by Pam Belluck
By all accounts, Cathy is a vital stabilizer. “The woman’s a saint,” is the way Rhoda Weinman, Tim Lepore’s close friend, describes it. “She is right to heaven, I keep telling her. Just his craziness alone. She’s very, very kind; she’s very sensitive; she’s very intuitive. She, of course, absolutely adores him. And you could tell from the things he said that he adores her.”
To Michelsen, Cathy “is the glue that keeps him together. He would be that crazy person who goes out in the moors and never returns if it weren’t for her.”
Michelsen says, “if there’s a problem in the office, Tim won’t deal with it—he hates confrontation, so Cathy has to go in and break up the fights and the issues that arise.” Cathy tolerates not only Lepore’s clutter, impulsiveness, and unpredictability but also the most frustrating thing for her, having to “play the role of the Tim wife,” when people, usually summer visitors, don’t recognize Cathy’s own importance to the island.
“She really does love him—God knows why. She told me everything he does and talks about is just so interesting. I don’t know anybody else who would be that patient.”
There is more than enough to be patient with.
Sometimes Lepore seems to blow off steam with macabre practical jokes. When Meredith’s best friend called one day, she hung up in tears because Lepore told her Meredith had been in “a horrible accident—she’s dead.”
When a girl Nick had begun dating in sixth grade phoned, Lepore said, “No, I’m sorry, he’s not available. He’s upstairs growing a penis.” The girl dumped Nick at a school dance soon after.
Paul Johnson, a friend, compares it to the antics of Hawkeye Pierce and the other army doctors on the TV show M*A*S*H. “I think some of these little eccentric things are there for that reason—you throw in a little bit of insanity to get some relief because there’s a huge amount of stress.” In Lepore’s job, “you’re it, and if you can’t fix it, that person dies or gets maimed for life.”
Lepore’s hobbies are his principal outlet. Some are short-lived flashes of passion, like when he suddenly decided “he wanted the entire family to just eat polenta,” Nick recalls. “He said eventually we’ll start growing our own corn. We would go buy the corn meal, and every meal was polenta. He had cookbooks, everything you could imagine—until my mother said, ‘Okay, that’s it.’”
He asked his office manager to order flax, planning to make linen. And he scooped clay from spots on the island, scheming to make pottery the way Indians did. Buckets of clay filled his car, which on a normal day is often littered with animal bones, old socks, and other detritus.
Once, says Martina Richards, a former nurse, Lepore “got all excited about something called Back Tuva Future,” a CD blending Nashville country music with the throat singing of the Tuvan people of Siberia. “He’d come into the office and try to do the Tuvan throat sound.”
And Nick, when he grew up and moved off-island, “got a random phone call telling me he needs a couple of pounds of acorn flour. It’s some kind of Korean flour; its main virtue is that it fills you up quickly. He wanted me to get it for him, but I know where it’s going. I’m not going to subject my mother to weeks of eating acorn flour.”
After all, Lepore had already subjected Cathy to his stone circle fetish. When he glimpsed a boulder he liked while running somewhere on the island, he would return to the spot with one of his lovingly-rehabilitated vehicles—military Land Rovers like the 1967 Chocolate Thunder or the 1973 Runaway American Dream. He hauled the stones home and arranged them in a circle on the lawn. “In the event that we lose calendars, these stones mark the winter and summer solstice,” he explains.
And what could be better to keep all those oversized rocks company? A Neolithic above-ground tomb called a dolmen. You build one of those and “you’re prepared,” says Lepore, who decided to improvise a version of these ancient structures using huge curb stones he scavenged from construction sites. He hasn’t quite collected enough of them yet. “Need a legion of serfs, perhaps.”
His plan to knit dog hair sweaters lasted for years. Lepore began saving shed fur from the family’s dogs—they’ve had up to five at once, three Nova Scotia duck-tolling retrievers, a Jack Russell, and a “Mississippi mutt,” one of the puppies regularly sent to Nantucket from an overflowing animal shelter in Mississippi. Lepore stashed the fur in plastic bags tucked in corners around the house.
