When we pulled out of the hospital, the driver said, “You probably don’t remember me.”
“What? No.”
“I recognized you right away. I used to live in Saskatchewan. I was an alcoholic. You came to a meeting once in Regina.”
There was too much going on—I had a hole in my chin and in the roof of my mouth, there was a bullet in my head and I was about to go away for being crazy. I couldn’t process what he was saying.
“You were in Regina. At the AA meeting.”
Holy shit.
He was a big guy, an ex-football player who played some games in the Canadian Football League. He told me he had been at that first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting I attended, and he remembered me because I’d played in the NHL. It was unbelievable. I can’t remember his name anymore, but he drove me four hours from Reno to San Francisco. I was worried about so much at the time—my relationship with Joanie, my job with the Blue Jackets—but he helped put me at ease. I don’t know if he worked for the rehab centre or the NHLPA, but his job was to drive people like me into the next stage of recovery. It was a long ride. I could have bailed at any time, but he just talked and listened and took me where I needed to go.
And he didn’t just drive me there, he got me there—guided me there. A lot of things were coming together all of a sudden. I knew I was alive for a reason. I knew that I had gone to an AA meeting in Regina all those years ago for a reason. Faced with circumstances like these, it was hard to argue with divine intervention.
While I was on my way to San Francisco with my pseudo–guardian angel, Joanie went back to the ranch. It had been two weeks since she’d collected her clothes and moved into the ICU with me. She could still hear the chilling echoes of that violent afternoon. Her pink tie-dyed shirt was still stained with blood. She went out back to feed the horses, walking past the tack shed where I’d shot myself in front of her. Close to that terrible place, she stopped. There was no more blood. The rain or wind must have washed the rusty dust away. Joanie looked down by her feet, and a small white pebble caught her eye. She knelt down and looked closer.
My tooth.
The bullet had blown it right out of my mouth. It was completely intact. The sight of it didn’t disturb her—she was just bewildered. What are the chances? she thought. Everything was blown to shit, but the pieces held together. A bullet ripped through my head, stopping mere millimetres from my brain. No permanent problems. Just pieces that needed to be put back together. Maybe, she thought. Maybe everything can be whole again.
Joanie picked up the tooth and turned it over in her fingers, brushing off the dirt. She walked back to the house, into our room, and opened a jewellery case she kept on our dresser. She hid it deep in the bottom and closed the lid.
29
Alcatraz
THE REHAB FACILITY WAS ON A HILL, SURROUNDED BY ART DECO homes with stunning views of San Francisco Bay. Along with the stunning sights came a pricey zip code—every driveway had a Porsche or two. This might have been somebody’s paradise, but it was my hell. Trust me, rehab is always much nicer in the promo pictures.
From the window, I saw the dots of white sails drifting beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and along the shoreline. I watched them move slowly as the sun dropped over the city towards the sea. A large brown island pushed up in the middle of it all—this ugly piece of unwanted rock, stuck square in the middle of this picture of perfect happiness.
Alcatraz.
My “cell” was simple—a bed, a desk, some chairs. I marked off time served on a calendar on the wall. Thirty days to freedom. Twenty-nine … Twenty-eight …
The living quarters were in an old hotel. I had my own room, right across from the counsellors’ and nurses’ area. I had my own space when I arrived, which I thought was a privilege but turned out to be policy. I was a new arrival going through detox and on constant suicide watch. I was in that room for a month, which was supposed to be the length of a rehab “sentence.” What a joke. I actually believed them. In reality, I was about to become the longest-serving patient the facility ever had.
There were no gates or guards or anything like that. I wasn’t behind bars. There was no law that kept me there. Technically, I was free to leave at any time, but they took away my cash and credit cards. I thought, I might as well swim with the sharks across San Francisco Bay. In my mind I was a man serving time, held against my will by a screwed-up system and a wife that wanted to put me away. Joanie could get me out of there, I thought. She just needs to say the word and I’m gone. But she wants to see me bleed.
