“Well, it might hurt. But you’ll get there in the end—somehow,” I said instead.
They were running slightly faster than I wanted to go. “I have to drop back to save my legs for later in the race,” I said. “Good luck! And remember: You will get there!”
“Have a good race!” the taller brother/friend said.
“Yup! You too!”
At mile 3, shadows started to form as the sun pushed away the clouds that had sat over us for the start of the race.
I passed Oceanport’s town hall and police station, still empty since Sandy. Because sections of this area of the race were still unsafe, we wound turn after turn through town, and at mile 4.5 I saw streams of runners moving in two different directions, like twin neon ribbons winding through otherwise quiet, empty streets.
Spectators were sparse until mile 5.5, where high-fiving Team in Training coaches were set up at the foot of a bridge to cheer. We turned onto what’s become known as Pork Roll Alley. Residents set up smokers and grills and yelled for runners while eating BBQ processed meats and drinking beers and Bloody Marys out of red Solo cups.
“Go, runners, go!” one man in a bathrobe yelled, grill tongs with a sausage stuck on them held up in the air.
“I will, man!” I shouted back. “I will!”
At mile 6.5, I crossed over a concrete bridge on Monmouth Avenue, the only hill in the race. “Hill” is a relative term, since it’s barely more than a lip over water in an area where the only other hills are dunes. The flatness of the course is one reason I signed up for this marathon, along with staking a claim back in my home state at my Jersey Shore. As I passed a still-closed school, I saw two runners dressed in black long-sleeved shirts push those sleeves up to their elbows. The sun poked through clouds in chunks, and I knew that the run through Deal—which provided little to no shade and would be run through twice—was going to be worse for them than for me.
It was a pretty start to the race, but a somber one, despite the party at Pork Roll Alley. We ran by houses that were either empty or under construction or being raised to meet new, shifting flood requirements. Driveways held storage units instead of cars. I had written about the Jersey Shore for seven years for magazines and newspapers, plus I’d written two books about the southern part of the coast. Watching Sandy rip apart half of the Jersey Shore was hard, but the slow-motion disaster of recovery was more painful. Already, fights about insurance and recovery funds had broken out, and I knew that it wouldn’t get better anytime soon (as of 2015, many of these homes are still empty, as are the Oceanport town hall and police station, and construction on Long Branch’s replacement boardwalk started only in June of that year).
I wrote about the race for the New York Times, and drove the course six weeks earlier with race director Joe Gigas, gut churning at all of the destruction around us—not just the empty homes but the giant trash piles where people dumped what they couldn’t use, the contents of restaurants and beach clubs still out on their lawns.
Still, those towns were determined to put on the races—and Gigas was, too, even though Sandy had bit into his house and swallowed the contents of four rooms. I’d talked to the mayor of Long Branch for my story, too. He was running in the half marathon for the fourth time, and he said that despite the destruction around the course, the race would go on.
“Watching these municipalities deal with this,” Gigas told me, a quote I used in the Times story, “and then there’s me asking, ‘Can I run through your town?’ No one said no. It’s that Jersey can-do attitude.”
I came up to mile 7, right before the course turned south for the race’s long turn down the coast, and checked my Timex: one hour and ten minutes on the nose. Perfect ten-minute miles. My legs and lungs felt fine. I was running smoothly, my breathing calm.
But it will hurt. It will hurt. It will.
Seven miles had flowed under me as easily as the water under that concrete bridge. Panic and pain held at bay. Just 19.2 to go.
I kept running after that first 5K in Medford, but not in the same way. Training wasn’t done to drop my time in a race. It became a tool in my arsenal of staying in shape, in part driven by Stephen. We met at a networking party at a then-hot! new! bar! in Center City, Philadelphia, that has changed hands five times since. When he said hello to me while I waited for a glass of wine—which I ordered in an effort to appear sophisticated despite the women in butt-exposing cocktail dresses and bros in cheap suits ordering shots around me—I almost dropped my wallet. I had been paddling around in the younger end of the dating pool, hooking up with law students and junior associates and assistant project managers who still lived with six of their closest friends and thought defaulting on student loans was funny.
