The Other

No Escape from the Unhappiness Machine I attended Roosevelt (the Teddies, Teds, or Roughriders), a public high school in North Seattle, while my friend John William Barry was a student at Lakeside, our city's version of an East Coast private academy like Phillips Exeter or Deerfield. Besides slumping at my desk all day and getting high in Cowen Park at lunch, I also ran the 880today called the eight-hundred-meter or the half-milefor the RHS track team. It was a good niche for me. You didn't need to be fast or have the wind of the distance runner. Mostly what you needed was a willingness to sign up. As a sophomore in 1972, I was a good enough half-miler to represent RHS with a time of 2:11.24. To put this in context, the world record in '72 for the half-mile was held by Dave Wottle, with a time of 1:44.30. Roosevelt's best half-miler of all time is Chris Vasquez, '97, at 2:01.23. This is a race that takes runners twice around the red cinder oval found behind many high schoolsI say this so you can imagine me losing to Vasquez by about thirty yards, or think of me still rounding the last bend, at the far end of the grandstands, while Wottle is crossing the finish line, arms raised victoriously. Either is a useful picture of meof someone intimate with the middle of the pack. There's good and bad in that. I remember one race more vividly than others. It's '72, so Nixon is president, though he and everything else, the world, seem far away from Seattle. I'm sixteen and wear my hair like Peter Frampton's and a mustache like Steve Prefontaine's. (Because of this mustache, I'm sometimes referred to at school as "the Turk," after the guy in the Camel cigarette ads. I'm not Turkish, but my mother's father, whom I never met, was what people call Black Irish, and possibly I inherited his coloring.) I've got on hi-cut satin shorts and a satin jersey emblazoned withRoughriders, and I'm at the starting line along with seven other runners, six with better qualifying times than mine. Despite them, I'm a believer that if the ninety-nine-pound mother in the apocryphal story can lift the front end of a Volkswagen off her crushed toddler, I can win today. I'll dispense with the obligation to describe the weatherwhether or not it was a sultry afternoon, with clouds of newly hatched mayflies above the track, or a windless May day smelling of moist turf and mown grass, is beside the pointand cut, literally, toin medias res:the eight of us stalwart and tortured young runners rounding the third curve of a high-school track and coming up on 250 yards. It's my usual MOout front early and counting on adrenaline to keep me there, but with heels nipped and a sinking feeling that's anathema to winning. A race is a conversation with yourself, motivational in quality, until somebody interrupts by pulling away from you, and then it becomes an exercise in fathoming limits. Losing is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated. The right track term is "running in a pack." That's usa band of runners hardly separated. One keeps exhaling humidly on my shoulders. Another's left forearm hits my right elbow on its backswing. A runner pulls up beside methe way a freeway driver pulls even in the adjacent lane to take your pulseand I assess his chances with a panicked glance. Not strictured yet; striding with more ease than I feel; biding his time; relaxed. Working up a freshly adrenalized surge, I gain a quarter-step on him, but purchased with the last of my reserves. The early leader inGuterson, David is the author of 'The Other', published 2008 under ISBN 9780739327869 and ISBN 0739327860.