Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (7 page)

“You mean to tell me you never smoked crack?” William asked me.

“No. I guess I just never got around to it for some reason.”

“Then how’d you end up working here?”

“I dunno. Just lucky I guess,” I said. I figured my brother might appreciate me not dragging him into things at this point.

As William’s words continued to sink in, I was filled with feelings of sadness for my troubled coworkers. But being as thoroughly self-absorbed as any other twenty-two-year-old, it didn’t take long before my thoughts turned back to myself. I had chosen to believe that my recent promotion was due to my overall sense of responsibility, my razor-sharp attention to detail, and that fact that I had yet to show up to work drunk. I now realized that what had really given me the edge over my fellow employees was that I simply wasn’t on crack.

As word of the disappearance of three hundred pounds of meat on my watch spread among employees and residents of the shelter, however, not being a crackhead wasn’t enough to keep me on top. Not too surprisingly, my inaugural supervisor shift turned out to be my last. My bosses never brought up the whole meat incident with me directly. But out of curiosity, I asked my brother if there had been any internal reports on the beef debacle, specifically with regard to my status as the guy who unwittingly helped make Russell’s dream a reality.

“Oh, yeah, uh, that,” he began before just sort of trailing off and shuffling into the next room.

I guess it was kind of like how one wouldn’t bother scolding a newborn (or certain shelter residents) for shitting himself without warning. I would remain a program aide for life. And while I kept working at the shelter for another few months, I couldn’t help but wonder whether everyone now viewed me differently. Or perhaps even worse, maybe they viewed me exactly as they always had.

All the Right Moves

My grandfather was born and raised on a farm somewhere in Ontario, Canada. I guess technically what that means is that I’m a quarter Canadian. But what it really meant for me and my siblings was that we were all tossed onto an ice rink at around the age of three and forced to learn how to skate whether we liked it or not. From what I remember, I really seemed to like it.

My siblings’ enthusiasm for life on the ice, however, varied. My oldest sister, Miriam, in particular, wasn’t into it at all.

“I
hate
ice-skating,” she said to my grandfather one night at dinner. “I’m not good at it and it’s stupid and boring and dumb and stupid anyway!”

“What good are you if you can’t skate?” my grandfather growled at her.

As a full-fledged Canadian, he took my sister’s offhanded comment to be the equivalent of telling him to go screw himself. He shook his head in disgust and, as a quarter-Canadian grandson looking to stay in good graces with his fully Canadian grandfather, I shook my head in disgust right along with him. Was Miriam even a person anymore? It was hard to say.

Despite my sister’s disdain for it, my family continued to go skating regularly throughout my childhood and I quickly grew to love everything about it—the sweaters, the organ music, the hot chocolate, even the actual skating part. Before long I was flying around the rink with what I presumed was not just Canadian proficiency but perhaps even a bit of Scandinavian proficiency, too. Soon after, I discovered ice hockey—the one thing that combined my love of ice-skating with my other boyhood passion: violence. And, like just about everything else I got into as a kid, I instantly became obsessed with hockey to the point of annoying everybody around me.

“The Canucks are playing the Jets tonight,” I’d say to anyone who would listen. “Nothing like a bunch of British Columbians going head to head with a bunch Manitobans, right? Should be pretty nuts.”

“Huh?” they’d usually respond.

My grandfather would silently nod in approval, though, which felt good. Still, there was no getting around the fact that Cleveland just wasn’t a hockey town. We didn’t have our own pro team and there were rarely hockey games on television, so I’d get my fix by reading every book I could find on the subject and plastering my bedroom walls with photos of hockey players I’d clipped from
Sports Illustrated
and
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
. My dad bought me a few hockey annuals, the kind with stats on every NHL team and player, and I memorized every page. To this day, I probably have a stronger working knowledge of obscure Canadian towns that happen to be the birthplace of a professional hockey player than any other United States citizen: Wayne Gretzky is from Brantford, Ontario; Bobby Clarke is from Flin Flon, Manitoba; and Clark Gillies is from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. I didn’t even have to look any of that stuff up. I still know it better than any of my family members’ birthdays.

