The Crazy Game

by Clint Malarchuk

  Once, I sat in the tack shed and told her I was going to do it. I said I’d rig a gun to the door, so that when she came in, a string would tug at the trigger and blow me away.

  The next morning, I’d always crawl back. “You know I’d never do that. I’d never do it. I love you,” I’d say. But later that night, it would return “I just can’t stand being in my head. I can’t live like this.”

  I made it about Joanie. I used her as a crutch. I’d laugh and joke around with my buddies, but I’d fight with Joanie when we were alone. Her parents told her I needed to go to rehab. There was no chance I’d be doing that. I had already gotten the help I needed. I felt I could handle this on my own. I wasn’t going to some corny adult summer camp where we held hands and talked about our problems. I was a cowboy and I could deal with this myself.

  It had been years since I’d actually checked in with a doctor. They say your body can build a resistance to the medication when you’ve been on it for a while, but I didn’t really understand that at the time. When the prescribed dosage didn’t set me straight, I’d turn to booze to take the edge off. Just need beer just to slow my mind down a little bit. But a few beers with my ranch buddies always turned into a dozen. Eventually, they’d go home and I’d polish off the entire case on my own. Joanie could always tell when I was lit because she’d hear Johnny Cash playing loudly over the speaker system we’d installed in the barn and outside the tack shed. When I was good and drunk, I’d be angry all over again. It was a cyclical thing.

  Joanie kept telling me to go and get my medication checked again, but I refused. I was afraid of being committed again. I was afraid of the weakness it showed.

  “I don’t need that,” I’d say. “If anyone finds out about that, I’ll lose my job. I’ll never get another job in the NHL again. I can handle this myself.”

  The fits of rage came in cycles. I’d go from being myself to Jack Torrance—I’m talking full-on Nicholson in The Shining—in a matter of minutes. Looking back, it’s a hazy period in my life. There was usually a two-hour period in the middle of the day when I seemed fine. That’s when Joanie felt okay to talk to me. When she saw my mood turning, she knew she couldn’t get through to me.

  When things got really bad, I became emotionally and verbally violent with Joanie. I was never physical. I would never hit her, but my rage-filled words certainly left unseen bruises. I became irritable over the smallest things and completely erratic. The only thing predictable about me was that I was probably drunk. She’d call our friends to help, and they’d come over and try to calm me down. Whenever someone else would show up, I’d try to downplay everything. “It’s nothing. I’ve got it under control. It’s just a fight. We’re having a rough time. It’s going to be okay. I’ll be fine …”

  It was almost convincing. My acting was as good then as it always had been.

  One of my good friends in Gardnerville was Brian Peck, a local veterinarian I had met through the equine dentistry practice when I was still married to Wife Number Three. He’d bring his kids over to the ranch for dinner and we’d go out back and shoot rifles at cans and targets I’d set up. We got along really well, and I trusted him. He was the guy Joanie called the most when things got out of hand. I told him about my OCD and depression. He could tell that I was slipping—you can only throw them off for so long before it becomes obvious that there is more to the problem than you’re letting on. Brian knew my bullshit as good as any of them. But the Torrance-esque episodes were getting more frequent and out of control than before.

  After one particularly bad fight with Joanie, Brian sat with me at my kitchen table and I broke down. I started sobbing. I told him there were voices in my head and I couldn’t get them to stop. They just kept swirling around inside of me—these obsessive thoughts, my own voice, telling me terrible things about Joanie. Brian told me I needed to get medical help. “That’s the first step, Clint,” he said. “We have to get you in to see someone.”

  I refused. It was embarrassing to be in this place again. Medication wasn’t going to help. Some jackass doctor wasn’t going to help. I don’t need help. I’m strong enough to fix this. But the only way I knew was to drown my anxiety and depression in booze, and that was a whole other problem.

  Brian was good friends with the district attorney. I didn’t know this at the time, but he actually called his friend and asked if he could get an officer to come and arrest me. Brian didn’t want me to go to jail; he just wanted to force me to get the help I needed. The district attorney told Brian there was nothing he could do. Unless I was caught breaking the law, the cops just couldn’t go out and arrest someone because they needed help.

