Hockey

I recently uncovered this picture of myself in the floor section of a Waka Flocka Flame show in Atlanta. A sparkly eyed deviant despite having been escorted out of a hockey game by law enforcement just an hour prior.

My friend Mandy was visiting me from Los Angeles. Her dad was managing Waka at the time and we took him up on the tickets as a backup plan to the game we were attending that evening. It was my “first date” with one of the players. He left two tickets at will call.

Upon arriving, I pictured myself five years in the future, full glam, pulling up to the stadium in a Range Rover Sport, baby in the backseat with the nanny in tow. Hockey Boy’s current team was semi-pro, but maybe he could push harder and get traded up to the LA Kings. Or the Arizona Coyotes. I like the mascot, and he’s from Scottsdale. I would move back to that haunted state for him. I don’t know how hockey works.

The sport is really only watchable if you have severe ADHD. Trancelike is the observer. The ice boys moved rugged and hare-footed, gliding across the rink. Their skates rip and rend the ice beneath them, the puck imperceptible, the arena, a bloodthirsty playground. Fighting is encouraged. Primitive and sexy, if not for the stadium lighting. So masculine it hurts. I enjoyed those first twenty minutes.

By the second half I was surrounded in the parking lot, weeping into my leather jacket while the cops scribbled my name down and made me beg for forgiveness from them and God alike. Omg so sorry. Sorry I am almost a genius for using my horizontal passport ID to buy a drink. Sorry the stupid teenage employee served me a cider, subsequently snitching and wasting your time. I only had two sips. A waste of seven dollars. I got a warning.

Moments later I was flying down the I-85 South going 95 MPH to get to the Waka Flocka Flame concert, hair whipping across my eyes as I puffed smoke out the sunroof.

Mandy and I spent two songs on the floor, broke a sweat, then drove back up to the suburbs to meet up with the Hockey Boy and his friends after team dinner. I don’t recall if the team lost or won.

I had to explain to Hockey Boy that although I had a jolly twenty minutes trying to locate him amongst the madness, I was now banned for life from Gwinnett Ice Arena. Mandy flirted, uninvested, with his roomate. Hockey Boy and I retreated to his quarters where we lay side by side. He rattled on about some drama between a coach and some teammates that was beyond my hockey expertise or interest. We made out. He told me the stories behind the scars on his eyebrow and lip, from his days at a youth hockey camp in Canada. I sold him two 10mg pills of my adderall prescription (my first and only drug deal).

His seduction efforts were ineffectual. I didn’t get to the second quarter of the game and he didn’t get to second base. I was also wearing a bodysuit, the modernized chastity garment. I ultimately left because his room was really, really clean, and it incited a foreign fear within me. The only art: a poster for Disney’s Frozen. He claimed it was for his kid sister back in Arizona.

Today, Hockey Boy has a popular TikTok account where he is a life coach who lives in Venice Beach. Qualifications unclear. His latest video is a diatribe on the enforcement of making horizontally filmed TikToks, to which he is vehemently opposed. In the video, he says, “My content is about content.” Isn’t that beautiful? He repeatedly uses “epic” in his instagram captions. His fiancée, also popular on the platform as a fitness influencer, possesses a tasteful boob job and a permanent spray tan. She likes to share mat exercises with the world, as well as what she eats in a day. Her latest video is instructing you on how to compile a taco bowl. The seasoning is pre-packaged. I only pray that I find my soulmate in this lifetime.

Back to the photo of me…My question is: Why do I look like the forty-one year old wife of an NRA donor? That face belongs at Mar-a-Lago. That face belongs on a shaky iPhone video from a Dallas/Ft. Worth terminal during a heated public meltdown, GreatLash tears running down her face but the blended smokey eye doesn’t budge. That face belongs behind bars for tax violations and fraud. That Reformation lace-up bodysuit belongs in the Smithsonian. My grandpa’s broken Oyster Perpetual Rolex, dangling off my wrist, belongs at home. Tennessee Williams would like this, I think.