Chapter 9 Riley - Late Winter 2018
I was living at two altitudes that winter and neither one of them knew about the other.
Up at cruising altitude I was having the season of my life.
Fifty points at the break. Road warrior, a rookie with a nickname and a stall door with a piece of paper taped inside it that I tapped for the cameras before every home game like a mascot.
The Pittsburgh press loved that. They ate it with a spoon.
And I had Moose, who was a road roommate.
"Ludvig. It's not even six in the morning. Why are you dressed?"
"I have been awake since five." He was sitting on the end of his bed with his hands on his knees, fully dressed, shoes tied, in a hotel in Sunrise, Florida. "I have watched half a period of Jokerit."
"The Finnish ice hockey team? That's the middle of the night, man."
"It is the middle of the day in Helsinki."
"You're not in Helsinki."
"No," Moose agreed, and looked at the wall.
At breakfast he lifted the corner of a waffle with a fork like he was checking under a rock.
"What?" I said. "You've got the face."
"It is a cake," Moose said. "You are eating a cake for breakfast and calling it bread."
"It's a waffle."
"With sugar syrup."
"That's the point, big guy."
"Hm," said Moose, and ate three boiled eggs.
That was the top altitude. That's what everybody saw.
Down at sea level, there was the thread.
The thread was nightly now. Not most nights, nightly. Nate would score and I'd have something in his phone before he was out of the shower, and I'd score and he'd have something in mine faster than that.
Riley: that goal was 40% goalie
Nate: It was 100% goalie. He should have had it. I'm telling you that for free.
Riley: don't do that
Nate: Do what?
Riley: don't agree with me, it ruins the whole thing. I have a system and the system requires you to be wrong
Nate: Sorry... That goal was a triumph of will over ceiling.
Riley: there he is
Somewhere in November I established formal oversight authority over his neckwear, which started as a joke and became a whole institution.
Riley: proof of tie. now. before warmups
Nate: No.
Riley: Sinclair!
Nate: [photo: burgundy tie, half-formed dimple]
Riley: 6/10. the burgundy's fine but that's a lazy dimple
Nate: It has a dimple.
Riley: it has half a dimple. you did that in a car
Nate: Correct.
Riley: I knew it!
By January he was sending them unprompted on game days, and he'd started doing it on purpose.
He sent me one that was just gray, completely gray, no pattern, nothing, captioned this is the one you deserve.
He sent me one with a paisley so aggressive I had to sit down, and one with tiny moose on it, which I rated an eight and a half.
I never gave a ten. Not once, all year.
I told him it was on principle. That was true in the sense that everything I said was true. I was saving it, but I wasn’t sure what for.
The trade proposal system got written in February, in a Courtyard, with a hotel pen. Tampa, in January, is why it had to exist.
All-Star weekend, and neither of us was skating in the game itself, because we were rookies and the league had its own ideas. But the league wants bodies at the events. Both of us got summoned for a sponsor thing and a kids' clinic, and there was exactly one hotel with a block in it.
No matchup. No game. Nothing on the schedule that put us in a building together. Just a city.
I was in the lobby at four with a lanyard on when my phone went.
Nate: 914
Three digits. No greeting, no insult, nothing on either side of them.
He had sat somewhere with a phone in his hand and worked out that every sentence he could build around those numbers made them worse, and then he sent the numbers by themselves, which is the single most incriminating text either of us has ever produced.
I looked at it for about four seconds. Then I deleted the thread, which I had never done in my life, and got in the elevator.
He got the door open about two inches and I got my hand flat on it and pushed it the rest of the way and had my mouth on him before it was shut behind me. He walked me backward two steps and the latch caught with both of us still going.
"Hi," he said, into my jaw.
"Don't talk."
"You love it when I talk."
"I love it when you lose, it's a totally different…"
He got a hand in the back of my hair and pulled, not gently, and I stopped mid-word.
He kissed me with his head tipped and his mouth open and one thumb pressed up under my jaw to hold my chin exactly where he wanted it.
He did not hurry any part of it, and I made an extremely undignified noise into it.
I got his shirt open and got my mouth on his collarbone and he made a sound like he'd been hit. I found out what happens if you say certain things directly into his ear while your hands are busy, which is that the entire architecture goes, all at once, floor by floor.
He got me on my back and took his time. He asked me questions he already knew the answers to just to make me say them out loud, and I said them, all of them, because by then he'd worked out that the fastest way to shut me up was to make me talk.
I fucked him, and then once more at six in the morning, slow and half asleep and unhurried, with the Gulf going gray outside and his hand flat on my chest the entire time like he was keeping something in place.
We filed the whole thing under nothing, which by March was getting genuinely funny.
Tampa also gave me the other thing.
I was on a hotel treadmill the next morning with the intermission coverage up on the wall of screens, and the network ran a soft feature. Lighting, music, the whole production.
Nate Sinclair, and a woman about our age, both in white, at a charity thing in November. Broadcaster's daughter. Family friends since they were kids, said the voiceover. They were laughing at something. The chyron said hockey royalty with a little heart-shaped puck graphic.
I've never in my life had an emotion arrive that fast with that little warning.
I hated the chyron. Then I hated the font of the chyron, which is not a thing a normal person can hate. Then I got further into the run and hated myself, which was at least a rational target.
I did more miles than I had any business doing on a travel day, at a pace I had no business doing them at, and got off the belt with my ears ringing.
What I did with it was file it under competitive analysis, a category I had recently invented and which was doing an enormous amount of work that season. Then I went upstairs and got in the shower and got out and picked up my phone and did not say one word about it.