It was a new one for their house cleaner, Mariellen Scannell, who thought she had “seen everything from A to Z.” Encountering a bag of hair, “I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’” Of course, “there’s a lot of stuff throughout the house that I ask myself that question: What the hell is this?”
Cathy began trashing the bags of fur, but Lepore never quite abandoned the notion. “He had a bag of dog hair that he kept in the car for the better part of five years ’cause he knew my mother would throw it away if it was in the house,” T.J. recalls.
Once something becomes a Lepore collectible, it’s almost impossible to discard. Cleaning is not his top priority. “Cathy has to do it all, including flush the toilet,” says Michelsen. “One night the furnace blew, and there’s water flooding the basement. Tim says, ‘I’m reading my book.’ Cathy and I are down there with mops and everything. We’re in the furnace room with all these boxes. I picked one off the floor, and the bottom falls out, and a real human skull and a bunch of bones roll out. I said, ‘Oh my God, Cathy. Who is this?’ She said, ‘Who knows?’”
Once Michelsen asked Lepore, “What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen?” thinking “it would be a one-sentence reply.”
“Hold on a minute,” Lepore answered, his eyes dancing. He dashed from the kitchen, returning with slides he had taken of horrific trauma cases he had treated years earlier in Rhode Island. He had Michelsen hold them up to the lamp light, one by one. “Here’s a guy who got shot, and his guts are lying over here. That’s his kidney. This one came in one night with no clothes on, and look what I found. Look at these things I pulled out of this guy.”
When Cathy asked Scannell to clean for them about eight years ago, Scannell was unprepared for what awaited her. She is not easily surprised because her clients run the gamut. At the top end, she cleans and cooks for Edmund and Doris Reggie, the in-laws of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Louis Susman, the American ambassador to the United Kingdom. Often, guests she is cooking for include Senator John Kerry and media personalities like Chris Matthews and Maureen Orth.
But with Lepore, while “I had an inkling because I had been to his office” as a patient, she had never been to their house. The first day, the Lepores happened to be off-island, and someone was house-sitting for the dogs. “Well, here goes nothing,” Scannell thought. “I’m going along the counters and kind of organizing stuff, and then I get over by the sink, and I wasn’t really paying attention. I’m just spraying the Windex, and oh my God, there’s a rat thawing out on the counter here!”
The house-sitter came running, explaining that Lepore “has a bird of prey and that’s his lunch,” Scannell recalls. “I was slightly disturbed for a short period of time.”
Scannell hung in there. When people ask, with astonishment and sympathy, “Are you the lady that cleans Tim’s house?” she replies, “Well, I make an attempt to.” She figures Lepore embodies the expression “a clean house is a sign of a wasted life.”
Scannell considers “the whole house somewhat of a Tim man cave,” especially with “all this hunting stuff.” Does she clean the gun areas in the basement? “No, no, no. Cathy knows where I draw the line.” But once, Scannell found herself struggling to pull the vacuum cleaner from its closet. “What the hell?” she grumbled. She switched on a light and immediately asked Lepore for help. “What’s the problem, Mariellen?” he asked. “Well, the vacuum cleaner seems to be wedged between a shotgun and a chain saw, and I’m a little concerned about having my head blown off.”
Still, Scannell can relate a little to Lepore’s sensibility. She did, after a
ll, furnish a new home almost entirely from the take-it-or-leave-it pile at the town dump, a feat that landed her on the Nate Berkus interior design TV talk show. And she occasionally matches wits with the doctor. When she realized that Lepore leaves the radio on to keep the dogs company, the dial set to Rush Limbaugh, Scannell began changing it to a liberal political station and leaving a note: “Stop torturing the dogs. This is animal abuse, making dogs listen to Rush Limbaugh.”
Discovering an old prescription pad, she scribbled a prescription for Lepore: “Your book levels were very high in books so please watch your intake of books.” She signed it “Dr. Scannell.”
