You even gave Sarah your final exam answers, since she took the class later in the day. You were a huge help.
Sarah passed algebra.
Sarah passed on attending the dance.
Stomach flu—very sad. She even cried on the phone.
Two weeks later you hear she went to the final dance at a rival school across town. With Mikey Fucking Vinson. And the rumor mill pegs them as crossing the legendary fourth base in a hot tub.
You cursed Mikey Vinson, prayed to God for wolves to tear the lecherous bastard to pieces. You pictured it. The wolves always ate his cock first, then his face. It was important that his face went second, so he could watch, and you could see his agony. Sometimes the wolves disemboweled him in the hot tub—a steaming red bowl of rotten Vinson soup.
The revenge fantasies waned though. You knew the truth, even then. This was on you. Later you cried yourself to sleep, thinking Sarah Miller would probably be the last girl you’d ever truly fall for.
You chump.
Age fifteen: Love got blown right off the radar. And not because of some steely world-weary resolve on your part. No, you were still a mess of hormones and need and zero savvy charging headlong into the bayonets of the beauties that walked the school halls.
Love caught the boot that year because your parents burned to death on their eighteenth anniversary.
Each November, every anniversary weekend since you were born, your parents shipped you off to your Uncle Joshua’s house in South East Portland.
This was fine by you since it got you the hell out of Salem—AKA Solame, Boregon—a city cursed by strip malls, bleach-toxic waterways, and virtues so minimal that to mention them as a counter-point to the city’s greasiness actually made living there more painful.
Portland felt big and electric and Uncle Joshua had a cozy little bungalow just off Powell on 58th. At the back of this house you had your own appointed guest room. Your Uncle even put a wicker basket on your bed with towels and a washcloth and a tin-foil wrapped chocolate in it. He told you, “I knew you’d like that, you tidy little bastard” and then he laughed.
He liked to call you a bastard and a scallywag and a roustabout, and you liked it too. It kicked off your visits and let you know that things would be different, if only for a weekend.
Uncle Joshua did freelance cover design for a batch of different publishers, and his favorites adorned the single hallway that bisected his house. Most of these involved gorgeous, buxom women whose significant breasts had never known gravity. Inevitably these women were in peril, typically ape or tentacle or goblin-based.
“I’ll never be Vallejo,” he told you, “but I just love painting this shit.”
It was great when he swore. You tried it on for size now and then but it sounded like you were pushing out the words, while your Uncle’s profanity ran fluid.
There were other benefits to the Portland visits. Uncle Joshua didn’t keep his Hustler mags that well hidden, so you found yourself in possession of glorious new jerk-off materials, finally getting a peek at what you’d so far been denied. The first time you saw a vagina spread wide open—“This is my sexy wife Roxy and she’s been begging me to shoot her pic for Beaver Hunt!”—it was all pink and slick and deeper looking than you expected.
That night you dreamed you were having sex on your Uncle’s couch and the woman’s hole was gaping for a moment, a jet black maw, and then her snatch shot out like a sheath of wet intestine and wrapped around your penis and tried to swallow it whole.
It was not the last night you’d wake up sticky and scared at the same time. It was always the creepy dreams—the ones that skewed towards morally bereft or damnably weird or both—that guaranteed you’d lose your load.
You tried, on occasion, to talk to Uncle Joshua about girls, but it seemed a sore subject. He’d shift the conversation to what you’d been studying in school or reading about. His interest felt genuine, and when he said that something you were doing was cool it usually made you feel like your life was right on track and that maybe girls weren’t ultimately a necessity for happiness.
Sure, your Uncle had women in his life, but you seldom saw them. They knocked at late hours and usually walked straight to his bedroom, sometimes leaving a trail of perfume in the foyer and living room that you secretly snorted up, like a horny little pig tracking hooker truffles.
You knew who these women were. You’d recognized one from her photo in the back of a Portland weekly paper that your Uncle kept on the laundry basket in the bathroom. The photo popped out because your Uncle had circled it in red Sharpie and jotted the word “TITS!” and a smiley face next to the phone number.
You pretended these women were the muses for his paintings, but you never saw him take brushes into his bedroom. And sometimes the noises coming from his visitors became a smidge too Discovery Channel, all animal grunts and squeals conveying feats of exertion that you couldn’t even properly visualize, despite your Larry Flynt primers. On these nights you turned up your Walkman to eight and buried your nose in whatever book was on the bed-stand.
Your Uncle gave you great pulpy novels—mostly swag from the publishers he worked for—about rough-and-tumble detectives and man-eating slugs and serial killers. You were allowed to read them in bed, by flashlight, till any hour of the morning
The catch on the late nights was that you had to promise him you’d still wake up to go jogging with him every morning at seven sharp.
Conversation was part of that morning routine. Your Uncle liked to start running at a gradual “talking pace” and then accelerate through the rest of the run. And since initially his “talking pace” was your “Holy shit, I need more air pace” you mostly listened.
