I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (12 page)

He refuses to wear boys’ sizes and so gives all new pairs of Costco slacks to my mother to hem. In crowds, he puffs his chest and fixes his face but walks too fast to be called assured. He has about him a forest-floor anticness. Not like he’s harried, but like he senses he’s about to be. He measures himself by the tape of a world that, he believes, looks upon him with amused contempt and pity. “You know what you’re allowed to be when you’re under five-foot-five?” he once asked me. “A clown, or a crazy person.”

When I started inching north of five-foot-four, something about my relationship with him changed. I’d find him sizing me up with a grin and a rehydrated glint in his eyes. During small arguments, he’d remind me: “I’ve got reach enough to shove one up your ass, believe me.” Under the basketball rim in our driveway, he’d post up on me while shit-talking my heart condition, my arms up like
Huh?,
his pickax elbows chipping away at my unsteady foundation. It was around this time that I realized I had become my family’s Goliath.

In his autobiography, Theo Fleury wrote, “My anger made me dangerous. When you’re raging and you have absolutely no fear, you can do a lot of damage. That quality would really become a part of who I was on the ice.”

On the ice, he slew-footed and cackled. Armored in his too-big helmet and bucket shorts, he raged like a Spartan baby once left for dead, back now on the warpath. He was exceptionally good at penalty-killing, playing shorthanded—trapped in his own end, chasing the puck as it skirted the boards, the anxiety mounting, the carrot he was after just out of reach.

He was in fact so good at this kind of tweaky pursuit that I came to suspect he had a Fleury of his own. An abridged little
fucker who never gives a moment’s rest. Frets you, bird-dogs you, forces you to do things you didn’t think yourself capable of, and do them at speed. He’s exhausting. When he’s not in your face, his strides are shushing right behind you. He goads you with his stick.

The big knock on Fleury was that he had a penchant for committing bewildering penalties at key junctures in games. Such was his style of play. “I had always taken retaliation penalties,” he wrote, “which were usually bad for the team but necessary for my survival. I was unrelenting. If I hit a big guy and he whacked me back, hoping I’d learn my lesson, I would come back even harder. I was ferocious. I had to be … If I let one guy take me out without doing anything about it, the next guy would be standing in line behind him. So I made no exceptions, even when the game was on the line. I couldn’t.”

Fleury was what hockey people call an agitator. As agitator, his MO went: Slash an opponent once, and the opponent would shake it off or else try to sell it to the referee. Slash him again, and the opponent would slash back, antagonism begetting antagonism. Slash him and his teammates at every turn, and they had no choice but to respond to Fleury as he needed them to. They came at him from all directions. They rode him into the boards with their elbows high and their stick blades higher. They hated him. And they were unforgiving.

Therefore did Fleury re-create the game in his own twisted image. The only possible style of play for him was one that had been filed to a needle point.

By the twelfth year of his professional career, Fleury had twice been entered into the NHL’s substance abuse program. Of this time and the time preceding it, he wrote things like: “The night before we left, I called the Molson rep and said, ‘I need beer.’… So we picked up twelve flats of twenty-four. We also picked up a Texas mickey—one of those 66-ouncers of whisky—
and I found a source who sold me a bag of weed the size of a toddler.”

He also wrote: “I just stayed in that room and let my brain go swimming in Paxil, coke, two six-packs and a twenty-sixer of Grey Goose.”

And: “I was torn between Drea, the New York stripper I had been seeing at the end of my marriage, and Steph, the stripper in Albuquerque.”

And: “I knew I was a full-blown alcoholic drug addict.”

By his thirteenth season, he was earning seven million dollars per year playing for the New York Rangers. He approached his stint in the league’s biggest market as “a challenge, an opportunity to shove it up somebody’s ass.” He claimed that during his three years in the city, he failed thirteen consecutive drug tests but was not suspended by the league because he was a leading scorer.

During his fifteenth season, he was involved in a free-for-all with the bouncers at a gentleman’s club in Columbus, Ohio. He was by then playing for the Chicago Blackhawks. After the incident, the Blackhawks placed him on waivers. No team claimed him. That off-season, he was suspended indefinitely for substance abuse violations.

