Wicked and Weird

by Rich Terfry

  Once in a blue moon, Coy would show up at the park on a ten-speed bike while Bunch and I were playing catch. He’d dismount while the bike was still moving and let it crash to the ground. It would make a sound like a tambourine. Then he’d start shouting orders:

  “GIMME THE FUCKIN’ BALL!”

  Even Bunch was afraid of him, which was saying something. We’d try to ignore him, hoping he’d lose interest and ride away, but he never did. Every thought in Coy’s head was an obsession.

  “NOW!”

  We’d toss him the ball as politely as we could and try to keep from crying. He’d pull his shirt off and start windmilling his arm to warm up.

  “I’M PITCHING! WHO’S UP, FOR FUCK SAKES?”

  What Coy lacked in good form, he made up in brute strength. He could throw very hard and had no interest in the strike zone. He aimed for our heads. He’d terrorize until he plunked one of us. Only then would he collect his bike and sprint out of the park, muscles glistening, hair flowing in his wind.

  But there came a day when I was ready for him. I had the lightning now.

  “WHO’S UP?”

  “I am.”

  By now a baseball bat felt like an Excalibur in my hands. I could hit with authority and control just about anything thrown at me. I was also fed up. At this moment, standing shirtless and godlike in front of me, Coy represented all the violence, death and fear in Mount Uniacke—on the roads, in the woods and at home. He was the ghost of Uniacke Jr. He was whoever had stolen my first baseball glove. He was Hoy Calahan’s hard-on. He was the demon that possessed Bunch’s mother. He was the reaper who laughed in Rusty’s ears.

  “Bring it on, motherfucker.” I couldn’t imagine saying those words to him then, but I imagine it now. I didn’t see this showdown as a battle between good (me) and evil (Coy). Instead, I wanted to out-evil him. This was a hitter’s trick I had learned from the scriptures of Ted Williams, the worst nightmare of every major-league pitcher of the forties and fifties. I wanted to destroy this beautiful man, to send him screaming back to hell.

  The first pitch he threw was unhittable. It whistled behind me, down a hill and into the bushes.

  “F-F-FUCK!”

  Bunch had to go running after it. It took him two minutes to return.

  “HURRY UP, PUSSY!”

  During that interval, I didn’t look at Coy. I just stared at the ground to keep my focus and maintain my evil. When the next ball finally came, it was right where I wanted it. It was probably a much better pitch than Coy had wanted to throw: belt high and on the outside edge of the flap of a cardboard box that we used as home plate. I swung with deadly intent.

  There wasn’t time to blink between the bat making contact with the ball and the ball hitting Coy flush in the face. It made the most godawful sound—a combination crunch-splash. Coy’s head snapped back, his hair flying as if it belonged to a glamorous model in a shampoo commercial. There was a fine spray of deep-red blood. Coy didn’t fall backward. He crumpled straight into a pile of himself.

  Bunch and I gaped at each other. The earth stood still. The birds, horses and dogs of Mount Uniacke froze. Coy lay in an unconscious heap for what must have been a minute but felt like an hour. Bunch and I telepathically agreed that we should run, except our bodies were rooted in the dirt.

  When Coy came to, he didn’t struggle to his feet like a vanquished boxer. He bolted into a frightening hunch. His face was so masked in blood it was hard to tell where, exactly, he was bleeding. All his front teeth were gone. His nose was obviously broken. His eyes were swollen shut. His cheeks puffed in and out as he breathed heavily through the smashed window of his dental arcade. He wasn’t looking at me or Bunch or anything in particular. Maybe he was having a vision; maybe he’d gone blind. After a moment, a new demon took possession of him and he roared at the sky. Then he turned ninety degrees and ran faster than I had ever seen a man run, straight into the woods. Bunch and I just stood and listened to the sound of snapping branches grow fainter and fainter.

  Afterwards Bunch and I sat on the grass in silence for a while, thinking about life and death. We stirred only when the sun was going down. Bunch announced, “My mother’s going to kill me,” and tore off once again on his shitty bike.

