Playing Hurt Read online

  When I was ten or eleven our town built a couple of Little League ballparks. We had a game there when everything was finished except the outfield fence. They had laid down the gravel warning track and built the fence frame, but they hadn’t put up the plywood boards yet.

  When I hit a towering fly ball that just kept going back, the left fielder gave chase until he ran into the fence frame, and the ball sailed over his head. Home run! As I rounded the bases I looked into the dugout, hoping to witness my dad’s approval. I was pleased to see him laughing.

  But when I got to the dugout I found out why he was chuckling. “You dummy, the fence isn’t finished! You just hit a ground-rule double!”

  The umpire had signaled a home run, as he should have—the ball didn’t go through the fence, after all, but over it—but my Dad made the official scorer mark it down as a double. Instead of celebrating his son hitting the first home run at the new park, he seemed to get more pleasure sending me back to second base.

  He wasn’t afraid to dress me down in public, but more frequently his punishments were meted out in private. If he told me to do something and I hesitated or questioned his order, he would furrow his eyebrow, which created a crease across the bridge of his nose. Then he’d slowly narrow his eyes, as if sizing up his prey. I knew what was coming next, so I’d start to run, usually for the perceived safety of my room. But that wasn’t very smart because then I was trapped, so I’d grab pillows to protect myself against the blows I knew were coming.

  When I was younger he’d hit me with an open hand, usually on any part of my body that I’d failed to protect. I’d duck and dodge and try not to cry, but pulling that off was almost impossible when the guy you thought was Superman had reduced you to a squirming lump of fear. The older I got, the harder he hit me.

  It could be hard having my dad around, but it could be even harder when he wasn’t. A few years after we moved to Montreal our dad started shuttling back and forth to Ohio. He did this, he told us, to make his fortune in prefab homes. His frequent absences made it harder for us to pay the rent, keep food on the table, and explain to our friends why our dad wasn’t around. Whenever they asked, I told them, “He’s working long hours in Ohio so he can create a better life for us,” because that’s what he had told us—and I desperately wanted to believe him.

  He started out by alternating two weeks in Ohio with two weeks at home. Then it was three weeks in Ohio and just one week in Chateauguay. Before long our father had become a casual, infrequent guest in his own home. The famous threat, “Just wait ’til your father gets home,” took on an entirely different meaning when that could take weeks—and when Dad did get home, absence seemed to make his heart grow harder.

  When I was around twelve my father had returned after a few weeks away and started giving us all chores to do. I unwisely suggested that, because he wasn’t around much anymore, he no longer had any right to tell me what to do. That’s when I saw the all-too-familiar furrowed brow and squinting eyes. This time the open hand became a fist. When he started punching me, naturally I clenched my hands, as if preparing to punch him back. This only enraged him more, and he punched me ever harder. As an added humiliation, he punctuated every blow with a cutting remark.

  “Why can’t you learn to keep your mouth shut?

  “This is your own fault!

  “Why are you so dumb?”

  Long after the bumps and bruises faded, what stayed with me was a deep, unshakeable feeling of worthlessness. Despite all the beatings, I never thought my father was the problem. Instead, I concluded that I deserved them because I must have been a horrible kid.

  Bernie and I almost never talked after my father beat me, but on a few occasions, when we knew I was in for hell, we managed to team up, steal the belt hanging in the closet, and hide it from our dad. My relief was short-lived, however, because my dad would just resort to his fists.

  Our sister was probably most affected by my father beating me. Gail’s room was above mine, so when she heard the commotion begin, she’d run down the stairs, hoping her presence would be enough to get my father to stop. If it wasn’t, she’d start screaming over my father’s shoulder, urging me to shut up so maybe he’d stop. And if that failed, she’d sit at the top of the stairs with her head in her hands, sobbing.

  When Dad had finished he’d walk past her as if she wasn’t there. Then I’d follow to reassure her that I was okay.

