I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (27 page)

And then the fight at Beauty Bar. Javad out cold on the floor. I'd been enraged by the asshole who had sucker punched him, rage that, for once, wasn't misplaced. But I'd let the jerk get away. Going home in a cab without my bike, then waking in a fury and running all the way back into the city to retrieve it. Gasping my way through Brooklyn, through the nauseating memories of my curdled life. And then stumbling upon—somewhere after exhaustion but before heat stroke—peace.

And the sleep! I had suffered from the entire spectrum of sleep issues my entire life: tossing and turning, kicking and punching, insomnia, night terrors, crying in my sleep, sleepwalking, sleep talking, even a light sprinkling of bedwetting as a child. How I had envied Allison, who simply closed her eyes and slept! Sleep was something I stalked, chased, and then choked into submission. As soon as I had left home, I'd gamed it, taking Tylenol PM or NyQuil, muscle relaxants, anything.

But when I lay down the night after my crazed run, I felt myself surrendering the minute I closed my eyes. It was like grabbing
the heaviest stone I could handle and diving down into a cold, dark loch. Instead of slowing, as on a normal dive, I descended faster and faster into the velvet fluid. When I realized that I had gone too deep, that I would run out of air before I made it back to the top, I opened my lungs and, impossibly, breathed. I swam deeper and deeper, breathing in huge, luxurious lungfuls of midnight blue water.

For the first time I could remember, I woke up in the same position I had laid down in. This was miraculous! I had dreamed so furiously all night—vivid, beautiful, narrative dreams—that it felt like I had been doing work all night. But I wasn't groggy; I was alert, ready to go. I hadn't been looking forward to anything in the day before me, but for some reason I couldn't wait to get to it. Then I tried to get up.

I hadn't moved the entire night because both my legs were broken. Femurs, tibias, fibulas. Ankles too. My feet, yes, every bone in both feet was broken, including those bones in your toes—metatarsals? Thank God my upper body had been spared. I tried to sit up.

No, my abdomen was trashed too, like someone had run over it with a car. Absolutely ruined. My shoulders and neck too. My goddamn arms were sore—how could you hurt your arms running? If alcohol were as harmful to your health as running, I would have only ever gotten drunk once.

I tottered out of bed, chewed some Advil, and hit the shower. After finishing my breakfast and morning coffee, I didn't feel so bad. Sore as I was everywhere else, my back didn't hurt. One rib in the middle of the right side of my back had been trying to turn sideways since I was seventeen, when some small but vital cog had crumbled while I hunched, sweating, over a cutting board at Sonic Burger. I had tried chiropractors and massage. I'd drank. I'd tried every pain medication, legal and illegal, that I could get my hands on. Nothing worked. The meds got me high yet did nothing for my back. But today, for the first time I could remember, my back was okay.

Sure, everything else hurt. But that was a new pain, a proud pain, opposite in essence from the wincing shame of drinking. For once, I ached from doing something good. Perhaps the best way forward would be to treat running like any other dangerous unknown that had entered my life: if the first fix didn't kill you and only made you hurt for a day, why not see if you could get away with doing a little more?

The next day, I tried it again. Don't think about it, I told myself, just socks and shoes and a T-shirt and those ancient Umbro soccer shorts you stole from Tatyana in high school, then out the door. People do this every day.

Then I was again out on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, gangly and unsteady and blinking in the too bright sun like a newborn giraffe. Don't look around, don't think, just one foot in front of the other.

It was merciless. They say you never forget how to ride a bike, but I had forgotten how to run. How old was I when I had first run, two? One and a half? That instinctual knowledge had abandoned me. The soles of my feet slapped the pavement painfully. Every muscle in my stiff legs wailed. The shock of the impact reverberated up my body, jarring my knees, my hips, my aching shoulders. My head wobbled on top of my backbone like it was going to fall off. I slowed to a walk after a couple of blocks. This wasn't working. What was I doing differently this time?

Aha—I wasn't livid with rage, as I had been when I'd left the house the day after Javad got coldcocked. Here, I thought, was one problem I could solve. I'd spent most of my adult life fighting to keep my temper. To run, I'd have to let it go.

