The Race

I was standing on some god forsaken macadem trail built with the misguided intention of providing inner city dwellers with a place to stroll and ride their nonexistent bikes after they got off the night shift of their second jobs. It was a gauntlet of stray pit bills and crack heads, the latter of which would knuckle down on you in an instant if you dared to jog by in a sparkling pair of New Balances. What was I doing there? Well, I hate to disappoint you but I wasn’t in the throes of a cocaine binge and trying to sell off the last of my CD’s for an eight ball. The real reason was much more mundane. You see I work at a gym, as you may well know, and the head trainer had organized a 5K run. He’d asked me to stand at the midpoint and point people in the right direction so they wouldn’t end up in the housing projects and possibly end up as lost a Jimmy Hoffa. I reluctantly agreed and when I did so I didn’t realized I’d be thrust into the most volatile depths of the urban jungle.

No, this wasn’t a place for a half asleep individual that had just rolled out of bed and had pillow lines indented on their cheeks. It was a battleground and I needed every advantage allowed me to emerge with my wallet intact. The runners were on their own, if they didn’t make it back well then I figured it was just the price some might have to pay in the quest to be healthy.

While the runners might have prepared for that morning with bagels and fruit my preparation for the race started that morning with the brewing of pot of black tar coffee, a near lethal beverage boiled down from the finest Arabica beans into a syrupy liquid that had to be consumed from a metal coffee cup for it would eat right through plastic. The Japanese and Nazis used crank to get up and go but they would have had nothing on me and my specially devised morning jolt. When one plunges himself into the depths of the urban jungle all bets are off and manipulation of the central nervous system is a must. One must simply be faster than the whackos that come at you from the trees with shards of broken windshield glass clenched between their teeth. I was ready for war and if I didn’t have a coronary from all the caffeine I’d ingested well, then I would live to write about this day…so obviously I lived.

I set myself up at the midpoint of the 5K race amongst the old tires, liquor bottles and fast food wrappers. There was an old rusting gate that the runners would have to pass through and it would be the perfect shield in which to position myself behind for it protected my back. Armed with my notebook and travel mug I set up behind the fence and began jotting down notes and drawing pictures of nude women.

About fifteen minutes later the first two runners approached the midpoint. They were trotting along like two drugged antelope, their faces reminiscent of the face in Munch’s Scream. If this was supposed to be fun then I was really not in tune with people. To me it looked as if these two were suffering from some sort of malnourishment. Rickets? And if I wasn’t mistaken they were being tortured with some sort of torture device that might have been hidden in their running shorts. Thumb tacks? A rabid weasel?

I watched as these two galloped out of sight. A few moments later more runners began to filter past me.

“Go straight through the fence,” I said. “Keep up the good work.”

I’ve never been much for cheering. If a person doesn’t have the self motivation to do whatever it is they are doing then I figure they might as well be doing something else. In fact the concept of cheering was so foreign to me that I had to write down several motivational sentiments on my notebook so that I might yell them out when the right time came.

“Only 1.5 miles to go,” I said. “Looking good…uh, go.”

No one seemed to notice that my encouraging words were not very heart felt. They were too busy trying to find the oxygen to finish the race so I stopped and focused on several of the attractive women in very short shorts that had just approached me. I smiled and they all nodded and smiled back. I might have joined the race at that time, going just fast enough to stay behind these women and enjoy the view, if someone hadn’t caught my attention.

“Yo where’s the free food and drinks?” he said.

I turned to see a scraggily looking man with a dreaded beard running behind two women who kept nervously looking back at him. His army jacket billowed out behind him and his breathing sounded as if he were on the verge of an asthma attack. Although he’d somehow managed to get a racing number fixed to the front of his jacket I was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to be in the race.

“The food and drink is for the people in the race only,” I said.

“I’m in the race,” the guy said and slowed to a stop.

“No, you’re not I didn’t see you at registration. You don’t even have running shoes. Are those cowboy boots?”

“These cowboy boots are better than any damn Nike shoe,” he said.

“Maybe if you’re running across the Outback but not here.”

He took a step towards me. “Are you threatening me?”

His breath smelled like the remains of a rotting horse and nearly made me gag but I couldn’t show any sign of weakness or he would pounce on me and that would be the end of that. So, I looked him in the eyes and took a step towards him, the caffeine ripping through my veins.

“Where did you get that racing number?” I said.

“At the race headquaters.”

He tugged nervously at his army jacket and it was then that I noticed bagels and bananas filling his pockets. At the starting line there had been a bunch of bagels, bananas and sports drinks for the runners and evidently this guy had cleaned the place out.

“Unhand those bagels,” I said.

“I bought these bagels,” he said and shoved me.

“You cocksucker,” I cried and shoved him back. Doing so caused four bananas and two bagels to fall out of his jacket.

“Die,” he cried, rearing back as if to attack me.

I was quicker than he thanks to my superior conditioning and black tar coffee and reacted before he could. I hit him in the chest and he stumbled backwards towards the railing. I knew what was going to happen next but was helpless to stop it. He hit the railing and tumbled over backwards. A heavily polluted creek sat about fifteen feet down on the other side of the railing and cement wall.

SPLASH!

I ran over and peered down into the creek. The guy was sitting up to his waist in water, bagels and bananas floated around him.

“I’m going to kill you,” he cried.

I picked a banana up off the ground and threw it at him. “Nice race, cocksucker,
” I said.

I thought it was as good a time as any to get back to the gym and it would save me the rather unpleasant job of having to fight the bagel and banana thief so I got in my Cherokee and took off feeling pretty good for I'd survived another day...