10 Hockey, Zen, and the Art of Bill Gaston’s The Good Body

The Body Person

From the outset, The Good Body makes clear that Bonaduce’s pursuit of the hockey dream has had dire consequences for his life. Bonaduce’s alienation from Jason, along with his ex-wife, Leah, illustrates a profound irony: the quest to be a professional hockey player, which is so often associated with traditional ideals of masculinity, can turn a man into a lousy father and husband. In the case of Leah, the novel suggests that she and Bonaduce have always had a strong sexual connection but that she was turned off by Bonaduce’s hockey role as a fighter. Bonaduce, in turn, was ill-equipped to maintain a relationship. In the case of Jason, Bonaduce lacked the skills to be a good father, and even if he had put in more effort, the demands of his career would have made it difficult to stay connected. This points to an irony in the hockey myth that I explored in the chapters on The Last Season and King Leary—that hockey, so often mythologized as a way to make a boy a man, has a way of turning out lousy lovers, husbands, and fathers. Perhaps the most poignant line in The Good Body occurs in the dressing room when it dawns on Bonaduce that the indifference Jason has projected towards him throughout the novel is, in fact, not an act: “the catchphrase he’d for two hours been breathing to himself, ‘We’re both pretending I’m no one special,’ now transmuted to the thought He’s not pretending” (Gaston 2000, 201).

The novel implies that the problems associated with hockey in Bonaduce’s life are also reflective of deeper existential issues. An important clue is the body imagery that appears throughout the text. As a professional athlete, Bonaduce is a “body-person,” and the novel shows how his attention to his own physique leads him to judge others through the lens of physicality. For example, Daniel Kirk, the first “manprof” he meets, is a “buttclenched male animal” (17) and Margaret, the student who will become his closest new friend, “probably thought a bit about food” (15). Bonaduce’s identification with the body—and his related tendency to use a head-body dichotomy to categorize people, with “head-people” understood as the irreconcilable other—can be read as symptomatic of the limited quality of his hockey-focused life. Chögyam Trungpa argues that a key aspect of Buddhist practice has to do with the synchronizing of mind and body, which he describes as “a basic principle of how to be a human being” (2002, 52). Similar claims could be made about various Western philosophies (especially feminist philosophies). Bonaduce’s identification with the body, on the other hand, is a version of the masculine tendency to deny bodily weakness and what that weakness points to.

That Bonaduce has lived in denial about aging and death is underlined by the event that most directly triggers his attempt to reconnect with Jason. This is his discovery that he has MS. MS is described in the novel as an incarnation of death itself. Bonaduce recalls the morning of his first MS attack as a continuation of “sleep’s dreamscape,” a transformation of himself into the kind of living dead creature you’d find in nightmares:

You wake up with vision so fuzzy it’s like sleep’s dreamscape has continued, and then you find the legs don’t work too well. Couldn’t even bloody walk, he was a big nightmare puppet with packed rag legs. It wasn’t some awful new injury, because he’d been feeling so weak and weird lately he hadn’t even been playing. (Gaston 2000, 43)

As a disease, MS involves a step-by-step withdrawal of feeling and function from the body, sometimes slowly over years, sometimes very quickly (Mayo Clinic n.d.). For Bonaduce, it means different parts of his body going dead in a foreshadowing of the overall death of his body: “Hold your fork. Dead hand on the lap under the table” (Gaston 2000, 234).

Bonaduce’s response to his MS, until the very end of the novel, is to deny the reality of the disease, just as his body focus has meant a lifelong denial of human weakness, aging and death. His attempt to play hockey for the UNB team goes directly against the medical advice he has received, which is not to overexert himself. When the overexertion has the predicted effect—an acceleration of his symptoms that turns him into “a limping mummy”—he responds in classic hockey player fashion by attempting “to walk it off” (235). Eventually he hits moral and physical rock bottom, breaking the leg of a player on Jason’s own team to try to win Jason’s favour and triggering an almost debilitating onset of MS symptoms, and then, in a last attempt at denial, gets in his car and tries to “get gone” (247). The crash that follows is like a forceful, final assertion of the body. Bonaduce wakes up in the ditch to find that he is paralyzed and has soiled himself, his body “emptying itself, muscles he couldn’t feel” (262). Only when he is forced to experience his utter helplessness before the weakness of his body, with the terror and panic that comes from a clear awareness of his own mortality, is Bonaduce able to glimpse what it means to be truly alive.

