Читать книгу White Snow Blackout - Joseph A. Byrne - Страница 4

I was seated in Geography class that September of 1972, at the University of Windsor, watching my favourite professor, a man named Ledoux, set up for class. Ledoux was a man’s man, a rugby star, rough around the edges, with a soft heart. An intelligent man, he was on the path to stardom in the U.S.A, when he came to Windsor. He always tried to hide his obvious soft side.

I had selected a seat near the door, knowing I would have to leave class early, in order to watch the hockey game. It was not just a game. It was Game 8 of the Canada-Russia super series. I figured Ledoux might even cut class early for the game. Ledoux had endeared himself to the class last year, when he took us on a field trip to New Hampshire. After crossing the international border into the United States, at the Ambassador Bridge, a clamour went up in the bus to stop at a variety store. Unknown to the professor, many of the students went in and bought three bottles each of the cheapest apple wine on sale there. They were then ready for academics.

After three days of pure fun, parties and learning, Professor Ledoux announced that each student would present an oral dissertation on an assigned topic. We would, each in our turn, present from the loud speaker at the front of the bus. We would be marked by three of our fellow students, serious types, who were apparently shocked by the fun-loving nature of our learning methods. My topic was ‘the cultural heritage between the cities of Schenectady, New York and Westchester, Massachusetts. We were given a half-hour to prepare.

Not knowing much about the cultural geography of that area, I decided to write out every joke I could remember and give them a cultural twist. If I ever got the Professor laughing, I would launch the one-liners in rapid fire to keep him laughing, spinning the next one off each time, before he could fully digest the prior one.

Student after student went to the front of the bus, showed a serious side, giving their best academic presentations, always giving it their best shot. Each time, they were marked down and ridiculed by the three appointed judges--fellow students who had no appetite for learning with apple wine. Professor Ledoux moderated many of the marks.

When my turn came, I began seriously, with a few academic points and then, imitating the serious and sour judges, I scolded the class in mock. I had waited until one of my colleagues had shouted out a smart remark.

I scolded by saying, “This is a serious presentation. This is no time for apple-wine-induced geography. Let’s keep it academic.”

Then I said, “Your answer was a nice try, but it is not accurate.”

“No,” I said, “just because you see a lot of hydro poles and telephone poles,” as I motioned outside, “and even telegraph poles, that does not mean we are passing through a Polish district.” The ruse worked. The Professor started to laugh and I hit him with one-liner after one-liner.

The Professor, unable to catch his breath, laughed harder with each punch line. He then eventually waved his arms as if to surrender, as the sour judges looked on. The Professor’s loud uncontrollable laughter was now the subject of uproarious laughter by my classmates and colleagues. When I couldn’t be heard any longer, I switched to sight gags.

I pulled a 12-inch cigar out of my pocket as the laughter was now too loud for anyone to hear anything I might say. I put on a pair of plastic glasses, with a heavy plastic moustache, flicked the cigar a couple of times and penguin-walked, in Groucho Marx style, down the aisle of the bus, all while playing out the falsetto of disdain at the conduct of the class. The Professor was appreciative of the sight gags. He reached for the microphone from me, while laughing uncontrollably, fell out of his seat and rolled down the front steps of the bus, surrendering completely to the laughter. He waved his arms for mercy, a couple of times, before I stopped.

After several minutes of pandemonium, the professor thanked me, between buckles of laughter, for stopping before, in his words, “he split a gut” or “fell out of the door and onto the highway.” I accepted the thanks without telling him I was out of ammunition. I couldn’t think of another joke anyway, other than walking upside down up the bus aisle, while delivering my speech.

After order was restored, five to ten minutes later, as Professor Ledoux was ready to speak, I beat him again to the microphone.

“I’m disappointed in the class, for laughing at my cultural presentation,” I said. “Professor Ledoux is running a serious class and this is not a Polish area,” I repeated.

As I gave the microphone to the professor, the sour judges started to indicate their disdain for the performance I had just given.