  “But why can’t you just do what he says,” she’d ask, “and then he’ll leave you alone?”

  I’d tell her I’d try to next time or I’d say I just didn’t know how. Maybe there was just something wrong with me, I said. Even worse, I believed it.

  My mother wouldn’t intervene in my father’s punishments. When my father wasn’t around, I didn’t fear our mother the same way, so I had more freedom to do what I wanted. As a result, two distinct John Saunders began to emerge. There was the good, public John Saunders, a careful young man who did well in school and went to church. Nanny and Grandpa were very religious, and our parents raised us to love God and believe in the Bible. I grew up very devout. On our grade school debate team I argued strenuously for God’s creation of man and earth in six days, and I won.

  Then there was the private, devilish John Saunders who was willing to try just about anything for a kick. That included science experiments, but not the kind you’d expect from a ten-year-old. I wasn’t growing roots out of potatoes or looking under a microscope to watch sugar crystallize in water—I was combining everyday chemicals to concoct explosives.

  I had learned that mixing sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal powder—all available at our local drug store, where my mom took me to buy the components—produced gunpowder. With my good buddies Ralph and Robin I’d played around with the mixture for about a year, using it to fuel rockets constructed out of paper and aluminum foil. Sometimes, when I was bored, I’d amuse myself by setting off small explosions, just to see things blow up. And I discovered that if you put copper powder in gunpowder, it burned like a rainbow. Pretty neat.

  But I didn’t stop there. One day in the spring of 1966, right before Easter, I packed a plastic lemon-shaped bottle with gunpowder and took it to an open field across the street, where I showed it to Bernie.

  “It’s a grenade,” I bragged.

  Bernie was naturally curious. I started a match and lit the homemade fuse—obviously not the smartest move. In an instant, flames soared up my face. I panicked and dropped the plastic lemon. A second later it exploded upward between my legs, scorching my jeans and my thighs.

  “I’m on fire!”

  Bernie looked almost as shocked as I was. He stared at me, petrified. I ran across the street to our house and banged on the glass door. Inside I could see my mother talking on the phone with one of her friends.

  Our mom didn’t have many rules, but she was strict about one thing: my brother, sister, and I were only to enter the house through the basement so we wouldn’t track in mud. At that moment, however, with my legs on fire, obeying that rule was not my top priority.

  I kept screaming and banging on the door. She looked up from her phone conversation, mildly perturbed, and pointed downstairs. She couldn’t see what the problem was. Finally I ran down the cellar stairs to the basement, then up two flights of stairs, howling. Seeing that my hair was singed, my mother told her friend on the phone to wait a second and brushed the ashes off my head.

  “Now get back outside,” she told me, and returned to her call.

  “No—my legs!” I screamed.

  She looked down and saw the real damage and hung up the phone. She threw dishwater on me to douse the embers, which sent me into immediate shock. My eyes grew fixed, and I shook like a cold puppy. When the police arrived they tried to put me into their cruiser, but then they realized I was going to need medical help during the trip to the hospital. We had to wait an agonizing twenty minutes for an ambulance. I shook and sobbed while my mother looked on, finally grasping the seriousness of the si
tuation.

  During the ride to LaSalle General Hospital I passed in and out of consciousness. When I was awake I felt an incredible searing pain, which I later learned was the result of third-degree burns. The wound went deep into my flesh. The skin of my inner thighs looked like raw hamburger meat, and I had suffered extensive nerve damage.

  I stayed in the hospital for three weeks. The doctors gave me painkillers, but the worst part of my recovery was the daily process of taking the dressings off and putting new ones on to prevent infection. It was forty-five minutes of torture. But what I remember most from my hospital stay was that my father never visited me.

  I still idolized him, which forced me to invent increasingly elaborate stories for my buddies to explain why he wasn’t around. I could fool my friends, but lying in that hospital bed, as the days became weeks, it was getting harder to fool myself. I saw other fathers visiting their children down the hall, sometimes staying overnight in uncomfortable chairs. I could no longer ignore the contrast: my father had better things to do than drive back to Montreal to visit his oldest son in the hospital.