I was a miserable prick. The first couple of weeks just drove me crazy. I wanted to get back to my job. Sure, I had shot myself, but I had obviously learned from my mistake. I messed up. Wasn’t going to do that again. Okay, I get it. Now let me get back and get rolling. I didn’t think I should be there. I didn’t want to be there.
Everything irritated me. Everyone pissed me off. I was just a mean bastard. I scared everyone. I grew a beard that made me look kind of crazy. Just let it grow out, like I’d completely given up on shaving. You had to check out a razor every time you wanted to shave. It was just a pain in the ass.
It didn’t take long for me to snap. A few days, tops. There was this one young guy who wouldn’t stop talking. He always had something loud and obnoxious to say. He was like a goddamn mosquito buzzing around my ear. One afternoon, all the patients hung out in this common area, and this guy went off on one of his loud, annoying rants again. I absolutely lost it on him.
“You! Shut the hell up!” I shouted. “If you don’t shut up, I’m going to throw you out that fucking window.”
Everyone stopped and looked at me as if I’d shot the man. The room fell totally silent. The kid didn’t say another word. Later, I found out he was on some kind of drug that was causing him to talk all the time. I felt bad about that. He ended up being a friend of mine.
I tried to escape after just a few days. I was mad at Joanie. I’d gotten really depressed and anxious. I’m done with this shit, I told myself. I packed my bags and marched out the door, but they managed to talk me out of it. They’d have to do that quite a few times before my time there was done.
That first week, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV, and it was lights out by 10 P.M. There were no TVs in the rooms, so it was impossible to cheat the system. We weren’t allowed cell phones—they search your bags and everything—but they didn’t know I had two: a personal phone and another one issued by the Columbus Blue Jackets. I turned one in and hid the other. The scam didn’t last long, though. I kept calling Joanie and leaving messages when she wouldn’t answer. “You put me in a prison,” I said. “I’m here because of you. I’m going to lose my job because of you.” Joanie called the centre and ratted me out. They told her they had taken my cell phone already. She said, “No, you have one of his phones.” She told them she’d call it until it rang enough for them to find it. She did, and they made me hand it over.
It was almost two weeks before they actually allowed me to make a sanctioned phone call. I wasn’t even allowed to call my own mother. Screw them and their rules. I managed to get my hands on contraband cell phones that the other patients circulated (like the old inmates in Alcatraz, we had an underground economy). Through those first couple weeks, when it got dark, I’d climb these stairs next to the centre that led up to the road behind the buildings, and I’d sit on the steps and call my mom. If I couldn’t get a cell phone, I’d go to a pay phone and call collect. She’d listen to me weep and tell me everything would be okay. She was the only person in the world that I believed was on my side. My entire life, she’d just loved and protected me. I needed her.
I told my mom it was all Joanie’s fault. I told her Joanie was the only person who could get me out of there. “She’s the devil shoving daggers into me,” I said. “She won’t help me.” Part of the problem was that I still really loved Joanie, even though I thought she was being the cruellest person in the world. I needed to fix things by being home.
If I was stuck in rehab, I reasoned, she’d probably just end up leaving me anyway. She didn’t answer my calls because the rehab centre restricted our ability to contact loved ones during the early stages of our treatment.
Joanie came down to visit once a week. She didn’t want me to be alone, even though she couldn’t stay with me. She’d have to get permission to come and take me to dinner down on the swanky waterfront strip. Every time she did, I’d smile and play nice until we got down the hill and out of sight. I was just waiting. As soon as the building was out of earshot, I’d start barking. “You better get me the hell out of here,” I’d say. “I’m going to lose my job because of you. You’re the reason I’m here. You better quit saying stuff. They’re going to keep me in here longer.” It was always the same, and she always bit her lip and put up with it. She never backed down.
