Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  The coach pulls all three goalies; this must be a record. I get a penalty and the organ player does “Darling, You . . . Send Me.”

  In the last minute their winger kicks in a goal and they claim a shot from the point hit me and went in. The referee says it’s in. I can’t believe it.

  “This isn’t World Cup soccer,” I say to the ref, “the guy kicked it in!”

  Later in the bar their winger admits to me that he booted the puck in but it’s too late for us to change anything. The visiting team is thrown out of the first hotel, the visiting team is thrown out of the second hotel. They still win, they connect the dots.

  The coach stops the bus at a freeway phone, tells us he’s calling the farm team and bringing up five players. We sit and watch him gyrate on the phone outside. Next game we’re a little sharper.

  The reporter says, Drinkwater, it’s been an up and down year. I tell him I prefer to think of it as sideways, backwards, crab-like. My shirt is strobing on the TV monitor.

  The TV’S evening news is depressingly similar in L.A., Chicago, Miami, San Diego, etc. Traffic seizes, guns out, an exponential equation. I think I want to live in the desert, listen to Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Brothers, drive empty spaces. Others can have the coasts. I feel the pull but don’t want to be another lemming.

  Oranges shake, their orchard a hod of coals. (Whoever is not written in the book will be cast into the lake of fire and whoever is not written in the book will find his ass down on the farm team, choking chickens.) The Mexican and Central American field-hands live on nada, their heads turn to watch me walk past. Braceros, los pobres: they stand in somber groups on Encinitas Boulevard waiting for work, for the jobs we won’t do. They move around with their hometown half-gods, like us, welcoming what kills them. They live illegally on the hill above the mall.

  February brings frost down on the orchards, rueful red-eyed hawks. When winter rains run off the Spanish tiles I think of children living in the huge dump, parasites moving toward their small bare feet; when it rains I think of those living in the riverbed. Are they drowning even now in their crates and boxes as I lie in bed? Are they stealing across yet another frontier, visiting the undiscovered country?

  My Intended watches another dawn walk over the border and I dream a shot coming right at my face, can hear the awful sound as the puck flattens my eye. I jump up in bed. I think of the shark’s eye staring at me on the docks in Mexico.

  What’s wrong? she asks.

  Bob Dylan and Channel 7 ask, How does it feel?

  Well, it’s difficult to distill. We’re on the edge, we’re on the edge of a huge desert that blooms just once a year, and you can blink or sleep through it.

  CHAPTER 39

  Riding the Pines

  In California Waitress X somehow tracks me down, knocks at my door and laughs, a baseball cap pulled low over her famous eyes. I suspect the rich Newfoundland boyfriend paid her ticket. She’s on holiday, driving in the sun, staying at a motel down between the San Diego Zoo and the Mexican border. This may be our last go-round but I’m thrilled to see her again. Not the smartest move but something in both of us clings to sensation, complication.

  On her left hand Waitress X wears an African ring made of flattened Napoleonic coins, a ring that speaks of atrophied amber light, of flux and loss. She tells me with some pleasure where those corroded colonial coins have traveled, first from French ports to fevered West African outposts and returning, by steamer, to France in their hammered incarnation, then moving to yet another colony, Canada’s few acres of snow, to live on Waitress X’s hand, and now in this strange sunny city, the African ring against my cheek. Her touch. She connected the dots. Perhaps those coins once belonged to a conscripted peasant torn from his family, tossed into the sea in mid-voyage, dead of the tropics, of yellow fever or malaria, shrunken and bent and stitched into a brown blanket and lowered to the fishes, his coins moving on without him, like the family face; a Senegalese reshaping them into this ring, smashing them into something else and now here beside the bartender: flesh-coloured Band-Aids like stars all over his big hands. The peasant’s family will forget him, will find a new father, a new husband.

  In his beard and hat the L.A. bartender resembles Cowboy Flett who played with the Leafs and the WHA Oilers and for Freddie the Fog, R.I.P.

