by Rich Terfry
COPYRIGHT © 2015 RICH TERFRY
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Terfry, Rich, 1972-, author
Wicked and weird : the amazing tales of Buck 65 / Rich Terfry.
ISBN 978-0-385-67972-5 (bound)—ISBN 978-0-385-67973-2 (epub)
1. Buck 65 (Musician). 2. Rap musicians—Canada—Biography.
3. Radio personalities—Canada—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.T316A3 2015 782.421649092 C2015-901934-6
C2015-901935-4
Cover photographs: (front) © Rob Campbell
Cover design: CS Richardson
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Foreword
Part One: Sherry
The Interrogation I
Part Two: Rose
The Interrogation II
Part Three: Claire
The Interrogation III
Wicked and Weird Playlist
Acknowledgements
THE DEVIL FOLLOWS ME DAY AND NIGHT,
BECAUSE HE IS AFRAID TO BE ALONE.
—FRANCIS PICABIA
FOREWORD
WHEN I WAS A KID, I would believe almost anything I was told. I was wilfully gullible. People close to me knew it. To amuse themselves, they’d fill my head with all kinds of fantastic stories and images. When my friend Peter told me he had a pet tiger that lived in his basement, I believed him; it was more interesting than knowing he had a basement filled with neglected exercise equipment, old tires and boxes of Christmas decorations.
I am no longer a kid, but my imagination remains more reliable than my memory. It may be worth bearing that in mind as you turn these pages.
THE INTERROGATION I
“Please state your name,” said the interpreter.
I said my name. I barely recognized the sound of my own voice. My throat was hoarse from screaming.
“Now please state your home address,” the interpreter said. Not only did she translate the interrogator’s words, she softened them. What he made sound so ugly and threatening, she made soothing.
“Eleven, rue Princesse in Paris, 75006.” There was something especially painful about saying the French word for princess. It felt underscored with a knife. Rotting in a jail cell was the furthest thing from royal.
“And your date of birth, please.”
I recited the date. An image of me as a baby flashed in my mind. It was an image from a photograph, one of my favourites: me as an infant in my mother’s arms. Her smile is so bright. It’s a real smile.
She’s not just saying cheese—she means it. I like how her hands look in the photo: clever. They’re hands that can do anything. And her hair is jet black and longer than I ever remember it being. She’s so pretty. And she looks happy. Genuinely happy. It was a rare and precious sight to see her look so happy. I was glad she wasn’t alive to see this day—a day when her thirty-three-year-old son, who’d devoted his life to proving he was a good boy, was languishing in a Moscow jail.
“Place of birth?”
“Halifax. Nova Scotia.”
Another memory now took shape in my mind: a trip to that city I’d made with my father when I was eight years old. The day I got my first baseball glove.
•
MY FATHER AND I drove “into town,” an hour from our home, in his yellow pickup truck. The old man was in a good and generous mood. As he waited for his paint-and-lumber order to be filled at the hardware store, he saw me eyeing the baseball gloves. The store carried only three or four el-cheapo models. I tried out each one with a few short jabs of my fist into the pocket. I liked the sound it made. I still do.
“You want to play baseball, Buck?” he asked. He had an amused look on his face, a look I now know all parents get when they see their kid begin to turn into their own person.
I hadn’t thought about playing baseball; I was seduced by the leather of the glove.
“Yeah …” I shrugged.
“Well, you’re gonna need a glove then, won’t you?”
I hated the thought of money being spent on me, because I knew the family didn’t have much of it. Money problems were at the heart of our daily domestic warfare. But the old man insisted and so I chose: the glove emblazoned with the logo of the cursed Montreal Expos.
During the drive back home, I marvelled over this miracle of leather-and-plastic craftsmanship. El cheapo the glove may have been, but it was the most expensive thing I had ever owned. I kneaded and moulded it with my hands. I buried my face in its pocket and inhaled the fumes of the cowhide and synthetics. I even tasted it, chewing on the loose ends of the laces that bound the fingers. I was falling in love.
I was determined to put the thing to work as soon as I arrived home. I called my best friend, Burt Reynolds fan club president and future inside trader, Buzzy.
“I got a glove! Wanna play catch?”
“ ’Kay. Where to?”
“Let’s go down to my dad’s store and get some gum and then over to the park.”
“ ’Kay.”
“Oh, wait. I don’t have a ball. Can you bring one?”
“I think I got one.”
“ ’Kay. See ya.”
My father ran the only business in our tiny hometown of Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia. It was an Esso service station where the locals could fill up, get their oil changed and buy a pack of smokes, a pair of socks and a porno magazine. There were fifty varieties of cigarettes to choose from, the socks were knit by Buzzy’s mom (her sweaters, hats and mittens were sold seasonally, too) and the magazines were strictly the raunchiest. Playboy was for men who wore neckties, not guys with calluses on their hands and black under their fingernails. There were no rich people in Mount Uniacke.
