I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

by Mishka Shubaly

  Dave brought me to a nice restaurant, you know, with the cloth napkins and two forks and no decimal points on the menu. I had foolishly assumed “lunch” meant the corner deli, so I’d thrown on my cutoff jeans, a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, and Vans with no socks. I’d worked at Beauty Bar the night before our lunch, so I hadn’t gotten to sleep till 6 a.m. I was so short on sleep, my eyes felt like they had been carved into my head. As the suits rolled in with their gelled hair and silk ties, I felt like a real dirt bag. God, it never changed. I shrank into the booth and quietly unfolded a couple of half-baked ideas I’d thought up for stories.

  Dave turned his nose up at all of them.

  “What you need to write,” he said, “is how you went from being this shitfaced, drug-abusing gutter-dweller to a sober ultrarunner. I even have a title for it. It will be called ‘The Long Run.’”

  I pushed back gently.

  “Dave, are you kidding me? Nobody wants to read about how I fucked my life up and the grim process of unfucking it up. It was like eating a bucket of sand.”

  “Trust me,” Dave said.

  After the years I spent buying drugs and working off Craig’s List and buying drugs off Craig’s List, nothing gets my hackles up faster than those two words. But Dave knew he was the only person who could get away with speaking them to me. In my darkest hour, writing for Dave at the New York Press had been a strand of spider’s silk in hell, a slender, glistening, translucent thread of hope that I might not die filthy and anonymous in Greenpoint after all.

  I slunk back to Brooklyn after lunch, leery of the task I’d been burdened with. I did not want to go back into that hole. But I did trust Dave, so I went home and “got out the big shovel,” as he’d said. I dug deep and laid the wreckage of my life out on the page. It was liberating, like coming out of the closet. And it was dark and humiliating and ugly. Best-case scenario, I only allowed myself to hope that The Long Run would do half as well as Shipwrecked because I was convinced that Shipwrecked had been a fluke. Moreover, I worried that The Long Run was so depraved that it would destroy my fledgling writing career, which had ironically only begun to thrive once I’d given up on it for good.

  Two days after its publication in late October 2011, The Long Run leapfrogged stories by Stephen King and Dean Koontz to hit number one. It sold more than 65,000 copies in less than six months. It only dropped out of the top ten in February, when my next number one pushed it out.

  Each day brought fan mail. Not just from other runners, drunks, and ex-drunks, but also from Republicans, schoolteachers, Christians, and a fourteen-year-old Mormon. One kid did a PowerPoint presentation for his high school English class with slide titles that still crack me up: “Mishka Goes to College”; “Mishka Travels”; “Mishka Gets Checked for AIDS”; “Cough Syrup.” The Long Run established me as a writer, and it was the genesis of this book.

  It turned out Dave was right, again: people did want to read about that long aggregation of mistakes I call my life. The very thing I thought would scare them off—the darkness—drew them in droves. I had been wrong; I had been so, so wrong. When I had been in pain, hating myself, feeling utterly alone, that was when I had been the least alone. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of other people had been feeling alone at the same time. We had been alone together.

  Now six years sober, my life has changed so much that I hardly recognize it. I still live in the same creaky, rundown apartment by the BQE that trembles every time a truck goes by. My ride still provokes looks of pity and horror every time I gas up. I’m still wearing the same jeans and a lot of the same T-shirts. I still need a haircut. But everything is different. My life has pivoted on its axis so that instead of staring down at the ground, I can see the sky.

  I haven’t had a boss in four years. I don’t have to wear a polo shirt with the company logo stitched onto it. I don’t have to wear a blazer. I don’t have to wear pants if I don’t want to, and so I rarely do. I moved to New York City with $300 to become a writer and a musician, and just seventeen hellish years later, what do you know, I kinda did it. I have a couch. I have ice cube trays. I have health insurance. Health insurance.

  I am still an alcoholic. What that means, in medical terms, is that there is a shiny black scorpion with a long, armored, serpentine tail coiled around my spine at the base of my neck. Its pincers reach through gaps in my vertebrae to gently but firmly grasp my spinal cord. Its reticulated tail lovingly circles my spine, cradling each wildly curved bone, its terminus hovering expectantly over that braid of nerve endings, a bulb pregnant with poison, then a thick, cruelly curved spike.

