Marathon Man (16 page)

One day, Howard decided to implement a new communication strategy, which involved writing pro-union slogans and hanging them up inside elevators and offices and storerooms. I knew the higher-ups would not view this exercising of our First Amendment rights in the same noble, positive light as we did. At the same time, horrible things went on every day in the hospital and nobody seemed to care, so putting up a couple of flyers wasn't going to be a big deal.

Howard and I were brought down to a windowless office where a couple of stern-looking men in suits were waiting to interrogate us. All that was missing was a lamp, turned up to its highest setting, to shine in my face. They put a piece of paper in front of us, which, as they explained, was a report from a leading handwriting expert, who had determined that the dastardly people who wrote those pro-union slogans in the elevators and the offices and the storerooms had the identical handwriting Howard and myself.

Howard immediately denied the charges. I don't think I helped his case, though, because I burst out laughing. “Yeah, I did it,” I said. I could feel Howard's eyes on me; I don't think he was happy I had confessed to the crime so easily. After all, the only thing they had on us were the pro-union flyers, a conclusive handwriting match, and the fact that for the past twelve months we were the only two people actively going around trying to sign people up to join a union.

The hospital went into crisis mode. This was going to be treated as “the crime of the century”—only slightly less heinous than the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Of course all they could really do was fire us. So that's what they did: They fired us.

Well, now Howard had them right where he wanted them. Building on the momentum of our unjust dismissal, and the ensuing outrage among the rank and file, he convinced thirty other workers at Brigham to march on the personnel office. We stormed down there and made our demands known: 1. We wanted the right to take a formal vote on forming a union; 2. Howard and I were to get out jobs back. To be honest, I dreaded the second part but I figured now wasn't the time to mention that to Howard, seeing as he was on a roll.

A man came in to see us. He was the head of Personnel. We had forced a face-to-face with the head honcho. Glancing over at Howard, his face brimming with confidence, the air of victory hung in the air. The head of Personnel said: “The police are on their way.” Well, I could see from Howard's reaction, him sprinting for the door, that we had ceded the upper hand.

I fled the scene along with Howard and the other thirty workers. I hadn't run that fast since I outlasted the Frenchman at the Coast Guard two-mile race. The cops hadn't caught me for squirrel hunting in Stanley Park and they weren't going to catch me now.

Following my near arrest, I stayed clear from the hospital. Let the heat die down. After a week, I walked into the hospital and they were circulating papers with a description of me. Holy cow, you'd think I was some arch-criminal! In truth, I was lucky I didn't get lost coming to work every morning. The papers said that if I was found to be anywhere on the premises I was to be apprehended and the police should be called in.

Did I think my small act of vandalism was going to be viewed as a vicious attack on the entire health care infrastructure of America? No. I never thought about getting fired. I wouldn't have wanted that, seeing that I still had six months left of alternative service. I just did something, in my own clumsily naïve way, that I believed would improve the place and make it better. But the powers that be didn't like that. So now my picture was circulating around the hospital with the following description: Young male, ragged clothes, long hair in a ponytail.

 

SEVEN

Power of the Emerald Necklace

A
PRIL 21, 1975

N
ATICK,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

Drayton and I had broken away from the pack. We were rolling. Hammering away at each other. I must have looked pretty intense at the moment, going mano a mano with Drayton, who had ice water for blood. I was in racing mode, every one of my senses fully engaged in competition. The physical chess game was fun. I was assessing Drayton's condition and he was assessing mine, and this was all happening without so much as a glance in each other's direction. If I could get a read on him before he could get a read on me, I'd gain the upper hand. He was thinking the exact same thing. So who was going to make the first move? If he decided to burst ahead, should I retaliate with my own surge? Or would I think, No, that's just what he wants me to do. I'm going to hang back. Let him get tripped up in his own trap. A hundred subtle calculations were taking place in our heads, which would be hard enough in itself, without flying along at a sub-five-minute pace.

