Our goalie has his ass parked right inside our goal all night; he doesn’t move out to cut down the angles. After the game he advises us seriously, “Most of the goals were defensive errors.”
Sure they were. We keep them wide and he lets in beachballs. My defensive error was playing on the same team as him. Or having a coach who keeps starting him because they’re paying him more than the other goalie. Do I share this with the reporters? No I do not. Do you know how hard it is to keep my mouth shut?
Every team seems faster and faster. I’m starting to feel retarded. In Vancouver it was a long shift and I couldn’t get off the ice. I’m working hard in the corners and in front of our goal, but the fucking wingers keep losing the fucking puck on the fucking boards one fucking inch from the fucking blue line and it stays in our fucking end; Jesus this drives me crazy. I can’t get off the ice. My partner’s been off a minute or two. No whistles. We’re flying around bottled up in our end. Finally I lug it out and almost puke by our bench; my throat convulses but I stop it.
I sit down saying, “Now I know how Derek Sanderson felt.” He kept puking over the boards in his last days.
The young player asks, “Who’s Derek Sanderson?”
Where did all the money go? everyone wonders after you’re through. When you’re no longer rookie of the year.
I bought the world a drink, said the Turk.
“Where I come from we don’t leave our zone until the puck does.” The guy speaking has several Stanley Cup rings from before the trade. He’s a large man, a man responsible for dethroning Dave The Hammer.
“Who gives a flying fuck where you come from.” The younger guys know he’s history, they owe him nothing. Do you guys know who started the players’ union? No. Why should they? The past is invisible and therefore does not exist, has no more currency than sunset’s pinkened bays leaking their colours, going to dark water under an oar carving phosphorescence. It’s gone. The new players think they’re different, special. They refuse to see us in themselves, to connect the dots. Maybe they are different.
I overhear two rookies out after a game.
“This is a nice place.”
“Totally. We know the cool spots that really mean something in the larger picture.”
“Who’s your agent? Still with that headcase guy in L.A.?”
“Different agent now.”
“Same coach?”
“They tied a can to him.”
“Still with the cute girlfriend?”
“She laid down an ultimatum: we had to get married by Christmas. She’s Italian. So no, not with the cute girlfriend. Not this cowboy; I’m too young.”
“Christmas. You don’t need that.”
“And I don’t appreciate blackmail.”
“Goodbye.”
“Sayanora.” He makes a cutting motion with his open hand. “I mean, get real.”
“Cramping your style. And using Christmas. That’s no good.”
“She’s Italian. You know.”
A tip for those idle winters: When storing that deer rifle; muzzle down so excess oil can run out of the gun and not back into it. Maybe you can saddle soap your boots? Are your hooks sharp?
CHAPTER 23
In the Failed Garden
Neon’s new jazz ensemble, The Voodoo Refuseniks, plays a nightclub on the old strip, where the LRT’s blue train now runs. Neon drums in the band and every evening ambulances and police pause just down the avenue from the club, waiting for the inevitable larger picture, the future that arrives like a train every night. Short of funds I bring along the Centennial dollar.
The bass player (a metronome, says the local jazz critic) solemnly insists on walking his wife to the parking lot. Hurry up please, it’s time. The bass player’s wife is irritated by this constraint; they’re not talking on the way to the car.
We want everyone to be happy but weeks before, a woman was knifed right on the sidewalk outside, right by the LRT. We find something disturbing in this. Men knifed, dumb kids, hooch hounds, stewbums, pseudo punks, headbangers, gangbangers, gearheads, skinners, stubblejumpers, Sarcee, Stoney, Blood, Piegan, bohunks, bird dogs, ambulance chasers, crackers, rounders, highbinders, peckerwoods, slackers, rappers, rake-hells, rigpigs, meatbags, bulldoggers, mule-skinners, ancient greasers—okay—but a young woman just yards from the lit door? I feel like a geologist examining a puzzling stratum of rock, a diver among demersal creatures.