Not one. I typed nothing. I deleted nothing, because I never started.
And standing there with a towel on, looking at a thread with months of messages in it and not a single question in it about who anybody was photographed with, I understood something about the thing we'd built, which is that it had rules nobody had written down.
Number one: you don't ask.
And I could obey it. That was the discovery. I found out that January that I was fully capable of holding my tongue about something that felt like a skate blade in the ribs, indefinitely, without complaint, for as long as it took.
That's not a skill I knew I had.
The near miss was on the flight to Newark, and it was entirely my fault, because I'm a man who leaves his phone face up on a tray table.
We were at cruising and I had a magazine open and my phone lit up.
Nate: rejected. Your 41 is a fourth liner with a bad contract and you know it. This is the worst offer I have ever received.
The whole preview, right there on the lock screen, big as a billboard.
Moose was in the aisle seat with a book about a shipwreck. He glanced down. He did not move his head. He read it upside down, all of it, at his leisure, the way he reads everything.
"You are in a fantasy league," he said.
"I am."
"With how many members?"
I opened my mouth.
"It appears," Moose said, "to be two."
"It's very exclusive. There's a waiting list."
"Uh-huh."
"It's an old college thing," I said. "Me and a guy from school. We keep it going. It's got a whole constitution and everything, it's stupid, you'd hate it."
Moose considered this.
"That is nice," he said. "It is good to keep things from school."
And he went back to his shipwreck. He accepted it with a courtesy so total, so completely without a follow-up question, that it was obviously not an acceptance. That was a verdict. That was a man closing a file and putting it in a drawer and telling you the drawer was empty.
I spent the rest of that flight writing bylaws in my head.
Because if it was a league, it had to be a league.
If somebody ever asked again, there had to be a real thing to show them.
So by the time we landed in Newark the Kowalski-Sinclair Invitational had a constitution with a preamble, a commissioner's office occupied jointly and in perpetuity, a trophy fund consisting of whatever had been in my coat, a keeper rule, a luxury tax, and relegation.
Relegation, in a two team league, where there was nowhere to relegate to and no lower division. I wrote the relegation rules anyway, and I wrote them at length.
That's the most me thing I've ever done in my life: take a thing I'm terrified of, bury it inside a joke, and then bury the joke inside a spreadsheet.
The public part came for us in the visitors' room in Newark, on a television bolted up in the corner, an hour before warmups.
The Calder Memorial trophy odds had moved. They put a graphic up. Sinclair minus 140, Kowalski plus 160, and then a gap you could drive a truck through before anybody else.
And then, because the sport cannot help itself, they ran the clip.
Last July all over again. Grant Sinclair in a good suit.
Product of effort, not talent. Honest. Replaceable.
And four men in suits around a desk, using it as the frame for the entire rookie of the year conversation, spending a whole segment debating whether I was a hockey player or a moral lesson about hard work.
Half the room looked at me.
"Hey, Riley," said one of our defensemen, reaching for the remote. "You want me to turn it off?"
"Turn it up."
Somebody laughed. I got up and went to my stall and slapped the piece of paper taped inside the door with the back of my hand, hard, so it made a sound.
"Boys. That's free rent right there. I've got a man on national television doing my pregame speech for me and he isn't charging me a dime for it."
Big laugh. Two guys came over and read it again like it was new. I did the bit. I'd done that bit so many times it had stopped having edges, and I'd never once dropped a line.
We won four to one. I had two.
Then, late that night, I was in a hotel bed in a dark room with the ice machine humming down the hall and Moose asleep four feet away breathing like a furnace. I got my phone out and pulled up the transcript, which I have saved in three places, and read it again.
And that night I believed it.
Not performed it, not used it, but believed it straight through, all the way down.
That my ceiling was my effort, that effort had a top and talent didn't. That the league would eventually work me out the way leagues do, and the man in the booth would turn out to have been right first. That second was where a Kowalski went, and second was the family home.
My dad was the guy who kept the plant running and never once got his name on anything.
His dad ran a shovel. And here I was at twenty-two with fifty points and a nickname somebody in Philadelphia made up, and it was already being explained to America that the reason I was good was that I was poor and angry.
And right at that exact second the phone lit up in my hand.
Nate Sinclair calling.
Not a text. A call. He did not call. In sixteen months he'd called me a handful of times and every one of them was about logistics.
The timing was so perfect it could only have been an accident. I did not answer it.
For a long time I told myself it was because Moose was in the room, which was true and was not the reason.
The reason was that I wanted it.
I wanted to pick that phone up so badly my hand hurt.
I wanted to say he did the thing again, and this time I think he's right, and I wanted to hear whatever came back, and I knew, absolutely, that what came back would be good.
He'd have had the actual numbers off the top of his head, because he always did, and he'd have said them in that flat voice, and I would have believed him for about six hours.
And taking that, at midnight, from a Sinclair, about a Sinclair's verdict, for free, with no bet on it and no debt attached and nothing owed either way, would have meant that this thing was something.
Something the constitution did not cover. Something the notepad didn't have a rule for. There's no wager clause for a man calling you at midnight because he watched a panel show about you and didn't like it.
I would rather lose alone than look at that.
The call went to voicemail. He didn't leave one. Then I turned my phone face down, and lay on my back, and added a bylaw to the only league I've ever been afraid of.
No truths after midnight. Nothing unpaid for, unbet, or free. Free was the one price I couldn't afford.