I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (34 page)

When I was young and fell down this well, I'd try to comfort myself by imagining some outrageous good fortune: winning the lottery or saving the life of some modern-day princess or just stumbling on a trunk of cartoony jewels like Scrooge McDuck's. As a teenager, I would conjure up the next Girl Who Is Going to Save Me and hold her face out toward the darkness like a candle. As I got older, my concept of escape matured. At the end of my drinking days, my reliable pick-me-up was envisioning my suicide.

I would ensure that my death wasn't the frightful mess my life had been. In the fantasy I finally settled on, I'd pawn a couple of guitars and buy a scrip of Opana, some speed, and a tarp. I'd snort the speed and go through all my shit—my books, my scribbled-in notebooks, my cassette tapes, all that crap. I'm hideously disorganized and still have boxes I haven't unpacked from three or four
moves ago. I'd go through all of that shit, throw out everything I could, and organize my entire house, then clean it, a thorough top-to-bottom scrubbing like I was moving out and absolutely had to get the security deposit back. I'm a slob, and people have been cleaning up after me my entire life. No more!

When the place was totally clean and everything had been dealt with, I'd lay the tarp on my mattress and lay a blanket my mother made when I was a kid down on top of it. That way, when I was discovered, there wouldn't be any mess to clean up—they could just gather the tarp up by the corners and lug my body off to Potter's Field. I'd cut up three pills of Opana into one long, thick serpent of a line. Then I'd swallow all the remaining pills and quickly snort the line. The shit I snorted would knock me out before my stomach could get upset and I could vomit. It would also prevent a last-second change of plans. I'd just drift away like Lily Bart in
The House of Mirth
. Comforting, isn't it?

There were no angels. Survival came down to me. Drag myself out of that hole, or topple headlong into it, it was my call, and mine alone.

I'd been humbled in so many ways. Getting so out of control I'd had to quit drinking forever. Being shamed by the doctor at the STD clinic. Forcing myself to apologize, not to one friend or a couple of friends, but to lots of people, even a few I didn't really know. Going to therapy—therapy!—and admitting I was an alcoholic. I had subjected myself to humiliation after humiliation, and each had come with a reward, or at least an alleviation of pressure. What was one more?

I forced myself to ask Chris to refer me to the staff psychiatrist. Dr. Beeder was a small woman with straight brown hair and owlish glasses. I didn't want to be medicated into idiotic bliss, I told her, but my relationship with suicide didn't strike me as normal. It slipped unnoticed into my head. I'd only realize I'd been planning to die when Freshkills booked a decent gig, and I'd think, Okay, I'll wait until after that.

She wrote me a scrip for something she said wouldn't change who I was. “You'll still be you, just maybe ten to fifteen percent better. Ironically, it may make you feel more like yourself.”

I hesitated for a minute outside the pharmacy. Really? Antidepressants? Shit, I'd taken every drug I could think of to
not
feel like myself. Why be such a pussy about taking something to feel like myself? It worked. Like she said, not a lot, but a little. Enough.

I went back to Sofia, the sports doctor who had coached me through my shin splints. After listening to me describe my current symptoms, she spoke.

“I told you to stretch. Did you stretch?”

I looked at my feet. Of course I hadn't.

“So here we are,” she said.

There was nothing wrong with my knee, she said, but I had acute iliotibial band syndrome.

“Sounds tropical,” I said. “Is it fatal?”

She swatted me, then explained. In ITBS, the long band of muscle that extends from your hip down to just below your knee becomes so tight that it rubs painfully on the bony protrusions of your knee. Rest and physical therapy should take care of it, but, Dr. Sofia warned, it might bother me for the rest of my life.

I found a physical therapist in my neighborhood, Eva, a redhead with cutting blue eyes who had run for the Polish national team. Two weeks into physical therapy, my left leg stopped hurting. With Eva's tentative permission, I went out for a short run. It was miraculous! I was cured! I wanted to throw down my knee brace and burst into song. Then I felt a familiar pain outside my right knee. By the time I got home, I could hardly walk. The next day, Eva began treating my right leg.

