An Inverted Sort of Prayer is narrated by main character, Billy Purdy, an Indian and ex-professional Canadian team hockey player, whose stardom sends him on an abusive rocky road of steroids, drugs, alcohol, sex, and sordid rendezvous’ to find himself.

Purdy is just as dangerous off the ice as he was on, as an enforcer.

So there you had it: a good in the room kind of guy with traces of blood in his urine splitting time between the press box and the penalty box. Sometimes I think my entire life has been spent in some box.

Purdy strives to be unnoticed, yet thrives to be recognized for his stardom — and you can’t have it both ways. This leads to him spending as much time boxing himself in, in life’s situations, as he’d spent in the penalty box during games.

He’s constantly trying to find himself once his career has ended, only to have his “friends” lead him further into abusing drugs and alcohol. He’s as much a star and failure in the local bars, as he was on the ice, placing himself within a cocoon or box to keep from getting close to others. Even realizing what steroid, alcohol, and drug abuse had done to him, he didn’t stop.

. . . booze is very different than juice. Juice takes discipline, while booze is the escape from any discipline and, in the short term anyway, manifests itself almost exclusively in the spirit—thus that particular nickname, I take it. Juice, on the other hand, proceeds as a muscular dialogue, teaching the user facts of general validity, and the abuser the facts of life. I have learned nothing from the use of alcohol. But I have learned a great deal from the abuse of steroids. . . . For the juicer, when he stops growing he starts to die.

For Billy Purdy there was no stopping. It was difficult for him to accept that he was no longer the enforcer of his trade and more difficult to accept that even out of the box and off the ice, he was a heavyweight and his own worst enemy.

Mine was a dying trade. The heavyweight, it seemed, an endangered species. Gone were the glory days of the gallant enforcer. Gone were the days of respect and pride upon the blades. These days it was all corporate boxes, television revenues, bottom lines, and faggot hockey. These days anyone could play the heavy and make it pay in spades.

It was after he’d been suspended indefinitely that he realized his life was a shambles and his friends weren’t really his friends.