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By Root 86 0

I had it in my mind that I would defeat these stabbers and rapists in the fifty-yard dash, because I was the fastest fairy of them all. No one bothered to tell me that my tiny Catholic grade school was invited to the town track meet only as some sort of token gesture. It was the public school administrators’ way of saying, “We don’t hate you Catholic people. Come, let’s watch our children run faster than your children.” No one told me that my school usually finished dead last. And I wasn’t even the fastest fifty-yard dasher in my class. In retrospect, maybe they were impressed with my tiny legs and tendency to uncontrollably flail my arms. Perhaps Sister Mary Elizabeth thought, Hey, he gets those arms flailing fast enough, something good could happen.

My parents believed in me too. The night before the track meet my mom made a big pasta dinner—because everyone knows that the secret to winning the fifty-yard dash is massive helpings of fettuccini Alfredo, accompanied by unlimited salad and breadsticks. I went to sleep with a dream of victory.

Race Day: on the drive over to the track, my parents stop at the drugstore, not to pick up some performance-enhancing drugs, but to grab some M&Ms. My parents figure the right combination of pasta and candy will allow me to overcome eleven years of physical mediocrity.

I show up at the track meet and the whole town seems to be there. I see the athletes are assembled on the grass inside the track, and I head toward it. A coordinator directs me to my group, and I spot the four people I’m running against. I see that one of them is Calvin Walker. He’s smiling and stretching out his long legs. I can see that he’s wearing special running shoes. I look down at my Zips. I’m concerned. Calvin is not nervous. This is a guy who knows how to run, a guy who has run before, on purpose. And I’m thinking, This is one of those guys who runs for fun, and not just because his older brother is chasing him with a tennis racquet around the backyard or because he thinks he can catch the ice cream man and get a Chipwich.

It dawns on me that I need to reset my expectations. It doesn’t matter how many M&Ms I eat, I am not going to win this race. In fact, not only am I not going to win, but it may appear to the casual observer that I am not even running in the same race as Calvin Walker. People are going to think that I’m some kind of fifty-yard dash equivalent to the ball boy in tennis. At this point, my only hope is that maybe these other losers in the race are slower than me. I even start planning the outcome, like, Calvin will get first, I’ll take second, that guy is third, that guy will take fourth, and that other loser will be fifth. Little do I know that these other losers are thinking the same thing and their reality is much closer to the truth. Because when the starting gun goes off, all those losers disappear, and I’m left spinning in a puff of smoke like Wile E. Coyote.

About twenty yards into the fifty-yard dash, I’m losing by about ten yards. I’ve never been great at math, but I’m losing by twenty percent of the total race distance. So twenty yards into the fifty-yard dash, I do what many quitters and fakers have done before me. I run off the track and grab my toe, hopping up and down in faux pain.

And to make matters worse, I stuck to my story for so many weeks afterward that even I started to believe it. Why had my damn toe given out? Old age? Not enough toe stretching? Whatever it was, I returned to fairyville like most fairies did: trophyless. In retrospect, I should have told everyone that the kids from public school had stabbed my toe.

Every kid who grew up in the eighties in Massachusetts thought they could be Larry Bird. The legend of the Celtics superstar was that he was not a natural athlete. Apparently, he wasn’t even very good at basketball growing up. He was frankly kind of an idiot. As the legend had it, Larry Bird was just some dumb, oafish kid who had put his mind to basketball. I thought, That’s like me! I’m an idiot and I suck at sports too! I’m exactly like Larry Bird! I