Memoirs, Ink

Hockey Night in Canada

by Ariadne Hawkins

The bullet holes made it hard to see the puck.  We had one of those big-screen projection TVs that were the latest technology in 1982, with a large unit containing three colored lenses on the floor, and a movie-type screen a few feet behind it.  The three small holes in the screen were pretty much the same size as a hockey puck on the projected TV image, so that when the puck ended up in the top left quadrant, it became difficult to follow the play.

We thought it was hilarious.  My teenage brothers and I would be sprawled about the sofas and chairs in the living room, arguing loudly about where the puck actually was, and ripping each-other mercilessly when caught out wrong.

 "Gretzky has it - see over there!"

 "No you asshole it's already over the blue line."

"That's the bullet hole again, you dork."

 "Moron." 

"Fuckhead." 

"Shhh... oh shit we got a penalty."

The TV was awesome.  We were the only people we knew who had one - they were typically only in sports bars.  My stepfather Alan had acquired it as part of some small-time drug deal - someone trying to get rid of a hot item in exchange for some crack, or some even more pathetic idiot actually selling his own possessions in order to get a few more hits before he dried out or jumped off a bridge. 

We had a lot of top-of-the-line electronics.  And native art.  And musical instruments.  And probably a lot of other stuff that didn't really register with me.   There were also some women who had a different arrangement with Alan, and traded not possessions, but themselves.  Despite the open marriage my mother and Alan had supposedly agreed upon, I noticed my mother's tight and angry mouth as she loudly crashed dishes and slammed cupboard doors in the kitchen when the women were in the back office with Alan, alone.

This small time drug dealing maybe bothered me more than the high volume deals that Alan did.  I mean, that was business: high finance, high risk and high profit margins. Whatever.   The characters and details of those deals were largely hidden from us.  Alan generally went off-site for them.  But we knew it was going on, and it was obvious that a shitload of money was being generated from that side of the business.  But the small trades were taking things from people that really mattered to them (or that mattered to someone, in the case of stolen goods).  And what Alan provided in return was a small amount of self destruction, a seed of suicide, a little step towards the death of the soul.  He liked to watch. 

The extra articles and gadgets in our house began to appear a few years ago when Alan started dealing coke, but the really cool ones arrived when he moved on to crack.  People would do almost anything to get another hit.  As did we.  But we didn't talk about that.  What we talked about was hockey.  How indomitable the Canadiens were.  How hopeless our hometown Canucks were.   Where the fucking puck was.  Sometimes we talked about Saturday Night Live (which conveniently followed Hockey Night in Canada).  If we were too strung out to maintain conversation, we replayed episodes of SNL (we of course had a VCR).  Steve Martin doing King Tut.  Devo.  Frank Zappa.

We didn't talk about how the bullet holes got there.  Like soldiers in a war, we lived very much in the immediate present or the distant past, in other places and times.  We did not talk about the recent past, and tried hard not to think about it either.  We tried not to think about the sound the door made when they kicked it down and the glass shattered.  Or about how the curtain to the front hall parted half a second later and the guy with the ski mask on stepped through so fast.  Or about how he held a gun directly against the temple of my brother Morgan's head and said don't move fucker or I'll blow your fuckin' head off. 

I tried not to think about how I was caught frozen for an instant in the glass French doors to the living room, looking at a gun held to my brother's head.  Or how I bolted out to the kitchen, tore open the back door, and fled across the back yard, hiding under some bushes. Or how I heard gunshots and imagined my brother's head splattered all over the wall, and felt immediate and immense guilt that I had run.

I tried not to remember running blocks away after I heard a window smash, loud thuds, shouting and running.  I ran, I ran, because I didn't know if they would come in my direction.  I tried to forget about calling home from a payphone when I finally came to some sense of safety, and then hearing my mother say that everything was ok, that no-one was hurt.  Hearing her say Alan had come out of the back office shooting and the guys ran, down the bathroom hallway, into my 8-year-old sister's room and jumped out the window through the glass, all in a matter-of-fact voice that suggested, with a slightly amused tone, that I was overreacting. 

So we didn't talk about that.  We just lounged in the living room, talked about hockey and laughed, perhaps a little too loudly, when we lost the puck among the bullet holes.

It's easy to talk about growing up Canadian now that I live in the US.  People tend to assume I come from an upper middle-class background because of my accent, and I rarely correct them.  When asked directly about my family I am vague.  I tell them, oh yes I had an eccentric family, we were all so busy and never seemed to sit down together, say, for dinner like many families do.   I say the only thing we really did together was watch Hockey Night in Canada.  And then I sometimes hum the theme music for them and explain how it is like Monday Night Football here, just greatly magnified.  If I have been successful (and I usually am) I have shifted the topic to Canadians and their obsession with hockey.

But it's not really true that our family watched hockey together.  In the last year I lived at home it was just my brothers and I who watched the hockey games. Alan was always in the back room, and ventured out only occasionally to check the score and maybe to ask Mum to get him another drink.  Vodka took the edge off.  And my mother never seemed to stop moving, in and out of the living room, the kitchen, the back room, artificially bright from the crack.  So she didn't really follow the game.  Nor did we when Alan came out.  Reese and Jack might actually ask him for a pipe.  Morgan would try to look cool and act the oldest.  I tried to look indifferent, but maybe crossed my legs and leaned back to look more attractive, since that seemed to result more often in an invitation to come back and get a hit.  But then Alan would leave and there we were again, focusing on the puck so we could be first to call the play, ignoring the various people sitting anxiously with us, waiting for their turn to do business.

And it's not true that that's the only thing we kids did together.  We all observed together in silence the degradations we had visited upon us, and those we visited upon ourselves.  Like Morgan punching holes in the drywall in his room, and jumping out the third floor window one night and breaking his leg.  And Jack turning into Gollum and standing in perfect stillness for hours with a glass pipe in his hand in the back room, like some skinny gargoyle, waiting for Alan or some other adult to relent and give him a hit, or let him clean their dirty pipes so he could smoke the scrapings.   Or the sound of Reese being kicked down the stairs when Alan was in a pissy mood.   And the occasional quiet nights when Alan would get me really high and ask me to have sex, which I didn't do, but I did allow inappropriately long and close hugs, which felt like slutting nonetheless. 

What we really did together was watch each-other being fucked with, figuratively and sometimes literally, by ourselves, our parents, and their friends.  But that's not something I can talk about.  So instead I talk about Hockey Night in Canada.

 

            Ariadne Hawkins spent several years of her childhood living on hippie communes in the Canadian Rockies. When she was twelve years old the family moved to Vancouver, and while she studied dance and did well at school, for the most part, her stepfather became a drug dealer, and family life experienced profound changes. Her childhood is the topic of a book-length memoir, The Gift of Anonymity, from which this is an excerpt.  The first chapter, A Dog Named Dog, was a finalist in Third Coast's 2008 Creative Nonfiction writing contest.

After leaving home at nineteen, she studied economics at Carleton University, then at Harvard, earning a Ph.D. in 1993.  She taught finance and strategy at the University of Oregon and Harvard, and spent several years consulting.  She has published in that field, but this is her first publication in creative writing.  Recently she has studied writing at Grub Street in Boston.