Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  “But you know, is it about…”

  “Just read it”—more annoyed this time.

  This was grade four or so. People—teachers, librarians—were forever telling me which books I couldn’t read. They weren’t trying to protect me from the content. Rather, they assumed that my mind worked on one level and that most books were on another, higher than that. A librarian at our school once snuck up on me from behind, pulled a book out of my hand and said, “You won’t like that.”

  How would she know? Had she read it? Was it not good?

  “That’s for later.”

  So of course I wanted these forbidden books. I spent most of my allowance on comics because I had no access to a bookstore. I’m sure there was one in our neighbourhood, but no one took me there. I got my books at the library, through the age-appropriate gatekeepers.

  Sheila was the first person who had given me an “adult” book.

  At first, I didn’t need to read The Lord of the Rings. Possessing it was enough. I liked to hold it and shuffle the pages back and forth. I’d land somewhere in the middle and hope that someone would walk into my bedroom at that moment. They’d catch me at it and think, “What a fascinating person he must be, reading such a large book.”

  I did eventually try to read it, but that book thwarted me. The Lord of the Rings is one of those beloved novels—Moby Dick is probably the ne plus ultra—that is overwritten to the point of occasional incomprehensibility. (Melville’s opus was rejected by dozens of publishers before its eventual success. One of the refuseniks replied, “First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?” and “Could not the captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?” We laugh at the poor guy now, but he had a point.)

  A certain sort of classic enters the canon because the few people who’ve done the hard work of getting through it very badly need other people to know what they’ve accomplished. Otherwise, why have bothered to learn about the minutiae of ambergris?

  Every few weeks, I’d get thirty or forty pages into The Lord of the Rings—understanding very little of what was going on, a birthday party or somesuch that never seems to actually start—and give up. I’d put it away for a while. Then I’d spot it on the shelf during a quiet moment and decide to try again. I suppose I continued trying because I didn’t want to come up short in Sheila’s eyes. She’d thought me bright enough to tackle this thing, and I would. Whether I enjoyed doing so or not.

  Years passed. At least two. Maybe three.

  On one unremarkable Saturday, it finally clicked. I picked the book up again, began reading and did not stop. The story had managed to get hold of me. Reading remains the one thing we can do compulsively and feel no guilt about. This was my first experience of that.

  Once you are grown, you read differently. Now you’re hoovering up information. You’re piling a few things you didn’t yet know onto all the things you already do. You may read better, make better connections and comparisons, but you no longer read deeply. You’re walking on territory that’s already been mapped, adding more points of orientation.

  I read that book like it was the first book I’d ever encountered. It was—and maybe this word is too much and isn’t meant in the literal sense—magical.

  I assume most people are familiar with the story—hobbits, a ring, dark lord, good wizards, bad wizards, a journey, trolls, near-death experiences, a volcano.

  It wasn’t the story that got to me. It was its detail. Someone had spent years constructing an edifice of imagination that lacked in no particulars. He’d thought about the language and the flowers and the way things felt to the touch. He wasn’t pulling you through it. He was planting you in the middle of it and pointing out every single thing. Tolkien taught me that we are not trapped in this world. We can construct our own. You felt his guiding hand in it.

  There are many authors I think I know better as friends than most real people I’ve encountered. He was the first.

  At twelve years old, it was still hard sledding. The ornateness of the vocabulary defeated me. The metaphors and allusions were so far out of my experience, they did not reach me. But the intimacy of description enthralled me, it all felt urgent and personal. It was a very long message in a bottle—“Here’s everything that happened.”

  Like all the art that has hit me hardest, the narrative was about outcasts and loners finding each other. Despite the creature-y aspect, it’s a love story and a tale of redemption. The good guys win, but they suffer in the effort. That’s what Tolkien was saying. That reached me.

  For many of the days that followed, whenever I was away from it, I pined to have that book back in my hands. I thought about it in the classroom and the schoolyard. I didn’t dare bring it anywhere for fear of losing it. After all, it had come from Europe.

