Wicked and Weird

by Rich Terfry

  The man’s head was disproportionately large compared with the rest of his body. It often listed to one side, giving the impression that his neck wasn’t sufficiently strong to support the head’s mass. The head was decorated with a face that wore a permanent scowl.

  It was obvious the meanest man in the world hated us kids. We’d see him out for a jog and he’d look in our direction and spit while staring a hole right through us. One day I was playing road hockey with my friends, the brothers Shoosh and Tubs. Wandering close by was their beautiful golden retriever, Raisins. When the meanest man in the world jogged past wearing a Bruce Lee track suit, Raisins smelled his evil and barked. The meanest man in the world gave gentle Raisins a flying kung fu kick and then froze in an attack pose when he landed. Raisins broke our hearts with a series of wounded yelps and ran away.

  “If that stupid animal ever comes near me again, I’ll fucking kill it.”

  The man spoke in a British accent—the first time I’d ever heard such a sound in real life, and somehow this made him more terrifying than ever.

  Two summers later, a group of us were playing a game of pickup baseball on the road in front of my cousin Bert’s house, which was next door to the place owned by the meanest man in the world. Halfway through the game, a scene unfolded in the meanest man’s front yard that blew my mind. Twenty-five years later, I still haven’t fully recovered from it. There on the lawn, breakdancing to the song “Tour de France” by Kraftwerk on a sheet of cardboard unfolded on the grass, were the three prettiest girls in the entire world. The combination of electronic beats and harp sounds, French lyrics and the blur of suntanned legs was overwhelming. I almost fainted.

  At this point in our game, Bert was hitting. He had excellent bat control, and he knew as well as I did that the situation required investigation. He hit a foul ball into the yard of the meanest man in the world so that one of us would have to enter the dancing girls’ orbit to retrieve it. I volunteered for the job.

  The beauty collected on that patch of grass was even more mesmerizing up close. The girls were several years older than we were. They looked as if they had stepped out of a Klimt painting. All three were tall, with legs that went on forever. They had sexy boobs and bums, like girls in the movies. They had long summer hair and wore red lipstick. But what struck me most was their shoulders—six beautiful, muscular shoulders. And the girls were dressed in great style, the like of which had never before been seen in Mount Uniacke—and hasn’t been since. The girls had names I had never heard before either: Maisie was the undisputed leader of the pack, the daughter of the meanest man in the world (a detail my mind could not fathom). Her friends were Pippa and Evie. They were visiting from England and were—collectively—the most exotic thing my eyes had ever beheld.

  As the baseball game disbanded on the road behind me, I asked the girls stupid questions and drank of them deeply with all my senses. We talked about music. The Beastie Boys’ first album had just come out and we were all very excited about it. I showed the girls some of my dance moves, having fancied myself a b-boy. Making matters all the more dreamlike, the girls doted on me, saying they liked my lips. A hundred previously unknown parts of my psyche were awakened. In the company of these new girls, I was a new and unfamiliar person.

  In my bed that night, my mind raced with the sounds and colours of the breakdancing beauties. When I couldn’t take the torment anymore, I got dressed, snuck out of the house and walked up the hill to the home of the meanest man in the world. From the road in front of his house, I could see the shadows of the girls moving across the walls of a room that glowed with a dim golden light. Stifling my terror of the meanest man in the world, I tiptoed across the lawn and tapped on the window. Maisie’s face shone in the frame for a moment before she turned to Pippa and Evie to help hoist me up.

  Once I was inside I fell with the girls onto a big bed at the end of the room. The girls slithered around me and laughed at jokes I didn’t understand, while trying to make as little noise as possible. Evie clicked the light off. Quiet fell over the room. Before I realized it was happening, my hands and mouth were exploring the ocean of womanhood that rose and fell about me. I was drowning and unconcerned. Hair, breath, hands, breasts—I didn’t know whose was whose.

