Searching for Terry Punchout

by Tyler Hellard

  …

  I don’t care, he was a sleazy fuckin’ frog.

  …

  You want me to tell the story or not? So, Billy was a good guy. I liked him and I didn’t like that French bastard laughing about making him bleed. I had nothing to lose letting him know that, neither. So a couple shifts later I grabbed Pierre and beat the holy hell out of him. That was my first-ever hockey fight. My first anything fight, really. Next period they sent a guy after me to square things up and sure enough I got the best of him, too. Word got around and the next game somebody else decided to try me on for size. After that, it became a bit of a regular thing.

  …

  Well, for a long time I had surprise on my side. I wasn’t the biggest fella, so I don’t think they thought I had a lot to offer in a fight. But the secret to fighting ain’t being big or strong. It’s balance. I’ve got a nice, low centre of gravity and a real strong core. All those years doing chores and wrestling sheep gave me good control over myself. Guys today think they’re in good shape because they got the six-pack stomach, well, I never had no six-pack stomach. But I don’t think any of those six-packs could knock me over even now. Balance, especially on skates. You have that, no man on earth can push you around.

  …

  I was real popular once I started dropping my gloves. Coaches took a liking to me, and so did the other players. I carved out my place on the team, and I guess that made everything easier. Made me miss home less, helped me relax and enjoy myself a bit. At the time I expected playing in the O would be all the hockey I’d get, and I liked that it kept me off the farm most of the year. When I went home after that first year, Dad decided to have a big chat about what I was gonna do with my life. I told him I was going to go back to Toronto and play hockey for as long as they’d have me, and when they wouldn’t, well, I’d sort it out then. Wasn’t really the answer he was looking for. He wasn’t much fun to be around after that, let me tell you. But that’s also the summer I met Vivian, so I spent more time with her, anyway. Did you know your mum was a full inch taller than me? I bought thick-soled shoes after our first date.

  …

  Well, I can’t hardly pretend she wasn’t there.

  …

  You want me to tell you what happened and I’m telling you what happened. You can’t also tell me how to tell it.

  …

  That summer I’d get up early to get all the choring done and rush out to spend the rest of my day with Viv. We’d go swimming or just for a drive. I didn’t really have many friends, but we’d get around with hers sometimes. It didn’t matter, we’d just have fun, and then in the fall I got back on the train to Toronto for another season with the Marlies.

  •

  Pennington has a few churches, putting everyone into neat Christian boxes. Really, though, it’s a town of lapsed Catholics, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and so on, as none of them pull any kind of crowd.

  My mother was raised Catholic and, I think, genuinely believed all the things she’d been told about God and Jesus and so on. My father was born Protestant, but for all intents and purposes, he was an atheist from early on. He did go to church on Sundays with his parents, but only until he was old enough to refuse, and they didn’t see much point in fighting him on it. When my parents got married, it was important to my mother to have the wedding inside the church, or more specifically, St. Patrick’s Church on Highland Drive. My father consented, but Father Tim, the priest at St. Patrick’s, wasn’t keen on people from his congregation marrying non-Catholics. For those marriages, he mandated a series of counselling sessions between himself and the otherwise happy couple.

  During one of these sessions, my father made his lack of faith known. To Father Tim, non-Catholics were misguided, non-Christians were to be pitied, and atheists—what he called “the aggressively Godless”—were beneath contempt. He tried to refuse my parents a Catholic ceremony, but my mother begged and, technically, as a baptized Protestant, my father was a qualified Christian. The priest eventually acquiesced. On the day of the wedding, he told my mother that, personally, he disapproved, and more importantly, he felt God disapproved. He told her the marriage would fail and that he couldn’t guarantee the salvation of any children produced by such a union. My mother got the wedding at St. Patrick’s she’d always dreamed of, but she only entered a Catholic church three more times in her life—once for each of her parents’ funerals and, finally, for her own, though I don’t know if that last one counts.

