Authors: David Samuels
Outdoors. Colo State 800 8th 1:52.84 57.0 . . .
Oregon 800 2nd 1:51.61 50.3
I actually don’t remember the last 220, and was unconscious for ten minutes afterwards ...
I could have run the 1500 and 800 at WAC, but I didn’t especially want to get clobbered, so the coach put me in a marathon that week. They got 21 inches of snow the day before . . . But I ran anyway mainly because the roads were closed and [I] couldn’t get back.
“Try to come out here,” he urged his friend, before signing off, “Indubitably in Big
Wyoming, Jim.”
XI. The Storm
That summer, Hogue found a job with a professor at the University of Wyoming, which
gave him backcountry passes to restricted areas of the Rocky Mountain National Park. When
Keith Mark came to visit, the two friends immediately set off into the mountains with their passes, sleeping bags, and backpacks for what promised to be an extraordinary outdoor
adventure. Hogue’s job was collecting butterflies, and when the two friends stopped to camp at night they would lay out a sheet and hook a black light up to the motorcycle battery. The moths would come, and Hogue would put them in a jar of formaldehyde, then pin their wings as if they were in flight. For the two friends from Kansas City, the mountains had always symbolized a kind of solitary freedom, the absence of the limits they associated with their hometown. Later, Keith Mark would date the change in his friend to the last day of that trip, when the two climbers were caught at the top of a mountain by a fierce summer storm.
“It’s that time in the mountains where it’s summer and it’s sunny,” he remembered. “And
over the top of the peaks comes some black clouds and a strong wind. And the temperature
dropped. And I was quite a bit higher in elevation than he was at the time. You know, we were probably half a mile apart. Then all of a sudden, lightning started just zinging by. And Jim was yelling, ‘You gotta get down!’ You know, I had my pack with a metal frame. And he was
yelling, ‘Get down! You gotta get down!’”
As lightning struck the peak, they burrowed into the exposed side of the mountain, which
was wet and slippery and beginning to freeze over. Sliding down the side of the mountain in a blizzard of ice, Mark made his way to where his friend had stopped. As the lightning struck around them, they got up and ran for the safety of the tree line. “You could feel the ice pelting you, you know?” he remembered. “And the lightning was fierce. You could just hear it. It was like running a key down a wire. Makes the hair stand up on your arms, you know? It was the
daytime, but you would see the flash and the thunder would just be there. It was unbelievable.
And we just sat there. Nobody said anything. We’re soaked to the bone. Scared. Cold.”
Hogue didn’t say a word when the lightning struck. He didn’t speak when the lightning
struck a few yards from his head. He didn’t speak when the hail stopped, and it started to snow, and the two friends, shivering, in shorts, made their way down the mountain to find that the park had been closed. He didn’t speak as they walked along the road in the hopes that someone would be out driving in the storm and would pick them up before they were stricken with exposure. A truck finally picked them up and drove them out of the park to a convenience store, where they changed their clothes and bought chocolate milk and donuts.
The friend Mark knew was never scared. He trained alone, so that no one would see him
throw up at the end of a punishing run and interpret his exhaustion as weakness. After that day on the mountain, Mark said, Hogue seemed less sure of himself. “There’s no doubt in my mind that what turned Jim’s world around is what happened that day in Colorado,” Mark insisted,
many years later. “Maybe he realized that he was a mortal just like everyone else.” The storm seems like a natural turning point for a metaphysically oriented hero, who may have come face to face with his own limitations on top of an exposed mountain peak blasted by thunder, hail, and lightning. Pehaps the failure of his will on top of the mountain was symbolic of his failure to transcend the limits of his body through training and willpower alone. Perhaps that failure turned him into a thief. When Mark visited his friend in Wyoming the next summer, he found car
stereos stacked up in one of the rooms. There were bicycles that Hogue didn’t own. The bicycles and the stereos suggested that he was trafficking in stolen goods.