  I was lost in adolescent-libidinal bliss, when a single blinding, bright-orange blast of synaesthesic fireworks flashed in my brain. It was the reflection of a bolt of electric pain that originated in my lower back and shot into my neck. The meanest man in the world had entered the room with ninja stealth and struck me hard across the spine with a bo staff. The girls shrieked as I dived headlong out the window. I landed hard on the ground and barrel-rolled into the ditch that bordered the front yard. When I collected myself, I found that the injury I had sustained rendered me unable to walk. The pain was terrific and I had to crawl all the way home, but I did so with a smile on my face. I had kissed a girl for the first time.

  •

  In those days there was another girl, Nikki, who would come visit from out of town once in a while. She was the niece of a man who lived up the road from me—about halfway between my house and the house of the meanest man in the world. During one of her visits, I decided I would show her a good time by taking her to a construction site near her uncle’s house. For an adolescent boy few things were more fun than an unattended construction site. There was stuff to climb on, holes in the ground, piles of dirt … It was the closest thing to an amusement park in a Podunk town like mine.

  That Saturday, Nikki was wearing a blue-and-white striped dress. I remember admiring the little blond hairs against the tan of her legs as we sat on a plank of the scaffolding of a new split-level that was being built. I was trying to convince her to push off and fall into a big pile of fresh dirt fifteen or twenty feet below. She was scared. I demonstrated a few times to show her how fun it was, playing it up by “woo-hooing” wildly as I flew. I’d scamper back up and sit next to her again, covered in more filth each time.

  After my eighteenth or nineteenth dirt dive, I waited down below and coaxed Nikki desperately. I fantasized about her falling into my arms and kissing me. Finally she agreed that she would do it on the count of ten.

  “… TEN!”

  Once Nikki pushed off, she raised her arms above her head—just as we all have the instinct to do when we’re falling. But as she did so, the middle finger of her left hand snagged between two of the steel poles. The weight of her body and the force of her fall pulled the finger right off. It made the most horrible dull popping sound.

  When Nikki hit the dirt, the full realization of what had happened didn’t come to her right away. It took a few seconds before she started screaming.

  There was so much blood. And it was all my fault. I wanted to die, but there was no time for that. I pulled off my T-shirt and wrapped up her hand with it. I told her to squeeze it tight with her other hand. She understood. Then I went about the grim task of climbing back up the scaffolding to retrieve her finger.

  The finger was so pretty. Little red tears fell from it. It took some work to un-wedge it from between the poles. I don’t quite know what possessed me to do it, but when I got it out, I kissed it before closing my fist over it.

  When I found Nikki again, she was passed out on the dirt. I scooped her up in my arms and ran her back to her uncle’s house. The sun was setting behind us as I ran, and our shadows were long and grotesque. It was like a scene from the cover of a romance novel, except that I was skinny and caked with dirt.

  My arrival at Nikki’s uncle’s house inspired chaos. There was yelling and running and crying. After I handed over Nikki and then her finger, I became invisible. I disappeared into a deep, mute shame. I never wanted to be seen again.

  I got back home, and my mother asked where my shirt was.

  “I lost it.”

  I grabbed my glove and a tennis ball and threw against the wall for three hours.

  I didn’t see Nikki again until a year or so later. That’s when I f
ound out they weren’t able to save her finger. She still liked me, though. We were too old for piles of dirt now, so we took a walk along the railroad tracks and kissed.

  •

  As an adolescent, my hormones raged as violently as those of any other boy. I was curious about girls’ bodies and had crushes, but I never had a girlfriend. My life was filled with baseball and music and fear and Catholic guilt. I was also in no rush to grow up. Most kids wanted to be older, but not me. I wanted to play in the dirt. I wasn’t curious about cigarettes and huffing gas and stealing my parents’ liquor. I wanted to stay a kid.

  I was scared, too, of anything that might alter my humour. The fiendishness of my alcoholic grandfather, Pepe, and the chaos in his home had left an indelible mark on me. The screaming and shouting, the crying and the violence, had scared the shit out of me. I had watched alcohol turn my grandfather into a sad gorilla. Seeing him have sex with a beverage, knock out a man with a loaf of bread and get clanked over the head with a cast-iron skillet seems funny now, but at the time—and through the eyes of a little kid—it was a nightmare.

