On Sunday Rachelle and I went to Canadian Tire to get our skates sharpened and to run a few errands. While paying for our assortment of chocolate bars and various “storage solutions,” I fell into conversation with our cashier, finding out that her favourite hockey player was Toronto Maple Leaf Captain Dion Phaneuf.
She thought he was “hot.”
This pissed me off.
Rachelle was confused, “Why on Earth does it bother you so much that the girl– a teenaged girl at that– likes a cute hockey player?”
“The guy has nothing to say, sleeps with vulnerable movie stars and takes cheap penalties. He’s a disgrace. The only reason she likes him is because he looks and acts like a cowboy. She mistakes stupidity for some sort of manly stoicism. It’s tyranny, Rachelle it’s the tyranny of the cowboys.”
Rachelle sighed, “You know, Michael, some women like men who are occasionally quiet and don’t have to tell you what they think all the time. They find it peaceful.” And then she turned the radio way up.
We drove the rest of the way to the rink at Jimmy Simpson Park in silence.
The dressing was full of tiny children in snowsuits, each one accompanied by their parents, most of them speaking with a foreign accent. One little girl– the one with decals of unicorns and ponies on her pink helmet– did not want to go skating. She cried and twisted, kicking at her father, who in a British accent admonished her, “Hazel, please do NOT kick at Daddy! You will make Daddy bleed! Daddy does not bleed well!”
This went on for several minutes, and when they finally headed off to the rink Rachelle looked over at me and smiled, “Aw, he reminded me of Colin Firth!”
This was a deliberate provocation on her part. Rachelle is in love with Colin Firth and every year on September 10th (Colin Firth’s birthday), she takes the day off work and watches a Firthathon.
One year she sent him a fucking scarf that she’d knit.
“He looks retarded wearing that helmet,” I said, and then I left and took to the ice, my strides powerful and certain.
Rachelle, with one arm behind her back, skated slow loops along the rink, while I rocketed past her, darting between all the children and incompetent parents clogging up the rink. At one point as I was dominating the rink, I happened to bump into the little girl with the pony decals on her helmet, and as she was a weak skater and had absolutely no character, she fell down and began to cry.
“Just making some space for myself,” I apologized.
Her father, the “Colin Firth” jerk, was all upset and started stammering things like, “Look here, now!” at me in his stupid accent, but as he didn’t know how to skate, he couldn’t catch me.
I skated backwards, taunting him face-to-face, “ You wanna throw? Come on, tough guy!” and then I would zip off laughing whenever he made an awkward lunge at me. However, I guess because Rachelle is still kind of awkward on skates and can’t control her body very well, she slammed into me, which knocked me flying into the boards.
As I was sliding along the ice and toward the boards, I heard the sound of applause, children cheering and saw my inhaler, which had fallen out of my pocket, gliding into the empty net.
“Murray scores another goal!” I thought to myself, and then everything went black.