Mary, the sourest one, started, “I gave him a zero!”

Professor Ledoux interrupted. “No, no, no. This student knows his geography. This is not a Polish district. I am giving him 11 out of 10,” and he couldn’t finish saying it, as he started to laugh again.

I was smiling as I thought of this story, while unpacking the books I hadn’t read last night and setting up for class. It was early in the year, September still. I was wondering at the arbitrary class selections I had made in high school. But back then, they seemed fitting. At Assumption High, I had to choose between Latin and Geography in Grade 11. I couldn’t take both. I chose Geography because my cousin did, even though I liked Latin class better. This was probably because of the immense man of a Latin teacher, a priest I had in both Grades 9 and 10 Latin.

“Conjugate habeo, senores,” he would say. “Decline puella, senores,” he would continue.

I was thinking at exactly that moment that this professor actually taught us something about Latin that stuck.

“Ex, cum, sine, ab, in, de, all take the ablative, so they say,” he would state over and over as though his life depended on it. Father was an immense man. When he gave the strap to a student, seldom as it was, his whole body would shake and vibrate as the strap struck the hand lightly. We would naturally laugh, and challenge each other to accurately count the jiggles.

I felt fortunate to have him as a teacher. In another class, the Basilian priest, also a teacher, asked a student to decline a noun of the first declension. The student took the teacher’s name.

“Fagius, Fagii, Fagio, Fagium, Fagii, Fagio,” the student started, his obvious errors showing. Father Fagius rose on his chair, hopped on the top of his desk, ran across the tops of the students’ desks and threatened to fly at the student. We held our breath. The student changed his tact. “Sunus,” he started, “sunii,” and so on.

I was waiting for Ledoux to make an observation or wisecrack, as he often would at the beginning of class. I thought he might talk about the tennis war of words he had started with a female geography professor, Dr. Sanderson. Professor Ledoux stated over and over for days that he was a better tennis player than her and that she didn’t have a chance.

“For your homework,” he would say, “I want you to come up with the top ten reasons Dr. Sanderson will lose against me at tennis. And predict the score, but not in numbers. I will win by twice, or triple, or shut her out. You get the idea. I will overpower her,” he would say over and over, “just like I do to the guys on the rugby pitch.” They were a perfect parody here, at the University of Windsor for the hot topic of the time, the battle of the sexes, epitomized by tennis stars Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The original battle of the sexes, between real tennis stars, was playing out just then. To him, a woman, even a good player, wasn’t likely to beat a man like him. Ledoux would not even hear of being beaten at tennis by the female geography professor, and, of course, on the day of the match, he lost. But, he certainly made a great spectacle of it.

As I was seated at geography class, there in Dillon Hall, thinking of this colourful man, Professor Ledoux, this man, with all the markings of greatness, began to speak. I waited for a witticism from him, but a tug at my shirt distracted me.

“Hey, Joe,” the voice called. “We better get down to the Ambassador lounge. Canada and Russia are playing.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

The game didn’t start for an hour yet, but my cousin, John and I, rushed out of class anyway, flying down the steps from the second floor, bursting out the door, running across the square to Ambassador Auditorium, in what is now the CAW Centre.

“Where’s the fire?” Ledoux called out, knowing full well where we were going.

To our great relief, the auditorium lounge was not full, but the best seat, right in front of the television monitor was taken. It was a sofa. A guy lay on it, moaning something about how boring his ancient Greek and Roman mythology class had been. His girlfriend, or if not a girlfriend, a female fellow student, or if not a female or a fellow student, just someone, sat on the edge of the couch, at his mid-section and lay sideways across his chest. She looked quite uncomfortable, but stayed in that position for a long time—long enough that some gentlemen offered her a helping hand, in case she was in distress.

My cousin and I surveyed the lounge, each of us grabbing a lounge chair from opposite sides of the room and dragging them to opposite ends of the couch. We sat there, the distance of a couch apart and waited for the game. We both could have sat next to each other, but then one of us would not have had the best available view of the game. Opposite ends of the couch offered the best view.

