by Rich Terfry
When I finally did tell Claire about my new gig, our discussion went something like this:
“Yeah, the producer said I’d be co-hosting with Pat Something-or-other. I’m not sure who it is—or if it’s a man or a woman. I think whoever it is used to work on a program about renovating houses and he or she was also in one of those funny home-video shows or something. They said they mostly just want me to introduce performers and presenters and that it won’t be anything sexy at all. Just … normal. You know. We’ll have our own separate dressing rooms and stuff, so you don’t have to worry about anything.”
“What in ze ’ell are you talking about, Bean?” That was Claire’s pet name for me. I called her “Bean,” too. Or sometimes I called her “Slender Loris.”
During the weeks leading up to the big show, whenever I was reading an email from a producer and Claire walked into the room I’d slap the laptop shut and break into a sweat, while trying to act nonchalant. My performance usually involved whistling, fussing over my fingernails and/or reading an upside-down book.
I figured one of the reasons I had been asked to co-host the awards show was that they were being held in Halifax. The producers probably liked the idea of involving a hometown boy. This turn of events provided an opportunity for Claire to visit my birthplace for the first time. Although France and Nova Scotia share the Breton connection, Halifax is a long way from Paris in every imaginable way. For example: Paris has the Champs-Élysées—the bustling main street of the high-fashion universe, where an evening stroll feels like an audition for the lead role in a Godard film or a Vogue cover shoot; Halifax has Barrington Street—a few blocks of boarded-up businesses prowled by homeless werewolves. Parisian cuisine is a ballet of exotic vegetables, the buttery flesh of once-beautiful birds and polyhedrons of rich pâté; Halifax has the donair—a torpedo of aluminum foil insulated with unidentifiable meat harvested from a machine, and a sauce more like semen than semen itself. It’s a hand-held heart attack that can only be legally traded and consumed between the hours of midnight and 4:00 a.m. In Paris, fish is purchased from museum-like markets; in Halifax, it’s sold out of the back of a pickup truck. Bread is a fashion accessory in Paris; in Halifax, it’s an envelope you can eat. In Paris, coffee is drunk from thimbles; in Halifax, it’s drunk from buckets. In Paris, smoking is a philosophy and a sex act performed in public; in Halifax, smoking causes cancer, but you don’t care because life is a cruel charade anyway. Humour, to a Parisian, is making fun of Belgians and the Québécois; for any Maritimer, it’s the self-effacing official language and a means of survival against the aggressive greys of day-to-day life.
Our trip from Paris to Halifax was a four-flight ordeal. After we checked in to our hotel at last, Claire unpacked her trunk of books while I ran off to the arena for rehearsal and to get acquainted with the February 1990 Playboy Playmate of the Month. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Pamela Anderson was very rich and very famous because of her looks. Would she be a real person with a heart and a brain? Or would she be a jerk? Well, she was much smaller than I thought she’d be. Cuter too. She had freckles, which she kept hidden with makeup. And she couldn’t have been sweeter. She greeted me with a generous hug that felt amazing—like having a volleyball tucked under each arm. And she gave me kisses. I think she took a shine to me. Her energy made it easy for me to feel perfectly at ease. She wasn’t done up in the “Pamela Anderson” costume. She was dressed simply and casually and had on little to no makeup. She carried no bag but did guard a hardcover book jealously. I asked her what she was reading and was flabbergasted when she showed me the spine: Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.
“ ‘Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman, and loves only a warrior,’ ” I whispered into her cleavage, quoting the old philologist.
“Oh my,” she murmured.
Sensing the topic was leading us in a dangerous direction, I quickly changed course.
“So! The Junos! This should be a fun weekend. Any bands you’re especially excited to see perform at this thing?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m so out of touch with new music these days. All I listen to is Beethoven.”
