Goose Loonies (Visions of Yzerman)

“It’s a chicken and egg thing. How your team plays echoes your innermost feelings, what you already “know” – but what you feel and know to a large extent comes from your team, because how they do is if nothing else a weird running pantomime of a fan’s life. Their play is in your earliest memories and reflections; it challenges how you look at things. Your team’s play stimulates imagination and creativity, engagement and communication between them, the game, and you. It offers something by which to imagine your life.”

Kent Russell, “The Nontraditional Fans of Hockey,” Grantland.com

SAWCHUK

1

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My old man used to say that the March 24 tilt against Hartford was the only game he failed to watch during the 1987-88 Red Wings season. “Even though we lost, it was the best game of the season,” he explained to me during Wings games, his voice buoyed by Labatt’s, “because it was the night you were born.” It was always through sports that he told me he loved me.

Ostensibly, it was an unremarkable regular season loss. Detroit had already clinched the Norris Division, making it a late-season throwaway game. The box score in the Hockey Reference archive indicates that Hartford won 3-2 in a heavily penalized game at Joe Louis Arena. The Whalers got two goals from Stew Gavin and one from Landon Ferraro. Petr Klima and Gilbert Delorme scored the goals for Detroit. Bob Probert notched an assist, John Chabot tallied two, and Joey Kocur amassed twelve penalty minutes — ten for fighting, two for slashing. The box score revealed little else of note. What it failed to suggest was that, underneath the surface, the gears of fate were turning deep within the Motor City hockey machine. 

Objectively, as opposed to my dad’s biased perspective, the night the Wings clinched the Norris Division title qualified as the best game of the season, for it was Detroit’s first division championship in twenty-three years. Symbolically, the division title represented the fruit of a long rebuild, a turning point in a revolution that saw the organization rise from the depths of “Dead Wings” era dormancy to serious contention in the late eighties. 

Steve Yzerman, who had been named the youngest captain in Red Wings history a season prior, deserved the lion’s share of the credit for that turnaround, perhaps, but Petr Klima and Bob Probert played pivotal supporting roles in it. Both selected behind Yzerman in the 1983 Draft, Probert and Klima posted career years during the 1987-88 campaign. Three years removed from the Eastern Bloc, Klima scored a career-high 37 goals that season; sporting a diamond earring and blond streaks in his hair as expressions of his newfound independence, he finished behind only Yzerman (50) for the team lead. Fresh out of his third addiction treatment facility and prescribed Antabuse, an emetic medication activated by alcohol, Bob Probert made the 1988 All-Star team en route to posting his own career highs with 29 goals and 33 assists. 

Klima and Probert’s banner years suggested that the duo — who had developed reputations as hard-partying troublemakers — had finally matured. Publicly, Probert professed his demons were behind him, but even one drink can be the unraveling of a recovering alcoholic. The son of an abusive alcoholic, himself, Red Wings coach Jacques Demers had prophetically recognized the warning signs exhibited by both Klima and Probert early on. “When you start winning with a bunch of kids,” Demers recalled of coaching the wild young Wings of the eighties, “you start playing father and you start playing doctor. They were just troubled kids. We knew we were always in a [ticking] time bomb with a couple of those guys.”

The proverbial time bomb exploded in the 1988 Campbell Conference Final, or rather, thereafter, depending on how you look at it. It obfuscated all that Detroit had accomplished theretofore, including the division title and the banner years posted by Klima and Probert. 

Detroit played well in the opening rounds of the 1988 Stanley Cup Playoffs. They dispatched Toronto in six games in the first round, then defeated St. Louis in five to advance to the Conference Final against the juggernaut Edmonton Oilers. En route to their fourth Stanley Cup in five years, Edmonton eliminated Detroit in short order, with a decisive Game Five taking place in Edmonton, Alberta on May 11, 1988. Had it all ended at that, it would have been a terrific year for the Red Wings. 

Alas, a column titled “Wings Lost Much More than a Game” appeared in the sports section of The Detroit Free Press the morning after Game 5. The column’s author, a young Mitch Albom, detailed a late-night drinking scandal that stained the Red Wings’ postseason exit and their season at large. Albom alleged that, on the eve of Game Five, six Red Wings players had gone out drinking at an Edmonton nightclub called Goose Loonies. The story posited that Red Wings assistant coach Colin Campbell had performed a routine curfew check at the team hotel. Incredulously, he found the hotel rooms of Klima and Probert empty. Campbell put on his jacket and went looking for the missing players in the city lights of downtown Edmonton. To aid in the search, he enlisted front office assistant Neil Smith, who recalled: “Probert had alcohol issues and Klima had a track record of running wild. So Colin and I went out to try and find them.”

Detroit’s third goalie, Darren Eliot — who turned out to be one of the guilty parties present — put it more bluntly: “Neil Smith and Colin Campbell were looking for Probert. In a hockey town like Edmonton, the word was out that Probert was on the streets and going crazy.” 