That same summer, Hogue came over to Marks house in Kansas City. When he left,
Mark noticed that he was missing a gold medal he had won in the Kansas Relays—one major
high school event that Hogue had never won. When he called his friend to ask about the medal, Hogue denied that he had it. A day later, Hogue called back to say that his mother had found the medal on his driveway. Their friendship was over.
It also seems possible Hogue lost confidence after failing to compete against the superior
Kenyan runners. In 1984, Hogue’s former teammate Joseph Nzau, representing Kenya, had
broken quickly out in front of the pack during the finals of the marathon in the Los Angeles Olympics and held the lead for more than twenty miles before fading just at the end of the race.
“Undoubtedly, James Hogue saw this on TV,” wrote Mike Penny, in one of the several e-mails
he sent me after our interview. “[D]id seeing Nzau on the worldwide stage of the Olympics
rekindle thoughts of greatness that led to his enrollment at Palo Alto—just months later? Maybe.
An interesting coincidence, at least.”
The record of James Hogue’s life is marked by blank spaces, and by a series of deliberate
distortions and erasures. It contains no shortage of possible reasons why its author might wish to start his life over, and become someone new. It is possible that by coming back to college at Princeton in the role of the older Kenyans he was trying to erase the hurt of having to complete against the more mature athletes. If so, it is interesting that his repeated injuries, most of which were purely imaginary, protected the younger runners on the Princeton team from suffering the same humiliation of losing to older, stronger runners that had he suffered at their age. If the causes of Hogue’s disturbance lay in his family history, those causes were not apparent to Penny, who met Hogue and his father for lunch one afternoon in Lawrence at the Kansas Relays.
Eugene Hogue, he recalled, “seemed like a distinguished, very normal, man.”
In 1979, Hogue dropped out of Wyoming and moved to Texas, attending a community
college and then the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied chemical engineering; he stopped taking classes just a few credits shy of gaining a degree. He was arrested on a charge of theft from a bicycle store in Austin. He was living an experience which is at once more particular and also more universal, of losing confidence, drifting through one’s early and mid-twenties, and waking up in a storage shed in Utah one morning and deciding to start over.
XII. The Confidence Man
James Hogue phoned me for the first time three days after I returned from Aspen. He said
that he was impressed by the research that had gone into the videotape and the letter, and that he would be happy to meet in New York. When he arrived, a few weeks later, his manner was
bashful. He looked down at the ground. His face was youthful but weathered, and he wore a
baseball cap over his thinning brown hair. This shy presence was what I had been hoping and waiting for.
Getting into Princeton was like a game, he said. The part he liked best was researching
the character and writing the application. He had taken the SAT himself. He could have scored higher, except didn’t finish one of the math sections on purpose.
“Why didn’t you want a perfect score?” I asked him.
“Only a few people get perfect scores,” he told me. A perfect score would have drawn
unwanted attention before the application process began.
I asked him what the experience of being at Princeton under an assumed identity had felt
like. “Let’s imagine that I was creating you as a character on paper,” I said, after he’d dodged the question a number of times. “What did you love? What made you uncomfortable? What made
you happy? What did you do when you were just feeling quiet? What did your actions mean to
you?”
He was silent. “Well, I had a flicker of an idea and then I forgot it,” he finally replied. He answered my questions in a way that avoided rudeness while limiting the amount of information he revealed. His expression remained mild and impassive, in a way that made me think of the even fluorescent light in an office building whose occupants have all gone home for the night.
One month after our meeting in New York, he made another trip east and we drove down
to Princeton. It was funny to be back on campus, he said. He got up the next morning and ran ten miles. Then we went to his old dormitory room, 141 Holder Hall.
“It was a nice little room,” he remembered. “A fireplace, two little bedrooms, a little
living room. It was all oak-paneled and had wood floors. This is Holder courtyard,” he said, gesturing out to the expanse of lawn in front of us. “They have five billion dollars and they still can’t grow grass here.”