Lepore’s leaning towers of books cover sizable sections of the floor. Scannell is convinced “he is probably ordering ten, twenty books a day.” That doesn’t include the magazines: Bowhunter, Primitive Archer, Traditional Archery, American Rifleman, American Falconry, Guns & Ammo, American Handgunner, Handloader, Rifle, Gun Digest, Shotgun News, Man at Arms, Bulletin of Primitive Technology. And those are just the weapons periodicals. There’s also Trail Runner, UltraRunning, Marathon & Beyond, Archives of Surgery, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Annals of Internal Medicine, The Medical Letter, Emerging Infectious Diseases, The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Current Problems in Surgery, Selected Readings in General Surgery, and Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
This seemingly unscaleable mountain of reading material fuels another Lepore collection: an arcade of arcane facts he stores in his sand trap of a mind. Once Weinman, who raises championship dachshunds, got a license plate in their honor: Doxie4. Lepore took one look and smirked. “Do you know what a doxie is?” he asked. (It’s a word for prostitute.) Weinman had no idea. But since no one else did either, she decided to keep the plate.
Dr. Scannell’s prescription also noted that “due to high sneaker count I’m putting you on a sneaker-free diet.” Tough medicine for a man who has saved every pair he has worn in the Boston Marathon, which he has completed each year since 1968. He also insists he needs different shoes for running on different surfaces. One pair came in handy, for example, when Lepore boasted to Richards that he had found “the only waterfall on Nantucket” and took her running out to the middle of the moors. “We came across a trickle of water, and he was like, ‘Look, there it is!’”
Cathy has tried to jettison some of Lepore’s sneakers, which are in various stages of disrepute. Lepore dug them out of the trash. Cathy bought a large shoe tree, which Scannell describes as “a teeny-weeny Band-Aid. Now we’ve got shoes all over the floor and a shoe tree in the middle of the room.”
That sneaker addiction might suggest a die-hard runner, but Lepore’s training and preparation is hardly rigorous. Sometimes he has time to run; sometimes he doesn’t. He doesn’t work out like an athlete or eat like one. “He’s a doctor, but he doesn’t take optimal or even average care of his health,” Nick says. “He’ll come home, grab a bowl full of tortilla chips, and spray mustard on it, and that’s his dinner.”
Weinman has run twenty marathons with Lepore in a head-to-head rivalry that became island lore. “My goal this year? To humble Rhoda Weinman, to have her eat my dust,” was Lepore’s boast to the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror. He almost always lost; Weinman says she’s beaten him eighteen times. Although Lepore got her into marathon running and they ran together for years, Weinman says his training regimen is so laughable that one of his best friends, a doctor, wrote her: “If you want to run a successful marathon, get rid of him. Don’t even think about training with him.”
In April 2008, Lepore entered the marathon after having major knee surgery. He was in such pain that he took Percocet and prednisone, and injected himself with “some long-acting local anesthetic” before the race, he says. “Alas and alack, not quite long-enough acting.” By seven miles, Lepore was “in some serious hurt, limp and gimp.” It took seven hours, so long that the official time clocks had been taken down, but he hobbled across the finish line.
“He’s turning in times that are right before the meat wagon,” Nick says. “He’s never in good shape for it. I’ve been trying to get him to stop for years.”
But Lepore’s not about to stop. Instead, he makes accommodations. His toenails, for instance. Sometimes running makes his toes blister under the nails, “get fluid underneath and hurt like hell.” So “I take a scalpel and take the nails off. It hurts for a couple of hours, but it’s better than hurting for a couple of days.” Sure, it’s unattractive—“my wife thinks I have the ugliest feet in the world”—but Lepore even offers to share his remedy, telling fellow runner Barbara Rives that “he could pull out all my toenails.” She demurred.
“For the smartest guy I’ve ever met, he does some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen,” Tornovish says. But Tornovish, a recovering alcoholic, has to hand it to Lepore. At least they are “healthy outlets” that “help him deal with terrible stress.”
Lepore’s self-invented contests are occasionally self-delusional. When his sons played high school football, Lepore showed up at a practice and approached the coach, who ordered the Lepore boys to the goal line. There, in front of the whole team, Lepore challenged his sons to a hundred-yard dash. The boys were not shocked. He had threatened to “come down and humiliate us” in a race, Nick recalls. “He said it was going to be ugly. He was always all worked up, saying, ‘I’m faster than you. I’m stronger than you. You’ll never be able to beat me.’” But it didn’t go exactly as Lepore had planned. “He swears he slipped because he wasn’t wearing the right shoes,” Nick says. “It turned out for him it was only a sixty-yard race.” And an ignominious defeat. “I was so chagrined,” Lepore recalls. “It’s nighttime. The lights are on. All the kids are there watching. And this old fart just doesn’t do it. I couldn’t believe it. My boys were faster than I was.”