Campbell and Smith’s search led them to the nightclub called Goose Loonies. “I waited outside and Colin went in and found not only Klima and Probert but four or five others,” Smith remembered. What a buzzkill it must have been for the players when, to their great infamy, Campbell showed up at Goose Loonies. Six Red Wings caught red-handed.

Probert, the was recovering alcoholic, later admitted he’d been swapping ibuprofen for his Antabuse pills under his coaches’ noses. Other guilty parties included Joe Kocur, Darren Eliot, Darren Veitch, and John Chabot, yet the media lumped most of the blame on Probert and Klima. They were the big names present; they had histories of alcohol-related problems. Á la Shoeless Joe Jackson and Chicago’s Black Sox, Klima and Probert became forevermore associated with the scandal. It damned them like scarlet letters.

A surely hungover Probert dressed for Game Five anyways; he led the team in postseason points, and with Yzerman injured the Wings couldn’t afford to sit him. He accumulated a tell-tale minus-three rating in a lopsided 8-4 loss. DeMers called Probert’s performance “god-awful.” Albom described it as “sluggish.” That Edmonton team was loaded. Craig Simpson scored two in the rout, Mark Messier contributed a goal and three assists, and Wayne Gretzky, Canada’s soon-to-be departed Great One, added two assists and an empty-netter for the Oil. 

Albom’s story precipitated a media firestorm in Detroit. Upon their return from Edmonton, the Red Wings staged an impromptu press conference to address the incident. The proverbial last straw broken, Jacques Demers stood at a podium inside Joe Louis Arena and issued a heartfelt apology to Detroit fans. Fighting back tears, he called the Goose Loonies incident his “biggest disappointment since coming to Detroit.” Steve Yzerman called it a “black cloud on the season.”

A big storyline that offseason, Goose Loonies became a household name throughout metro Detroit in the following days, weeks, and months. Even now, twenty-seven years later, I still come across references to it in the sports section of the Detroit newspapers, usually around its anniversary.  

DeMers’ public apology, while dramatic, belied more volatile currents running through Detroit’s front offices. Behind closed doors, the organization’s big-wigs again discussed treatment options for Probert while debating the termination of some of the other perpetrators’ contracts. The fault lines beneath Hockeytown were shifting. The turn of the decade fast-approaching, Detroit’s brain trust wanted to put an end to the “Dead Wings” era, for good.

🏒🏒🏒

Twenty-four years later, while vacationing in Ontario with some of the guys I grew up with, I read Probert’s tongue-in-cheek version of the Goose Loonies incident in his autobiography, Tough Guy: My Life on the Edge, over some breakfast beers. We had driven up to Jim Racine’s schoolhouse cottage near Grand Bend for the weekend, primarily to attend Game 5 of the OHL Championship in London, Ontario. It was early spring. The corn stalks planted in rows behind the schoolhouse had barely peeked out of the dormant brown soil, and the north country air still retained some of winter’s frigidity as morning dawned.

Hungover and jittery – unable to sleep – I retrieved my paperback copy of Tough Guy from my duffel bag and tried not to make any noise as I snuck a handful of beer bottles out of the refrigerator. My friends Bryan and Adam slept on an adjacent floor beneath a long blackboard. I watched their sleeping bags to see that neither stirred. Although I often drank in the morning with my college buddies, these were the guys I grew up with, and they were much less further gone than I was at the time. As the eldest of our friend group, a role model to those guys, I didn’t want them to catch me drinking so early. 

The wood floorboards creaked in the morning chill as I tiptoed through the dining room and into the front hall. I sidestepped the rope hanging from the school bell and slipped out the front door, closing it gently. The sun was bright but the air was cold. I crept around the side of the schoolhouse through the shadows of birch trees, then found a chair on the back deck, which faced the cornstalk horizon. I uncapped my first beer bottle and took a swig, swallowing it like medicine. Soggy playing cards, beer bottle caps, cigarette butts, and various cans and bottles littered the glass table and the wooden deck on which it stood, relics of the previous night. We had gone pretty hard – cracked our first beers in the car as soon as we entered rural Ontario – and, in the pale light of sunrise, I felt nostalgic for childhood summers at the schoolhouse for the first time since our arrival.

From 1898 through 1969, the property served as a school and boarding house in Hay Township, Ontario. The Racine’s grandfather, Dick Ewasek, bought it shortly after it closed publicly. He and his wife used it as a summer house for decades, and my family joined Mrs. Ewasek and the Racines there two or three times per summer for most of my childhood. Factoring customs at the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, it was about a four-hour drive from metro Detroit, with much of the latter half affording views of Lake Huron’s eastern shore and the bent red pines that lined it. From the Bluewater Highway, it was just a short drive north past the beach town of Grand Bend. 

Maintained in its original layout and decor, with the antiquated schoolmaster rules still nailed to the walls, the interior of the schoolhouse resembled an historical site. On the main floor, the front end featured a dining room table and chairs, a china and liquor cabinet, a kitchen, and a modern bathroom addition. In the back end, chalkboards still lined the wall, and a wood stove provided the only source of heat in colder weather. There was a separate mudroom entrance at the front where the rope to the school bell dangled temptingly; we rang it as frequently as we had as children, its magnificent gong-like chimes echoing into the Ontario days and nights – we must have annoyed the neighboring farmhouses to no end.

