Fighting Time

When I was in third grade, the namesake of my elementary school was changed from J. Edgar Hoover to Herbert Hoover. Apparently issuing assassination orders doesn’t bode well for one’s legacy. The real joke, though, is that the name will have to be changed once more if Herbert’s blind faith in laissez-faire capitalism — which precipitated the Great Depression and its attendant misery — is ever as reviled as J. Edgar’s autocratic proclivities.

At the time, however, my older brother Kevin had his own explanation for the name change.

“You know those vacuum cleaners, the Hoover ones from the commercials?” he asked. “It’s that guy. Herbert is the guy who owns all that.”

Aside from convincing me that our school was named after a vacuum cleaner magnate, Kevin also filled me with phony stories about the elderly school janitor, Mr. Ed. Mr. Ed was ancient and musty, a brittle giant seemingly forged from dust.  He hauled his monumental body around as if it were a curse, his jerky motions belying a lifetime of baggage. Atop an otherwise bald head, his wispy gray forelock defied gravity, moving like a periscope, probing and prying and dancing its obscene dance while he laid down sawdust on a fresh pile of vomit or paced the hallways to the jingle-jangle tune of his tool belt. There was a malevolence about him, an imposing gravity to his very presence. Something had soured inside of Mr. Ed. The accumulated experience of a lifetime curdled and turned poisonous where in others it flowered into sanguinity. For many of us it was unusual to see a scowl fixed on a wizened face with such finality. Our grandparents shared with us advice, stories, crooked smiles and the cure-all offering of Sunday afternoon cookies, while Mr. Ed shared with us only the implicit promise of disaffection. With the downcast eyes of stoics and sinners, we wilted beneath his gaze.

“He cuts off kids’ wieners, you know,” said Kevin. “He did it to a kid who stuck gum on the wall; threatened the rest of us, too.”

I thenceforth became acutely aware of every single garbage can’s location, from classrooms to hallways to the playground. I tossed my gum into trash cans compulsively, fearfully, and eventually stopped chewing gum altogether.

Behind my grade school, in the sprawling field where yellow, water-hungry grass gave way to a cluster of trees, a high school kid put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, staining the white rock he perched upon.

I ran past that spot three times a week for three years of my life, on speed training days and race days, the rock never losing its novelty, its sense of ecumenical doom. Sandwiched between two evergreen trees about fifty yards from the finish line, my eyes instinctively sought it out as I barreled down the home stretch, fighting against the indefatigable, yellow-numbered time clock.

There’s something primal about running, especially running in a group: sinewy muscles expand and contract in lockstep strides; rubber soles assail the concrete and beat out a bleating, percussive rhythm; exertion and singularity of purpose strip away the minutiae, resurrecting those evolutionary imperatives laid waste by automation and complacency. The body works just as it was intended to. The mouth favors grunts instead of words. When you stop running, your head swims with endorphins and you’re bound to those on your flanks by sweat and collective exhaustion. Then you get your breath back and real life begins again.

It was strange that Kevin and I ended up on the cross-country team in the first place. As I began to learn around age fourteen, turning into what you hate is one of the universal themes of punk, and a similar force was at work when my brother and I became runners. Walking home from Hoover Elementary, our politeness unraveling and running out of slack somewhere along Cambourne Lane, we used to attack the high school cross-country team as they headed west towards the swamp. It wasn’t that we hated them or anything, but since they couldn’t fight back, they were easy targets. They bore the full brunt of our ennui-driven rage until we learned that kissing girls was more fun than harassing people. We’d spit on them and swing our backpacks, plumbing the dark depths of our pre-pubescent lexicon. “Faggots!” “Dickweeds!” “Nice tights, pantywaste!” And there we were, less than a decade later, clad in the same tights, our genitals squeezed in a lycra grip, running past grade school kids who antagonized us just as we had antagonized the unfortunates before us, tiny fists registering nostalgia and shame somewhere amid the irritation and pin prick pain.

Though some of the kids on our team were running merely because they were looking for something to do after school, most of us were more enamored of the process of yearning and consummation, the competitive crapshoot of failure and success. Our shins were riddled with puncture wounds doled out by the quarter-inch spikes of those we attempted to draft behind; we shat behind shrubbery when our stomachs gave way, returning from a six-mile loop without the socks we’d begun with; some of us were hit by cars and ran the remaining miles back to school in spite of welts and possible fractures. And all of it was for naught unless we won, or at least sated whatever our own particular goals may have been, because there was no status to be gained from running. Our sweat was the sum of our ambitions, and, once loosed from the white chalk starting line, we were alone; the universe was occupied only by our empty heads, hungry legs, and the eternal ticking of the clock that stood God-like next to the finish line. No one else cared. Girls didn’t flock to our ectomorphic frames – all hipbone and vein – wrapped in revealing short shorts that felt like a pointless formality. If we had wanted to get laid we would have learned to play instruments and started bands, which is what some of us did when high school ended and vices became more attractive than regimen.

Kevin was a senior when I was a freshman. His class was full of guys who had been friends since grade school; they had been running together for years, forming inexplicable bonds. Leading up to the state finals at Detweiller Park in Peoria, they went undefeated and, every single week, were ranked first by an IHSA committee. I tagged along with them, being preened and prepared, a de facto heir to whatever it was they were hoping to bequeath after their departure.

Detweiller Park was an explosion of last gasp beauty. Every autumn since then I’ve been overwhelmed by that earthen decay, arriving with the wind and bringing me back to those sweeping, colorful chasms that sprawled out before me, distant tents tribe-like in their allegiance to team color, the swell of the crowd reverberating through the trees while people I didn’t know ran in races I didn’t care about.

I don’t remember the details of my brother’s race, only that it began badly and ended even worse. Sprinting from one edge of the course to the other, yelling myself hoarse and watching it all fall apart, I wanted to jump the yellow ropes and pull my brother to the finish line on unspoiled legs. I wanted to give him that trophy that then seemed so important but now seems so pointless, because to coronate particular moments is to overshadow substance with ceremony.

The team finished a disappointing sixth, and no one on the team earned all-state honors.

On the ride home, raindrops flitting across the car window on their amoebic march into oblivion, I felt more aware of the temporal nature of life and the absoluteness of that moment than I ever had before, even more so than I had when standing before my grandfather’s casket a few years prior, thumbing a piece of cardstock with the lyrics to an old Irish ode printed on it. That may sound hyperbolic or calloused, but it’s true. The disappointment and pain of someone you care about is always much more unbearable than your own pain. It makes you feel helpless. And, at its very basest, time renders us helpless too. We are subject to its certainties, its ceaseless pull and tear at our bodies. Racing was a controlled fight against time, bestowing only momentary victories before real life began again and that supreme moment of crossing the finish line in triumph was distilled into a poorly manufactured trophy to be packed away in boxes and eventually discarded. What really mattered was the residue of those victories and losses, the friendships and stolid determination earned through toil and camaraderie.

Our high school’s newspaper, The Sextant, used to print a year end supplement in which seniors wrote their high school wills, metaphorically giving away possessions, memories, advice. I opened it during lunch and flipped to my brother’s name. “To my brother, Sean,” he wrote, “I will the knowledge that dreams must be chased down.”