I’ve begun to write—bubble captions coming out of the faces I draw, but also little stories about the games I watch on TV. I get Mom’s Royal typewriter out of the hall closet, roll in a sheet of her onionskin typing paper, and tap out stories with the datelines in ALL CAPS. I have to strike hard with every keystroke, as if trying to ring the bell at the State Fair carnival midway. And indeed at the end of every line of type a bell does ring, and I throw the carriage return back with a flourish.
Is that what people think of writers? That they’re sissies? No one thinks hockey players are sissies. They don’t wear helmets, much less glasses. Their mustaches look like A-frame roofs over the broken-windowed houses of their hockey smiles. Their godlike qualities are enhanced by the white-columned Greek temple they play in—Met Center, whose signature seats, upholstered in alternating green, gold, and white leatherette, look beguiling on TV, which is practically the only place I see them. But tonight’s game is being televised only in Boston.
The truth is, I’ve been inside Met Center for lesser events, like the circus, the Ice Capades, and one mind-blowing Saturday afternoon spent watching the Harlem Globetrotters perform astonishing feats. They do with a basketball what Evel Knievel does with a motorcycle—impossible things in star-spangled outfits on Wide World of Sports. Both have animated, action-figure, and lunch-box incarnations, not to mention names—Evel, Meadowlark—that sound almost made-up. But walking into Met Center to see the Globetrotters instead of the North Stars, and being hit in the face by the refrigerated air meant for hockey, was disorienting. It was like seeing men dressed as women on TV, Flip Wilson as Geraldine.
This is what I think about when I fall asleep next to Tom’s empty bed, still made up beneath its blue bedspread. And when he enters the room very late at night, his feet falling silent on the shag carpet, I’m woken by the smell of him. Secondhand smoke and secondhand violence.
“You awake?” Tom says, putting on his pj’s in the dark.
“Yeah, how was it?”
“Henry Boucha,” Tom says, referring to the North Stars winger who is both a native Minnesotan and a real-life Ojibwa Indian, “got his eye poked out.”
“What?”
“Henry Boucha,” he repeats, “got his eye poked out. By Dave Forbes.”
Lying there in the dark, looking at the ceiling, I see Boucha’s eye falling to the ice. In my imagination, it falls like one of Dad’s pimentoed olives into a glass of gin. “What are you talking about?” I say.
And for the next thirty minutes, like a traveler from a faraway land—like Sinbad the Sailor or Marco Polo, returning with tales of the unimaginable—Tom describes a horror unlike any conjured by Vincent Price or Television City.
What I learn from Tom, and the next day’s papers, and the subscription to Sports Illustrated we get from Aunt Mary in Cincinnati, and the next summer’s network news, and the New York Times that Dad will bring home from a business trip, and just about every other news organization whose dispatches reach me through the car’s radio speaker or every conversation that floats up the stairs from a dinner party, is this:
Early in the first period, shortly after Tom and Dad settled into their leatherette seats of green and gold with a bucket of popcorn and two Cokes and a copy of Goal magazine to mark Tom’s passage into manhood—his hockey bar mitzvah—Henry Boucha hit Dave Forbes with an overhand right that knocked the Bruins enforcer to his knees. Both men were given seven-minute penalties, during which time Forbes allegedly told Boucha he would “shove this hockey stick down [your] throat.”
When both penalties expired, and with play stopped, Boucha skated to the North Stars bench. Forbes followed him and thrust his stick in a “bayonet or spearing type of motion” at Boucha’s right eye, which began to spurt blood theatrically.
“The defendant’s attack did not end at that point,” in the words of Hennepin County attorney Gary Flakne, who will try Forbes on a charge of aggravated assault that summer. “Rather, as Henry Boucha clutched his eye—which he thought he had lost—and fell, stunned and bleeding to the ice, the defendant leaped on Mr. Boucha’s back and began to strike Mr. Boucha’s head and body with his fists. [Then] the defendant grabbed Mr. Boucha’s hair and began to pound Mr. Boucha’s face onto the ice as blood radiated from Mr. Boucha’s head.”
As every boy in South Brook knows, Boucha doesn’t wear a helmet. He wears only a green terry-cloth headband to keep his onyx locks drawn back like theater drapes. He required twenty-five stitches and had a fracture of his right eye socket, but he had not—contrary to what Tom describes to me—lost his eye.
“Who won?” I ask.
“Bruins,” he says. “Eight–nothing.”
Eight–nothing? It’s an unheard-of score in professional hockey. Tom unfurls his rolled-up copy of the game program, Goal magazine, revealing North Stars center Jude Drouin on the cover. His sideburns are nine inches long. His front teeth are absent as he glides, bereft of helmet, across the Met Center ice, his Christian Bros. stick poised to poke-check the puck from some unfortunate Philadelphia Flyer. Jim will wear 16 at Lincoln because Jude Drouin does. The cover will go on the basement wall to commemorate this night of nights.
Thirteen days from now a Hennepin County grand jury will indict Forbes on a charge of aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon. He’ll be suspended ten games by the NHL, while Boucha will miss several weeks before returning with double vision, his promising career in serious jeopardy. Boucha will never be the same. And neither will Tom, it appears, as he lies there in the dark, past midnight, vibrating like a tuning fork.
Professional hockey is the intersection of cartoon violence and real violence. In the hours of analysis devoted nationwide to Tom’s tenth birthday present, Peter Puck—the vulcanized, anthropomorphized mascot of NBC’s network coverage—is seen as an accessory to aggravated assault. My Saturday morning entertainment is hitched to Tom’s Saturday night entertainment.
“Peter Puck, the silly cartoon character NBC uses as a guide for new hockey fans, is an insidious commercial for the sort of hooliganism that may someday result in murder on ice,” writes Gary Deeb in the Chicago Tribune. “Peter is the creation of Hanna-Barbera, an animation outfit with all the scruples of Attila the Hun. For years it was Hanna-Barbera that produced many of those ultraviolent cartoons that anesthetized youngsters on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons.
“Their NHL hockey segments are in keeping with that tradition. More often than not, the between-periods cartoons feature grotesque giants belting each other over the heads with their sticks, while Peter watches and giggles in a ‘boys-will-be-boys’ manner.
“At no time does Peter tell viewers that clobbering somebody across the face with a stick is nearly as dangerous as whipping out a pistol and firing away from point-blank range. A youngster new to hockey can only deduce that such action is acceptable—and generally harmless.