My excitement lasted about five minutes. Empty boxcars were boring and smelled like piss. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, and still the train sped on. I had to get off this thing. Peering out the open door, I thought about jumping. I pictured myself hitting the ground and rolling, like the guys I’d seen on TV. I looked ahead, hoping to see a soft place to land, but I saw only rocks and hard-baked dirt and scrubby bushes—all of them flashing by quickly. The only thing to do was dangle from the handle near the door and try to ease myself to the ground.
I grabbed the cold steel with a sweaty palm and swung out of the railcar. Now I was hanging over the moving ground, with the speed of the train pressing me against the boxcar. I realized that if I let go, I’d probably end up under the wheels of the train. But I couldn’t swing my leg up to the open doorway and climb back up. My grip was slipping. I let one sneaker scrape along the ground, trying to get a sense of the speed of the train until I couldn’t hold on any longer. I let go and landed on my feet at a run, taking lunging step after lunging step as I fought to keep my balance. Somehow I stayed upright while the train sped away from me.
“Yeah!” I shouted as I slowed to a trot. I raised my arms. I was invincible, a superhero. I was also, I realized, a hell of a long way from home.
Vibrating with adrenaline, I took off down the center of the track back toward Attica. I ran and ran, thinking I’d spot my ugly apartment building around each next bend. Every so often, I stopped and walked, then I’d force myself to run again. I ran for almost two hours until, at last, I saw our place. Not long after I let myself in and flopped onto our couch, my mother walked in.
“I got two cinnamon buns from downstairs. Day old, but just as good.” She held up a small paper bag. “How was your day?”
“Okay.”
“What have you been up to?”
“Nothing.”
It’s not that I thought I’d be in trouble if I told her what I’d done; I never got in trouble with Momma. But this adventure was something I wanted to keep to myself: the train ride and the rush of the jump and the miles and miles I had run to get home.
- - - -
Before eighth grade started, my mother asked me if I wanted to go live with my father, my stepmother, Molly, and my stepsister, Dina, in California. I don’t know whose idea it was. I’d been to see my dad a few times and we’d had fun together: he’d taken me to Disneyland and the beach. He was not affectionate like Momma, but I liked it out there. More than anything, I was excited that moving to California meant I would get to play organized sports. My mother and Coke were never in tune with what that entailed: uniforms and practices and games and schedules. I told Momma I wanted to go, then felt awful for saying it. She cried when I left, but somehow, I also sensed her relief. She would have more time for her projects if I wasn’t underfoot. I knew how much her work meant to her. I got on the plane sick with guilt over leaving her—and bewildered that she could just let me go.
I signed up for Pop Warner football as soon as I got to California, even though the only football I had ever seen was on television. I was almost six feet tall and skinny as a rake handle, and I barely made the weight limit—125 pounds. I saw little playing time, but I liked how it felt to be a part of a team, and I enjoyed the practices—especially the running. One day after practice I was out doing some extra laps around the field while I waited for my stepmom to pick me up. I noticed the school cross-country coach watching me.
“Hey!” he shouted to me when I got close. “You look more like a runner than a football player. Why don’t you come out for my team?”
I went to my first cross-country practice the next day. I wore my football cleats because I didn’t have any running shoes. One of the other boys mumbled, “Nice shoes,” as we took off on a three-mile trail run. I didn’t care. I was just happy to be running. By the time that first workout was over, I knew I had found where I belonged.
- - - -
I remember my first race, the chaos of elbows and knees when the starter pistol fired, the jostling for position as dozens of boys tried to squeeze onto the narrow trail. Several hundred yards into the race, I tripped and fell. I tried to scramble to my feet, but it was like being caught in big surf. I kept getting knocked down. A shoe landed on my hand and spikes punctured my skin. I looked up to see who the hell had just stepped on me and spotted a kid in bright green shorts speeding away. When I finally got up and ran again, I was powered by something new and potent—the rocket fuel of adrenaline and anger.
