Chapter 17 Jamie
JAMIE
Igo to Cole on a Tuesday because Tuesday is the day Jonah picks the music and the locker room is loud enough that a conversation in the weight room won't be noticed.
This is the bravest thing I have ever done.
Braver than the draft. Braver than the first practice.
Braver than the Philadelphia hotel room, which was brave in the privacy of a dark room with a sleeping roommate and a search bar that nobody would ever see.
This is bravery in the presence of another person.
This is walking up to a man and asking a question that cannot be unasked and that will, depending on the answer and the asking, change the architecture of my relationship with the team and with myself.
Cole is doing curls. He's in a sleeveless shirt and his arms are doing the thing that NHL players' arms do when they curl, which is being unreasonably muscular in a way that makes normal human arms seem like a first draft.
Mik is on the bench press nearby, spotting a rookie (not me, a fourth-liner named Bennett who talks even more than Jonah, which I did not think was possible).
The weight room is occupied but not crowded, and the music from the locker room bleeds through the walls at a volume that provides cover.
I stand near the dumbbell rack. I pick up a pair of twenties, which is what I use for lateral raises, and I do three reps while I gather the words that I've been assembling for weeks. The words are simple. The simplicity is the terror.
I put the dumbbells down. I walk to Cole.
"Can I ask you something?"
Cole sets down the weight. He looks at me.
And the look is the thing I will remember for the rest of my life, because the look contains no surprise.
Zero. The expression on Cole Briggs's face when I say "can I ask you something" in a weight room on a Tuesday morning is not the expression of a man hearing an unexpected question.
It is the expression of a man who has been waiting for this question from this person for weeks and who is not going to make the asking harder than it already is.
"Yeah," he says. "Of course."
I sit on the bench across from him. My hands are on my knees. My heart rate is approximately 140, which is the rate I hit during the third period of close games, and this is not a close game. This is the most important shift of my life.
"How did you know?"
Three words. The same three words I asked Declan in the media room, about journalism, about vantage points, about the moment you recognize a truth about yourself.
But the words are different now because the context is different.
I'm not asking about career. I'm not asking about finding a new way to love hockey.
I'm asking about the thing. The actual thing.
The name that I found in Philadelphia and have been carrying in my chest like a hot coal.
Cole does not ask "know what." Cole does not pretend that the question requires clarification.
Cole Briggs, who kissed Mikhail Volkov on the ice after Game 7 in front of eighteen thousand people and an unknown number of television cameras, who was traded from Chicago because the sponsors were nervous about the gay winger, who rebuilt his career and his life in Atlanta on the foundation of a truth he refused to hide, does not need clarification.
"I always knew," he says. "Since I was a kid. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. I knew the way you know your dominant hand. Not a decision. A fact. The fact was there before I had the language for it. I just... knew."
"Was it that simple?"
"The knowing was simple. The knowing was the easiest part.
The hard part was the pretending. I pretended for years.
Through high school. Through college. Through the first two years in the NHL.
I dated women. I performed straightness the way I performed penalty kills: with discipline and practice and the exhausting commitment to something that was not natural. "
He leans forward. His elbows are on his knees and his eyes are on me and the eye contact is not the coach-to-player eye contact of Callahan or the mentor-to-mentee eye contact of Mik.
It is the eye contact of a man who has been where I am.
Exactly where I am. In this body, with this fear, at this age (or close to it), with this question.
"The pretending was more exhausting than the knowing ever was," he says.
"The knowing was a fact. The pretending was a project.
A full-time, every-waking-hour project that consumed energy I should have been spending on hockey, on relationships, on being alive.
And the worst part is that I was good at it.
I was so good at pretending that I almost convinced myself.
Almost. There was always a gap. A place where the performance didn't quite seal.
And the gap was where the truth lived, and the truth was patient. The truth waited."
"Did it get easier?" My voice is quiet. The weight room is not quiet (metal on metal, Bennett talking, the bass line from Jonah's playlist), but my voice is quiet because quiet is what I have and quiet is what this moment requires.
"The being got easier. The being got easier the second I stopped fighting it.
The second I looked at the pretending and the performing and the exhaustion and I said: no.