Wise Men or Wise Guys

The deeper existential issues faced by Bonaduce in The Good Body are the primary focus of Buddhist philosophy. Buddhism takes as its starting point the view that human suffering arises not so much out of the inevitability of change and death as out of our attempts to “solve” these facts of existence in some final way, either by denying their reality or by trying to explain them in a way that transforms them into something other than what they are. As Steve Hagen puts it, “We think we have to deal with our problems in a way that exterminates them, that distorts or denies their reality.… We try to rearrange and manipulate the world so that dogs will never bite, accidents will never happen, and the people we care about will never die” (1997, 18). Buddhism teaches the folly of such thinking. Rather than try to “solve” the facts of existence, Buddhism encourages us to cultivate non-attachment. Hsing Yun puts it like this: “Prajna [wisdom] teaches us that nothing should be clung to because there is nothing that can be clung to. Everything is empty” (2001, 78). Non-attachment is not about escaping reality but about “dealing with the fundamental nature of reality,” which is its lack of an essential meaning and the inevitability of change (90). The pay-off for achieving Buddhist wisdom is to live more fully in the present. This is all that is meant by “enlightenment” in Buddhism. Indeed, as Hagen points out, the term “Buddha” simply means “awakened one” (1997, 3).

Gaston’s first three novels all revolve around Bonaduce-like protagonists who are startled towards wakefulness by an encounter with a Buddha figure. In Bella Combe Journal, Vaughn, a hockey-playing wanderer, is challenged by Bert Flutie, a far-seeing bum, by Lise/Annie, whose only rule is “wakefulness” (Gaston 1996, 192), and by Connor Peake, a poet who goes from the extremes of meditating to performing weird antics in order to shake up the people around him. The Baal twins in Tall Lives, who struggle equally with the opposite extremes of order and chaos that dominate their lives, are challenged by Felix, a Buddha-shaped French-speaking philosopher, who ultimately sees the futility of attempting to “change the world” and as a result burns up his life’s work, an encyclopedia, along with his house (Gaston 1990, 207). And in The Cameraman, the protagonist, Francis Dann, also a hockey player, is challenged by his friend Koz in much the way that Vaughn is challenged by Connor Peake. Koz, like Connor, is a tricky agitator whose antics seem designed to shock people into wakefulness—but in this case as a film director rather than a poet. Koz’s ideal is to think of life as a very expensive movie with only one chance to do things perfectly. “The way we waste time,” he goes on to say, “you’d think we forgot we’re going to die” (Gaston 2002, 156).

There is a characteristic ambiguity in Gaston’s Buddha figures: they are all tricksters as well as agents of enlightenment. Koz is typical. He is described throughout The Cameraman by way of antinomies. He is an ordinary guy with extraordinary abilities, a popular jock who is also uncannily a top student, the kind of kid who “was absent a lot, yet always got perfect scores on tests” (Gaston 2002, 25). Koz is both “the maze and the map out” (232), a maker of films that suggest both “silliness and genius” (61), a possessor of eyes that suggest “a wise man, or a wise guy” (187). To Francis, some of Koz’s deeds might have been intended to “shed light” but others “could easily mean nothing at all” (60–61), which adds a destabilizing layer of irony to the catchphrases Koz uses to draw attention to his work: “watch this” and “trust me.”

