After making certain there was nothing left to smoke, I tossed the glass pipe into the brush and started walking in the direction of lights. My plan was simple: keep my head down and my feet moving. After about ten minutes, an SUV slowed and pulled up alongside me. I glanced over and saw the passenger window coming down. In the driver’s seat was an obese, bare-chested white man. I had a sickening feeling that he was naked below the waist, too.
“Need a ride, sweetie?” he said in a high-pitched voice.
I ignored the man and walked faster.
The car continued to cruise alongside me. “Sweetie?”
I refused to make eye contact.
“Asshole,” he yelled in a much deeper voice, and sped off. Immediately, I went from scared to indignant. Who was the pervert calling an asshole? You come back here and I’ll kick your fat ass, you fat fuck. I kept walking, jangling with adrenaline. I had to get off the streets. I had to get some sleep—and I had to think of a story to explain away my four-day absence.
As I walked, I started throwing out what I called Santa Claus prayers—the ones that promise, “If you get me out of this mess, I will never, ever, screw up again.” The universe pretty much always came through for me, even as I failed, over and over, to hold up my end of the deal.
After a few minutes, I spotted a big lit sign in the block ahead: MASSEY CADILLAC. I couldn’t believe it. Somehow I’d ended up in front of my workplace. It seemed like colossal good luck, luck I didn’t deserve—but later, after all of this was over, I came to believe that some higher power, some benevolent, all-knowing super-Santa, had led me to the one place that would help me get to safety.
I finally knew where I was. From here, I could get back to my hotel. Two days later, I picked up my car in a tow yard, paying two traffic tickets and the towing fee, more than $600 total. My car had about $1,000 in damage.
Pam pretended it didn’t happen because denial was the only way she had left to deal with my relapses. My boss forgave me. He knew I had a drug problem, but I was also his best technician and I made him a lot of money. My poor battered 4Runner, which so often took the brunt of my bad behavior, also seemed to forgive me.
- - - -
I watched in awe as my son, Brett, emerged into the world. I felt transformed, as if I had gone a lifetime with diffuse emotions that had been looking for a place to light—and now here it was. Brett. I knew what I felt. I loved him. I was happy.
I would never drink or use drugs again. I was certain of that. Now that the hollow place inside me was so thoroughly filled, how could I possibly even consider putting poison into my body? I stayed home with Pam and Brett for a wonderful week before returning to Wichita, Kansas, where I was in the middle of a huge hail-repair job. By then, I had started my own company and had several guys, including Garrett and Shayne, both of whom had been sober for about a year, working with me. We were sharing a furnished apartment in Wichita.
I loved the physicality of the work and the satisfaction I felt from a job well done. I talked about Brett all the time, and the more I talked about him, the more I knew that I would stay sober. I was so grateful to have that dark part of my life behind me.
On July 10, Pam and Brett came to visit. I had reserved a suite in a hotel and took a few days off from work. I remember lying on the bed with Pam, Brett between us, his arms and legs swimming in the air, like an upended turtle. I felt overwhelmed with love, wanting to do everything in my power to keep my little family safe and secure.
So I was astonished to find myself driving down the tenement-lined streets of northeast Wichita after dropping Pam and Brett at the airport. The car seemed to be making turns on its own. I knew I didn’t want to do what I was about to do, but I knew I was going to do it anyway. So much work. Such a great dad. Give yourself a little treat.
Six days later, I was sitting on the ground in a parking lot numbly watching police search my 4Runner, which now had several bullet holes in it. I know there had been a dealer and a gun and the pop, pop, pop when he fired it at me. I know I had floored the gas and fishtailed down the street to get away. I remembered stumbling out of my $15-a-night motel, which I could no longer pay for, and realizing my car was missing.
The funny thing was, I had called the police myself to report my car stolen—and they had found it. Now they were pulling out the things I assured them the thieves had left behind, including my crack pipe—the sight of which caused such a seismic jolt of want in me that it took all of my strength not to leap up and rip it from the cop’s hand.
