Cycles

He was a meek man, my father, but constant in all things. He owned and operated World Press & Tobacco, a two-aisle indoor newsstand and smoke counter that had every newspaper worth reading and many more that weren’t. There were also thousands of magazines catering to every obscure habit, hobby, predilection, and desire. There was a single rack of postcards and a display cabinet of cigars and cigarillos, pipe tobacco, and rolling papers. He mostly spent his days perched on a stool at the counter listening to jazz LPs, the likes of Wardell Gray, Sonny Stitt, and Howard McGhee. Behind him was the rack of Player’s and du Mauriers, Cravens, and Export A’s. He opened at 7:00 AM to sell papers and cigarettes to the office workers, closed at 1:00 PM, came home, had his supper and slept a couple of hours. At four in the afternoon he returned to the store and stayed open until midnight. Six days a week, closed on Sundays. He did that for better than thirty years.

I hated him for those midnights. I hated him for the comfort he took in small things, the quietness and sobriety of his life, his friendlessness, his slump-shouldered posture. Mostly I hated him for the vision he represented of the life that I might inherit. I had somehow come to swallow the idea that I would one day eat the world whole, leave my footprints all over it, but my father’s life suggested such things weren’t likely. It both saddened and frightened me.

My father, Richard Hamelin, was hopelessly out of step in all things, including fashion, politics, music, books, and television. He was a thin, mousy man, sharp-angled and awkward, but his loyalty and steadfastness were obvious from his unchanging wardrobe: the worn-kneed corduroy pants and nubby polyester shirts, an ancient peacoat with missing buttons and fraying cuffs, and always the same grey vest with a black satin back. On his feet he wore moccasin-style suede shoes.

He opened the store in 1972 right after he married my mother, Helen Masters, and three years after earning his degree in English Lit from Ottawa U. Soon I came along, and twelve years after that my sister Amy was born. I have always assumed Amy was a mistake. Maybe we both were. Maybe the mistake was in their even having kids to begin with.

My father was not a sports fan, and I was not my father, or so I wanted desperately to believe, so I felt that giving myself over to football would distance me from him. Is there something more than opposite? Polar opposite? I reasoned that loving and playing football made me the polar opposite of my father. People would look at him and look at me and they’d say: No way are they related.

Without asking I moved into a room in the basement. I hunkered down, read bodybuilding magazines, watched wrestling and football videos. That was my life.

I had already defied my parents’ expectations by transferring to the Technical High School. Tech was where you ended up once you had decided, or had had decided for you, that academic success was not in the cards. Tech was where your future mechanics and HVAC guys went. If you didn’t graduate from Tech, you were probably headed to prison.

But the entire point for me was football. I left a school with no football team for one with a feared squad. In grade nine I made the juniors and wound up a tight end, blocking on running plays and flaring out for short passes. I was quick and I caught a few good balls. I was also introduced to special teams, which is like a crash course in brutality. There are few legal venues as perfect for the adolescent male to work out his bloodlust as special teams.

By the time I was ready for the senior team, late in the summer before grade 11, my father had yet to see me play a single game. Looking back, I still can’t decide if that was because of his fear of physical things, of seeing his son exposed to such danger, or if it was more of his steadfastness, his quiet stubbornness, the same steady adherence to order and consistency that got him to the store each morning and kept him there until midnight.

I started at tight end that season and was told that, as a rookie on the senior team, that was kind of a big deal. One practice that fall we were running some plays on offence, working on blocking schemes, lined up against the D-line and linebackers, with live hitting. We had this guy named Joel who played outside linebacker. He had a pencil-line beard and ridiculous designs shaved into the sides of his head. We all hated him, but he was a quick, strong defender, so we kind of had to let it go. On one particular play during this practice I was pulling a stunt, crossing paths with the guard on my right, and Joel came inside and didn’t see me coming over. He had his eyes fixed on the quarterback. I hit him three-quarters on and laid him out flat. There was a terrific popping sound, the very thing you hope to achieve when you strap on shoulder pads with the aim of using them as weapons instead of as protection. Joel was starry-eyed, breathless, and chastened.

Three of the coaches later went out of their way to congratulate me.

Upon my retelling, my father would ask, “Was that really necessary? It was a practice, after all.” But in the expansive moments that followed the hit—moments wherein my skin felt like chain mail and my blood felt like rocket fuel—every part of me, physical and emotional, said: I want to do more of that.

I decided that strength was the key, and so within a week I was on my first cycle. It wasn’t hard to find the stuff: half the O-line and most of the defence were using. It wasn’t a secret among the players, but a shared understanding. There was a second-string running back whose older brother worked in one of those health supplement stores, and he had a connection to a guy selling the real stuff. That was our supply chain.

When I started bulking up but kept my speed, Coach Doherty, who handled the defensive side of things, noticed me and said, “Let’s try this meathead at middle linebacker” (Doherty called everyone meathead, because he couldn’t remember names). That was how I went from O to D, which is kind of like switching tribes. It was immediately obvious to everyone that I had found my place. I began to walk differently.

Football became a rite, our shared religious observance. We were our own gods. The cycles were communion biscuits. On game days we augmented them with greenies, just to make sure we were extra alert and open to the grace of utter fucking domination. Before pregame drills we had a ritual: we would put on our helmets and shoulder pads and we would hit the school’s brick wall a few dozen times at full speed.