Wicked and Weird

by Rich Terfry

  Stan had mentioned that I would need to become bigger and stronger. At home I wasn’t getting the protein my body required—I subsisted mostly on sugar-blasted breakfast cereal. And I didn’t have access to proper weight-training equipment. So, I constructed an elaborate routine of twenty different exercises using a cinder block I found in the weeds behind my father’s gas station. It worked just as well as any gym. Soon I was ripped.

  During those months, I consulted frequently with my spiritual advisers, Bev and Terry. “B&T,” as I referred to them, were former nuns who were now lovers. I had been riding my bike to B&T’s place since I was nine. They lived in a mobile home next to the railroad crossing and always had a corn dog waiting for me; they knew I liked mine with mustard only. I could talk with B&T about almost anything: calculus homework; the suicide epidemic; David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. They collected baseball cards, which they would sometimes trade with me, and they told me stories about the greats from before my time: Eddie Mathews, Richie Allen, Robin Roberts. After I told them the news about Stan Sanders, they literally jumped for joy.

  Whenever I showed up at B&T’s place, Terry would answer the door with a smile. “Well, dog my cats! Look who it is! I hope you brought some rookie cards!”

  One afternoon, I arrived in a terrible state. I can’t remember what the problem was now. Maybe I’d been walloped at home. Maybe I had been in the woods. Maybe I’d heard the news that Gary Carter had been traded to the Mets. Whatever it was, I was enough of a cretin to ask these two women who had once devoted themselves to the church, “Why does God let bad things happen?” I’ll never forget what Bev told me.

  “Do you like surprises?”

  “No.”

  “Not even sometimes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She paused long enough for a faint grimace and then continued.

  “Don’t you love it when a ball team makes a triple play? Or when an outfielder reaches over the wall to rob a home run? Or how about when a hitter manages a four-home-run game? (Bob Horner of the Atlanta Braves once hit four against my Expos and the Braves still lost!) What about Ted Williams hitting over .400 or DiMaggio’s streak? Point being, baseball would be a pretty boring game if the pitcher struck out every batter in every game, wouldn’t it?”

  This is where Terry chimed in.

  “If the Lord had everything planned out for us, life would have no meaning at all. There’d be no baseball because the outcome of every game would already be decided. There would be no surprises in life, like Bev said. No mistakes, but no excitement or mystery either.”

  “You’d be a robot,” Bev said, but she pronounced it “robit”

  and then performed a series of bleep-bloop sounds. Terry laughed and then there was a silence long enough for me to turn their words over in my head once or twice.

  “I guess so,” I said at last.

  Every time I spent a Saturday afternoon with them, I’d leave feeling a little less afraid of the world. Then I’d go home and throw a ball against the wall for a few hours.

  I also worked hard to save up some money that year. I helped out my father at the gas station. Few people who lived along my road had a lawn, but I offered to mow for those who did. During the winter months I got into the driveway-snow-removal racket. I used a trick my father had taught me—fire.

  The old man hated shovelling snow. Mount Uniacke was situated at a high altitude and relatively close to the ocean. These factors meant that during winter months, we were hit with a lot of heavy, wet snow. That’s the worst kind to shovel, especially when you suffer from a chronic herniated disk the way my father did. He had always complained that there had to be a better way. Then one night, the solution came to him in a dream. Our driveway was on an incline. He reasoned that if he poured a rivulet of gasoline across the high end and lit it on fire, the heat would melt the snow and gravity would draw his illumination downward, finishing the job for him. Next snowfall he was giddy with anticipation. I’d never seen him excited about snow. As soon as the storm subsided, he ran to fetch his gas can. I stuck my head through the drapes across the living room window to watch. He poured the gas, lit the match—and wouldn’t you know, his diabolical plan worked like a goddamn charm! The snow was gone and his back was spared. He employed his new method in the wake of three consecutive snowfalls. Each time was a complete success. His only complaint was that the job took too long. It was faster than shovelling, but there was still a lot of time spent standing around supervising.

