SPRING WATERY lemon sunlight in the afternoon, throwing a false warmth that’s gone by twilight. Clouds unrolling in high sinister patterns, casting a strange greenish light as I sit in study hall tense and filled with foreboding. Then cold driving rain for days at a time and something hurting in me like a spiritual toothache. In the mornings I wake with despair. The days are asking something of me, but I don’t know what it is or how to reply. I’m sixteen years old, and I feel caught in a fine mesh net. A tremendous power is flowing underneath me, but I don’t know how to touch it. Lyle sniffs the air like a dog, grins at me with wry satisfaction. “Track season,” he announces, as though that statement justifies everything, as though our lives have rolled down to that one meaning: to run.
Track season had begun for Lyle during Christmas vacation. He’d run, bogged down and panting, through calf-deep snow up the steep hills behind his house. His method of training was simple: he ran himself into exhaustion. When the weather broke and the snow began to melt, he hitchhiked each Saturday and Sunday to our school to run alone on the sodden track. But now that the track season has opened officially, he has me—his flabby, untrained, and apprehensive protégé—to introduce to the rites of his personal religion.
It’s the first day of practice. It might as well be January, drizzling with malignant insistence, half rain, half snow, the temperature in the forties. The coach issues us uniforms, makes a speech about the season, and tells us to go home. That’s not for Lyle. “Let’s go,” he says.
“What?”
“Let’s go. You aren’t going to let the weather bother you, are you?”
I feel like a fool as I dress, pull on jock and sweat suit, lace up the tennis shoes. Lyle is bounding up and down, swinging his arms. “What a godawful day,” he says gleefully. We trot from the gym to the track. I feel as though someone has turned me out in the middle of winter in my underwear. Following Lyle’s example, I’ve wrapped a towel around my neck and ears. “Let’s warm up,” he says at the track.
We begin jogging on the wet cinders. Above us a sky like dirty whipped cream is on its way somewhere else, moving fast. Soon the snow has misted my glasses so I can barely see Lyle in front of me. He’s muttering to himself, turns to make sure I’m behind, calls back, “You jog a lap and then walk a lap until you’ve finished ten. I’ll do a couple slow miles.”
We jog one lap together. I stop, and he trots on. I’m panting, discovering to my amazement that I’m warm enough. He laps me as I walk, calls out, “What’s the matter?”
“I’m tired.”
“Tired,” he snorts as though he isn’t sure of the meaning of the word, and he’s gone down the track.
After five or six laps, even though I’m walking every other one, I’m getting sick at my stomach and dizzy, feeling alternately chilled and feverish. There’s a pain in my side like an ice pick. I’m scuttling along like a crab, clutching at my chest. Lyle’s finished his two miles, yells at me, “Run it out. Take the pain and run it out. Don’t let your form go to hell.” He gives me a sample of how I should look: feet pointed straight ahead, long clean strides, hands carried up and reaching as though winding string into the body. “When it hurts, stretch it out.”
I finish my last lap. My side is on fire. My lunch is attempting to come up. Lyle supports me with one arm and pushes me along in a fast walk through the wet snow. “Jesus, it hurts,” I say.
“Of course it hurts. That’s the point. Keep at it. You’ll be great. Look at your chest. Good lung capacity. You’ve got the desire. You’ll be really great.”
I’m keeping my thoughts to myself. I don’t give a damn whether I’ll be great or not. What I’d been doing out there— although at the moment it doesn’t any longer make the least bit of sense—had been trying to make myself into a real boy, but now I just want the pain to stop and I never want to feel this bad again.
“A year ago,” I say, panting, “if somebody had told me . . . that I’d be out for track . . . I’d have laughed in his face.”
Lyle gives me a playful push and a sly smile. “You’ll be an athlete yet. You’ve got the spirit.” I only groan.
Back at the gym, naked in the showers, he yells to me, “Mens sana in corpore sano, right?”
