This is as good a place as any to relate several vignettes about my older brother. Practical jokes have always been a part of my life since I was a kid and many of those precious moments have been at the expense of Jack. There’s a reason for that, of course. Very early on I realized that one easy way to get Jack’s goat was to attack his personal and highly structured sense of order and propriety. Jack was a very persnickety kind of guy. He wanted things just so. His clothes, his food, his books and papers. Everything. You know the type, fastidious to a tee. Well, as far as I was concerned that was the fatal chink in his armor, one that I exploited many the time. Here’s an example.
One day when I was in my early teens, as Bill and I were about to make our favorite summer time drink, Kool-Aid, I had the urge to bedevil Jack. All I had to do was take two sufficiently different flavors and mix them together to get a new taste sensation. We then took a tall glass filled with ice and the mixture to Jack and told him that it was a new flavor, Fruit Punch, or some such name. He took the glass and cautiously tasted it before giving his approval. We waited a few minutes while he took several drinks, setting the hook as it were. Letting him settle into the idea of liking it. He smiled and said that he liked it and we should buy it again next week.
When Mom came into the room I told her that Jack really liked the new Kool-Aid flavor we got at the A&P grocery store. With a puzzled look she said she didn’t remember buying any new flavors on our last shopping trip. Immediately Jack frowned, smelling the proverbial rat. Bill and I laughed gleefully and ‘fessed up. We made the “flavor” by mixing two together; it wasn’t “real.” Jack stomped into the kitchen and threw the Kool-Aid into the sink.
“I knew it,” he said irritably, “that stuff tasted terrible. I knew it wasn’t real. I was just playing along with you guys.” Of course Bill and I hooted and razzed him unmercifully the rest of the day, offering to refill his glass with the new flavor every time he came into the kitchen.
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When Jack started college at SLU he picked the pre-med/pre-dent program. He thought dentistry was exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Naturally, with all the math and science requirements, the program was quite difficult. Equally naturally, Jack was up to the challenge intellectually. He was a very bright guy and totally focused on succeeding, unlike his grasshopper brother who just wanted to play and drink. Jack studied constantly, beating the books every night. And did very well in his classes. Many the day he would abandon the Arts Lounge to study in the library.
One morning I was at the SLU main library doing research for a term paper and felt the urge to take a dump. While I was sitting on the toilet completing the dirty deed, someone came into the john and occupied the next stall. When the guy dropped his pants and sat down I looked under the partition and noticed his shoes looked just like Jack’s. I leaned over a little more and thought that I recognized the socks as well. It certainly looked like one of ours. And the pants also had a familiar look. It had to be Jack.
Without hesitation I finished the paper work part of the job, then reached under the partition, grabbed the guy’s ankle and pulled hard, nearly yanking him off the pot.
“Hey, Goddammit,” he yelled in a mixture of surprise and outrage. Naturally, I was so hysterical I couldn’t stand up. It was Jack and he was royally pissed-off. After finishing taking a crap he wouldn’t even talk to me outside the john. He angrily told me that it wasn’t funny, that I was just an immature clown. And he stalked off in quite a huff. Hey, I still think it was hysterical. Imagine sitting down to take a shit in the library and an unknown stranger reaches under the stall and grabs your leg. Fuck yes it was funny
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I’m jumping ahead quite a few years for this next vignette but, what the hell, it’s about Jack and another practical joke. Our grandparents celebrated their 50 wedding anniversary with a party for their relatives at our house. Dozens of people came to wish them well. Dozens of the extended Ernst family. Most of our mother’s Cundiff relatives. Jack and his wife, Eileen, were there as were Bill and his girlfriend, Lottie, and my wife, Sandy. It was a big crowd.
Right before we were about to eat Bill and I went into the bathroom to wash our hands. As I returned the soap to the holder I noticed a grayish green scum at the bottom. My wicked mind immediately conceived a gross plot. I eagerly scrapped up a little of the partly dry soap scum with a fingernail and rolled it into a tight ball. Knowing my perverse nature well, Bill was watching me closely and asked what I was doing. I placed the nasty looking ball on the tip of my little finger and positioned the finger carefully along the outside of my nostril, wiggling it to simulate a booger hunt. Then pulled the finger away in a motion that should look like I was retracting it from within my nose and held the dark green ball up for him to see.
“How about it?” I asked. “Think Jack will fall for it?” Oh yes, it was a truly brilliant way to get Jack’s goat.
Barely able to control our glee, we returned to the living room and found Jack in conversation with our Uncle Frank, Mom’s brother. By that time I was laughing so hard inside that I could hardly keep a straight face. I stood to one side of Uncle Frank so he couldn’t see what was happening and went into my act. Holding my head so Jack could only see my profile, I pretended to insert the finger up my nose and hunt for a booger that was bothering me. The expression on Jack’s face was priceless. He was absolutely aghast that I would stoop to such a low act in public.
But when I pulled the putative booger from my nostril his face contorted into a mask of utter revulsion as he exclaimed, “Oh, my God, that’s disgusting.”
I held out my pseudo booger-afixed little finger, inspected it for a brief moment before reaching out and slowly wiping it onto Jack’s bare upper arm. His face contorted in rage as he went ballistic, first trying unsuccessfully to swat the pseudo booger from his arm. Naturally, being soap, it stuck there. Then he took a tremendous swing at me. Laughing hysterically, I dodged away, avoiding his punch as I tried to tell him that it was only soap.
Bill jumped in and grabbed Jack’s arms as did Uncle Frank. Bill told all the people who were by that time watching the fracas that was just a practical joke. We had used soap scum. It wasn’t a real booger. Jack was incensed, enraged, choleric, apoplectic. All of the above. He refused to be mollified and stomped away in high dungeon. He eventually calmed down but it was quite a while later. Naturally, behind his back, that incident also became part of the Ernst family lore, especially between Bill and me.
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