The first weekend in October, we had a big party at our place. A bunch of friends came over, and I drank through the whole thing. It was messy. Predictably, later that night, I was irate. I picked another stupid fight with Joanie.
“You’re only with me because I played hockey,” I said, which was absurd—she’d never even seen me play. “You don’t really love me.”
The following Monday, October 6, 2008, Joanie left our house after we got in a huge fight. It was almost exactly a year since Dudley had come and saved my life and I wound up in the state loony bin. Neither of us can remember exactly what it was about. I was drunk again. Things were escalating, and I was out of control. Joanie was afraid. She thought that I’d calm down if she left, so she checked into the Carson Valley Inn. The next day at noon, Joanie went to a meeting of Al-Anon, the support group for family members of alcoholics. When it was over, she came home to check on me. I wasn’t answering her phone calls.
It was two-thirty in the afternoon. The sky was overcast. She walked in the door and found my phones, which were switched off. She went out the back sliding doors and called for me—I didn’t answer. She walked up and around the side of the tack shed and saw me sitting there.
I wasn’t right. I hadn’t stopped drinking since she left. Hadn’t slept. I was exhausted. My head was spinning. I was in blue jeans and shirtless. She wore a tie-dyed pink top and pants from her skating lessons.
I sat next to the tack shed, facing the mountains. She saw the gun lying on a wooden table beside me.
“Where were you?” she asked. “What are you doing out here?”
“I’m looking for rabbits,” I said.
I was trembling. My face was red and sweating. The rage inside my head was full-strength. It was screaming. I couldn’t shut it off.
“I can’t stand being in my head,” I said.
“What are we going to do about this?” she said.
I wasn’t in control anymore. The monster inside me had taken over. I could feel my anger towards her, but I knew it was meant for me. I have to make it stop.
“Is this what you want?” I yelled.
“What?” She didn’t understand.
“I can’t do it anymore,” I said. “I can’t turn my head off. This is all I can think about. I can’t live inside my head anymore.”
I picked the gun up and pushed the barrel against my chin. It was like you see in the movies—on an angle to the back, towards my throat. She didn’t have time to stop me. She didn’t have time to scream.
I pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped through my chin and tore towards my brain.
27
I Did
THERE WERE NO FLASHBACKS. I DIDN’T RETURN TO THOSE COLD nights spent carving out dreams on the outdoor rink back of Elmwood Drive. There were no visions of Christmas mornings, no Saturday nights watching hockey around the television, no boxing matches in our old backyard. There were no smashed windows or broken vows. I didn’t see my first NHL game or the one that sliced me open and drained my blood like sand in an hourglass, counting down to the end. There was just red darkness and the chaos I couldn’t kill.
I opened my eyes and saw Joanie’s screaming face. I put my hand on my chin and felt the blood between my fingers, falling faster and faster to the dirt. I stood there as the blood made red rivers down my chest. I bled like a stuck pig.
“See, Joanie?” I coughed. My mouth was numb. “Is that what you want?” Blood fell from my mouth and nose as I spoke. “Look what you made me do!”
My words slurred. I couldn’t move the left side of my face.
Joanie was hysterical, fumbling with her phone as she tried to call for help. I started to walk away, waiting to die—pacing back and forth, trying to hold in the blood. Waiting to die, knowing it was coming. I went into the tack room and then walked out. Sat down and then got up. I went over to the barn, found a towel and pushed it under my chin, letting it absorb the blood. It was heavy and wet. I sat down, I got up, I stumbled back down. My eyes rolled back in my head.
Joanie was on the phone, yelling and screaming. “There’s been an accident! My husband’s been shot!”
“Where is the gun now?” the 911 operator asked Joanie. “You need to get it away from him.”
She grabbed it and threw it as far as she could.
“I can fix this!” I yelled. “I can fix this. We don’t need the cops.” I found my shirt in the truck and put it on. The blood kept coming as I sat down and pushed the towel against my chin, trying to make it stop.
Joanie was yelling into the phone. “You guys need to get here! You need to be here!”
