Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  Highway 401 near Kingston, Ontario

  10:30 p.m.

  Sitting in the back seat, I also realized that there wasn’t help waiting for me at our destination, my grandparents’ place in Scarborough. Again, like my mother, my grandparents might have feared my father lashing out at them, and that fear might have trumped any objections they had to the abuse.

  * * *

  Over the next five hours, he kept coming back to one of his go-to threats.

  “I brought you into this world and I can take you out,” he said.

  I took it the way that it sounded: a threat to kill me, a very real threat. When he had said it before, it had just sounded like bragging about his power over me. Now it was sounding like he thought it wasn’t just within his power but also within his rights.

  I had always thought it was hyperbole. I’d taken his threats of hitting me seriously, but killing me . . . no, I had never taken that seriously. But I had never seen him in the state he was in now, never so extreme for so long. I’d thought he wasn’t just capable of “taking me out of this world” but sort of leaning that way. But my hockey career had been his whole life. If I was going to break away from him, he had nothing else to look forward to, just another dead-end job for minimum wage, another plea to his in-laws for a bailout, another day in a loveless marriage and dysfunctional family. Going to jail for killing me or ending his own life might not have looked so bad to him by comparison. I thought I had to fear for my life because of how little value he found in his own.

  I had always known that I would break away from my father. I had thought it would be a process, that I was going to have to claw for every inch of independence. I thought my father would have to cede control but that that would come over a long haul. I had played for him all those years, but eventually I was going to be playing for a team that was going to pay me. That was going to become my first loyalty: an NHL team that was going to be paying me for control of my playing career. If there was going to be a single moment of truth, a moment when my life would change in a fundamental way, I thought it was going to be when I signed that contract. After all, that contract had been my father’s objective from the very start.

  I had never imagined, not until he grabbed me and pulled me off the bus in Ottawa, that my independence from my father would come down to a showdown. I had always thought that breaking away would be for a better life, but now I was thinking that it might be the only way to save my life.

  * * *

  Even though my father had been awake for at least eighteen hours and maybe more than twenty-four (having worked the night before), he was wired. He didn’t do drugs, but it seemed like was on amphetamines or cocaine. He was shaking. His eyes were popping. He was talking nonstop. He drove the entire way from Ottawa to Toronto with only the one stop for a piss break. He had the pedal down and was going way over the speed limit. And just like the van, he showed no sign of slowing down. Over the course of hours, his rage only accelerated. A manic episode, a breakdown . . . I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’m not sure that a medical specialist could have diagnosed my father if one had been sitting in the front seat next to him.

  I was agitated too, but I was aware of everything going on. I knew that there was going to be a confrontation and that it was going to be physical, like so many before. I tried to stay as calm as I could. If I was going to get out of this night alive and in one piece, it wasn’t over, no matter what he said. If I could break away, I was going to keep playing hockey no matter what he thought, I wasn’t going to have to give up the game. And I grew cocky about it, just like I had on the bench earlier when I was chirping back at him. When he ranted and looked in the rearview mirror, he caught me smiling, and that only stoked the fire. I had to be careful, though—I knew I was going to have to stand my ground and confront him when we got to his parents’ place. That was going to be me seizing the moment on my own terms.

  I couldn’t control my father. No one had ever been able to talk him down or reason with him. But I knew how to push his button, and I knew exactly when I was going to do it. That much I could control.

  * * *

  Scarborough, Ontario

  January 5, 2002, 2:30 a.m.

  “Get the girls, get their shit packed and get ’em out here. Don’t waste any fuckin’ time.”

  Again, my mother got out of the van and went up to the front door. It was locked, so she rang the bell. I could see my grandparents standing in the doorway, my mother explaining that we were going back to Michigan. My father kept the van idling and watched his father and wife talking. I opened the door.

  “Stay in the fuckin’ car,” my father said.

  “No, this is it,” I said. I got out and stood on the lawn. “I’m not going. I’m staying here.”

  “Get fuckin’ in!”

  “I’m not going anywhere. This is it. I’m done with it.”

  I could have run then. I could have outrun him. I could have run and hid or tried to get help, but in the back seat I had made my decision to make my stand.

  He took a run at me and I stood there. He started throwing punches.

  “You little fuckin’ bastard. You piece of shit.”

  He put everything he had behind every punch and landed every third one on target. He was looking to knock me stone-cold, lights-out unconscious. If any one headshot caught me wrong, I’d have a concussion that would send me to hospital and to a dark room for weeks at least. I punched back and flushed him a couple of times.

  “You wanna take a punch at me, you faggot?”

  He got me down, bent over me and punched away. Awful minutes passed. He was hyperventilating. He punched right through a smoker’s cough and a gasp for air. And finally he punched himself out, couldn’t throw one more shot. He stood up and staggered away.

  Lights went on at the neighbors’ homes.

  “Is that enough?” I said.

  I crawled away. My mother was just standing by, weeping, and didn’t help me up. I got up to my knees and then my feet. While my father was bent over at the waist, trying to catch his breath, I walked into the house, past my grandparents, who were standing by the door. They looked at my sweatshirt, torn, wet and covered in cold mud. They looked at the cuts and bruises on my face. They said nothing. My father stood on their lawn and told them what had gone on.

