Flirt: The Interviews

by Lorna Jackson

  – and then I slipped on the hidden ice – a boy named Paul winging an ice-ball at my bare head – and fell to my knees and slid hard and fast into the curb. My kneecap hit first. My elbow hurt most, but when I tried to get up a whole joint had disappeared.

  —Sports injuries often happen this way: you think it’s one limb but that’s a trick, turns out to be another. Prompt and professional diagnosis is key to successful rehabilitation. Now, did you shatter it, crack it or what?

  —Stay with me, Bobby, you sound like a pamphlet. Cracked across. Swelled to three times by dark. I lay in the den with my leg on pillows, my mother annoyed, inattentive, chain-smoking Black Cats, rum and Cokes; our dog barked at icicles falling from the eaves. My older sister was giving parts of herself to Hodgkin’s Disease. My father was missing.

  —Missing what?

  —In November 1968 – two months before my fall – he had disappeared, left a note in his Pontiac Parisienne under the Burrard Street Bridge saying gone for good – suicide – and … Don’t worry, Bobby, don’t do that with your eyebrows: he came back, it’s not like that, the story’s not sad, he sat out a season, that’s all. He had a little Soldier’s Heart, a little Post-Traumatic Stress from WWII and a crash in Germany, a little Shell Shock come back to haunt. Lost his memory, lost his way.

  —Let me know if that heat’s too much on your feet. I need cold on my legs; the Escalade can do both at once.

  —How many people can you get in here?

  —I’ve had eight adults but that’s without golf clubs.

  —My father was missing when I cracked my kneecap. And my mother couldn’t manage one more complication, a girl like me: injured and cold. Another body’s degeneration. She didn’t consult a doctor until the morning of day two. Then a night in hospital. Drain the fluid, full plaster leg cast for a month.

  —They’d never do that now. Too much muscle deterioration. Now it’s a system of braces.

  —My right leg is a quarter inch shorter than my left.

  —Back problems?

  —You bet.

  —Parents have to take a more educated role in watching out for their kids’ bodies in sports. Fundamentals. Codes of conduct. Early sports injuries can ruin lives and limit an adult’s activities later on. Coaches, too, must condition their athletes from day one. Sorry, I’m a pamphlet again. You and your father were close?

  —Pliny the Elder spoke of knees as symbols of power. They’ve been called “the knob of the head’s staff.” Do power brakes help with your legs or make it harder to control the stops?

  —Sorry. I thought that guy was coming off the curb. They help. But still some rough stops. You know, no one dies from knees.

  —Howie Morenz: dead of a broken leg.

  —The game’s changed.

  —In the 1969-70 season, four years into the league, you won the scoring title – 120 points – you won the Hart Trophy, the Conn Smythe, and your team won the Stanley Cup. You scored the winning goal in overtime.

  —Derek Sanderson was in his third year with us. Your dad would remember him checking Béliveau.

  —I know; I’ll get to him. The next year – spring 1971 – my father – recovering from amnesia, from his time missing – was a Canadiens fan. He had always loved Jean Béliveau and stressed to me that Béliveau was the sort of player – the sort of man – we should all admire. A handsome gentleman, no naughty elbows, the home game sweater, the bleu-blanc-rouge, a little grey at the temples of his shot. Béliveau’s last season and that year my father fell for Ken Dryden, his attitude, how he knew everything, could stop anything. The McGill law degree, the clean face, the wiseman posture: chin on glove on stick. A tender. I took the Bruins, I took you and the black shirts and Sanderson’s urges. Four is still my lucky number. Lucky for what, who knows, but I like its heft, its girth and smooth sound. I hear the number and see you – your shoulders not huge like the boys now – your face clean, hair flying, and so much neck in that vulnerable golf-shirt way, no Bobby Hull farmer tuft at your neck. My father in the big chair, feet up, his slices of sharp cheddar and Labatt’s Blue and the sports section, rubbing the shrapnel starting to surface in his forearm, the game helping him back to the present. Me on the loveseat with my long teenage legs crossed, a springer spaniel’s head at my knee. My sister upstairs purging chemo. The Canadiens took the Cup that year.