The evening has turned colder when we begin to hitchhike into town; the air feels as brittle as if we’d stepped back a month into winter, but I’m beginning to enjoy my tiredness. My feet ache with each step; my legs ache all the way up to my hip joints. By the time I get home, all my used muscles will be shaking with light fluttery spasms.
“This is what the church fathers talked about,” Lyle is saying. “We don’t have a desert, but we have a track.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Were they after the same thing?”
“Of course they were. Labore est orare. It’s the only way we have to get at what they were after . . . or the hills.” He sweeps one arm up to the distant snow-covered skyline just edged with twilight. “I climb the hills back of my house. I need to be alone to think . . . to pray. It’s all got to come from here.” He pats his uniformed chest in the vicinity of his heart. “Even running. Concentration. Prayer. It’s all the same thing. They tried to tell me that I couldn’t play sports by concentration, but they were wrong. That’s how I learned everything I know. But you’ve got to do it too. That’s been your trouble.” He pats his forehead. “All here, nothing in the lungs and legs. But you’ve got a good heart.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be that good. I started too late.”
“No, no. You’ve got the spirit. That’s the important thing. If you’ve got that, everything else will follow.”
“The spirit’s willing, but the flesh is weak,” I say, smiling, meaning it as a joke.
“That’s what all this is for,” he answers in complete seriousness, “to make the flesh match the spirit.” Up and down the National Road we can see the snow in the air shaking out like bright splinters.
That was Lyle and I, the beginning of our friendship, track season, our sophomore year. After all these years I still remember that night clearly. By the time I was walking through downtown Raysburg, the ache of my body had turned to joy; tired as I was, I could have run again, laughing, through the streets. I remember crossing the Suspension Bridge over the dark river where the city lights were caught and repeated, the weight of my book bag in my hands, my uniform collar turned up around my ears, the sound of snow crunching under my feet, the sound of automobile tires on the pavement, the tremor of my loosening muscles, my glasses steaming in the moist air of the kitchen when I came in from the cold just in time for dinner.
◊ ◊ ◊
LYLE AND I had become friends that past winter while hitchhiking into town from school. We both favored a particular spot on the National Road where a traffic light stopped the cars, and we both arrived there after most of the other guys had gone home—he kept late by wrestling practice, I by meetings of the Classical Club or the school newspaper staff. For a few weeks we’d hardly spoken, had simply smiled, nodded, and, by an unstated mutual agreement, hitch-hiked together. Finally one evening, even though we’d been classmates for over a year, he introduced himself formally: “My name’s Lyle Ledzinski,” holding out a long, bony hand.
I took it. “John Dupre.”
“I know,” he said, “the brains of the class,” and giggled—a sound like a hiccup.
If he knew my reputation, I certainly knew his too. We’d both entered the Academy as freshmen on scholarships with a certain renown preceding us. I was the whiz kid, the straight-A student who’d won every academic prize offered at Jefferson Grade School—“Einstein Junior,” as I’d been labeled, a nickname I hated but couldn’t shake (although it was a vast improvement over what I’d been called at Jefferson—“Miss Dupre”). I’d established myself on the honor roll and had stayed there, firmly entrenched, with not much effort. And Lyle was one of the Polish kids from South Raysburg who made up the core of our football, basketball, and track teams—those tough crazy athletes with unpronounceable last names who formed a nearly exclusive club in the Academy and had weekend adventures that sounded (at least to the ears of a sheltered middle-class bookworm like myself) positively legendary: drunken parties, street fights, stolen beer and stolen hubcaps, encounters with cops. But even in that colorful crowd, Lyle stood out; he’d received the only track scholarship ever given in the history of the school. At fourteen, alone, on a hot summer’s day, timed by the coach, watched by his father and our head master, Colonel Sloan, Lyle had run, with no one to pace him, no one to compete against but himself, a five-minute mile.
