Island Practice (24 page)

When Cathy asked Scannell to clean for them about eight years ago, Scannell was unprepared for what awaited her. She is not easily surprised because her clients run the gamut. At the top end, she cleans and cooks for Edmund and Doris Reggie, the in-laws of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Louis Susman, the American ambassador to the United Kingdom. Often, guests she is cooking for include Senator John Kerry and media personalities like Chris Matthews and Maureen Orth.

But with Lepore, while “I had an inkling because I had been to his office” as a patient, she had never been to their house. The first day, the Lepores happened to be off-island, and someone was house-sitting for the dogs. “Well, here goes nothing,” Scannell thought. “I’m going along the counters and kind of organizing stuff, and then I get over by the
sink, and I wasn’t really paying attention. I’m just spraying the Windex, and oh my God, there’s a rat thawing out on the counter here!”

The house-sitter came running, explaining that Lepore “has a bird of prey and that’s his lunch,” Scannell recalls. “I was slightly disturbed for a short period of time.”

Scannell hung in there. When people ask, with astonishment and sympathy, “Are you the lady that cleans Tim’s house?” she replies, “Well, I make an attempt to.” She figures Lepore embodies the expression “a clean house is a sign of a wasted life.”

Scannell considers “the whole house somewhat of a Tim man cave,” especially with “all this hunting stuff.” Does she clean the gun areas in the basement? “No, no, no. Cathy knows where I draw the line.” But once, Scannell found herself struggling to pull the vacuum cleaner from its closet. “What the hell?” she grumbled. She switched on a light and immediately asked Lepore for help. “What’s the problem, Mariellen?” he asked. “Well, the vacuum cleaner seems to be wedged between a shotgun and a chain saw, and I’m a little concerned about having my head blown off.”

Still, Scannell can relate a little to Lepore’s sensibility. She did, after all, furnish a new home almost entirely from the take-it-or-leave-it pile at the town dump, a feat that landed her on the Nate Berkus interior design TV talk show. And she occasionally matches wits with the doctor. When she realized that Lepore leaves the radio on to keep the dogs company, the dial set to Rush Limbaugh, Scannell began changing it to a liberal political station and leaving a note: “Stop torturing the dogs. This is animal abuse, making dogs listen to Rush Limbaugh.”

Discovering an old prescription pad, she scribbled a prescription for Lepore: “Your book levels were very high in books so please watch your intake of books.” She signed it “Dr. Scannell.”

Lepore’s leaning towers of books cover sizable sections of the floor. Scannell is convinced “he is probably ordering ten, twenty books a day.” That doesn’t include the magazines:
Bowhunter, Primitive Archer, Traditional Archery, American Rifleman, American Falconry, Guns &
Ammo, American Handgunner, Handloader, Rifle, Gun Digest, Shotgun News, Man at Arms, Bulletin of Primitive Technology
. And those are just the weapons periodicals. There’s also
Trail Runner, UltraRunning, Marathon & Beyond, Archives of Surgery, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Annals of Internal Medicine, The Medical Letter, Emerging Infectious Diseases, The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Current Problems in Surgery, Selected Readings in General Surgery
, and
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
.

This seemingly unscaleable mountain of reading material fuels another Lepore collection: an arcade of arcane facts he stores in his sand trap of a mind. Once Weinman, who raises championship dachshunds, got a license plate in their honor: Doxie4. Lepore took one look and smirked. “Do you know what a doxie is?” he asked. (It’s a word for prostitute.) Weinman had no idea. But since no one else did either, she decided to keep the plate.

Dr. Scannell’s prescription also noted that “due to high sneaker count I’m putting you on a sneaker-free diet.” Tough medicine for a man who has saved every pair he has worn in the Boston Marathon, which he has completed each year since 1968. He also insists he needs different shoes for running on different surfaces. One pair came in handy, for example, when Lepore boasted to Richards that he had found “the only waterfall on Nantucket” and took her running out to the middle of the moors. “We came across a trickle of water, and he was like, ‘Look, there it is!’”

