Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (8 page)

One day, I walked proudly into the locker room wearing a really tight, colorful sweater that I was certain made me look like Cheap Trick guitar player Rick Nielsen, one of my idols. It seemed like a really great idea at the time. My teammates, however, thought otherwise.

“Hill, you fucking pussy,” one of them said. “How fucking gay is that sweater?”

It sounded like a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer.

“Does your mom know you wear her clothes?” another player asked.

I couldn’t figure out why these guys weren’t into what I was pretty sure was a totally awesome rock look. I also made a mental note to maybe not wear that sweater to the rink anymore.

Giving me shit about my fashion decisions was just the beginning of my hazing. As situations involving a bunch of young men coming to terms with an influx of testosterone tend to go, all three of us freshmen on the team were on the receiving end of a healthy share of abuse. And given my oddball status, I usually got it the worst. On more than one occasion, I’d close my eyes to rinse the shampoo out of my hair in the shower after practice only to notice a stream of warm water hitting me from somewhere other than the showerhead I was standing under. I’d open my eyes to discover one of my upperclassmen teammates urinating on me with a big smile on his face. I’d usually jump out of the way and punch him in the arm, sending myself bouncing off him and skidding across the shower room floor in the process. Since I was barely a hundred pounds, my punches were mostly symbolic gestures causing no actual pain to the recipient. But I felt it was important to send a message loud and clear that while I might very well tolerate being urinated on by just about anyone who tried, I didn’t have to like it. It felt like the least I could do.

“Ha ha, Hill!” one of the other guys in the shower at the time would howl. “You got pissed on!”

Since he was merely stating facts, I rarely had a comeback.

In addition to the urinating, there was also a fair amount of towel snapping and other standard locker-room shenanigans. Occasionally, an upperclassman would use a freshman’s towel to wipe his ass and then leave it on the towel rack in hopes that the freshman would dry himself off before discovering it (and now he) was covered in shit. Somehow I escaped ever having that bit of nastiness pulled on me, but I saw it happen to other guys. At the time it all seemed just really mean and gross, but looking back on it, it was also more than a little bit homoerotic. I guess I’m just lucky no one tried to make out with me or anything.

While it was practically raining men most days in the locker room, things were balanced out a bit by the drives home from practice on days we didn’t have school afterward. I carpooled with a few of the upperclassmen and they would regularly threaten to drag me into strip joints or try to get me to proposition a hooker as we drove through Cleveland’s seedier neighborhoods on our way back to the relatively whore-free suburbs. I was still a few years away from recognizing the entertainment value in that sort of thing, so I was terrified.

“What about her?” one of the guys would say, waving at a hooker as we rolled up to a red light. “Would you do it with her?”

“Please don’t come over to the car, please don’t come over to the car,” I’d think to myself over and over as I prayed for the light to turn green before some woman wearing just a trench coat and underwear walked over to the passenger seat window.

“How much pussy do you get, Hill?” was another question I often fielded in the locker room.

“Um, what?” I’d reply. I knew there were probably other guys my age somewhere on the planet with active sex lives, but I was fourteen and still spent most of my weekends hanging out with my parents or watching a PG-13 movie in my friend Andrew’s basement. Besides my sisters, I didn’t really even know any girls. Eventually I realized the guys on my team were just messing with me, mostly just out of plain old teenage obligation, but at the time I was convinced I was a total weirdo for being a virgin who didn’t occasionally hit the local strip joint or chat up a hooker whenever the opportunity arose.

I was never really bullied in elementary school, so I didn’t understand why I had suddenly become the target of nonstop abuse. “Have I been a total punching bag my whole life and these guys are just the first ones willing to point it out to me?” I wondered.

But in spite of all the hazing and my teammates’ frequent suggestions that I spend my allowance on sex, I still loved playing hockey, so I just did my best to ignore all of it. And, as cliché as it sounds, I knew that quitting would probably give my teammates too much satisfaction, so I refused.

“How was practice today?” my dad would ask.