The series had become a nail-biter. What we thought would be a laugher turned out to be a laugh at us. Would we be good enough, determined enough or lucky enough to come back and win? This was the only thing that mattered to us then, the only thing on our minds, in those days. No one knew if we could win, but boy, we wanted it--all of us did. We all wanted to win badly. It was not only Team Canada that we rooted for, or Canada that we rooted for. It was us. We not only wanted to win; we played for the win. We all did-- in our University lounges, our favourite bars, or our living rooms. We were playing to win. We weren’t just watching. This was the big game--Game 8. We had to win this game or Russia would be declared the winner of the series. That is because they already had three wins and a tie. We had three wins and a tie, but they had scored more goals than us.

“How much of a difference do you think Jim would have made?” I asked over the couch to my cousin, causing the guy lying on the couch to perk up.

“Hard to say,” was his reply, but I thought and still think he would be the difference maker.

“Like Bobby Hull,” finally came the answer I wanted.

“He was the best player I ever grew up with,”

I added for no apparent reason.

“Actually, I think he would have been the best player ever,” my cousin added.

In our minds, Jim’s name belonged with Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Jean Beliveau and the rest of them, only he never got the chance to prove it.

Jim was Jim Mahon. He was a big part of our lives. Not only our hockey lives, but a big part of who we were. We believed that if he had gone to the NHL, a dozen or more players from the Essex area would have followed him there, and Jim would have brought us, all of us, there with him.

Jim showed me and us, at a young age, that we were not gifted hockey players. We were generally smaller, less coordinated, not as strong, with less insight about the game. To him, it came naturally, the immense strength, the coordination, the ability, the maturity, the love to work hard at the game. It was like God gave us this great gift to grow up with, this great hockey player, this great person, and if he were playing there, in this series, he would have made a difference.

The obvious comparisons I made in my mind, between myself and this great hockey talent, took all the pressure off of me as a hockey player. I was free to make the NHL or any team or not make it or make any team or try to make them or not make them or keep trying to make them without ever being expected to make them. The pressure was off. I could aspire, at best, to be an underestimated hockey player. This is because it seemed to me that nearly everyone else playing the game was a better hockey player than I was. I could become, perhaps, a middle of the pack player, for as long as I wanted to be, moving up from level to level, in the middle of the pack. I didn’t need to be a star, not even in the hope within my mind. This is because I had seen what a great star is like. I had seen the immense talent of a star. The pressure was off me because I wasn’t that. I didn’t yearn to be a star. I could, however, hope to be a star maker, or if not a maker, a star helper. This modest goal could be my great aspiration.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been given a great gift. My great quality was that I didn’t know any better. I could work hard all over the ice. I could bump, or grind or generally make it as hard for the opposing players to play as I could, without ever having expectations from anyone that I should play better. I could simply work hard, everywhere on the ice. I never knew hockey as work. I just thought that’s what you do. You go out there and play as hard as you can all the time.

On my first organized team, the St. Clair Beach Juveniles, our coach, Dennis, came into the room between periods and started talking about working hard. I listened for a moment, turned to my centerman, Dan Sylvester, and said, “What does he mean, work hard? I thought we were playing hockey.”

“This may have been the quality we displayed best in the Canada/Russia series,” I thought. There was Pete Mahovlich holding off KGB guards from getting to Alan Eagleson, with his hockey stick. There was Al Eagleson gesturing to the KGB police with impropriety. Whatever Pete and Alan were doing, the rest of the players were also doing. We had to win by force of will. We certainly weren’t going to win with our puck-handling skills, or our one-man rushes.

Still, if Jim were playing there, we believed we wouldn’t be in this predicament.

“Hello, hockey fans...” the announcer started.

“Quiet!” someone yelled, “the game is starting.”

Russia was leading the series. We had to win today or we would accomplish the unthinkable—lose the series.

