Isolated from his first brother by misfortune and from his second by a significant age gap, Mark grew up as an only child in all but name. This circumstance may have strengthened a deeply self-reliant nature that Mark evinced early and seemed to have inherited from Space. Father and son alike kept their own counsel.
When Mark was still a preschooler, Space enrolled at St. Louis University School of Medicine, and the family moved to the Midwest. For the next year they lived in poverty in a low-income housing project near campus. Crime was rampant in their midtown neighborhood. Mark could see a small playground below from his bedroom window, but he was afraid to use it. When Sharon shopped for groceries she would honk the car’s horn outside their building until Space came down to help her carry the bags up to the flat. The stench of urine never left the elevator. The walls were so thin that at night Mark could hear the screams and weeping of a woman being beaten by her husband in a neighboring apartment.
FIVE-YEAR-OLD MARK ALLEN felt no safer inside the slum tenement building his family inhabited in St. Louis than he did outside it. The source of his fear was his father. Mark would later use the words “rough” and “abusive” to describe Space’s treatment of him. Besides administering frequent “negative reinforcement,” as the adult Mark Allen would delicately characterize his paternal handling, Space endlessly criticized his eldest son’s imperfections. He did not erupt in fits of temper. On the contrary, he was icy and distant, paying Mark little attention except to pass judgment and to express his disappointment in no uncertain terms.
Mark long repressed his memories of the worst that happened to him during these years. The details would remain lost deep inside him for almost a quarter century. But the effect that Space’s tough parenting had on his eldest son was profound. Mark internalized the judgments that his father passed on him. The self-trusting part of Mark knew he was a good kid: smart, friendly, funny, and blessed with many talents. But he struggled to fully believe in his own worth, to love himself as he deserved. There was an emptiness inside him of which he was constantly, dully aware.
To cope with this emotional undernourishment, Mark developed a strong desire for outside validation. Like many sons of fathers who withhold their blessings, he had an unquenchable thirst to distinguish himself. By the time he started school most of his greater efforts were motivated by hopes of proving his worth—to his father, to himself, and to the world. Yet nothing he did ever seemed enough.
“All along I felt I was hopelessly lost in a sea of the ordinary,” Mark once explained. “I always wanted to do something that would stand out, something others would look at and say, ‘That’s incredible.’ ”
MARK STARTED FIRST GRADE two weeks late. His family had just moved from St. Louis to Sacramento. Space had earned his medical degree and scored an internship at a hospital just down the road from the University of California–Davis, where Dave Scott’s father, Verne, was on the civil engineering faculty. Mark’s classmates did not know what to make of him. He spoke sparingly and expressed little emotion. But he was not quiet in the empty way of some kids. Mark’s silence was intense. His piercing, green-eyed stare suggested that a lot was going on behind it. He seemed to exist halfway in the reality occupied by his fellow students and halfway in some other reality, visible to himself alone.
Kids who are hard to peg attract nicknames, and Mark would have many. His first nickname at school was “the Kid,” an appellation that referred both to his scrawny body and to his inscrutability. Later he would become “Twanger” (a bastardization of “Twain,” as in Mark Twain, whose unruly curls of chestnut hair Mark Allen shared) and later still “the Enigma” and “Zen Master,” monikers recognizing the unique spiritual presence that Mark’s older peers came to see in his semiabsence from the here and now.
Mark’s new first grade classmates had been learning to read since day one of the school year. Mark did not even know the alphabet. But he knew that Space expected him to be the best student in his class, so he studied the reader he had been issued with all the focus and willpower a 6-year-old boy could muster. Before long he had surpassed everyone to become the strongest reader in the entire first grade. He tasted a delicious triumph, a feeling of satisfaction so bracing he never forgot it.
The next year the Allen family moved 100 miles southwest to Palo Alto, where Space started a residency at Stanford University. That summer the Olympics took place in Mexico City. Mark was captivated by the swimming events and the medal-winning exploits of Mark Spitz, Don Schollander, and other American heroes. By then Mark probably knew the story of his father’s swimming experience. Growing up on a farm in upstate New York during the Great Depression, Space had never learned how to stay afloat in water. After graduating from high school he enlisted in the navy to avoid being drafted into the army and possibly sent to the front line of the Korean War. But in order to join the sailors’ ranks, he first had to pass a test that consisted of swimming from the edge of a pool to the middle and back. Space survived the test, but barely.