The story Hogue told me corresponded in most of its particulars with the story I had
heard before. He was born in Wyandotte County, Kansas. He liked to run. He had read
The
Great Gatsby
in high school and was a fan of Geoffrey Wolff’s
The Duke of Deception,
a memoir about the author’s father, an inveterate liar and con artist.
In his own account, James Hogue was an average person, the youngest of four children.
His parents were rural people who had grown up out West. His father, Eugene, routed boxcars on the Union Pacific railroad. The Kansas City neighborhood where they lived was a safe
environment, he said, with streets of row houses with flower gardens in the backyards and trees to sit under during the summer. No one in the neighborhood did anything out of the ordinary. “If I was ten years old and it was the summer,” he remembered, “I would have probably been out in the yard playing. We had irises growing, so we’d hide in those or play in the tree house or go down to the woods. It was usually pretty hot, so you don’t really want to roll around in the grass or anything, with the chiggers and things like that. I really don’t remember too much about it.”
In junior high school, he said, he was the best runner in Wyandotte County. He learned to
visualize himself winning races. He learned that there is a time in which you are capable of running the race that remains true no matter who you are or where you are in the world. His father came to all of his races, he remembered.
“What was he like?” I wondered.
“Quiet,” he answered. “Really terse.”
“Did he compliment you on winning?”
“I can’t really remember that. I mean, there weren’t any compliments to be given. I was
winning all the races.” He didn’t remember his father being either happy or sad. He said he barely remembered the night on the mountain that had so impressed Keith Mark; it was “maybe a little hairy,” but it did not affect him in any important way He never expected to be able to beat the Kenyans he ran with in college; they were Olympic-caliber athletes. “When you’re running against somebody who’s been in the Olympics and you’re sixteen years old,” he said,
exaggerating his relative youth by a year, “you don’t expect to beat them. It’s not a
disappointment to you if you don’t beat them.” He would never reach their level as a runner.
“I just didn’t have the genetic ability,” he said. “They were superior, really superior
athletes,” he added. “You’re talking about a one-in-a-billion person. I never thought I would be that good.” After the death of a grandmother who lived in Wyoming, he left Laramie and moved to Austin. He stopped taking classes when he ran out of money He felt it was wrong to ask his parents for money, he said. He worked in a lab and built houses.
I noticed at a certain point that he seemed to have a definite aversion to saying the name
“Alexi Santana,” so I asked him why. “I’m just not used to talking about myself in the third person,” he answered. “I’m not a football player or a boxer or something.” I thought that was an interesting answer.
“So when you say ‘myself,’ you include Alexi Santana,” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
There were other questions I wanted to answerer:
Q: What have you been thinking about for the last ten years? What interests you about
what you did here?
A: I don’t know. I mean, the things that interested me are the abstract things. The specific things I think are boring.
Q: Abstract things? Like what?
A: Why did I do this? Why did that work? Why didn’t that work?
Q: Why did you do it? Why didn’t it work?
A: Because they found out it was all a fraud.
The questions I was asking him weren’t real questions, he explained. They were the
products of a story line in my head, whose relation to his life was at best coincidental.
The day that Jim Hogue first arrived in Princeton it was raining, he said. He had been
living in Las Vegas, building houses during the day and hanging out at the casinos at night.
When I asked him whether he won much, he shrugged. “You never win,” he said. His friends in Las Vegas had helped him create the character of Santana. They drove him to the airport, and some people from Princeton picked him up in a car. Being at Princeton was like being an actor in a play.
He remembered the rain. He had been living out in the desert, he said, and he hadn’t seen
rain for a very long time. Princeton wasn’t as intellectually rarefied as some might imagine, he added. “They certainly weren’t talking about Plato,” he remembered. “I don’t think anybody at this school does that.” People seemed unaware that they were rich. He remembered having lunch one day with a girl he didn’t know well. “She would be describing her house,” he recalled, “and say it has five bedrooms, and they have five cars or something, and I’m, like, ‘Wow! You’re rich!’ And she goes, ‘Oh, no. Not at all. You know, we’re poor.’” He didn’t understand how