by Rich Terfry
The first wrinkle showed up quickly: Aaron’s grandfather refused to drive into Toronto, where we were marooned. We were instructed to wait on the side of the highway. He’d look for a group of four and we’d look for a white van. But then came the second wrinkle: police arrived before Aaron’s grandfather did. The officer told us it was illegal to stand on the shoulder of that particular stretch of highway and we’d have to leave. So we hid in the bushes with our equipment and jumped out, waving our arms, any time we saw a white van.
Fifteen white vans later, Aaron’s grandfather drove up and pulled over. When Aaron opened the passenger-side door, I saw sitting behind the wheel a fraction of a man. He was missing many parts of his body: legs, fingers, teeth, ears, god knows what else. The missing leg meant that he got around in a wheelchair. The wheelchair meant that the van was customized with a hydraulic platform system that allowed Aaron’s grandfather to get in and out on his own. And the equipment meant there wasn’t much room in the van for four passengers. There was really only room for one—in the passenger’s seat up front.
“I don’t know where you fuckers are going to go,” the old man said with in the most gravelly voice I’ve ever heard. He referred to the group of us as “you fuckers” for the rest of the trip.
Aaron sat up front with his grandfather. The rest of us twisted and contorted ourselves into the back, being careful not to touch the wheelchair, any of the equipment or the old man’s blanket, as per his instructions. It was almost impossible and extremely uncomfortable, but we were grateful for the ride.
Aaron’s grandfather was one of the scariest human beings I’ve ever encountered. He looked scary: his head was huge and square and purple. But it was his energy—he was like a cage of constant fury. And though he was disabled, he radiated the impression that he could kill you with two fingers—maybe even just a look. I did not dare make a sound, much less eye contact in the rear-view mirror.
As soon as we started the drive, one of us, Bo, fell asleep. His body was tied in a knot as he rested on the steel bed of the van, but he’s one of those people who can sleep anywhere and through anything. The ride was particularly rough because Aaron’s grandfather kept driving off the road. He was distracted by the sight of churches he saw in the distance as we drove past small towns. He’d veer off the road, hit the gravel shoulder and then jerk the van back onto the highway with maximum violence. I’d have a heart attack, while Bo remained blissfully unaware, even as his head clanked against the wall of the van with terrific force.
Adding to the agony of the journey, Aaron’s grandfather pulled into every single rest stop along the way. The rest of us would sit in total silence for ten minutes before the drive started up again. On our very first stop, the old man unzipped and pissed into a juice bottle without moving from the driver’s seat. He moaned and grunted as he pissed. When he was done, he put the lid on the bottle and stuck it in the beverage holder in my line of vision. It was almost impossible not to look at—the piss sloshing inside the bottle as the van veered on and off the shoulder of the highway.
Late that night in the wilds of Quebec, after a good sixteen hours of driving, Aaron’s grandfather decided it was finally time to get out for some air. He hoisted himself up from the driver’s seat and plunked himself down in his wheelchair. Then he reached over to flick a switch that engaged the system to lift him out of the van. But when he hit the switch, nothing happened. A new fury blazed in his eyes. He looked over the equipment and spotted the problem: Bo in his slumber (which had continued unbroken for the full sixteen hours) had kicked out one of the wires that powered the system.
The old man exploded.
“I TOLD YOU ROTTEN FUCKERS NOT TO TOUCH ANYTHING!”
Bo jolted awake.
“What’s the problem? What happened? Tell me what to do—I’ll fix it,” he said.
“DON’T TOUCH A FUCKIN’ THING, YOU CURLY COCKSUCKER. I’LL RIP YOUR STUPID FACE OFF!”
The old man inched himself out of the chair and let his body crash to the floor of the van. I found this very upsetting. Then he crawled over our feet to get at the problem area. He struggled with the wires, growling like a jaguar as he worked. He was missing a thumb on one hand, so he had to use his teeth. Sparks flew out of his mouth as he cursed.
