“Bret’s smart,” he told your mother, as if she didn’t know that. “By the time you get done talking to him, you’re almost convinced suicide is a logical option.”
It took time to cure those thoughts. Once, your mother found you in your bedroom with a machete. “You want to kill yourself?” she screamed, seizing the machete. “Here, I’ll help you!” She smacked your legs with the handle.
Eventually the doctor suggested taking you off all the medications. He told your mother she might lose you, but it was a gamble worth taking. She and you agreed.
You kept seeing the doctor. You passed your high school equivalency exam. You prepared for the rest of your life.
You decided to take the civil-service test for a post-office job. You asked that you be able to fill out your name and address before the test started, so you wouldn’t waste so much time writing. They refused. They thought you were trying to gain an unfair advantage. It wasn’t the first time people had misjudged you, and it wouldn’t be the last.
You told your mother you were going to take a data-entry course at Waukesha County Technical Institute, and she said sure, if that’s what you want to do. You said you’d get there yourself, and she said of course, if that’s what you wanted.
You walked to West Greenfield Avenue and got on the number 9 bus, and you didn’t know it, but behind the bus, slid down in her seat to make sure she wasn’t seen, was your mother. She had never felt so proud. She had never—except for days in the hospital—felt so frightened.
You, Mark, and your mom moved north to Pine Lake in 1987 when she bought a bar—The Whispering Pines—and those were good years. Your mother met a man, Oscar, fifteen years younger than her, and kind. You tended bar and got to know people, and people got to know you. Your mom and Oscar married; they lived upstairs and you and Mark lived in an apartment below. You took classes at Nicolet Area Technical College. You got A’s in Computer Concepts, the Psychology of Human Relationships, Economics, and Creative Writing. Business Law and Intermediate Algebra, you got B’s. Fundamentals of Speech, you got a C.
You wanted to be more than a bartender. You applied for jobs around town, but the people hiring said you should be able to type. Of course, you could type. But you couldn’t do it fast enough. You filled out an application at a local gas station—it was long, and it took quite some time and you didn’t like the way the person at the desk watched you labor over it—and after she thanked you, and you left, your mother saw her tear up your application and throw the pieces in the trash can.
One place that was interested in you was Drs. Foster and Smith, a pet-supply business. But the supervisor was curious. You were receiving disability insurance. Did you not know that working a steady job would jeopardize your monthly government check? Why would you want to do that? You explained to the person that you wanted to work because that’s what men did. They worked. Did she have a problem with that? She did not, and she said the company would be glad to have you, and you decided that you thought you might fit in at Drs. Foster and Smith.
You started work on August 29, 1995. You were employee number 860. You worked near another young man named Marko Modic. You lifted things and you moved heavy things and it didn’t take Marko long to figure out—once he got past your difficulty with language and the way, late in the day, the right side of your body stiffened, and the left side of your face froze up—that you were a smart guy. Really smart. And funny. Smarter and funnier than most everyone else in the warehouse. You and Marko would talk about politics and women and sports, and you would join the other warehouse employees one day a week to play volleyball. It didn’t take you long to realize that with your balance issues and the way the right side of your body didn’t work so well, you couldn’t play. You stayed on the sides, making wisecracks.
Marko realized that for all your jokes, you had a chip on your shoulder. You acted like you had something to prove. When someone else would carry a five-gallon bottle of water up a flight of stairs, you would carry two jugs, one on each shoulder, right-side weakness be damned. If someone would ask about your injuries, you’d shut them down. We’re all different, you would say. End of story.
Marko got to know you, but not many others did. The company hosted an annual summer picnic and an employee appreciation Christmas luncheon, but you didn’t attend. Dealing with others was exhausting. And you knew that you made them uncomfortable. You knew what they were thinking when they saw you. Lunch-time, while others were knotted at tables in the cafeteria, talking about whatever people talked about, you sat in the break room, in front of the television, wolfing down your chicken and coleslaw.
People offered you rides to work, but you knew they felt beholden, and you didn’t want that, so you refused. You didn’t want to risk making anyone more uncomfortable. You walked to work and you walked home. You walked to the grocery store and the Laundromat and you walked to the Red Cross blood center because you wanted to be useful. You watched a few TV shows and went to bed early, and you got up and you fed Taffy and had your oatmeal and cranberries and started over again, and it was enough.
Your mother had been a hard woman, and she had done her best and she had succeeded. You were a hard man.
If only you could have explained to people all you knew—about farming and animals and your cat and the designer chickens you planned to breed, about military history, and how you knew Latin and German, how you longed for a woman’s touch.… But you couldn’t explain it to them. That was part of the problem. That was the problem. They didn’t want to hear you try to explain because you made them so uncomfortable. You knew that. You knew that even if you found the cure for cancer, unless you could speak it or write it, it was useless knowledge.