  More than the story, I remember the way the book felt, the way it sagged in my hand under its own weight, the dull crack it made as the bulk of its pages adjusted in turning.

  As I neared the end, I slowed. I didn’t want this feeling to stop. What if I never found another book like this? What if Sheila had given me the best book, and I’d already hit the peak of my reading life? What could follow this? When we are children, every experience is whole and complete, unconnected to any other. Every day, every book, every trip, every encounter might be an odyssey, something completely unlike anything we’ve felt before.

  Think of how you felt when you were a kid and someone said, “Tomorrow, we are going to the store.”

  The store! What might happen there? What would you see? Maybe you’d come back with something incredible you hadn’t known existed until you found it there. At the store.

  Now it’s, “Christ, remind me to go to the store.”

  For a while, everything is new. And then it isn’t. You realize all things are connected, and nothing is unlike any other. It’s the coping mechanism that makes life bearable as well as dull.

  I read that book over and over again. I read it ragged trying to rediscover in it the same feeling I’d had when I encountered it the first time. Each pass through grew shorter and less sweet. After a while, it began to fall apart. The binding has come completely undone. It’s become a loose collection of pages held together by scotch tape. When I wanted to reread The Lord of the Rings, I bought a few cheap, beater copies for the purpose. Sheila’s gift had become the classic car of my collection—too precious to drive.

  They made movies from it. That ruined everything. Now every muppet who hadn’t taken the time and effort to get this thing from the source could have a bowdlerized copy of it, a visual Coles Notes. Nine hours, start to finish. I watched them and have never since felt the desire to reread the book. They made my particular experience of it common.

  But if the house was to catch fire and I could only save a few things, that book would be one of them. It’s the one book I own that I take off the shelf every now and again, just to hold and flip through it.

  There is no inscription. We weren’t sentimental that way.

  HOCKEY

  WE OFTEN DISCUSS SPORTS AS A WAY OUT—of whatever life we’re living, of our worries. In Canada, hockey is a way in. Playing it or following it pushes you into the mainstream. It was once the key to belonging.

  My mother immigrated to Canada from Ireland in 1970. She came with her sister. Other than that, she didn’t know anyone. She quickly found office work, embedded herself in the local Irish community and hooked up with my father.

  Her first touchstone in the country was the Hamill family—they were also working-class Irish immigrants, but more settled and attuned to Canada’s rhythms. My mother and her sister briefly lived with them upon arrival. The patriarch of that family, Mickey, was a very particular Irish sort—loud, jolly and just a bit vicious. He worked construction and excelled at Gaelic sports—hurling and football. Unfortunately, Mickey had been banned for life from the local clubs after cracking a hurling stick over the head of a referee while arguing a call. He continued to ins
ist it was a reasonable thing to do. I can see his point. When you give a man a stick and agree that he may use it in violence, he’s going to do so. Occasionally, he’s going to do so contrary to the rules you imposed upon him.

  We would often spend Saturday evenings jammed into the Hamills’ tiny front room. The adults sat around drinking and smoking (I remember that room as so thick with cigarette smoke that it was as hazy as a sauna). I would watch them drink or smoke, trying to figure out what made a joke a joke and why people would laugh at certain arrangements of words and not others.

  They would talk. Mickey would not. That drew me to watching Mickey.

  While the others jabbered, Mickey perched on the edge of the couch watching Hockey Night in Canada on a television perhaps two feet from his face. Like all seventies TV sets, the Hamills’ was more furniture than appliance—a wooden cabinet the size of a refrigerator turned on its side.

  Looking back on it, I’m not sure Mickey understood the finer points of hockey. He would shriek mantras that had very little to do with the nuances of the game: “OUT! OUT! OUUUUUUTTT!” or “GO! GO YE FECKIN’ EEJIT! GOOOO!”

  What made an impression on me was the passion.

