“Oh yeah. Lotsa cottages, eh?”
“You got it.”
“What’s your old man do?” Torchy asked.
“My father owns a hardware store. A chain, actually.”
“Geez, great.”
“What does your father do?”
“My old man?” Torchy shouted back at me, still hauling ahead.
“He’s a fucking drunk.”
Torchy Bender. Torchy. Funny, but when I think of him now I always see him as he was then, not as he became in L.A. Torchy played centre for the Hardrocks, nifty with a head fake that made him look like his body had somehow separated at the waist, like a child’s Slinky toy. Torchy could come over the blueline, deliver the head fake, tuck the puck between the defenceman’s legs, leap four feet straight up and over the hip check and land in full flight, completely clear. In regular-season play over 1963–1964, he had fifty-seven goals and sixty-one assists for a hundred and eighteen points and precisely two minutes in penalties. I had seven goals, forty assists, for forty-seven points and a hundred and thirty-seven minutes in penalties. We both made second-team all-star. The perfect pair: him the dream, me the nightmare.
The second year we even lived together, free of charge, in the basement apartment of the team owner, Gus Demers. It was a magnificent setup, a large red-brick home out Ramsay Lake Road, dynamited straight into the rock so our bedrooms were suspended out over the water. We had our own entrance and our own refrigerator, always fully stocked. Gus gave us full access to the inboard-outboard cruiser, the sailboat and the white Valiant convertible; Torchy assumed access to the owner’s daughter, Lucille.
I’m not even sure Gus minded. As long as it helped the team, anything was all right by him. Torchy would be pumping her down in the boathouse long after swimming weather and fifty feet away Gus would sit in the family room with the television blasting and his big, beefy hand wrapped around a fourth double rye and Coke and he’d turn to me — me always drinking milk straight from the carton because I was convinced Coke would turn my face into its own Sudbury — and he’d squish up his fat eyes and say something like, “Dirty fucking Jesus Christ, Bats — aren’t them two ever coming in?”
Maybe Gus liked the idea. Maybe Torchy pumping Lucille, like Gus’s exaggerated swearing, somehow made him feel more like one of the boys. Torchy was always saying how Gus didn’t want to be the owner, he wanted to be stickboy. He didn’t look down on us; he looked up, like we were something he’d never been able to be. I’m sure he’d always been too fat to play the game. Even at supper the sweat would be rolling down through his greasy hair just from the scramble for the third pork chop. He competed with his mouth, always cursing, promising, praising, backstabbing, lying. Harmless, though. And kind. And simple. Lucille’s virginity probably had as much value to him as an empty refrigerator. Gus Demers’s theory was the same for screwing, eating and hockey: if you see an opening, fill it up.
Lucille. She was seventeen years old, a brilliant student who applied her ample brains to far more than isosceles triangles. She beat Ed Sullivan to the Beatles and San Francisco to free love. A genius who never guessed wrong. Torchy used to say she was fine once you kept a paper bag over her body, which was a bit nasty because Lucille did have a marvellous face, and fine, long brown hair sheltering fawn eyes. Her flaw was no tits, that’s all, and maybe a few extra pounds on her hips. Torchy was convinced he’d failed somehow, having gotten into her pants almost immediately, but under brassiere never. “It’s like a goddamn Band-aid,” he’d say. “I bet if she took it off her little titties would flake off.”
I never found out. She kept her brassiere on for me too.
For months it had been my impression that Lucille was Torchy’s girl, though Torchy clearly felt no commitment beyond the boathouse, the back seat of the Valiant, the television room, the ping-pong table, and once, he claimed, the breakfast nook, where the cornflakes stuck to Lucille’s ass. Lucille was like a magazine Torchy kept hidden under the mattress. He reached for her when he needed it, dropped her the second he was finished. And, again like a copy of Gent, she took it all, lying low and never changing expression from one session to the next. I wondered what it was she got out of it all. It never occurred to me that perhaps she just liked it.