You didn’t want to be useless. You helped your mom and Oscar around the house. You memorized four-digit bar codes for items in the warehouse so that when someone needed something, you knew exactly where it was. You toted those gigantic jugs of water. You didn’t take vacation days (partly because the paperwork required for a vacation was so daunting). When you weren’t working hard, you studied. You took Introduction to Sociology and American History to 1865 and American History from 1865 and Marketing Principles and Personnel Management. You started a retirement account. The Red Cross only visited Rhinelander to collect blood four times a year, so you started visiting the Community Blood Center at Trig’s Food and Drug in the RiverWalk Center, on South Courtney Street. They would take your blood every two months, unless your iron was low. If that happened, you made sure to eat more spinach and fish and Total cereal. People built their lives differently, and you had built yours. It was lonely, but you could manage. It was enough.
In 2003, when you were thirty-five, your mother and Oscar told you they had bought a farm sixty-five miles west, and they would be moving. Would you like to join them? There would be horses and chickens.
You declined. You had been working at Drs. Foster and Smith for almost eight years. Did Oscar and your mother seriously think you would consider giving up your seniority?
Your mother was so proud, yet again. And so afraid.
You stayed in Pine Lake near your brother Mark until the bar sold in 2007. Then you moved to your apartment in Rhinelander. It was the first time you would be living completely alone. You still avoided the Christmas party and the company picnic. You still turned down offers of rides to and from work. You had a job, and three Fridays a month your mother and Oscar picked you up after work and you had those weekends at the farm, and it was enough.
Then in early spring of 2010, Eric phoned from Houston, where he was teaching high school science, and he suggested you join him in a 5K run in Rhinelander. You declined. Not because you didn’t think you could do it. You had been walking five miles a day, to and from work, for years, so how difficult could running be? But you knew how uncomfortable you would make the other people, the people who could speak in paragraphs, the people whose right hands didn’t tire late in the day, whose smiles didn’t freeze. And you worried
about your balance. What if you stumbled in the middle of the race? What if you fell over? Eric persisted. “C’mon,” he said, “it’s a group thing, but you’re alone. You’re not going to bother anybody and nobody’s going to bother you.” Did you enter because Eric wouldn’t let up, or because of something else? You’re not sure.
You made it through the 5K in tennis shoes from Walmart with the soles coming loose, and that was one of the first times you realized that what you thought you knew wasn’t always true. Running miles wasn’t the same as walking—your legs felt like rubber bands. And no one seemed uncomfortable around you. People seemed preoccupied with how they were going to do. They said hello, and you said hello, and they smiled and you smiled. Maybe you weren’t helping others, but it felt good. The race finished a couple blocks from your apartment, so you and Eric jogged over there and showered before going to the awards ceremony. People welcomed you, asked you your time (twenty-nine minutes), smiled and chatted, and it didn’t really matter how slow you talked, how often you had to pause for answers. No one seemed to care. Your boss’s wife was there. So were other people you knew. Five weeks later, you ran another 5K in Park Falls, Wisconsin. The night before, you woke with a cold, but you ran twenty-nine minutes again.
You bought a new pair of shoes, the kind with the big N on them. You decided you had to strengthen the right side of your body. To do that, you needed to go to the gym. You took some of the money you had been saving and you applied for a membership at a local health club, and when you pulled out your credit card and asked if the club accepted it, the guy behind the desk—a big, muscle-bound guy—looked you up and down, at your short jeans and your old jacket and at the smile frozen on your face, and he said, “Well, sure, if it’s your card,” and you turned and left. But you didn’t quit. Failure isn’t getting knocked down. You joined Anytime Fitness, in downtown Rhinelander, and your first time there—after your seven a.m. to three p.m. shift at the warehouse—the manager showed you around and explained the machines and you nodded, and you got on one of the treadmills. There was a woman on the treadmill next to you, an older woman, and she smiled and saw you were new because you were struggling to set the programs on the machine. She asked how fast you wanted to go. You knew you made people uncomfortable, but she was so nice and you didn’t want to be rude, so you answered, thinking she had asked how far you intended to go. Four. You were going to go four miles. She smiled and nodded, but the truth is, she could see not just that you were new but that you were different, and she thought four miles an hour seemed a little fast. But she kept quiet when she helped you punch the buttons.
You nearly flew off the machine and the woman nearly screamed. You recovered on your own, though, and she helped you adjust the machine to a lower speed and you made it those four miles, and that woman thought about how she had never seen a stronger, more determined person in her life.
You kept at it. Your weak right side meant extra effort, extra focus, to keep from falling as you ran, but you kept at it. You had learned to button your shirt with your claw of a right hand. You had learned to play piano left-handed. Of course you were going to become a marathoner. You had heard about the Disney World Marathon and had always wanted to visit Florida, but you checked, and it was filled up. So you found one closer, the Journeys Marathon in Eagle River, and enrolled for the May 2011 event. But before it, you flew to Las Vegas and ran the Thin Mint Sprint, a 5K, at the end of January 2011. By yourself.
The day before the race, at your motel, there was a poker tournament. “Look at the dummy, look at the retard,” is what you told your mother the other players were thinking. You won sixty dollars.