  Upstairs I knock at the hotel door and Normie Ullman answers naked. He’s still in good shape but I don’t really care to see Normie Ullman naked. Normie also played for the old WHA Oilers. Curly is after puck bunnies and Dino is chasing anything. Yvan Cournoyer is tanned and grinning and chasing anything. No wonder they call him the Roadrunner. Maybe he’s spending the cheque from that big Zeller ‘s ad we did. They’re fighting with fire extinguishers. Their ex-model wives are thousands of miles to the east, Orient pearls unwept on their neck, the cooler shades of love. There are days it seems that all hockey players are pervs or nuts or stickmen. I’m sure several are normal but there’s not a lot of evidence. You’re away from home a lot, in decent shape, and for a brief while you possess money and youth. You try to rid yourself of both.

  Waitress X worries her hammered ring while strange flowers behind her hair bow towards Chinatown. We finish the fish, explode the last fortune cookies: “A challenge is near.”

  “Yes,” says Waitress X, “paying our bar tab will be a challenge. I should be working. Is that Tom Waits over there? He lives by Petaluma now.” He’s chasing a veal cutlet like it’s a live lobster. “He looks more human than on his albums,” Waitress X says. “He is certainly a curious man. Does he still smoke, do you think? Those homemade tunes. What goes on in his doll house head? Of course what goes on in all of our heads.” She looks at me pointedly. At my head.

  I call my machine for messages and hear the place being trashed. I scream home and my door is gone. A single cloud rises up in a perfect question mark. Seaplanes rush the harbour, barely clearing the granite and brick buildings lining Wharf Street. One plane, the very kind I’m in all too often, clips a tugboat and cartwheels across the inlet. No one is hurt, just claims of hypothermia and shock and legal questions. Of course it can’t happen to me. Gulls go down, fleshy feet hanging over the sun, gliding downstream to spend the night at sea, dreaming, dreaming of the fragrant dump.

  In the corner I get my purple glove hard in the new guy’s face, mash it around a bit. He hisses, “You’re dead, old man!” I’m maybe four years older than this seagull, this floater. When he turns I stick him behind the knee where there’s no pad. I’ll show him a trick or two before the clock releases us for the evening and we can breathe again. He’ll thank me some day, age making him wistful, false.

  The blinking coach fined me for having too impressive a suntan. He felt it displayed a lack of commitment to the team. I never play well in L.A. I’m riding the pines again, riding the pines until doomsday. Where is Bart Crashley when we need him. This place enters and alters your cells like salt. I like that.

  Milk Truck opens one of his own beer after a game. A guy on the kid line, not even of age in this state, asks if he has any others. “Here,” says Milk Truck, tossing the bottle cap, “sniff this.”

  I have the worst sense of smell in the world but even I can smell alcohol on the centre. He floats at the red line, he won’t check anyone and he can’t take a pass. I saw him before the game wielding a hatchet to shorten his stick, leaving splinters all over the black rubber mats. We were killing ourselves laughing but meanwhile our best forward is benched waiting for a trade and this idiot plays. It’d be funny if we won a few but we don’t.

  I’m the only D-man who stays at home and they’re making noises about a trip to the farm. Choking chickens. If I get beat it’s because I’m the only one back on a 3-on-I. You have to play the pass and hang in the middle, ignoring instinct, refraining from charging the guy with the puck. The rest of the team just watches, already thinking up their excuses for not helping out. You guess where the pass will go and you look stupid when they tic-tac-toe it int
o the net. You look naked and stupid because you’re the only one back there. That’s your reward.

  Our captain is furious: We’re playing like garbage, he screams, like horseshit!

  I skate harder, I get to the corner first. I’ll show them. My stick is down and my back is to their forward, bracing myself, waiting for him to smash into me, but he swings wide to try and lift my stick and steal the puck. I pivot with the puck, my hip out; he slams straight into the boards hard and falls to the ice holding his dripping face. The end of his nose is slit open like that scene in Chinatown. The zebras give me a high-sticking major for drawing blood and I’ve done nothing. My stick was on the ice. He put himself into the boards. I argue and get extra time. Unsportsmanlike conduct. Piss me off. The other team is yelling at me to watch out, they’ll get me back, and I’ve done nothing. I rush their bench, exultant, enraged, leap at them and bop some cementhead on the nose. My team is silent, unsure what exactly happened in those three seconds. I have a rep for elbows. Thanks, guys.

