Don't Make Me Stop Now

by Michael Parker

  Sometime in the night I began the story of How We Met, and it began at the beginning, and wound its way around facts as stock and familiar as the items I purchased weekly from the market, until the moon moved lower toward the water and a hazy light appeared in the sky.

  Watching the sky, water lapping at my chin, I remembered hearing how they’d discovered that the earth was round: a boat had sailed out to the horizon, kept on moving, out of sight, over the earth’s curve. Inching my way up the barnacled piling, I saw how they could get behind such an idea.

  Results for Novice Males

  LAST NIGHT, LARRY GOT himself arrested again. The conditions were especially favorable: It was humid out, unbearably so, though a line of thunderstorms had pushed through on their way to the coast, stalling above us for an hour’s pummeling. After the storms, people streamed outside — into backyards, onto porches — and Larry had an audience. Down the hill, through the dip of thick wood and unofficial trash dump the neighborhood kids called the Ravine, the projects east of us hummed with thumping bass notes, tire screeches, crazy laughter. Hazy moonlight, bats swirling drunken loops around power lines, skin slaps against mosquito bites. Larry was not wearing a shirt.

  I was in the bathtub soaking away the crust of salt, road grime, and sweat from an eighty-mile bike ride when sirens arose from the Ravine, whining closer until blue light streaked across the dark walls above the tub. Had things not soured between us, Larry would have ridden at least a part of those eighty miles with me, for Larry and I used to train together. Three weeks ago, we entered the same race, an Olympic distance triathlon in the foothills, but Larry took offense when I beat him roundly in all three disciplines. Apparently Larry thought racing together meant racing alongside. His swim wave took off three minutes before mine, but Larry is a sluggish and graceless swimmer, and I was out of the water twenty-eight seconds before he hit land. I say “apparently” — it wasn’t as if I was aware of passing him, nor could I tell who was who out there. It was a wet-suit-legal race, my goggles were fogged, the lake was tannic-laced, the color of Coca-Cola — all I saw were slick black torsos, fluttering feet, arms arcing in and out of the water.

  Larry took it personally. I suppose he thought I’d wait for him. I was out of my wet suit and into my bike shoes and helmet in an absurdly slow four minutes — I even took the time to eat half a PowerBar. Though this was not my first race, I was so anxious about finishing that I erred on the side of endurance rather than speed. I even entered the race in the Novice Male category. Not Larry. It was his first triathlon — he’d never cycled more than twenty-five miles in his life, and he barely trained for the run or swim either — but he insisted on signing up in his age-group classification.

  “Novice Male?” he said over the fence one afternoon. “Forget that.”

  I shrugged. “Hell, I’m still a novice. This is only my second season, and I want to save it all for the Ironman.”

  I’d decided to do a full Ironman race next season. I’d mentioned this to Larry a half-dozen times, but he always smiled and nodded, as if he knew something I didn’t, which had to do with my bailing or ending up the season injured.

  “Who wants to be called into the water with the novices?” he said. “Everybody turning around, checking you out.”

  “Actually, we’re the last wave, Larry. There will be nobody left to check us out.”

  “They make you guys go last?” I grinned at the “you guys.” “So the winner’s like, what, an hour ahead of you?”

  I shrugged again. It occurs to me now that when talking to Larry, I communicated mostly with my shoulders.

  “It’s best if the water’s clear. You’re less likely to get kicked in the face. You wouldn’t believe how turbulent it can be in one of those mass starts.”

  I’d never experienced a mass start, nor had I been kicked in the face — I always start my swim far to the right and a little behind the rest — but Larry wasn’t listening.

  “Psychologically, though . . . ,” he said.

  I waited for him to finish his sentence, but apparently he thought he’d gotten his idea across.

  “You know your age group’s probably the toughest,” I told him. “Most guys don’t get into this sport until their late twenties. Takes them a while to mature, especially on the bike. Few years, they’re at the top of their game, man. I’ll bet the top three go close to two hours.”

  Larry said, “Guess that’s one advantage to getting older.”

  I grinned again. Shrugs and grins: the language I share with old across-the-fence Larry. “Oh, my age group isn’t exactly slow.”

