in less than twenty-four hours if I called him directly. The stop was shaping up to be one of our best.
The day of the event, Dan and I woke early and went to a local radio station for a quick interview followed by an autograph signing at a local Superstore that was so poorly attended the store manager apologized to us. I just told him it was good preparation for my eventual book tour, when I would be sitting with stacks of Anchorboy and looking forlorn as customers lined up with their copies of Fifty Shades of Grey and ignored me.
We had stopped at the Big D diner for the second time in two days, and by the time I arrived at the show site I, uh, really had to go number two. (Sorry, trying to make this as pleasant as possible to read. I realize you’ve already had to sit through a chapter about poop in this book.)
Dan is always adamant that he will never do a “road trip”—that is, have a bowel movement anywhere other than home or in his own hotel room. I just do not have the physiological makeup to put things off that way. So, I was faced with a bit of a conundrum. There were porta-potties, but I don’t think I need to explain why that idea was disgusting. There were toilets on the tour buses, but using them for anything other than number one was a complete and absolute non-starter—the worst violation anyone on the tour could commit. On the first year of the tour, someone dared break that rule and went number two on the bus, back when we had only one bus and not three. To this day, no one on the crew has fessed up to the crime, but Dan witnessed the rage that the bus driver displayed upon learning that someone had dared soil his septic system with solid waste. The culprit would probably have been better off to just shit on the bus driver’s face.
That afternoon, however, nature called and she was not about to be ignored. Near the show site I noticed a cluster of industrial-looking buildings, and outside of one of them three gentlemen were gathered at a picnic table enjoying their lunch al fresco. Surely they wouldn’t mind my using their company washroom, especially if they were all outside for the next hour. I gingerly approached them and hoped I wouldn’t be recognized. I could just imagine the stories now: “Onrait was in Bathurst last week. He took a dump in our bathroom. It was epic!”
As I said, I hoped I would not be recognized. I approached the picnic table.
“Onrait!” yelled the oldest of the three men.
So much for that.
I thought “Guys, can I please drop the kids off in your pool?” was perhaps a little uncouth, so instead I broached the subject with a bit more trepidation.
“Hey, guys, coming over to watch the show today?”
“You bet! Do you think you could get me a T-shirt? I opened the gate for the buses and trucks when they first arrived,” said the oldest gentleman again. The other two guys at the table were around my age, but the self-designated orator of the group looked slightly older than my parents, somewhere close to seventy perhaps.
“I wish I could, my friend, but I can’t even get one of those T-shirts.” This probably sounded like an outright lie, but it was actually true. Those T-shirts were harder to come by than a Honus Wagner rookie card. “I could get you a hat, however, but I need to ask you a favour. Do you think I could use the company washroom? Ours is a bit crowded right now.” I tried to force a laugh at that point.
“Sure!” replied the older man immediately.
Wow, that was easy! What a nice guy. I glanced over at the picnic table and noticed there were six empty beer cans, and they were each working on their third brew of the break. Wish we had these relaxed rules about drinking during our lunch break! I thought to myself.
“I can show you where it is,” said the older gentleman.
“That’s so not necessary. Just point me in the right direction and I will be out of your hair in a minute,” I offered. But the old man was having none of it. He wanted to talk about TSN and the show and whether I really couldn’t get him one of those Kraft T-shirts, and I was happy to oblige in some idle chatter for the chance to use a real washroom. He was clearly a hard-working, hard-living guy, and I wanted him to remember me as someone who took the time to chat for a minute or so before soiling his company’s likely pristine washroom facilities. We entered the building and he led me upstairs to what I assumed were his offices. I had neglected to ask what he and the other two fellas actually did for a living, but I made the assumption that since we were in an industrial park, it had to do with auto parts or construction or something else I would never understand. The old man walked a few steps ahead of me.
“My place is just up here.”
Your place?
“I live alone, so it’s a bit messy in my apartment.”
Your apartment?
Was I really about to take a shit in an old man’s apartment?
It appeared that, yes, I was about to take a shit in an old man’s apartment.
But there were other questions: Was I walking toward my impending death? Was I about to be chopped up into little pieces and thrown into the harbour? How would anyone from TSN ever find me here? Perhaps more importantly, how would Dan do the show all by himself?
I figured now was a good time to abort the mission. I called out to him as he made his way up the final steps to the third floor, his floor. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize this was your apartment building. I thought you worked here. I sincerely apologize. I should probably get going.” At this point those porta-potties were looking pretty good.
“Nah! Don’t sweat it. You might as well use it. I’m not using it!” he said with a laugh. This logic made a surprising amount of sense to me at the time. I followed him toward his front door. This was really happening. “Stranger Shit 2012” was on.
What was the worst that could happen? That he might kill me and leave me for dead? I realized it was actually pretty difficult to tell from the appearance of a person whether this was a possibility unless that person was wearing a hockey mask and you were at a summer camp. I decided to just go for it, finish the job as quickly as possible, run back to the show site, get him a hat, and pretend this entire thing had never happened.
