I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (29 page)

I kept running through the winter, buoyed by Izgi's encouragement. Only after six months of sobriety could I see how small my life built around inebriation had been. Still, I'd found little to put in its place. Running gave my empty life some purpose, a sense of momentum. I had no idea where I was headed, but I was sure I was making progress toward it. When I was stressed, just thinking about running calmed me.

Running was available everywhere, in unlimited supply, and it was totally free. No partner necessary, no special equipment, and no training—you just started doing it, and then you were doing it. Running was an inverted drunk—you felt like hell first, and then you felt great. Your suffering had meaning, and it actually made you a better person.

Izgi bought me a pair of real running shoes. My feet felt better, but my legs still ached without end. I complained enough that Izgi made up funny songs about my legs to make me laugh. My nipples looked like they had been hit with a belt sander from getting chafed by my sweaty T-shirts. Izgi bought me a couple of slippery, synthetic-fabric shirts and threw my sweat-drenched laundry in with hers without complaint. I loved running in the clothes Izgi had given me, thinking about her while I ran, about how she cared for me, and how I cared for her.

My roommate Esteban was in the kitchen one day, heating up food in his bathrobe while I was getting ready, tying my shoes, filling my
water bottle. Our kitchen was small, and he'd gotten large enough that it was tricky to fit us both in there at once. What to do about Esteban disappearing into his body? He rarely left the apartment now. I had no idea how he paid his rent. The heavier he got, the sadder I felt for him, and the more I despised him for giving up.

“Health kick, huh?” he said, throwing some leftover Chinese food in the microwave.

“I don't know about health
kick
. Health shuffle, maybe.”

He guffawed. Always in such a good mood. Condescend to him all I wanted, he had still figured out something I hadn't.

“How far do you run?”

“I don't really know. I run as far as I can. When I can't run anymore, I turn around and start walking home. Then after a little while, I can run again. Then walk and run home.”

He shook his head.

“Well, make sure you bring a Metrocard with you. Hell, I'd even bring $20 for cab fare in case you need to bail out.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“I should be your coach,” he said, tucking a long oily strand of black hair behind his ear, then stirring his General Tso's chicken in its Styrofoam container.

I slipped into my room on my way to the door. I quietly unzipped the pocket in my water bottle sleeve and took out the Metrocard and $20 bill I had been running with. Esteban was right, you had to have a bailout . . . if you wanted to be like Esteban. I had lived my whole life without a safety net; I wasn't about to start relying on one now that I was sober. I forced myself out the door, down the stairs, and out into the cold.

I had put off going to see a doctor about my legs because I feared they'd tell me to stop running. Finally, the pain got so bad that I made an appointment with a sports doctor who accepted my Medicaid.

Dr. Sofia was an Italian immigrant, short, with a brown ponytail. She was a runner and listened attentively as I described my
situation. She inspected my legs and tested my reflexes. She led me through a series of motions to see how my body moved. Then Dr. Sofia sat down and started writing in my file.

“Is it, like . . . stress fractures?” I said. “You can get those from running, right?”

She looked up at me as if she had forgotten I was there.

“No. You're fine.”

“But it hurts all the time. Not a little bit. A lot.”

The doctor pointed at the chair, and I sat down.

“So, you have been a drunk for a very long time. And then one day you decide ‘I am going to be a runner.' Correct?”

“I guess.”

“This is great. Good for you! But your body, it's not ready. Sitting on a bar stool, it's not great exercise for legs, you see.”

I nodded, feeling like an idiot. I knew what was coming.

“You're going to tell me I have to stop running.”

She smiled.

“No. Keep going.”

“But it hurts
so much
. I'm not, like, damaging anything?”

“No. Your bones are weak from not doing anything with impact. You are actually doing a good thing. Making the bones stronger. Undoing damage.”

“Is there anything I can do for the pain?”

“Ibuprofen.”

“Yeah, that's not really cutting it.”

“Vicodin is excellent for pain.”

“Okay.”

“Percocet is even better for pain than Vicodin. Morphine even better than Percocet. But listen to this. You like running. Or running is important to you now, yes?”

I nodded.

“When you are a teenager, you start to drink alcohol. You get sick, headache, hangover. You feel pain, but you keep going, yes?”

I nodded again, flushing.

“So now you like running. You feel pain, but you keep going. Drink lots of water; maybe take some Aleve. You must warm up before, and you must stretch after you run. If you don't stretch, this will cause you problems. After some months, the pain will stop. But you don't need Vicodin. You know how to do this.”

Did I? Doing the least I could get away with had been my identity for a long time now. It was easier than confronting my two greatest fears, trying and failing. But every time I went running, I tried and I failed. I tried to run the entire route I had planned without walking, and I failed. I tried to sprint every other block on the way back home along the Williamsburg waterfront till I got to North 14th. I failed. I tried to beat a double-decker tour bus down Broadway to Izgi's. I failed, even with a bunch of tourists cheering me on. But somehow, trying and failing hadn't had any negative consequences. In fact, by trying and failing over and over again, I had actually made a lot of progress. I had rarely met my running goals, but I had gotten closer and closer to meeting them before I failed. When it seemed sure that I would hit the mark the next time, I made more ambitious goals so I could keep failing, keep striving, keep moving forward. My smartass doctor was right—I had endured a lot of pain in order to keep drinking. I'd assumed a lifetime of drinking made me a bad fit for athletic activity. Had it actually tempered me to be a distance runner?