The ambiguity of Gaston’s Buddha figures reflects an ambiguity in Buddhist teacher figures more generally. There is a lot of reverence towards teacher figures in Buddhist literature and many stories are told of the journeys towards enlightenment experienced by these teachers, journeys that become object lessons for others to follow. There are also many stories about the tests posed by teachers in order to prepare students to learn. Often the tests involve hardships or frustrations that at first seem extreme or inexplicable. In Zen in the Art of Archery, for example, Eugen Herrigel describes long periods of apparently fruitless repetition at each stage of his learning to shoot. At the beginning he spends the better part of a year simply practicing drawing the bow (incorrectly, as it turns out). Eventually he learns that the repetition is necessary to “detach him from himself,” for “all right doing is accomplished only in a state of true selflessness, in which the doer cannot be present any longer as ‘himself’ ” (Herrigel 1953, 67). Another way to put this is that the tests set by the teacher are designed to break down the ego-investments of the student, investments that are expressed, among other ways, in the student’s desire to be a “good student” or to “get” something from the teacher. As Chögyam Trungpa explains, “the impulse of searching for something is, in itself, a hang-up” and only when this hang-up is exhausted can enlightenment take place (2002, 42).

That the teacher’s role in Buddhism is to challenge the student to give up his or her ego-investments implies that the teacher wields a great deal of power. In order to thwart the desire to “get” something, the teacher will inevitably make what seem like arbitrary or inexplicable demands, acting, apparently, as a wise guy and not a wise man—and the student must submit to this. Herrigel points out that the teacher-student relationship in Zen depends upon the student’s “uncritical veneration of his teacher” (1953, 62). For Trungpa, the basic condition of true learning is an openness in the student that comes from a kind of “psychological surrender” to the teacher. “It is essential to surrender,” he writes, “to open yourself … rather than trying to present yourself as a worthwhile student” (Trungpa 2002, 39).

Coupled with this reverence towards the teacher, however, is an awareness of the limitations of the teacher’s role. There is a crucial distinction in Buddhism between the wisdom that the teacher may convey and the nature of true wisdom. The teacher is, in an important sense, only an agent, only someone who might help the student achieve his or her own experience of truth. Ultimately enlightenment has to be experienced directly. The role of the teacher is very much like the role of the “sacred” texts of Buddhism. These texts are revered, but at the same time, it is understood that they do not contain truth in some concrete or extractible way. As Hagen puts it, “Buddhist teachings and writings can assist you, but you won’t find Truth in them, as if Truth somehow resided in the Buddha’s words” (1997, 10). One of the most famous metaphors in Buddhism has to do with how the Buddha’s words are like a finger pointing at the moon. The finger can point the way, but ultimately, to see the moon, you have to look for yourself. The same is true of the teacher. To think of the teacher as some superior being who possesses wisdom or truth is to mistake the finger for the moon. This is why Trungpa, in the same chapter that describes the need for psychological surrender, also cautions against the idea that this might lead to any kind of “master-servant relationship.” Instead, he suggests that the way to think of the teacher is as a “spiritual friend”—someone who assists the student from a position of equality. The process of learning, then, becomes “a meeting of two minds” and “a matter of mutual communication” (Trungpa 2002, 39).

The Weirdness of Goalies

The Good Body takes Gaston’s portrayals of ambiguous Buddha figures a step further by making the Buddha figure in the novel a goalie Bonaduce rooms with for the last part of his career in the minors. In the character of Fournier, Gaston draws a comic parallel between the ambiguity of Buddha figures and the stereotypical weirdness of goalies, who are usually understood to be either the most thoughtful players on a team or the craziest (another version of “a wise man or a wise guy”). The usual goalie weirdness of Fournier is magnified by “his accent and Montreal suave,” which make him stand out even more than the other Canadian hockey players in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Bonaduce’s team at that time is based. Bonaduce senses what is special about him:

[Fournier’s] English wasn’t great, but the glint in his eye leapt easily over language. He had a way of smiling at your subtle question, looking at you with understanding but saying nothing. If you persisted, he might wave it away and say happily, “No matter!” … He read so much. (Gaston 2000, 119)

Eventually, once Fournier gets to know Bonaduce enough, he admits that “his lifestyle was in keeping with the traditions of Zen”: he shopped “only for the food of one meal,” had only two sets of clothes, and so on (119). Unlike the other players, who tended to pick up women in bars, Fournier met women in libraries or the grocery store, and the ones he dated tended to be “Zen or health-food types themselves” (120).

