I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (20 page)

All in all, Brophy played for twenty-two years, never reaching higher than the double-A leagues two rungs below the NHL. He wound up his playing career in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, living out of a closet in an apartment he shared with teenage teammates. “I just wanted to play as long as humanly possible,” he told me. “Fighting made it twice as good, and I could do it. I vowed that I’d never lose my job to another. I didn’t.”

When he was done playing, he started coaching. He coached his way through several minor leagues—the Southern, Central, American, North American, World—imparting his same means of survival onto his players. He taught them that fighting was about minimizing weaknesses, and hockey about never showing them. He wanted to make sure his boys were prepared for the sport as he’d known it, so he instilled in them a slow habituation to pain, a numbness to violence.

“Don’t consider this a threat, boys,” he used to say, “but I’m coming after each one of you.” He dared them to hit back. He saved his most hateful language for anyone who refused a fight. “Look at that Charlie Bourgeois!” he’d say. “Turtling up like a pussy!”

His playing ability never got him to the NHL, but he did coach his way there for a few seasons in the late ’80s. Toronto, the richest club in the league, thought its roster had become complacent, spoiled, so they brought in Brophy to straighten them out. His motivational tactics worked long enough for the team to make the division finals. Soon after that, though, they turned on him. “We’d all like to go and shoot him between the eyes,” one of them said. Years later, reinterred in the minors, Brophy discovered that all of his young wards had come to feel
the same way. No longer able to make himself understood, he quit the sport.

What was the greatest moment in his lifetime of hockey? “The hell kind of question is that?” What was the first thing that just came to mind? “This time in Clinton, New York, when Don Perry was beating the fuck out of this Charlie Bourgeois, and a fan jumped on the ice and ran for him. I laid as nice a hit on him as you could’ve asked for.”

During a long commercial break, one of the other residents shuffled in, joggling a tray of hard caramels in one hand and a shot glass full of pills in the other. “Oh, please, you’ve got to put him in the
Casket,
” she said, referring, thankfully, to the local rag.

“I said I’d get them,” Brophy told the woman, pointing to the shot glass.

“I’ve tried to get my children to tell the editors, ‘Make Brophy famous!’ ” she said to me. “Take his picture. Promise me you’ll take his picture.”

I did as she asked with my cell phone. Brophy looked from me to her with pursed purple lips.

He stirred the air with his shot glass, smiled. The TV announcer (whom Brophy once coached) interjected: “Let’s watch that contact to the head!” Brophy took his medicine. Then he said to the two of us, “Oh, yes,
let’s.
”

Our guy’s in a corner of the rink, in a one-sided fight. His hands have shed their gloves and are flying about the face of some plugger like new moths around a sodium lamp. Everyone else on the ice has found a partner to hold on to while they watch our guy get his. He’s hitting mostly forearms and elbows; the plugger is hugging his face and sinking to his knees.

Moments earlier, the Albertan kid had been handling the
puck with his head down when this nobody here took a run at him. The kid sensed the hit at the last moment and sidestepped it, but the plugger stuck out his right leg and knee-on-kneed him.
It’s a miracle nothing snapped.

Our guy had just jumped onto the ice as part of a line change. He saw the kid spin down, writhing, and he didn’t need to look for the puck or listen for a whistle.
Heard a piercing sound, like when regular scheduled programming’s interrupted.

“Pull that shit again, fish,” he says. “Manhandle” isn’t the term for what he’s doing. It’s something more desperate, the way he’s clutching and yanking and pawing at him—our guy is
ragdoll
ing his antagonist.

He’s easing up on punches to the skull because the plugger’s got a helmet on.
Things’re dangerous; things’ll pop a knuckle.
Uppercuts, however, he’s wheeling with abandon.

Did the plugger mean to do it?
Does it matter?

Our guy keeps throwing until an official steps in. On the way to the penalty box, this official asks him no questions as to
why.
No one ever has, or will.

