What You Need

by Andrew Forbes

  When you stepped up to the running board and swung yourself inside Donnie’s dark blue F-150, you hadn’t yet felt like an intruder in your own house. You had not yet sat at the round table in the darkened kitchen with a glass of milk, red in the weak light of the microwave’s digital clock. You hadn’t yet sat listening to the hard September wind blowing east across Huron and beating against the side of the house and then been startled when your grammy switched on the overhead light and, looking at you there, said, “You’re fifteen years old. You’ve got nothing to cry about, girl.”

  CYCLES

  He was a meek man, my father, but constant in all things. He owned and operated World Press & Tobacco, a two-aisle indoor newsstand and smoke counter that had every newspaper worth reading and many more that weren’t. There were also thousands of magazines catering to every obscure habit, hobby, predilection, and desire. There was a single rack of postcards and a display cabinet of cigars and cigarillos, pipe tobacco, and rolling papers. He mostly spent his days perched on a stool at the counter listening to jazz LPs, the likes of Wardell Gray, Sonny Stitt, and Howard McGhee. Behind him was the rack of Player’s and du Mauriers, Cravens, and Export A’s. He opened at 7:00 AM to sell papers and cigarettes to the office workers, closed at 1:00 PM, came home, had his supper and slept a couple of hours. At four in the afternoon he returned to the store and stayed open until midnight. Six days a week, closed on Sundays. He did that for better than thirty years.

  I hated him for those midnights. I hated him for the comfort he took in small things, the quietness and sobriety of his life, his friendlessness, his slump-shouldered posture. Mostly I hated him for the vision he represented of the life that I might inherit. I had somehow come to swallow the idea that I would one day eat the world whole, leave my footprints all over it, but my father’s life suggested such things weren’t likely. It both saddened and frightened me.

  My father, Richard Hamelin, was hopelessly out of step in all things, including fashion, politics, music, books, and television. He was a thin, mousy man, sharp-angled and awkward, but his loyalty and steadfastness were obvious from his unchanging wardrobe: the worn-kneed corduroy pants and nubby polyester shirts, an ancient peacoat with missing buttons and fraying cuffs, and always the same grey vest with a black satin back. On his feet he wore moccasin-style suede shoes.

  He opened the store in 1972 right after he married my mother, Helen Masters, and three years after earning his degree in English Lit from Ottawa U. Soon I came along, and twelve years after that my sister Amy was born. I have always assumed Amy was a mistake. Maybe we both were. Maybe the mistake was in their even having kids to begin with.

  My father was not a sports fan, and I was not my father, or so I wanted desperately to believe, so I felt that giving myself over to football would distance me from him. Is there something more than opposite? Polar opposite? I reasoned that loving and playing football made me the polar opposite of my father. People would look at him and look at me and they’d say: No way are they related.

  Without asking I moved into a room in the basement. I hunkered down, read bodybuilding magazines, watched wrestling and football videos. That was my life.

  I had already defied my parents’ expectations by transferring to the Technical High School. Tech was where you ended up once you had decided, or had had decided for you, that academic success was not in the cards. Tech was where your future mechanics and HVAC guys went. If you didn’t graduate from Tech, you were probably headed to prison.

  But the entire point for me was football. I left a school with no football team for one with a feared squad. In grade nine I made the juniors and wound up a tight end, blocking on running plays and flaring out for short passes. I was quick and I caught a few good balls. I was also introduced to special teams, which is like a crash course in brutality. There are few legal venues as perfect for the adolescent male to work out his bloodlust as special teams.

  By the time I was ready for the senior team, late in the summer before grade 11, my father had yet to see me play a single game. Looking back, I still can’t decide if that was because of his fear of physical things, of seeing his son exposed to such danger, or if it was more of his steadfastness, his quiet stubbornness, the same steady adherence to order and consistency that got him to the store each morning and kept him there until midnight.

