Took my nephew out to see one of those X-Men pictures a few years back. Pretty entertaining flick. Funny that Ricky would have fit right in among that crew. Mind you, Foxy didn’t have any amazing physical powers, save of course for his unparalleled flexibility, but he could do some astonishing things with his mind.
One of our favorite games back in the day was the “Date Game.” Used to play it pretty much every time we’d get a new reefer supply. Those were exciting times. Mason Dixon would bring out his favorite smoking instrument, which was sort of a cross between a bong, a pipe, and a fireplace bellow – he’d constructed it from an old tetherball Ricky had swiped from the playground of that Methodist Church down the street. We’d load that puppy up with the fresh shake and away we’d go.
The way the game was played is that we’d take turns naming a date in history, any date. Within seconds, Ricky would tell us what day of the week that date fell on. March 22, 1883 – “that’s a Thursday, that’s a Thursday,” Ricky would answer, almost like some sort of robot. It was uncanny. We could play that game for hours. Of course, this was before this whole internet business had been created and you can be damn sure none of the Reynolda Raiders kept any encyclopedias handy in the Barn, so we had no way to confirm Foxy’s answers, but it wasn’t necessary. Don’t need to put a stopwatch on an antelope to know that sucker is quick.
That wasn’t Ricky’s only power. He had a few other special skills guaranteed to dazzle. For instance, the Fiesta Fox couldn’t read or write music, but put the guy in front of a piano, play him a song one time, and you’d be goddamned if Foxy couldn’t play that piece back to you perfectly on the first try. Never forget his rendition of Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” – dang near had me in tears. Also, Ricky never could pass a math class without buying off the professor with a handful of his tapes or a couple of quality blue tabs, but I once watched the guy square a 28-digit number in his head. Remarkable. This is the same fella who couldn’t dress himself until he was 14.
Anyway, never knew how Ricky came to develop these powers. May have had something to do with the lightning strikes. Mr. K once theorized it had something to do with that time Ricky got stuck in the well as a small child. Fell in headfirst and got himself lodged in there real tight, 18 feet underground. No idea how Little Ricky had gotten out of his cage – Mr. K thought he must have snuck out and then gone looking for food or medicine or something. But Ricky was fixed in that well upside-down for 6 days before Mrs. K sobered up and heard him howling. When they pulled him out, the doctors said Little Ricky’s brainstem was all swolled up the size of a grown man’s forearm. Crazy.