Searching for Terry Punchout Read online

  The game on the ice below us ends with a long whistle from the referee, and the players—men between thirty and sixty years old, senior leaguers who have been playing against each other in various combinations for decades—make their way off. A couple stay behind shooting pucks into the empty net, squeezing in a few more minutes of ice time.

  And then I see him. My father. He’s pulling the large doors at the far end of the ice and propping them open, before disappearing back into the Zamboni room. He doesn’t look up because he has no idea I’m only two hundred feet away.

  “I didn’t think he’d be here this late,” I say.

  Paulie squints at the ice to see what I’m looking at. “Your old man? He’s always here. I assumed you were staying next door with him.”

  “Next door? Dad’s not on Duke Street anymore?” Are there even houses next door to the rink? There didn’t used to be.

  “He’s just down the hall there,” Paulie says, gesturing toward the door.

  “Down the hall?”

  “Yeah, man.” Paulie looks at the door quizzically, taking a second to confirm this fact to himself. “Like ten feet down the hall,” he says, as though it was the details of the hall itself eluding me.

  Below us, the Zamboni pulls out onto the ice, my father at the wheel.

  “When did that happen?”

  “I dunno, a few years ago. You said all that stuff about Sports Illustrated or whatever, I figured you’d talked to him.”

  “No,” I say, trying to remember when I last spoke to my father on the phone. A few years ago, probably on my birthday or Christmas or something, seems about right. “Not yet.”

  “Last call, guys,” the bartender calls out behind us. I’ve never needed another drink so much.

  •

  Terrance James Macallister was born on a farm just outside Pennington in 1947, the son of sheep farmer Ellis Macallister and his wife, Agnes.

  Terry learned to skate on a pond behind the barn when he was five years old, but didn’t start playing organized hockey until he was thirteen. The years of pond skating and farm chores paid off and Terry became a local star overnight, powering through the other kids and scoring almost at will. To compensate, they made him play with the older children, and at just fifteen he joined the Pennington Royals, a junior team of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. He scored fifty-four goals, a record at the time.

  After Terry had been with the Royals for a year, a man showed up at the farm and offered him a chance to play for the Toronto Marlboros in the Ontario Hockey Association. Terry wasn’t as successful against the bigger, faster, and more skilled players in the OHA, but he worked hard and carved out a role, using his farm-boy strength to beat up players whenever his coach asked him to, which ended up being fairly often. Beating people up on the ice would become Terry’s calling in life, and his ability to intimidate pretty much everyone else in the league helped the Marlies win a lot of hockey games. Over a three-game stretch in the playoffs during his first year with the team, Terry had three different one-punch knockouts, and while records aren’t kept on such things, no one could remember seeing anything like it before. A reporter for the Toronto Telegram dubbed him Terry Punchout and the name stuck.

  Terry wasn’t drafted by an NHL team, but he got an invitation to the Toronto Maple Leafs training camp when he was nineteen. During his first scrimmage, he beat the holy hell out of the Leafs’ long-standing tough guy, George “Duck” Wilkins, making a good impression on all the people on whom you want to make good impressions. A week later, Duck was traded to St. Louis and, on October 14, 1967, Terry Punchout made his professional hockey debut. He would go on to play 1,032 regular season games over the next fifteen years. He scored 119 goals and added 301 assists. By any statistical standard, it was a bad hockey career, but Terry also accumulated 3,994 penalty minutes, more than any player before or since. It’s a dubious record, not the sort of thing that would put him in the Hall of Fame, but it made him a legend, nonetheless. There isn’t a hockey fan alive who doesn’t know his name. His hometown named a stadium after him.

  I know all this about Terry Punchout because I know everything about Terry Punchout. I have every stat and every milestone memorized, and I know a few things that aren’t in the record books. His favourite colour is green. He’s allergic to rabbits. He likes to drink rum and Coke in a tall glass with lots of ice.

  What I didn’t know is that he now lives in the same rink they named after him, the same rink where he’s been driving the Zamboni since I was fifteen years old.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I need to piss so bad it hurts, but I’m afraid to open my eyes. The problem with rum is the hangover. It isn’t like other hangovers; it gets inside every part of you. I can feel it in my hair. Paulie and I had already had more than enough to drink when the bartender shut us down. Still, we convinced him to sell us a bottle of dark rum for sixty bucks, which I’m fairly sure came from my wallet, and we opened it in the parking lot.