  This spiny black abomination is not some rare tropical parasite that wormed its way inside me. It’s not a hive of nanobots implanted by an elite squadron of secret UN commandos. It’s not a malign interplanetary virus injected into me by some universe-hopping alien scientist. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, I built this monstrosity, one little bad decision after another. It’s a devil of my own creation, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, my mistakes incarnate.

  The scorpion is sleeping. Life is pretty sweet right now. But when I get a whiff of Jameson or gasoline or I get too angry or tired or depressed, it twitches uneasily in its slumber, its tail writhing minutely, its pincers digging ever so slightly into my spinal cord. I live in fear of what will happen if that evil little fucker ever wakes up.

  The Jameson thing, I get. The common wisdom is that I will be an alcoholic for the rest of my life. The rustling of the scorpion in its arachnid dreams when alcohol vapor hits my sinuses is a purely chemical reaction. But this vile crustacean/arthropod/dinosaur/demon stirs for other things too: pornography, video games, eBay, Facebook . . . even a fucking Snickers bar. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, as the saying goes.

  But when I run under the blazing hot sun until I’m exhausted or find a smelly dog on the street in Mexico and scratch that tickle spot that makes its leg skritch and it sheds all over the clean shirt I just put on, or when I make my sister’s kids laugh in the backseat of the car by singing bathroom songs, good, healthy blood runs over this sleeping scorpion, softening its armor, turning its thick, black shell to walnut, then rich, racehorse brown, then liver, and finally pink, slowly eroding and dissolving it, absorbing its minerals and proteins back into my body. I will stay vigilant, and I will prevail.

  One hard truth I stumbled upon is this: I drank because I wanted to drink. Every single drink, every single drug I took, I took because I made the decision to get fucked up, and fuck the consequences. I was sad and angry and lonely, and a little alcohol made me feel better. It took me a long time to figure out that a lot of alcohol made me feel worse. Whoops.

  I know that ultrarunning is not entirely the opposite of abusing drugs and alcohol. I used to run around all night, go to sleep at dawn, and sleep like the dead all day. Now I’m up at dawn, run around all day, and sleep like the dead all night. The girls I’ve dated since I’ve been sober haven’t understood why I’m drawn to running long distances, just as, in the past, my girlfriends didn’t understand my marathon benders. Now, as then, I spend a lot of time walking funny. And when you treat your body as a science experiment, whether with ultrarunning or ultradrinking, you spend a lot of time sleeping and a lot of time in pain.

  But if I am addicted to exercise, it has been by far the dreariest, most painful, least thrilling addiction I have ever experienced. I never had to goad myself to take a drink or a pill; it was always a reward for good behavior. “Wow, you’ve been awake for six hours without getting fucked up! You deserve a treat. But best not to eat a whole Opana—we’re getting low, and that shit is expensive. A quarter pill will do the job with the correct method of delivery—life is too short to swallow anything you can snort!”

  No, having spent most of my life as an addict, I have a decent understanding of addiction, and I am not addicted to running. I hate running. It’s never gotten easy for me. The last mile is not the hardest mile. The hardest mile
is the first mile. What’s harder than the first mile? Lacing up your goddamn running shoes before you even leave the house. Finally getting moving after a dry ocean of irritable procrastination is dispiriting—I’m sore or crampy or just tired, my legs feel wooden, my feet clumsily scuff the ground. I’m a big guy, and it takes me a long time to warm up, six or eight miles. After I get warmed up, it’s okay, but only for a minute. Then I want to stop, I want to slow down, I want to walk, I want to take the shorter route, I want to turn around and grab a cab and go right home.

  Running is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. Running keeps you honest. There is no short way to run a mile; there is no easy way to run a marathon. You can’t force it. If you are out of shape, you can’t just go out and run twenty miles today and be back in shape—you’ll injure yourself and wind up worse than you were before. If a bully is picking on you at school, it takes only instantaneous courage to throw a punch, take your lumps, and get him off your back. If you find yourself twenty pounds overweight in the spring, it takes will-power to lose weight. But if you’re a sedentary person, in order to run a marathon, you must change everything. You must do what you don’t want to do and give up what you do want to do. You must repeat that, over and over again, whether you fail or you succeed, for a very long time. You must tear down the faulty life you’ve built, the faulty person you’ve become, and rebuild everything from the ground up. It takes not just courage and planning and hard work but patience and determination and an ability to quietly suffer a little each day for a long time without giving up. It’s worth it.

