writing childhood hockey again

Character was in the hallway, when Harry emerged eventually, drawing patterns on the wall. Not in or obtrusively. At ankle level. Little black lines here and there. It was almost cute. He was reminiscing about his childhood. He'd grown up in a bad neighbourhood. Riding his bike, training-wheels-less, through sidewalk cracks and dogshit, dodging ghetto gepettoes and drugs that he hadn't at the time realized were there. I don't think he realized, back then, the importance of any of it. He was just being, in that way children are. The poverty was just life. It never really affected him. Then his parents moved a little to the north. The mean streets of Westmount were just a wholly different type of cutthroat. Old blood, old money. He didn't believe in ghosts, not then not now, holy or otherwise, although he did like them conceptually and in songtitles when they meant memories and forgotten feelings, trading places like fading faces, but Westmount was definitely a ghost township if ever there was one. The façades. Oh god, the façades. They were everywhere; brick, make-up, chequebook, fender, fuck fuck fuck. Everything. The smiles were wanton and rampant and everyone was up to his neck in self-righteousness. He made it through, though. His out had been hockey. He hadn't responded to any ropings-in, any accusatory, finger-pointing posters. I want YOU to waste your youth skating in circles. No, he'd seen another poster entirely. Tight fingers sink gunslingers. Dead or alive, he wanted to be a goalie.

He'd skated down, I guess, between the pipes. There was no time to tap any remorse code messages on the red steel, his mom had put the pads on the wrong legs at first and had had to go through them, strap by aching strap, loosening, removing, and then redoing. He'd barely made it out on time. He probably stopped the first shot he faced, and the second, and maybe the third and fourth and fifth. He probably let a few in but came out of it feeling that kind of kiddy giddy high that creates behavioural patterns. And voilà: he spent a lot of his youth skating in circles around the defensive zone face-off dots, waiting for something, anything, to come his way. A metaphor, if you will, for his problems later on in life. There was never enough adversity for his tastes. You figure after a while someone like that's bound to do something stupid like race an oncoming forward to the puck at the blueline. And whether or not he makes it there first, and whether or not he sprawls the right way and miraculously knocks the puck away, and whether or not the forward misses the net anyway, he decides to try it again, maybe. Maybe. It happens.