  Raised without religion, I had to work out my own worldview. What I came up with was this: everything in life is pass or fail. I don’t do percentages. Things either are or they aren’t. My father was a hockey player and then he wasn’t. Dave and I were friends and then we weren’t. My mother was healthy and then she wasn’t.

  We found out just before Christmas. She was tired and had lost a few pounds. She thought she had a bug she just couldn’t shake and joked about her six-month flu. Eventually she went to see Dr. Kelly. He wanted tests. He wanted to take blood, to X-ray and scan things, and to cut out a small piece of her. Something was wrong.

  Everything was wrong.

  Her chances wouldn’t have been all that great even if they had caught it early, but she had waited so long that when they did start a treatment, odds of survival were never really discussed. I was seventeen when I learned that aggressive chemotherapy isn’t pretty. My mother went from not feeling well to being unable to do much more than lie in bed, which she complained hurt her back, though she couldn’t muster the strength to get up most days. Her skin, always pale, took on a translucence that didn’t seem real. At first, they let her come home between treatments, but near the end she was in the hospital full-time. She slept a lot, and I’d sit and watch her breathing as it became increasingly shallow. In March, my acceptance letter from St. Mary’s arrived in the mail.

  “I suppose I’ll have to get better before you go,” she said. “I don’t want you worrying about me instead of studying.”

  I’d waited years for that letter, for the possibility of heading out into a greater world full of all the things Pennington didn’t have. I wanted excitement and sophistication and interesting people, and while I wasn’t sure what any of that meant in practical terms—it’s not like I thought I’d be eating sushi with famous artists and going to the opera every night—I knew I had to get as far away as I could. I’d spent my entire life living in a place that never felt right.

  My mother hadn’t explicitly told me I had to go to university. She’d spent years asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up and was delighted by my answers, even during the brief period when I was seven and thought Pizza Guy sounded pretty cool. Once I hit high school, she’d ask about schools and classes and majors I might be interested in. Until she got sick, not going to school wasn’t an option. But I knew she wouldn’t get better. My mother was sick and that meant I was stuck in Pennington because what else could I do? I wanted to blame the cancer instead of her, but as the disease ate away at her—at who she used to be—it got hard to tell the two apart and hard not to blame her for taking away all the things she’d taught me to want in the first place.

  But I never had to make a choice. By April, the doctors gave up trying to fix her, because treating the thing that was killing her was only killing her faster. They told us—me and Mom and all the neighbours and distant aunts and uncles and cousins who were suddenly around me all the time—she would die, giving her anywhere from two to six months. Maybe longer, if she was lucky.

  “These things can be hard to predict,” the doctor told me. She died two weeks later, an unfairness I’ve held against all doctors everywhere ever since.

  My mother was alive and then she wasn’t.

  •

  It’s six o’clock when I leave the rink with about a half-hour’s worth of tape of my father. I worried I’d have trouble getting him to talk—he’s not exactly a chatty guy—but as soon as I clicked th
e tape recorder on, he just went off with almost no prompting. It was a huge relief, and I’m feeling good when I go to meet Paulie and the guys.

  Pat’s Pub is a local institution. It maintains a delicate balance between respectable family restaurant during the day and the hub of Pennington’s singles scene at night. As the town’s only real bar, it services a wide demographic of men and women aged anywhere from nineteen to forty-five. By leaving town when I did, I never had the chance to properly take part in Pennington’s nightlife, missing out on the chance to have sex with the kind of older women who spend their time at Pat’s. Every choice has a consequence.

  I had always imagined Pat’s at night was a heady mix of disco lights and sexual possibility. In reality, transitioning “Pat’s Pub for Family-Friendly Grub” to “Pat’s Pub for Decisions You’ll Regret Tomorrow” is a trick of dimming the lights and clearing out a half-dozen tables to create a functional dance floor. I’m sipping a rum and Coke in a corner booth, watching a waitress replace the salt and pepper shakers with ashtrays. A pair of colourful lights start moving overhead. The music isn’t on yet and I can hear the gears inside grinding as beams of blue and yellow sashay back and forth across the tile floor.

