The Late Bloomer (13 page)

Dave calls me “Bakes,” but the other three freshmen, while they are otherwise likeable chaps, sometimes call me Pear and rarely want to hang out with me because, seeing as I'm just a lowlife sub, I am not cool enough.

And, finally, there is the
Hazing Hell
. . . .

Not only must I face the daily humiliation of being called Pear, being ignored by most of my freshman teammates, and being relegated to the status of backup goalie, but the upperclassmen decide to make me miserable with a humiliating, homoerotic series of rituals that I must perform before I am accepted as a real member of the clan known as the Colgate Red Raiders.

It starts when the guys give me a choice: I can shave my head, or shave my entire body—from the armpits down to my toe hair. Not yet fully beaten into submission, I refuse to do either. Fine, they say. If I'm not willing to shave myself, they promise they will pin me down and shave me themselves. They give me a week to change my mind.

“Come on, Bakes,” another freshman says a few days later. “Just do it. They're going to fuck with you even more if you don't shave. They just want you to be one of the guys. They had to go through this shit, and they just want you to do the same. It's not like they're asking us to do anything they haven't done themselves.”

“Fuck 'em,” I say. “That doesn't make it any more acceptable. If they force me to do anything, I'll just tell the administration.”

“Yeah, then you'll be blackballed,” he snarls. “You think it's hard now, if you nark on them, the guys will fuck with you until you quit.”

“I don't care.”

But, of course, I do.

Even so, a week passes, and while the other freshmen have taken a razor to their armpits, chest, ass, legs and balls, I haven't yet shaved an inch of my body. I'm the least hairy of all the guys, but it's not the hair, it's the principle.

I get to practice early, before anyone can see me naked; after practice, I stay out on the ice late. When it appears that everyone has left the arena, I head for the locker room, hoping to sneak out without anyone accosting me.

I'm in the shower rinsing soap off my face when I open my eyes and see a group of five or six upperclassmen surrounding me. One's holding a can of shaving cream; another is waving a Bic razor in front of me.

“Time to shave, Pear,” one of them says.

I stand under the rushing water, feigning that I am not terrified.

“You're not leaving till you shave, you know.”

“Listen,” I say. “I'll do anything but shave my body. I just don't want—”

One of them pushes me against the tile wall and holds my wrists together over my head. When I squirm and slip onto the floor, they laugh.

“Okay, all right,” I say, nearly in tears. “I'll fucking shave. Just leave me alone. I'll do it my fuckin' self.”

The meatheads leave, except for one, who for the next fifteen minutes watches me shave almost every inch of my body. I hope he enjoyed himself . . . the asshole.

—

My initiation continues on our first bus trip to Boston. A longstanding Colgate hockey tradition is that on the team's first road trip every
freshman must tell a joke to the rest of the guys. And if the joke isn't funny, you are forced to strip naked and locked in the bus's coffin-size bathroom until you come up with one that makes the cavemen howl.

On a Thursday afternoon in late October 1988, I climb aboard the team bus headed for Northeastern University. It is my inaugural road trip, as well as my formal initiation into a club that I am increasingly questioning whether I want to be part of.

I have about as much of a choice to not go through with the initiation rituals as do adolescent male members of the Amhara tribe, rural cultivators in Ethiopia who force their young men to endure whipping contests they call
buhe.
I recently read about them in my anthropology book. Evidently, the Amhara elders hold these ceremonies in which the boys are forced to stand amid a circle of older men cracking whips. If the bloodied youths (whose faces and bodies are cut with the lacerating whips) show any signs of meekness, such as crying, they are mercilessly mocked and taunted. Afterward, to prove their manliness, the young men are encouraged to burn long scars on their arms with hot embers.

You think these Ethiopians are vicious? Try the manhood rituals endured by young men in Melanesia, in the highlands of New Guinea, which anthropologist David D. Gilmore has so described:

[
Boys
]
are torn from their mothers and forced to undergo a series of brutal masculinizing rituals. . . . These include whipping, flailing, beating, and other forms of terrorization by older men, which the boys must endure stoically and silently. As in Ethiopia, the flesh is scored and blood flows freely. These Highlanders believe that without such hazing, boys will never mature into men but will remain weak and childlike. Real men are made, they insist, not born.