A metal spiral staircase with wood steps led upstairs to an overhead wood-floor balcony. Bookshelves that held musty classics and elementary school readers lined the wall on the balcony. An open doorway from the balcony led to the sleeping quarters, which included a schoolmaster’s bedroom and a separate, open sleeping room with three beds, some end tables, and an old billiards table that squeaked with the floorboards. A wood ladder in the main boarding room led up to a small loft that looked out of the crow’s nest window above the school bell tower, making it an ideal place to sleep when it was not inhabited by bats or bees.

Despite many family vacations with the Rivards and the Racines, who were more like aunts, uncles, and cousins in practice and in spirit than close family friends – trips to Hilton Head, Disney World, and Virginia Beach, where Mr. Rivard was stationed at a naval base – the schoolhouse remained my favorite vacation spot throughout my adolescent years and into the young adult ones. A relic of a forgotten time, its sepia photographs and science artifacts told stories of long-lost Canadian yesteryears. Outside, the cornstalks swayed breezily and the adjacent creek meandered lazily, as if at a slower pace of life. In that sense, a trip to the schoolhouse offered more than a mere escape in destination; it was an escape to the past.

Taking another swig of beer to steady my hands, I opened Probert’s book and started reading at the page marked by my bookmark. As I discovered in the pages of that book and in subsequent research, Goose Loonies was only the beginning of a downward spiral for Probert and others present that fateful night. Probert had been in treatment for alcoholism three times by that point, after all, and he joked about his issues with an aplomb known only by seasoned addicts. In Tough Guy, Probert downplays his whole role in the affair, then channels Jeff Spicoli in recalling the summer that followed: “after the Goose Loonies incident, the team was telling me I had to go into rehab again. I told them, ‘No way. I just got a boat and a new car and I’ve been in rehab three summers in a row!’” 

Just as nonchalantly, Probert describes how he and Klima began using cocaine that offseason. That habit soon landed them in more trouble with the team:

In September 1988, Petr Klima and I got suspended. I’d been sent down to Adirondack and fined $200 a couple days before because we had missed a team bus and a flight from Chicago to Detroit for a game. Petr and I were at my house the night before, and we were supposed to report the next day by 11 A.M. We stayed up late, so we called up and postponed our flight. It was time to leave for the second one, but we postponed it again. We headed out to catch the [third one], but got held up at the titty bar near the airport. We finally got on the last plane, but didn’t get in until about 12:30 A.M., so the team left us a message on our phones, saying, ‘Don’t bother staying. You’re suspended.’

According to the team’s account, Klima and Probert skipped practice before missing their flight to Glen Falls, New York, where they were supposed to report to the Adirondack Red Wings. At any rate, Probert soon landed back in rehab. Amidst pressure from the Red Wings, he entered treatment for the fourth time in October 1988.

Goose Loonies must have seemed like small potatoes to him, indeed, when he got arrested in March of 1989 for attempting to cross the Windsor-Detroit border with more than fourteen grams of cocaine. Border agents found a cocaine mill in his leather jacket and a bag of cocaine in his underwear. Probert faced serious felony charges and ultimately pled guilty pursuant to a plea agreement. To his credit, he served three months in federal prison, earned an early release therefrom, and found his way back onto the ice for Detroit — later finding a successful career with the Chicago Black Hawks — but his personal demons were forever linked to his name, fairly or unfairly.

On July 5, 2010, Probert suffered a massive sudden heart attack while boating on Lake St. Clair with his children and in-laws. Emergency crews rushed him to Windsor Regional, where doctors pronounced him dead. He was 45 years old. Probert died just a couple chapters shy of finishing his autobiography, and Helene St. James, a local hockey columnist who co-wrote the book, had to ghost write its final pages. She revealed that Probert was using large quantities of OxyContin daily at the time of his death. It was hard not to speculate that his early demise was somehow loosely connected to that fateful night at Goose Loonies. Only two years had passed since his death, and the wound of his passing was reopened as I voraciously consumed his roller coaster of a life story.

Petr Klima also continued to struggle with alcohol after the Goose Loonies incident — even in the absence of his sidekick. While Probert was at the Betty Ford Center in October of 1988, police busted Klima for drunk driving after he backed his car into a parked vehicle outside of The Jukebox, a Royal Oak, Michigan bar. The arrest put him in violation of his probation terms for a previous drunk driving violation. In late May of 1989 — not to be outdone by Probert’s March cocaine bust — Klima was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol for the third time in two years, this time in Bloomfield Hills, and this time for the last time with Detroit. The Wings dealt him to Edmonton in a six-player deal later that summer. Between Edmonton, the minors, and several other NHL franchises, Klima bounced around from team to team throughout the remainder of his career, even winning a Stanley Cup in 1990 with the Oilers – perhaps fitting that he won there – but he never quite lived up to the hype he generated during his first three seasons with Detroit.