But here was this 100 percent American man in a black leather jacket, snug white shirt pulled across his chest, and faded olive khakis. He had bright white teeth and ruffled black hair that together screamed charm. I would learn soon that he was a grown-up too, with a grown-up job, a house, two dogs. I was twenty-three. He was thirty-five. He was the kind of adult I wanted to be—someone who had seen some shit and lived to tell the tale. He was smart, confident, successful, and as far away from the guys who still went out on Tuesdays for quarter beer night as I was from the moon.
We started spending a lot of time together, first because we kept bumping into each other, then by choice. By the time I left the magazine to try my hand at freelancing, we were calling or texting or emailing every other day, then every day—but just as friends. Very chummy, close friends.
Stephen was sober when I met him. His father had been an abusive alcoholic who went into rehab again while Stephen and I were becoming friends. When we went to his father’s condo a year later, Stephen tore apart the place to make sure his father hadn’t hidden any booze there.
“I can’t stop at one drink,” he said to me as we ate lunch at a diner a few days after the rehab phone call. “So I just don’t start.”
I, of course, was completely in love with him. I had never felt so at ease with someone—man or woman—in my life. I asked him once if he would consider dating, and he said no because he didn’t want to ruin our friendship. My choices then were to give up on him or stay friends. I chose the latter. I had watched the despair of my parents’ marriage, and I knew I never wanted to be trapped with a person who made me so miserable. I wanted to be with someone I considered a friend, someone who made me feel like Stephen did, and until I either met that person who felt the same way back or I changed Stephen’s mind, friends we’d be.
It was during this friend-zone time that I started the boot camp. Stephen took an interest in that too. He was a workout fanatic, and it showed. The more weight I lost, the more he encouraged me to “get on the next level” of fitness. Maybe if I substituted a protein shake for one meal a day, like I’d read in a magazine, I could burn more fat and build more lean muscle. In the weight room, he said, I should stop doing high repetitions with five and ten pound weights and instead switch to lower reps with heavier weights.
“Don’t be scared of lifting a lot,” he said. “You’re stronger than you think.”
Swoon.
He told me I should show it off, too, which I did: backless mini dress to a magazine event, low-rise jeans with lace halter crop top to a birthday party. He went with me to each of these, not exactly as my date but more as the older brother, the designated driver.
All that changed on an October night, soon after my twenty-fifth birthday. I was out having dinner with a group of musician friends in Old City in Philadelphia. After dinner at a crummy Mexican restaurant with plastic tablecloths and plastic utensils and terrible food but cheap margaritas, our group crossed over to Plough and the Stars. During the day it was a respectable, quiet, and cozy Irish restaurant that served dishes like Guinness casserole and shepherd’s pie, but on weekend nights it became a sweaty-bodies-pressed-together-girls-crying-on-the-phone-in-the-bathroom club. I was standing on the second-story balcony, which shook to the b
ass of a dance remix of some pop song while a famous violinist tried to stick his tongue down my throat when my cell phone buzzed.
“I fell off the wagon,” Stephen yelled over the background noise of whatever bar he was at. “Where are you?”
The Stephen who walked in was not the guy I knew, though. He was bad boy incarnate, his swagger writ large. He wore ripped jeans and a graphic T-shirt and had one cigarette in his mouth with another tucked behind his ear. His movements were exaggerated, his laugh louder, his eyes brighter. He didn’t look like the same person, but like a cousin just sprung from jail who was ready to party. The calm, contemplative best friend was gone, and “Steve,” as he insisted I call him, stood in his place.
“Scram,” he said to the musician, nudging him aside so that we leaned together, hip to hip, against the balcony railing. He lit my cigarette, which I’d bummed off the musician before he scurried away, off his own.