  •

  While Bunch’s mother was the number-one-ranked angriest mother in Mount Uniacke, my own mother was probably number two. She had inherited her furies from my grandfather. He lived a hundred miles away in small-town Cape Breton, where he worked as a lighthouse keeper and an alcoholic. He didn’t look like a lighthouse keeper, but he did look like an alcoholic. He drove Cadillacs and wore flashy shirts and dyed his hair jet black until his last day. He had a leathery countenance, a diseased laugh and a cat named Diesel. I called my grandfather “Pepe,” but everyone else called him “Rocky.” Every word that came out of his mouth was yelled at the top of his lungs and was enhanced with an array of obscenities, unless he was reciting Yeats, which was often. He also knew thousands of dirty limericks, some of which he wrote himself. He smelled like a cocktail of hard liquor, cigarettes, Royal Pine Car-Freshner and sweat twice-filtered through the armpit of a polyester shirt. The exterior of his house was painted pink. The interior was decorated with Catholic iconography, framed photographs of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and, at any given time, the bodies of at least one or two men knocked unconscious by booze and/or Pepe’s fist.

  I was visiting on the Saturday afternoon when Pepe TKO’d his neighbour Roscoe in the first round of a kitchen boxing match.

  Roscoe was lanky and dull-witted, and though he hadn’t combed his hair in decades and had lost most of his teeth, he was quite handsome. He wore a scarf and rowed a dory around the bay most afternoons—two habits my grandfather could not abide. Pepe also thought Roscoe was namby-pamby due to his “excessive” regard for nature. He’d once returned from a stay in the hospital to discover that a chickadee had built a nest at the base of the windshield of his car. He didn’t have the heart to disturb the nest and refused to move the vehicle or go anywhere near it. Soon other birds came along and nested, and eventually Roscoe forfeited the automobile to the thriving avian community.

  On the Saturday in question, Pepe and Roscoe began squabbling over an old grudge as the day grew drunker. As their feud intensified, loaves of bread baked by my great-aunt Eleanor cooled on the Formica table. At last Pepe, stung by a particularly grievous insult from his old nemesis, bolted to his feet with such violence he sent his chair tumbling onto its back.

  “Son of a whore!”

  “Your mother’s a big turtle!”

  “Lick the back of my balls, ye gypsy bastard!”

  “You musty can of piss! Ram it up yer howl!”

  “Ah, pull a cunt over your head, you dirty plunger!”

  “Cockeyed turd puncher! Go fuck yer own arse!”

  Pepe snapped. He growled through his teeth and looked around the kitchen for a weapon. Finally, he grabbed one of Eleanor’s loaves. It was a twin loaf of fluffy white bread that looked like a perfect pair of golden brown buttocks. Pepe pulled the halves apart and buried a fist in each one. Then, brandishing them as boxing gloves, he struck a pugilistic pose.

  “Come on!” he taunted. Roscoe was understandably bewildered. My grandfather clamped a second loaf between his wrists and tossed it to his opponent. As I watched the drama unfold, I imagined that sinking one’s hands into mounds of still-warm bread must be a most pleasurable sensation, but the old-timers were probably too worked up to savour it. They circled each other for a few moments, dukes up. Pepe faked a body blow with his left before landing a firm jab right between the eyes with his right. An angry cloud of bread crumbs swarmed Roscoe’s face and settled in his hair. He wasn’t hurt, but he was profoundly offended. He lunged at Pepe, arms flailing. For a few moments, the two were tangled in a cat fight, each landing weak blows about the chest and shoulders. Breaking free, Roscoe took a wild swing with his right. It missed, causing his front foot to skid on the fine layer of flakes that ha
d accumulated on the kitchen’s tile floor. As he struggled to balance himself, he dropped his guard, allowing Pepe to land a mighty right hook to the cheek. Roscoe dropped like a rag doll.

  “Now, go away and shit yourself, ye feckin’ wankstain!”

  Pepe should have been a Dadaist. He had a natural flair for the absurd and surreal. On another visit, it was just the two of us in the pink house one night. My parents, aunts and uncles had gone out to the Pig and Bell pub, where the house band played a riotous brand of traditional Irish music and the brawling and dancing were indistinguishable. Pepe was too sick to go. He had been throwing up loudly all night. We were watching an especially brutal boxing match on TV when he asked for my help.

