The Runner (10 page)

5. Did you ever feel a great sense of entitlement? If so, why? Do you now?

The privileges I enjoy by having graduated from Harvard and Princeton are silly. I like

The Simpsons,
especially the pictures, which are produced by teams of skilled animators who work in a complex outside of Seoul, South Korea, which lives under constant threat from the Hermit Kingdom of the North. When I try to imagine the life of my Korean counterpart, I see an overly serious corporate servant with straight black hair and a good degree and nothing to eat in her refrigerator aside from a single container of blueberry yogurt.

As I watched the news on TV that night, I learned that Malibu was burning; it had been

the lead story on the evening news for three nights in a row. The chaparral is natural fuel that leaves oils behind in the ground when it burns; after it rains, the mud slides off the hills like grease from a frying pan. The homes of a multi-platinum singer and an Oscar-winning director were gone, as was the residence of a local cartoonist whose multimillion-dollar spread featured sliding glass doors opening onto a redwood deck cantilevered over Carbon Canyon, a sheer,

two-hundred-and-sixty-foot drop to the Pacific. Sixty-three houses, each worth more than a

million dollars a piece, had gone up in smoke. The fire raced six hundred feet in thirty seconds, devouring everything in its path, popping cedar-shingled roofs and raining firebrands down on the beach where I once swam and tried to surf. I saw news footage of the helicopters hosing down the slopes and lumbering seaplanes that swooped down out of the sky and dumped ocean

water on the flames. When I lived in Los Angeles I once tried to write a cartoon show called
I.Q.

Jones
about a sprightly subatomic particle who was black, heavily into physics, and bore a strong physical resemblance to one of the less fortunate California Raisins. I thank God that
I. Q. Jones
never made it onto the air. I felt bad for James Hogue. His chance at recovering some grip on a normal life had slid through his fingers here. The wreckage was plain and affecting, even if he was also an asshole.

James Hogue hated anything associated with being ordinary, the same way that I did. He

just went about things in a different way. The final question he posed in his letter sounded entirely sincere.

“6. What is it with the janitor’s clothing?” he wrote, wondering about my preference for

army surplus jackets and worn blue jeans. “Was or is it a statement of solidarity with the

lumpen?”

“Ciao,” he wrote, without signing his name.

IX. SuperStar

In a local café, I met a girl named SuperStar. She had been Hogue’s girlfriend in town

before he went to Russia and met the blonde doctor, and pretended again to be someone new.

SuperStar was the name she used in our conversations on the Internet. She had black dyed hair and a necklace. I found her because of a notation in the prison record made by a local clergyman who put $25 on Hogue’s commissary account. We began a correspondence, and she finally

agreed to have coffee with me.

Jim would always have a book with him, she remembered, and he grew good weed. All

her friends bought weed from Jim. That was a new part of the story. He said he was twenty-eight years old. She thought that was funny, since he was obviously older: he was probably in his thirties. She was eighteen. They met hanging out on the slopes, and he kept asking her out to dinner. Jim used to come over and visit her at her house.

When he was with SuperStar, Jim talked all the time. He would talk about art. He would

talk about random things he read in books. SuperStar was impressed because he was different than the local eighteen- and twenty-year-olds who got high on the slopes.

“We were together a lot,” she said. “Sometimes he wouldn’t come over until one in the

morning, because I was working.” Barely out of high school, she had already learned to make allowances for any man who might show her a little bit of attention. Kind, bright, but unsure of herself, she is overweight, and dyes her hair black. It might be easy to make her feel unloved.

“He was a very shy person,” SuperStar remembered, looking over at her friend, whom

she had brought with her to the café for protection. Her friend is so pretty that it is hard not to stare. SuperStar will never steal her pretty friend’s boyfriends. SuperStar and her friend exist on different planes of existence, looks-wise. One is ethereal, gorgeous, a vision of college

sophomore loveliness in soft sweatpants and a tight sweater able to make the heart of any man beat faster. The other is a sullen, earth-bound girl, garishly painted. Jim took care of himself. He took care of SuperStar. They would talk two or three times a day on the phone.

When I asked her for personal details about her lover, she mentions how much he loved

Christmas. “He had a huge collection of Christmas music. He loved any type of Christmas song.”

It was rare to meet an adult who was in love with Christmas in such an unreserved and uncynical way. “He said that he had a mother,” she remembered. “I never got into the family stuff because it was a touchy subject for him.”

SuperStar was the one visitor that Hogue’s neighbors remember ever coming to his house

on San Bernardo. Downstairs was his wood shop, she remembers. Hogue heated the upstairs

with a wood stove. In the living room he kept a wooden carousel horse. Hogue was eager to

impress the young girl by telling her about the books he had read and showing off his skills at cooking and woodworking. “He’d tell me he was really smart,” she recalled. He would cook for her, and they’d watch movies together. He especially enjoyed watching movies about New York, she remembered. He also liked watching movies in Russian.

SuperStar liked being with him enough that she stopped smoking pot. Soon she noticed

that he stayed up late and had long conversations on the phone in Russian. She felt like she might be going crazy. Up late one night, she aimlessly entered his name into the Google search engine.

She learned that there were parts of Hogue’s past he hadn’t told her about, including the fact that he had spent time in jail. She confronted her boyfriend, who at first insisted that he was not the person she had read about online. “It’s my cousin who looks like me,” he said. SuperStar didn’t believe him. “I thought I would come here and get away,” he said. Then he broke down and

cried. Before that, “I’d never seen him sad or upset,” SuperStar remembered.

She stayed with him because she wanted to help him, she said, sounding like any other

woman who stays with a man because she wants to save him. Maybe he would change. Maybe

he would finally tell her the truth about his past. When he finally left town, she felt relieved, but she was worried for him, too. She called his cell phone when he was on the run, and he took her calls.

