Thu, 19 May 2005

hasbeen
My friend Sawyer used to run track in high school, and he was good, like four-minute mile good. He set school records for the full and the quarter, got a full-ride scholarship to Northwestern, and while there started training for the olympics when he got hit by a car one morning. He came out okay, though he shattered his right knee rolling over the hood, and that pretty much was the end of his competitive running days. Some people have this sort of thing happen and do years of rehab and start a new regimen and talk of how they’re gonna come back, better than ever. Michelle, who also went to Northwestern before she dropped out and moved back here and is now on her third kid, she told me that was how Sawyer was, that first year, and everybody did all this shit for him, all these donations and stuff and people he didn’t know would come by the house and tell him what an inspiration he was and all that, only Sawyer could see it, could see he’d never really run like he did before, and so one morning he cleared out his savings account and all the leftover donation money and vanished. Nobody saw him for about five years, by which time everybody forgot about him, except the people who weirdly felt that he owed it to them to keep doing endless laps out there on the junior high track by his house. One night he called Michelle, and I don’t know all the details of that, but she drove up to Madison for a couple days and came back like nothing happened, maybe a year ago. I went over to her place last Friday, while Bruce was off fixing airplanes in Chicago and the kids were all in bed, and after enough rum she gave me Sawyer’s address, and said he’d like to see me, which probably wasn’t true, but there was a tone in her voice that made me not want to press the point. Saturday I drove up to Madison and pulled into a small apartment building that looked to be full of college kids, and there in Apartment 3A I saw Sawyer, in a short-sleeve dress shirt and navy blue slacks, just off work. Michelle must have called and told him I was coming, as he seemed to be expecting me, though he stared at me for a second or two as I stood in the doorway, until he asked “What are you doing here?”. I stepped in, into the half-kitchen just inside the doorway, and said “I wanna talk to somebody who used to be good at something they can’t do anymore.” “Well that’s me, I guess,” he said, and passed me on the way to the refrigerator, where he poured himself a glass of iced tea without offering me any. “Is it better? Is it better that you used to be able to do something, or woudl it be better if you could never have done it, never known?” I said. He walked into the living room, sat down in a leather recliner facing away from me, and said “It doesn’t matter. It’s not any different. You want something, you don’t have it, it’s no different for anybody.” I don’t know what I expected him to tell me, but that wasn’t it, and suddenly I felt tired, and self-conscious, and halfheartedly asked him if he wanted to go out and get a beer or something. He said no, and nothing else, and I mumbled some excuse to leave, and how he looked good, and how we should keep in touch, and I drove home in the dark, listening to evangelists on the radio.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #