Freak Show: The power of dreaming

Surfboard shaper, Medford Haley arrives in California to do a three-hundred board shaping contract only to find that Clark Foam has shut down and there are no blanks. With three months to kill on his ticket, a rent a wreck burning dollar-bills at the curb, he looks up his long lost bud, legendary surfer/shaper/ballplayer, John ’Bubba’ Bradbury in Venice Beach, home to musicians, artists, body builders and any number of odd-bod movie extras. A place where ’freaks’ or outsiders just kind of blend in. Bubba, who is in the process of putting together a momentous baseball game, ’A battle of the titans’; asks Medford whose Gramps was a pro ballplayer to stick around and keep him company because the steroids he takes for his pitching elbow causes severe anxiety and panic attacks. Having played a lot of ball with Bubba, Medford agrees to help in the training and recruitment program for the big game.

John ’Bubba’ Bradbury’s dream of pitching one last game against the best of all time with a team consisting exclusively of dis-qualified mavericks, misfits and downright drug-crazed outlaws, fruit-loop eccentrics with oddball nicknames and mental disorders still looking for names and crippling superstitions to challenge Leavenworth Federal Prison Warden’s pet team of caged, iron-pumping one-eyed, mutants fuelled by rage. Medford takes one look and mutters reflectively, ’Business as usual.’

Enter Aglakti ’Aggie’ Anumiaq, an Inuit boy, fresh out of Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary and former member of their mutant ’Lifers’ baseball team, here to try out for Bubba’s team of freaks. Aggie: whose name in the Inuit language literally means: One who makes words stand or ’Songmaker’ had served five-years for assaulting federal officers. He believes: that like his ancestors, he must first dream to manifest his future.

Happy to re-visit the happy days of his baseball playing youth, Medford takes on the position of manager to help Bubba with his pet projects, remodelling his study at ’Dunrunnin’, his house in Venice Beach and moulding dream team of superstar social misfits. Medford will soon remember Bubba’s perfectionist side that fuels his severe anxiety affliction and superstitious tendencies.

While Aggie revels in the down-souther’s life in Venice, he still dreams of his arctic home in Seward Alaska. Then one day, quite by chance he bumps into a childhood girlfriend on the beach who is studying dance in Los Angeles. They learn to surf together and he falls in love.

Things go well for the baseball team until some ’gang’ members took exception to the team practicing on their turf, attacking Bubba’s immaculate Nomad with clubs, shooting and killing two team members in the process.

Things continue to deteriorate when Pee Wee, Bubba’s best friend and team’s dwarf-catcher begins hoeing a Russian Mafia Boss’s wife’s row, drawing a line in the sand that will bring the Russian Mafia into violent conflict with the Mexican Mafia that will culminate in a deadly turf war in the parking lot of the Santa Barbara City College during ’The Battle of Titans’ baseball game at the stadium there.

Aggie, who’d been dreaming constantly of Buniq Late Hiin his Inuit childhood sweetheart finally dreams of Bubba’s team of freaks winning ’The battle of the titans’.

After the game Aggie is offered a position on the San Francisco Giants but changes his mind when he dreams of coming home to Alaska: To Buniq, his father and his own brood of children.

It’s the story of a young Inuit man’s experience of modern dystopia.

Mike Davis is a career surfer/shaper, published poet, award winning writer and author of Shawn McQueen trilogy - The Ballad of Sara Zane, The Inheritors, Holy Man, The Shaper and Freak Show from the Medford Haley series, Ice, Brothers, The Noosa Heads Affair, Kevin: King of the Air Surf Guitar.