  It smells like a saddle in here, Bobby, but quieter. I’d count the speakers if I could find them. In the doors? On the ceiling? Merle Haggard never sounded so buttery. We’ll have roses in December …

  —That’s a pretty voice you have. It’s the old country tunes I like. Not too jumpy, but not too smooth. You know, except for Hull, no one had really big shoulders back then. Now players do more to bulk up, spend short summers training and pumping. All we had off-season was lawn-mowing, golf and the race track. The game’s changed and their proportions are different, muscled, not bulk. And the equipment adds inches.

  —You were handsome, regardless. My father was missing, suffering – we learned later – from amnesia in a hotel room on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo. Occasionally, our phone would ring and he’d either be on the other end, talking like nothing was wrong – “I’ll be home after work” – or he’d groan into the phone and scare me. The cops put a tracer on our phone, but I don’t remember the premise, the rules. The night I was in hospital with my kneecap, he phoned my mother. She told him she couldn’t do this bullshit (my word, not hers), that I had broken my leg and she’d had enough. The hospital staff was to watch for him; my sister somehow got my mother’s cream-coloured Austin running and sneaked into the kids’ ward with daffodils and a chocolate milkshake from White Spot car service, ten at night. The next day I was home. Soon, so was my father, sick and tired of waking up sick and tired, worried for my knee. The start of that 1969-70 season.

  Five years later, the little apartment on the beach down the 82 stairs? I moved out in four months and that kneecap could not stay put.

  —A flight of stairs is torture. Too much weight set on that disfigured joint. Get me an elevator, or I don’t go.

  —Before I fell, I wished for a broken leg. I’m telling you, but I haven’t told anyone else. I wished for something interesting to happen, that would make people care about me in a serious way. I guess twelve years old wants attention and I wasn’t getting my allocation.

  —Lucky I never had daughters.

  —Back to 1974: sister gone in 1971, the year the Canadiens won, Béliveau’s last game. I quit university in December 1974 and dumped the boy from Sociology who resembled Sanderson and, no muscles to hold it in place, my kneecap kept slipping and sliding and locking. I had surgery the next September.

  —Not another cast?

  —Standard then. Sub-luxing patella. You know the details. The night before surgery, a cute intern fondled my knee, front and back, and asked if I’d taken ballet as a child. He said my kneecaps sat up off the tracks like someone who’d pressed her legs too far back.

  —I think you have nice legs, especially in little boots like those, but I wouldn’t say ballerina. Swimmer, maybe.

  —That’s nice for you to say. I’d played volleyball in high school, and I dove for balls, tried to out-crash my best friend. My father suggested it was time to quit the game when my shoulders and neck began to resemble Bobby Hull’s.

  —Fathers don’t talk like that now.

  —There’s a theory, you know, about competitive sports and its reflection of a phallocentric culture, of orthodox masculinity.

  —Tell me some of it, but stop if I say so.

  —It’s about self versus other.

  —I follow.

  —Competitive sport demands that the masculine colonizing urge conquer the space of an “other” while protectively enclosing the space of the self. Isn’t that the definition of an offensive defenceman? Heading across the red line but still ready to hold your own blue line? Or sexual desire coupled with the need to be as manly as possible.

 
—Okay, but if that’s your metaphor, it seems obvious.

  —All right, make it sexual. The player whose desire to win produces the most invasive phallus, called offensive strategy, coupled with the tightest asshole, defensive strategy, wins the game.

  —Stop.

  —Nietzsche called it a festival of cruelty. Look at the Greeks!

  —Stop, I said.

  —When my father saw my muscles building, the risk to him was that I would join – visually and sexually – the masculine realm of sports. But there’s only one way for women to be both phallus and asshole.

  —Be lesbians?

  —According to this model, yes.

  —That would be hard on a man like your father.

  —He loved Peggy Lee’s ankles.

  —And Jean Béliveau. Tell me about the rehab after your surgery.

  —Bobby, I was nineteen.

  —No rehab?

  —I was depressed.

  —You sound like a goalie.

