My counselor had been carping on about all kinds of self-stuff. Self-care. Self-love. What was next, self-fellatio? The problem with America wasn’t that we didn’t love ourselves enough, it’s that we loved ourselves too much. Still, I knew what he was getting at: if you showed a little care and cleaned your kitchen once in a while, you inevitably hated your apartment less. And maybe even felt a little better about your life.
It wouldn’t be capitulating to treat my body like my other mode of transportation, my car. Don’t waste time, energy, or money on frivolities—car washes and bumper protectors and new floor mats. Just the bare minimum: check the fluids regularly, keep it fueled, and do the necessary maintenance. And if I intended to race the old, high-mileage shitheap, well, I needed to be vigilant about caring for it. I even came up with some rules for running.
Never get hungry. Whenever you’re offered food, take it—not a lot, just a little—and keep moving. If you waited till you got hungry, then it was too late. You’d either gorge and get sick to your stomach or feel nauseated and continue not to eat, making the nausea worse. Calorie shortage manifested mentally before it did physically. Depressed? Having a rough day? Ready to quit running forever? Eat something, and watch your worldview swing around. But what goes up, must come down. If you ate a handful of Skittles, you would rocket up, then come crashing down. If you drank a Red Bull before the race, you’d be crawling by the end. I ate white foods—oatmeal, bagels, bananas, cubed potatoes, potato chips—as they padded your stomach, were easy to digest, and were quickly converted into sustained energy. Caffeine was fine, but only for the last quarter. Sugar was only for the last gasp.
Never get thirsty. Every time you thought “Should I drink?” you should drink. Every time you didn’t think about drinking, you should drink. Peeing took valuable time, but it took less time than dealing with a muscle cramp. Drink water, warm not cold, and water, not soda or juice or any kind of fancy fuel. You could drink that, too, but you had to drink water. And salt. Mix an untasteable amount in your water, or steal a couple of packets from your local McDonald’s and rub some on your gums at the aid station. Like it was the good old days and that salt was pure, flaky cocaine.
Never get lost. Each race was long enough without tacking on bonus miles. Never turn down help. A cookie or a chip or a smear of Vaseline or even a hug might keep you going. Never tough it out. That minor chafing or hot spot or little grain of sand in your shoe at mile four might end your race at mile twenty-four. Never give yourself an out. If you said you’d run halfway and then evaluate it, you’d drop at the half. If you said you’d see how you felt, you’d drop when it got dark or when it got cold or just when you got tired. When you lined up at each race, you had to tell yourself that if you bled from every pore, if your feet broke off and you had to run on your splintering shinbones, if monkeys flew out of the sky with AK-47S that shot ninja swords, you were still finishing that race.
Never, ever give up. To be a runner, you had to listen to your body, and you had to ignore your body. Can’t run anymore? Walk till you can run again. The race ain’t over. Can’t walk anymore? Stand till you can walk again. The race ain’t over. Can’t stand anymore? Sit down, lay down, vomit in the grass, cry and curse God and tear out your hair. Then stand up again. The race ain’t over. The race ain’t over. The race ain’t over.
I had blown off seeing the therapist once I’d hit the six-month mark and had my exit interview with Project Link. But I forced myself to start going again. “Be your own father,” the narrator in Invisible Man had said. I started with a new counselor, Chris.
Chris didn’t do anything. Each time I came in and sat down, he asked me how I was doing. Fancy, expensive PhD hanging on the wall, just to be able to ask me how I’m doing?
We talked about the band. We talked about running. We talked about my job. I felt bad because we never talked about how Chris was doing.
“We can talk about me next week,” Chris said with a grin as I was leaving.
I showed up in a snit one day and questioned aloud why I was even there. It was one thing to say you were an alcoholic in a bar. The solution there was to have another drink. Saying it in a doctor’s office was much scarier—the solution there was to never drink again. I’d been careful not to cross that line and cop to the “A word” with Chris.