  “So what’s your goal?” he asked me.

  Like most Novice Males, I had two goals. The first — the one I made public — was just to finish without embarrassing myself. The second — the one I kept to myself, especially around people like Larry — was to go under two hours and forty-five minutes.

  “I’ve told you, Larry. I’m out there to have a good time and cross the finish line and still be able to walk to the medical tent.”

  “You’re full of shit, Patrick. You know you got a goal. I don’t get this modesty thing, man. Might as well just put it out there.”

  I grinned at Larry, stifling a shrug.

  LARRY WASN’T THE KIND of person I’d usually choose to spend time with. He sold couches in the showroom of a discount furniture store, and I practiced law in Raleigh, an hour commute on the interstate. Had I met Larry a few years ago I would have barely tolerated him; a conversation like the one we had about race categories would have led to my avoiding him forever.

  But I was a different man a few years ago. I had no understanding of humility, of selflessness — despite my occupation, which contrary to popular belief calls for inordinate amounts of patience, I was not a patient man — and I could not force myself to suffer fools at all, much less gladly. Larry is a fool, but I’m a snob and can be as self-absorbed as Napoleon. I have two children by two women, and I left the second woman for someone quite a bit younger than her, which set the two children and their mothers against me with a vengeance. The younger woman and I had moved here to this quaint, pre-Revolutionary mill town, bought a modest mill house and set about restoring it. We were here for a year when the younger woman, whose name I do not utter aloud anymore, left me for a fellow much closer to her own age.

  I’d never been left before; always I’d done the leaving. Instantaneously I went from being someone who does not suffer fools gladly to the worst kind of self-pitying, drunken fool. For a year I sleepwalked through everything, and everything suffered. My job, my relations with my children — a son just out of college, living the ski-bum life in Telluride and a daughter just now entering high school in Raleigh. I failed to return my son’s Sunday night calls, and on the weekends I was to host my daughter I excused myself with lies, holed up in my half-refurbished house, drank Maker’s Mark by the gallon and listened to Vic Chesnutt CDs my dear departed ex had given me in an attempt to update my classic rock musical tastes.

  Listening to Vic Chesnutt while bolting back Maker’s Mark is nearly as lethal as mixing barbiturates with the same elixir. Nevertheless I kept it up for eleven months, until my ex-wives alerted my two older brothers — also members of the legal profession — who appeared at my door one Saturday in a rental car, packed a suitcase for me, and drove me to a clinic in the mountains just south of Asheville, where I shook and sweated and seethed with resentment for the requisite twenty-eight days, after which just enough clarity descended for me to ponder my brothers’ decision to rent a car to transport me to purgatory. Obviously I was a vomit risk. They might as well have been wearing surgical gloves, so apparent was their disgust for the mess I’d made of my life, but they dealt with the situation efficiently, in clearly billable hours.

  Shame is what kept me drinking for that disastrous year after I got left; shame, after I emerged from the clinic, was quadrupled. My brothers fixed things with the firm — that was easy enough — but I had promised to att
end ninety meetings of a certain self-help group in ninety days, and I did hang in there, rather gallantly I think, for eight consecutive nights in various dank church basements around our mill town. I confess, however, that I spent more time studying the decor of Protestant “fellowship halls” — the obligatory pictures of Jesus looking like a Blind Faith–era Eric Clapton, the bulletin boards lined with construction paper featuring photos of parishioners descending on long folding tables of casseroles and pound cakes — than I did listening to the monologues of the fellow addicted. The program and I failed to click. It wasn’t my snobbishness that prevented the connection, for I make no distinction between a truck driver making public his every vanity and fear and a philosophy professor, though in general, for the sake of entertainment and the time-honored appeal of the vernacular over the genteel, I will go with the truck driver. I admire, from an intellectual distance, the impetus behind those dozen steps, for who can convincingly argue against the need for all of us to operate less out of that black center of self?