He opened the door to his apartment.
Now the porta-potties were starting to look like bathrooms at the Bellagio.
The place was, for lack of a better term, an absolute pigsty. It had likely never been cleaned in the entire time he had lived there. Open cans of food and empty cans of beer littered the filthy kitchen. The stale smell of smoke, lager, and musty newspapers and magazines permeated the air and hit my olfactory nerves like a rocket. It smelled exactly like my grandfather’s basement, only this place didn’t fill me with memories of my childhood. This was likely the place I was going to die.
At least the smell of my rotting corpse wouldn’t affect the neighbours too much. It would probably be weeks before they noticed. By then the Kraft Tour would be over, and Dan and my other fellow employees would have assumed I had simply abandoned the company to marry a Maritime girl and lead a simpler life in New Brunswick as a morning radio DJ.
The old man led me through the small, extremely cluttered one bedroom. Hockey cards were everywhere, and literally hundreds of hats. Baseball hats to be specific.
“I collect them,” he said. “I have a few worth a lot of money.”
Perhaps the old man’s love of collecting baseball caps would be the one thing that kept me alive that afternoon. I made sure he knew what
was waiting for him if I lived through this ordeal. “I’ve got a TSN hat with your name on it! I just have to go back to the show site and pick it up.” I was trying to dangle a carrot in front of him in the hopes he wouldn’t kill me. I just wanted to poop and leave. I was actually going to do this. I was going to have a bowel movement in a complete stranger’s dirty bathroom.
And it was dirty.
“Take your time; I’ll be out here,” he said.
“Sounds good, thanks!” I replied. This was turning into some bizarre SNL sketch. As soon as I shut the door to the loo, I realized he was not going to make his way to the other side of the apartment. Instead, he decided to continue our conversation as I sat on his throne.
“So, have you ever met Wayne Gretzky?” Yes, I had met Wayne Gretzky, I replied, as I glanced over at where the roll of toilet paper should have been.
The holder was completely empty. There was one dirty towel flung over the shower. This was a dire situation. “Ever interviewed Sidney Crosby? We love Sid in the Maritimes,” he continued.
Was this really my life? I continued the conversation as if there wasn’t a door separating us while I pooped in his toilet and wondered how I was going to wipe myself. By now the rest of the crew were probably also wondering where I had disappeared to. Why didn’t I just crap my pants? At that point I really, really wished I had crapped my pants.
As I finished my business, I realized there was only one option.
I flushed the toilet—thank God that was working—and I hopped up on his bathroom counter, sat directly in his sink, and turned on the water. Then, employing a method used by millions of people in South Asia and other parts of the world, I used the handsand-water technique to clean my undercarriage.
“Everything okay in there?” the old man called out.
“Just great, thanks,” I replied.
Yeah, just great. This is exactly what I had envisioned when I entered the Canadian television business: sitting in the filthy sink of a filthy bathroom cleaning my filthy ass while having a conversation with a complete stranger and potential serial killer on the other side of the door. This must be what people were referring to when they talked about “the Golden Age of Television.”
I finished cleaning up and was grateful to see a bar of soap on the counter. After washing up, I realized there was nothing I could use to dry my hands or my undercarriage. I pulled up my shorts anyway and immediately decided this was better than having not cleaned myself at all. Then I exited the bathroom to find the old man staring straight at me. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“Everything is great, thanks so much!” I replied. A more honest conversation would have gone something like this:
“Did you just take a dump in my toilet and then clean your ass in my sink?”
“Why, yes, I sure did; thanks for the opportunity to do that!”
The old man was insistent that he have the chance to show me some of his most “valuable” baseball caps, including a vintage Labatt Lite cap. I patiently listened while he informed me about the ups and downs of the vintage baseball cap industry in our country, all the while feeling like a guy who had just had sex in an ugly girl’s apartment, wondering afterward how long he would have to stay without appearing to be rude. The answer was approximately ten minutes.
At one point I considered getting the guy’s contact information so I could pitch a reality show like Pawn Stars that would involve only vintage baseball caps, but I realized I couldn’t maintain a work relationship with someone I’d met only to relieve myself in his toilet.
“How did you meet this guy?” people would ask.
“Shat in his toilet,” I’d reply.
The old man insisted on walking me down the two flights of stairs to the back patio of the building, where the two younger men were still sitting, nursing their beers, probably wondering if I had just been raped and at the same time not caring much.
“I want that baseball cap!” proclaimed the old man. He had earned it. I trotted back over to the show site and dug through the supply trailer until I found a red TSN cap to exchange for the man’s hospitality. I ran back to the apartment building and handed it over. “Maybe I can get a shirt later too. I’ll come by the show later.” That sounded like trouble. I tried to appeal to him to drop it, but it was a bit difficult at this point.