I hung my glove on my handlebars and made the five-minute bike ride from my house to the gas station. When I got there, Buzzy was practising wheelies in the parking lot. “Cat walks,” we called them. He wore a scowl of determination. His bike was a rickety Frankenstein job.
“C’mon, let’s get gum!”
We leaned our bikes against the facade of the building and scrambled inside. At the counter we each grabbed a handful of two-cent Bazooka. Sherry was working the register. She was a real basket of oranges. I was in love with her; and I knew she dreamed of leaving town. Her fancies carried her twenty minutes down the highway—to Sackville, where there was a mall and a McDonald’s and black people. In the mean-time, in addition to minding till for my dad, she cut my hair. First time she did so it was a disaster. But I always begged my mother to hire Sherry because sometimes she’d thoughtlessly push her large, beautiful breasts into the side of my face while she worked. Buzzy and I trained ourselves to unload our pennies near the edge of the counter so that Sherry would have to lean over to collect them and we could look down her top. We thought we were pulling the fast one of the century, but I’m sure she knew what was up. Then again, maybe her smile and the slow motion and the Peer Gynt soundtrack are just figments of my distorted memory.
In two minutes we wer
e back outside, drunk on sugar and cleavage. We mounted our bikes and made for the park—an overgrown field furnished with a couple of abandoned picnic tables. When we arrived, I realized something was terribly wrong.
“FRIG!”
“What?”
“Where’s my friggin’ glove?”
An avalanche of dread and despair crashed down on me. It was gone—gone before it knew the meaning of its own existence—and I was petrified by the spectre of the beating that surely awaited me at home.
“Maybe you left it on the counter at the store,” said Buzzy. He was lobbing a dog-chewed orange street-hockey ball into the air and trying to catch it, but mostly dropping it or missing it altogether.
“Ugh! I don’t think so. It was on my handlebars! What the frig!”
“How come you never swear?”
“UGH! Shut up! Let’s go back.”
We raced back to the gas station. I prayed under my breath and through clenched teeth that sweet Sherry was keeping my glove safe for me. Images of skin—all kinds of skin—flashed in my mind: that of my own bare ass, beaten raw with a belt or a broom handle; the hide of some old, helpless cow, pledged to the children of junkyard baseball; Sherry’s abundance …
Kneeling before the altar of Sherry, panting more heavily than usual, I made my plea: “Didileavemyglovehere?”
“Glove?”
“FRIG!” I began to hyperventilate.
Back in the parking lot, among the puddles of gasoline rainbows, Buzzy went into therapist mode.
“Calm down. Breathe deep. Don’t be such a pussy.”
“Imdeadimdeadimdead …”
“Nobody’s going to kill you. Jeez. Just think. Retrace your steps. It’s gotta be around here somewheres.”
“I only took two steps! Someone musta stole it!”
Until long after the sun went down, Buzzy helped me look. We combed the ditches between the gas station and the park, figuring the glove might have fallen off my handlebars on the ride over. Eventually, we gave up. I accepted the darker truth: it had been stolen from me in broad daylight. I drifted back home to bear the beating of my life.
•
For the next three days, I didn’t leave my bedroom. I was terrified of my parents—of most people, in fact—but especially my mother. She was the chief disciplinarian at home. My father was her placid ally, though he’d attack if ordered. My sisters—Lisa and Abby—were her evil angels, always plotting against me. Mom suffered from severe depression and anxiety, but she didn’t know it, so neither did we.
My mother’s specialties were:
• Catholic guilt
• evocative cursing
• sobbing
• penmanship
• guarding secrets
• holding grudges
• close combat
• spaghetti
• discouragement
• rage
She also spoke with a vaguely Irish accent, which scared my friends.
In my poor mother’s heart, serenity was a house of cards, and it pained me deeply when it toppled, which was every day. I was afraid of her, but I also felt extremely protective of her. This was the person who fed and clothed me, yet when she came crashing down, she had wild tantrums I felt helpless to relieve. I resolved to never be the cause of my mother’s woe. I promised the same heavens that she cursed to never be bad. But my actions didn’t stop there. I tiptoed through my childhood, striving for complete invisibility. I hid in my room or in the woods. I didn’t make a sound. My resolve was fortified every time my mother screamed at me or hit me, especially since her wrath was only ever directed at me and her absentee Jesus. Lisa and Abby could do no wrong in her eyes. And I was constantly reminded that despite my focused efforts, when things went awry it was my fault and I must do better.
My mother yelled at me for the first time seconds after I was born. As is typical of the rest of my life, my birth was fraught with complications. The doctor couldn’t get me to breathe right away. He had to jam a tube down my throat.
“Breathe, you purple bastard!”
