ON APRIL 4, 2003, in Chicago, I was still hung over from the night before and my reflexes were slow. I was standing in front of the net and a slapshot came high around the boards. I held up my glove to stop it, and it pinged off the glass, deflecting onto my right cheekbone. I played two more shifts and then went to the dressing room to see the doctor at the end of the period. My cheek did not hurt, so they put a visor on my helmet and I went back out. My eye was swelling and my ear was ringing big time, but I finished the game. After I showered, I looked in the mirror and saw a gargoyle looking back at me. I needed an X-ray, so I called Steph at home. I said, “You gotta come get me to go to the hospital. I think something is seriously wrong with my face.” The X-ray showed my cheekbone was cracked from just underneath my eye to the side of my mouth. I went on an emergency waiting list for surgery. Meanwhile, I was given Vicodin, a highly addictive painkiller. I took a couple because my cheek was starting to kill me, and Steph hijacked the rest. She was a pill-popper. In fact, I got her two or three prescriptions out of it.
They operated on my cheek in Chicago—went in through my right eye socket, reconstructed my cheek and put a metal plate and a screw in my orbital bone just under my eye. I could not fly due to the pressure on my sinuses, so we drove from Chicago to Santa Fe, which is 1,300 miles—giving us more than twenty hours to talk. I just kept saying, “I don’t wanna play hockey anymore. I really don’t wanna play hockey.” Steph said, “What are we going to do?” I said, “Well, we can move back to Santa Fe and put Aleca in school.” There was lots of money left in the bank, about six million. I figured I could play golf every day and we could party a little, and basically retire.
We got there and were all set up, my cheek healed, although if you didn’t know I was a hockey player you would have thought I’d been thrown through a plate-glass window or something. We got Aleca all settled in, and on April 19, 2003, I took Steph out for a celebratory dinner. I got completely annihilated, and when we got home I told her I was going out to find some blow. So I drove from bar to bar, and for the first time ever, I couldn’t find any. I looked all night.
Material things had never meant much to me. Yeah, I liked my cool cars and nice suits, but I was never all about the stuff. But when I had a decorator put together my house in Santa Fe, she helped me commission a beautiful, one-of-a-kind, original desert scene that hung over the mantle in the living room. I just loved that painting. When I looked at it, I got the same restful feeling I had when I first came out to Las Campanas. I got home early that morning, and my painting was on the front step, cut into a million pieces.
Steph and I had been through hell that year. I had been suspended, then there was the Columbus incident and the broken cheekbone—it was a mess, and she’d stood by me. Yet when I didn’t come home that night, she demolished my special painting. What did that say to me? Maybe that painting represented me and my career, a one-of-a-kind thing, and I was blaming her for destroying it, I don’t know, but I absolutely snapped. I went into the house and tore it completely apart. Everything. I ripped the curtains down, kicked every door off the hinges, pulled plates and bowls and shit off the counters and threw them on the tile floor. I was insane.
Steph thought I was going to kill her, so she ran and locked herself in Aleca’s room. I came after her and kicked the door down. Aleca was there, and she was frightened. I will always feel badly about that.
Steph had her cell phone and tried to call 911, but I grabbed it and broke it in half. She ran to the kitchen and picked up the phone and a big butcher knife and called the cops. I smashed the toaster and blender and whatever else was on the counter. Then I tore the phone off the wall, and she ran into the office. When I heard the sirens in the distance, I jumped into my Beemer and drove straight into the desert.
I drove for about ten minutes, so I was a couple of miles from the house. But the land was so flat out there, I could see the lights of the police cars reflecting off the open black sky. I knew they’d catch up to me eventually. I started walking back, and when I got there, they handcuffed me and took me to jail.
I was thrown into the drunk tank, where I passed out. When I woke up and looked around, there were about ten tough-looking Mexican guys staring back. I dropped my head in my hands and thought, “What just happened? What the fuck am I doing here?” I was fingerprinted and had a mug shot taken, then was put back into the cell with my Mexican buddies. By then, it was Friday night. I phoned my golfing buddy Claudie and said, “Claude, man, you gotta bail me out of here. I am going to lose it if I have to stay in here all weekend.”
He said, “Don’t worry, man, Steph is feeling really badly and she has already been over here and we are coming to get you.”
Claude managed to pull some strings to get me out of there. He picked me up and Steph was in the back of the car. I got in still pissed off. Claudie said, “You’re fucking throwing everything away here. What are you doing?” And then Steph piped up. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cut up your picture. I’m so sorry.” And she started to cry. She looked so pathetic and vulnerable. I felt terrible. “How is Aleca?” I asked. Steph said she was okay. “I’m a fuckin’ asshole,” I said.
“You got that right,” Claudie said.
So we kissed and made up and went back to the house and cleaned it up and had things fixed. I drank a few more times and we partied together, but I never lost my temper like that again.
I had one year left on my contract, but on May 1, Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the National Hockey League, agreed to put me in stage three of the program, which meant that as of May 6 I was suspended for six months, and in order to play again I had to enter treatment.
I decided I wanted to play the last year of my contract, so I got everything back on track. The doctors were calling me again, and I was going to meetings and getting ready to go back into treatment. Then one day I was watching myself in the mirror as I was running on the treadmill at the gym and I just stopped. I said, “This fucking sucks.”
I went back home and told Steph I was finally done for good. She said, “What are you going to do?” And I said, “Just live in Santa Fe. We got a nice house, you are taking classes online. I am tired.” So we planned a wedding for October. I never phoned the Blackhawks, didn’t phone Don Baizley to tell him I wasn’t coming back. Nothing.
The media called, but I didn’t owe anybody anything, so I wasn’t talking, and according to the Chicago Tribune all Sutter would say is, “I’m disappointed, but I’m not surprised. This is something that is going to be with Theo forever.”
I think the whole league reacted to my leaving the way you would feel after having a big, happy dump. There were a lot of guys like me in the game, but they didn’t want anyone to know that. My presence kept the bad news on the front of the sports pages. Hockey wants to be known as the school’s good-looking, clean-cut jock, and I was really fucking with that image.
HAVING DECIDED I was done with hockey, and with nothing but time on my hands, I found a new level of messed up. During the day, I would lie on the couch and eat or sleep, then spend most nights in Albuquerque because that is where my dealer was. Finally, I came home one day and Steph and Aleca were gone. I had bought her a brand-new Cadillac Escalade. She’d taken that along with a little money. I didn’t care. She deserved it.
People who loved me tried to contact me. I remember my mom calling, freaking out on the phone—“What are you doing, killing yourself?” and I said, “I’m fine. Don’t believe anything you hear or read. I am living healthy, golfing every day …” I didn’t want anybody to come see me.
But eventually Claudie called Chuck and said, “You better get down here. Your buddy is fucked up bad.” Chuck came down, and the place was a mess. He tried to talk me into straightening out and offered to help. He said, “I guess maybe I should be thankful that I am not a part of this whole chaotic mess. Your career is in total disarray … you have lost control of yourself. The drugs are becoming exponential in their pull on you. You’re doing tons of it and wasting your money on the new hangers-on you find at the strip clubs. What about the kids—Beaux and Tay and Josh?”
I said, “Chuck, I am happy just partying. I don’t want them to see me like this. Do you think I would be good for them right now?” Chuck said, “Bones, you just come and go out of people’s lives, and it hurts them. You’re a special guy. You have the ability to make the person you are with feel like the most important person in the world.” And he talked to me about how, when we used to hang out, I would crank up the music and look at him and sing, and how it used to fucking queer him out. He’d say, “What are you doing? Look out the other window, you friggin’ weirdo.” And he reminded me of the time he went with me to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and how it was full of freaks and famous people. Some bigwig producer had spoken that night and said that when he first figured out he needed help he asked a friend to take him to a place where the people had the same status that he did. The next day,his friend drove him to the grungiest, filthiest area of L.A. and they attended a meeting in a real dive. Then Chuck talked about how we loved each other like brothers and how much it meant to him that night in Colorado when we had prayed together. And then he said, “Come on, Bones, let’s go home.”
But I knew I couldn’t. I had too much shit piled up that I had no idea how to even begin to get rid of it. I would lie down at night thinking about all the bad things that had happened to me and all the bad things I had done to others. I would flash back to lying in bed and snorting coke with a naked stripper and spending all kinds of money while Veronica and the kids were sleeping at home. And that fuckin’ guilt and shame would grab my heart and squeeze it like a stress ball.