For the next six weeks, I went to physical therapy four times a week. It was painful and time-consuming and hardly encouraging. I stretched daily and spent many a night lying in bed with a bag of frozen peas strapped to my leg, wondering if Izgi missed me, wondering if Allison ever missed me, wondering if anyone ever missed
me. Eva dug her sharp elbow deeper and deeper into the flesh of my right thigh, but still I couldn't run for more than a few blocks at a time.

I'd signed up to run the NYC marathon for Luis's charity, but when the race rolled around, I'd run less than ten miles total in the preceding two months. Eva stopped just short of absolutely forbidding it.

“You shouldn't do it,” she said. “I'm telling you not to do it. But I know you. So if you do it, do not run. If you feel pain, you must stop. If you don't stop, you're going to undo all the work we've done here.”

The morning of the marathon, I allowed myself to run over the Verrazano Bridge and then forced myself to walk. People were cheering but also kinda looking at me like, “What's your problem, man? Run!”

By the time we got to Manhattan, I was in the back of the pack with the absolute beginners, a seventy-year-old Buddhist with a long white beard and a guy with one leg. The last ten miles, my leg was in agony. But I finished . . . behind Meredith Vieira, Jared from Subway, and the Chilean Miner, who had been able to do more training underground than I had above. I did beat Al Roker. Big whoop.

I redoubled my efforts at rehabilitating my stubborn leg. I did a series of painful stretches daily and iced my leg so long and so frequently that I gave myself frost burn. Most importantly, I took three weeks of total rest. When the oubliette came for me, I closed my eyes and imagined myself running through a moist, verdant tunnel of foliage with Luis, both of us laughing at some filthy joke.

Slowly and carefully, I began to run again. One mile. One and a half miles. Two miles. Three and a half miles. Five miles. Eight miles.

I went down to Mexico in January to stay with my uncle Albert, the same uncle who had invoked my mother's wrath by slipping me a couple of rum-and-Cokes at a family reunion when I was nine. Albert used to work all year long in northern Canada so he could go on an epic bender each winter in Mexico. The previous year, he had bottomed out, and the town where he had run amok became the town where he had gotten sober.

I slept on the floor in his tiny casita on an air mattress. He went to his meetings, and I ran. One day on, one day off, stretching my IT band hard several times a day. I didn't know what I was running from. I didn't know what I was training for. I didn't even know who I was. I didn't know why running was good for me, but I knew it was good for me, so I ran.

I had let myself get out of shape, and building my endurance back up in the blazing Mexican sunshine exhausted me. Nightly, I plunged to the bottom of an ocean of sleep.

One night, I dreamed that I had returned to our family home in Canada. I lived in a cave under a bridge with my mother and father and my four brothers. We dressed only in leather made from the skins of animals we had hunted or trapped. But our living, our way of life, our reason to exist was the enormous marlin that swam in the river under the bridge. My brothers and I fed our family by leaping onto the backs of these giant sailfish, twenty or thirty feet long, wrangling them toward the shore like marine cowboys, then slitting their throats with our wooden-handled scimitars, butchering them, and smoking the flesh. It was, at once, infinitely strange and infinitely familiar. My people had lived this way since the beginning of our history. Our purpose was narrow—we had been created to eat the marlin, as the marlin had been created to feed us—but we fulfilled that purpose to perfection. I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do. For the first time in my life, I belonged. There was so much love radiating from my heart that my chest felt hot. I was truly happy.

I awoke from the dream with a succinct epiphany, the reason why my father and I couldn't get along: he had been the first person to disappoint me and the first person to express disappointment in me.

Dreams were meaningless, just the brain idling, I told myself. As emotionally stirring as my dream had been, it was just the detritus in my head: part coward's fantasy of being macho, part white boy's fantasy of being “Indian,” part modern urbanite fantasy of returning to savage nature, 100 percent pure jumbled fiction. But I'd encountered many truths in fiction, perhaps more than in any other genre or even in my real life.
The first to disappoint me; the first to be disappointed in me
. Was my pickled brain even capable of manufacturing such a tidy, fortune cookie explanation? It was like a Möbius strip cut out of a page
of One Hundred Years of Solitude
, shorter than a joke, denser than a black hole.

