Horace tries to lighten the mood by telling me why autumn is his favorite season, but I’m only half listening. Maybe my athletic self has not only been rotting away inside me, maybe it’s also become a ghost that’s going to haunt me for however much time I have remaining. The ghost is the voice that taunts me whenever I lose my wind during a morning jog around Prospect Park. The fingers that mockingly pinch the love handles that sit stubbornly on my hips. The saboteur who finds a way to ruin every single one of my dates.
We reach my stoop and climb two flights of stairs to my studio. I live in an old brick building that gets stuffy with the day’s leftover heat, and I crack the windows before retrieving two beers from the fridge. I hand Horace a bottle and join him on my little blue IKEA couch. We sit there in awkward silence, listening to traffic sounds filter into the room from 7th Avenue.
Finally, Horace finishes the question he’d started asking back at the bar:
—What happened?
ONE
I was raised in Sillitoe, Colorado, a suburb in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, ten interchangeable square miles of sagebrush, strip malls, cacti, and ticky-tacky subdivisions. My parents both worked administrative positions for the same multinational mining company that employed most of my town, and like virtually all our neighbors we were as pale as the snowy peaks visible from my bedroom window and Christian in a perfunctory, most-Sundays sense—Roman Catholic, to be exact.
Such relentless uniformity magnified the smaller differences between people, which is how a white-bread kid like me got singled out as a weirdo. It started with my voice, a faint, airy, tentative thing that my classmates mockingly transformed into a lispy soprano and that the adults who called our house would mistake for a little girl’s (failing to stifle their laughter when I corrected them). Raising my hand in class, yelling out on the playground, even saying good morning to the school bus driver could lead to humiliation, and by second grade I had developed a quiet, watchful manner to limit my exposure. In the way these things go, it was my quietness, and not the bullying, that prompted my teacher Ms. Munson to call Mom and Dad in for a conference one autumn afternoon. Ms. Munson informed my parents that “Miles displays antisocial tendencies”—which, in a town that prides itself on sunny friendliness, was like saying your son’s got a horn growing in the middle of his forehead.
My parents scrambled to find a cure. They conscripted classmates into play dates, but since those kids were often the same ones who bullied me at school, the sessions just led to more alienation. A halogen lamp was set up in the corner of my bedroom on the theory that I needed more light, but all the lamp got me was scalded fingers when I tried removing the bulb. I was taken to something called a “friendship specialist,” a charlatan who conned my parents out of a sizeable chunk of their modest salaries via hourlong sessions in which I practiced things like shaking hands or making eye contact.
The next, worst remedy came after I sat for a state-mandated aptitude test that spring. Ms. Munson called my parents in again, but this time she was all smiles as she showed off my unusually high test scores and pronounced that the real root of the problem was that I wasn’t being challenged enough by my classwork. It was Ms. Munson’s recommendation that I skip a grade, and my parents, blinded by the pride of having a gifted son, didn’t consider the questionable logic that led my teacher to her conclusion, nor the disastrous implications of me going from being the meek, weak-voiced kid in class to being the meek, weak-voiced kid who was also a head shorter and a year younger than his peers. Which is precisely what I became when I was advanced to the third grade.
At this point, a lot of kids in my position would have thrown up their hands and cultivated rich interior worlds to compensate for the exterior one that insisted on misunderstanding them. But I was an only child, and the last thing I wanted was more alone time to crawl even further inside my wormy brain. No, beneath my shyness was a burning desire to be accepted, a sharp hunger to homogenize. And in Sillitoe, Colorado, the easiest way for a boy to do that was to love football.
Organized ball started in fourth grade, and I spent the preceding summer reading Sports Illustrated articles and counting down the days until my first practice. When the holy morning finally arrived, Mom took off the first half of work to drive me to my state-mandated physical. I doubt a pediatrician has ever had a patient more eager to drop his drawers and cough as her cold hand cupped his testicles. Then we visited a sporting goods store downtown, where I obtained a jockstrap as big as my face and the first cleats of my young life, low-cut Nike Sharks the color of tar. My parents switched duties at noon, so that Mom headed to work while Dad drove me to a municipal park with the Rockies’ Front Range lording over it. When we pulled into the parking lot, I begged Dad to stay in the car—I wanted to show off my independence to my new teammates—and as I stepped alone into the hot, dry August afternoon and crossed the parking lot in my cleats, I felt like an astronaut taking his first steps on Mars. My confidence lasted until I spotted my teammates on the practice fields, the same kids who bullied me at school, including Gus Mintaur, an ice-eyed Aryan who was in the habit of “accidentally” pouring milk down my back