“I don’t believe what I’m seeing!” he barked over the music, staring at me. I hadn’t smoked since college. I never got the appeal, but I did it there at the Plough and the Stars for the same reason I had done it in college: because I was that boring girl who always listened to the rules, always went to class, always did her job. Everything about smoking was wrong, and I wanted to show that I could be a little bit wrong, too. I had to show Steve that I was a fun girl, someone other than the person he saw as his best friend. “This is not the Jen I know!” he yelled, then licked my earlobe.
When Plough and the Stars closed at 2:00 AM, he took me to an after-hours club located under a parking garage, pushed me up against a wall, and smashed his mouth against mine while running his fingers up my shirt and under my bra. On the way to his friend’s house, where I crashed for the night, I puked out the cab window. I woke up next to him, and puked again, barely making it to the bathroom. After the first time we had sex in a drunken blur a few weeks later, I woke up with bruises on my hips and ribs.
This went on for a year and a half. He liked me. Then he didn’t. He didn’t want to see me at 7:00 PM on a Saturday night, but he’d call me at midnight saying, “I need you,” and I’d get out of bed to meet him at some no-name bar in the middle of the woods, and play Big Buck Hunter until he hailed us a cab and threw me into his bed.
There’s no other way to put it: That year and a half of my life sucked. It sucked for a lot of reasons: There’s the obvious that being my former best friend’s long-term booty call was a time-consuming and soul-draining occupation, but also drinking a lot and smoking a lot didn’t make me feel great physically.
Then there was the mental weight. I put a lot of the blame for our half relationship, for the way I couldn’t quite make him love me, on myself, a notion that he encouraged. He told me I should highlight my hair (which he offered to pay for), dress sexier, do something to make him turn that corner. Alcoholics can be miserable and manipulative, and he knew what he was doing to me, even if—I know, I know—he wasn’t entirely in control of his actions.
“You HATE me,” he yelled over the phone on one of the nights he made his friend call me back after I hung up twice. “You HAAAAAAATE me.” Part of me did. But I went to him anyway. If Steve was going to that much trouble to get a hold of me—if he said he needed me that badly after I told him to leave me alone—maybe we were close to a breakthrough. Maybe if I went this one time, the back-and-forth would finally be over, I’d get my Stephen back, and we would just be together.
“Drink,” he’d say as soon as I walked through the door. “Start now. You’re behind.”
When I was thirteen years old, Avalon, the shore town I’ve gone to every summer of my life, started a dredging project to widen the beaches. They took sand from the ocean floor and transferred it onto land. It worked, but it also kicked up seaweed. A lot of seaweed. I was determined to swim anyway, but it clung everywhere, catching in the crooks of my elbows, my knees, my hair. I tried to float over it on a boogie board, but it hooked onto the strap that connected the board to my wrist and weighed me down.
That’s what dating Steve was like. In David Carr’s memoir The Night of the Gun, he called this kind of relationship a “minuet of misery.” As Stephen dropped deeper into alcoholism, creating and breaking his own rules (it’s not a problem if I only drink on weekends, it’s not a problem if it doesn’t affect my work, it’s not a problem if I’m a little hungover at work), and as his calls became later, more frantic, and more frequent, he pulled me down too.
That first 5K in Medford came eight months into this mess. I had managed to eat enough to maintain that training, skating on the edge of eating too little to be too small, but I plunged over the edge soon after. I kept running after that 5K, but it was for him. I wanted to be as small as possible, and I saw running as a path toward that goal. I had a strength training routine down. I was in the weight room four days a week, lifting twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty pounds at low reps just like Steve said, but I still didn’t look like Jessica Alba from Sin City, who he had on a poster in his basement. “You can look like that,” he said one night as we played pool, Jessica staring down at me as I tried to sink the eight ball. (I didn’t. I scratched.)
