Pharmakon (44 page)

“I said it so Willy could stick up for him. I wanted to give the boys something to bond over.”

My seemingly lackadaisical disinterest in winning had a strange way of devaluing the prize, the ribbon, or cup Willy invariably won. My brother was the state champion now. Photographs appeared in newspapers of his breaking the tape at the finish line, arms raised, body pitched forward, eyes already looking ahead to the next race.

By the spring of 1969, I was less than four minutes away from running five miles in thirty minutes. My parents knew about Willy’s challenge by now, and it had become something of a family joke about what would transpire between us when and if I ever met his challenge.

It was around this time, I think, that my father suggested we go on a double date. Having been sent to an all-boys’ school while still in puberty, my experience with girls my own age was nonexistent. Having never gone on a date with a girl, the idea of stepping out in virgin territory with my brother watching was a nightmare.

Willy wasn’t much of a dater, either. Girls were always paying attention to him, but he was so busy running, he only asked girls out when his star status at St. Luke’s demanded his attendance at a school dance and he needed someone on his arm to impress his teammates. On those rare occasions, he would double-date with his best friend, Emory Nicholas, a two hundred and forty pounder with a strangely high-pitched voice who threw the hammer, javelin, and shot put. I found it interesting that they both went for the same type—blonde, overeager, and big boobed. As Emory put it in his near castrato tenor, “Sure things.”

It was Emory who had told Willy about Constance Murdock. From our limited conversations about the mythic beauty, I inferred Constance wasn’t easy. This, coupled with the fact that she was the New England girls’ champion in the mile, prompted me to imagine her as a female mirror image of Willy. I could imagine Willy making love to himself.

They had met the year before at a winter track meet outside of Boston that Willy had attended with my parents. I wasn’t there. My mother said she was pretty. My father called her “unusual.” Which pissed Willy off. I tried on more than one occasion to get Willy to talk about Constance, but at the mere mention of her name, he’d smile and say, “No.”

Willy wasn’t amused by the prospect of a double date, but I could see he was looking forward to having me as a friend, now that it was clear to one and all that he had set the terms of our bond.

One morning in the last week of March, as I was checking my list against the contents of my briefcase, my father took me aside and told me, “It’s time for you to quit dawdling.” Willy was outside waiting behind the wheel of the Skylark. I thought my father was talking about being late to school.

“I’m not dawdling.”

“You and I both know that you could run five miles in thirty minutes if you really wanted to.” Willy honked the horn for me to hurry up.

“He’ll do it when he’s ready.” My mother still watched to make sure my head was screwed on straight.

“You’re putting it off because you’re ambivalent.”

“About what?” My mother and I said the words simultaneously.

“About having a friendship with his brother.” Of course, he was right.

I didn’t like it when my father talked about me in the third person, like I was one of his patients. For so many months, running had seemed the cure. Now, suddenly, a few words from my father and a brain that needed a smooth combing had turned the cure into a symptom.

Overdosed with family, a delicate balance within myself was shifting. The need to say yes versus the need to say no versus the need not to feel crazy anymore. My feelings were further complicated when I passed my brother in the hall that day after lunch, and he not only talked to me, he stopped to inquire, “What’s wrong?”

“I’m nervous.”

“About what?”

“I’m going for it. Five miles, thirty minutes, today’s the day.” I tried to sound more Clint Eastwood than John Wayne.

“I understand.” He didn’t. But he filled Coach Wyler in on the time trial. At three o’clock, my brother unstrapped his chronograph and buckled it onto my wrist. The whole track team, JV and varsity, were assembled behind the field house. They all knew of the challenge now.

Coach Wyler drew out the course I would run in the dirt with a stick from the popsicle he had just finished. “Gentlemen, since no hills were specified in your challenge, I suggest up through the sanctuary, twice around town, then back down through the goalposts.”

I shook my head no. “Too many distractions. I want to run on the road.” My brother nodded in agreement. “Five miles is five miles.” A new course was imposed by Coach Wyler. “Fair enough. Zach’ll go out the back, turn right on 512, left onto Mill Road, then take Long Lane, then back through town and in the front gate.” I pulled off my sweats. Coach Wyler mounted his bicycle. My brother shook his head no.

“You don’t need to go with him, Coach.”

“I don’t mean to impugn your little brother’s character, but how are we gonna know he’s run the full five miles?” Everyone laughed except me and Willy.

“I trust him.” Suddenly, in that moment, we really were friends.

I ran as I had never run before. I forgot about my father and my mother and the warmth of my brother’s handshake and listened only to the beat of my heart. Matching its rhythm to my stride, I kept my eyes down to avoid getting caught in the vapor trails of jets or the dreams of sleeping turtles. I knew I was going to be okay, even before Willy’s chronometer told me I’d covered the first mile in five minutes and twenty-two seconds. Breathing easy, muscles relaxed, not a thought in my mind except covering ground with as little emotional involvement as humanly possible, I did the second mile in five seventeen.

As I turned onto the rutted macadam of Mill Road and passed the red silo that marked the halfway point to victory, I had character. I wasn’t just a fourteen-and-a half-year-old, I was my own man. I had out-distanced all my doubts and ambivalence, and outrun even my family.

