Though my dad always kept his office door open, we all knew that he was most comfortable alone. He was a quiet, attentive listener; when talking to his co-workers, I was always struck by how much they seemed to adore him. My dad could listen to a person ramble on without ever feeling the need to interrupt. Nor, unless asked, would he ever offer advice. Instead, he would clarify your problem—rewording what you’d said in a way that crystallized your thoughts and allowed you to solve the problem on your own.
When talking to Micah—and later, when talking to me—his routine was always the same. He would ask what was going on regarding a specific situation, then would listen while you filled in the void. And the more Micah—or I—talked, the less he would say. Sometimes, these one-sided conversations lasted upward of an hour. We would usually leave his office thinking more clearly, and believing he was one of the smartest people we’d ever met.
In the end, my dad gave us three ironclad rules that we were bound to throughout our teenage years. They were:
A. Don’t drink and drive.
B. Don’t get a girl pregnant.
C. Be in by your curfew—midnight as a freshman, and increasing half an hour with every passing year in high school.
My dad, by the way, was very shrewd to offer us these particular rules when he did. We would soon be reaching the age where one or another might become an issue, but since we were following all three already, they seemed entirely reasonable at the time. Even more important, by our teenage years we’d been on our own for so long that anything more would have seemed draconian (too little, too late) and no doubt would have led to outright rebellion. These, however, seemed well thought out, and Micah agreed to abide by them.
Micah, it must be said, followed those rules, and only those rules. Everything else, it seemed, was up for grabs, and for the next couple of years he continued to press the outer limits. On more nights than I can count, I remember listening to my mom and dad fretting about him.
“He just keeps getting wilder,” one would say. “What do we do?”
A long silence would follow.
“I don’t know,” the other one would answer.
That year brought about changes for me, too. I began competing in track and field, and though not great, I was one of the better freshmen on the team. This isn’t saying much, since in the distance events, there were only a handful of us.
Still, I loved track and field, and as fate would have it, there was a genuine track and field legend who also lived in Fair Oaks. Billy Mills, an Oglala Sioux Indian raised in poverty in the Black Hills of South Dakota, had won the Olympic gold medal in the 10,000 meter run at the Tokyo games in 1964. It is still regarded as the greatest upset in Olympic track and field history. He’s the only American ever to win the Olympic 10,000 meters, and proving his talent for posterity, broke the world record the following year. Years earlier, I’d read about him in one of the many almanacs I’d perused as a kid, and I’d been fascinated by his story. When I learned that he lived in Fair Oaks, I was ecstatic, and I remember running to the kitchen to tell my mother.
“Oh Billy,” she said, nodding. “I know him and his wife, Pat.”
My eyes widened. “You do?”
“Yeah,” she said easily. “They get their glasses at our office. They’re wonderful people.”
All I could do was stare at her, thinking that I was standing next to someone who’d actually talked to a genuine American hero.
This was heady stuff for a kid, and after talking to my mom, I was always on the lookout for him. I’d get excited when I saw him walking into the grocery store (I’d memorized how he looked) or into a restaurant, but I couldn’t summon the courage to introduce myself. When I learned that informal, neighborhood track meets were held at the local high school, I wanted to go because I suspected that he might be there as well. Sure enough, he was there, and when I saw him, I was transfixed. I’d watch him walk and think to myself, “That’s how the fastest man in the world moves,” and try to imitate it. Needless to say, I wanted to impress him with my talent, but to be honest, it never happened. Billy had three daughters and his youngest competed. Unlike me, however, she was great, and never once lost a single race.
Learning about Billy’s past led me to read about other great runners. I dreamed of running like Henry Rono, Sebastian Coe, or Steve Ovett, but that’s all it was—a dream. Yet I went out for the track team, and gradually I became friends with Harold Kuphaldt, a junior who was also on the team.
Like Billy, Harold was almost a legend, albeit a high school one. Harold was one of the fastest runners in the country (he would record the nation’s fastest time in the two mile for juniors, and hold the American junior record for a while), and, as with Billy, I idolized him from afar. Again, there’s a world of difference between the lives of freshman and upper classmen. Yet one afternoon, toward the end of the season, the team was running as a group and I found myself running alongside Harold. We started chatting until Harold eventually grew quiet.
“I’ve been watching you run,” Harold said to me after a few moments of companionable silence. “You can be great if you work at it. Not just good, but great. You’re a natural at this.”
I remember nothing about the run after that. It seemed as if I were floating, carried along by the words he’d said. There was nothing anyone could have said that would have meant more to me than what he’d told me. Not only did his words feed my fantasies, but they also touched the deeper core within myself, the one that always sought approval from my parents. I could be great, he’d said. I’m a natural . . .
I vowed at that moment to make his words prophetic, and instead of spending the summer goofing around as I usually did, I decided to train instead. I trained hard—harder than I’d trained during the season—and the harder I worked, the harder I wanted to work. I ran twice a day, often in temperatures exceeding a hundred degrees, and frequently ran until I vomited from exertion. Despite Harold’s words, I wasn’t a natural athlete, but what I lacked in talent, I made up for with desire and effort.
My brother, meanwhile, was working and earning money; in the past couple of years, he’d matured a bit and was rapidly becoming a man. And a handsome man at that. Combined with his natural confidence and charm, he quickly became irresistible to the opposite sex. The fact that he had a steady girlfriend didn’t seem to matter; girls flocked to his side or admired him from afar. My brother was essentially a babe magnet.
Not so for me. I was shorter than Micah, with skinny arms and legs, and had none of the easy confidence of my brother. It didn’t matter, however. Running offered me the chance to excel if I worked hard enough, and I began focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else that summer.
