Perdition: Thy name is Hernia. Part Four

I was feeling confident about surgery the following day and decided to go back to the third floor Shufflers lounge and watch the Toronto Maple Leafs face-off against the exciting 2012 edition of the Calgary Flames. There are two observations to be made about the TV culture in a Hernia Hospital. The first is that I would not want to be a female patient within the confines of a hospital that caters to Hernia repair exclusively. The reasoning is simple, men suffer from a much greater instance of Hernias (my source is observation, please refer to a medical journal, and/or I will insert proof later), I would reckon that the ratio is 30 men to 2 women. This makes for female consternation with regards to TV watching, to the scent of the place, to the manners at the dinner table, to the overall functionality of the place: it caters to men. The TV problem really takes precedence over all other facets of male-dominance in the hospital. The only thing on was sports, it was absolutely the only thing that was apportioned onto the luxurious 65 inch digital High definition screen. I must confess that I am not a die hard sports fan, I like Hockey, I like skiing, some soccer, figure skating (Yes I do), proper boxing, and most individual sports. But not religiously, not in the manner that others do. I don’t analyze the standings, I don’t know immediately who was traded where, I don’t know about the assault charges or the drug addictions (although that would be interesting), I thought March Madness had to do with exams. So, it was with bemusement that I took in the real face, the true essence of the sports fan, but more than that, I witnessed the Leafs fan in action.

Back to that later, firstly though, the women who ventured into the TV area of the lounge usually lasted for, well, 35 seconds if they did not have the usual electronic appendage in the form of blackberry or Ipad. She walks in, gives the look around, no one acknowledges her presence, she asks, “So, whats on?”, ”…” , “uh, OK, well, hmm, just like at home eh? I don’t have the remote! (Nervous Laughter)”, “…, yeah, you know how it is with men (Confident laughter of men overcompensating/ trying to be apart of the ‘brotherhood’ of powerless fools)”, “ah, well (sigh, she resigns herself to her personal glowing screen and/or moves into the table and chair section)”. I say nothing, I acknowledge nothing, I look around quickly, I see failure and fraudulent bonhomie, I see men with no power, I see women longing for a strange likeness, something to validate their presence in this enclave of stench and corroded dreams. The husbands of the women eventually come, with their sons in their hockey coats, and the husbands, the visiting husbands, now take their place in the ring of hockey watching, in the ring of silence, the stubborn, bitter silence, that the wife never bought into, that this hapless family, dad driving the forklift between midnight and eight, thinking and planning for his sons eventual success in making it to the ‘show’, sometimes fuming at the son “why didn’t he take that pass right…jeez. I flooded the bloody backyard and I ran plays for five hours…and I work ten hours a day, all for Todd and Blake to screw up?! They won’t make it past ‘C’, c’mon!” All the while the wife comes home after taking calls at the insurance company, taking the “Yogurt Challenge” or some other insipid grasp at meaningless and vapid self-improvement…watching her life vanish before her eyes, the moment never even passed, it was never there. And so, she sits now, at the card table in the Hernia Hospital, playing solitaire, and staring out the window while her husband, not a patient, stews in front of the Leafs.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a hockey team in the National Hockey League. Their history, to a certain extent, is illustrious, but moreover, the team has been unlucky. Unlucky in management, unlucky in outcome, unlucky in coaching, unlucky in mentality, and most importantly, due to, or the reverse of these former facets of unluckiness…the team is unlucky in their fan base. Yes. I grew up on the West Island of Montreal, a veritable enclave of middle-class meritocracy and a joyful mix of Francophone, Anglophone and smatterings of Allophone 15 minutes west of downtown. I knew one Leafs fan growing up, a great friend and a hot tempered man of Irish extraction now living in Chicago, and I am not certain he remains a Leafs fan now. But really, the majority, and I mean 90%+ of my contemporaries were Habs fans..(another beast that has recently begun to turn ugly and bitter). Some friends, those who liked to turn the screws of the Habs fans..were Nordiques or Bruins fans…both were considered maladjusted contrarians and welcomed with open hearts into our circle of friends. Anyway, the point is that I knew very little of Ontario culture, and the culture of “Leafs Nation”. I have lived in Ontario in a more or less permanent fashion since the fall of 2003 and have, for the most part, tolerated the experience with fairly moderate enjoyment (I believe this is the default setting for living here).  I was friends with Art-Types and Music Geeks, and my best friend from university, like me, is a current affairs/ Personal Computer game nut and we watched sports at no time. Therefore, my experiences with the Leafs fan began only in earnest when I moved, with my girlfriend at the time, to Guelph, the town in which she grew-up.

But, really, only at the Hernia Hospital did I witness the Leafs fan in his true habitat, in his true essence. Diane Fossey would have swooned at the prospect of the experience. The game was part-way through as I lumbered gingerly onto a corduroy easy-chair and began to soak up the madness. “Ah”, I thought to myself, “excellent chairs, really plush, but not too soft, not much give, perfect really” and suddenly a man began to have, or so I thought, a terrible fit of Tourette’s: “For F__K’s Sakes..do it right you f---ken f_g_ot! Godamned fkin idiot, whadda piece of s—t…nice one Burke, great fkin job there, ya fkin f-g!!”…Whoa, what was that? A smallish red-faced man, sporting the accent of the eastern reaches of Ontario, I would say he worked in a warehouse between Brockville and Cornwall, was spouting these incredibly ridiculous and abhorrently offensive epithets at the passive and indifferent television. Then I realized, in my mirth regarding my chair, that the Flames had scored, I believe Cammalleri provided the play or set-up, and the leafs were down a goal, or something like that. He was favouring his groin, this crazed maniac, but the grimace on his visage was beyond mere pain from surgery, no, this was Twenty Year Hate, Twenty Year Bitterness….he could not have been older than me, that is to say, 31…and I would say he was happy for the first ten years of his life . . . Until that one fateful day when his grandfather and he went to the Maple Leaf Gardens for a night that would change everything, it was the winter of 1991 and the Leafs beat the North Stars 6-1. The young chap from between Brockville and Cornwall became, therefore, essentially possessed, in the demonic sense, by the demon ‘Leafs Fan’. They came close in those years, to, you know, Winning It All, as they say. But they never did, and for the next Twenty Years, picture the mug-shot composites that the police use in Oklahoma regarding the downward spiral of meth-use. The boy’s face began to harden into a grimace of absolute sour-bitterness. The Leafs fan, not the casual fair-weather fan who trades stocks in the day and rents expensive women from the Belorussian consulate at night in Toronto. No, the real fan is the guy who works a crap job for 80 hours a week with no pension, a Sour Bastard without equal. Other true blues began to start weighing in with equally incisive commentary and soon I was surrounded by a maelstrom of seething men, screaming, grunting, gesticulating, bashing, and abruptly leaving from the scene. I tried to hide my amusement and horror and I think I succeeded, my chair was in a darkened corner of the room, and besides, I was still one of the new guys, and my opinions would count for nothing in any event. However, the dark cloud of insight and realization began to pour into my mind, as it always does, and I thought as I quickly looked over at the 500 piece puzzle box with frayed corners and the ‘bookshelf’ with battered condensed reader’s digest novellas. I flashed back to the angry, bitter, and radically unhappy hockey watchers…and the insight came in strong and true: This is a Madhouse. I was to ascend out of my own chair, I was the last one in the lounge, or at least the TV area, and walked back to my room. Preparing for sleep before the Big Day, or as some of my follow patients would probably call it, Game Day.