So as I nervously try and memorize my jokes on the team bus that afternoon, I can be glad that at least I live in a society where hazing of
young men is of the more humane variety. Or at least that is what I keep telling myself.

Since my teammates mostly enjoy racist and sexist humor, I have scribbled a few such jokes (which my Dad told me over the phone the night before) on a piece of paper crumpled in my pocket. It's about a four-hour drive to Boston, leaving plenty of time for them to commence their rolling production of
Lord of the Flies.
The only thing that keeps me from totally crapping my pants is the presence of Coach Slater in the front seat. No matter how much of a cold shoulder he has shown me, I doubt he will let things get too far out of hand.

Dave Doherty goes first, grabbing hold of the driver's microphone and delivering hilarious punch lines. The guys applaud with raucous approval. After a few more zingers, he heads back to his seat, fully clothed, the upperclassmen high-fiving him as he passes down the aisle. He has passed the test.

Then it is Dale's, Jason's and Jamie's turns to step up to the mike. One by one they all bomb. As promised, Boomer instructs all three to take off their clothes. They do. He then rustles them up like Canadian prairie cattle, shooing them into the tiny bathroom.

By now, my heart feels like it is going to burst through my breastbone. I make my way up the aisle and grab the mike, noticing out of the corner of my eye that Slater is staring out the front window with a smirk on his face, as if he is oblivious to the student-code–breaking hijinks being committed all around him.

Boomer shushes everyone, but I'm not given a fighting chance.

Boomer has already decided I'm going into the shitter.

I open the door and see Jason, Jamie and Dale crammed into a bathroom made for one. Suddenly, I am overcome with dread.

“NO!” I growl, pushing away from the bathroom. “I'm not fucking getting in there.”

“I have twenty guys here who think different,” Boomer says.

He doesn't realize how serious I am. But I really do mean it. I am
not squeezing into that bathroom. Uh-uh. No way. It's too small. A heaviness fills my lungs. My breath grows short. The mob is shouting at me. I wish Coach Slater would stand up and put an end to this craziness. But he doesn't.

Hazing is as much a part of college hockey tradition as horn-blaring bands and crowds taunting goalies. I had heard stories of freshmen head-shaving, of players being locked in closets until they drank a bucket of warm beer, of freshmen being forced to sit in a circle and jerk off into a Dixie cup. It's amazing that no player has ever died or that school officials let these things happen.

On the bus, I whisper into Boomer's ear that I'm claustrophobic, and he somehow finds whatever shred of compassion he has remaining and lets me sit outside of the bathroom. But just when I think I'm in the clear, he commands me to take off all my clothes, then ties them in knots with the other three bathroom-entombed freshmen's shirts and pants and underwear. He uses our socks for ropes, tying them snugly around the tangled mess.

I could think of more humane male-bonding rituals, but just as few men get to choose their culture's rites of male passage, few prisoners get to choose their captors or the gender of their captors. Either way, I doubt the female hockey players are getting their panties tied into a bunch.
Men are so fucked up.

Boomer throws our clothes into the bathroom as if they are an unsolved Rubik's cube and he tugs on my lifeless arm. “Since you're too pussy to be in there,” he says, “you have to run the gauntlet.”

Figuring it's better than being locked in a bathroom, I comply.

As I run naked up the aisle, my teammates slap and kick me in my pale ass. One guy gives me a stab in the stomach. “Free shots!” Boomer announces gleefully. Everyone is laughing but me—and Slater. The bastard looks out the windshield with a blank stare.

Later that night, the bus rolls to a stop in front of the Marriott at Boston's Copley Square. Slater hands out room keys. Mine is on the thirty-third floor, and as I make my way to the elevator bank I realize
there's no way I am stepping into that elevator, a box not too unlike that bus bathroom. I feel too claustrophobic.
What if it gets stuck, and I can't get out, and I start hyperventilating and get dizzy and pass out and die?
After the other players ascend to their rooms, I find the stairwell and begin climbing all thirty-three floors with my forty-pound hockey equipment bag slung over my shoulder and a suitcase in my hand.