  My old car is detailed, waxed, gleaming, looking skanking, mint. When in Rome: Otherwise you feel like a grubby loser in a bucket of bolts. I listen to FM— 10,000 watts out of Mexico. Beer is so much cheaper here. I can buy twenty-four Pacifico for the price of a six-pack of no-name in Canada. I can sneak out fishing wahoo most anytime with a few friends, a sleek fibreglass hull roaring under the piers and bridges.

  On the nude beach north of La Jolla a man passes me a handbill: Others toss them but I take them, I like them.

  ALTERNATIVE CANCER TREATMENTS

  IN MEXICO

  BIO-ELECTRICAL MEDICINE

  [THE ONLY CLINIC ON NORTH AMERICAN

  CONTINENT TO FEATURE THIS TREATMENT]

  7:00 P.M. FOLLOW SIGNS.

  The clinic is Mexican but the spiel and sizzle seems as All-American as a naked bootleg. No one hands you anything like this back home. You’re behind the wheel of a Batmobile. Dudes chase me in the American city with New Age weapons that look like electric shavers. They wreck my hands for kicks. I still inhabit my face. I wake one morning the spitting image of my father. My father refuses chemotherapy or any treatment. I’d do the same. We talk a bunch on the phone. The bird is the word, says the AM radio. This is supposed to be the new world, sings X down at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. The punks are visibly ageing. They talk about Sid Vicious and get nostalgic.

  I don’t want to go to Disneyland but the Intended convinces me and I have a riot, running from ride to ride, joyously nauseated, going on Space Mountain just one more time in the dark while a thirteen-year-old Samoan gang member takes a bullet in the spine, in section H the “Happy” parking lot. Right where we’re parked. Why not the “Grumpy” section of the parking lot? The brawl eventually involves ten people. Another bullet hits a kid in the elbow.

  We lounge on the boring Jungle Cruise and hear gunshots. A hole in my poor old Volvo; the Anaheim police take the .308 cartridge as evidence.

  The Highway Patrol stops one of the cars heading south on the San Diego freeway. A shotgun in the backseat. Each side blames the other. The thirteen-year-old dies at 3:00 A.M. at Scripps. Hockey is pretty passive compared to these jokers. This is big-time violence with their Uzis and glocks and shit, it makes Dave The Hammer’s brand of destruction seem quaint and shy and antique.

  At morning practice a bunch of us fool around, like kids bumping, tackling for a joke, submarining each other, getting giddy. Waitress X is watching the practice, sipping sugared machine coffee. One guy leaps in the air to land on his buddy’s back but his good buddy is turned to skate up ice, one leg behind him. Two hundred and ten pounds land on this one outstretched leg and 210 pounds pull it backwards. It’s unnatural. I see the leg give and I see the man’s face. It makes me sick. I can’t look at the guy who did it, do not want to know more, do not want to know that the knee was yanked right out of the socket. Knee injuries make me cringe. The stupid thing is the accident in practice helps me stick with the team, make a few more paydays.

  Most of the guys are drinking gassy draft, eating pickled eggs, pig’s feet, turkey gizzards, beer sausage. I learn to take a can of Florient on the bus with me, spray it at their noxious clouds. I enter a techno-zombie state after the third city.

  Another new assistant coach. Power of positive thinking at the defaced chalkboard.

  “O.K. guys, we got ‘em on the ropes, keep pressing, good pressure, good pinching at the blue line.”

  We’re down 2-0 and we got them on the ropes? PHD, he says: Pride, Hustle, Desire.

  “One game at a time,” he opines.

  Yeah, versus what? Just once I’d like to hear a coach say, O.K., guys, seven games at a time.

  Flying around the ice like a hyped-up racehorse you barely see the puck drilling right at your head, a rising black line, not a disc. Instinct says: move here. I could never play goal. I could never be a coach.

  Spittle and bits of ice fly from the coach’s mouth: “GET ON HIS TAIL.’ STAY ON HIS FUCKING ASS.’! Check him. I SAID CHECK HIM!! Oh shit. . .”

  Their guy scores.

  The coach is on the bubble but we may all get cut before he’s canned. It’s a guessing game, tiptoeing around. Our best winger had his anterior cruciate ligament ripped in half and the medial ligament torn from the bone.

