#kent parson

garden-of-succulents:

garden-of-succulents:

Jack Zimmermann’s media image: Drug addict, fashion ho, sassy rebel, leather jacket, bad boy who will seduce you into a life of crime and risky driving, doesn’t really care about hockey.

Jack Zimmermann’s reality: Soft bro, autistic, history nerd, neon yellow sneakers, loves getting thick books for his birthday, hockeys harder than god, his mom buys his suits for him, gets excited giving opinions on protein powders.

Kent Parson’s media image: Clean cut all-American white bread, tries hard for his sport, loves fluffy kittens and rainbows and unicorns, the kind of boy you could take home to meet your mother

Kent Parson’s reality: Always two steps from a breakdown, only has people he’d die for and people he never wants to see again, is secretly horrified at the idea of children looking up to him as a rolemodel, would murder Gary Bettman for one corn chip, has absolutely hidden vodka in his water bottle, longs to escape and turn into a Tropical Gay

#wipitgood WIP amnesty: The fic I keep wrestling with but never make progress on, the “How Kent Parson Discovered Paganism” story. The poem quoted is real; it’s by Franco Buffoni. 

—

The year after my life fell apart and I made it big, I googled, “why is god cruel?”

Holy fuck, that got me so many stupid answers. I’d already tried to read When Bad Things Happen to Good People the summer before and given up a few pages in, and this was pretty much that in Google form. Everyone’s so desperate to tell you that God doesn’t reallylet bad things happen, they’re not really bad, they’re just secretly good things in disguise or something and it’s all going to work out in the end.

Fuck that.

But I found a poem.

From Mars cruel god of war
The desire to tie the corpse to the chariot
And drag it around each morning,
From Mercury the idea to put a stop to that
And buy the body back.
Because everything sooner or later becomes a musical
Or a collectible card or figurine

And that was… holy fuck. Nothing I’d ever read had made me feel like that.

In middle school we did a thing on Greek mythology. We actually got to do a field trip to the movie theatre to see Troy, and I actually got to go, which I basically never do. (Hockey.) It was awesome, and I remember our teacher reading us the opening lines of the Iliad, “Sing of the rage of Achilles.”

I didn’t really like school. I actually kind of hated it. That was before I moved to Quebec, and before the school actually realized that I needed things read aloud to me. Like, I’m notilliterate, but reading is hard and I’m slow at it and it makes my head hurt. But that was with the one teacher I really liked and I remember it. I remember being in school then and thinking, “I wish it was like this all the time.”

And, well. We talked about the movie in class and how the war had really taken ten years and the movie wasn’t totally accurate and Carrie said, “They totally didn’t mention the part where Achilles and Patroclus were gay,” and the teacher agreed with her. Like, Brad Pitt Achilles was gay, and in the movie they made them just cousins.

Everyone else was arguing about it because there was a girl in the story and that proved he couldn’t be gay but I actually raised my hand and said, “Wouldn’t he just be like, bisexual and cheating?” and I could tell Carrie was going to talk to me after class about it. We were really good friends last year and she thought she was maybe a lesbian. I wasn’t actually sure if was was okay for me to be friends with her again, because the hockey season was still over, but it was still… I didn’t actually know if it was okay anymore. My coach still thought I’d be going into the OHL and he still parked across from the school sometimes, so I just packed up my stuff and left without letting her catch my eye.

I looked it up later though, and she was literally right. They were totally… bisexual or something. So I knew that was the story. This guy killed Patroclus, and it made Achilles so angry that he killed the guy and dragged his body around behind his chariot, even though he shouldn’t have done it. I’d imagined feeling that, back then, like: Finding someone really important to me, and having them die. How much I’d want to get revenge. What I’d do even if it made me a horrible person. I’d never really been in love, but I could imagine then.

So it was like I was being stripped, turned inside-out, by that poem.