“Get off the phone—I can handle this!” I yelled. “I can fix this. I can stitch myself up.” I didn’t want the world to see me bleeding out again. It was a mistake, and I knew it then. It was just a mistake and I could fix it without the world knowing and seeing what I’d done. I think I was scared, like a wounded animal trying to escape a hunter. But I was also the triggerman.
The towel was soaked in blood. Everything felt light and I stumbled forward as I sat, but I caught myself. Joanie grabbed me. I could hear the sirens coming down the road.
The cops squealed into our yard and came out with their guns drawn, looking at Joanie as though she’d been the one who shot me. Five of them looked like they were ready to shoot. I was pacing around now, slumping occasionally—dizzy and fighting to stay conscious.
Joanie sat next to me as they yelled at her to move away. She refused. The cops kept yelling, “Ma’am, you need to move! Ma’am, you need to move!”
“No!” She put her arms around me, worried that the cops would try to finish the job.
“Fuck off,” I coughed at them. “Mind your own business.”
My dogs, Bob and Boon, sat next to me, leaning against my legs. The cops didn’t know what to do. They kept yelling at Joanie to move, but she wouldn’t. The dogs stayed put.
I stood up and starting walking to show the cops I could.
“Don’t call an ambulance,” I said. “I can fix this.”
But the bleeding wouldn’t stop. It came out of my mouth and the hole the bullet left in my chin. Part of my tongue and several of my teeth were gone. I could feel the hole in the roof of my mouth. The bullet was buried in my skull. I was certain I would die.
The ambulance roared in moments later. With the paramedics there, the cops backed away. I kept saying I was fine. “I can fix it. I don’t need to get in the ambulance.”
Joanie kept trying to help me. One of the cops was nice to her. “You need to listen to them,” he said. He kept the other cops away. They seemed to think that Joanie had done it.
Her phone rang. A neighbour was listening to the police scanners. “Is everything okay, Joanie? Do you need me to come over?” she asked. Word rolled like a wave across Gardnerville. Joanie begged me to get into the ambulance. It was only going to get worse. Damn it—I let them take me.
The hospital was seven miles away. They rushed me in, all these goddamn people staring at me, getting involved in my business. I just wanted to run away and die. The doctors said they needed to airlift me to Reno. A helicopter landed on the pad out front. “Look, I’m fine. I don’t need to go.” I couldn’t let them just carry me off. You get up and keep moving, I thought. They wheeled me out to the helicopter.
“I’m not getting in that thing. No way.”
Joanie was still at the house, being questioned by the police. They wouldn’t let her leave. I’d warned her not to tell them the truth—everything we had would be gone if she told them the truth. She told them it was a hunting accident. “He was cleaning his gun and it just went off.” They didn’t believe her.
It seemed like everyone else in town was at the hospital. You could almost feel that wave sweep across the town. “Clint’s been shot … Clint’s been shot … Clint’s been shot …” There were at least thirty people there, staring at me with their faces of panicked horror. My third wife was there—she didn’t live far from us, and we’d remained clos
e after our divorce. Waco and Dave were there, too. Even Brian Peck was there—we’d hardly said a word to each other in months. I was on the stretcher, yelling at the nurses who were trying to sedate me, flailing like a shot cow in a slaughterhouse. Might as well slice open my neck and get it over with. Brian put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me down.
“Clint, you need to let them get you on this helicopter.”
“Screw that,” I said. “Just give me a Band-Aid.”
Waco stood beside Brian, tears in both their eyes. “You’ve got to get on the chopper, man. You’ve got to.”
Just give me a Band-Aid and let me finish this game.
Joanie arrived at the last minute. They strapped my arms and legs to the board. “Give him a lot of meds,” Brian told one of the doctors. “Sedate him good. Because if he wakes up mid-flight, he’ll take that helicopter down.”
A numbness fell over me. I don’t know how they managed to get that needle in, but it hit me fast and hard. I couldn’t thrash, I couldn’t fight, I couldn’t yell. The rage stopped spinning. I closed my eyes and flew away.