I wanted to quote Nietzsche again, but I just stared, agape and swaying. When I managed to recover, our conversation ran the gamut from politics to the films of Robert Bresson. We were discussing the religious allegories of Au hasard Balthazar, when we were interrupted by a man with a clipboard. He introduced himself as a floor director. It was his job to be worried about everything. He explained to us that never in the thirty-plus-year history of the Junos telecast had it run short of its on-air schedule. Instead, like all awards shows, it always ran long. But in the highly unlikely event that an opportunity for dead air should happen, the production team needed to be prepared to fill time until the end of the show’s final hour.
“So, if we’re light at the end of the show, would you two be comfortable improvising to fill a few minutes?”
Pam and I looked at each other and shrugged.
“Sure!” we said in unison, not breaking our locked gazes.
“We’ll work something out,” she added with a naughty smile.
As Mr. Clipboard walked away, Pam and I agreed that we wouldn’t have to worry about any such eventuality. The floor director was covering his ass, but there was no way the show would run under the time scheduled.
“And if by some miracle it happens, we’ll just make out for two minutes,” Pam concluded.
“Ha ha. Yeah …” I said, feigning nonchalance.
Two nights later, it was showtime. The weekend with Claire had been a series of exercises in avoidance (of the topic of Pam), family introductions (my father asked if she had ever seen a cow before) and situational comedy (her violent Parisian disgust for Tim Hortons coffee brought me to tears; she liked donairs, though). The show went off but was not without its hitches. There were a few heart-attack-inspiring technical difficulties, and drunken outbursts by musicians along the way. Pam was nervous all night and most of the gags written for her fell flat. And, despite the hiccups, the unthinkable happened: the show ran short.
During the final commercial break of the evening, Mr. Clipboard seized upon me and Pam. He was in a flap. “We need to fill ninety seconds! You two prepared something, right?”
Pam looked stricken.
“No problem,” I said gallantly. Next thing we knew, a director was pointing at us and we were being stared down by the myopic red eye of the camera, fawns caught in the high beams. “Uh … Thanks for watching, everybody. We’ll do it again next year …” Then, gazing into my co-host’s breasts, which were prominently on display in her final, eye-popping outfit of the evening, I said, “Thanks, Pam. That was a lot of fun!”
“You’re so cute …” she said, laying her hand gently on the side of my face. Then she kissed me. On the mouth. It was more than just a peck. Her lips lingered on mine for a few seconds. They were soft and tasted sweet. I forgot that I was in an arena filled with people and our intimacies were being broadcast on live television, and my hands searched her body. For this, she punished me. She tried to drown me by grabbing the back of my head and forcing it into the ocean of her bosom. I was no match for her. I decided then and there that this was how I wanted to die and surrendered completely. But despite my forfeit, she wrestled ferociously, slamming my face into her chest and shifting left and right so that each boob landed solid blows. Finally she heaved one last downward thrust upon the back of my skull so that my head was now firmly lodged in the death grip of her bottomless cleavage. All went black. Angels began to sing. A magnificent, warm light appeared to me. I felt my body move gladly toward it. But a powerful wind swept me up and a harsh electric light engulfed me. Heaviness retuned to my bones.
Instead of putting me out of my misery once and for all, Pamela Anderson pulled me out from the deep and dropped me to the floor. She then turned to the camera, waved and said, “Good night, everyone!” I thought my beautiful se
x nightmare was over, but it wasn’t. Next she knelt to meet my ear and whispered, “Follow me to my dressing room.”
As the credits rolled, and the live audience made for the gates, I zombied behind the click of Pam’s heels, through the labyrinth of the arena’s bowels to her private luxury trailer. It was more spacious and outfitted with more amenities than my apartment in Paris. Pam sat and freed herself from the torture of her shoes, then stood and eagerly began to disrobe in front of me.
“Ugh. Get me out of this ridiculous thing,” she complained, referring to her wisp of an outfit.
As she slumped into a comfortable-looking loveseat, I thought, Your body looks very expensive.
“It is,” she sighed, indicating that I had actually said those words out loud. “Come sit!” she instructed, patting the spot next to her. I fell at her side, my hand landing on her naked thigh.
