I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (32 page)

When I'd lined up for the first time at the Staten Island Half Marathon, I had stared at my feet and thought, I am not like you. When I lined up at another backwoods ultra, where first prize was a carved log or a painted rock, I shook hands, I looked at faces, I looked into people's eyes. Sure, they were runners, but they were also alcoholics and junkies and sex addicts and anorexics and diabetics, survivors of domestic abuse, morbid obesity, cancer, incest. You had to be a little bit crazy to run more than thirty miles for fun. These freaks—these damaged, wounded, frightened, hopeful people straining to get better, to be better, to overcome, to truly live before they died—they were my people.

When I showed up for my shift at Beauty Bar a little after 10:30 one night, I hung around outside for a minute instead of going straight in. It was nice out, and I wasn't eager to blow another night in a bar. True, I would be working, not drinking, but tonight, that only felt worse. This was my ex-world, but I hadn't been allowed to leave it behind.

I sat down on the doorman's stool for a minute to rest my tired legs. A woman down the block squawked something unintelligible. I made out one word: “phone.” A skinny young guy sprinted down the street in front of us. A thought went through my head: he is not running for the bus.

And then: I bet I can catch him.

I leapt off the doorman's stool in front of Beauty Bar and dug in hard, sprinting with everything I had.

The kid flew up the block, then down the steps into the Third Avenue subway station. He was thin and lithe, a sprinter, and he was moving fast. I had never been fast, even as a kid. At our sixth-grade track meet, Chuong had won every single distance. I wasn't even fast enough to compete, not by a long shot. I certainly hadn't gotten any faster in the last twenty-plus years. At thirty-three, it took a lot of work to get my 215 pounds moving at all. But most fast people aren't fast for long. This kid probably wasn't even a runner. I was. I could run all night if I had to. As long as I didn't lose sight of him, he was mine.

I was still accelerating when I hit the staircase down to the subway.
Shit
. I sent some hapless tourist sprawling as I skidded down the steps but somehow managed to stay on my feet. If the kid hopped the turnstile and made it onto a train, I was screwed.

But as I skittered off the steps into the station, I saw him disappearing up the staircase on the other side. I dashed across the station, then sprinted up the stairs, three at a time, and followed him south across 14th Street, dodging oncoming traffic.

I hollered, “Stop, thief!” and “Stop him!” and “Call the cops!” My helpful fellow New Yorkers did nothing.

But eighteen months previous, I wouldn't have done anything either. I certainly couldn't have given chase. I probably wouldn't have even been able to stand up. I'd passed out at Beauty Bar my last two visits there before I quit drinking: once from snorting Opana in the bathroom, once from simply being so drunk that even snorting chalky lines of crushed Adderall hadn't revived me. The only reason I hadn't gotten thrown out on my ass was that Zack, who'd barbacked there for ten years, had vouched for me.

If I had been a conscious witness to the grab-n-go, I'd have told myself that the kid needed the phone more than she did, that this was a more equitable distribution of wealth—trickle-down economics at work! And if it wasn't? Hey, not my fucking problem.

After crossing 14th Street, the thief ducked left on 13th and sprinted down the block toward Second Ave. My jeans were wet and sticky, clinging to my legs, my quads already burning, but I was rapidly closing the distance between us. I started yelling at his back, perspiration already soaking through his T-shirt: “I can run all night long, motherfucker. Drop the phone! You hear me gaining on you?
You hear me gaining on you?
I
will
run you down!”

I was disappointed that no one joined in to help. So many people had tried to help me in the past, just a stranger in trouble. As I lay wasted on the sidewalk outside Luna Lounge or Motor City, people had offered me change or tried to buy me food because they thought I was homeless. A professor had followed me out of class after I had shown up with fourteen stitches in my hand, bought me dinner, then given me quiet hell for the way I was living. A bartender in his fifties came over the bar when I was getting stomped by about six guys on St. Patty's Day, broke the fight up, chased them out, and let me drink for free the rest of the night. A stranger helped Allison get me up four flights of stairs one night. Strangers woke me up on buses and subways so I wouldn't get robbed or miss my stop. I had been helped into cabs by at least half the city.

And the cab drivers, man . . . Several cabbies turned the meter off halfway through the ride or just waved off my attempts to pay them entirely: “Ah, you're having a rough enough time as it is, buddy. This one's on me.”

When I stood covered in blood outside Mike's Papaya one morning at sunrise, a big, white bandage covering fresh stitches in a wound on my arm, a cab cut across two lanes of traffic to scoop me up. I marveled aloud that the cabbie had stopped at all.

“The blood, it's not good, but in the face, I see you are a good man,” he said, grinning.

The night after Jacob had died, I cried all the way from Bedford and North 5th in Brooklyn up to 107th and Amsterdam in Morningside Heights. The taxi driver silently handed me Kleenex after Kleenex through the plastic divider. He didn't even turn the meter on till we were on the FDR, which was good as I didn't have enough to pay the full fare, just a $20 Jens had stuffed in my hand. That driver never spoke a word to me. I can't recall ever seeing his face, but I will never forget him or his kindness.

Screaming at this kid as I chased him down the street, I realized that for once I wasn't the one in need of help. I was
helping someone else
.

