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You're an Egg
MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ
When I was eighteen I worked for a while in the garment district of New York, cutting fabric, making deliveries, and occasionally doing some heavy lifting. One of my co-workers was a fiftyish, wiry Latino man with a motormouth and an omnidirectional sense of humor. On dreary, boring workdays he could be an ideal companion. But one day, he took it into his head to chatter to me for five hours or so about how fragile our bodies are. "You're an egg," he kept saying as we worked a loading dock,"an eggshell, m'fren'. Sixty pounds of pressure anywhere on your arm and snap!, just like that. You fall from fifteen feet, you break one leg, maybe two. You fall from the sixth floor and it's fifty-fifty you're a dead man. 'Course, if you jump, you want to make sure you don't screw up and live, eh?" He spent most of the day narrating the details of horrible industrial accidents, punctuating them always with the refrain, 'You're an egg, a little eggshell, I tell you." After a while, it was like working with the voice of fear nattering away in your skull, like a tableau out of Pilgrim’s Progress.
I was young, and I really didn't want to hear any of this: fragility was for other people. As for me, I was a healthy college kid, and when I wasn't working or going to classes, I was playing ice hockey for Columbia University's "club" squad, which played in the local metro league against opponents like the John Jay School of Criminal Justice and Nassau County Community College. I'd seen a variety of hockey injuries, from pulled hamstrings to separated shoulders; they were terrifying, and therefore, in order to play, I didn't think about them. Most folks, of course, are in deep denial when it comes to dealing with their status as eggs; fragility is always for other people. But there's a funny thing about denial: when you tell people they're in denial, they tend to deny it.
I stopped playing hockey in 1980, at nineteen, when I contracted mononucleosis. The crack in my eggshell, it turned out, had nothing to do with sticks or skates or pucks in the teeth. Sometimes it's not a question of sixty pounds of pressure or a fifth-story fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men; sometimes our infirmities are minute, intangible, inscrutable. Sometimes, as with my son James, it's a developmental disability like Down's syndrome, that affects everything you do; sometimes it's a wrathfull deity that smites you but once and then goes back to its business. I remember accompanying a close friend to an appointment with a neurologist some years ago; out of the blue, she had suffered a grand mal seizure, and now her neurologist was telling her that her CAT scans, her EEG readouts, and her MRI results had come back, post-seizure, completely normal. No trace of electrical disturbance whatsoever. My friend found this reassuring—and bewildering. "So we're talking about demonic possession," I said to the neurologist with a straight face. The doctor gave me a querulous look, gauging whether I was serious or just annoying, before replying with some aplomb, "No, we don't scan for spirits."
Like a lot of Americans, I have a complicated relation to my body. I'm torn between a sense of obligation to keep the hardware in good physical shape and a sense that it really doesn't matter, in the cosmic scheme of things, if I get extra cheese on the pizza. There are times I like being embodied (as if I had a choice)--when I'm riding waves or bouncing my kids in a pool or making out with my wife; there are times I'm convinced that my embodiment is precisely what's preventing me from getting any real work done.
I have suffered no seizures, no falls from great heights. What's happened to my body has happened slowly and imperceptibly: I have gained weight, like many a man in his thirties. Weirdly, though, I've gained bulk. At thirty-seven I weigh about forty pounds more than I did at thirty, but as my stomach has grown, so too have my shoulders and chest. It's as if I've gone through puberty a second time, my pituitary getting around to some of the areas it hadn't covered when I was in my teens. I now have a considerable upper body, though I don't especially want one. I don't know how to move around in this new container, and it messes with my self-image something awful. For most of my life I have been a waif, and now, suddenly, in the middle of the journey, I am a brute.