When I had gone through treatment at the Beacon House eighteen months earlier, I had embraced every aspect of the program except for the “higher power” part. I was an atheist and I figured that higher powers and Gods were for people too weak to help themselves. I didn’t need that kind of outside aid. I was a strong guy. Just point me to the goal and I would get there myself.
But at last I could see that my way had not worked. My beautiful new son could not keep me clean. Nor could my wife or my father or my business or my ego. I was twenty-nine years old, and I was sitting in a gutter, in filthy clothes, my fingers black and blistered. For the first time in my life, I put my head down and said a prayer. It wasn’t one of my save-my-ass-just-this-one-time bargaining prayers. It was a real prayer, a simple prayer. I asked to have this craving for drugs and alcohol taken away. I asked to not die.
The police actually sent me on my way. I was dazed and exhausted but I knew something important had happened. I had felt the prison gate of addiction swing open. I don’t understand how it happened, but I stepped through that door.
I found an AA meeting that night. Most of the speakers recounted the usual blackouts and family betrayals.
Then a man got up and started to talk about passion. He said we had to find a spiritual connection to something that we loved. He said to think about all the time we spent using and planning to use and recovering from using: “Now fill that time with something else. Something meaningful.”
In the morning I got up and put on my running clothes. I walked out of the apartment complex and felt the heat rising off the city streets. I turned down a side street, pushed the timer on my watch, and started running. My legs felt shaky and weak, my breathing labored. I began to sweat profusely. My entire body itched as poison oozed out of my pores. I ran for twenty minutes, then turned around and battled a hot headwind all the way back. By the time I got close to my apartment, I was nauseated and oddly chilled. I doubled over in pain, gasping for breath. A woman in a minivan stopped to ask if I was all right.
“Just overheated,” I replied, thinking about what I could have said: Just coming down off a six-day crack binge. “Thanks, though.” I waved weakly.
I went to three more AA meetings that day, and for the next six months I sat in on at least one recovery meeting a day. I found myself a sponsor who forced me to work the 12 steps. John didn’t take crap from me. He told me that if I didn’t do what he told me to do, I’d have to find another sponsor. I followed his rules—and when I felt shaky and desperate at 2:00 a.m., I called him.
I flew home every couple of weekends to see Pam and Brett. Pam understood that this was how I had to do it. I had to be removed from my life while I went about the hard work of saving it. I spent my time working, going to meetings—and running. I ran along the river, I ran through cornfields. I ran alone and in a group. Every day, I looked forward to getting out there, to losing myself in the rhythm of it. As I ran, I remembered what that man had said at that first AA meeting about finding a passion—something that would matter so much that you would do anything not to lose it, something so precious and powerful that it would override any impulse to use again.
Gradually, I saw that I already had it. Running. I loved running. I needed running. Nothing else made me feel so clean, so focused, and so happily spent. In those six months of recovery, I never missed a day. Garrett and Shayne teased me about
switching addictions. They laughed at me when I came back from a run, pumped up, talking fast about my latest epiphanies about my relationships or my sobriety or my business. But it wasn’t a matter of simply trading addictions. The high that I experienced after a long, hard run—that effervescence of endorphins that had eluded me for so long—was purer and sweeter than any pleasure I had ever felt on drugs. Drugs and alcohol had been my way out. Running would be my way through.
CHAPTER 5
In the space between chaos and shape, there was another chance.
—JEANETTE WINTERSON, The World and Other Places: Stories
In the three years after my day of reckoning in Wichita, I ran marathons in Jacksonville, Des Moines, Pikes Peak, Dallas, Calgary, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Cancún, Maui, Honolulu—the list goes on. I celebrated Thanksgiving at the Atlanta Marathon, Carnival at the Mardi Gras Marathon in New Orleans, St. Patrick’s Day at the Shamrock Marathon in Virginia Beach, Patriots’ Day in Boston. Any event near a hail job, I jumped on it. Through it all, I stayed sober. Race after race, I forced myself to bypass the tempting beer tents—a finish-line fixture—and go back to my room, shower, change, and head out to an AA meeting. Nothing about it was easy; everything about it was necessary.
At home, I pounded out miles on the broad trails along the Chattahoochee River or on the single track that veined the hills above it. Sometimes I drove out to Stone Mountain Park, ran the perimeter of the mountain base, then went full throttle up a steep trail to the mountain’s bare rock summit. My runs kept me—and probably Pam—sane.
My training philosophy was to run as hard as fucking possible every time I went out. I craved depletion; anything less left me anxious. I knew nothing about the benefits of speed work or aerobic thresholds or hill repeats or tapering. Pacing was not in my vocabulary. My results reflected my ignorance. I’d run balls out during the first three-quarters of a race, then find myself breaking down in the final miles. I felt helpless—that freight train of hurt coming on: the lactic-acid burn, the rubber legs, the slow-mo crash.
The more I raced, the more I cared about my times. I started to obsess about breaking three hours in the marathon. I got close, but race after race, I found myself lurching across the finish line several minutes over. The San Diego marathon nearly did me in. Pam and Brett were there to greet me as I came in at 3:01. Three. Oh. One. Unbelievable. They were bouncy and excited. I was pissed off.
“The headwind,” I said. “. . . And this huge blister on my heel . . .”
Brett asked to sit on my shoulders, so I hoisted him up even as I continued to rail against the factors that had conspired against me.
Brett tapped me on the head. “Daddy.”
“If I hadn’t started so far back in the pack . . .”
“Daddy!”
“I should have . . .”
“Daddy. Daddy!”
“What?” I said sharply.
“Daddy, did you have fun?”
His question brought me up short.
“Did you have fun, Daddy?”
“Fun? Yeah, I had a great time.”
I said it because that’s what he wanted to hear. But I knew it wasn’t true.
I thought about Brett’s innocent words while I showered and, later, when I was lying in bed, unable to sleep. Maybe I was doing something wrong. I had been running compulsively, without thought or intention—and certainly without joy. I ran when I was sick and I ran when I was injured, which seemed to be most of the time. I ran after spending twelve straight hours doing the difficult physical labor of fixing hail dents. I ran in rain and cold and heat and humidity, all so that I could give myself a gold star for the day. Missing a day of training terrified me. If my commitment to running wavered, didn’t that suggest that my commitment to sobriety was in jeopardy, too, that my willpower had a dangerous chink?
This wasn’t working. I had to find pleasure and reward in the running itself. It had to be about how I felt while I was doing it, not just how I felt when I was done. And I had to listen to my body. It was time to make adjustments, come up with a new plan. I started mixing in easy runs each week with hard ones. I figured out roughly how much mileage I needed to log to race well at a certain distance—and I kept it at that. I even allowed myself days off. I stopped obsessing about breaking that three-hour mark. If it happened, it happened. I was making myself nuts trying to force it. Besides, I had more important things going on. Kevin Engle entered the world with ease on November 29, 1994. He was peaceful and curious from the very beginning. Now I had two sons, a successful business, a happy wife, and more than two years of sobriety.
It took more than a year, but that three-hour barrier finally fell. In October 1995, I ran a 2:59:02 at the Twin Cities Marathon in St. Paul, which qualified me for the hundredth Boston Marathon, a special event that I was aching to run. From then on, I broke three hours almost every time I ran. I had found my groove—and I’d done it by giving myself permission to relax.
Several weeks after the Twin Cities race, I got a call from the manager of a Brisbane, Australia, auto auction. His huge fleet of cars had been pummeled by a massive hailstorm, and he wanted to hire me to do repairs. In late November 1995, just before Kevin turned one, my crew and I boarded a Qantas flight for the long trip back into summer.
