Playing Hurt

by John Saunders

  After our meager stash ran out, we stumbled on a way to get more, for nothing. When classmates asked us for pot, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize we could sell it to them and smoke the profits—never mind that risked being arrested by the police or roughed up by competitive dealers.

  We started small. We calculated that if we could get just twelve people to give us ten bucks each, we could get high for free. To get things started, we even threw in a little extra for our first customers. Our plan worked—maybe too well. Our classmates soon beat a path to our lockers, which angered the professional dealers in our town. We went ahead anyway, and it wasn’t long before we were taking in more money than we could ever spend smoking pot.

  We each had a hundred dollars burning holes in our wallets, making us feel like high rollers. I bought new clothes, posters, and records. Even better, at sixteen I started putting some food on my family’s table. Mom never asked where the money came from. If anything, she seemed pleased, maybe even impressed. Occasionally she asked me for a few dollars “to pay a bill.” On more than one occasion I opened the drawer where I stashed my pot and proceeds and found I was short a few bucks. It would have been hard for someone to find the cash and not see the stash.

  I never said anything to her, and she never asked. I was making good money, smoking a lot of pot, and my mom was leaving me alone. Why rock the boat? I had a good thing going, and it didn’t make sense to spoil it over a few missing bucks.

  The drug business was good, but having gotten a taste of easy money, we wanted more. My friends and I started scheming ways to bring in more cash, although we also did a few dumb things, I’m afraid, just for the thrill of it. We hit a new low when we robbed a classmate’s house and sold his father’s musical instruments to a guy in Montreal who gave us fifty cents on the dollar.

  We also organized a system to steal record albums from the local department store—possibly the stupidest item you could pick, given its unwieldy shape—and eventually we were caught. Although the store’s security cop didn’t call the police, he told our parents. My mother slapped me and told me to stop hanging out with these kids, blaming them more than me.

  But if I was proud of the idea that I was raising myself, I was doing a very poor job of it.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Drug Business

  WE WISELY GOT OUT OF THE B&E BUSINESS, AND WE stopped stealing after security broke our “album ring,” but we continued selling pot, which was more dangerous. We’d started out just wanting to get high for free, but we quickly became minor league drug dealers. We were making so much money that we couldn’t help but wonder how much more we could make if we “turned pro.”

  What we should have been wondering was who knew what we were up to and how long it would take before someone caught us—or attacked us. Classmates who liked getting high knew they could get it from us. Classmates who didn’t get high told their parents and teachers about us. Before long it seemed like everyone knew what we were up to. Ignoring these signs, we charged full speed ahead.

  In January of 1970, about a month before my sixteenth birthday, Gerry, Vincent, and I hitchhiked to Montreal, where we met with a dealer named Claude. He sold us joints made of hash and tobacco, which proved to be a big hit with our friends. After a few more successful deals he introduced us to LSD, but it wasn’t very lucrative because our classmates were scared of it. We found bigger profits selling mescaline, a natural herb that functions much like LSD. As an organic drug, mescaline had greater appeal to our more cautious classmates, and it sold like hotcakes. The problem was that Claude couldn’t get his hands on as much mescaline as we needed. But once our classmates tried mescaline, it wasn’t hard to convince them that its artificial cousin, LSD, was safe. We sold plenty after that.

  I was not above dropping acid at the start of the school day and soaring through my classes high as a kite. Why not? Thanks to my shoulder injury, my hockey career was on hold anyway. In tenth and eleventh grade I probably took more than two hundred acid trips.

  LSD fulfilled my daredevil instincts, gave me a cheap thrill, and dulled the pain of depression. Now, to be clear: I was responsible for my decisions, and suffering from depression doesn’t make taking drugs right, or even smart. The last thing a depressed person needs is a drug problem on top of his other problems. But tell that to a sixteen-year-old.

  And sure enough, I almost got into real trouble with the police when they decided to inspect my school locker. Luckily I’d been tipped off, and I moved my stash just in time. When they asked to inspect my locker, I couldn’t have been more cooperative—“Why, sure, officer! Why do you ask?”—which probably irritated them even more. But they found nothing.

  We also had a close call with some friends of Claude’s who happened to possess a very long knife they were not afraid to wave under our noses. If any of these situations had gone wrong, I might be in jail, or dead. I certainly wouldn’t be on ESPN. The fact is that I was pretty damn lucky. And I was even luckier when you consider that I never got into any car accidents on drugs or tried to jump out of a window, which many have.

  But no depressed person can wipe out their problems with alcohol or drugs. These substances just kick your problems down the road, but they resurface, again and again, and they come back stronger each time.

  Throughout my shoulder recovery Jacques Demers stuck with me, although I’m sure he didn’t know my whole story, or even half of it. Perhaps he saw himself in me, a kid who needed someone to believe in him.

  As soon as I returned to the ice I blew out my left shoulder again during a hitting drill designed to toughen us up. Mr. Bougee wanted to cut me from the squad because he didn’t want to save a spot for a defenseman in rehab. Fortunately Jacques stood up for me and wouldn’t let him cut me. But even after my shoulder had healed well enough that I could play, Mr. Bougee kept delaying my return. When it became clear that Mr. Bougee was holding me up, I went to Jacques and explained that hockey was probably my only way to get to college.