  I just needed to find another way of going about it, which I did in time. Triathlon, I read once in a cycling magazine, is the perfect sport for aging white men with too much time and money on their hands. My reasons for loving it have to do with the obsessiveness it requires. It is a most unforgiving mistress, as they say of the law, though I never found the law to be anything more than, to extend the metaphor, an occasional lay. Training for a triathlon requires three concentrated meticulously planned workouts in each of the three disciplines per week. It fills countless hours, it distracts you from nearly everything in its path — in short, it is the perfect remedy for a lovelorn problem drinker trying to learn how to absorb full on the brunt of life’s pain.

  Triathlon is all about suffering, of course, though its particular stripe of suffering leads to a endorphin-enriched plateau that feels, compared with other avenues of suffering I have embraced, relentlessly spiritual. If it is true that the depravity of modern man stems from a spiritual deficiency, triathlon, if approached from the right angle, will wing your sculpted, shorn body to nirvana.

  Larry Edwards did not approach triathlon from the right angle. He did not approach many things from the right angle, I thought last night when the blue lights cast their circular sweep across my walls. It is my custom, after a long bike ride, to put on some music, turn out all the lights, and soak for an hour or so in the whirlpool tub my up-to-date ex-girlfriend insisted on having installed in the bath we added to the back of the house. She also insisted on an outdoor shower, which after she left I avoided not because I was initially against the extravagance and the impractibility (we do have a winter in North Carolina) but rather owing to the early evening showers we took there, after our runs, sunlight and fresh heavy air arousing us, Larry Edwards no doubt spying on us from his side of the fence. When she left me, Larry said, “Man, I were you I’da held on to that one.” As if she were a car I’d sold. As usual we were perched on the fence, and after I told him she’d moved out (which he knew already, since he’d sat on his porch and watched the U-Haul come when I was deliberately out of town), he nodded toward the redwood slats of the outdoor shower and added, “So, what are you going to do with that thing now, store your mower in it?”

  For a good ten minutes last night I enjoyed the play of blue light across the walls, thinking of Larry, of how I’d ended up entangled with the guy. I reminded myself that we had nothing in common except that he happened to own a house next to mine. An accident of timing and geography, like nearly everything else in my life. I was legally drunk when I met the woman who would later leave me, and though she came to hate my drinking, she once told me that she was glad I had overindulged the night we met, for if not I might never have had the courage to approach her (she knew exactly where my courage came from) and we would never have had our year and a half of passion. After she’d been gone a few months, I realized that this chain of events stretched further than she admitted, for if I had not had a few drinks and approached her, had she never moved to the mill town with me, she would also never have changed jobs and started working at the nonprofit where she would meet the younger (though decidedly less fit) man she took off with. We tend to interpret chance in our lives in the most positive light until something happens to remind us that there is always a more threatening version of events shadowing whatever fortune we claim.

  The threatening version of events unfolding next door had precedence. Larry has a problem with what they now call anger management. He gets a little sloshed on weekends and takes things out on his wife and children.

  I heard the screams last night, in fact, but I ignored them until Larry’s shouts grew louder and were joined by other male voices — policemen, obviously — overusing the word sir. Then a woman’s screechy cries. I knew that the entire block — half of which was gentrified, the other half natives, descendants of or current mill workers — would be outside taking in the show. I like to believe that I’m above such behavior, but there was something about Larry’s misfortune that I reveled in. I got out of the tub, toweled off, wrapped the towel around my waist, stained the floorboards with wet footprints on my way to the dining-room window.

  They were in the yard — three policemen, Larry, his wife, Barbara — and Larry, from what I could tell, was not cooperating. I couldn’t see very well, and so I slipped outside on the porch, forgetting that I was wearing only a towel, that I was still dripping from the bath. The cops were attempting to calm Larry so they could put him in cuffs. Despite the “sirs” I could tell from their accents that they were hometown boys, acquaintances of Larry and Barbara — Larry’s high school sweetheart — and that they were not terribly excited about hauling Larry off to jail.

  But it was their job to do so, and after a few more tense minutes they cuffed Larry, and talked softly to him, as if he were a child, before leading him to the car. It was then that he saw me. I suppose there was more light out than I thought, for Larry sneered at me in exactly the same way he had when I’d suggested he register as a Novice Male. Then he said something which traveled across the yard in an uncharacteristically husky, phlegm-flecked half cough: “Couldn’t even wait to get dressed?”

