Thursday

THE ACORN TRICK

By Randy Reynolds

Male birds have flashy plumage to strut in front of potential mates. Male tropical fish have their bright colors. Boy lions have that big mane and a substantial size advantage over the females they want to impress. Human males, however, don’t have these built-in attention-getters. We have to invent our own ways to get girls to notice us.

For me at age 12, that was no problem. I had my acorn trick.

I’d like to think there was more to me than just my ability to put an acorn in my nose and make it come out my mouth, but I’m not sure. I’m the guy who threw the coke bottle across a crowded gym on a dare; the one who raced horses bareback on the highway; me, I’m the boy who didn’t mind a good fistfight as long as the right girl was watching. I’m the one who cut a girl’s initials into my wrist. Never mind that I was afraid to take a polio shot, I’d slice her initials deep and ragged, trying not to hit a vein, and she’d be impressed and horrified with the blood and later with the scab and she’d smile at me and I’d dream about her, and then she’d lose interest and I’d have to wait for the scab to go away before I could do the same thing for another girl. This delay between wrist carvings put a serious crimp in my girl-chasing, so I thought of something quicker and less bloody to make the girls notice me: the acorn trick.

Out on the playground at recess, when no one was looking, I jammed an acorn up my nose. Holding another acorn in my hand, I went up to a group of girls and said, “Have you ever seen anybody do this?” I waved my handheld acorn in front of their faces then put it into my mouth and pretended to swallow it. With one finger pushed against my empty nostril, I blew the acorn out the other.

They said “Ewww!” and “Yuck!” and other gratifying things and I smiled and reversed the trick: I put the same acorn back into my nose, pretended to swallow again and spit the original acorn out of my mouth.

My fame spread near and far, and I soon found myself performing this trick at every recess and lunch break and after school, and even after church. Other boys, not realizing that I was using two acorns, tried to imitate my trick, but all they did was hurt themselves.

I must have done my acorn routine a hundred times before it finally backfired in front of a couple of cute girls standing at the entrance to our sprawling pink-stucco school. (Why Lee Road School was pink, I don’t know; Mary Kay would have loved it.) Mary Alice and Mary Lee wanted to see the acorn trick. “Please, please, please!” they begged, jumping up and down like children waiting in line at the Haunted House exhibit at the parish fair. Never one to disappoint the ladies, I made a show of searching for the right acorn and slipped one into my mouth before turning to face them. With a flourish and a smile I shoved the other up my nose, went through the gagging motions, and spit the hidden one out of my mouth. They were disgusted with me, but fascinated, too—basically the same effect I would always have on girls.

But something went wrong. When I returned the mouth-acorn and tried to snort out the nose-acorn, nothing happened. The nose-acorn was gone. I made some lame excuse and hurried away, snorting and digging at my nose trying to expel or dig out the missing acorn.

For the next few days, I worried that the acorn might have been inhaled into my windpipe where it would smother me, or into my lungs, where it would take root and grow. But life moved on, I got a fulltime girlfriend, a really jealous one, carved her initials into my arm, and stopped trying to impress all the other girls with my respiratory skills.

A year later, in science class, I sneezed and an acorn flew out of my nose and landed a few inches from Miss Landry’s feet. She looked at it and shuddered, but kept right on with her lesson while I threw the bloody acorn into the trash.

Twenty years later, when I went back to Lee Road for a reunion of my Boy Scout Troop, my old friend Dennis Sharp, at that time the distinguished principal of Lee Road School, reminded us all of my special skill. “Randy could put an acorn in his mouth and make it come out his nose.”

I felt the time had come to own up to my dishonesty. “Not really,” I said. “It was a trick.”

“No it wasn’t,” said Dennis. “I saw it many times. I used to tell my friends about it at college. We tried and tried, but we couldn’t do it.”

I explained the trick, but he refused to believe it. “I saw it with my own eyes,” he said. “You put it in your mouth and it came out your nose. It was amazing.”

I did my best to confess, but Dennis wouldn’t buy it. He got so upset that he didn’t speak to me again during that whole reunion weekend and, for all I know, he and his friends still get together at school board meetings and put acorns in their mouths and try to make them come out their noses.

Obviously, I made a strong impression on those boys. I sometimes wonder if the girls remember it, too, dancing up and down with eagerness in front of the pink school as I did the thing no other boy could do.

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Note: I've been told that Lee Road Consolidated was tan in those days; I distinctly remember Old C.B. Rogers (the 6th grade teacher) making fun of it for being a sickly green, and saying that the school board must have gotten a sale price on some leftover World War II paint; and yet in my dreams (I always dream in color) Lee Road School is pink. I have, therefore, taken license to describe it as I see it in my dreams.)

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