The Midnight Games

Chapter 3-1

Here in the east end, it’s nothing new to see a rundown European church – Polish, Ukrainian, Italian – suddenly turn Asian, its faded signs freshly painted over in Korean or Vietnamese. Along Barton Street, everything from Satan to c******s has its house of worship. In this neighbourhood, churches loudly promise everything from cancer cures to “glorious rapture” (better, I guess, than the regular rapture). They are just a few of the many enterprises that explode into life, like aliens from a more cheerful planet, cleaning and painting the empty storefronts, putting up a brave face for months or years, waiting for their offerings to catch on, their sparkly display windows gradually turning dull and dusty, before eventually turning off the lights for good, covering the windows with a fresh set of newspapers and heading home.

The first I saw of the Resurrection Church was graffiti: a few words hovering around a logo that looked different every time I saw it drawn with magic marker or brush or spray can. Sometimes it looked like a math problem, sometimes like some weird musical notation, sometimes like a single staring eye.

THEY RETURN!

Just this past summer, on a hot day down by the railway tracks, I had been searching for praying mantises with my friend Sam Shirazi. We had gone down to the end of Markle Avenue, just off the rarely used train line that curved through our neighbourhood into the north end; a no man’s land of belching chimneys (mostly gone cold) and vast catwalked factories and crumbling parking lots. Markle led to an abandoned chain factory in the corner of an empty parking lot ringed by dusty underbrush. Behind it, rusted metal smokestacks from an old incinerator still stood – barely stood, it looked to me, getting rustier every year. But that day, the old brick building was showing some action. There were cars parked there, and a sign over the logo proclaimed this as the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods.

“Funny place for a church,” I said.

Sam responded, “There’s a guy in there looking at us.”

“We’re not on their property. We’ve got every right to be here.”

“Now he’s talking to that other guy. Let’s get out of here.”

“Who cares?” I said. “They look like redneck losers.”

“Nate. Yeah,” Sam replied.

Sam knows more than I do about run-ins with rednecks. I conceded and we headed back down the tracks. My dad’s family is Portuguese and my mom, as I recall her, was some kind of blonde, so I look more or less white-bread Canadian. But sometimes Sam gets a hard time from the guys at school who run in gangs and sneer and bully and, when they figure they can get away with it, punch out anyone outside the g**g. At first I’d thought it might be both funny and instructive to point out their feeble knowledge of geography, since they call Sam “Paki” even though he and his family are from Iran. In reality, these miniseminars were never appreciated. Now I simply try to avoid such confrontations, though when they happen, I stand by Sam. Of course, Sam’s full first name is Osama, which doesn’t help.

Anyway, I’d thought no more of the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods. Until tonight.

“HOLD THIS...” Dana handed me the flashlight. In its uncertain beam I saw him pull out his pocket knife. It wasn’t much of a knife, with a rubber handle and a blade about five centimetres long, but this little blade, amazingly, sliced through the solid metal bands that anchored the fence to the fencepost, in this shadowy corner of the chain-link barrier that separated Ivor Wynne Stadium from the city around it.

“Buddy set this up here so he could sneak into Ticats games, he’s a big fan. Then a couple weeks ago he asked me – same as you did, Nate – if I knew anything about these midnight games. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said he’d go to one of them and tell me what goes down. But I never saw him again.”

“He went into a midnight game, and he didn’t come out?”

“Before the game I’d see him every morning buying his smokes at the Big Bee. Every day, seven a.m. like clockwork. Next thing you know, he’s gone.”

Then Dana showed me his secret. Looking around, he pulled two plastic zip ties out of his jacket. He slipped the bands he had just cut – which weren’t metal at all, just zip ties – into a pocket.

“I spray paint ’em silver,” he said proudly.

At that moment a roar blossomed from the crowd and the announcer’s excited voice – “ON THE WAY, THE GREAT ONE HIMSELF” – blasted from the stadium’s sound system. “Go go go quick quick quick,” Dana urged me, pushing the fence’s lower corner inward and following after I scuttled through. From the shelter of a dumpster we could just see the football field’s illuminated east end. Dana gestured at the nearest refreshment booth. “Nate, buy a beer,” he whispered. “So we won’t look like total moochers. Get an extra cup.”

“I can’t buy a beer. I’m underage.”

“The way I hear it, tonight anything goes. This is a midnight game. I’ll meet you back here.”

“But ...” I was going to say “... they know me here.” Dana had already faded back into the shadows. I worked the stadium concessions during football games in the summer and fall. I have made a lot of hot dogs and been hissed at by a lot of drunks, but I’d picked up a few cooking skills, and probably social skills too.

