Boston 2007

I have run the Boston Marathon once before. My preeminent memory of the 2004 race is of the herds of runners scurrying this way and that, prior to the start, trying to find somewhere to pee.
Hopkinton, where the race has started from in each of its now 111 editions, is a tiny, rural town of 2,700 residents with neatly but unpretentiously kept lawns and practical wooden or vinyl siding on the houses. On that April Monday three years ago, it was an African grassland; the race participants like desperate gazelles flocking to the the edges of yards and ducking behind obscuring shrubs, police on horseback and foot acting like confused, learning lion cubs chasing them as only the first drops were hitting the ground and thus there were men running about with cocks flapping in the cool spring air and women hurriedly waddling away as one must when one’s thighs are limited by the shorts still wrapped around them.

That was then.

This year is all about bringing the love; encouraging whatever is necessary simply for survival itself. It is, even more than usual regarding marathons, about stupid courage, about competition and camaraderie.
This year, it was 43 degrees, raining and windy and a cop wouldn’t bat an eye if you pissed on his gun. The forecast for raceday was so dire (with some predictions calling for torrential rain, sub-freezing temperatures and sustained 45 m.p.h. winds) that there were actual high-level discussions of whether or not to cancel the race on account of weather for the first time in its history. By the time the day arrived - thankfully slightly milder than was expected - an air of gratitude took precedence over all.
Everywhere, there were men spreadlegged in front of bushes and women gathered in groups of 3 or 4 talking casually and laughing as they crouched comfortably next to each other anywhere; in the street, on a lawn, even a sidewalk. It was raining, who cares.

I sprint to the start, as my qualifying time has earned me a spot up front and I fully intend to enjoy such a perk as the difference between starting in the front and even 2,000 people back can mean minutes before the starting line is crossed. The gun sounds and we are cascading downhill.
There are many elements that contribute to the Boston Marathon’s deserved reputation of being one of the more - if not the most - difficult of the major road-run marathons in the world, but primary among them is the hills. It’s not the hills between miles 17 and 21, where the infamous “Heartbreak Hill” is the last in a series of three that is sure to make the ill-prepared and the ready alike weep, but the 4 miles of steep downhill running at the very beginning of the race.
Sure it makes for a great pace if one is fool enough to think that such is the rate one will run for the entire race. If they staged a 5 miler on this part of the course, there is no doubt that everyone who ran it would easily set their personal-best time at the distance and walk away without a scratch. Later that night though, even just the first four of those five miles would show the toll they’d taken.
The great marathoner and former personal one-time torturer of Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, ran upwards of 140 miles a week readying himself for Boston in 1982. Thinking this still might not be enough preparation for the downhill portions, he sat at home at night, every night, and punched the tops of his legs 1500 times.
Downhill running is fast, but terribly shocking. The runner is basically falling further forward at a seemingly ever increasing rate of speed, and is stopping and skidding with each footfall. At 170 footfalls a minute, a just under six minute mile sees the legs accepting 1000 individual shocks, or 4,000 over the first four miles. I remind myself that it is only four miles and it certainly is nice to look down at my watch and see that I’ve run four miles in a little over 23 minutes with very little effort at all.

But here’s the rub.

Those little extra shocks break down the quadriceps muscle and other tissues of the legs in little, gradual, almost unnoticed ways. This kind of damage will only reveal itself much later. Specifically, it will reveal itself around 15-17 miles later, or right around the time that I am ascending the half-mile long incline that is “Heartbreak Hill.” The extra strength summoned for this climb and the fact that I am making sure I stay on pace as I do it, will ensure that I will have nothing left to try to catch anyone from this point on, and that the next 5 miles, the last miles of the race, will be all, 100% all, about holding on for dear life. I vowed to myself before the race that I would not do a mile faster than 5:45 (which I failed at, covering mile 3 in 5:41) and would not go slower than 6:59 (which worked out nicely as I ran my slowest mile, mile 19, in 6:54,) but after Heartbreak, I was afraid to look at my watch as I passed the mile markers, fearing that there might even be a great big “8” staring back at me. There was not, but I was stunned at this, as my gait had turned frighteningly abbreviated.