  “Run to da fridge, you. Fetch me a fuck water.”

  “Huh?”

  “FUCK WATER! And hurry it up, b’y.”

  I walked to the kitchen, hoping his words would make sense when I got there. I opened the fridge door and searched frantically. Pepe’s temper burned from the other room. When I couldn’t find the F-word anywhere, I looked back to where he was sitting and worried my eyebrows.

  “Yer t’ick as manure and half as useful, son,” Pepe grunted as he rose from his chair. “Sharp as a feckin’ beach ball, fer da luff a Croist.” He stomped to the kitchen, and I could hear the silverware rattling in the drawer. Plates trembled in the cupboard. Pepe peered into the refrigerator like a pitcher receiving signals from his catcher. He captured a can of club soda and showed it to me. “Fuck water, yeah?”

  “Okay.”

  Pepe cracked the can. His hands looked like driftwood. Next he loosened his belt. Then he poured the club soda down his pants, moaning as it filtered. “Oh yeah. Dat’s da stuff …” After a pause, he looked over at me and winked. “Now we can watch da rest of da foit.”

  •

  My other grandfather, Charlie—my dad’s dad—was my hero.

  Charlie was a retired janitor and lived an hour from Mount Uniacke, deep in the country. He was mute and whistled to communicate, like Harpo Marx. He and my hard-cooking grandmother lived in a little white house with a porch, and a cherry tree in the yard. He chopped wood for the stove and went for a walk every day, rain or shine. The walks weren’t for fresh air or exercise but because he hated his next-door neighbour, Hooky Walker. Sometime back in the forties, someone in the neighbourhood had pilfered from folks’ milk deliveries. Charlie always suspected Hooky.

  One day not long after the milk-pilfering incident, Charlie grabbed a hat from his rack and went for a stroll. On his way he saw Hooky sitting on his porch. As per usual, no pleasantries were exchanged. Later that same afternoon, Charlie was relaxing on his own porch, when he saw Hooky drift past on his afternoon constitutional. Charlie noticed that Hooky’s hat was a rather nice one (probably stole that too, he thought), so when he went out for another walk that evening, he made a point of wearing the finest chapeau he could find. Twenty minutes after returning home and resuming his post on the porch, Charlie chafed when Hooky walked by again—making no eye contact but proudly wearing a new hat of his own, this one the finest of the four showcased that day. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

  When Charlie woke up the next morning, he lay in bed thinking about how he would answer Hooky’s hat challenge. When inspiration struck, he sprang from his bed and laddered up to the attic. Later that morning he left the house in his daily uniform of workboots, overalls and a long-sleeved white shirt. Wobbling on his head was a silk top hat, three sizes too small.

  For several days, each man’s challenge was answered by the other in increasingly daring ways. Charlie ran out of hats before that no-good Hooky did, but he was no quitter. When it was his turn, he folded his newspaper into a sailor’s hat. The next day he wore a cardboard box on his head. When he ran out of makeshift hats such as lampshades and upside-down mush pots à la Johnny Appleseed, he perfected the skill of balancing objects on his head: books, lit candles, a sack of potatoes … After a couple of months Hooky surrendered, but no one could hold a grudge like Charlie. He walked by Hooky’s house with something on his head every day for more than forty years, until the day he passed on.

  All my first favourite songs were the ones Charlie played for me in his parlour: “Just Waitin’ ” by Hank Williams; “Playin’ Dominoes and Shootin’ Dice” by Red Foley; “Life Gets Tee-jus, Don’t It?” by Tex Williams. These are all talking-blues songs, but back then I didn’t know there was a name for them. The lyrics are spoken in a rhythmic way rather than sung. I imagined these songs speaking for my grandfather since he couldn’t speak himself. He must have had a hundred of them. Maybe more. I loved these songs simply because Charlie loved them and I had never heard anything like them anywhere else. I was only four or five years old when he started playing them for me. The collection was so strange, and so dear to him, I thought he must have somehow created the music himself.

