JUNE 29, 2006
BANDAGES AND PLASTER: A HISTORY OF SHAWN AND ME

Look, anyone interested in what it's like to be Shawn Spencer's best friend should know by now that our history is really pretty unremarkable. We were just two kids who met in elementary school and bonded over our shared love of throwing things at each other.

And rather than attempt in this limited space to comment on the nature of our friendship, I'll only say that our story is best told by the impressive collection of scars I've amassed over the years, all the result either directly (baseball bat) or indirectly (dog bite) from my association with him.

Not that Shawn can't say the same thing. He still has no feeling in his left heel from the "Golf Cart Incident," so he'll definitely back me up when I tell you that our story is one for the record books.

The medical record books.

To date, we've collected 37 stitches, three broken legs, seven cracked ribs, four chipped teeth, two dislocated shoulders (one each), four, or possibly, five second-degree burns, a concussion, and some kind of skin condition that showed up after we were chased through some cactus.

And I can tell you exactly when it started: Fall 1984. Class pictures.

We're lined up in our school cafeteria, and I get to the front. The picture lady sits me down, combs my hair, lifts my chin, snaps the picture and the next thing I remember, I'm being lifted off the floor after taking a lunch tray in the head.

You can see it in the picture a red plastic blur inches away from my stupid smiling face. And although he was limited by a third-grade vocabulary (and still is), Shawn informed later that the basic idea was to catch the object in motion just before the point of impact. Like a physics experiment, I suppose.

It became an annual tradition, one or both of us caught on film a moment before some hurled object makes contact. If you ever get to see our class pictures, you can always find Shawn or me. Just look for the kid about to be hit with something.

The injuries were never the objective, of course, just a natural extension of our competitive nature. At least that's what my mom always told Ted, the guy in the emergency room. We were on a first-name basis with him and he always responded the same way: "It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt."

My mom would agree. But it always seemed that with Shawn and me, it was never really fun or games unless someone got hurt.

It was for this reason we spent so much time devising original and dangerous games at home. There was "Sliding Into Home Base", in which a blanket was placed atop a marble floor and then slid into at full speed (me: two broken fingers, Shawn: fat lip).

And then there was "Coathanger Trap Shoot", where we lobbed wire coat hangers into the air and took aim at them with other wire coathangers (Shawn: six stitches, Me: detached retina).

And finally, there was "Rugburn Race", which is pretty self-explanatory.

At one point, Shawn's father, Henry, taught us to play "Keep The Balloon Off the Ground", figuring we couldn't possibly get hurt playing with a balloon (Shawn: sprained wrist, Me: broken eardrum).

You might think that everything calmed down as we got older. You might think that. But suppose you were at the junior-high skate party, and your best friend was enjoying his very first couples skate and you just happened to have a pocketful of ball bearings that he'd removed from your skateboard causing you to crash into a tree only hours before.

Would you resist the urge to scatter them on the floor just as he skated by? I didn't think so.

Retribution followed with "The Chickenfighting Debacle" for which payback was the "Bus Episode" and on and on in a neverending cycle of reprisal until finally a truce was declared after we were both laid out in the mosh pit at a Pixies concert.

It's an unsteady truce, to be sure, but no one's complaining. We've got more important things to do these days.

Like Psych. We've got time for cases and clients, but not much else. I suppose before long, we might miss the rough and tumble. But then if I feel the need to get my nostalgia on, I've always got my scars.

And by the way, for scarring, I can recommend Dipraxacyllin ointment. Don't waste your time with any of that over the counter stuff. It's crap. Diprax is the bomb. See your doctor for a prescription.