  There was a pub in Calgary that a few of us from work would head to on Friday nights, but it’s been a while since I’ve been in a nightclub, even a makeshift one like Pat’s. When I was younger, and dancing and drinking were prerequisites to getting laid, I’d go to clubs begrudgingly. The screaming to be heard over the music, watered-down booze, and self-consciousness over my demonstrable lack of rhythm never made it much fun. But it was the easiest way to meet girls.

  My dating life is unspectacular, which, I like to point out, is different from non-existent. Before I left Calgary, Jana and I had been together for about six months. We sort of fell into the relationship by accident and neither of us worked up the momentum to break free of it. When I met her, she liked clubs and bars and going out and having fun. After a month with me, it was Saturday nights at the video store, where we’d spend over an hour trying to agree on a film. Her apartment was nicer than mine, so we spent our time there. When I told her I was leaving Calgary, she seemed relieved. It’s not the response you’d expect after spending six months sleeping together. On the drive to Pennington, I had a lot of time to think about why it didn’t work out, and why we couldn’t recognize it soon enough to cut each other loose, no harm, no foul. Best I can figure, we just didn’t have that spark or chemistry or whatever horseshit people who believe in a sappy kind of love talk about. Why isn’t it enough that we got along okay, had similar enough interests, and a decent amount of pretty okay sex? If you have all of those things, and they make you happy enough, what’s the difference between that and real, true, honest-to-goodness love?

  Friday night is pretty shaking in Pennington. Paulie and Shitty arrive at Pat’s just as the music starts—a menagerie of dated and predictable club hits—and I’m a few drinks deep. Shitty complains about his janitor job. He’s developed a healthy contempt for the disgusting nature of children.“Why do those greasy little shits stick gum to everything?” And then Dave arrives with Mac. I tense up as they pile into the booth, but no one says anything about last night, not even a hint that less than twenty-four hours ago this guy’s fist was travelling toward my skull with speed and conviction. Dave doesn’t look at me at all, and I’m fine with that. We’re in silent agreement to pretend it didn’t happen.

  So we drink. Again. We drink while talking about everything and nothing in particular. Mac and Dave break off to chase girls, Paulie and Shitty stay in the booth talking about girls they’d like to chase.

  “Do you think Stacey will be out tonight?” Paulie asks.

  “Jesus Christ, guy. You need to let that go,” replies Shitty.

  “What?” says Paulie, incredulous.

  Shitty shakes his head and turns to me. “So get this. We’re round Mac’s at New Year’s and Paulie manages to pick up Stacey Bailey.” He makes sure I remember who Stacey is, and I nod. “Anyway, he claims he fucked her, but who’s to say, right?”

  “I did!” Paulie protests.

  “Yeah, sure, and ever since he’s always asking about her like a fucking puppy dog looking for a treat.”

  “Maybe he likes her,” I say, defending Paulie. “But if that was New Year’s, I think you can move on. She ain’t interested.”

  Shitty laughs. “It wasn’t last New Year’s. We’re coming up on three years since our little boy here popped his cherry. I tell you, she must have fucked him, because it’s the only explanation. No one else has and the poor prick is scared no one else will.”

  “You’ve been fucking the same girl for ten years,” says Paulie. “So what do you know about it, fuckhead.”

  “Actually, it’s only been eight. Danielle wouldn’t let me the first two. She’s a lady.”

  Shitty and Danielle Morrison started dating near the end of high school, shortly before I left town. Their current relationship status is something he calls “pre-engaged.” As he’s explaining exactly what that is, someone slams into the booth, shoving me over. I turn to yell “Fuck off!” at the culprit and get as far as “Fuck” before I see that it’s Jennifer Clark.

  Jennifer could arguably be called the love of my life, not because our high school romance was Shakespearean or anything, but because there just aren’t any other real contenders. The last decade has been kind to her. She’s put on some weight, but it suits her. She was never much for makeup, which still seems to be true, and her brown hair is as long and thick as ever. She perfected the girl-next-door look a long time ago. Simply put, she’s lovely.

