Searching for Terry Punchout

by Tyler Hellard

  But all of that was from another lifetime, a million years ago. Now Stephanie Smith is the girl selling used clothes at Frenchy’s. She’s still beautiful, even though she’s wearing too much makeup, giving her skin a salmon hue. Her black blouse cuts low, drawing attention to her cleavage, as spectacular now as it was when she first started showing it off in junior high.

  Holy shit, it’s Stephanie Smith!

  “Hi.” Now, you’d think I’d be bothered by how awful this girl was, but I’m not. I only think of the gorgeous, popular Stephanie I fantasized about as a teenager. My heart is racing, which I know is ridiculous, and feeling ridiculous only makes me more nervous.

  She offers a curt smile, and there’s an awkward pause as we eye each other, waiting for someone to initiate the transaction. Stephanie isn’t wearing a wedding ring, and I imagine a thousand scenarios for why she’d be single, most of them involving fate pushing us toward several days of amazing sex in my room at the Goode Night Inn. At this moment, I can think of no greater victory in life than finally sleeping with all the girls who have so thoroughly rejected me over the years.

  “Can I help you?”

  Help me? You have no idea.

  “Um, no.” More awkward staring. “I’d like to buy these.” I thrust the clothes at her. “It’s me. Adam. Macallister. From high school.” I have never been less cool.

  Stephanie nods and purses her lips. “Mm-hmm.” She takes the clothes and punches some buttons on the cash register. “Eighteen dollars.” She looks through me and I understand I’m getting the cold shoulder from Stephanie Smith. How is this possible? She works at Frenchy’s! I (almost) write for Sports Illustrated! I live in Calgary! I am a fully formed, successful adult! Or, at least as far as she knows (sweatpants aside), I am. Are social hierarchies, like the Ten Commandments, carved in stone and inalterable forever? Stephanie Smith is selling me a pair of used jeans and all the rules of high school somehow still apply. Well, fuck you, lady!

  I don’t actually say this to her. I give her a twenty, accept my change, and shrink into a fog of doubt and self-loathing. All it took was her aloof stare and I’m broken. A few minutes later, sitting in my truck in the parking lot, I am incredulous about what has just happened, and it would be really nice to have someone around to laugh about it with.

  •

  After I change my clothes, I stop at a gas station to fill up the Dodge. I check the oil and the tire pressure. These aren’t pressing issues, but I excel at procrastinating. If I knew how to check spark plugs or whatever a manifold is, I’d do it. As it is, my knowledge of cars is limited, and after about ten minutes, I’m out of things to examine. And not just with the Ramcharger, but anywhere. I’ve killed as much day as I can, and it’s time to do the thing I came here to do.

  The door to my father’s apartment is unexceptional. There’s no number or sign or peephole, nothing to indicate a human being lives behind it. It could be a broom closet. If Paulie hadn’t called it to my attention, the door would have gone unnoticed by me, as it likely is by everybody. It is a door that may as well not exist. I knock on it.

  I hear the creak of a chair, some shuffling footsteps, and a few unintelligible grunts. Then, sure enough, my father opens the door. I don’t speak and he doesn’t speak. We just stand there, not speaking. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel, seeing him. I thought I’d convinced myself I didn’t care, but now that I’m here I want to hug him. And punch him in the face. At the same time.

  He’s only fifty-eight, but he looks so much older. His back is hunched and his hair is white and stringy, sticking out in all directions from under an old black-and-red newsboy cap. He’s wearing a cotton union suit, the top half exposed and stained with sweat, the bottom covered by saggy dark work pants held up with suspenders. I’ve been taller than my father since I was fourteen, but now he looks small, weak and worn and wizened. His face is in ruins. His bum right hand hangs limp at his side. Fifty-eight? Shit, he could be ninety. He could be a thousand.

  “Dad, it’s me. It’s Adam.” It’s the second time today I’ve felt the need to identify myself to someone I know.

  He stays quiet. He doesn’t offer a hug or a handshake or a smile. Just bewildered silence.

  “Can I come in?” When I imagined this moment, I wasn’t the one driving the conversation. I’d show up, and he’d offer a lifetime of apologies without excuses. Not that I’d forgive him so quick, but he’d work hard at it and make me understand, or at least accept, how we got here, and then a day would come when we looked back at the ten years I’d been gone, we’d shake our heads as if to say, Wow, we really mucked that up. Good thing we’re sorted now. No part of me actually believed that’s how it would go, but if you’re fantasizing about a significant life event, why wouldn’t you make it happy?

  My father steps out of the doorway so I can enter. His apartment is a concrete box, a prison cell with few creature comforts. The walls are grey and bare. A card table holds a hot plate. He has a small fridge, the kind I used to keep beer in as a university student. In the centre of the room is a green recliner, the fabric torn on the right arm. It’s pointed at one of those big old console TVs resting on the floor, more furniture than appliance. There are dirty dishes piled on top of it. A sagging cot sits against another wall. No windows, no plants, no pictures. The lights are fluorescent. Forcing someone to live in this room would surely violate an international human rights treaty.

  My father closes the door. He looks at me, then he looks around the room that is, it seems, his home. He grinds his teeth, mouth tight. He looks like he’s trying to eat a potato chip without anyone hearing it crunch. The TV flickers with CBC’s five o’clock news, the picture tinged pink and riddled with static.

  “How are you?” I ask. He jumps, just a little, as though my voice frightens him.

  “Adam. I didn’t know…” he trails off. Then, with firmness, he says, “You should have called,” and gathers the dishes on the TV. He sets them in the deep, square sink next to his mini-fridge. Above the sink there’s a small shelf holding a bottle of dish soap and a tube of toothpaste. As far as I can tell, there’s no phone in here. What exactly does he think I should have called him on?

  “Yeah. Sorry, you’re right. I should have called. I lost your number, I guess. It’s been a while, you know?” Of course he knows. He keeps tidying as best he can, but there’s a lot of clutter—shoes, dirty clothes, newspapers—and nowhere to put any of it. He ends up just pushing the mess around the room. Finally, he faces me.

  “Are you hungry? I’m hungry. We can go down to the canteen and get some fries.” Now he’s looking past me, at the door.

  “Why don’t we go out and get something?” I ask.

  “Oh, I can’t go anywhere. I’ll need to clean the ice shortly.”

  “Okay, is the bar open? J.J.’s? We can get a drink.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Since when? You know, it doesn’t matter. Canteen fries would be great.”

  “Okay, fries,” he says, picking up a coat from the end of the cot and herding me toward the door with it. “And some hot chocolate.”

  Right. And some hot chocolate.

  •

  In the stadium, a dozen or so parents sit behind the benches on either side of the ice, cheering on a group of kids who look to be about six or seven years old. The goalies are ludicrous in their giant pads, standing bored for long stretches of time as their teammates try to swat the puck up and down the ice. It’s cute, sure, but not action-packed—though you wouldn’t know it listening to the screaming adults. Hockey parents are invested. They spend an unreasonable amount of time dragging their kids to and from rinks. The kids develop lifelong rivalries with other kids from other towns—they play and win and lose and fight with each other for years. And after each game, their parents reward them with pizza and pop. It conditions them to think that beating those kids from those towns is good. Then they grow up and have
their own children and the cycle repeats itself. Winning, losing, fighting. Pizza and pop. And parents in the stands yelling at players, referees, each other, and so on, shitheads begetting shitheads for all of time.

  My father and I sit near the corner, quietly watching the game with our french fries and hot chocolates. The Pennington Rec Centre canteen specializes in soggy fries drowned in lumpy beef gravy and thin, generic ketchup. I’m not complaining. I grew up on this potato slurry. This is comfort food.

  “So how long have you been living up there?” These are the first words either one of us has spoken since we sat down.