  “He had it fuckin’ comin’,” he said.

  While he was justifying every last punch, I was on the phone to the police. I can’t remember calling 911. I might have. My mother might have. My grandparents might have. I was exhausted and my mind was foggy. Everything was a blur. I spoke to the 911 dispatcher.

  The dispatcher had the address from the call display and double-checked it with me. “Is this an emergency?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it’s an emergency.”

  My father saw me holding the receiver. In less than a minute, in the time it took me to dial the number and the dispatcher to pick up, it was over. Everything. My father probably couldn’t hear me. If he didn’t know I was on the phone with the police, he had to have suspected that that was next. He stood there while I stayed on the line.

  “My name is Patrick O’Sullivan . . . I’ve been beaten up by my father . . . I’m cut but I think I’m all right . . . I’m afraid what he’s going to do . . . I’m afraid he’s going to kill me.”

  “Police are on the way. Stay on the line.”

  He didn’t need to hear the dispatcher.

  “Fuck,” he said. And that was all. He knew it was over.

  It was the first time I had ever seen my father back down, the first time I had ever seen him run. No time for goodbyes, not even a last threat. He drove off and a few minutes later a couple of cruisers and four cops were at the house.

  * * *

  Scarborough, Ontario

  3:30 a.m.

  A police officer walked out to the cruiser parked in front of the house and got on the radio. John O’Sullivan. February 26, 1960. Six feet. 240 pounds. Black hair. Brown eyes. Michi
gan plates. Possibly heading to the border.

  Inside the house another officer took the lead. He pulled me aside and asked me questions. He tried to calm me down. I was shaking. He probably thought it was just nerves, but it was more than that. I hadn’t slept in twenty hours and hadn’t eaten since lunch. I was exhausted even before I had to fight for my life. And anyone who has been in a fight knows just how much it takes out of you.

  “How did this start?”

  I didn’t know where to begin. “It’s always like this,” I said.

  “Then how did it start tonight?”

  I told him about the beat-down on the lawn.

  “He did that?” the officer asked, pointing to fresh cuts and bruises on my face.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  And when I answered all of his questions, I had some of my own. What next? Yeah, he’d be caught and questioned. I wanted to know: Could he be charged for those other things? It had been years, I told the officer. Years. And it had been just like this. Lots of times worse. The officer took down everything. He asked and asked again.

  “What else did your father do?”

  “He would throw me out of the house and lock me out all night in the middle of the winter. From eleven until the morning and I was freezing out there.”

  “And how old were you?”

  “Eleven, twelve. He did it all the time.”

  The officer told me that the police were going to follow up. I could hear the other officer asking my mother and grandparents questions in another room. I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying.

  “Is he going to jail?” I asked.

  “Your father is in a lot of trouble,” he said.

  That only left me one question to ask myself: Why hadn’t I tried to get help sooner? If the police had asked me, I wouldn’t have had a good answer. I wouldn’t have had any answer at all.

  I told the officer that I was worried that my father was going to come back, and he did his best to calm me down. Arrangements for me to stay with someone would be made in the morning, they said. Until then a cruiser would stay parked outside, to protect me and nab my father if he tried anything.

  He didn’t.

  * * *

  Scarborough, Ontario

  8:30 a.m.

  Before the cruiser left in the morning, an officer told me that U.S. Customs in Detroit had spotted the van at the border. My father had used one of his fake IDs to cross the river. He was at large, but a warrant was out for his arrest.

  I was exhausted. I had been played a game, been beaten to a pulp. I had slept a bit on the bus on the drive up to Ottawa, but I was ready to pass out. I went to one of the upstairs bedrooms and stretched out. I tried to find a way to put my head on the pillow that didn’t put any pressure on the welts on my face that were still swelling up. I checked to see if I was leaving any drops of blood on the pillow. I closed my eyes and tried to will myself to sleep. I was still shaking and sweating, just too much adrenaline pumping.

  Eventually I managed to drop off for a few minutes at a time, but whenever there was a knock at the door I sat bolt upright—it would seem crazy for my father to come back to his parents’ place with a warrant out for his arrest, but he had an established history of doing crazy things. Whenever the phone rang downstairs, I woke up and tried to hear what was going on. I knew there would be a lot of calls back and forth with the police and the team. I knew the story would be out there—not in the newspapers but on the hockey grapevine. I knew that by the time I came downstairs a lot of people who’d had suspicions about my father for years would have had them confirmed. Anybody who had something more than suspicions about my father would be thinking that they’d seen it coming.

  * * *

  Mississauga, Ontario

  6 p.m.

  When Joe Washkurak got in touch with me later that day, he told me that he had made arrangements to have me picked up and escorted into my uncle Barry’s townhouse to gather my stuff. The police wanted to make sure that my father hadn’t shown up at Barry’s, but I didn’t think he’d be there—he was crazy but not stupid. That would be the first place the police would have looked.

