Knock Me for a Loop: Post 5

Row 4: With Friends Like These…

(Posts for the foreseeable future may be a bit brief and slapdash. Proofreading? Revision? What are those!? Sincere apologies—it’s been a heck of a few months and the Commissioner is digging her way out of them.)

The text chooses not to answer the All Important Question of whether or not Grace went to the hospital to see Zack, instead jumping to one month later. Zack is at home, using a wheelchair, and moping. He considers his giant television, which he bought in order to cover up a hole left by Grace’s whirlwind of destruction* and the fact that he misses his dog (whose name was apparently originally Bruiser.)

*Apparently, the hole in the wall was left by Grace throwing a hockey trophy through it.

He’d come home to find the ass end hanging in the air like the minuscule hockey player had gotten stuck during some botched escape attempt (51).

I include this quote as an example of the author just trying too damn hard. Because I read that and assume that it’s supposed to be funny, but all I can think about is how a trophy is highly unlikely to stick that way into a wall, and even if it did, it’s not the hockey player’s ass that you’d really notice since the rest of the trophy, which is much larger, would have to be hanging down below it. It just makes no sense.

Whatever. So, in the past month, Zack has been knitting, but now when there’s a knock at the door he quickly shoves his current project (blankets for the local VA hospital) between the couch cushions because “[k]nitting was a private hobby” (52).

If the media found out, it would be a public relations nightmare. His fellow Rockets would rib him endlessly, call him a pussy, a pansy, a eunuch, and worse. His fans would probably do the same, as well as losing respect for him and going so far as booing him when he skated onto the ice (52).

Remember how in Her Man Advantage Axel (the hero) was so afraid people might find out about his background as a member of a Helsinki biker gang and also fear it would lose him endorsements and such? And my point was that that’s so incredibly spinnable—look where this athlete came from, isn’t it amazing? I kind of feel like this is the polar opposite (knitting instead of biker gang-ing) but with the same general likely outcome, which is to say generally positive in the media. It’d be a one-day fluff piece during a slow news week for his team and maybe end up as a piece of trivia on the jumbotron during a game. (Like when Paul Bissonnette had his Lulumonunderwear stolen from the practice rink’s locker room.)

I mean, I can’t speak for other hockey players and how they might call Zack “a eunuch, and worse” (although honestly I don’t think ‘eunuch’ is the first, or even third, insult that comes to most people’s minds these days) because I suppose they might… but given how much time is spent talking about the tight knit spirit necessary in the locker room, I don’t think it’s necessarily a given.

Plus, knitting is having a resurgence, and while it is absolutely still female dominated, there are well-known male knitters, including Russell Crowe.

AND there’s even precedent. Goalie Jacques Plante (known as the first goalie to wear a face mask) apparently would knit all sorts of things, including his owntoques to wear under his helmet.

And while I don’t know if any current NHLers who knit, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some.

(Actually, what came to mind was Zenon Konopka and his pet rabbit, Hoppy, for whom he has jerseys made for each team that Konopka plays on. Do you think he gets called a eunuch because he has an effeminate seeming pet?) 

Would YOU call this man a eunuch?

In the time it takes for whoever is at the door to get to his living room, Zack thinks about the game in which he got injured. I’ll spare you the details—partly because I’m writing this at 2am—but he starts by thinking it was his fault because he’d been distracted in the six months since Grace left him and then three paragraphs later he thinks about how amazing he’d been playing that game, “blocking shot after shot” until “something had just gone … wrong” (53 ellipsis original.) While the text doesn’t talk about memory loss as a symptom of his concussion (which he has and which gives him headaches, even now a month on, which is definitely worrisome), I’d say that this textual suggestion (presumably unintentional by the author) of memory loss worries me… Okay, not really. Because fictional characters.

Then he thinks about his other secret hobby (still in the time it takes for his guests to get from front door to living room), which is watching soap operas. (One of said soap operas is Guiding Light, which was cancelled, according to Wikipedia, in 2009. So apparently Zack is also time traveling?)