  The policemen and Barbara turned to stare. I knew that Larry would not remember this moment, and that Barbara, as soon as the blue lights switched off and the cruisers moved down the street, would call me on the phone and ask me to go down to the magistrate’s office and get her husband out of jail. She’d done so before; even though I tried to tell her I don’t practice criminal law, she had it in her head (no doubt from television, which is where 90 percent of Americans pick up their erroneous ideas about my profession) that you call a lawyer to get your husband out of jail when he drinks too much and belts you or one of the kids in the mouth.

  I went inside then. As I got dressed, I thought again of how ill suited Larry Edwards is to the sport of triathlon. What he does not realize is that this sport is not really about other competitors. Sure, there are times in a race when I will push myself to pick off the person in front of me, but I’m really competing with myself. This is why I love this sport so, why it’s given me what amounts to a new life.

  I picked up the phone on the third ring and said, “I’m just getting dressed.”

  “Thank you, Patrick,” said Barbara.

  “I need to know what happened, though,” I told her.

  There was silence so long I envisioned my words crawling the thirty feet from my kitchen to hers.

  “He really looks up to you, Patrick.” Barbara was crying, and while her sobs got to me, I bristled at her words. Larry, I have always suspected, hates me a little. More than a little, maybe. He hates that I’m a lawyer and he is selling couches for little more than minimum wage. He hates that his high school sweetheart has gained thirty-five pounds while I get to make love to a woman younger than him in the open air of an outdoor shower. He hates that I can afford a set of disc wheels to race in, and Dura-Ace components, a titanium frame Lite-speed; he
hates even more that I am naturally a stronger swimmer, a smoother pedaler, a faster runner than he is.

  “I’m training for an Ironman,” I said to Barbara. I have no idea why. Even if Larry had not complained about her attitude toward what little training hours he managed, I would have surmised that she resented it. It left her alone with the kids. It took away precious time he could have spent on a part-time job. Left him too exhausted to help around the house. The yard, the house, their two used ragtag automobiles — everything suffered. On some level I suspected she blamed it on me, who after all had come along and given Larry the idea that this was something he could do.

  “Will you get him out?” she whispered. “And then, I’ll tell you what” — these words were louder, her tone had hardened, gone crusty, and there was something in her voice that suggested both Larry and I were childish, boorish fools, but that I was the more hopeless case — “tell you what, Patrick, Larry won’t bother you again. Okay? I’ll see to it.”

  “Larry’s not bothering me,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said, and hung up. I looked at the phone in my hand and then at my body, as if I had forgotten to get dressed and were still parading around in a towel.

  Down at the county jail, after I settled things with the magistrate, Larry appeared, not smiling.

  “Where’s your towel?” he said. I did not shrug and I did not grin, which suggested to me that my patience was strapped, that I needed to dig deep — as I often have to do on a long training ride, a hot and humid race — to simply keep going.

  “I don’t want to go home now,” said Larry when we were in the car. I stopped myself from telling Larry that he did not get to decide. I did not remind him that I had just bailed him out of jail for assault charges, that I put up my own money to secure the bond only because I was so embarrassed at having been caught gawking at his misfortune wearing nothing but a towel.

  What was the right thing to do? Stay out all night driving Larry around town while he drank himself into a state of self-loathing? Was I indulging him, or encouraging his self-indulgence, by not taking him straight home to immediately make his amends? Driving through the still downtown streets, blinking yellow streetlights recalling the earlier swirling blue, I thought about how ill equipped I was to handle this situation. The only thing I knew how to do was run, swim laps, ride my bike. In my training guides and the triathlon magazines I devour they talk about “junk miles” — the mileage one accumulates without actually getting better, stronger, faster — mileage that does nothing to correct mistakes in your form. Most of my life had been spent piling up the junk miles, but what I needed tonight was simply the patience to persevere. Any more — actual wisdom — was too much to ask for from someone who had ridden a hilly eighty miles at a little over eighteen miles an hour.