“The morning run blows the morning prayer out of the water, so far as I’m concerned,” he told you. “Clears out the toxins. Gets you breathing. Gets you thinking, and thinking straight. And unlike prayer it really clears out transgressions. Mile one makes up for the greasy burger I slammed between lunch and dinner. Mile three makes up for that time I started shooting bourbon and then passed out on the couch. I still made my deadline for the painting, but...”
He’d use a word like “transgressions” with you and just assumed you got what he was talking about. And you did, though only in context at the time.
Half the time you were just trying to maintain speed with him as he spoke. Though each block of the city had its own set of sensory distractions, you always stayed tuned in to his voice.
“Don’t get me wrong, kiddo. I’m not saying I consider running some kind of penance. God, that would be hideous. It’s so far from a punishment. I’m just saying that it cleans everything out. The worry, the garbage, all of it. Now pick it up a little bit after this block.”
He was always trying to get you to go a little faster.
Truthfully, you were a shit runner until after the weekend when you lost your parents, when it became all you wanted to do.
That was when running—as hard and fast and for as long as you were capable of—was all you could do, really. Any other scenario meant leaving a space open in your brain. Time to think and reflect.
Then you would have to picture your Uncle collapsed on the kitchen floor with the phone in his lap, saying, “I think this call was real. I think it was. Shit. Jesus. C’mere, kid.” He reached out for you, hands shaking. You’d never seen him cry before.
You would have to remember the way your house in Salem looked when only a charred support post remained upright amid the ashes.
You would have to think about your parents in their bedroom, holding each other in slumber just moments before a combination of spilled champagne and dried rose petals and faulty electric blanket wiring caused the flash fire that consumed them before they even had a chance to escape their bed.
So you kept running. Your Uncle’s house in Portland became your new home, the place where your morning prayer was the sound of left/right footfalls and your evening prayer was that you would not dream again of your
parents trying to scream with smoke-filled lungs, like broken bellows that refused, at last, to compress.
It was about five years after the fire when love finally ran you down.
You were twenty-one years old and still a virgin. You’d decided to chase nobility and had never exploited your semi-orphan status for a cheap lay. Besides, that would have meant talking to someone. Maybe even getting to know someone. Not an option.
Your Uncle’s route—female companionship as commodity—never quite seemed like the right tack.
You’d become fairly confident that chasing the cat was for suckers anyway. You had transcended that status because you had a new kick, and it was something you’d guessed was much, much better than pussy: THEFT.
You weren’t stealing for the money—your parents’ life insurance and allotments from a nice little trust kept you financially sound—so much as you were stealing because you’d recognized a great opportunity.
Portland was a runner’s city, and while it was impossible during the day to hit the waterfront on either side of the river without seeing a jogger or two, it was also fairly common to run into different crews at night. OHSU medical researchers training for the Portland Marathon at two in the morning. A pair of cabbies whom you always spotted jogging through the streets of the overdeveloped condo blight near the Pearl District. Running zealots like you, who absolutely had to run and were thus forced into the night shift.
You kept your morning jaunts with your Uncle going, of course, but he was seldom interested in cracking open more than a three-to-five miler. So the evenings were your time for the long hauls. The air was cooler; the minimized traffic meant sucking down less exhaust. And the further you traveled, the easier it was to black out from exhaustion after you got back to your house, hit the shower, and hobbled to your bed. Less time staring at the ceiling, thinking about who you were, what your life meant, just how truly alone you might be.
Most nights you spent a few hours on the streets, tearing up one of your three rotating pairs of Nikes. And what you started to notice was that Portland’s runner omni-presence rendered you invisible to the cops. Or if not invisible, then negligible—a non-threat. Just another fitness junkie trotting around in fancy gear. Garmin GPS runners watch—Check. CamelBak water backpack with enough H2O for the long slogs—Check. Yellow reflective vest—Check. Short shorts designed to hug your junk for minimum shift and emulate that 70’s basketball player style—Check.
Sure, you looked like a douche-bag, but this wasn’t about attracting girls with your NASA-approved space gear or Kenyan physique. It was about the act itself. It was about going further when you could, letting your legs burn a little more, trying to push the dreaded “wall” —that utter vacuum of energy that forced you to stop and walk—out another mile or two. Sometimes you got lucky and accidentally ran yourself into a runner’s high and found yourself soaring over miles of terrain, the air tinted with a slight taste of cotton candy as it surged in and out of your chest. Other times you fought for every stride, side knotted up, thighs burning, guts liquefying. But you always loved it.
It cleared things out, and it gave you your own space to carve through the night, temporary and unseen.
You actually thought that the cops might be ignoring you because you reminded them of what they should be doing off shift. These guys, with their proto-fascist moustaches and Krispy Kreme-endorsed lard rolls rubbing raw against their belts, they couldn’t catch a running criminal without a K-9 unit or a bullet.
You always waved at them, or gave them a nod that said, “Hey, boys, here we are. Upstanding citizens keeping things safe, sound, and healthy on this fine and muggy evening.”
Sometimes they waved back. Some of those times you were running right by them with a thousand dollars worth of pinched jewelry jammed into the inner pockets of your CamelBak.