The following is in no way intended to appear arrogant.
My stride has been described, mostly by veteran fellow runners, as “easy,” “beautiful,” “effortless,” and “perfect.” It is not as if I set out to do this with any intention. I didn’t spend hours in front of dance studio mirrors until I honed my footstrike to look like the running equivalent of Catherine Deneuve circa 1967. It’s just how I like to run. It’s always been what feels right. It’s what makes sense to me if I want to get from one point to another in the least amount of time with essentially the least amount of effort. If I could consistently run sub 5 minute miles by dancing like Rick Astley, I would do it, though I would be in disguise, possibly as Rick Astley.
It is rare that I get to observe what my stride looks like. It’s just one of those things that I don’t get much of an opportunity to see, especially since I’m usually concerned with running as fast as I can. So when, somewhere in Wellesley around mile 11, there was a glass replacement store with seemingly miles of big plate glass windows as the facade of its showroom, I couldn’t resist checking myself out. I turned my head to see my image, tightly clothed in black as always, gliding along. Damn, I look good.
I am so glad, oh so glad, that there were no more opportunities after that, as by mile 22, I was shuffling ahead as if my shoelaces had been tied together. Luckily, everyone else was doing pretty much the same deathmarch, though every now and again some crazy bastard would come flying by in perfect stride and I and any other runner around would mutter profanities to no one in particular. Most of us, at this point of the race, were between 25 and 40 years old, but everything about us from our weird, resourceful limps to our bitchy demeanors bespoke of men well into their 80’s, glorious death only a few agonizing moments away now.

There’s a guy who’s been next to me for a good 2 miles now who has on a shirt that reads “Eureka.” I don’t know if he’s a vacuum salesman, or if he’s running for a corporate team, but I have decided that I’ll give into the vaudevillian joke and I keep thinking “Eureka sucks,” or, as everyone keeps shouting out said name as we pass, “you don’t smell so good yourself.” I have to get away from this guy.
I put on a “surge,” which is like flooring it in an ‘83 Chevette with only 2 good cylinders, and get a good 30 feet ahead relatively quickly. “Eureka!” I hear again “Oh, shut the fuck up,” I silently plead and step on the broken accelerator again. This guy, whoever he was, is undoubtedly responsible for me finishing in 2:45 rather than 2:46, and I am grateful for that. I just hope he never wears that damned shirt again.

I am not super-fast. I am fairly quick and certainly relentless and the pace at which I run will never get me into the comfort of the elite trailers and training rooms before and after major world races. However, running at the rate that I do does entitle me to certain perks that I enjoy and exploit to the fullest.
I came in 222nd place at Boston this year where close to 21,000 people ran. In New York, I placed 200th overall in 2005 in a race that had over 37,000 participants. In Falmouth I consistently place in the top 60 out of 9,000. At the Ballycotton 10 miler in Ireland I came in 14th out of 2,700. I don’t state these statistics to make myself feel oh-so-cool, because in any of those races there were lots and lots of people far faster than I. I state it to illustrate a point:
These events are set up to accommodate thousands of runners and often hundreds of thousands if not millions of spectators. Often they are run through the most public places in the most metropolitan of cities. Huge roads are closed down and open only to the racers. 5th Avenue is closed. Boylston Street is closed. Commonwealth Avenue is closed. Due to the length of these races, by the time I come down the road for the last portion of the race, there is no one around me, sometimes not for a 100 feet or more. Lining the sides of these empty 6 to 8 lane thoroughfares are 50,000 or more screaming spectators, pressing against fences and barricades and reaching around police officers wherever they can. It doesn’t take much energy - thankfully, as I have none to spare - to raise my hands in a motion that begs for applause and noise, and they always oblige. 50,000 people, 15 deep on the sidewalks of New York, or Boston, or even Falmouth, go absolutely buggy just because they know how good it feels to the runner, to me.
As I cross the finish line, an almost instantaneous quiet replaces the sound of the crowd and the silence makes for the most intimate fraternity. There are 30,000 water bottles, medals, bananas, heat blankets, bags of chips. There are hundreds of volunteers eager to help in any way. There are helicopters overhead and newstrucks as far as the eye can see, and yet still there is silence, as embraces and breaths and smiles are exchanged between the 40 or so runners surrounded by all of this, and for this very short chapter, I am one of them. We are alone and I have done something that will live with me forever. I get to be a rock star for one day. I get to hear the roar of the crowd and allow it to carry a body that is only partly, at best, connected to this mind at this stage of the race. It is wracked with pain, it is twisted and beaten, it is ready to give, but it can still raise a hand, turn up the volume, bring the love.