  The truth is, I broke plenty of laws. It was a miracle, or a curse, that I wasn’t arrested sooner than I was. It’s hard to count all the times I’d go into bars just looking for the biggest guy in there, hoping he’d take a swing at me. I guess it was jealousy or insecurity, but I felt the need to beat everybody up to prove to Joanie that they might be big and on steroids, but guess what, they can’t beat me. I’d come home messed up, with blood on my knuckles.

  The breaking point came in the summer of 2007. Joanie had been visiting her parents back in San Antonio, and I was supposed to pick her up at the airport in Reno. She went to San Antonio to get away from my increasingly destructive behaviour and to get some advice from her parents, who were always great at dealing with this kind of stuff. But alone in Nevada, my obsessive thoughts were back and my head was spinning. I wanted to fight someone, someone bigger than me. I needed to get the rage out. So on my way to the airport, I pulled into a random hard-core gym in Reno. I’d never been there before, had no idea who would be inside, but I figured it’d be someone big. I wore my cowboy hat and boots. I went to the front desk and said, “I’m not working out. I just need to talk to somebody.” The person at the desk said okay and let me in.

  I found these two juice monkeys. One was bench pressing, the other was spotting. I stood next to them. They were both wide. One was shorter than the other—a Mexican guy, stocky and tuned to the max. The other was a six-foot, three-inch white guy, a lot bigger. They both had arms as big as cantaloupes, but all fatty, too. I was forty-six years old and in decent shape, but nowhere near the mass of these guys.

  “Could you lift that much if you weren’t all juiced up?” I asked.

  They looked at me, confused. “What the fuck?” the bigger one said.

  “We’re not on juice, man,” the shorter guy said.

  “Liar,” I said. “You’re a fucking liar. You’re flat-faced lying to me, you don’t fucking take steroids. You goddamn goof.”

  The big guy got off the bench.

  “What are you, a fucking cowboy?” the smaller Mexican guy said. He shoved me in the chest.

  “That’s assault, man,” I said. “You pushed me. Now I have a reason to kick your ass.”

  “Fuck you, cowboy.”

  I drilled him. He stumbled backwards and hit the mirror and dumbbell rack. The big guy tried to grab me. I elbowed him, but he got his arms around me. The other guy grabbed a ten-pound plate and slammed it into my face. It caught me flat across my nose and eye. If he’d gotten my nose alone, it would have ended up where my ear should be.

  I went spastic. I threw a high elbow on the guy holding me and caught him under the jaw. He fell back onto the bench. I was so pissed off at the little shit who used the plate, I grabbed him by the strap of his tank top. “You piece of shit.” And I whaled on him.

  The other guy didn’t get much involved after that. I never hit him again. It was the middle of the afternoon, and there were only a few other people in the gym. But the staff and everyone else were around us now. I took off. I ran out the front door before anyone could grab me. I knew they called the police because I passed a cop car with wailing lights as I was driving away.

  My face was messed up. My nose was broken, I was covered in blood and my eye was already black. I drove to the Reno airport and waited for Joanie in my truck.


  “What the hell happened to you?” she said, seeing the bloody mess of my face.

  “See what you made me do?” I said.

  I blamed everything on her. She didn’t know what to say. She went through a ton of trauma with me. She was thinking, I made you do this? This is my fault. I’m bad for you. She went through a lot of stuff because of me. It was only going to get worse.

  After I started that fight with the two juice monkeys at the gym, Brian convinced me it was time to see someone. He arranged for me to go to the hospital in Carson City to see a doctor. Our friend Waco McGill came with us, probably because Brian knew how violent and unpredictable I’d become.

  The first time we went, the waiting room at Carson City Hospital was packed, and I told them there was no way I was going to sit around and wait for some shithead intern to dick around with me. We waited and waited and waited until a nurse finally called us up to the check-in desk.