Ten minutes later, I enter the room, breathless, sweat soaked into my shirt. I drop my bags and immediately splash cold water on my face over the bathroom sink and see my Olympic and NHL dreams slipping through my fingers like the rushing water.

Upon returning to campus from Boston, I head straight for my fourth-floor dorm room in West Hall, of course taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Kevin, who along with Sean and a few other guys on our floor listened to the Northeastern game on the radio, eagerly asks how the trip went. “Fine,” I mumble, ignoring him.

I stuff my textbooks into my backpack and trudge down the hill to the main library to camp out in my favorite study carrel tucked behind a row of books on the basement floor. Where no one can see me. There, I read my psych text, which says that claustrophobia, the irrational fear of closed-in spaces, can be brought on by anxiety in one's life; issues of feeling out of control or helpless may also manifest themselves in the form of claustrophobia. I am deathly afraid of elevators, and seeing as though I'll have to stay in a hotel every other weekend on hockey trips, if I don't get over it—fast—I'm going to be one miserable boy named Pear. My hockey career will cease.

A week after the Boston trip—I climbed the thirty-three flights of stairs seven times that weekend, rather than risk getting stuck in an elevator—I make an appointment with a staff psychologist at the student counseling center. My mother tried to get me to see her psychologist, James, after the divorce, so that I didn't have any “issues” later in life. But I refused. Psychologists were for the weak, I thought.
Needless to say, I don't tell Dad or Kevin or Sean or certainly anyone on the team that I am seeing a shrink.

I have set up an afternoon appointment, right before hockey practice, since the counseling center sits conveniently halfway down the hill on my walk to the rink. I don't wear my gray and maroon Colgate hockey jacket, lest anyone spot me. My picture is on the team schedules that are posted all around campus as well as the downtown restaurants and shops. Even though I'm not the starting goalie, seemingly everyone—hockey is
the
most popular sport at Colgate—knows who I am. Since this is such a small school, only 2,700 students, if one person finds out that I am fucked up mentally, then the fast-moving gossip mill will reveal it to everyone. A hockey coach once told me that goaltending is eighty percent mental. If I don't believe those watching me are under the illusion that I am invincible and confident, my powers of focus and puck-stopping hubris will be impaired. I need to get over this problem.

Twisting my head, I look back and make sure no one is watching as I make the left turn onto the path leading to the counseling center, which is purposely tucked behind a stand of trees.

The psychologist greets me at her office door. A plain, mousy lady with scarecrow-straight brown hair, she asks what she can do for me in a voice so timid I can barely hear her.

“I think I'm claustrophobic, and, well, I really don't want to be, so I want to fix it.”

I tell her about the bus trip.

“Oh, I'm a big hockey fan,” she says.

Great. Now I'll have to worry about her watching me from the stands, knowing that no matter how tough I look on the ice, I am just a neurotic little shit underneath all that equipment.

She says she's
so sorry
when I recall the whole hazing ritual. Then I tell her about my dad, and how he is sick all the time and how I am afraid he is going to die any day, and how Jenny is starting to hint that we should “see other people,” due to the long distance. I tell her that I
don't really fit in at Colgate, that I hate the drunken frat scene, and that the best grade I've received so far is a B-minus. And of course, I tell her that I feel as if Terry Slater is basically destroying my hockey career and, thus, my life. I do
not,
however, mention my sexual performance anxiety. That's too personal. That's tucked away, behind sandbags. Another thing I don't tell her is that not only do they call me Pear, but the other day an upperclassman snuck up on me in the shower and started squeezing my breasts, chortling, “Nice titties, Bakes!” I hate my body.

Shrink asks if I ever have felt claustrophobic before, and I tell her I have, when my brothers would occasionally stuff me in closets. After a couple more of these Shrink sessions, I make a breakthrough: So many things in my life are out of my control. My father's health, my girlfriend, my academic experience, my hockey coach, the uninvited taunting from other players. Shrink says claustrophobia is just a symptom of all these so-called control issues.

