The Late Bloomer (10 page)

I lick the sweat dripping down my upper lip onto my tongue. Embarrassed. Pissed off. Frustrated. Disappointed. Humiliated.
I can't fucking believe it!
This is worse than letting a player score on me from the red line. I roll on my side, facing away from her, gritting my teeth in shameful disgust.

“It's okay. Really, it is,” she soothes, stroking my wet hair. “You're just nervous is all. This happens to every guy.”

“Yeah, right,” I grumble.

“It's true. I read that—”

“Please, don't—”

“—it's common for a lot of—”

“Just shut UP.”

The room falls silent except for the vibrating air conditioning unit and “Feels Like the First Time” still groaning from the portable radio. I knock the radio onto the floor.

I yank the blankets over my body and curl into the fetal position. I pinch shut my eyes, hoping to squeeze my brain into numbness, and I fall asleep.

A few hours later I'm awakened by Jenny slithering on top of me. Though half asleep, I'm sporting an erection—albeit a half-hard one. But it's enough. She slides my penis inside of her and lies still. “It's okay,” she whispers in my ear and stroking my hair. “It's okay . . . it's okay . . .”

I keep my eyes closed and grip her swaying hips, waiting for it all to end.

The anesthesia is wearing off, which is good in that I can keep my eyes open, but bad in that I am starting to feel an inescapable pain pulsating inside my head. My skull is throbbing, my face is swollen and bruised, and, unable to breathe through my nose, I'm growing anxious and uncomfortable—especially because I'm having a hard time trying not to choke on the globs of blood that won't stop dripping down the back of my throat, my only airway. I'm conscious, but I don't know the time or what day it is, nor do I care. I'm just trying to breathe. Time inches by. Minutes feel like hours; hours like days.

When my eyes open, the southern California daylight no longer is brightening my hospital room. Evening. All is quiet but for a wheezing old woman struggling on life support in the room next to mine. In between coughing fits, she won't stop moaning in Spanish, something I can't understand. Neither can the nurses, it seems. People are panicking, running in and out of her room. I roll my head onto my left ear and peer through the dividing window as a doctor rushes in, fumbles with a syringe and pulls shut the privacy curtain. A minute or so later the woman lies silent.

I can't believe I'm here, that I let myself end up here, faceup, prostrate and struggling just to breathe. It didn't have to be this way. I realize that. I didn't have to get this sick. There were warning signs that my hormonal household was not in order—that night in Toronto, for starters—but it's
too late for regret, too late to mourn the past. My life has come down to a series of moments, of phlegmy breaths. Please, God, give me the strength to get better, to get out of this bed. I promise I will never again neglect the life you have given me. I will pay attention to what my mind and body tell me. I will not deny the mortality of my humanity; I will not deny the fallibility of my manhood and the fragility of life. Please, just let me sleep, let that painkiller kick in, please just let me see black.

A nurse bends over and rubs my forehead, glancing at a rhythmically bleeping box beside my bed. She explains that I'm in the intensive care unit at Cedars Sinai Medical Center . . . my nose and sinuses are packed with gauze because my sub-brain surgical wounds are “draining” . . . I should breathe slowly through my mouth . . . let the oxygen mask do its job . . . just relax and everything will be okay.

The middle-aged nurse with a Spanish accent and a motherly voice then points to a button on the inside of the bed rail. “I know you can't talk, so just push this if you need me,” she says soothingly, before turning and walking away. As she's about to leave the room, I grunt and point to my legs, which are still encased in rising and falling plastic leggings, covering me, like my hockey goalie pads did in a former, healthier time of my life, from my ankles to just above the knee. The nurse returns to my side. I crinkle my forehead, drawing panic lines, saying to my nurse with facial gymnastics what I can't verbalize: What the fuck are on my legs?

She—thank God—understands my primitive communication. “They're squeezing your legs, keeping your blood circulating,” she says. “They'll prevent blood clots.” Phew . . . that explains the incessant hissing. But I still don't like any of this. I want to move my own legs, circulate my own blood. I'm scared. I wish this was just a nightmare. I wish everything would go black again. And it does.

“We need a goalie, and we want you,” Coach Terry Slater says in his Canadian prairie-bred patter. “We want Kenny Baker to play for Colgate.”

Slater delivers me this news over the phone. It's late April of my senior year of high school and Colgate University's first-string goalie has dropped out of school to sign a pro contract, and since all the top college hockey programs have three goalies, they desperately need to fill their vacant goalie slot.

I have been receiving letters from Colgate's young assistant coach, Brian Durocher, since my sophomore year of high school, but they were always of the form-letter variety.
We're impressed with your talents and hope you will consider our school when that time comes . . . blah blah blah.
Terry Slater is a college hockey coaching legend. Slater has been coaching ever since he retired from pro hockey in the early sixties. Known as “Slats” in the cloistered hockey world, Slater first earned his reputation as a hard-ass while head coach for the Cincinnati Stingers of the World Hockey Association, the now-defunct rival to the National Hockey League that employed hockey greats such as Gordie Howe and Wayne Gretzky before merging with the NHL. So when
the
Terry Slater personally calls me at home one evening, I figure
Colgate is very interested in recruiting me. And Slater does nothing to dissuade me from that notion.