With the town of Wellesley just beyond our view, Drayton and I continued to match each other step for step. We had run the first ten miles at a blistering pace. There was a possibility that Fleming would be right: that our personal duel would be the undoing of both of us; taking so much out of each other that we had nothing left to fend off the other challengers. Just then, a woman standing along the route shouted, “Go, Jerome! Go, Jerome!” Although his face showed no emotion behind his dark sunglasses, Drayton was apparently fired up by the show of support because he suddenly surged ahead.

I felt a jolt of anger shoot through me. If that unknown Boston spectator had dumped a bucket of cold water on my head, it would have been the same thing. Okay, I got that I was a nobody in my own hometown; I got that my bronze medal at the World Cross-Country meant nothing to anybody back here; I got that the press thought so little of me that I wasn't included among the race favorites. But this is the Boston Marathon—you root for the home team. You root for Clarence DeMar and for Tarzan Brown and Les Pawson and John “the Elder” Kelley and Johnny Kelley and Amby Burfoot. You root for the guy running with a giant
BOSTON
hand-written in marker across his shirt, not the guy with the fancy red Maple Leaf on his. That's plain wrong.

At once, I shot off down the road like a heat-seeking missile. As for that spectator, I don't know who she was—I'll probably never know who she was—but I'll tell you one thing: At that moment, she was Jerome Drayton's worst enemy.

The whole way, Drayton and I had been feeling each other out. But when that woman yelled “Go, Jerome!” all that careful calculating went out the window. The adrenaline kicked in. While I had years of the most extensive training under my belt, it was that comment that got me going. It was the shot in the arm that I needed. Okay, I'm ready to go now. Let's take the gloves off. Let's do this. I caught up to Drayton and roared past him.

Going through Natick, which is about 10.5 miles into the race, I had been trying to pull away, churning with a light but relentless gait. Now, I was going to see how the man in the dark sunglasses responded. Was he going to give chase? Usually when you surge, if someone's going to go with you, it's clear—they'll pull back even with you pretty quickly. Maintaining physical contact, and even pretty good visual contact, is very key in all this. Once there's a certain gap between two competitors—and it's probably around seventy-five yards—you start to lose the sense of competing; you can't compete as well. The closer you are, the more you can compete with someone in a road race, in a marathon. So I was trying to open that gap on him, but it was impetuous. A dizzying blend of feelings came over me. Boldness and butterflies jostled with each other while sailing at a brisk clip—the exhilaration of playing with fire mixed with the possibility of getting burned.

I had made my move around eleven miles into a race that most serious runners will tell you started at mile 20. Drayton was probably thinking that the real race wasn't going to start until the Newton Hills. He was probably thinking, He'll come back to earth. But I had no intention of coming back to earth. I'm going from here, this is the move. I'm driving hard the rest of the way. Why shouldn't I? I had the cool weather, the tailwind. I had the shoes! Everything was working for me. Well, I had my answer. He let me go. Big mistake.

T
HREE
Y
EARS
E
ARLIER

B
OSTON,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

Dawn was breaking through the window of our apartment at 32 Oakview Terrace. The mild, cloudy weather lent the city a romantic touch. I looked at Ellen's side of the bed. Empty. Already left for work. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. My thoughts turned to the hospital, my source of employment, until I was chased off the premises.

While I was happy to be spared from witnessing any more emergency room horror scenes, my life had been flung into doubt. I feared what the selective service board might do to me now. For a year and a half I had worked as an escort messenger, which meant I still owed the government another six months. What would they do to me if I couldn't find another alternative service job? Would they find one for me—in some harsh, barren region of the country, far from my family and friends? Or maybe they would just toss me in jail. Being locked up in a tiny cell would be the ultimate torture for a guy like me. Find me the most rambunctious golden retriever in the world. His need to run around outside was nothing compared to mine.

My first thought was to go around to the other hospitals in Boston. I figured one of them must have a need for an experienced escort messenger. Not so. Every place I tried turned me away. I remember going up to the Baptist Hospital on Mission Hill and having the door literally slammed in my face. Had I so enraged the higher-ups at Brigham Hospital that they had me blacklisted from every hospital on the Eastern Seaboard? It looked that way.

