On running from monsters.

“You are 95% the greatest man I have ever known.” My ex-wife said that. We were having dinner together, the last time I would ever see her, before she set off in her car for Alaska. “And you are 5% a monster. I’m running away from the greatest man I have ever known to escape that monster.” God, the things people say to each other. How much heartbreak, misery, and war could be avoided if people would just exercise a little more compassion before speaking?

It is not so easy for me to run away from the 5% monster. I wish it were. I would drive to Alaska if it would make me a better man. I do run, though. Sometimes I run so hard I think I might puke. Sometimes I even do puke. My nose runs and my eyes water and I can taste bloody iron in my spit. I shadow-box the air in front of me. I imagine what it would feel like to crush a man’s skull in my bare hands. Or to choke someone to death. Or to smash a man’s head against the pavement. I envision all the things bothering me; other people, life problems, anxiety, sadness, anger, jealousy, myself, and I say to them, “I am better than you and I am stronger than you and I will utterly destroy you.” One time I screamed, “YOU WANTED THIS!” to nobody in particular. It just spontaneously came out of me. I don’t even know, still today, if I was screaming at myself or to someone who wasn’t there to hear it. I run. And then, around the second or third mile, I just let go. I feel all that tension release; temporary nirvana; just my physical body moving in physical space; my heart beating and my legs moving and my feet hitting the pavement and my lungs sucking air and nothing else matters. I let go of all those things that were bothering me, including my self. It’s not murder and destruction after all; it’s sublimation, like a comet that wanders too close to the warmth of the sun. The comet evaporates and is blasted into space, its atoms returned to the sparse universe to be re-formed into something else.

The strangest job I ever had was the year I spent in the porn industry. I had just been laid off from my job as a maintenance man, and I got a phone call from my college friend Jason. “You’ll never believe what I’m doing for work,” he said. I was hired very quickly. My job title was ‘Describer’. I would watch the videos and then ‘describe’ what happened in them. Later, my descriptions would become the synopsis of the movie that you would see on the website. Ever read a plot synopsis of a porn video on the internet? There’s a very tiny remote chance you read something I wrote. To pass the time, we would try to work the most esoteric or gross-sounding euphemisms for a woman’s anus into our descriptions. Balloon knot. 3-hole. Turdcutter. Fartblaster. The pay was really bad, but side-benefits involved unlimited free porn, all-day-long blue-balls, and bragging rights at nearly any party you went to. Also, it was the only job I’ve ever had where I could tell a co-worker, “I want to fuck your grandma in the ass,” and not get fired. We didn’t even have an HR department.

I would sometimes work nights as a bouncer at a club in Chinatown. Often I’d be checking IDs at the entrance to the bar, and occasionally underage women would say to me, “I’ll show you my tits if you let me into the bar.”

I would say, “Girl, I’ve been looking at tits all day long. Please don’t show me your tits.”

I rode my bicycle to work nearly every day, 4 miles in Philadelphia rush hour. No helmet. I remember I once bounced off the side of a pickup truck in an intersection and I kept going. I didn’t even put a foot down. “You okay?” the driver said.

“I’m fine,” I told him, riding away.

One time, someone stole just my bike seat, but they left the post. I rode the whole way home standing up. A few times I forgot my seat was gone and tried to sit down on the post. I suppose it was a little karmic retribution for all the butthole jokes.

For my birthday that year, my girlfriend’s father bought me a very kind, thoughtful gift: a bicycle helmet. I saw him on June 13th, the eve of my birthday, and he gave me the helmet. The next morning I wore it for the first time, on my actual birthday. I was riding down a hill near my apartment when a bus pulled out and veered into the bike lane. I swerved and barely dodged the bus, hitting a parked car, which bounced me into the curb. My bike and I went cartwheeling down the sidewalk. Luckily nobody was standing there. They would’ve been creamed. Bystanders came running to find me laying on the ground on my back, laughing into the sky. The wind was knocked out of me and my arms were scraped up, but I was okay. I pulled off my helmet and looked at it. The helmet was scraped badly and cracked in one spot, which just made me laugh even harder. I laid there and smiled into the sun.

To this day, that bike helmet is the best birthday gift I’ve ever gotten; continued life.

“I’d like to get rid of that 5% monster.” I’m in therapy now, talking to Paul. “What if I could be 100% the greatest man someone has ever known? That would be pretty great.”

“Well. Iain. That may be impossible.” Paul is looking at me. “Would you settle for 5% ‘kind of unpleasant’?”

I don’t answer him, but I’m thinking, “No. Why settle? I don’t have to settle.” I’m thinking I’m destined for greatness. It’s a manic symptom.

Paul has noticed I’m losing weight. “Something killed my appetite,” I tell him. “Hunger pangs? Stomach growls? I never get them anymore. I keep forgetting to eat.”

“Weight loss is very easy for you. Just have something emotionally traumatic happen to you.” I like that Paul is able to laugh at the absurdities of life along with me. “Do you ever feel tired or low-energy?”

“Not really. I feel okay. Sometimes I notice I am feeling low blood-sugar, so I’ll make myself go eat a thing. Low blood-sugar is the new hungry.”

“Are you exercising?” he asks me.

“Yes. I joined a gym and I’m running again,” I say.

“Good,” he says. “I think your appetite will re-regulate, but let’s keep an eye on it.”

Paul and I meet once or twice a week. I initially started seeing him a couple years ago. In the middle of my divorce I started vomiting in the morning. I went to the doctor and they checked me for ulcers and a variety of cancers of the digestive tract. After ruling out everything they could think of, my doctor said, “You’re very healthy except for the vomiting. Maybe you should see a therapist for your anxiety.”

I tell Paul, “I’m finally feeling better after my hip surgery. It’s so good to be running again. It’s the only way for me to let go of things. Life things. How people describe yoga; breathing, meditation, clearing their mind, all that woo-woo stuff. That’s me running. Running is my yoga.”

I was halfway up Mount Jefferson in New Hampshire when I realized there was something wrong with my leg. Every step was painful. I could feel bone touching bone inside my left hip. I still summitted the mountain, because I’m stubborn and I had promised a girl I would kiss her on top of that mountain. Later I got x-rayed and it turned out my hip was malformed and had been nearly my whole adult life. It’s called a hip impingement. The proverbial square peg in a round hole. All of the running and hiking I had been doing on my impinged hip had worn out the socket 30 years ahead of time. My labrum hung into the socket like a lace curtain stuck in a closed window.

My orthopedic surgeon knocked me out, thank God, then he dislocated my left leg from its socket. They went in with little tools and scraped out all the ruined cartilage. Next, they ground the bones into the correct shape, put my hip socket back together, and then finally reattached what remained of my labrum with screws. It took a very long time to feel almost normal again, but finally I do.

Glenn Cunningham, a famous runner, said, “In running it is man against himself, the cruelest of opponents. The other runners are not the real enemies. His adversary lies within him, in his ability, with brain and heart to master himself and his emotions.”

I do not run to defeat the other runners. Sometimes there are no other runners. I run to defeat my 5% monster. It is my cruelest opponent. A violent, bitter, angry shade, my self-image in negative; just a hair’s breadth behind me.

Paul asks me, “How much of your recovery do you think you can attribute to being able to run again?”

I laugh. “Maybe all of it? Well, that and therapy. And drugs. Exercise and therapy and drugs.”

“That’s a proven combination actually,” he says.

I laugh and Paul laughs along with me. It feels a little like that birthday morning, nearly ten years ago. I’m laying on the sidewalk, bleeding and bruised but very much alive, laughing into the cloudless blue sky, grateful for the constellation of little coincidences that have led me to this point.