Cathy has tried to jettison some of Lepore’s sneakers, which are in various stages of disrepute. Lepore dug them out of the trash. Cathy bought a large shoe tree, which Scannell describes as “a teeny-weeny Band-Aid. Now we’ve got shoes all over the floor and a shoe tree in the middle of the room.”

That sneaker addiction might suggest a die-hard runner, but Lepore’s training and preparation is hardly rigorous. Sometimes he has time to run; sometimes he doesn’t. He doesn’t work out like an athlete or eat like one. “He’s a doctor, but he doesn’t take optimal or even average
care of his health,” Nick says. “He’ll come home, grab a bowl full of tortilla chips, and spray mustard on it, and that’s his dinner.”

Weinman has run twenty marathons with Lepore in a head-to-head rivalry that became island lore. “My goal this year? To humble Rhoda Weinman, to have her eat my dust,” was Lepore’s boast to the Nantucket
Inquirer and Mirror
. He almost always lost; Weinman says she’s beaten him eighteen times. Although Lepore got her into marathon running and they ran together for years, Weinman says his training regimen is so laughable that one of his best friends, a doctor, wrote her: “If you want to run a successful marathon, get rid of him. Don’t even think about training with him.”

In April 2008, Lepore entered the marathon after having major knee surgery. He was in such pain that he took Percocet and prednisone, and injected himself with “some long-acting local anesthetic” before the race, he says. “Alas and alack, not quite long-enough acting.” By seven miles, Lepore was “in some serious hurt, limp and gimp.” It took seven hours, so long that the official time clocks had been taken down, but he hobbled across the finish line.

“He’s turning in times that are right before the meat wagon,” Nick says. “He’s never in good shape for it. I’ve been trying to get him to stop for years.”

But Lepore’s not about to stop. Instead, he makes accommodations. His toenails, for instance. Sometimes running makes his toes blister under the nails, “get fluid underneath and hurt like hell.” So “I take a scalpel and take the nails off. It hurts for a couple of hours, but it’s better than hurting for a couple of days.” Sure, it’s unattractive—“my wife thinks I have the ugliest feet in the world”—but Lepore even offers to share his remedy, telling fellow runner Barbara Rives that “he could pull out all my toenails.” She demurred.

“For the smartest guy I’ve ever met, he does some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen,” Tornovish says. But Tornovish, a recovering alcoholic, has to hand it to Lepore. At least they are “healthy outlets” that “help him deal with terrible stress.”

Lepore’s self-invented contests are occasionally self-delusional. When his sons played high school football, Lepore showed up at a practice and approached the coach, who ordered the Lepore boys to the goal line. There, in front of the whole team, Lepore challenged his sons to a hundred-yard dash. The boys were not shocked. He had threatened to “come down and humiliate us” in a race, Nick recalls. “He said it was going to be ugly. He was always all worked up, saying, ‘I’m faster than you. I’m stronger than you. You’ll never be able to beat me.’” But it didn’t go exactly as Lepore had planned. “He swears he slipped because he wasn’t wearing the right shoes,” Nick says. “It turned out for him it was only a sixty-yard race.” And an ignominious defeat. “I was so chagrined,” Lepore recalls. “It’s nighttime. The lights are on. All the kids are there watching. And this old fart just doesn’t do it. I couldn’t believe it. My boys were faster than I was.”

When not challenging his sons to feats of strength in a homemade strongman competition with concrete balls, Lepore engineered trivia contests. On a trip to a Boy Scout ranch, he’d give extra food to the son who answered detailed questions about World War II aircraft. When another boy joined in and knew obscure answers, like the arrangement of pockets on the pants soldiers wore during the D-Day invasion, Lepore’s inability to stump the kid “just drove him nuts,” T.J. says.

He had better luck at the Boy Scouts’ Pinewood Derby races, where boys race cars they build from small blocks of wood. But the path to success was bumpy. When T.J. was about eleven, he and Lepore won the Nantucket derby, but at the district level on Martha’s Vineyard, “we got our doors blown off,” T.J. says.

