by Rich Terfry
I raced home and went straight to bed. And lay stone-cold awake until it was time to get ready for school the next morning.
For all I know, the man is still down in that hole.
•
During my childhood and youth, whenever guilt or fear piled up on me, whenever too much thinking made me sad, I’d go find Sherry for a bad haircut and conversation. I gravitated to her because she seemed to be one of the few people in Mount Uniacke capable of abstract thought. She had aspirations and desires. She yearned to know what people and life were like in other parts of the world—or at least in nearby Sackville. She longed for new people, new dangers. She needed challenges and adventures.
Sherry would sit me down in a chair in the centre of her kitchen and hack away while I asked the big questions:
• “Where do hotdogs come from?”
• “Can cats get bored?”
• “Do weeks have seven days in China?”
• “What would happen if I went back in time and tried to kill my grandfather? Would he be indestructible?”
• “How come some girls have bigger boobs than others?”
• “Could my life just be a dream someone else is having?”
• “If I could take my eyeballs out and point one in front of me and the other behind me, what would happen?”
One day I went to Sherry about a troubling recollection:
“Sherry, do you believe in reincarnation?”
“Hmm. I’m not sure. I don’t think so, though. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I remember something weird from when I was three years old. At preschool my teacher, Hashy, would take all us kids into a big empty room every day after lunch break. There was nothing in there, but the walls were painted in crazy colours with pictures of animals and stuff. Hashy would ask us to sit on the floor and close our eyes. No talking. No moving around. We’d sit like that with our eyes closed for a few minutes. Then, after she told us to open our eyes again, she’d go around the room and ask us what we saw …”
“Okay, yeah. And you remember what you saw sometimes?”
“Yeah, it was always the same thing. But the weird part was how I explained it. For some reason, I would always start by saying, ‘When I was big …,’ and then I’d describe what I saw, which was some kind of Indian ceremony. Like the native peoples, you know?”
“Uh-huh …”
“There was dancing and singing and costumes with feathers and one of the Indians was me. And I knew everything about his life. I knew what he did and I understood his language and everything. He was a warrior and I knew about how he made his weapons and how he got hurt and everything. Every time Hashy asked us to close our eyes, I seemed to remember this other life.”
“Wow. You know what that is, honey? They call it ‘past-life regression.’ Normally they hypnotize people to tap into that stuff. I read about it before and thought it was horsefeathers. But now, gosh, I’m not so sure!”
Another time, Sherry told me that I have synaesthesia. I had thought everyone saw shapes and colours when they heard sounds, until she pointed out that it’s a rare condition.
Sherry would answer my questions and tell me about her dreams and the books she was reading, all the while stabbing at my hair with her scissors. I’d always go home having learned something and looking like a goddamn fool.
•
My hair was a crazy mess—“a rat’s nest,” my mother called it. I was built like a twig and my skin was dirty. I also had a big gap between my two front teeth. I liked it. I thought it made me look like a rascal. But my mother insisted on braces.
Upon my first visit to the orthodontist, I had to have a set of impressions done. This meant biting into trays of cement so that moulds could be made. The moulds would then be used to make casts of my teeth, which would be analyzed by my orthodontist so he could formulate my braces strategy.
On this particular day, I was wearing a pair of hiking boots that I had recently received as a gift for my birthday. I was very proud of them. I thought they made me look like a rugged outdoorsman. I was unaware that I had stepped in dog shit on the way into the clinic. The deep-lugged soles of my new hiking boots were especially effective in gathering and retaining dog shit.
After an initial introduction and an assessment by my kindly orthodontist, I was remanded to the care of a pretty young assistant who had just graduated from dental school. I swooned upon first sight of her. She led me to another room and eased me into her chair. She talked me through the procedure and assured me it would be quick and easy. As soon as the top mould was in place, she explained that she had to let it set for a few minutes and then excused herself from the room.
Ten minutes later, she was back.