Shortly after, the Albertan kid does score, and his goal’s a thing to behold. He glides from behind his own net, calls to the man with the puck, takes his pass in stride; then he blows past the first forechecker, cuts inside on the next, crosses the blue line and powers through a heavy slash—
he can stay upright when he wants to, the fucking gamesman;
then he gets the right-side defenseman to go fishing on a deke, then he fakes to the backhand before cutting forehand and sliding the puck between the goalie’s legs—then he punctuates it all with a war whoop and a punch to the glass. Our guy is on his feet, thinking,
A little selfish, maybe.

And watching from the box as the kid’s mobbed by teammates.
Given affectionate face-washes and attaboys. The child beaming, at home in his body as only one whose body is not his job can be. Our guy catches himself smiling at the thought of looking the other way, spreading the evening paper in front of his face, letting the other boys have at him.

Brophy didn’t want to finish watching our game. Instead, we bundled up against the wind and went outside with Lady, the home’s communal golden retriever. The late-spring landscape was vibrantly green, the tint of inexperience.

“You suffer a lot of concussions in your career?” I asked.

“I should fucking say so.” He knocked a knuckle against the mantle of his skull. This was the thick head, I’d heard, that not once but
twice
was ejected through windshields (Brophy having truck with neither man nor belted seat). That was so often a weapon it was not unusual to see Brophy in the box shunking incisors out of his forehead the way Civil War soldiers used to do minié balls. He rapped this head, and if a sound was made, I didn’t hear it.

We ambled along a post-and-rail fence some stallions were grazing behind. “Jesus, look at them,” Brophy exclaimed. “Jesus Christ, they’re beautiful. You know who’s in shape? Waists like
this.
”

I wondered aloud if his thick skull was the reason he wasn’t susceptible to all that scrambled-brain stuff. “I don’t know.” Wasn’t he ever scared about what comes next? “I don’t lose any sleep over it. I might not win it, but I sure won’t lose.”

Depression?

He chuckled, the sound of a single stone plinking down a well. “Are we in a prescription drug ad? You want me to talk to my doctor about pills for my guy?” In the daylight, I could see the faint blue webbing of burst vessels in his cheeks. He said,
“Look, you could die on the bench, but you could not die on the ice. You crawled to the bench. Your own players would shanghai you if you were out there rolling around. No, you crawled. And I made lots of ’em crawl. But they made the goddamned bench.

“They say now that they’re addicted?” Brophy went on. “I coached Dave Semenko. Piece of shit. Worthless. Worthless alcohol addict. Once, he missed a home game.
A HOME GAME.
I went into his room, found him with, I don’t know, bottles of wine everywhere. He said he needed help. Help. You drink—you’re a hockey player, of course you drink. But then you quit when you quit.”

After a moment, I said, “That sounds about as feasible as squeezing it off mid-pee.”

Brophy dropped a trembling hand onto Lady’s head, letting it do the petting the way an electric mixer beats an egg. Then he bowed once, twice, three times to relieve the tightness in his lower back, and added, “I never considered the fact that
anything
could keep me from doing my job.”

The one day I was sure Papa couldn’t lay me out was the last day I saw him alive.

He hobbled out of his bedroom with his sport shirt untucked and his face unshaven, the only instance of either that I can recall. His big blue eyes were screwed deep into his head. The doctors had only just found it, the cancer that was knotted through his intestines like a rat king, gnawing away. The pain he could no longer deny. But by then, of course, it’d
been
too late.

Throughout his life, Papa had worn the scowl of Samuel Beckett and thrown hands regardless of who was in the right. This was remarkable to me. Papa wouldn’t equivocate if he suspected someone of threatening him or the people he was close to. He felt froggish, so he jumped.

One time, when we were walking down Ocean Drive on South Beach, I toed a brown scuff against the grain of a seated stranger’s crispy-white Air Force 1. The left one. He stood up very quickly, asked “What the
fuck
?” With my still-breaking voice, I let out a noise like an inexpertly squeezed accordion. Papa flexed his knees, leaned back, weaved his fingers together over his stomach, and chugged this, “Oh, ho ho, ye-ow! Oh!”

By then, Papa had come to stoop under the thick back that’d stood him so well in his younger years. His traps—all his muscles, really—were broad and ill defined, labored after. I doubt there was anything he could not shoulder. And his hands were enormous, real mitts. They were hardily expert but surprisingly soft. Every Saturday, he showed up at our house and used them to fix something mechanical, eat a ham sandwich.

