Flirt: The Interviews Read Free Page B

equipment adds inches.
    â€”You were handsome, regardless. My father was missing, suffering – we learned later – from amnesia in a hotel room on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo. Occasionally, our phone would ring and he’d either be on the other end, talking like nothing was wrong – “I’ll be home after work” – or he’d groan into the phone and scare me. The cops put a tracer on our phone, but I don’t remember the premise, the rules. The night I was in hospital with my kneecap, he phoned my mother. She told him she couldn’t do this bullshit (my word, not hers), that I had broken my leg and she’d had enough. The hospital staff was to watch for him; my sister somehow got my mother’s cream-coloured Austin running and sneaked into the kids’ ward with daffodils and a chocolate milkshake from White
Spot car service, ten at night. The next day I was home. Soon, so was my father, sick and tired of waking up sick and tired, worried for my knee. The start of that 1969-70 season.
    Five years later, the little apartment on the beach down the 82 stairs? I moved out in four months and that kneecap could not stay put.
    â€”A flight of stairs is torture. Too much weight set on that disfigured joint. Get me an elevator, or I don’t go.
    â€”Before I fell, I wished for a broken leg. I’m telling you, but I haven’t told anyone else. I wished for something interesting to happen, that would make people care about me in a serious way. I guess twelve years old wants attention and I wasn’t getting my allocation.
    â€”Lucky I never had daughters.
    â€”Back to 1974: sister gone in 1971, the year the Canadiens won, Béliveau’s last game. I quit university in December 1974 and dumped the boy from Sociology who resembled Sanderson and, no muscles to hold it in place, my kneecap kept slipping and sliding and locking. I had surgery the next September.
    â€”Not another cast?
    â€”Standard then. Sub-luxing patella. You know the details. The night before surgery, a cute intern fondled my knee, front and back, and asked if I’d taken ballet as a child. He said my kneecaps sat up off the tracks like someone who’d pressed her legs too far back.
    â€”I think you have nice legs, especially in little boots like those, but I wouldn’t say ballerina. Swimmer, maybe.
    â€”That’s nice for you to say. I’d played volleyball in high school, and I dove for balls, tried to out-crash my best friend. My father suggested it was time to quit the game when my shoulders and neck began to resemble Bobby Hull’s.
    â€”Fathers don’t talk like that now.
    â€”There’s a theory, you know, about competitive sports and its reflection of a phallocentric culture, of orthodox masculinity.
    â€”Tell me some of it, but stop if I say so.
    â€”It’s about self versus other.
    â€”I follow.

    â€”Competitive sport demands that the masculine colonizing urge conquer the space of an “other” while protectively enclosing the space of the self. Isn’t that the definition of an offensive defenceman? Heading across the red line but still ready to hold your own blue line? Or sexual desire coupled with the need to be as manly as possible.
    â€”Okay, but if that’s your metaphor, it seems obvious.
    â€”All right, make it sexual. The player whose desire to win produces the most invasive phallus, called offensive strategy, coupled with the tightest asshole, defensive strategy, wins the game.
    â€”Stop.
    â€”Nietzsche called it a festival of cruelty. Look at the Greeks!
    â€”Stop, I said.
    â€”When my father saw my muscles building, the risk to him was that I would join – visually and sexually – the masculine realm of sports. But there’s only one way for women to be both phallus and asshole.
    â€”Be lesbians?
    â€”According to this model, yes.
    â€”That would be hard on a man like your father.
    â€”He