Steve Chiasson, a longtime Red Wings defenseman, never got caught at Goose Loonies, but later admitted to having been present there. Chiasson struggled mightily with alcohol abuse, too. In August of 1989, a little over a year after the Goose Loonies incident, Oakland County deputies busted Chiasson for driving under the influence of alcohol in Farmington Hills; his blood alcohol content was .13. He played in Detroit through the 1994 season, then played with Calgary, Hartford, and Carolina. Following elimination at the hands of the Boston Bruins in the 1999 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Chiasson joined several Hurricanes teammates for an impromptu end-of-season bash in suburban North Carolina. He died later that night after rolling his pickup truck in a single-car drunk driving wreck.

Laying Probert’s book on the glass, leaf-printed deck table — folded text down — I sipped my beer and stared out to the cornfield stretched out below the schoolhouse deck, feeling the pleasant buzz of a liquid breakfast. Rolled out across the shell-pink horizon was Canadian farmland as far as the eye could see, the fields broken only by a distant tree line. The brown earth glowed golden under the early morning sun. Hawks circled overhead; blackbirds cawed from the telephone wires. 

Probert’s struggles with cocaine and booze captivated me. I was reading a lot of books about the dark side of alcohol at the time — memoirs of battles with the bottle — probably on some subconscious level knowing that my own toe-to-toe fight was looming right around the bend.

But all that was still in the stars.

The Dark Side of Hemingway's Drinking

There is a fine line between hard-drinking and alcoholic. I should know. I spent the better part of the last decade flirting with that line, at times swaying into both camps. When it comes to pop culture, the hard-drinking writer is something of a folk hero, often a legendary figure of mythical proportions (see: Hunter S. Thompson, Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Bukowski, Hemingway). The hard-drinker is to be admired. Step over that fine line into the alcoholic territory, though, and you've suddenly found yourself in taboo waters.

The popular conception of Hemingway is that he was a hard-drinking, hard-living portrait of masculinity, surely a drinker to be admired. A quick google search will reveal a plethora of sites encouraging you to "Drink like Hemingway". Kenny Chesney even recently released an album entitled "Hemingway's Whiskey," glorifying the writer's life-long infatuation with the bottle.

In pop culture, it's not hard to see why the hard-drinking days of such writers are glorified. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous book? The Great Gatsby. Jack Kerouac? On the Road. Jack London? The Call of the Wild. The literary realm remembers the glory days of such writers, not the darker counterparts to the heroic drinking days. In the midst of the recent release of Gatsby the movie, most of American society would probably picture Fitzgerald a colorful, hard-partying figure of the roaring twenties. Lost in popular culture, however, is the fact that Scott Fitzgerald had such a problem with morning drinking - drinking away alcohol withdrawals from the night before - that Hemingway(!) of all people often cringed at his friend's embarassing public antics, to the point where Fitzgerald had to be avoided during some of the worst drinking spells. Few people know that Kerouac wrote perhaps the quintessential novel on delirium tremens - the final, dark stages of alcoholism - in Big Sur, or that Kerouac spent his finals years walking around his hometown in New England, bloated by alcohol, in a stupor that earned him town-wide pity. Fewer would probably know that Jack London wrote an account of his own alcoholism in John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs. As for Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson, these folk heroes are lauded as the testament to towing the line between hard-drinking and alcoholism successfully, perhaps the most laudable drinkers in literary pop culture. What we don't see is the final years of Thompson and Hemingway's drinking, when the ravages of liquor began to gnaw away at their brains and their livers, leading both ominously down a path of fate involving a shotgun and their own hands.

And this is unfortunate. I've always sought after the darker tales of battles with the bottle. Any hack writer can put heavy-drinking tales to paper, but it takes true literary genius to account for those harrowing dark days when you come face to face with the devil himself in the midst of delirium tremens, as Kerouac did in Big Sur, or to account for a losing battle with the bottle when you can't put down the mescal despite your best intentions, as Malcolm Lowry achieved in Under the Volcano.

I'm somewhat of a self-proclaimed Hemingway afficionado. The deeper I delve into the Hemingway catalogue, the deeper my primary critique of his work gets - that he was unable to ever account for his experiences with alcoholism. This summer I read one of Hemingway's final novels in Across the River and Into the Trees, which is in essence a retrospective piece on his life as he approached the half-century mark of his life. Given the retrospective quality of the novel, it had the potential to be a masterpiece of nostalgia and regret - and Hemingway indeed thought it would earn masterpiece status in the way that The Old Man and the Sea would turn out to be years later. From booze to war to lost love (three failed marriages at this point in his life), Hemingway had a breadth of life experiences from which he could have worked. Instead, we get tidbits of war flashbacks that do not come close to achieving the war-ravaged emotions of "Big Two-Hearted River". Unfortunately, this novel aims low rather than reaching for the stars. In part, I blame this on Hemingway's unwillingness to address the role of alcohol in his life, which he continuously refused to do in any honest way throughout the course of his life.