I told Chuck to leave without me.
I WENT HARD at it for three months. Just mounds of coke and lemon Stoli and strangers who followed me home from strip clubs. I basically stopped eating and sleeping. I wanted to die, but my body was too resilient. Finally, I bought a gun from a pawnshop and decided to blow my brains out. I was 36 years old.
I sat there on the couch, swigging frozen lemon Stoli, staring at the gun and a single bullet on the glass coffee table. What did I have to live for? More nights of pure hell? Life was only livable when I was obliterated. I was a worthless piece of shit and I knew it. No good to my kids—fuck, I could barely even remember their faces. Couldn’t keep a relationship together—Shannon, Veronica and Steph all basically hated me. My parents were fuckin’ disappointed in me, my brothers said they didn’t want to watch me die. Chuck, my buddy Chuck, was gone. Hockey was over, fuckin’ over, man. Nobody really cared about me—Crispy, Sutter, Slats, all I was to them was a piece of fuckin’ meat.
You know that feeling when you have to do something that you really don’t want to do and you are mentally preparing yourself? Like taking some really fuckin’ nasty medicine or sitting outside the principal’s office at school or staring down at the water from a really high diving board? Each breath is sticking to your lungs and it is hard to swallow because your heart is taking up all the room in your throat. Then you finally hit the point where you say, “Okay, fuck it, here I go.” Well, that is where I was at two o’clock that morning. I was ready to jump.
I grabbed the bullet, loaded the gun and jammed it in my mouth. I don’t know—maybe if I’d had it ready and didn’t have to take the time to put the bullet in the chamber, I might have gone through with it. But once the barrel was rattling off my teeth and my finger was on the trigger, I’d cooled off just enough to hesitate.
It’s not as if I’d felt this sudden urge to live. I still felt like shit and wished I were dead. I think that’s why, after I ran outside and chucked the gun into the desert, I was screaming at the universe like a madman. But it was the easy way out, and I had never taken the easy way out. Besides, killing myself was just too fuckin’ scary.
In weird twist of fate, my 16-year-old son Josh called and gave me reason to go on for the time being. I hadn’t heard from him in months. When I picked up the phone he said, “Hey, how’s it going?” I said, “Good, you?” He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “You know what I’m doing.”
There was silence, and then Josh said, “Well, what do you think about moving to Calgary? We’ll get a place together ‘cause I can’t live with mom anymore.”
Shannon had married, and she was a good mom, but Josh had grown up without his father for too long. I had to go back to Calgary. He and Beaux and Tatym needed me.
I put the Santa Fe house up for sale, but for the longest time it didn’t sell. I finally took a fuckin’ bath on it.
IT WAS JULY, and I will never forget that fucking road trip. I stopped in Albuquerque to see my dealer, because Calgary has shit cocaine. I bought five 8-balls and stuffed them all around the engine. I also had a little vial in my front pocket. I timed it perfectly—it was twenty-two hours to Calgary, so I had to leave at 3 a.m. to get there in time for last call.
I did a lot of blow in the car on the way, which made me hypervigilant. Every tree, every sign, every electrical pole was vivid, and I was zoned right into the road. By the time I got to the border, I was just fuckin’ tweaking and shitting my pants. I drove up to the window and looked at the border guard’s face. I was paranoid and thought, “Holy fuck, what if he knows about the shit in the engine? What if he can tell?” The guard pointed his finger at my chest, and I thought I was going to pass out. “Hey!” he said, “you’re Theo Fleury!”
I smiled and said, “Awesome! How’s it goin?” It was just like the McLovin’ scene from that movie Superbad. We shot the shit for a couple of minutes, and he told me to drive on through. As soon as I left the border I drove straight to Lethbridge, Alberta, picked up a twelve-pack and chugged three beers before my hands stopped shaking. I’d finished the case by the time I saw the lights of Calgary, and then I had to pull over for a minute because I was having a major anxiety attack. “Am I really doing this? Oh God, should I be here? What the fuck am I doing? Is it too late to turn around?”
Sure enough, man, at 1:45 a.m. I pulled up to the Melrose Café on 17th Avenue, where all my friends were waiting for me. I walked in, picked up my drink, held it high up in the air in a toast and said,
“Hi! I made it.”