Heading down Long Lane now, the wind at my back, anything was possible. The road narrowed, potholes topped up by the morning rain reflected the grace of my velocity. Fields turned over but not yet planted, and hedgerows flecked with forsythia sweetened the air I breathed. I was so much better than fine that when a pickup piled high with baled hay barreled by me, blasting its horn as it showered me with a spray of pothole water, I did not lose stride or concentration.

I was fine until I took my eyes off the blur of ground beneath my feet to wipe the muddy water off my face . . . that’s when I saw her.

She stood atop a five-foot-high stone wall postered with signs that read “No Trespassing.” From a quarter-mile away, her body was so quiet, she looked almost like a statue. Curious, I quickened my pace to get a better look. Her hair was long and the color of butterscotch. Though the day was hot for the last of March, she was dressed for the summer to come, not for the spring that was. She had taken off her flannel shirt. At first I thought she was standing up there in just her bra. But now I was close enough to see the bra was the top to a bathing suit—which must have been a bikini, because it was skimpier than any of the bras my sisters or mother wore. Her jeans rode so low on her hips, I wasn’t imagining she wasn’t wearing any underwear. They were bell-bottomed and frayed, and secured with a macramé sash. My knowledge of hippies in the spring of ’69 was limited to what I’d seen on the pages of
Rolling Stone
magazine and read in an issue of
Time
with a cover with the words
TUNE IN, TURN ON, DROP OUT.
But that’s what I knew her instinctively to be. She was barefoot, her feet and her hands were dirty, her eyes were closed, and her arms outstretched. She stood as still and primeval as a lizard warming itself in the sun.

It is difficult to run with an erection, but it and I pressed on. I was almost upon her now. She must have heard me panting, but she showed no sign of it. She looked old to me . . . seventeen?

As I ran by her, I could see the blonde down of her unshaved armpits. For a heartbeat I was close enough to imagine what it would be like to count the freckles that dappled the hollow of her belly just below her right hip. Before I had time to ponder the weight of that fantasy, my legs had carried me past her. Now there was nothing but the empty road and the race ahead.

Of course, I had to look back. I was still running, but instead of looking where I was going, I was reexamining what I had passed by. She was looking at me now, then she waved. If it had been a friendly, up-in-the-air wave, a “hello, see you around” wave, it would have been easier to resist. But it was a low-armed, lazy wiggle of the fingers. Subtext: Don’t even think about it.

Still, I kept running. It wasn’t until I heard her laugh that I stumbled. At first, she laughed because I was out there on a beautiful day busting my ass running. After I lost my footing she laughed because I was lying facedown in a mud puddle. When I got to my feet and turned to demand “What’s the joke?” she had disappeared.

My brother’s chronometer weighed on my wrist. I checked my time. I’d lost less than three minutes. I still had a chance to show my character. I did when I ran back to the stretch of the wall where I’d seen/imagined her standing. There was no sign of her. I was disappointed and yet relieved to know that, once and for all, I did have a screw loose.

I was just about to start running when I heard her voice echo up from a grassy berm on the other side of the wall. She was singing “Sunshine of Your Love.”

First her head, then her body, surfaced on the far side of the berm. She walked in time to Cream as she crossed a stretch of lawn, as flat and green and chancy as the felt on a poker table. Unlike me, she didn’t look back. My eyes stayed on her even after she disappeared amid the ornamental shrubbery in the distance.

My thirty minutes were up by then. The race wasn’t over, it was lost. Mind, body, and heart too weak to stay the course; I retraced my steps and headed back to school. When I got to the field house, my brother was the only one still waiting.

“What happened?” he called out.

I feigned a limp as I answered, “I sprained my ankle.” I had no intention of telling Willy what had really happened, in part because I was embarrassed, but mostly because I did not want to share her.

“You’ll do better next time.”

“I hope so.”

The sprained ankle I didn’t have got me out of track practice. The next day, as soon as my brother and the rest of the team took off after Coach Wyler on his bike, I slipped out of the school grounds and took off down 512 toward the stretch of road where I had first seen the sunshine of my love.

She wasn’t there. I ran my hands over the stones where she had stood, barefoot and life changing, and reimagined it. When it began to rain, I still waited for her to appear. She didn’t, but I was glad I had made the pilgrimage. For if I hadn’t, I would have been convinced she was waiting for me and that I’d blown yet another challenge.

The next day, I continued my deception. Struggling to remember which ankle I supposedly had sprained, I limped through my classes. At three o’clock, I again waved good-bye to my brother and teammates, then immediately snuck off. Changing into my track shorts in the woods so as not to sweat through my school clothes and give myself away, I ran my own race back to the wall.

This time, I was in luck, or so I thought. After fifteen, twenty minutes of peering over her wall, scanning the horizon, as nervous and anxious as the teenage Green Beret sniper I saw Dan Rather interview on last night’s news from Vietnam, I caught sight of her. I heard her calling for somebody named “Bill.” I was jealous until I realized Bill was a dog that looked to be a golden Lab. She wasn’t wearing her bikini top, but it was still nice to see her. I have a distinct memory of envying Bill as she bent down to rub his stomach.