Because everything sooner or later becomes a musical
Or a collectible card or figurine
Hitler or the Fierce Saladin
Dracula the Impaler
All stripped of any awareness of suffering:
There is no voice in stones

I’d been a trading card for years. Like, a literal trading card. Top NHL Prospects of 2010. People would ask me to sign them when I was in the Q. “An investment for my grandchildren for when you make it big.”

People still asked me to sign stuff with Jack on it. Memorial Cup… memorial stuff. Or from World Juniors. Every time I did it I’d just kind of wonder: How the fuck do you ask something like that? Like, what makes you look at a picture of two people, one of whom nearly died and might never be okay again, and ask his buddy if he’ll autograph it for you? Why the fuck would you ask, “Do you miss him?” How the fuck do I answer that? “Yeah, I guess?”

For a moment, reading that poem, I could imagine myself in a box like a Barbie doll, wired to a plastic card, with a plastic tray that kept me pinned down, in the right position in the display window. They always took so much patience, finding the invisible tape. I used to open my sister’s for her because she got so impatient, she tried to wrench the whole package apart, so I took it away from her, felt for the edges of the tape, took the cardboard apart and untwisted the ties.

That night I looked up “Achilles” in the Apple audiobook store and bought a double volume of The Iliad andThe Odyssey, and I fell asleep listening to the gods fighting over an apple.

@bardofspades​ suggested we #wipitgood, which is to say, since Check Please is ending soon, clean out our WIP folders with all the OMGCP fic we never got around to finishing.

This is my first WIP to post. Trigger warning: Child sexual abuse

A bit of backstory: Curtis O’Brien, my OC, fills the same space, more or less, as real-life hockey player Sheldon Kennedy, who revealed as an NHL player that he was sexually abused by his hockey coach when he was a teenager. He traded off the ability to sue the pants off the Canadian Hockey League for the ability to force them to implement training and policies aimed at preventing and reporting child abuse. After he got his PTSD somewhat under control, he became a full-time advocate against child abuse. 

My headcanon is that Kent likewise suffered abuse from his Bantam coach, and has spent a long time determinedly not talking about it. I wanted to write a fic where, before he did start talking about it, someone (in this case, Andy) got him to talk to the one man who’s an expert on what it’s like to be an NHL player out as a survivor. This piece really stops before any of that actual stuff takes place. You just get, you know, Kent being awkward, and everyone being giant nerds about public health. Oh, and the claim that Cummerbund was Andy’s dog before she moved to LV, when I later determined that Kent and Andy adopted him together.

—

Andy met Curtis O'Brien when he came out of Customs, smiling her customer-service smile with a card on his name on it but feeling a bit silly. He was easy to pick out of the crowd: an ex-hockey player in a suit, a tall man with a slightly jerky walk who scanned the crowd for her. When he approached she tried to upgrade to the relaxed cheer she tried to copy off rich people who had never been afraid of getting fired, transcending Director of the Aces Foundation to the offhanded, casually powerful just Andy. She couldn’t think of him as a prominent expert in his field or the board member of national-level organizations in two countries or a consultant on an important initiative key to her job’s success; she just had to smile and welcome a guest to her home. He clutched his checked baggage when she offered to take it from him at the carousel, so she just led him out to short-term parking.

Kent was back from morning workout when they arrived at the house, so he faked calm like Andy and shook Curtis’s hand with the hockey-player head dip and mumbled greeting, which Curtis returned. Andy wrestled his suitcase to their guest room, having pounced on it when she parked the car, and invited him to make himself comfortable.

“Nice house,” he said, but apparently there wasn’t any kind of hidden message behind it. It was a nice house, for a strictly median definition of “nice”; Kent’s teammates claimed mansions outside city limits and he’d left a penthouse taking up half a floor to come here, but nothing differentiated their house on the street from any other three-bedroom split level on the block. Its yard was neatly xeriscaped, its carpets clean, appliances undamaged, and she could afford the rent, which had long been the height of Andy’s domestic ambitions, but a lot of people didn’t think it befitted Kent’s dignity or whatever.