To satisfy my growing hockey appetite, my dad drove me and my friend Kevin two and a half hours to Pittsburgh one weekend to see the Penguins play the Edmonton Oilers, whose star center, Wayne Gretzky, was just becoming a household name in America. We even got there a couple of hours early so I could wait outside the players’ entrance and get his autograph. A few hundred other people had the same idea, so when Wayne finally showed up he was mobbed. To this day, I’ve never been so starstruck. Somehow I held it together long enough to get him to sign a recent issue of
Sports Illustrated
he had been on the cover of. I was so excited I practically required medical attention. I was convinced the magazine held magical hockey powers simply because he had touched it, so I kept it in a dresser drawer all by itself like some sort of minishrine for the next couple of years until one of my sisters threw it out for reasons I am still trying to get to the bottom of. And as awesome as it was for me to meet Wayne Gretzky—a hockey legend like I hoped to become myself one day—I was certain it was a pivotal moment in his life, too. I was completely out of my fucking mind.

Of course, with all my tireless hockey research, it didn’t take me long to figure out that—at the ripe old age of eleven—I was getting an extremely late start in the game. Most of the pros I’d read about had a hockey stick shoved into their hands as soon as the placenta was hosed off them. I resented my parents for not doing the same with me. Gretzky was drafted by the pros at the age of sixteen.
Sixteen
.

“I’ve got a lot of catching up to do in the next five years,” I thought. “From now on, it will be all hockey all the time, dammit.”

To that end, I decided to take things to the next logical and manly step by signing up to play ice hockey in the local youth league. I wasn’t particularly athletic, or even all that interested in sports for that matter, but as unpopular as hockey was in Cleveland at the time, I figured it made me a trailblazer of sorts. And perhaps best of all, playing hockey seemed like the most Canadian thing I could possibly do, so I was certain it would further ingratiate me with my grandfather. It would basically be the opposite of telling him to go screw himself.

I made my auspicious hockey debut by joining the pee-wee league in Cleveland Heights, the next town over. The league was comprised mostly of eleven- and twelve-year-old boys. There were a handful of girls in the league, too, but I tried to ignore that fact since most of them were better than me. My team was called the “white team,” after the color of our jerseys. I didn’t think it was possible to have a lamer name than our rivals, the “red team” and the “blue team,” but somehow we nailed it.

To prepare me for the beating I was about to receive on the ice, my dad took me to the sporting goods store near our house and got me outfitted in hockey equipment from head-to-toe, including a combination cup and jockstrap. It was the first time in my life my testicles required formal protection and it made me feel like a man, a man with near-microscopic, prepubescent external genitalia, but a man just the same.

As I hit the ice for the first time, covered to the point of being unrecognizable in my sparkling new pads like some pathetic gladiator who would only be called to combat once everyone else had been killed, I was certain every parent in the stands would quickly take notice of the new kid and his uncanny natural ability to work magic with a hockey stick. Sure, my skating hadn’t really improved all that much since the age of three and, yeah, I fell down just about every other time I tried to shoot the puck, but I was still convinced my raw talent was impossible to miss. It would be like the first time Streisand stepped in front of a microphone to sing, only slightly more butch. As I skated down the ice, I pictured someone in the stands secretly videotaping the whole thing for later use in a documentary about my unstoppable hockey career.

“There he is—Dave Hill,” I imagined a baritone-voiced sports announcer saying over grainy footage of me doing my damnedest not to fall down. “Just eleven years old here, but clearly a hockey god in the making.”