Once the repair was made, he had to get himself back up into his chair. We knew better than to offer help. As he prepared to hoist himself, the old man clamped onto my knee with his claw-like hand, the one with the thumb. He squeezed punishment into me as he lifted. The pain was blinding. I wanted to scream, but dared not. Just before he fell back into the wheelchair, Aaron’s grandfather hung in the air like a gymnast, with his buttocks positioned directly in front of my face. There was six inches between my nose and his pants pockets.
Yes. Yes, he did.
The old man blasted a fart he must have been saving for years directly into my olfactory system. The gale force of his rectal monsoon literally blew my hair back. I could see it too. The shock wave caused a rippling effect in the air and my vision was briefly tinted with a brown distortion. There was a distinct taste associated with the gust: Brussels sprouts and tires. The insult was what I imagine a sarin gas attack to be like. I didn’t stop breathing for self-protection; I was physically unable to inhale. A chemical reaction had caused a brief asphyxiation. I felt death’s hand on my shoulder.
The door of the van slid open, and I tumbled out ahead of the wheelchair and barrel-rolled under the vehicle. This was survival instinct. I refused to come out. My friends had to plead and negotiate for several minutes before I agreed to emerge.
When we finally did recommence, the old man decided to fuel up. He manoeuvred the van into a gas station’s full-service zone. The attendant came to the window and spoke in French.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS FUCKER? I CAN’T UNDERSTAND A GODDAMN WORD HE’S SAYING!”
I don’t think the old man had heard French before. I’m not sure he understood the concept of other languages. Aaron jumped in to help; fortunately, he knew enough French to complete the transaction. His grandfather looked at him as if he had transformed into a werewolf.
When it was time to pull out, the still-seething old man performed a malign ceremony for the francophone heretic. He unscrewed the lid from his piss bottle and flung its contents on the attendant as we drove away.
The trip should have taken one full day. Instead, it took three. When we finally arrived in Halifax, my friends and I went our separate ways, not a word spoken between us—no goodbyes, no thank-yous. None of us dared speak of that grim journey for some time. It was only a year later that Aaron called us together and made a surprise confession: before that trip, he had never met his grandfather. Two weeks prior to our three-day ordeal, the old man had been released from a federal penitentiary, having served more than fifty years.
•
After that ill-fated tour, I decided to make some changes. I moved out of the haunted house and into a crappy little bachelor pad of my own. I graduated. I got a new and better job at the hotel, working in the fitness centre. I also wrote a song that changed my life.
Still struggling to make sense of my life since my mother’s death, I wrote a song about her and the lost feeling I had been carrying since her passing. The song is called “Ice,” which was my mother’s nickname. I struggled for a long time as I tried to decide whether to include it on the album I was working on. The song is so personal I figured the things I was expressing in the lyrics weren’t anyone’s business, and in any case wouldn’t mean anything to others. But in the end, I decided to include it on the album I called Man Overboard. I did this for myself. I did it for my sisters. I did it for my father. When the album was finally released, I was terrified. I felt vulnerable, naked.
For six months after the album came out not much happened. It didn’t sell well and the press didn’t pay much attention to it. I toured the United States for the first time, but most of the shows bombed. I was pouring my heart out and nobo
dy cared.
When the touring finished, I was worn out and ready to give up. I felt like a loser. I had let my mother down. I was broke. I was living in squalor. I wasn’t doing anything with my degree. My baseball dreams were slipping away and there I was, wasting my time messing around with music. Finally, my head hung low, I trudged back to university and met with advisers to discuss options for grad school.
Later that afternoon when I got back to my rat-trap apartment, the light on my answering machine was flashing. The machine was full, maxed out with messages from people freaking out, saying they had been listening to the radio and heard an interview with the band Radiohead in which they mentioned my name. They were big fans of the Man Overboard album.
Radiohead was the biggest band in the world at the time. They had just released their shocking Kid A album, which changed the face of popular music. The most important band in rock and roll was working with beats and samples and electronics, and now was telling the world that my work had influenced the group.
