Page 7 of Gravity
No, his usual scene is playoffs and greatness.
“Will you be at the golf game tomorrow?”
Tomorrow, before the division-round games, there’s a charity golf tournament. It’s supposed to be pure fun, nothing serious. A chance to relax and let bigwigs with big checkbooks have a chance at an afternoon with the league’s best players. I don’t know why I was invited to play, but I was, and I agreed. “Yeah, I will be.”
“Merveilleux. I will see you there.”
It seems like he wants to say more, as if there’s something else he wants to ask. But he doesn’t. He sits at the bench and starts unlacing his skates, staring at the ground in front of him with a seemingly single-minded determination.
I have no reason to hang around. So, after a minute of aimless fiddling with my duffel strap, I head for the door. “Bye.”
“Bonne soirée,” he calls.
I intended to go back to my hotel room, but I’m waylaid before I get there. As I walk through the hotel’s foyer, a group of hockey players I know from a few other teams call me over to the lobby bar, and we drink for hours until we stagger to the late-night poker tables. I finally stumble up to my room at four in the morning. Tequila sloshes in my veins. The whirs and dings of the casino flare and fade, flare and fade as I wait for the elevator.
Hold on, because this is all going to slip away and it will be gone before you realize it.
The elevator opens up to the eleventh floor. My hotel is Vegas-average, and my room is smack in the middle of the building. It’s nothing special. A metaphor for me as a player. I snort at my own philosophizing as I pinball from wall to wall down the hallway toward my room. It takes three tries to get my keycard into the door, and I drag myself over to the bed and fall forward, arms and legs starfishing to the corners.
Less than five hours later, my phone alarm blares, yanking me from a deep unconsciousness. My pillow is stuck to my cheek, I have one shoe on and one shoe off, and I’ve have somehow worked myself halfway out of my hoodie. All I want to do is strip and crawl into bed, maybe brush the taste of hangover from my mouth, but the alarm on my phone readsCharity Golf @ 11am.
There’s nothing worse than missing a charity event, except for missing a charity event because you’re drunk or hungover.
I limp to the shower and try to force myself awake with a blast of ice-cold water. My body is aching, and after my morning dose of Tylenol, I slather on the lidocaine—odorless, thank God. Older players don’t care if they smell like Icy Hot or Aspercreme all day long, but I’m still young. I have some pride left.
I throw on my khakis and the one linen button-down I packed and blaze downstairs to meet the shuttle, arriving two minutes behind schedule.
“Jesus, Lacey,” Phillips, one of the guys I know from St. Louis, says as I crawl into the van. I’m the last guy to arrive. “I coulda scored three goals on your team in the time it took you to get down here.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I pitch my empty water bottle over my shoulder and into the back seat toward Phillips. The desert sun is brutal and my sunglasses are doing nothing to shield my eyes. My brain feels like someone is using me for a live lobotomy experiment. Behind me, a cooler lid creaks open.
“Beer?” An ice-cold Corona appears in my face.
My stomach turns over. I shove the beer away and slump against the window as everyone in the van laughs. Bottle tops pop off, the other guys either starting fresh or keeping their buzzes going from last night. I hunch into myself, my flushed face leaning against the air-conditioned window as I try to snag another half hour of sleep.
* * *
“Dude,I didn’t know Bryce Michel was going to be here.”
My eyes pop open. The shuttle eases to a stop at the entrance of the Las Vegas Paiute Golf Resort. Ahead of us is an Escalade, and climbing out of the backseat—looking impeccable, and not hungover—is Bryce.
“Is he playing?” Phillips asks as he slides out of the van.
“Yeah, remember? The organizers said they were working on a special guest,” Radulovich pipes up from the very back. He’s a defensive player like me. He's six-five and two hundred fifty pounds, and he's terrifying on the ice. But off the ice, he’s one of the nicest guys in the league.
“I thought they meant, like, an actor or someone like that,” Phillips says. “I was hoping for Zendaya.”
“We’re the NHL, dude. We don’t get Zendaya.”
When we walk into the resort, the first person I see is Bryce. He’s fenced in by team owners in the exclusive club lounge. They've formed a ring around him, and most are wearing their meteor-sized Stanley Cup rings. Bryce smiles a lot, which is always the right move whenever you’re surrounded by billionaires who control your paycheck.
Everyone is herded into a banquet room for the pre-event meeting. Tables of mimosas and screwdrivers line one wall, along with buckets of ice-cold beer. My fellow players each grab a drink, or two, or three. I snag a water bottle and slink into the corner. Three rows ahead of me, Bryce sits alone, looking down at his phone.
Dude. Go. Talk to him.
No, Jesus, you can barely think in full sentences. Stay away.
I stay put.