“Okey-dokey,” she said as she re-entered the room. “That first one should be ready to come out now.”
She gave the tray a tug. It didn’t budge.
“Hmm,” she said with knitted eyebrows.
She pulled a little harder, but it still wouldn’t move.
“Gosh, I might have left it on a little too long!” she said.
My anxiety shot up a few ticks as the assistant excused herself from the room again. A moment later, a larger member of the staff followed her into the room to attempt his hand at removing the mould. He grunted as he tried. It felt as if all my teeth were going to be sucked out of my head. But still the tray didn’t move.
“Hold on,” I was told as both staff members ran out of the room.
A few minutes later the building’s maintenance man came into the room with his tool box. He clamped and tapped and gave all kinds of tools a go in an effort to get the job done. He even pushed against my forehead with the heel of one hand as he pulled on a pair of vise grips with the other. Nothing. The tray was stuck.
“I have an idea,” he said, and left me alone once more.
I was sitting in the chair reading the inspirational posters on the wall, striving to stay calm, when I was overcome by a terrible smell. I glanced around the room to try to locate its source. That’s when I realized I must have stepped in dog shit outside. With my eyes I followed my shitty tracks from the room’s entrance to the chair. Then I looked down at my feet. Shit waffled out at the sides of one of my boots. Worse, the shit was smeared all over the foot of the chair. A thousand bolts of horror shot through my brain. I prayed that somehow the pretty dental assistant hadn’t noticed. I got up out of the chair and started rifling through drawers, trying to find a stash of those baby-blue paper bibs they always chain around your neck at the dentist’s. My mind raced. My heart pounded. I broke out into a sweat. Finally I found them!
Hardly able to breathe with a tray of rock-hard concrete filling my mouth, I furiously wiped the chair. But rather than cleaning up the mess, I was spreading it around. Soon almost the whole chair was covered. I tried cleaning the floor, hoping I’d have better luck, but the results were the same. I was painting the room with dog shit. My stress mounted. The terrible smell grew stronger and stronger. I felt light-headed; the room began to spin. I could hear footsteps coming down the hall.
I fainted. What the pretty assistant saw when she opened the door: me, sprawled on the floor alongside the dog shit, surrounded by the special dental utensils from the little table I had knocked over when I collapsed.
When I came around again, I was in the car with my mother, who was driving me home. The mould tray was gone. I still had my teeth. My mother was crying. I still don’t know what happened after I passed out, and I don’t want to know.
I never wore those boots again.
A few weeks later, I got my braces. I had to miss a day of school to have them fitted—and it happened that this was the day musical instruments were being assigned to students in the music program. When I came back, I had my pick of the un-chosen instruments: the tuba and the French horn. In my mind French horn was for girls, so I went with the tuba. If I’d had a choice, I would have chosen the drums or the bass guitar or the trumpet.
No
one wanted the tuba, but I adopted it and I grew to love it. I liked the feel of its deep notes resonating in my chest. It felt like being healed.
Sometimes my music teacher, Mr. Pretty, would let me sign out the tuba and take it home. My mother didn’t like when I played it in the house, so I would take it into the woods. I would lug the thing as deep into the forest as I could go. When I found the right spot, I’d sit on a fallen tree and wait. I’d sit for twenty or thirty minutes with my eyes closed, smelling the trees, feeling the cool and listening to the silence. I wanted to give the forest animals—the deer, the rabbits, the bears, the coyotes, the big cats, sasquatch—a chance to forget I was there. Then, when the air was just right, I’d begin to play.
I only knew a couple of songs: “Hang on Sloopy,” the A&W Root Beer song, “The Pink Panther” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The animals didn’t like any of those songs. So instead I would play long, warm notes. After about a minute I’d hear the animals stirring behind the curtain of green. The feeling of the forest would change. It would lift a little. As badly as I wanted to see them, the animals never showed themselves—but they did seem to indicate that they didn’t mind me being there. At least, so I thought until the day I had a showdown.