Lyle was strangely arresting. The most immediate impact of him came from searching eyes that glittered from behind thick glasses; he peered out at the world down a long nose like a night-roaming animal caught by mistake in the daylight. That startled badger effect was accentuated by the adolescent acne that flushed his face. He wasn’t especially tall but gave the impression of much greater height because he was thin to the point of emaciation. Later, as I’d get to know him, I’d see how he carried himself—tall and cocky, his head high and back, his great nose sticking up into the air—the stance of the selfproclaimed hero. By emaciation, I don’t mean a fragility; he was all knots and knobs, bony joints, hard cords of muscle twisting around his arms like the gnarls of an old tree trunk. He could not possibly have been called handsome, but there was something appealing about him; he was electric and disquieting. He talked with his hands, making frantic passes in the air, his voice high-pitched and strained as though he might break down at any moment. And yet there was, superimposed over all of that tension, such a courtliness and graciousness that I imagined him as an old-world Polish aristocrat.
And he loved to talk. We were interested in the same things. Life, we would have said—Truth. He’d quote Saint Augustine or Saint Francis; I’d come back with Nietzsche or Freud. We were fascinated with each other. Soon we were more interested in talking than getting home; we’d stop for a Coke in town or just sit by the side of the road without bothering to stick out our thumbs. He kept telling me to go out for track in the spring. Why, I wanted to know. “Because then you’ll understand what life’s all about.” What should I go out for? “The mile,” he said as though nothing else was worth considering.
So I went out for track. And kept at it, though God knows why. Eventually I could finish an entire mile without stopping to walk; it took me about ten minutes.
“Don’t worry,” Lyle said, “it’ll come,” and then, later in the spring, he invited me to meet him in a bar—which is what I’d wanted all along.
The drinking age in West Virginia was eighteen, but Raysburg in those days was a wide-open town, and there was always a bar somewhere that would serve anyone who walked through the door. The Cat’s Eye was at the foot of a narrow flight of stairs in the back of an alley off Short Market Street. I must have paced up and down for an hour, working up my courage to go in. I could hear the distant sound of rock ’n roll. Kids passed me on their way in or out, but no one I knew. Sometimes I had trouble convincing people that I was even sixteen, and I kept wondering what I’d say if somebody asked to see my draft card. I was literally shaking with fear, but I knew I had to do it. Walking back that alley and down those stairs took nearly everything I had.
The bar was loud, that was the first impression: thunderous jukebox, yelling high-school kids. After a moment I located Lyle. He was sitting at a corner table, waving a beer bottle at me. I threaded my way through the crowd, mostly boys but some girls too, more than I’d expected—high heels, tight skirts, lots of makeup. A wild set, I thought, thrilled. And everybody in the whole damned place looked older than I did. “Can we really get served?” I asked, amazed.
“Just have to be tall enough to reach the bar,” Lyle said. He ordered four more beers. “My, my, my,” he said, smacked his lips and rubbed his long hands together. We each drank one quickly, hardly stopping to breathe. “Do you feel anything?”
“Not a thing,” I said and drank the beer desperately, waiting for some kind of effect. I suspected that the times before when I’d tried to convince myself I’d been drunk, nipping at my father’s bourbon in the middle of the night, I hadn’t been drunk at all, at least not on the alcohol. This time I wanted to experience it fully, have no doubt in my mind that I’d done it. We ordered another round. I didn’t much like the taste of the stuff.
I was counting carefully. I drank five beers in less than fifteen minutes. “You’re going to get smashed out on your ass,” Lyle said. That sounded like a very funny thing to say; I began to giggle. Halfway through the sixth beer, I found suddenly that the world was profoundly altered. I laughed outright, fell back in my chair. Here it was. For the first time in my life I was drunk—unbelievably, gloriously drunk. “Cut it out,” Lyle said. “People will think you’re drunk.”
That was the funniest thing I’d ever heard in my life. “This is great,” I managed to shout between spasms of laughter.
