Free Hockey Dreams by David Adams Richards Page B

mentioned on television programs like “Barney Miller,”“Colombo,” or “The Rockford Files,” it was almost always satirized. The boys never fought to get tickets to a game, but always had a comment about those who would go.
    Paul had become cynical about it. He had watched the attitude of the media towards it. And the problem was always the same — the media we thought was our media, we cheered it, laughed at it, and glorified it. Yet it was not ours, and the game was not theirs.
    He told me about the interview of Canadian players by the ABC network before the winter games in Sarajevo in 1984.ABC wanted to show their viewing audience that though Canadians still thought they were the best in the world they had not won a Gold in years. After they interviewed a Canadian player who said Canada was the greatest hockey nation, they mysteriously mentioned that Canada had not won Gold in years, and made no further comment or explanation. Then they spoke of how many Gold the Soviets had won.
    It was as if nothing had to be explained to their audience about why, Paul said. It made us all seem like pathological delusionists, Paul said.
    I told him that I thought sometimes we
were
pathological delusionists. That our entire country was filled with pathological delusionists. Talk about being boring or stuffy or uninteresting. We were the bravest and craziest, the most interesting country in the world. Each one of us was worth fifteen Laplanders.
    We get out on a baseball mound in April, and play golf in the snow. Even my father was a pathological delusionist. He owned a drive-in theatre.
    I shouldn’t say “even” my father because he was the case supreme. Sometimes in late October, at the little drive-in in Bushville he’d be playing
Beach Blanket Bingo
and giving away free hot chocolate with an order of fish and chips. It was as if the poor bugger was going to make his fortune doing this.
    Snow would be dawdling down, all the underpaid staff in long underwear, the projectionist in hat and gloves. Ginette,who worked for us faithfully, there making fish and chip boxes, and thawing out wieners.
    But the worst of this is — cars actually start arriving.
    Neddy Brown and his family, the grandpa as drunk as a snake, and Neddy wearing sunglasses in a cheap Elvis imitation jacket: “How ya doin — how ya doing tonight — are ya lonesome — lonesome tonight?”
    This is true, I don’t lie about things (or at least I don’t like to get caught lying about things).
    Paul said he knew it was all true and he believed me. “It was just like poor Stafford and his rubber snake,” he said. “He kept trying to convince his brothers and sisters that it was real — tried to feed it mice — just like he tried to convince us that Gordie Howe phoned him up.”
    “Pathological delusionists,” I said, a little sheepishly, because one day Gordie Howe actually
did
phone me up.

SIX
    I T WAS, THAT DAY IN 1989, when I went back to visit the town and met Paul, as if we were finally beginning to recognize what and who we were. It was deep winter — one of those winter days when you either go to work or start to drink wine at seven in the morning. We were walking along the highway on our way to visit Stafford Foley.
    I could see how Stafford, back in 1961, would think his snake was real. He would think it was real because he wanted it to be real. He didn’t want to sleepwalk — walking down the street in his slippers. He didn’t want to have insulin attacks, where he would become as strong as the Amazing Hulk, and five or six of us would have to hold him down and feed him a sugar cube. He didn’t want to be tiny and blind. He wanted to have his own snake. He wanted to play hockey.
    And if it wasn’t going to happen he would become a pathological delusionist. He would tell people Gordie Howe phoned him or he was over talking to the coach — who wantedhim to become a scout for the team. Stafford had all kinds of plans such as this, back