Even when I played hockey, I did so as a scrawny little forward who either got by on speediness or got stapled to the boards by behemoth defensemen. I could hardly even throw a check, let alone knock someone to the ice, so I worked on my stickhandling and stayed as far as possible from the rough stuff. And when I was at my fastest, I wasn't too bad a player at all. Once, twenty-seven years ago, I was a star player on a formidable team, a New York City squad that, in 1972, accomplished the unheard-of feat of beating half a dozen of eastern Canada's best youth hockey teams. Wayne Gretzky's team, from Don Valley, Ontario, was in the upper division of a Canadian tournament to which my team was invited--as one of four American teams playing in the sixteen-team lower division. The other three, knowing their place better than we, lost all of their games. We lost 1-0 in the finals, after beating three well-regarded clubs; I'd scored six of our ten goals in those three games and got myself a line or two in the local papers. But Gretzky in 1972 was already famous throughout Canada; like Bobby Orr before him, he'd drawn the attention of National Hockey League scouts by the time he was eight, and everyone knew he would grow up to be one of the game's most extraordinary players. Don Valley, however, lost to Kitchener in the final game of the upper-division tournament. A month later, my team played an exhibition game against Kitchener, and beat them 3-2 in their home rink, much to the consternation and outrage of the locals. To this day, I can say that I played on the team that beat Gretzky's team--despite the fact that the. Kitchener officials tacked an extra five minutes onto the third period in a lame attempt to help the hometown kids even the score against the upstart Americans. But since that glorious week in 1972, it's been all downhill for me, leaving me in that unenviable group of humans whose careers as athletes peaked at the age of ten
A couple of summers ago, when I was just shy of thirty-six, six-foot-one and 220, I decided it might be a good idea to play hockey again—and maybe lose a few pounds, too. In June the University of Illinois opened a new outdoor roller rink, and there were fliers everywhere announcing the formation of a summer roller hockey league. I happened to own rollerblades; my wife had bought me a pair in 1991 so that I could regain my skating legs without going to the rink, and I'd tooled around the neighborhood from time to time, occasionally looking on wistfully at a pickup hockey game in a parking lot but too shy to join in. I would need padding and a helmet to play in a league; I'd given away all my hockey gear when I left New York in 1984. The university league was officially "non-contact," because when you're checked to the ice, you slide, but when you're checked to the asphalt, you land hard and feel lucky to get away with monstrous scrapes and no broken bones. You're an egg, and you need elbow pads and shin guards at the very least.
My egginess was only one of my problems. In order to make the change from ice to roller hockey, I would have to learn how to stick-handle and pass all over again—this time with a new coefficient of kinetic friction; a ball on asphalt moves nothing like a puck on ice. And even on ice, under the best conditions, crisp passing is so much more difficult than it looks: you have to calibrate your own speed, your teammates' speed, the likelihood that they'll keep skating in the direction they're skating now, the likelihood that the other bodies on the rink might intercept the pass, and then aim the puck so that it lands softly but quickly on about a ten-inch area of your teammate's stick. Too hard and the pass is uncontrollable, useless; too soft and it'll be deflected or picked off. Deposited on the skates, it'll leave your teammate with his head down, blind and vulnerable; too far ahead, and you might as well have given it away.
In order to play at all, I would have to work out regularly just to maintain the wind necessary to last a full game, especially since between 1980 and 1997 I had developed asthma. And, not least of my worries, I would have to learn to play in hundred-degree heat for an hour at a time. Whether it's for lack of trees or lack of hills, prairie summers can be as earnest and as unpleasant as prairie winters.
In one way, roller hockey combines the physical challenge of ice hockey with the long-term endurance demands of soccer: roller hockey teams sometimes field as few as five or six players---about one-third the staff of an ice hockey team. As a result, each player winds up playing the bulk of the game (three twelve-minute periods in my league), often for seven or eight minutes at a stretch. At my age, there was no way I could play effectively on shifts longer than three minutes. Yet at the same time, roller hockey turns out to be somewhat forgiving of oldsters like me, especially if we have good hockey instincts. Because rollerblades simply can't stop on a dime or change direction quickly, roller hockey is a more languid, leisurely form of the sport. The game is full of curlicues and arabesques and gentle crashings into the boards. It rewards opportunistic, predatory players like me who know how to take advantage of loose balls and defensive lapses. The ball is much harder to control than a puck, making "possession" an absurdly tentative thing, and if you trail just behind the stickhandler or just on the fringe of a battle along the boards, you can find yourself the beneficiary of a play whose development happened without you.