Hemingway deserves as much blame as pop culture for his image as a hard-drinking folk hero rather than an alcoholic, though. For as much as pop culture perpetuated the myth of Hemingway the hard-drinking, hard-living icon, Hemingway himself was never capable of recognizing his drinking for what it ultimately became: a dark problem. While Hemingway had no problem calling out Fitzgerald for his drinking and recognizing that for Fitzgerald, pouring out the liquor cabinet was essential, he had quite the problem admitting his own demons. This denial, of course, is one of the underlying symptoms of addiction.

I'm currently about 500 pages deep into the 600 page tell-all Hemingway biography, written by Carlos Baker. This means I am starting to get into the dark side of Hemingway's drinking years, when the act of drinking was no longer a social outlet amongst expatriates in Paris or a military coping mechanism amongst his comrades in arms. In reality, alcohol had destroyed a lot in his life. The latter two of his first three wives both left him in part due to his reluctance to accept a sense of domesticity, opting instead to retain the late-night drinking sprees of his twenties well after he had grown old. Moreover, Hemingway suffered a number of injuries from automobile acts resulting from drinking and driving, some leaving him with concussions that further inhibited his alcohol-deteriorated brain. Further revealing is the fact that, after being wounded in the first great war, Hemingway's nurses were perturbed to find hidden bottles of cognac stashed away in his hospital room. But perhaps most revealing is that, when suffering from kidney problems and told by doctors to abstain from drinking, and finally in his late years when family and friends pleaded with him to put down the bottle, Hemingway was either unwilling or unable to follow doctors' or friends' orders.

Whether or not Hemingway suffered from alcohol dependence - the crucial turning point in any story of alcoholism - is disputed. In his later years, Hemingway is said to have drank a quart of whiskey per day. Though he set rules for himself to try and limit his drinking, he often was unable to abstain from the elixir past lunchtime. Ultimately, the alcohol began to rot Hemingway's brain - as it has been wont to do for so many illustrious writers. Self-medicating with alcohol in his final years led to a deep-seated depression, climactically resulting in that tragic day with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. Though he called his own father a coward for committing suicide, Ernest was unable to escape the same fate, the terrors of alcohol and depression weighing like a black cloud over his soul.

I don't mean to critique Hemingway for his drinking. Someone in my shoes is certainly in no place to do so. Rather, I can only lament that the tragic story of the dark side of the bottle never found its way into Hemingway's writing. As is evident from Kerouac's Big Sur and Lowry's Under the Volcano, these types of tragic tales can result in some truly meaningful literature. It's a tragedy in itself that we never got to see what the master of American literature could do with similar material. All that's left is the mistaken perception in popular culture of a hard-drinking, hard-living man, an entirely incomplete portrait of the legendary Hemingway, and the wonder of what could have been.

Under Blue Canadian Skies

Hidden in rural Ontario amongst miles and miles of cornfields, there is an old schoolhouse that holds a special spot in my heart. Tucked in on a stretch of dirt road, on the banks of a winding creek, it exists in a realm of the past. It's a simpler place where things move slower and life is easier.

In my youth, a Memorial Day trip up to the schoolhouse offered us the first glimpse of summer to come. We would run for ages through the corn stalks, stopping every so often to catch crawfish in the creek bed and hiding in the tall grass in an endless game of hide and seek. In our unbridled spirit, we weren't so much different from the kids who played in the fields of the schoolhouse dozens of years prior. The grown ups weren't so much different from the small-town Canadians living in rural Ontario those years ago, either. They sit out on the deck, drinking bottles of beer, watching out over their little ones - wondering at once where the time went and where it might lead.

At dusk we used to sit out and look up at the stars and exploding fireworks in the vast country sky. In the quiet solitude of the Canadian night, we looked up into the vastness and wondered to what extent the universe went on, while at the same time feeling safer than ever in the confines of that wood-stove schoolhouse. We live simply, the way life once was in the past. And we spend our time the way it was meant to be spent, embracing every moment of the day. And for a weekend, that's all that mattered in the world.

I remember wondering as a child if we'd ever grow up to be like the grown ups, drinking bottles of the beer on the back deck and watching the sun over Lake Huron in the distance. A couple of weekends ago, my childhood buddies and I drove up to the schoolhouse for our annual summer trip to the schoolhouse. As we sat out on the deck in the falling Friday dusk, I thought about the passage of time. We were no longer the kids who spent their days in the fields and rows of corn fields up there. Rather, we were the ones drinking the beer on the deck - thinking about where the time went and where it might lead.

June 7, 1997

I've been doing some extensive writing this summer, largely expounding on the original Life and Loss with the Red Wings post from about a year ago. This piece is from a particularly memorable day for me: Saturday, June the 7th, 1997.

Part I

To this day, when I hear the word summer, my mind hearkens back to June nights in Millwood Village. June nights are like a Bruce Springsteen song - there's an intoxicating feeling in the summer air and anything seems possible. Neighbors gather together in a backyard lit by tiki torches, the smell of charcoal cooking hot dogs and hamburgers sifts through the humid air, and a Jimmy Buffett song plays from the stereo. The grown ups sit out on the back patio drinking bottles of beer and sipping cocktails through umbrella straws, talking about things that don't make sense to us kids, while neighborhood boy chases neighborhood girl, and vice versa. We laugh and run and play, stopping to catch fireflies every so often, our energy level never running low thanks to a limitless bucket of soda on ice.