You ran the race, you returned to the gym, and you asked your mother if she would keep May 14 open. You wanted her to come to Eagle River to watch you run in the Journeys Marathon. You hadn’t even run a 10K. You couldn’t even walk from her house in Kennan to the barn without swerving. How the hell were you going to make it 26.2 miles? The hard woman told you that you were nuts and told you that you didn’t want to do this, that you should run a half-marathon first.
But she and Oscar drove three hours to the race. You wore a cotton T-shirt and over that, a green cotton Whispering Pines sweatshirt that you wore when you did chores at your mother’s barn. You wore nylon running pants over your shorts. You were freezing and your mother thought you might die. She knew the cutoff was six hours, and she seriously doubted you would make it and wondered how you would take this setback. After five hours, when well over half of the entrants had finished, she suggested that Oscar drive the course, to check how you were doing, and Oscar suggested that your mother needed to relax, and then she told Oscar to get in the car and go check on her boy.
Fifteen feet from the finish line you limped up to your mother and Oscar, waiting. You were exhausted, and she could see the right side of your body wasn’t working too well. She could also see the joy in you. You told them about the race, how wonderful it was, how cold you were, how you were going to do more marathons, and your mother was happy and relieved, but she also couldn’t help hearing people screaming all around her.
“Cross the line! Cross the finish line!”
Your time was 5:39. There were 101 finishers. You were 96th.
It’s late afternoon and the last light of day is casting long shadows on the snowy streets of Rhinelander. You’re getting a ride home today, so you have a little time to chat. You’re sitting in Culver’s, home of the ButterBurger.
It’s a Wednesday, and you have just finished another day at Drs. Foster and Smith. You’ll have frozen pizza for dinner and tomorrow some more canned chicken with coleslaw. You bought the can of chicken for $2.39 at Walmart and the bag of coleslaw at Trig’s for 99 cents. You’ll get two meals out of the chicken and at least four out of the coleslaw. You’re good with money. You estimate you save $2,000 a year in cab fare alone. You have more than $50,000 in your retirement account. You had more once, from the insurance money awarded after your accident, but your retirement account means much more to you. You worked for it. Your credit rating is “excellent.” You have a platinum credit card. Those are things people don’t know about you.
They don’t know that you traveled to Las Vegas alone years before you made the trip to run the Thin Mint Sprint. You had intended to meet a woman you’d met online there, but it hadn’t worked out. And once you took a bus to Nashville for the same reason, and that hadn’t worked out either. They don’t know that you met someone who had also been in a psychiatric ward once—after you came home following your suicide attempt—and that you have kept in touch with her, through her problems with drugs and her troubled marriage, and that she asked you to train with her for a half-marathon (this does not make your mother happy).
You know that disappointment hurts but that nothing hurts as deeply as the injuries people inflict on themselves. You talk about terrible acts of violence in the world and you say that people who can’t express themselves, who feel as if they can’t tell the world who they are, those people are driven to terrible sadness and can do terrible things to themselves and others, and you sound more like a philosophy professor or a priest than a warehouse dummy.
You talk about thought and language and the Romanian woman you met online and you say “Good day” and “How are you?” in Romanian, then admit that if the conversation goes much beyond that, you’re in deep trouble. Even though it’s late in the day, and you’re tired, your smile is bright, and infectious.
You know that taking action—whether it’s reading history or reciting poetry—expands the mind, and that running conditions the body and expands a man’s world, and that a man can take pride in the things he does, as long as he’s doing things, and you sound like a therapist, or maybe like someone who once tried to commit suicide and then learned the folly of his thinking.
And then you say for a long time you wished you had a girlfriend but now realize that women your age usually have kids, and those women want someone with a car to help take those
kids to soccer practice, and that without a car you would just be a burden, so you have accepted that you’re not going to have a girlfriend. And you sound like a lot of other people who put themselves in boxes because they’re afraid.
You feel bad for people who don’t enter races because they think they won’t do well. Does that make any sense? you ask. How are you going to do well if you don’t try?
You know that speed and distance are the standard measures of a runner’s success, but that like a lot of standard measures, they’re wholly inadequate to measure your experience. They’re wholly inadequate to measure you.
In almost eighteen years, you still haven’t been to a company picnic or the employee appreciation luncheon. You don’t go because you know you make people uncomfortable. Running is one thing—you’re one among many, you don’t have to chat, and anyone who is uncomfortable, you’re not going to see again anyway. But life is something else. What use would it be, you showing up and talking about yourself? What good could that possibly do anyone?
Bobbi Jewell almost screamed when you nearly flew off that treadmill next to her at Anytime Fitness nearly three years ago, but she helped you adjust the settings and watched you go four miles. And then she watched you go four miles the next time you were both there, and the time after that. She watched you add the elliptical trainer and the stair climber.
Bobbi is the owner of a travel agency in Rhinelander, and you stop by her business—it’s your first stop once you get back in town from running trips—to show her your medals, your bling. You don’t know how much you inspire her.
Marko Modic, your old pal from the warehouse, got promoted a few years after you started together. Then he got promoted again. Today he’s head of human resources at Drs. Foster and Smith. He says you’re smarter than 99 percent of the people at the warehouse, and he’s including your supervisors and his.
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