The floodgates opened. Radiohead’s endorsement was enough to send me into orbit. Now everyone wanted a piece of me. Every record company in the world wanted to sign me. Man Overboard started selling like crazy. Best of all, I started hearing from people all over the world who wanted to tell me how much the song “Ice” meant to them. I heard from people who had lost a parent. I heard from people whose lives were affected by cancer in one way or another. For some people the song was simply about loss or the fear of loss. For others the song was about family. It seemed to mean something to just about everyone who heard it. I had connected with people—all kinds of people—and it was an incredible feeling.
A few days after my answering machine melted down, Radiohead’s manager contacted me. He told me that the guys in the band wanted to meet me and asked if I could make it to Montreal to say hello when they were passing through on their tour.
It was an offer I couldn’t pass up. But for all the excitement and new interest, I was still broke. And Montreal is almost eight hundred miles from Halifax. My only choice was to hitchhike.
My hitchhiking technique had improved since my graduating from high school and my encounter with Baby Legs, and I had much better luck this time. Or maybe I was radiating positive vibes. Somewhere in New Brunswick, a guy named Johnny Oiseau picked me up. Before opening the door to me, he asked if I liked Slayer. I’m certain he would have left me on the side of the road if I had said no. But I said yes, and Johnny flashed the devil-horns sign and motioned for me to climb in.
“You goin’ to see a woman?” Johnny asked.
“Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t. It was easier than explaining what I really was doing.
“Nice boobs?”
“Uh, yeah … Pretty nice, I guess.”
“You know, the best boobs in the world are in England. It’s been proven by science.”
“Isn’t that something,” I ventured.
Johnny proceeded to tell me the story of his life. Some of the highlights:
• He was emancipated from his adoptive parents when he was fifteen.
• He’d been in love with Jennifer Connelly since watching the movie Labyrinth in 1986. I said, “She’s got great eyebrows,” and he looked at me as if I was speaking a language he had never heard.
• When he was twenty-one, he entered into a venture with a shady businessman and sold dried seal penises as aphrodisiacs. He did most of his business in the Chinatown neighbourhoods of cities across North America. He hadn’t realized what he was doing was illegal until he was busted and thrown in jail. He still spoke a bit of Chinese, but mostly just “dirty talk.”
• He had once paid a prostitute five dollars for a hug.
• A few years after he got out of jail, he’d won a million dollars playing the lottery.
• He proposed marriage to a woman while the two of them appeared on the video scoreboard at an NHL hockey game. She said yes. “Face like a welder’s bench, but a helluva figure,” he said. They were divorced after ten years. She caught him fooling around with the catcher and first baseman of the women’s softball team he was coaching. “She took everything but the truck.”
“So what is it you do for a living now, Johnny?” I asked.
Johnny became very excited. His eyes lit up as he gazed at the road ahead of us.
“You’re about to find out,” he said. “Do you see what I see?”
What I saw was the carcass of what appeared to be a dead deer at the bottom of the hill, about two hundred metres ahead.
“Quick! Skip back to track one!” he ordered.
He was referring to the CD in his stereo: Reign in Blood by Slayer. Track one is “Angel of Death.” I did as requested and hell came flying out of the speakers.
“Crank it!” Johnny said.
As I fiddled with the knobs, Johnny hit the switch on a unit wired in under the truck’s dashboard. The snowplow began to lower. When it made contact with the road, beautiful plumes of sparks sprayed past the driver’s and passenger’s side windows. Johnny accelerated and centred the carcass in his path. I’ll be haunted by visions of what happened next for the rest of my life.
Phoosh!
The physics of the curve of the plow multiplied by the speed of the truck sent the lifeless deer streaking past the windshield, over the roof and into the bed of the pickup, where it landed with a sickening thud. Johnny had it timed perfectly. He howled like a jungle animal. I snapped around and saw the mangled bodies of dozens of animals, big and small, piled in the back of the truck.