  Satisfied that flame was the answer, my father was ready to take things to the next level. One Saturday afternoon he drove to the army-navy surplus store in the city and came back home with a decommissioned flame-thrower. A man named Skid, who lived a few doors up the road, was an American who’d operated such a device during the Vietnam War. My father guessed right that Skid would be able to make the machine work again. Once my father got the hang of using it, he was able to clear the entire driveway of a foot of snow in sixty seconds flat. I was his official timekeeper and kept a log for him. Then, when he was satisfied I was old enough and responsible enough, he passed the torch to me. During my last winter in Mount Uniacke, I cleared driveways there and in neighbouring villages for twenty-five dollars a pop. Word of my skill spread and soon I was in demand as both a service provider and a popular attraction.

  In the spring of that year, Pepe passed away. “Doctor, am I making any progress?” were his last words. He drank himself to an early grave, but he was the last of my grandparents to die. Charlie had died a few years earlier.

  Pepe’s funeral featured keening and crying and laughing and drinking and fist fighting. Not even the priest was immune. All afternoon family and friends exchanged stories about Pepe and recited famous quotations. Feeling overwhelmed by the cacophony, I went outside to skip stones on a pond behind the church. After a minute or two alone, I was joined at the water’s edge by a drunken individual who appeared to be about five years older than me and was the spitting image of Corey Hart in the “Sunglasses at Night” video. He started throwing rocks into the pond too. He had a good arm.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked without making eye contact.

  I studied him but didn’t answer. Unless he really was Corey Hart, I had never seen this person before.

  “I’m your brudder.”

  I skipped stones in silence for another few minutes before saying, “I gotta go.” I took one more good look at his face. We had the same mouth, same nose. Though I never ran into this stranger again, his (and when my memory failed, Corey Hart’s) became the face of my never-ending insomnia.

  I didn’t mention the encounter to my parents. I had grown so protective of my mother’s frail emotions that I felt offended by what was either a lie about her or the revelation of one of her most precious secrets. How dare this drunken, counterfeit pop singer attempt to turn my suffering mother’s life upside down? It mattered not that this divulgence might have explained my mother’s pain and the violence that went with it. That pain and violence were familiar and comforting. We had a system! And if my mother wanted to protect me from the truth, I needed for her to feel she was successful. Even if it meant I was her scapegoat through the years. Even if it meant learning to loathe myself forever.

  •

  At last, I graduated high school. I received straight As, with my best grades in English and biology. I’d had to work hard for the A in calculus. My parents didn’t attend the graduation ceremony. Instead, I brought my baseball glove.

  After collecting my diploma, I slipped away from my old life as quietly and with as little fuss as possible. No goodbyes. No explanations. It was time to be a baseball player now. I couldn’t bear facing expressions of doubt on the faces of my parents or friends. I couldn’t expect anyone to understand what I had to do. And I wasn’t going to give the evil in the woods one more chance to pull me under. I had a week before baseball camp started and had no idea where or how to kill it. I had no real high school friends to turn to
, so I bought a cheap pup tent and pitched it in a nearby campground.

  After a few days of staying sharp by throwing rocks, eating raisins and sleeping in my clothes, I decided to hitchhike to the town where the camp would be. Maybe my technique was all wrong or maybe I looked like some kind of fiend, but no car stopped for me for a long, long time. I started walking backward along the shoulder of the highway at nine that morning and it wasn’t until seven in the evening that a car finally pulled up beside me. I must have covered fifteen miles by then.

  Deliverance took the form of a 1983 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. It was humongous. I was about to crawl into the front seat, when I noticed there was no room. Every bit of available space inside the car was polluted with trash, treasure, documents and personal effects.

  “Here, gimme a minute to move a few things around for you, son …”

  There was a coffee maker, several pairs of shoes, a tool box, books, empty cans, a hand-held vacuum cleaner, a pair of binoculars, a large jar filled with pennies. There seemed to be one of everything. The captain of the vessel carelessly cleared space on the passenger seat as if he were swatting flies.

  “Make yourself at home!”

  I installed myself in this environment and the driver steered the ship back into the current of the highway. The Cadillac’s suspension was shot, so she bobbed and listed as we sailed. It would have been soothing if not for the occasional fright from the sound of the hull scraping bottom.

  “Name’s George, but they call me ‘Baby Legs.’ You look like a music lover.”

  “I guess so … Buck.” I pointed at myself with my thumb. “Thanks for stopping.”

