I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (39 page)

A clueless volunteer had derailed his 100K attempt at Green Lakes, we had figured out later. The dude had pumped Luis full of salt on an empty stomach when he was already dehydrated. Not this time.

“You know what,” I said, “I have some better tape here.”

I pulled a roll of thick, waterproof fabric tape out of my bag and waved the volunteer away. I pulled off the tiny piece of tape the volunteer had used. No way that would hold on to a wet, spongy
foot for another thirty miles. I dried Luis's sweaty foot on my shirt and went to work on his left big toe. Two minutes later, we were on the move.

“Okay, we're going to talk shop for a minute and then we're going to talk about anything but running, alright?” Luis was in good spirits, but I could tell he was already in pain. “We've got eight hours left. If we can cover four miles an hour, I can break twenty-four hours. So that's what we're going to do.”

It sounded doable. I'd run thirty-two miles in less than five and half hours. You can almost walk four miles in an hour. But that's on flat pavement. The last thirty miles of the Vermont 100 were supposed to be the toughest of the race. Vermont had hills as steep and sustained as any I'd seen around the country. Throw in a couple of chatty stops at aid stations and a couple of bathroom breaks, and it'd be easy to go over our allotted eight hours.

Luis already had seventy miles under his belt, and he had two blisters coming up deep under his calluses. We'd have to push his body to its limit to break twenty-four hours. Anything and everything could go wrong in thirty miles. One small problem, and we wouldn't make it. He might not finish at all. Hell, we might end the night in the ER.

He started shivering. The guy never brings enough clothes. I pulled a shirt out of my bag, the same black shirt from Izgi that I had passed off to Luis at Virgil Crest when he'd had to leave me behind. The significance wasn't lost on him. He nodded at me with a grin and then pulled it over his head.

We ran down a dirt road for a little while. He wanted to know how my day had been. While he was out running seventy miles in the hot sun, had I been able to find a nice, quiet place to work? Had I gotten enough to eat? How had I slept?

An arrow pointing to the left on a yellow pie plate tacked to a post directed us off the road and onto an inclined jeep trail. We hiked up the muddy, rocky ruts in silence broken only by
the labored sounds of our breathing. Luis was lagging behind. I couldn't imagine how he was feeling.

It was beginning to get dark. Once we reached the top of the hill, we stopped so I could pull my headlight out of my bag. Luis was already wearing his, and he reached up to switch it on.

“Fuck.”

He pulled the headlight off, flipping the switch several more times.

“Dude, it's not fucking working.”

I flipped on my headlight and handed it to him. He put it on without a word, and we began to run.

The terrain was a narrow, rocky, and root-ridden trail through the woods. Occasionally, it was wide enough for us to run side by side, but more often than not, we had to run single file. The headlight was bright and showed the trail in high relief: golf-ball-sized rocks, thick roots protruding from the ground, tiny, steeply angled ravines in the earth—all perfect hazards on which to catch a toe and go face first into the dirt or, worse, roll an ankle and do enough damage that you'd be immobilized. Luis and I had done a fun run with our pal Jerome in which the two of them, running side by side, hit an ice patch. Luis was fine, but Jerome broke his ankle badly, had to be carried a mile out, and couldn't walk for six weeks.

The light was so bright that, after illuminating the path for Luis, it made my path behind him seem that much darker. I tried watching the shining path in front of him to memorize it when I went over it. That didn't work. I tried not looking at the illuminated spot in front of him, just staring at the blackness behind him so my eyes would adjust to the dark. That didn't work either. Finally, I realized that the only way to do it was to run in front of him, zigzagging back and forth so my own shadow wouldn't block out the hazards of the terrain in front of me.

We wove our way through the woods, following the glow sticks that hung from the trees every hundred yards or so, like we were
on some mystical quest. It was a beautiful night, the moon high and full, its light glinting off the dew on leaves as we ran past. As the night wore on, I did everything I could to distract Luis, telling him the worst, most offensive jokes I could remember, unfolding debauched stories from my life on the road, singing Elvis songs, doing everything I could to take his mind off his pain and exhaustion. Mostly he suffered in silence and just kept moving relentlessly forward.