28
The Damage Done
A FRIEND DROVE JOANIE TO RENO, ABOUT AN HOUR NORTH OF the house. She didn’t know if I was dead or alive. All she knew was that, after the gun went off, the bullet went into my head and never came out. Anything could happen, and it probably wasn’t good.
When she arrived, a doctor explained that there was little they could tell her, other than that I was still alive. And that she should go home and get some clothes, because it was going to be a while. The surgeons didn’t know how much damage had occurred. They couldn’t start surgery until X-rays revealed whether there was already swelling in my brain. If there was, surgery would have to wait. Joanie was told, very calmly, “We’re not going to be able to get back to you for about another two to three hours.”
The bullet had gone through the bottom of my chin, towards the back and left part of my mouth. It ricocheted off my left molars, went through part of my tongue and ripped through the right upper palate, through my sinus, close to my right eye. It stopped just millimetres from my brain. The X-rays showed little swelling, so the surgery went ahead. But removing the bullet was too risky. It remained lodged in my forehead.
I was out of surgery by the time Joanie got back from our ranch. They said I was doing fine. There wasn’t any serious damage, other than the hole in the roof of my mouth. After surgery, a doctor told Joanie it looked as though I would survive. They needed to keep me unconscious for a while because they were still worried about possible swelling in my head, especially with the bullet still inside. My system needed to get rid of all the alcohol and the cocktail of prescription drugs I’d been taking. The doctor told Joanie the medication I was on shouldn’t have been mixed together and that the dosages I’d been told to take by that pill-pushing doctor I’d seen after being in the state institution were crazy. What we thought would make me better had made things worse.
Before letting her into my part of the ICU, a nurse warned Joanie, “What you’re going to see isn’t good.”
I wasn’t in a private room; my bed was at the end of a large, open area, curtained off for privacy. It was kind of like a cul-de-sac, and I was in the first one on the right. The room was royal blue and white. The sheets were light blue on top with white stripes underneath. There were no windows.
I was unconscious, propped up with a brace around my neck. There was a breathing tube down my throat. Monitors beeped all around me. They let Joanie pull up some chairs, so she could make a bed to sleep on at night. It wasn’t comfortable. It was awful for her. But they brought her blankets from the dryer. Joanie figured out where to get food and find a bathroom. Otherwise, she stayed by my side.
Later, everyone was gone. It was just me, unconscious, and the woman I’d blamed for putting me there. She was alone and scared. She tried to tell herself this wasn’t her fault, but she couldn’t stop believing that it was. Joanie had been trying to help, trying to save us, and now she sat there crying because she couldn’t.
A police officer called Joanie and told her his report was done, and if she stood by her story that the shooting had been an accident, I would be able to leave at any time. As a suicide attempt, I wouldn’t be let go. So she had the officers change their report to say that I had tried to kill myself. She knew I wouldn’t get help if I could walk my own ass out of the hospital. If I was going to get the support I actually needed, it would have to be against my will.
With that decision, Joanie brought me back to life.
I was in and out of consciousness for a week. Joanie’s sister came to be with her the day after the shooting. My mother arrived shortly after. I woke up once and the nurse asked me if I knew where I was.
“Buffalo,” I said.
“No, Clint. You’re in Reno,” the nurse said. “You shot yourself.”
I’d pass back out and wake up again a little while later. Every time they asked me where I was, it was the same hazy reply: Buffalo … Buffalo … Buffalo …
With all the sedatives, I was still confused about where I was and what had happened. But when the nurse asked me about Joanie, I kept saying the same thing: “I love my wife.” A doctor told Joanie that that was my true personality. When people are put under sedation, he said, their true personality comes out. A lot of people that seem mean and ornery are really just mean and ornery. But I was just a nice cowboy, the doctor told her.
They kept trying to tell me that I had shot myself. The nurse told Joanie I needed to know right away why I was there so that I could properly process the trauma.
