by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

There’s much news from this town that gets repressed because it’s too darn icky.

Nobody discusses the hats for the poor. The fabled Montreal Canadiens hockey club have a little-used policy of handing out old, insalubrious Vitalis-and-gel-stained hats to the underprivileged.

Hockey fans toss their hats onto the ice when a player scores three goals. It’s the jocko-homo equivalent of women launching panties at Tom Jones. Except projectile undergarments have style. Sadly, you never see female undergarments launched at a neighbourhood bar on karaoke night.

The tradition of tossing hats on the ice to celebrate a player scoring three goals started in Guelph, Ontario. A hat company owned the local team and named them the Mad Hatters, and encouraged fans to toss the hats as a gimmick.

But seeing as all hockey-origin stories are traditionally disputed, I’ll imply that hat-tossing started here when a salutary beaver pelt tribute was thrown for early Hab Telesphore “Lefty” Laframboise, who potted three straight flukey-bounce-off-the-boards goals during hockey’s classic gaslight era. Don’t bother looking it up.

When a fan tosses his hat, he rarely descends to request it back. This suggests that the hats they’re throwing aren’t $300 borsalinos and Parisian-tailed berets. It tells you the discarded hats are a mess of decrepit headwear.

The team’s policy is to collect the disgusting old caps and give them to the poor. The corporate hat donations enrich the lives of the downtrodden, as the poor can flip them over and stand on the Main begging for change. The road to hell is littered with old ballcaps.

These diseased hats, if worn, could lead to an urban head lice epidemic and could end us all up in quarantine. Not to panic, but they might carry scalp-eating disease. I don’t think it’s impossible, according to butterfly effect theory.

In Tampa Bay they were smart. A player named Chris Kontos scored three and security immediately ejected fans for the offence of hat littering.

Looks like we won’t have to worry. Montreal players know well enough not to set this in motion. No Hab would tamper with fate by scoring three in a game. Safe head hygiene reigns now, but it’s unsatisfying for a fan hellbent on hat-tossing.

I predict someone will invent a detachable three-piece hat, attached together by Velcro. Fans won’t have to delay their gratification waiting for a player to score three goals, which he probably won’t. They just take off a piece and toss it down every time the player scores.

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Oops. I got carried away. There’s much other tasteless news. A well-dressed executive occasionally visits a rundown strip club on the Lower Main on his lunch hour. He’s a sort of urine vampire. He’ll enter a plywood booth with a stripper and request a hearty taste of her watery resource. The stripper pees in a bottle and he tosses it down in front of her and leaves. He pays $150 for the drink.

St-Henri’s Dubois brothers, a much-feared gang from the ’70s, once sent a photo of their naked bottoms as an expression of their admiration to the equally brutal Night Patrol, police officers known for beating confessions out of suspects. The Night Patrol was later disbanded after savagely beating the Dubois brothers.

Last year, at a crowded no-wimps-allowed bar in the Point, a loose-lipped patron was smacked in the head with a baseball bat after speaking indiscreetly.

A local writer went on a police ride-around several years back. The first stop was a party where a dead guy was laying on the floor. A cat was nibbling away the guy’s brain. The partygoer had shot himself in the head after witnessing his girlfriend having sex with another man.

A neighbour of mine here in NDG lived in her 4 1/2 with 19 cats. She’d kidnap neighbours’ pets and leave indecipherable notes about the psychic powers of cats around the block. Two years ago she moved out, and the block was treated to the overwhelming stench of pungent cat urine, which undoubtedly continues to linger inside.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca