This American Life

I slam one last slapshot into the back of the net and watch it bump up against the rest of the pucks that have piled up in the net. I go forward and round the net, counting the ones that didn’t make it into the net.

They aren’t all mine; but they are all there, scattered like so many lost souls. I rifle a few into the net and head for the locker room, slamming my stick into the rack, then rip off my helmet. I know how my hair looks. It looks horrible. I don’t care.

I slam my way into the showers, and people get out of my way. Upset and frustrated, I leave before anyone else can speak to me. A few fans that’ve come to watch the practice venture towards me, and out of the corner of my eyes I look at them.

A dumpy woman in an oversized sweatshirt that reads “New York, New York” is clutching her son’s hand desperately. The boy looks about eight, with a curly swath of dirty blond hair and a zipped-up blue winter coat. It’s one of those puffy ski jackets, and he has in his hands three or four trading cards and a pen. I walk past them both, blow them off, and continue to my car.

The little boy looks crushed as I see him in my side mirror. Tears fill his eyes and for a moment I feel horrible.

The moment quickly passes, and I shift the car into “drive”. I take the cement path around the blocks of parking structure and immediately make a wrong turn.

“God-damn-it!” I say loudly, slamming both fists on the steering wheel. Now, due to my own stupidity, I have to take the main tourist street through the city, and I don’t know a way to reach the freeway. I hate taking the main drag.

Fuck it, I need bread, though. I’ll just stop somewhere, since I am taking the long way.

Almost immediately I’m sucked into the vortex of one-way traffic, red stoplights, stop signs, angry people crossing roads, horns blowing, drivers cursing, people walking. Uncombusted diesel fuel hangs in a blue smoggy haze above my head, thick and choking. I gag and begin to crank down a window.

It’s pissing rain from the cloud-thickened sky; just a few drops every now and then. Freezing, sleeting rain that would eventually turn into snow. I roll my window back up and rest my head against, waiting for the light to turn.

I want to kill it.

It turns green and I gun the accelerator for another three block until I hit another red, where I stop short and sigh. To my right, a neon sign is blaring “WAYNE’S PIZZA!!!!!!” in headache-inducing orange. More neon over the door reads “COME IN! WE’RE OPEN!” and to add to the cavalcade of ugliness, there’s an annoying neon slice of pizza. I hate pizza, and the smell of baking pies is wafting into my car. Inside WAYNE’S PIZZA, a young kid is sitting at the counter amidst a sea of Formica tabletops and vinyl-seated chairs. There aren’t even any posters on the wall, painted a sickening orange as well.

To my left, a bottle blonde with greasy hair stumbles out of a dive bar. I watch as though in slow motion—watch her laugh loudly, mouth gaping open. Watch her trip over her companion. Watch her shiver through her Rancid tank top, and then spend two minutes crossing the street in front of me. Watch her crash drunkenly into WAYNE’S PIZZA, and I pity the kid working there. He must deal with quite a few drunken fuckers a night.

Once more I hit the gas and accelerate, and I manage to go eight blocks before stopping again. It’s maddening. I’m seized with the urge to scream, and I feel it welling up in my throat, tightening, hardening, but I swallow it down.

I see businessmen walking home in their identical black suits, with identical gray trench coats and identical black briefcases. They walk by one of those spaces between two buildings, closed off with a metal grate. Two punk kids slouch in front of it, trying to look Older and More Important and utterly failing. One is tall, with his hair shaved and spiked into a black mohawk. Chains drip from his pants pockets, and headphones hang around his neck, no doubt blasting some raving lunatic with a guitar. His companion is shorter, with a leather jacket and Vans on. His reddish hair is worn long and stringy.

Reddish hair. It hits me with near-physical force. I look around me again and recognize the streets that are coming alive in dormant memory.

Once upon a time, a young kid named Marian Gaborik grew up in a far-off land with his best friend, Marcel Hossa, who happened to have reddish hair just like his father and older brother. So the two kids grew up and went to a different far-off land to play professional hockey, and became a little more than friends. One day, Marian invited his best friend to come see him in Minnesota, which Marcel promptly did. They had a fuzzy happy fun-filled day that only lovers can have, and at the end of it, Marcel told Marian that there was somebody else and they had to go back to being “best friends.”

In the half-second it took to replay the film strip of memory, the light has changed and I hit the accelerator and don’t stop again until I’m out of the city proper and on the highway.

Best friends my freaking ass. I could have killed him that day, strapped him to my bumper, and dragged his body—red, raw, bleeding, broken—through the streets of Minneapolis. Somehow I managed to keep a smiley face and mutter some bullshit about how it “wasn’t quite working out the way I’d hoped it would” and blah de fucking blah.

I know I could have killed him. I could have rammed him into the corner of my kitchen table, knocked him out, slammed his head on the floor, gone to work on him with a kitchen knife. I could have, and I wanted to. I wanted him dead, buried, gone forever. But after he left, I drove around for a while and blast music and let myself think I’d “gotten over it.”

I turn the radio on now, pressing the different buttons on the console. I shuffle through the various stations and replay more strips of memory.

I remember a long time ago, after a hockey game, going back to Marcel’s house and sleeping over. We were little—eight? Ten? My memory fails me at that point—and full of excitement and happiness and boiling over with fun. I remember fooling around with a camera, taking stupid pictures of ourselves, taking pictures of each other, taking pictures of our hockey equipment, taking pictures of the outside of his house. I still have a few of those pictures, tucked away in some long-forgotten album. I remember playing “spies” and sneaking around outside the house when it was dark. We stumbled all over each other and tried to see into Marian’s room, boosting each other up. We did that for quite a while, trying to see into his room, until Marian opened his window and started yelling at us.

I remember going inside and lying on his bedroom floor and talking about growing up to become big hockey superstars. We talked about what it would be like to play in the pro European leagues. We talked about going to the US one day and laughed it off.

Spinning by on the interstate, I pass by billboards, shot up out of the wasteland, advertising radio stations and cheap lawyers and general sleaze. I want to vomit. I can’t stand the ugliness of it all.

Turn the radio dial, twist the knobs, press the buttons, find a new and a new and a new station. The cheap disposability of musical “talent” in this country astonishes me. How...just—how? Why?

I remember hanging around my house with Marcel, eating cookies in the kitchen until someone materialized to tell us to a) stop eating those cookies, or b) go home, Marcel or c) get ready for practice, it starts in a little while. We’d sit around some more until someone really started yelling.

I have the radio on “seek”, and it continually blasts out some assault on the ears. God. It’s horrible. Some hitchhiking kook waves his arms, hoping to find a ride to somewhere—anywhere—as night slowly and inescapably falls.

I realize with a jerk back to reality that my exit is fast approaching, and I sail across four lanes of traffic in order to get into the right lane. Just as I’m taking the exit, someone in a pickup truck cuts me off sharply. Two of those American flags that one can place on one’s car’s windows fly from the driver’s side and the passenger side, and a larger one is draped across the back window. I wonder, idly, whether the garish flag obscures his vision. Its blazing red stripes alternate with shocking white, and the fifty stars seem crowded and confused. Overkill. How, I ask myself, do American schoolchildren draw fifty stars on their flags in their pictures? Why? The pickup’s bumper is covered in stickers as well—“Proud NRA Member,” “I Have An Honor-Roll Student at Holmes Middle School,” “I Have an Honor Roll Student At Jefferson High School,” “Abraham Lincoln Community College,” “Don’t Mess with U.S.,” and a particularly distasteful “REAL Americans Carry Guns.” The truck itself is in rather poor condition, and it cuts through a yellow light right ahead of me.

Another pickup is next to me at the red light, except this one is bright blue and has four window flags, but they are not proper American flags—they are red, with blue X’s across them and stars within the X’s. State flag? I’m not quite sure—I just know that they don’t match. They gun the accelerator as soon as the light turns, and I turn several corners to a grocery store.

A vast meadow of asphalt lies in front of the chain store, with grocery carts scattered across it like dead leaves. I narrowly avoid hitting several in my quest across the pavement. Once I go into the store, I’m overwhelmed, as I always am, by the variety.

Three kinds of pears. Four kinds of apples. All the bananas you could ever want. Pineapples, kumquats, all types of various fruits and vegetables, all looking faintly sick. I go through the store as quickly as I can.

Coca-Cola, that epitome of American soft drinks, and its various offshoots—Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, 7UP, Mug root beer, and about a dozen other kinds of pop. Five different kinds of bottled water—bottled water! Plus the carbonated types, the juice drinks, the fake-coffee substitutes. On the other side of the aisle lie sauces, creams, gravies in jars, anything you could desire to drown your meal in.

As I go by the dairy aisle, I’m reminded—harshly—of one of the first times I was in an American grocery store. I was eighteen, young and stupid, with some friend from home, long since forgotten. We were talking in a normal tone of voice—unaware as yet that in America, for all its vaunted allegiance to one’s roots, one must hide native tongues and traditions and customs as “un-American,” a paradox of no small type. Upon presenting ourselves at the register with some small purchases, American money, and English words, the clerk refused to serve us.

“Goddamn foreigners, coming in here and taking our jobs. Learn to speak English, you goddamn commies!” he said. Reflecting now, he couldn’t have been older than my friend and I. Even now from time to time I wonder where he is now and what’s become of him and why he felt so actively resentful of us.

I take a loaf of bread—the first one I see—and almost run to the register, disappointed that there are more than a few people in each line. I choose the shortest one—currently paying is a mother with a toddler in the wire cart. Behind her is an older man in a suit, buying, inexplicably, a bottle of whiskey and a package of cookies. Behind him is a tired-looking girl in a long black coat. Pretty, but famine-thin. A leather choker hugs her neck and a spiked metal bracelet hangs on her bony wrist.

When I reach the register, a happy-looking woman with gray hair and an apron greets me cheerfully. “How yew doin’ today?”

“Fine, thank you,” I say carefully. I don’t want to continue this conversation. I do NOT want to continue this conversation.

“Yew don’t sound like yer from round ‘here,” she says quizzically, scanning my one solitary loaf of bread.

“No, I’m not.” I think giving terse answers will discontinue her questions and hopefully prevent some of the murderous looks the people in back of me are throwing at me.

“Then, honey, where yew from?”

“Slovakia.” Obviously she thinks the questions do need to continue.

“Never heard of that. Where is it?”

“Europe,” I say shortly, grabbing my bread and change and fairly dashing through the door. I hear her remark on me to the next customer, but I don’t care. I do not care. I want to be home. More to the point, I want to go home—real home, Trencin home.

At my house, I can press a button and open my garage from forty feet away. Press another button and close it. Go inside, press another button, and my house is protected from intruders. Press another, and I can reheat myself a delicious boil-in-bag dinner. (Maybe not so delicious). The ease and comfort of life startles me, as always.

I press another button and listen to my messages from the day.

“Hi Marian, what’s up? Just calling to say hello, call me back whenever. Thanks.” Marcel. God, is there anyone else I don’t want to speak to more right now? I look at one of the pictures of him and I that is hanging, inauspiciously, in my kitchen. Framed in remembrance, and I can’t bear to take it down.

In the picture, he and I are standing in front of a giant sign that reads “Welcome to the Great State of NEW YORK, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” somewhere in JFK Airport. We have our arms on each other’s shoulders, Marcel is sticking out his tongue, and I’ve turned my eyelids inside out. Typically juvenile picture-ruining tactics, honed to perfection. We look like idiots, but I love that picture.

Marcel, I can’t call you now. I’d have to explain why I feel so horrible, and I don’t exactly know. What I do know is that I want to go with him to his home, his Canadian home, his North American life. How can it be so different from mine? How can he be so satisfied and well-adjusted and happy? How can he go to bed each night without the horrible pangs of longing for home? I want to know how and why. I wanted to create my own America. America without the suffering of this American life.