One of my favorite things used to be punching into them. The ol’ one-two, his palms enveloping my rocky kid fists. I both loved and feared the pliable forcefulness of those hands. Every sentient creature did, I think. Animals respected his touch. Our dogs esteemed him highest. Fishing, we’d catch crabs, and Papa would invite me to watch as he tickled the underside of each until it fell asleep in his palm, discharging this gross black unguent before it got chucked in the pot.

The front of his right fist was a shambles, though. His knuckles were badly set, like the rolling letters in the
HOLLYWOOD
sign. Still, he planted them just the same in the face of that large, angry man. The man scuttled in a hurry, to leak there on the ground. Papa continued to laugh. This was neither the first nor the last time he would fight for me.

All he had known was impersonal violence. Or so I was told. When he was a boy, he found his father swaying from a barn joist. His mother he had to institutionalize. After his older brother abandoned him to their decaying Pennsylvania farm, Papa survived the Depression by trapping minks. At eighteen, he went to war.

He could joke about the killing. He wouldn’t talk about what it had
felt
like—depth being a suspect dimension—but he’d crack wise about the poor bastards who’d got theirs. He could spin this long yarn about the time he escorted a soldier to his execution. The guy had inadvertently murdered a fellow GI when he brained him with a full beer bottle. Papa took him and painted London red, burned through the last of the condemned man’s cash. Then, he delivered him to his hanging, and stayed to watch.

He still wasn’t saying much that last day I saw him. It was as though he was in another place altogether, lacing up. He wouldn’t bring any dinner to his mouth; my mother fed her father like an infant. Afterward, sitting on his living room couch, cargo jets shearing the silence as they landed at Miami International across the street, I asked about his life as best I could.

What was absolute tops? He shrugged. What stuck out the most? He mentioned the afternoon he saw some guys playing baseball while riding on donkeys. Donkeys were shitting all over the diamond, he said. Bucking guys off, biting them on the hands, on the asses, on other donkeys’ asses. I suppose now that that’s what
was
memorable to him. Not the hard work, suffering, or violence. A fish knowing least about the water it swims through—that kind of thing.

Prior to that day, I had never thought to ask him about his past. He was a
grandfather,
you know? What’s a grandfather but a grinning, declawed mascot of the man he used to be? An anthropomorphized beast. He punched a few guys out every now and again, sure. But he loved to golf and dance and steward his church. That he had once been someone other than Papa—had in fact been a clenched man named Alexei Romanchuck—had seemed impossible until then.

What I wanted to say but could not was: Your life is literally unimaginable to me. It marks the distance between
then
and
now.
Had I been slotted into it, I surely would not have been strong enough. How did you do it, survive? What can you share? Please. Am I made to guess?

Whatever it was I
did
say prompted Papa to maunder about other things: the big bands that used to play during movie-house intermissions, the free trips to China and Greece he was entitled to as an Eastern Airlines employee. He offered up more and more non sequiturs. He was like some foreign-language speaker handing me a spoon, then a pack of playing cards, then a glass of water, smiling all the while, handing me anything and hoping to hit on what would make me stop talking.

Later, Mom came up to us with melting eyes. She said it was time to say goodbye. I said, “I love you,” and for the first time Papa didn’t say,
Yeah,
but rather, “I love you, too.” We made promises to see each other soon.

The cancer that killed him a few days later looked more like a gemstone, I was told. A geode, wetly glistening. What was it Hemingway called guts? Grace under pressure?

It’s late, and our guy’s team is down a goal and looking flat. He’s on the bench with his elbow over the lip of the boards, effervescent with adrenaline. He knows what’s coming. The couple thousand in attendance know what’s coming.

New Haven changes lines on the fly—out comes Leclair. Now our guy’s like a rocket about to lift off. Shaking from the inside out. He’s anticipating the moment he’ll be released from gravity, his body falling away like a delivery booster. He gets a pat on the back from Coach. Over the boards he goes.

The arena’s ringing palpably, an expectant tinnitus. The tough guys are rounding the ice, a little behind the play. People stand and point.