  —The exercises hurt. Come on. My sister was dead, I had one epileptic dog and two wrecked parents – “Don’t upset your father” – and everything got dark, hopeless, loose and preventable. My mother didn’t push me to work out. I remember bags of sand but only the occasional lift. I had no coach. The surgery – see the scar?

  —Can’t look now.

  —The surgery punished me for everything. Who cares about walking when you’ve quit university and have to live with sad parents and be the daughter who isn’t the one who died? Losing a quad muscle hardly seems significant.

  That feels good on my face. How did you do that?

  —There’s switches for all the windows right here. I can lock your door, too. The passenger ejector seat was optional and pricey so I passed. I’m having second thoughts.

  —That’s a mean joke, Bobby Orr, but I see your point. How many operations on yours?

  —Six on the left knee, going on seven.

  —Now, they say you revolutionized the position of the defenceman in hockey by taking the traditional moves and blasting them open to drive for the net. Three strides, top speed, spinning past forecheckers, around the net and up to the goalie’s open side. Scotty Bowman said for each possession you “took pictures” from your defensive position and then built a story.

  —Scott said that?

  —I added the story part. I think you were an astute reader. You read the game, recognized its patterns because you’d read so many examples so thoroughly before. You saw characters who’d likely follow a predictable course given their motivations, flaws, desires and limitations – and you found a way to enter and influence the story, to make it more poignant or thrilling, given existing patterns. Fast, maneuverable.

  —I saw room, spaces. I wanted to keep the puck moving. I regret that my play made others seem inept. They weren’t. Just caught out. You’ve looked at highlights packages and see goals. After a rush I knew I could make it back to defend my own end. But I didn’t always. My style caused problems, believe me. I made mistakes that cost the team. Bad mistakes.

  —You also became known for the behind-the-net clear to centre ice, where often Derek Sanderson would pick up the pass, you’d catch up and you two would kamikaze for a short-hand score.

  —You see guys use that play today, but they don’t get enough slick on the stick, and they turn it over in their own zone.

  —My father wasn’t keen on Sanderson.

  —No, mine neither.

  —The handlebar moustachio, the white skates, hair even longer than yours. Sex on ice, compared to say a Béliveau or a Cournoyer. I went through a Sanderson phase – revisited it when Dale Tallon played for Vancouver – but always came back to you. Remember the nude centrefolds of Joe Namath and Jim Brown in Cosmopolitan Magazine? I still have those.

  —Derek always got the draw, and he practically invented the sweeping poke check. To my knowledge, he never sold pantyhose.

  —He took the white skates thing from Namath, right? They opened a bar together next door to the Playboy Club. Sanderson said he was obliged to live out every sex fantasy he’d ever had.

  —That would be plenty.

  —What about you? I’m told – by a writer friend on the limp, a duffer hockey enthusiast sans gall bladder, a guy who visited your house when he was ten and saw the room where all your trophies lived, and noticed you being shy albeit a legend already, your freckles and carrier cut. He says you playing for Chicago was like a dog in leg casts and that you partied very hard one summer in a fish camp on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.

  —Derek and I didn’t hang out much, the occasional eighteen holes. I went to his bar a few times, but you could see the fall starting. It wasn’t funny to see the addictions take his judgment. And we couldn’t tell him anything, the coach couldn’t crack down. Part of the power of the Big Bad Bruins was Turk and his excesses. The city wanted that almost as much as the Cup. They got both when Turk played. He was doomed and the million bucks finished him.

  —Last week, our neighbour David’s truck rumbles down the driveway, exciting my lab who loves his tennis balls and fast hands. He has sliced his thumb from tip to base on his new Australian axe. While he cut cords and stacked them, a wasp bounced up to his eye and took his attention. He tells me about the blood, the pain, the clamping while the mother-in-law called First Response, the new pain when the paramedic pinched where David had clamped, the Demerol’s bliss. He holds his hand upright, like a surgeon ready for duty, and hangs it from one finger at the neck of his white T-shirt. A Bobby Hull tuft.