  Baby Legs was probably in his seventies. He was wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe and slippers. His glasses were big and square. He paid little attention to his driving. He was preoccupied with his other tasks and chores around the household of his craft. This meant taking it illegally slow and weaving in long Ss across two lanes. His current concern was digging through a shoebox filled with cassette tapes that rested on his lap.

  “Let’s see if you know this one. Don’t look. No cheating.”

  He pushed a tape into the deck and turned the volume up as loud as it would go. A 1970s rock song I didn’t recognize played at a harrowing volume. After a few bars, he looked across at me, and I shrugged.

  “Come on! Bad Company, man!” Baby Legs seemed genuinely dismayed that I didn’t know the group. “Those guys got so much pussy it was unbelievable. Here, try this one.”

  He ejected the Bad Company cassette and started rooting through the box again.

  “Okay. Here we go!”

  Another tape went into the deck. Again the volume was blinding.

  “You gotta know this one.”

  I had no idea.

  “Nazareth, baby!”

  Baby Legs rocked behind the wheel to a song called “Bad Bad Boy.”

  “These guys played in front of twenty-five thousand every night and had their pick of the pussy!”

  After a few seconds, the party came to an abrupt end when he ejected the tape and threw it back in the box.

  “Okay, I know you’re going to know this one.”

  Paying no heed to the road and traffic around us, he searched the box again. This time he had trouble finding what he was looking for.

  “Shit. Where’d it go?”

  He dug and stirred, sometimes with both hands. The car’s wheel alignment was off, so every time Baby Legs took his hands off the steering wheel, the yacht veered to the right, toward the shoulder of the road. He glanced up from his rummaging just in time to see we were coasting toward the ditch, and gave the wheel a tug to adjust our course. It would have been terrifying if we hadn’t been going so slow.

  “There you are,” he said before jamming the tape into his system. This time I registered a glimmer of recognition when the song began to play. The group sounded like a band I remembered Buzzy being into.

  “Oh, I think I know this one,” I said.

  “Of course you do! These guys are the kings of pussy!”

  Baby Legs played air guitar.

  “Come on! Who is it?”

  I felt that the tenor of the rest of the trip was riding on whether I could pass this test. Was it Styx or REO Speedwagon?

  “Is it … REO Speedwagon?”

  “Yeah, baby! The Speedwagon! Who else? You know, I met these guys once. Portland, Maine. Took the ferry over. Partied all night. There was pussy everywhere! So you like the Speedwagon, do ya? Well, hold on now because this will blow your mind.”

  Eject. Ferret, ferret, ferret. Swerve.

  “Now, try this shit on for size.”

  The riff from “Frankenstein” by the Edgar Winter Group came gusting out of the speakers and Baby Legs lost his mind. He started whooping and head banging, which brought on a violent coughing jag. He fished around the floorboards until he came up with a Thermos. Then he screwed off the top with two arthritic twists and took a deep gulp of I didn’t want to know what.

  “Now, THIS guy! Ugliest motherfucker you ever saw. Looks like a weird woman. But he gets pussy, too. Yessir. ALL kinds. Where’d you say you were heading? You partying tonight? You know, when you’re on Quaaludes, you get laid no matter what!”

  Baby Legs gave me a wink.

  “I’m, uh, going to baseball school.”

  “Baseball? You’re never going to get any pussy playing baseball.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” I said. I had no idea what I was talking about.

  For the next few hours, Baby Legs taught me all about seventies rock and roll. I told him about how Bert used to barricade me into a closet and blast me with Black Sabbath.

  “No wonder you’re afraid of pussy!”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but I let it go. Baby Legs even touched on a bit of punk. He liked the Buzzcocks, Sham 69 and Generation X. He must have played two hundred tapes for me—a few seconds of each. He fed me bologna slices and licorice allsorts. As we drove, I counted at least two dozen other motorists who gave him the finger as they passed, but Baby Legs was either oblivious or impervious to any and all displays of scorn.

  A few miles shy of my destination, Baby Legs asked whether I’d object if we made a pit stop.

  “Wouldn’t mind stopping in on an old girlfriend. She’s usually got some pie on the go. Plus I kinda have to poop.”

