Free Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation by Dave Hill Page A

probably give my teammates too much satisfaction, so I refused.
    “How was practice today?” my dad would ask.
    “It was really fun,” I’d lie, trying to save face. “My teammates are really nice guys. You’d like them.”
    Between the stress of his law practice and raising five kids, I decided hearing his son had gotten pissed on that day was something my dad probably didn’t need. And, to their credit (I guess), my older teammates rarely gave me shit outside of the locker room or carpool. At school I was one of them, so while they weren’t overtly friendly to me, they never tried to wipe their feces on me or anything, so I was still really proud to be a part of the team. Besides, those guys all graduated after a couple of years and before I knew it, it was my turn to be an unfathomable asshole to the younger players. But by then, I was too into the guitar to have more than a passing interest in urinating on anybody. And I knew at least one or two girls by then, too, which seemed like the greatest thing that had ever happened ever.
    “Dave, look at Chris’s retarded haircut,” one of my fellow upperclassmen on the team might say in reference to one of the younger players.
    “I’ve seen better, but it’s not bad,” I’d reply, unable to muster the necessary strength to ruin the kid’s day.
    My high school hockey career concluded with just slightly more fanfare than that first season I played back when I was eleven. I saw a lot of “ice time” (hockey lingo for getting to play in the game a lot), got a cool varsity letterman jacket, and even briefly had an actual girlfriend who would sit in the stands during games and occasionally agree to make out with me later that night. It was incredible.
    I continued my unstoppable hockey career in college, albeit briefly. A couple games into my sophomore season, I realized it was interfering with my drinking too much, so I decided to pack it in. The coach was a little bummed to lose me but my roommates were thrilled because it meant I would no longer be stinking up our dorm room with my sweaty, moldy equipment. I didn’t play hockey for several years after that. And during that time, it was hard to even watch hockey games on television. Sure, the integrity of the game probably remained intact after my retirement, but I still felt a little guilty about it since less than a decade earlier I was convinced the ice was my natural habitat.
    Some years later though, with my grandfather in that great big Maple Leaf Gardens 2 in the sky, my half-Canadian mother managed to coax me back onto the ice again.
    “I know a man named Paul who runs the men’s hockey league down at the rink,” she said to me sometime after my twenty-seventh birthday. “He said you could play on his team.”
    It sounded suspicious to me that my mom might “know a man” like that, but the prospect of coming out of retirement was too intriguing to let that distract me from the matter at hand. I had been away from the game awhile and was hungry for action.
    “Oh yeah?” I said coyly. “What would I have to do?”
    “Just call him. He said they could use an extra player.”
    I called Paul the next day and joined his team, the “yellow team,” the following week. We played our games on the same ice I had started playing hockey on back when I was a promising yet delusional eleven-year-old, often at midnight or so, the time usually reserved for old men whose hockey dreams had been dashed by age, life changes, or just plain sucking long ago. The players ranged in age from their mid-twenties to at least one seventy-year-old. About half of the men had grown up playing the game and the rest picked it up as adults (you could usually spot them by how they had really new equipment and also fell down a lot).
    After being away for so long, it was good to be back on the ice. Still, all that time away had left me beyond rusty. My brain would send a message to my body to do all sorts of really cool hockey