Tuesday Night Bieber
by Joe Sacksteder
We’d been scrimmaging for ten or fifteen minutes, and so far no Biebs. But his bodyguards were watching the game, so there was still hope. Tuesday night, Park City, Utah. I’d positioned myself in the net closest to the lobby, trying to catch glimpses. The lobby did seem to be hosting an unusual accumulation of very attractive people. A potential posse.
When Eli, the other goalie, lugged his bag into the locker room and made the announcement, I’d assumed that Bieber was the nickname of some local hockey player everybody except me knew. He needed gear, Eli said. The only hockey store was down in Salt Lake and had been closed for a few hours.
“I can’t focus,” I told Tommy after sucking in warm-ups. “I can’t stop thinking about Justin.”
I’d subbed in net on Sunday for the bar league team most of the good Park City guys play on—so I’d been looking forward to an asterisk of flattery on their usual shit-talking. I mean, in addition to what Park City Tuesday night drop-in usually does for me. How it gets me away from slogging through grad school reading and reminds me that I have a body. How I feel like I’m in a space shuttle some nights as I drive up a mountain and leave behind Salt Lake’s smog. How just getting on the ice regularly is more and more important as I enter my mid-thirties. How for now I know that, yes, my competitive career is probably behind me, but give me three months and I could still be as good as I ever was.
I write mostly fiction, but I recently realized that almost all the nonfiction I’ve put out into the world concerns my few minor brushes with celebrity, as if life isn’t worth much unless it’s happening proximal to someone famous. I’ll further interrogate what this tendency says about me—but later, and privately. This essay is about the moment I heard a gloved fist pounding on the plexiglass behind my net, and I turned around, and there was Justin Bieber.
I didn’t know how to act. I was kind of impressed that we didn’t have to sign any papers or get a lecture from the bodyguard detailing what would happen to us if we damaged one of the world’s most precious commodities. I was tending net for the dark jerseys, so Justin would be on my team until Eli and I switched sides halfway through. I saw him introduce himself to the two guys sitting on my team’s bench, bump gloves.
A buddy from Justin’s crew was playing on the other team. Their gear was brand new, the nicest stuff. I would later find out that his handler called the owner of the Player’s Bench in Salt Lake and convinced him to drive two sets of new gear up a mountain at 9 PM . Justin sort of had a baby Bambi thing going on with his ankles. He started off mostly on defense, hanging back, occupying relatively deserted sectors of ice surface. He slapped his stick on the ice frequently, calling for passes when he shouldn’t have.
Were they avoiding passing him the puck?
Guys… Pass Justin the puck.
I’m always looking for circuitous routes into the NHL that don’t involve me having played Division One hockey a decade ago. I was entertaining fantasies that Justin would see how good I was and tweet a picture of the two of us with the caption: “Best goalee eva,” after which I’d receive an invitation to practice with the Maple Leafs just as, like, a joke.
The human mind exposed on the page is a sick and pitiful thing. (I’m also very brave.)
Same reason why when Tommy got a breakaway, I was telepathically blasting at him YOU WOULDN’T DARE SCORE ON ME IN FRONT OF JUSTIN! Tommy hit the crossbar, but someone soon fired one past my glove, and immediately I looked up expecting to see Justin crestfallen and speechless. He was skating to the bench. I couldn’t say for sure whether or not he even knew his team had been scored on.
Every time Justin leapt over the boards, his bodyguard would pull out his iPhone and start filming. Then, when he returned to the bench, he would curate the footage. His posse had dispersed throughout the rink. Two stylish guys were sitting in the stands, a stunning blonde/porcelain wisp of girl was hanging out by the doors that led to the locker rooms, and a half dozen or so Beliebers were keeping warm in the lobby.
He slashed someone really hard in the shins, which alarmed me until I realized it was his buddy.
Finally, Eli and I switched sides.
Justin had not scored on Eli, and by now he had abandoned any attempt to play defense. Drop-in hockey is not usually a showcase of defensive skills, but a few of the guys were taking extra special care to keep the Biebs from getting any good chances. Every time the puck got poked away from him, he would slam his stick on the ice and kind of, like, puff up. Like a territorial bird. I’m not sure that he ever even breached his team’s defensive zone in the second half of the scrimmage. He spent all his time “cherry-picking” up by the red line. Come on, let him get past you just once. He dealt Hagn a beachball-strength check in the corner, perhaps only half realizing that drop-in, where most of the guys don’t wear shoulder pads, is pretty no-check.
“He wasn’t even looking…” I said to one of my defensemen after a particularly fine save.
