by Russel Smith
When you’re six six two fifty everyone in the league wants to fight you. When you’re this size guys can make a name for themselves by landing a knuckle in your personal space. Dusters become fan favourites in a slick instant, even if all they do is hug and block and throw little body jabs that couldn’t bruise a rib. The other thing that happens when it’s your job to hurt people in front of twenty thousand spectators is that people notice. People watch. People record and tweet and blog. Joe Nobodies come on Twitter and beak off about how you’re a skeezbag because you ran their team’s goalie and can you really write back that you were just doing exactly what your coach told you to, exactly what you get paid for, exactly what someone else will do if you decide to turn your hairy nose up? When you make your living throwing punches, sometimes you get heated. Sometimes you tell someone that if he doesn’t drop the mitts you are going to shove your thumbs through his nostrils and watch them come out his eye sockets. Sometimes the stupid hanging microphone picks up the comment which then circulates on social media and you end up with a two-game suspension and a $5,000 fine. And how to explain that you are not actually a particularly violent person when what circulates on YouTube is a shot of you skating across the rink at full speed, holding two halves of a stick you’ve just broken over your knee, the ends like mouths full of jagged splintery fangs.
What happened with Stacey, after the eyeball incident, was that I told her about Rebecca.
After that fit of laughter I said I had to take off and she gave me that same look again, like wanting some wordless more, and I opened easy as a twist-off Chablis. Told her about Rebecca the gorgeous and brilliant and funny publicist for a women’s health magazine. Rebecca with the single snaggled incisor and a smile like a grade school secret. I told her about the diagnosis, a year after Lucy was born. Told her about Rebecca’s double mastectomy, how they found a colony of cysts on the uterus, meaning full hysterectomy plus radiation. How there was no sex for two years and then Rebecca went to the doctor concerned about something hanging out of her vagina and the doctor said it was her bowel. Seven hot nights hardly swallowing thinking over and over what kind of a man leaves the ovarian-cancer-surviving mother of his two-year-old child. Puking at practise and for the first time in my life unable to stomach food. I told Stacey all of it. Told her how Rebecca had calmly lowered her voice and said she’d always suspected I was a monomaniac and at least now she knew. Told her how Rebecca took the house and the child and half the bank account and though she’d always been against them she had new implants by the end of the week. How she called them a gift to herself. I told Stacey how that was three years ago now and my daughter was five now and begging for a baby brother and I’d had this perfect chance to make a good family and had failed. I told every stained and sneering truth and she asked what my name was, my real name. Then she said we didn’t have to do anything but could we just go to bed and she took me there, wrapped her fingers around my drugged, exhausted cock and just held it there, whispering “Wes, Wes, Wes” until we both fell asleep.
The plane lands in Boston at 4:00 which means straight to the bus because the puck drops at 7:30. On the ride to the rink Moose tells me coach is probably going to ask me to spar with Anderson which both of us know is a bad idea. Not because me and Anderson were a regular d-pair for two seasons in Tucson—you fight your friends more often than not in this line of work. It’s a bad idea because Anderson is soft. Because he got called up last month and he’s won two fights and so his coach is foolish enough to think he can scrap. Because it’s my first game back and there’s no way, contract-wise, I can justify holding back but if I don’t hold back somebody could get hurt. Somebody who’s not me.
So I sit in the bus looking out across the river and thinking maybe that’s Harvard on the other side. Moose tells me Anderson texted him saying I better get a broom because I’m going to get dusted which I’m not even sure makes sense. I try not to think about Anderson and eventually it works. I start thinking about Harvard, thinking maybe Lucy will go there one day, wondering what my daughter will think of me five years from now. Wondering if I want her to watch me wailing knuckles for a living. I’m thinking, not for the first time, that maybe retirement is my best option. Maybe I could try journalism or get a nice office job with the player’s association. Maybe I could get into training, use my kin credentials. Maybe it would be nice to throw towels at guys and lay guys on spinal boards and stitch them up on the bench.
There are few things as lovely as the sight of blood pooling on white ice. No red has ever seemed more red—like a rose blooming out of a snowbank. It is this sight, I sometimes think, that keeps me going. Not the ocean hush of the crowd, not the salary or the sense of belonging, not the elite level gear or the hundred thousand Twitter followers but the sight of a man’s liquefied essence spreading out before him. The gentle wisp of steam as it leaks onto the indifferent slab below. The pattern never the same and something so simple and vast about those spattered archipelagos on the cool, stark ice. Recalling, always, the same shrill memory. A childhood pond, a whirl of lazy snowflakes. Flakes like little white insects bobbing after each other and never quite getting there. Sweat-damp pant legs clinging to calves. The shred of skates skirring over ice. Cardinals fluttering through a winter sky.
