Stronger (23 page)

Afterward, Big D pulled his car into the handicap-accessible area outside the arena to pick me up. The Bruins had lost a lead in the final period, surrendering two quick goals, and the Blackhawks had just celebrated a championship on our ice. We were bummed as I swung myself into the car.

“Let’s hit it, Big D,” I said, strapping up.

Someone knocked on my window. I looked out. A guy in a Bruins jersey was standing there, signaling to me. I rolled down my window.

“Jeff Bauman,” he said. I’m pretty sure he was drunk. “I just wanted to shake your hand, bro.”

“Thank you,” I said, shaking his hand.

As he left, someone else stepped forward. “Great to see you tonight, Jeff.”

“Thank you. It’s nice to meet you.”

Another person stepped forward. Then another one.

“We have to go,” Big D said.

“It’s cool,” I said, shaking another hand. “We got time.” I went through five or six more people, some of them talking with me, some of the women kissing me on the cheek. They said I inspired them. I told them they inspired me, too.

“We really need to go, Jeff,” Big D said again.

“Chill,” I said, “one more minute.”

“Dude… it’s not going to be one more minute. There’s a line down the block.”

I looked out the window. There must have been a hundred people waiting to shake my hand, and more were piling into the back of the line.

A few minutes later, we pulled away. I waved to the line as we left, and the whole line waved back. It was one of the most memorable moments of my summer. I hadn’t been sure I wanted to be at the game. I was never sure I wanted to go anywhere, honestly. It was always a struggle. Always.

But it always ended the same way: I was so happy I’d come.

A few days later, I sat down for my one national television interview, with Brian Williams of NBC. He had called Kat personally, which impressed me so much I stuck with him, despite a last-minute call from Oprah’s people. Mom was devastated. She loved Oprah. But I’d made a promise. I couldn’t go back on my word.

That interview was the first time I used the word
stronger
. Mr. Williams asked me, “How are you different from before the marathon?”

“I’m stronger,” I replied. “Way stronger.”

I meant physically. At Spaulding, they called me Wolverine, after the X-Man, because of the way my wounds healed. I could do a hundred push-ups, no problem, when I had never even attempted that before. I had mastered the one-leg bridge. I was physically strong.

But I was stronger in other ways, too. I just hadn’t realized it yet.

32.

W
e went to Uncle Bob’s house on the South Shore of Maine in mid-July. Our family went every summer. It was as much a tradition as Aunt Jenn’s barbecue in June and Cole’s birthday party in August. Uncle Bob’s house was pimped out, and it was right on the beach. I’ve never been a beach person—so much sand—but it was nice to swim in the ocean on a hot July day.

As it turned out, that was the week of the
Rolling Stone
controversy. The magazine had released an issue with a huge close-up of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger bomber, on the cover. It was sort of a glamour shot. It wasn’t from a photo shoot, but it was a photo that made him look about as handsome and “rock star” as he could ever look.

People were upset, especially in Boston. There had been a protest against the magazine, and a Massachusetts State Police sergeant named Sean Murphy had, without authorization, given photos of the manhunt to
Boston
magazine. The photos showed cops in riot gear, and Dzhokhar covered with blood, trying to exit the boat where he was found. One showed the red dot of a rifle target on his bloody face. This is what the magazine should have published, he said.

That, of course, created its own controversy.

Sergeant Murphy, who had initially been suspended from the force, happened to be at his summer place in the same small Maine town. Uncle Bob’s friend Gerry Callahan, the radio personality, said the sergeant wanted to meet me. I said sure, tell him to come by. I met cops all the time. I loved meeting cops.

We had lunch, chatted, and took a picture afterward. Soon after, Aunt Jenn uploaded the photo to Facebook. The next morning, there was a big article in the newspaper, featuring the photo, claiming that I supported Sergeant Murphy. Before long, it was national news. I didn’t feel anyone had done anything wrong, but other people started to feel like I was being manipulated. That maybe Mr. Callahan, who was outspoken on the issue, was using me to help Sergeant Murphy.

“I don’t want to make a statement,” I told Kat, when she advised me to clear up the misperception. “I just want it to go away.”

I wasn’t against Sergeant Murphy. I don’t think he should have released the photos. And I also don’t think he should have been reassigned to the graveyard shift, which was what eventually happened. It was an emotional time. Very emotional. We should all have second chances.

I was just worried that everything would get blown out of proportion. And it did. With the photo circulating, the press dug up something I had said on my radio interview with Gerry Callahan on WEEI, a minor controversy at the time. Mr. Callahan asked what I thought of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and I responded, “He’s dead, and I’m still here.”

It wasn’t meant to be vengeful. I wasn’t saying I wanted him dead, or that I was happy he had died. It was a statement of fact. Who came out better because of the bombing? Nobody. But that coward got it worse than me.

Now the press was putting that statement and the photo together, implying that I was offended by the
Rolling Stone
cover, and violently angry toward the Tsarnaev brothers.

This was crazy.

And wrong.

I don’t have vengeance in my heart against the bombers. I don’t want to see the surviving brother tortured or executed or taken out vigilante style. I don’t necessarily want him dead. I don’t want him walking free, able to hurt other people, but I don’t see how his death accomplishes anything. It’s not closure for me. What they did is part of my life, whether the bombers are alive or not.