  Tuesday I stopped a 90 M.P.H. shot on the side of my ankle bone and couldn’t walk or skate. But a day later it’s fine, just a deep bruise. I keep walking, twitching, knees swollen like basketballs, geography lessons, coins for long distance. I read the calendar—February 14—thought it said Valium Day. I misunderstood. Yes, I misunderstood. I went for a quick drink by the fishing boats with Waitress X. A walk on the beach, watching out for rattlesnakes washed out of the valleys by the floods.

  My Intended is already asleep when I slip into bed. She jumps, frightened, and is clawing at me in the dark; half asleep, she doesn’t know who I am, rakes my neck, my shoulders.

  “I got eyes,” my Intended said to me another time, “I got eyes.” Now what could that mean?

  We are listening to some ancient scratchy ballad.

  “Who is this?” she asks.

  “Some way-back blues singer. Floyd Tillman. I taped it off an old 78.”

  “Floyd Tillman,” she says. “Floyd’s hurting on this tune,” she says. “Floyd’s a hurting dude,” she says.

  I have scratches healing all over my face. I play her an ancient ballad. No one has turntables anymore.

  When I was younger, perhaps eleven, I wore a ring of twisted metal. I found it in the wildflower meadow that sloped to the lake. There was once a rotting paddlewheeler beached at the bottom of the meadow; we dreamed of making that filigreed riverboat float once more the way we dreamed of building a drag racer out of a rusted old boat trailer rammed into the bush. Someone else’s father owned a small white car that could drive right into the lake and then move through the roiling water. How we envied that: to be on the lake and still be in a car. This seemed the height of science’s fruits; this seemed so cosmopolitan. Soon we would be sipping Martinis, for sophisticated outside worlds were moving their centre closer. We were in awe and we were bored. My brother was teasing me in front of two girls we both liked. He crossed some line and I hit him in the face, forgetting I wore the ring. The girls were stunned. I fled but I still see my brother staggering about the earth, bent like a hinge and clutching his jaw. I threw away the silver ring, swearing I’d never wear another. That ring may have settled its metal into grass of the path leading west away from the meadow. Sexton beetles may have buried it; now gravity pulls it toward the centre of our earth, or perhaps some other innocent found it, put it on, and hit their brother, hit the family face.

  I step into their forward just as the whistle blows the play offside. He catches my knee with his; in considerable pain I roll around in convulsions, yelling at everyone, Leave me alone! They look on, faces suitably serious, pretending concern. Later over beer the masks drop. Milk Truck laughs, asks: “What the hell were you doing on
the ice—the funky chicken?” Everyone cracks up.

  Taxiing into LAX, I peer out our plane’s porthole and see a 737 skid past on its undercarriage, smoke and flames nimbly chasing each other up and down seams in the fuselage. But this is the thing: a much smaller plane is pinned beneath. The 737 hit or landed on the smaller plane from behind like an owl. The 737 is grasping another plane and then the two hit the corner of a building, the old fire station. The 737 snaps into two uneven pieces but, smoking and burning up, keeps sliding across a meridian of ornamental grass. When it finally stops passengers crawl over the crowded seats, crawl out over the burning wing or drop out the back exit, tiny stick figures leaping from the flames and smoke. Some are children, pushed out to drop onto the scarred pavement. A broken arm, a broken leg, that’s not so bad. I can’t see anyone in the smaller plane, or what’s left of it. I wish them luck.

  Our team’s plane is directed to another runway to stay out of the way of emergency crews laying foam on the huge flames. There is so much rubble after the crash; it’s unnerving, this instant chaos in a tidy public place. Bits of metal and plastic crap are scattered for blocks, as if some minor artillery battle was fought.

  The larger plane was landing into the sun, larger than the sun, blind, then the pilot cursing on the black box recording. I craned my neck and watched the pilot and co-pilot die when they struck the building, the plane’s nose disintegrating silendy against the fire station. They crashed at sunset, then it’s night in Los Angeles, some light still over the ocean, the last surfers paddling in, talking to each other about tomorrow’s weather forecast. Dozens of passengers do not find the exits, are lost in the wreckage, face on the melting carpet, asphyxiated, lungs full of vinyl. I’m amazed how many did get out.