At my worst, it was still debatable whether I was an alcoholic. I knew from the Twelve Steps that alcoholics were supposed to be powerless before alcohol. I’d never been powerless. Or at least I hadn’t consistently been powerless. I had turned drinks down sometimes, or only had one or two, and had sometimes gone days or even weeks without drinking. It wasn’t war all the time. I’d always known people who drank more than me, people who were worse drunks than I was, people in deeper trouble. And I had stopped without rehab or AA. Alcoholics weren’t able to do that.
“You keep asking me about my life, and I’ve kept bouncing it back to you,” Chris said. “You really want to know about my life?”
“If you’re going to tell me how you’re an alcoholic and AA saved your life, then start crying and try to hug me, I will punch you, Chris.”
“Relax. Nobody’s punching anybody. I’m gonna tell you about a friend of mine. Guy I grew up with in Stuytown. Ernesto.”
I perked up. I loved hearing about the carnage of others’ lives.
“This guy Ernesto, we went to school together. Pretty good ball player, point guard. I could get around him sometimes, and I could shut him down sometimes because I worked harder than anybody out there. You know, short kid disease. But when he committed and really drove to the hoop, he was unstoppable. Ernesto didn’t drink every single night or always get shitfaced. But if he could, he would. He didn’t black out every single time, but if there was nothing standing in the way, he did. Bad shit didn’t happen every single time he blacked out, but sometimes it did.”
“I know plenty of guys like that.” Big deal.
“We went to different schools but sort of kept up, you know, pickup games in the summer. And we both wound up back in the city after school. Ernesto didn’t always drink in the morning, but sometimes he did. I think he wanted to more than he did. He just . . . seemed to have a hard time being happy without alcohol. With it, he was the king of the world, you know, life of the party, girls hanging all over him. Still, any given day, at any given time, he would rather be drinking.”
I rolled my eyes. “And then one day he woke up, and he was dead. Moral: don’t drink. The end. Very sad, Chris.”
“Nah, he’s still alive. Doing fine.”
“So now he’s a custodian and you’re a doctor. I saw that Afterschool Special, too.”
“Am I telling this story or are you?”
“Sorry. I’ll let you finish.”
“No, it’s cool; you want to be the doctor, you can be the doctor. So, Dr. Shubaly, do you think Ernesto is an alcoholic?”
I shrugged. “Sure. Yeah, he’s a fucking alcoholic.”
Chris nodded but didn’t say anything.
“So what happened to Ernesto? What’s the moral? You’re a shrink; there’s gotta be a moral.”
“No moral, Mishka. There is no Ernesto.”
I flushed.
“Aw, fuck off, man.”
“I can’t diagnose you, Mishka. You’re the only one who can make that call.”
I suddenly felt very small and very scared.
“Okay. Fine. So I’m a fucking alcoholic. Is that what you want to hear?”
“I don’t care either way. You want to take it back? I won’t tell anyone.”
“No. Fine. I’m a fucking alcoholic. The worst thing is true.”
“Mishka, this isn’t bad news. Or even news. From what you’ve told me, you’ve been an alcoholic for a long time. What’s changed is that now you’re facing it. You’re climbing out.”
I hated Chris. I hated him for getting paid to listen to me bitch and complain. I hated the way he spoke, his carefully calibrated mix of “street” and the bu
llshit lexicon of “steps” and “progress” and “self-care.” I hated the careful little traps he laid that I blustered right into. And I hated him for being right.
Biking home, I felt mad and sad and scared. But after a couple of hours, I felt better. Not just better than I had when I had left the session, better than I had felt before the session. When the thing you fear most in the world finally happens, it sucks. But at long last, the fear is gone. The Worst Thing Imaginable has occurred, and you’re still here: you’ve survived it. The dread-filled wait is over, and you can finally get down to the grim business of living the rest of your life.
When we were dating, Izgi had complained several times that my apartment smelled funny. It embarrassed me, as I had noticed it too. I cleaned and cleaned, opened all the windows to air the rooms out, to no avail. Finally, I’d mentioned it to Esteban, and the smell had gone away. When it came back, I mentioned it again. Again, it went away.
The third time, I’d had enough. I waited till I was sure Esteban wasn’t at home, then slipped the lock on his door. Bracing, I flipped the light switch.
