I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (31 page)

Biking home, I felt mad and sad and scared. But after a couple of hours, I felt better. Not just better than I had when I had left the session, better than I had felt before the session. When the thing you fear most in the world finally happens, it sucks. But at long last, the fear is gone. The Worst Thing Imaginable has occurred, and you're still here: you've survived it. The dread-filled wait is over, and you can finally get down to the grim business of living the rest of your life.

When we were dating, Izgi had complained several times that my apartment smelled funny. It embarrassed me, as I had noticed it too. I cleaned and cleaned, opened all the windows to air the rooms out, to no avail. Finally, I'd mentioned it to Esteban, and the smell had gone away. When it came back, I mentioned it again. Again, it went away.

The third time, I'd had enough. I waited till I was sure Esteban wasn't at home, then slipped the lock on his door. Bracing, I flipped the light switch.

I had never been clean, but what I saw was worse than anything I could remember. Esteban's room was pure filth and despair. The walls were gray with dust and lint halfway to the ceiling, pocked with greasy handprints. Clothes strewn everywhere, not just dirty but blackened and stiff. Desiccated Chinese food shellacked to aluminum takeout containers. Gay porn magazines, ads for sex clubs, flyers for gay escorts. An imploding couch heaped with so much trash it was impossible to sit on. A fax machine, the phone off the hook, on a collapsing bookshelf. There was a tiny cleared path leading to a defeated-looking chair, one corner propped up with a phonebook, in front of an ancient dusty terminal.

His poker station. Esteban had mentioned several times that he had been playing Internet poker, I thought just to kill time. But apparently, it wasn't just time the poker had been killing. There were
three Tropicana bottles next to his computer, all filled with piss. A fourth one, closest to the chair, was half full. Our bathroom worked perfectly. Esteban had been pissing into bottles so he wouldn't miss his poker blinds. He hadn't even bothered to throw the full bottles away.

I turned off the light and locked the door, dialing my landlord even as the door was swinging shut. No more.

It turned out that Esteban was behind on rent as well. Still, it took two months to get him out and then two days for a cleaning lady to make his room livable. I talked my landlord into letting me rent the whole place. Jens, who had played drums for COME ON twelve years earlier, had just broken up with his live-in girlfriend, so he moved in. With my drinking half and my depressing roommate gone, I felt like a malign spirit had been exorcised.

One day at counseling Chris asked me what I'd been reading.

“I'm reading
The Dark Knight Returns
. You know, the Batman graphic novel that came out in the late eighties?”

“I remember that era of Batman well. When they had that poll to see if Robin should die? I lost friends over that.”

“I thought it was such bullshit when Robin died. But now I know that he had to die. Is that the difference between a man and a boy? Men know that Robin had to die?”

Chris shrugged.

“That was after
Dark Knight
anyway. I haven't read it since I was in seventh grade. Man, it's pretty great. Batman's old and fucked up and weak, sort of courting disaster every time he even leaves his house.”

“Fantastic premise.”

“Do you remember the story?”

Chris cocked his head. Motherfucker was a library of noncommittal gestures.

“It's been a long time for me too,” he said.

“I thought I remembered it all but I was surprised at how much I had forgotten. Harvey Dent—Two-Face—they've surgically
repaired his face, and he's gone through all kinds of annoying therapy so they've pronounced him cured and set him free.”

“I guess even Frank Miller values talk therapy.”

“Aha, but he's
not
better. That's the thing. As soon as he's released, all these horrible crimes start happening, crimes that could only be the work of Two-Face. Batman hunts him down and corners him in this abandoned warehouse. Always gotta be an abandoned warehouse, you know?”

“Right.”

“But it's kind of a touching scene. These two old men who have known each other twenty-five, thirty years . . . they've been in each other's lives for longer than they haven't.

“They're fighting in and out of the shadows. Great inking there. There's this twinning thing going on. Batman puts on a mask that gives him freedom. Two-Face's face is his mask, and it imprisons him. They've each been transformed by trauma—Batman by the murder of his parents, Two-Face by getting acid thrown in his face. Batman keeps his duality secret; Two-Face celebrates it. And so on.”

“I should reread it.”

“After fighting for a while, Batman reaches out to Two-Face. He's like, ‘Harvey, why are you doing this? You were cured. They set you free. They even fixed your face! You've wanted to be free of Two-Face since he appeared. You had that opportunity, and you threw it away. Why couldn't you let yourself be free?'

“And Harvey says, ‘Batman, are you crazy? I'm fucking deformed.' And he steps out of the shadows. His face? Totally normal. Handsome, even. Pretty depressing.”

Chris nodded.

“So what's the point of the story?”

“I don't know. No one is ever cured? Naw, it's Frank Miller, so it has to be darker, more cinematic than that. How about ‘the scars of the soul run deeper than scars of the flesh?'”

“Why did you choose that story to relate to me?”

“Oof. I guess I feel like old Harvey Dent sometimes.”

“Keep going.”

“Like, standing on the street, people just see some jerk waiting for the bus. But I carry all this shit around in my head. All the people I've hurt, disappointing my family, all my failures . . .”

“Other people just see a man waiting for the bus, not a jerk.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Maybe they even see a good guy. He's in good shape, color in his face, decent haircut. Even shaves sometimes. He could be anything.”

“But in my head . . .”

“So how could Two-Face transform back into Harvey Dent?”

“More annoying talk therapy?”

“Sounds like Harvey's already been through a lot—let's not subject him to something so terrible as that.”

“I don't know. Isn't it almost time to wrap up?”

“Nah, we've got a few minutes left.”