  I started at tight end that season and was told that, as a rookie on the senior team, that was kind of a big deal. One practice that fall we were running some plays on offence, working on blocking schemes, lined up against the D-line and linebackers, with live hitting. We had this guy named Joel who played outside linebacker. He had a pencil-line beard and ridiculous designs shaved into the sides of his head. We all hated him, but he was a quick, strong defender, so we kind of had to let it go. On one particular play during this practice I was pulling a stunt, crossing paths with the guard on my right, and Joel came inside and didn’t see me coming over. He had his eyes fixed on the quarterback. I hit him three-quarters on and laid him out flat. There was a terrific popping sound, the very thing you hope to achieve when you strap on shoulder pads with the aim of using them as weapons instead of as protection. Joel was starry-eyed, breathless, and chastened.

  Three of the coaches later went out of their way to congratulate me.

  Upon my retelling, my father would ask, “Was that really necessary? It was a practice, after all.” But in the expansive moments that followed the hit—moments wherein my skin felt like chain mail and my blood felt like rocket fuel—every part of me, physical and emotional, said: I want to do more of that.

  I decided that strength was the key, and so within a week I was on my first cycle. It wasn’t hard to find the stuff: half the O-line and most of the defence were using. It wasn’t a secret among the players, but a shared understanding. There was a second-string running back whose older brother worked in one of those health supplement stores, and he had a connection to a guy selling the real stuff. That was our supply chain.

  When I started bulking up but kept my speed, Coach Doherty, who handled the defensive side of things, noticed me and said, “Let’s try this meathead at middle linebacker” (Doherty called everyone meathead, because he couldn’t remember names). That was how I went from O to D, which is kind of like switching tribes. It was immediately obvious to everyone that I had found my place. I began to walk differently.

  Football became a rite, our shared religious observance. We were our own gods. The cycles were communion biscuits. On game days we augmented them with greenies, just to make sure we were extra alert and open to the grace of utter fucking domination. Before pregame drills we had a ritual: we would put on our helmets and shoulder pads and we would hit the school’s brick wall a few dozen times at full speed.

  Hammer, they called me. There isn’t much choice when your name is Jason Hamelin; there’s little art in the practice of concocting nicknames for high school football teammates. Our quarterback, for example, was a tall, composed kid named Anil Mukerji. I’ll let you guess what we nicknamed him. That we liked him and that he was a very good quarterback did not prevent us from having a lot of fun at his expense. One of our best receivers, a guy named Mike Dorn, dropped one pass all season, in our first game. One pass. Next practice someone called him Butterfingers. By the next game it had been shortened to Butter.

  Botterill was our left end, captain of the defence. We called him Killbot. I think I came up with that. Peter Skenks, centre, anchor of the offensive line, we called The Skunk. Stefan Moreau was Moron; he went on to get a scholarship at Temple. Trent “Weiner” Sweeney was later a walk-on at Syracuse, which is where I’d wanted to go. For most of us other guys, though—Bowser, Digger-Dog, Mother Jones, Shoes, Cowpoke, Goggles, The Towel—this would prove to be the end of the line.

  But we didn’t know that then. Then all I knew was that I was playing middle linebacker, the lynchpin, the keystone, quarterback of our justifiably feared defence. I was still doing special teams, too. Kick cover
age, where what you do is line up with the kicker, and as soon as he kicks the ball you run as fast as you can and hit anything that moves. The hope is that you get a chance to hit the guy who caught the ball.

  We were a gang of marauders set loose upon a village, a war party, a scourge. Unexploded ordnance, maladjusted and murderous young men galloping at full speed toward another band of like-minded miscreants, boys with daddy issues to dwarf my own, hormones firing like malicious pistons. Special teams was a place to work out ugly things, unleash pent-up aggression, engage in serious headhunting. Scores were often settled. You could line a guy up before the snap and be fairly certain you’d get a chance to hit him with a thirty-yard head of steam behind you. Boys would break teeth, bones, occasionally rupture soft tissue. It was a strange, sanctioned form of bloodletting, and when it was over we were patted on our backs.

