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

moves like skating circles around my opponent, rifling the puck past the goalie, and other stuff I’d put on my imaginary highlights reel, but my body, nearly paralyzed from a decade’s worth of beer and chicken wing intake, would rarely come close to getting it right. It was still a lot of fun though, so between that and the after-game binge drinking my new teammates and I would get up to, it was enough to keep me coming back each week.
    Somewhere toward the second season after my triumphant return, the yellow team was playing our archrivals, the blue team, whose scrappy, middle-age brand of ice hockey was legendary among the three other teams in the league. Early in the game, one of the blue team players began repeatedly hitting me in the legs with his stick, an illegal move known as slashing, every time we came near each other. I ignored it the first couple times it happened, but after he did it a third time I decided to let him know who was boss, so I punched him in the face, sending him crashing to the ice with a flabby, fortysomething thud. Since everyone in our league wore helmets, face masks, and heavily padded gloves, punches were more a nuisance than actually painful. Still, he was pissed and came back for more. By then, the referee had blown his whistle to break up the fight, so we just wrestled each other for a few seconds before everyone else pulled us apart. Somehow during all the mayhem, however, the mask on my helmet unfastened, leaving my face wide open for pummelling. To his credit, my scrappy opponent managed to pull an arm free from whoever was restraining him and punch me directly in the face. Of course, I normally would have destroyed him after that, but my arms were being gently held back by the seventy-year-old I mentioned earlier, so there was nothing I could do. The fight was over and I was the only guy left with anything more than emotional wounds.
    “You’re a jerk!” I yelled at my assailant.
    “No, you are!” he responded.
    Tensions remained thick as both teams skated back toward their respective benches after the melee. Except for me, that is. I was determined to settle the score, so as soon as no one was looking, I skated back over to the guy who’d hit me and wound up on him as best I could, landing a solid blow that sent him crashing to the ice all over again. It was what some might call a “dick move,” but I was still pretty pleased with myself. The referee, however, wasn’t and decided to suspend me for what ended up being the rest of the season as there weren’t many games left to play that year anyway.
    Disgraced, I spent the next few weeks thinking about what had happened on the ice that night while hoping I wouldn’t run into any of the guys from the league at the grocery store or elsewhere. Even if I were buying really manly stuff at the time, it would still be kind of embarrassing. In the end, though, it was my mother who ended up confronting me about what had gone down at the rink that night.
    “I ran into Paul the other day,” my mom told me one morning at breakfast.
    “That’s nice,” I said, trying not to arouse suspicion. “How is he doing?”
    “He’s good,” my mom said. “He said you got into a little trouble down at the rink.”
    “Really?” I said, trying to sound like I had no idea what she was talking about. “That’s weird. What did he say happened?”
    “He said you beat some guy up.”
    “Oh.”
    I was totally busted, so, being a fully grown man, I decided to just stand there staring at my feet and saying nothing.
    “Well, did you?” my mom pressed.
    “Yeah, I guess I kind of did,” I told her.
    I ended up giving my mom the play-by-play on what may have technically been the only real fight I had ever been in in my whole life.
    “Are you mad at me?” I asked her when I finished.
    “No,” she said. “It sounds like he deserved it.”
    It was in that moment I remembered that while I may have been a quarter Canadian, my mother was twice