It makes sense, but the bottom line is that I'm still horrified at the mere thought of stepping inside elevators. Shrink suggests I try a treatment called “progressive desensitization.” Gradually, she says, I can make myself less anxious and fearful about riding elevators by stepping inside a larger-size one, then quickly stepping out; then by riding a smaller one for just a floor; then riding in one packed with other people. And so on and so on, until I am able to ride in any kind of elevator without feeling terror.

Shrink offers to accompany me. But this whole therapy thing is ego-crushing enough; the last thing I want Boomer to see is me walking around campus holding Shrink's hand. I tell her I can do it on my own, thank you.

I begin my self-treatment by finding a wider-than-average elevator in Lathrop Hall. Chemistry teachers use it for hauling laboratory equipment. Since it's not one of those phone-booth–sized ones, I can handle it. Every day, on my way to study at the science library, I press the call button. The first few times, the door slides open, and I only
peek in. A few times later, my heart pounding on my chest like a little boy locked in a closet, I get in and ride it one floor down (going up is riskier, since it may get stuck between floors). In hotels when on hockey trips, I force myself to take the elevator (hoping that it's large or at least glass-encased, which isn't so scary) and I pray that it doesn't get stuck. It never does, although I remain tremendously nervous about riding in them. Call me a functional claustrophobic.

I learn how to manage my fear, but not how to eradicate my frustrations.

I don't play a single minute of hockey my entire freshman season, a fact that with the help of Shrink (whom I stopped seeing after four sessions because I figured I was now strong enough to handle it myself) I conclude is for reasons totally out of my control. Dave is older and playing well and Slater apparently will play him until he falters.

I opt to spend the rest of the season trying to focus on those things I
can
control. I work hard in practice and lift weights afterward in order to make myself a stronger and faster goalie, hoping that a more muscular body will earn me a new nickname. While sitting on the bench during games, I play entire games mentally, pretending that I am Dave, the starting the goalie. In these imaginary games, I usually let in fewer goals than Dave does. This way, I stay mentally sharp, the part of my game that, more so than my reflexes, is my single most valuable goaltending skill. I was phenomenal that day in 1983 against the Rochester Americans because of my ability to block out distractions (in that case, my parents' divorce), not because I was the fastest or biggest goalie. I could, however, control my mind.

One evening in the library, where I start spending more time than the ice rink, I come upon a philosophy book. I don't remember the title, but I remember not being able to put it down until I finished it. Its central thesis is that the universe is in a constant state of entropy—disorder, chaos, whatever you want to call it—yet, humans only have the illusion of control. That's it! Fate is my master—not Slater, not how much I beat myself up about not playing. Certainly not Dad, who
in so many words has communicated to me that my freshman year has been a major disappointment to him. So silly are we humans to think we actually have control over anything. Life, sports—it is all so random.

That book reminded me of my first Olympic team development camp in 1985, when a group of sports psychologists from Michigan State University led a series of seminars on how to master the mental part of the game. They suggested we read a book titled
The Inner Game of Tennis,
which I did. Its author, W. Timothy Gallwey, divided every game into two essential parts: the inner game and the outer game. Gallwey argued that a solid inner game (self-confidence, concentration, focus, calmness) allows one's outer game to flourish.

In goaltending, the outer game consists of executing skills such as skate saves, stick saves, pad saves, glove saves, two-pad stacks and the controlling of rebounds. I was confounded that sometimes I could make every save with strength and confidence and other times clumsily let in goals because I lacked confidence in my abilities. Gallwey wrote that a negative inner game is the single greatest impediment to a positive outer game. In other words, if you think you suck, you will. Gallwey's philosophy, essentially a westernized application of Zen Buddhism to sports, was to “let things happen” instead of trying to “make things happen.” Let your racquet strike the ball, let the action flow as free as a river. To do this, he wrote, one must “still the mind” and practice a “nonjudgmental awareness” of his athletic performance that doesn't judge an action as either good or bad, but merely an opportunity for observation. Translated into hockey terms, I determined this to mean I could unlock the great goalie inside of me by not
trying
to be better than Dave, not
trying
to convince Slater I was the best goalie; rather, I needed to simply
let
myself play to my greatest potential and
let
the chips fall where they may.