  Some of those boys have gone on to do terrible things as men. I wonder if they might have skirted such ruin if they had been allowed to continue playing football.

  The Tech High Senior Red Raiders had a reputation. We demanded fealty, determination, effort. I don’t think the coaches even knew how serious we were. The head coach was Robert Broussard. We called him Bobby Brushcut. His real job was teaching. I had him for applied math, and even in the classroom he always wore his turf shoes and his Red Raiders windbreaker. Sometimes he’d even have a whistle dangling from his neck. Brushcut was a football coach first and a math teacher only by necessity. But during class I thought I detected some loyalty to the material, some genuine love for the concepts, and this disappointed me. On game days he’d go right on with the lesson, as though it was a normal day. It was all noise to me; I’d only be able to concentrate on football.

  It makes sense to me now: being applauded for knocking guys’ heads off contributed to a sense of self-worth in a way that academics and family life did not. Home was all about humility, and as a seventeen-year-old humility is not really in your wheelhouse. You kind of want to believe that you’re a deity. I felt that I had licence to kill an opponent, if the situation called for it, and that I would not be punished as a result, but celebrated.

  I walked the halls as though I was already a legend. The cycles brought me from solid to ripply to huge, and people noticed. One day at home I walked out of the bathroom without a shirt on, just a pair of track pants, and I ran into my father in the hallway. He looked me up and down, sort of casually, as though he was trying to hide it. And what I saw in his eyes as he took me in was great discomfort, maybe even fear. I liked that. It told me I was becoming a person of my own invention.

  We practised in the morning and again after school. The October mornings smelled metallic and earthy. The cold air cleaned out your nostrils. Some mornings the mud was still frozen in the shape of our cleat marks and prostrate bodies from the previous day’s practice. As the day went on it would thaw out and get good and runny.

  Our uniforms were never clean. The light grey pants always bore the marks of earlier games and practices. They were grass-stained, mud-smeared, often bloody, and poorly mended. Mud was good. It said you went flat-out. But blood was better. Blood was a badge.

  In the locker room we listened to Metallica and N.W.A. at an ungodly volume. We hung rookies by their underwear on hooks in the showers and then urinated on them. We punched one another. Batiste, who was a defensive back, used to march around naked asking everyone, “Is it funny?!” Then he’d answer the question himself. “It ain’t funny.” He’d get into your face and yell, “Motherfucker, it is NOT FUNNY!” I don’t know what wasn’t funny, exactly, but I think we all got the general idea. The general idea was don’t fuck with Batiste.

  When not on the field I was in the weight room, watching myself in the mirror. I ate dinner alone in my room, watching lifting videos. It was a lifestyle that left little room for extras. I never saw my parents.

  We finished that year 9-1, the only blemish on our regular season record a squeaker against Confederation that we lost 7-6 when our kicker missed an extra point going against a crazy wind. Then we fell in the semis to St. Leo. That game was like a fight in a prison yard. The difference was a fourth-quarter safety, which is two very cheap points, if you’re asking me. Their nose tackle fell on Anil in the end zone, the ball like a live grenade beneath his stomach. Final: 9-7.

  That was a bitter pill to swallow. It became the taste of the cycles that long off season, the chalky little supplement tablets.

  I was a massive beast. I was going to eat your son. I was going to cause him serious head trauma, simply because he had the misfortune of suiting up in another school’s uniform. It could be anyone. That’s what I was prepared to tell the assembled mourners: It was nothing personal.

  The next year was another matter. We rolled through that season like a thing sent to destroy young men, belongings, pride.

  One quick thing I feel it’s important to mention here: you always hear that one of the side effects is impotence, but I didn’t see any of that then. I had no trouble, and no shortage of opportunity. If you can imagine the kind of girls who might attend a last-chance school like Tech, and who might then be attracted to boys like us, well, I knew the company of a good many of those girls.