At one point, Justin’s stick got swatted and went flying. He hesitated for a moment, before strut-skating to the bench. This is not something a hockey player would normally do, just leave an unbroken stick on the ice during a noncompetitive game. Someone eventually pushed the stick over to the dark team’s bench. “Pick it up,” Tony heard him say. For a second, Tony thought Justin was talking to him. No: his bodyguard.
Look, I’m being hard on the Biebs. Yes, he bought thousands of dollars of equipment that he might never use again. Yes, he refused photographs and signatures with the very few non-posse people in the lobby. Yes, he was obviously image conscious. But he was basically friendly, and he was probably having as normal a night among strangers as is possible in his world.
Oh, and he really wanted a goal. In my head I’d been revising over and over the status update I would post immediately upon arriving home that night (and of course whether or not he got a shot on me would have significant bearings). I was thinking about that ridiculous story a few months back where Vladimir Putin scored seven goals on his birthday in a game against former NHL-ers. Was I going to let Bieber score? Maybe if he scored a goal we’d take a photo afterwards, just the Biebs and me.
In the end, I didn’t have a choice. In the end—if a heartthrob pop icon scoring a goal on you is shameful—the actual goal was as unhumiliating as it could have been. Sometimes the assist is the real goal, and I think it was Heimo who ended up feeding him what was basically a backdoor tap-in. I lunged over to my glove side, but the Biebs had a lot of net to shoot at.
A hyperbolic analogy seems to be called for, but none are really game-ready. All the air left the rink? My life divided into two?
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Nope. They call it drop-in hockey, and sometimes it’s Justin Bieber who drops in. And scores a goal on you.
He was very excited. He threw his hands up in the air, shouted, “That’s what I needed!”
If my dignity needs preserving, I can at least report that I stopped him on a half-break a minute later. Left pad save. But, as his posse immediately rolled out after that shift was over, it was clear that his work was done. If the incident was reported by some desperate news outlet, the report would be that he scored a goal. That’s what he needed.
As I would joke later, “After he left… what was the point?” We still had another twenty or so minutes of drop-in, and maybe it was mental exhaustion that caused me to basically turn into a garage door.
In the locker room afterwards, we tried to decompress. We had to navigate a tricky situation: be starstruck—but not too starstruck. Make light of the fact that every single one of us would regale future family members and friends and strangers with the story of tonight for the rest of our lives. A few of the guys hid their obvious celebrity crushes behind tough words about what a little shit he was. “At least you guys didn’t get scored on by him,” I groaned, mortified-proud.
We were all pretty sure that the bodyguard had accidentally stowed his phone during the shift Justin scored—which is the reason why several thousand people did not watch footage of me getting scored on by Justin Bieber that night. Thankfully?
At the Boneyard (yes, that’s the name of the bar where we go to jerk each other off), we tried to drink the night real. I splurged on a seven-dollar Unibroue because that’s how I roll now. We looked at Justin’s Instagram account. Tommy’s girlfriend can be seen sitting in the stands in one of the photos. That girl totally thinks she’s got a shot at the Biebs, was one comment. I attacked an abandoned plate of fries. An “extra” beer was put in my hand by the waiter. The Sabres game was on replay. I didn’t care one iota about the forty-pages of George Herbert poems I wasn’t going to read for Genealogies of the Lyric the next day.
I’m a referee too, and I like to complain about how often the scheduler sends me up to Park City. Six percent grade is rough on my roller skate of a car. “Once you accept a Park City game,” other refs have told me, “you’re screwed.” So I gripe, but I never do anything about it. Maybe it’s my hibernating Hollywood ambitions drawing me to the home of Sundance. Or the other life I might have led where I go skiing more than once every five years. Or maybe it’s because, on the way home, I can put my car in neutral from Parley’s Way all the way to Foothill. Ten miles. And, at the late-night / very-early-morning hour we say goodbye to the Boneyard, I can ease off the brakes, slaloming the inside lane on every twist and turn.
Just the feeling of heading west—
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If I have a "Freebird," it's this short essay, which appeared on Hobart soon after December 1st, 2015, the night that Justin Bieber scored a goal on me at drop-in hockey in Park City, Utah. It remains meaningful to me, not just because of the novelty of the event it depicts, but because it seemed to get at something about the sense of promise that accompanied the difficulties of a PhD program, with a final two paragraphs (cut by Hobart's editors) that likewise best encapsulated my weird, sudden infatuation with the West.
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JOE SACKSTEDER is the author of the short story collection Make/Shift (Sarabande Books), the novel Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press), and an album of audio collages Fugitive Traces (Punctum Books). His experimental horror novel, Hack House, is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. www.joesacksteder.com