Unable to find an alternative service job, I had no choice but to try and secure any means of income. That wouldn't be easy. The country was in a recession. Jobs were hard to come by. When a position did open, the competition was fierce. The fact was, I had a degree in sociology from a good college and it was worth about as much as the loose change in my tattered jeans.

I was in a serious bind. On one hand, the government made it clear that they were going to get those six months I still owed them. Or else. They assigned me a case agent with whom I had to speak on a weekly basis to discuss the status of my job search. From time to time, as I lay awake in the dark, I concluded the government's real aim was not to find me a job, but rather to cause acute anxiety and as much humiliation as possible. Payback for not fighting in their messed-up war.

After weeks of fruitless search, I finally landed a job working behind the counter of Arby's Roast Beef on Huntington Ave. I knew before I started that one of the job requirements was to wear a white paper cap, but it wasn't until I actually affixed the little triangle hat to my head—announcing “It's a pleasure to serve you!”—that I felt the full weight of degradation descend on me. I quit after a few days.

I couldn't find work, and when I did find work I couldn't keep it. I knew this local guy named Kirk. He was a very big fan of the sport; a track fanatic. He had all these issues of
Track and Field News
, like forty of them. I borrowed them all. I would stay up and read through them until three in the morning. Flipping through the pages, I would read about people I knew from college. Amby Burfoot had become a world-class long-distance runner. Jeff Galloway had taken seventh place in the Boston Marathon. Frank Shorter had become an Olympic champion. And what was my great claim to fame? Completing a hundred laps around a crummy YMCA track?

I needed something to take my mind off the constant burdens in my head. I had already moved all my worldly possessions into our new apartment. That took a total of one afternoon. I couldn't stomach another pass through the classifieds. I stared out the window at the rolling lawns and shady trees not far in the distance. Our apartment was near the border of Jamaica Pond Park, which was part of the Emerald Necklace, a long string of parks running through the heart of the city.

Looking ahead at the distant scenery, I flashed back to when I was a kid and I'd dart through the woods with Charlie and Jason, leaping over shrubs and streams without the slightest care. All those times, desperate to rid myself of the nervous energy that plagued my body and mind, and feeling a sudden need to be away from people, I would go running alone through town. And the longer I ran, the more settled I became. How else to explain my rash decision to run twelve miles on my own when I was a kid, other than a precocious spirit that often moved me to act without a road map? The point is, I could always count on running to act like some kind of root medicine for my brain, drawing out the toxins, replacing it with a soothing calm.

There I stood, an aimless, jobless twenty-four-year-old, longing for that childlike sense of well-being, when the world felt perfect, limitless, radiant. Before I knew it, I had slid on my running shoes, tucked my unruly hair behind my ears, and bounded out the door. I set off running down Centre Road, past rows of run-down Victorian houses, a testament to the hard times plaguing the neighborhood.

New England fall days are at the whim of Mother Nature and this day she was in a great mood. There was no excuse not to go running outside. But I wasn't looking for reasons to stay indoors and do nothing; I was eager to escape my grim thoughts.

Before I could enter the park, first I had to cross a four-lane death trap called the Jamaicaway. Motorists, hyped up on Dunkin' Donuts coffee, zoomed by me as I formulated a plan for surviving my mad dash across the road. If I had ever doubted that a car could be an instrument of irrational rage, I was convinced now.

After surviving the perilous crossing of the parkway, I emerged into the wide-open vista of the park's gorgeous sixty-eight-acre pond. Once I reached the small dirt path at the edge of the pond, I started running along it. Quickly, I settled into a nice groove. There was no better feeling in the world to me than this high. A beautiful morning. The soft breeze at my back, the skylit water to my right, the morning sun falling through breaks in the clouds, landing on my forehead. It was like going sightseeing, but instead of traveling by bus or car, my two legs carried me forward. I lifted my eyes to see the blossoms blooming on the trees, shifted my gaze ahead at the unending blur of nature's colors, and then looked over at the Canada geese frolicking on the water's edge.