Eighteen years later Space still feared the water. This fear did not trickle down to his first child, as parental fears often do. If anything, Space’s phobia probably made the pool even more intriguing to Mark. But it did give him a late start. At age 10 Mark could manage no more than an exhausting dog paddle. Observers would have assumed, based on his skill and his size, that he was about half his actual age.
Sharon often took Mark to a local public outdoor pool to play in the water. Mark’s favorite part of the swimming-pool experience was the diving board, which stood at the deep end. There was a rule that you had to be able to swim twenty-five yards without stopping before you were allowed into that part of the pool. This distance represented the outer limit of Mark’s swimming range. Enforcing the rule was a matter of lifeguard discretion. One day Mark was dog-paddling across the pool toward the diving board when a lifeguard called out to him, “Hey, kid! Can you swim twenty-five yards?”
Nothing made Mark more determined to do something than being told he could not do it. A mere suggestion of inability, like this lifeguard’s skeptical question, was often enough to set him to the task. I’ll show him I can swim, Mark thought. I’ll show everyone!
Mark passed the test, but barely. A short time later he spotted an advertisement for youth swim club tryouts in the Palo Alto Times. He begged his parents to take him. Within a year of his first lesson Mark had become an exceptional competitive swimmer. His meteoric progress in the pool filled him with a delicious triumph. That was reward enough, but an even greater and unexpected reward was the pride that Space, who had never before shown any pride in his son, took in Mark’s accomplishments in the water. The more Mark won, the more supportive of his swimming—and of his general being, it seemed—his father became. Mark drank up the approval thirstily.
One day, when Mark was 12 years old, Space swung by the hospital to see some patients and brought Mark with him. They first stopped by the nurses’ station, where Space introduced Mark to an attractive woman in her mid-20s.
“Mark, meet Nurse Carole,” Space said. “Everyone calls her Toot.” Addressing the woman, he continued, “Mark’s my oldest. He’s going to be an Olympic swimmer.”
Mark blushed and rolled his eyes, pretending without success to hate the overblown praise. Toot rolled her eyes with him as though to say, “He lays it on thick, doesn’t he?” Mark did not know that his father had fallen in love with the pretty nurse. Toot also did not know some things.
Space’s pride in Mark’s swimming did not last long beyond this introduction to his future stepmother. It became apparent that Mark, though gifted, would never in fact become an Olympic swimmer. Mark had fallen victim to a version of the Peter Principle, rising to the level where he was no longer the best. The ride was over. Almost as suddenly and unexpectedly as Space had gotten behind Mark’s exploits in the pool, he turned away. He stopped coming to races. He stopped listening, even pretending to listen, when Mark tried to talk about his swimming. Almost co
mpletely incapable of expressing deep feelings openly or airing grievances directly with another person—especially his father—Mark found himself powerless to alleviate the bereavement Space’s indifference caused in him. He had come to rely on the approval that winning earned him, and the loss of that approval tormented him.
Around the time Space stopped paying attention to his eldest son, Mark hit another wall as a swimmer. He became a classic athletic head case. A choker. If someone got even a half-stroke lead on him, his race was done. Without fail, if the guy next to him seemed bigger, stronger, or more focused, Mark choked. There was a fear lurking inside him that became paralyzing, utterly self-sabotaging, under the right stimulation.
Mark heard a voice in his head at the most critical moments of the race. The same confidence-crushing script played over and over: I can’t do it! This guy’s too strong! I’m going to lose again! Despite his talent, his love of swimming, his willingness to work hard, and a burning desire to win, Mark carried a deep sense of self-doubt into his racing that made him weak in the moments when he most needed to be strong. Any endurance athlete can fall prey to a voice of negativity and self-pity in crisis moments, but in Mark that mutinous inner voice had a special personal significance. It hated him.