  I don’t run as frantically as I used to. I don’t need to. I still bang out the occasional marathon on my own, but I don’t feel a desire to compete against others. Nor do I feel compelled to run a faster marathon or run further than I have before. I don’t desire to be superhuman. I never did. I wanted to become human. I have.

  Running hasn’t solved every problem in my life. It hasn’t made me a perfect man. I feel like I felt after that first half marathon and that first ultramarathon and that first fifty-miler: I can’t believe how far I’ve come, and I know I still have a long way to go.

  When I was seventeen, I made the decision to believe in Heaven. Not the oppressive, puffy-overwhite-clouds-and-smug-angels-with-harps-annoying-you-to-fucking-death Heaven but a more cluttered, relaxed, God-free zone where you would just be reunited with everything and everyone you had ever lost. The childhood dog you loved, the grandfather who died when you were only six, your dead junkie friends, and your quiet neighbor who suddenly succumbed to lung cancer though he had never smoked a day in his life. Also the green corduroy hat you wore hitchhiking across country and left in a Burger King bathroom, and that 1969 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop you pawned for coke, and your old friend Charlie, the stuffed toy dog you had as a baby, which you managed to hang on to till you were thirty-two, though it was disgusting and gray and had been for years, thoroughly saturated as it was with your saliva from years of oral adoration as an infant, till you left it in the trunk of a Kia you rented on a trip to Cleveland that the Hertz desk clerk Shenikwa never found, though you called and called and called. In my Heaven, every single thing you have lost will be restored to you.

  I’ve found some of that Heaven without having to die. Since I stopped drinking and started running in 2009, the things I had lost—the most meaningful things in my life—have flowed back to me almost effortlessly. My relationship with my mother has never been threatened, and Tashina and I have always stuck by each other in our loner, hardheaded way. But when Chuong and Helen drove out to California and I got to see him hug my mother, well, that was a singular happiness. My mother gave him back his Vietnamese-English dictionary, which she had held on to for him all these years. “I knew you’d be back,” she said with a smile when she produced it and put it in his hands. He never finished eighth grade, but his stepdaughter is in medical school, and his son is in dental school. “Never do drugs, never go to jail. I did good, Mom?” he said to her. Yes, Chuong, you did good. We’re planning a trip to Vietnam together so I can finally meet his mother.

  Tatyana and I didn’t speak for seven years after she kicked me out of her house, coincidentally the same amount of time I didn’t speak to my father. Even before that, it hadn’t been unusual for Tatyana and me to go a year without speaking.

  Tatyana and her husband Bill welcomed me back into their lives unconditionally. I wanted to be forgiven, and they wanted to forgive me. But that wasn’t enough. When their dream home came up for sale, they let me loan them money, money that was just lying around because, never having had it, I had no idea what to do with it. The “Redneck Ranch” is gorgeous. It’s a sprawling five-bedroom house on over an acre, as was our old house in New Hampshire, but as perfect as that home was flawed. Tatyana and I get along better now than we ever have in our lives, even before the divorce. We talk or text almost every day and haven’t argued once since our rapprochement. It’s odd, in your mid-thirties, to find a best friend who knows you inside and out, a best friend you have known your entire life.

  I spend as much time at the Redneck Ranch as I can. As unpopular as I was with my family, I am infinitely popular with Tatyana’s four kids. Tatyana’s dogs love me so well that, the last time I visited, they cried and tackled me the minute I got out of the truck. It was pitch-black, the middle of the night. But they knew my smell.

  Karma, a chubby chocolate Lab, is happiest when she finds me sprawled out on my sister’s couch, exhausted from a long run. Harley is content to lick every salty surface he can find. My legs, arms, shoulders, tummy. But Karma crawls on top of me—this is a sixty-pound dog—carefully spreads her entire body over me in order to immobilize me as completely as possible. Then she roughly polishes my face, in disgusting detail, with her tongue, trying to force it into my ear canals, up my sinuses, and through my clamped lips into my mouth. Yuck.

