Marathon Man (12 page)

I hated sitting still for too long. I was too impulsive. I got bored too easily. Luckily, I never had to wait long for the nurse's bell to ring, alerting me that I was needed.

Brring!

“Orderly!” the head nurse would call out to me. I'd pop my head up like a rabbit. “Take Ms. Graham up to Imaging. Right away.”

The second the words flew out her mouth, I was off. I wheeled Ms. Graham through the hospital's labyrinth of long white halls, teeming with doctors and nurses and sick patients. I had never been in a hospital before, except once when I was a kid and I'd had my appendix taken out. In college, when I ran along the country roads with Amby, I'd gaze around in every direction, but as I moved through the hospital, I kept my eyes fixed directly ahead. By not dwelling on the horrible things going on around me, like the sight of people dying among strangers, I could keep my sanity.

I thought it best to present a positive and cheerful attitude to the patients, no matter how disturbed I was by their condition. I wheeled Ms. Graham around the corner, and up the elevator we went. Within seconds, we arrived at the next floor and I whirled Ms. Graham out the door and rolled her down the hallway, the humming bright lights passing one after the next. We reached the end of our journey—the Imaging unit—and I brought Ms. Graham into the room, where a nurse was scribbling something on a clipboard. She didn't bother to look up at me as I rolled Ms. Graham to a stop and exited out the door.

I didn't bother to check my watch. I don't think I was even wearing one. But I'm sure the time it took me to bring Ms. Graham up to Imaging wasn't far off the American record … for Brigham Hospital escort messengers. Yet when I returned to the nurses' station there was no thunderous applause from the hospital staff, nor did the head nurse lay a wreath of garland upon my head.

I sat back down in the escort messenger office, where we would all be smoking cigarettes, which was allowed in hospitals back then. Things would really be cranking in the hospital. I was there for no more than five or ten minutes before another call came out. “Orderly!” I heard a voice bark. “Bring Mr. Finkelburg up to Hematology to get blood work.”

And I was off!

Who knows how many miles I covered in a day. It was a big hospital and I walked all around it during my shift from 3:00 to 11:00 p.m. It must have been over five miles. One time, I was rolling a gravely ill patient to an operating room. The guy was dying of emphysema. We got to the OR and I waited with him for the doctor to show up. All at once, the guy jumped up off his stretcher and said, “You should quit smoking those.” He lumbered over to my backpack, sitting in the corner of the room, and snatched the pack of Winstons from the front pocket. He put the smoke in his mouth and, holding the lighter as steady as he could in his sickly hand, he lit the tip. Watching him with sad astonishment, I thought, quietly: I should quit smoking those.

As I sat around the bare room with the other escort messengers, waiting for the bell to ring again, I'd think about my high school buddies who'd been sent to Vietnam and all they must be enduring and I'd feel sick to my stomach. I hated seeing our country split apart. All this strife and conflict didn't sit well with me. I wanted to be outside running in the fields, where I could escape this feeling of worry and agitation. But these were perilous times and perilous times don't allow for chasing butterflies.

The fact that we were all working off our alternative service was a special distinction that didn't endear us to the hospital's straight-laced, horn-rimmed bureaucrats. In their eyes, we were dirty hippies who had failed in our duty as Americans to serve. Was helping patients get off their bed and onto gurneys integral to the country's welfare? Probably not. But the way I looked at it, I was “fulfilling two years of national service in some civilian work of social value.” More importantly, I was not another cog in the inhuman war machine. I felt great about that.

While hospital management viewed us as a bunch of unpatriotic, pot-smoking cowards, fit only for menial labor, to the thousands of young people who'd transformed the city into a hotbed of free love, psychedelic music, and fringe culture, we were fighting the good fight of nonviolent protest. The hospital administration did like one thing about hiring a bunch of no-good, long-haired scalawags. They could pay us peanuts. Jason and I took it in stride. The important thing was that we weren't stuck behind a desk. I don't think I could have lasted a couple of hours before breaking into a full-body rash.