This couldn't be the incantation that would cleave the heavy chains apart, spring the rusty old locks open, could it? There was something to it, more than just poetry. Was it even true? I had worshipped my dad, been fascinated with the hair growing out of his face, the smell of his pipe, his sweat. How had he disappointed me? Maybe by allowing himself to be henpecked, always evading my mother with jokes or just kowtowing when she was mad? No, there was something before that. A big disappointment, maybe the biggest. He didn't like me.

There was no question that I had been a disappointment to him. I had disappointed my father in ways great and small. If I had been one thing to him, over the arc of each day and over the arc of my wasted life, I had been a disappointment. I saw only one way to undo that.

Dad loved my running. His running years were behind him—he'd already had a knee replaced—but he loved hearing about my running, loved talking about running, and wanted a detailed report after each new race. In the same way that seeking revenge on
my father had hurt us both, running was a way for us to both root for me. Each new accomplishment of mine felt like a joint victory.

I hit the dusty cobblestones that morning with new fire. I banged out ten miles before Albert crawled out of bed. After his breakfast, my lunch, I went out and ran another six.

I ratcheted up my weekly mileage, pushing the length and pace of my runs. I had never trained this diligently or consistently. Had I ever applied myself to anything with this much focus? From the time I awoke until I fell asleep, I had one thing on my mind: fifty miles.

CHAPTER 11

Darkest Night

M
y whole life, I'd been a lightning rod for trouble. But when I got back from Mexico, good things sought me out with the same urgency trouble had.

I was driving home from Costco with a carload of groceries in January 2011 when my phone chimed. At a red light, I fished it out of my pocket and clicked it on to check the email that had come in.

When the stoplight turned green, I was still staring at my phone, reading and rereading the short email, dumbfounded. The car behind me honked. I looked up, pulled through the intersection, then pulled over to read the email one more time.

hi mishka, is that you? if it is you call me, if it not you i'm sorry wrong person heheheh or call me talk to u latter bye

Chuong
.

He had left a New Mexico number. I called it instantly, without thinking. The phone rang several times, and then someone picked up.

“Hello?”

The voice was distant and muffled. It could have been anyone. What was I supposed to say? If it was him, he wouldn't recognize my voice right away.

“Chuong?” I said.

“
Brother
,” he said.

Chuong had been in Albuquerque this entire time. How many times had I been through there on tour? Five? Six? After the first time, I hadn't even tried to look him up in the phone book. Had I given up hope of finding him? Or was it because I was wasted and hungover and depressed and had no idea how to deal with finding him? No matter. He had found me.

Chuong's English hadn't improved dramatically in the twenty years since I'd seen him, and his voice was indistinct. He ran his own landscaping business. He had a wife and a sixteen-year-old son. “How is Mom?” he asked, then “How is Dad?” He sounded stunned when I told him that our family had flown apart. How could he not know of the biggest thing in my life? But he had been gone such an incredibly long time.

He was sorry for running away, he had missed me, he had missed all of us. He had tried again and again over the years to find us, hundreds of calls to information, but it had been hopeless. He couldn't wait to see me again, for me to meet his wife, meet his son.

I told him I was broke, but I promised that I'd find some way to come and visit him. That would be great, he said; we would drink lots of Heinekens, lots and lots. Hoo boy.

When we were saying good-bye, he said, “Tell Mom that I am okay and have a son.” He had always loved her, and she had always loved him. Then he said, “Please tell you dad I say I'm sorry.” He sounded sad. It was sinking in now, the divorce and all the sadness and pain that had followed. In his mind, we had been one big happy family this entire time.

One night in mid-March, I drove out to rural New Jersey for Ultrafest, an ultrarunning event with races of fifty kilometers, fifty miles, and a hundred miles run on the same loop course. When I got to the event home base—an open field behind a small church—Johnny Rocket grabbed me before I could set up my tent, the same tent my mother had given me when I was seventeen for Simon's Rock graduation.

“We got a tent all set up for you, man. Don't worry. Yo, Christine, I'm putting Mishka in your tent, okay?”

Christine Reynolds laughed her great throaty, honeyed laugh somewhere off in the dark. Sure, that tent was just set up as her changing station for when she ran the hundred-miler the next day, so I was welcome to it now. I quickly loaded my gear in, unrolled my sleeping bag, and lay down. It was windy, and the tent rustled and flapped loudly, but I forbade myself from changing positions for fear of tossing and turning all night.

