Page 10 of I'm Your Guy
“—you look distracted. Don’t make Hessler do all the work.”
“Yessir,” I grunt, and he moves on to yell at someone else.
He isn’t wrong. I am distracted. And I’m unsettled. This month has been one of the worst of my life. So much family stress. So much guilt. And now I’m letting it fuck up my game.
My mother is probably sitting home in New Jersey, watching me on ESPN, too.
That’s a sobering thought. I rub my temples and try to regain my focus, which has been missing all night. Every great athlete knows how to shut off the noise in his life.
Tonight, though, the noise is sinking me.
We go out there and fight like hell for the second period. Things go a little better, and Stoney ties it up with some help from Newgate.
I’m having another shaky period. Coach doesn’t even bother ripping me a new one over it, and somehow, his silence feels worse. Like I’m not even worthy of coaching.
We skate onto the ice for the third period, and my head is throbbing. “We’ve got some momentum now,” Hessler says.
“No thanks to me,” I grunt.
He thumps me on the shoulder. “It’s not over yet, man.”
But the tie holds deep into the third period. I just have a dark feeling about this game. Like it’s already beaten me.
You’re playing like a pussy. Stupid bastard.
Even though he’s two thousand miles away, Uncle Vin’s voice still rattles around in my head at moments like this. It started when I was a kid, and he’d come to our bantam games. He’d stand behind the bench, red-faced, spittle flying.
I’d wanted to please that man more than I’d wanted to breathe. He’d been a professional hockey player, so clearly, he’d known what it took to succeed.
He’d repaid my attention by addressing me as “you little bastard,” which he meant literally. “Can’t call you DiCosta,” he’d jeered, “because you don’t really qualify.”
It was true, I guess. If unnecessarily harsh. DiCosta is my mother’s name. My parents never got married, and I haven’t seen my father since I was a toddler.
None of that should’ve mattered, though. And Uncle Vin’s bullshit had the unintended effect of galvanizing me. I’d been determined to win hockey games if only to spite him.
It had worked, too. I’d been a high-draft pick for Trenton right out of high school and started on a D1 college team my freshman year.
Eventually, Uncle Vin retired from the pros and finagled a position on the coaching staff for Trenton, his old team. It had meant more of his verbal abuse at the training camps, but I was used to it.
Or so I thought. “You still got the same bad habits as when you were a kid. And I’m gonna break you of every one of them. I’m gonna break you, period.”
He liked to humiliate me in front of the team. Every mistake I made, he made sure everyone knew.
I haven’t seen Uncle Vin in two years, but every time I have a bad game, I still hear him screaming at me.
The volume is lower now, though. I can almost tune it out.
We set up for another faceoff. The sweat streams down my face, but I find that quiet place inside myself where there is only hockey. The ref drops the puck, and the fans roar. But that’s just background noise. Kapski wins the faceoff. He flips it to Hessler, who flips it to me.
Head down, I skate the puck forward. Stoney is open, but my gut says not for long. So I fake the pass and drive onward.
It only takes them a couple seconds to figure out what I’ve done, but the delay is enough. I slide past Carolina’s winger and evade a poke check from their D-man. Running out of new ideas, I fake the pass to Stoney, and then I shoot it to Kapski.
Who scores.
The lamp lights, and I feel myself sag with relief. There you go, Uncle Vin, you asshole. Cheers.
Four minutes later, we’ve clinched the game. I drag myself back to the dressing room, feeling lucky to have survived with my dignity intact.
