The Crazy Game

by Clint Malarchuk

  Most memories of my dad involve sports. Mike Malarchuk was the kind of father who lived at the rink with his sons. Hockey was the most important part of our life. He was a timekeeper at my games when I was young. He’d come watch me play for hours on the outdoor rink near our house in the freezing Edmonton winters. Back then, we mostly played outdoors, even in organized league games. Playing indoors was a big-time reward. When I was a mite—probably nine years old—Dad was the manager of my team. On Saturday mornings, we had indoor ice out at the Enoch Cree reserve. We’d get up at four in the morning and climb into our old Gran Torino and drive through the freezing dark. We’d be on the ice at five-thirty, but often we’d have to go and wake up the rink manager, who lived next door, so he could let us in.

  The Enoch arena was so cold it might as well have been outside, but those practices always felt special. It was the highlight of the week. After practice, I’d go home and watch a half-hour or so of Saturday morning cartoons—always Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner—on our black-and-white television in the basement. Dad had finished the basement himself—he was handy. There was a bedroom for my brother, Garth, a bathroom and the TV area, which was all carpeted. One of my earliest memories, when I was really young and small, is of falling asleep on my dad’s chest while he lay on the coach and watched that old black-and-white TV. He had a toothpick in his mouth. I curled up into him and dreamed.

  On those Saturday mornings, after practice and cartoons, I’d pull on my jeans and a heavy sweater and bundle up in my winter jacket. I had this huge old pair of gloves that were so ripped that my fingers came through. I’d put a smaller pair of gloves beneath them so I could grip my stick and still be warm. I thought that was great. The fingers would flop around because the gloves were so worn out. Then I’d tie up my skates and head to the rink out past the schoolyard behind our house. The ice had painted lines. It was smaller than a regular rink but had boards and was big enough for five-on-five shinny. There was no refrigeration system. The quality of the ice depended on the weather and the work of the attendant assigned to scrape it down each day. It had a chain-link fence on top of the boards—nothing fancy, but to us, it was Maple Leaf Gardens or the Montreal Forum. I’d be there by nine in the morning and play shinny with the neighbourhood kids all day. We didn’t have goalies, so I played out. Sometimes Dad would come and stand out in the cold, just because hockey was what we did. It was us.

  At dinner, around five, I’d walk across the snow-covered field in my skates, and when I got to our back door my mom would lay down towels on the kitchen floor and I’d shuffle on my hands and knees to the table. Then I’d shuffle back and be off across the field. I’d stay out there so long that they would turn the lights out on me. It’d be about ten at night. There was a man who took care of the ice—he’d drag out a hose to flood it down and I’d help him. “Don’t you have to be home?” he’d ask me.

  “No, Mom knows where I’m at,” I’d say.

  My parents could see the lights from our back window. They knew that once those lights went out, I’d be home as soon as the ice was ready for a new day.

  When I wasn’t playing hockey outside, my family practically lived between Jasper Place Arena and Coronation Arena in Edmonton. Garth was seven years older than I was and was one of the best goalies in the city, if not the province. Garth was my idol. He got to play indoors because he was older and on the best teams. I remember going to those games before he left home at seventeen to play junior in Calgary. I’d either run around and get into trouble while my mom and older sister, Terry, watched from the stands, or I’d be in the timekeeper’s box with Dad, running the clock. Everyone knew Mike Malarchuk at the rink. He was funny and friendly. He was a joker, a real charmer. Everybody liked Mike. Everybody.

  I don’t think as a kid you can really see the world you’re living in. You can’t dissect it. You can’t comprehend it. Looking back, it’s hard to say exactly when things fell apart. There were small hints along the way. Like the time Dad left me in the car while he ran into a store, and he was gone for a while and I got bored. So I went rummaging around in our Gran Torino and found a raunchy magazine—Juggs or something like that—and a half-empty bottle of whiskey. Maybe it was half-full. It didn’t bother me much. Looking back, you can see the problems you were blind to then.