The league consisted of five teams. Three teams were made up largely of players who knew each other and registered as a team, and the other two were made up of ragtag, randomly assigned folks like me. My team was named Miracle on Asphalt, and we quickly established ourselves as the league's doormat, getting hammered 9-2 and 7-5 in our first two outings before losing by a respectable 4-3 in game three (I tied the score at 3 with four minutes to play, but just as I was getting pleased with myself, we were trailing again). In the second week of play, the league posted its first "standings," which I saw when I showed up for game four: Miracle on Asphalt, in the league cellar, was the only team that had failed to win a game, but I was listed as the league's second leading goal scorer, with four goals in three games (a player named Dave Baranec was first, with seven). I noted that the large group of players with three goals contained a number of people who'd played only two games to date. Still, it went to my head. I was in the standings, alongside the real players; I might even be able to lead my team to its first victory. I was pumped. Maybe today, I thought, if I can just turn it up a notch. That day we played a team that called itself, simply, The Best Team. I scored three goals—my first hat trick since 1979. And we lost our fourth straight game, 12-3.
I have three bodily half-talents. I discovered each of them before I was twenty and developed each of them in exactly the same way: I became reasonably skilled at each in a short period of time, and then, when it became clear that any further progress would require emotional devotion and long hours of practice, I gradually sloughed off. Hockey was the first of these; golf, which I took up when I stopped playing hockey (like Happy Gilmore and any number of retired hockey players), was second; drums, in my sophomore year of college, was the third. All of these disciplines contain endless minutiae and literally infinite possibilities for improvement; for me, this was part of their initial appeal. Unlike, say, bowling, they have a fairly high minimum threshold of competence, requiring a certain level of physical proficiency before one can even think of participating in them meaningfully. In every case it took me almost a year to attain that skill level, but once I'd attained it, I thought of myself as a fast learner. I could establish a body-memory of how things were supposed to feel when they were done right, and I could find a groove in which mind and body worked in sync. But I never approached the level of patience—or single-mindedness—that it takes to become really good at something, and my learning curve quickly asymptoted until I was either feigning more talent than I had (as in drumming), leveling off at just-over-mediocre (as in hockey), or playing a bizarre Felix Krull impostor version of the game in which it was difficult to tell whether I was brilliant or awful (as in golf).
My little hobbies, my half-talents, all require elaborate apparatus. Golf alone is 90 percent paraphernalia and fetishes (head covers, tools for repairing ball marks, titanium woods, graphite irons, zebra-lined putters); drums, too, come with a lifetime supply of expensive accessories (miles of hardware, splash cymbals, roto toms, double-bass pedals, cowbells). I have very little tolerance for the trappings and technicalities of either, so I can never walk into a pro shop or a drum shop without being made to feel illiterate: What swing weight and loft are you looking for in a driver? Why aren't you playing pinstripe heads with your SD4 combo jazz sticks? How much radial torque do you set your flange for? All right, I made up that last question, but it's only slightly less intelligible to me than the first two. Yet the attitude of pros and salespeople is that I should have swing weight preferences and finely honed drumstick/drumhead concordances if I'm worthy of being a customer in the first place. I once traded notes on this subject with a friend who assured me that bicycle shops were every bit as intimidating as any of the shops associated with my hobbies, every bit as dominated by tech-heads who demanded to know why you weren't using GraphoMite if your CR400 ratio was so low. Indeed, she told me that one salesperson finally sputtered that she shouldn't even own a bicycle if she was going to treat it so casually. "It was as if I'd abused a small animal," she said. "I thought he was going to take my bike away and turn me in to the Maintenance Authorities."
It is at such moments---and I have known many of them, particularly in New York's music stores on Forty-eighth Street, where you can't get the attention of sales help unless you're with the David Bowie band. I recall with relief the words of one of my drum heroes, the great Elvin Jones, formerly of the John Coltrane Quartet, who, when asked by Modern Drummer magazine whether he had gone to the eighteen-inch bass drum because it offered a "jazzier, poppier sound," replied that he'd bought such a small drum so that it would fit in the trunk of his car.
