Rain stains the black trees, good earth leaping and splashing into rivers rising in our South Pacific theme basements. My hybrid motorcycle floated from the wet All Weather Road, trying to avoid John Ghostkeeper’s moonblind cutting horse (goddamn that horse), entering the sorry ditch where police tell me I struck a barbed wire fence and two fence posts.
I saw nothing but nothing, blew sideways into blind meadows undersea with stones on my tongue, stones in my passway, wires at my eyes, king of exits, king of salvage, down writhing with the snakes and coyotes. My shoes came right off in the mud. That hurt? someone in a uniform asks.
Shirt Is Blue looks uncomfortable visiting me in the hospital, a big man, skin pale, ready to faint. He whispers, Know what they call motorcyclists here? Organ donors.
A kid lies in the next bed: Any trouble breathing? they ask him. We’re going to put in a halo. A silver thing and holes in his skull. I wrecked dad’s car, the kid in the next bed says. Don’t worry, they say. On the road to church, the kid in the next bed says. Don’t worry, they tell him.
I can’t move, he says.
Don’t worry yet. Lie still. More X-rays.
Get this tube out of my nose, he says.
I’m sorry, I can’t understand you with that nasal tube.
What time is it?
I said do you have any allergies? Penicillin? Phenobarbitol? Sulfa?
I’m cold. My parents . . .
Where’s the technician? Can you move your fingers?
Can I worry yet? the kid asks.
Finally the pictures of my wrecked leg arrive. Big negatives hung on a white field: scrimshaw, postmodern art.
They stare at these X-rays with that auto-pilot frown. They point at my knee and I’m out for the season. Coach will be pissed off. GM more so. He went out on a limb for me, let go a draft pick, albeit a low one. And right when I started scoring with my lucky stick.
Need another X-ray? No, we’ve seen plenty, thank-yew!
How far does this tube go? Making me sick.
The kid’s halo is screwed on and I’m cringing as they actually turn silver bolts right into his head. The sun expands coming in the eastern glass.
The kid finally stops yelling, a dog’s breakfast of tape, tubes, electrodes, collar, metal struts to keep his head on, six bolts living in his skull. Good head, he jokes, ha ha ha. Can I worry yet, he asks.
Drinkwater Out For The Season. I read about myself in a Catholic hospital in this city of thieves, recession bringing the worst out in these dog-headed folks of the northern plains, the big meat eaters and wolf-faced crazies in a ward, waiting to blow the unemployment cheque at the track by the slough. Police on the avenue below always have someone spread on a blue hood, flashers bouncing on the road like zinc; it’s pretty, and off to the west antlered animals move in the tiny gap between trembling limestone mountains.
I read about myself in the Catholic hospital and think of the animals, their seasonal migrations, like mine. I pivot on these seasons. Like farm kids going to two wars, I went off to the leagues, to the Lethbridge Broncos, the WHL, backroads to Elysian fields, waitresses everywhere, giving me things. Hello Walls is on my radio. My Intended moves her sleek digital palmcorder. She is worried about me; she has taken time off from work just for me. The air is so bad in hospitals and I’m itchy as hell.
Ah quit your bitching, the nurse says to me.
That could be you, the nurse says, pointing at the kid in the next bed. That could be you. The kid in the halo attempts to look noncommittal, not sure how he’s supposed to feel about her statement.
No, nothing happens to me, I say.
Everything happens to you, says Shirt Is Blue, eating another onion, tears springing into his maze of wrinkles.
Why does everything happen to me? I ask.
Why does everything happen to you? Shirt Is Blue asks. I don’t know, he says, why do they buy the Queen gifts? She’s loaded, she doesn’t need them. She must have a fucking warehouse: Oh great, here’s another Eskimo carving, here’s another Calgary Stampede cowboy hat.
I’m sorry, says Alex Trebek on TV, you must phrase it in the form of a question.
I feel sick, I say. Yeah, my fingers feel like hot dogs.
Hot dogs? That’s O.K., that’s normal, the nurse says, that’s to be expected, she says.
Normal? When do I get real food? This stuff’s been through an atom-smasher. When do I get out?
Don’t you have a TV yet? she says. There’s some good things on the TV.
I have a TV! When do I get out of here?!
There are wired birds in the air; our conversation seems to flow through their gnarly feet. What are they putting in my IV?
He has ever but slenderly known himself, says Shirt Is Blue, flirting with the Irish nurse, quoting King Lear, building up to ask her out on a date in his topless Jeep with the pictures of Roy Orbison and Christ. Me, I’m beginning to view the bodies two storeys below at the funeral home as rookies and veterans: IN they go through the doors, fresh meat, untouched, money makers to be worked on; OUT they come, processed, drained, their face done over, on their way back home, forgotten, cut from the team, from memory, from history, from the only game in town.
The motorcycle crash makes me realize my dependence on my Intended. For some reason I want to see her and not Waitress X after the accident. I want to see my Intended. I surprise myself at times. My Intended brings my opiates: licorice, the latest issue of The Hockey News, a smuggled quart of dark homemade beer.
I’m not as bad as you think, Waitress X said. I didn’t believe her then. But I know now she was right.
An ex-friend was tearing up the bigs that one year and took me to the nightclub by the municipal airport, a club that was once a restaurant where I was fired as a busboy, now a hangout for uppity jocks and their suckholes. My ex-friend was gravy train, point a game and I was an ex-iron man, out of hard cash, suing an agent who ripped me off and I’m left with what might have been, that. There was a big lineup but he strolls right to the front and leaps across a counter, me following self-consciously with people in line glaring at the back of my head.