  When Dad was manager of my mite team, the coach’s name was Cecil Papke. I spent a lot of time with Cec and his son Murray, who was on our team. They didn’t live far from us. I looked up to Cec so much. He was an old-school coach, kind of a Don Cherry type. This was the early seventies, when long hair was the fashion, but Cec made all of us get it cut and combed neatly. He made us wear shirts and ties to all of our games. Cec had coached the Calgary Centennials junior team when he was younger, and to us, that might as well have been the NHL. He’d played semi-pro hockey. I looked up to him. I’d go over to the Papkes’ house and play hockey with Murray and just hang out with the family. Cec and my dad were good friends. He covered for Dad all the time—when he would go missing for a few days, here and there, or when he’d get so disoriented he couldn’t come to our games. When my dad wasn’t able to be my dad, Cec would step in. I don’t want to say that Cecil Papke was a father figure, but he was the model for the kind of man I wanted to be. My dad was my dad—I loved him. For a time, he was a great father. But he was also a drunk—a full-blown alcoholic.

  There wasn’t a specific moment when everything at 8112 163 Street crumbled. I guess it was always kind of chipping away. You hold on to the happy pieces and try your best to leave the worst in the rubble, but the dust of it all clings to you.

  My brother and sister saw the worst of it, but they were gone before I was old enough to really understand. Garth, the great goalie, my hero, left to play junior hockey. Terry, six years older than me—a provincial-level hurdler and sprinter—took care of me like a mother, but she married young and left the house before she was twenty. Part of the reason I went to Grande Prairie in the summers was to get out of Elmwood. Life in the raw wild was peaceful compared to the unpredictable chaos at home. I could shoot bears, but I couldn’t stop the monster at home.

  Jean Malarchuk, my mom, was the toughest, strongest person I knew. She was my best friend. I never saw him hit her, but I know that he did. He lashed out when he was mad. I saw him take things from the fridge, like a tub of cottage cheese or a plate of leftover dinner, and fire them at the wall. He’d throw plates across the room in the middle of dinner. He’d smash dishes on the floor. Mom tried to keep me away from the violent outbursts, but it was impossible when he came home blitzed. If we were lucky, he’d come home late—if he came home at all. Once, I woke up in the middle of the night, hearing a radio turned up loud. I got up and walked around the house, looking for it. It was downstairs, coming from my brother’s room, but he was away playing in Calgary at the time. I found Dad passed out in the room, still dressed and shit-faced. He had been listening to a hockey game and fallen asleep.

  Nights like that were bearable. Other nights weren’t. I’ve forgotten many things in my life, but I’ll never forget the sound of shattering glass. It woke me up. Smash. And then another. Smash. It sounded like a stack of plates slammed on the ground. It could have been a baseball, or a deer, or a missile crashing through our house. I opened my eyes. Dad was home. It was 3 A.M. and I was twelve. I jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen in my pyjamas and bare feet. I thought Dad was throwing plates at Mom. I needed to help her. But she sat alone at the kitchen table. I could hear Dad shouting outside. Smash. Another window shattered, back in my parents’ room. He had taken a hammer from the shed. I ran to Mom and she hugged me.

  “I’m sorry, Clint, it’s your dad. I locked him out. I had to lock him out. He broke the windows.” She’d called the police. Terry was still at home then. She came into the kitchen and we huddled together as he yelled and ranted and smashed.

  Dad was gone when the police arrived. Blue and red lights revolved through the jagged glass of the smashed
windows. I remember the wail of the siren. I couldn’t stop shaking. The cops sat down with my mother and wrote up a report. They said they’d drive around the block to make sure he didn’t come back. We pulled each other close in the same bed and tried to stay warm in a room Dad hadn’t got to. It was still cold. So cold we’d freeze alone. I tried to sleep but kept seeing shattered glass and my father’s rage, so I stayed up and watched the night leave and the room get light. I didn’t hate him then. I didn’t know what to feel, what to think. This was a man I loved and he was ruining us.