One Sunday night shortly after nine I was lying on the couch eating a sardine sandwich and half-watching Bonanza. I’m convinced it was the episode where Hoss meets the leprechauns, or maybe I’m just remembering magic and nothing else; whatever, that night it finally happened to me. Lucile’s parents were out to dinner at the in-laws and Torchy was on the milk run back from Kirkland Lake, where he’d gone for his mother’s birthday. No one home but the two of us.
Lucille came downstairs, wearing her housecoat and carrying a huge ice cream float.
“Any good?” she asked.
“Oh, not bad. Hoss has fallen in with these little Irish leprechauns.”
“Sounds great,” she said, with her marvellous snottiness. She fell into the chair opposite, flat on her back, he head barely tilted up by a pillow so she could get at her straw. She made a loud, sucking sound, not even at the bottom of the glass yet.
“I’m bored,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
I turned to answer her, but couldn’t. She’d forgotten to put her panties on! She sat, legs wide apart, house coat riding like a canopy over the entrance. I couldn’t possibly tell her. I turned back to Bonanza, aware of the blood rising within, in two places.
She slurped again, louder.
“You like that show better than this one?” she asked.
I couldn’t turn. I couldn’t answer. I turned the other direction and slapped the pillow straight and shifted.
A slurp. “I thought,” she said, laughter teasing in her voice, “that you were the league bad boy, eh?”
“I get my share,” I said. I meant penalties, but I know she didn’t take it that way. Lucille howled with laughter.
I heard her set her drink down. “Maybe you’d like to show me just how bad you are?” she said.
I swallowed and said nothing. Suddenly Hoss vanished and the picture whisteled away in shrinking light. Lucille had kicked off Gus’s remote control that he’d rigged up to deal with Lestoil commercials.
“Well?” she said. She had her left leg cocked over the side of the chair, dangling.
“Well,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
“Well?”
She stood, letting the housecoat drop over her shoulders onto the floor. No panties, but a bra. I stared, remembering Torchy’s line that he’d heard of “A” cups but Lucille had the saucers, but I hardly felt like laughing. I coughed and covered my mouth, but she took my hand and pulled it away and fell into my lap and mouth at the same time.
Her tongue tasted of Pepsodent; mine, shocked by hers, must have tasted like sardines — half the sandwich was still sitting on the coffee table, with half a dill — but she hardly seemed to mind. I’d French-kissed before — I wasn’t that innocent — but up until Lucille I’d been the instigator and I’d believed tongue-touching was simply a wetter, warmer way of holding hands. Lucille tongue-kissed like Hinky Harris stickhandled, fast and with so many deceptive dekes that my own tongue flattened itself to one side in terror.
My only thought was that I didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, it didn’t matter; Lucille took complete charge, even to unbuckling my pants. She kept on her brassiere; I kept on my socks. In thirty seconds there I was, fitted to her like a plug to a socket while she supplied the current. She pumped; she bucked; she groaned, moaned, grunted, shunted; and never once did her tongue leave my mouth though God knows I could have done with a deep breath. This was harder than starts and stops in practice.
I’d never even thought to put on protection and suddenly I wondered what I should be doing. I wished I’d taken my socks off and then I’d have something to cap it with if I yanked out. But it never came to pass. Lucille’s big hips bounced us over to the remote control and onto it
and suddenly Pa Cartwright was shouting at us over the dinner table. If he thought Little Joe should hop to it, he never saw us. Before I realized it was Pa shouting and not Gus, I had my pants back on and was reaching, instinctively, for the sardine sandwich. Lucille had also been spooked and was holding her housecoat to her already covered chest — what else do you call it when breasts aren’t involved? — and from upstairs came the sound of a door dinging open.
Five minutes later I was working on the pickle, nodding while Gus argued that Chrysler’s slant-six engine was going to run General Motors out of business and then we wouldn’t have to suffer all this commercial shit at the end of Bonanza.
Thank God he didn’t ask about the show itself.
I find Torchy Bender difficult to explain. One example seems to cancel the next. On a trip back from the Soo after an exhibition match I saw Torchy’s hand sneak off with Dennis Bannerman’s leather briefcase — D.S.B. stamped in phony lettering along the handle. Bannerman was my first defence partner, a jerk in Perry Como sweaters who refused to swear and who wrote up biology experiments on the bus while the rest of us were playing hearts. He fell asleep on the late haul down Highway 17, his homework done, his prayers said, and when he opened up his briefcase next morning in Grade 13 physics, he discovered Torchy had convinced the entire first line to take a dump in it.
