Tripping the Light Fantastic (Cont'nd)

I chuckle thinking about the lion waiting for him at the watering hole after the game.

The puck takes about six weeks to drop from the fat Zebra’s hoof to the ice. I discover I don’t have to move my legs to skate. I float over the ice like an angel on a wave of feathers. Beevo is winning the face-off now, and the puck shuffles back to me. It takes its sweet time. It realizes time is sweet. I stop it with my stick, which bends and waves in my hands. An Andover superstar rushes headlong at me, snarling like an overbred hound from hell, but moving in slow motion. I sidestep him with the greatest of ease. I have to stop myself from laughing it’s so much fun. My bones are almost-congealed jello, my skin tingles with the fire of Godlove, and my third eye is wide open. I see Harry the Hoagy streaking with trails like a comet up-ice and I can see the line the puck will travel to get to him before I even make the pass. So I flick my stick and the puck goes on that exact line, like a geometry equation only I can see. As if Harry the Hoagy and I are connected by a Higher Power. The puck nestles gently on The Hoagy’s stick. He cuts between the two Andover behemoth superstar defensemen and suddenly he’s 1-on-1 with the master of the universe goalie, face to mask, stoned off of his nut. Harry the Hoagy starts to go right, the goalie bites, Harry changes his mind, slides the puck onto his backhand and eases it into the gaping mouth of the goal like Casanova scoring with the Queen of France.

We stop. The crowd is all stunned silence. The Andover superstars flabbergast. Then it dawns on us. We scored a goal. We’re ahead for the first time the whole year. We free-form to Harry the Hoagy and do a group hug interpretive dance celebration, Fosse meets Bullwinkle. The fat Zebra has to come get us to re-start the game. We’re too busy celebrating. We’ve never celebrated being ahead in a game before, and we have no idea how it’s done, or when it’s supposed to be over.

The whole game is like that. Lurch hits a guy so hard he airlifts him up off the ice and knocks out his whole family. Rat is a whirling dervish, breaking up plays, leading rushes, poke-checking guys who aren’t even there. Fat Phil is a man possessed, moving like one of those graceful hippo ballet dancers in tutus from “Fantasia”. And Joe Starfucker, well, Joe plays the game of his life. Stick saves, pad saves, glove saves. At one point he makes a save, and his glove flies off. The puck rebounds right back to an Andover superstar, and he fires again. Joe Starfucker reaches out and catches that puck with his bare hand. This time even the Andover superstar crowd has to give him a big ovation. They don’t want to, you can tell. They have to. He holds the puck over his head, he’s showing it the Great Puck Spirit, then bows deeply, as if he’s a Japanese kabuki actor.

Late in the game, the Andover superstars manage to sneak one by Joe Starfucker, after they roughed him up in the crease, which as anyone who’s ever been roughed up in a crease knows, is nasty business, and strictly illegal to boot. The game’s winding down, and the Andover superstars are sharks who’ve smelled blood. But the acid still floods our collective brains with the power and beauty of Mother Earth and Father Sky, and we match the superstars hammer for tong.

There’s a minute left to play. We need to get a face-off deep in superstar territory. Beevo takes the face-off, the puck falling like a big black penny from heaven. Beevo flicks it easily back to Lurch at the point. Lurch winds up and takes a Paul Bunyon swing at it. However, he mostly misses, catching the puck on end so it flutters like a drunken butterfly toward the net. The Andover superstars are caught off-guard. They’re expecting a bullet, clenched and moving towards the upper left corner of the goal, where it is happily headed.

I see the puck fluffernutting towards me, getting bigger and bigger as it calls my name:

“Here I come, David – here I commmmmmme…”

I see myself gently flicking the puck, caressing it lightly like a well-loved lover past the Andover superstar goalie. So I reach up with my wavy stick and kiss the crazy gyrating puck with it. The Andover superstar defensemen and goalie are already off-balance because it is loop-de-looping instead of shotgunning, and when I flick it, the puck tumbles down and right, leaving them grasping at air straws.

Gently, lovingly it bulges pillowy into the billowing netting of the goal.

The buzzer sounds.

BUZZZZZZZ!

The game is over.

The silence sits on the ice like the gods have pushed the mute button.

David has slain Goliath. Not with a stone and a slingshot, but stoned with a headful of totally trippy shit.

We skate over to Joe Starfucker and jump on top of him, flopping around on the ice like a huge undulating amoebae, until they cart us off. In the locker room our clothes jump off our bodies. We sing in the rain of the shower, then have a wild raucous ride home.

Word of our triumph and how achieved it spreads like wildfire through our little community. Of course we never win another game all year. Never even come close. Rat’s brother gets put back in the slammer, and that’s the end of the great Acid Experiment.

But for one glorious winter afternoon, we were one with the universe, Kings of the World, and we did it tripping the light fantastic. nth