Hockey doesn't cultivate quite the same fetish culture, but it does require a good deal of protective gear, and players can get as religious about their brand of sticks or skates as any golfer devoted to a brand of balls or clubs. Appropriately enough, over the past two decades my frustration dreams about hockey, drums, and golf have usually taken the form . of obsessive, low-grade nightmares about the equipment. Frustration dreams are born of long layoffs; I didn't play drums at all for four or five Years at a stretch (1985-89, 1991-94), or golf for seven (1990-97), or hockey for almost eighteen. And when I haven't played something for a long while, I begin to have dreams about doing so, almost as if I can feel the aura of a phantom limb; but my dreams always follow the same frustration narrative, and I wind up dreaming about not playing. For instance, I'll imagine an evening when I'm supposed to play hockey, but I can't find the arena. When I do get there, I discover that I don't have my stick, or I've forgotten to pack my elbow guards, or my skate laces have broken and I can't get new ones, and I miss the game completely. Or I'll be setting up to play with my band, but my drumheads have split, or I don't have the legs for my floor tom, or I have to tighten a wing nut for half an hour, or there isn't enough room for me on stage and I'll have to set up downstairs while the rest of the band plays without me. Or I'll be all set to tee off, but I won't be allowed on the course without golf shoes, or the fairways will consist of deep gaping pits with bulldozers in them, or I'll have to putt the ball over a stone wall and onto a spoon .... You get the idea.
I suppose I can play golf or drums for as long as I have some reasonable control over the movement of my limbs. But with hockey, I figure I've got maybe three years left, five at the outside. After every game that summer, I counted my bruises; no hockey game can truly be "non-contact," any more than basketball can, except that our incidental collisions and entanglements happen at higher speeds. My forearms and lower legs were soon a multi colored mess—partly because I tend to play where the ball is, but more immediately because my bruises didn't heal the way they did when I was eighteen, and the old bruises weren't gone before the new ones arrived.
Thirty-six is "young" in academe. In hockey, by contrast, the average professional player is about twenty-eight; there's only a handful of NHL players older than I am. Grizzled veterans Guy Carbonneau, thirty-nine, and Craig Ludwig, thirty-eight, have recently won the Stanley Cup with the Dallas Stars, but Wayne Gretzky retired at thirty-eight--just as gracefully as he always played. In the English department I still feel like a gangly adolescent; on the roller rink my teammates and opponents were largely undergraduates, and they treated me with a deference usually reserved for grandparents once they discovered that I could actually remember the Ford administration.
At my advanced stage of decrepitude," a slightly older friend wrote to me last year, describing his waning basketball skills and his family's suggestions that he take up golf, "just saving face becomes a victory in itself." We were on e-mall, comparing notes on how our bodies were holding up over the summer in the face of defeats by graduate students and apple-cheeked women's studies minors. By now it was July, and for the first time in my life I was exercising all my half-talents at once. I'd been playing drums regularly for a few years, having formed a rock/noise band (Nastybake) with a pair of graduate students in 1994; now I was playing hockey again, and I'd even taken up golf for a third time, at the urging of a friend, the historian Jeffrey Herr. I did everything twice a week. I had found a groove. And like thousands of fellow teachers (and millions of students of all ages), I wanted the summer never to end.
Then came the day when I lost the groove and screwed up my schedule. My band had to move practice to Thursday afternoon; Jeffrey had made a tee time for early that morning; I had a hockey game at 6:30. For some reason, I refused to cancel anything. I was defying my inevitable decline and death; I was showing off for my family; I was in the middle of summer, having a blast; I thought I was twenty-five.., and I figured that five hours of golf, two hours of band practice, and one hour of hockey would be a fine test of my body's capacity to move about in the world. Perhaps saving face would be the best I could do, but at least I was going to find out.
The temperature that day peaked at 98 degrees; the heat index was over 110. By the time I finished eighteen holes, just before noon, golfers were already starting to wilt in the sun, and a heat advisory had been issued. I'd managed to triple-bogey two of the first three holes and then rally (with two birdies on the front nine) for an 85; I'd missed most of the heat, but my shirt was still two shades darker than when I'd put it on. I drove home, changed, downed a light lunch and plenty of fluids, and got ready for band practice. Nastybake plays its share of frenetic and/or technically complicated songs, and practices can be physically draining; on a humid day, in a dank Champaign basement, I could go through two towels easily. On this day, we had to cut practice short. After only an hour, steam was rising from my forearms and my T-shirt and towels were literally saturated. "Musicians are supposed to die in plane crashes or from drug overdoses," I pointed out. "If we die of heat prostration, we'll be the laughingstock of rock and roll." And when I went home to change out of my second round of rank, heavy clothes, I realized that if my team was asked to wear dark jerseys for the game at 6:30, I might have to skate around in my Pittsburgh Penguins "away" jersey, solid black. A moving solar panel.