While I loved the fact that I was always moving, the job could be very stressful at times. Every time a code red emergency was announced over the address system, a giant knot would form in the pit of my stomach. A nurse would activate a STAT. That meant somebody's heart had gone bad. It was my job to rush the patient to the surgery room on a gurney. My legs were moving but I felt disconnected to them. I was in shock. Please make it, whoever you are, I told myself. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they didn't. That's what you learn working in a hospital.

Occasionally, I had to roll a lifeless person through the long, white halls to the cold, metal slabs in the basement. None of us liked to do that. As I pushed the sheet-covered body on the gurney past the fluorescent lights overhead, I cast my eyes down at the head resting a couple of inches from my waistline. This could be my childhood friend Gerald returning from Vietnam. The thought was almost too much too handle. Thankfully, Gerald made it home without getting shot, which isn't to say he came back whole. Drug use was prevalent among soldiers over in Vietnam and, like many others who fought there, Gerald returned addicted. After he came back, an undercover cop caught him trying to buy drugs. He did some jail time. It made me sad when I heard what had happened to Gerald. Charlie and I had known him since he was little. We'd chased squirrels with BB guns together. We went fishing in ponds. He was always a real smart kid. He just got caught up in the war. Tough stuff.

At this time in my life, I was living in a place on Westland Avenue with Jason. The city was full of cheap places back then; a haven for the young hippie hordes who migrated there. Our apartment was near the Back Bay Fens, a large park with rolling lawns, athletic fields, and a rose garden. It was a classic example of the “poor postgrad” aesthetic of the time: two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a long, narrow hallway that led to a tiny living room/kitchenette. Jason and I made chicken scratch at the hospital—seventy-one dollars a week—but it was enough to muster up the ninety dollars for our share of the rent with enough left over for cigarettes, gin, and movie tickets.

We'd just gotten out of school and landed smack dab in one of the strongholds of the counterculture scene. Everybody was having a good time and that's what we wanted to do. Boston was a cool city, especially for two white suburban kids with hair down to their shoulders. We drank beer, we went out to clubs, we chased girls, and we listened to rock 'n' roll. It was great.

The alternative scene was still young and there was little money to be made outside the mainstream. We saw the Moody Blues and the Rolling Stones, despite barely having two nickels to rub together. Free concerts blanketed the city. You could walk down to the public garden and see the Allman Brothers Band for nothing. Duane Allman was probably not that much different than Jason and me. He was a young guy with long hair who happened to be a good guitar player.

Standing there on the grass, you'd be surrounded by hundreds of long-haired, pot-smoking kids who shared a similar mind-set. Rejecting the status quo, rejecting a conventional life. We didn't have any answers. We didn't join a political cause. Our cause had always been running, replaced now with our patriotic duty to support the local economy, primarily Jack's Bar.

Jack's was a great little pub in Harvard Square in Cambridge with live music and free peanuts. On weekend nights, the place was bursting with energy. People were packed to the gills and there were peanut shells all over the floor. It was one of the best places in the city to see local artists from the exploding Boston music scene—a young, redhead spitfire named Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor's brother Livingston, folk guitar hero Spider John Koerner, and blues harp player James Montgomery. Jason and I went to Jack's to hear great music but also, truth be known, to meet girls. The amount of success we had, well, that was another story.

Around this time, Jason bought a Triumph BSA 650 from our high school friend Randy Cook. The BSA was a seriously cool ride. James Bond rode one in
Thunderball
; so did Hunter S. Thompson. Charlie was next to get his hands on this British beauty. I didn't see much of my brother in those days. He lived with his girlfriend down in Connecticut, where he worked at a drug and alcohol rehab facility. I'd catch up with him at holidays at our parents' house in Newington. Once in a while, Charlie would drive up to my place in Boston and appear at my door with a bundle of groceries. I knew my mom had told Charlie to check on me; she would want to make sure I was eating enough. After all, a man needed his ketchup for his brownies, his mayonnaise for his pizza, and his orange soda pop to wash it all down.

Owning a Triumph, like Jason and Charlie, was all I could think about. If Jeremy Drayton's dream in 1970 was to win the Boston Marathon and repeat at the Fukuoka Marathon, mine was to feel the rush of air and the power of the engine's roar as I rode my Triumph through the city streets. Then, out of the blue, Jason learned of a guy in the neighborhood who was selling his Triumph 650. I'd been saving up to buy a motorcycle for months but was still short. I had to face facts. It wasn't going to happen.