I surged forward, catching and passing runner after runner. I was flying—until I came to a stream. Since I had never run a cross-country race before and had never gotten my feet wet on a run, I didn’t know what to do. I stopped abruptly, which caused the boy behind me to barrel into me and knock me over.
“Move, asshole,” someone said as I tried once again to get to my feet. I watched the other runners splash through the water without missing a step. One of my teammates passed me.
“Come on, Charlie,” he yelled.
C’mon, Charlie, I said to myself. C’mon, Charlie. I got up and ran again—picking my way through the stream on my toes, then lengthening my stride when I hit the trail. Now I had room to move. The field had spread out, and for a few minutes I was alone in the woods. I heard my feet hitting the dirt, and my rhythmic breathing. I felt myself moving with a kind of animal grace. When I emerged from the trees into an open area, I spotted the lead pack of six or seven boys. And in the middle of that group, I saw the kid in the green shorts. I was going to catch him.
Just as I closed in, he glanced back and saw me running in full attack mode. He took off, shooting right to the front of the group. I tried to push harder, but my legs were suddenly leaden, as if I were trying to run through thigh-deep mud. Green Shorts crossed the finish in first place. Having my blood on his spikes hadn’t slowed him down.
I lurched across the finish line in fifth place and doubled over with hands on my knees, trying to get my breath. When I straightened up, I saw Green Shorts walking right toward me. Oh, shit. What’s this?
“Good race,” he said, giving me a slight lift of his chin, before walking on.
Good race. Good race. Those two little words changed my life. I had gotten recognition for my effort, for refusing to give up. I never lost another race that season, and I went on to win the sectional qualifier for the Junior Olympics. At the state meet, I came in thirteenth. Not bad for a rookie year, but I wanted more. I wanted to be the fastest.
I played basketball on the school team during the winter, but it was mostly so I would be in good shape for track and field in the spring. In my first-ever track meet, I won the half mile, the mile, and the triple jump. My teammates smacked me on the back, and my coach told me that I was a naturally gifted runner and that I could be really fast if I worked hard. When I showed my three blue ribbons to Dad, he seemed more surprised than impressed. I hoped he would come to see one of my meets, but he never did. I went undefeated that season.
At the end of the school year, my father announced we were moving back to North Carolina so he could start a new job working with his brother. I was upset because I wanted to run Junior Olympics in California so I could race against some of the guys who’d beaten me in cross-country. But Dad’s decision was final. I felt better when my coach told me I could run in the North Carolina JOs if I could get there in time for the sectional meet. I didn’t mind moving as long as I could run. At the sectionals, I won the half mile and the mile. When I found my father in the crowd, he said, “Good job . . . but if you had just pushed the pace a little harder on lap three, you could have gone faster by a second or two.”
I threw myself into high school and into doing anything that I thought might make my father proud. I made the varsity football, basketball, baseball, and track teams. I produced, wrote, and performed a morning news show on the school’s closed-circuit TV network. I was clas
s president my sophomore and junior years and student-body president my senior year. I was top ten in my class of four hundred and voted Best All Around in the senior class. I was recruited by several colleges to play football, and I got an early acceptance to my dream school and family alma mater—the University of North Carolina.
On paper, I was a perfect kid, Mr. Wonderful. Except Mr. Wonderful was not what I felt like. Each new accomplishment and accolade brought only momentary relief, followed by the certainty that I was not doing enough. When I lived with Mom, I was never anything but myself, but with Dad, being myself felt inadequate. My father did little to refute that notion. He could, especially when he’d been drinking, flay me with a few choice words about a blown layup or bad pass, an A-minus instead of an A. I thought he focused on the negative; he saw it as just being honest. His dad had been that way, too. The grand Engle tradition: praise was for sissies; disparagement, ridicule—now that would make you a man.