The evening was thick and torpid, and everyone wore T-shirts, white or gray. Miracle on Asphalt lost its fifth straight game; only five hardy souls had attempted to brave the heat. Thus depleted, we played with one "ringer," a lanky thirty-something graduate student more capable than myself, and though he and I both scored, our team was never really in the game. Sodden and very tired, I packed my things, trudged back to the car, drove home, drank two large bottles of water and a can of beer, and fell asleep for fourteen hours.
The next morning I felt as if I had spent the entire previous day drinking. I tried to tell myself I had actually devoted the day to physical activity, but all my body could say back to me was that it hurt to move about in the world. I stretched and tried to meditate. Around noon I finally ambled out of the house. Picking up my mail at the English department felt like a significant physical accomplishment. I persisted in this state until early Saturday afternoon, when my family decided to go out for ice cream. I hadn't eaten ice cream all year, and a few minutes after slurping down my "blizzard" or "snowdrift" or whatever, I felt a strange numbness on the right side of my face. When it didn't go away after a few minutes, I turned to my wife, Janet, and said, "Now this is weird .... "
Within the hour, Janet, a former cardiac intensive-care nurse, had given me a series of neurological tests, called our HMO's patient advisory nurse, and told me to get ready to go to the emergency room. By that time my facial paralysis was obvious: I could hardly close my right eye or move the muscles in my right cheek, and I was beginning to think that though I might be too old for hockey, I was too young for a stroke.
At first, the ER staff had trouble believing that anything was wrong with me. I had no other symptoms, the onset of the paralysis had been absurdly sudden, and to people who didn't know me, I didn't look terribly asymmetrical. Janet had to assure them that I didn't usually smirk like this, that I usually have a broad toothy smile. I was asked to walk a straight line, to grasp both the doctor's hands in mine, to touch my finger to my nose. I was asked to do all these things again. Then I was asked whether I had any cold sores. At last, when the doctor manually opened my right eve with ease even though I had tried to close both eyes as tightly as possible, he nodded and turned to Janet, saying, "Yep, it's Bell's palsy." She groaned sympathetically. I wondered if the doctor would proceed to tell me that I shouldn't even own a body if I was going to treat it this way.
Bell's palsy comes in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes it's permanent: Curtis LeMay, the general best known for insisting, as George Wallace's 1968 running mate, that we should bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age, covered his severe case of Bell's by chomping on a cigar all day. Sometimes it comes and goes, lasting weeks or months, leaving faint echoes, permanent tics, or no traces at all (George Clooney had Bell's as an adolescent, but you'd never know it today). It's caused by viral damage to the seventh cranial nerve, but no one knows what brings on the virus. Normally an onset of Bell's is preceded by some other medical mishap, like an upper respiratory infection or Lyme disease (and, as researchers have more recently found, herpes simplex I, hence the question about the cold sores), but in my case it wasn't clearly triggered by anything at all. It's certainly not related to the consumption of ice cream, or playing golf, rock and roll, and roller hockey in the same day--though Janet surmises that I wore down my immune system and got zapped as a result. But whatever its cause and whatever its course, my Bell's palsy spoke to me of frailty and mischance and convinced me that my belated attempt to reclaim my body from the passage of time was surely doomed to failure.
It helped, and didn't help, that I appeared to have a rather mild case. Some of the major side effects of the disease are psychological; no matter how mild or severe the case, it's unsettling and depressing not to have control over your facial muscles, and the experience often throws people (as it threw me) into a real funk. As long as I didn't talk or smile too much, no one except my most intimate friends could tell that something was wrong: my fight eye blinked more slowly than my left, and sometimes it stopped blinking altogether. (That's one of the most dangerous side effects of Bell's: corneal desiccation. Your eye gets dehydrated became it stops blinking and you can't sense it, just as if half your face had been injected with novocaine.) But once I began to speak, particularly if I had to say a lot of words with f’'s, p’s, and th's in them, I sounded drunk; and if I began to laugh, I looked mildly deranged. One side of my face could be in hysterics; the other said we are not amused. Laughter, the thing that binds me more often than anything else to my fellow humans, was suddenly the thing that made me noticeably different, an object of solicitude and concern. I learned this the next time I played golf, when I told my partners of a TV commercial I'd seen that cannily poked fun at golf's fetish culture (in this case, by pretending to be an ad for new plutonium clubs with lead-shield head covers) and found myself uncontrollably snickering and spitting out of the left side of my mouth.