Short

I almost dated a dwarf. I don’t mean that I came close to going out to dinner with someone who could have made it to the third call for Ewok auditions. I mean my very first girlfriend was almost a dwarf, missing the essential criteria by maybe an inch and a half, two tops.
She was proportioned like one of those Russian doll sets where each doll contains another doll inside it, she being the second to smallest. She also somewhat resembled what many cultures symbolize as a fertility totem, though I don’t think she would have been able to carry anything larger than a mango to term.
She had moved to Cape Cod from New York; a city kid, wise beyond the years of her peers. She always wore a cool, unimpressed expression that seemed to say, “I come from a place where the rats are bigger than me and the hot dogs are bigger than your penis,” or at least that’s how I took it.

She smoked Marlboro Reds, which counted for a lot, because this meant that she had chosen to smoke this particular brand, rather than steal the pack from her parents, as the rest of us did.
Most fourteen year-olds in my neighborhood couldn’t find anything stronger than a NOW or a Tareyton in a purse or glove compartment. It was the ‘80’s and smokers had begun to go lighter as many were suffering from the early stages of two burgeoning plagues; emphysema and Reaganomics, neither of which had ruined anyone’s lungs or self esteem just yet, but coughs and ill-advised investments were increasingly forthcoming.
Her name was Jem, (with a J) short for Jembelee. Her father’s name was James and she had three sisters, Jennifer, Julie, and Jocelyn. This was a long passed down family tradition, and a strictly patriarchal one at that. James’ dad’s name was Jasper, and his father’s name was Joseph. Jem’s mom was cut out from any entitled connection, as her name was Marilyn. Had James been borne sons, they would have all been J’s too.
The family also had a Chihuahua named Gene, but just so things didn’t become phonetically confusing , they pronounced his name with a hard “G”, making anyone who called the dog instantly as if they were from Calcutta, or perhaps Rio.

The summer Jem and I dated was preceded by a spring of utter discontent; birds chirped in hushed tones and flowers bitterly bloomed only once a week. Were I an even slightly intuitive soul, I’d have read the signs; the wind blowing from the north, the regular afternoon rains and the way they matched the cycle of the moon, the dog shit almost constantly found underfoot. But no, a girl had smiled at me from across the room for the first time. She had unleashed her exotic Gotham charms and they came at me like 5th Avenue DVD peddlers of romance and they all had the Star Wars trilogy (the good one's) for free and I had been hypnotized. By an evil midget.
"Can your dad give us a ride to the Barn?" she'd ask, meaning the small mall of artificially barn-like structures in Eastham that was the Gift Barn, the Game Barn and the Pizza Barn. Plus there was a mini-golf course, which, fortunately, bore no direct farmish title like "Corn Links," or the "Baa--aaa--aaa--ck Nine," though the 14th hole required negotiating a wildly swinging cow udder that bordered on pornographic.
"Sure," I'd say, every time, which was at least 4 times a week, knowing too well that for each ride I'd have to do a lot of bargaining and planning. My father was beginning to suffer from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and though he was retired and, I suspected, secretly relished the opportunity to get the hell out of the house, he still had to be plied with promises that this would be the last time, a promise easy to make as he'd surely forget it had been made within the hour.
It should be noted my father also drove approximately 10 to 20 m.p.h. under the posted speed limit, meaning that in a 25 mile-per-hour zone, I could get out and run far enough ahead in a short enough time that, given the old man's failing mind, I could pretend to be a hitchhiker, and given the old man's sense of generosity, he'd pull over and pick me up, especially because of the slight resemblance I bore to his son.
He'd drop Jem and I off at the quasi-rural complex and slowly make his way back home, as my miniature mate and I waded into the sea of punk teens and white trash tourists that perpetually filled the area just past the parking lot and just before the entrance to any of the three barns. I always wanted to play miniature golf, but knew better than to float this idea as the one time I did, Jem completely freaked out, ranting about what an affront the mere name of the sport was. Instead we would find a picnic table, pull out some Marlboros and start to smoke the night away. Knowing what I know now, I often wonder if minus the cigarettes she and I would be, respectively, normal in height and really quite tall. This of course was all moot, as every single member of both her family and mine were not only all under 5 foot 8, but also smoked, with the exception of her two younger sisters, who were barely started on candy cigarettes.
Soon, friends with huge mohawks and patches on their jackets proclaiming a love for anarchy and bands such as the Circle Jerks and Scraping Foetus off the Wheel would arrive, having been dropped off by their parents, too.
They'd smoke and we'd smoke and they'd all be short and we'd still be short, and eventually, almost every time it seemed, my very first girlfriend would go off with one of them. Eventually she'd come back and I'd ask her where she'd been. Eventually I'd believe her and eventually it would seem as if nothing had happened, because, of course, it hadn't.
However, eventually I would see two of my friends who really loved each other and it would occur to me that they didn't leave with other people for hours at a time. They would just sit there and laugh and kiss in that awkward, repulsively wet and beautifully clumsy way teenagers kiss. Eventually, I'd come to my senses. Eventually I'd find a girl who smoked, who had all those patches of all those really fucking good bands, who was, like me, an utterly terrible but earnest kisser, a girl who really loved me. Even if it would only be for a short time.