  I was glad that I didn’t have to go into Barry’s alone. Barry would have been the first person my father called, probably not even an hour after he took off the night before. He would have kept Barry updated. If the police caught up with my father, Barry would have instructions for getting him bail.

  After gathering up my clothes, Joe Washkurak dropped me off at the home of Matt Tanel, our backup goalie. Matt’s father was a police officer, so there probably wasn’t a safer place for me to stay on short notice. After a few hours there, my nerves jangled a little less and the adrenaline slowed to a trickle.

  Only then did it really sink in. This was my new reality. It wasn’t just my father who was going to be out of my life, but his whole side of the family. Just as there was going to be no “patching up” with my father, there was never going to be any way that I could fully trust the rest of them. It would have been tough enough to maintain any connection with them because of their knowledge of the abuse I was put through and their silence. No matter what my father would ever do, they were going to defend him just by reflex—he had emotionally manipulated everyone around him. It was left to me to break away.

  23

  GETTING BACK ON MY SKATES AND GETTING MY SKATES BACK

  Mississauga, Ontario, January 2002

  For the four days, my father was at large with a warrant out for his arrest. I don’t know where he would have been hiding, or even whether he stayed in Michigan or came back to Toronto. I imagine that he slept in a van or managed to couch-surf at the house of someone he worked with. And I imagine that he came up with his own explanation for his need for a place to stay. The wife kicked me out of the house, nothing that’s real serious, just temporary. We’ll get back together, for the kids’ sake. He would have come up with some bullshit line that would make him seem hard-done-by and sympathetic.

  I missed a couple of days of school—I didn’t want to go in with lumps and cuts all over my face. My teammates had to know, but I didn’t want anyone else at school to know.

  I missed a couple of practices. It wasn’t just that I was beaten up physically and distracted by all the shuffling in and out of offices and the courthouse and the police station. On top of everything else, my father had run off with my equipment in the back of the van, so before I could get back on the ice I was going to have to get fitted for new skates and order a batch of sticks. It doesn’t sound like much, but I was like most players at that level: particular about my equipment, attached to it. Sticks and pads—replacing those was just a nuisance, but my skates, well, that was like switching cars on a driver at the Indy 500. It would take a while, maybe even weeks, to feel comfortable in them—pretty much in keeping with everything in my life off the ice.

  When I made it to practice on Tuesday, most of the players were up to speed on everything that had gone on after the game in Ottawa. The team’s staff filled in most of the other blanks and put into place a new protocol: from here on out, I was to go nowhere alone—not to school, not the drive to practice, not in my room at the hotel on the road, not in any other situation that might come up. No matter what, everyone had to assume that my father was just around the corner, waiting to pick up where he had left off on my grandparents’ lawn. My teammates supported the rule and bought in, which reassured me but also made me feel claustrophobic. Everyone in the dressing room wants to blend in and be just another player. No one wants to be that kid. The other guys understood, especially after the game in Ottawa, that I didn’t want to be that kid, but it was beyond my control, just my bad luck.

  * * *

  Mississauga, Ontario, January 9, 2002

  We were playing the St. Michael’s Majors, one of the league’s top teams, on Wednesday night. The IceDogs management was ready to let me sit out the game or maybe even a couple of games if I didn’t feel ready. I told the coaching st
aff that I wanted to be in the lineup. I was anxious and determined to play. Sitting on the sidelines watching the game would have felt too much like my father had won. That was the whole point of the beat-down on my grandparents’ lawn—so I couldn’t go back and play. I had to show him that it wasn’t over.

  Even though I wanted to play, I had no idea how I was going to be able to perform against St. Michael’s. I was still rattled. My nerves were still jangling and I had spent a lot of nervous energy over five days. My energy level was low—I’d had trouble sleeping and not much of an appetite. I’d had one practice in my new skates. None of those things helped, but any one of them I could get past, at least for a game. It was more than that, though.

  On top of everything else, this would be the first game that my father wasn’t going to be at.

  It was understandable when I was eight or nine years old, what looked like normal stuff. A young kid has to count on a parent for transportation. A parent wants to ensure that the kid is in a good environment and is having fun. Still, you’d have imagined real life would have intruded occasionally, a work conflict or a doctor’s appointment or the flu, something that could not be avoided that meant my mother would have to get me to the practice or game instead of my father. But real life never got in the way of my father getting me to the arena. Time and space didn’t get in the way, not even driving thirty hours from Nova Scotia to Chicago to see a lousy game that everyone on the ice forgot about five minutes after the buzzer. It was hockey first and foremost, and whatever else there was in my father’s or my family’s life could only compete for second place.

  Yeah, you’d imagine that his absence should have made things easier, lifted a weight off. Still, it was in the back of my mind. From the second I stepped on the ice to the second I stepped off, he had watched every play I made, every stride I took. I had always played knowing that I was being watched. That hadn’t been in the back of my mind—it had always been a lot closer to the front than I liked. It had felt strange in Mississauga back in the fall when he hadn’t been there at practice—he had never even missed a practice in all those years. And now it was going to be a game without him. I’d known it was going to come to this someday. It was what I had been working for. Still, it happened so suddenly. It was a shock that I was going to have to deal with.