I had never been clean, but what I saw was worse than anything I could remember. Esteban’s room was pure filth and despair. The walls were gray with dust and lint halfway to the ceiling, pocked with greasy handprints. Clothes strewn everywhere, not just dirty but blackened and stiff. Desiccated Chinese food shellacked to aluminum takeout containers. Gay porn magazines, ads for sex clubs, flyers for gay escorts. An imploding couch heaped with so much trash it was impossible to sit on. A fax machine, the phone off the hook, on a collapsing bookshelf. There was a tiny cleared path leading to a defeated-looking chair, one corner propped up with a phonebook, in front of an ancient dusty terminal.
His poker station. Esteban had mentioned several times that he had been playing Internet poker, I thought just to kill time. But apparently, it wasn’t just time the poker had been killing. There were three Tropicana bottles next to his computer, all filled with piss. A fourth one, closest to the chair, was half full. Our bathroom worked perfectly. Esteban had been pissing into bottles so he wouldn’t miss his poker blinds. He hadn’t even bothered to throw the full bottles away.
I turned off the light and locked the door, dialing my landlord even as the door was swinging shut. No more.
It turned out that Esteban was behind on rent as well. Still, it took two months to get him out and then two days for a cleaning lady to make his room livable. I talked my landlord into letting me rent the whole place. Jens, who had played drums for COME ON twelve years earlier, had just broken up with his live-in girlfriend, so he moved in. With my drinking half and my depressing roommate gone, I felt like a malign spirit had been exorcised.
One day at counseling Chris asked me what I’d been reading.
“I’m reading The Dark Knight Returns. You know, the Batman graphic novel that came out in the late eighties?”
“I remember that era of Batman well. When they had that poll to see if Robin should die? I lost friends over that.”
“I thought it was such bullshit when Robin died. But now I know that he had to die. Is that the difference between a man and a boy? Men know that Robin had to die?”
Chris shrugged.
“That was after Dark Knight anyway. I haven’t read it since I was in seventh grade. Man, it’s pretty great. Batman’s old and fucked up and weak, sort of courting disaster every time he even leaves his house.”
“Fantastic premise.”
“Do you remember the story?”
Chris cocked his head. Motherfucker was a library of noncommittal gestures.
“It’s been a long time for me too,” he said.
“I thought I remembered it all but I was surprised at how much I had forgotten. Harvey Dent—Two-Face—they’ve surgically repaired his face, and he’s gone through all kinds of annoying therapy so they’ve pronounced him cured and set him free.”
“I guess even Frank Miller values talk therapy.”
“Aha, but he’s not better. That’s the thing. As soon as he’s released, all these horrible crimes start happening, crimes that could only be the work of Two-Face. Batman hunts him down and corners him in this abandoned warehouse. Always gotta be an abandoned warehouse, you know?”
“Right.”
“But it’s kind of a touching scene. These two old men who have known each other twenty-five, thirty years . . . they’ve been in each other’s lives for longer than they haven’t.
“They’re fighting in and out of the shadows. Great inking there. There’s this twinning thing going on. Batman puts on a mask that gives him freedom. Two-Face’s face is his mask, and it imprisons him. They’ve each been transformed by trauma—Batman by the murder of his parents, Two-Face by getting acid thrown in his face. Batman keeps his duality secret; Two-Face celebrates it. And so on.”
“I should reread it.”
“After fighting for a while, Batman reaches out to Two-Face. He’s like, ‘Harvey, why are you doing this? You were cured. They set you free. They even fixed your face! You’ve wanted to be free of Two-Face since he appeared. You had that opportunity, and you threw it away. Why couldn’t you let yourself be free?’
“And Harvey says, ‘Batman, are you crazy? I’m fucking deformed.’ And he steps out of the shadows. His face? Totally normal. Handsome, even. Pretty depressing.”
Chris nodded.
“So what’s the point of the story?”
“I don’t know. No one is ever cured? Naw, it’s Frank Miller, so it has to be darker, more cinematic than that. How about ‘the scars of the soul run deeper than scars of the flesh?’”
“Why did you choose that story to relate to me?”
“Oof. I guess I feel like old Harvey Dent sometimes.”
“Keep going.”
“Like, standing on the street, people just see some jerk waiting for the bus. But I carry all this shit around in my head. All the people I’ve hurt, disappointing my family, all my failures . . .”