  I lift my eyelid just a sliver and blinding, unimaginable light pours into my skull. My stomach lurches. It takes several hard blinks for the room around me to slowly take shape. Flowery wallpaper. Bay windows. Fake plants. I’m on a large grey couch with thick, soft cushions, my long body stiff from bending while I slept. On the coffee table in front of the couch is a tall glass of water resting on a small white doily. Beside the glass is a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol. Beside that is a bowl of potpourri. The rich, lavender scent only makes me feel worse. I take a deep breath and lift myself up on my left side, nice and slow. The childproof cap on the pill bottle is a struggle, but I manage to spill four tablets into my hand. I try to choke them dry for fear of adding more water to my already taxed bladder, but there’s not enough spit and the pills turn into a bitter paste on my tongue. I gag a little and grab the glass. A sip turns into a mouthful. The water is tepid, but I’m a sponge, and empty it in three swallows. I figure I’ve got about two minutes to find a toilet.

  Steeling myself, I stand in one jerky motion. The room tilts impossibly, and while the rational part of me understands this is the hangover challenging my senses, there is another part of me that is surprised furniture isn’t crashing into the wall. I take a beat to let the room level itself, which is when I notice I’m not wearing clothes.

  It is at this precise moment, leaning hard to my right in just my boxer shorts, that my grade-school music teacher walks into the room.

  “Oh, good, you’re up,” she says, ignoring nearly everything that’s happening in front of her. “I just woke Paul for breakfast. I hope you don’t mind, but I threw your clothes in the wash with his. They seemed a bit grubby. Are you hungry?”

  There are a lot of things I want to do right now—cover myself up, apologize profusely, throw up, die a quick death—but there is one very pressing matter to deal with first.

  “Can I use your washroom?”

  “Sure,” she says, “it’s upstairs. The one with the toilet.”

  While pissing, I remember making Paulie sit and drink with me on a concrete slab in the rec centre parking lot so I could see my father again, though I didn’t say that out loud. And sure enough, after about thirty minutes—after the beer-league players and old guys from the bar and even the bartender had cleared out—my father came to the front door to lock up the building. He did it from the inside, then disappeared back into the darkness of the lobby like Pennington’s Quasimodo. It was hard enough coming back here knowing I needed something from him, that I needed him. I’d promised myself I’d get through this without changing my feelings toward him—a contrived mix of anger and ambivalence. But now I just feel sorry for him.

  •

  After relieving myself and putting on Paulie’s too-big sweatpants and too-bigger sweatshirt, I enter the Coleman dining room. Mrs. Coleman is setting a stack of pancakes on the table, while Paulie, who doesn’t look like he’s suffering nearly as much as I am, piles bacon onto h
is plate. Mr. Coleman reads the local paper, the Pennington Weekly Record. Taking in the spread, I can understand why Paulie is comfortable living at home. Pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, juice, and coffee on a weekday morning. I can only assume Mrs. Coleman retired from teaching music and has now gone insane caring for her husband and only son. She looks about the same as she did back in Grade 4: tiny, with sharp blue eyes behind large, gold-rimmed glasses. Her hair has more silver in it and she appears to have shrunk a good foot and a half, though that probably has more to do with me not being eight years old anymore. I sit and nod as she offers me coffee.

  “So how have you been using your time, Mr. Macallister?” She called everyone in her classes Mr. and Miss. Back then it seemed respectful, but now it feels silly.

  “Um.” I take a gulp from my coffee to stall and burn my tongue.

  “He’s been living in Calgary,” Paulie offers.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” says Mrs. Coleman. “Charlie and I went to the Stampede back in 1976 and had a wonderful time. And you’re just home for a visit?”

  “He’s writing a thing about Punch for Sports Illustrated,” Paulie says.

  Jesus, I told him that, didn’t I?

  “Really?” asks Mr. Coleman, looking up over his newspaper. “And how is your father?”

