Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn (4 page)

He says, “So one thing they can do is take those old kneecaps out, see they aren’t any good any more. Then they replace them with these new plastic jobs.” He says, “I had it done a couple a weeks ago, works pretty good.” About that time he kicks it down and we’re going ninety again. I see him pounding underneath the knee of the leg on the accelerator. Finally it pops forward and we’re back to thirty again.

So we’re going down the road, thirty or ninety, and Otto turns to me and says, “It’s awful cold to be out hitchin’.”

I says, “Yessir, I was up at Black Lake fishing.”

“What did you get?”

“Well, for a while I hit a school of crappies.”

“Those are nice eating.”

“Yeah. But then I went deep and was snagging eelpout.”

“Oh.”

Now, eelpout have to be one of the ugliest fish on the planet. I know you shouldn’t say this about God’s creatures, but these fish are truly hideous. An eelpout is actually a freshwater cod, a burbot, that lives in the lower depths of northern lakes. The eelpout has no scales, just dark gray skin, a fat white belly, little beady eyes. Believe me, you wonder what’s going on down there that would produce this fish. When one comes up through the hole, you don’t know whether to cut the line or throw up.

Otto says, “Yeah, eelpout, they make good eatin’.”

I say, “What, are you kidding, Otto? It’s all I can do to take ’em off the hook.”

“No,” he says, “you just gotta know the proper way to prepare them.”

Now, I’ve heard that eelpout has the nickname “poor man’s lobster.” I’ve just never known anyone that poor.

Otto says, “I’ll tell you how to make it.”

Thirty, ninety, thirty, ninety,
all the way home.

NEW YEAR’S DAY  

Once again the end of the year is approaching, and my unkept New Year’s resolutions remain stacked up like all the firewood I would’ve cut had I kept the year before’s New Year’s resolution. At this point I’ve come to the conclusion the only way I’ll get through them all is to believe in reincarnation. If I were honest, every year I’d just say, “Okay, this year I really have to eat more pizza, forget birthdays and anniversaries, and say at least five incredibly inappropriate things, no, make that six.”

I keep making one resolution, though, that I am planning to do. I really want to run another marathon.

It has to be Grandma’s Marathon up in Duluth, Minnesota. I do remember the last time I ran Grandma’s it hurt a little, but the neighbors who saw me pull my car up after the race said my walk from the car to the front door was the longest hour and a half of their lives, a horrible sight, like a slow-motion accident they couldn’t take their eyes off of. But the next time, I tell them, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to train.

I actually enjoy running. There’s a “runner’s high,” a euphoria one gets from running long distances, that I hope to feel one day, and Grandma’s is a great marathon. It’s run along the banks of the mighty Gitche Gumee, Lake Superior, from the town of Two Harbors to Duluth. Some buddies of mine had run it every year and said I should give it a try. I ran cross country in high school and always wondered if I could finish a marathon. Six months after a New Year’s resolution loudly proclaimed in front of witnesses, it was time to find out.

The gun goes off, and thousands of runners, a sea of colored shirts, bob up and down. It is a perfect day of forty-five degrees with a little drizzle, and in under twenty minutes I pass the starting line. Luckily, I’m packing plenty of Motrin in a plastic jar, I mean plenty. I sound like a mariachi band going down the road.

I first run with a cigarette salesman who entered on a bet with his buddies. He keeps wheezing, “It’s worth a Winston,” and filling me in on various surgical procedures. He assures me there’s a couple of vertebrae in the human body they’ve found you don’t even need. He tells me that monkeys are almost as smart as people. “There’s even a monkey they taught to smoke, and there’s this dolphin …”

I say, “Wait, they taught a dolphin to smoke?”

“No,” he says, “what good is smoking gonna do a dolphin? They taught it a language like radar. But a dolphin is not a fish, mind you, it’s a mammal, like us.” He starts to hack and has to stop.

But I feel good, talking to people, having fun, waving to the crowd, the cheering crowd, completely oblivious of the future. Halfway through they announce the winners. Somebody has already won? Oh well, I kinda knew I wasn’t gonna win, and I still feel good.

All along the route, there are volunteers handing out water and juice to keep you going. But at mile fifteen I witness a sight I hope never to see again. I see this grubby hand sticking out from the sidelines with a huge glob of Vaseline dripping off it.

Now, a valuable friend to the runner is Vaseline. You need it anywhere you rub together, or are rubbed by clothing. If you don’t use a heapin’ helpin’ of petroleum jelly, you can be guaranteed viscosity leading to thermal breakdown. So, lube up before the race.

I follow the glob down an arm to this little man with high-water pants, a three-day growth of silver beard on his face, and a huge grin, and he’s saying in a deep gravelly voice, “Vaseline?”

The thought of taking part in that glob sends a shiver through me. Nobody is taking any. In fact, everybody makes a huge arc around the little guy, as if saying, “Eeeewwwww, don’t touch me.”

I make it past the Vaseline man, but I can’t shake him from my thoughts. One of the perils of running is the ability to dwell for miles on a subject, no matter how repulsive. And I picture the Vaseline man when they are handing out the jobs.