Politics and Porn

If you ever saw one of my elementary or middle school pictures you might wonder, “Oh dear lord, what the hell happened here?”
Pornography, politics and one terribly ungifted barber inadvertently uniting the two.

My parents didn’t really seem to pay a great deal of attention to my overall appearance after I turned 5; a total reversal from the time prior. Up until that age, any photograph you saw of me might have you thinking you’d stumbled upon “Kids Vogue” or some such magazine that doesn’t actually exist. There I was in my little red short suit. There’s little Joe playing on the beach in a sharp yellow swim trunks with matching flip flops and sandpail. See me strolling down Commercial Street in Provincetown, 1973, decked out in a kick-ass Osh Kosh B’gosh overall/sweater combo. I was stylish, ridiculously cute and outrageously, inescapably lame. As if some instinctual awareness of my developing loserdom had been awakened in me, I began to combat my parents’ fashion efforts with careful, socially toxic rebellions. Sometime in October of my sixth year, I thought it might be a curious little experiment to not change my t-shirt until Christmas, a boycott that sort of automatically excluded bathing. I’d do things like wear two different shoes and then lose them both before the end of the day, and just to make it interesting, each hours apart. I relished “Dental Days” at school, wherein us students would chew mysterious, certainly toxic pills that would turn the teeth of those beset with plaque red. I would make sure I had the reddest teeth and that they stayed that way for the whole day.
My parents surrendered quickly to such attacks, preferring to save the discipline for more important things like room cleanliness and counterproductive rules regarding eating.
However, one ritual that remained consistent for my elementary and middle school career, was that of the day-before-school-photo-day haircut. My parents reasoned that a good one or two months worth of filth could be neatly disguised by a good, clean cut, a little toothpaste and a shirt bearing an embroidered likeness of a man and a horse participating in what is such a grossly snobbish sport it makes sailing look like NASCAR.

My dad was an old school “man.” He wasn’t exactly cut from the same cloth as the local hunter/fisherman types, he was more European Aristocrat, but he had that oddly universal, bordering on homo-erotic need for serious American male fraternity. So, when it came time for the haircut, while I could have gotten a fine ‘do from the woman who cut my mom’s hair, or even a decent style from just your regular old family neighborhood barber, my dad instead took me to Jolly Roger.
Roger was, to put it mildly, a weird dude. His barber shop looked like a tiny moosehunting lodge, paneled in dark wood with hand carved signs nailed to the outside and 20 years worth of NRA stickers on the windows that blocked most of the light from getting in. He always wore plaid flannel shirts and black suspenders and he had sharp, close-cropped sideburns propping up a short, oily pompadour that smelled like cigars and Aqua Velva. The thing I remember most about him though, was this super-totally-ultra creepy grin he’d sneak out all too often and it for some reason made me think I was glad I wasn’t his dog.
Roger’s barber shop was always busy, with 4 or 5 guys waiting to get in his chair and get the most god-awful haircut known to man. It may seem strange that there would be such demand for low-rate chop jobs like the one’s Roger dished out with complete consistency, but more than anything, most of these guys were either killing time between the breakfast table and the Elks Club, or just waiting to die.