I saw Torchy cry the day they shot President Kennedy. I saw Torchy pick up a garter snake and snap it like a whip, the guts turning out of its mouth as he tossed the reptile in a high, twisting circle toward a group of terrified public school girls.
I saw Torchy pick up a small girl who’d lost her mother at what passed for the Sudbury Plaza. He settled her down, dried her tears and then walked around carrying the child and shouting the mother’s name like a bullhorn until he found her leafing through romance magazines in Steinberg’s.
I saw Torchy steal Gus Demers’s .22-calibre semi-automatic Cooey and sneak over to the Ramsay Lake Golf and Country Club, hid in the cedars just off the 250-yard mark on the eleventh hole and use a mushroom long rifle to blow up a Titleist another twenty yards to the left. When the foursome that was playing the eleventh hit the fairway in terror, Torchy coolly sprayed six shots over their heads, running for it only when the clip ran out.
I saw Torchy impersonate poor Alvin Dorsett’s stutter until Dorsett broke down and quit the team and then I saw Torchy turn around and talk him into coming back out and threaten to drop the first person that made a joke about his friend Alvin.
I saw Torchy phone his mother in Kirkland Lake every Sunday night at ten, the voice rising from his throat so childish and removed from the brute who held the receiver that it looked, at first sight, like a telephone joke, Torchy phoning some poor old woman and pretending he was something he was not. In a way he was; in another way, not.
I saw Torchy Bender quietly pick up first Snap an then Clearasil at a time when it was beginning to look as if my pimples were growing me rather than me them. It had gotten to the point where I was afraid to shake hands for fear pus would explode out of my nose. Torchy bullied me to wash carefully every night — not with Dr. Jarry’s pumice stone, which he threw out when I wasn’t looking — and then go to sleep with a brown mask of Clearasil, which I would scrub off in the morning. For a week I looked like a trampled strawberry patch, but then, mysteriously, the season of Batterinski’s pimples ended.
It was the least the bastard could have done for me, considering my teeth. I lost them in a four-pointer against North Bay Trappers. Whoever won would head into the second part of the season in first place, so it was a game we were all up for — but no one quite so much as Torchy, who was also chasing the Soo’s Reinholdt for the first-half lead in league scoring.
Torchy was in magnificent form, moving in on the Trappers’ net like a hummingbird at Batcha’s honeysuckle and leaving the North Bay defence slamming the boards in frustration. Even with the crowd on him and the Bay’s thug, Simon Billings, chopping away at his ankles, Torchy still managed to score twice and set up a third — a carom pass to me at the point and a low, hard one that Alvin Dorsett somehow tipped in as Billings flattened him with a cross-check — and we went into the first intermission up 3–0. All thanks to Torchy.
Up 6–2 halfway through the third I went down Bill Gadsby-style — knees flat out, hands to the side the way Al Jolson finished “Mammy” — and was just turning my face away from Billing’s exaggerated slapper when I felt a painless, almost soft, certainly silent push against my mouth that sent me over in a perfect backwards somersault and left me spitting blood and my remaining front teeth onto the left face-off circle. There was no pain whatsoever.
I looked up and Torchy was bent down looking worried. “That fucking Billings,” he said in a low hiss. “He did it on purpose.”
I leaped up in a rage, still spitting blood and teeth, and spun like a cornered raccoon. Billings was standing off to the side, leaning on his stick and talking to a teammate, with a big, laughing smile on his puss. I wrestled Torchy’s stick away and ran at Billings, holding the blade out at him like it was a stropped razor. His eyes nearly popped. The linesman caught me for a moment, and before I could shake free Billings had turned and was skating toward his bench. I reached out and tripped him and he dove headfirst, turning and wrapping his arms and gloves around his head as he crashed back first into the boards. I could see his eyes: afraid to look; afraid not to look. He squirmed like a netted trout.