Nothing made me crazier than when someone hit me in the face. My blood started thumping through my veins just thinking about it. I squatted down and glanced around. No one looking. I smacked myself hard in the face, twice. I stood up.

Let go
.

I ran.

I lumbered stiffly forward, my ancient Adidas Sambas scraping the pavement. The air felt scratchy whisking in and out of my lungs. I couldn't get my breathing to line up with my footfalls. How did I not know how to do this? Then, suddenly, my feet synced up with the rasping sound of my breathing. I was doing it.

I ran down Driggs, dumpy little two- and three-story buildings lining the street. Past McGolrick Park, across McGuinness Avenue. I felt sick heat growing in my chest. The muscles on the tops of my thighs ached. Then they burned. Then they were boiling under my skin, about to cook their way through at any moment. Something bad might happen—should I stop?

No. That was my weak self, the one who whined and cried and drank in bed. But Christ, that mounting fire in my legs! It was like running through hell. But if you were running through hell, I reasoned, the solution was not to stop but to keep going. Let the weak half suffer; let him bleat until he fled or died completely.

Fuck you, I thought as I ran. Fuck this entire filthy, nepotistic city, this malignant tumor of old money and condescension, cock-teasing me with opportunity just to whip it away, this city that had tempted me and ignored me and exhausted me. It's not that I wasn't smart enough or good enough, just that I wasn't some Upper East Side blue blood or the son of a Connecticut millionaire. It's not fair, and that's exactly how you fuckers want it.

My mouth was dry as straw. Phlegm collected in my throat, but I couldn't swallow, so I coughed and choked on it. My bones screamed with each pounding step. I was doing structural damage, I had to be. People stared at me. I stared hard back.

Fuck you all with your tiny, self-contented little lives, your Urban Outfitters wardrobes, your fancy fucking phones, your designer weed, your coffee tables of repurposed lumber, your vintage eyeglass frames, mocking the Poles or the Puerto Ricans or the black kids at the automotive high school. This isn't your private playground.

And fuck the Poles and the Puerto Ricans and the black kids at the automotive high school for mocking the gentrifiers—being from here doesn't just give you a pass. All of you, what the fuck did you ever do with your lives? You ate and you slept and you peed and you paid too much for a pair of shoes you didn't need.

I felt like I was fighting as I ran, kneeing some invisible enemy in the face with each step, punching another face each time I swung my arms forward, my eyes fixed ahead on the ever-advancing hordes. I thought of all the people who had fucked me over, listed their names in my mind, then destroyed their faces: grade school martinets, cruel gym teachers, high school bullies, bosses, cops, landlords, tyrannical administrators, ex–band mates, ex-friends, ex-lovers . . . Yes, fuck my traitorous father—obviously, so much of this lay at his feet—but also fuck my sisters for being able to live without spontaneously igniting; fuck my mother for coddling me and making me soft and weak like my father . . . Who was left?

Me
.

Fuck you, I thought.

You blame this country and this town and these people and some dark, nebulous force like there is some grand, cosmic conspiracy to hold you down. Not only is that not true—the exact opposite is true! EVERYONE has tried to help you since you were just a kid. You wouldn't let them. The darkness and the failure you claimed to battle against, that was your food and drink. You cherished your pain. You held it to your breast and nursed it like a newborn child. You did this to yourself.

“Not fair!” I had been crying since I was a baby. I'd imagined my life to be so goddamn hard, but Christ, my friends in New York, they'd never met their dads, or their dads had been junkies or alcoholics, or they'd died in prison. Or my friends had been raped and beaten by their fathers till they
wished
their fathers were dead. I had been right—life was unfair. But it had been unfair
in my favor
.

I felt cold to the core. Here was the hideous truth:
I
was my problem. I recalled that Latin saying “Every man is the architect of his own fortune.” I had been the architect of my own hell. Brick by brick, I had built my own prison. I had written my own nightmare.

I caught a flicker of my reflection in a passing bus—sweaty, red-faced, scowling, fists clenched. I was only barely shuffling forward, but I felt like my heart was going to explode. I stopped, gasping and shaking, barely able to stand. My body needed to stop running.

But where had listening to my body gotten me? My body needed alcohol. Gallons of alcohol, white grain liquor, the cheap shit in the plastic bottle with the twist-off cap, thundering over me like a waterfall in a shampoo commercial, my pores drinking it in. My body needed a woman, many women, a platoon of soulless femme-bots, a legion of barely legal nymphs, cheerleaders, gymnasts, ballerinas and figure skaters and contortionists, oh my! My body needed opiates. Just a handful of pills, espresso grind, thank you, and don't bother wrapping it up. I'm getting that “to stay.” Super-size it, make it a pound, make it a kilo, make it a bale, fill the hold of a small airplane, conscript every man, woman, and child in a small war-torn country into an army devoted solely to growing poppies, cooking them down, and sending that shit up my nostril. My body needed to stop running. God fucking damn it, my body doesn't get what it wants. I started running again.

There was no question I was running from something. I'd been running my whole life. Convulsing from one side of the country to the other. Living like a fugitive: keeping strange hours, avoiding the people I loved, waking up feeling hunted and exhausted, and doing it all again the next day. I had been trying to escape a horror that followed me everywhere I went, terrorized by fear itself.

I was running again, now literally running. But something inside me had pivoted, and for the first time I had the bizarre sensation that I was running
to
something. Instead of running away
from my fear, I was running straight into it. What lay on the other side? I had no idea. But it couldn't be worse than the life I had led.

I crawled home, feeling like I had lost a fight. Still, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had fought back. I opened the door to my building with shaking hands, then pulled myself up the stairs to my apartment by the banisters. I almost fell taking my shorts off in the bathroom, but I managed to make it into the shower without major mishap.

Quitting drinking had been simple subtraction. I had removed alcohol from my life. Becoming a runner would involve something entirely different. I would have to start completely from scratch. No, I wasn't even starting from scratch. First I had to dismantle the old structure, pull each rusty nail from each warped plank, break crumbling concrete from rusty rebar. Only then would I be able to start from scratch.

I would have to tear down the asshole I had been and build a human being in his place. How, I had no idea. It would take patience and commitment, two things I had almost wholly purged from my life. My greatest fears were trying and failing. In order to become a runner, I would have to try incredibly hard, and I might still fail. That sober thought was more frightening than any drug-addled hallucination.

When I got out of the shower, I got onto my computer. I looked for a local race longer than five miles so I'd have something to push for. They had seven-mile races, didn't they? Well, no. A 10K race was only six miles, and I knew I could do that. I signed up for the Staten Island Half Marathon to be held on October 11, 2009, less than two months away. Thirteen-point-one miles. It was farther than I had ever run in my life.

CHAPTER 9

Congratulations, You've Rejoined the Human Race

M
y days were long now that they didn't start at noon and end at sundown. Whenever I was angry or depressed or frustrated or just didn't know what to do with myself, I went running. That added up to a lot of time on my feet. Walking to the bathroom in the morning after my nightly plunge into the depths of sleep became a treacherous ordeal. Sitting down or standing up became a creaky, complicated process. Running stirred parts of my lungs that hadn't seen oxygen in many years, and breathing in the hot steam in the shower, I coughed up all manner of marine life that had shaken loose. Still, I came home from every single run feeling better than when I'd left. My head felt better, anyway. My body was trashed.

I'd taken an anatomy class in high school and thus imagined I had a decent grasp of the human body, its parts, and how they worked together. I understood running to involve coordinated contractions and relaxations of the calf muscle and the gluteus maximus, the two muscles that made up the leg. So why did every cubic inch of my legs hurt? My toes, my arches, my heels, the tops of my
feet, the sides of my thighs, the insides of my thighs, odd bumpy muscles in my hips, weird places in my butt . . . from my love handles down to my toenails, the only place I poked that didn't hurt was my kneecap. My lower legs glowed constantly with a warm ache, from the tender surfaces of my shins to deep within my calf muscles to the very bones themselves. I stopped getting high and even quit smoking. Running was tough enough without handicapping myself.