Twelve miles from the finish, we were incredibly still on schedule. At the final weigh-in, we saw a man of probably fifty sitting at a picnic table. He looked hollowed out, a total zombie. I knew that he, like Luis, was trying to buckle. He looked finished.

“Dad,” his daughter waved a cell phone at him, “I just got a text from Mom. She said no way can you beat twenty-four hours.”

He looked dazed, unable to respond.

“Hey, Dad,” I said, catching his eye, “I think you can do it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah,” he turned to his daughter, “you tell Mom to stuff it.” He wobbled to his feet and stumbled off with his pacer. Luis wolfed down some fruit and some more Coke, and then we were moving again.

We passed UltraDad, he passed us, we passed him, he passed us. Step by step, Luis started to fall apart. I put my arm through his to help him up the hills. At one point, his head dropped to my shoulder. He had fallen asleep but somehow kept walking.

Luis was such a good man. He'd served his country without complaint. He was a good friend, a good son, a good father. I hope to never find myself in a foxhole, but if I do, I want Luis by my side. It amazed me that he wanted to be friends with me, a low-rent, druggy, drunken, useless piece of shit.

My friend asleep on my shoulder, I looked back at all the petty failures in my life. At every fork in the road, I had taken the coward's path. I had lied to my friends. I had stolen. I had cheated. I had made excuses. I had deceived. I had hurt people who cared
about me. A long list of people would never speak to me again. In no way was it remarkable that my father and Tatyana had walked away from me. Time after time, I had defaulted to anger and pain and let weakness dictate my choices. Amazingly, against common sense, against the burden of evidence that I was unsalvageable, my mother and Tashina had never given up on me. I had rewarded their unwavering faith with disappointment after disappointment. It was all darkness, impenetrable.

The night had gone on too long. Luis was exhausted. We'd never make it. I should just let him sleep by the side of the road. Then I could run off into the bushes to cry about what a fucking failure I had been.

No
.

I'd duped myself before, duped myself for most of my life. No more. Yeah, I had been that bad man. But I forced myself to do an inventory of my current life: I'm a good roommate. I'm a good friend. I'm a good brother. I'm a good son. I had even been a good boyfriend to Izgi. Was it possible that now I too was a good man? It seemed impossible, but the facts were plain. But if I was a good man, I had sure as shit better get out of my own head and focus on the task at hand: getting my friend in on time.

“Lou,” I said softly, waking him up. He groaned and lifted his head from my shoulder.

“Oh my God, I am so tired.”

Again, we began to run. Again, we passed UltraDad and his pacer.

“This is it,” I said. “Late-night blood pact, one of my specialties. Everyone gets in under twenty-four. We're committing now. All of us.”

The other runners grunted their assent. UltraDad looked like he was about to fall over. No way he was going to make it.

Finally, we made the final aid station: an unmanned picnic table with only water.

“This is it, Lou,” I said. “Two point two miles. Now you empty the tank, bro. You're going to run a couple of miles for your daughter, Lou. Run it in for Isabella.”

I headed out first, into the darkness. Every time we came to a flat or a downhill, I called back to Luis: “We've got a decline coming up. Open it up now!” Suddenly, there were glow sticks in empty gallon jugs on the ground on either side of us: lights placed by the race organizers to light the last stretch. As we whipped through the glowing gates, I allowed hope to bubble up. Were we actually going to make it?

I ran down a soft, pine-needle-padded trail, the makeshift green lanterns on either side of me blurring into each other. Then I saw it—a huge wooden arch in an open field, with “FINISH LINE” in glowing red neon at the top. I hauled ass out of the woods and ran around to the other side of the finish line and started calling for Luis to bring it in, come on home, baby.

I'd gotten a ways ahead of him and couldn't see or hear any sign of him. I heard the officials muttering about the time. God, it would be such a heartbreaker if he didn't make it. Then I saw a light bobbing through the trees, like some will-o'-the-wisp. I screamed Luis's name as loud as I could.