The television set was an outdated set, even for 1972, with alternating black and white, then coloured pictures. The sound was erratic at best, with undertones of static when the sound was at its best and indistinguishable noise when it was at its worst. But it didn’t matter. The game was on. We needed to win this game to be anything at all--to be Canadian. We needed to win, so our country would not sink into a depression, like the one in 1929, but not an economic depression, rather a social depression. You couldn’t cut this tension with a knife, as has been often said. There was no way of cutting it. Well, actually, there was one way, only one way—win the game.

I remember the shame we felt on the first night when Canada lost. We had bragged to our American friends at a wedding party that night. We had bragged at just how good our Canadian professional hockey players were. We had stated that the Americans would have no chance at all in a series like this one. “Our guys are unbelievably good,” we would say. We were in attendance at a beautiful wedding at Beach Grove Golf Club. The family of the bride had toasted the family of the groom. It was the groom’s turn next to toast someone. The bride was radiant and she looked even better. The groom was polished and happy.

I’m not sure what happened next because the Russians had scored.

“Are you kidding me?” someone said, “That had to be a fluke!” And we all gathered around the television set in the outer lobby.

“Wait until Frank Mahovlich shows them a slap shot,” someone said and we all laughed at the thought of it.

When the Russians scored again and again and Canada had clearly lost, we rejoined the wedding party, looking like we had just walked out of the morgue. I saw several people cry.

“What happened to the Big M?” someone said.

His shot just kept bouncing off goal pads as if it was our expectation that he would shoot the puck right through those Russian pads.

Back at the wedding party, we put on our best faces and tried to look happy. Many of us were asked by attendees of the wedding if something was wrong.

“Did you just get run over by a truck or something?” someone asked. “Yeah,” I said, “we got run over all right. We got run over by a big, red, truck!”

That game hurt. It really hurt. It hurt all of us. It kicked us in the pride. We too, were hockey players. We were Canadian hockey players. But it wasn’t only that we were Canadian hockey players and all the pride that went with that. We were also told over and over in news reports everywhere that we were against Russia in life too.

In my case, I got my first pair of skates at Christmas time, the year I turned six years old. My aunt had bought them. My aunt lived in Detroit. She was an immigrant from Lithuania, here because of the Russians. The Russians had tramped through her country. Lithuania was a strong, proud, free country that became a casualty of the Second World War. It lost its freedom to the Russians, or so we all thought. Lithuania was now, in fact, a part of what was often referred to as a silly concept, something called the Soviet Union, the union of unwilling partners, we were told over and over.

Canada and Russia, great allies of each other during the Second World War, were now at odds with each other, at war, Cold War, and the war was coldest on the ice. At one time, the two countries romanced each other. They stood together in war. But, just as separating couples sometimes do, people who, at one time loved and liked each other, but who now despised each other, Canada and Russia fought. Canada and Russia, the great allies, brought together by a third party evil, which they defeated together, now turned at each other. It was a cold war, with cold, icy feelings. It was us versus them. From our perspective, we were the good guys--they were the bad. The horrors of Stalinist Russia drove the point home. Who would deliberately starve their own people? To us, living on the farm, it was unthinkable. We had to beat Russia at hockey. We had to beat them at everything. They represented the evil we feared. We just had to. We didn’t know exactly why, but we knew we had to.

Equally, my aunt had come to America, brought here on false hope, hope provided by a US military man. She was locked here, kept here during the Cold War, away from the family she loved over there, unable to return. We had to win at hockey for her too. We had to win.

My mother, too, had fled during that awful war. She fled here. She taught us as little children.

“I was lucky,” she would say, “because I could run away. I could run here. You can’t run from here. There is nowhere better to go.”

Hockey was the summary of our feelings: personal, social, real, or imagined. To lose to the Russians now at hockey, would be the same as losing to them at war. To see them prevail over my aunt, my mother and my country, would hurt immensely. We had to win. Our players knew we had to win--didn’t they? We weren’t always sure. Some of them had left the team. Some of them seemed to sleep-walk. Phil Esposito had corrected us, after the loss in Vancouver.

“We are trying,” he would say, but this made us wonder just how good these Russians were.

