Grimey Taught Me

When I created this Tumblr, I was pretty sure that someday I was going to post this story, but I never got around to writing it. But since Danger Guerrero mentioned GUTS on Twitter a few days ago, I thought I’d give it a shot. It’s basically about how my friends and I are horrible people.

A few years back (2007, I believe), I was roommates with a couple of my friends, and one night the three of us were in the living room waiting for some random TV show to come on. So in the meantime, we’re flipping around channels, and stumble upon the Nickelodeon Games & Sports channel, where Nickelodeon can air all their old game show tapes (Family Double Dare, Figure It Out, Hidden Temple) for the rest of time. At this particular moment, the channel was airing GUTS.

Here’s the thing about GUTS: unlike other Nickelodeon game shows, they introduce the kids on the show with their first and last names. We do the math… the show was shot in the early-to-mid 90’s, all the contestants are in their mid-20’s now… they probably have MySpace pages. So naturally, my roommates grab their laptops and start looking them up.

The first one we look up is this awkward-looking girl (whose name I don’t remember). In her bio on the show, she said that she wanted to be a television reporter, and sure enough, according to her MySpace page, she had become a television reporter. The second one was a tiny Vietnamese kid, whose life went the other way as evidenced by his personal MySpace headline “TOKER POT SMOKER.”

Future TV reporter girl ends up winning the episode, so my roommate Chris decides to send her a MySpace message, something along the lines of “Congratulations on winning GUTS all those years ago, you did a really good job on that bungee-basketball game.” Up next is another episode of GUTS, so we pretty much abandon the show we were going to watch to continue MySpace-stalking former Nickelodeon game show contestants.

The next episode features a contestant named Jana, her self-given nickname for the show: “The Warrior.” My other roommate Dale finds her on the GUTS Wikipedia, she’s one of the few contestants who never finished less than first in any event. So Chris sends her another jackass MySpace message: “Great job on GUTS there, Warrior, you were struggling with that rope ladder a bit, but you did a good job with that handbike.”

I didn’t have a laptop at the time, so I spend part of the next day at work looking up all these people myself. I get to Jana’s page, and I’m going through her MySpace photos, and I notice that in all of her photos, she’s always sitting down. And then in one photo, on the arm of her chair, there’s a little joystick….

(When I tell this story in person, this is usually the part where the other person recoils in horror and says, quite loudly, OH SHIT)

So Chris, Dale and I spend an entire happy hour wondering what’s the proper internet etiquette after messaging a stranger about her difficulty with a rope ladder before realizing that she is currently paralyzed. Do you wait for her to respond and mention it first? And how did a former GUTS champion become paralyzed in the first place? Diving accident? Car crash? (Reminder: My friends and I are horrible people.)