  “Didn’t you used to be Adam Macallister,” she says with a cool smile. “I knew that guy once upon a time.”

  “Jennifer. Hi. Wow. Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hey!” Paulie shouts from the other side of the booth. “Didn’t you guys used to screw?” He and Shitty fall over each other in a fit of giggles.

  Jennifer doesn’t miss a beat. “That’s not entirely true,” she says, and I’m sure the look on my face is one of abject horror.

  •

  Jennifer and I dated early in our Grade 12 year. She was fantastic, self-confident, fiercely independent and, in most ways, completely out of my league. But she never liked hockey players and I’d quit being one the year before, so I held a certain appeal. Our relationship progressed, as these things do. Despite my exposure to junior high sex-ed classes, locker room talk, and soft-core pornography, the specifics of sex still didn’t quite fit together for me. Like, I knew what it was in a strictly mechanical sense, but the bigger questions of “How?” eluded me. I assume it’s like this for everyone, but maybe I was a bit thick.

  We agreed to do it through an awkward discussion with a lot of avoiding what “it” was and then a lot of making certain each other understood the “it” we weren’t talking about. Jennifer’s little brother, Scott, had a hockey tournament in Halifax, and their parents took him, leaving Jennifer alone for a weekend. I came over around seven. We watched True Romance on VHS and even though we’d seen it a thousand times, we watched it through to the end. I was terrified. We started kissing, which would normally escalate fairly quickly to heavy petting, but that night each step took forever. We made out for an hour until Jennifer, possibly realizing I wouldn’t make the move, took control. She stood us up and pulled off her sweater. I did the same with my T-shirt. She undid her jeans and I undid mine. I felt silly standing in my boxer shorts, fully erect and scared to death I’d screw up putting on the condom. Jennifer undid her bra and pulled her pink panties over her hips and let them fall, stepping out gracefully. I froze and she smiled and I blushed. She stepped forward and kissed me while hooking her thumbs into my boxers. She started to sink to her knees, pulling the shorts down as she went. I felt her breath on my neck, down my chest and my stomach and…

  The subject of premature ejaculation isn�
��t covered in locker rooms or soft-core porn. It was, however, mentioned in sex ed as a thing that happens, not uncommonly. But I was sure it wouldn’t happen to me. Like most guys, I had a good idea it was something to be ashamed of. Ashamed. I didn’t know the meaning of the word until I accidentally came in Jennifer Clark’s eye. The moment seared itself into my brain and, to this day, thinking about it brings on crushing embarrassment. What followed, however, has a more dreamlike quality. Jennifer, surprised, screamed. I said nothing, not even “I’m sorry.” I grabbed my clothes and ran.

  I avoided Jennifer for about a week, and when she finally tracked me down, I dumped her. It was just easier than discussing what had happened or, worse, risking it happening again. A couple months later she started dating Phil Mumford, who also didn’t play hockey, but did play piano and guitar. In grade school that made him a loser, but in high school he learned some Red Hot Chili Peppers songs, and that guitar got him any girl he wanted. In March, word got out that Jennifer was pregnant. It was scandalous news in a town like Pennington, where everybody knows everybody else. While I certainly didn’t want to be anyone’s father at that age, I was jealous that Phil Mumford could manage what I couldn’t, even if he did screw up putting on the condom. Jennifer was starting to show when I left town a few months later.

  I wouldn’t say I’ve pined after her all these years, but it’s not like I haven’t thought about her either. I’ve replayed that night in her basement in my head nearly every day, starring an infinitely more couth version of myself. I’ve also imagined accidentally bumping into her on the streets of Vancouver or Toronto or Montreal, where I suggest grabbing a drink someplace nice and impress her with my cosmopolitan ways. Whether by time travel or coincidence, all I wanted was a second chance—the opportunity to prove I’ve become something more than the sexually immature teenager she once knew. I have thought about this, but I never believed the moment would really come, and here it is, Jennifer rubbing elbows with me in a small, crowded bar and the best I can manage is “hi wow hi.” Honestly, it’s a wonder I’ve ever managed to get a girl to sleep with me at all.