One day, after my shift ended at the hospital, Jason and I went to give the Triumph one last look. We stood in front of the motorcycle like a bunch of teenage gawkers. She was a terrific-looking thing. Without saying a word, Jason put a bunch of folded bills in my hand. He probably didn't know he was making me the happiest guy in the world. Then again, he was barely scraping by himself, so maybe he did.

Did we need high-performance bikes—those Triumphs could really move!—just for getting around town? If you asked my twenty-one-year-old self that, the answer would have been “absolutely.” It also didn't matter that, mechanically speaking, we were clueless; things were always rattling or loosening up or vibrating strangely on our bikes. While these kind of issues would have probably have sent my mom into a tailspin of panic, they didn't concern me in the slightest.

Cruising around the city streets on our bikes, Jason and I thought we were Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in
Easy Rider
. In reality, the long hair and the leather jackets were the only real similarities between them and us. We were no more cosmic hippies than we were hardcore bikers. While we never jumped on the bandwagon of free love, acid, and tie-dye spirituality, Jason and I shared a steadfast love for personal freedom, as well as a steadfast distrust of authority.

At the same time, we were a bunch of former college athletes from the suburbs of Hartford. The only LSD I had ever tried was the kind Amby introduced to me in college: Long Slow Distance training. Neither of us traveled to Woodstock in August of 1969; I was delivering mail to people's houses in the Newington suburbs; Jason was working in a kitchen in West Yarmouth on the Cape. The “we're all in this together” feeling that hippie kids were looking for in the flower-power scene, Charlie, Jason, and I had always found in one another. The Three Musketeers! We felt a deep kinship with other runners. If you ran, you were one of us.

Except, of course, I was no longer running.

 

FIVE

Washed Out on Westland Ave.

A
PRIL 21, 1975

N
ATICK,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

A record-size field of 2,041 runners had entered the 26.2-mile race from Hopkinton to Copley Square in Boston but, in reality, only seven runners ever posed a serious threat. Now there I was, not even halfway along the course, and I'd left all but one of them in the dust. Tom Fleming, the Jersey brawler. Gone. Ron the Hill, the record holder. Gone. The Mexican, Mario Cuevas. Gone. And now, unbelievably, there was only one man still up front in the lead with me. Jerome Drayton. He must've been looking at me, thinking, Who's this guy running a sub-five-minute pace? Because there were only a few guys in the world who could keep up that kind of speed and he knew exactly who they were.

We matched each other stride for stride into Natick. We were not running the inclines and declines. We were charging them. This almost never happened: a side-by side duel in a marathon, starting this early in the race, and extending over miles. More incredible was the pace that we were running together. I didn't know what my splits were, nor did I care—I was running against Drayton, not the clock—but we were cruising along the rural roads at under five minutes per mile. That's pouring-it-on speed. It turned out we were two seconds behind Ron Hill's course record.

Here's the thing about the marathon: It only takes one man to outrun you and you've lost. Just ask the hundreds of runner-ups in this race. All of them, at some point along the 26.2 miles of road, had the same thought: I'm going to win the Boston Marathon. Maybe the thought only lasted a brief, intoxicating moment, but that's all it takes for hope to take hold. And hope is a dangerous thing to have as a marathon runner because all it takes is one man, at any time, at any mile, to wipe you out. He has ravaged your psyche, obliterated your spirit, crushed your will to win, but that's not the worst of it—because don't forget, your body is still on the course, and you still have the agonizing business of getting to the finish line, which could be several miles away. It's not like boxing, where one uppercut is all it takes to put you out of your misery. In the marathon, you have the chance to watch your dream get pummeled slowly, yard by excruciating yard, knowing there's nothing you can do about it. You're already maxed out. There's no recovering. No catching up to that competitor who left you for dead. The rest of the way is pain and heartbreak. Until it's over. But it's not really over because you'll be muttering to yourself for years afterward: I was going to win the Boston Marathon. Become champion of the greatest road race in history. How did it all go wrong?