  The morning was as cold as the night. I got dressed, ate breakfast and went to school as if nothing had happened—overtired and screwed up as usual.

  4

  Wobblebottom

  SCHOOL WAS NEVER MY THING. THE TEACHERS ALWAYS SEEMED to hate me, and the feeling was mutual. My third-grade teacher was the worst of them. As wide as she was high—probably five feet tall and three hundred pounds—we called her Mrs. Wobblebottom. She patrolled the class with a wooden yardstick in hand, randomly blasting it down, inches from heads and hands. It broke frequently, but she always found another one. We were petrified.

  I was a class clown. I was always busy talking, always making jokes and causing distractions. It was impossible for me to concentrate. The numbers and words at the front of the room just blurred together. I couldn’t keep up. My head would spin and I was anxious—the shit at home, the buzz around me, the mounds of gum under the desks—everything whirled around in my mind and made my skin creep up my arms and slowly crushed my chest. So I made jokes and laughed and talked and did everything I could to stay outside of myself. Mrs. Wobblebottom didn’t understand.

  One day, while I was entertaining my classmates, a blackboard eraser whizzed through the air and hit the wall just inches from me. A cloud of chalk dust fell on my head. “Don’t take shit from anybody,” my mother used to tell me, and I assumed that applied to teachers as well. And I was mad. I grabbed the eraser and threw it back. It hit her in the chest. Chalk exploded on the broad side of the barn door. She came at me and I bolted between the desks. My classmates roared as Wobblebottom’s face went deep red—it was like she was going to kill me. I took off down the hall, burst through the doors and raced up the monkey bars. Unless there was fried chicken tied to the top bar, she’d never attempt that climb. I was safe.

  Wobblebottom came huffing out and screamed at me. I ignored her. She hollered and threatened, but I’d stay up there forever if I had to. When she finally relented and went to the office to get the principal, I climbed down and ran across the field to my house. Mom had to drag me back to Elmwood Elementary. I ended up in the principal’s office, but I didn’t back down.

  “She threw it first,” I said. Mom always had my back on stuff like that. I would tell her what happened at school, and if I deserved it, I deserved it. But if she thought I was just sticking up for myself, she’d go to bat for me. She was pissed about the eraser thing.

  I knew I had a unique kind of problem as soon as I started at Elmwood Elementary. The anxiety consumed me. Mom knew about the gum on the desks and how sick it made me feel. All that chewed sloppy shit clumped in mounds made my stomach twist. I wanted to hurl. So many germs and shit. Am I the only one who sees this? Am I the only one who feels this way? One day, Mom went to the school before class and scraped the gum from underneath my desk and scrubbed it with Lysol. After that, I kept a bottle of Lysol in my desk and cleaned it myself every day. It helped a bit.

  Sunday nights growing up were like a frickin’ ritual. The next day was Monday and I had to go to school. I just couldn’t handle it. It just stressed the hell out of me. I’d cry. I don’t know—Jesus Christ, I must have been the worst kid in the world.

  I always had trouble getting to bed. It was something about being alone in my room, alone with my thoughts. My head would just spin. Sunday nights were a train wreck for me. It wasn’t depression then—how can a kid that young be depressed? But it was constant anxiety. It never went away. “My stomach’s churning,” I’d tell my mom. “It won’t stop.”

  Mom would actually have to drag me to class on Mondays. We’d take the sidewalk around the corner to get to school. As soon as she got me through the doors, I’d slip out the side entrance and be at the kitchen table when she got home. Mom took me back again and again. The things that woman did for me. I wish I could have been better for her. With all the shit she took from Dad, I don’t know how she found the patience for me.

  “I’m stupid, Mom. I don’t get it. I can’t go back.”

  “You’re not stupid, Clint. You’ll get it. Let’s go.” She said it every day.