If you were from, say, Colorado or maybe Vermont and you now lived by the sea or on the flat plains of the midwest, if you saw my school pictures you would instantly get homesick and cry. My bangs were like a goddammed mountain range, and a freshly formed one at that. No sloping beauty of Mount Fuji here. No, Roger, each time mind you, managed to carve from my precious locks stunning renditions of the Rockies, of the Sierras, of Everest. Looking at the cragged line of my brow, I find it amazing I still have two intact nostrils.
Yet, still, there was a reason I didn’t protest too much the trips to Roger, and it wasn’t just the ever-present threat of an angry Spaniard. It was porn, and lots of it.
Roger, as one might expect, had a vast array of “educational” magazines strewn about the shop. The selection and range was as broad as it was confusing. Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Gallery, Swank, Juggs, Better Homes and Gardens, Newsweek, Time, Hustler, Field and Stream, and Highlights for Kids. Oddly, there were no sports magazines. I think Roger and his buddies thought that pictures of guys sweating without hunting or being at war was way too close to gay.
I wasn’t advanced at much, still not, but I had a strangely early tendency to be girl-crazy.
I asked a girl out in the 1st grade, gave her a box of chocolates and everything. This was, not surprisingly, my first experience with rejection.
But now here I was at 10 years old and due to a plethora of yet more experiences with rejection, I was getting a pretty good idea that it might be a very, very long time (with my luck and social skills, likely longer than just about anyone my age) before I saw a girl naked. Because of this, Roger’s library became sort of a Holy Grail. I wasn’t so hyperbolic as to believe that within these magazines lay the very keys to human sexuality, but I at least held a hope that they’d give me some kind of general look at what I was missing, albeit in retrospect, minus the airbrushing.
Over the course of a year, my dad would take me to Roger’s maybe 5 times. Over 4 years or so, that was 20 trips. Somewhere around #12, I really began to case the joint. I picked up on when the attention wasn’t on me, when the pauses in conversation would and would not make for a good time for my plan to unfold.
My plan - and it’s simplicity was as brilliant as it was unintended - was to grab a copy of Newsweek and hold it up as if I were reading it. Then, when the timing was right, to quickly snatch, say, a Playboy and open it up inside the Newsweek. I, of course, hadn’t taken into account the fact that I would now appear to be reading a very thick copy of Time (though I reasoned that if pressed, I could just say it was the Fall Fashion Issue with a 62 page spread of Menachem Begin in Christian Dior “and look, there’s Leonid Brezhnev looking just smashing in a Gucci wrap!”) but that was a minor concern at best.
Roger and my dad were exchanging mono-syllabic jokes about brown trout and my dad must have come up with a real zinger, because Roger was suddenly doubled over with laughter (taking Fred-in-the-chair’s top of Mt. Washington and part of an eyebrow with him) and my dad was also in teary-eyed hysterics. I seized the moment, seized the Playboy and seized sociopolitical infamy.
Part of my plan was to ask Roger if I could take the copy of Newsweek with me to use for an extra credit report for school. I was sure he’d say yes, as I knew the value he placed on such a magazine was nothing compared to his truly treasured ones.
When it was my turn to get in the chair, I placed the magazine(s) under a copy of Better Homes and Gardens (I still don’t know what the hell that was doing there) and hoped for the best.
After my bangs had been transformed into the silhouette of a shattered radial saw blade, I climbed down from the chair and picked up the Newsweek. “Roger, would it be OK for me to borrow this? I have to do a report on a politician for school and I thought this guy would be good,” I said, referring to the old man with the receding chin, thin gray hair and glasses on the cover of the magazine. “Sure,” said Roger, adding with more than a tinge of hope, “You like Jesse Helms?” I stood there, unsure but sure I should just agree and be done with it. “Oh yeah,” I said “he’s the best.”
There is definitely some karmic lesson here regarding the objectification of women and how it may or may not relate to backwards-thinking politics, but to this day I prefer to be ignorant of it for fear that I may just suddenly become a horribly guilt-ridden monk.
Now, I was committed to writing a report on this Helms guy, a man I knew nothing about, nor did I really wish to, but I couldn’t get out of it because my dad had seen this whole little transaction occur and while he probably was at least partially on to me, he also would let it slide if I actually followed through. My pops was big on education, having been an immigrant who paid his own way through Brown and anything I did to lay to rest the still nagging fear that I might be mildly retarded was A-OK with him.