  He has stopped in to show off the new kits. Wine kits. I hear the words and see the tidy boxes stacked in the back of his truck, my heart thumps and terror or desire rushes into my hands. Kits: young foxes, home pregnancy, Craftsman homes in cleaner times. Kits. “Those kits, they’re top of the line, they’re primo, they’re like Chardonnay,” he says, his chest big beneath the sliced thumb all wrapped in gauze.

  It’s been fifteen years since my last drink – a cold bottle of pear cider I guzzled the Labour Day morning before I trimmed the laurel hedge in Sapperton, went to the top of the tallest step ladder with hot and weak knees, began to cry and couldn’t stop, couldn’t climb down, couldn’t fathom the branches I’d shorn, longed for a rough blade at my own neck.

  “It’s like Chardonnay,” he repeats and wants me to treat him as our dog does, the huge and wet smile, the pissing on his sandals. I say, “I have no interest in this. I’m an alcoholic and I don’t want to talk about this.”

  —Nice shot.

  —“I think of it as cooking,” he says, “but fair enough.” I’ve known this man for eight years. I know his wife, his children, his beach-stink dog, his wheelchaired mother, his injuries, trespasses, preference for breasts, his fishing holes, and I’ve dined on his smoked salmon; I know the colours of his dahlias, I know he can’t get jeans to fit because he shears sheep and builds fences and his thighs, like yours, are Popeye thighs; I know where he and his wife first made love and that their lovely daughter was thus conceived, I know he wept the first day he left his boy to stay at our co-op preschool, I know he played trumpet once for Mel Torme in high school in North Vancouver.

  How does he know so little about me? How does he ignore or forget the crucial detail, the one important pattern? When I quit, my friends were relieved and also put out. That’s normal. But the worst betrayal: not one – guitar players, singers, funny people with large enough hearts – not one told me it was time to stop. Not one said, even sober, “ever thought of quitting? Don’t you want to be happy? We love you, be well.”

  You had a reputation, Bobby.

  —For?

  —Puck bunnies.

  —And the reputation?

  —Circumference, length, vigor.

  —History forgets I was twenty, scared skinny, a boy with a crew cut from Parry Sound. These are now my fifties, my legs have walked a century. They don’t bend or take my body’s weight. Pain always. I’ve earned and been robbed o
f a half million dollars. I introduced my teammates – strong boys who skated ponds and slow rivers and worked their uncles’ butcher shops come summer and never finished high school – to sonofabitch Alan Eagleson. You talk about betrayal? I’ll never make it up to them. That reputation you refer to – the details I still see when I don’t want to – seems old and silly now.

  —I stopped watching when you left the Bruins.

  —You had other things to do.

  —The game changed. My father stopped watching when the WHA salaries went stupid. He said he’d rather play golf than watch mediocre players make that much money. After his first heart attack, exercise became crucial and he went back to grass court tennis.

  —If Béliveau was his man, I understand his disappointment.

  —If the “neutral-zone trap” were an animal, what animal would it be?

  —Pirhana.

  —It swallows what?

  —Momentum. Pride. The story of open ice.

  —They build new knees, Bobby.

  —So I’m told.

  —My father and I watched that game, in May 1970, thirteen months before my sister would die. She will spend her nineteenth summer in Paris and die in St. Paul’s hospital in Vancouver – pneumonia – the following June, after Béliveau and the Canadiens beat the Bruins in seven games to advance for the Cup. But the world of my father and me in the den in 1970, that world is still capable of ice and sports and naughty long-haired heroes like you. In that photo of the Cup-winning goal you scored in overtime – the trick and planned pass from Sanderson (“This is it,” I said to my father as the puck came around and found you) – in that photo you are flying, Bobby. You’re so up. You are a boy above the city, taking off and flying home to Parry Sound. Your wings are spread and there’s no pain, your knees cushioned by the frozen air, and you will never need walking again. No more vertical. All is flight and victory. And then you disappear; Sanderson – happy like a boy on sports day – slides in and lies on you, loving you, wanting you young, his hands on your face, that embrace. Men in love, so up. You do seem young, even now. Your hair has gone more golden than grey, along this line, at the temple.