After my birth I was kept in the hospital a few extra days for observation and then brought home to the gas station, where we lived for the first several years of my life. There are photos of me as an infant asleep in the ring of an old tire. I assume they were taken as a joke, but I’ve never seen any of me in a proper crib. I was home only a few weeks before an emergency was visited again upon my mother and me. My father was away at a grease convention, when I developed severe infections in my throat and lungs. Somehow my mother completed the hour’s drive back to the city in a blind panic. Her already battered psyche was damaged irreparably when the doctors broke it to her that I wasn’t likely to survive. My grave condition became a local news story that eventually reached pioneering television evangelist Rex Humbard, who was passing through town. He visited the hospital to pray over me (he also helped ease the pain in my mother’s heart a few years later when he officiated at the funeral of her idol, the King, Elvis Presley). I battled for a few months, but beat the odds and was cleared for discharge. Still, my treatment was far from complete. I had to wear a mask connected to a nebulizer every day for the next three years. I still remember the smell.
Maybe my mother never forgave me for making that year of her life hell. I believe she hated me until the day she died.
•
My parents had chosen to settle in Mount Uniacke (pronounced you-nee-ack) not because it was the land of their dreams (I don’t think my parents had dreams) or because it was a great place to raise kids (the nearest high school was thirty miles away), but because of the business opportunity for my father (the gas station). The locals referred to the community as “Mount Maniac,” and not with affection. Surrounded on all sides by woods, it provided ideal cover for killers, deviants and motorcycle gangs. Dirt roads curled around each of a half-dozen pretty little lakes. Landmarks were limited to a junkyard, the old fire station, the elementary school and my father’s place. The trees also kept the secrets of the long-abandoned gold mines that had attracted scoundrels to the area in the first place. Horses patrolled the fields in silence and at night coyotes serenaded us invisibly in the distance—the music of the mountain.
It was a town of only a few hundred people, many from families that had been there almost two hundred years. Folks minded their own business and the law left the place alone, which meant trouble always had a place to hide. Everyone knew people who went unpunished for bad things.
The story of the town’s founding goes like this: Back in 1776, Richard John Uniacke joined a rebel militia led by a man named Jonathan Eddy, who tried and failed to bring the American Revolutionary War to Nova Scotia. British loyalists captured Uniacke and transported him across the province from the Isthmus of Chignecto to Halifax to stand trial for treason. The journey was a difficult one and along the way Uniacke’s guards stopped to rest by a lake. RJ was just a young punk, twenty-three years old, with his head stuck up his own ass. But during this rest stop he was struck by the beauty of the place and promised himself that if he ever managed to get untangled from the trouble he was in, he would return. Ten years later he did just that. He bought a thousand acres and named his land Mount Uniacke.
Uniacke’s appetite for hellraising was passed on to his son Richard John Jr., after whom I was named. Junior was a loud-mouth. One day he offended a fellow by the name of Bill Bowie. Bowie challenged young Uniacke to a duel and ended up eating dirt. Junior never had to answer to the law for what he did and an odious precedent was set.
In 1865, when the gold rush hit, the area was in the hands of the senior Uniacke’s grandson, William F., and a few farming families. That’s when the place went to shit completely. Big money was being made, and this attracted a few honest, hard-working men and many miscreants. Soon the place was lousy with gamblers, scam artists, bandits and cutthroats. Famous prospector and legendary broken heart Muskox Mahoney passed through Mount Uniacke in 1884. He couldn’t be
ar to inter his dead wife so he outfitted her coffin with skids and towed it behind his horse for years, voyaging from California to Nova Scotia and back again. They say he made and lost a fortune in Mount Uniacke before he, and what remained of his wife, moved on.
The peak of the rush and the town’s glory days were over by 1891. The last of the Uniacke clan died off not long after the turn of the century. The final whiffs of gold were gone by the mid-1920s. The only folks who stayed behind were those with the worst luck, who couldn’t afford to move away, and the lowest of the low-life criminal fringe.
Some excitement returned to Mount Uniacke in 1934 when Ed Miller set up shop. Miller was a carnival impresario, world renowned for his travelling “ten-in-one” sideshow. He bought a big piece of land, where he kept his equipment during the off-season and where he, his family of “freaks” and immediate blood relatives lived. It was not an uncommon sight around town to see a tattooed lady or a “human skeleton” out for a stroll or a swim. I’ve heard stories that sometimes Ed Miller would play his steam-powered calliope on Saturdays and that it could be heard clear across Mount Uniacke. When I was growing up, my next-door neighbour was an old-timer named Mr. Baker, who told me that as a kid he saw strongman Alasdair McConnell lift a full-grown horse off the ground.
The Millers call Mount Uniacke home to this day. My friends and I would go to their big, old house every year on Halloween. You never knew who might greet you at the door. The Tallest Woman in the World? The Human Anvil? Cathy, the Crab Girl? If we were lucky, it would be one of the beautiful ladies from the “hootchie-kootchie” show. The family would have a cotton candy machine set up on the porch and would invite us into their parlour to look at their collection of pickled punks and weird animals. In dirty glass terrariums they’d display two-headed snakes, giant rats and exotic spiders.
•
My friend Buzzy’s interest in making easy money was fostered at the Miller compound. He hung out there every chance he got. He gravitated toward the carnies—the amusement operators who knew a thousand tricks for swindling a sucker out of a quarter. They showed Buzzy the ropes and he learned fast.