I was droning softly one afternoon when a big ol’ black bear appeared before me. We stared at each other for a few moments. The bear’s energy was hard to read. I decided that he had either come to see me play or to make me stop. I had to make a choice. Gazing into his beautiful black eyes, I started to play again. He listened for ten or fifteen seconds and then decided he’d had enough. He raised his head, bared his teeth and let out the most frightening sound I’ve ever heard. Maybe he didn’t mean anything by it. Maybe it was his way of letting me know he liked my music and wanted to be friends. But in that moment he seemed to be saying, “You suck and I’m going to eat your face!”
I filled my lungs with a desperate inhale and then blasted the loudest sound I could muster. My horn produced a roar that sounded like hell breaking loose. The bear turned and ran for his life. A riot broke out in the forest. Birds flew out of the trees and there was the noise of scurrying in every direction.
I knew I had to get out of the woods and that my only chance was to play my way to safety. Unable to run with my giant instrument, I made the long walk back to civilization playing the riff from “Hang on Sloopy” the entire way.
•
My childhood in Mount Uniacke might have killed me if not for tennis balls and concrete walls. After the anger and punishments that accompanied the loss of my first glove had subsided, my father bought me another, even cheaper, one. As soon as I put it to work, something clicked. I was good almost right away. Defending your face and body against the attack of a small, hard projectile like a baseball, armed only with a glove or a bat, is a terrifying prospect at first. But once you get the hang of it—the first time you catch a high pop fly or hit a line drive—the thrill becomes addictive. As the speed increases, you begin to believe you can catch a bullet in your teeth or snatch lightning out of the sky. You feel like you’re getting revenge against death or learning to harness its power. There’s something almost godlike in your ability to bring the chaos to order. What remains of the fear turns inward with the knowledge you could efficiently kill a man with the game’s basic artillery. It’s been done a couple of time on the field during big-league games.
In 1920, Ray Chapman, who played shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, was hit in the temple by a pitch thrown by Yankees pitcher Carl Mays, who was going for his hundredth career win that day. Mays was a devout Methodist and refused to play on Sundays. But he had a mean streak in him. He had a reputation as a head hunter. He threw at Chapman on purpose, pissed off because he was crowding the plate. When the pitch made contact with Chapman’s head, the sound was sickening. This was in the days before batting helmets. Chapman collapsed to the dirt and never got up again. Players from both teams ran to check on him. But not Mays. He never left the mound. He just stood there with his arms folded and waited for play to resume. He lost the game that day but went on to win 207 in his career.
Unlike in most other major sports, you don’t have to be big and strong to excel at baseball. Hank Aaron, the greatest home-run hitter of all time, was only six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. Pedro Martinez, one of the greatest starting pitchers ever—five foot eleven, 170. What you need to be is smart. A successful baseball player is a thinker—a philosopher, a psychoanalyst, a Zen master. The game demands an ability to think several steps ahead, to imagine ten possible outcomes at once, to read an opponent’s thoughts, to be in the moment and to accept failure. Baseball turns boys into samurai.
I liked hitting and catching and throwing, but there was something even bigger that I loved about baseball. Although it’s a team sport, you feel alone when you play. In the batter’s box or on the mound or wandering the outfield, you’re on your own with your thoughts, concerns and worries. When you’re on the bench, you may have nothing in common with the players sitting next to you: money, smarts, beliefs, tastes. And the game is the same no matter where you play it. In a small country town—like the one I grew up in—or the big city, it’s always played on a pasture of dirt and grass. Even in the shadows of skyscrapers you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere.
The human animal has always scared me and that fear was useful on the field. It motivated me and kept me sharp. But even when I wanted to, I often couldn’t find other kids to play with. Most of those who lived along the dirt road where I grew up preferred hockey to baseball and were generally more interested in making trouble than playing sports. So usually I practised alone. My house was situated on a hill. This meant that a six-foot face of its concrete foundation was exposed in the backyard. I’d throw a ball against that wall all day long, and I’d continue throwing it past sundown in the glare of the porch light. Any ball that would bounce back to me would do: foam balls, rubber balls, tennis balls—anything I could get my hands on. Balls (and money to buy them) were scarce, so I was always searching, stealing and hoarding.