“It was really fun,” I’d lie, trying to save face. “My teammates are really nice guys. You’d like them.”

Between the stress of his law practice and raising five kids, I decided hearing his son had gotten pissed on that day was something my dad probably didn’t need. And, to their credit (I guess), my older teammates rarely gave me shit outside of the locker room or carpool. At school I was one of them, so while they weren’t overtly friendly to me, they never tried to wipe their feces on me or anything, so I was still really proud to be a part of the team. Besides, those guys all graduated after a couple of years and before I knew it, it was my turn to be an unfathomable asshole to the younger players. But by then, I was too into the guitar to have more than a passing interest in urinating on anybody. And I knew at least one or two girls by then, too, which seemed like the greatest thing that had ever happened ever.

“Dave, look at Chris’s retarded haircut,” one of my fellow upperclassmen on the team might say in reference to one of the younger players.

“I’ve seen better, but it’s not bad,” I’d reply, unable to muster the necessary strength to ruin the kid’s day.

My high school hockey career concluded with just slightly more fanfare than that first season I played back when I was eleven. I saw a lot of “ice time” (hockey lingo for getting to play in the game a lot), got a cool varsity letterman jacket, and even briefly had an actual girlfriend who would sit in the stands during games and occasionally agree to make out with me later that night. It was incredible.

I continued my unstoppable hockey career in college, albeit briefly. A couple games into my sophomore season, I realized it was interfering with my drinking too much, so I decided to pack it in. The coach was a little bummed to lose me but my roommates were thrilled because it meant I would no longer be stinking up our dorm room with my sweaty, moldy equipment. I didn’t play hockey for several years after that. And during that time, it was hard to even watch hockey games on television. Sure, the integrity of the game probably remained intact after my retirement, but I still felt a little guilty about it since less than a decade earlier I was convinced the ice was my natural habitat.

Some years later though, with my grandfather in that great big Maple Leaf Gardens
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in the sky, my half-Canadian mother managed to coax me back onto the ice again.

“I know a man named Paul who runs the men’s hockey league down at the rink,” she said to me sometime after my twenty-seventh birthday. “He said you could play on his team.”

It sounded suspicious to me that my mom might “know a man” like that, but the prospect of coming out of retirement was too intriguing to let that distract me from the matter at hand. I had been away from the game awhile and was hungry for action.

“Oh yeah?” I said coyly. “What would I have to do?”

“Just call him. He said they could use an extra player.”

I called Paul the next day and joined his team, the “yellow team,” the following week. We played our games on the same ice I had started playing hockey on back when I was a promising yet delusional eleven-year-old, often at midnight or so, the time usually reserved for old men whose hockey dreams had been dashed by age, life changes, or just plain sucking long ago. The players ranged in age from their mid-twenties to at least one seventy-year-old. About half of the men had grown up playing the game and the rest picked it up as adults (you could usually spot them by how they had really new equipment and also fell down a lot).

After being away for so long, it was good to be back on the ice. Still, all that time away had left me beyond rusty. My brain would send a message to my body to do all sorts of really cool hockey moves like skating circles around my opponent, rifling the puck past the goalie, and other stuff I’d put on my imaginary highlights reel, but my body, nearly paralyzed from a decade’s worth of beer and chicken wing intake, would rarely come close to getting it right. It was still a lot of fun though, so between that and the after-game binge drinking my new teammates and I would get up to, it was enough to keep me coming back each week.

Somewhere toward the second season after my triumphant return, the yellow team was playing our archrivals, the blue team, whose scrappy, middle-age brand of ice hockey was legendary among the three other teams in the league. Early in the game, one of the blue team players began repeatedly hitting me in the legs with his stick, an illegal move known as slashing, every time we came near each other. I ignored it the first couple times it happened, but after he did it a third time I decided to let him know who was boss, so I punched him in the face, sending him crashing to the ice with a flabby, fortysomething thud. Since everyone in our league wore helmets, face masks, and heavily padded gloves, punches were more a nuisance than actually painful. Still, he was pissed and came back for more. By then, the referee had blown his whistle to break up the fight, so we just wrestled each other for a few seconds before everyone else pulled us apart. Somehow during all the mayhem, however, the mask on my helmet unfastened, leaving my face wide open for pummelling. To his credit, my scrappy opponent managed to pull an arm free from whoever was restraining him and punch me directly in the face. Of course, I normally would have destroyed him after that, but my arms were being gently held back by the seventy-year-old I mentioned earlier, so there was nothing I could do. The fight was over and I was the only guy left with anything more than emotional wounds.

