Running on the beach the first week of track and field practice has a similar feel to it. There are so few distance runners on a team dominated by sprinters and jumpers and throwers, the leftover remnants of the standout football and basketball programs. We awkward distance-running few are misfits mostly, too thin, too short, too clumsy for other sports. The distance runners are mostly the immigrant kids, the misfits, the ones who could never make the basketball team. We are Guatemalan and Ethiopian, Mexican, Salvadoran, Korean, and Italian/Dutch/French/Dope Fiend. Getahun is the only other serious runner on the team, the only other one who wants to win races and isn’t just trying to get out of PE. He escaped the civil war in Ethiopia and moved to the United States where he lives now with an uncle in Inglewood, goes to school and works a job at a tuxedo shop in the Fox Hills Mall. We become fast friends. I stopped hanging around the kids from the Bowl after the motorcycle accident. They’re not bad guys but I knew I wasn’t going to make a change if I didn’t change the company I kept.
Getahun and I climb over steep hills in the empty neighborhood cleared of houses beneath jumbo jets hanging in the sky above us heading out to sea like rumbling pterodactyls while we sweat and pant in the salt air heavy with the smell of decaying seaweed and the occasional rotting seal washed up in the sand. The runs are pleasant. The thirst, the ancient feeling of movement, the commitment to the Hard Task, the relief as I stretch in the grass after a six-mile run, exactly young, exactly a body in the sun.
Interval workouts are something else entirely. They are a brush with death, with failure, with the pain that keeps a body earthbound despite the heady plans of the mind. Halfway through the second interval of the eight-by-four-hundred-yard set we are given the first week of practice, as I begin to tie up, it hits me that there is going to be nothing fun about this. It’s just going to hurt. It feels unfair because I’ve already joined the team. I’ve already told the family, Laura, Drew, everyone, that track is my sport and I can’t very well quit because interval training is too hard. By the fourth interval, an ache begins to set in, a depression that there is no refuge. A sinking nausea. A weight in my legs as I feel the burn of lactic acid like I’m fighting against taut cords, fluttery and rigid, pulling me backward. By the eighth interval, the physical pain turns to confusion, a tendency to lose track of time. I look around for a soft place for my thoughts and there is none.
It’s here in this place, in this quiet frenzy at the edge of my body’s limit, that I find something surprising. Anger.
A recurring image comes to mind. There is an empty room with three wooden chairs in it. My father is sitting in one, my brother is in the next, and there is a third chair, which is empty, reserved for me. They look up at me as if to say, “You’re next.” There is a blue floor and a shaft of light falling from a high window and I realize the room is a jail cell. I pump my arms and grit my teeth, feeling the spit fall from my mouth, and think, I. Will. Not. Become. You. I round the turn, dizzy and out of breath, focusing on the empty room and their faces, sad, expectant, like a prophecy I can’t avoid.
This becomes my ritual on the track after school on interval workout days. A light fog falls over my brain, a quiet storm in the distance as Getahun and I warm up. There is a sphere in my chest, a small defined space that floats quietly, containing something. I think about remaining small forever. That I will never grow. That I will never be taller. That I will be here, stuck forever. There is no future for me. No options. No choices. I consider the dream of faraway people and places, the chance to walk among them, a chance I will miss because I am destined for mediocrity, for prison, for rehab, for jail and a squandered life. I squeeze my eyes hard and put it all in the sphere. And then, with sweat falling in my face, when the burn in my lungs sets in and I see the final straightaway, the white wooden stands to the right, our coach standing at the finish line with his stopwatch while my legs tie up and my lungs burn, I let it out. I empty the sphere. And there on the track, I feel the anger consume me, the helplessness. The desire to break free becomes like a scream turned to movement. I pump my arms, I feel something electric in my legs and I lean forward and picture the room, the chairs, the place waiting for me, the place I am destined to end up no matter what I do, a feeling that makes me able to run until I fall over.
* * *
I DON’T KNOW if this place is one my brother is going to leave behind since he was kicked out of rehab after nine months for having a girlfriend. They moved to Oregon, he and Tiffany, where the rent was cheaper and they could get a place together. They stayed with Mom awhile then found an apartment on the edge of town between the fairgrounds and the railroad tracks. He got a job working at a mobile home plant that he says isn’t so bad except that it’s cold when it rains because the plant is outside and he accidently drove a nail through his hand one day.
“Man, I don’t know if this is what I want, little bro,” he tells me over the phone. “I mean, school sucks but this sucks more.” He tells me he’s still sober, which is good because we were all scared he was going to die and now he merely seems miserable.
I met Tiffany once at a sober dance in the Clare courtyard. “Sober dances” were what they called the parties they had without drugs or alcohol. There was a DJ setting up lights when I got there, people putting out sodas and pretzels when Tony emerged from a hallway screaming, “Little bro!” He ran to me and hugged me hard like I was his best friend on earth. “The man has arrived! Let’s get you some punch! You ready to rock this town?”
I could feel how much he loved me, how much he felt like we were two survivors of something. “I hear you’re kicking ass in school, man. That’s so great! I’m so proud of you.” I don’t have the heart to be mad at him anymore and something about being out of the house in Oregon makes it easier to see him this way: as a kindred spirit, a person who understands something no one else in the world could.
He looked handsome with his black hair and tan face, less gaunt without the drugs in his system. Behind him was a short blond girl with a mod haircut shaved up on the back of her scalp, huge swooping bangs falling across her face. She had five earrings in her left ear and countless necklaces and bracelets. “So you’re the one I hear all about? Give me a hug, little brother.” She seemed to think of me as family from the beginning, like a sister I never met.
We danced the wop to Cameo and did the running man to Bobby Brown, swirling around with the other teenage Dope Fiends lost in the music. I liked her. They slow danced and she stared up at him with dreamy eyes, whispering something in his ear that made them both laugh. It was obvious they were in love. When they were kicked out, they were given a choice to end it or leave. They chose to leave.
Dad says he’s playing with fire leaving rehab like that. It may be true, but I understand it. If someone told me I had to choose between school and Laura, I would choose Laura. I don’t think they remember how big it feels, to be seen by another for the first time, to look into the face of someone who sees not some snot-nosed punk with a funny haircut but a man, full of promise and power and tragedy.
When Tiffany got pregnant a few months later, she called Bonnie because she didn’t have a mother to call. She was abandoned as a child and hadn’t seen her mother in a decade so she didn’t know where else to turn. She said she was scared but excited by the idea of becoming a mother herself. Bonnie tried to reason with her, saying, “Are you sure you’re ready for this kind of responsibility? Don’t you want a life? You’re only fifteen years old.”