  “Awhile.”

  “You should have told me.” What I’d have done with the information, I don’t know.

  “Not much to tell. You don’t tell me when you move.” Which is true, I don’t. I’m not even sure he knows I was living in Calgary. We’ve spoken on the phone a handful of times over the years, but the calls were always short, pointless, and fewer and further between as time went on. “It’s not like you send me Christmas cards,” he says.

  “Mail goes both ways, Dad.” Neither one of us is scoring points here. This a pissing contest between men dealing with their own hurt feelings.

  On the ice, one kid manages a breakaway and stutter-steps his way toward the goal. When he gets about five feet from the goalie, he comes to a full stop, winds up, and swings at the puck with everything he has, missing completely and crashing to the ice. The rest of the kids catch up and they all tumble over each other like bowling pins. Next to me, my father slurps his hot chocolate.

  “Sports Illustrated wants to do a story about you. They want me to write it.” I throw it out there. It won’t make things more awkward, that’s for sure.

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  How come every time I mention this article to people, they don’t immediately recognize how great of an idea it is?

  “You’re famous, Dad. Well, infamous, I guess. And you’ve been hiding out for a long time. People want to know what happened to you.”

  “And what happened to me?” he asks, more to himself than me, so I don’t answer. “Nobody cares what happened to me.”

  “Well, Sports Illustrated cares,” I say, trying my best to sound enthusiastic. “That’s the entire reason I’m here. You should be excited. You should be flattered.”

  “I coulda saved you the trip. Tell them thanks but no thanks.”

  “Dad, this is a big deal.” The parents behind the bench farthest from us erupt as one of the kids shovels the puck over the goal line.

  “It’s not something I’m interested in.” He puts his Styrofoam cup down and rubs the jagged pink scar on the back of his right hand like he’s hoping to buff out the damage.

  “It’s Sports Illustrated. It’s the biggest deal.”

  “Not to me. Thank you—really, thank you—but no.”

  I had considered this possibility. It’s another reason I didn’t reach out before I came—I figured it’d be harder to turn me down to my face, and if he did, I could use any guilt he might have against him to change his mind. “Dad, this is a big deal to me. I need this. I need you to do this for me. Please.” I hate myself for begging and I hate him for making me do it. “Dad, you owe me this.”

  “What do I owe you?”

  I have no idea what he owes me. “It’s just a couple of interviews. We’ll go somewhere and you talk into a tape recorder. Just tell some stories and I’ll ask a few questions. That’s it. You don’t have to do anything. Just give me some details and then you can go back to hiding.”

  My father swirls his hot chocolate.

  “I’ve never asked you for anything before.” I feel like a kid trying to negotiate his way into staying up late.

  He sighs. “Just do something else. Find someone else. This can’t be that important.”

  “On a scale of one to ten, this is like a forty-two. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.”

  “You wouldn’t be here,” he repeats back quietly, staring into the dark, chocolatey sludge at the bottom of his cup. “Just talking? No taking my picture or anything?”

  “No pictures. They’ll use old photos from when you played. So you’ll do it?”

  “We’ll have to do it here.”

  “Actually, it’s a bit echoey in here. It’ll be better for the recording if we go somewhere else.”

  “I don’t have time to be running around town telling stories. We can do it up in my room.”

  “Yeah, sure. Whatever gets it done.”

  The buzzer signals the end of the game, and the kids swarm from the benches onto the ice to shake hands. They have to do this. It’s supposed to promote sportsmanship. The parents on both sides are clapping, though there’s a discernible lack of enthusiasm on the losing side.

  “I need to clean the ice. Come back tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.”

  “Alright, tomorrow. Sounds good.” I exhale and it feels like I’ve spent my life holding my breath. Maybe this will work out for me, after all. I’ve read a thousand athlete profiles and a lot of players like to talk about how they bet on themselves. It’s a stupid cliché because stupid clichés are the first language of all athletes, but I’ve never actually tried betting on myself to do something difficult, and now that I am—admittedly, more out of necessity than anything else—I’m suddenly surging with something that feels dangerously close to self-confidence. It’s intoxicating. I want to stay focused, step up, dig deep, give it a hundred and ten percent, play the game the right way, and do what it takes to win.