Drooling can be a problem for people with Bell's. So can headaches behind the ear. So can sleeping. On all three counts I was getting off light. Still, in order to make sure that my right eye stayed sufficiently lubricated during the night, I went through an icky regimen every evening of squirting gel under my eyelid, placing gauze over the eye, and taping the gauze firmly in place. On the first morning after I began this routine, I discovered that it doesn't matter whether you remove tape quickly or slowly when it's coveting your eyebrow. It hurts like the devil either way. Throughout each day I doused my eye with artificial tears, and I started a round of steroids to relieve swelling in the nerve. Janet bought me a black eye patch, which she declared "cute" and my children declared "weird." "You're the Bell's Pirate," my wife said, offering me a kerchief for my head, which I agreed to wear if she would let me shave my head and pierce my ears.
Of all things: a disease that afflicts your face—and only half your face—and nothing else. For an indefinite period of time, I would be two-faced. "Janus-faced," Janet said, helpfully, trying to get me to see the rich philosophical possibilities of my condition, the long fascination we humans have had with facial anomalies, from Cyclops to the Elephant Man. "Well, now," I replied, "Janus-faced is better than two-faced, I suppose. But let's not go putting eyes in the back of my head just yet."
Even though I had no other symptoms, I felt infirm. I was an egg again. I missed Miracle on Asphalt's game six and was out of town for game seven, traveling to Washington (with my eye patch) on business. By the time I got back, my team was 0 and 7, having lost 4-3 and 12-1 in my absence. I suggested to Janet that I would like to play in our last game, in however debilitated a state. We played the team that had beaten us 7-5. I flipped a wrist shot past their goaltender on the short side to open the second period, Our captain finished off a nice passing play ten minutes later, and at the end of regulation time we were fled, 2-2. Five agonizing minutes of overtime produced nothing. We went for the final tiebreaker, the shoot-out: each player, in turn, taking the ball from the center red line and coming in alone on the goalie. Unlike soccer shoot-outs, ours would be "sudden death": first team to score wins, if their goal isn't immediately matched by the other team. My teammates tapped me to go first. But I hadn't worked out in almost two weeks, and by this point I wasn't sure I could even skate half the length of the fink, let alone control a ball and shoot. The moment was tense and dramatic. I tried to milk it for all it was worth, but as I came in on goal and tried to fake the goalie to his fight, he deftly and anticlimactically poked the ball off my stick. We eventually lost the shoot-out on the fourth round, and thus lost the game 3-2 in double overtime. But at least we had completed our perfect, winless season.
Or so we thought. Over the next couple of days, I gradually tapered off my steroids, decreased my lubricants, and stopped test-smirking out of both sides of my face, until I could manage a decently Reaganesque "heh heh heh" smile that was marginally wider on one side than the other. I began to work out again, to try to play golf, and to restart the painful process of body reclamation that had been interrupted, over the past decade and a half, by graduate school, children (with disabilities and without), tenure, teaching, writing, and Bell's palsy. And then I learned that my summer hockey season wasn't quite over.
It was the sportswriter Dick Young, I believe, who once quipped that if World War II had been run like a hockey season, Poland would have made the play-offs. Sure enough, Miracle on Asphalt had qualified for the play-offs--because team five, bless its heart, couldn't field enough players for a regulation game. So the league decided Miracle on Asphalt would "pick up" the extra players from team five, and play the first-place team in the first round of a two-round play-off. The first-place team had already beaten us 9-2 in the opener and 12-1 in one of the games I'd missed. Its name was Phat Hope. And against it, I knew, we had Phat Chance.
Tuesday, August 5, three weeks after being hit with Bell's palsy, I was going to bring my eyedrops and my elbow pads to the rink and try to play one last hockey game. I had every reason to beg out, and an hour before game time, I almost did: while packing my blades, I noticed that my right rear wheel had been worn down almost to the bearings. There was no way I could play for an hour on asphalt on that wheel Panicking, I hopped in the car, in full gear (save for the skates), and drove to the nearest active-lifestyle outdoors-equipment store to buy some new wheels. I knew I could save thirty or forty dollars by buying wheels from a sporting-goods place rather than the local canoe/skiing/Timberland joint, but I didn't have the time to spare. I thought I could run in, pick out a set of wheels, and get to the rink just in time to change the one dead wheel.