  It’s true that the cycles proved a tough habit to break, as did the greenies. I think they left me kind of open to additional, let’s say, weaknesses, too: cross-tops, oxy, sometimes red birds. I’m not saying no to any drinks, either. I don’t work out much anymore, so I’m smaller, and certain parts of me are shrivelled and unsightly. My luck with women has more or less evaporated. That’s all true. But it’s important to recognize just how momentous a time in my life this was. For two years I was feared, adored, discussed. Other teams watched videos that isolated me and my actions. They concocted strategies to combat my skill and strength. They modified their game plans.

  Every single girl I passed in the hall knew my name. How many people can say that about any part of their life? So, as shitty as things have been since—and they have been extremely shitty—I’m still tempted to say that, on balance, it was all worth it.

  We were perfect, unbeaten. We had our revenge on St. Leo in the semis, 24-8, in a snowstorm. That was fun. It put us on a collision course with the City West champs, Brookside.

  The championship game, called the Capital Bowl, was always played on a Sunday, so here was my father’s chance to come and watch me play. Once we’d earned our berth I said to him, “Think you’ll make it to watch the final?”

  And he said, “Oh, now, I suppose that’s possible.”

  That’s possible. I wanted to say to him, “I’m your son!”

  What I did say was, “It’d be cool if you could.”

  “I think I’m fighting a cold, Jason. It might be better for me to stay home and get some rest.”

  I did not sleep the night before the game. Not one wink.

  They held the Capitol Bowl at a neutral site, an Astroturf field behind a sports and rec complex with metal bleachers and a digital scoreboard. No change rooms, so we got into our pads and uniforms at Tech and then boarded the bus. As we got off the bus and sprinted out onto the bright green surface to begin warm ups I felt it under my feet: it was like a sheet of plastic laid down over a parking lot. I was looking forward to picking up some good citizen’s son and body-slamming him down onto it.

  Mom came, and she brought Amy. They sat halfway up the bleachers and they looked like they were trying to hide from the noise. They got cold and left before half-time.

  During the pregames Boterill said to me, “Hammer, today I’m going to kill someone.”

  I said, “Yes you are, Killbot! My goal is to make these guys shit out their own teeth.”

  “Yes, guy!” shouted Killbot.

  Brushcut called us in, had us all take a knee. After the usual niceties he began screaming at us: “Who are you going to hit?” and we were shouting back, “Everyone!” And then he asked us again, and we shouted louder, “Everyone!” The third time he asked, every m
ember of the Tech H.S. Senior Red Raiders football team shouted louder than they had ever shouted before, barking “EVERYONE!” up into the clear November sky. But not me. I called out: “Richard Hamelin!” It was one of those things you do without fully realizing that you’re doing it.

  We kicked off to start the game. We swept down the field like a gale, like a hurricane, knocking over everything we encountered. You could have parked a garbage truck at midfield, and we’d have knocked that over. A yacht.

  The wind was at our backs, which felt like the natural world confirming our dominance. Brookside’s kick returner was tiny, and though that usually means quick, I caught him splitting between two blockers and I plugged the hole with my head. I was a giant arrow with a helmet at its tip. There was a target painted garishly on his chest, six inches below his chin, and once I was airborne I was not to be denied it. I was later told that I drove the poor boy back five yards, in the air. He did well to make it to the sidelines under his own power, though he did not return to the game.

  We referred to that as “setting the tone.”

  Brookside’s bread and butter was their running game. They had a battering ram of a fullback, a young man built like a truck, so the game promised plenty of hitting, lots of inside stuff. It was going to be a good day. Our defence took the field boisterously, wearing T-shirts beneath our pads that read TECH HS D-FENCE: YOU ONLY GET 2 CHANCES. This was Canadian football, remember: three downs. We were proud of that.