  Jacques was sympathetic, but his hands were tied, so he told me to go to another team, La Prairie, ten miles away but in the same league. I met with their GM, who said, “You look great. Can you play Monday night?”

  “Sure!”

  But when Monday night came, the paperwork still hadn’t been finished. I missed that game, then another game, then another. A couple of weeks later, when the season ended, I’d never gotten in a game for La Prairie or Jacques’s team, Les Aisles. I ended up playing for a local travel team, a crucial notch below Juniors, so no scouts watched us. At the end of the season I ran into La Prairie’s coach, who explained why they couldn’t play me: Mr. Bougee wouldn’t release me from Les Aisles—and he wouldn’t let me play for Jacques either.

  In 1973 the Chicago Cougars, one of the brand-new World Hockey Association teams, asked Jacques to become their director of player personnel. Before he accepted, he had a lot of questions about working and living in the United States. He knew our dad spent most of his time working in Ohio, so he asked Bernie and me about the opportunity, which we encouraged him to take.

  When he accepted, Bernie and I walked around the corner to his house to give him a pair of cufflinks. We loved him and missed him immediately. But we would both see him again.

  CHAPTER 9

  Hurting Myself

  SELF-MUTILATION IS USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH TEENAGE girls. The most common method is to use an old-fashioned razor blade to make small cuts on the arms or thighs, just deep enough for blood to surface.

  One night, feeling despondent, I grabbed a wire hanger from my closet and beat it against my legs as hard as I could, first with my pants on, then eventually on my bare legs. During gym class the next day I couldn’t hide the damage I’d done. When the boys gawked at the deep welts on my thighs, I told them, “We had a rough game of street hockey last night.”

  After I returned home that day I went into my room and did it again, whipping my legs with the hanger until the skin welled up wit
h blood. I flinched as each blow sent a stinging shot straight through my thighs. When I felt I’d finally given myself my appropriate punishment—for what, who knows?—I stopped and sighed, as if I’d finally scratched a hard-to-reach itch.

  I don’t know why I started hurting myself. Some experts say people who hurt themselves are deprived of feeling, so feeling pain is better than feeling nothing. Others say it’s an act of anger turned inward. Or maybe I was picking up where my father had left off, punishing myself when he was not there to do the job himself.

  When Dad was around, life was never dull. One night, when he was at home, I rode my bike about five miles to visit a friend, Susan, the daughter of my dad’s best friend. I planned to hang out with her until about ten and then be home for my eleven o’clock curfew. Now, curfew was rarely enforced when our father wasn’t home, but when he was, things were different.

  Susan and I weren’t interested in each other romantically. We just liked talking with each other. Before we knew it, time had flown by, and it was 11:30, but I thought it would be okay with Dad because her parents could confirm that I’d been at their house the whole time. Nonetheless, I pedaled home as fast as I could. Halfway there I spotted my mother’s station wagon crawling around a turn. Then it hit me: she wouldn’t be going out when my father was home. As the car pulled up alongside me, the driver’s door flew open and my father jumped out.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  He yanked me by my collar, pulled me off the bike, and threw me to the pavement. I instinctively covered my face. He was madder than I’d ever seen him, kicking me hard in the side.

  “You stupid no-good waste! You’ve got all this talent, and all you do is screw around. If that’s what you want, then you’ll get it, all right! I’ll be happy to help you.”

  Our car shielded him from onlookers. He must have kicked me six or seven times before I jumped up and cocked my fist as if I was going to fight back, but that didn’t stop him. He threw me up against the car and punched me twice on the side of my head, then ordered me to get in the car while he loaded my bike in the back.

  I was obviously defeated, but he wasn’t finished. Like a lot of black guys in the early seventies, I had a huge Afro. Everyone who wanted to be a rebel wore their hair big.

  “Tomorrow morning you’re going to get a goddamn haircut,” he told me.

  That bothered me more than the beating. My Afro was part of my identity, and I dreaded the comments I’d get at school when my friends saw I’d shaved it. When we got home he went upstairs to bed. I sat at the kitchen table, tears rolling down my face.

  As usual, I blamed myself: Why do you make him do this to you? All you had to do was make a phone call, and none of this would’ve happened. Then I heard someone coming down the stairs. As I brushed away my tears, my father sat down at the table across from me.

  I spoke first, blurting out, “I’m sorry.”

  “John, you think I like to beat you? I just want you to be all you can be, and you can’t do that without discipline. You need to learn you can’t do whatever the hell you want.”

  I wanted to say, “I do whatever I want when you’re not here,” but I’d had enough for the night, so I just listened.

  “I don’t want to be away from you guys,” he said. “I’m just making the best life I can for you.”

  This statement ignored the fact that we seemed to have much less money, not more, since he’d basically moved to Ohio. I had learned to fear my father, but I still held tightly to the memories of the long afternoons this man spent teaching me the art of pitching a perfect curve ball or how to make the proper cut down the field with a football tucked against my chest. That father had to be in there somewhere.