  We spoke on the phone exactly once, very briefly. I was afraid he’d be furious with me because I was sure to miss out on a lot of sports that spring and summer. He didn’t shout, as I expected him to. He chastised me in a finger-wagging sort of tone. “Whatya doin’, dummy?” But he never let me have it, perhaps because he felt some guilt about not coming to see me.

  When Easter Sunday arrived I was still in the hospital. My mother brought me a Cadbury Creme Egg—a real treat—and said, “It’s from your father.” I knew it was a lie, and she probably knew I knew, but we both played along.

  Lying there alone each night in my hospital bed forced me to confront proof of my biggest fear: there was something wrong with me—something that made me inherently unlovable. I spent every night crying. Not from the burns but from my dad’s indifference. I had never experienced physical pain as severe as those burns, but the emotional pain was worse.

  I did learn one important lesson from my time in the hospital: I’d better learn to look out for myself.

  Despite all this, because Dad was so passionate about coaching our teams, I still thought that down deep he loved me and that we were buddies. Bernie has told me that Dad bragged about me often. I’m sure Bernie’s not lying, but it’s very hard for me to imagine that. It just isn’t consistent with the man I knew.

  Three months after I got out of the hospital, well into the summer of 1966, my skin was slowly recovering, but my scars were still so bad that they bled and required fresh bandages each morning and night. Raw flesh remained exposed, some of which I couldn’t feel due to nerve damage. One day out of curiosity I picked up a comb and sank it into my wound. I felt nothing.

  I couldn’t run, and I certainly couldn’t play football. But when my father came back from Ohio for a few days he told me I had to play. My mother didn’t protest.

  “Dad, please,” I pleaded. “Let me take just this summer off.”

  But football was my father’s first love, and he insisted. I wasn’t ready, but I wanted to live up to his expectations. I agreed to return.

  I was our team’s lead running back, so on our first day of practice I took most of the snaps. Near the end of the scrimmage I saw my father arguing on the sidelines with his assistant coach, Mr. Delaporta. After a few minutes Dad waved me over to join them.

  When I started walking toward them my father yelled, “We don’t walk in practice, boy. RUN!” So I ran the final few yards, despite the excruciating pain in my legs.

  “What did I do wrong?” I asked.

  “Mr. Delaporta doesn’t think you’ve healed from that stupid accident. He thinks I should feel bad because you were dumb enough to play with fire and tried to blow your balls off!” He laughed. “Mr. Delaporta doesn’t think you should play this year.”

  A wave of fear swept over me. If I hinted that Mr. Delaporta might have a point, my father would feel I had shown him up in front of his friend—and I knew what that would mean after we got home. I was trapped. So I looked Mr. Delaporta in the eye and said, “I feel fine. I begged my dad to let me play.”

  “John,” Mr. Delaporta said sternly. “Look at your uniform.” I didn’t have to look down. I knew what he wanted me to see.

  “John, your legs.”

  Slowly I lowered my head to look at my white football pants. Blood had soaked through my bandages and was leaking out the bottom of my pants down my shins.

  “Bernie, he can’t play,” Mr. Delaporta insisted.

  But Dad wasn’t budging. “This is a tough kid,” my father told him. Then he turned to me. “You want to quit?”

  My legs were in agony, but I knew better. “Dad, I’ll never quit.”

  I played that entire eight-game season, including two practices a week. No matter how much I bandaged the burns under my uniform, I bled through my white pants every time. I often heard opposing coaches and parents openly question whether the kid with the blood-soaked pants should be playing.

  My father gave them all the same answer: “It’s none of your business. I make the decisions regarding my son.” Back then that was enough to end the conversation.