Toward the end of football season senior year, I got caught with a beer in my hand at the State Fair in Raleigh and the coach suspended me for one game. My father was furious and we had a huge argument. I decided to run away, and I urged my girlfriend to come with me. We had only been dating for a few months, but things had gotten serious quickly. She was a senior with a lot to lose, but all that mattered in the moment was getting away. We loaded up her old Ford Pinto and drove south to Daytona Beach. In Daytona, nobody checked IDs, so even though we were only seventeen, we stocked up on rum and pineapple juice and got drunk in our motel room. I got a job as a busboy, but after two weeks of pretending to be grown-ups, we realized we had to go home. We hadn’t even called our parents to let them know we were safe, and that cruelty weighed on both of us.
- - - -
My father ignored me for several days after my return—until one afternoon when I pulled into our driveway after football practice. He was outside, getting something from the trunk of his car. I took my time gathering up my books and my backpack, hoping he would just go back into the house and leave me alone. But when I looked up, he was glaring at me with his arms crossed. His face was red. Reluctantly, I got out of my car.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he said slowly.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your problem.”
“It is my problem!” he shouted. “You just blew any chance you had for a scholarship. You blew your shot at playing college ball.”
“All right! I know!” I yelled. “I don’t give a shit!”
He took several steps toward me and drew one leg back to kick me. I dodged his foot, and the momentum of his missed swipe upended him. I saw the slick soles of his penny loafers as his legs went into the air and heard the sickening thud when he hit the asphalt. I didn’t know what to do so I ran to my van and backed into the street. Before I drove away, I looked back and saw my father scrambling to his feet.
I knew he was right. This was a monumental screwup. By missing a few key games, I’d ruined my chances of playing college football. I had also been a candidate for the prestigious UNC Morehead Scholarship, which would have given me a free ride to UNC. I’d blown that, too. I had made a huge mess of things. But I knew I could redeem myself in college. All I had to do was study hard, make good grades, and stay out of trouble.
CHAPTER 2
Moderation means small, non-habit-forming amounts. That’s not you.
—CHAD HARBACH, The Art of Fielding
I arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a seventeen-year-old freshman, half expecting a WELCOME CHARLIE ENGLE! banner to greet me. In only a few weeks at UNC I learned one troubling truth: I was average—at best. Four thousand shiny overachievers had descended on the campus, and way too many of them were smarter than me, better looking than me, and, it pained me to admit, more athletic than me.
I did get an invitation to try out as a walk-on for the football team, but soon after school started, I sprained my ankle in a pickup basketball game and football was out. I had missed my chance, unlikely as it may have been. What I should have done was go out for the cross-country team. I could have carried on the family tradition and kept myself in good shape. I thought I could make the team, but I doubted I could ever live up to my grandfather’s legacy. I would have been training on a course that was named after him. I thought it would be easier to not even try than to risk failing.
- - - -
Several weeks into my first semester, I learned how to play backgammon. I also turned eighteen. For me, both these things translated into opportunities to drink. When I wasn’t pounding shots in the downtown bars, I was in the halls of my dorm, hunched over a backgammon board. Backgammon, as we played it, was a drinking game—BEER-gammon—with a complex set of rules and wagers that all led to the players getting shitfaced. Roll Acey-Deucy, drink. Roll Boxcars, drink. Roll Double Ducks, drink. Loser drinks, winner drinks, drinker drinks. I don’t know if I was any good at the game, but I was a champion, varsity, first-string, starting-lineup, all-conference drinker. I had found my place to shine.
Despite my drinking, I went out for JV basketball, coached by Roy Williams, and made the team. It was an incredible time for UNC hoops: Michael Jordan, James Worthy, and Sam Perkins were all on varsity, playing for Coach Dean Smith. I knew I wasn’t ever going to compete with those guys, but I wanted to be part of the team. I decided to be a team manager instead of a player. I hoped to move up to varsity eventually. I had a family legacy there. My uncle had been a varsity manager in the 1960s. Yes, I was sitting behind the bench and handing out towels and water bottles, but I was giving them to some of the greatest basketball players of all time. I was a tiny part of the team, but I felt overjoyed when they won the 1982 NCAA Championship.