Fournier only appears on a few pages of The Good Body. On these pages he plays the role of concerned friend, checking in on Bonaduce by telephone (114), sending his new girlfriend’s book about “yeast infections” as a treatment for Bonaduce’s MS (186), and helping to arrange a last, large pay cheque from Bonaduce’s former hockey team (266). He is not the immediate catalyst for Bonaduce’s enlightenment. The New Age-like quality of the therapies he suggests for Bonaduce’s MS (by way of his extremely New Age girlfriend) underlines the extent to which he may be a flake. His presence in the novel, however, suggests the availability of another way of approaching life from the somnambulistic one that has defined Bonaduce’s approach so far. Bonaduce, importantly, is open to Fournier’s ideas. When he goes along with Fournier’s Zen lifestyle Bonaduce feels “lighter, more ready for the game, party, movie, or call-up to the bigs” (120).

Dressing Room Savvy

Bonaduce’s openness to Fournier’s Zen-like ideas is one of a number of clues that there is more to Bonaduce than the stereotype of a “stupid rough hayseed hockey player” (Gaston 2000, 41). Long before his fateful crash, Bonaduce is shown to have other important qualities: he is genuinely literate, a guitar player and aficionado of contemporary music, and he is often a clear-eyed observer of both hockey and the larger world. For example, early in the novel he looks out the window to see a landscape where nothing is happening and has a Buddhist-like thought: “You could think of it as an empty stage waiting for something to happen. Birds. Deer. They had to come. In two months, snow. There were worse things to watch than an empty stage” (35). Later he remarks upon the “trivial ugliness” that a career in hockey must seem like to someone like Leah, whose own work involves helping refugees and “victims of war and torture” (54–55). And at various places he makes astute—and funny—observations about the world of academia. His most telling observations in this area involve comparisons between academia and hockey. There is macho posturing in the academy, he points out, that is not unlike that found in hockey, as his hilarious account of Phil “presenting” in a graduate seminar shows (40). The graduate students are good at irony, he observes, because they practice it “like pros” (85). And, most significantly, the intelligence on display in academia is not foreign to the hockey dressing room, where there is also a great deal of “wit” as well as “nightclub and taxi savvy,” not to mention the “sound public management of pride and envy, something academics were famously inept at” (42).

An important aspect of Bonaduce’s astuteness is that it occurs not only in spite of his being a hockey player but also because of it. Bonaduce’s interest in music and literature, as well as his openness to the ideas of Fournier, marks him as a “freak” in the eyes of his teammates (34). Yet the astuteness of Bonaduce’s observations is related to the “savvy” he has absorbed from the hockey dressing room. Beyond the worldliness of the dressing room savvy, there is a sense that Bonaduce’s astuteness is a result of his ability to observe with an innocent eye practices whose absurdity is hidden to those who are immersed in them. This is particularly true in his satires of academia. What this suggests is that the point of view of “regular sorts … hockey-jacket types” is not only a source of “somnambulism” but also potentially of critical insight (220).

That Bonaduce’s astuteness occurs not only in spite of his being a hockey player but because of it is itself reflective of the double-sidedness of hockey in The Good Body. Yes, hockey is associated with somnambulism; but hockey, the novel suggests, also contains elements that can point the way to enlightenment. Take Bonaduce’s body focus. Though Bonaduce’s self-identification as a “body-person” suggests an unhealthy division of body from mind, the body-focus of his life as an athlete also contains clues about a way out of this unhealthy division. As an athlete, Bonaduce has daily physical rituals not unlike the practices of meditation. Exercise helps to quiet his busy mind: “Jog the legs, the spine, the body into a pleasant stupor, hard breathing” (10). Gaston’s first novel, Bella Combe Journal, makes an explicit connection between the “hard breathing” of physical activity—especially skating—and the awareness of breath that occurs in meditation (see Gaston 1996, 77–78, 142).