What happened with Stacey, eventually, is that she doesn’t date hockey players. It’s always been a rule of hers. An age-old prohibition she chose not to bring up until three weeks in. A steadfast embargo that did not prevent her from sitting in the special box reserved for wives and girlfriends and saying afterwards over rye and Cokes that she could get used to that kind of treatment. A hard-and-fast rule that did not deter her from joining me on one of my twice-monthly Sunday afternoons with my daughter. Did not discourage her from playing mini-put at the mall with me and Lucy, the three of us afterwards drinking Orange Julius in the food court, singing along in Kermit the Frog voices to the late-November Christmas music—“He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” This alleged rule didn’t stop Stacey from coming back to my apartment and eating spaghetti while watching Frozen. From holding Lucy’s hand under the blanket and then saying “I hope so” when Lucy asked whether she’d see her again. But it did cause her, a week later, to suddenly cease communication. To leave all texts and phone calls unanswered for three days and then finally write back, “I’m sorry Wes, I can’t date a hockey player. It’s been fun but please don’t contact me again.”
There are times when there are no good choices. There are moments when you have to choose between your own happiness and your duties, your vows. What you may have to realize is that “sickness and health” can become very literal, very mundane. “Sickness and health” can mean you spend ninety percent of your waking life cleaning vomit and changing your baby’s diapers and helping your impossibly pale wife stagger from the bathroom to the bed, her body like an apple tree in winter. It can mean walking over to a lump of covers and body holding that screaming infant several times a day and the child’s mother always groaning back, “I can’t I’m sorry I just can’t,” a morbid whistle wheezing through the back of her mouth where the chemo had rotten the teeth out. It can mean that since you have a decent salary you can afford a part time in-home caregiver for when you have to practise and play and sometimes her mother comes down to help but none of this stops you from feeling terribly, constantly, excavated. Feeling like a grave that has been dug up and left open, exposed to the vagaries of sleet and snow and wind. A grave who has to rise up each morning to smile and bounce his never-silent child up and down the vicious beige halls.
And of course you know it’s worse for Rebecca. Of course you do everything you can to imagine her side, to consider how she must feel when she can’t feed or snuggle or even really touch her own child. You reach into every deepest reservoir of empathy but at some point it doesn’t change the fact that something in you is faded, almost lost.
You may get through all of this
because you simply couldn’t gather the strength to leave in the middle of the sickness. You may come through everything to discover your beloved partner is weary and sexless and she is not making any promises because her underbits are all sliced up and swollen which you are sympathetic but some nights you dream her saying “just go,” saying “it’s okay.” And you can’t anticipate that it will never be okay. You can’t predict that leaving does not, in fact, mean relief.
How could you know that after leaving you would wake up each morning to find your tongue turning fuzzy and your stomach a mangle of rage and shame? How could you know you would look into your daughter’s planetary eyes and wince with shame each time she said the word “mummy?” That the shame would thrill through your bloodstream and you would lie awake at night fearing the You your daughter will come to construct as she grows older. The You that has left his diseased and broken wife alone with their daughter and the ravage of her body. Fearing this future You because it is also present You and nothing, now, can make that otherwise.
One of the worst things is the waiting. Waiting through the plane ride and the bus from the airport and warmup and the pregame speech and the national anthem, knowing the whole time that you are going to have to get violent. Sitting on the bench listening to the crowd turning frenzied and knowing you’ve got to face a professional fighter who will open your face in an instant if you have a lonely second thought about pounding him first.
I sit on the bench feeling a little ridiculous wearing all this gear. I sit through the Megacard National Anthem, sit through the Mite-T-gel puck drop and the Trinity TV timeouts, wondering when I’m going to get my nudge. Moose scores a clapper in the first and then they bang in three quick ugly ones and I’m sure I’m going to get the tap but I don’t get the tap. At the start of the second we kill off a double-minor and there’s a long stretch of play with no whistles and then I see Anderson taking the ice. He’s lining up on the wing and he’s got his little weasel eyes on Taylor which is when Coach grabs my shirt and basically hurls me over the boards.
