The Meaning of Hockey, Chapter 36

“I’ve thought about it and I’ve made up my mind,” said Mike who skated slowly around the barely lit Coliseum ice with his father.

“You looked pretty damn good,” said Bobby. “You’d fit in perfectly on a line with Buckinghorse. That was a great outlet pass you fed him.”

“He’s a good skater with a knack for getting open,” said Mike.

“You’re a superb playmaker with an ability to see the ice,” said Bobby. “Where did you get that? Certainly not from me. I was always the guy streaking up the middle.”

“I saw you make a few plays,” said Mike.

“How? When?”

“Coach at school had a few old tapes. One of them had you threading a pass to set up a breakaway on Eddie Cheevers. I used to dream about doing it just like that.”

Bobby felt like a piece of pork in sweet and sour sauce. It was exhilarating to know that his son had dreamed of being like him, but it provoked melancholy to know that Mike had grown up without a father.

“I was no artist,” was all Bobby could think to say. “A virtuoso stickhandler, a master puck hog, that was me.”

A puck rang around the boards at the far end of the rink as Lalli took one final slap shot before stepping off the ice.

“You were good enough to last eighteen years in the NHL,” said Mike. “Not many guys last that long.”

“Not many,” said Bobby even as he was thinking that his son actually sounded proud of a long-absent father.

Bobby picked up his skating pace as he circled in front of the net. He pushed a puck out of the crease and dropped it off for his son as he cut up to the blueline. Mike returned a perfect pass just as his father reached full stride.

Bobby stopped and waited for his son to catch up to him.

“So, tell me what you decided,” he said when Mike was in easy hearing range.

As he asked, he realized he knew the answer. In fact, he was experiencing a déjà vu.

He is going to say ‘I’m sorry Dad.’

“I’m sorry Dad,” said Mike, “but I can’t.”

Feels good to be called Dad.

‘The life of a hockey player is just not for me.’

“The life of a hockey player is just not for me.”

‘The game takes up all your energy and I want to do something else with my life.’

“The game takes up all your energy and I want to do something else with my life.”

He lifts up a puck with the toe of his blade and quickly flips the stick five or six times before it falls off.

Mike snapped a puck up in the air, caught it with his blade, and then flipped the stick five or six times before it fell off.

And I say ‘when did you know?’

“When did you know?” said Bobby.

A look.

It was a look that Bobby did not recognize. Must have come from his mother.

“Do you like stories?” said Mike.

Of course I like stories.

“Of course you like stories,” said Mike. “You’re a hockey player.”

He skated towards the open gate at the Home players’ bench and Bobby followed.

***

A half hour later father and son still sat on the Home players’ bench at the Pacific Coliseum. Joe, the Zamboni driver, had opened the gates and was removing the nets in order to flood the ice.

Mike had babbled on about something he had read on a website call Znet and Bobby listened patiently, waiting for his son to tell him the story that contained the reason why he no longer wanted to play hockey.

“There was this girl in London named Sarah.”

Finally.

“Your girlfriend?”

Mike nodded.

He shouldn’t interrupt, but this was the first absolute confirmation that his son was straight.

“I met her when I was seventeen.”

“Your draft year? If you opted in.”

Mike nodded again.

Shut-up Bobby. Let him tell the story.

“Second season in London. My rookie year had gone pretty well after Christmas. That time you came to see me up in Sault Ste. Marie, that was probably the low point.”

You can say that again.

“After that I started getting more ice time and I got new billets who weren’t religious and I was second in team scoring over the last thirty games.”

“Good enough for two paragraphs in the Hockey News preview of next year’s top draft prospects.”

Bobby, shut the fuck up.

He had been so proud when he read that story. Proud like any hockey dad, even if his sole contribution was providing the fidgety little sperms.

“Alex, one of my linemates, introduced me to Sarah. She was really beautiful. Dark hair, brown eyes, Portuguese. London has this big Portuguese community. Anyhow, Sarah was a singer. Great voice, I mean really great, and she sang at weddings almost every weekend since she was eight. Did all these songs from Portugal and Brazil. Fado, jazz, folk songs, she could do it all. First while we went together I’d go listen when I could and it was like really incredible. She’d be at some hall on the south side singing love songs and sad songs and people loved her. You could see tears forming in the eyes of old men with leathery hands and suits that didn’t quite fit. The young men, they’d stare and glance nervously over at me and I knew, if I wasn’t like this famous hockey star, they would have fought me for her. Her voice wouldn’t just get in your head, it tingled your fingers, made you sigh and bumped up the testosterone levels of every male in the crowd.”

Bobby imagined a voice like Edith Piaf’s who someone once described as melancholy sexy.

“But her biggest fans were the middle-aged and older women. You know the type. Seventy-year-old widows who had spent half their lives picking grapes and plucking chickens. Fifty-year olds who worked as cleaning ladies. Alex liked to describe them as ‘short, fat and strong like ox.’ Sarah’s singing would turn those tough women, who had gone through five childbirths and the death of their husbands into blithering babies. They’d be crying their eyes. Sarah really was an incredible performer, even for me and I couldn’t understand a word of Portuguese.”