All summer days in the suburbs are magic. In a way, I remember them all. There's the whir of lawn mowers; the pitter patter of sprinklers raining on immaculately groomed front lawns; the yelps of the dogs barking at eachother through the backyards; house-wives in blue bonnets bent over flower gardens; kids meeting in the front street in the early morning sun, the possibilities of the summer day ahead of us truly boundless.

But I remember a particular one of those June nights most of all. And it's funny the way those moments work. There are no voices that call out to savor every second of the night, or that it will be one of those few moments in life that remains forever etched into your memories. The night just goes on, and only later on do you look back and realize how special that moment was.

The neighbors slowly trickle towards my house through the backyards or on the front sidewalks, everyone dressed in festive Red and White, kids wearing Yzerman and Shanahan and McCarty jerseys. The dads congregate around the grill out back, taking turns flipping hot dogs and painting barbecue sauce on slabs of ribs. The moms carry homemade dishes of potato salads and fruit salads and nacho dip into the kitchen. As for us kids, we toss water balloons in spite at Philadelphia Flyers logos plastered onto the front driveway, compete in an egg toss competition, and craft our own Stanley Cup replicas out of plastic tupperware and tin foil. There's a sense of calm that distinguishes the night from other summer barbecues, though. Everyone is tranquilly giddy with the idea that something truly special could happen that night. The dads understand it better than us boys do: having weathered a forty-two year Cup drought, they understand full well the implications on the line in the impending Game Four of these Stanley Cup Finals.

They say men are children sometimes. I know that's the way it was that night. All the adults were children that night. Here were mothers and fathers who had watched with a careful eye over my play in their backyards, who had taken me on trips to the swimming pool in their mini-vans, had lovingly bandaged my scraped knees in their bathrooms, had invited me to dinner and served me spaghetti at their own kitchentables, had tucked me into sleeping bags on weekend sleepovers; here they were, gathered round my living room television like kids for one more time. Gone were the faces I had grown accustomed to in my seven years in Millwood: faces of toil and sweat on dads pushing lawnmowers or peaking from underneath a kitchen sink, faces of weary mothers stirring up yet another batch of Kool-Aid or mopping up muddy footprints from a hasty jaunt through their pristine kitchens; for one night, at least, there eyes were wide as childrens, voices exuberant as the kids they reared.

Just when a lull emerged in the game - people getting up to refill drinks, mothers checking on daughters in the sandbox out back, dads taking cigar breaks to ease their nerves, fingernail gnawing commencing as the game clock couldn't tick fast enough - Darren McCarty broke free to open ice. A Red Wing dug the puck out of the boards and sent it center-wards to open ice, where it found Darren McCarty's stick as he darted from blue line to red line. Only the orange of Jaani Niimina's Flyers jersey stood between the gritty McCarty and Philadelphia goaltender Ron Hextall. The announcers' voices reached fever pitch, in the way that announcers can silence entire sports bars in an instant, like a prophetic gong from the sports gods. Bodies perched up from the living room couches around me, half-standing and half-sitting. McCarty dekes to his backhand, and Niimina stumbles towards the ice. Mano a mano now. The couches in my living room are vacant now, anticipatory 'oh's' mouthing from lips.

And I will never forget that calm before the storm. I know there was no way, in those mere seconds, that Steve and I had time to shoot each other that glance. Yet that's just the way it was: Steve and I sharing that one special moment, the coming on of a smile between best friends at those crucial junctures in life the way they do before your first round of spin the bottle, as you both step onto the stage at high school graduation, or as you nod to your best man in your wedding. Time seemed to stop, giving Steve and I that moment to forever cherish. That's the way I remember it, at least.

Hextall lunges out from his crease, and McCarty pulls back to his forehand with an open net before him, and that's all she wrote, folks. And before McCarty leaps into the boards - mouth roaring - before Stevie Y and Vladimir Konstantinov and the other Red Wings pile onto McCarty in his corner of the boards, the television screen disappears behind the hands of jubilant fans at the Joe. Hands reach into fists in front of the camera lens, releasing forty-two years of pent up hockey frustration into the rafters of the Joe, where the ghosts of yesteryear seem to be watching on. More than that, the living room about me had swallowed my own television screen hole, as bodies much larger than mine erupted into pandemonium. My father and Steve's father jump up and down gleefully, other bodies are embracing one another, sending beer mugs jostling against one another and drops of beer spilling onto the carpet - but for once the grown ups are the ones who don't care. We were all kids in that moment.

