Congratulations to Merv, Canada’s oldest poor person!
IN ONE OF THE WILDEST stories of the last decade, fans of the human Kylie Jenner donated money in a bid to see her become the world’s youngest billionaire. This innate human drive to see perfectly round numbers does seem to raise some interesting philosophical questions, yet no one seems to know where our human fascination with round numbers comes from. Math biologists speculate that we are evolutionarily predisposed to view those seductively round zeros as sexually ripe, small buttholes, while others suspect that the human mind is simply unequipped to truly conceive of fractions or decimals whatsoever. Either way, it’s hard not to admit there is a certain strange allure to round numbers, perverted or otherwise.
With all the fanatical coverage the Jenner pledges received, me here at OCT am proud to feature a perhaps less renowned personnage, yet one with an equally round number in the world of money. A man for whom many have, over the years, donated their efforts in helping to maintain his net worth, which, while not a whopper, is round like a whopper from burger king, of zero dollars of any kind. This is Mervin Borjniak.
Born in 1924, Merv grew up in a nest built into the underside of the Bloor Street Viaduct by his trapeze artist mother. While quite precocious and talented at school, Merv suffered from severe peanut anxiety, and was unable to get the necessary medications to help improve his schoolwork, as, in 1935, peanut anxiety was not yet a medically recognized condition.
By the age of seven he had to drip out of school, and ended up working pro bonor at his uncle’s glass eyes and tongues shop. During this time, Merv found his true passion, spending his leisure hours combatting peanut anxieties with music, and quickly becoming one of the most virtuosic trombone players at the glass eye factory.
When he turned 20, Merv took his glass trombone downtown, performing alongside other Toronto fixtures in their youths, crafting brain-enhancing sonnets as Manfred the rat man of Nathan Philips Square first trained some of his most enduring rats; creating thunderous biblical soundscapes for Sarko (then a young proselytizer); and improvising light hearted and humourous ditties with Ramblin’ Andy down at OCAD U (then OCA). He was even present at the famous concert where Flyerman, then just Flyerchild, lit up his jacket for the first time, helping send the wee fashionisto on his meteoric rise to fame with a merry blast of his ol' glass tambourine.
Toronto. Mervin was a regular comedian with the horn.
Yet for all his busking success, Merv struggled with addictions, and nearly 100% of his income went to police fines for public ululation, illegal paper plane flying, and for wearing purple (which was illegal in Toronto until 1982).
Turning his imagination to the war efforts of the mid sixties, Merv joined a peacekeeping commission, bringing his glassy trombone stylings to Vietnam, where he was shot fourteen times in the neck and elbows. Sadly, Merv arrived back in Toronto, where, having endured the horrors of war for nearly a decade, the life of his famous glass tuba ended, when two Rochdale students successfully used it as a megabong.
Depressed, shell-shocked, and near-penniless, Merv blended in amongst the wacky ’80’s Queen West crowds, using the final remaining shard of his trombone to whittle small wooden Madonnas that he sold at 50¢ a-pop for the Jesus’ mom variety, and 70¢ a-pop for the hedonistic cone tits and business slacks variety. (Historians will note that Madonna’s cone bra didn’t debut publicly until 1990, begging the question: were Merv’s cone tits tchotchkes simply a product of his ever-churning mind’s eye, or did Madonna steal inspiration from these odd wares perhaps in a midnight tryst of sorts? Are cone tits, indeed perhaps genetically inbuilt into some recess of the musician’s dark psyche?)
These questions will sadly remain unanswered, for, as the city’s chill, marijuana stained green thumb was thumb wrestled down under the thumb of a not-very-chill cocaine fuelled mania, Merv was arrested for fashioning the likeness of a woman and distribution of pornographic wood, whence woefully Merv’s whittling shard and final memento of his beloved trombone Waylon was confiscated during his arrest, likely due to the jail strict ‘no weapons’ policy and even stricter ‘no whittling’ rule. Despite contesting his charges, stating that ‘pornographic wood is a human right’, Merv served his full sentence of 11 years at the Don Jail.