Gage and Dylan finally get to the living room and their first question is to ask “Don’t you ever get out of this damn thing?” about the wheelchair, which seems rather insensitive since Zack still has a cast on his leg.

The friends are only there to berate Zack for sulking and for not going to physical therapy. Zack has blown off all of his appointments, in part because there were “no guarantees that he’d ever play hockey again” (56). That seems pretty reasonable. I mean, yeah, obviously Zack should be going to PT but it’s understandable how a pro athlete (or really anyone, but especially an athlete) might fall into despair and depression after a concussion and the news that he might never play again. But Gage and Dylan think that the answer is to tell him that they aren’t going to be his friends anymore until he starts to shape up. Sometimes you have to cut ties with someone who has depression for your own mental and emotional well-being, but these guys are totally full of BS if they think that doing so will actually help Zack.

And this isn’t some hinting around from these characters—it’s full on ultimatum.

“That’s it,” Gage bit out, pushing to his feet. “I’m done with this shit. Sit there and mope. Feel sorry for yourself. Crawl into a hole and hide from life. Whatever” (57).

And then a bit later, after Gage has actually “stomped off”, Dylan agrees.

“And I think Gage may be right—until you get your head on straight, figure out whether you want your life back or you want to sit here feeling sorry for yourself… I don’t think we can come around anymore. You really are on your own” (58).

Clearly Gage and Dylan are not exactly the stick-by-you thick-and-thin help-a-friend-when-he’s-down types.  What jerks, frankly.

In addition, why are Gage and Dylan the only ones coming by? Dylan is a reporter and Gage is… I have no idea (if I knew, I’ve already forgotten.) Where are the teammates? For that matter, wouldn’t you think that the NHL would have people coming by to check on Zack? People to badger him into going to his doctor and physical therapy appointments because I would think that would be, essentially, part of his damned contract? That’s just a guess on my part… and if I were writing a novel about hockey players, particularly one wherein a vast portion of the plot depended on the recovery route of a main character, I’d do some freakin’ research. 

(NOTE: I'm not ignoring comments, I promise. I'm just ... in a weird place and having gotten responding to them yet. But I LIVE for comments, so don't let this stop you from making them. Now, Blogger is apparently keeping people from commenting, which suuuuuucks, but I appreciate when you get them through.) 

Her Man Advantage: Post 12

Chapter 8: The Credulity, it is Strained

Hey, remember how I went kind of overboard about the blood that must be on Chelsea’s hand when Vincent kissed it? Well, that was still all I could think about when the next chapter opens on Chelsea and Vincent’s date. They’re having dinner out, just the two of them, and for most of the scene the text continuously informs on how this is so unusual for Chelsea as well as providing more back story amongst the internal monologuing. We also learn more about Vincent’s upbringing—stories like how he had to spend the night before his high school hockey playoffs chasing a cow (since he lived on a farm, not, like, for the hell of it.)

But through all the backstory and the chatting, Chelsea keeps thinking about the palm of her hand, to the point where “sensation…still lingered there” (76). So not only was her hand bloody but Vincent’s lips gave her an allergic reaction? Kidding, kidding. The tingly hand kiss comes up again on the next page, when Vincent reveals he’s trying to prove himself to her, and again three pages later when he takes her hand “his thumb reaching around to the underside of her palm and stroking her there, right where he’d kissed her earlier” (80). On one hand (ha, see what I did there?) this slow building relationship is a nice counterpoint to the speed of the main story. On the other hand, I just wish Chelsea had wiped the blood off before Vincent had kissed her.

I’m enjoying reading this novel, I must say, but I can’t help but feel that the author put a bunch of ideas into a blender and picked a few for each character, no matter how wildly improbable. I mean, the internal logic works, mostly.

• ·         Jennifer’s sister gets horribly bullied via social media so she wants to create a documentary exposing social media bullying’s dangers but is told she must create a commercially viable hockey documentary first in order to get funding.