Never did they think to turn around and question you. What self-respecting thief would run right by a cop car while rocking reflective gear meant to call attention? Hell, what self-respecting human being would wear little nylon hot pants like that if they weren’t a die-hard running fanatic?
To them you were just another night runner fading in the rearview.
And in fairness to them, you were pretty minor shit at first. No better than your standard jockey-boxing meth-head menace.
It all seemed so easy and made you feel clever and dangerous. You used that feeling to try and squash old jealousies that you knew were worthless but couldn’t keep from harboring. You thought, “I bet Mikey Vinson never had the stones to pull of this sort of thing.”
You were most familiar with the suburban streets of your South East neighborhood, but it didn’t feel right to jack the low income starter families and Russian and Vietnamese immigrants that called it home. The ritzier region of the North West hills seemed like a better target. You’d frequently run near the NW 23rd (AKA Trendy Third) street shopping district, an upscale consumer rat’s nest where surgeons and lawyers parked their Harley’s out front of the Starbucks. You believed that one day the 1960’s Sonny Barger would magically materialize and beat these men with a length of chain, but it never happened. Despite your dismay over this lack of justice, 23rd remained a decent through-street to Thurman, where you always turned to head up to Forest Park and the Leif Erickson trail.
The neighborhoods on the way up to the trail were beautiful and the streets were strewn with easy targets. Suburbans and BMW’s and Jaguars (and a smattering of Portland’s ubiquitous Subarus and Priuses). You started to spend less time running the trail and more time learning the surrounding territory. You memorized the location of older vehicles—hoping they’d be less likely to have alarms—and as you ran sidewalks you looked to see who had a habit of leaving small valuables in their ride.
You scanned purses, cell phones, MP3 players, laptop computers, PDA’s, you name it.
You acquired gear for the job. The LifeHammer tool was designed for drivers who found their vehicle suddenly submerged in water. It was lightweight and one side featured a razor which the driver was supposed to use to cut their seatbelt loose. The other side was the real gem—a small metallic hammer specifically designed to make shattering tempered vehicle window glass a breeze. Ostensibly created as an exit tool, it also worked great for entrances.
So one evening, around two thirty in the morning when you guessed cops would be even busier nabbing drunks, you LifeHammered your way through the triangular rear window section of a jet black Escape, reached in and popped the lock, and then grabbed a pale blue iPod Nano. You accidentally hit the control wheel and the light flooding from the player caused a temporary panic—Is it a flashlight? A cop’s floodlight?—quickly abated as you recognized the glow and stuffed the player into your backpack.
You got out of there fast, hands sweating but mouth parchment-dry. Your shorts felt extra tight and you realized you were half-way to a raging hard-on. You could still smell the mixture of stale air and over-sweet cologne which had floated in the cab of the rig.
It was glorious. Without intending it, you tracked a new record pace on the run back to your house.
This was beyond a runner’s high, and the kick had a momentum you couldn’t contain. You hit twelve more cars in the next two weeks, sometimes scoring nothing, sometimes taking a worthless object just to have a totem from the night. Your spree temporarily upped the patrol presence in the area, giving you your first chance to wave hello to the five-oh and clueing you in on the idea that it might be better to strike more randomly. Your territory shifted between the hills on the North and South West side and the richer South East neighborhoods near Laurelhurst Park.
Each evening’s loot got stashed in a cardboard box in your closet, which you picked through during the day, deciphering what you could about the people you had taken from. You fell asleep to other people’s play-lists (you loved it when you accidentally scored the player of another hip hop fanatic) and studied the smiles of strangers in digital photos.
Your Uncle Jos
hua stopped you one morning, before your mutual run, and asked you why you seemed so happy. Why the little smiles during breakfast?
You said you didn’t know, and that was enough for him. Your shared loss had kept you close, but quiet, as if speaking too much might bring you each nearer to what had happened. It was years ago but still floated under the ice of every conversation. Each word shared threatened to chip away at the agreeable distance. Unless, of course, you were talking about movies or music.
You gave him one of your best iPod’s later that day and showed him how to operate it. He spent that night uploading King Crimson albums and painting a pirate lassie with sea-spray gleaming on her treasure chest.
You spent that night taking your brief career in burglary to the next level.
After all, any tweaker can crack a couple of car windows. The vehicular smash-and-grab felt like the definition of inelegant crime, and the buzz was starting to dwindle.
Breaking into houses seemed like a logical next step. You started to smile just thinking about it, but killed the grin in case Uncle Joshua was watching. You laced your shoes double tight before leaving the house that night. The rain was thick to the point of sheeting as you began your run, but you barely noticed.
You came so close to bailing out.
You’d done your research, been by the place—a beautiful art deco rip-off in the NW hills—enough times to notice the owners almost always left the sliding glass door on the side of their house open. But as you moved quietly through their yard you heard the wet grass squeaking under your shoes and you felt too conspicuous. Would your sopping shoes leave prints on their floor that would sell you out? Only one of their three cars was out front, and the lights were off, but what if one of the owners was sitting home right now, polishing a rifle in the dark? Was it worth it?
You backed off. You were taking this too far.
We Live Inside You Page 18