Naive. He was holding the phone half over his shoulder to speak into the mike, and I saw the return message pop up.

My name is Noelle.

Yummy!

“Yummy,” he dictated in a monotone. An ordinary looking businessman in a suit. Fit, wedding ring on his left hand, escort on the other end of the line.

I felt an absurd disconnect, standing there with my hockey bag, stick and carry-on wheelie. I’d come to Las Vegas not for gambling, not for the shows, not for hookers, but for an international rec hockey tournament. The fourteen members of our Toronto team had flown into town to play three games over three days, with playoffs on the fourth.

Reception beckoned the businessman to the front desk, and I was called soon afterwards. Yet Vegas didn’t stop. As our team headed for the elevators, we met a row of Playboy Bunnies sitting on banquettes. One leapt up, seeing the Canada tee-shirts a couple of us wore.

“I’m from Leaside! I’m from Leaside!” she cried, the Toronto neighbourhood with a rink where our team sometimes played. She plumped up her costume and posed for photos. I wanted to a picture of a Playboy Bunny behind a bunch of hockey bags, but I couldn’t get a good angle.

We spent three and a half days in Las Vegas, all of them filled with so many strange encounters it felt like a week. A few members of our team had been there before—I hadn’t—and one of our forwards knew all of the good restaurants. A couple of us even had gambling experience, and most would briefly succumb, at least to the slots. That wasn’t hard when going from our rooms to the games meant wheeling our bags through half an acre of slot machines in the hotel lobby.

“You know,” a guy said one time, “just because you’re Canadians, you don’t have to carry hockey sticks everywhere you go.”

***

I love playing hockey, although that’s not what I want to write about.

I’ll say, though, that I started playing when I was eighteen, doing my undergrad at the University of B.C. and working as a summer student reporter on The Vancouver Sun. We didn’t say “intern” then, but that’s what I was. I worked nights with a group of friends who decided to organize a Sun Nightside hockey game. We got off shift at 2:30 a.m. and were still pretty wired, so someone found ice time at an arena on the borderline between Burnaby and New Westminster from 3:30 to 5 in the morning.

I had never played hockey but I could skate, and I showed up the first night with my white figure skates hung by their tied laces over my shoulder. I have a very visual memory, and can still see the picks of those figure skates on the ice as a shadowy group of players made comments, which I could probably reconstruct but can’t really remember. It was okay. Our boss, the night city editor, couldn’t skate at all. We made him goalie.

I got some hockey skates that summer, and I think I still had them the first time I moved to Toronto. There, my boyfriend (and future husband) quickly found a pick-up hockey game. All the players worked in the media: The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, the CBC. I think the game continues to this day, maybe even with some of the original players. There were several other women playing when I signed up, but gradually most of us dropped out as we got pregnant. These were the last regular male-female games I’ve played.

After I moved to Toronto the second time, back from six years in Latin America, a friend heard about a women’s league at Bill Bolton Arena. We both signed up, and although my friend only lasted a year, I’ve been playing at Bolton for almost twenty years now. A few years ago, I joined a second league, so I play twice a week and often take a skill class. There’s also my travelling hockey team, a group of women who met a couple of years ago when someone wanted to pull together a team for a tournament in Iceland. I play defense and I’m mediocre at best, but I’m being genuine when I say I love it.

Anyway, what I really want to write about is the fantasy of tourist life in Las Vegas, not the reality of hockey, and especially not the reality of our tournament.

For the record, that didn’t go very well. We’d never played in the Las Vegas tournament before, and the convener seemed to have been overly impressed by the fact we were Canadians, which he assumed made us elite. He put us in a division with 22-year-old U.S. collegiate players, who beat us roundly. Since our team’s average age is 45, we should probably have been placed in a division with the Colorado Middle Age Rage or the California Hot Flashes. As it was, the only way we could last on the ice with any of the we played is that they took partying seriously.

In a face-off one morning, a 22-year-old looked up and said, “I’m still drunk.”

In the office after the game, an intercom plea: “Anyone clean up the puke in dressing room four yet?”

In our defense, I should say that a year and a half before, when our team played in Reykjavik, we were placed in the proper division and only lost the championship on a shoot-out. But with forty teams to jimmy around in Las Vegas—about 560 women—there was slippage.

Yet the neon of Vegas. The glitz. And the flimsy, fragile tinselly nature of the town, along with some pretty flimsy, fragile people we met on our peregrinations, which is what I really want to write about.

Jump to Part Two.