Inside Darren

Chuck and I met each other in the summer of 1999, at a church function, standing around a campfire. I have no idea how it came up, but somehow we started talking about our mutual enjoyment of Babylon 5, and our friendship grew from there.

From the moment I started talking to Chuck, I knew he wasn’t normal. I don’t mean this in an insulting way, I just mean that Chuck was (and is) not “average” on any level. He weighs just over 100 lbs on a good day. He’s 33 years old, but acts like he’s 10 years younger (or more). He’s the most honest person I’ve ever met - and by that I mean that he couldn’t put on a fake persona if he tried.

At first I was worried that he might be one of those “clingy” people - you know, those people who have no friends, and call you every 15 min to see if they can drain some self esteem out of your reservoir of emotional stability. But he wasn’t. He also worked at the biggest movie theatre in my city, and could get me into free movies.

The first movie he got me into was “The Iron Giant”. There were maybe 5 other people in the theatre with us, so Chuck asked the projectionist to crank the volume on the sound system. The result was the loudest, most amazing audio experience that I’ve ever had in a theatre. Of course, we had to shout to each other for the rest of the day just to be heard (like when you’re on your way home from clubbing, only without the mitigating effects of the booze), but it was worth it.

I could probably write a book on Chuck, but for now, I offer you a (non-exhaustive) list of his quirks:

1. He refuses to eat chocolate without having milk to drink with it.

2. He has the lowest alcohol tolerance I have ever encountered (consider his weight, mentioned above). Alcohol makes him very sleepy, and when he tries to open his eyes, only his eyebrows move up.

3. He likes feet. A typical conversation, after we’ve just been speaking with an attractive girl, will begin like this:

Darren: She was pretty.

Chuck: Yeah, and her feet were beautiful!

He eagerly looks forward to “sandal season”. Yeah, I find it freaky too.

4. He likes the colour pink. No, he’s not gay, really. He just likes pink.

5. At about 10:30pm on any given night, in any situation, he gets incredibly sleepy, to the point where he has trouble holding up his own head. Strangely enough, this doesn’t impair his ability to socialize as much as it should. He once played his best 2 games of euchre in a state where I couldn’t tell if his eyes were actually open.

6. He laughs like Bert from Sesame Street. For those who can’t remember this laugh, it’s like a loud, vocal machine gun. Once, on the subway with Chuck and my friend Dave, Chuck started laughing, and Dave felt obligated to apologize to the rest of our subway car for Chuck’s laugh freaking them the heck out.

7. Chuck bumps into beautiful young girls who know him everywhere. It’s scary how often this happens. He could be walking past “The Body Shop” and suddenly be getting hugged by some 17 year old that used to work at the theatre with him. Girls also pet him a lot. You’d have to know him to see how this could happen.

8. Chuck is amazing at things you don’t think he’d be amazing at, like frisbee and hacky-sack. Things that you can’t tell that someone would be amazing at from just looking at their physical build or by talking to them.

9. He is very aware of the texture of foods, and will not eat anything “slimy”. That mostly means things with sauce on them.

10. He refuses to entertain the idea of fatherhood, and will generally stay 10 feet away from all children, for fear he’s going to “break them” somehow.

11. He has the biggest collection of movie soundtracks that I know, and by this I mean the movie scores, not the songs you’d hear on the radio. He could tell you the composer of most major films.

12. He will not buy a belt, even when his pants obviously need help not falling down.

13. When he has to burp, he does so buy pulling what we call “The Seagull Maneuver”. I don’t know how to do descriptive justice to this action. He kinda moves his head down, then forward, then up in one fluid motion, while wearing a facial expression that suggests something like “I’m choking on lego”. He cannot burp without doing this.

14. He eats pizza an average of 5 times per week, but will not eat cheese in any other form or situation except on pizza.

15. He refuses to push the gas pedal all the way down when speeding up to merge with highway traffic, because he’s afraid it will “hurt the car”.

16. He gets overstimulated very easily. In fact, I honestly believe that Chuck experiences every physical sensation at 10 times the normal amount experienced by the rest of us. He can get overwhelmed in large crowds, especially if there is a lot of light and noise. Rollercoasters incapacitate him for a good 1/2 hour afterwards. I even saw him spit out a cup full of watered-down cherry Kool Aid because it was too strong for him.

17. At any restaurant that serves it, he orders chicken fingers and fries. Nothing else.

18. He likes to give presents to girls. Ladies, if you want a man who will shower you with gifts, look no further than Chuck. Just be aware that you’ll have to wear open-toed sandals for the rest of your life.

19. When Chuck flips out about something, you gotta step back and give him space, because he gets physical and dramatic. I don’t mean psycho-level, but enough that you have to have a fairly high level of embarrassment-tolerance in public. Once, when a friend of mine said something that freaked him out in a restaurant, he yelled “WHAT?!” and started rapidly pacing up and down the aisle beside our table. We calmed him down, once we forced ourselves to stop laughing.

20. He randomly says “Oink”.

21. He is deathly afraid of spiders. Early on in our friendship, after finding out this fact, Chuck and I were at a coffee shop. As he was telling me a story, I noticed a spider crawling along his shoulder. I knew that if I told him about it, he’d jump up in a hurricane of flailing arms and screaming, knocking over our table and several others nearby, so I calmly kept nodding my head at his story, as I suddenly and forcefully swiped the spider off of him with my hand. He was startled, but luckily I was able to keep my white-hot-chocolate from landing in my lap.

22. If he is eating a meal and runs out of drink, he cannot continue eating until his drink is refilled. Something about the food drying out his mouth too much, if he doesn’t sip his drink between bites. I, on the other hand, often forget that I even have a drink beside me until my meal is finished.

23. He is bar none, the best faker of phone conversations that I have ever met. Three times he has pretended to be on the phone while I was with him, without actually talking to anybody, and every time he fools me. Generally, I’m not that gullible.

There are more quirks that I could include, but some of them would require my sacrificing Chuck’s dignity, and I think you’ve heard enough already. So, in closing, here’s to you, Chuck. You’re one screwy individual, but I wouldn’t want to experience your friendship in any other way. Oink.