My aunt didn’t know much about hockey. To her, hockey was just a rumour. She was active in more important things, like poetry and, of course, writing. My aunt wrote for the Lithuanian government in exile. There were rumours then, that it was they who controlled the country’s immense gold supply. The parties at my aunt’s house were so grand, they seemed to prove it.

We met great figures from history at those parties. We met presidents. We met the former Lithuanian field marshal there. He was a true military man, straight and disciplined. He had a full black beard and an ever-present glass of straight whiskey, Canadian whiskey.

“I can drink this whiskey all day long,” he would tell us as kids, “and it doesn’t bother me.” And then he would prove it. “At war, we often didn’t have food,” he would tell us as though teaching a great truth. “But we always had whiskey. Whiskey protected us,” he would teach, “and it protected our stomachs too.”

He would give us blackjack gum too. We had never heard of blackjack gum, as kids, or black licorice, but it was really good. The General didn’t know anything about hockey either and he didn’t care about it, but we had to win for him too, didn’t we?

The pastry at those parties was the finest of the time. Mrs. Balanda, a baking genius, would bring in what she called Napoleon cakes, the fanciest we had ever seen. At ages like four and six, we, a bunch of unruly farm kids, would run at those cakes, fine, thin French pastry, layered with fine thin raspberry, or plum filling, alternating with fine, thin whipped cream and layered again with fine, thin French pastry, with this repeated thousands of times over. These were first built for Napoleon, in Lithuania, to welcome him. Pastry and thin crepe-style pancakes were made to feed his armies and to welcome them, too. There wasn’t any choice but to welcome, when a mighty army tramples in. We, as kids, would run at those cakes repeatedly with both hands outstretched and grab as much as we could before running back to an outer room to eat it, then we would run at them again.

“Hey, you kids, stop that,” we often heard from somewhere, but my aunt wouldn’t hear of it.

We could not do anything wrong in her eyes, at those fancy parties. We, a bunch of farm kids, having the run of the fanciest of parties, the fanciest of fancy. Not only that, but did I mention also, she bought us our first pair of skates? The skates were a bit different from the ones the other kids, back at school in Grade One, would wear. Ours had no back support leaf. They were made in the same style as speed skate boots are made. We feared this might be a big deal to our friends at school. What if they laughed at our skates, skates bought with my aunt’s hard-earned money. The skates didn’t fit in with the rest of the skates there, worn on the outdoor ice rinks at school by our friends. Our skates must have been immigrant skates.

What we learned, quite inadvertently, from those upscale parties in Detroit, is how upper nobility conducted themselves in formal settings. We would imitate the act of it, sometimes even on the ice with our skates. When we got home to the farm in Maidstone Township, on the Puce Road on the night we got our first pair of skates, it was well past our bed time. But it didn’t matter to us. It didn’t even matter that we were told to go to bed. We hurried to lace up our skates, unsure if we would be allowed to go outside, after midnight and skate with them or if we would have to sleep with them on our feet that night.

Luckily, there was a mud puddle just outside of the house, there on the Puce Road, which had frozen over, a light blanket of snow on it. Our mother caved in. We could try the skates, but not for long. We ankle-bent our way over to the puddle, strode out too soon onto the ice and fell forward as the blade slid out on the slippery ice. This surprised us. We fell again. Then, we fell again and again. In a few minutes, we were bruised and battered. We fell on our knees. We fell on our elbows. We fell backwards and hit our heads on the ice and we fell on top of each other. But, it didn’t matter. We had skates and we were skating. We would be hockey players next. Our mother called at us over and over to come in.

“It is late,” she would say.

“We can’t come in,” we would reply. “We’re playing hockey,” and we would fall again.

After a considerable amount of time, she finally came out to get us.

“Watch this!” we said at the same time, slid out on the blades of our skates for the distance of a few feet, hit a stone with the blade of our skates and fell awkwardly to the ice. “We’re skating, mom,” we said together.

“I see that,” she answered. “I see you are skating now.”