The blood was warm and thick on my chin. It felt good. There was still no pain. I felt warm all over. Around me was total panic: referee’s whistles, the crowd howling, the Trappers’ bench screaming. I felt none of this. No panic, fear or even anger. I felt sensible, knowing the purpose of the coming act. Time had slowed respectfully, as if this was somehow more important than the game. Revenge was due and I was delivering it. Billing’s arms flailed and I picked an opening carefully, without hurry. Torchy’s stick came down once between an elbow and a face; the stick snapped at the blade; Billings opened his mouth to scream, but all that came out were bubbles, red.
As far as I was concerned it was over. Hockey, unfortunately, is without proper balance. If it worked sensibly, Billings and I would have gone off to get our stitches, the game would have resumed and, with luck, maybe I would have made it back for the last shift. But no one else was willing to admit it was over. Both linesmen were hanging off my shoulders when this short little bald-headed man in a Trappers’ booster jacket hit the ice after climbing over the screen and grabs up Billings’s stick and comes slipping across the ice at me, his face all twisted up and the stick cutting madly out in front of him like a scythe.
What could I do? With the linesmen on me I was a dead duck. But Torchy, God bless him, was free and charged the old geezer like he was coming one-on-one with me and I was the goaltender. Torchy blindsided him with a hip and the booster spun twice completely in his rubber boots before he buckled straight over backwards, his head striking the ice with a sound that made me think of the hollow wild cucumber we used to fire against trucks on Highway 60 so drivers would think they’d struck something big.
But this was no joke. He was hurt — I could tell by the way he stayed down, not even hoisting back on reflex alone, but staying on the ice like he’d gone halfway through and was stuck. The other linesman and the referee both jumped Torchy, and a good thing too.
The crowd went berserk. They threw rubber boots, programs, cups, even a set of car keys at us. Three North Bay cops had to come out onto the ice and escort the two of us, first to the dressing room and then out to the bus, where a crowd of punks screamed insults, knowing the presence of the cops meant their fists wouldn’t have to follow through on their tongues. They had a heyday. By the time I got out to the bus with an ice pack my mouth had swollen shut. I couldn’t even yell back at them.
It didn’t stop Torchy, though. As soon as he was sure the door was locked tight, he mooned them.
It took eighteen stitches for me and four sessions for p
late fitting at Gus Demers’s dentist. Billings, I heard, needed thirty stitches, so there’s no doubt who won that exchange. Torchy also lost when Demers refused to let him dress next time we went back to North Bay, a decision which Torchy has always claimed cost him the league scoring title. Stupid bastard, Gus probably save his life.
I found out later the little bald man was Billings’s father.
I found out much later that Torchy Bender had tipped the shot, so Billings had been completely innocent.
“But you told me he’d done it on purpose,” I said.
“He was pissing me off. I wanted him off my back, okay?”
Maybe I should have hated him, but I loved Torchy forever — at least I thought it would be forever — after that. I guess I was one of Jaja’s true Poles even then, always walking alone. No one had ever fought my fights for me; no one had ever been expected to; damn sure no one had ever been asked to. But Torchy had done it on his own, and given a shit less for the consequences. He did it for me, and as long as I could remember no one had ever done anything for me before.
He made it rough, but I stuck by him. I awoke to a pillow in my face, usually, and more than once to a bare butt impersonating an elephant charge about six inches from my nose. I had to lie for him and Lucille. I had to let him crib from my history notes — funny, it just struck me that history was my best subject, so I must have more Jaja in me than I realize — and then, when he failed and I passed, I somehow let him talk me into quitting Grade 11 with him.
But what can I say? The one time I needed him, he was there. And if Torchy Bender was willing to walk with the guy he loved to call “the big, dumb Polack,” I was willing to let him walk and get away with it. But only Torchy.
In hockey it is called a “rep,” short, of course, for “reputation.” Mine grew out of North Bay: one game, one moment, the clock stopped, the game in suspension — and yet it was this, nothing to do with what took place while clocks ran in sixty-eight other games, that put me on the all-star team with more votes than Torchy. Half as many, however, as Bobby Orr. But still, it was Orr and Batterinski, the two defencemen, whom they talked most about in Ontario junior.
The Last Season Page 14