The rest of the game seemed a blur. The anticipatory celebration was already underway in Detroit, my house being no exception. The party forty-two years in the making was on. I remember my dad pulling me tight to his leg and leaning in to whisper in the closing minute, "Watch this," he said, "You'll remember this the rest of your life". Steve's dad did likewise, holding onto Steve's shoulder tightly from behind. I remember the faint glimmer of a tear sparkling in some of the dads' eyes - no doubt thinking back to the games they watched with their own fathers a long time ago, thinking about how dearly they wished in vain to share this moment with their dads, and the long, painful Dead Wings era they had experiences first-hand. I remember we chanted "Stevie! Stevie!" along with the crowd at the Joe, just before our captain showed that toothless smile and took hold of Detroit's long-awaited silver grail.

The night sort of just went on for us kids. We were just happy we were allowed to stay up past midnight as the celebration continued on for the adults. School had let out but a few days prior, and there seemed an electrifying spirit in the newly found summer twilight: fireflies lighting the wooded trails out back like flickering candle lights, the night life - creepy crawlies in the earth, bats buzzing in the branches, other critters rustling in the brush - was refreshed from a long winter's hibernation, and the stars above shimmered with renewed zeal. Even the distant sounds of fireworks exploding into the night toasted the night's victory.

I remember laying in the thick grass of Steve's front lawn, panting and out of breath from a game of flashlight tag. I took a moment to soak it all in, looking at the craters in the silver crescent moon high above me, thinking it all grand. A couple houses down the street, I thought I could make out the faint echo of a song playing through the night:

Late December, back in '63

What a very special time for me

Red Letter Days

Some days, like some people, come and go, not even a scent or sight to remember them by. Other days stick out like a best friend does, forever altering the course of your life.

I found this conversation in an old journal of mine. It's a conversation (from AIM!) between my lifelong best friend Steve and I on the day I received that fateful letter in the mail from the University of Michigan. A law school graduate now, it is a testament to the passage of time. I've never been a big believer in fate or destiny, but looking back on this, it's hard not to think about the stars. Steve and I clashed in colors as youngsters - Steve always moseying through the backyards and hopping for crab apples in his green and white Michigan State sweatshirt, me waiting at the back porch in my navy and yellow sweater with 'Michigan' stitched across. It's hard to not credit destiny to the fact that we are now both graduates of the schools we once dreamed about. Four years in your college town can make it seem routine, but this piece from my old journal is a testament to just how much my destiny was driven for 17 years by the sole desire of receiving that letter from Michigan.

Time changes all things, but it doesn't change memories. I wanted like hell to get out of my hometown at the time of this journal entry, but the years have colored my memories of those days with a tinge of nostalgia. I remember a time, a place. I was living under my father's roof, antsy to the point of rebelliousness to sow my wild oats and find life outside the streets of my neighborhood. It was a time of innocence, even if I didn't think it back then. My journal is chock-full of days of playing baseball at the sandlot with the neighborhood guys, sneaking in a bottle of Jack Daniels to the Friday night football game, puppy love in the way that high school sweethearts play such a role in shaping who you start to be as an adult, high school nights spent driving around aimlessly just because we didn't want to go home, phrases like "carpe diem" scribbled across the pages, and teenage angst brewed over cheeseball lyrics.

Looking back reminds me of my years. Now, a night at a restaurant or watching sitcoms sounds like a good night to me. Drinking has taken on a new, darker meaning to me. The seventeen-year-old self emanating from that high school journal stands in direct opposition to the quarter-century old me: back then I would have yawned at the thought of staying in, and my every night was motivated in some sense to find that next buzz. I was so full of life, and night. And that's a feeling I'll never get back.

ScubaSteve101eml: i heard you are an official wolveriene
BlueDevl34: haha
BlueDevl34: yup
BlueDevl34: i guess so
ScubaSteve101eml: its like the best day of yer life
BlueDevl34: yeah pretty much
ScubaSteve101eml: like ever since u were like 4 you have been waiting to oppen that letter
BlueDevl34: lol
BlueDevl34: i was so nervous tho

Petoskey

It's hard to believe it's been three years since my Indian summer in Petoskey's great northwoods. On the bright side, I feel like I'm finally able to write about it with a disconnected vantage point - which is a long way from where I was last summer; whatever happened in my personal life will never be able to take away from the beauty of my Northern Michigan experience and the special spot in my heart the place holds. This is a piece about Petoskey for a larger piece of writing I'm currently working on:

My college sweetheart awoke me with a gentle kiss on the forehead, the type of kiss when you are in love that makes you feel as safe as you’ll ever be. I stretched my arms and yawned, half-smiling in my content as the daylight broke in through the blinds of the sliding glass door that led out to that wooden deck at the feet of the dark Northern woods behind the house. I curled up in the now expansive comforter, reaching my arm over the vacant impression in the bed where her body had been.

When I finally awoke the woodpecker was already busy at work at the large oak in the backyard, my girlfriend gone to another day’s work at the tourist restaurant in town, and the house quiet in the way that houses in the woods get in the early day – not even a creak in the wooden walls. I nibbled on an English muffin in the lonely breakfast nook, reading about some local hero pictured on the front page of the small-town paper. I scrubbed the dishes left behind by her breakfast with lemon dish soap, feeling like some retired old man or a housewife with the kids gone off to summer camp. The bathroom mirror, fortunately, reminded me that I was still, in fact, a younger man with a lot of life before me – disasters far from my wildest dreams still looming in life, joys unfathomable to a 22 year old man still awaiting. I ran my toothbrush under the faucet and brushed my teeth – the flavors of mint and well water reminding me of the taste of Up North – with renewed enthusiasm for my daily hike. 