As it happened, I didn’t know the bartender, who wasn’t much older than me and looked unsurprised when I materialized out of the shadows in the black pants and hoodie that Dana had recommended and which I usually wear anyway. When I held up one finger he poured a Steely Dan into a plastic cup without asking for ID. I pushed the money toward him. I was only sixteen and didn’t look a day older, but Dana had said that at midnight games, anything goes. Well, we would see.

“Could I get an extra cup?” I asked. “My buddy’s has got a c***k in it.” He pulled a cup from a stack.

“Good crowd tonight,” I observed.

“More all the time, and we got something real good this week,” the bartender said. “Yog-Sauces will be smackin’ his lips when he lands here.” He turned as a new group of customers approached, laughing and slapping and jostling each other excitedly.

I retreated to find Dana had closed up the gap in the fence, and was waving to me from just inside the nearest entrance, looking out at the lights on the field. He pulled a Steely Dan of his own from his pocket and emptied the can into my offered cup.

“No way I’m buyin’ it here,” he said. “It’s five bucks a beer, isn’t it?”

“Six.” That six bucks had hurt and I was hoping Dana would at least split it. Actually, I had been hoping this evening would be free of charge. At least now we looked like legitimate paying customers. We started up the stairs to the nearest bleacher, the beer sloshing in its plastic cups.

FOR ALL the noise the midnight games made, with their thunderous announcements and heavy metal music pounding through the neighbourhood, tonight there were no more than a few thousand people here, filling the lower rows of the bleachers, watching the bright lights and the figures running and scattering and feverishly prepping the field below. Dana and I had agreed that, to stay inconspicuous, we would head for the empty upper tiers where we could look down on the crowd and scope out whatever was going on.

My father and I live two blocks away from the stadium, on the other side of my old school, the boarded-up Prince of Wales Elementary that we preferred to call PoW. This was the house I grew up in, an old three-storey brick house that my mom and dad had bought to raise a family, though they’d only managed to produce me before my mother died ten years ago, when I was six.

Since the summer’s end, once every week or ten days, the games had been keeping our neighbourhood awake. Everyone on our street was used to Ticat nights, when the blasts of music, the amplified chanting, the flyovers by jet fighters and antique bombers, the blasts of cheering were all tolerable because they were part of our way of life, and because they finished by ten p.m.

I had inherited my father’s lack of interest in football, but since I’d turned fifteen, and began to work in the concessions, I’d welcomed the games and even enjoyed the noise and the drunkenness, the anticipation, the bursts of excitement. Like a lot of kids in the neighbourhood it was my first real job where I made real money. Not only did I make some money, but for a few hours a new world opened up, a world different enough from mine to make me happy to clean up the spilled drinks and grease spatters, fill up on leftover fries and hot dogs, and leave the custodians to dim the lights as I left the stadium and went back to everyday life.

But I didn’t know anyone who had ever been called to work the midnight games. I could have used the money, but when I called the concession they had nothing for me. “Those are private contracts.”

I didn’t mind too much; there was something weird about these games, not advertised online or on the radio, unreported on TV or in the sports pages. They started up at midnight, when the streets filled with families and couples and crowds, hollow eyed and obsessed, bickering and swearing and trading lines from songs I’d never heard, as they came from all over the city to converge on the latest Midnight Game.

“The guy at the bar mentioned something called Yog-Sauce,” I said, “or Yog-Sauces.” I fought for balance as I skidded on a wet spot.

This was another reason to keep going up, and up; the occupied seats were awash in Steely Dan. It turned out I had been alone in my pathetic purchase of a single beer with extra cup. The customers who were arriving as I left had taken trays to handle all the beer they needed, and among the crowd plastic cups slopped Steely Dan across plastic seats. People were noisy and excited: “Get this show on the road,” someone yelled.

We passed a baby in its stroller, shrieking and ignored while its mother, a ponytailed woman spilling out of her shirt, screeched at the man in the baseball cap next to her. “I wanna be a cougar. Why? Because cougars are awesome. Because I wanna find a loser like you and chew his leg off!”

“I haddit with you!” he shouted. The baby kept crying. Dana and I, keeping our heads down, trudged up the steps to the upper tiers, our shadowed feet crunching through discarded empties and splashing through puddles. Halfway up the section we started to find empty rows; and finally we sat down on benches above the crowd. I sipped my beer. The benches were damp with dew, or what I hoped was dew, drawn out of the air as the autumn night cooled.

“This beer tastes funny,” I observed. Dana was squinting out at the field.