Bulldogs

My best story by far, part of a longer work. Some of it happened.

This is a work of fiction but in the middle of the party, S of all people, who had disappeared for a good hour and a half, maybe more, walked down the stairs into the living room wearing an oversized fur coat and thick black sunglasses. Stringy brown hair flopped when he walked. Sloppy red lipstick. Only white briefs underneath.

S had turned wild, a complete one-eighty from the guy I grew up with. He and I set a high-school scoring record last year, before turning into bulldogs in the spring. With that coat on he really looked like he had nothing to lose. Under the coat, I could see bruises on his chest, that immediate yellow and purple kind, from training earlier that day. Over the summer, the older players had taken him in. He didn’t leave their side during practice or swims or meal time or maybe it was the other way around. The older players loved him and he discovered he loved to be loved. He went to Espio before any of us. S had talent.

He lit a cigarette and had obviously smoked a few before that one because a haze followed him from upstairs. He shouted to himself, hands in the air wildly, rapping the wrong words to every song that played in the background. And then he yelled at us to call him Prince.

“I’m the motherfucking Prince,” he said.

Parko said fuck off S and tried to remove the coat, I think so he could wear it, though S held on and then Parko grabbed a Bud Light from the fridge and poured it onto S’s head. The foam sunk into the fur. The girl whose house we were in wigged out and ran up the stairs into a bedroom and slammed the door. Jonesy laughed so hard he fell backwards off the counter he’d been sitting on. He grabbed a fruit bowl and a bottle of red wine on his way down. His huge body wriggled on the ground.

My mother’s fur coat, my mother’s fur coat, the girl yelled from the bedroom. Out a window I could see that half-light that appears before the sun shows. The street looked pretty and enlightened and the morning gleam did too much for an otherwise boring place—boring, except for, or because of, the oil roads, farms, and sports teams that connected the place to every other place. A drive-through city in a flyover province. A suburban glitch. Airport hotels, car dealerships, overpasses, freeways, outlet malls and soccer fields. Soccer fields so green in the summer they made up for the impossibility of another winter.

The party had turned sour. I hated to look at the time. I caught a glimpse of the microwave’s clock and it said we were well past curfew. Kickoff in less than twelve hours. We were playing the snakes or maybe the wolves. Baz, the team captain, yelled from across the room saying, S, what the fuck, and S practically swallowed his dart, inhaled the whole thing, stumbling over to Baz and blew smoke right in his face. S turned to look at the rest of us—a mix of athletes, college students, and kids from town—laughed and kissed Baz on the lips. Baz did not want to be kissed by S and hurtled his head into him. S’s body flattened on the floor, head sent into unconsciousness, alcohol-blood bleeding all over the place.

Somebody got us home. Probably Jonesy drove. S and Baz would link up later that day for a goal and an assist while S scored two more on his own. He’d arrived at the field still wearing the fur coat—no sunglasses—and when the two of them walked into the locker room with matching forehead cuts and cloudy red lips the coaches kept their eyes down.

Coaches always kept their eyes down. Sweat it out, they’d say. I should’ve told S that the kiss didn’t seem half as bad as the headbutt, that it wasn’t worth the concussion, but I opted to sweat it out and kept my eyes down. The bulldogs lost after all, pushing themselves to the limit as I watched from the bench.

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The first week into training camp S had proven himself one of the better players on the team. He couldn’t be stopped. During a training session, we stood in the soft green field. Still early days. The white line boundaries and goal posts were geometric and glowed in the grass. We waited for the coaches to set up the next drill. It looked attack-focused, one-two-pass-and-move with an emphasis on finishing on target. The other players were bigger than the players from last year, the size of men. S splashed water in his mouth.

“I’m going to fuck a hundred girls this year,” he’d said, “for real.”

I asked if he’d shave my head after practice (preemptive, attack-focused, bulldog-like). Something squirmed in my gut. After that, we divided into starting eleven and substitutes. I took an elbow to the face from either Jonesy or Baz and my nose broke. I stood up easily but decided to go back down. Roddo’s blotto! one of them said. I didn’t come to for a bit and when I did the bleeding had stopped and I was fanned out on a folding table in the physio’s office. I closed my eyes to the dirty cone light above while my head bubbled and swelled and went from being one thing to another.