I laced my shoes up the next day and went back out. Could I keep running through the pain? I could. Could I run longer? I could. Could I run longer still? I could. One day, I realized that the aching in my bones was gone. I began to gain confidence. My runs grew of their own volition, from five laborious miles, just out and back, to regular half marathons.

I planned a long run for my birthday—seventeen miles on February 17, over five bridges in three different boroughs. It went wrong. I got lost; I ran out of water; I ran out of food. Finally, I was so faint with hunger that I ate a pizza crust out of a trash can. I was
chilled to the bone by the time I got home, shaking so hard I could hardly get my key in the lock.

I couldn't wait for my frying pan of chicken and vegetables to cook, so I worked my way through half a quart of peanut butter while it cooked. The peanut butter tasted good so I spooned another quarter jar over the chicken and veggies and then, fuck it, some honey too. I ate the entire mess right out of the frying pan, four large chicken breasts and mounds of sticky-sweet vegetables, probably thousands of calories. I collapsed into bed. My alarm went off a couple of hours later, and I awoke with a moan. Time to go to work, where I would be on my feet for five or six hours.

I rechecked the route the next day after almost twelve hours of sleep. I'd calculated the mileage wrong. I'd run at least twenty-one miles.

As soon as it started to warm up, I resumed biking to and from work. One night, my bike broke. It was a newish bike, a fancier mountain bike that my trainer Tracy had given me for a song because she rarely used it. Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge on an empty Delancey Street, even pedaling as fast as I could, I wasn't feeling any resistance. Had something gone wrong with the gears? No, I'd just had it tuned up. Had I forgotten how the shifter worked? Nope, it was definitely in top gear. I glanced up. I was
blazing
down the empty street. It wasn't that the bike was broken; my body was fixed. Now, my body's top speed was greater than that of my bike. When I hit the incline to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge, I didn't downshift, just leaned forward. Could I reach the top in the highest gear? As my thighs began to burn, I felt a weird sensation at the base of my skull, like 'shrooms were just coming on, an old, almost forgotten sensation . . . Oh yeah
, pleasure
. By the time I reached the crest of the bridge, I was flying.

My body started to change. One day, while I was shaving, something caught my eye in the mirror as I turned my head. Was that an ab I saw, momentarily interrupting the vast white expanse
of indistinguishable meat I called my stomach? I twisted my body to the left and right, craning my neck, staring out of the corner of my eye, but I was unable to replicate the exact conditions that had provoked the first sighting and therefore unable to confirm my hypothetical ab's existence. It would be like the Loch Ness Monster, I decided: a fleeting glimpse of a convex shape, only slightly more than a ripple that, though I would spend haunted years looking for it, would never reappear to confirm the existence of life below. But I was wrong: it came back several times, then decided to stay and even brought along a friend. I had two abs between my burgeoning chest and my deflating beer gut. I recalled the sensation when I was detoxing that half of my body was trying to eat the other half. Could it be that the good half had won?

I found a new New York in the city I had long dreamed of leaving. My circuit had been pretty limited: the clubs where my bands had played, the bars I'd been fired from but still drank in for free, the Greenpoint bars in stumbling distance of my apartment. But now I ran through the huge swathes of New York I had avoided—the Financial District, Midtown, the Upper East Side. They were fine, nothing to be afraid of (as long as you were moving through them quickly). And I ran through the hidden eddies of the city, Woodside and deepest Bushwick, Dyker Heights and Astoria. There were stories everywhere: a four-inch gold-lamé heel hooked into a chain-link fence like the erotically crooked neck of a heron, low places that stunk of human sweat, sebum, and excrement, and, in the night in the middle of the 'hood, huge fragrant wafts of fresh baked bread and powdered sugar, as if you were running through the middle of a giant donut. A marathon wouldn't be long enough, I decided, so I signed up for an ultramarathon in Long Island in early May.

In April, I went to Turkey with Izgi to meet her family, a big step for both of us and something that would have been impossible for me just a year earlier. Our first jetlagged day, she brought me to an ancient tower overlooking the city, and we climbed to the top. Holding Izgi's hand and looking out over Istanbul, that great
nexus of humanity, Europeans and Africans and Asians and Arabs, living and struggling and dreaming and dying as they had for thousands of years, I had an epiphany about my own life. I was but one person among millions, among billions. If I never did anything with my life, if I never accomplished Some Great Thing to avenge my mother and make my father love me or fear me or just notice me, Some Great Thing to set myself apart from that threshing sea of humanity, it didn't matter. If I could just treat this good woman by my side right and keep myself inching forward as a human being, that would be enough.

Ten days after we returned, I rose so early it was still dark and drove out to the start of the Greenbelt 50K—thirty-two miles of trail in central Long Island. It wasn't just smaller than or different from the Staten Island Half Marathon; it was almost nothing: a small cluster of runners lit by headlights in the gray mist in a nondescript parking lot for a quick briefing, then shuffling off toward the trees when the race director said, “Okay . . . go.”

By the time we reached the woods, the pack had thinned out so much that it was just me, slipping and sliding on a wet, sandy single-track trail in my battered running shoes. The woods reminded me of the woods behind our house in Canada. Was this what my sober life was to be, me wandering alone into the abyss of my memory? I felt a pang of fear: What if I couldn't? Relax, I told myself. You have your water bottle and your iPod. Just listen to the music, keep an eye on the markings, and run, one step after the next, until you can't anymore. They'll send someone in to find you when you fall apart.

People passed me, but I didn't fall apart. I focused on my feet; I focused on the music; I focused on Izgi. I ran alone for a long time. Then I started passing people. Izgi caught me at the last aid station, wolfing down ice-cold watermelon. She had taken the train down to Staten Island.