The hundred-mile race started at 4 a.m., so all my buddies rattled my tent and heckled me as they ran past. Had I slept at all? I felt like I'd just hallucinated all night long. I willed myself to take more sleep, but my heart was already hammering. I dragged myself out of my sleeping bag and began getting dressed. No way could I run fifty miles today. I felt ill prepared to run five.

When I stepped outside, the night was pure black, as dark as it had been when I'd pulled in. My stomach felt like a plastic grocery bag full of live eels. It was hopeless. I would fall apart. I would fail.

The darkness was still untainted when we clustered at the starting line, each runner just a voice behind a blinding headlamp, familiar or unfamiliar. Too cold. Too early. Too lonely. Rick McNulty, who ran the New Jersey Trail Series, gave us his usual spiel: The course was well marked but pay attention. Use the port-o-potties provided, as this was a bridle path through a residential neighborhood. Don't litter. Stay warm. Have fun. And . . .
go
.

We ran through the wet grass up a sloping incline into some trees. I could see my feet and the ground immediately in front of me, maybe the back of the next runner, and that was it. As we ran, the pack dispersed. Lonely as it had been at the start, it got lonelier.

The morning grayed as the sun began to approach the horizon. The air filled with mist. I saw figures weaving through the trees toward us. They looked like aliens. Then, one after another, they called out to me.

Zsuzsanna. Christine. Johnny Rocket. Luis. All running the hundred-miler. They high-fived me, they hugged me, they slapped my ass. No way I could run the fifty miles, but I couldn't drop yet. Wait till the sun comes all the way up, see what the course looks like, see how my knee holds up.

I fell into step with a stranger, and we talked for a while. We shed layers as the sun climbed in the sky. I stopped to stretch my IT band at an aid station, and the other guy left me behind. I struck out alone. The scenery . . . there was none. It was banal, nowheresville New Jersey, brown and gray, post-snow and pre-green. My exposed skin was too cold, my torso too hot, my legs leaden and half-asleep. But I got a boost each time I encountered a running buddy I'd made over the last year. Christine gave me a huge smile and a thumbs-up. Luis slapped me five and danced by, jamming out to his iPod. Zsuzsanna hugged me without breaking stride. I got a quick sniff of her conditioner before she was bounding away down the bridle path. The miles ticked by.

Every race, someone commented that I was too big to run. They'd said the same thing to my dad. It didn't matter. We ran. My feet hurt, often for days after a race. Had his feet hurt like that?

Thirteen miles down now. The ascent of Pike's Peak was thirteen miles. My father had run it twice. Yeah, but that was thirteen miles at high altitude, thirteen miles with more than a mile of vertical gain. Thirteen flat miles in New Jersey was nothing.

My mother had never been a runner, or at least I had never seen her run. She had always been an avid hiker, so I had asked
her once, as a little kid, why she didn't run like Dad. She explained to me that I had been such a big baby that giving birth to me had damaged her bladder. If she tried to run now, well, she leaked a little bit. That was my mom, answering honestly every question her kids asked, even if what she told them blew their fucking minds. And that was me, a ruiner before I even left the womb.

A marathon down. Had Tatyana ever run a marathon? I couldn't remember. She'd run something—a marathon or half marathon—but that was before I could differentiate between the two. Back then, 13.1 and 26.2 had both extended well into the realm of impossible numbers.

The farthest my father had ever raced had been 26.2 miles. Less than a mile from the finish of the Russian River Marathon in California, he'd blacked out cold and come to with road rash on his face and a medic standing over him, but he'd finished a marathon in Colorado. I still remembered the long-sleeve T-shirt from one of Dad's races, designed to look like hands pulling a button-down shirt open to reveal the race name underneath it, like Superman revealing the emblematic
S
under his shirt, as though finishing that race had made you a superhero. That was my dad.

Thirty-four miles. The furthest I'd ever run. Dad had run thirty miles one time, maybe thirty plus. He couldn't recall exactly how many, but every time we talked about that run, it got longer, stretching to thirty-two miles then thirty-four then thirty-six. That was my dad, always retreating into the distance.