“Other people just see a man waiting for the bus, not a jerk.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Maybe they even see a good guy. He’s in good shape, color in his face, decent haircut. Even shaves sometimes. He could be anything.”
“But in my head . . .”
“So how could Two-Face transform back into Harvey Dent?”
“More annoying talk therapy?”
“Sounds like Harvey’s already been through a lot—let’s not subject him to something so terrible as that.”
“I don’t know. Isn’t it almost time to wrap up?”
“Nah, we’ve got a few minutes left.”
“Chris, you didn’t even look at the clock! You always wrap it up at quarter till and it’s 2:55! What if I’m late for something?”
“Tell me one thing Harvey can do to not turn back into Two-Face. Then you can go.”
“Okay, shit. Let’s see. He can make a list of things that Two-Face does—committing crimes themed with duality or incorporating the number two, deciding the fates of his foes with a coin toss—and a list of things that Harvey does—pursuing justice, reinforcing good, punishing evil. Then he can focus on doing the Harvey things, reward himself for doing those things, and, you know, not capture his foes and torture and terrify them. Good?”
Chris gave a half smile and pointed to the door.
On the bike ride home, I flip-flopped. I believed in Chris. He’d helped me see that my relationship with Izgi had been not a failure but a success—a normal, adult relationship that had run its course. And he was right, that was true. It had been rough between us for a minute, but now Izgi helped me, and I helped her; we supported each other, and we would stay friends for life. Chris was a good guy.
But Chris was also manipulating me. Blatantly, right in front of my face. He had recognized how hardheaded I was, so he didn’t feed me new age wisdom; he forced me to volunteer it for myself—the only way I would accept it. Positive reinforcement would never help Harvey D
ent. Two-Face would always undo the honest DA obsessed with justice. More importantly, without Two-Face, Harvey Dent wouldn’t exist, would never have existed.
Had Harvey Dent never been disfigured, had Two-Face never appeared, readers would never have known Harvey’s name. He would have lived and died outside the frame—a nobody. If Two-Face disappeared, the man Harvey Dent would only be important because he was No Longer Two-Face, or At Least Not Right Now. And bad guys only disappeared for one reason: to come roaring back in the next episode.
Chris had tried to use the parable of Harvey Dent and Two-Face to show me that changing my inside world would change the outside world. Maybe that was true. But his parable made me realize something else, that my disfigurement—my drinking, my alcoholism—was the only thing that made me special. Without it, I was nothing, not even worth naming, just another of the anonymous masses, or not worth drawing at all.
I kept my head down at races, alienated even from myself. Still, I made new friends. It was impossible not to out on the trails, running side by side with strangers for miles. The runners I met made me look like a short-timer, a rank amateur. Johnny Rocket was a shit-talking mason from Jersey who did almost no training between his fifty- and one-hundred-mile races. Joe Reynolds was a dirty old man with a white mustache like a scrub brush; he streamed pervy jokes and unforgivable puns while casually racking up lots of 50K finishes, even the occasional fifty-miler. His wife, Christine, hosted the Finger Lakes 50s race. She was as sweet as Joe was salty, and she ran with a beatific grin on her face, only marginally wider after a couple of postrace beers than it had been at mile forty-nine.
A long, lean brunette always encouraged me as she blew past, even though she was perpetually racing a longer distance than I. After our third race together, I finally asked her name: Zsuzsanna Carlson. She had a small face with deep, expressive eyes and a little button nose that, combined with her bouncing ponytail, called to mind a bunny rabbit. Her legs required a completely different metaphor. They were the legs of a statue magically sprung to life—shiny, polished granite in constant, impossible motion, thrashing tirelessly up a narrow rocky split in the side of a mountain. Her favorite races ground up one tear-inducing rock face and plunged down another in the beautiful but brutal mountains of Virginia: the Massanutten Mountain Trail fifty-miler, the Hellgate 100K, the Grindstone hundred-miler. Zsuzsanna talked about running 66.6 miles up the side of a mountain in the middle of the night in the dead of winter with the kind of open desire most women reserve for dark chocolate.
I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Page 24