A number of passages in The Good Body show Bonaduce’s awareness of breath. Take this one from his first night in his new bed in Fredericton:

[This] pure and gentle going-in that almost erased you, a tender secret muscle the size of your body that turned you to air if you flexed it right—if you stayed here like this, you could be one of those people, and he knew they existed, one of those people who know only what matters, who can play life like the game it is. (Gaston 2000, 47)

The implication of passages like these is that Bonaduce’s awareness has been heightened by his activities as an athlete.

The goal of an athlete’s physical practice is to achieve that elusive state referred to as “the zone.” Gaston, in his hockey memoir, Midnight Hockey, likens the zone to the mental state that comes from meditation:

The funny thing is, the zone appears to be exactly what meditators are seeking when they meditate. Go ahead, read any book on meditation and check out how they describe the sought-after state: a heightened clarity, a stillness, a place beyond words, and effortless.… It’s mind and body together, in perfect union. (2006, 99)

Bonaduce himself had an experience of the zone during a period in Kalamazoo when he scored an amazing number of goals, “first of a bunch of flukes and deflections,” and then others when he actually tried to score (Gaston 2000, 191). The clarity Bonaduce achieves at the end of The Good Body is very much consistent with the characteristics of the zone he aimed for—and sometimes experienced—as an athlete.

Luck’s Big Magnifying Glass

Perhaps the most fascinating intertwining of Zen and hockey in The Good Body has to do with the treatment of luck. Luck is foregrounded in the opening pages of the novel with the description of the antique air freshener that dangles from Bonaduce’s rear-view mirror (Gaston 2000, 3). His friend Marg identifies this talisman as Bonaduce’s “rabbit’s foot” (29) and tries to increase his chances of good fortune by giving him another good luck charm in the form of a dream catcher (34–35). References to stars (49), astrology (61), and fireflies (those living embodiments of stars) (101) help to maintain the profile of luck in the novel. All of these references underline the significance of Bonaduce’s observation that the confluence of events that brings him to Fredericton—the folding of his minor league team, his MS diagnosis, and a rare letter from Jason—suggest that he is taking his turn “under luck’s big magnifying glass” (13).

Luck, of course, has a powerful mystique in sports. The prevalence of superstitions among athletes has to do with the fact that success or failure often seems determined by factors over which an individual has no control. A lucky bounce here or there can make all the difference. When Bonaduce is in the zone, he experiences it as a form of luck (191). The challenge for an athlete is that this zone of apparent good luck is both elusive and fragile—hence the tendency to think of it in mystical terms and to try to control it by magical means. Bonaduce describes the tendency like this: “The good zone you seek is delicate and there’s nothing of it to hold on to, which is why the guys have their little thing.… Shamrock, Buddha, girlfriend’s bandana, lucky rock” (262–63).

Luck, from a Buddhist point of view, is complicated. The idea of luck implies something outside of ourselves, some external force that might work either for or against us. Good luck charms are intended to “charm” this external force into acting on our behalf. Given the Buddhist teaching that “you are your own refuge, your own sanctuary, your own salvation” (Hagen 1997, 19), the idea of appealing to some external, quasi-supernatural force to fix your life is deeply flawed. As Shravasti Dhammika explains, the Buddha “considered such practices as fortune telling, wearing magic charms for protection, fixing lucky sites for buildings and fixing lucky days to be useless superstitions” (2005, 41). Yet there are psychological aspects to luck that have affinities with the goals of Buddhist practice. Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire summarized the results of his ten-year study of self-identified “lucky” and “unlucky” people as follows: “Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good” (2003).

One of the truisms in sports psychology is that it is important to have a positive attitude. Being positive is no guarantee, but doubting yourself is a sure way to failure. Bonaduce knows this: “Doubt can kill luck all by itself” (191). At the same time, success requires that you can’t want to succeed too badly. To be lucky in the deepest sense—to be in the zone—requires non-attachment. As Gaston puts it in Midnight Hockey, “you can’t force your way into the zone—it has to simply happen” and “it has more to do with relaxing than it does with straining” (2006, 98–99).

