Stronger (13 page)
No, I guess that’s stupid. There are better ways to show that kindness matters. And it does. Nothing makes you happier than a kid writing to say you are their hero.
But it was also hard. People would write and tell me, “You are Boston Strong, Jeff.” Or “You are what makes this country great.” Or “I know if you can make it through this, Jeff, that means we’ll all be okay.”
But what if I didn’t make it? What if I broke down?
What if people saw how frustrated the little things made me?
The workouts were punishing. By the time I had advanced to thigh lifts, my legs were burning. I had to lie on my side and lift each leg ten times, but there were days I couldn’t do it. My muscles weren’t ready. They would clench and spasm. I had to pound on my legs, digging my thumbs into my thighs to loosen the muscles, or the pain would keep getting worse.
At times like that, I wondered, What if I quit?
What if I just accepted the chair?
What if I never felt normal again?
I was never a subscriber to the “no pain, no gain” school of life. Doctors had to confiscate weights from one guy in Spaulding, who was injured in a snowmobile accident, so he wouldn’t work out unsupervised in his room. He kept asking and asking, so they let him be the first patient to enter the new building. He was wearing an American flag shirt when he rolled through the door.
What if the world expected me to be that guy?
It wasn’t my personality. I was never competitive. I was just… ordinary. I played softball in a league, but mostly for the beer. I loved pickup basketball games, but I didn’t particularly care if we won.
Baseball was my game, even if I wasn’t the best player. That was my cousin, Big D. Derek got a full ride to Bridgeport University in Connecticut, where he was a four-year starter. He was a big left-handed pitcher. He didn’t strike out a lot of guys, maybe because his fastball was only in the high eighties, but he’d knock them down, inning after inning. I thought he was going pro for sure, but he never got the call. That was how he ended up paving roads for Uncle Bob.
My half brothers on my dad’s side, Chris and Alan, were hockey players. My dad even built a hockey rink in the backyard. He used marine-grade plywood for the walls at each end and a wooden frame to hold the ice, and every year around Thanksgiving, when I was up for a visit and it was freezing in Concord, he’d say, “Let’s go set it up, boys.”
We’d work the whole weekend nailing supports into the boards, while Dad flooded the frame, let the water harden into ice, then flooded it again. He’d do that maybe fifteen times, so the ice would stay solid all winter. It was usually about midnight when he finally turned on the big floodlights, connected by extension cords to the house, and lit up our work. Chris could stay out there all night in short sleeves, even though it was minus twenty degrees. He had a ninety-mile-an-hour slapshot, and he’d work on it for hours. I think if he hadn’t gotten off track, he could have played for a Division I college.
I usually lasted twenty minutes. Then the chill got to me, and I had to call it a night.
But that wasn’t an option now. No matter how much it hurt, there was no way I could settle for the chair.
Maybe it would have been different if I’d been in a car accident. Then I wouldn’t have had so many people watching me, and hoping for me, and caring about whether I succeeded.
Then my injuries wouldn’t have been intentional. They wouldn’t have been the work of people who were trying to hurt me and destroy my life. People I could never let win.
Maybe if it had been an accident, I would have given in to the fear, because knowing your life is different, and that a huge part of you is missing forever… that’s terrifying. Alone at night, I’d sometimes think, Screw it, Jeff. It’s too much. How can they expect you to keep getting up from this?
It’s easier, after all, to lie down and accept your fate, especially when your legs are throbbing and your burns are rubbed raw.
But I’d think of all the people out there, rooting for me. I’d think of the kids, kneeling beside their beds, saying prayers for my recovery. And the next day, I’d be back on the arm bicycle, pedaling faster, or I’d be pushing myself to do ten leg lifts this time, then eleven, then twelve.
You can do it, Jeff. It’s not just about you. It’s not just for you.
You’re Boston Strong.
B
efore Spaulding, I tried to stay out of the media. During my second week at BMC, Kat gave me a list of one hundred interview requests and asked if I wanted to do any of them. I chose one:
GQ
magazine, which was putting together an article about the effort to save lives that included six main points of view. Why did I choose
GQ
? I don’t know. I’ve never read the magazine. But it’s a
gentleman’s
quarterly, right? That sounds classy to me.
That article wouldn’t come out for more than a month, though, so my first public comments happened at old Spaulding, when I did an interview with Gerry Callahan for local sports radio station WEEI. I didn’t think about it too much. Mr. Callahan had grown up in Chelmsford, and he was my uncle Bob’s lifelong best friend. I had known him since I was a little kid, and I still remember when he came to my third-grade class to talk to us.
If you listen to his show, you probably know about his character Bob the Drunk. That’s my uncle! “Highly fictionalized,” Uncle Bob insists, “highly fictionalized”—but I don’t know if I believe him.
So why wouldn’t I talk with Mr. Callahan? It was only a five-minute phone interview, and I could do it from my hospital bed. The conversation got a little deep at times, especially for a cutup like Gerry Callahan, but it was fun. Mostly, we just chatted about how I was doing.
Well, people blew up. A few liberals didn’t like it, I guess, because Gerry Callahan is conservative, and they made a bit of a stink about politicizing things, or something like that, I don’t know.
Mostly, though, it was other media. They couldn’t believe I had turned down network news, Oprah Winfrey, and the
Boston Globe
to give an exclusive to local sports radio. But it wasn’t an exclusive, and it wasn’t a political statement. It was just a favor for Uncle Bob.
“Ah, just let it go,” I said, when reporters started pressing for an explanation. “I don’t feel like dealing with it.” I guess I was naive. I didn’t think anyone would care what I said. Now that I realized people were probably going to overreact, I figured it was best to keep quiet.