“Clint, do you understand that you shot yourself?” she kept asking. Eventually, I nodded that yes, I understood.
The nurse explained what all the machines attached to me were for.
“You have a hole in the roof of your mouth,” she said. “We’re going to give you something to drink, but we’re going to thicken it up. It will have a weird texture.” They had to thicken anything that could pass up through my mouth and into my nose. It was all very matter of fact. Joanie just stayed in the background.
When my mother came to see me, we both broke down. Here I was with a bullet in my head, still breathing. The woman who’d given me life and helped me fight through it—here she was, standing over me, in tears. And I knew it then.
I took her hand. “I’m here for a reason,” I said. “I must be.”
The news spread quickly, and reporters kept calling and trying to get into the hospital to find me. It got so bad that the hospital asked if they could officially discharge me but keep me at the hospital under the alias Roger Gordon. One woman called our home phone and Joanie’s cell phone, claiming she was my aunt, had heard about the accident and wanted to know where I was being taken care of. Joanie told her she would call her back. She spoke to my mom, who confirmed I had no aunt by that name. It was another reporter. Next, the press somehow found out about Roger Gordon and started to hound the hospital again. We switched my name to Karl, because I loved the character Billy Bob Thornton played in the movie Sling Blade.
I was almost paralyzed on the right side of my face for the first little while. Between the hole in the roof of my mouth and the messed-up state of my tongue, I had a speech impediment. Everything I ate came up through my nose. I had a lot of macaroni and cheese—it was the only solid food I could eat. It was just terrible—terrible and painful.
The doctor said it was incredible that I was alive, that I could see and that I could function. “It just missed your eye. You have full vision,” he said. “You didn’t destroy your sinus cavity. It’ll be hard to talk properly for quite some time, but eventually that will go away.”
It was a goddamn miracle. There was a brief moment of joy. The blade, the pills, the bullet—nothing could take me down. I’m the toughest motherfucker I know. Then the reality hit—I’ve really messed up this life of mine. I’d be in the ICU for a week. But it was going to take a lot more time to fix a world I’
d blown to pieces.
A man only has so many chances. I’d make the most of it this time. I spoke to my son, Jed, on the phone back in Calgary, and my daughter Kelli called me from Australia. Dallyn came in later that week. It broke my heart to have her see me like this, but her beautiful face was an inspiration.
Joanie called Rick Dudley. Days earlier, he had heard the news and thought he’d be making arrangements to attend a funeral.
My brother, Garth, called the NHL Players’ Association to get help for me. They took care of everything. Andrew Galloway from the NHLPA told Joanie I had to go to rehab. The association would pay for it, but I had to do everything they said—for however long it took, whether it was thirty days, sixty, or more.
Joanie told me what was happening—that I was going straight to rehab, whether I wanted to or not. There was no choice. The NHLPA had made it clear. And Joanie said we were through if I didn’t agree to take the help they were providing.
I wanted to go home. My mother and I tried to talk Joanie and the doctors into at least letting me go home before sending me to rehab.
“You’re not coming home,” Joanie said. “I’m sorry.”
I wouldn’t admit that it was a suicide attempt—but it didn’t matter, because the police report said it was. Still, I was sure that if the Blue Jackets found out what I’d done, they’d fire me. So I stuck to my story—I was shooting rabbits; it was an accident.
My fears were unfounded. Scott Howson, the Blue Jackets’ general manager, was very supportive. I don’t think he really bought my story about the rabbits. I don’t think anyone really did. He flew in from California to visit me the last day I was in the ICU.
“I’m going to be there for the opening game,” I told him.
“Clint, you just need to take care of yourself. Do what the doctors say and your job will be waiting for you when you get back.”
Okay, fine, I thought. Thirty days and I’m out of here.
They shipped me to rehab as soon as my face was surgically repaired and it was certain I was out of danger. It would take a while for my mouth to heal, but there was no permanent damage. The NHLPA sent a driver to pick me up at the Reno hospital and cart my sorry ass to a rehab facility just outside of San Francisco.
The Crazy Game Page 20