Zamboni Thoughts #9
An installment series about driving an impossible vehicle
Zamboni Thoughts is a serial column that attempts to explain what it’s like to take a part-time job at a small-town ice arena without thinking it through first. You can read previous columns here.
“What size are you?”
It was the beginning of another weeknight closing shift at the Northfield Ice Arena, and Tom, the manager, had just stumped into the back office.
“Why do you want to know?” I drawled, cocking my eyebrow at him.
Tom snorted. “We’re getting jackets. You all are, anyway. I don’t need one.”
I eyed Tom’s jacket. His grayish, blueish, battered winter coat — which I had never seen him without, which he wore every minute of his daily eight-hour shift, which was as much a part of him as his real arms — might have been purchased new in 1982.
“Yes, you do,” I said.
Tom ignored this. “Do you want a jacket or not?”
“Get the jacket,” Rocky called from across the office. “They’ll never offer you another one.”
This was my first shift with Rocky. I liked him already. He was younger than me, the owner of a business — something about sales — and he also had a bunch of other jobs, including working at the ice rink and at the local lumberyard. He had several kids with a huge age gap between them (“that last one was a big-ass surprise”), boundless energy, and the kind of relentless positivity that made me certain he listened to lot of bro-y leadership podcasts. In a corporate setting, I would have hated him, but at the ice arena, this all translated into Rocky having filled up the Zamboni, cleaned both bathrooms, inspected the locker rooms, and told me his life story (“blessings on blessings, man”) in the first 45 minutes of our shift.
“I’ll take a large jacket,” I told Tom.
Tom looked embarrassed. “We don’t have ladies’ sizes.”
I tried to imagine what a ladies’ Zamboni jacket would look like. “A large men’s is fine.”
Rocky and I watched the clock. We talked shit in the office, sort of. Rocky’s version of talking shit was extremely benign; I tried to pump him for information about Cody, my ice arena arch-nemesis, but the worst thing Rocky would say about him was, “That guy just doesn’t do the work.” From the look on his face, it was clear that, to Rocky, this pronouncement was truly damning.
The Mites (5-9 y.o. boys) had practice; Rocky resurfaced the ice with the Zamboni afterwards, me scuttling after him with my snow shovel and squeegee as he parked the Zam back in the garage. The Bantams (13-14 y.o. boys) had a game; we resurfaced between the second and third periods, and then again afterwards. Then the high school girls (were you aware that, in hockey, only the boys’ teams have real names?) from a few towns over had practice.
I was leaning on my broom out on the floor, watching the ice, in the middle of trying to figure out if the high school girls’ coach was 1) a lesbian or 2) just a Minnesota sports mom when Rocky crept up behind me, punched me lightly on the shoulder, and said, “You’re up after this, Zamboni Queen.”
“After this practice?”
Rocky nodded. “Your turn to drive the Zam.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m not allowed yet.”
“Last resurface of the night!” Rocky said, thumping the glass window surrounding the rink rhythmically with his fist. “With everyone already gone after this? You can’t hurt anything.”
“I seriously don’t think I’m allowed to.”
“C’mon. You know how to drive it?”
“Yes.”
“And do The Pattern?”
“Yes.”
Rocky laughed. “Listen, you’re never gonna drive if you wait for them to say you can. I worked here for two and a half years before they finally let me drive for a game.”
I stopped dead, broom still in hand.
“Wait. Rocky, wait. Two and a half years? You worked here for two and half years? Before you got to drive the Zamboni?” My eyes suddenly felt a little buggy.
Rocky shrugged. “Yeah. It’s really, really hard to learn to drive. It takes years to master it. I’m even good with stuff like that, and it took that long to learn how to do it right.”
“Are you. serious.”
“Yeah. That’s why you should practice when you can. Like tonight. When it doesn’t matter that much.” He turned around and began walking back to the office. “Listen, I’m gonna get the stands tonight,” he tossed over his shoulder. “That’s my gift to you. You just be ready to resurface when the girls leave, and we’ll get out of here early. I gotta get out early, anyway — I have to be up at 4 tomorrow.”
The high school girls clumped off the ice and swarmed past me, chattering, in a blocky, pillowy mass of hockey pads and clacking helmets. Their coach, looking every inch an old-school lesbian and smelling — alas, alas — every inch a straight Minnesotan woman who’d bathed in some kind of electric pink Victoria’s Secret body spray — walked past me, then doubled back to shut the gate after the girls.
I hadn’t moved from where I was standing.
Two and a half years.
Two and a half years to drive the Zamboni for a game. And Rocky said he was good with this kind of stuff.
You know who was bad with this kind of stuff?
Me.
John, my Zamboni trainer, had never said it, but I was not picking up Zamboni-driving quickly. I knew it; I could feel his unspoken Midwestern frustration when I messed up The Pattern during our lessons, which had been going on for months now, or forgot to do something basic, like turn the brush off after the first loop around the ice.
Cody, for all his assholery the last time we’d worked together, had been telling me the truth — I wasn’t going to drive this season. And now, Rocky was giving me the real numbers; I wasn’t going to drive next season, either. Maybe not even the season after that.
What was I doing here? I felt suddenly like an idiot, standing in the middle of a wet rubber floor in damp boots on a Thursday night at 10 PM, tired and not even close to going home yet, clutching a broom to sweep up after children I didn’t know who’d been playing a sport I couldn’t have cared less about. What was all this for? I could have been in bed, with a book that was good, for fuck’s sake! They thought I was going to quietly spend two to three years scrubbing toilets and sweeping balls of superfine child-hair out of locker room corners until they deemed me ready to drive the oversensitive and overpriced ice-car??
I should quit. I should quit right now.
Well, tomorrow. After I help Rocky close up.
What a waste of time. I shook my head. What really got me was that no one had been up front with me when I started training: that no one had told me learning to drive the Zamboni would take years.
Years! of my one wild and precious homosexual life! that had been wholly and blissfully ignorant of hockey rules before this all started!
I walked into the hall and hung up my broom. Rocky poked his head around the corner. “All you, Zam Queen. Ready to ride?”
I nodded. Rocky was right. The stakes had never been lower.
In the garage, I climbed up onto the Zamboni and turned the ignition. It whirred and clanked to life, and, atop it, I surged forward onto the ice. Rocky stood on the edge of the rink, ready to shut the gates after me.
“She rides tonight!” he yelled. “Looking good up there!”
We flew forward, the Zam and I, straight down the middle of the ice, the wind I never got used to cutting at my face and making my eyes stream from the corners. I readied for the first turn, easing into it the way John had taught me, lining up with the side of the rink, turning on my brush, imagining the darkened stands filled with a crowd, imagining the intensity of having to do this right, exactly right, while hundreds of men watched me with their arms crossed over their stomachs; what it would feel like to resurface the ice so perfectly even they couldn’t find a strip that had been missed.
Pulling my brush in, tracing my second loop, and beginning The Pattern, I realized I was doing it: I was driving the Zamboni.
Alone. For the first time.
I didn’t quit that night, or the next day, or the day after that.
But that night, sitting proudly astride my lumbering, finicky mechanical beast, I had no way of knowing I was driving the Zamboni alone for the first — and last — time.
The suspense!
CLIFFHANGER. Very good suspense.