I respect people who think differently. Aunt Jenn and Mom hate the bombers for what they’ve put us through. They call them monsters and animals.

“They don’t deserve to be on this planet,” Aunt Jenn says.

Mom keeps it simple. “They killed people, Jeff,” she says. “They killed a child. Martin’s parents had to watch their son die. Only a monster would do that.”

No, I thought, they were people. No matter what they did, they were people.

I never thought about them beyond that. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s part of my healing. Maybe I’ll go through an angry phase one day, like the psychologist at Spaulding said I might. But the people I think about, when it’s quiet and I have to think about the bombing, are the Odoms, who were with my family in the hospital; Ms. Corcoran, who lost her legs and almost lost her daughter; Pat and Jess, the newlyweds; Martin, Krystle, and Lingzi Lu, who stood near me, but whom I never got to meet.

I think about Carlos.

All those friends inspire me.

It didn’t bother me that
Rolling Stone
wrote about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I didn’t want to read the article, and I never have, but I wasn’t upset that they tried to understand why he would bomb a marathon and kill innocent people. It’s important to know, because he wasn’t a monster. He was a kid.

I felt kind of bad for him, actually. Not as bad as I did for the victims, but a little. He was only nineteen, and when you’re nineteen, you do stupid stuff. I did, and you probably did, too. Sure, very few people do something that stupid or evil—and there’s no other word for it; blowing up strangers is evil—but he was still just a depressed teenager acting like a jerk.

You get only two or three important choices in life. What job you do, whom you marry. Those are big decisions. If you’re right about those two decisions, you’ll probably be happy.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev made the worst decision possible. He destroyed his own life, and he took out innocent people in the process. He’s nineteen, and he won’t have a chance to make any other important decisions. He’s done.

I don’t want to give his defense any ideas. I don’t want them to say, “Jeff Bauman isn’t angry at my client,” because that’s not my place. We should decide his fate together, because that’s what our country is about. I hope he stays in jail forever.

But still, I mostly blame his brother. Tamerlan Tsarnaev and I, we were similar. We were both twenty-seven when the bomb went off; we each had a brother who was nineteen. I know how powerful that position is, because I know the way my brother looks up to me. He would do anything I ask. Alan is Air Force Strong, now that he’s been through boot camp, so maybe he’s different, but a year ago… anything I told him, he would have believed.

I read about Tamerlan recently. I avoided it for a long time, but after a while I wanted to know. What I found was a bully. A boxer who quit but still liked to beat people up. A man who’d scream at the leader of his mosque. Who’d intimidate people in his neighborhood. He had a terrible temper. He assaulted his girlfriend. He was married, but his wife was just another person to bully and abuse. He was a man whose religion—no, not his religion, but his
interpretation
of his religion—wouldn’t allow a woman to be his equal.

Maybe that was the biggest difference between him and me, I sometimes think. He had a whipping post. I have a partner.

I go back to those big decisions. Maybe I think about them, because I’m in the process of making them now. I’m at the time in life when you become an adult. When you have to make big decisions to determine who you will be, because not making them becomes a decision in itself.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev… he was too small. He couldn’t handle it. He was a loser. He needed to stand up, but he blew everything up instead. He wasn’t mad about our treatment of Muslims. I mean, he was, and I can see why. We’ve killed kids over there, I can’t deny that.

But that was not why Tamerlan set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon. He set off the bomb because his life hadn’t worked out yet, and he was afraid to keep trying. He thought the world wasn’t fair. He was right: the world isn’t fair. Life is tough. There are people committing suicide at factories in China, just so we can have cheap iPhones. That sucks.

But do you blow the whole thing up? No. Hell no. There are other ways. Setting off a bomb, or shooting up an elementary school, doesn’t make you bigger. It makes you the smallest kind of person on earth. The kind who has to blame others, because you can’t face yourself.

I guess I am angry about that. I’m angry that a loser like Tamerlan Tsarnaev found a way to hurt other people. He’s gone, and the only thing he left on this earth was victims.

No, I won’t give him that. I’m not his victim. Neither are the Corcorans or the Odoms or all the other people I admire. We’re all going to be stronger, even the families of the ones we lost. I won’t give in to anger, because being angry will make me more like him. But also because anger means he mattered. And he didn’t. His life was nothing.

The victim of his hatred and cowardice, in the end, was his own brother.

I heard the
Rolling Stone
article ended with Dzhokhar crying for two straight days in his hospital room. People were confused by that. They wondered what he was crying about.

I’m not confused. He was a human being. He killed a child. Of course he cried. Why wouldn’t he? He was done.

I was at the beach.

And sure, part of my visit to Maine was painful, and part of it was frustrating. I sat at the end of the walk, staring at the beach. I couldn’t move in the sand, either in my wheelchair or with my artificial legs. I was stuck, until Uncle Dale scooped me up, put me on his back, and carried me to our blanket, piggyback style.

The day was warm, but the beer was cool. I looked at the water and thought about Mrs. Corcoran, and how she had loved to walk on the beach, and how she cried because she’d never do that again. She was right. Neither of us would ever walk on the beach. That sucked. But with Erin and the Forehead beside me, and a beer in my hand, life was good.