In the wake of his divorce, Rich Terfry, CBC radio host, musician and now author, released an album called Neverlove in 2014, under his Buck 65 moniker, and now a memoir of sorts dubbed Wicked and Weird: The Amazing Tales of Buck 65.
To reward such creative output, he’s had to spend the last week answering questions about how awful his life was and how badly he’d screwed things up.
“I won’t lie: there are moments this week when I’ve asked myself, why did you do this?” he says, on the phone from his Toronto home, his hometown Blue Jays on the TV in the background, his cat nearby.
“But, in the end, I stand by the idea of opening up to the world, to make myself vulnerable and say, ‘Here I am. I’m going to need help with this thing. Let’s talk about it.’ ”
The tales from Wicked and Weird are just that. They are brutal and honest and scary. Some are unbelievably tragic and others are just laugh-out-loud funny snippets of adolescence. They paint a portrait of a shy and withdrawn kid who turns to creative pursuits best done in private: writing, music and knocking rocks across a lake with a bat.
While his Neverlove album describes what he was feeling in the moments of his divorce, the memoir fills in the back story leading up to it as he tries to make sense of where it all went wrong.
“Almost automatically, I started writing,” he says. “I needed to untangle things and reflect back to see for myself where it went wrong and where I screwed up. It’s a confusing thing to ponder and look at.”
The events themselves, put together in Terfry’s first book, are accurate, but each and every one has been subjected to a certain degree of creative embellishment.
Many of the stories revolve around his small-town upbringing in the town of Mount Uniacke in rural Nova Scotia. And there is baseball. Lots of baseball — including the time he exploded a kid’s face with a sharply hit ball straight back to the pitcher’s mound.
Terfry, now 43, says baseball has been the one great love of his life, even to this day. He could throw 90 miles per hour, he was drafted by the New York Yankees and he dreamed of becoming a major leaguer. But a bad knee and a bad shoulder combined to curtail his aspirations.
“It is still and will always represent my biggest dream not coming true,” he says.
But his days of playing ball are far from over. Most days he’ll still walk to the school across the street and hit balls off a tee, videotape his swing and look for slight improvements.
And when talk turns to a dinger he swatted during his last rec league game, the excitement and love are all too obvious. “It was at the field right in between King and Wellington, and I hit one right onto Wellington, over the fence, over the trees,” he says. “I’ve still got it. It felt really good. It didn’t even feel like I had to crush it.”
