The Runner (14 page)

To understand who the applicant was, and how he was able to succeed, for a time, in such

an audacious imposture, it is necessary to step back for a moment from our story and think about the one true constant in Hogue’s scattered life, which was not his true name or even his talents for imposture but the habit of running long distances at a pace that only a few human beings on the planet could match. Distance running offers almost no material rewards and demands a

dedication so complete that it is hard for many world-class runners to hold down regular jobs. It is normal for distance runners to cry, scream, vomit, and even urinate on themselves during races. Push beyond those barriers often enough and knees swell and tendons snap, leading to chronic injuries that can make it hard for distance runners to walk, let alone run. What running offers in exchange is the euphoric pleasure of the runner’s high that Cindy Putnam described to me in Telluride. Anyone who has engaged in even mildly intense physical activity, like jogging, playing tennis, or working out at the gym, has experienced some version of this state, in which the brain is flooded by mood-elevating chemicals that wash away the daily residues of anxiety, boredom, and fear. For runners, the dreamlike state induced by running ten or fifteen miles can become necessary to their sense of well-being, and as potent an addiction as any drug.

“One of the things I used to like to do,” Jon Luff remembered, “was run in the dark. And

you can go out and run really hard in the dark and you actually don’t feel like you have a body.

You feel like you’re just this head moving around, because you are in such good shape that you don’t even really feel the road, and you can just get into a rhythm where you’re sort of ethereal in this weird way. You’re just kind of out there, floating around. It’s a bizarre feeling.”

Other aspects of the runner’s high can best be compared to the effects of daily meditation, or any other discipline that demands that the practitioner subordinate all other parts of their life to a thirst for the transcendence that only their chosen discipline can provide. For Luff, the highs that distance running offered were matched by the promise of self-sufficiency, of an activity that created its own sense of meaning and absolute necessity: “To be completely absorbed on a daily basis, and to be completely happy doing something that by definition needs or requires nothing.”

The world of long-distance runners is filled with people who dedicate their lives to the

experience that Luff describes, spending two months here and three months there, moving from one runner’s town to the next, spending summers in Boulder, Colorado, and winters in Southern California, without steady work or sustaining relationships, willing to sacrifice almost anything for a taste of the distilled transcendence that is available to those who are willing to train their bodies and minds by running hard for ten to fifteen miles a day. Familiar aspects of everyday reality and behavior are stripped bare. The runner’s mind, operating in a void for many hours every day, becomes more and more practiced in distilling things down to their essence, and to enduring pain.

The two runners ran together all that first weekend, and would later become close friends.

Santana was very different from the person Luff had expected to meet. He was gentle and

inquisitive. As he discovered things about Luff, he offered new stories that expanded the territory they had in common, like their shared love for the mountains. He looked forward to seeing his new friend in September.

Luff brought Santana to his interview with Katherine Popenoe at West College, the

ancient red brick building where the Princeton admissions office is housed. The two met there for approximately an hour, and then Popenoe accompanied the applicant downstairs.

“You know what?” Luff offered to the neatly dressed, middle-age woman who held

Santana’s fate in her hands. “He’s really a unique person.”

“Well, yeah,” Popenoe answered. “He’s very well read.” Santana’s application suggested

that he knew Norwegian; Popenoe had lived in Norway and spoke Norwegian, and the two had

exchanged a few words in that language. The admissions officer also quizzed him about the long list of books he had submitted with his application, with satisfactory results.

Luff found himself envying his new friend. “This is a really strange process,” he joked to

Popenoe. “This is great. If I knew about this, I would have skipped high school.”

As he turned to leave, another question occurred to him.

“What kind of people do this?” he asked.

Popenoe’s answer was matter-of-fact. “Well,” she said, “I really only get this type of

application from ex-cons or people in prison.”

Several weeks later, Alexi Santana received, via a post office box in St. George, a letter

informing him that his application to Princeton had been accepted. His total family contribution would be $2,010 ($1,340 from his summer savings, $170 from the sale of his artworks, $500

from his parents). Princeton would give him a grant of $12,730. His tuition, fees, and other expenses amounted to $21,100—a sum that exceeded the take-home pay that the average

American adult would make that year. The difference would come from federal loans, a Pell

Grant, and an on-campus job.

While Princeton’s offer of financial aid was undeniably generous, the timing of their

acceptance letter could not have been less convenient. On March 30, 1988, two weeks before the letter from Princeton arrived in his post office box, James Hogue appeared in court in St. George and pled guilty to receiving bicycle frames and tools that had been stolen from Tesch’s shop in San Marcos. On May 19, when 1,134 other members of the Princeton Class of 1992 were

glorying in their acceptance to one of Americas most prestigious universities and looking

forward to their last summer before college, Hogue was sentenced to a maximum term of five

years in prison; he would serve twelve months.

On the brink of escape from his life as a drifter and a petty thief living in a storage locker by the side of a highway in Utah, Hogue had been ambushed by the past. He marked his first

week in the Utah State Prison in Draper by writing a letter to Katherine Popenoe at the Princeton admissions office. “Dear Ms. Popenoe,” he wrote on the thin white-lined paper provided to

inmates by the State of Utah Corrections Department. “Your offer caused a great deal of

excitement and anticipation in my little world. If you could only know what ideas filled my mind. ...”

The author’s chief motive and preoccupation was his desire to keep Alexi Santana’s

admission to Princeton alive while his creator was in jail. He would be forced to defer

Princeton’s offer for one year, he wrote. A close friend of his had run into legal problems, and he had spent all his money in order to help him. Now, his mother in Switzerland was suffering from a serious blood ailment, and he needed to comfort her in any way that he could. “I’m just sick to think that my withdrawl [
sic
] has deprived another candidate of a place in the class,” he wrote, in what perhaps might be taken as an admission of the effect that his deception might have had on another deserving candidate.