“You were great, Peanut,” I lied.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“It was pretty nerve-racking, huh?”
“Gosh …”
We spent the next few minutes going over the show, brushing against each other and trembling.
“Well, what are you doing now?” she asked. “You should come back to my hotel room with me.”
I swallowed so hard my brain was pulled into my stomach. Children in rural England wearing traditional costumes began performing their ribbon dance around the maypole. Two bighorn rams in the mountains of Montana clashed, head to head in slow motion. Mount Etna erupted violently, sending its orange light into the Sicilian sky. Roy Hobbs—the natural—hit his home run into the stadium lights and trumpets sounded from the heavens.
“I …”
Claire.
“Can’t.”
Claire: the smartest, most beautiful and all-around-amazing girl in the world was waiting for me. Claire: the one who fed me—mind, body and soul. Claire: my teacher, my muse and my best friend.
I stood up and explained to Pam that I had to go to my family. She pouted and rose to hug me. Still completely naked. My heart pounded in her arms. Fireworks exploded in my skull. After several moments in our pose, we broke free. Pam ripped the corner off a piece of paper and wrote down her contact information.
“Here. Take this. Keep in touch. Let me know when you’re coming to LA and you can stay at my place.”
“Jeez. You’re the greatest, Peanut.”
I kissed her with true fondness, knowing I would never see her again. As I was halfway out the door of her trailer, I turned to glimpse her one last time. She looked truly lonely, perhaps all the more for her nakedness.
As soon as the door clicked shut, I ran, chanting Claire’s name under my breath. I mazed my way to the foyer where my father, sisters, Claire and I had earlier agreed to meet. There I was greeted by a collection of confusing expressions on the faces of my blood relatives.
“You did such a good job,” said one of them.
“Where’s Claire?” I said, practically begging.
“She’s gone.”
“She ran away.”
“She left.”
“What do you mean? Where is she?”
“She was so upset when she saw you and Pamela Anderson,” said my sister Lisa. “We couldn’t make her stay. She took a taxi to the airport. She’s gone …”
That’s when the devil took hold of me. I fell to the floor and into battle with the seizures of a panic attack. My family picked me up and took me home.
I later discovered that Claire had grabbed the first flight out of Halifax and eventually found her way back to Paris. She refused to talk to me. I didn’t see her again for well over a year.
•
INTERROGATION REVISITED
“Please state your name,” said the interrogator.
I said my name.
“What is your occupation?”
“Musician.”
“Do you want to be a baseball player?”
“Yes, I do. More than anything.”
“Well, you’re gonna need a glove then, won’t you?”
“Yes! Yes, I sure will!” I shouted.
But the interrogator wasn’t listening. He too was lost deep in the trees. And soon all I could hear in the darkness of the woods was the sound of my own voice.
•
I don’t remember exactly how I ended up in a town called Ward in the mountains of Colorado.
After a few days of deep, still darkness at my sister’s house in Halifax, I simply started running. When I ran out of breath, I hitched rides. I hopped trains and stowed away. I drifted, empty, for maybe a month, until one day I just stopped. All I had to my name was my passport and the clothes on my back.
There are fewer than two hundred people in Ward and I relied on the kindness of almost every one of them for the first while. I did odd jobs that mostly involved moving junk around, and eventually I set up shop in a basement apartment I could call my own. It seemed to me that the town belonged to the countless stray cats that roamed the hills there. I took in one of them and named him Kevin.
Ward looks like a town that grew out of a junkyard. Depending on your perspective, it’s either a graveyard or a folk museum for the history of the American automotive industry. Just about everywhere you look, you’ll see the corpse of an old vehicle eaten by rust and/or sand and/or trees and/or vandalism. Ward also has a pay phone and a Coke machine, neither of which are appendages of a business. They’re just there. On the side of the road. I never saw anyone perform maintenance on either machine, but both functioned well about fifty percent of the time.