My godmother, Marilyn, my father's only sister, had been diagnosed with abdominal cancer the year before and had already slogged through several rounds of chemo. My mother called one day to tell me Marilyn might not win her battle. I got back in touch with my father, and we made plans to go up to Saskatchewan to visit her in November. As much as I dreaded a long-distance field trip with my dad, I hoped visiting Marilyn with him might help me crack the riddle of my father. The last time I'd seen Marilyn, in 2003, I'd asked about my grandparents. “My family starts with me and my husband,” she'd said, looking away from me. “You won't see any pictures from before that.”

She was hiding something, from herself and from us. What was it?

Rage had been the only thing that could get me out the door and running, but through Marilyn's illness, I discovered something that could keep me going long after my anger had burned itself out. When I walked down the stairs and hit the sidewalk, I had a laundry list of people to be angry at, things to be angry about, a list so long that I felt I could never get through it. But the longest I could stay mad while running was maybe an hour and a half, and that was really milking it. Stewing in my anger that long put power in my legs, but it exhausted me emotionally. By the time the anger had cooked itself down to nothing, my defenses had fallen. Other
feelings crept in. Sadness, yes, and regret, but also love, even hope. So, not totally dead inside after all.

While I trained for the Staten Island Half Marathon, I thought about Marilyn. I pictured her face, deeply creased from long hours in the sun, her kind eyes, her smile. I tried to think about the future,
her
future: Marilyn alive and well and happy, driving the combine on their farm, cooking pierogi and venison sausage, playing with her grandkids. As I had forced myself to sit in my anger, I forced myself to sit in my love for Marilyn. Thinking about how much I loved her and the love she had shown me over my life, I finally began to feel better.

Through friends I met a girl named Izgi, a Turkish immigrant with dark hair and eyes and a cute accent. She worked as an auditor for a blue-chip accounting firm and had her own apartment in Soho. Somehow it didn't bother her that I made $300 a week babysitting drunks at a bar till four in the morning. She allowed me an open destiny and made no judgments about my old life.

“The past, you say it's in the past, so? . . .” She cocked an eyebrow at me and shrugged. “Everybody makes mistakes. But not everybody is so brave to say ‘I was wrong.' To me, you have only been a gentleman.”

Not everyone was so forgiving. While I was running to the park one day to do some pull-ups and push-ups, a male voice called out from an open second-story window, “Fuck you, Mishka!”

Maybe just one of my friends, some good-natured ribbing?

“You suck, asshole!”

I guess not.

“Making amends” is an integral part of the Twelve Steps. In my darkest hour, I had never considered going to Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't do groups, I didn't do programs, I didn't do structure. I was hardheaded, and that had gotten me into trouble, but to
pretend I wasn't would bury me. I had gotten sober as I had gotten fucked up: alone, by my own will, on my own terms. I had harnessed my hardheadedness, as I had harnessed my anger, and they served me now. This idea that I had to be humble not just before a God I didn't believe in or people I'd hurt or nonalcoholics but before
everyone
and that my “recovery” would last the rest of my life . . . fuck that, all the way, in every way. I'd been a living apology my entire adult life. I'd had my fill of submission. I quit drinking so I'd no longer have to be humble, so I could take charge of my own life.

AA's concept of amends was bullshit. If you'd punched a guy in the face, there was no way to unpunch him. The harm you had done, you couldn't undo. Nothing would make it right, and it was dumb to dangerous to believe that something as quick as a handwritten letter would balance the scales. You had to live with the knowledge that you had evil in you, that you had done evil, and that you had the potential to do more evil in the future. Let that burden guide your hand down the line.

Still, I wasn't so stubborn that I couldn't see I owed apologies to a lot of people. I'd apologized to my band mates almost daily for my behavior—drinking all the drink tickets, doing all the coke, not doing any of the driving, getting into shit with the other bands, wandering off into the night trashed, costing people money, worrying them, annoying them, pissing them off. But in the second half of 2009, I began anew with apologies that I would finally back up with action in the real world. I wasn't simply going to grovel again for forgiveness for the trespasses of the night or the week or the month before, I was actually
no longer going to continue to do
the things for which I was now asking forgiveness. I intended to apologize one final, definitive time.