At the faceoff circle, standard banter: “Let’s get some Windex on that glass jaw.” “Nice fuckin’ lip sweater.” “How’re your glutes bud? Picking up a few splinters from the pine wagon?”
Then Anderson goes personal, goes dark. “Shame about Rebecca,” he says, nodding iceward. “Heard she got shredded down there, basically went through the blender.”
Words that send the world listing.
A blast of light and a dentist’s drill, sans anesthetic.
Everything red and blue and all cares and friendships wilting and who the fuck did Anderson hear this from? My chest and biceps flickering and a slurge of vomit in my throat. A smell like oil and before I can swing the puck drops and Anderson skates away chuckling and I’m lost out here with the horn-blare and the crowd-howl and everything noisemakers, everything glare.
Bodies whizzing around and the schwick of skates on ice and I find myself with the puck even though the puck means nothing now. Thinking about shooting just to get rid of it but then I see Anderson and I simply leave the puck where it is, skate towards him dropping my stick and gloves.
What happened with Stacey, eventually, is that I went to her house late-night. I drove over to her condo six and a half deep, fully ready to rage into her intercom and send some golf balls through her window. Expecting her to be in there with the latest Justin Tinderlake but no such luck or whatever else you’d call it. Because it turned out she was sweet, deadly sweet. Turned out she answered the intercom and said hey, said she’d half expected this, said she’d been thinking a lot about it and she supposed I deserved an explanation so come on up. So I came on up, mussed Gorgonzola until his eyeball made a move and then I sat there on the couch with my feet lost in zebra-print plush. She brought me a peppermint tea which I did not remotely drink and told me that although she’d told herself she wouldn’t do it a friend had send her a link which brought her down a YouTube rabbit hole. Hence she wound up watching me pommel guys. She spent a fierce half hour watching me flatten Denis O’Neil’s nose and concuss Ryan Armstrong and blind Todd Salinger in one eye. And after seeing me batter people like that, she said, she could no longer look at me the same way. She just couldn’t get those images out of her mind and that’s why she hadn’t responded to my texts—when my name came up she saw visions of me leering and ramming my arm down another man’s throat, flashes of me skating down the ice holding two composite plastic scythes, my beard bright with blood. All of it made her squeamish and fearful, she said, and how could I possibly object? She saw me as a barbarian i.e. saw me as myself and I could not argue with that so I walked out. Walked into the elevator and plummeted down. Fell slowly through the city with my feet on the floor.
Anderson turns and smiles for a second then sees that I’m bare-knuckled and drops his mitts. I’m swinging before they touch the ice. Two swings before he can even get his fists up and he’s already down and tucking. I sit down hard on his chest and start beating, feel the teeth slough loose under my knuckles and keep going, opening his nose.
A hiss in my ears, someone far away whispering monomaniac. A flash of a woman in silhouette, stark and bald at the bathroom sink.
My fists churn faster and as I look down Anderson’s face becomes my face too. I’m torqueing my fists against my own face, watching my skull tock against the ice and my eyes go distant. I find myself split in two and know this can’t be right but it does not make the warmth of the blood between my fingers any less real. And even as I keep pounding I know that none of this is reversible, that this choice cannot be undone, and so there is nothing to do but keep swinging, keep trouncing, keep mashing this mask until it curdles, leaks the matter of its making.
a titan bearing many a legitimate grievance
Reg Johanson
By New Year’s Day I was back in Vancouver but my daughter was still visiting in Edmonton. Over Facebook Messenger I found the courage—suddenly, I surprised myself—to say what I couldn’t at Christmas: “I felt like we didn’t really connect in Alberta,” I wrote, “and that you didn’t really want to talk to me or spend time with me. Is that true?” I held my breath. She wrote back and said yeah, that’s true. At the age of nineteen she could finally write:
I don’t feel comfortable around you for long periods of time. You have the same blood as me but I don’t know you. It’s not like after this trip we will be all peachy and it will be as though you were always there. No way. Spending 6 days together isn’t going to make it all better. This is really stressful for me actually. This isn’t easy. I look at you and I see the face of the dude who didn’t want me. I don’t care anymore but after all these years I can’t just be normal and stuff. I was really mad at you for a long time and it’s not just going to disappear. I didn’t even want to come to Canada to get to know you or anything like that. I don’t want that to be what this is based on.