  If anyone happened to walk in front of the television set, Mickey would set to frantically waving his arms over his head like a presenting orangutan. He couldn’t bring himself to yell at his friends, but he also couldn’t bear to miss a moment of whatever the Toronto Maple Leafs were doing (usually quite poorly).

  As he watched, Mickey would gradually bend forward until he was in a low crouch, knees practically on the ground, hands raised slightly in a gesture of grasping. His bum would begin to slide off the seat. His eyes were bugged out. He looked perpetually in the motion of tackling.

  When it came time for a commercial break, Mickey would swing back suddenly to the vertical, as if regaining consciousness. He’d be red-faced, clammy and a bit breathless. He’d press his hair back and cheerily engage whoever was sitting alongside him (the worst seat in the room) for precisely two minutes. Then he would break off conversation just as suddenly and recommence screaming at the television.

  I’d stand in a corner observing his gestures—the hands, the yelling, the simian flailing. I would occasionally catch my mother watching me watching Mickey. She’d make a shooing gesture. I’d move into one of her blind spots for a minute or two, and then return to my observations.

  I have always been very aware of people watching me. (Though no one ever really is. There is no greater misapprehension in life than the belief that others are as fascinated by you as you are by yourself.) Mickey did not have this sickness. He didn’t care how he appeared to others. He was a man entirely comfortable with himself. It’s a rare gift.

  Eventually, my fascination with Mickey began to extend to his fixation. What was it about hockey that made Mickey kneel down in front of the television, grip the cabinet so hard it was in danger of splintering, and then scream, “NO! NO! NO!”?

  It was around this time that my mother insisted I begin playing hockey. She had a five-skill plan that I suppose was meant to turn me into a contributing citizen who could pass for Canadian. I was expected to learn five things—how to skate, how to swim, how to ride a bike, how to drive and how to touch-type. That she was right about the value of all five didn’t make it any less irritating.

  I eventually became reasonably proficient at four of them, but skating didn’t take.

  I played hockey for years, somehow getting worse at it as I went along. Despite hours of “power skating” lessons—the Canadian iteration of a fad diet—I never did learn how to stop with a leading left foot. Or skate backward. Or move from side to side.

  As tends to happen with the weaklings at the beginner level, my first coach made me a defenceman. Since I skated backward so poorly, my only option was to grab hold of opponents and pull them to the ice as they went by me. When it became clear that that sort of thing was punished but also tolerated, my criminal hockey behaviour worsened. I was out there on the ice like an out-of-control top, wheeling around wildly in search of a solid object to fell. It was Newtonian physics without any of the grace.

  At the height of this flagrant disregard for the norms of the game, I grabbed hold of the puck in my own goalie’s crease and rather than shovel it out shoved it down my pants instead. Why? Well, why not? Once you do something so stupid, you have to stand tall. Not by admitting it, but by deepening the lie. Several people had seen me steal the puck, including the referee, but I insisted they were wrong.

  No adult man was going to jam his hands down the front of a seven-year-old’s pants. I was removed to a dressing room and instructed to strip. I refused. Several adults were brought in to press me. I rebuffed each one. Eventually, they found another puck and the game resumed. I was ejected and walked home in my hockey uniform, minus skates.

  I spent years slapping that puck against a garage door—a pointless way to spend your spare time and a good way to ruin a door—but having claimed the thing through nefarious means, I enjoyed getting some use out of it.

  When my mother heard the story, she agreed that keeping the puck was the proper thing to do.

  “Sure, what do they need a puck for anyway?” she said. “They must have dozens of the things.”

  My mother and I rarely agreed on much, but she did love assuming my proxy in any tussle with authority. Never submit, especially when you’re in the wrong. That was my mother’s credo.

  The puck incident did blight my nascent hockey career, which didn’t bother me in the least.

  For some reason, Canada has arranged youth hockey on an insomniac’s schedule—no game can start after 8 a.m. Which means you have to be up at 6. During winter. When it’s cold and dark. For generations of Canadian children, hockey is like working in a coal mine, on your days off.