I was answered by a long, desperate, wordless howl, pained and joyous at the same time, a wail from the bottom of the well of human endurance. Luis burst out of the trees, running hard, and flew across the finish line to wild cheers and applause, then toppled to the ground, groaning and laughing.

“We did it,” he said. “Mishka, gimme a hug.”

I looked at the clock: 23:55. He had started at 4 a.m., traveled one hundred miles, and made it home at the moment of darkest night. He had done it; we had done it. Then, incredibly, Luis sprang back to his feet.

“We gotta get Dad in!” He sprinted off into the woods from which he'd just emerged, calling, “Dad! Dad!” like a lost child.

Minutes passed. They felt like months. It was a valiant effort by Luis, but no way was UltraDad gonna make it in. Then, blinking through the trees, I saw Luis's headlight and another dimmer light. Oh God, it was going to be close. No way could they get in before the twenty-four-hour cutoff. Wobbling but running hard, UltraDad emerged from the woods and unsteadily crossed the finish line. I immediately looked at the clock: 23:57:58. UltraDad had made it. He had beat twenty-four hours by just two minutes and two seconds. John Lacroix, UltraDad, was the last person to buckle.

I helped Luis up to our campsite by a tiny dugout. While he cleaned himself up in his tent with baby wipes, I stripped off all my clothes and dove into the freezing water. When I surfaced, the sun was just coming up, its glorious pink-orange creeping up into the cold sky, still shot through with stars. We had taken a journey through the darkness and emerged, whole but transformed, on the other side.

CHAPTER 12

The New Life

A
fter
Shipwrecked
had finally fallen out of the top ten, Dave Blum invited me to lunch so we could talk about my next Kindle Single. The next one? I hadn't had any ideas for the first one. Still, I couldn't turn down a free lunch, even if it meant braving the wasteland of Midtown.

Dave brought me to a
nice
restaurant, you know, with the cloth napkins and two forks and no decimal points on the menu. I had foolishly assumed “lunch” meant the corner deli, so I'd thrown on my cutoff jeans, a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, and Vans with no socks. I'd worked at Beauty Bar the night before our lunch, so I hadn't gotten to sleep till 6 a.m. I was so short on sleep, my eyes felt like they had been carved into my head. As the suits rolled in with their gelled hair and silk ties, I felt like a real dirt bag. God, it never changed. I shrank into the booth and quietly unfolded a couple of half-baked ideas I'd thought up for stories.

Dave turned his nose up at all of them.

“What you need to write,” he said, “is how you went from being this shitfaced, drug-abusing gutter-dweller to a sober ultrarunner. I even have a title for it. It will be called ‘The Long Run.'”

I pushed back gently.

“Dave, are you kidding me? Nobody wants to read about how I fucked my life up and the grim process of unfucking it up. It was like eating a bucket of sand.”

“Trust me,” Dave said.

After the years I spent buying drugs and working off Craig's List and buying drugs off Craig's List, nothing gets my hackles up faster than those two words. But Dave knew he was the only person who could get away with speaking them to me. In my darkest hour, writing for Dave at the
New York Press
had been a strand of spider's silk in hell, a slender, glistening, translucent thread of hope that I might not die filthy and anonymous in Greenpoint after all.

I slunk back to Brooklyn after lunch, leery of the task I'd been burdened with. I did not want to go back into that hole. But I did trust Dave, so I went home and “got out the big shovel,” as he'd said. I dug deep and laid the wreckage of my life out on the page. It was liberating, like coming out of the closet. And it was dark and humiliating and ugly. Best-case scenario, I only allowed myself to hope that
The Long Run
would do half as well as
Shipwrecked
because I was convinced that
Shipwrecked
had been a fluke. Moreover, I worried that
The Long Run
was so depraved that it would destroy my fledgling writing career, which had ironically only begun to thrive once I'd given up on it for good.

