to hit him and as the moment of collision came, I clenched every muscle in my body, bringing my arms in close and crossing them around my abdomen. I lowered my head at the last possible moment. I was a human bullet at that point. With a loud grunt, I crashed into the forward with such force that I heard the wind get knocked out of him. At the moment of contact, his head was facing downward, his eyes looking at his feet where the puck met his skates instead of the tape on his stick. The top of my helmet hit just under his chin as I knocked him into another galaxy. He careened backward, hitting the boards and then the ice, his head whiplashing violently each time. I had effectively hit him in the head and caused him to hit it twice more. Without a helmet, his brains would have been all over the place.
The player lay unconscious on the cold rink floor for thirty minutes. There was a long, awkward silence in the arena and I began to get cold as I sat on the bench looking at the scoreboard, which read 2 to 0. We were losing even though the board showed that our team had thirty-eight shots on net and the other only two. In a hockey game, fourteen shots on net is a pretty average game, anything more than that shows a great offensive game. Anything less than ten for the other team shows you’re playing a great defensive game. The fact that they had just two shots on net showed that I was killing it on defense.
I couldn’t have played better! Our offense was doing well too, with over twice the average amount of shots on net, but there were no goals to show for it and that’s really all that matters. I kept asking myself, How could we not have the lead? It was because they’d scored on their lone two shots. I was so angry that they were about to win the championship, with barely three minutes left in the third period, that, well, I took out my frustrations on that kid. I didn’t want them making any brave moves toward our zone ever again.
Ever again, I remember thinking to myself, then, Where is that kid? Was he still lying there? When I peeked out from inside our bench, looking at the place where I hit him, I could see he was still there, and the coaches were now kneeling beside him. Finally, an ambulance came onto the ice; it was then that I realized that it was very serious and got a little scared. Well, serves him right . . . I’d tried to rationalize to myself. That’s what happens when you come at me, motherfucker.
I remember cursing aloud, and when the referee, who happened to be in the scoring booth adjacent to our bench, heard me, he threw me out of the game. I made my way to the locker-room and was informed immediately that I had a two-game suspension for hitting the kid, but it didn’t matter, our season was over. My dad came into the locker-room just as I began to cry. I had been sitting in there waiting for the game to end. He told me not to worry about the suspension or losing the state title. He assured me I couldn’t have played any better and that the suspension wouldn’t carry over to the next season. He didn’t know I was worried that I had just killed another kid.
My dad actually loves to see me hurt other kids. Sadistic, I know, but I seldom disappoint. My coach actually got me a T-shirt that had a picture of a phone on it with a line that read, “Forward all my calls to the penalty box.” I was responsible for an ambulance making its way onto the ice and being ejected from the game more times than I can count. When this happened, my dad would whistle at me and make a flexing pose.
When I gave up hockey for football it wasn’t because of my run-ins in the rink, but because football offers greater glory than hockey. If you want to know the truth, there ya go. This includes the ability to get girls and also some notoriety. I love making enemies with teams from other neighborhoods, even the guys on our opposite squad. This aggression rubs off on my teammates and it helps us win.
Before each game my dad says, “Be indestructible, be versatile, and give ’em hell.” If I crush it, he says, “I really like watching you play.” These are the only times my father seems pleased with me, and I am proud when he is proud. So I like to brag about how many kids I’ve hurt without once being injured in return. I’m not even in eighth grade, but I’m six feet tall and 165 pounds. Later I’ll realize I was just a kid with a big mouth, and the guy everybody loved to hate, but right now I feel indestructible.
When I was younger, I tried to invite other kids over so they would return the favor and help me stay the hell out of my house, but they would steer clear of me after they saw what kind of atmosphere awaited them there. When I realized this, I quit giving invites and instead only sought invites. I’d pack a backpack and stay at other people’s houses for as long as I could. If someone stopped inviting me, I’d move on to the next. As I got older, I learned to form alliances and loyalties with different groups of kids by any means possible. I decided that I had to be popular to make this work. One of the best ways I found to do this was by offering to solve other kids’ problems. If anybody was getting bullied, I thoroughly enjoyed taking care of it. Then in middle school came a distraction: girls. Girls are the one thing that conflicts with my busy sports schedule.
At fourteen, I happily become sexually active. On weekends, I orchestrate time alone with several different girls, usually high school girls, at their houses, sometimes even more than one in a single night. As an eighth grader, I mostly hook up with ninth grade girls and a few girls in my own grade. A couple times, though, I’m lucky enough to get with one of my sister Allison’s friends, who are in eleventh or twelfth grade. On Fridays after the school bus stops up the street from my house, I head directly to see a girl. I can get around well enough on foot and they are all in walking distance.
You could say I’m someone whose priorities revolve around physical gratification. Whether it was hitting and hurting people in hockey when I was a kid, my aggression on the football field today, or the joy of sneaking over to an older girl’s house at night. I like to think I live in the fast lane, playing by my own rules. My siblings do their own thing too, because who would want to be in the Bush household by choice? Lindsay is always at the house of one of her many boyfriends or at the barn with her stable full of quarter horses; she even owns one of them, purchased for her by my dad. Allison is so popular that it seems like she’s a celebrity known throughout Green Bay. Sometimes she lets me party with her and I flirt with her pretty friends. At one party, unbeknownst to her, I lost my virginity to one of them.
Meanwhile, I’m basically failing school. Homework doesn’t seem like a good use of my time and the detentions just keep coming, usually for cheating on a test or homework, or stealing from the locker-room or the school store. There are many therapists my parents force me to see who work to diagnose me and give a reason why I’m such an academic disaster. The whole thing is idiotic. I hate seeing them. I hate being told something is wrong with me.
The sessions are always skewed anyway. My parents manipulate the therapists so they don’t know what’s going on at home. They even turn into different people when we attend a family session. Everything is always made out to be my fault. I guess it’s not my behavior that’s the problem; I am the problem. The truth is that if my parents would just change, maybe offer me a few nice words here and there, everything could be so much better.
By the end of eighth grade I have a handful of very close friends with whom I spend most of my free time. Looking back, I will think that bouncing around from friend’s house to friend’s house wasn’t a normal or healthy way for a kid to live, but right now it seems like a good idea.
One day, Jake, Erik, Kieran, Gavin—guys who live on my block—and I decide to get some weed, some beer, and some girls, and go far out into the country, to Gav’s grandparents’ farm. Gavin has been drinking and partying with his cousin Tyler, and recently smoked some weed for the first time. Erik is a year older and has recently become a full-fledged stoner, wearing Pink Floyd shirts and stuff. I’ve been drinking, but I haven’t smoked weed before and I’m down to try it. Getting high with friends seems so simple and innocent, so freeing and fun. I get Kieran to put up $20 by having Gav tell him it’s for the beer, which is actually free from Gav’s dad, and I give the money to Erik who gives me a bag of weed on the bus to school the very next day. Gav, Jake, and Kieran decide I should invite some girls I know from the next school district, Bay Port,