Running a fifty-miler in under twelve hours qualified you to apply for a hundred-mile race. I'd soaked up that information somewhere and stored it in a dark corner of my mind, shielded from hope. If I kept this pace up, I would beat twelve hours. I would beat eleven hours. Shit, I would beat ten hours.

Thirty-seven miles. Further than I'd ever run. Further than he'd ever run. No questioning it. Each step was a new personal best. The sun was all the way up now, had been for a while. It made the water in the creek sparkle. Then the snow sparkled. Then little
rocks in the bridle path sparkled. Then the whole path was sparkling and breathing and moving, like I was running on the back of some great jeweled serpent.

I had heard someone say that 90 percent of running an ultra-marathon is mental, and the other 10 percent is mental. Old joke. Big laugh. It had just scared me. My brain was always trying to eat me alive. As a kid, terrified of the dark, I had insisted my parents tie my closet door shut. But then the monsters were under the bed. “If you don't believe in them, they don't exist,” my mother had said, her final word before she stalked out, exasperated with me. Great, so what you're saying, Mom, is that if I believe in them, they
do
exist. I'd learned to fall asleep fully covered with blankets, drenched with sweat, sucking air in through just the tiniest gap. Well, I wasn't a kid anymore. I had thirteen more miles to run so, Brain, if you don't have anything positive to contribute, shut the fuck up.

Everything was breathing and moving and sparkling, the sky not just a faraway thing or a tinted absence but an enormous sky-blue air mattress, inflating and deflating, its surface a rough but soft texture, like velvet. I had never been more alert.

A mental game, then. How much could I remember from my life, from my first memory till now? No, stupid idea; that would be torture, sick as I was of sorting through my life. My dad's life, then; how much could I recall? I waded back through his life, before us, before Mom, before college, before high school, before school . . . What was the earliest thing I knew about him, as a child, a boy, a baby?

When it came to me, my right leg buckled. My body canted to the right. I kicked the back of my right leg with my left foot and almost sprawled into the dirt. Adrenaline hit me instantly. Seconds earlier, I had thought I couldn't be more alert. Now I almost had X-ray vision, my heartbeat a drumroll.

A decade earlier, during my kamikaze yearlong tour, I had stopped off at my father's house en route to a show—LA, maybe. He had been traveling for work, so he left me the key. It was an
opportunity to get a good night's sleep in a clean bed, wake early, take a shower, then leave feeling rested and recharged, with plenty of time to make the drive.

My father's house was full of wine. I opened a bottle as soon as I walked in, one of the big ones, a cheap one he wouldn't miss. I took it in the shower with me and sucked on the bottle thirstily, the cool wine so luxurious in the steaming shower. I dried off. Friends in San Francisco had given me some pills, so I ate them and went to my father's computer. Nobody home—I could get as loose as I liked and jerk myself into oblivion.

One hour? Several hours? I tried to make it last as long as I could.

Hands shaking, I cleared the Internet history, then closed the browser. I took a long, parched pull from the wine, killing it, then put the empty bottle on the desk and glanced at the computer. There, on the desktop, was a file labeled “Annulment.”

It would be wrong to read it. It wasn't intended for me. My father had read a letter I'd accidentally left on the printer when I was sixteen, and that had been incredibly violating. I wanted so badly to read it. But I had to be better than him. I could not allow myself to do it.

I put both hands on the desk and pushed the rolling chair back, away from the computer. I let my head fall back. Whoah, I was fucked up. My head lolled to the left.

One filing cabinet drawer was slightly open. One folder peeked out. I had to close one eye to read the label. “Annulment.” It could not have been any clearer—I was meant to read it.

I worked my way through the thin, stapled document, concentrating hard to keep my eyes from crossing. It was shit I'd already read in the email he'd sent me, supposedly explaining why their marriage was invalid. I chafed at his insincerity, his fake humility, how he sounded so blameless and put-upon. Some mean-spirited stuff about Mom, about them smoking pot together once, but none of the earth-shattering revelations I had hoped for.

I'd had a rough time of it with women. Even if it was mostly my fault, it had left me bitter. But the way Dad talked about Mom suggested a rancor deeper than anything I'd felt. Even after he had bailed on her, had bailed on all of us, had successfully made his escape, to still hate her like she had been his jailer . . . it scared me, and it made me incredibly sad.