“Good lord, Johnny!” I shouted over the Slayer. “Who the hell pays you to do this?”
“No one, baby! This here’s just a hobby!”
Johnny went on to explain how he had worked out the exact speed needed so that every possible animal would land in the bed of his death wagon. He explained that before he had mastered his technique, he’d smashed a few windshields, and that once he had dropped a skunk carcass onto the hood of a Hyundai Elantra driving behind him. What Johnny did with his treasures, he wouldn’t say.
“I have two dreams,” Johnny said. “I wanna make love to Jennifer Connelly, and to one day scoop a moose. If I can do either of those things, I’ll die happy.”
After Johnny and I parted ways, it took just two more rides to make it all the way to Montreal. I saw Radiohead perform and was brought backstage to meet the guys. They were nice, and passionate about music. We talked about equipment and current bands—ones we liked and ones we didn’t. We talked about books. We talked about exercise. And they offered to help me out with my career. They were surprised to learn that I had been operating alone—no agent, no publicist. They hooked me up with everything I needed, and in one fell swoop I went from ragged amateur to professional. I imagined it felt like what a college baseball player feels when drafted by a professional organization. I wasn’t in the big leagues yet, but I was surely well on my way.
•
I worked a few good months in the fitness centre at the hotel and managed to put some money in the bank. This was enough to pay for a ticket to fly across the Atlantic for my first European tour, which my new Radiohead-approved team had set up. My manager at the hotel was supportive of my budding music career and excited about all the great things happening for me. He allowed me to take as much time off as I needed.
I quickly found that playing for audiences in Europe was very different from playing at home. It felt like they were ready for me. They weren’t put off that my music was different from everything else. They were hungrier for new things. I wasn’t dismissed as the “weirdo” I had been back in North America a lot of the time. I’m sure the Radiohead endorsement had a lot to do with it, but now I was playing for much larger crowds. The tour went amazingly well until I hit a snag in Sweden. I was instructed to make my way to a city in the north, in Lapland. I had the details written on the piece of paper folded up in the front pocket of my pants.
When I arrived at my destination that day, navigation
was challenging. No one spoke English and the old streets were crooked and poorly marked. After some searching and head scratching, I wandered into a room that seemed about right. It was like an old all-purpose legion hall, arranged with rows of long tables where families had gathered to enjoy some kind of feast. At one end of the room was a stage with a microphone resting in its stand. At the other end was a sound man, half asleep behind his desk. He never left his post or said a word as I set up. Everything seemed in order and the sound quality was good. No tinkering required.
I waited fifteen minutes for a promoter who never materialized, so I started my set. This appeared to startle the patrons, who were still hunched over their plates. After two or three songs, it was clear they weren’t familiar with my material, but I pressed on and won them over. In the end, it was a great set.
After the show, there was still no sign of the promoter. The next morning, I checked out of my two-star hotel and started working my way toward Finland. When I arrived in Helsinki that afternoon, several panicked emails from my agent back in London awaited me: “What happened last night?” “WHERE WERE YOU?” After some discussion, we realized that the show I had played the night before was in the wrong town altogether.
Two weeks later—after feeling my way across Europe, learning how to get lost, picking up pieces of new languages, breaking rules I hadn’t realized were rules, eating things I didn’t recognize, feeding the animals and feeling invincible—I woke up in Paris. I had arranged to give myself a week off there to acquaint myself with the city’s charms. I fell in love immediately.
Paris! Her vibrations seemed to harmonize with mine. Her first kiss felt like a familiar one. Paris! She thinks out loud. Art falls from her trees. Walking down her streets, I felt like I was in a movie. I kept searching for the cameras. Paris! She made me repeat her name. Again and again. I felt her voice on my neck. Paris. She’s a sexy older woman. She took my hand and forced it under her blouse. She frightened me and turned me on at the same time. Paris. I was overwhelmed.