Pearls clicking, a woman leads us to a backroom available for the in-crowd. It looks like a gambler’s movie; green felt on the round table and they’re grinning at me and the WHA goalie wouldn’t stop, his nose bleeding into the white pile, and I thought, That’s it for him, because we knew the young coach wanted him gone. I thought, he’s gone and he doesn’t know it, but later he turned up with the New York Rangers of all clubs, and he did okay. I thought New York would kill him but he did all right for himself there with the manicured, the wired, the bottom feeders, the crackpots, the MSG screwballs.
Then October, the wire, the same goalie not protected, gone from yet another team.
Messier was there at the club hitting on every blonde and Gretzky hid in a staff hall, too famous even way back then, peering sneakily from behind a curtain like old Polonius. Eddie Mio bummed another smoke from me. We could hear loud voices from the women’s can:
Women’s Can Voice #1 says, Once my nose is numb, I’m gone! I don’t drive, I don’t talk! Ever notice how a guy’s head and nose looks like his dick? Flat nose, flat dick.
Women’s Can Voice #2: You ever notice that?
Women’s Can Voice #3: No.
I felt my nose. Wayne Gretzky looked at me, felt his nose. Mark Messier felt his nose.
During the oil boom Alberta was all nose, coke everywhere, a giant nostril hovering, trembling gently. Neon would write one cheque, thinking he had bought enough. Then he’d write out one more, he’d run out. Then another cheque. Another cheque, another, all in one evening. Finally he ripped up all the little cheques and wrote the guy at the party one big cheque. Powder lifts as a swarm and the sparks fly upward, Alberta Crude paying the bill. One player had to get his nose cauterized; the guy from Sports Illustrated was not making it up. Players were doing coke right out of Lord Stanley’s Cup. None of us would have made it in the old sixteam league, that’s what we heard day in day out and I’m still sick of it. Hey, they might not have made it in our league. You’ve got to ride the roller coaster to know.
In my dreams I still see it loom in the rain: that giant horse with the white eyes. I try to steer the motorcycle but the road’s mush and I slide past the margins, the end of the straight and narrow. I float at a neighbour’s fence a curious man: What will this feel like?
Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear. One step, two step . . .
At my worst low (in terms of manic depression, not manic morality) I dreamed the beautiful Waitress X came back to me. In the dream we were necking, closer and closer into each other, not sex but some other much more sensual manner of moving closer, barriers melting, some kind of slow give, one body, communion, whatever. A Vulcan mind-meld. I was so fucking happy. Waitress X was back and saying to me with a little laugh, catching her breath: “I couldn’t leave that you know.” This made sense to me.
Then I woke cold in a room trying to fathom what it is in our bodies, our minds, that torments ourselves when it’s absolutely the last thing we need. These dreams alter the entire music of the day. I got used to her mouth, her way of kissing. Why can’t she just be here? Is that such an impossible desire? Too grieved to negotiate my feet from the bed, I had to lecture myself: Quit feeling so jesus sorry for yourself blah blah blah count your blessings blah blah blah get it through your thick skull, you had your shady fun but you belong to someone, and so does the waitress. I lift weights in an attempt to work off depression, to sweat out my ailments.
In the hospital Hello Walls echoes again on the radio.
In England, the reggae singer, born in Brixton, is told to go home. Mr. Singh, born in an affluent suburb of Toronto, is told to go back where he came from. The Maori scholar says it is time for eighteen million whites in Australia and New Zealand to go home. The Japanese-Canadians want reparation. The Métis and Cree profess love for shopping centres, investment property, lifestyles of the rich and famous. Perhaps I should look up Oliver Cromwell and ask for my plot of Irish bog back, rebuild my castle. We are all going home, Air Canada is having a seat sale.
With the aged bachelor uncles: respect, some polite shouting. Lots of sludge coffee and coffee cake and Camels or Chesterfields. They’re all moody, smart, great readers, but half-deaf and will never admit it. We mail money for hearing aids and they buy more lottery tickets or the Irish Sweepstakes. We hear what we want to hear.
He’s a jockey and he’s never ridden a horse?!
No, he’s never ridden this horse!
Five hundred bucks for a pair of sneakers!?
No, speakers, stereo speakers!
So you play hockey?
Yes sir, I play this Saturday night.
Oh. (A pause.) And when is it you play?
I said, Saturday night. . .
Now it’s Saturday night, waving to my favourite uncle in the crowd.
“Shoot! Shoot! We pay ya to hit the friggin’ net!” After our side has scored and we’re skating back slow and easy to centre for the face off: that looseness, grins, ready to do it again, tapping shin pads, the coach leaving you out on the ice for an extra shift. That was a good feeling. I shot a knuckler that went in the net off a guy’s head. Horseshoes some nights.
It’s way too easy to get used to losing, it does something small to you.
Speaking of losing, I hate things now without her, without youth, wheels, my right to mix it up, ambulate, penetrate; my inalienable right to walk with a Waitress X. I’m happy when driving a car and night is a thousand stars, a thousand stations; AM watts from Wyoming, Utah, Mexico. A horizon, valley sinks, massifs. Not this massive collection of skin mags in the hospital. The only consolation I wrest from the assembly line of naked Playmates: How unhappy these people will be in a decade or two. Wrinkled in bathroom steam and paw prints, they’re going to feel a lot like I do, like shell casings used too many times, like a shredded knee. You go a tiny bit off the straight and narrow. You hit the wall or you hit barbwire and then someone in white is turning the six bolts, someone is screwing on the dreaded halo.