Children of the New World: Stories by Alexander Weinstein Page A

remembered me, I could end a night with a snowbunny. We’d take the shuttle down to Bear Ridge and the girls would run their hands over my scars and see the tattoos I’d gotten inked to cover the worst of my wounds. “Feel this,” I’d tell them, guiding their fingers along the firebird that spreads its wings across my left hip. Sympathy medicine, Jerry, the old bartender, used to call it. He said the crash was the best thing that ever happened to me. “Man, if I could go home with as many chicks as you, I’d ski off a cliff any day.”
    “Yeah right,” I’d say, thinking, No you wouldn’t . Not if you knew what it was like to spend three years in recovery you wouldn’t, not if you had to learn to walk again you wouldn’t, not if you knew how bones can scream, you sure fucking wouldn’t.
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    THE WINTER AFTER I got out of recovery, X-Sports did a final documentary on me, pitched as a comeback story. When I get in a real dark place, I’ll open a brew, vape some medical, and watch it. The first half shows me stomping every mountain known to man. It’s sick. I achieved first descents on every continent; fucking dominated big mountain skiing. There’s no doubt I was the best extreme skier out there. Then we hit the fatal mistake . Usually I’ll fast-forward through that section—but nights when I’m real low I’ll just sit there, the weight of Sour Diesel keeping me pinned. I see myself heading toward the cliff I never should’ve taken. I’d spotted the jutting ledges from the helicopter, marked it as a no-go, but the mountain stoked my ego and, in a split-moment decision, I wrecked my life thinking I could conquer anything. Fast-forward through my recovery, my parents saying they know I’ll pull through, my buddies saying I’m the gnarliest skier alive and there’s no way I’m ever going to stop rocking trails. And then there’s me, learning to walk again, three years sped up to make it look like five minutes. The doctors predicted I’d never walk, but I fought against it, stopped taking the drugs, chewed through the pain to avoid the sleepy numbness, forced myself to try. The video doesn’t show any of that, just hints at my return to skiing as I take my first steps out of the hospital.
    The biography ends with me getting back on my skis and teaching my pathetic extreme class. “Nowadays, Ronnie’s getting his confidence back and teaching a new crop of skiers how to tackle the mountains he once conquered.” There’s a clip of me doing a fakie off a rail and a small group of students clapping. “He’s getting ready to take on his old nemesis, and when he does, you can bet we’ll be there.” They fade out on the Neacola range, the very mountain that ate me, and the implied promise that I’ll rise to fight that cliff again. And that’s it: a comeback story without a comeback. When I didn’t return to extreme skiing, the interviews stopped. If I wasn’t willing to risk my life, the media wasn’t interested in following me. No blood, no money.
    A year later the thaw began and I got a pass from Mother Nature. I escaped with the dignity of my promised return; it wasn’t my fault I never went back, just the sorry state of the environment. But everybody knew the truth—my buddies, the videographer, big mountain skiers like Ethan Perdergast and Sean Godly—the sky could’ve dumped snow for the next hundred years, and I never would’ve gotten into another copter to pick my line toward that cliff.
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    ANGIE COMES IN at ten to help me get set up for the lunch rush—which is a joke; there’s no rush, just the Little Eskimo Club wanting pizza and hot cocoa, followed by a few beginners and the ancient warriors who order wings, burgers, and fries. Angie takes drink orders while I work the grill.
    “Hope you have a second keg ready for the whiteout, ” she says as we watch the scattered groups eating beneath the dimmed lights. Yesterday we had another bunk report of a