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You’re fucking bulldogs, let’s go, coach said calmly at halftime. This was our next game. He said it like his heart wasn’t in it. We are bulldogs, I thought. Though coach half-assed it.

His wife had been cheating on him. I think everyone knew but him. Parko noticed her at Espio one night and before he could cross the dancefloor to tell us, stupid smile on his face, we’d all noticed her, planted among the strobes and people half her age. I’d used Baz’s ID to get in and stood off to the side drinking water from a beer can (pour out the beer and fill with water in the bathroom). Coach’s wife danced and pulled herself deep into someone who definitely wasn’t coach. He had a boy face and looked like he could’ve played on our team. They left together. We’d decided to leave, too, when S lobbed a full bottle of beer into the crowd. He pulled the fire alarm on the way out.

That night actually ended with a crash that I wasn’t around for. Sucks missing out. Jonesy slammed into a guardrail at a crosswalk and spun out into a tree. He’d had his seatbelt on but it didn’t show. He looked brain dead from the shoulders up. Apparently the car hit a fire hydrant, too, and sent water gushing straight up into the air, falling down on the existing dew and damp suburban lawn. When asked about it, Jonesy tried to tell to us how he’d made it rain, the water from the fire hydrant landing in tiny drops on the pavement. McNeer practically cried from laughing so hard, fucking hilarious, he said, Jonesy’s one of a kind, Parko said.

I’d actually been with Jonesy up until sometime right before the accident. He wouldn’t stop talking about how S better figure his shit out, figure your shit out, S, he’d said, unhappy with S’s behaviour at Espio. He dropped me and S off at my parents’ house and for once we got to sleep before whatever practice or match came next. I guess Jonesy went to a house party instead of going home. I noticed him spend more time on the sideline after that. I liked having someone to go through the concussion protocol with. Thinking about it now, someone should have said something. Coach did a good job looking out for us, though.

Jonesy’s crash and coach’s wife at Espio were in the past now, when we were near the end of summer camp, maybe, three-a-day sessions then, I think. No one told coach, he never asked, Espio forever packed, Jonesy never the same, S still S or the MFing prince or whatever and all of us still bulldogs.

The locker room smelled like piss and dust. Wood benches, concrete floors and crooked white cone lights. Damage marks and electrical tape all over the walls. I could see the dried salt stains on the bodies of everyone around me. Salt and cuts and scratches and balms and lotions for the pain and different colour tape wrapping and holding together different parts of our ankles, calves, knees, thighs and ribs—bodies of brilliant wreckage. Coach went on about consolidating our efforts in the final third, quit shying away from fifty-fifties. Parko leaned over and showed me some nudes of his girlfriend. He smelled hungover.

“I got those, too,” I said.

“Fuck off, Roddo.” He slammed my ribs with his fist, “bitch boy.”

I did wince. I had purple around my eyes and a gash on my nose that looked moldy. My shaved head likely made me look like a mad man. I remembered that pain was an illusion.

I didn’t show him my phone, obviously—I had the pictures, everyone did—but I didn’t want to end up pinned down at the rookie party, waterboarded by the team and their Bacardi 151. I didn’t drink. I also didn’t want to end up like S, concussed on the floor and leaking because I couldn’t figure my shit out, or like Jonesy, concussed in a car, waiting for better news. Besides, nude photos came across as old, a nuisance and probably evidence of something that required evidence.

The other team was only up one at half but we lost by four in the end. S scored a hat trick.

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I learned it was tradition to head to Rave’s following the final preseason match. Rave’s was a bar a few doors down from Espio that filled the bottom of a short motel. Bulldogs drank for free because the owner had once been a bulldog. A lot of us weren’t of age but everyone could order a drink or multiple drinks without a problem as long as we showed an ID in performance for the security cameras. We ordered the special without saying a word, gold pitchers of Pilsner or triple-rum-Coke. I don’t know how the bartender decided. Most times we didn’t pay for the drinks, we would just walk in, sit at a table or the bar, and the drinks would appear in our hands. I didn’t get ID’d I think because when the server saw my face she got a sad look on her face. I’d rode with Parko and Jonesy to Rave’s after we had all cooled down from the loss.