The driveway winded for a quarter mile through the front woods and heaps of dead autumn leaves, gone unnoticed for years. Out past the neighborhood drive on Hunter’s Ridge, a hilly, country road stretched for miles of wood and farm land, its hilly crescents rising and falling like concrete tidal waves. The gargantuan northern white pines towered above either side of the road– the great red cedar trunks like enormous pillars, and the bows of pine branches up in the air, perching atop the tree like the bald eagle, the king of the northern Michigan woods. Only a sliver of blue sky appeared above the road, the leafy branches above enclosing the road in a canopy. I walked along the edge of the road, feeling the soft, pillowy bedding of pine leaves beneath my feet, the smell of mint and spruce wafting upwards. The great, lonesome hawks floated high above, peering down from a soft blue sky in search of potential prey – chipmunks scurrying across the forest floor, garter snakes peeking out of holes in the earth, field mice hiding beneath the floorboards of hunting shacks. And down the road, in the distance, the trees opened up to reveal the vast lake, water calm and stainless – Walloon Lake in all its pristine Hemingway glory.

Walking down that two-lane country road, Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” tucked underneath my arm, old cabin whiskey in a coffee mug in hand, I looked between the tree trunks for Nick Adams’ ghost, thinking he might be dashing along a trail with his young Indian Pochahontas, or toting his beebee gun at his side, creeping carefully over fallen, rotting tree branches, or laying up against a tree – straw hat draped over his eyes, napping and dreaming of  the Last Good Country. You could feel his spirit up there in the great Northern Michigan woods. It was a calming presence. I felt as far away as possible from Detroit and Ann Arbor, the worries of the day left all those miles behind in Southeastern Michigan. Up here, it was as if the industrial revolution had never happened.

At the lake I walked down the wooden boardwalk steps to the rocky beach shore, Petoskey stones hidden in the puzzle of century-old stones and pebbles, and looked out across the lake to the Scots pines watching over the lake on the other side. Small cottages – secluded log cabins and pastel yellow and pink summer homes – stood at the far side of the lake, hidden between the shade of the pines. I picked up a smooth, flattened stone and hurled it side-armed at Waloon’s glossy surface. The stone hit the surface and skipped three times, creating ripples in the steel canvas, before falling to the depths of the lake amongst the murky seaweed and wise old Trout lurking there.

I looked up from the clean black and white pages of my book, tucked a feather in between the pages as a bookmark, and listened to the cicadas buzzing from the trees – the soundtrack of that summer. I took a look at Walloon spread out before me and thought about the previous years, not feeling like college was over at all but that come autumn my best friends and I would be back together at the college house, preparing in the early hours for a football Saturday tailgate. I knew college was over, but I didn’t feel it. I was blissfully unaware of what would happen come autumn. At any rate, it didn’t seem to matter; breathing in that clean, summer air, it felt like the days never changed up there in the north woods.

I brushed an ant off of the hairs of my leg and watched him disappear into the jungle of the blades of grass underneath me. I took a long sip of whiskey out of my coffee mug, a ceramic white mug with the Michigan black bear printed in black across the front, and swallowed hard, feeling the elixir work its magic through my upper chest. I stared into the puddle of rusted brown in the coffee cup, feeling like an old man. The previous year had left me drained. The sweet burn of the whiskey brought back a lot of those memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because Time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.

I said my silent goodbyes to Walloon and began the long trek up the country road back. Walloon behind me, Petoskey and Lake Michigan hidden below the horizon a dozen miles ahead of me, the sky suddenly turned a shade of gray that foretold of rain. I climbed up the first crescent on my way home, hastening my pace. Amidst the northern woods, the forgiving North sky above me – it was easy to see why Hemingway had chosen this place to heal his wounds when he returned to America from the great war, his skin tattered and his psyche in ruins. The Mexicans say that the Pacific Ocean has no memory. If the Mexicans ever saw Northern Michigan, I think they might say the same thing about this place. As I looked into the deep woods, darkening even more so as storm clouds billowed overhead, I got the feeling this was a place where you could lose yourself in more ways than one.

Lyrics

Too much thinking and too much aching
has put a big strain on my pride
I'm tired of drinking and I'm tired of taking her memory for a ride
I used to think that yesterday, we knew how to spend the time
Then I found out it was her way, of killing hers and wasting mine
And now I know that I should tell her, all that tears are gonna get her is wet
But you know I can't cause she's the best forever yet
And now I know that she don't miss me while she's doing whatever she does
And I know that she wouldn't call me if she knew where I was, even if she knew where I was
And now I know that I still miss her and I'm trying real hard to forget
And I wish somebody new was the best forever yet
I wish somebody new was the best forever yet

- Reckless Kelly, Best Forever Yet