Life improved for Mark after Space divorced Sharon, married Toot, and moved with his new wife to Elko, Nevada. Mark was required to visit his dad occasionally and dreaded each trip. His best friend, Eric Bunje, always noticed that Mark seemed out of sorts for a few days after returning to Palo Alto. But when Eric invited his friend to talk about it, a wall went up. Otherwise, with Space out of the way, Mark began to feel truly free for the first time in his life.
On weekends he and Eric planned long bike rides. Mark on his ten-speed Gitane, Eric on his Schwinn, both in street clothes, they pedaled from Mark’s home on High Street to an A&W restaurant and split a gallon of root beer, or rode to Foothills Park and ate submarine sandwiches, or dragged themselves over the coastal mountains to San Gregorio State Beach—a seventy-mile round-trip.
Mark remained dedicated to his swimming, but he needed more success, more recognition, than he was finding in the pool, so he decided to test the waters of another sport. One day the coach of the Palo Alto High School cross-country team was approached by a scrawny kid with a piercing, green-eyed stare and hair like Mark Twain’s who asked if he could race. Not join the team or train with the runners—he couldn’t do that because swim practice conflicted with cross-country practice. Just do the races. Mark’s self-doubt got the best of him during his first race, when he faked a stomachache and dropped out. But he redeemed himself at his next opportunity and soon became one of the team’s top runners—logging just a few runs per week on his own.
Mark’s explorations at this time were not limited to the physical but included the spiritual. If he seemed to others to exist partly in another reality, it was because he did, showing a strong spiritual sensibility when he was still quite young. One of Mark’s childhood friends observed an early sign of this sensibility in the strong pull that nature exerted on him; before Mark had even reached his teens he demonstrated an adult appreciation for the beauty of a fiery sunset or the grace of a gliding hawk. Later Mark developed a curiosity about religions and spiritual traditions. The same childhood friend noticed that when Mark visited the homes of religious friends, he asked lots of questions. He felt pulled toward sages, prophets, and wise men depicted in movies, figures like Chief Sitting Bull. Space’s father no doubt intrigued Mark. An osteopath, he had been more or less adopted into a Native American tribe in New Mexico and had learned the tribal language, spiritual ways, and other customs.
After her divorce Sharon chose spiritual exploration as her primary means of self-reinvention. Through her Mark was exposed to Zen Buddhism and transcendental meditation. On his own he discovered the works of Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist and best-selling author who narrated psychedelic stories of a youthful shamanistic apprenticeship in Mexico. Mark had been forced to attend Sunday school briefly when he was younger and had chafed against it. Christianity was too rule-bound and institutionalized for his taste. He much preferred the primitiveness of the shamanism Castaneda described, the ubiquity of nature in its lore and rituals, and the immediacy of the supernatural. Too bad such practices existed only in Mexico and other faraway places.
Mark hungered for a spiritual path he could really latch on to. He judged each one he sampled by feel. He knew the right path would feel right when he found it. It would lead him into deep connectedness with all things and would fill the emptiness that troubled his soul, that became a confidence-crushing inner voice of doubt in competition, and that motivated all of his searches in life. But nothing seemed a perfect match. So he kept searching.
Midway through his senior year of high school Mark left home, with Sharon’s hands-off support, to participate in tryouts for a lifeguarding job in San Diego. He qualified and returned to Southern California immediately after his high school graduation to laze away his days on the beach for $6 an hour until it was time to begin his studies at UC–San Diego in the fall. He lived in a low-rent apartment in the town of Oceanside with Gary Hardin, a fellow lifeguard and a former swimming teammate in Palo Alto. The days passed in a haze of mellow pleasure.
Mark had recently learned to surf. His first ride was an awakening. He was instantly hooked and quickly bought a board. Surfing brought Mark a joy he had never experienced in any other hobby—not playing baseball, not taking kung fu lessons, not riding a unicycle, not even swimming. Surfing had the element of exertion that Mark liked in swimming, but it was also thrilling, a pure adrenaline rush. And there was something wonderful about the idea of taking a free ride on water instead of struggling through it—something magical, mystical, about partnering with nature to create these little performances of ephemeral beauty.