I have to stop here. I want to rush past these words—I mean continue rushing past them, as I rushed past them when they were written—Give me time to say it, she wrote, because I don’t want to be mean and my nails are too long so I’m not as fast—because she wrote so many other things that distracted me, that I felt needed responding to, needed answering, needed explaining, defending, apologizing for, denying, refuting, that I ran by these words until I tripped over them just now. I was telling the story and something told me I should check the record to make sure I was remembering the conversation accurately. I wasn’t. I had made up another conversation very different from the one we had. Or—the conversation we had, that is on record, was simultaneous with another one, that is unrecorded and much, much longer. The story I wanted to tell—so that I can continue the story—the story continues, many days have passed, many more days, life has been lived, there have been developments that I would like to narrate—but just now in recounting it I can’t move past this. When she wrote them it felt like the beginning, and I wanted to
begin. Now we were getting somewhere. Now we were connecting. Hurry up let’s get somewhere, let’s get that connecting going. Let’s, let us, do or go. Let us not stay here, with these words—even though it’s not every Christmas that I receive such a gift, of speech such as this, that lifts us out of hell as the Greeks imagined it, where the dead repeat the same gestures for eternity (she wrote: Can you be more personable? you seem so cold and offended right now … I know you are online but you can add more personality? And that’s what got me started). If we hadn’t spent Christmas together we might still be stuck in our distinct modes of resentment. Her apparent indifference, that broke out into open contempt only in moments of exhaustion, when she was maybe surprised by anger and forgot for a second that she wasn’t giving a fuck, then come stabbing out like a stiletto. My guilty conscience, that made me pathetic and contemptible to both of us, the judgement of which I internalized until I wanted to kill myself. This mood is the thing I hate most about myself. It lifted only when I could very clearly feel <>. I mean it lifted when I could accept this thought. Then it relieved me. It cleared the air of moralism and sentimentality that keep out the real feelings, out of which I had made awkward gestures, like sharing a meme, something like, Share This If You Are Just So Proud Of Your Wonderful Daughter, or some other such bullshit. It felt like the whole Internet went WTF? She wrote: I have no intentions of being a bitch—please don’t take it that way. But I’m not going to sugar coat it either. I’m going to say exactly how I feel. And none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for Facebook. We could not have said what we said face to face. Facebook was the right platform for these ugly feelings. Our first conversations were on the telephone, starting when she was about five. We talked on the phone most weekends until she was ten or eleven, when our talks became, for the first time, stilted and one-sided—me asking a lot of dull questions, withering a little more with each of her shorter and shorter answers. Which was a reversal of the situation in our earlier conversations, in which she did all the talking. So we didn’t talk much for a few years, and then Facebook. About age sixteen she popped up one day with a confession: she was in love with a boy—a white boy she met in the Christian private school her mother—who was the daughter of Muslim parents from Fiji—had sent her to, because she thought it was a good compromise between the state school’s racism and violence and the too-conservative Muslim school, where the girls wore hijab. She was sneaking around to hide this white boy from her mom, who she was certain would not accept the relationship. Also, she had become a Christian, just like her boyfriend and all her friends at school. Her mom would for sure not be accepting that. The situation was coming to a crisis. She had run away for thirty-six hours a few weeks previous. She was desperate and didn’t know what to do or who to turn to, so she reached out to me. And for me this was so rich. It was a plenitude. It gave me an opportunity to act responsibly, and I relished it. At this time in my life I was grateful for every opportunity to be good. So just for the record, in case her mother should hack our messages, I advised her to tell her mother everything, and then I sat back and enjoyed being her confidant. She swore me to secrecy and I accepted to be sworn. Because the other thing about it was that it was a repeat of the circumstances of the way her mother and I got together. She was living our story again, in so many of the particulars: a brown girl and a white boy, hiding from her parents, running away, seizing the long-awaited opportunity of each other to force the irrevocable transformation of her life, and his, after which they would be free from all constraints. Even down to the religious conversion: she had become a Christian just as I had become a Muslim, though she claimed to be an actual believer, whereas I did it to help her mother’s parents save face in their community after the scandal of our running-off. But her crisis passed. It all came out and her mother accepted her boyfriend and even the religious conversion, which did not last, as mine did not. She is still with her boyfriend. I’m not sure where he’s at with religion now. Nobody’s asking him to become a Muslim, I do know that.