So I’ve been told that my inability to skate backwards with any effectiveness is all in my head. I think you can convince yourself of all kinds of untruths if you really try. Crazy people throughout history have convinced themselves that they’re refugees from another planet, Jesus, the master race, or even more simply, that everyone else is crazy except for them. I’ve had people persuade themselves with conviction that they did not and could not love me, so hey, if you’re allowed to convince yourself of that, then don’t take my backwards skating fixation away from me. It’s all I have.
I recently noted that Bizzy asked for a hockey update. To satisfy her and to appeal to the many people who for some strange reason are living vicariously through me (you know who you are), my hockey story tonight is a 30-second unrequited romance that should leave you sighing for more, or at the very least, rolling your eyes in embarrassed sympathy.
I’ve been going to a hockey skills workshop on Sunday nights at Ice Oasis in Redwood City. Skating with the girls twice a week is getting a bit depressing since I can’t keep up with a one of them (are all these people from Canada or is this some kinda sick joke?), so I make myself feel better by going to skills and skating circles around large, unstable men. Sure, they all shoot better than me, but first they have to catch me. I’d been wearing my Snoopy jersey to practice so often that the instructors had started referring to me by that name, so I decided to mix them up a bit and wear my Piranhas jersey that I don’t know what to do with anyway. Last Sunday I was on the ice for a mere five seconds when I could see someone gliding next to me out of the corner of my eye. It was one of the instructors, who, for the purpose of this blog, we’ll call “Crush,” because his distinctive SoCal attitude reminds me of that sea turtle in Finding Nemo.
“Is that your real name or is that a nickname?” he said. I turned to him. “Huh? OH, that’s my last name,” I answered, bumbling. “Dude, that is SO COOL. Did you know that means CUTE in French?” I tried not to roll my eyes, but unfortunately, it’s become an involuntary reflex. “Yes,” I said, “I get that pickup line all the time.” Five crossovers later and I had managed to escape him.
Tonight, on a whim, I decided to wear the jersey again, since I thought by this point everyone had already seen it. I was about two laps around the rink tonight before I heard “Is that your real name or a nickname?” You already used that line, I almost blurted out. I looked and it was a different instructor. “Oh, uh, it’s my real name,” I said. “It’s Italian, right?” he continued. Surprised that someone actually got it right, I answered yes, smiling. “Did you know in French it means CUTE?” he said, beaming.
It’s well known that hockey provokes people to aggression, but for me, it doesn’t always occur in the usual and customary manner. Some people get slashed, checked, punched, run over, but me, I get picked up on. The refs should give penalties for such poor game, but then, people don’t even get busted for bad driving these days. I have little hope it will be decreed a penalty in the near future.
And then there are the people not suffering from poor game, just an altogether lack of a clue. Namely, me. There’s an instructor at skills who looks curiously like Paul from the Southpointe Iceoplex in Canonsburg, PA. Paul was a hockey clinic instructor at Southpointe when Bizzy and I skated there during my second and last sultry Pennsylvania summer. Quite a looker (and yes, we saw him with his shirt off in the office), but unfortunately too short and absolutely zero sense of humor, even when Bizzy accidentally hit him in the face with her stick. Now, Bizzy gets minus two-hundred points for hitting the pretty boy in the face, but that’s a tale for another blog entry. So this instructor, who we’ll call Paul, is blessedly taller than the real Paul, and appears to have a more substantial sense of humor. He’s been at Polars practice on several Sunday mornings, insisting the women be in ready stance all the time in case he “accidentally” ran into them.
I got a good look at him tonight at skills, and had decided quite suddenly that I was going to ask him out. My problem is that I decided this too early on, when my group had just rotated into his corner of the rink. It’s well known that I have no coordination in front of current or potential love interests. It’s just too much to ask to stickhandle a puck around a cone and lust over someone at the same time. Don’t believe me? You try it sometime.
“You’re just going to stickhandle back and forth like this,” Paul said, pushing a puck around in front of himself. We copied. “Now look two feet in front of your puck…now look five feet in front…now look at the boards….now look at me.” My puck was gone. I’m not sure how long it had been gone but I was still stickhandling as if it was there. I got another one. “Jessica look at me.” Ah yes, looking! “Richard look at me.” I looked down and my puck was gone again. “We’re going to stickhandle around these cones now,” Paul said, pushing some strange orange discs into a straight line (they weren’t cones at all). The drill was impossible. Paul’s puck went in a straight line back and forth between the cones. Mine went diagonally from my stick between the cones and then back again, eventually knocking the last cone out of position. I started to turn the corner sharply to the right with the puck on my backhand. “Look at me!” Paul said as I skated by. I glanced up and my puck went sailing off past the blue line into one of the other group’s corners. “I can’t,” I said, exasperated, then stood up straight in defiance and skated back to the goal line, puckless.
Paul was talking to us at the goal line, although I have no idea what he said. Would you like to go to dinner sometime? How about drinks? Do you have a girlfriend?…No, I thought, scratching that last question from my mind. Sure I wondered, but you couldn’t just straight up ask that. Do you have a real job or do you just work here? Will you be at Polars practice next week? Is that your red Mustang in the parking lot? What’s your shoe size? “Now you’re going to stickhandle between the cones like this,” Paul said, demonstrating. I envisioned myself skating up to him after practice was over. So, I was wondering… I replayed it in my head until I had it down.
We did a couple more cone drills (for me, poorly) before an instructor blew the whistle to rotate the groups. “Thanks, you guys did great,” Paul said. He took his left glove off to scratch his head. Ring? Ring!! I slammed my stick down on the ice like a person who’s just missed a really good goal, and skated away, beaten. And to think I could have actually been practicing that whole time, instead of dwelling on my approach. My only consolation is that after the incident, I played fairly well during the scrimmage. Without the pressure of the scrutinizing eye of a potential date, all my oppressed coordination came back in one big uprising of thwarted wrath. I slashed one person, ran into another, and at the end stormed back to the locker room to rip off all my tape in spurned fury.
Anticlimactic, I know. Disappointed by this story? Send your generous donations to the Find Jess a Man foundation. Your contributions will help to improve my blog entries and hopefully ensure that they have a point in the future. Thanks for your support.
