Waiting for
Ricky Tantrum
Waiting for
Ricky Tantrum
Jules Lewis
Copyright © Jules Lewis, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Michael Carroll
Design: Jennifer Scott
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lewis, Jules
Waiting for Ricky Tantrum : a novel / by Jules Lewis.
ISBN 978-1-55488-740-8
I. Title.
PS8623.E9655W35 2010 C813’.6 C2009-907534-2
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
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for my parents
Relling: All the world is sick, pretty nearly — that’s the worst of it.
Gregers: And what treatment are you using for Hjalmar?
Relling: My usual one. I am trying to keep the make-believe of life in him.
Gregers: The make-believe? I don’t think I heard you aright.
Relling: Yes, I said make-believe. That is the stimulating principle of life, you know.
— Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, Act 5
Oleg had a spitting habit back then.
“You kids know what crabs are?” Nikolai Khernofsky, Oleg’s uncle — the chef, waiter, and owner of Nicky’s Diner — asked, elbows resting on the wooden restaurant counter. “Not the kind you could eat, kids. No, no, no. Vicious creatures, these ones.”
There was only one fry left on the white oval plate in front of Nikolai, and Charlie Crouse, reaching for it with his right hand, standing up from his blue-topped bar stool, grabbed it and stuffed it into his mouth. “I know what they are, Mr. Khernofsky,” he said, chewing. “They’re little bugs that eat your crotch.”
“And how do these bugs get in your pants, kid?”
“If you stick your dick somewhere dirty.”
“Holy mackerel!” Nikolai smacked a palm on the counter. “How do you know that, kid? What are you — nine, ten years old?”
“Twelve.”
“Twelve? Well, let me tell you,” Nikolai said, addressing only Oleg and me. “This kid, this is a —” He turned back to Charlie. “What’s your name again?”
“Charlie.”
“Farley,” Nikolai repeated with pride, turned back to us. “Farley’s a smart kid, boys. He knows, ha, he knows something about safety. How come I never met this kid before, Oleg? This is a smart kid. You and Jimmy, sometimes you are not so smart. But this kid —” He plopped a hand on Charlie’s shoulder, nodded at him. “This is a smart kid. How about some more fries, eh? These are the best in Toronto, Farley. The finest.”
“It’s Charlie.”
“Sure. Charlie. But listen. You listening, kid?”
“Yes.”
Nikolai looked him hard in the eye, tightened his grip. “If you taste some better fries anywhere else in this city … if you taste some better fries than these, Farley, I’ll … I’ll eat my pants!” He let go of Charlie’s shoulder, clasped his hands together. “Ha, ha! Every last scrap of them, in my belly!”
Later that day, after our house-league basketball game at Saint Joseph’s Community Centre, the three of us strolled a few blocks west to Korea Town, and like most Sunday afternoons blew whatever change we had at the Fun Village Arcade, a modest place on the first floor of an old three-storey red-brick building on Bloor Street.
As soon as we got inside, Oleg — the star of our ball game, raking in thirty-two points (more than half the team’s total score) — planted himself on one of the orange swervy-bottomed plastic chairs in the front section of the place and popped a quarter into the mini-arcade machine resting on the green table in front of him. There were three in Fun Village, boxy things that for a quarter offered games like sports trivia, memory, touch and shoot basketball, and the most popular — the only game anybody really used them for — virtual strip poker.
Oleg picked his regular model, a tall, big-eyed blonde wearing an elegant black dress and black high heels, who always began the card game sitting cross-legged on a red plush armchair in a bookshelf-lined room which, a pink-lettered caption above her photograph revealed, was her husband’s study.
Her name — the caption also let her challenger know before the game of poker started — was Sylvia Broomdale, and her hobbies included shopping, driving sports cars, astrology, and being naughty while her husband was away on business.
“Bet you don’t even get her shoes off,” Charlie said, and I followed him into the back of the arcade, dimly lit, dusty, where all the real games were. The big ones. The monsters. Taller than we were, at least twelve of them, lofty, dark, looming machines with blinking screens ringing out sound effects: Marvel vs. Capcom, Raiden, Tekken, Bust a Move, and, Charlie’s favourite — probably because nobody could beat him at it — Mike Tyson 2000.
Charlie slipped a quarter into the lit-up orange slot. “You ready to get pounded, Jim?” he asked.
As an animated referee announced our fighters (I was Tyson, Charlie was Lennox Lewis), we waited for our match to begin. Like always when he was concentrating hard on something, Charlie’s face went slack and his mouth drooped a bit, which made him resemble a two-year-old, mesmerized, gazing at a dog for the first time.
Then the referee said, “Let’s keep it clean!” a bell sounded, the crowd cheered, and the fight began. After violently jerking our joysticks back and