Then, late in life, things looked up for Merv when in a bizarre twist he was cast on the brand new Nickelodeon show Clarissa Explains It All, where he performed opposite Melissa Joan Hart as the closet-dwelling, turtle obsessed, Uncle Nugget. The show was a success, and remains beloved by all to this day. Yet strangely, despite staying with the show for its entire five-season run, not a single one of Uncle Nugget’s scenes was ever aired, with test audiences regularly claiming the character ‘made their teeth hurt’.
Mervin in the Uncle Nugget costume. BTS from Clarissa Explains It All.
As the Nickelodeon gig wound down, Merv would meet his most influential benefactor on his way to becoming the poorest man alive. In the mid ‘90’s George Lucas was in between jobs. Having finished up work on Ewoks: The Battle for Endor a mere baker’s decade earlier, Lucas had reportedly found some unusual hobbies to nourish his wacky mind. A source close to the film director confirmed, “Yeah, he used to do this thing… The internet was just coming around and, you know, he was always so, so creative! I think he had just started funding the Star Trek prequels and… I may be the only person who knows this but, I’m quite sure [Lucas] wrote the first ever Nigerian prince email. Except his took place in space!”
And so it was thus owing half to this vainglorious creative vision of a mad director, and half to the gentle and giving nature of his own heart, that at 70 years old Merv was bilked out of his final few royalty cheques by, unbelievably, one of entertainment’s richest men. Yet there’s a silver lining. Upon seeing The Phantom Menace, Merv remained perversely optimistic, telling perplexed Breakfast Television host Kevin Frankish, “I made that! I mean I helped make that because I was Uncle Nugget and I gave all my gold to the space prince. Do you see? Everything I did, the glass trombone, Vietnam, the erotic wood, it was all for Jar Jar Binks!” Unfortunately, like many Torontonians after the release of Star Wars Episode 1, Merv’s mental health declined until eventually he just slipped through the cracks, joining the ranks of the 10,000+ other Torontonians currently experiencing homelessness.
Vietnam. Mervin demonstrates his tuna.
And we might easily have left it there, with Merv leaving the public zeitgeist, forever replaced by more contemporary cultural icons like Skibidi Toilet. But then, in a Dec. 2023 prank by intrepid TikToker @ebenezersplooge420, Mervin resurfaced. 17 year old Ebenezer’s channel focuses on “pranks” in which he “takes from the poor and gives to the rich”. In his clever prank, Ebenezer meets Merv in a flowerbed by the side of the road. The set up involves offering to split a happy meal. When the happy meal arrives Ebenezer then claims he is just 7¢ short, having earlier found out that this is all the money which Merv possesses. Ever kind, Merv can be seen rifling through his Hello Kitty fanny pack from whence he produces a nickel and two pennies, at which point the TikToker grabs these and runs from the establishment, sticking Merv, finally and fatally flat broke, with the bill.
It is rare to see the moment when a round number is achieved. Usually it happens in the background of our lives, whether through the online sale of a Peppa Pig NFT, or resale on a vial of gamer girl bathwater. All we really have are these cultural moments where, whether it’s Kylie Jenner with her $1,000,000,000.00, or Mervin Borjniak with his $0.00, we are shown someone reaching their ‘O’, live, joyfully spreading the rare beauty of their perfect numerical sphincter for us to rejoice in.
Finally, in police body cam footage, we can see Merv, unable to pay for the happy meal, pleading for humanity from the arresting officer, pleading for any type of sanity, any kindness at all. “What if I give you my fanny pack?” He garbles at the stolid employees, “And you can keep the happy meal toy, I don’t need a f***ing porg!” Merv was brought to a correctional facility where he died later that month, but not before officially becoming Canada’s Oldest Poor Person!
“It’s really a shame, he turned 100 the same day we arrested him,” say’s Lt. Max Madsen, who arrested Merv that day. “The guy was really just on the brink of notoriety, what with being so old and poor. His death really shocked me. Although in hindsight, that may have actually been one of my taser darts misfiring during the altercation.”
As for the 7¢? Ebenezer donated them to Elon Musk, pleading with the mega-billionaire on his social media platform X, “Send me just one sperm, Elon. Please!” An account believed to be Elon's later responded, “My sperms are worth more than all of humanity. They all must go to the surrogate farm now.”
Like so few of us, Mervin Borjniak lived a life full of the sexiest numbers. Finishing strong at 100 years old and with $0, he may have been rich in personality, kindness, and humanity, but he will always remain notably poor in our hearts.
©2024