“Have you gone crazy?” she asked him.

“I guess I have,” he answered. She thinks he told her that he loved her, but she is not

sure. The story is at once pathetic and touching, because it shows what nearly all of us will do to hear the reassuring voice on the other end of the phone. Next to the promise of love, very little else matters. The next morning she found his jacket in her car with a note that said, “Happy belated Christmas, I love you, James.” He stayed in town for at least two weeks after he

disappeared, living in abandoned condos, to see if things would cool down, and planning his getaway to Arizona, where he would start a new life.

When I asked SuperStar for a positive memory of being with Jim, she answered that she

had enjoyed spending time with him outdoors. “He loved being out in the snow, or in the

mountains in the summer,” she remembered. He also loved kids, or the idea of kids, and spoke about having children. “But he can’t have kids,” SuperStar said, telling me of the medical articles he saved, and the times they had sex in the middle of her cycle. She wanted to know more about Jim. She wanted me to tell her the story of who he really is, because he was a good person

sometimes, and because he hurt people, and because she doesn’t understand how the pieces of his frustrated personality fit together.

“He really wanted to be the ideal person, to have the perfect life, but he couldn’t have it,”

SuperStar said as the café closes. They would sit together on the bed, SuperStar stoned, Hogue cold sober. He never smoked the weed he grew. He would lie in bed and lay out his plans for the future. Sometimes it felt good to lie next to him. “But more often he wasn’t even looking at me,”

she remembered, with surprising bitterness. “He’d be staring off into the dreamworld that he created.” Perhaps SuperStar was suspicious that Hogue’s dreamworld didn’t include her, or

perhaps his descriptions of the future sounded like fantasies even to an eighteen-year-old girl.

Their conversations left her feeling cold and alone. “He would keep talking and talking,” she remembered sadly. “I don’t think he was ever really there.”

X. The Application

On my last evening in Telluride, I opened up a battered manila folder that I brought with

me from New York, and began to read. The papers inside had been written two decades ago by

an eighteen-year-old whose amazing life story had captivated nearly everyone who met him until it was finally revealed to be a lie. The folder and its contents had arrived at my office in New York through the offices of a lawyer who had finally obtained copies for me more than fifteen years after the originals were supposedly destroyed. Some of the documents were typewritten, and others were written by hand. There are about thirty pages in all. Together, they served as the blueprint for the greatest deception of Hogue’s self-made career.

Once the papers arrived, and I identified them as genuine, I found other things to occupy

my time. The essays and letters and lists inside seemed too important to read in a hurried way, before the stakes of Jim’s case seemed clear, and before I felt sure about my own feelings about a subject whose defining feature was his opacity. Because Jim made himself so hard to read, and held so many parts of himself back, and became expert in inventing new identities, he made

himself into a screen on which people could project their hopes and dreams. Jim could be

anything that you wanted him to be. It was hard to say where my sympathy for Hogue came

from, and that made me wary. Perhaps the idea of a continuous self was only a fiction that made it easier to enforce mortgage contracts and collect taxes. We become someone new every two or three years like a snake shedding its skin, and it is only a trick of the mind that supports the perception that we are the same person over any significant span of time. My belief that telling lies is destructive of the human community formed through language might be a freak of my own imagination and have little application to the life of a drifter who made himself up along the course of his own private and secretive journey

I believed that my identification with James Hogue would help me understand him better.

It would help me write a better story. It was a habit that Hogue had warned me against, and the fact that he was a liar and a thief didn’t make his injunction any more or less binding. I would continue to see my life in his. I would continue to believe that the connection that I

acknowledged was somehow valuable on a human level—a proof of my own laudable capacity

for empathy At the same time, I would also have to consider that any assumptions I made about Hogue might be reflections of my own selfish motives and preoccupations which had nothing

whatsoever to do with my subject. Was Hogue afraid that I would see him for who he was? Was he annoyed by my invasion of his privacy? Did he court my attention because he wanted his

story to be known? The answer to all of the above questions is “yes.” For Hogue, the community of human beings that is formed through language was simply a figment of my imagination and

the imaginations of other people like me. Week after week, the manila folder containing the plans for his greatest con lay unopened on my desk.

As the trial date approached, I headed off to Telluride with the folder stuffed in my green army duffle. I would read it when I felt ready. Once his sentence was handed down, and he

refused for the last time to see me, I felt that it was time to look backwards through the wide lens of the telescope in the hopes that I might go back in time and see James Hogue whole, or glimpse the moment that led like all other moments to a place from which no escape is possible. I found more or less what I was looking for. I found myself rooting for him to succeed, even though I knew the story would turn out badly.

The folder contained a copy of an application to the Princeton University Class of 1992,

complete with the required personal essays, lists of books, and proof of a 1410 SAT score. Other essential items, like a high school transcript and letters of recommendation from teachers, were missing. Now that I had seen the effect that Hogue’s more ordinary deceptions had on the people of Telluride, I felt like I could better understand the spectacular self that he had invented to gain admission to Princeton, and the deeper significance of his greatest con.

Hogue’s application to Princeton was both a carefully considered con and an inspired

goof on the American college admissions process, an absurdist commentary on the larger

absurdity of a system that would never have accepted him for who he was. Reading through the items in his folder, I was reminded again of how little connection the Ivy League selection process has to the ability or the inclination to endure the rigors of high-level academic work.

Because we naturally abhor the geeky, antisocial personalities who tend to excel in the classroom and in the lab, Americas most prestigious universities have turned the admissions process into a beauty contest rigged to favor the kinds of students that might look good on a television reality show—a wholesome racial and ethnic mix of pretty faces and talent-show winners. The