  “The doctor will be a couple of hours,” he said. “We’re going to have to get you a full psychological evaluation, and we’ll probably have to keep you in the hospital overnight.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “If I had a broken leg, you’d run me up to emergency. I’m losing my mind and I have to sit here? Just give me the proper medication. I’m not staying overnight.”

  You could see it in the nurse’s face—Red flag on this guy. We’re going to have to commit him. There was no way I was going to go in to see a doctor who was going to try to commit me.

  “I’ve got to make a phone call,” I said.

  I walked out of the room, headed down the hall and bolted for the exit. Brian and Waco thought I’d just gone to call Joanie. Eventually, they realized I wasn’t coming back.

  The next day, when I had settled down and seemed rational, they convinced me to go back to the hospital—for Joanie’s sake. Brian set up an appointment and everything. I was in a better state of mind and realized he was right, so I agreed. But again, the waiting room was packed and I was pissed off right away. “This is a waste of fucking time,” I kept saying. “We’re just going to sit around and wait. If my leg was broken or some shit like that, they’d see me right away, but they don’t give a damn about me.” We waited for a little while, and then Brian asked the nurse at the desk how much longer it would be. He could see that I was starting to turn. The nurse said it would still be a bit. I was done with that shit. The staff at the hospital had my name in their records and thought I was dangerous. I told a security guard to go piss up a rope or something like that and took off for the parking lot. Brian and Waco ran after me. They were as pissed off as I was that I couldn’t get some decent help.

  I don’t think they realized that the hospital had called the cops. I didn’t really know until I saw the lights way up the road as we drove away. A couple of cop cars were heading in our direction. Ah shit, I thought. They’re going to put me away. We were riding in Brian’s Dodge Ram 2500 and I was sitting in the back seat. When he hit a red light, I opened the door and bolted. Brian and Waco tried to stop me. “Come back! Where are you going?” But I wasn’t about to get locked up. I took off for some bushes on the other side of the ditch.

  The cops passed Brian’s truck, but one of them did a quick U-turn and pulled him over. Sure enough, they were looking for me. Brian told him I’d taken off at the hospital and they were looking for me, too. He promised to contact them if he and Waco found me again. With my cowboy hat and blue jeans and boots, I was pretty easy to spot, so I held the hat behind my back and ducked my head down as I darted through the trees and shrubs. I was completely paranoid, borderline delusional.

  It was dusk, so I figured I just needed to hide out until it got dark. I had to hide down in some friggin’ bushes like Commando Clint. I wound up in a parking lot. I got down on my stomach and army-crawled between the cars so no one could spot me. I turned my cell phone on and called Joanie.

  “The FBI is after me,” I said. “They’re after me. They’re trying to lock me up.”

  She had no idea what I was talking about, but I couldn’t talk long because I had to keep moving. I hung up and barrel-rolled into another ditch.

  Brian and Waco were in contact with me, but they had a cop tailing them, so they couldn’t stop to pick me up. I told them I would find my own way home. I hid inside some bushes, lying on my stomach. There were a bunch of cop cars driving all over the place, flying past me.

  I called Joanie again and told her the FBI was still on my tail. “I’ll get home,” I told her. “I’ll get home.”

  When the heat was off, I snuck out to the main road in Carson City and hitched a ride back to Gardnerville, about fifteen miles away.

  When I got back home, I looked through my window and saw Joanie and Brian sitting at our kitchen bar. Something crazy clicked in my mind. Holy shit, this whole time—Joanie and Brian. She was cheating on me with my friend! Just one look was all it took to convince me.

  In reality, they were trying to figure out where I was. It looked like I’d lost my mind. Brian told Joanie she needed to get out of the house. I was unhinged. “He’s going to come back here,” he warned her.

