Flirt: The Interviews (2 page)

—Parts of it were plenty scary. You never smoked, did you, not with skin like that. Is my leg okay there? I need to stretch.

—I'm forty-five years old, Eon. I am grieving the death of my womb.

—I'm told there is a serenity, a kind of pasture mentality. I mean this in a kind way. Forty-five is too old for a cutting horse. Horses should be frisky, good blood. Ambition. Forty-five is just about right for a woman. I predate you by decades.

—You married a teenager. Leave the leg.

—You fell hard for the towboater.

—The towboater came to Christmas dinner at my mother's townhouse at the mouth of the Fraser River six months into our, let's call it, relationship. He'd run a load of logs across the strait on the 21st, towed a concrete barge the 22nd and worked the booms for twelve hours after a bundle broke loose as the snow flew on the 23rd. His hands could hardly hold the cocktail fork; an old scar defined the numb tip of one finger; maybe he wasn't keen on shrimp. On the third round of wine, my mother's new lesbian hippie friend – Julia – leaned at him all shrill: “You are killing trees that are better off
blah, blah
. . .” “I just tow them,” he said. “Nevertheless, you are complicit in the murder of old growth,” she said. “How do you know how old these logs are?” he said. “You objectify them with that term – ‘logs' – so you can feel okay with being the vehicle of death.” Then he said, “Already dead, they're logs. Still in the ground and standing, they're bait. Economy. They're the walls, you stupid dyke.”

—Maybe I like this fella.

—That's your first smile of the day. We drove home upriver to New Westminster. We sat outside the apartment in the little front seats of his tiny Renault –

—A guy like that drove a Tonka toy? Don't date guys like that, sweetheart. You're looking for someone with access to four legs.

—He did not cut the engine. He reached across me a little way to that stupid door handle and shot-putted it open. He almost didn't make it back over to his side; he was that drunk he had to push himself up off my knee. But he glued his hands onto the steering wheel and pretended the Indy – fast hard turns and jerking the wheel to miss ad hoc barricades –
rrrrrrtch
–
and he said, looking out the windshield and up at the streetlights, “My family is funnier than yours. My family is smarter than yours. And my family is better at sex than yours.”

—The end?

—Not for long. Now, do you have to shave twice a day to come out so smooth? Smooth as Perry Como.

—Only when meeting media.

—Mind if I touch your face? I've noticed you have a thing for women with three-syllable names, peculiar consonants: Sylvia, Beverly, Juanita.

—Shirley.

—Ever play with a drummer named Lou?

—Sure, probably. Can't see him, but I probably did. Lou sounds like a drummer's name.

—Here's a good question: How are drummers different from pickers?

—That
is
a good question and I'll try it. Drummers drink scotch, while pickers fill up on draft. Drummers like hard-core strippers, while guitar players prefer the bartender's girlfriend, or maybe the part-time hooker flogging long-stemmed roses after midnight. Drummers typically bathe several times a day, whereas a picker will wait for the weekend or maybe the next.

—Lou hung himself in the Hope Hotel.

—That's a bad joke.

—No, we all played there. Lou didn't make it out, either.

—Let's walk.

—Oh. No. I don't need that.

—Yes, you do, you need to walk.

—What's your favourite crop?

—I mean it. Let's walk. We'll be the dog's flock. Those shoes are fine. Wear my big sweater. Put the pencil down.

—Your knees are like Popeye's biceps after spinach.

—I can't get slacks that fit.

—I've never been in a Cadillac. Does this one have a name?

—Escalade.

—That's a pretty word for a car. A pretty idea.

—I had a Corvette years ago. I love them, they're beautiful, but I have trouble with my legs, so getting in and out . . . getting in and out of the Escalade is much easier. I wouldn't call it a car.

—“He has an Austin's motor in a Cadillac's chassis.”

—Who does?

—They said that about Jean Béliveau. Six foot three with a Tin Woodsman's too-small heart. Drive, Bobby. Should I call you Bob? Now, do they still call you Bobby?