Later, after the very successful show had been completed and we were seated at a tent signing autographs that we hoped would end up on beer fridges all over town, the old man kept popping his head around the corner like some sort of comic book villain. “Still waiting for that T-shirt!” he’d yell loud enough for everyone to hear, progressively drunker and drunker as the sun faded past the horizon and day turned to night. Our marketing manager, Tiffany De Groote, started to wonder why this old man was hanging around our tent the entire night and what exactly he meant when he told her, “Jay promised me a T-shirt!” I had to fess up about pooping in his apartment to her and the rest of the crew, much to their amusement and my embarrassment.
In the end, age and fatigue and a surprisingly long autograph line proved to be too much for the old man to handle, and he eventually slinked back across the road to his hats and beers. I wondered how often his family came to visit him, and if they ever dared make their way into his abode at all. I hoped that some way, somehow, I had made his day by shitting in his home, and I look forward to the day when I run into someone in New Brunswick who says, “Aren’t you Jay Onrait?”
“Yes?”
“You crapped in my grandpa’s toilet once!”
CHAPTER 31
The Crying Games
I KNEW THERE WAS NO way we’d be able to replicate the Vancouver Olympic Morning show at the London Games in 2012. In Vancouver, we were broadcasting at a time when there weren’t actually live events going on. The whole point of our Vancouver show was to set up the events of the day ahead, recap the events of the day before, and shamelessly promote CTV personalities in a way that hadn’t been done before or since. But in London, thanks to the time change, the day’s events would have already begun at 6:00 a.m. EST. Suddenly, instead of waking up to us talking to drunks on Robson Street, you would be waking up to actual athletes competing in Olympic events. The Olympics! On CTV!
That meant there was little chance of rounding up the old Olympic Morning gang for one more go-round, not to mention the fact that CTV had made it very clear to everyone at the network that the budget would be severely scaled back from Vancouver to London. I was unsure as to whether I would be going to London at all. Okay, that’s a lie. I assumed that after all the positive feedback the network had received for my Vancouver gig they would find something for me to do in London, but just like with The Week That Was, I was about to have my heart broken.
About a half-year before the Games started, we received our Olympic assignments. Mark Milliere called me at home on the day of the announcement to reveal that Dan and I would be hosting Olympic Morning on TSN. I was initially delighted! Then I remembered the hard truth about our coverage of the London Games; TSN hosts wouldn’t be heading to London, they’d be going to Scarborough. Dan and I would be hosting from a makeshift studio at TSN in Toronto. Several play-by-play broadcasters would be calling the Games off monitors in Toronto as well. Again, this was made apparent to all of us and was not unprecedented by any stretch. The CBC had employed such a method successfully during their coverage of the Games in Turin and Beijing.
However, despite the fact that TSN was by far the most successful cable channel in the history of this country, I could not shake the unmistakable feeling that I was being demoted.
They had decided to put my friend Dave Randorf and former Canadian Olympian Catriona Le May Doan together on the London version of Olympic Morning on CTV instead. I completely understood the logic. Dave was an outstanding broadcaster with a ton of hosting experience on big events, and Catriona had been one of the breakout broadcasting stars of the Vancouver Games. The entire point of putting Beverly Thomson and me
together for the Vancouver Games was to fill six hours of broadcast time with a bunch of different personalities under the CTV banner when there were no actual sporting events going on. My experience reading highlights came in handy for the frequent recaps during the show, and Bev’s experience interviewing people from many different backgrounds was useful for the guests visiting the studio.
Now, in London, because of the time change things would be set up much differently: The morning hosts for 2012 would be hosting a more traditional Olympic broadcast, telling viewers where they had been and then sending them to their next destination. For this reason I suppose it was deemed necessary to have a veteran broadcaster like Dave and an Olympian like Catriona as hosts to make those throws smooth and credible. This much I understood. But they were also telling Dan and me that we’d be doing the exact same show, only on TSN. So basically the Olympic Consortium executives were saying, “We know you can do this job on TSN, but we don’t trust you to do it on CTV, even though you just appeared on CTV in the morning during the last Games.” I felt a little like Brian Dunkleman after the first season of American Idol. Dunkleman co-hosted Idol along with Ryan Seacrest for season one, but by season two Dunkleman was gone and Seacrest began his solo quest to become the next Dick Clark.
Friends and strangers kept asking what I would be doing at the London Games. I kept lying and saying I didn’t know. I hated the thought of the looks on their faces when I told them I wouldn’t be doing Olympic Morning on CTV again. All of this was turning me into an angrier and more bitter brat than I already was. I approached my own boss, Mark Milliere, about my dissatisfaction. He made it clear there was very little he could do about the situation because he was not in charge of the Olympic Consortium. He did offer me an alternative, however, and I happily took it, even though it made me look like a bona fide jerk.