Despite my fearless efforts, however, my inaugural hockey season came and went without much fanfare. My team almost always lost and the most attention I ever got at the rink came after my family’s golden retriever bit me in the face the night before a game.
1
Still, I had my eye on the prize, so I spent the following summer working on my ice-skating and playing street hockey all by myself in my family’s driveway while all the other kids went swimming. Fortunately, my parents were extremely patient and barely complained when I figured out how to shoot the puck high enough to break all the windows on the garage doors. The first time it was an accident. But once I realized I wasn’t going to get in trouble for it, I didn’t exactly try to avoid having it happen. That summer, the sound of breaking glass was like hearing thousands of fans cheering for me on the ice. I was devastated when there were no windows left to break and my dad simply boarded them up rather than replace the glass and risk having me break them all over again.

Given the fact that hockey was the only sport I was ever any good at, my skill at it seemed more like a form of autism than actual athleticism. Much to even my own surprise, I managed to improve enough before my triumphant return to the ice the following season that it seemed like a reasonable enough idea to try out for the travel team, the one all the really good kids played on. Not only did they play teams in other cities, but they had cooler jerseys than all the other teams at the rink, were more handsome, and even had cooler names than everybody else, too—like Kip, Trip, and Torch, names that I’d never even heard of before but still sounded awesome to my impressionable young ears. The kids on the travel teams were usually dicks to all the players on the non-travel teams (or “house teams” as they were not-so-glamorously called), but I felt like they had somehow earned the right. I wanted to be one of them so badly my pancreas hurt. Despite making it past the first round of cuts for the team, I was still back on the house team in the end.

“You really impressed me out there, Hill,” said the travel team coach, a guy with a thick mane of red hair and a much cooler outfit than any of the house team coaches ever wore, told me after I’d been cut. “You keep working hard and I think you’ll have a real good shot at making the team next year.”

“Really, coach?” I asked, beaming up at him. “Really?”

“I mean, sure. Uh, why not?”

I have no idea if he actually meant it or if he just felt obligated to say something nice to me so he could pass me in the hallway outside the locker room without things being too awkward, but either way I was pumped. Even with that mini-motivational speech, the house team is where I would stay for the next two years until it was time for high school. It was a long, cold two years, too—no cool jerseys, no trips to faraway cities to play other more handsome kids who probably had really cool names, too, no nothing.

My all-boy Catholic high school, Saint Ignatius, had its own hockey team, which felt like worlds colliding—my secret hockey world and the one my friends at school actually knew about. I figured I would finally be recognized among my peers as the best (if only) hockey player in our immediate social group and that felt great. I still wasn’t quite one of the greatest hockey players of all-time or even in my town for that matter, but I had at least gotten good enough by then that I ended up being one of only three freshmen to make the varsity team. The fact that the team was absolutely abysmal definitely helped matters, but it remains my greatest and perhaps only real athletic achievement to this day.

This is the sixteen-year-old me trying to look as athletic as possible in my high school hockey uniform. I feel like I really nailed it.

The Saint Ignatius team practiced before school, requiring me to get up at 4:30
A.M.
and usually making me late for first period.

“And why are you late again today, Mr. Hill?” my Latin teacher would ask me.

“Because I’m a fucking champion,” I wanted to tell him instead of just shrugging and collapsing into my desk as I did most days.

I was thrilled to finally be able to play hockey with guys I went to school with, and maybe even people besides the players’ parents would show up to games, like girls, for example. But I quickly learned that being a freshman on a team full of juniors and seniors almost twice my size was like being in a really bad after-school special. Not only was I a hairless, hundred-pound doormat, but I had little in common with the other guys on the team aside from being a suburban white teenager. They were mostly jocks who also played football, baseball, and whatever else didn’t conflict with the hockey season. And I was a shy, anxious semiloner who was obsessed with the electric guitar but still happened to play one sport and one sport only when he wasn’t practicing scales in his bedroom or hanging out in a friend’s basement listening to Led Zeppelin records. I might as well have gone ahead and taped a
KICK ME
sign directly to my crotch.