Quote:
Originally Posted by Mayer
Holy crap! HOSER! I haven't thought about that guy in years! I live about 4 houses down from where he used to live. Wow, was that a scarey guy when you were a small child. Were you one of his "victims"?
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Haha, well I once wrote a short story recollecting my thoughts about my childhood, and one part included Hoser... here is an excerpt.
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You see, we lived in this area for a good 10 years, from about grade 3 - 11, and Hoser was the token creepy old man. His house was a spooky place painted a menacing 'foreigner's pink' that sat on the entrance to a gravel alley. His windows were always covered up with cardboard from the inside to cover where the eggs and rocks had broken through the glass. Egging Hoser's place was one of the great rights of passage in our generation, and was obviously a tradition that was held with great seriousness, as half of his roofing tiles and siding planks were covered with the sun-baked spoils of a child's tomfoolery. Also, his lawn was perfect and he was always growing many types of plants in the soil directly in front of his house.
In his back yard there was a garage, a chicken wire and cheap wood fence, a menacing greenhouse, a lot more plants, and a 1950ish baby blue pick up truck with the name HOSER spray painted across the tailgate in dark green. I'm sure it didn't run, but it did bear the solemn job of announcing who lived there, and we all knew it well.
The truck was a thing of beauty, but the greenhouse... ahhh, the greenhouse. That was the source of Hoser's power. We would stay up all hours of the night during sleepovers trying to scare each other with ghost stories, but the only ones that ever worked were the tales where we would make up what we thought was hidden behind the rickety plastic door of that damn greenhouse. Was it a torture chamber? Or an experimental laboratory? Maybe it was the centre of his drug growing operation... no, it had to be where he cooked stray animals and children!
We all hated that greenhouse.
And it would be the scene of one of the most important events of my childhood.
BUT! Before I get into that, I want to explain a little more about the man that owed it in order to set up the atmosphere properly. You may be wondering to yourself, why did everyone throw rocks and eggs at his house? Why did everyone call him Hoser? And why did everyone seem so afraid of this man?
All good questions. Here are my lame answers.
Hoser's real name was Csaba Goczan (Pronounced CHA-BA GOCK-ZAN); I learned this from a classmate who lived directly beside him. They had to serve him with a subpoena for stealing electricity from them by plugging his lawnmower in to mow his lawn. Csaba got the name Hoser some six years before we moved into the area by going around to all of the houses in the neighbourhood, pilfering lawn and garden equipment for his personal stash. I heard that when they sent him to jail, they auctioned off all of the repossessed goods at the community centre and it collected enough to build the paved hockey rink with real wood boards AND the zamboni that maintained the ice in the winter. Crazy er, who steals that many hoses?
People threw eggs and rocks at his house because he eventually came back to live in the community after he served his time, and a few people were still pissed off at him. It made him an easy target for abuse: "lonely foreigner who steals from you" apparently equates to "break his ". Understandably so, Csaba did not take kindly to people abusing his property the way that they did, even if he was a crazy that had a lawn equipment fetish. If he ever caught you throwing things at his house, he would chase after you, and you would run like hell.
Why? Because Csaba was about 5'8", with a portly and strong build, around 180 lbs thick, with tanned Romanian looking skin, balding head of white hair (kind of like the dad from Everybody loves Raymond), and always wore the same blue jacket/grey pants/angry as hell face. We knew his mannerisms well, as we would always follow him and watch as he waited for his bus at seemingly random intervals during the week. Where did you always go Hoser? One time I saw him drinking a coffee outside a Cinnabon, but I am sure his daily tasks involved much more evil than that brief interlude.
His other distinguishing feature, which added to his bad-ass-itude, was a dent in his left forehead that looked deep enough to bake a cupcake in. When my friend's brother, David, was our age, Csaba caught him and a friend egging his house. Hoser then came out and yelled in a thick East European accent "Ey! You Fuggin Assolez!" and ran after them full speed. Well, he caught them, and started choking David's friend until he turned blue. David freaked out and grabbed a brick that was laying next to a lamp post, and hurled it at Hoser's then smooth forehead; the rest is history.
The one time Hoser had caught us throwing eggs at his house, that incident flashed into my head. We jumped on our bikes and booted it down the street in the opposite direction, towards an alleyway. My brother ditched out along the way and ran into our backyard, I learned that he had stayed in the shed with hedge clippers ready for almost half an hour. The rest of the guys in the group followed me around the corner into the alley, before we went in I saw that Hoser hadn't closed even half the distance and that he was just walking like Jason Voorhees would while in pursuit of his next kill. It was weird, but it would buy us some time. We gathered up and tried to decide what to do, but before we got anywhere, Hoser came striding around the corner! He was less than 20 feet away in mere seconds from where I saw him before. Much like Jason Voorhees would be. This scared the crap out of me so I just got on my bike and rode it all the way down to the river where I just hid in the bush until sundown. I swore on my life at the time that I was going to be found face down in the water somewhere for egging the poor 's house. Before I went home that night I left a snickers bar in his mailbox with a note that said sorry as a peace offering.
Back to the Greenhouse. We were coming of age and had done the egg thing before. It was just after we had learned of Hoser's real name, and our thirst for knowledge of the mysterious beast grew evermore. We decided that it would be a good idea to find out once and for all what was inside the walls of his greenhouse.
We waited and watched him get on his bus one summer morning to make sure we would have enough time to check things out, and not die in the process. This was a very real concern. On our way through the alley, I was fully expecting to find a weed grow-op in there.
It was myself, and two other friends that took the adventure on head first. Our plan was to gain entrance to the greenhouse by getting into the backyard through the garage. The side door was unlocked, and what awaited us was one of the most unholy scenes of my life. It was dark, and everything had a layer of grimy dust as thick as a nickel. Rusty garden tools hung on the walls, and another out of commission truck (half dismantled - much like we would be if we got caught) took up most of the space. We got the out of there as quickly as possible to the welcoming warmth of his back yard. It was cluttered, and all the space was devoted to gardens of various types, some of the plants were taller than me (4'10" at the time). There was a padlock, left open, "guarding" the entrance to the greenhouse. It was now or never.
Steve carefully took the lock out of the bolt as if were going to explode in his face or set off an air raid siren when he touched it. He gently creaked the door open and we stepped inside.
There was no torture chamber, experimental lab, drug operation, or Chinese food kitchen in there. There were only fledgling tomato plants.
We left the greenhouse, disappointed somehow, put the lock back on and exited once more through the garage. It wasn't scary the second time through.
What I realized in there was that Csaba wasn't Hoser, our imaginations were Hoser. Csaba was Csaba. And Csaba was a tired and lonely old man that had a love for giving things life, and nurturing them in his gardens. I had stinging regret, and still do, every time I think about what little s we were to him growing up. Every time I think about Hoser now, I wonder what his life was like before he came to our country, and what he contemplated while he grew his plants given the way his life had played out.
Last time I heard anything about him was about a year ago. His brother had committed him to a mental institution.
Kids can be so cruel.
"It's long, green and tubular...?"