  But playing with open wounds prevented my skin from healing very fast or very well. By the time football season ended, I had developed huge keloids, rubbery scars that often come with badly healed burns. Mine were about three inches thick on both inner thighs, so they rubbed against each other when I walked, which made the pain worse.

  When hockey season approached, my mother took me to some specialists in Montreal. They tried a series of experimental procedures, injections, and medications to see if they could reduce the keloids. One of the treatments involved a device that resembled a power drill with a tiny needle on the end. The doctor stuck the needle into my huge scars and flipped the “ON” switch, spinning the needle to spread the medication throughout the scars. The twice-weekly procedure was excruciating. Worse, it didn’t help.

  I played hockey that winter, and my dad coached me in baseball the next spring before he returned to Ohio. But before he left he made sure I knew who was boss, one more time.

  My burns still hadn’t fully healed, but I was playing well, and our team led the league. I pitched and played third base. Bernie was a great shortstop. One of our best friends, Rick, played first and was a star left-handed pitcher who could throw a wicked curve ball, very rare at that age.

  In the championship game, with two innings to go, our team was cruising along with a 4–0 lead. I was pitching, and feeling a little cocky, I started to joke around on the mound. I struck out two but then grooved one that a big kid knocked over the fence: 4–1.

  In the seventh and final inning the first batter knocked a ground ball to my brother, who tossed him out. Two outs away from the championship. I struck out the next batter, but the catcher missed the ball and the batter stole first. We still had a 4–1 lead, though, so the next batter caught us by surprise when he bunted. We couldn’t get anyone out on the play, so now we had runners on first and second, with only one out, and the tying run at the plate.

  Against the next batter I threw a breaking ball off the fists, just where I wanted it. He backed up and smashed it deep into center—an impressive piece of hitting for a sixth-grader.

  If it was gone, they’d have tied the game, but it stayed in the park and our center fielder made a great catch. Both runners tagged up and advanced a base. Now they had runners on second and third, with two out. A single, and our lead would be cut to one.

  But none of this stopped me from clowning around on the mound. My friends played along, but not Bernie. If he’d learned nothing else from me, it was when to keep his mouth shut and avoid our dad’s wrath.

  I wasn’t worried when I walked the bases loaded, even though that brought the winning run up to the plate. Then my father walked to the mound.

  “Stop acting like a stupid idiot,” he told me.

  I just stared at him and said, �
��I can handle this.”

  From that exchange alone I knew I’d be in trouble when we got home, but I remained defiant.

  The next batter crushed a fastball into the left-center field gap, far out of reach. That brought in the runner from third base, who jogged home to make it 4–2, and the runner from second base, which cut our lead to 4–3. While those two crossed the plate the runner on first base ran to third base and the batter made it to second. He was now the winning run, and a single would probably bring him home. Our opponents were going crazy, jumping around in the dugout, thinking they were about to take the title.

  Again, my father came to the mound. “See what acting like a jackass has accomplished?”

  I didn’t buckle because there was nothing he could do to me on the mound. I also knew my buddy Rick, our best pitcher, had already pitched the day before, and the rest of our pitching staff was not very good, so Dad had little choice but to keep me in.

  “Wait and see,” I told him, with more brass than brains. “I’ll strike this guy out.”

  He walked back to the dugout, fuming.

  First pitch, on the inside corner: called strike.

  Second pitch: a swing and a miss. Strike two.

  We were one strike away from winning the championship—or one single away from losing it.

  Before the next pitch Rick and my brother visited me on the mound. Rick and I started joking around, acting like the game was already over—but not Bernie. My father glowered at me from the dugout, just like I knew he would, then started walking toward the mound to chew me out again. I thought he might even pull me from the game, out of spite.

  But before he could cross the baseline onto the field, the runner on third base took off for home plate. I was so shocked that I shot-putted the ball to the catcher. The runner beat my throw easily to tie the game.

  Or he would have, if my father hadn’t called a time-out when he’d left the dugout. The umpire had the guts to make the right call, which sent the runner back to third base.