Right away, I found a local AA meeting to attend. I also started training with a group of runners who met daily at a sports shop. One day, after a run with them, I noticed a flyer on the store’s bulletin board for a 5K trail race in a state forest. It sounded appealing—a chance to get out of the city, add to my race T-shirt collection, do a little postrun sightseeing, maybe even spot my first kangaroo. I tore off the directions to the event and marked my calendar.
On race day, I got up early so I could make the two-and-a-half-hour drive out to Nanango. I thought 7:00 a.m. seemed a little aggressive for the start of a fun race, but maybe that was the way the Aussies did things. I didn’t mind. Dawn broke over the scrubby, dry grasslands. I was driving through what I had been told was kangaroo country, so I was paying close attention to both sides of the road. Nothing. They were probably still asleep.
And then I saw one—right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, but too late. There was a sickening thud. I pulled over, turned on my hazard lights, and got out, expecting to see a mangled marsupial. Instead, I found a slightly dazed looking but otherwise intact kangaroo staring at me accusingly.
I apologized in what I hoped was a calming voice and took a step toward him. He started to panic, so I backed off. Then I heard something in the brush and looked up just in time to see a dozen or more kangaroos crossing the road. Illuminated by the car’s strobelike red flashers, they looked like a troupe of alien disco dancers. I watched them bounce away, then turned back to check on my victim. He was gone.
Rattled but relieved, I continued on to the East Nanango State Forest. I parked and found the race registration table.
A cute blond girl handed me my race number, but no T-shirt. “You only get one if you finish.”
I walked away, chuckling to myself. If I could finish a 5K? I dropped my backpack near a pile of bags and surveyed the field of runners while I pinned my number on my shirt. They were not the lean and wiry road-race warriors I was used to. Some men had ponytails and some women had buzz cuts. Some were overweight. I overheard two guys near me talking while they stretched.
“Gonna be a hot one,” one said.
“Don’t know if I’ll finish before dark,” his friend replied. “Just give it a go.”
I smiled to myself. These guys were worried about finishing a 5K?
“You ever run fifty-two K before, mate?” One was looking at me.
My face flushed. Fifty-two K? Uh-oh. I mumbled something in response, did a few lunges, and then walked, as casually as I could, back to the girl at the registration table. I asked her for a map of the course. She picked up a f
lyer and handed it to me. My eyes locked on the symbol at the top. Nanango Forest Foot Race 52K. Holy shit. Thirty-two miles instead of a little more than three. I thought the marathon was the ultimate distance. Did people really run beyond 26.2 miles? And if they did, why?
I weighed my options. I could walk back to my car and drive away. No one would ever know. But I’d driven all the way out here, nearly murdered the Bambi of Australia, an innocent kangaroo, and paid the race fee. I studied the map again. The route was three loops of about 17K, 10.5 miles each. Oh, what the hell, I thought, I’ll do one lap as a training run and call it a day. I won’t get the cool T-shirt, but I’ll have a good story.
A loudspeaker announced it was time to gather on the starting line.
Five minutes later the whole group started shuffling down the trail, and I shuffled along with them. There had been no starting pistol, not even a loud yell, but we were off. The course followed a red-dirt road and then became a narrow trail as it climbed through stands of feathery hoop pines, some draped with streamers of gray-green moss. We crested a hill and then headed down, bottoming out in a forest of giant ferns. Jungle-bird sounds I’d never before heard told me I was far from home. In a while, we started up again. I was soaked with sweat, breathing hard. It went on that way for more than an hour: long climbs, knee-punishing descents, the relative relief of a canopy of broad-leafed trees, then out into the open again.
At last, I came to the top of a long hill and could see the start/finish banner in the distance and a handful of runners spread out ahead of me. I was almost done. I’d be heading for breakfast with the AC cranking while these guys were still busting their asses in the forest. I could hear the loudspeaker; names and hometowns were being called out as each runner approached.
“And here comes Charlie Engle. Crikey, I didn’t think Yanks could run that fast.”
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