Up in Ontario

Football Player

It gets dark so early, now that the clocks have fallen back to standard time. Waiting on the sidewalk tonight, feeling the bite of fall in the wind, watching the witches and superheros pass buy, I caught the bus home. Took my seat in the near emptiness and felt the weekend arrive. We rolled through two stops and a few people got on. A young girl in the seat opposite mine wore a hooded sweatshirt with 'Ambiguous' printed across the front, and she held a hardhat like the kind you find worn on construction sites between her feet.

At each stop we waited a few minutes, the driver keeping us on time in the light traffic. At Robson Street the front door opened and a man stumbled on and leaned on the toll box. He had a fine mane of white hair, a white moustache, a tailored suit and coordinated raincoast and shiny briefcase. He was so drunk he could hardly stand. "How comes there's so many stairs?" he asked the driver as he fished in his pocket for change.

The drunk man with the white hair sat sideways two rows in front of me. He did not sit facing forward, but rather, leaned against the window and faced the rest of the bus. I watched the lights of the retail shops pass by. The drunk man was watching me and waiting for any opportunity to start a conversation. Ten second passed, then another ten, and the drunk man swung his fine head of white hair away from me and towards the girl with the hard hat. "You being safe with that?" he asked her and flicked his finger at the hat. She nodded and he was encouraged. He asked her if the hard hat was hers and winked. He told her he used to wear one, underground, after he retired from being a pro athlete and went to work in Revelstoke building the Mica Dam. "When I retired from being an athlete," he repeated and stared at her until she asked him what sport he had played. "Football," he said. "Then I changed the bits on the drills underground."

As soon as I heard the drunk man say that he had been a professional athlete I knew he had been a football player. The meaty, twisted fingers and the heavy, shaggy head on top of the thick neck; I had seen it before in my own football coaches. His body still held some of the strength that had punished opponents on the offensive or defensive line. He still held the cocksure aggressiveness trained into players through drills and camps and practices, a survival instinct for the violence of the game. He still knew he could lick anyone he needed to lick.

The football player rode the bus for three stops, and for the entire time it felt as if all the rest of the passengers held their collective breath. When he stood to get off at Davie Street at the same moment as the bus braked, time seemed to hold still: would he fall?

The football player stumbled and caught himself on the toll box and lifted his briefcase in a wave to the girl with the hard hat. "Jesus, are those steps new?" he said as he stepped down to the curb and left us in silence, save the quiet rumble of the diesel engine. Everyone took a deep breath and looked around at each other in a sheepish way. Sharing the unusual experience both united us and embarassed us. A mixed feeling of disapproval and charity prevailed for the retired football player.

Seeing the football player walk away from the bus and into the night brought to mind an article I had read earlier today about how Halloween has endured through the ages, as it has been modified from a pagan ritual to a campy masquerade to a night of fantasy projections. The writer made the case that the most important ongoing theme of Halloween was community discovery. You head out into your neighbourhood dressed up and everyone wants to see each other and remove the masks and say, "Who is that?"

I remember one Halloween when I would have been around 8, I dressed up as a football player. I idolized football players at the time and my mom borrowed my cousin Grant's football helmet, a bright green shell with a white trojan and white facemask, all of which seemed impossibly heavy to me. I put it on my head and my brother grabbed the facemask and turned the helmet all the way around on my head without twisting my neck. He left it backwards on my head and I ran into the doorframe trying to grab him. That night, I wore the helmet to visit the first few houses and then decided that it had to go. It was too heavy and slowing me down. I ran back home with it bouncing on my head and I left it on the doorstep. When we came home, the helmet had disappeared. I felt panicked. I knew the helmet had been lent to me and I knew that I had said I wanted to wear it. A football player always wore a helmet. I didn't know what to do; my 8 year-old mind tried to remember if I had really brought it back home or left it out somewhere. Fortunately for me, my mom had found it on the front steps and stashed it away inside. But for a terrible moment I thought I had lost the helmet and I would never be able to become a football player because you couldn't play without a helmet.

Who is behind your mask?