  And then there was my mother. It’s not that I feared her disapproval. Rather, the thought of veering out of absolute control and being a disruptive force within her fragile preserve never crossed my mind. I was never going to be the cause of my mother’s anguish. No way.

  But the biggest motivation for my self-discipline was baseball. I intended to become a professional athlete, and I took my health very seriously. It helped having a figure like Ted Williams as a role model. I quickly discovered that he is almost unanimously regarded as the greatest hitter who ever played. Even though his career ended long before I was born, I wanted to learn everything I could from him. I read every Ted Williams–related book, essay and magazine article I could get my dirty, callused hands on. When I read that he never drank anything stronger than a milkshake for fear it would dull his skills, that was good enough for me. My favourite active player when I was young was Gary Carter. Growing up in eastern Canada, the only big-league games I could find on TV or on the radio were Montreal Expos games. He was their charismatic all-star catcher. He was actively involved in the “Just say no” campaign and his word was gospel to me. Gary Carter could have told me to chew on my rancid socks after every game and I would have followed his advice.

  In 1984, I met Gary Carter during a visit with my dad to Montreal. Carter was nice to me. Nicer than any adult had ever been. He gave me his autograph and posed for a picture, and then he asked me if I wanted to play catch with him. This encounter took place at Olympic Stadium before a Sunday-afternoon game against the San Diego Padres. My father had hassled the Expos PR office until they gave in and arranged for me to hang out in the tunnel leading to the dugout before batting practice that day. Gary Carter was the first to arrive. Later I met Andre Dawson, Tim Raines and Tim Wallach. Pete Rose too—he collected his four thousandth hit while wearing the Expos uniform in 1984. And in those days the great Duke Snider—the Duke of Flatbush—did colour commentary for the Expos television broadcasts. We rode in an elevator together, and I said hello. It was the best day of my life, and sealed my fate as a baseball man and a clean-living hard worker.

  •

  My youth had been spent in self-imposed exile from the rest of the world. I hid. I hid in the dark of the woods from horrors at home. I hid in the dark of my bedroom from the horrors of the woods. I hid inside the walls of music and my imagination. I imagined kissing girls I’d never know and I imagined playing in the World Series. Surrendering my voice made my eyes and ears stronger. I was the quiet observer, never knowing comfort. I was the unforgiven son, seeking approval through punishment. As I grew taller and stronger, I did not desire to deaden myself. I was at once overstimulated and already numb to the point of near paralysis—as if I were living in a dream. A monster in the woods had chased the love out of me, so I sought pain as a reminder that I was still alive. Not that death ever left me alone for long. It continued to stalk Mount Uniacke. I had a pair of shoes I wore only to funerals. I noticed that holes had worn through the soles the day I put them on to attend services for my friend Bunch. People said he took his own life. But I think that after his mother’s tortures, Hoy Calahan’s poisonings, and playing catch with me until it hurt almost every day, his body just gave out at the age of fifteen.

  With Bunch on the wrong side of the grass, my exercises intensified. I threw the ball harder against the wall and hit it later into the nights. My shoulders grew stronger and my dreams more vivid. A career in major-league baseball was all I wanted, but I had no strategy for getting there. My credo was simple: “Keep working hard and hope for the best.” So when I heard there would be college coaches and big-league scouts prowling an open instructional camp not far from where I lived, I signed up right away.

  Upon arrival at the camp, I learned that the star attraction was a man named Stan Sanders. He wore a World Series ring he’d earned as a coach for the New York Yankees. His claim to fame was scouting Baseball Hall of Fame rump-shaker Mike Schmidt. Now Sanders was the head coach of the University of Toledo Rockets and a scout for the Yanks. He had been a fixture at the camp for several years and made it known each morning that never once had rain fallen during his watch. He vowed that no one would ever spot a drop as long as he was around. I saw him as a holy figure—a man of the cloth in the church of baseball.

