Time Is A Bouncing Ball - more Renfrew stories

The article printed below is a work of fiction, and it is not new ( I have updated it twice. The latest was submitted to the CBC two years ago - this is that version). 

 I think I wrote Version One in the Eighties. It was used in a long-gone magazine called Valley. It was published by General Store Publishing House in Burnstown, Ontario. 

The faded clipping has been pinned to my corked lined office wall for over 20 years. I wanted to post it on my website before the clipping (my only copy) fell apart and the story returned to being just a fading memory. 

I figured out the Optical Character Reader on my printer this weekend and so Presto Chango ... another story in my ongoing mostly fiction series about Renfrew in the Sixties and is now on stephenweir.com.

Title: TIME IS A BOUNCING BALL by Stephen Weir 

It's too long ago now to remember how we got onto the roof of the Howard Haramis restaurant. I can't imagine climbing up the fire escape, but 50 years ago there was only one building on Renfrew's main street with an elevator, and that was the O'Brien apartments, three blocks down the street. 

 Some of us felt queasy up there fear of heights? No, it was the fumes from Howie's BeatIe Burgers wafting out of the exhaust fans that stood between us and the street below. A Beatle Burger, for those who missed Renfrew in the '60s, was a "special" hamburger designed by Howard Haramis, owner of the town's finest restaurant: it was a braised burger covered with frilly melted cheddar and curly leaves of lettuce, trimmed outside the bun to look, with a lotta poetic licence, like a mop-top haircut. 

A few months after he put the burg on the menu, Howie was elected mayor, probably due in no small part to the statement his hamburgers made to the community: Howard is Hip! 

 There were four of us leaning over the edge of the building, looking down on Raglan Street, three storeys below. Ignoring the noxious vapours of John, Paul, George and Ringo rising in our faces, we cased the situation. We were concerned about the street action taking place around the two buildings we were looking down upon: the post office and The Renfrew Mercury newspaper. 

The post office, with its stone walls and clock tower, was a picture-perfect landmark. On Friday nights it was a magnet, dragging bored teenagers out of their homes and onto its steps. From there they watched Renfrew's lone set of traffic-lights in action, and gawked at the bumper-to-bumper Highway 17 cottage country traffic crawling past.

The Mercury building was to the left of the post office. Editor Norm Wilson (another future mayor) knew his market well - he placed classified ads and the latest obituaries in the front window. On Fridays the "young" lads (anyone over 65) stood in front of the window or hours reading and discussing the breaking news stories Norm taped to the window every day. 

 In the interest of science we were going to conduct an experiment and we wanted to avoid detection' by the teenagers who were busy making faces at passing motorists, or by the young lads waiting for the latest death-notice to be posted in the Mercury's window. 

A new toy had hit the market and we all wanted to test the truth of its advertising. The ad went something like this: 

Kids! We DARE YOU to Send this BALL into ORBIT!! SuperBall, Built With SPACE-AGE TECHNOLOGY, bounces HIGHER and FARTHER than any ball in history OR YOUR MONEY REFUNDED! 

This SuperBall was something different: it lost very  little energy when it bounced, it would almost return to your hand if you dropped it. If you threw it at the ground, the ball would zoom upwards seemingly towards the stars. We wanted to find out how far the ball would travel if we threw it from the roof of the restaurant. 

The timing had to be just right. Four things had to happen: the traffic had to be stopped, the truly young lads had to be occupied mugging at motorists, the truly old young lads had to be checking themselves to make sure they weren't in the obituaries; and there had to be enough light in the sky so we could track the flight of our round rubber missile. 

We figured that if the promo ads were correct, the ball would clear the roof of the post office without a hitch. 

I can remember the moment vividly: the traffic stopped, all eyes at ground level were looking the other way, our chosen strong man, standing with fist raised in the light of the setting sun, looked like a monument to the struggling work class in Moscow's Red Square.

The gigantic shadow of our roof-top blackened the wall of the post office across the street. Whoosh, the Superball went screaming towards the pavement. It hit the street with a sickening splat, like a peach pit landing in a high-speed food processor, and raced upwards again. As it gained altitude we realized it wasn't travelling straight. It was arcing towards the post-office clock tower. 

Time stood still. In unison, we slowly twisted our bodies to the right trying to steer our missile away, like a curling skip bending his body to "English" a errant stone back towards to the ice button. 

It didn't work. 

With a plop and a tinkle of glass, the ball went straight through the clock's face, leaving a neat, round hole between the six and the seven. We froze. 

We could hear the ball demonically bouncing around inside the clock tower, its space-age technology reluctantly surrendering kinetic energy.

The driver of the car at the lights hit the gas and ran the red light,  thinking he had been shot at. 

The Mercury crowd started banging on the paper's front door, yelling for Norm to come out and scoop The Advance (the other local newspaper). 

The teenagers on the street were cool.   It was preternatural, they knew instantly that young fellow vandals were at work. They started scanning the rooftops looking for someone to congratulate. The tedium of their short lives had been - like the window - briefly broken.

Before the ball stopped banging around the tower we had scattered. Each of us took off in a different direction. To this day we have never been together again.

Soon after, one went East and was jailed for a bank robbery (he became mayor years after being released). Another moved "Way North" (if Pembroke is the far north) and became an artist painting murals of buses, motorcycles and nowadays cats. I headed West to have more exciting adventures than launching Superballs and number Four - the actual ball launcher - went South to Africa to take pictures of a deadly epidemic. He came back to town and drank until he fell down his second floor steps and broke his neck. 

  

Police checked the SuperBall for fingerprints and DNA. The town took its own sweet time repairing the damage.  The hole in the glass was still there when I left town in 1969. I'd see it every Christmas when I would return home to the Valley. 

It was years before I could look at the post office without checking for the cops and blushing brighter than the stoplight. 

Former Renfrewite Stephen Weir is an author, scuba diver, underwater photographer and freelance writer.