Finally, temps are in the 70s. Payback for those punishing August runs. The first day, Sunday, before my shift at the New York Post, I shoot for an hour, five minutes: 1:05. My lucky number, and a seven interval up and down the stone step stairway to the overlook of the manmade lake in Prospect Park. When I catch my second wind, halfway through the staircase interval, I’m Cameron’s Avatar, on Labor Day weekend 2010, and I feel my leg like it was before my blood clot. Like a 20-year-old, with a memory of one.
*
The bellmen had the best jobs and the hearts of the prettiest maids. Front line with the tips, big-forehead handsome and beefy. Career hotel keepers held the manager posts at Chateau Lake Louise, an historic Canadian Pacific Railroad hotel, a mansion on a glacial blue lake, during the summer of 1976, but college students flocked there to fill the menial ones.
The previous summer I’m 19 and the night houseman. Lake Louise isn’t the kind of place where hipsters came in at 2 a.m., or 3 a.m. No, we liked to say that the folks who came (in those un-PC days!) were the newly wed, the nearly dead and the slanty heads, but if a late-night reveler were to see me waxing the main lobby that summer, struggling with the floor buffer that was at least as heavy as I was, I’m sure she wouldn’t have given me a second thought. I must have done well enough, though, because in the summer of 1976, I graduated to a day job: Captain Linen, I was called, responsible for a crew of sheet and towel sorters in the bowels of the hotel. Where I’m sure forensic scientists are born. (And Dumpster divers …)
I want to say, as way of explanation for what will follow here, that I don’t see myself as a victim. I know it is de rigeur, that as Thomas Laqueur writes in the July 8, 2010, London Review of Books, that "We Are All Victims Now," or as Alice Miller famously said, "All children suffer trauma and permanent psychic scarring at the hands of parents." Suffice to say that 1976 – and again 25 years later, but that’s for a future post – was a very bad year. And if you believe in the power of numbers (see above my lucky number 1:05, is my birth date, 10-5, and my wife’s childhood street address number, the significance of doing running intervals of 7) then I take some comfort in the fact that in 2031 (sequence of bad years: every 20, 25, 30), I will be 76, which would make for a long life, and, give or take, the cultural norm, if I make it there ...
But that summer, around Victoria Day holiday, in May I lost one of my best friends to a motorcycle accident. I can’t say much more here, except to say, that when I called the hospital in Winnipeg where he was rushed, I convinced the nursing supervisor that I was family. And in so many ways, I was. In pre-Internet times, I had only learned from a letter from my mother that my friend had had a serious accident. I was at a payphone miles from the hotel when I called the hospital and learned that he had passed away only a hour or so before.
*
A lot is made about this phrase: old soul. My daughter Kate is one. And I consider myself to be one too. And Bessie Doenges. Bessie wrote a column for me at the neighborhood weeklies I edited on Manhattan’s West Side. The column "Bessie Writes" could not have been more aptly named. In a front-page article that appeared in the Sunday New York Times of Dec. 17, 1995, Bessie is referred to as a "discovery at 94." She had an agent, and prospects for wide publication.
The phone rang at 8 a.m. that day, and it was Bessie:
"My legs! My legs!" she said.
"Bessie, are you okay?" I said.
"Of course, I’ m okay," she said, with a sniff. "But my legs are on the front page of the New York Times!"
A Poem
By Bessie Doenges
I creak and I crack
And I have a lame back.
I don’t care;
I’m aware.
My teeth won’t fit right
And my hair is a sight.
I forgive;
I still live.
My feet go to sleep;
Must I weep?
I can’t hear;
Life’s still dear.
Very gently I bite
My arm and taste
The salt.
*
A woman in a orangeish velveteen housecoat is walking her dog along the perimeter of Green-Wood Cemetery, Fifth Avenue and about 27th Street. We’re both on the sidewalk as I stride past, saying excuse me. Suddenly, the dog, a Doberman, strains on the leash, and I veer off the concrete near the 10-foot wrought-iron fence of the Brooklyn landmark.
"You shouldn’t be running like that," she said. "It’s dangerous!"
Soon, I’m on Angel Ruiz Gautier Way, or 36th Street. It’s humid and I’m sweating freely, but not like the previous Wednesday, when it was 98, hopefully the hottest day I will face before Steamtown, which is only a month away. Now, though, I can look forward to this new pathway, along Fort Hamilton Parkway, and eventually up to Windsor Terrace, where I see a strange sign, advertising "clean" tradesman and a closer look at Our Lady’s Field, sponsored by Holy Names Sports.
I am wondering if one day Mayor Bloomberg will decide to open Green-Wood to joggers, when I see it. A black and gold butterfly as wide as my palm, fluttering above and through the iron spears of the cemetery wall. I smile and pick up speed, climbing McDonald Avenue hill with ease.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Seven
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