  My father descends the stairs and heads toward the Zamboni room. “Thanks,” I call after him, because there’s no “I” in “team,” but he doesn’t respond. I tell myself that it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

  •

  I was born in New York, but don’t remember ever living there. Before I was two years old, my parents split up and my mother brought me back to Pennington, while my father went off to Los Angeles to play for the Kings. For the first couple of years, we lived with my mom’s parents. I sort of remember that—flashes of my grandfather playing solitaire on a TV tray and the taste of my grandmother’s maple fudge.

  By the time I was five, my mother worked at the hospital delivering meals to patients and we’d moved into a small apartment on Jasper Street. Most of the other apartments were occupied by widows and spinsters who’d take turns babysitting me. The only other kid in the place was Dave Arsenault.

  Dave and I were the same age, both the sons of single mothers. People like to think they pick their friends. You believe they are the people you want—people who complement you, people you want in your life. Maybe that’s true sometimes, but usually it’s just proximity and circumstance. Back then, if I’d thought up the criteria for an ideal best friend, it’s improbable the best match would have been the kid downstairs. But Dave and I became best friends precisely because he was the kid downstairs.

  We weren’t allowed to leave the immediate neighbour-hood, but both our mothers worked, so it was an impossible rule to enforce. Most days, we’d sneak off to the Duck Pond, which was our Neverland. It was tucked away beside a small wood, surrounded by marsh and reeds, and fed by a deep, narrow stream. We called it the Duck Pond because it was a pond and there were sometimes ducks and we weren’t wildly creative. There was a fort in the trees built by the kids who came before us and left for the kids who came after. To get to the fort, you had to shimmy over a plank that crossed the stream, then climb rotting boards nailed into the side of a tree. In retrospect, I’m surprised there were no accidents, drownings or deaths.

  We made it a rule that to use the fort, you had to help stock it with supplies. I delivered an empty Quality Street tin for storage purposes. Dave provided a box of wooden matches. One kid added an FM shower radio, another a milk crate we used as a table, and another brought a deck of cards minus the four of spades and both red queens. We collected a hammer
and some nails for basic repairs, and kept two cans of beans in case someone had to “crash,” which was just wishful thinking. But it was Paulie who brought us the most valuable item of all: a small stack of vintage Playboy and Penthouse magazines pinched from his father.

  “What if he knows you took them?” I asked, because I was the sort of kid who was too afraid of getting caught to enjoy being bad. More than once I’ve been accused of hating fun.

  “He won’t. He has boxes of them.” Paulie would later prove this to us at a sleepover. Even by today’s standards, with infinite access to internet pornography, Mr. Coleman had a collection of staggering size and scope.

  We were grateful to Paulie for introducing us to naked women. We’d read Penthouse Forum for laughs, with no understanding of what it was we were laughing at. Our comprehension of erotic stories was only slightly better than our comprehension of quantum physics.

  The Duck Pond was also where Dave and I tried our first cigarettes, which he stole from his mother’s purse. The menthol 100s were comically long in our small mouths, more like straws than smokes. He struck his match on the first try and sucked the flame into the tip of the cigarette. It was easily the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

  “You just suck it in. Like breathing,” Dave said, handing it to me.

  I didn’t get the difference between pulling the smoke into my mouth and pulling it into my lungs. I not only inhaled, I inhaled with gusto, mentholated smoke scratching my throat and burning my chest. I coughed the lit cigarette into my lap, then panicked, slapping it away before it singed my pants. I tried again, trying to get the smoke in and out smoothly, until I was overcome with dizziness and vomited down the fort’s trap door onto every step of the ladder we needed to climb down. Dave made fun of me for months.