As a dedicated reader of
The Hockey News
, I know that Colgate already has two goalies who will be sophomores next year. I respectfully ask Slater about my competition.

“Well, Kenny,” he replies, “there's Greg Menges and David Gagnon. I can't promise anything other than you will have as good a shot as them. But I'll be honest with you, Kenny. I am not holding a slot for either of them. If you're the best one out on the ice, you'll be our starter.”

I like how he sprinkles
Kenny
into every other sentence.

“Why don't you come out to campus for a visit,” he adds. “We'll fly you out and take care of you for a couple days.”

A week later I land at the Syracuse airport, where I am met by a driver in one of those chauffeur caps standing in the baggage claim area holding a cardboard sign with
BAKER
scrawled on it. The hour-long drive to the rural village of Hamilton takes me over several saddleback hills and narrow glacial valleys brimming with a springtime-green palette of oaks, willows and poplar trees.
This school must be in the boonies; okay, it's in the middle of nowhere, but it's still prettier than Buffalo.

About two miles north of town, the hilltop campus and its stately brick buildings come into view. The driver, a self-described “huuuuuge” Colgate hockey fan, points out the various student drinking holes as we roll slowly through the village of Hamilton's quaint, one-block-long row of prewar storefronts. “That's the Back Bacon,” the driver says, pointing to a hole-in-the-wall bar with a mural of a beer-swilling pig painted on the facade. “If you're like most of the hockey players I know, you'll be spending a lot of time there.”

I don't tell him I'm practically a teetotaler, or that I am not the kind of cock-swinging jock he thinks I am. I like the attention, though. This is my first time in a limo. So I keep quiet.

“That's Kappa Alpha Theta,” he says a little farther down the road,
waving his right hand in the direction of a white two-story house amid a row of equally antiquated buildings that he calls Fraternity Row.

“A frat?” I ask.

“No, a sorority,” he says with a
huck-a-huck
chuckle. “Prettiest girls in the school.” He gazes back into the rearview mirror and crinkles a curious eye.

“You got a girlfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“Too bad. Being on the hockey team, you won't have trouble meetin' ladies.”

A few minutes later I meet Brian Durocher, Slater's amiable assistant, at the ice rink. Since the hockey season is over, Starr Rink sits warm and iceless; rows of wood bleachers are empty. I imagine the arena packed to the rafters on a frigid January night . . . the school band blaring the fight song . . . fans waving signs . . . I make a spectacular glove save with one second left in the game . . . rabid fans are chanting
BaaaKER! BaaaKER! BaaaKER!

Brian says he has been tracking my hockey career for several years and reminds me that he sent me a letter congratuling me on my Team USA gold medal victory over a year ago. Brian tells me that the team had a pretty respectable season this year, finishing fifth in the highly competitive Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference behind perennial powerhouses such as the University of Vermont, Harvard and Cornell. But, as Coach Slater had told me over the phone, the team's starting goalie has left, opting to go pro rather than finish college. “That means we're going to be weakest in the goalie slot,” Brian says. “So we hope you like it here. Of course, we'd really like to see you next year wearing a Colgate uniform.”

Brian and I walk past the trophy cases in the lobby over to Slater's windowless office. Black and white photos capturing Colgate hockey's highlights over his last eleven seasons line the concrete walls. I first notice Slater's hawkish, fifty-year-old face and piercing eyes as he sits
talking on the phone, his forehead wrinkles squirming beneath a graying widow's peak of gopher-brown hair. Until now, I've only seen pictures of Slater, and in those he looked older and more intense than in person. When I sit before him, he smiles—something I've never seen him doing in the photos in the media guide they mailed to me. With the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder, Slater shakes my hand with a logger's grip.
This guy's not mean; in fact, he is downright magnanimous.

I sit upright, poised. There's something about his rigidity that makes me feel like I'm addressing an Army general, which I later learn is exactly how he perceives himself, instructing players to call him “The General.”

In 1977, Slater came to Colgate and turned around a losing hockey program that had up to that point been populated mostly with prep-school brats. Slater, a native of the Ottawa area who had played professionally in the Montreal Canadiens organization, used his fame and clout in Canada to recruit the top players from Ontario and Quebec. Harvard, Yale, Boston University and Boston College might have gotten the best New Englanders, but the Colgate Red Raiders started nabbing some of the best Canadian players. Americans, however, soon became token players who many suspected Slater kept on the roster just to please the mostly American alumni and athletic department brass. Out of about twenty-five players, in fact, Slater usually only had five to ten “Yankees” (as the Canadians like to call us) on the squad, making it among the least American squads in the league.

In his sales pitch, Slater never explains why he wants an American goalie; yet, flattered and respectful that they've flown me out to their campus, I don't bother asking.