Mike stopped for a moment as Joe made his first pass on the Zamboni.

“Everything was going great. Everyone said we were the perfect couple because I was going to be this famous NHLer playing in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles and she — with that voice — would be mega-superstar like Celine Dion. Thing was with Sarah, she really, really, really wanted that. It was like it was more than a dream, it was what she needed.”

Bobby recognized the sort of person.

“Anyway, one day just before I left for the off-season back in Boston, Alex and his girlfriend plus Sarah and I drove over to this concert in Sarnia. I thought we had a pretty good time, but coming back Sarah was in a major bad mood. We get dropped off at her place and we sit on the verandah at her parents’ place and I ask her why the funk. What did I do? She, like, doesn’t want to talk about it at first and I’m thinking she caught me looking at some babe at the concert, but turns out it wasn’t anything like that. It was something Alex said. There were these back-up singers up on stage and Alex says to Sarah, ‘you should get some back up singers like those.’ She doesn’t say anything, but then Alex continues ‘you could do a Portuguese chorus — all these fatsos with dresses down to their ankles.’ And he laughs. That was it. That’s what set off Sarah’s bad mood.”

The pass of the Zamboni was right along the boards in front of them.

“I didn’t get it but didn’t think any more of it because a couple of days later I was back home for most of the summer and even though I talked with Sarah almost every day, I really didn’t know what was going on. She was excited. She’d signed with this agent in Toronto and he was going to make her famous. I didn’t like the slimy bastard, but who was I to talk? I had an agent and he wasn’t exactly a kindergarten teacher. I learned all this on the phone and when I get back to London in August I go see Sarah and it’s like she’s this totally different person. She’s lost fifteen or twenty pounds and she wasn’t that big to begin with. She’s like hyper, always busy and bouncing around. She’s decided to quit high school and work on her music full time. She’s wearing these clothes that are incredible. Like see-through blouses. Low, low cut dresses. And she’s smoking. I couldn’t believe it. Well, I’m thinking it’s good that she spends most of her time in Toronto because this is not the person I had been dating. I’m thinking it’s time to break up, so I head into Toronto to see her on my day off and we go out for dinner at this real trendy Queen Street West place full of beautiful people. I’m trying to have a conversation, you know, tell her I don’t really want to see her anymore, but we’re constantly being interrupted. It’s like everyone in there knows who she is. It’s very weird, but she seems to get off on it. Even the chef comes out and presents us with this special desert. Chocolate raspberry something or other. We finally get through dinner and out of the restaurant, but I haven’t said anything yet about breaking up so we go to her apartment and I can tell she’s got this big sex thing planned. She’s kissing me and I mean, we hadn’t really done it yet, gone all the way, and there’s these candles everywhere and I start thinking maybe my talk can wait till tomorrow. Thank goodness she had to go to the bathroom, so I get some time to make up my mind. I’m debating with myself: She wants to, so if you want to what’s the problem? But would she want to if she knew what you’re going to say? How do I know? Maybe she’d want to even more. And so on and so on.

“I’m thinking about this and I’m thinking and then all of a sudden I realize Sarah has been in the bathroom for like fifteen minutes. Seems strange, but maybe she’s having a shower or something so I give it another five minutes, but still no sign of her. Finally, I knock on the bathroom door, but there’s no answer. I knock again. Nothing. I start to get worried. What’s going on? Is she doing drugs? Shooting up? I knew some guys in high school. I’m yelling and I get no response so I go into the kitchen and find a metal skewer that I can use to open the bathroom door lock. It takes another couple of minutes, but I get the door open and there she is, lying on the bathroom floor, unconscious, in front of the toilet, all blue. There’s vomit on the side of the toilet and caked on to her cheek.”

“She was bulimic?” asked Bobby.

Mike nodded.

“I phone 911 and then I go back into the bathroom and I pick her up and put her over the bathtub so her head is almost between her legs and then I grab her from behind and squeeze. It was something I saw in a movie once about a guy who had a piece of meat stuck in his throat. I squeeze again and then again, but she isn’t breathing. I squeeze one last time and finally there’s a response. A little cough. Just then the ambulance guys show up. They were fast. Maybe seven, eight minutes. They work on her and work on her. Give her oxygen and then take her away.”

“She was alive?”

“They got her breathing again,” said Mike.

“Was she okay?”

He shook his head.

“Brain damage. No oxygen for about ten minutes. She was unconscious for two weeks and then one day just woke up.”

“Any permanent damage?”

Mike nodded.

“She can’t do much with the left side of her body and her speech is pretty slurred.”

“Oh man,” was all Bobby could think to say.

“A couple months later I asked her what happened. You know, why? She said it was the night of the concert in Sarnia and what Alex said about the Portuguese fatsos. She became totally fixated on her weight. Wanted to look like Celine Dion. She had realized that’s what it would take to become a star. She was willing to pay the price. Those were her words. ‘I was willing to pay the price.’”

Mike looked into Bobby’s eyes.

“’Willing to pay the price.’ There’s the thing, I’m not.

Next Chapter: Wednesday

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