I'm done. This is who I am. The relief was.
.." He pauses. His eyes are bright. Not tearful.
Luminous. The eyes of a man remembering the most important moment of his life.
"The relief was physical. Like setting down a bag I'd been carrying for ten years.
I didn't know how heavy it was until I put it down. "
"And the telling?"
"The telling is hard every time. Every single time.
It doesn't get easy. It gets less terrifying.
The first person you tell is the worst. After that, each one is a little smaller.
But it's never nothing. Telling someone who you are when who you are is something the world has opinions about. .. that's never nothing."
"Who was your first?"
"Jonah." He smiles. The smile is warm and specific and directed not at me but at a memory. "I was twenty-two. We were in my apartment. I said three words and he said two and the two he said were 'I know.'"
I laugh. The laugh surprises me. The idea of Jonah Park responding to his best friend's coming out with "I know" and the absolute certainty that Jonah said it with a smile and probably a hug and possibly a snack, because Jonah processes all emotional milestones with food, is so precisely Jonah that the laughter is involuntary.
"He'd known since we were teenagers," Cole says. "He said he was waiting for me to tell him and he was prepared to wait as long as it took."
"And Mik?"
"Mik was different. Mik was..." He looks toward the bench press where Mik is racking the bar, Bennett still talking, Mik not listening.
"Mik was the person I found on the other side.
After I came out. After the trade. After everything burned and I rebuilt.
Mik was standing in the new thing I'd built, and he'd been there all along. He was just waiting for me to see him."
I look at my hands. My hands are on my knees and they are steady, which is a surprise because my heart rate is still 140 and my chest is full of something heavy and warm and cracking open.
The steadiness of my hands is the body's way of telling me what the mind hasn't caught up to yet: this is okay.
The asking was the hard part. The asking is done.
"I haven't told anyone," I say. Not the words. Not yet. The words are still a step away, a threshold I'm approaching but haven't crossed. But the not-telling is its own kind of telling. The admission of silence is the first syllable of the word.
"You're telling me," Cole says.
The sentence lands. He's right. I am telling him. Not with the word. Not with the explicit, labeled, vocabulary-specific naming that the articles in Philadelphia said was important. I'm telling him with the question. "How did you know" is the telling. The question IS the word.
"Yeah," I say. "I guess I am."
Cole reaches over and puts his hand on my shoulder.
The hand is warm and firm and the gesture is the gesture of a man who has been on the receiving end of this conversation and who knows that the person giving it needs two things: touch and silence.
The touch says you are not alone. The silence says I will not rush you.
We sit for a moment. The weight room clanks.
Bennett talks. The bass line thumps. The world does not change.
The world is the same world it was three minutes ago, before I asked the question, except that the world now contains one more person who knows the shape of what I'm carrying, and the one more person is a man who carried the same shape and survived it and built a life inside it that includes love and hockey and a Russian who reads Dostoevsky and a kiss on the ice that changed the sport.
"Thank you," I say.
"You don't need to thank me."
"I think I do."
"Then thank me by doing the thing. Not today. Not on my timeline. On yours. But do the thing. The bag is heavy. Put it down."
I stand. My legs are steady. My hands are steady. My heart rate is descending from 140 toward something more sustainable. I walk toward the door.
Mik is in the corridor.
He is standing near the water fountain, which is where he went when I approached Cole, and the positioning is not accidental.
Mikhail Volkov, who sees everything, who reads the geometry of a room the way he reads the geometry of a defensive zone, removed himself from the weight room when he saw me approach Cole because he understood what was happening and he understood that his presence would change it. He gave me Cole. He gave me the space.
He says nothing. He looks at me. The look is brief and precise and it contains the same recognition that it contained in the film room when he said the walls were optional.
He nods.
The nod says: welcome to the other side of the wall.
I walk past him. Down the corridor. Past Gerald's desk (Gerald nods too, a different nod, a Gerald nod, which is the nod of a man who sees everything and says little and whose nods contain more information than most people's speeches). Out to the parking lot. Into the bright Atlanta afternoon.
The bag is heavy. Cole's words. Put it down.
I'm not putting it down today. But I'm beginning to loosen my grip.