  Mr. Coleman once threw a cassette tape of mine out the window of a moving vehicle. I made the tape to play in the dressing room before games and filled it with singalong stadium rock and obscene rap classics. Paulie borrowed it to make a copy, and stuck it in the tape deck of his dad’s minivan on the way home. Mr. Coleman is a reserved guy, level-headed on all matters of music and politics, so when 2 Live Crew’s “Fuck Martinez”—a profanity-filled song targeting a Florida politician who had tried to have the group’s earlier profanity-filled songs banned—came on, he didn’t approve. The song played for about half a minute before Mr. Coleman hit eject, casually rolled down his window, and fired it out into the night.

  “He’s good, I guess,” I say, and chew on a piece of bacon. My tongue appreciates the salt, but my stomach is still unsure.

  “I can’t even think of the last time I saw him,” Mr. Coleman says. “To be honest, I didn’t realize he was still around.” When he says “around,” he means “alive,” because he is now, as ever, an asshole.

  “Oh, I see him puttering around down at the rink sometimes,” Mrs. Coleman says, smiling. “He looks well.”

  “Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention,” says Mr. Coleman. “So, what does Sports Illustrated want with old Terry Punchout, anyway?”

  It’s a fair question—it’s been a long time since anyone gave a shit about my father—but there’s something in his tone that bugs me. Old Terry Punchout? Mr. Coleman and my father are about the same age.

  “Bobby Monaghan will break Dad’s penalty record this year, so he’s relevant right now,” I say. “People are talking about him and he’s been off the grid so long they want to know what he’s been up to. Hockey stars don’t usually disappear like he did.” I’m overselling again. Especially when it’s entirely possible my father will want nothing to do with any of this.

  “Well, hockey stars might not disappear,” Mr. Coleman says with a laugh, “but he wasn’t exactly Bobby Orr.” He lifts his paper back up between us again, but keeps talking through it. “I can’t imagine a lot of people are looking for Zamboni-driving tips.”

  It’s not that he’s dismissive of my father that bothers me, it’s that he’s dismissive of my story. When I first pitched a piece about my dad a few months ago, it was in a Vancouver bar and I was drunk enough to do it with conviction. Now that it’s a thing I actually need to write—a thing my livelihood depends on—I have my doubts, and this guy isn’t helping.

  “I think his rookie card is worth about a hundred bucks,” Paulie mumbles through a mouthful of pancake. “You know, if the corners are sharp. That’s pretty good.”

  We all look at him for a few seconds, but no one responds. It’s Mrs. Coleman who finally breaks the silence by saying, “Oh, Charlie.” She smiles at me and waves her hand dismissively at her husband. “Don’t listen to him. This all sounds very impressive, Adam. Good for you. Your father must be excited.”

  Mr. Coleman glances over the top of his paper at his wife and something in her eyes cows him. “Well, it’s been a few years since I’ve read Sports Illustrated. Maybe I’ll give it a skim if Terry’s on the cover.”

  Paulie stabs at the stack of pancakes and pulls another two onto his plate, and I turn my attention to my own food.

  A lot of people in Pennington love my father, or at least they love the idea of him, but it’s not universal. When I was nine, he was described in the Weekly Record as a “violent reprobate” by J.J. Johnstone, another local hero. About the same time my father was starting out in the NHL, J.J. left Pennington to take theology classes at St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, intent on becoming a priest. He came back to town one year short of graduating and took a job reporting for the paper. A year later, he took over for the retiring sports editor and has run the paper’s sports pages ever since, and I assume he still does.

  J.J. never liked my father. While Dad was making his name in the pros, the Weekly Record shared surprisingly little about him. Then, when my father retired in 1982, J.J. wrote a long treatise about how the end of Dad’s career gave the league a chance to clean up its act and get back to what J.J. called “pure hockey,” not the “goony sideshow hockey played by the likes of Terry Punchout.” I didn’t know any of this stuff at the time. In 1984, the town built a new rec centre and decided to name the arena after somebody. The two names put forward were the ex-pro hockey player and the long-time sports editor. Town council voted 7–0 in favour of Macallister Stadium (that the new bar is called J.J.’s is probably a consolation prize), prompting the “violent reprobate” comment and a long conversation between my mother and me about why J.J. was so mean to my dad. The cruel irony of asking her, the one person with good reason to hate my father, didn’t occur to me until much, much later. That she defended him in that moment is as good an example of the kind of person she was that you’ll ever find.