“I'll get right to the point, Kenny,” Slater says. “The goaltender is the most important player on the team. See, you're like the quarterback. And a team—I don't care how many hotshots they got scoring goals for them—is only as good as its goaltender, Kenny. That's why
we've brought you out here. We've been watching your development for the last, oh”—he glances over at Brian, who offers “three years”—“yeah, three years,” Slater continues. “You play in that butterfly-style, and I've seen your reflexes. You know, Brian was a goalie at one time himself”—“Boston University,” Brian chimes in—“and he says you're the quickest goalie he's seen in a long time.”

His flattery is working. This guy is good.

“The two guys we have now aren't very
quick
goalies, Kenny. They're big guys, and they've got a year on you, but I'm telling ya, you have got just as much a chance to be our number-one goalie as they do. I don't play favorites; I play the best, hardest-working players. Understand?”

“I do, sir.”

“Good. Now I want you to have fun this weekend, talk to some of the guys, get a feel for our gorgeous campus here. You know, it was founded in 1819, so it's been around awhile.” Slater laughs at his own joke, air pockets escaping his lungs like bullets from a tommy gun. “We don't expect you to decide right now. You have to test-drive a car before you buy it, eh?”

That's true, I nod.

“It's a big decision. But when you get back to Buffalo, I want you to talk it over with your father and let us know just as soon as you can.”

If Slater were an Army recruiter, his charisma would have me signing the commitment papers on the spot.

Brian and I walk up to the student center on the hill. Two players from Buffalo—Karl and Jeff—meet us on the stone patio where students, as they appear to do a lot of, lounge around like this plot of academia in Hamilton, New York, is the French Riviera. Brian tells me the sturdy junior players will be my tour guides for the weekend and, after handing me a few bills in fun money, heads back to the rink.

After touting the reasons to go to Colgate (the great education, the chicks, the great hockey program, the great chicks, the free booze, the
chicks) during a walk through the leafy campus—
wait till I tell Dad the walls really have ivy on them
—Karl and Jeff take me over to the off-campus apartment of a cocksure player from Canada nicknamed “Boomer.”

Boomer gets right to the point, to the core of what clearly is a recruiting message aimed at my most banal male urges. “You'll be like a kid in a candy store,” says the muscular jock, who boasts of being the designated player for showing recruits a good time. “Free pussy. You won't even have to try, eh? The pussy will find
you
, my friend.”

One of the first things I notice about Boomer is that, besides the fact that his top rack of superwhite teeth resembles a row of mint Chiclets, he, in a common conversational Canadian quirk, utters
eh
in every sentence, usually at the end, which turns just about everything he says into a question.

Boomer hands me a Molson and plops beside me on his ratty couch. The place reeks of beer. “Check out these babies,” he says, thumbing through a stack of Polaroids like a deck of cards. The photos, he explains, are of a naked hockey groupie. “We fucked the shit out of this cum dumpster the other night,” he explains.

Oh, I say.

The photos show a woman, probably in her early twenties, wearing nothing except for white socks sagging around her ankles. As if the images don't speak for themselves, Boomer enthusiastically describes every bare-ass shot of her laughing and grabbing her boobs, which dangle like a pair of plump watermelons. One picture shows her bent over, ass in the air, her pale butt cheeks that haven't seen sun in their lifetime forming a vertical smile for the camera. “Now that's a full moon if I ever saw one, eh?” he says. “But you know what they say: ‘The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin'.”

I laugh, too, and say, “
That's
for fuckin' sure,” and then I sip some more beer, trying not to grimace from the bitterness.

Boomer spreads the pictures, solitaire-style, on the coffee table. My eyes pop open as he gives the pornographic play-by-play.
Check out
those titties, eh? . . . I did her right there in the kitchen . . . Nice bush, eh?
Since I am a sexually inexperienced seventeen-year-old, and the only naked woman I've ever seen in person is Jenny, my curious eyes are glued to his personal pornography. I have never seen anything like this—so raw, so sexy, so . . .
wrong.

Boomer makes it sound like my athletic grant-in-aid will come packaged with attractive—if not morally pure—women as a fringe benefit. According to Boomer, there are two types of Colgate chicks: (a) the “good to go” (any girl who will sleep with him), and (b) “bitches” (any girl, I quickly surmise, who has too much self-respect to spread her legs for some drunken jock). Later that night, I go from bar to bar watching drooling girls flirt with Karl and Jeff and Boomer and Dupe and Bish and Younger and Lillie and Davey and seemingly every other player on the team, who all strut around town like barnyard studs.

Without even seeing a classroom, I'm sold. Except for Cornell, Colgate, two hundred miles due east of Buffalo, is the closest NCAA Division I hockey school to home. That means Dad will be able to drive to see me play every home game. At breakfast with the coaches the next morning, I inform Slater that I will definitely play for Colgate. He has my word. Then I call Dad.

“You're sure, now,” Dad says. “This is where you want to spend the next four years of your life?”

“Absolutely,” I assure him.

“How much they offering?” he asks.

“A full ride.”