Few went to see the Voodoo Refuseniks and the club, like all others, folded, let the winos take over. We soon forget the young woman who felt intimate with the knife.
I cannot tell you how oafish it feels to be thinking all the time of the waitress, how little and stupid to be obsessed, subject to the same emotions as every guy and his dog. For this is my worst fear—to be like everyone else. My ego is a furnace. It needs constant fuel. I want to be out every day eating glory and the other big numbers of orality, to cross again (and again) under the fleeting spotlight.
The coach is oral, chews ice cubes, hair slicked back, pretending he’s Scotty Bowman. Lose, and you suffer, he states, making us do fifty push ups with bare knuckles on the ice. The goalie lines up three coffees in paper cups, lets them cool and gulps them just before the game. His goalie mask an airbrushed insect face, a baseball tied in his catching glove between games. The goalie conspires to drive the new assistant coach around the twist. We all play the idiot.
Don’t upset the applecart, the guy says.
Cart?
Don’t rock the boat now. Boat?
Remember the Turk, don’t be a bad egg guy now.
Turk? Egg?
Dammit, next!
We limp to the whirlpool.
If you don’t get knifed by the train track, it’ll be a tumour.
Before succumbing to cancer my uncle in Dublin saw his Raheny garden fall to ruin. We got out there with pitchforks and warm bottles of Guinness, but everyone knew it wasn’t going to fly. It was almost July, too late to plant his garden, and that seemed worse than his impending death, the patriarch upstairs viewing the empty obvious future: the no-good children on flex-time drinking a smart drop to the glory of his soul, his polished golf clubs soon bent or pawned and his failed garden possessed merely by thistle and dock.
Decades ago my uncle had been offered a scholarship to Trinity, but the family was too poor, his father drowned, and he had to take a job at Guinness rather than accept the scholarship. He wanted his own children to get an education but his sons started dropping out of Chemical Engineering to join the police force, an Irish cliché he hated.
One side of my uncle’s body was paralyzed and no longer could he dance at weddings. He had been a fearsome rugby back, a golfer grinning with trophies but who is this meeting me at the station? I try to get away, thinking him a derelict: thin and hunched and an eye patch.
Is it cancer and a stroke? I wonder. No one seems able to tell me exactly. His illness affects his throat muscles and he can hardly swallow the minuscule bits of food his wife cuts and puts before him.
His hearing is gone in one ear. At meals he wants to listen to their portable radio’s newscast. The radio, unfortunately, is on the side of his deaf ear: as we eat and talk he twists the volume knob louder, head leaning closer to it, leaning into the world he’s leaving. Our voices rise in competition and my uncle cranks up the radio another notch, and again, and we fairly shout over the tea mugs and fried potatoes and fried bread until my uncle throws down his fork and bellows for quiet, “By the grace of God,” his tired face and one eye turned trembling from where he’s bent over the plastic radio’s grille. “God almighty give me patience.” We are all silent, a rarity in this house. He turns down the radio and we’re silent for another moment, and then it begins again.
Upstairs I peeked into his bedroom; its dark purple drapes and crucifix and religious prints reminded me of a church in Lent, statues cloaked, waiting for the Ascension. We begin in a bed, we meet Waitress X in a bed, then there are two forms of morphin
e and to sleep peaceably is a small sweet gift. As a teen my uncle ran with the IRA but later he hated them. De Valera was his man in politics but now the old Prime Minister is dead like the others. No more dancing at Irish weddings.
Half joking, I told my uncle the IRA should blow up the McDonald’s on Grafton Street, not the Brits’ embassy or airline office, and he was furious with me, spitting out that he wanted no tourist joking about that subject. He was my mother’s favourite brother; my mother cried knowing she wouldn’t see him again. We told her that wasn’t true but she was right. (We’ll not see the likes of him again.) I was glad I met him. My uncles all had hawk noses, huge mustaches, high starched collars like Don Cherry, and they all worked at Guinness in the old days, the largest brewery in the world, coopers crafting perfect oak barrels. My mother tells me it was a respected profession and a very good salary for those times. Bottles of stout were part of the pay packet. What is there now: Flipping burgers? Driving a tourist bus? The dole? (It’s destroyed, we are.)