“You’re a jerk!” I yelled at my assailant.

“No, you are!” he responded.

Tensions remained thick as both teams skated back toward their respective benches after the melee. Except for me, that is. I was determined to settle the score, so as soon as no one was looking, I skated back over to the guy who’d hit me and wound up on him as best I could, landing a solid blow that sent him crashing to the ice all over again. It was what some might call a “dick move,” but I was still pretty pleased with myself. The referee, however, wasn’t and decided to suspend me for what ended up being the rest of the season as there weren’t many games left to play that year anyway.

Disgraced, I spent the next few weeks thinking about what had happened on the ice that night while hoping I wouldn’t run into any of the guys from the league at the grocery store or elsewhere. Even if I were buying really manly stuff at the time, it would still be kind of embarrassing. In the end, though, it was my mother who ended up confronting me about what had gone down at the rink that night.

“I ran into Paul the other day,” my mom told me one morning at breakfast.

“That’s nice,” I said, trying not to arouse suspicion. “How is he doing?”

“He’s good,” my mom said. “He said you got into a little trouble down at the rink.”

“Really?” I said, trying to sound like I had no idea what she was talking about. “That’s weird. What did he say happened?”

“He said you beat some guy up.”

“Oh.”

I was totally busted, so, being a fully grown man, I decided to just stand there staring at my feet and saying nothing.

“Well, did you?” my mom pressed.

“Yeah, I guess I kind of did,” I told her.

I ended up giving my mom the play-by-play on what may have technically been the only real fight I had ever been in in my whole life.

“Are you mad at me?” I asked her when I finished.

“No,” she said. “It sounds like he deserved it.”

It was in that moment I remembered that while I may have been a quarter Canadian, my mother was twice the Canadian I was, so her tolerance for bullshit on the ice was even lower than mine. I both feared and admired her for that.

I’ve played hockey a few times since my controversial (to me and my mother anyway) expulsion all those years ago. But for the most part, I consider myself retired from the game. I still have all my equipment, though—it’s hard to miss sitting in the middle of the kitchen like that. Sometimes I think about coming out of retirement and making yet another triumphant return to the ice. Maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t. If it ever does, though, one thing I know for sure is that as soon as I hit the ice, I’ll hear that baritone-voiced sports announcer all over again.

“There he is—Dave Hill,” he’ll say as I drag my old bones to center ice. “He left the game completely years ago, leaving a trail of violence and destruction in his wake.… And while he very well might be a bit of a loose cannon, by golly if it doesn’t translate to pure magic out on that ice. He’s still got it, folks. He’s still got it.”

On Manliness

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain.

—Norman Mailer (a very manly man)

I’m not the manliest of men. I condition, I moisturize, and I have worn a mud mask at least once more than most men who claim to prefer the company of women.
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Similarly, I struggle to name a professional athlete unless he has either dated Madonna, been publicly accused of rape, or—ideally—both. And, frankly, the amount of time I spend gossiping about Prince William, Kate Middleton, and the rest of the Royal Family just makes me sound like a fucking bitch.

Making matters worse, I’ve never been in a knife fight. Not even once. Think about it: if you get in at least one knife fight in your lifetime, no one will ever question your manhood again. Just ask one of the Sharks or the Jets from
West Side Story
. Those guys sang and danced around like a pack of raging queens 90 percent of the time, but when they broke out those knives there was no question about it—these were real men. Men with a keen interest in choreography, but men just the same.