I told my mom to call Joanie and try to convince her to set me free. “He can hate me all he wants,” Joanie told her. “If he hates me until the day I die, that’s fine. He’ll be alive.”
My “warden” was Tina, a tough counsellor with attitude. She was younger—in her mid-thirties, maybe—all tatted up with long, black hair. Really pretty, but also really tough. She was responsible for assessing me—working with me one on one, evaluating my progress, stuff like that. At first, I was assigned to a guy I just didn’t connect with. There was no way I was going to tell him shit about my life. I didn’t like him at all, but after a couple weeks, he left rehab and I was reassigned to Tina. We met pretty much every day. At first, I hated her. I know she was doing her job, but Tina called me on my shit, and that was hard to face.
After a few weeks, Tina called Joanie and told her she thought I needed to be in there longer than a month. Joanie asked how long, and Tina recommended keeping me there for three to four months.
“You’re kidding,” Joanie said. “Have you told him?”
“No,” Tina sighed. “We’re going to.”
“Well, be ready.”
The next day, I met with Tina and she told me it looked like I’d have to stay through Christmas. It was early November. I lost my shit. “Screw you,” I said. “I’m out of here.” And I marched up to my room, packed everything up and went for the doors again. “Not a chance. Not a goddamn chance,” I said. “I’m leaving now.”
No one understood how panicked I was. There was a gun against my head and no one seemed to realize. Thirty days and I’m out of here, I thought. I could still save my job and my marriage. But if they made me stay longer than that, it was all over. I’d have nothing. So I packed my bags, put on my black cowboy hat and walked out the front door. I marched down the steep roads that wind down to the bay, dragging my wheeled suitcase behind me.
They sent one of their counsellors after me. He stayed about twenty feet behind me the whole time. I was yelling and screaming at him as I went along this busy street of shops by the water, packed with rich tourists. People looked at me like I was some crazy John Wayne or something. “Quit following me!” I yelled. “I’ll break your neck!” I had no money, no phone. What was I going to do? I was walking around town with a suitcase and a cowboy hat and no money. I kept turning around and yelling at the guy. “Leave me alone! It’s a free world. Go back to your hotel.”
I thought about hitchhiking. It was a four-hour drive over the mountains to get home, and it was tough to find someone heading that way and willing to give a lift to a rehab fugitive. I’d have better luck with Joanie. I found a pay phone and called her collect. She answered. “You better get me a ticket,” I said. “I’m heading to the airport.” The centre had already called her. She said she wouldn’t pay for a ticket and told me to go back to the facility. Then she hung up. Shit.
There was nothing else to do. I had to rethink my plan to get home. When I got back to the facility, they gave me a Breathalyzer test. I’d been walking for about an hour and a half, and they had a guy following me the whole time. They knew I hadn’t had anything to drink. It was just another goddamn indignity.
I was convinced more than ever that Joanie was the only reason I couldn’t get out of that place. I was so angry with her. I told the patients stories—only revealing tiny fractions of the truth—about how badly she had treated me before the gun accident. Tina started to think that Joanie might be part of the problem because of the way I framed everything. And I’d really convinced myself it was true. She wasn’t taking my calls. She wouldn’t listen to my mom. She wouldn’t buy me a ticket home.
Experts working with the NHLPA and the NHL—Dr. David Lewis and Dr. Brian Shaw—counselled Joanie the whole time. I didn’t know she was speaking with them. Like the rehab centre, they also told her not to answer my calls. It was a tough-love approach, and it was hard for her. She was worried sick about me.
I took Joanie’s name off the official “call list” to get back at her for not taking my calls. It meant she was no longer approved to contact me or get updates on my progress from the counsellors. Joanie called Tina several times a day to check in on me, but now reception wouldn’t take her calls. It also meant she couldn’t come visit me at Thanksgiving. That’ll show her.