My grandfather drowned on the day of Michael Collins’ huge funeral in 1922, leaving his wife, my grandmother, alone to raise eleven kids. My grandfather’s favourite son Michael, named after Michael Collins, died of pneumonia while only a small child. He got his good clothes soaked and was afraid to come home. Others died and I never learned their names.
Michael Collins of course was shot in an ambush. Some say the British got him. Others say the Irish, business as usual, killing their own. Once my father, British, told me the Irish are too used to death, that death doesn’t mean the same thing it means to others. I don’t think that’s true. They’re just a little more intimate.
The oldest son, Danny, had to help raise the other ten children, try to be a parent. My uncle Danny: I never met him. Danny was apprenticing under his father, my grandfather, at the time of the drowning; Danny finished the apprenticeship with a friend of his dead father. The Guild accepted only children of coopers, perhaps a genetic link to my interest in alcohol. Perhaps I can shift the blame to people I’ve never met.
My favourite uncle, Joseph, also apprenticed as a cooper before emigrating to Philadelphia, beveling staves, burning the insides, but the man he was working under at Jameson’s was arrested by the much-hated Black & Tans, and that ended the apprenticeship.
No loss, my Philadelphia uncle claims, I ruined more whisky barrels than I made. He slept through a police raid where his oldest brother Danny was plucked from the same bed. Slept right through. I inherited something of this ability to sleep, to ignore the obvious. As my uncle Joseph states: You didn’t pick that up off the ground. My uncle Danny sat in jail for a week but they couldn’t prove he was an IRA messenger. He was a cool one, they said.
My Irish grandmother was a large woman. A patriot. In the Easter Uprising of 1916 and through the years of the civil war she smuggled guns under her big black dress, hid men in her huge house on the Liffey, on Usher’s Island.
When the army lorry pulled up for a raid her fugitives ran up several flights of stairs and out across the high roofs, a murky river below moving under narrow bridges and narrow streets and British soldiers hammering at my mother’s front door. Who tipped them to the safe house? A friend? My grandmother delayed the soldiers, putting on a show, wailing that she was a poor widow and they were after waking all her poor children and tenants. On the top floor the men clambered up the huge chair kept handy and out the skylight. Onto the roofs of riverside Dublin, jumping roof to roof like possessed chimney sweeps.
When the British shelled the house and the Four Courts my mother was evacuated in a pram crammed with loaves of brown bread from a nearby mill. My uncle mentioned this to us and my mother was mad as it dated her. She had lied to us kids about her age, not wanting it known that she was alive during the uprising, that she is older than our father. My parents met at a wild wartime party in Bristol and knew. Chance is everything.
“Pretty play,” my Intended says with emphasis, watching a game. And hockey can be pretty: slick moves and magnetic amazing passes. Such a beautiful and graceful game played by those who are neither.
My dying uncle in Dublin has one eye. An eye-patch. I had an eye-patch in Grade Three: they tried in vain to salvage my lazy eye. After I shot at the net our forward had one eye. The big brick and stone tenement house on the Liffey was knocked over years ago and is now a car lot. No one remembers when it got demolished. All the soldiers are dead and all the patriots are dead. Maybe they’re still chasing each other across roofs somewhere.
I see my mother in a dark nurse’s cape, a sly grin, my father in a naval uniform and a pipe, their houses bombed out, their friends dead. A tiny black and white photograph; a wartime party in a tiny living room. They jettisoned their dates, knowing this was the one. Their eyes fix the camera eye.
I can’t imagine not playing. My body feels funny if I don’t skate. It’s addictive, perhaps like gambling. I bet the house on the Oilers and lost my shorts. The waitress’ boyfriend Will will bet on anything. I was in the kitchen with Dinah, I’m walking with Jesus, always a third with us. My Intended is in pink, sending a pearl brush through her hair. The sparks torture me. She looks good. She’s not talking to me. Redeyed dogs chase ragpickers down the lane into prairie winter. In running one knows what it is to be alone. That’s my new motto.