No such luck. When I told the sales help I needed hockey wheels, they asked me for hardness and circumference numbers. I knew one but not the other. "Uh," I said, "I'll get the skates. They're in the car." Running back into the store, I told my salesman I would need 72-millimeter wheels. All he had was 76 and up. "But," he said, flipping through a book 'labeled the "Rollerbible," "your skates, the Spiritblades"—I hadn't even known their name—will take a 76. And it looks as if you could change all our wheels, anyway."
I agreed, but informed the nice man that I had to play in half an hour, and asked him to make sure that his wheels would fit in my skates. To my chagrin, this meant removing my current wheels. "You were playing on 78As?" he asked, incredulously, referring not to the circumference but to the hardness. Oh God, I thought, here comes the technical lecture. Your swivel base is set at six point five ? You shouldn't be allowed to wear skates like this. I was playing on soft 78s instead of hard 84s, I replied, because I started skating on a hard-rubber surface when I got the things and never changed the wheels. This only provoked a second round of questions, this time about the ball bearings. As any technically competent blader will tell you, ball bearings come in different varieties of frictionlessness: there are the ABEC-ls, which are kind of sticky, the ABEC-3s and -5s, which enable you to roll delicately and effortlessly, the ABEC-7s, which are used by those particularly finicky pros who can sense a pea underneath ten mattresses, and the ABEC-9s, which are made chiefly for the aerospace industry. I have 3s. "The problem with your 3s," I was told, "is that they burn so quickly. If I were you"—oh, help—"I'd go with ABEC-ls with the copper core, because they can handle the stops and starts better. You may get a smoother glide with the 3s, but you'll have to keep replacing them if you play on asphalt."
Every word this man said was true, and every word would have been helpful in some other context. But for now, I was facing a scenario out of one of my frustration dreams: I would have to get to the game, get out my skates, loosen eight screws (four in each skate), remove the wheels, pop out the casings and the ball bearings, clean the-bearings with Speed Skate Lube (a kind of WD-40, but not WD-40, because WD-40 is lethal on skate bearings for reasons that elude me), reassemble the wheels, and rescrew them into the skates. In less than twenty minutes. I figured I'd miss the first period, and maybe nobody would miss me. After all, I probably shouldn't even own rollerblades, the way I treated mine.
I did make it to the game, and somehow changed all my wheels just in time for the opening face-off. A miracle on asphalt, indeed. But it's hard to play hockey when your eye is full of artificial tears. Our team was somewhat stronger: we had help from our free agents from team five. Then again, we were playing a team that included one of the University of Illinois's star players, a lean, graceful twenty-year-old with considerable speed and great peripheral vision. Janus-faced, perhaps. The man could change directions, stickhandle now-you-see-it-now-you-don't, and pass cross-rink in the same motion--and he had three or four fine skaters and shooters to pass to as well. Miracle on Asphalt rarely executed a decent passing play. Phat Hope looked as if they'd played together since childhood.
They scored first, of course, and not long thereafter, they scored next. But somehow we tightened our defense, put a shadow on their star, and stopped the bleeding. I started coming back deep into my own zone, making sure Phat Hope didn't have anyone standing alone near the net. (The rap against me always was that I was an indifferent two-way player, a liability on defense. Like all raps against me, this one is only partly true.) At the end of the first period, we were down only 2-0. Between periods, as we sucked on water and Gatorade, we congratulated ourselves for staying close. I squirted a few more artificial tears into my right eye, leaving my sight too blurry to allow me to start the second period, and insisted to my teammates that if we scored the next goal, we would change the complexion of the game, forcing Phat Hope to play more conservatively and maybe make a few mistakes in their own end. I was some cheerleader. In my heart, I figured that if we played well we could keep the score around 6-0 or 7-0.