  There’s a curious blurring that goes on when I’m at my sister’s house. Harley is a shaggy black mutt, adopted from the shelter. My old dog, Katie, was a black mutt from the shelter. Zeke, Tatyana’s old dog, was a retriever; Karma is a retriever. Karma’s eyes are amber, almost yellow, like our old dog Princess’s eyes. Karma growls like a friendly Wookie when she’s happy and wags her tail so hard her hind legs skitter across the floor. Zeke did the exact same things. The black fur on Harley’s belly is riddled with white hairs, like Katie’s. Karma sheds horribly, like Katie did, great tufts of brown hair drifting off of her every time you scratch her back.

  One afternoon when Bill was at work and the kids were at school and Tatyana was running errands, Karma sat in front of me, her tail thumping the floor, laughter bouncing around in her eyes. Then she rolled onto her side and stretched out, waiting for me to pat her. I went down on one knee and obliged. Then both knees. Then I got on all fours, and instead of petting her, I just put my head into her fur and inhaled. She smelled exactly like Katie, my dear old dog, now long dead. I kept my face in her fur and kept breathing in her smell, that good, musty smell of a friendly old dog. I closed my eyes. It was Katie under my hands, under my nose. God, Katie, I have missed you so much. I kept my eyes closed.

  This blurring happens with people too. When I’m there, no one is capable of calling my nephew Mika and me by our correct names. I gave my mother shit for it until the day I called Mika by my name. At school, Mika insists that people call him by his birth name, Mikhail. At school, I insisted people call me by my nickname instead of my birth name, Mikhail. We are both named after Michael, my grandfather, a man neither of us knew. When Mika was a baby, he couldn’t say my name, so he called me Minna. When his younger brother Kai was a baby, he couldn’t say Mika’s name, so he called him Minna. The mother of my father, Murray, was named Minnie. The beloved dog of Bill’s childhood was named Murray. The confusion really stacks up sometimes.

  Once, when I was visiting for Mika’s eleventh birthday party, it got to be too much. We were sitting at the dinner table, a simple pine table my dad built before we left
Canada, the same table we had gathered around each night for dinner before my family flew apart. I sat in my spot, and the other kids sat in their spots. We were sitting in the same chairs we had always sat in, chairs that were always in need of new felt on the feet, chairs that had always been creaky from the kids leaning back. There was a black dog, Harley, and a brown dog, Karma, just like there used to be a black dog, Katie, and a brown dog, Zeke. There was a mom there across from me, where my mom used to sit. There was a dad at the head of the table, sitting in the special chair, the only one that had arms, where my dad used to sit. We were eating, talking, horsing around, and laughing. The mom loved the dad, and the dad loved the mom, and the only thing the parents loved more than each other were the children. I felt so good, sitting there at the table with my family. I was supposed to drive to LA after dinner to catch a flight home. The thought of leaving made me so sad that I had to run upstairs and cry. Not a dignified cry either, like you’re supposed to have when you’re an adult and a tear just drips out of the outside corner of your eye, and that’s it. An ugly cry where your face looks shitty, and the tears mix with snot, and you can’t get any air into your lungs, and you feel again like a helpless infant. I wasn’t ready to go. I never am.

  In 2012 Simon’s Rock invited me to speak at the twentieth anniversary of the shooting, a perfect 180 from trying to kick me out five days before graduation. For the first time, I finally reached out to Galen’s father, Greg Gibson. I sent him the piece I intended to read at the memorial and expressed my hope that the anniversary would not bring him any new sadnesses. His response took my breath away:

  After Galen’s murder, I thought we would always suffer the damage of this catastrophe, and that the kids, being young and strong, would grow past it. More and more now, I see I was wrong. We were old and tempered and already formed. We suffered, grieved, and got on with our lives. It was the kids, unformed, who were most profoundly affected by this terrible demonstration of the fact that we cannot control what happens in this world. So, in fact, this anniversary doesn’t bring any new sadnesses to us. We’ve just got the old, familiar, almost comfortable ones. But I sense it is you, the young ones, for whom the new sadnesses must continually come.