“Chris, you didn't even look at the clock! You always wrap it up at quarter till and it's 2:55! What if I'm late for something?”

“Tell me one thing Harvey can do to not turn back into Two-Face. Then you can go.”

“Okay, shit. Let's see. He can make a list of things that Two-Face does—committing crimes themed with duality or incorporating the number two, deciding the fates of his foes with a coin toss—and a list of things that Harvey does—pursuing justice, reinforcing good, punishing evil. Then he can focus on doing the Harvey things, reward himself for doing those things, and, you know, not capture his foes and torture and terrify them. Good?”

Chris gave a half smile and pointed to the door.

On the bike ride home, I flip-flopped. I believed in Chris. He'd helped me see that my relationship with Izgi had been not a failure but a success—a normal, adult relationship that had run its course. And he was right, that was true. It had been rough between us for a minute, but now Izgi helped me, and I helped her;
we supported each other, and we would stay friends for life. Chris was a good guy.

But Chris was also manipulating me. Blatantly, right in front of my face. He had recognized how hardheaded I was, so he didn't feed me new age wisdom; he forced me to volunteer it for myself—the only way I would accept it. Positive reinforcement would never help Harvey Dent. Two-Face would always undo the honest DA obsessed with justice. More importantly, without Two-Face, Harvey Dent wouldn't exist, would never have existed.

Had Harvey Dent never been disfigured, had Two-Face never appeared, readers would never have known Harvey's name. He would have lived and died outside the frame—a nobody. If Two-Face disappeared, the man Harvey Dent would only be important because he was No Longer Two-Face, or At Least Not Right Now. And bad guys only disappeared for one reason: to come roaring back in the next episode.

Chris had tried to use the parable of Harvey Dent and Two-Face to show me that changing my inside world would change the outside world. Maybe that was true. But his parable made me realize something else, that my disfigurement—my drinking, my
alcoholism
—was the only thing that made me special. Without it, I was nothing, not even worth naming, just another of the anonymous masses, or not worth drawing at all.

I kept my head down at races, alienated even from myself. Still, I made new friends. It was impossible not to out on the trails, running side by side with strangers for miles. The runners I met made me look like a short-timer, a rank amateur. Johnny Rocket was a shit-talking mason from Jersey who did almost no training between his fifty- and one-hundred-mile races. Joe Reynolds was a dirty old man with a white mustache like a scrub brush; he streamed pervy jokes and unforgivable puns while casually racking up lots of 50K finishes, even the occasional fifty-miler. His wife, Christine, hosted
the Finger Lakes 50s race. She was as sweet as Joe was salty, and she ran with a beatific grin on her face, only marginally wider after a couple of postrace beers than it had been at mile forty-nine.

A long, lean brunette always encouraged me as she blew past, even though she was perpetually racing a longer distance than I. After our third race together, I finally asked her name: Zsuzsanna Carlson. She had a small face with deep, expressive eyes and a little button nose that, combined with her bouncing ponytail, called to mind a bunny rabbit. Her legs required a completely different metaphor. They were the legs of a statue magically sprung to life—shiny, polished granite in constant, impossible motion, thrashing tirelessly up a narrow rocky split in the side of a mountain. Her favorite races ground up one tear-inducing rock face and plunged down another in the beautiful but brutal mountains of Virginia: the Massanutten Mountain Trail fifty-miler, the Hellgate 100K, the Grindstone hundred-miler. Zsuzsanna talked about running 66.6 miles up the side of a mountain in the middle of the night in the dead of winter with the kind of open desire most women reserve for dark chocolate.

I ran with Republicans, I ran with Mormons, I ran with born-again Christians. Conversation—with anyone, about anything—was the only antidote for the boredom, doubt, and pain that came late in a race.

I ran with a bubbly librarian, Cherie Yanek, who ground out competitive finishes at some barbaric hundred-milers, hosted a 50K race at Burning Man, and ran dressed as a pink flamingo whenever the opportunity presented itself. If you had told me before I started running that I would become friends with an Italian American personal trainer from New Jersey with six-pack abs who listened to dance music and dressed, daily, in a track suit and a visor, I would have told you the notion defied logic, that it violated laws of physics, that it defeated ironclad mathematical truths, that it was impossible a thousand times over. Yet Jerome Scaturro—a black belt and Ironman several times over—became not just a buddy or an acquaintance but a trusted friend.

I made no mention of my past incarnations: the Wannabe Writer, the Soused Songwriter. I was a night manager at a bar. I played bass in a band called Freshkills. I happened to not drink. But it turned out I wasn't the only one with secrets.

One by one, my running buddies opened up. Zsuzsanna had been a hardcore alcoholic—straight vodka, from a plastic bottle. She'd been sober for fourteen years when we met. Despite suffering from asthma since she was a child, Melissa O'Reilly dreamed of running Badwater, the 135-mile race across Death Valley in the heat of summer. Steroids in her asthma medication had weakened her bones, so she kept getting stress fractures. But as soon as each new injury healed, she was back running again. A race director I met had sixteen years sober and had run ultras of all distances, including a 144-mile self-supported run. Bob Bodkin had been diagnosed with sarcoidosis—granules in his lungs—which he treated by running the Grand Canyon, rim to rim to rim, then the Oil Creek hundred-miler a week later. I got wind of David Clark, a 320-pound alcoholic who had lost 150 pounds in eighteen months by running. For the fifth anniversary of his sobriety, he ran Leadville, a grueling high-altitude hundred-miler through the Rockies. Like me, these people had used running not as a means of escape, but of transformation.