At the same time, being locked up in jail was a powerful reminder there were worse

things in life than gaining admission to Princeton by making up a new name for yourself and a silly story about a self-educated shepherd who ran barefoot through the desert canyons. “I have come to see how precious and coveted these spots are,” he wrote. “I don’t think I appreciated this enough before now.” Here, at least, there is no reason not to take Hogue at his word. His visit to Princeton a few months earlier must have seemed like a memory of paradise compared to the

realities of being locked up in a cell in Utah. While he would not be in touch directly for a while, he warned, Princeton could reach him through his girlfriend, who would forward any

correspondence. The address he gave was a post office box in Park City, Utah, that belonged to his sister Theresa, who had hosted Hogue off and on after he fled from California, and claimed to be ignorant of his deceptions. By the end of his letter, Hogue was feeling good enough about his chances to indulge himself in some sly Latin wordplay.

“Ad astra per aspera,”
the self-educated cowboy from Nevada signed off—”to the stars through difficulties.”

It is possible that some prep-school Latin scholar in the Princeton admissions department

was able to translate the motto, and relate it to the difficulties that Santana outlined in his letter.

But it would have taken a true license plate addict to notice that the Latin phrase that appeared above Santana’s signature was the official motto of the state of Kansas, which is nearly flat and very far away from the mountains where Santana claimed to have herded sheep.

No one in the Princeton admissions office got the joke. No one ever saw the article in the

San Jose Mercury News
mentioning that a thief had been applying to Ivy League colleges under the pseudonym of Alexi Indris-Santana. The phone calls that track coach Larry Ellis received that spring had not come from Santana. They had come from James Hogue, a

twenty-nine-year-old inmate in the Utah state prison system.

IV. A Bicycle Built for Two

Alexi Indris-Santana arrived at Princeton in August of 1989, six weeks before classes

began, to work out on the track and to attend an early orientation program. There he was

interviewed by Harvey Yavener, a reporter for the Trenton
Times
. Coach Ellis had told Yavener about the barefoot runner from a ranch in Nevada, and he thought that it would make an

excellent feature for his paper. The interview took place early in August, a month when reporters on the college-sports beat are always grateful for a good story.

Dressed in running sneakers, jeans, and a white oxford shirt, the young Princeton

freshman seemed confident but shy. His eyes were hidden by a pair of dark sunglasses. He had the weather-beaten features of a person who had led a hard life, who had slept outdoors and worked as a cowboy “You have to sit under a black Arizona sky at night to know what the Milky Way really is,” Hogue told Yavener. “There are times I yearn for those open spaces. But running the backwoods here, I’ve found how beautiful this Princeton area can be,” he continued, in a soft, wistful voice, across the conference room table in the track-team office.

Hogue had lived in Switzerland, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Morocco, and several Western

states, he said. He had been educated at home. “It’s not that unusual,” he told Yavener, before providing the most complete recorded version of Alexi Santana’s mythical life. “At least, not when I was young in California. I went to nursery school and kindergarten, and then my parents decided they’d teach me at home. You have to set up a private school. I learned to read early and always had a lot of books. Some days, I’d read from morning to night. I learned some French and Italian. I never have had a TV, but I listened to a lot of music. I’d go to librarians, and they’d help me find the books I needed.”

Yavener had been covering college sports in southern New Jersey for nearly forty years.

He had never heard a story like this one before. The Princeton freshman had started running only two years earlier, while working as a wrangler on a thousand-square-mile ranch in Arizona,

where he spent weeks with just his books, his horse, the cows, and a radio for company. “I just started to run around the canyons in a pair of old tennis shoes, nothing fanatical,” he explained.

“I think I might have the talent to become a winning runner in college. But those stories about my coming in with impressive times, they’re just hearsay.”

Barely three months had elapsed since James Hogue had been released from prison in

Utah. After having violated his parole by leaving the state, he was now Alexi Santana, a

self-educated ranch hand, a gifted runner, and easily the most interesting member of the

Princeton Class of 1993.

“I’m looking forward to this adventure,” he told the readers of the Trenton
Times
. “I expect to spend a lot of happy hours here in the library, but happy hours in other things, too.”

Santana’s father was dead and his mother was ill, he said. He had no fixed address. But,

as he told the reporter that afternoon in August, he had finally found a home. “If anyone asks,”

he said, “I’ll tell them I’m from Princeton.”

V. The Roommates

Like most incoming freshmen, Ben Richardson arrived on campus that September with

new clothes, a computer, a selection of favorite books and records, and the phone numbers of high school friends who would be attending other colleges. He also brought with him the packet of material that Princeton had sent with his acceptance letter, including the little card that gave the names and addresses of his new roommates. Over the summer, Richardson had talked by

phone with Avshalom Yotam of Palo Alto, California, and Austin Nahm of New York. His third

roommate, Alexi Santana, did not have a phone number or address listed on the card.

Richardson’s new rooms were on the ground floor of Holder Hall, a Gothic stone pile

constructed around a pleasant grassy courtyard during the decade following World War I.

Arriving on campus more than a week before most of his class, Richardson saw a light in one of the windows of his suite. The next morning, as he moved his stuff into the room, he met Alexi Santana, who was just returning from his morning run. Santana told him that he ran ten miles a day. He had worked on a ranch. His father had been killed in a car crash, and his mother had recently died of leukemia.

Over the next few days, and the year that followed, it was hard not to look for clues that

might further illuminate his roommate’s unusual story. Santana’s room was neat and filled with books and CDs, and the Mexican wool blanket on his bed was always tucked in flat. At an age when few students in college are inclined or accustomed to making their beds, his roommate’s practice struck Richardson as strange.