  During the ten-day run of the camp, my determination was ferocious. I wasn’t fit to be spoken to. I had seven years of golf-ball, gravel and snowball training under my belt, and now this was the real deal. I needed to make an impression among a few hundred campers, many of whom were older and bigger than I was. I also had very little experience playing with a proper ball, let alone playing the game in an organized way. But I was fuelled by my desire to do it for Bunch. He’d believed in my dreams. He’d told me I was good every day.

  Two days into the camp, Stan approached me as I was doing fielding drills in a small group.

  “I’ve been watching you, son,” he said.

  I kept working.

  “I can tell you’ve had some very good coaches,” he continued.

  “Yes, sir,” I lied. I regret that moment to this day. I was ashamed to tell him that I’d never had a coach. I’m sure he would have been totally flabbergasted if he’d known the truth: that I had taught myself, mostly by throwing rocks.

  “Well, keep up the good work, kid. I’ve got my eye on you.”

  Hearing those words would have rattled the nerves of most, but not me. I was already looking much further down the road, past the trials of this week. Nonetheless I recognized a door being opened and doubled my grim persistence. No ball got past me. Every throw was a missile to the chest. Every swing of the bat sent the ball screaming into the yonder. Whenever Stan saw something that impressed him, he’d bellow his signature slogan: “Ho! Lee-toe, Leedo!”

  The best moment of that week came when Stan pulled me aside as everyone else was breaking for lunch. He was carrying a pail filled with pristine white baseballs.

  “You can grab a sandwich later. Let’s take a little extra batting practice, just me and you. I want to see you hit every one of these balls over that fence,” he ordered, pointing toward centre field.

  This was it. A make-or-break moment. I chose a bat from the rack and dug into the box. Stan climbed the mound, looking like an old army general, his uniform pulled over his beach-ball belly and aviators obscuring any emotion. He went to work, barking orders at me as he threw.

  “Okay, knock the cover off this one!”

  Crack!

  “AGAIN!”

  Crack!

  “Let me see you go the other way!” he said.

  Crack! I hit the ball into the opposite field.

  Time after time the ball jumped off my bat and into the “other air.” As each one landed somewhere out of sight beyond the fences, a cheer went up from the young campers looking on as they ate their lunches.

  After about fifteen minutes of
this demonstration, Stan said, “Okay, last one,” and waved the ball by his ear. “I want to see you hit this one into outer space!”

  I nodded, and instead of coiling my body, I relaxed.

  CRACK!

  “HO! Lee-toe, LEEDO!” Stan proclaimed as the ball rocketed for the heavens. The old general looked pleased as I walked off and sat down to eat the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich of my life.

  On the last day of the camp, Stan called me over to sit next to him on the bench in the dugout.

  “How old are you, son?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “So, you’re still in high school.”

  “Yes, sir. I have one more year to go.”

  “Do you want to be a baseball player?”

  “Yes, I do. More than anything.”

  “Okay. Well, listen. When you finish high school, I want you to come to Toledo and work with me for a few years. I’ll send you on your way.”

  I looked at the ground and nodded.

  “Now, listen to me, kid,” he continued. “I want you to understand something. I’m not going to waste my time coming all the way out here to the middle of Bumble-fuck, Nowhere—pardon my French—to bring an average player back home with me. There are five hundred average players in my own goddamn backyard! I wouldn’t be saying this unless I was positive that you’re going to be a superstar.”

  He instructed me to return to the camp the next summer and “be ready to go.” And then he shook my hand.

  •

  In my last year of high school, I was hell-bent on my escape plan. Study and practise. Study and practise. I barely slept. I didn’t tell my parents I’d be leaving at the end of the school year. They weren’t supportive of my baseball ambitions and I don’t think they cared what I did with my life. I wasn’t pressured to go to university; it wasn’t even suggested. I strove for academic and athletic perfection strictly on my own.