—Some do. The fans, the fans' kids, the bogus websites. To them, I'm always twenty-two and flying through the air. Call me what you want. Not on the floor; there's a trash can in your armrest.

—I hope I don't make you nervous. Just drive. I suppose you're a defensive driver. Get it? Defensive? Your hands are trembling like a compass. What's that steering wheel made of?

—Leather and wood. It's already starting to change with my hands. See there? Like a putter, or a hand-me-down axe. You should know I'm scared skinny of talking like this. I'm no shucks as a talker. Don't do that. I'll turn up the defog, but please don't use your hand. The grease.

—I've lived in apartments smaller than this car. First time away from home – 1974 – off to the university across the water, I rented a little bachelor joint down 82 stairs to the rocky beach on Shoal Bay in Victoria. That's 82 down and 82 back up.

—That's 81 more than I could handle.

—Even then? Even the year you scored more points than Esposito? Than everyone?

—Especially then.

—Me too, turns out. I'd had a bad fall in 1969. January, the streets of Vancouver fluffed with snow, and after school the rough boys – the Meraloma rugby players, the boys I liked, their cowlicks and white teeth and ski jackets and perpetual running shoes – chased us with snowballs in the wide-open frozen streets, between cold-arched chestnut trees. I ran hard – I was twelve, long-legged and fast, happy to be chased by those boys

– and then I slipped on the hidden ice – a boy named Paul winging an ice-ball at my bare head – and fell to my knees and slid hard and fast into the curb. My kneecap hit first. My elbow hurt most, but when I tried to get up a whole joint had disappeared.

—Sports injuries often happen this way: you think it's one limb but that's a trick, turns out to be another. Prompt and professional diagnosis is key to successful rehabilitation. Now, did you shatter it, crack it or what?

—Stay with me, Bobby, you sound like a pamphlet. Cracked across. Swelled to three times by dark. I lay in the den with my leg on pillows, my mother annoyed, inattentive, chain-smoking Black Cats, rum and Cokes; our dog barked at icicles falling from the eaves. My older sister was giving parts of herself to Hodgkin's Disease. My father was missing.

—Missing what?

—In November 1968 – two months before my fall – he had disappeared, left a note in his Pontiac Parisienne under the Burrard Street Bridge saying gone for good – suicide – and . . . Don't worry, Bobby, don't do that with your eyebrows: he came back, it's not like that, the story's not sad, he sat out a season, that's all. He had a little Soldier's Heart, a little Post-Traumatic Stress from WWII and a crash in Germany, a little Shell Shock come back to haunt. Lost his memory, lost his way.

—Let me know if that heat's too much on your feet. I need cold on my legs; the Escalade can do both at once.

—How many people can you get in here?

—I've had eight adults but that's without golf clubs.

—My father was missing when I cracked my kneecap. And my mother couldn't manage one more complication, a girl like me: injured and cold. Another body's degeneration. She didn't consult a doctor until the morning of day two. Then a night in hospital. Drain the fluid, full plaster leg cast for a month.

—They'd never do that now. Too much muscle deterioration. Now it's a system of braces.

—My right leg is a quarter inch shorter than my left.

—Back problems?

—You bet.

—Parents have to take a more educated role in watching out for their kids' bodies in sports. Fundamentals. Codes of conduct. Early sports injuries can ruin lives and limit an adult's activities later on. Coaches, too, must condition their athletes from day one. Sorry, I'm a pamphlet again. You and your father were close?

—Pliny the Elder spoke of knees as symbols of power. They've been called “the knob of the head's staff.” Do power brakes help with your legs or make it harder to control the stops?

—Sorry. I thought that guy was coming off the curb. They help. But still some rough stops. You know, no one dies from knees.

—Howie Morenz: dead of a broken leg.

—The game's changed.

—In the 1969-70 season, four years into the league, you won the scoring title – 120 points – you won the Hart Trophy, the Conn Smythe, and your team won the Stanley Cup. You scored the winning goal in overtime.

—Derek Sanderson was in his third year with us. Your dad would remember him checking Béliveau.