I loved it—but I loved drinking more. I was occasionally so out of it at practice that I made mistakes on the stat sheets. Four JV managers were vying for one open varsity slot. I didn’t get it. I didn’t deserve it.
At the start of my sophomore year, my roommate Mike and I checked out the fraternity scene. We bounced from house to house, party to party, happy to provide entertainment for the brothers whose mission it was to get the new guys trashed. I decided to pledge Sigma Phi Epsilon; they were jocks who got decent grades and always seemed to have pretty girls hanging around. I liked that most of them wore jeans and T-shirts, not preppy penny loafers and button-downs.
I was happy to be a part of this group of guys who would watch my back—even if it was because I was bent over puking on my shoes. The drinking age was about to go up to twenty-one, and since bars would no longer be available to me, I was pleased to have snagged a guaranteed place to drink in the moldy basement of the frat house.
Road trips were big with the Sig Ep boys. My first one was to Boone in the mountains of North Carolina for a day of skiing and partying with the Appalachian State brothers. We loaded a keg onto our chartered bus, cranked up the Stones, and settled in for the two-hour trip.
About halfway to Boone, Steve, the kid next to me, fished something out of his pocket. “Want a bump?” He held up a small plastic contraption that looked like some kind of secret decoder ring.
“What?”
“Blow.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sure,” I said, not wanting to expose my cluelessness.
Steve lifted the bullet-shaped device to the light like a jeweler holding a gem. The sun revealed a small amber-colored round chamber at the bottom, about half-full of powder. A tiny handle on the side looked like the key on a windup toy. Steve twisted the handle, showing me the white powder in the top of the chamber waiting to be . . . what? What was I supposed to do now?
Steve saw my confusion and held up a hand in the way that said, Pay attention, you’re about to learn something. He put the bullet up to his left nostril, tilted his head back, inhaled, and closed his eyes. “Ahhhhhhh.”
He reloaded the bullet and handed it over. Self-consciously, I put it up to m
y right nostril, blocked my left, and breathed in. Steve gave me an expectant look, so I nodded with what I hoped was convincing enthusiasm, showing him I had indeed gotten the “bump.”
He took back the device, fiddled with it, and handed it over again. “Other side.”
I inhaled the powder, then remembered to close my eyes and tilt my head back the way he had. “Thanks, man.” I returned the bullet to him.
I sat back and waited for the drug to take hold. Twenty minutes and two beers later, I was still waiting. Maybe it was all the alcohol I had consumed, or maybe it was bad coke, but I felt no different. If this was all cocaine did, who needed it? Not me. I had drinking. I understood drinking. Alcohol did exactly what it was supposed to do; it numbed everything. Drinking was reliable and I was excellent at it. I could outdrink most anyone, and I learned early on that the best way to recover from a hangover was to start drinking again. I remember being relieved that the coke hadn’t affected me. I didn’t want it—or anything else—to distract me from drinking.
Two weeks later, in the back of a bar on Henderson Street in downtown Chapel Hill, one of my buddies offered me coke again. To be sociable, I snorted two quick lines through a rolled-up dollar bill. After a minute or two of my feeling nothing, a klieg light switched on in my brain. I remember the electric tang of the lime I bit into before I downed the liquid fire of a tequila shot. And the way “Roxanne” seemed to come out of my ears instead of from the jukebox speakers. And that pitcher of cold beer with its drops of condensation on the side shining like rhinestones in the blue light of the bar’s neon PABST BLUE RIBBON sign. I’d never seen anything so beautiful.
Suddenly, I had plans—big, big plans. I remember the looks on my friends’ faces—Tom and Lenny and Carl. Really, did anyone have cooler friends than me? I reeled off my recipe for greatness. I would study hard, make straight A’s, get back into prime running shape, volunteer at the local homeless shelter, get a part-time job, pay my father back, save the whales, find a cure for every god-awful thing that made nice people sick.
Running Man Page 2