  But really, my grades were never good. I struggled. I could never focus in class. In the sixth grade they put me in a special-education program. I looked at the kids that were around me—there were about eight of us—and most of them were bad, bad kids. But I wasn’t one of those kids who go around picking fights. Usually, I was the one helping out the kids getting picked on. There’s no better feeling than punching a bully in the face and making him squeal like a little pig. Some of the other kids in the class had special needs. I thought to myself, I’m not one of those kids who tease people, and I’m not handicapped. I’m just plain dumb.

  Hockey was my escape. That outdoor rink was the only place I didn’t feel anxious. Sometimes I’d play with the older kids, my brother’s age, and I’d strap on the pads because I was too young to play out with them. As long as I played net, I could be on the ice endlessly. I’d load my gear on a toboggan and lug it through the field and down the small path to the hockey rink. Mom always knew where I was. That gave her peace of mind.

  I refused to take breaks while playing, so most days the ice in my crease was stained yellow—I decided it was easier to wet myself than to take off the goalie gear and interrupt the games. Mom always asked why my equipment was so rancid. She must have known. “Mom,” I’d say, “that’s hockey.”

  One of the kids in my grade was Kelly Hrudey. You might remember him from his incredible days with the Los Angeles Kings, or more recently as a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada. He was a pal and came to my house a bunch, like a lot of the kids in the neighbourhood did. We were a really sports-minded group.

  Kelly was probably the best athlete around growing up. He was just naturally gifted at everything he did. We played on the same baseball team, but never on the same hockey team. He says it’s because I was the best in net at the time and no one wanted to compete with me. He learned how to play on the outdoor rinks, just like me. But Kelly didn’t even start playing organized hockey until he was about fourteen years old. He started playing a level below A hockey, but pretty soon he was in Medicine Hat as a junior. The Tigers weren’t very good. He was facing something like fifty, sixty shots a game. That’s when people started to really notice him. Imagine starting organized hockey as a teenager and making it to the NHL and being that successful! Kelly clearly worked hard for his success. He was a a natural superstar, and I envied his ability at every sport he played.

  In the summers, we’d play ball hockey all day, every day. We’d play on the street in front of our house or over on the school blacktop. These were massive games that all the kids from the area got into. Sometimes things got violent, as these things tend to do. I don’t remember this, but I’ve been told that during one of our marathon ball hockey games, I got mad at Kelly for some reason and punched him in the face. I don’t know, it probably happened. I’ve punched a lot of people.

  When I was pretty young, maybe twelve (everything seemed to happen that year), I remember these people down the street who had something like six kids, and four of them were boys. They were kind of like orangutans. The oldest brother was the same age as Garth. So they made a classic wager: “I bet my little brother can beat up your little brother.” They put money on it. The thing was, I was fighting a fourteen-year-old. That’s a big difference at that age. It was out in the field behind our house, where most of this stuff happened. It was a fu
ll-on fight.

  “You can do this,” Garth told me. I was scared because the kid was much bigger. But I won. I always won, even against the older kids. My brother made sure I was tough. He was always picking on me, which helped me a lot. I learned how to be an actor, in a way—to roll with challenges and stand up for myself, even if I was trembling inside. Because I excelled on the ice, I was always playing with kids older than me. When I was twelve, I was playing with fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. I didn’t even have hair on my nuts. They did. It was a big age difference, but I held my own.

  That was the same year Garth broke my nose for the first time. He was practising his pitching on the baseball diamond behind our house and he had me catching for him. He was nineteen and brought some good heat. He also had a temper. The ball kept popping out of my catcher’s mitt when he threw fastballs and slipping under me when he threw curveballs. “Just hold your glove in front of your face,” he said. “I’ll hit the glove.” That’s how he talked to me then. “Just do it.”

  So I watched him wind up and I put the glove in front of my face. There was a pause, and I thought the ball should have been in my mitt by now, so I lowered it to see what was happening. Boom—a fastball, square in the nose. I have a great pain tolerance, but I still remember, when I got up, that Garth said, “Clint, do not cry. Do not cry!”