I was down to my last cigarette getting off the train in Toronto. This was good and bad: good because I don't smoke, bad because I wanted to be in Fiji. This must have been an oversight on the travel agent's part that booked my trip. I should have been suspicious right from the beginning when I saw the Canadian flag tattooed on the roof of her mouth. How did I know she had a tatoo there? That's a story for a different time. Luckily this is that time.
The travel agent's office was right next to a hockey rink which was frequented by the high school team from the Home for Wandering and Criminally Insane Boys. The travel agent's name was Langostino Bach and it was apparent the she had some interest in either me or the box of doughnuts I was carrying at the time. To break the ice she opened her mouth to show me the post-nasal drip forming on her uvula when a hockey player, the victim of an over zealous opponent, was hip-checked so hard that he came crashing through the wall and thrusted his hockey stick into the back of Langostino's neck, exposing a tatoo of a Canadian flag on the roof of her mouth. She later revealed that the flag appears to move when she gargles with salt water.
Oddly enough, I was not as impressed with her as most people might have been, but suffice it to say that she had a certain je ne sais quoi, a particular metzo-metzo, an ever-familiar bowl-o-rama mastrodonare, a...a...how do you say, a pinshwa del mo canissy wop dilly penken ogwa bik. Despite all of this, the roof of her mouth was etched onto my mind for good. There were, however, a few subtle traits that might have escaped all but the most discerning eye.
She had eyes that would make milk curdle...a forehead that would make laundry mold...a shoulder blade that would make a common slug froth at the mouth...a connecting earlobe that would make the observer think of a road map of Afghanistan...her eyebrows were connected by dots tattooed on her face...her mouth quivered from a vitamin deficiency and the majority of her face was covered by puck marks...the kind made from a hockey puck and not acne. She always wore shoes of dead people to remind her. It didn't matter what she remembered because to her it was a means to an end. This was unfortunate because in the end she didn't know what the term "a means to an end" means. So the response to people's question about why she wore dead people's shoes to remind her that they were a means to an end meant nothing to her or the people asking the question. This was what I liked about her.
We later met again, by accident, at a beef jerky conference in the well know town of Congruence, Wisconsin which is the beef jerky and Elvis shaped ice cube tray capitol of the USA. She was standing next to a display of beef jerky flavored yogurt made by Cows, Cows and Still More Cows, Inc. (CCSMCI, or Cowsmic for short) of Bovine, Texas. She had just sneezed into a vat of beef jerky flavored yogurt out on display. There were several employees of Cowsmic hopelessly spooning nose matter out of the display yogurt. They weren't very happy. This is when I came along and slipped on a piece of stray nasal discharge on the floor. She was just getting over probably the worst head cold seen by humans, Pop-Tarts or guppies. This was another thing I liked about her.
Lying on the ground, I stared up to see here looking at me as if I had done something wrong!
She said, "What do you think this is...a hotel?" "As a matter of fact", I replied, "it is." She said, "Oh."
We were in the Prawns Bivick Royal Hotel's main conference room. Nobody knows what Prawns Bivick means, but it is theorized that it is not a person's name, instead, is a combination of two words: prawns refer to shrimp and bivick is Latin for "two arteries on one's forehead that form a strong likeness to the Tigris and Uphaties rivers". The theory alleges that a local ink salesman got his head caught in between the exhaust pipe and the chassis of his car in an attempt to kill a rabid chipmunk that had bit him on the chin and wouldn't let got. The ink salesman remembered this trick from the back of a can of lard. After the police got to the man and chiseled the rabid chipmunk off his face, they noticed that the chipmunk had bulging arteries in its forehead that strongly resembled two merging rivers. Since this was the 74th occurrence involving an ink salesman, a rabid chipmunk, an exhaust pipe and bulging chipmunk-forehead arteries, the only logical step was to dedicate the next major building to this common incidence. The town planners were drawn, as if by forceps, to the name prawns bivick and who could blame them. This theory failed in explaining how the relationship of this incident to shrimp, but that day nobody really cared, and the local hotel anthropologist, Srwack J. Lozenge, had guests.
Looking up at her, while lying flat on my back, I could clearly see the highways and byways of her nostrils. This didn't really do much for me but it had to be said.
She said, "Looks like both of us have problems." "Speak for yourself!" "I was", she said, pulling out a medic alert card stating that she had dual personalities. "Oh", I mumbled.
It turned out that her other personalities was a Mid-Western mulch distributor named Gus. This struck me as odd...but, not too odd for only last week, I opened up a wax museum featuring actual-size DNA molecules of various crustaceans and spiny European hedgehogs.
We were instantly drawn together...not only in a romantic sense, but in a literal sense as well...some local artist, witnessing my fall and Langostino's dual personality medic alert card, ran over with a sketch pad and started to draw our caricatures. This wasn't important.
What was important was that gravity continue to work at all times and under all circumstances. Langostino and I later discussed our similar views on gravity, its necessity and general goodness over beef jerky ice cream sundays when we later got together for casual conversation.
The conversation naturally turned to the specific odors of low tide and its place in the home. From that point on, we were well on our way towards a relationship based on mutual understanding and aquatic smells.
One day, while on my way to visit the local chapter of the 'Brothers In Search Of Spotless Turnips' lodge, I noticed a stray piece of waxpaper stapled to the back of a school crossing guard.
I was sure that was not any waxpaper stapled to the back of the school crossing guard.
There was no argument - Langostino had a more than different view of the world. This became all the more apparent when, while attending the sixth annual jelly-fish impersonation conference in Newark, New Jersey (the jelly-fish capitol of the world), I popped the question:
"So what is your view of the world?" She scanned the room, as if looking for anyone that might be listening, and whispered, "We are all reflections." From a physics point of view, this was true and before I could finish saying, "Well anyone knows..", she interjected with, "I'm not finished." The room dimmed, mainly because it was time for hand shadow jelly-fish contest, but she continued. "You know what you see, you know what you hear, you know what you smell, you know what you feel and you know what you taste." There was pause. "You know?" "Yes", I replied. "Well, then you understand?" "Understand what?" There was this growing sense that I asked the wrong question. "My view of the wall." "What wall?" "Any wall, a wall, this wall." She gestured to the wall in front of us where Lipwald "the Spanker" Grizzle was doing his hand shadow impersonation of the spiny Alaskan snub-nosed jelly-fish. "No, no, no. I said 'what is your view of the WORLD.'" "Oh, well I view the world as a bowl of after-dinner mints."
It was a different view, though I can't say it was strange, since just last year I subscribed to the National 'Save the Q-Tip' foundation; an organization aimed at preventing the Q-Tip from becoming an endangered species.
There were several different games Langostino and I played during our spare time together, but nothing was more exciting, provocative, unabashed, non-disclosing, fully integrated, striking a strong resemblance to taco salad, nothing evoked a more animal response, brought out the true colors of a person, reflected one's inner most being, brought more meaning to the phrase "spherical crouton" than the diving board game of Julio Hargarhargarar (pronounced "hulio hargarhargarar").
The object of the game was to have one person lie face down on a diving board, with their head hanging over the edge, while the other person took a running start, jumped onto their chest, and tried to find the proper foot location to produce the sound "HARGARHARGARAR!" from the person getting stomped. Ultimately, there were no winners.
'Tino, a nickname used only by her close friends, was in the kitchen, filling her nostrils with crushed red peppers, when she eventually sneezed and an outdoor-barbecue-sized "thing" flew part-way out of her left nostril and remained dangling from a strand, swinging to-and-fro in a highly elliptical pattern with a slight precession. We were both in the midst of a world record polyp. Little could be done to contain our excitement, except of course, seeing how many words we could make from the word "tin".