One of the most exciting days I can remember in my town came when a transfer truck carrying a full payload of golf balls jackknifed on the main drag in front of my father’s gas station. The truck rolled on its side, and on impact the cargo doors flung open, sending hundreds of thousands of golf balls bouncing and ricocheting in every direction. This was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. You would have thought the golf balls were precious gemstones to see the way all yokels nearby scrambled to fill their pockets. Golf was considered exotic and fancy where I came from, so perhaps everyone smelled an opportunity. Caught up in the excitement, I ripped the shirt off my ten-year-old body and used it as a bindle sack to collect as many balls as it would hold. I smuggled my windfall home and added it to my stash.
For the next several years I incorporated these contraband golf balls into my practice regimen. Because they are much smaller than baseballs, they bounce off concrete with terrifying velocity, but I figured that hazards would benefit the development of my hands and reflexes. I also used snow and gravel. Through the winters I’d throw snowballs at the trunks of skinny trees. In summers my batting practice often took the form of hitting rocks with a three-foot length of two-by-four. I’d send the rocks humming into the woods behind my house or into the lake behind the fire hall. Before long, I was able to hit a rock the size of a Ping-Pong ball into the trees beyond the opposite shore. This skill made me something of a local folk hero. I also trained myself to toss one rock high into the air and then hit it with another, tossed a few seconds later. One day, with no one around to witness it, I managed this feat seventeen times in a row, a personal record. I was like Annie Oakley without a gun.
I even figured out how to pitch to myself. I’d stand ten feet in front of my wall and position myself sideways, with my left shoulder toward the house. In my left hand I’d hold a bat. With my right I’d throw a ball sidearm, across my body, then snap into my bat
ting stance so I could hit the ball when it bounced back. The work was done at the far left end of the wall so that I could hit the ball into the open yard between my house and that of Mr. Baker, next door. This necessitated precision bat control. If I hit the ball too far to the left, it would hit the old man’s house and he would get mad at me. If I hit the ball to the right, it would hit my house and my mother would get mad at me, which was way worse.
Making matters all the more precarious, to the immediate right of my preferred section of wall was a window. It was about two feet from my target, so I had to develop a very accurate throwing arm. Shaking her fist at me, my mother constantly screamed her prophecy that I would one day break that window and her promise that she would kill me when it happened. I wasn’t one bit worried. I had total confidence in my abilities. But even after years passed without incident, still the warnings came.
And then it happened. On the millionth pitch in the ten thousandth and first hour of five years of tireless repetition, I was a little late with a swing and hit the ball through the window, sending a spray of glass into the rec room. Miraculously the rec room was unoccupied. But I was petrified. My mother was preparing dinner over the barbecue on the deck that overlooked the backyard. I waited for the hellfire to rain down.
But it didn’t come. All I heard was the sizzling of hamburgers on the grill. By some divine mercy, my mother hadn’t noticed the violent micro symphony of the shattering glass.
My mind raced. My chances of escape were slim, but I had to try. I ran into the rec room through the basement door and dropped to my knees in the middle of the field of broken glass. I started furiously sweeping the shards from the carpet with my bare hands. I was being cut to pieces, so I had to take extra care not to spill blood all over the place. Once I had every tiny shard collected in a neat pile, my attention turned to the window frame, which had jagged teeth of glass arranged around its edges. I had a theory.
I ran into the bathroom, which I remembered had double frames of glass in the windows. Using the claw end of a hammer I had dug out of my father’s tool box, I pried loose one of the frames. This I managed to do with surprising efficiency. I sprinted back to the rec room with the frame cradled in my arms. Next I swapped out the injured frame with the pilfered one.