Well, almost everything. I was as worried about Micah as my parents were. Toward the end of the summer, after much lobbying, I convinced him to join the cross-country team with me. The team, led by Harold, was expected to be one of the best in the state, and would travel to meets in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where, after the meets, we would have the chance to visit amusement parks or boardwalks—places we would ordinarily never have the money or excuse to visit. “All you have to do is run fast enough to be in the top seven,” I told him, “and you’ll have more fun than you could ever imagine.”
He finally took me up on it. Once my brother started running, he quickly made the top seven. Our team went undefeated, and for the most part, Harold did as well. Harold broke course records at nearly every meet, and ended up finishing second in the high school national championships.
While Micah didn’t focus on running the way I did, with a desperate determination to excel in it, it nonetheless changed him for the better. He was part of a team, a team that counted on him, and—not surprisingly, considering the way he’d been raised—he took the responsibility seriously. Little by little, he began courting less trouble, and the more successful the team became, the more he took pride in being part of it. It didn’t seem to matter to him that I was faster than he was; in fact, he was always the first to congratulate me on how I’d done.
More important to me, however, was that we were spending time together again for the first time in years. And best of all, enjoying it.
My sophomore year was transformative. Not only did I learn to love athletics and running, but it was the first time in my life that I outperformed my brother physically.
At the same time, I continued to focus on getting good grades. Unfortunately, it was becoming more and more of an obsession; not only did I want straight As, but I wanted to be the top student in every class.
I also began devouring novels. My mother, like my father, was an avid reader, and she frequented the library twice a month. There, she would check out anywhere from six to eight books, and read them all; she particularly loved the works of James Herriot and Dick Francis. As for me, I discovered the classics—Don Quixote, The Return of the Native, Crime and Punishment, Ulysses, Emma, and Great Expectations, among others, and grew to love the works of Stephen King. Because I’d been raised on old horror movies, they struck a chord with me, and I’d read them over and over as I anxiously awaited a new title to be released.
In my sophomore year, I also had my first real girlfriend. Her name was Lisa and, like me, she ran cross-country. She was a year younger than I, and, as fate would have it, her father was Billy Mills, my boyhood hero.
We dated for the next four years, and I not only fell in love with Lisa, but with her family as well. Billy and Pat were different from my parents in that they genuinely seemed to revel in my accomplishments. More than that, Billy would talk to me about my training and the goals I wanted to reach, and had a way of making me believe they were possible.
My life was growing busier; between school, running, homework, and Lisa, I didn’t have much time for anything else. Nor did I have any money, and I came to realize that this situation wasn’t exactly conducive to dating. Since our parents didn’t give us allowances, nor would they open their wallets if we wanted to go to the movies, I decided to follow my brother’s lead. After the cross-country season ended, and on top of everything else I was doing, I got a job as a dishwasher at the same restaurant where my brother worked. In the beginning, I worked until closing two school nights a week; within a few months, I was working thirty-five hours a week, and had been moved up to busboy. Eventually, I became a waiter, and with tips was earning a tidy sum for a high school student. Every minute of every day was accounted for—I was on the go from seven in the morning until nearly midnight, seven days a week—and this schedule would remain essentially unchanged until I graduated two years later.
On our training runs, Micah and I often talked about both the past and the future; sometimes we talked about our dreams, other times we talked about money.
“Do you ever stop to think about how poor we were when we were younger?” he asked me.
“Sometimes. But to be honest, I never really knew that we were poor until a couple of years ago.”
“I hated being poor,” he said. “I’ve always hated it. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get older, but I’m not going to be poor. I want to be a millionaire by thirty-five. I don’t know how, but that’s what I’m going to do.”
“You’ll make it,” I said.
“How about you?”
I smiled. “I want to be a millionaire by thirty.”
Micah said nothing. Our strides moved in unison, our feet slapping the ground with almost perfect precision.
“What?” I finally asked. “You don’t think I’ll make it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just think thirty-five is more realistic.”
“So what are you going to do to make it?”
“Who knows. How about you?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
My brother and I ran together, worked together, and in our free time began to hang out with the same friends. Harold, Mike Lee (another member of the cross-country team), Tracy Yeates (California state champion in wrestling), Micah, and I called ourselves the Mission Gang.
Three Weeks With My Brother
In spite of our general reputation as model student- athletes, we shared a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde-type existence. It was with them that I got drunk for the first time in my life, and we found tremendous joy in using fireworks in ways that weren’t entirely smart, or even legal. We regularly blew up various friends’ mailboxes, whooping with delight when they were launched into the air with big kabooms. We also teepeed friends’ houses with so much toilet paper that it looked like it had snowed the night before. Once, around Christmas, we came across a street where every house was decorated with twinkling lights. Over the next two hours—thinking we were soooooo funny—we unscrewed every lightbulb and hauled them off. We’d filled six plastic garbage bags with lights, and the houses looked as if they’d been visited by the Grinch. I really and truly can’t explain why we did such things. It’s juvenile and embarrassing, but I can’t help but think that if we had a chance to go back in time, we’d end up doing those things again.
Due to the time we spent together, my brother and I grew close again. By then, however, our relationship had changed from what it once was. We weren’t simply brothers anymore; we’d become good friends. From my sophomore year on, we never had another argument or fight about anything.
In the spring, my brother and I competed in the same events, and my training had begun to pay off. With me leading off and Harold as the anchor, we set meet record after meet record, and our distance medley team ended up running the fastest time in the country. Harold won the state championship in the two mile, and my time in the 800 was tops among sophomores nationwide.