  Baby Legs let his schooner veer onto an off ramp and we made into the backwoods, slower than ever. Entering a community named Delusion, we were overtaken by a ten-year-old on a banana bike.

  After sampling tapes by Uriah Heep, Hawkwind and Van der Graaf Generator, we pulled into the driveway of what looked like a life-sized gingerbread house. Without ringing or knocking, Baby Legs walked in through the back door and into the kitchen. I followed nervously behind.

  “Ethel? You up? Come out, come out!”

  “Goodness gracious. Is that who I think it is?” The voice was slow with a singsongy British accent. A moment later, a face with a pouf of blue hair peered into the kitchen from around a corner. Upon it, a wicked smile was painted in a thin line. Then appeared a crooked hand offering the “come hither” gesture. As the hand and face withdrew slowly from sight, Baby Legs giggled and chased after them, bouncing out of the room like a cartoon burglar. Seemed the Quaaludes were working.

  I sat, abandoned at the kitchen table, for forty-five minutes, leafing through a couple of back copies of Reader’s Digest, trying to zone out the sounds of grey sex being expelled from a room down the hall. When Ethel and Baby Legs emerged again, both were wearing robes. Hers was silk. Without addressing me by name, she invited me into the living room for tea.

  The living room was the most decorated space I’ve ever seen. It was like a museum of ceramic and souvenir-shop curiosities, with Britannia, Beefeaters and lions everywhere. The centrepiece of the room was a taxidermied weasel, displayed on the coffee table. It was frozen in the act of bounding over a hunk of stick. Perhaps it symbolized a failed marria
ge in Ethel’s past. Or perhaps it foreshadowed my bad luck.

  “Would you fancy a cup of tea?”

  “Oh yeah!” said Baby Legs, answering for us both. I had never drunk tea.

  Ethel rang a bell that had been resting on the arm of her chair and a dog barked from somewhere else in the house. Baby Legs turned to me and winked. After a few minutes of explaining to Ethel who I was and where we were heading, I witnessed one of the most incredible spectacles I’ve ever seen in my life: a large poodle came walking into the room on its hind legs, and across its outstretched forelimbs was a tray piled with tea service for three. This seemed like the most natural thing in the world to Ethel, and Baby Legs didn’t flinch, so I tried to play it cool and keep my stupefaction to myself. The dog walked slow and careful to where Ethel was sitting, china shivering musically. Ethel poured the tea into the cups, asked if I wanted milk or sugar, and then the poodle—whose name was Albert—walked the tray over to me. I took my cup and sipped assiduously.

  After a few cups, followed by some decrepit necking between Ethel and Baby Legs at the door, Baby Legs and I boarded the Cadillac again. As we floated out of Delusion and along the final stretch to my destination, there was silence for the first time all evening. No more tapes. Maybe Baby Legs had played them all. Maybe the drugs had worn off. Baby Legs seemed wistful, and his driving was much better now. He managed to keep a fairly straight line and drove only ten miles per hour under the speed limit.

  It was just after eleven when we pulled over in front of the ball field where my camp was being held.

  “Where you heading from here?” I asked.

  “I’m already home, baby.”

  I offered Baby Legs a few bucks for gas. He refused, wished me luck and disappeared into the night. I like to imagine he found his way back to the seventies somehow.

  That night I pitched the pup tent in deep centre field. As I transitioned from Baby Legs’s freaky world to the kingdom of baseball, I conjured psychedelic dreams that must have resembled the visions of former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis on the night of June 12, 1970, when he threw a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres while on acid. I saw high fly balls with rainbow comet tails that exploded into fireworks. I saw bats and balls form neon fractals and Fibonacci spirals and Apollonian gaskets. The face of 1954 National League Rookie of the Year, Wally Moon, appeared to me. His signature unibrow transformed into a magnificent raven that took wing and soared across the starry firmament. I followed its migration to the land of Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, where the clocks were replaced with the melted face of 1957 all-star Don Mossi. As I wandered this territory, I travelled back in time to 1903. That’s when I met Hall of Famer and genuine eccentric Rube Waddell. Together we embarked upon wild adventures and did all his favourite things: we ran after fire trucks and collected shiny objects. We petted puppies, tamed lions and wrestled alligators. We acted out scenes from Chekhov dramas and married a hundred pretty girls each.