When not challenging his sons to feats of strength in a homemade strongman competition with concrete balls, Lepore engineered trivia contests. On a trip to a Boy Scout ranch, he’d give extra food to the son who answered detailed questions about World War II aircraft. When another boy joined in and knew obscure answers, like the arrangement of pockets on the pants soldiers wore during the D-Day invasion, Lepore’s inability to stump the kid “just drove him nuts,” T.J. says.
He had better luck at the Boy Scouts’ Pinewood Derby races, where boys race cars they build from small blocks of wood. But the path to success was bumpy. When T.J. was about eleven, he and Lepore won the Nantucket derby, but at the district level on Martha’s Vineyard, “we got our doors blown off,” T.J. says.
When Lepore asked to see the winning vehicle, its owner wouldn’t let him, making Lepore suspicious. “Okay, good enough. I’m coming back, and I’m hungry.”
Lepore pored over books and interrogated Pinewood insiders, learning tips that weren’t exactly “kosher.” He polished the wheels and axels with a tool he used on his guns. He added weights in strategic places. He gutted out the wood and poured in lead that he melted the way he liquefied lead for bullets. And he shaved the plastic tires so that only a ridge would touch the track, reducing resistance so the car would go faster.
Lepore even built backup cars in case something went wrong or judges disqualified one of his vehicles. “Nobody was going to beat my car—nobody.”
In the Nantucket competition, “my car was three feet ahead of the next one. The only way you could be faster than my car is if it had a jet on it.”
At the district competition, though, T.J. recalls, “there was kind of an awkward moment” when the judge examined entrants’ cars. “He knew that people had been finagling,” Lepore says. “I said, ‘Let’s race.’ I am in competition with a lot of guys that are carpenters, woodworkers. Everybody had a little fudge. It’s just, I did it better than anybody, because I’m shameless.”
Lepore’s car did so well, Nick remembers, that it “was one of the reasons that the Boy Scouts had to change the rules. Word had gotten a
round.”
Lepore’s other competitive outlet was boxing, a dead-of-winter activity the island organized so people wouldn’t go stir crazy. “He was always going on about how good he was—bring the thunder and the pain,” Nick recalls. “He would have testosterone patches on, and he came out snorting like a bull.”
Anyone watching Lepore’s pugilistic exploits could see what the doctor apparently couldn’t. “He was an insult to boxers everywhere,” says Steve Tornovish, who met Lepore boxing at the Boys and Girls Club. “He couldn’t break an egg.”
Once, as T.J. held a sign that said, “Doctor Death, Doctor Death, Doctor Death,” Lepore fought Nick’s twelfth-grade government teacher. “Everybody who came to my house for decades saw that video,” Nick says. “He’s talking about how he’s pulled his double jabs, and it’s the slowest thing you’ve ever seen. He says, ‘This is the punch that put him down.’ There’s no punch. The guy must have tripped or something.”
Lepore does point out that when he retired from boxing in his late fifties, the head of the Boys and Girls Club, a former pro boxer himself, pronounced Lepore the senior heavyweight champion. “I’d conquered everyone in my age class,” he says. “I’m like Rocky Marciano. I fought everybody that wasn’t in a wheelchair and then a few that came close. I was looking at the nursing home for other contenders.”
Even when T.J. got married, Lepore could not suppress his competitive streak. At the rehearsal dinner, during a sentimental slide show about the bride and groom, a burst of sound erupted, and T.J. heard, “Yeah, yeah, do it. Go, go, go!” It was his father, and “he’s got just about every guy between the ages of fifteen and sixty in a group, and he’s got these nails.” Lepore had cut the heads off the nails and was challenging men to bend them with their bare hands, including T.J., who had to “bend the nail in front of my wife’s father.” More than a few wedding guests cut their hands.