On my first shift, five minutes into the second period, I managed to pickpocket a Phat Hope defenseman behind his own net; snagging the ball, I whisked a pass out to one of our guys from team five, a strong, solid player named Dan, and he slapped it under their goalie's outstretched left leg so quickly that no one, including myself, saw the play. Even the referees were caught off guard, unsure of whether the shot had clanked off the post or off the base of the net But it really was a goal, and just like that, we were back in the game. Meanwhile, Phat Hope wasn't clicking. Their offense sputtered and miscued, and we began to see glimpses of actual weakness: some of their defensemen, it appeared, weren't all that sure-handed--not nearly as daunting or as fast as their forwards. "Fore-check, forecheck," we began to yell to each other, urging ourselves to put pressure on the defense and make them cough up the ball in their own end. It didn't work; Phat Hope continued to outplay us, but not by so wide a margin now. As the second period wore on in the August sun, we began to think we might at least keep pace with these guys.
· Late in the period we had our own defensive lapse. One of our defensemen had overcommitted in the far end of the rink, allowing Phat Hope to break out of their zone with three players bearing down on our lone remaining defenseman. Desperately, I turned and tried to catch their streaking forwards. They slowed, trying to set up a play; I covered one of their wings, but not the ballcarrier; and as they got off the shot· and began a mad scramble in front of the net, I found myself on my knees ten feet in front of my team's goal as the ball rolled helplessly in front of our prone goaltender with players of both teams swiping at it wildly. Throwing myself my full length across the asphalt and extending my stick with one hand, I swept the ball into our goalie's glove and forced a stoppage of play, maybe even helped save a goal. But I couldn't get up. I was winded, I'd taken a stick to the midsection, and my right eye was stinging from dehydration. My teammates asked if I was okay as I got to one knee. I checked the clock: one minute left in the period. "I can rest between periods," I said. Noble words, and stupid ones, too.
But I was right: only thirty seconds later, we got the break we'd been waiting for. One of their defensemen faltered while trying to pass deep in his own zone, and he was stripped of the ball--which then came to me, off to the right side of the rink, twenty feet from the Phat Hope net. Dan was ahead to my left, by the side of the net, but I thought a pass here would be too risky--and I wanted to take the shot. Skating in, I head-and-shoulder-faked to my left, leading the goalie to think I was going to try to tuck it in the far side. He went down, and as he fell, I gently lifted the ball over his left shoulder on the near side of the net, a ridiculously slow, lazy shot that caught him going the wrong way.
And so we were tied, 2-2, at the end of the second period. Hell, we could even win this thing: after all, according to every known law of hockey physics, the team that scores a tying goal in the final minute of a period comes out flying in the next and goes on to victory. We had the momentum; we had the determination; we had the element of surprise; yes indeed, we were going to win our first game--by knocking Phat Hope out of the play-offs, no less. I gave myself an extra squirt of artificial tears. The third period, surely, would be ours.
In the middle of that third period, I scored my second goal of the game, and drew the applause of various spectators and a couple of players waiting for the 7:30 game. It was a solo effort, a breakaway; I'd plucked the ball loose from a defenseman forty feet from our goal, outskated everyone down the rink, and flipped a brisk wrist shot just under the crossbar, once again over the goalie's left shoulder. It was deeply gratifying. It's one thing to put on a burst of speed; it's another thing to keep control of the ball, shoot accurately, and score while you're skating at full · speed; and it's still another thing to do this in the third period of a play-off game. And it should have been the highlight of my season. But by that point in the game, sadly enough we were down 6-2. We'd come out flat, nervous, hapless. Phat Hope had come out determined to put away these pesky Miracle on Asphalters and get back to playing real roller hockey, and they'd blistered us for three goals in the first two minutes, getting a fourth soon thereafter. We eventually lost 8-3.
We shook hands with Phat Hope after the game, congratulating them on winning and wishing them well in the championship match. I skated off the rink and began to undress, exhausted but strangely and pleasantly sated. We had lost, as we were supposed to, but we had given the game an urgency that no one on either team had had any reason to expect. Of course, I knew my feeling of mild euphoria wouldn't last. Tomorrow I'd be stiff and sore; in four years I'd most likely be through with hockey forever; in forty, if I lived so long, I'd be an old, hard-boiled egg. But for now, at least, I could crack a smile. The smile was a bit creaky and asymmetrical, I noted; my right cheek was still a little numb. Still, though I knew how inexorably I must succumb to all of the ordinary--and some of the extraordinary--frailties of human flesh, I knew also that I had managed to save face on this one late summer afternoon, and that was victory enough.
Michael Bérubé is Professor of English and Director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child; his most recent book is The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies.