Flush of Success

Flush of Success

During the first semester of their university prep year at Wentworth Collegiate Institute, Marcus and Slob obtained some meager work at a concession stand operated at the stadium where the Hamilton Tiger-Cats professional football team played their home games. The concession was located in a terribly spartan concourse hidden beneath the bleachers, an area which was normally occupied by enough pigeons to make guano clean-up the inevitable first task every week before preparing the booths for the upcoming game.

One fall Sunday in 1981 Slob, Marcus and the other staffers were just completing bird-shit duty when a truck backed up to the concession stand. The manager, a lanky adenoidal, crater-faced man of greasy demeanor, hopped down from the passenger side and walked to the back of the truck. He sent the truck’s sliding back door up on its rollers revealing dozens of bags stuffed full of furry little tiger mascots, all mysteriously wearing little sailor suits. “What the fuck…?” ejaculated a girl both Marcus and Slob were hoping to get to know.

“What she said,” added Marcus, gesturing at the pleasantly structured brunette and trying to gain points over Slob by agreeing with the girl.

Speaking at least half through his nostrils, Dave the manager tossed a bag of toy tiger-sailors at Slob and said, “These’ll be handed out with any purchase. Navy Day promotion the team is putting on.” From inside the bag in Karl’s hand a muffled tune seemed to be trying to burst forth.

“What the fuck…?” said the attractive brunette.

“They sing Anchors Aweigh when you squeeze ‘em,” Dave looked a little put out by the entire scheme himself. Marcus almost asked the brunette what she sang when you squeezed her, but decided the timing was not propitious. It was probably ‘What the fuck…’, anyway.

“What the fuck is Navy Day?” asked a kid who apparently went to the same high school as the brunette, the one across the street from the stadium.

“Good question,” added Marcus, looking askance at the manager and hoping for an answer.

“Don’t know,” shrugged Dave.

It was several days later before their buddy Michelle read the latest issue of Newsweek magazine at work and found out that Navy Day was yet another of the seemingly endless celebrations in the U.S.A. honoring that country’s military. “Why the fuck did the Tiger-Cats celebrate a foreign military, then?” was all Marcus could add after she told him of her discovery.

On that game day, however, the concession staff were quickly overwhelmed with customers clamoring for popcorn, chocolate, hot dogs and chips, colas, root beers and coffees, few enough of whom had the slightest idea what to do with the noisy, irritating little sailor cats and not many of whom were especially grateful to have one thrust at them. Soon the desperate workers were giving two and three each to any children they could find, but for some reason there was an unusual shortage of kids at this particular game.

Anchors Aweigh played in an incessant, mad campfire round medley on all sides of the embattled concession stands. The brunette was reduced to tears of anguish and abandoned her station, quitting before either Karl or Marcus could even find out her name. An efficient, business-like matronly woman already in full white uniform appeared seemingly from thin air to take her place. In the melee of serving half-time patrons no one had time to ponder the new woman’s origins, but they thanked all the gods they could remember that she was there and really, really knew what she was doing.

Barely half of the little tigers had been dispensed by the third quarter and the tiny sailors had begun to take to the air. Occasionally, someone would be hit unexpectedly by a fluffy missile which would then plop down beside the target and belt out a sickeningly enthusiastic rendition of the official anthem of the United States Navy in a wholly inappropriate baritone for such a little effigy. In the end, Slob decided that it was the timbre of the tiny tiger’s voice which people found so jarring, almost repulsive as it came from the cute little mascot.

As the game came to an end the home team engineered a stupendously daft loss, snatching bitter, last-minute defeat from the gaping jaws of victory. The gathered spectators doused the AstroTurf carpet with merrily singing stuffed animals. Few players from either team; and oddly enough no officials, felt the sting of an aerial toy sailor, but the overall dignity of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats would take several years to recover from the shower of shame. The game had been broadcast on national television and the network had mercilessly milked the cute carnage for its entertainment value, sucking maximum eyeballs onto TV screens on behalf of the sponsors.

As the storm of mascots subsided the gridiron field was left looking like a miniature Gettysburg or; as Shakespeare’s King Duncan might have described it, ‘Appeared to memorize another Golgotha’! Strewn about in humming heaps still eulogizing the seaborne life with vigor in spite of their unintended and ramshackle comportment, the little beige felines in their adorable white uniforms were in places piled three and four feet high. Most of the field remained barren, yet the TV cameras made the most of the unbloody shambles where the tigers piled up.

Beneath the bleachers a full quarter of the toys remained in their bags. These would eventually be returned to their distributor and reappear in discount stores in the United States, where baffled bargain hunters would be left to mull the connection between tigers and the naval branch of the military.

Meanwhile, as real storm clouds began to gather over the carnage, at the manager’s urging the concession crew sprang into action. Grabbing the emptied bags piled behind the booth they scattered onto the field, grabbing as many of the toys as they could and stuffing them back into the bags. The food stand workers raced to rescue as many of the tigers as possible with the hope that the distributor could be convinced to take them back as well. Slob and Marcus dived on a pile near the thirty-yard line and shortly surfaced with three full bags each, the tigers still belting out their rousing tune.

As it happened, the distributor refused the soiled product and the concessioners were saddled with multiple large bags of cheery, deep-voiced ocean-going cats to store somewhere. Marcus had four bags stashed in his mother’s attic and Slob had somehow managed to stuff five bags into the notorious crawl space beneath his parents’ basement stairs. Of course Slob couldn’t just let them rot there.

The little sailors kept a low profile for several months while Slob’s friends bandied about various plots and plans for them. Jake wanted to build a pneumatic cannon to launch them at skaters on the frozen marsh at Princess Point, but the necessary engineering skills eluded them. Rowan wondered if they couldn’t be handed out for Halloween. Neil wanted to use them for batting practice, but he quickly encountered a wall of protests. Finally, and as was essentially customary, it was Slob who, sitting and staring at the bags in his basement one Sunday evening, alighted upon the real, cosmic purpose for the nautical tigers.

He immediately entered into a series of experiments to work out the dynamics and the most economical, practical means of implementing his idea. In the end, the use of two standard rubber erasers, a couple of strips of that most marvelous and valuable space-age invention duct-tape and; of course, one Anchors Aweigh obsessed toy tiger was all that was needed to enact Slob’s vision.

Next to location, timing is godly in the implementation of a good gag. Slob wanted to make the most of both. In 1981 winter followed its usual practice of replacing fall after a suitable interlude, and with winter hockey season inevitably replaced football season. This was also the first year Neil worked his job as part-time Zamboni driver at the arena where a popular local junior ‘B’ level hockey team; cloyingly called the Hamilton Junior Bees, played its home games. Jobs of any sort were already scarce so it took a surprising amount of cajoling to convince the more typically incautious Neil to cooperate. Eventually he had to agree that the first iteration of the Anchors Aweigh gag required a good sized venue. The Junior Bees’ arena was just the place.

Slob found that, by taping two stacked erasers to the chest area voice trigger of a toy tiger and then taping the entire rig to the underside of a toilet cover in the correct location, the tiger’s song would be activated by the lifted plunger arm when someone flushed the toilet. With early access to the arena through Neil, it proved to be a simple matter to quickly apply little toy tigers to the undersides of the many standard toilet covers used in public washrooms at the time, and then wait for the singing to begin.

The hockey game started shortly after suppertime on a busy week night, so it wasn’t long before choruses of baritone ‘Anchors aweigh, my boys, Anchors Aweigh’ began serenading the whirling deposits fans had left in the arena toilet bowls. A mixture of confusion, anger, surprise and delight accompanied the unexpected musical score with which visitors bid farewell to meals both past and passed. Once over the first rattling surprise, few flushers held any grudges. The fans were quick to discourage the maintenance staff from removing the tiny singers, at least until the game was over.

On the ice, players and officials appeared baffled at the repeated and apparently good-humored exodus of fans in the middle of play. When the crowd opened up in a raucous and spirited rendition of Anchors Aweigh the referees and linesmen gathered at the timekeeper’s box to finally uncover the mystery. This they shared with the two teams which; for the most part, couldn’t help joining in the happy mood. No complaint was made by the visiting team and no one had the necessary humourlessness to penalize the home team, it was just a preseason game after all! At the combined request of both coaches the singing tigers were left in place in the closest men’s room to the teams’ locker rooms so that the players could enjoy the experience in person after the match.

It was difficult to remain grumpy or morose after bidding a nautical farewell to one’s personal waste and few people involved would later be able to recall the final score of the game. In later years few could recall much of anything about that night beyond the sudden impact of their first musical flush. The final resting place of the tigers involved in the Junior Bees’ game remained unknown to the friends, but the toys were assured of an honored place in team lore.

This first foray in repurposed musical toy usage was the largest single effort, but the following months saw a downpour of public performances which achieved local historical status while surprising lavatory visitors in many locations around and near the city. The cinema at which Rowan worked was an obvious and frequent location. Of course, other cinemas were not left unserved. Malls, hotel lobbies, gas stations and parks all received the treatment. The loos at the city’s reserve naval station were a must visit location as were the more public boating clubs. City Hall and the downtown museums were subjected to repeat visits as were both the college and the university which call Hamilton home.

A number of letters-to-the-editor expressed a general appreciation, although the usual assortment of disturbed, and sometimes disturbing, complaints was also registered with the newspapers and on radio programs. One lady was so startled and frightened by the deep voice emitting from behind her (she apparently failed to hear the opening fanfare) that she admitted to peeing herself. The irony and fortuity of her position seemed to escape her notice. A curious man managed to pinch his index finger while ‘checking under the hood’ for the source of the music.

In time the fountain of toy tigers ran dry. A few of the friends, neither Slob nor Marcus among them, kept a tiger as a memento of one of the more far-reaching and innocuous of the group’s gags, but eventually whatever had powered the belting out of that sewer-shanty inside the little toys began to wear out. Anyone wanting to accompany the flush of a toilet with Anchors Aweigh would need to seek other sources for the music.

On the mantelpiece above the unused fireplace in the corner of the living room at the boys’ rented house, a toy tiger in a sailor suit held pride of place during 1984 and 1985, while the boys lived there. As time moved along for those who frequently gathered in the tiger’s company, the little cat would come to bear a symbolic double-meaning, a palpable bitter sweetness connected to melancholic messages they were already receiving but couldn’t yet hear.