Two days after its publication in late October 2011,
The Long Run
leapfrogged stories by Stephen King and Dean Koontz to hit number one. It sold more than 65,000 copies in less than six months. It only dropped out of the top ten in February, when my next number one pushed it out.

Each day brought fan mail. Not just from other runners, drunks, and ex-drunks, but also from Republicans, schoolteachers, Christians, and a fourteen-year-old Mormon. One kid did a PowerPoint presentation for his high school English class with slide titles that still crack me up: “Mishka Goes to College”; “Mishka Travels”; “Mishka Gets Checked for AIDS”; “Cough
Syrup.”
The Long Run
established me as a writer, and it was the genesis of this book.

It turned out Dave was right, again: people did want to read about that long aggregation of mistakes I call my life. The very thing I thought would scare them off—the darkness—drew them in droves. I had been wrong; I had been so, so wrong. When I had been in pain, hating myself, feeling utterly alone, that was when I had been the least alone. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of other people had been feeling alone at the same time. We had been alone together.

Now six years sober, my life has changed so much that I hardly recognize it. I still live in the same creaky, rundown apartment by the BQE that trembles every time a truck goes by. My ride still provokes looks of pity and horror every time I gas up. I'm still wearing the same jeans and a lot of the same T-shirts. I still need a haircut. But everything is different. My life has pivoted on its axis so that instead of staring down at the ground, I can see the sky.

I haven't had a boss in four years. I don't have to wear a polo shirt with the company logo stitched onto it. I don't have to wear a blazer. I don't have to wear pants if I don't want to, and so I rarely do. I moved to New York City with $300 to become a writer and a musician, and just seventeen hellish years later, what do you know, I kinda did it. I have a couch. I have ice cube trays. I have health insurance.
Health insurance
.

I am still an alcoholic. What that means, in medical terms, is that there is a shiny black scorpion with a long, armored, serpentine tail coiled around my spine at the base of my neck. Its pincers reach through gaps in my vertebrae to gently but firmly grasp my spinal cord. Its reticulated tail lovingly circles my spine, cradling each wildly curved bone, its terminus hovering expectantly over that braid of nerve endings, a bulb pregnant with poison, then a thick, cruelly curved spike.

This spiny black abomination is not some rare tropical parasite that wormed its way inside me. It's not a hive of nanobots implanted by an elite squadron of secret UN commandos. It's not a malign interplanetary virus injected into me by some universe-hopping alien scientist. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, I built this monstrosity, one little bad decision after another. It's a devil of my own creation, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, my mistakes incarnate.

The scorpion is sleeping. Life is pretty sweet right now. But when I get a whiff of Jameson or gasoline or I get too angry or tired or depressed, it twitches uneasily in its slumber, its tail writhing minutely, its pincers digging ever so slightly into my spinal cord. I live in fear of what will happen if that evil little fucker ever wakes up.

The Jameson thing, I get. The common wisdom is that I will be an alcoholic for the rest of my life. The rustling of the scorpion in its arachnid dreams when alcohol vapor hits my sinuses is a purely chemical reaction. But this vile crustacean/arthropod/dinosaur/demon stirs for other things too: pornography, video games, eBay, Facebook . . . even a fucking Snickers bar. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, as the saying goes.

But when I run under the blazing hot sun until I'm exhausted or find a smelly dog on the street in Mexico and scratch that tickle spot that makes its leg skritch and it sheds all over the clean shirt I just put on, or when I make my sister's kids laugh in the backseat of the car by singing bathroom songs, good, healthy blood runs over this sleeping scorpion, softening its armor, turning its thick, black shell to walnut, then rich, racehorse brown, then liver, and finally pink, slowly eroding and dissolving it, absorbing its minerals and proteins back into my body. I will stay vigilant, and I will prevail.

One hard truth I stumbled upon is this:
I drank because I wanted to drink
. Every single drink, every single drug I took, I took because I made the decision to get fucked up, and fuck the consequences. I was sad and angry and lonely, and a little alcohol made me feel
better. It took me a long time to figure out that a lot of alcohol made me feel worse. Whoops.