For Mark, the pleasure of surfing was completely intrinsic to the activity, whereas the satisfaction of swimming was largely contingent on winning. Only winning really satisfied Mark in the pool because that was the point, especially for those who were attracted to the sport as a means to be extraordinary. Winning swim races momentarily answered in the affirmative the silent question that followed him everywhere: Do I have something to offer in this world? On his surfboard Mark was filled, also briefly, tantalizingly, with a very different feeling: peace. It did not answer the question that dogged him. It made him forget it.
Mark spent as much time as he could riding waves throughout the summer. Years later an interviewer would ask him what he thought he might have been if he had not become a triathlete. A surf bum, he said, only half joking.
MARK QUIT SWIMMING after his first year at UCSD. The coach was terrible and the athletics department unsupportive, asking him to pay his own way to the national championships, for which he qualified despite training only a few days a week. Enough of chlorine. Mark would rather surf, where he couldn’t lose. But his decision was short-lived. The athletic department hired an infectiously enthusiastic young coach, Bill Morgan, who had himself just graduated from UCSD. Bill befriended Mark and persuaded him to get back into the pool. It wasn’t a hard sale. Swimming was still Mark’s best escape from the sea of the ordinary.
Mark wound up using all four years of his college eligibility, and achieved some of his finest successes as a swimmer, qualifying for the championships of the NAIA in ten events. But he would have done more, perhaps even won a few of those championship events, if his shaky confidence had not bedeviled him still. In race after race Mark started strong and finished poorly. His talent and fitness would carry him to the decisive last lap, and then that voice of doubt and fear would enter his head, and he would fall apart.
I can’t do it! This guy’s too strong! I’m going to lose again!
Mark’s most spectacular collapse occurred during his senior year in a 200-yard individual medley, a grueling event that comprises a 50-yard butterfly leg, a 50-yard backstroke leg (Mark’s specialty), a 50-yard breaststroke
leg, and finally a 50-yard freestyle leg. He started incredibly well, reaching the 150-yard mark in 1:27, on pace for a nation-leading time of 1:56. But what should have been his fastest leg, the closing 50 freestyle, was his slowest—a pathetic thirty-two-second slog, putting him at the wall in 1:59. Still a great time, but not what might have been.
Bill Morgan nearly had to help Mark climb out of the pool, so weakened was he from his implosion.
“What happened?” Bill asked.
Mark threw up his arms in speechless frustration.
MARK GREETED HIS GRADUATION from college with both relief and dread. On the one hand, he felt relieved to be freed from the grind of taking classes that were not always his own first choices (he had majored in biology at his father’s quiet insistence) and the “black-line fever” of swimming endless laps in the pool. He looked forward to having more time to surf and hang out with friends, enjoying the beach-centered, cannabis-scented San Diego lifestyle. On the other hand, the pressure to follow his dad’s plan for his life intensified. Space wanted his eldest son to become a doctor too, even though it seemed to Mark that he did not really like being a doctor himself.
Every few weeks Space phoned Mark to have the same conversation.
“Have you decided what you’re going to do with your life?” he would ask.
“No, Dad. Not yet.”
In his first summer out of college Mark reluctantly struck a compromise. He worked full time as a lifeguard and took surfing trips to Mexico and Hawaii. But he also studied for the Medical College Admission Test. Mark dragged himself to the university library several times a week to listen to study tapes. Again and again he would snap out of daydreams and realize he hadn’t absorbed a single word in minutes. Why am I doing this? he asked himself.
Blessed—or, in this case, cursed—with a steel-trap mind, Mark aced the test despite his halfhearted preparation. Only then, when the two conflicting plans for his life (or rather his father’s plan and his own unscripted preference) formed a crossroads, did Mark discover that he just couldn’t do it—could not bear to give himself over to four years of medical school, several more years of internship and residency, and after that a career that he knew he would loathe as much as his dad hated his own career in medicine.
Iron War Page 5