I figured I could do the same off the ice as well.

In my diary, I start referring to myself as “Zen Ken” as if I were
chronicling the inner game of my life. Dad wants to smoke himself to death?
Fine. Nothing I can do about it. Just let him be.
My psych professor gives me a D+?
Well, I just have to do the best I can and let the grade point average fall where it may.
Jenny, who two months into the school year wants to break up and date guys at her college, is having doubts about our future?
Go right ahead and do whatyagottado, babe.
Guys on the hockey team want to put me down and call me a homo behind my back because I don't scam on all the hockey groupies?
Whatever, dudes. Think what you will. I'm well practiced in being true to myself despite outside pressure to be different—case in point: my KAK-calling brothers abusing me.
Those same teammates want to corner me in the shower after practice holding a disposable shaver and force me to shave my freshman body from the neck down?
If that's what will get them off my back, whatever.

I've recently discovered a new song that I like very much, a laid-back reggae tune that exhorts all to “Don't worry, be happy.”

—

I don't remember exactly when I first realized I might be able to do something productive with my life besides playing hockey, but it was probably in spring of 1989, near the end of my freshman year. That's when my academic writing assignments no longer intimidate me, and when the academic dean no longer makes me take a remedial writing course.

The instructor of that class compliments me on my improved grammar, my sentence structure and my “strong voice,” which I've realized is the voice that I've been scrawling into the pages of my diary (back then, I called it a “log” because a diary was a pink book in which Marcia Brady wrote about boys) since age eleven and was writing about snowy days, my hockey dreams and my favorite TV shows.

I have become an all-around better student and more comfortable with my anti-partying social life. I become just as comfortable studying
in a carrel in the library as stopping pucks in front of a net. I read every book on my class reading lists, front to back (often on the team bus while other players listen to CDs and chew tobacco). My teammates, many of whom attend classes just so they are eligible to play, consider me bookish, and, well, I am. I even carry a hardback Webster's Collegiate Dictionary in my backpack everywhere I go, so, whenever I come across a word I don't know (a frequent occurrence), I find it in my dictionary, highlight it and memorize its meaning.

I especially enjoy the reading assignments in philosophy class: Kant, Buber, Nietzsche, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I devour
The Rules of Attraction
by Bret Easton Ellis, a novel mostly about sex and debauchery on a fictional New England college campus, circa the late-1980s. I am struck—make that, disgusted—by the similarities between real-life Colgate undergrads and the hedonistic students at Ellis's Camden College, so much so that I write a paper indicting young men and women I deem unscrupulous, dehumanizing, soulless Darwinian sexual predators:

The Dressed to Get Screwed parties that the students have in the novel are not that much different than an average fraternity party or a Friday night at The Jug. Go to any fraternity party and you will find plenty of girls “dressed to get screwed.” Some of the clothing, or lack of clothing for that matter, can make even the most sexually serene man's heart rate increase. Unlike in the novel, not everyone is at these parties to get screwed, but the similarities between their organized sexual extravaganzas and our (Colgate's) social functions are quite striking. If examined closely one will see that Colgate University and Camden College have more in common than just being drinking resorts for rich kids.

Being a male, I obviously view the mating situation here from a male's perspective, which is exactly how I am going to describe the status of the social scene here at Colgate.

Women are viewed as sex objects, objects that will satisfy the men's sexual wants and desires. Not all women are used to satisfy the men's lust; only those who make it through an extensive judging process are given the illustrious opportunity to be used. The cattle-auction–like process has occurred at every party I have been to while at Colgate. The process begins as soon as the piece of ass, I mean girl, comes into the guy's view. First her general appearance is remarked upon, such as “She's kinda cute.” Followed by a more specific observation like “And a nice set of tits too!” If the girl makes it this far into the screening process, she is subjected to the most crucial judgment of them all: whether he'd fuck her or not. If the guy concludes, “Yeah, I'd fuck her,” then he'll move in on her. If he concludes conversely, then he will not pursue the venture any further. Why should he waste time hanging out with a girl he would never fuck anyway? The entire process is termed “scamming.” . . .