  When, years later, I heard hip hop music for the first time, I thought of it as “the music Granddad likes.” To me, it was just more talking blues. When I heard beatboxing on records by Doug E. Fresh, T La Rock and Just-Ice, it reminded me of a naughty talking-blues song called “Swamp Root” by Harmonica Frank, which was one of Charlie’s all-time favourites. This song features the hillbilly beatbox technique called “eefin’.” It’s a percussive combination of gasps, moans and fart sounds that goes back a hundred years before Doug E. Fresh came along.

  Charlie passed on to my father his eccentricity and joy of playing records. Dad worked as a DJ when he was a teenager, and in the sixties his services were much in demand at sock hops, hoedowns and pig roasts. He also used to warm up the crowds for a popular rock and roll combo named Walt and the Satans.

  My cousin Bert also inherited the music-sharing gene, but there was a mutation in the chromosome. Bert’s method was infliction. He had an incredibly powerful hi-fi set-up and would run the speakers into a closet. Then he would throw me into that closet, barricade the door and play the most doom-heavy selections in the Black Sabbath catalogue: “War Pigs,” “Iron Man” and “Children of the Grave,” the volume set to ten. This experiment went on for more than a year. Bert wasn’t satisfied until I could recite all the lyrics by heart. I suppose I have Bert to thank for my appetite for dark, heavy music. Bert would also record himself belching into a microphone, and he blasted me with these tapes as well. I’m not sure what effect this procedure had on my psyche.

  By the time I reached my teens, my musical tastes were already quite broad, but it was hip hop that dazzled my imagination. To me, hip hop felt like something old-fashioned colliding with something from outer space. In those days of the early eighties, the beats were mostly drum machine and synth based, and the sound of scratching was the most joyously confusing thing I’d ever heard. By 1986, the musical scavenger hunt of sampling was becoming commonplace and rapping was more technical and abstract. I would transcribe lyrics in notebooks, trying to unlock the mysteries of Rakim, Kool Keith and MC Shan.

  Because I lived in rural Nova Scotia in the days before the internet, with only two channels on the television, the music I loved was hard to find. I heard it at the roller skating rink on weekends and on tapes I got from kids I met there. Still, resources were very limited.

  My life changed one Sunday when I was on a trip to the city of Halifax with my mother. I was fiddling with the radio when I heard something extraordinary—a song called “Leader of the Pack” by UTFO. My mind was blown. I had the song on an umpteenth-generation mixtape, but now I was hearing it hiss free—ON THE RADIO! I soon learned that what I was hearing was a weekly, two-hour, all-hip-hop radio show broadcast from the Dalhousie University campus station. For the next few years, my life revolved around that two-hour time slot.

  Halfway home that fateful day, my heart sank when we lost the signal. The station was only meant to serve the campus of the school, which existed within a radius of a few city blocks. I needed to find a way to listen at home, which was almost fifty kilometres away.

  My ju
venile and frantic mind deduced that the answer was to find high ground. The signal was lost when it was blocked by obstructions natural and man-made, so I needed to get up into unobstructed air. Luckily, I lived on a mountain; even so, the elevation wasn’t enough. The tallest things in Mount Uniacke were trees, so I scouted the area, by bicycle, for the highest one in the village.

  Satisfied I had found it, that tree became my home for two hours every Sunday. I would get gussied up in my knockoff Adidas track suit, load up on blank tapes, batteries and PB&J sandwiches, grab my shitty boom box and scramble to the top, some fifty feet in the air. The tree was flimsy at its apex. I swayed perilously, which made me nervous, but I tried to look cool because I was clearly visible to passing cars below. It was important to maintain an appropriately b-boy pose and grimace.

  Those were glorious days for hip hop music. I filled tape after tape with songs by Schoolly D, MC Shan, Steady B, Mantronix, Craig G, Eric B. & Rakim, Ultramagnetic MC’s, the Boogie Boys, Dana Dane, on and on and on. And I’d come home just after sunset, scratched, covered in sap, and with two handfuls of tapes filled with mind-altering music.

  •

  Music was a growing obsession for me. But baseball remained my first love by a long shot. My arm was getting stronger. I would try to throw rocks over the horizon, and I was beginning to wonder what was over there. But my whole world was still a half mile of dirt road.

  At the end of that road is a beautiful lake. For that reason, some of the houses along the road served as summer homes for people who lived in the city. One such home was owned by the meanest man in the world.