No Clean Hands

Act I

The photograph showed a young man suspended in mid-air, and I knew immediately that I was looking at the kind of thing that changes everything if you are brave enough to change it or foolish enough not to know the difference. I was sitting in my apartment above a noodle shop on Alameda Street, drinking coffee that had gone cold somewhere between midnight and three and eating the particular brand of loneliness that comes from spending too many years alone with your own conclusions. The photograph had arrived in the mail that morning, wrapped in brown paper and bearing no return address. Inside was a single sentence typed on a card: Look at him. He is what speed looks like when the world gets out of the way.

The young man in the photograph was Dwayne Williams. Twenty-three years old, five feet eleven, one hundred seventy-five pounds of lean muscle and nervous energy. The photo had been taken at a race at Wrigley Field, and Williams was captured at the midpoint of a one hundred meter dash, his body angled forward at an angle that suggested not so much running as controlled falling. His face was turned slightly toward the camera, and even in the grainy quality of a news service photograph, I could see the particular quality of concentration that separates the good from the great—a quality that looks a lot like anger if you do not know better.

I had been a war correspondent for six years before the accident in the Argonne forest took my partner and ended my career. His name was Tommy Callahan, and he was the kind of man who believed that truth was something you could capture if you just got close enough to it. He died believing it too, which is to say he died not believing it at all, because the truth does not yield to proximity. It reveals itself to people who know how to wait, and Tommy had never been good at waiting.

After Tommy died, I spent a year drinking and a year writing a book that no publisher wanted and a year trying to convince myself that none of it mattered. Then I found a job with Victor Lance, a sports media magnate whose empire consisted of a newspaper column, a radio show, and a network of contacts that extended from the boxing rings of downtown to the country clubs of Beverly Hills. Victor called it sports journalism. I called it watching rich men chase pretty things and writing about it in a way that made the pretty things look like they meant something.

Dwayne Williams was a sprinter. He competed in the hundred meter, the two hundred, the four by one relay. He won everything he entered and lost nothing that he took seriously. His times were fast—fast enough to make me think about Olympic selection, fast enough to make me think about the kind of thing that changes everything. I called the number that had accompanied the photograph, which turned out to be the number of a woman named Rose Carter, who described herself as Williams's former coach and current mother.

Rose Carter received me in a small apartment near Exposition Park that smelled of lavender and exhaustion. She was a woman of forty with gray in her hair that she had not bothered to cover and eyes that had seen things and decided, reasonably enough, that they would not be discussed. Williams lived with her. He had grown up in the projects on Central Avenue, raised by a mother who had been a track coach in Chicago before the city decided that black coaches did not belong in public school athletics and moved her to Los Angeles, where the racism was more polite but no less effective.

"He needs something," Rose said, pouring coffee that was closer to热水 than anything I would recognize as coffee. "He has the speed. He has the talent. But he is running on shoes that were made for walking, and the world is going to chew him up if someone does not make him something that can keep up with him."

"I can do that," I said. And I meant it the way a man means something when he has spent too many years watching the world fail to deliver what it owes and decides, for the first time, that he is going to try to make it do so anyway.

Act II

Victor Lance occupied an office on the twelfth floor of a building on Wilshire Boulevard that had been designed to make the people who worked in it feel important. He received me in a chair that cost more than my annual salary and listened to my proposal with the attention of a man who was deciding whether I was worth his time or whether I should be escorted out.

I proposed a performance shoe. Not a sneaker, not a casual athletic shoe, but a shoe designed specifically for sprinting, with a sole that distributed weight appropriately for the sprinter's gait and an upper that accommodated the particular demands of maximum velocity. I proposed that we name it after Williams. I proposed that a percentage of every pair sold go to Rose Carter—not as payment but as recognition, the way a man recognizes the people who made his success possible even when the world refuses to.

Victor leaned back in his chair and studied me the way a surgeon studies a patient he is considering operating on, weighing the likelihood of survival against the cost of the procedure.

"You want to build a shoe around a sprinter," he said. "You want to give the sprinter's mother a cut of every pair sold. You want to call it after the sprinter and make it into something more than footwear. How much do you want, Jack? And what do you think you are offering in return?"

"In return, I am offering you the first performance sprint shoe on the market. I am offering you a story that will sell newspapers and fill radio stations and make your name mean something to people who have never heard of it. And in return for me, I want fifty thousand dollars to develop the product and a column in your paper every week about the intersection of athletics and American culture."