Altogether, Theo Fleury appeared in 1,084 regular-season NHL games, scored 1,088 points, and was assessed 1,840 minutes in penalties. The only players in NHL history with as many points
and
penalty minutes are Brendan Shanahan (six-foot-three, 220 pounds) and Mark Messier (six-foot-one, 210). Fleury spent thirty-one hours, or about ninety-three games’ worth of playing time, in the penalty box. Some might call such behavior self-destructive.

“The secret is that if you show the tiniest clue that you are intimidated or afraid,” Fleury wrote, “you are finished.”

His relationship with his teams’ fans was such that one
night, when he was sent off the ice to replace a bloodied sweater, someone in the stands removed and threw down a Fleury replica jersey so he wouldn’t miss his shift.

His relationship with other teams’ fans was such that one night, as the crowd at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum chanted, “Crackhead! Crackhead!” at him, he slapped his bicep in vulgar salute after scoring the game-winning goal.

But two years after hockey, in New Mexico, at dawn one day, Fleury “ran out into the middle of the scrub, screaming at the universe, ‘Fuck you, fuckin’ asshole-son-of-a-bitch. I’ve had enough. I can’t take it anymore. Don’t give me any more shit!’ ” He drove to a pawnbroker and paid him five thousand dollars for a pistol and one bullet. He returned to his home, loaded the gun, and put it in his mouth. “I sat there forever, shivering so hard the barrel was bouncing off my teeth. How did it taste? It tasted lonely.”

He did not pull the trigger.

“It’s not as if I’d felt this sudden urge to live. I still felt like shit and wished I were dead. I think that’s why, after I ran outside and chucked the gun into the desert, I was screaming at the universe like a madman.”

What we cherish as drive or will, the psychoanalyst Adler considered “but a tendency in the service of the feeling of inadequacy.” Adler believed that every one of us feels inadequate in some way. We can’t help it; we picked it up when we were young. It doesn’t even matter if we really were inferior. It’s simply the nature of this place to make us feel small.

Then what happened was we learned ambition, how to pursue a grander future. We thought up some goal. We thought,
It’ll all stop once I grow up, once I make the NHL, once I get published, once I take over the world.
This goal—we ordered our whole lives around it. And we strove, relentless.

“[Your] goal is so constructed that its achievement promises the possibility either of a sentiment of superiority, or an elevation of the personality to such a degree that life seems worth
living,” Adler wrote. “It is this goal which gives value to our sensations, which links and coordinates our sentiments, which shapes our imagination and directs our creative powers, determines what we shall remember and what we must forget.”

This was what I loved about Theo Fleury. What made him so inspiring to watch. Through sheer force of will, he shoved it up everyone’s ass. Even in the twilight of his career, his Hall of Fame stature long since achieved, he played as if proving something. He was fired by a deathless engine he had to keep stoked. This was also what damned him.

Alfred Adler: “So many people are convinced that their ambition, which might more appropriately be called vanity, is a valuable characteristic because they do not understand that this character trait constantly dissatisfies a human being, and robs him of his rest and sleep.”

Theo Fleury: “All was perfect in my world, and for me that was a problem. Because I had built my life on being the underdog. Being the one who said, ‘I’ll show you.’ But all I knew how to do was manage the fight—once I’d won it, once I was at the top, I didn’t have a clue. The only place I felt good when I was sober was on the ice.”

After the NHL, Fleury joined the Horse Lake Thunder, a senior amateur hockey team that played out of the Horse Lake First Nation reservation in Alberta. They failed to win the senior amateur championship, the Allan Cup.

He joined the Belfast Giants and was voted 2006 Player of the Year by the British Ice Hockey Writers Association.

He joined the Calgary Vipers minor league baseball team in 2008 and played a few games as a utility fielder.

He formed a seven-member country-and-western band, singing lead.

He filmed a pilot for a reality show about his new concrete business called
Theoren Fleury: Rock Solid.

And six years after his last NHL game, finally sober, he
petitioned for and was granted reinstatement into the league. He accepted a tryout offer with an old team. At forty-one, he recorded four points in four preseason games but was cut from the roster.

Did he ever figure it out, I wonder? How to content yourself with where you tap out?

On the way were still more beers, the night being young in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and Tim’s blood stanching where the cobra had bitten him. He wanded a good finger over the restaurant’s menu pictures and told me, “If it was you, dude, you’d be dead in this Applebee’s.”