Lyle was getting alarmed. “Let’s get out of here,” he hissed. I made an effort to put on a poker face, and he hustled me upstairs and outside.
The open air, rather than sobering me, made me drunker. I walked into the indigo night waving my arms and yelling; the exhilaration was so great I could find no way to express it except by screaming with laughter. The world was filled with a savage power; I’d sensed it before but had never felt it that clearly. We walked quickly into East Raysburg, and I loved everything I saw. Those wretched narrow gutters of streets, the full garbage cans, the decrepit houses, the polluted sky above them, the light itself—contrast between the blue-black overcast and the yellow of windows—the phone poles and power lines: it was all beautiful. No, not beautiful—ugly, awful, disgusting, and I loved it. If this was life, this world as it looked then, the state I was in, then I wanted more of it. I would have jumped into a sewer to get it.
Eventually I got control of myself. “Let’s go back,” I said.
“Are you all right?”
“Sure, I’m all right.” We turned around and ran back to the Cat’s Eye—back the alleys, down the stairs, and through the jam of yelling underaged kids to wedge ourselves around a table in the corner. The jukebox, kicking out that wonderful rock ’n roll, was perfect for the way I was feeling.
We ordered enough beer to cover the table top. Lyle was getting drunk too. His eyes were glittering; sweat was pouring down his face; he was shaking with excitement. We spotted a beautiful hoodlum girl standing with her friends across the room. She was dark, could have been Italian, and was wearing a skirt so tight I couldn’t imagine how she’d squeezed herself into it. “Look at that,” I said.
“My, my, my,” Lyle said. We stared at her, fascinated. She reminded me, once again, of how much I wanted to have a girlfriend, some Chantilly-lace, pretty-face sweetheart like the one the Big Bopper sang about, Chuck Berry’s sweet sixteen sporting bright red lipstick and high heels, or a majorette who’d walk into the Friday Night Hop after the football game still wearing her uniform, her legs, under her deliciously short skirt, pink with cold, those wonderful tasseled white boots on her feet. Or, if I couldn’t have one of those wet-dream lovelies, any ordinary girl would do, any of the Canden or Raysburg High kids I saw on the bus with their pony tails and bobby socks. Drunk as I was, the full force of my desire struck me: I want a girl. I had an image of myself exploding from sheer frustration to leap, screaming, into the Ohio River.
Lyle must have been thinking something similar. “You go out with anybody?” he said.
“No. Do you?”
“Yeah. Sort of.” He shrugged dismissively, toasted me with his beer bottle. “May this be the year of piece.” It took me a minute to get the joke.
We stayed until the bar closed, yelling short bursts of words at each other over the noise. I was forcing myself to drink as much as I could as fast as I could, and the more I drank, the more I felt that anything was possible. Running track was possible. Being a real boy was possible. Having a girlfriend was possible. I was feeling for the first time the total movement of drunkenness (which later was to become hauntingly familiar), beginning to know the bits of physical sensation that blend to make this movement: the bitter tang of the beer, the music like a visible force hammering in the room, the smoke burning and blurring the eyes, the shouting voice of the bar, the charge of electricity in the air— beginning to know the mental expansions, breaking of constraint, the sudden possibilities of thought, events interconnecting in a peculiar and supra-lucid pattern. And I felt for the first time the power of our talk—these shouted statements—taking off like a roller coaster on the force of this movement, expanding out and twisting into new and unexpected directions. I’ve never found the words for the moment of realization (from nowhere, with no warning) that we’ve become bathed in a numinous power, a devastating glory, that I’ve lived all of my life to arrive at this instant, this passing breath of time, that this NOW completely justifies—more than that, glorifies—everything.
Lyle was yelling at me across the table, words that look trivial when put down on paper, but at the time full of power and truth: “We’ve got to know . . . all of life! ”
Walking home afterward, across the bridge, I felt shattered. I had never suspected that it could be like this.