If I do that, if I can look like that, I told myself, it’ll finally flip that switch in him, turn a relationship held together by spider webs into something solid and real. Running burned more calories an hour than any other cardio I could do in the gym. Running needed to be part of my life then so I could show Steve what I was willing to do for him. I didn’t enjoy the miles like I used to. Those days of bounding around Knight Park being serenaded by birds and kids and Little League games were gone. Now I was trapped in the run, like I was trapped with him, trying to use one as the means to an end with the other.
The more I drank, the more I smoked, the less I ate. I vowed to do better with my no-carb, no-fat diet: No more slip-ups. No more carbs at all. And if I did make a mistake—a plate of cheese-covered nachos when out with friends, Saturday sandwiches with Mom—I puked it back up. It wasn’t that different from throwing up after a long night of drinking, right? So what was wrong with getting rid of too much food?
On one cool morning six months before the end, when we hadn’t called or texted or emailed in nearly a week—a new record!—I went for a run. It was a gorgeous, clear day, the first one after the summer heat had finally broken. The world felt wiped clean. Maybe, I thought, that day could be a new start for me too.
I ran straight for Knight Park on my usual 3-mile route. I started feeling that strength again that I had found in training for the 5K, in moving my body forward, one step at a time. But one minute I was looking at the war memorial on the corner of the park and the next I was staring up at the concerned face of a mom and her two-year-old.
“You okay?” she asked as her toddler yelled “Boo-boo! Boo-boo!” over and over again. “You just went down.” I was 115 pounds, a weight I hadn’t been since middle school.
“Oh, I’m okay. I didn’t drink any water today,” I lied, and let her help me stand up. My vision started to fade again, so I held on to her shoulder.
“Let me drive you home,” she said.
“No, I’m okay,” I said, first to her, then to her son, whose eyes were now wide with terror. I played peek a boo with him until he smiled and offered me his binkie. My vision had stopped graying by then, and I shuffled home.
I spent a lot of late nights on the message boards of Al-Anon, the companion group to Alcoholics Anonymous for family, friends, and children of alcoholics. The group has its own twelve steps, and the first is “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” It is, word for word, the same first step as Alcoholic Anonymous’s twelve steps.
I never went to a meeting because I could never get to that first step. I stopped talking to my friends about it because they were sick of hearing about it. I blamed myself for Steve’s problems. I was there on the night he started drinking again, and I told myself he kept drinking because I could not
fix him. How could I quit on him now? I didn’t want to give up on Stephen even though Steve had become a monster.
“Maybe we should get married,” he said one early March day in 2007, after another late-night call, another bottle of pink wine, and drunk sex I sort of remembered. We were lying in bed at about noon, staring at the new paint on his bedroom walls; three different colors of green on three different walls. He had called me at 1:00 AM the night before, and of course I went. My dog was at home and had probably wet her crate. I knew I needed to leave, but I didn’t want to break the moment. “We have fun together,” he said. “Maybe this is what it’s supposed to be like.”
Soon after, his Myspace page filled with posts from a gangly woman with an overbite. One late night after we shared a pack of cigarettes, a six-pack of beer for him, and a bottle of wine for me, he broke the news to me that she was his girlfriend, even though he had fucked me a week before. He told me, while holding my hand, that she “did that thing for me that you never could.” What that thing was, he didn’t say. I’ll never know. He thought we could all be friends, he said, lightly stroking the back of my hand. “I’ll keep you in the top eight of my Myspace friends.”
I yanked my hand from his, knocked the empty bottles off the table, then stormed out, slamming the door behind me. I drove home, drunk and white-knuckled. I emailed him the next day telling him to never contact me again.
For once, he listened. I didn’t reach out to him either. I was humiliated. I had wasted a year and a half trying to prove I was enough for someone, again. I hadn’t been enough for Dan to at least try dating when we went to different colleges. I hadn’t been enough for my college boyfriend. I hadn’t built a relationship with any of the men I dated after, because I was not enough for them to try. I opened my body to them, but I wasn’t enough of a whole human being for them to want more than that night or string of nights. With Stephen, I thought I was close to finally being enough for someone, and I failed. Again.
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