But even though Joanie couldn’t call in, I kept phoning her. I was still borrowing cell phones snuck in by other patients. When everyone went to sleep, I’d stay up all night, leaving long message after message on her voice mail. “You bitch. You better get me out of here. This is all your fault.” Stuff like that, but often much worse.
Joanie didn’t know what to do. She was hurt that I’d taken her off the call list and worried that she couldn’t check on me. It was mean. I wasn’t thinking about how much she cared about me and how agonizing it was not to be able to know how I was doing. She felt partly responsible for what I had done to myself. I blamed her outright, for starters. But beyond that bit of craziness, she worried that somehow she had driven me to pull the trigger; that life had been wonderful until she showed up and brought out the monster in me. That kind of guilt festers. And now I’d blocked her from calling in, as if she was some kind of crazy stalker I didn’t want to talk to. Of all the things I did to hurt Joanie, this was one of the cruellest.
She didn’t know what to do, so she called Andrew Galloway at the NHLPA, who had arranged for me to go to rehab. He helpfully suggested that the clinic might not be able to give her an update, but she was able to give them an update. It took her a while to figure out how to do it, but Joanie forwarded every message I had sent her to Tina’s office phone one evening. She filled Tina’s voice mailbox right up. When Tina came in the next morning, the light on her phone flashed with evidence. She sat down and listened to every single one. The messages were terrible and abusive. It was embarrassing. Joanie also left a message with all the numbers I had called her from. She probably got five or six people in trouble. It was a disaster. I was busted.
30
Warriors
A LOT OF PEOPLE CAME THROUGH REHAB. SOME OF THEM WERE there for maybe a month, some a lot longer. Eventually, most would say, “Screw it, I’m leaving,” and they’d just check themselves out.
After just a month, it seemed like I’d been there an eternity. I worried constantly that my career would be over. I asked the NHLPA’s contact to tell me whether the Blue Jackets had filled my position, but he never got back to me. I searched the Internet for word that I’d been replaced but couldn’t find anything. It felt like my career had been sabotaged. If I wanted to go back to work, I had to complete the program—and now Tina was making me stay even longer. I was stuck. It seemed like an infinite sentence.
When my first month was over, I was told to pack up and move into a room with another patient. Everyone had a roommate. A lot of people cycled through my life during that time. They’d move you all the time, switching up your roommates. It was always unsettling, but I liked most of my roommates. There were eight of them in the end.
The first didn’t work out. He was this big, fat guy who was in there for drug addiction. I was really careful around him because someon
e had warned me that he was a snitch. We started off as friends, but it didn’t take long for him to rat me out for using another patient’s contraband cell phone to call Joanie. He got us both in trouble. What an asshole.
Unfortunately, he was just one of several miserable people I encountered in rehab. One supervisor made my life a nightmare. He was a drill sergeant. He’d always catch me with chew in my bottom lip and make me spit it out. Damn, I hated that. Talk about withdrawal. There was no chew, and caffeine and sugar were limited. Sure, the food was good and the scenery was nice—but all those shitty rules drove me crazy.
There was a small gym in one of the garages on site. It was always locked and you had to have permission to use it. Being active was one of the ways I dealt with my anxiety, and these assholes wouldn’t even let me lift a weight. Eventually, I found an unlocked window and was able to sneak in and work out without them finding out. The window was up near the top of the garage, so I had to climb up and drop in. They didn’t find out until I told another patient how to do it. He was this big guy who told me about all the steroids he did. He was in rehab for drug addiction. This donkey didn’t cover his tracks—put the weights away, close the damn window, make it look like you weren’t there. They busted us and locked the window. Shit.
Rehab was like jail, but it was also a lot like elementary school. As part of the program, we’d have mandatory group sessions every day. These were particularly annoying. We were assigned to specific groups with about five or six other patients. We’d sit there and bullshit about everything. “How are you feeling? What are you thinking about?” There was always some idiot who’d just babble on and on about themselves. Like anyone actually cared.
The Crazy Game Page 21