I Am Nobody. Greg Gilhooly

ever just leave me alone. He was always on me. Sunday dinners were the worst. My sister, Dawn, later told me that she feared them, dreaded them, for she knew that whatever I said about anything, my dad would challenge me, and not in a productive way to encourage critical thinking, but in a way that belittled me, that tried to tear me down, that was designed to make me feel inferior to him. “You’re nothing. You’re not as smart as you think you are. Oh, come on, that’s stupid, you’re stupid. You’re a loser. What, you think you’re better than me? You think you deserve more than I have? You’ll never make it! You’ll never succeed! You’re nothing!”

      My sister would cry. My brother would be thankful it wasn’t him.

      It hurt. It hurt so much, until eventually it didn’t anymore. And then it became a game with me to provoke him, to get him whipped up into a frenzy, for me to sit there and be belittled. I just didn’t care anymore. And my inner voice would kick in:

       Go ahead. Yell at me all you want. I don’t care. I don’t care about you. I don’t care about anything anymore. You’ve told me I’m stupid, I’m a loser, I’m never going to succeed. What more could you possibly tell me?

       But you think I’m a loser? I’ll show you.

      Looking back on things, that all makes sense. He had never been able to achieve all that he wanted in life. He saw me, his eldest child, achieving everything that at one time had been his to obtain. He had dropped out of school after Grade Eight, but knew in his heart that he was better than that, that he was smarter than that, but that he was trapped in a situation he couldn’t escape. He was stuck having to do whatever he could to raise a family, and here I was about to get all of the benefits of his miserable hard work. But at the time I didn’t have any perspective. All I could see was his anger toward me.

      I fought back. I said things I never should have said.

      “I’m a loser? You’re a loser! Look at you! How could I ever be proud of you?”

      At some level I knew what he was going through, what he was dealing with, but as much as I tried to focus on the good and love him, it didn’t make any difference. The tragedy of life is that you can’t see then what you can see now. I know now that he was envious of me, but I couldn’t see that back then. All I could see was the anger and his inability to show me any approval for what I was doing, not resentment, jealousy, or a fear that maybe his first born son, a son he loved and admired so much, saw him as looking small and inadequate.

      And yet, unlike my reaction to my mom, a part of me always knew that he was indeed proud of me. I would, every once in a while, hear from others the things that he was saying about me to them. But he was too stubborn to ever say these things directly to me and I was too stubborn to ever force the issue with him. So, while he played the tough guy with me, I think I knew that deep down he was proud of me, even in the face of his relentless verbal assaults. Sure, there was his demeaning mantra of “book smart, worldly stupid,” his outright dismissal of anything I ever said or wanted to try to achieve, and his saying I wasn’t nearly good enough for those types of things. Still, I think he was proud of me.

      In the midst of this trainwreck at home, I was now moving on to high school alone because the guys I played hockey with, as well as my best friend, Carl Torbiak, all remained in junior high in the proper grade for their age. I became increasingly isolated, a geek living in a jock’s world and a jock living in a geek’s world, now without my best friend.

      Please don’t get me wrong. My life at home and at school was not even close to the worst imaginable, and I did deal with things in my own way. I had friends, just no close friends. I know that many have much worse family situations than I did. I wasn’t some lost soul nobody loved or appreciated. But I was a boy with vulnerabilities.

      Being an outward success at external things didn’t fulfill my emotional needs. Already isolated within my family, seemingly unloved and unappreciated by my parents, and now displaced at school, I wanted more of a connection with the world around me. And the thing is, when you want something so badly and aren’t getting it, it makes you vulnerable to somebody who comes along and offers you understanding and an acceptance of who you are and what you want out of life.

      I may have pretended otherwise, but when I was a young, awkward, giant misfit of a kid I had never wanted to be special or different. Being successful didn’t make up for being different and alone. I craved the acceptance that I wasn’t getting at home, the normalcy that I wasn’t getting at school, and the understanding that I wasn’t getting from friends outside of hockey.

      Still, no matter how tough things may have been for me on the inside, I always had hockey, my safe place, the place I belonged.

      That is who I was when I met Graham James.

      TWO

       THE PREDATOR

      IN THE 1970S, everyone in the Winnipeg hockey community knew Graham James. He was an innovative minor hockey coach focusing on talent and speed, not size and brute force. He produced winning age-group (under sixteen) hockey teams while serving as a successful scout for major junior hockey teams in the Western Hockey League, one rung below the NHL. And he was based in St. James, the western part of Winnipeg, where I grew up.

      Graham seemed to live and breathe hockey.

      You might find it odd that I refer to the man who abused me as “Graham.” Yet that is how I see him, how I think of him to this day. He is, was, and always will be “Graham.” I have tried to pretend otherwise, and I have been encouraged to try to distance myself from him by referring to him as “Mr. James,” “the accused,” or “the defendant.” But to me, he is and always will be “Graham,” and so “Graham” he is.

      I had only seen Graham from afar, but I, like the rest of the hockey community, saw him as somebody of importance. He was a winning coach, a scout, an innovator, a hockey intellectual working among less-educated and less worldly coaches. His demeanor at the rinks was somewhat aloof, and he always seemed to be deep in thought, analyzing and processing everything going on around him. He had an aura about him, and he was somebody you wanted to impress. And then suddenly you would see him laughing with a group of coaches or players, and in an instant he went from unapproachable Hockey God to regular guy. Everybody either knew or knew of Graham, and it seemed as if everybody wanted to impress him.

      Impress is an interesting word to use, because Graham himself was anything but impressive. He was short and pudgy, with a boyish round face and unkempt curly hair. He had a sad face and was poorly groomed, and his presentation could best be described as “disheveled.” Yet because he was someone of importance in the hockey community, none of this seemed to register. He was somebody to impress.

      It was Graham’s job to know about every hockey player who might be of potential interest to a junior hockey team. It was Graham’s job to get to know young boys. He was coaching the St. James Midget (sixteen-year-olds) AAA Canadians, a team from my area composed of boys two years older than those on the Bantam team I was playing for. We were both involved in hockey at the highest level in Winnipeg, and Graham most definitely knew who I was.

      I finally got to meet Graham in January 1979, when my St. James Bantam Canadians traveled to Minneapolis for the North American Midwest Regional AAA Silver Stick Championships. Although Graham was coaching the St. James Midget Canadians, something that itself would have involved a massive time commitment, he somehow found time that weekend to help a friend of his, Mike Tishler, the coach of our arch rivals, the St. Boniface–St. Vital Saints.

      In January 1979, people saw only good in Graham. They looked fondly upon him for giving even more of his time to the game of hockey by helping coach another team at that Silver Stick tournament in Minnesota, a team he was not directly involved with. The tournament was an opportunity for him to scout the best players in our age group. And there may even be people who to this day believe that Graham’s motive was solely to help coach that team and give his time freely to the game