  What I did like about hockey was the brutality. The ice was a place of consequence-free violence in which we could not do each other any real harm—all of us being too light and too well armoured. As long as you didn’t hit anyone with your stick (the Mickey Hamill Rule), just about everything fell under the banner of “working off some steam.” I worked off a lot of steam.

  It was the actual play that escaped me since balance and suppleness have never been my strong suits. At one point, I very badly wanted to be a skateboarder. The first time I got on a friend’s board, I managed to tentatively put both feet up on the deck. Then I made the mistake of swinging one leg out for an almighty push-off. The board flew out from underneath me, sending me sprawling backward. I landed like an anvil on the concrete and was knocked unconscious.

  When I came to, none of my friends had moved from the spots they were in when I’d fallen. I don’t think it was that they didn’t care. It was that they didn’t want to further embarrass me by helping. A half-dozen of them stood there in funereal silence while I lay on the ground deciding if I wanted to vomit now or vomit when I got home.

  From then on, I concentrated on the lifestyle aspects of skateboarding—largely the music—rather than actual skateboarding. It was a sensible compromise.

  Much the same rule applied in hockey. I would agree not to play it, but I would try to enjoy it nonetheless.

  My father also watched hockey, but morosely. For him, the sport was a national duty. He’d sit by himself with a drink in his hand boring his eyes dully into the screen. Occasionally, he’d let off a “Terrible,” or a “Jesus CHRIST.” He didn’t make it look like much fun. He was a Maple Leafs fan in the way most Torontonians were Maple Leafs fans in the 1970s—unwillingly.

  His family had moved to North Bay, Ontario, from Ireland when he was young, so I knew he could play, but had never seen it. The only time he talked about hockey was with his brothers, when they’d argue who’d been best. They told a story about my uncle Finnan having been given a tryout for the Leafs, but I very much doubted it. It is a habit of Irish families (and maybe other families as well—I couldn’t say) to have often been close enough to greatness t
o have brushed past it, but never in any objectively provable way. This is why my mother’s side continues to insist we are distantly related to James Joyce. They are impervious to the argument that, on an island with a population of four million, everyone is a distant relation of everyone else.

  My single hockey memory of my father is going with him to Toronto’s High Park for a leisure skate on a public rink. It was late afternoon on a Saturday. We didn’t often go out on my weekends with him, so this excursion was already remarkable. He got roped into a game of shinny with some twenty-year-olds. Someone gave him a stick and lent him gloves. He’d probably been drinking, but he was still fully functional.

  I watched from the bench. For ten minutes, he enjoyed himself. That thought occurred to me: “He’s having fun.” I don’t think I’d ever before seen that. He was also more than a little good. He was one of the best out there. Even the younger men, many of them decent players, were obviously impressed. I felt myself expanding.

  One of the rules of shinny is that you don’t raise the puck, since no one is wearing pads. Eventually, someone always raises the puck. One nitwit took a hard slapshot into a crowd that nailed my dad in the chest. The game stopped. Only I knew what was coming.

  My father went down on one knee, clutching at himself. The other players gathered around. A few of them looked stricken—they’d just taken out the old fella. My father would have been in his mid-thirties at the time, still formidable. He was of average height, but thick. He’d done hard labour in his youth and that strength never really leaves you.

  Someone helped my father up. After a few minutes’ recovery, he asked who’d taken the shot. The dummy stepped forward for ritual absolution. He was young-ish, but not young. Maybe he was there with his kid as well.

  He had his hand extended in a gesture of conciliation when my father punched him in the face. It was a square blow, which is not easy to do. He buckled. My father dropped on top of him and began swinging. There was now a pile of men on the ice, most of them trying to help but not doing a good job of it. Accidental elbows spread the rage around, turning peacemakers into combatants. For a moment, it was a proper brawl.