  They didn’t see me coming. I charged through the screen door—ripped it down completely. Their white-as-ghosts shock confirmed my suspicions. Everyone ran. They were afraid of me. I went after Brian, swinging for his face. Joanie screamed at me to stop, but I wanted his blood. He ran around the couch to get away from me. I went one way and he went the other. I nearly caught him a few times—just kept swinging and cursing. He was on one side of the couch, I was on the other. We went back and forth around it. I threw the television remote at him. And when I got close enough, I took a swing and missed. Joanie kept screaming at me. Brian tried to calm me down. I got tired—so goddamn tired.

  Then I realized Waco was there, too.

  I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t know how to explain how quickly my mind flipped into believing my wife was cheating on me with my friend. The cops didn’t come after me. I guess they figured I’d made it home and didn’t want to deal with any more headaches. Waco took Joanie to a family friend’s house to stay for the night. He took the guns out of my house, but he forgot about the ones I kept in the tack shed out back. I went into my room, fell on the bed and passed out. Brian slept on the couch, but I was so out of my mind I didn’t even know he was there. Every hour or so, he’d wake up to the sound of me yelling into my phone, “You’ve ruined my life, Joanie. You ruined my life!” And then it would go quiet. I’d just fall asleep, until I’d wake up again and leave another seething message on her phone. This was the pattern. My rage would build to a point where I’d rant and rave for two or three hours and then just crash.

  In the morning, Brian checked to make sure I was still breathing. Then he left me there, unconscious in the tattered pieces of the life I’d torn apart.

  26

  I Might

  THE BARREL OF THE GUN TASTED COLD AND METALLIC, LIKE BLOOD. I sat on the shoulder of an empty road in the desert and thought about the peace of death. It was a horrible notion, but it was the only thing I could imagine taking away the chaos. It was going to destroy me one way or another. So I had the gun in my mouth and was searching for a reason to not pull the trigger.

  It was October of 2007. I was starting my second year as the Columbus Blue Jackets’ goalie coach and was back home in Nevada before the season kicked off. After a summer that nearly ruined my marriage with Joanie, in which I thought the FBI was trying to chase me down, and in which I had tried to beat up one of my closest friends, I still had farther to fall. I was drunk and depressed and obsessed with irrational things. I was nearly beaten.

  My last call for help was to Rick Dudley as I sat in the truck with the gun in my hand. He was the only person I knew who understood where I had been and where I was heading. He’d done so much for me as a coach and as a general manager. Rick was a huge, strong man. But he was one of the most compassionate and caring men I’d ever met, too. Rick und
erstood mental illness. He knew I didn’t want to behave the way I did.

  When I was out in San Antonio, he told Steve Ludzik to be careful because I’d turn into a monster if I ever went off my meds. When I heard that later, I thought, What a compliment. Absolutely. I didn’t think it was a negative thing. At five-eleven, maybe six feet, I’d go up against a six-foot, five-inch beast and not even bat an eye. It was important to me. It never bothered me that I was only six feet and 195 pounds while another guy was six-four and 280. I’d take that guy on any day. I was really proud of that—I was cocky about it. It never crossed my mind that I could get hurt—Fuck you, I can take you down. I’ve got nothing to lose. This was the person I became whenever I’d lose control. Duds understood that mentality, crazy as it was. He was also the only person I was afraid of. I knew Duds could kick the shit out of me if he needed to.

  Joanie often called him when I got out of control. When I was sober and had a handle on things, I told her to dial his number if it ever seemed like I was losing myself. He always knew how to talk me down. “You better not screw this up with Joanie,” he’d say. He knew that I’d lucked out with her, and he knew how quickly I could ruin it. His was the only voice that anchored me in sanity. Over the past couple of days, Joanie could see that I was spiralling out of control. She called Dudley and asked him to come and intervene. He knew things were getting dangerous, but nothing could have prepared him for this. I dialled his number.

  “I just want to say goodbye,” I said, and I told him about the gun in my hand.

  Rick begged me to wait. He said he’d be there in a day and made me promise to wait for him to get there. He was the assistant general manager of the Chicago Blackhawks at the time. That’s not the kind of job that gives you time off to go hug a buddy who’s feeling down, but Duds got on the first flight he could—and he hates flying. He drives pretty much everywhere.