As you enter Ward, there’s a field on your lefthand side populated by numerous piles of stuff. There’s a pile of cinder blocks. There’s a pile of bald tires. There’s a pile of old toilets. There’s a pile of bicycles. In my time there, the children of Ward were boys. I don’t think I ever saw a female child. And the boys all looked the same: wild. In the summer, they were always bare-chested, feeble, scrawny, dirty. With untamed hair. Shorts, too tight, cut out of an old pair of jeans. Rubber boots. And always attached to a rat-trap bicycle. Whenever these boys needed new bike parts, they’d scavenge the bike pile. They scavenged for everything.
Someday, the boys’ uncles would teach them how to huff glue or change a transmission or escape. But for now, the boys built ramps. I don’t think they had much choice, but I was happy to see that there were still kids in the world who did this, or played outside at all. I had been an expert ramp-builder when I was a kid, so when I saw a small group of wolf-boys struggling with a build, I offered to assist.
“Hey, let me give you guys a hand.”
They looked at me as if I was leper—but a leper who could help them out. They were working with some bricks and a sheet of plywood with the word “WORMS” painted on it—a sign from a long-ago failed business enterprise, I supposed. But the wood was too flimsy and the bricks were mismatched and piled all wrong, so the whole thing collapsed every time they rode over it. No good.
I trotted over to the Field of Piles and gathered some proper supplies: cinder blocks; a couple of old railroad ties; a stronger, less-rotten sheet of wood. Using a discarded wheelbarrow with a hole that had rusted through the hold, I hauled all this over to where the kids were standing.
“Alright, let’s get to work, boys.”
I gave them instructions and in two minutes flat we had a sturdy ramp built.
“That’s too high,” said one of them.
“Hmm. What’s your name?” I said.
“Ian.”
“We call him Beef,” said the other two at the exact same time. All three smiled. They were all missing front teeth.
“Well, Beef, how about I give this thing a trial run for us just to see if it’s safe first? How does that sound?”
Those boys wanted to see me—a grown man—defy death and launch myself over our contraption. And because I was the new guy in town, I was eager to impress. I was also so depressed that I didn’t care if I wrecked my ass doing something stupid.
/> I pulled a bike out of the pile. It passed the only test I was concerned about, which was whether or not there was air in the tires. I put the chain back on and straightened the handlebars. No wrenches required.
I pedalled down the road a hundred yards from where the ramp was set up. I didn’t need that much of a run up; it was for dramatic effect. I got into position and took a moment to collect myself. I inhaled a deep breath. I flashed back to my childhood Evel Knievel days. My eyes locked onto the ramp. When I was good and ready to attack it, I raised a thumbs-up above my head for the boys to see. They signalled back. I charged, dropping my head and pedalling as hard as I could. As I approached the ramp, I could see a mix of glee and terror on the faces of the boys. They were ready to have their minds blown.
The key to a successful ramp jump is to pull up hard on the handlebars as you hit the ramp. If you don’t pull up and shift your weight back, you’ll nosedive through the air and land on your front wheel. There’s no way to control your landing like that. You want to land on your back wheel first. That gives you control. You absorb the shock of your landing through your feet and legs instead of your hands and arms. But I pulled up too hard. A split-second before blast-off, I yanked the handlebars right out of the bike’s head tube. When they came free, they made a terrible, low-pitched, hollow popping noise.
“Holy shit!” sang the boys in unison.
I was flying and totally out of control. I went into my nosedive and braced for annihilation. Everything went silent.
I don’t remember hitting the ground. I just remember lying in a heap, tangled in my bicycle with the handlebars still in my hands. I was a good thirty feet beyond the ramp. I felt little burning patches all over my body. I tasted blood in my mouth. I felt around with my tongue. A tooth was gone. Another was broken. I hated myself and the pain felt good.
Beef and the boys came running to my aid, their rubber boots clomping musically. They tried to help me to my feet but they were too underfed and weak.
“That was fuckin’ awesome!” one of them said. We were friends for life.