If it was anyone else on this earth, they’d be dead. The African water cobra that had tagged him two hours earlier is so rare a specimen that no antivenom for it currently exists. Yet cobra bite and lagers notwithstanding, Tim looked fresh; he was well on his way to becoming the first documented survivor of that snake’s bite.

“Which reminds me,” he said from across the table, taking out his phone so I could snap a picture of his bloody hand. “For posterity. After tonight, every book is fucking wrong.”

It was on my account that he had done this, willfully accepted the bite. Even though we’d only shaken hands that bright winter afternoon in the salted parking lot of a Days Inn. Tim Friede, the man from the Internet who claimed to have made himself immune to the planet’s deadliest serpents. I’d come to test his mettle, to goad him into an unprecedented ordeal: five venomous snakebites in forty-eight hours.

Around us, young people were getting unwound in a hurry. The hour was fast approaching when the restaurant would flip off the
APPLE
portion of its lighted sign, clear out the tables and chairs, turn the edited jams to eleven, and allow for twerking on the floor space. Our server returned with the beers. Tim looked up at her with his serous blue eyes, smiling, and said, “You never did card me. You have to guess.” She demurred. He continued: “I could be your dad.”

While Tim fumbled for an in with her, I considered the swollen hand he propped next to his head. Two streams of blood had rilled down and around his wrist bone, reading like an open quote. He was a dad’s age, forty-four years old; that much was correct. But he appeared both grizzled and strangely boyish. He had an eager smile of small, square teeth and a platinum buzz cut. The skin over his face was very taut; it looked sand-scoured, warm to the touch. Scar tissue and protuberant veins crosshatched his thin forearms, which he now covered by rolling down the sleeves of two dingy long-sleeve T-shirts. His neck was seamed from python teeth.

The snake that had done his twilight envenoming was
Naja annulata,
about six feet long and as thick as elbow pipe. She was banded in gold and black, a design not unlike that of the Miller Genuine Draft cans we’d bought and then housed on our way to Tim’s makeshift laboratory. When we walked in, the snake was shrugging smoothly along the walls of her four-by-two plastic tank. She was vermiform mercury. And she greeted us with a hiss, a sourceless, sort of circular sizzle, what one would hear if one suddenly found oneself in the center of a hot skillet.

Kissing-distance past my reflection in the glass, the cobra induced in me a nightmare inertia. Attraction and revulsion. She had not spirals but eclipses for eyes.

“I love watching death like this,” Tim had said, leaning in,
startling me. “Some nights I watch them all night, like fish. Mesmerizing.”

The cobra was one of a $1,500 pair he’d just shipped in, Tim preferring to spend most of what he earns—working the 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. line shift at Oshkosh Truck—on his snakes. The thing nosed under an overturned Tupperware container while I checked her CV on my phone. Her venom? A touch more potent than arsenic trisulfide. Tim unlatched the front of her tank, reached in, and was perforated before he knew it. The cobra flew at him with her mouth open and body lank, like a harpoon trailing rope.

“Ho ho, that’s just beautiful,” Tim said, withdrawing his hand. There were two broken fangs stapled into his ring finger.

He picked up a beer with his other hand, cracked it expertly with his pointer. I glanced around at all the other caged ampersands—mambas, vipers, rattlesnakes—and I smiled. Rosy constellations of Tim’s blood pipped onto the linoleum, shining brighter than old dead ones.

A little while ago, I was searching the web for the man who best embodied the dictum “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” I was looking for him who thought he’d succeeded in fortifying his inborn weaknesses. Who believed he had bunged the holes left by God.

I discovered Tim among the self-immunizers. The self-immunizers are a far-flung community of white, western men—a few dozen of them—who systematically shoot up increasing doses of exotic venoms, so as to inure their immune systems to the effects. Many of these men handle venomous snakes for business or pleasure, so there’s a practical benefit to their regimen. A few prefer instead to work their way from snakes to scorpions to spiders, voiding creatures’ power over them. Most
seem to be autodidacts of the sort whose minds recoil at the notion of a limitation deliberately accepted—something I sympathized with, being myself an unfinished, trial creature. On their message boards, Tim talked the biggest medicine.