“Nice dog,” Curtis added, bending over to let Cummerbund wash his hand enthusiastically. Speaking of things that didn’t fit Kent’s dignity—but the dachshund had been Andy’s first.

“Yeah, he’s a big suck-up,” Andy said. “Smell a fresh mark, hey boy? I bet he’ll even scratch your belly for you.”

“Don’t be hard on him,” Curtis said, scratching behind Cummerbund’s ears. “He’s a good boy.”

Cummerbund sat under Curtis’s chair and looked beseeching during lunch, while the humans ate cobb salad and made smalltalk. Andy was friends with some of the CWHL players Curtis did an annual fundraiser with. Kent thought one of the kids on Curtis’s local WHL team was a good pick for Team USA for World Juniors. Curtis’s officemate was doing Crossfit and using the supplements one of Kent’s sponsors made; he was training for a marathon. Easy stuff.

From the tension in his shoulders Andy thought Kent would leave it there and move on for the afternoon, claim he was letting their guest settle in. Instead he grimaced in a friendly way and said, “You know, tomorrow will be the first time I’ve actually sat through one of your guys’ trainings.”

Curtis reached down to scratch Cummerbund’s head. His movements were quiet, but still betrayed a lot of energy, like he was used to slowly leaking stress around the edges while keeping his eye on the puck. “It’s getting rarer that anyone lasts very long in hockey without taking one of our classes,” he said. “Almost everybody who works with kids does.”

“Yeah,” Kent said, his hands twitching where he kept them held down on the table, like he wanted to gesture. “I had to, I read the material and took the certificate exam online? I couldn't—I went, like, the morning of it, but I had to leave, so I caught up after.” He paused, lifted a hand to scratch the back of his neck, and admitted, “You came to my team in Juniors to give a talk, and I pretended I was sick. Hid at home, got one of my friends to tell Coach I couldn’t make it. They scratched me for a game.” He was red by the time he’d finished saying it, reaching for his water bottle and fiddling with his lid, didn’t look up; instead he picked a cube of cheese off his salad and offered it down to Cummerbund.

“Hard stuff to deal with,” Curtis said oddhandedly, though high spots of colour were appearing in his cheeks. He was trying his best to downplay it, though. “Some people gotta take their own time.”

“Yeah,” Kent said, and blinked, like he’d expected a scolding that hadn’t come. He shook his shoulders out a little. “Yeah. It’s… yeah. I can’t deal with… I couldn’t, for a long time.”

Curtis stayed quiet, looking at him, as Kent suffered through silence, until it seemed at Kent had no more words to summon up; then he turned to Andy and asked, without fuss, “You’re organizing all the people coming in tomorrow, correct?”

“Yeah,” she said, curling a hand around Kent’s under the table and trying to pick up the conversational ball. “I, uh… yeah. We’ve got the researchers and the Children’s Services people, and some state athletic associations, about ten different sports, and uh, we’re expecting about twenty coaches and other people from the Four Corners area.”

Curtis raised his eyebrows. “I thought you couldn’t get steady numbers from them?”

“Well actually,” Andy said, “I have a friend? She’s indigenous Mexican and she’s got some friends at the Hualapai reservation, and they invited us down to this inter-tribal baseball tournament in Phoenix last month, so I ended up meeting a lot of people there, some of them people I’d been emailing the last six months. But it was making the in-person contact that really got them to commit.”

I have never actually written this headcanon, which feels incredible. How.

I headcanon that when Kent was a rookie at a team party, someone threw out half a cheese pizza into a trash can that had just had its liner changed. It was perfectly clean. So one of his teammates took a video of him pulling pizza out of the garbage and saying, “Jesus, you guys, there’s nothing wrong with this! It’s still good!” and eating it.

So his nickname among fans on Twitter has been “Trash Panda” ever since and for all that he has a very bland Hockey Dude Persona in public, Kent secretly loves it to bits.