The thief whipped desperately across Second Ave, weaving through honking cars. I was right on his heels and closing fast. He was done.

When we reached the other side of the avenue, he whirled around, his chest heaving from exertion, his face a mask of exhaustion and bewilderment: Where did this guy come from? And why can't I get rid of him?

In high-pitched moments of drama, I never, ever say the right thing. But this time, I did.

“Dude,” I said, looking him dead in the eye, “give me the phone, and you walk away. Or we fucking go to war.”

I had at least fifty pounds on him. His face twisted with anger. I had ruined his night. It felt great.

He reached in his pocket and withdrew the latest iPhone, released only that week. He tossed it to me. I caught it and slipped it into my pocket. I pointed in his face—
I got you
—and walked away without another word.

By the time I got back to Beauty Bar, a small crowd had assembled outside.

“Aw, man, he got away,” the doorman said when he saw me approaching, empty-handed.

“Nope.”

I pulled out the phone and held it high. People cheered. Mike Stewart, the bar owner, gave me a high five.

“I just came outside a minute ago to yell at you for not keeping an eye on things,” he said, grinning.

I felt good. I had done a good thing, done it without even thinking about it. It hadn't come out of the Big Book or a sermon or even a session with Chris. Something decent inside me had woken up and acted without any prompting, without anything holding it back.

A group of people clustered around one panicked girl walked toward the bar from the Third Avenue subway stop. As I watched, she hit a button on the cell phone in her hand and held it to her ear. The iPhone rang in my hand. She looked up in shock. Her eyes met mine, and a look of recognition flashed over her face. Her face lit up.

“My phone! You got it back!” She threw her arms around me. “Oh my God, you're a hero!”

Well, no. But there was no denying that I was something more than I had been before.

That August, less than a year into my running life, I met my shadow self. I was driving up for the Green Lakes Endurance Run in Fayetteville, New York. I talked to Johnny Rocket to see if he
wanted to go in on a campsite or ride up together. He wasn't going, but he hooked me up with another runner who was: Luis Ramirez.

Luis stood up from the little campfire he had going when I pulled in, and we shook hands. We talked while he prepared his food for the next day. He was broad; I was tall. I was pale; he was dark. He was clean-cut; I was shaggy. I was soft from years in bars and on the road. He was ripped from years in the Marine Corps. I was Canadian American; English my first language and French my second. He was Dominican American; Spanish his first language and English his second. He was a proud father and a super-dad. I had no children and intended to continue that hot streak. He listened to “anything”—meaning dance music, hip-hop, or Latin music. I listened to “anything”—meaning rock, soul, country, punk, or indie rock. We had so little in common that we appeared to exist in opposition.

I had a good race. My left knee started to hurt running down the hills, but I still ran my best 50K time of 5:24. It didn't bring me any joy. On my best day, I was still only in the middle of the pack. And a 50K wasn't even a real ultramarathon. At thirty-two miles, it was just a prolapsed marathon. My father had run marathons, high-altitude marathons; he'd even run Pike's Peak. In his prime, my dad could have easily run a 50K. As fast as I'd run today, Dad still probably would have beaten me.

Luis was running the 100K distance. I knew I wasn't ready, but, God, was I envious: sixty-two miles, a real ultramarathon, a race that was impossible to diminish. But the day got really hot, and Luis fell apart late in the afternoon. He threw up, then hallucinated, and, after hugging a tree for a couple of minutes because he couldn't stand on his own, decided his best bet was to drop.

If we had bonded around the campfire the night before, it was nothing compared to after the race. We had taken our bodies to the limits, alone and together, and we were exhausted and giddy. We told filthy jokes and more than one dark story from our pasts. Luis
was disappointed that he'd been forced to drop, so I did my best to buck him up.

“Luis, this shit that we set out to do . . . not everyone does it, you know?”

“I know. I just had my mind set on doing it and not giving up. When I say I'm going to do something, I do it.”

“That's great. I wish more people lived that way. But . . . man, it's different with ultrarunning. Biting off more than you can chew, that's sort of the point. You don't go out there to win.”

“I didn't want to win,” Luis said, staring into the fire. “I just wanted to finish.”

“Luis, you can't think that way. You don't go out there to finish, you go out there to get beaten. You finish a run, that means you played it safe. You could have killed the 50K. Shit, as fast as I ran it, I should have been doing something longer.

“You go out there to leave everything you have on the trail. You find something bigger than you, you throw everything you have at it, and
maybe
you come out on top. If you only fight dudes you know you're going to beat, you're not a fighter; you're a bully. If you only fight dudes you know may beat you, well, that's how a fighter becomes a champion.

“The finish line, it's not the finish line. The external distance is just a distraction, an exercise. The goal is to cover new terrain in here.”

I tapped two fingers against my temple.

“If you fall short, you don't cross that arbitrary line, it doesn't mean that you suck. It just means that you have ambition, that you try to do big, heroic things. That's what matters. A DNF should be a badge of honor. It means your dreams are boundless. Ultrarunning is the opposite of real life, Luis: when you fail, you win.”

He looked up at me.

“That was fucking deep, man. You should be a motivational speaker.”

“Sorry. I got worked up.”

He grinned.