• ·         Axel’s stepfather takes him to a Finnish motorcycle club as a child and he gets suckered into running messages for said group until he joins a hockey team and meets an American billionaire’s son who knocks his tooth out in a fight and whose parents are horrified at Axel’s lack of caring parents and therefore adopt him and send him to Boston College after which he gets drafted to the NHL and now Jennifer’s hockey documentary is likely to make dangerous waves when the old gang sees it

• ·         Chelsea’s hippie mother made her way by living in a tent and letting men take care of her, which she repaid via sex, giving Chelsea many hang-ups about relationships and accepting anyone’s help. When she runs away she spends years on the streets but eventually manages to get a job in a department store and become an enormous hockey fan, so much so that since she’s already at the rink constantly, she’s given a job in the rink “gift shop”. She’s also working on her BSc online so she can eventually open her own women’s shelter.

Let’s… let’s talk about that last paragraph since I’ve just presented information that was revealed during the date as opposed to earlier. Put aside the fact that I’ve never seen a rink call their store a “gift shop” (it’s usually a Team Store or Team Shop). Set aside the fact that personally I think an online degree is of dubious value in almost all cases, and how the heck is Chelsea going to do necessary clinical work via the internet.

No, my question is far more fundamental. How in the world did Chelsea afford season tickets to an NHL team on a department store salesperson salary? Don’t get me wrong—season tickets in the upper levels of less popular teams’ arenas aren’t too expensive, relatively speaking. Philadelphia is not a less-expensive market, however. The very cheapest seats for Philadelphia (Flyers, not Phantoms) in the 2014-15 season, for example, would be the very highest seats in the mezzanine, which work out to $1848, or $42/seat. Over the course of a 9 month payment plan, I’m sure Chelsea could have swung that. However there’s still two problems with that. First, even if she went to every practice, she really wouldn’t be able to catch anyone’s attention (enough to be given the team store job, for example) from the seats furthest from the ice. If she wants seats at the ice, which to my mind would be practically necessary in order for her to get noticed, then the price is something closer to $9240 or $210 per ticket. Don’t get me wrong—there are ways to get noticed even if you can’t afford seats on the glass, but they’re usually negative attention (I could tell you stories I’ve heard and seen, but I’m polite-ish so I shan’t) and usually requires that the person be seeking said attention, which would be entirely out of character for Chelsea as she’s been written.

The second problem with this scenario is that she also goes to all the away games within driving distance—that’s going to cost gas money and ticket prices, to start with. And then there’s the fact that it would require time off from work, significant time some weeks. Granted, the Eastern Conference teams are closer together, meaning less drive time, but that also means that there are more teams within a doable drive, which means more games that Chelsea is out of town. Even if her job (at the department store) gave her that kind of flexibility, it would eat into her paycheck significantly.

The best way I can see this working is if her apartment is very close to the department store, the arena, and the practice arena and that despite the locale it’s very cheap. Then she could get the cheapest season tickets and get herself noticed by being at the practices instead of the games. But we know from the previous game that Vincent looks for her in the stands every night—which would be impossible from the upper level seats—and that she’s definitely on the lower level at the Montreal away game.

Once Chelsea has the team store job (I refuse to call it gift shop), it’s conceivable that she’d get a deep discount on tickets, so that could explain the home games. But that wouldn’t solve the cost of the away games, and a town like Montreal? A single ticket in the lower level is going ot be exorbitant.

Of course, the easiest handwave is that this isn’t the real world, it’s an imaginary NHL where tickets are cheap, Philly’s team is struggling to get butts in seats, and department stores pay a comfortable wage.

But even that can’t explain away the coincidence that Vincent just happened to take the same online business development class as Chelsea because he wants to get his MBA (after majoring in Math at Michigan State), which he reveals during the date.

I apologize if your credulity has already stretched to its breaking point.