Cool downs went like this: prolonged silence, select words from coach, shower, wait to dry in the confined space of the locker room, talk about nothing, the older players leading the discussion, someone always smoked weed with the showers running on full, someone always had beer for everyone else once the coaching staff left, pass around phones with nude photos as the room turned to a hot box, message more girls for more nudes, they’d send photos of themselves, someone would turn on some music, someone would turn it up way too loud—I’d sit back, the cold wall against my skin, I’d bring myself down, I’d see it all happen, I’d think up responses to what the older players would say to me, I’d rub my shaved head, I’d look for an out but not really, I didn’t know how that should look, should sound, I’d put a towel on my head, over my face—

I told Parko I’d drive but he insisted. Jonesy, the walking head injury, went dark in the backseat. On the drive, the steering wheel appeared loose under Parko’s hands, slippery. Bitch boy, put some music on and he handed me his phone. The phone unlocked to the naked photos of his girlfriend, again, and he asked, you like that? I turned up the music. Parko said he liked me, said I had a good head on my shoulders, not like this guy and he motioned behind us, but I felt bad for Jonesy, Parko couldn’t help swerving the car. I imagined the towel over my head again. I thought I should say that he could reconsider the term bitch boy, no wonder no one liked him, instead I brought out my phone, S had texted me. More photos, two girls this time. I showed Parko. He shouted like yee-haw and slammed the wheel with one hand. He reached under his seat and passed a beer to me, which I opened and gave back. Pretty sure he finished it. We’d arrived in front of the bar. Jonesy’s laugh surfaced from the depths.

S didn’t show up but an endless stream of photos and videos arrived from his number all night.

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The rookie party closed out the summer, training camp, and preseason. We hadn’t won a game, lost a lot. The party had a reputation. S blacked out almost immediately. I tried to act the way I would at Espio. There were more people there than just the team. I didn’t know whose house it was but I think the guys who lived there had been on the team last season, either that or they were bulldogs-adjacent. The house smelled like cigarettes and a different kind of sweat from the locker room. Rap music played loud enough from the kitchen to fill every other room in the house. The whole scenario looked unremarkable from the outside.

The older players gathered and sat the new players in front of them like a job interview and asked questions, like, how would you want to go out? how many girls have you had sex with? what’s your wildest sex story? We had mostly bad answers. The growing crowd laughed.

“I want to die in my bed with Nikes on my feet,” said Sneeze, thousand-yard stare through everyone during question period.

They called him Sneeze because every single time he did a shot he would sneeze. He probably sneezed fourteen or fifteen times that night, his eyes bloodshot and bulging, cheeks red, forehead slick, huffing and puffing around the house. When they asked him a different question he answered with the same line about his Nikes. They didn’t like that and shaved the top of his head to look like a newborn’s, more like he was balding. I was glad I’d already shaved my head. Then the diapers came out and we all had to strip down, diaper up, and wrestle for a rubber dog toy shaped like a dildo. The rest of the party went like this: more stripping, more drinking, baby karaoke, call the WAGs on speakerphone, hand over our wallets, intricate head shaving, they used our credit cards to shop online for butt plugs and pornos on VHS, the beer bong came out, 151 waterfalls, and then they shipped the online purchases to our parents or girlfriends which was a lot of work they found out so most lost interest after Daniel (a rookie) finally have them his girlfriend’s mailing address. Her hot-pink butt plug arriving any minute now.

I managed to avoid most everything until Jonesy, incoherent and in pain, but obviously tapped into some sixth or seventh sense, took my beer and spat it out. What the fuck is this, Roddo, he asked, and in the midst of the mayhem some players turned their heads. I didn’t say a word. They all looked at me. A pit opened in my stomach.

“Roddo’s always blotto!” said S, from the couch he’d passed out on. He was coming to life, having missed the party entirely. He looked like he was on life support. They laughed, then hesitated. My stomach gaped. I deferred to my head injury, the deep wound on the bridge of my nose, the tape on my ankles and calf, my eyes weren’t right, look at my head, I said, I pulled at the tape, pressed my eyes hard, fruitlessly squeezed my skull, but they had all these things too, these things we would always come back from, these things that affected momentum but never stopped it entirely.

Where’s the beer bong? Someone asked, closing in. Or, the 151.

Get the vodka! Another shouted, no, the Texas mickey. Commands fired off with the intensity and pace of doctors in an emergency.

I turned into a babe, a bulldog for real, eyes down, lost my head, nearly died, according to Parko, it was hilarious, McNeer said. S had tried to help. I know they hesitated. Had to for the prince.

A version of this story originally appeared in Maisonneuve magazine.