The backup goalie mentions Waitress X’s restaurant.
Do you know that waitress there? I ask him.
The tall elegant one? Yes! Why?
Oh, nothing. I clam up for once.
The goalie goes on to happily sell insurance in Calgary, forever consulting the gods of fine print. I find a stomped-on Oiler practice jersey and hang on to it, adding it to my collection of sweaters. I have one sweater from Moose Vasko with his sweat on it.
I am wary of Calgary fans. They turn on you too fast; they’re too fickle.
CHAPTER 24
Harvesting the Brains
My Intended turns to the TV reverently. What year you like? What movie? What golden era? She’s being nice to me. After working all day with razor and video, she’s in a good mood, her hand at the controls, at the channel at hand. Most of the time she is nice. She likes Pee-wee Herman no matter what he does.
Once we were happily watching a duster, a 1950s western. My Intended turned to me smiling, cleaning her glasses: “Let’s have some baked beans,” she whispered. “And whisky.”
What makes me laugh is that she’s half-serious.
Now my Intended is watching a jittery TV just before an election. She is humming “Don’t Bogart That Joint.” Inert bagmen faces flash, spinning promises like free frisbees. They believe in a strong country; they believe in the future; they believe in the past. The present they’re not so sure about. “Now come on. You really expect me to swallow that?” She addresses the screen like it’s family, an ex-boyfriend. “Beautiful, beautiful,” she mutters.
It’s just information, she says to herself, a feed, it’s light from the stars; reruns; someone else was alive when it was originally transmitted. Now the camera eye is an elephant graveyard, a junkshop. “I stood too close to the microwave drinking instant coffee and I’m going back in time, zapped,” she says. Ha. She laughs and I look at her, pretending it’s our first date. We get each other’s jokes.
Let’s go out, catch a band. Cat Ranch is at the National Hotel. We know the guitarist. Let’s go. Cat Ranch has a red recliner onstage with them and “lucky winners” get to lounge there with free popcorn and draft as the band thunders around them playing KISS covers or the Replacements. There’s a pole lamp and pictures of Queen Elizabeth and Lassie, a ridiculous rumpus room look.
Black lights flail above, Polaroids wink; her orange tears blink off and on the dance floor and on the screen the ‘60s. We’re in the ‘60s again. My Intended and I do the Frug, her hair flying. I think my brain is dissolving a little, shrinking, tightening, while my skin loosens. I pour alcohol into sulcal craters, imagine a moonscape. Mine. Scientists raise mice as a crop and “harves
t” their brains, slice them like cheese. What would mine look like? Piers become beautiful as they fall to pieces. By the spas and finger lakes of upstate New York. There some of us went to see a band called 13 Screaming Niggers. There it is, as they say.
On Sunday friends phone: Come for dinner. And bring your bathing suits, they say.
We have a hot tub, they say.
O.K., I say and hang up.
No, I’m too fat, she tells me after the phone call. She worries she’s losing her looks, touches her freckled skin looking for reassurance. I know the lines and I know I’m supposed to say the lines and something stops me.
My Intended gets up silently for work on her ad campaign and brings me a tumbler of orange juice; I could love her for that alone. Her bra moves through the curtained bloom, shadows between her breasts, between insteps and shoe: cleaved, neither one nor the other. She knows technology, she is the calibrated future, a freckled Scottish ghost chopping and haunting what we view on Channel 6, trapping each instant in its microscopic frame, moving syntax and action where she wants. Like a team owner.
While I lie in bed my Intended drives away in her green dials, a pilot drifting in the dark hall of great shade trees. In space, men stand on an antenna, effecting repairs; will they too drift away? The undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns. On MTV whites pretend to be black, blacks to be white; we have all fallen into too precise moves and movies, antic travel posters: the silent flight to a pale floating palace. My Intended drives in pre-dawn light to avoid the morning traffic, to keep herself separate from the other wordless pilots.
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