The single most painful experience of my life was during the first phases of the semi-annual Afrin Large Nostril contest of Mizmick, Ontario. The contestants were all lined up for the judges, displaying proudly their omnipresent beaks, when Tino turned to me mumbling from the corner of her mouth, "...could fit a fork-lift in that guy's nose, John." Turning to her, all I could bring myself to say was, "Don't call me John!" We didn't speak again until the hotdog man accidentally spilled a container of 15 molar nitric acid directly into my left ear canal. He apologized and made some comment of doing independent studies in oxidation-reduction reactions during spectator sports. He must have thought we were pretty stupid to believe he needed 15 molar, and not 12 molar nitric acid to complete the reactions.
It started out as a harmless prank when Tino and I first got these periwigs during the Halloween season and told my neighbor that he was on trial for not believing in aliens. We told him that WE were aliens and that this form of oppression would not be tolerated by the Five Orders of Periwigs; a life form similar to humans in every respect except for the desire to wear large curly white-hair wigs and contract their chin muscles. He was visibly shaken by the incident.
The joke back-fired when we discovered that our neighbor was HIMSELF an alien from the planet Wrwrcognisen, which translates roughly to "And the Cheese Went Flying". He explained that Wrwrcogniseniens, beings from Wrwrcognisen, are born covered with hair, lose all of it in their mid-years and then become a hair-ball again towards the end of their life, or if they come close to the sides of their drive ways. He went on to describe the procedure for criminal punishment which entailed exposure of the forehead and temples in public. This had no significance to our prank, but he admitted that a gastric disturbance compelled him to relate the story. The real reason for his unrest was that he was in a restaurant with his family, on the anniversary of his prize winning beet award, when they all placed five orders of periwigs; a delicacy for the Wrwrcognisens. The waiter spontaneously combusted ruining the evening - this mark was etched in his mind like eleven year old swamp scum pounded into a silk dress with a jack hammer operated by a sweaty, tobacco chewing, sea sick leper pulling a rabid dog.
One day we made this list. It was an odd autumn day. We were trying to relocate all of the leaves that had fallen off this tree in a wooded region near Erysipelas National Forrest (home of the tragic St. Anthony's fire of 1973). It was the ultimate puzzle to find out where each leaf went on the original branch. The odds were against us since within 50 square meters there were at least 137 trees and the leaves of the surrounding trees had been blown indiscriminately into the area we were working in. We believed this had been the work of Mylar J. Yorkspray, the local leaf-blower and laryngology expert (the study or treatment of disorders related to the larynx). But we had no proof.
With our suspicions aside, we found quickly that our task at hand would take many lifetimes to complete and the luck of a dry handkerchief in the North Pole. As a result, we decided to make a list of all things NOT related to ambulatory ocean sponges. Since there are no ocean sponges that could ever walk about, our list could, without any doubt whatsoever, include every possible object in the universe - a task, we concluded, far easier that the stupid leaf matching puzzle that we read in an article named "Eleven and a Half Ways to Ruin the Rest of Your Life."
The "courtship" process for Tino and I was both short in duration and bizarre in format. The duration was only a few weeks but the format was one that made the cover of "Crash and Burn" magazine. What probably won her my attention was the time she assured me that a grapefruit hit with an aluminum baseball bat would never travel fast enough to collapse a person's trachea. Her verifying this premise sent me to the hospital for five days and engraved her memory into my heart. To this day, I still get a lump in my throat thinking about that event.
But I was not the only one who was struck by cupid's arrow (grapefruit, in this case). Yes, Tino herself, admitted that when we met she had this unusual feeling about me. Later her endocrinologist discovered that one of her stomach enzymes, tracnuopeptide (named after the renowned Nirobian eight-sided stop sign merchant and curtain advisor Gack N. Trac), was responsible for the unusual feelings she was having. But this was not the only unusual feeling Tino was having. It was one of mutual attraction of two people destined for each other; a feeling of saving society just by being together; a non-descript sensation of putting a pine cone on a bicycle seat.
Yes, we were hooked. Like salt and a salt shaker; a check mark and a questionnaire; a lance and a festering boil; a stamp and a tongue; belly-button and lint; the letters "ph" and "f"; and so on.