A Gaston story that develops these ideas about luck in a particularly illuminating way is “Saving Eve’s Father” from the collection Sex Is Red. “Saving Eve’s Father” tells of a boy named Alex who discovers that his girlfriend Eve’s father—a man who has the good or bad fortune to have the same name as a famous hockey player, Mike Gartner—is addicted to a video gambling machine. Alex takes all his savings out of the bank in loonies, goes to the store with the machine in it, and proceeds to play for hours upon hours as Eve’s father and other local addicts look on. His plan is to play until all his money is gone (minus one dollar he leaves in the bank to keep his account open). When asked by Eve why he is doing it, he replies that he isn’t sure except that “as long as I’m playing, [her father and the others are] not” (Gaston 1998, 9). The store owner understands that Alex is sacrificing himself. “The boy’s dyin’ for your sins is what he’s doing,” he tells the addicts (12).

The larger context of the story makes clear that the video gambling machine preys on the desire of the men to fix their lives by a stroke of luck. Even Alex recognizes its seductiveness. When he wins a game “the pealing angel-song of the electronic bells” and the “cartoon-blue” of the screen are “like some version of paradise” (11). Unlike men like Eve’s father, however, Alex recognizes that the game is fixed, that not only do you always lose in the end, but that along the way the machine creates unlikely lucky streaks to “suck you in” so that you play on in hope until it has “all your money” (11). The machine, the story implies, is an analogue for life itself. Life contains good fortune and bad, but, in the end, our luck always runs out. The wise response to this condition, from a Buddhist point of view, is non-attachment. Real luck has to do with not clinging to luck. Alex discovers this for himself when his desire to fail at the gambling machine is spent. At this point, a symbolically appropriate twelve loonies short of losing all his money, he has to stop, because “He knew now what luck was, how it came of truly not caring if you had it or not. And, knowing this, he saw that if he kept playing he would start to win, and keep winning, and ruin it all” (13).

Pure Desire

The interconnections between Buddhism, hockey, and life are well-captured by a passage Bonaduce writes as part of his creative writing course. Immediately before, he had made a joke about Shakespeare and received a comeback from a fellow student who says “Shakespeare’s a waste of time. Hockey isn’t. Oh” (Gaston 2000, 136). This inspires him to write as follows:

When you read a book you are nothing but a fan. And fans of books have nothing—nothing—over fans of hockey. That a puck is an utterly meaningless thing to chase is exactly the point. They might never think of it this way, but hockey fans are drawn to the spectacle of men who are the best in the land at using their bodies to fulfil pure desire. (136)

The passage goes on to say that the desire of the players is “pure” because the puck is “the perfect symbol of worthlessness.” This makes the game “so abstract, so pure in its meaninglessness, it is almost Japanese” (137).

Bonaduce’s passage riffs on the assumption that hockey, as a game, is not “serious.” Hockey is not part of the world of striving and doing and transforming of the material world that we associate with “real work.” For this reason, you might say that hockey is “utterly meaningless” (136). Then again, so is life. Hockey is fundamentally like Buddhism because they are both part of the reality of life itself. Human beings are creatures of desire, and our desires (to do things, to accomplish things, to get lucky, even to be a “good” student of Buddhism) can make us mean and make us suffer, but they can also lead us, in spite of our meanness and suffering (and sometimes because of them), towards enlightenment. To be enlightened is to be awake to life’s reality (the opposite of somnambulism). This wakefulness, in turn, is associated with the state of “pure desire.” Pure desire implies a desire that has worn itself out, that has become devoid of the impulse to desire for any specific thing. Pure desire doesn’t search for something but just is. This is akin to what happens when Alex’s coins run out in “Saving Eve’s Father.” His desire wears out; he stops searching, hoping, and craving. And at the moment when he no longer cares whether he is lucky or not, luck returns to him (or would if he kept playing).

What happens to Bonaduce at the end of The Good Body is akin to what happens to Alex when his luck runs out. With the crash, Bonaduce’s luck runs out. He has to face the reality of his mortal body. In that moment, he lets go of his shit (literally and metaphorically) and thus of his desire to clean up the mess of his life. Only then, after he no longer cares if he is lucky or not, does luck return in the form of “the light streaming glory through the orange curtains” (269).

Nothing should be clung to because there is nothing to cling to.

Works Cited