“Okay, who wants to hand out water? Who wants the oranges?”

And he’s saying to himself, “Hang in there, don’t jump, hang in there.”

Until, “Who wants the Vaseline job?”

“Oh me, oh me, oh, oh, me!”

I finally come to a peace with the Vaseline man when I realize my legs have started cramping up, and my pace slows to a crawl. A tiny pear-shaped woman blows by me, reads the back of my shirt, and says, “Come on, Kling.” Then, one by one, the entire assortment of the human race parades past. A guy dressed up like a clown, a naked man running backwards, a guy playing the xylophone.

Then this walker passes me, doing that braggadocio, better-than-thou hip movement thing. A walker!

I want to stop, but I’d resolved to
run
a marathon, not
quit
a marathon, so I forge ahead, looking straight down, one step at a time. Truth be told, if someone offered me a dollar to stop, I would say, “Deal.” But they don’t.

It’s like one of those dreams where you want to run, but you can’t. And I’m starting to cramp. I reach for the plastic bottle. All of the Motrin is gone and now I’m in pain and worse yet, I’ve got the Motrin monkey on my back.

And then, BOOM, I hit the wall. Now, whatever you’ve heard about the wall, believe it. It comes at about mile twenty-two, or for me, mile nineteen, and it is evil itself. Pain can’t describe it. You see your own death mask. You’re laughing and crying at the same time. You will betray your friends. You will give the secret rocket-fuel formula. Anything.
When will the running stop
?

Then an amazing thing happens. All of a sudden, your mind takes over. Since your body is worthless, your mind says, “Get out of the way, I’m in charge now.”

I’ve heard of people finishing marathons with broken legs, and I believe it.

George Bataille, the philosopher, said that after enough pain, one reverts to a sense of eroticism. It’s true. Suddenly everyone in the world becomes inexplicably gorgeous. The world is as beautiful as the Jehovah’s Witnesses say it will be. I’m dancing with the pandas. Some leather-clad biker guy yells, “Lookin’ good.” Well, don’t I know it, I’ve never looked better. I give him my address and tell him I have a hot tub.

There are rock bands playing in downtown Duluth. People cheer and their cheers hold you up. I will guarantee the best-tasting orange you will ever eat is at mile twenty-two. The flavor explodes.

Then I look ahead and see the walking man. I can take him. I’m hurt, and I’m tired, but I have to beat the walker. “Beat the walker, beat the walker,” becomes my mantra. With a half a mile to go, I take the walker!

Then I see the finish line. I did it, I did it. No, I’m still doing it. I’m doing it, I’m doing it, then I did it, I did it.

Two angels of the Lord approach me, each with a metallic-looking blanket under one arm. They hold me up, and I say, “What are you doing?”

One of the angels speaks in tongues, but the other one clearly states, “We’ve seen this look before.” And magically, my legs quit working. Completely. I have no feeling. I know I don’t look good anymore.

The cherubs of a merciful sponsor float me into a tent and give me a cookie and put me on a cot. There’s a guy on a cot next to me. I ask him if he saw that Vaseline man. Even in his pain, he can dig down for one more shudder. “Eeeewwwww!”

Then I drive home, where the neighbors have made popcorn and pulled chairs up to their picture window so they can watch me walk to the front door. I hobble up the sidewalk, wondering if resolving never to make a New Year’s resolution again counts as making a New Year’s resolution. Inside I hear the phone ring, and I hope to God it’s not the biker man. What was I thinking? I don’t have a hot tub.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY  

My grandfather once told me, “Be good to your neighbors. There will be a day you will need them.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” And: “The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.”

Even though I wasn’t part of the struggle for civil rights in the sixties, I recognized it. I was born with what was called a disability. To me it was just who I was. Even though I could tell the world wasn’t designed specifically for me, I felt like I was a part of it, of my community and my family. So it was always odd to me when I was treated like an “other.”

Dr. King, like me, wasn’t after acceptance. He was after recognition: seeing something of you that also exists in me. What is it that makes us belong to each other?

I saw part of the answer in action when the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed a couple of years ago. In the midst of the television coverage, something catches my eye, something out of the ordinary. Is it in the sequence? What is it? A man helps children out of a bus. I realize what it is. It’s not in the events, it’s more the casting. The young man helping the children was Latino—Jeremy Hernandez. The children are African American, white, Asian American.

I knew this would surprise people watching the national news. Minnesotans’ faces for years have seemed as white as our food. There have long been thriving communities of African Americans, Latinos, and more, but not in the northern suburbs where I lived as a kid or, until recently, in the small towns. My neighbor, a curmudgeonly old Norwegian guy, always said, “I ain’t a racist. Didn’t I live next door to a Finn for forty-seven years?” To some folks that’s funny, but not to the old guy … or to the Finn.

News anchors reported that officials wanted to thank many of the accidental heroes, but they had gone home. Now this was typical Minnesotan. There is a work ethic here: you do your job and go home. Nobody would think of sticking around for a thank you. It’s just what you do.