—I know; I'll get to him. The next year – spring 1971 – my father – recovering from amnesia, from his time missing – was a Canadiens fan. He had always loved Jean Béliveau and stressed to me that Béliveau was the sort of player – the sort of man – we should all admire. A handsome gentleman, no naughty elbows, the home game sweater, the
bleu-blanc-rouge
, a little grey at the temples of his shot. Béliveau's last season and that year my
father fell for Ken Dryden, his attitude, how he knew everything, could stop anything. The McGill law degree, the clean face, the wiseman posture: chin on glove on stick. A tender. I took the Bruins, I took you and the black shirts and Sanderson's urges. Four is still my lucky number. Lucky for what, who knows, but I like its heft, its girth and smooth sound. I hear the number and see you – your shoulders not huge like the boys now – your face clean, hair flying, and so much neck in that vulnerable golf-shirt way, no Bobby Hull farmer tuft at your neck. My father in the big chair, feet up, his slices of sharp cheddar and Labatt's Blue and the sports section, rubbing the shrapnel starting to surface in his forearm, the game helping him back to the present. Me on the loveseat with my long teenage legs crossed, a springer spaniel's head at my knee. My sister upstairs purging chemo. The Canadiens took the Cup that year.

It smells like a saddle in here, Bobby, but quieter. I'd count the speakers if I could find them. In the doors? On the ceiling? Merle Haggard never sounded so buttery.
We'll have roses in December
. . .

—That's a pretty voice you have. It's the old country tunes I like. Not too jumpy, but not too smooth. You know, except for Hull, no one had really big shoulders back then. Now players do more to bulk up, spend short summers training and pumping. All we had off-season was lawn-mowing, golf and the race track. The game's changed and their proportions are different, muscled, not bulk. And the equipment adds inches.

—You were handsome, regardless. My father was missing, suffering – we learned later – from amnesia in a hotel room on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo. Occasionally, our phone would ring and he'd either be on the other end, talking like nothing was wrong – “I'll be home after work” – or he'd groan into the phone and scare me. The cops put a tracer on our phone, but I don't remember the premise, the rules. The night I was in hospital with my kneecap, he phoned my mother. She told him she couldn't do this bullshit (my word, not hers), that I had broken my leg and she'd had enough. The hospital staff was to watch for him; my sister somehow got my mother's cream-coloured Austin running and sneaked into the kids' ward with daffodils and a chocolate milkshake from White
Spot car service, ten at night. The next day I was home. Soon, so was my father, sick and tired of waking up sick and tired, worried for my knee. The start of that 1969-70 season.

Five years later, the little apartment on the beach down the 82 stairs? I moved out in four months and that kneecap could not stay put.

—A flight of stairs is torture. Too much weight set on that disfigured joint. Get me an elevator, or I don't go.

—Before I fell, I wished for a broken leg. I'm telling you, but I haven't told anyone else. I wished for something interesting to happen, that would make people care about me in a serious way. I guess twelve years old wants attention and I wasn't getting my allocation.

—Lucky I never had daughters.

—Back to 1974: sister gone in 1971, the year the Canadiens won, Béliveau's last game. I quit university in December 1974 and dumped the boy from Sociology who resembled Sanderson and, no muscles to hold it in place, my kneecap kept slipping and sliding and locking. I had surgery the next September.

—Not another cast?

—Standard then. Sub-luxing patella. You know the details. The night before surgery, a cute intern fondled my knee, front and back, and asked if I'd taken ballet as a child. He said my kneecaps sat up off the tracks like someone who'd pressed her legs too far back.

—I think you have nice legs, especially in little boots like those, but I wouldn't say ballerina. Swimmer, maybe.

—That's nice for you to say. I'd played volleyball in high school, and I dove for balls, tried to out-crash my best friend. My father suggested it was time to quit the game when my shoulders and neck began to resemble Bobby Hull's.

—Fathers don't talk like that now.

—There's a theory, you know, about competitive sports and its reflection of a phallocentric culture, of orthodox masculinity.