I know that ultrarunning is not entirely the opposite of abusing drugs and alcohol. I used to run around all night, go to sleep at dawn, and sleep like the dead all day. Now I'm up at dawn, run around all day, and sleep like the dead all night. The girls I've dated since I've been sober haven't understood why I'm drawn to running long distances, just as, in the past, my girlfriends didn't understand my marathon benders. Now, as then, I spend a lot of time walking funny. And when you treat your body as a science experiment, whether with ultrarunning or ultradrinking, you spend a lot of time sleeping and a lot of time in pain.

But if I am addicted to exercise, it has been by far the dreariest, most painful, least thrilling addiction I have ever experienced. I never had to goad myself to take a drink or a pill; it was always a reward for good behavior. “Wow, you've been awake for six hours without getting fucked up! You deserve a treat. But best not to eat a whole Opana—we're getting low, and that shit is expensive. A quarter pill will do the job with the correct method of delivery—life is too short to swallow anything you can snort!”

No, having spent most of my life as an addict, I have a decent understanding of addiction, and I am not addicted to running. I
hate
running. It's never gotten easy for me. The last mile is not the hardest mile. The hardest mile is the
first
mile. What's harder than the first mile? Lacing up your goddamn running shoes before you even leave the house. Finally getting moving after a dry ocean of irritable procrastination is dispiriting—I'm sore or crampy or just tired, my legs feel wooden, my feet clumsily scuff the ground. I'm a big guy, and it takes me a long time to warm up, six or eight miles. After I get warmed up, it's okay, but only for a minute. Then I want to stop, I want to slow down, I want to walk, I want to take the shorter route, I want to turn around and grab a cab and go right home.

Running is hard.
It's supposed to be hard
. Running keeps you honest. There is no short way to run a mile; there is no easy way to run a marathon. You can't force it. If you are out of shape, you can't just go out and run twenty miles today and be back in shape—you'll injure yourself and wind up worse than you were before. If a bully is picking on you at school, it takes only instantaneous courage to throw a punch, take your lumps, and get him off your back. If you find yourself twenty pounds overweight in the spring, it takes will-power to lose weight. But if you're a sedentary person, in order to run a marathon, you must change everything. You must do what you don't want to do and give up what you
do
want to do. You must repeat that, over and over again, whether you fail or you succeed, for a very long time. You must tear down the faulty life you've built, the faulty person you've become, and rebuild everything from the ground up. It takes not just courage and planning and hard work but patience and determination and an ability to quietly suffer a little each day for a long time without giving up. It's worth it.

I don't run as frantically as I used to. I don't need to. I still bang out the occasional marathon on my own, but I don't feel a desire to compete against others. Nor do I feel compelled to run a faster marathon or run further than I have before. I don't desire to be superhuman. I never did. I wanted to become human. I have.

Running hasn't solved every problem in my life. It hasn't made me a perfect man. I feel like I felt after that first half marathon and that first ultramarathon and that first fifty-miler: I can't believe how far I've come, and I know I still have a long way to go.

When I was seventeen, I made the decision to believe in Heaven. Not the oppressive, puffy-overwhite-clouds-and-smug-angels-with-harps-annoying-you-to-fucking-death Heaven but a more cluttered, relaxed, God-free zone where you would just be reunited with everything and everyone you had ever lost. The childhood dog you loved, the grandfather who died when you were only six,
your dead junkie friends, and your quiet neighbor who suddenly succumbed to lung cancer though he had never smoked a day in his life. Also the green corduroy hat you wore hitchhiking across country and left in a Burger King bathroom, and that 1969 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop you pawned for coke, and your old friend Charlie, the stuffed toy dog you had as a baby, which you managed to hang on to till you were thirty-two, though it was disgusting and gray and had been for years, thoroughly saturated as it was with your saliva from years of oral adoration as an infant, till you left it in the trunk of a Kia you rented on a trip to Cleveland that the Hertz desk clerk Shenikwa never found, though you called and called and called. In my Heaven, every single thing you have lost will be restored to you.