I have to say that for a 10 year old, I was a political monster, though only in a completely self-serving, narrow way, like a little, budding neo-con. I did things like refusing to order off children’s menus at restaurants because I found the suggestion belittling and discriminatory. I wrote angry letters (I’m not even making this up) to the Lego corporation, demanding that they make a Lego space set, which they in fact had, and I simply hadn’t been able to find it. I was a concerned citizen, man, but I didn’t know a damned thing about national politics (though later that year I would feel this strange, unfamiliar disgusted sensation when I learned both my parents had voted for Reagan.)
Copying the story from Newsweek verbatim would have been better journalism than what actually transpired. Instead, I took what to this day I’m still not sure but can only imagine was a not exactly glowing piece on the outwardly racist, purely evil Senator from North Carolina, and turned into, well, a glowing piece about the outwardly racist, purely evil etc. etc. I actually even titled it “Jesse Helms: an American Hero.” No shit. David MF Duke might have dialed that one down a bit.
The real beauty of it? The man who was my sixth grade English teacher who would be the recipient of said report and would undoubtedly give me an “A” for such advanced, impassioned journalism, was none other than Mr. Dennis Pearl.
Dennis Pearl was as close to a true left of center, progressive, intelligent and driven teacher as you could get. The fact that he was teaching the sixth grade is a testament to his sense of dedication to his calling. While most teachers at that level were there because they either couldn’t get anything better or 6th grade was as far as they could go and still be guaranteed intellectual superiority, Mr. Pearl was there because he viewed this age as a crucial turning point. And now here I was, standing in front of this hopelessly idealistic man, handing him a green folder with the letters spelling out “Jesse Helms” in red, white and blue stars and stripes.
“Wow, Jesse Helms,” he said, laughing easily, fairly sure this wasn’t a joke, but still pretty goddammed funny nonetheless. “’An American Hero’, you really like this guy, huh?” he asked. “Uh sure, yeah, he’s great,” I responded, trying to sound confident in whatever it was I’d written. “What do you like most about him?” Mr. Pearl asked, genuinely curious. I was struggling. I couldn’t remember much of anything from the article, as I kept taking breaks from reading to look at the Playboy I’d stolen. Suddenly numbers came to me “I guess it’s that he’s been a Senator for 10 years, I mean that’s like a lifetime,” which to me, it rather exactly was. Mr. Pearl laughed easily again at this. He had one of those laughs that only good teachers have. He would never mock you, even when that was essentially what he was doing in finding some weird 10 year old idea you’d proposed hysterical.
“Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll read this, and give you credit for it. But, I’d like you to go to the library and look up a little more info on Senator Helms,” he continued. “I’m not trying to tell you to think one way or another, but you might want to take a look at how he feels about things like black people, free speech and some other issues.” I began to get a very sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach. The report was still within my reach and I wanted to take it back. I somehow knew that I’d done something so bizarrely and perfectly wrong that I needed to rectify it, or at least never let it see the light of day. “Well, maybe I should take another stab at this before...” I said, reaching in vain for the folder that now laughed out loud at me in the colors of the flag. “No, I’ll hold on to this. You’ve taken the time to write it and the least I can do is read it.” I knew I didn’t stand a chance.

I didn’t bother going to the library, as if something in me knew that all I needed to know about the good Senator from the Tar Heel state would be revealed to me soon enough. Instead, I went home after school and once again looked at the Playboy and had a sort of a 10 year old’s version of an epiphany. I realized that if I’d paid even one tenth the attention to the Newsweek article that I’d given to this other magazine, I might have had a better idea of just who this Helms character really was. Yes, this was probably true, at least on paper. However, still not necessarily. As with as much time I’d devoted to studying every inch of this precious volume subtitled “Entertainment for Men,” I still hadn’t learned much of anything about women.