  •

  After breakfast, Paulie drives me back to the motel. I’m still wearing his clothes, which hang loose on my body.

  “Hey, wanna watch the Leafs game tonight? Have some beers? We’ll be at Mac’s place. I can pick you up.”

  To my surprise, I want to go. Whatever apprehension I had last night about being seen seems to be gone. Hanging out with guys from high school might be fun. I’m not even sure who’s still around.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say.

  “Cool, man. I’ll come get you around six.”

  “Alright.” I open the door and step out. “Oh, thanks for letting me crash. And for the clothes.”

  “No worries.” I slam the car door shut and Paulie flashes a peace sign as he pulls away, leaving me in the parking lot next to my truck. I should have asked for his help to dig out my clothes. There’s a slow, thick, and slushy rainfall, and moving my TV and stereo and boxes without getting them wet is a two-man job. But showing him that all my worldly possessions are packed up back there doesn’t really jibe with the image I’m trying to project.

  After a quick shower to wash off last night’s stink, I put Paulie’s sweats back on and make a trip to the mall. The drive is my first daylight look at Pennington. MacDonell Books, Pat’s Pub, Cathy’s Flower Shoppe, Clovie’s Diner, and so on; a few things are missing and there are new additions. It’s like seeing a photo of myself from a day I don’t remember. But it feels the same. That’s the problem with home: even if I hate it, it’s still home. We’re wired for familiarity. It’s a design flaw.

  Turning left onto Elm Street, I come to the first significant change in landscape. Not only has the Capitol Theatre closed, but the building is also gone, leaving a vacant lot. It’s not even paved, just empty space with a few years of u
nchecked growth and a tilted “For Sale” sign jammed into a mound of dirt, its colours faded by the sun.

  The Capitol Theatre was one of Pennington’s top teenager hot spots. It was where I saw Return of the Jedi and Back to the Future and Terminator 2. My first date (Amanda Gallant, Aladdin) happened there. Actually, my first twenty or so dates happened there. My first kiss with tongue (Karen Yeo, Groundhog Day), my first hickey (Sabrina Turner, Mrs. Doubtfire), and my first honest-to-God boob grab (Danielle Morrison, under the shirt but over the bra, True Lies) all happened in the darkness of the Capitol. How the hell are kids learning about sex now?

  The mall parking lot is mostly empty. The Mayfair Mall isn’t big, anchored by the town’s liquor store at one end and an IGA at the other. The Frenchy’s Thrift Shop I’m looking for is still there, and after some digging I find a pair of jeans my size and a couple of T-shirts, including a vintage Nordiques shirt that’s kind of cool, the sort of thing I might wear even if I wasn’t desperate. Taking my finds to the register, I’m stupefied when I come face to face with Stephanie Smith.

  Our high school didn’t officially have a prom queen—proms were cancelled in the early nineties because most kids preferred to head into the woods to drink beer and set pallets we’d steal from behind the mall on fire—but if we’d had one, it would have been Stephanie Smith. She was beautiful, and from Grade 9 on she rarely acknowledged my existence. My above-average acne and below-average self-esteem placed me firmly in Sir John Thompson High School’s middle class, well outside the scope of anything Stephanie gave a shit about.

  The horrible high school girl who wields power over all the popular kids and makes life miserable for the unpopular ones might be a cliché, but Stephanie embraced it. When Tamara Cormier got her period and bled through a pair of white pants, it was Stephanie who started calling her Tamara Tampon and it was Stephanie who kept calling her Tamara Tampon long after everyone else stopped thinking it was funny, which it never really was. There was a rumour that Tamara tried to commit suicide by eating a handful of pills. The pills, however, were Extra Strength Advil and only caused a mild gastric bleed. Even after that story made the rounds, Stephanie didn’t stop with the Tamara Tampon stuff. She was a terror to the social proletariat, and I probably got off lucky just falling into the category of people she ignored.