I chased down and cornered the friends I'd been in bands with who'd been irradiated by the most fallout from my toxic life. I called them, emailed them, or pulled them aside at band practice. I was careful to make eye contact, apologized specifically for the
nights I remembered, then gave a blanket apology for the nights I couldn't remember. Nothing stuck.

Jimmy snorted, waved me away with a hand, and said, “You're fine.”

Zack rolled his eyes and said, “Stop. I mean, okay, sure, I hear you. But don't make this any more awkward than absolutely necessary.”

Jason stared at me for a second, his eyes quickly lighting up. “Awww! Wouldja listen to this guy? Ya big lug! I love this guy!” He pinched my cheeks, then put me in a headlock. “Folks, ain't he the sweetest?”

Time and again, I set myself upon Mitchell. Mitchell and I had been in Beat the Devil together for a couple of years, an intense, difficult time with lots of grueling nickel-and-dime tours, inebriation, and screaming matches in the practice space, the bar, or the street. Each time I tried to apologize to him, he shrugged me off. I would collect myself, then set upon him with renewed fervor. Finally, he got annoyed.

“Dude, every time I see you, you apologize to me. Knock it off.”

“I feel like you're not hearing me.”

“I hear you, man. I'm not brushing it aside. It's just . . . you really don't have anything to apologize for, okay? I mean, we were
all
fucked up. If you drank or did more blow or pills or whatever, well, you got us that beer 'cause the clubs loved you, or it was your friends who hooked us up with the pills. And blow . . . Jesus, if there's a team of accountants tracking who's done more than their fair share, well, I don't think
you
are gonna be in the first wave of people they audit.

“You're a hard-ass and that's fucking annoying, but we kinda have to let it go because you're harder on yourself than anyone else. You were never belligerent or mean or spiteful or . . . You never started shit with me or with anybody. In fact, I remember you being pretty patient and talking me down more than once when I wanted to fight
you
. You were only ever a danger to yourself.

“You just . . . once you started drinking, you would sort of wake up from the depressed fog you'd been in. Then you'd get really funny, just awesome to hang out with—I mean seriously, a champion drinker . . . Later in the night, you'd get slurry. Then you'd be asleep or nodding out at the table. At the end of the night, we'd carry you somewhere and have to pull your cowboy boots off and throw a blanket over you. You were never an asshole. It was just kind of . . . sad. This great big excitable puppy dog of a guy who was totally falling apart.”

When October 11 rolled around, Izgi and I schlepped down to the Staten Island Ferry at an hour of the early morning I could only recall experiencing from being up all night. She held my hand on the boat, bouncing with excitement in her seat. I felt no excitement, only exhaustion and dread. I focused on the ferry. This vast powerful ship, had it been here the entire eleven years I had? In a city where nothing came cheap, this boat ride—a mundane but completely satisfying pleasure—was absolutely free. What else had I missed?

When we entered the corrals for the race, I felt sorely unready. The other runners were stretching and warming up next to me, some of them already shiny with sweat, alert and well scrubbed under their visors, wearing logo-emblazoned athletic apparel of patented synthetic materials, hydration belts, iPods, and $200 digital watches. It's a run, you fucking clowns; we're not going to the moon. I wore gym shorts and an old black undershirt, capped off with a couple days' beard and a bad case of bedhead. It must have looked like I'd lost a bet.

These runners, they were players. Doers, decision makers, shot callers, winners. They were normals—the people I'd feared and condescended to my whole life, while secretly wishing I could just effortlessly
live
like they seemed to. This half marathon was a farce.
I was not a runner. I was a mangy, flea-bitten coyote among purebred greyhounds. When the gun went off, I half expected them to turn on me and tear me apart.

As we began to run, I had one goal, one word in my mind:
finish
. Just get this behind you, another example of you biting off more than you can chew, one more mistake rolling under the tires. Carry Izgi and Marilyn with you, hold their tender, smiling faces in your head like talismans, and get this done. Then get the fuck out of here.