When Lepore asked to see the winning vehicle, its owner wouldn’t let him, making Lepore suspicious. “Okay, good enough. I’m coming back, and I’m hungry.”

Lepore pored over books and interrogated Pinewood insiders, learning tips that weren’t exactly “kosher.” He polished the wheels and axels
with a tool he used on his guns. He added weights in strategic places. He gutted out the wood and poured in lead that he melted the way he liquefied lead for bullets. And he shaved the plastic tires so that only a ridge would touch the track, reducing resistance so the car would go faster.

Lepore even built backup cars in case something went wrong or judges disqualified one of his vehicles. “Nobody was going to beat my car—nobody.”

In the Nantucket competition, “my car was three feet ahead of the next one. The only way you could be faster than my car is if it had a jet on it.”

At the district competition, though, T.J. recalls, “there was kind of an awkward moment” when the judge examined entrants’ cars. “He knew that people had been finagling,” Lepore says. “I said, ‘Let’s race.’ I am in competition with a lot of guys that are carpenters, woodworkers. Everybody had a little fudge. It’s just, I did it better than anybody, because I’m shameless.”

Lepore’s car did so well, Nick remembers, that it “was one of the reasons that the Boy Scouts had to change the rules. Word had gotten around.”

Lepore’s other competitive outlet was boxing, a dead-of-winter activity the island organized so people wouldn’t go stir crazy. “He was always going on about how good he was—bring the thunder and the pain,” Nick recalls. “He would have testosterone patches on, and he came out snorting like a bull.”

Anyone watching Lepore’s pugilistic exploits could see what the doctor apparently couldn’t. “He was an insult to boxers everywhere,” says Steve Tornovish, who met Lepore boxing at the Boys and Girls Club. “He couldn’t break an egg.”

Once, as T.J. held a sign that said, “Doctor Death, Doctor Death, Doctor Death,” Lepore fought Nick’s twelfth-grade government teacher. “Everybody who came to my house for decades saw that
video,” Nick says. “He’s talking about how he’s pulled his double jabs, and it’s the slowest thing you’ve ever seen. He says, ‘This is the punch that put him down.’ There’s no punch. The guy must have tripped or something.”

Lepore does point out that when he retired from boxing in his late fifties, the head of the Boys and Girls Club, a former pro boxer himself, pronounced Lepore the senior heavyweight champion. “I’d conquered everyone in my age class,” he says. “I’m like Rocky Marciano. I fought everybody that wasn’t in a wheelchair and then a few that came close. I was looking at the nursing home for other contenders.”

Even when T.J. got married, Lepore could not suppress his competitive streak. At the rehearsal dinner, during a sentimental slide show about the bride and groom, a burst of sound erupted, and T.J. heard, “Yeah, yeah, do it. Go, go, go!” It was his father, and “he’s got just about every guy between the ages of fifteen and sixty in a group, and he’s got these nails.” Lepore had cut the heads off the nails and was challenging men to bend them with their bare hands, including T.J., who had to “bend the nail in front of my wife’s father.” More than a few wedding guests cut their hands.

Meredith began working at her father’s medical practice in middle school, “organizing all the dead people’s files,” she recalls. She returned to work for him in high school after her inability to operate a cash register got her fired from a job selling T-shirts. Later, she tried different careers—teaching, lab work—but eventually decided “I wanted to be like my dad.”

After becoming a nurse practitioner, she had trouble finding a job, so Lepore said, “Why don’t you come down and work for me?” He immediately threw responsibilities at her, having her perform a spinal tap, although she’d never done one. She watched him break bad news
to patients, always no-nonsense: “This is what’s going to happen; this is what we’re going to do; here’s my cell phone number.”

And she admired how in situations where “other doctors would probably say, ‘Well, let’s wait and see,’ he’ll say, ‘If you’re sick, you’re sick. I’m going to give you something.’”

Meredith also learned that although “you go into this field sort of wanting to save everyone,” often “there’s only so much you can do. You can make yourself crazy trying to do everything to fix them.” Her father, she believes, is “the smartest person I know, hands down,” But while, “sometimes I was so impressed, other times I was so frustrated.”