Besides, I’d already agreed to one other feature interview, and it wasn’t with the
Boston Globe
, even though they were the biggest newspaper in town and, in some ways, this was our story together. A lot of reporters, from all kinds of media sources, were aggressive or disrespectful of our privacy, especially in that first week. Erin’s sister Gail caught an ABC reporter in Boston Medical Center eavesdropping on family conversations and trying to strike up casual conversations. Another reporter tried to enter a survivor’s therapy session that Remy was attending. Early Friday morning, during the manhunt, a reporter called Erin’s mom and, as a pressure tactic, implied that talking with him would be helpful to finding the missing suspect.
Kat had a run-in with a
Boston Globe
reporter who was working on a big article centered on a time line of the first week. We had asked Kat not to give any information to the media, so she told the reporter she couldn’t comment on my role in identifying the bombers. He responded that if she wouldn’t comment, then he could question the Facebook page that was my main source of donations. There were dozens of ways to give to victims that first week, and some were sketchy at best. Kat knew that any doubt expressed by a leading newspaper could affect the site, but she held firm, just as we’d asked.
The reporter for the
New York Times
, Tim Rohan, was different. My brother Chris had met him outside Boston Medical, and he had written a nice article about my dad. Dad brought Tim to my room the next day, and we chatted. Tim didn’t ask for an interview or try to sell himself to me. Mostly, we talked about the Red Sox, who were off to a surprising hot start and in first place. Like me, Tim was a big baseball fan.
He was also a twenty-three-year-old intern.
Before the bombing, the
New York Times
, apparently, hadn’t thought much of the Boston Marathon. It was a great event, but a boring story. The same every year. So they sent one intern from their sports department to cover it. Tim Rohan was the only
New York Times
reporter on the scene for one of the biggest events of the year.
And to the paper’s credit, they let him run with it. They didn’t send a big shot for follow-up interviews. They let Tim handle it the way he wanted to. And it worked, at least with me.
When Kat suggested I agree to one big article to tell my story, I instantly thought of Tim. I liked him. He was a good kid. I didn’t care where he worked; I just wanted to help him if I could. I figured this could be his big break.
Mom wasn’t so sure. “What’s he doing here?” she snapped the first time she saw Tim with his recorder. She was even less happy when she found out he was planning to trail me around, sometimes with a photographer.
But Tim was hard not to like: very friendly and polite. Big D bought me a PlayStation while I was at Spaulding—primarily, I think, so he wouldn’t have to make conversation. With a PlayStation, Big D and I could trash-talk each other, and neither of us would have to think about my legs. I introduced Tim to my favorite game,
MLB: The Show
. Don’t tell the
New York Times
, but we spent hours together playing
The Show
. Of course, he was an intern, so he was probably barely getting paid.
Mom didn’t warm up to him, though, until she found out Tim was also raised by a single working mother. And that he had worked his way through college. He had started in engineering, like me, before deciding to take a shot at his dream and switched to journalism. After that, Mom loved him. Maybe she saw a different version of me in him.
Even now, months later, she asks about him. “So how’s Tim doing, Jeff?”
I shake my head. “The worst thing happened to him, Mom. The very worst. The
New York Times
hired him full-time to cover the Mets.”
Ha, ha, Tim. Good luck with that. The Mets are terrible.
I
read Tim’s article about my time at Spaulding recently, and it felt so foreign. The guy in the article seems so sad and alienated. He stares out the window. He answers questions with three words.
He feels like a freak. “There was no escaping all these people,” Tim writes, “all their pity and all their questions.” In the article, only Erin makes me happy. Or if not happy, at least comfortable.
“Seeing her was the best part of his day now.”
I know the article is accurate. Tim spent weeks trailing me, watching everything I did. I look back on all the times I laughed with Michele and other survivors. I remember good times. But I was that guy in the article, too, just wishing everyone would leave me alone. In many ways, I still am. I feel separate from the people around me now, even my family and friends. I feel like they’re watching me, like you’d watch a toddler who is happily playing with blocks, but you never know, they could hurl themselves down the stairs at any minute.
It was hard work at Spaulding. Hard work. When my publisher asked me what I wanted people to know after reading the book, one of the things I said was, “I want them to know how hard it was.” Moving a two-joint artificial leg, meaning an artificial knee and ankle, takes six times as much strength as moving a regular leg. So I had to get stronger. I had to work myself to exhaustion. Not much is ever accomplished without hard work.
I just wanted to feel normal.
When the photographer, Josh Haner, came to shoot a slideshow presentation for the
New York Times
website, that was what I kept saying: “I just want to be normal.” I said it so sadly.
Was I really that morose? There isn’t much humor in Tim’s article, or in the slideshow. Because they were with me so long, they caught my quiet moments. Those moments were real, but were they the real me?
Maybe that laughing, joking guy wasn’t the real me. Maybe I
was
hurting inside.
No, I was
definitely
hurting inside. But the wisecracking patient was me, too, because I never spent much time alone at Spaulding. Erin was usually there, of course, and I could be vulnerable with her. But I had to be “Bauman” for my family, and for the twenty or thirty friends who visited me, including a few people I hadn’t seen in years.
There were dozens of strangers, too: cops, EMTs, marathon volunteers, security guards. Carlos came by a few times, and I met the medical tech running alongside him in the iconic photograph. (I still haven’t met the woman pushing the wheelchair, Devin Wang, who was a twenty-year-old Boston University student at the time, but I’d like to.) These people were dealing with their own issues, and they needed closure. They needed to feel like we’d won. How could I not meet everyone and tell them how grateful I was?