Hobblings... (More short, short autobiographical fiction)

It's Wednesday, so that means something about books, or some writing. Today it's more autobiographical short fiction, or perhaps "Autobiographical Friction". Enjoy.

At 13, I was in the school’s First IX hockey team, and I was the youngest at that point; first time ever for a junior to be in with the seniors. We were playing the top school in the league and we were trying our best, and in the final moments of the game the ball was dragged back in front of me and I was wrong-footed, beaten. I stood on the ball and rolled my ankle really badly – um, as opposed to really well…

Hobble to the car, get rushed to the after-hours, then emergency physio where the whole foot and most of the leg is strapped and I’m warned to not play on it for weeks. But this wasn’t the correct advice – according to my team manager and coach – because the very next day I was on a bus to New Plymouth for a rep tournament.

The physio protested that this was a very bad idea, but the team coach and manager still thought it was probably a good idea for me to go, since the travel day was a day of rest anyway, right? They believed the run of eight to ten matches inside a week would be fine once I “got going again”.

So I sat in the back corner seat of the van and listened to AC/DC and Pink Floyd and Stevie Ray Vaughan on my red Sony Walkman. My foot up on the wheel-arch. Strapped. Agony.

I jogged onto the field with a slight limp at 8am that next morning and in the opening moments of the game I twisted the other ankle. It was strapped on the side of the field and I was deemed too crucial to sit out the match. Play on.

In fact I played every game, with ice straight after then Deep Heat, rolls and rolls of strapping tape. And several spins from the Pink Floyd and AC/DC and Stevie Ray Vaughan tapes too.

It was brutal. I thought I’d never be in so much pain ever again, but this was long before finding myself near-unemployable and almost laughably rejected from any job-app I submitted, usually without even an interview.

But there were some good times in and around the pain. I remember watching Big Trouble In Little China. And the movie Crossroads, where Steve Vai played the devil’s guitarist. And The Karate Kid had to dig real deep and use his classical upbringing to pull a primitive musical form into new and exciting shapes – all with the off-camera help of Vai and Ry Cooder.

I bought ‘Passion and Warfare’ by Steve Vai and the soundtrack to Crossroads by Ry Cooder on the return home. Hobbling on both feet.

I still have both of those albums. I still love them. Even if I can only listen to them now and then. Once a year or so.

My hockey stick is long gone. I haven’t owned one for years. I picked one up sometime in the last decade. As foreign as a gun. No idea what to do with it. But there was a time when I was such a good shot.