  “You can keep your hair,” he said, then he rose from the table and went to bed. That was it.

  I still wasn’t tired, so I went to my room and played a Led Zeppelin album at a very low volume. I grabbed a hanger from the closet, but then a new idea came to me. I grabbed a pack of matches, lit the entire pack, and held the flames to the hanger until the matches burned down to my fingers. Then I pressed the hot wire into the bare skin of my shin.

  The pain was excruciating, but I held it there until the wire cooled. As I removed it, flesh fell from my shin. I could see into the wound. It reminded me of burning my legs with the explosives.

  I lay down on my bed.

  I feel so alive now. The more I’m able to take, the stronger I become.

  I felt some peace. At least I was in control of the pain instead of it controlling me.

  A few weeks later, on a spring afternoon, I was walking home from school again when it looked like we were having a yard sale. Our family’s possessions had been piled by the curb: our living room sofa, our lamps, our dishes, our coffee pot, all my clothes and hockey jerseys, even my little sister’s stuffed animals.

  My mom and I had barely spoken in months, but when I saw her sitting on the curb with her head in her hands, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her again. When she looked up, her eyes said it all.

  The landlord had changed all the locks. On the front door he’d hung a sign that read, “EVICTION NOTICE.” We’d spent six years in that house, the most time we’d ever lived in one place.

  “Your father hasn’t paid the rent for six months,” she told me. “Take a good look around,” she said, waving her hand in the air. “Because you’ll do this to your family someday. You’re just like your father.”

  That was her way to cut me the deepest, because she knew it was my worst fear—and there was some truth to it. I was already developing my dad’s two worst traits—violence and absence. If I was going to avoid repeating his mistakes, I felt I needed to get out of Chateauguay, ironically enough, and get a fresh start.

  PART TWO

  Trying to Build a Better Life

  CHAPTER 10

  Moving Out, Moving On, Moving Back

  WITH HIGH SCHOOL WINDING DOWN I HAD TO MAKE A big decision. Thanks to my banged-up shoulders, my drug use, and a couple of lost seasons, my hockey prospects had dropped considerably. I’d visited the University of Michigan, but the feelers I’d previously received from Dartmouth, Princeton, and Providence College had all dried up.

  My dad told me he knew someone at Indiana University, where they were planning to upgrade their hockey program from club to varsity status. Without any better offers, I decided to go to Indiana. To our dad’s credit, he knew the value of a college degree and pushed Bernie and me to use hockey to get an education. He even promised to pay a good chunk of my expenses.

  The summer between high school and college I got a job collecting night crawlers just outside Chateauguay. They called us “worm farmers,” which was a nice way to say, “worm pickers.” At dusk I strapped on a miner’s hardhat and aimed my headlight into the dark leaves. One by one I plucked the worms from their holes with my hands and collected them in cartons the size of take-out boxes. For each box of writhing worms the boss gave me 75 cents, Canadian. That was enough to convince me it was time to get a college education.

  At night I played in a competitive summer hockey league to get ready—the first real hockey I’d played in a couple of years. When Jacques Demers, who had returned to do some scouting for his new team, the Chicago Cougars, saw me at the rink, he called me over. “You’re playing de best I’ve seen you play!”

  Near the end of the season the family of one of my high school friends, Jerry Findlay, moved to Toronto. Because I was still eager to get out of our apartment whenever I could, I jumped at Jerry’s invitation to bike the entire 350 miles from Montreal to Toronto. We did it in three and a half days, sleeping in a tiny tent each night on the side of the road. I was in better shape than I’d been in years.

  When I returned to Montreal I discovered we had been evicted once again. My mother had found another studio apartment for her, Bernie, Gail, and now me for a few weeks. When I entered the place I saw a tiny room filled with boxes and a couple of mattresses piled on the f
loor. I was not eager to stay long.

  Although Bernie and I could fight like dogs, we always had a tight bond, and Gail was our baby. Because our dad left for Ohio when she was only five or six, she barely knew him, which was both good and bad. I tried to be the understanding older brother who offered sage advice—“Do as I say, not as I do!”—and a shoulder to cry on.

  Because Bernie was around a lot more than I was, he took it upon himself to keep bad guys away from her—and he was good at it. Gail prayed that her dates would pick her up when Bernie wasn’t home because he could scare her dates so much that the date sometimes ended before it started. I knew as long as Bernie was living under the same roof as Gail, she was safe.

  Right before I left for Indiana, the first week of August 1973, the University of Michigan’s new head hockey coach, Dan Farrell, called me at home. How he found me after all our moves, I have no idea. When I picked up the phone I was surprised to be talking to Michigan’s head coach—and even more surprised by what he said.

  “Hi John. This is Dan Farrell at Michigan. I just wanted to wish you good luck this year. And if you ever change your mind and want to attend Michigan, we’d love to have you.”

  My heart went cold. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, frankly, I just don’t understand why you’d turn us down for a school that doesn’t even have a true varsity program.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  “Your father called me last week and told us you’re going to Indiana.”