Page 73 of Game Misconduct
By the time February rolled around, Danny felt like every time he was at home alone was a disaster waiting to happen. He knew what he was going to do when he got there, and he felt like shit about it. He felt like he was going to crawl out of his skin half of the time, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Every time he tried, he ended up caving.
It was one thing to feel so goddamn miserable and deal with it and another thing entirely to know that you couldn’t talk about it.
He couldn’t talk to Mike because Mike would worry about him more than he already did, and Danny didn’t want to lose him. He couldn’t, even though he knew he was going to anyway. He couldn’t talk to Araceli, because she’d pity him, or try to fix him, or worse, tell their parents. He couldn’t talk to Gears or Landry because both of them were kids and he was the one who gavethemadvice. He couldn’t talk to Coach, because he didn’t want to get traded or screw up the twilight of his career.
On a freezing night in February, he sat on his porch in just a hoodie and jeans, smoking a cigarette because it was that or he was going to go back inside and pour himself another drink or take another pill and he was already on the other side of what he considered a safe limit. It was quiet on his street, which was the usual way of the neighborhood. Also, it was almost midnight, and Danny was alone with the urge to go back inside and do exactly that, and he thought,maybe if I was dead, I wouldn’t be so fucking tired all the goddamn time.
Danny exhaled. He had had thoughts like that before, fleeting, but never so clearly formed in his mind.
Thinking about it had never seemed like a relief before.
It was like the more he got to know and then had to leave Mike, the more he was alone, the more the yawning void in his chest grew wider. Like it would consume him. That was the only way he could characterize something he knew was probably depression. He just didn’t feel like he could call it that, because it was his fault he felt that way, not something his brain had done to him. His inability to control himself with alcohol and pills. His inability to stop the black moods that swept him when he was alone.
He took out his phone and scrolled through the list of contacts, mostly guys he didn’t talk to much anymore. It was hard when you got traded. Some friendships continued, but sometimes it was easier not to keep them up, easier not to see your friends succeeding where you’d failed. Danny had always been content to let things drift. But that also meant...well, here he was, on the porch of an empty house in February, as miserable as he’d ever been, completely alone.
He stopped on the M’s. Andrew Martin had been an assistant coach on Danny’s first team. He’d been the guy who worked with the defensemen, had been a d-man himself during his playing career, and it had been Marty’s guidance that had gotten him back on his feet after the broken hip. Marty had been the reason he still had a career in the league at all.
They’d always had a good relationship. Marty appreciated how hard Danny worked, worried about how much he pushed himself, and had been crushed when Chicago had traded him. He’d been like a second dad away from home for Danny, his voice weirdly soothing, his gap-toothed smile comforting.
They’d kept in touch on and off throughout the years, Marty checking in on him every time he’d gone to a new team, every time an injury made the news. Marty had been around the block too, but with more success: he was now the head coach on the Jersey Scouts and even though they hadn’t made it to or past the first round of the playoffs in a few years, Marty was still beloved in Newark just because that was the kind of guy he was.
It was a stretch, but maybe he’d understand.
Marty didn’t pick up right away, but he answered before it went to voice mail, which Danny hadn’t been expecting given the hour and because he was in his early sixties. His voice was a little sleepy. “Danny?”
“Hey, Marty,” Danny said, “sorry to uhh...sorry to call you so late,” and stopped. He sounded a little drunk. He didn’t know what to say.
“Is—everything okay?”
Danny was silent for what felt like a long time but wasn’t even a minute. His back was cold and clammy with sweat. “Uh...no, Marty. Everything’s pretty shit, actually, and I—I don’t know what to do.”
“Hang on one sec, Danny. Stay on with me, all right?” He heard Marty getting up, murmuring something, probably to his wife, and then silence, as he walked. “Okay, just had to get out of the bedroom.”
“I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you or Julie up.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine. You know I told you when you got traded that you could call me anytime, and I meant it. Talk to me, buddy.”
“It’s not easy to do that.”
“Talk to me in hypotheticals if you gotta, but Danny, if you called me at one in the morning, there’s something going on.”
“Uh... Marty...if one of your guys had...was maybe, uh, having an issue with, with drugs and...alcohol...like...bad shit...what would you tell him to do?”
“I’d tell him to take the time he needed to get himself cleaned up,” Marty said, without hesitation. “That I’d help him find the resources he needed to do that, that I’d support him through whatever steps he needed to take. And that we’d be here for him when he got back. It’s like any other injury. It needs to be healed. That’s what I’d tell him, Danny.”
“Do you think that’s—the normal reaction? In the league?”
“I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know. It should be. But also, I don’t think—well, if I was talking to someone on another team whose policies I didn’t know, I’d tell him not to worry about it, because your health comes fucking first, and even if things go to shit after, hockey ain’t worth that.”
“It is. It is worth it.”
“Danny, it’s fuckingnot.”
“I—hypothetically, the guy we’re talking about—Marty, the problem—the problem is he doesn’t have a life outside of hockey. I don’t have anything after that.” He swallowed, hard, because he had never said it aloud, but that was the problem, that was the thing he feared. That was the crux of it. “I only have two seasons left, and after that, I got nothing. I retire and what the fuck am I good for? I won’t even be forty years old and what the fuck am I gonna have in my life? What’s the fucking point of going on...?”
“Danny, it might seem like that, but that’s not fuckin’ true. You’re one of the best guys I ever coached, and you’re only thirty-five, you’ve got your whole goddamn life ahead of you. It might take you some time to figure out the direction you wanna take it, but—”
“I don’twantto do anything else. I don’t—I don’t knowhow.”