Victor laughed, and it was a good laugh—genuine, if slightly condescending, the kind of laugh that says I am amused by your ambition but not intimidated by it.

"Fifty thousand is a lot of money for a shoe," he said. "But the story behind it might be worth it. You have a certain... texture. The war correspondent angle plays well with my readers. They like their journalism with a side of tragedy."

I took the deal. I told myself that it was because I believed in the shoe and Williams and the possibility that something built around a young black sprinter in 1951 Los Angeles could mean something beyond commerce. But the truth was simpler and more desperate: I needed a thing to focus on, a purpose to replace the one Tommy had died pursuing, and this was the closest I had come in two years to something that felt like trying to change the world.

Williams was a complicated proposition. Fast, yes—unquestionably fast, the kind of fast that makes you think about the relationship between human bodies and the physics of motion and wonder how much of speed is genetics and how much is will. But behind the speed was a story that I should have paid more attention to and did not, because paying attention requires a kind of emotional availability that I had not practiced since Tommy died.

Williams ran clean, or appeared to. His times were consistent, his technique was sound, his demeanor in public was that of a young man who understood the responsibilities of talent and was fulfilling them with the sort of earnestness that is either admirable or naive depending on your perspective. But Rose spoke with a caution that I mistook for maternal modesty. She told me that Williams had moments—late nights, phone calls he did not let her hear, a look on his face that she recognized from her years as a coach in Chicago, the look of a man who knows he is carrying something he cannot afford to drop.

I asked her what he was carrying. She looked at me for a long time and said, "You will find out."

I found out three months later, in a motel room on Santa Monica Boulevard, from a doctor whose name I never learned and whose office smelled of formaldehyde and the particular kind of confidence that comes from men who know things they are not supposed to know. The doctor told me that Williams was using something—a substance that enhanced endurance and accelerated recovery, the kind of thing that was easy to obtain in 1951 if you knew where to look and knew people who knew where to look. He told me that Williams had been using it for approximately six months, which meant he had been using it when he set his personal best at Wrigley Field, which meant his best time was not entirely his own.

I sat in the doctor's office and listened to him speak and felt the particular weight of knowledge that has no outlet, the way a man feels when he is handed a detonator and told that the bomb is already wired and the timer is already counting down and the only choice he has is whether to pull the trigger or let it explode on its own schedule.

I told Williams what I had learned. He was sitting on the edge of his bed in a room that smelled of sweat and lemon polish, lacing up his racing shoes with the methodical care of a man who knows that the way he ties his laces affects the way his feet strike the ground and the way his feet strike the ground affects everything. He listened without expression and when I finished he continued tying his shoes and when he was finished he looked at me and said, "How much do you know about the difference between talent and cheating?"

"Not enough," I said.

"Then shut up and listen." He told me that he had started using when he was nineteen, that a coach in Chicago had introduced him to something that made him run faster and recover faster and feel, for the first time in his life, as though his body were actually keeping up with his ambition. He told me that he hated it and needed it and hated himself for needing it. He told me that Rose did not know and that he intended to keep it that way because the last thing he needed in his life was his mother's disappointment.

"I am not asking you to fix it," he said. "I am asking you to decide whether you care more about the truth or the shoe."

I decided that I cared about the shoe, which is to say I decided that I cared about the thing I was building more than I cared about the man who would wear it. It was a decision that I told myself was pragmatic and professional and that I did not tell myself was the kind of moral failure that accumulates the way sediment accumulates on the bottom of a river, layer by invisible layer, until the riverbed has risen several feet above where it used to be and nobody notices because the rise was gradual enough to go unseen.

Act III

The shoe was ready in the spring of 1952. I designed it myself, working from photographs and measurements and the kind of obsessive attention to detail that war correspondence teaches you if you survive long enough to transfer it to civilian life. The sole was layered—a rubber compound that provided traction without stiffness, a cushioning layer that absorbed impact, and a thin outer sole that wore quickly but provided the grip that a sprinter needs at maximum velocity. The upper was leather, light and supple, stitched to accommodate the natural expansion of the foot under maximum exertion. I called it The Nightingale, after Williams's nickname, because I wanted the shoe to carry something of his identity the way a song carries the identity of the bird that sings it.

The launch was scheduled for the day of the Pacific Coast Championship, which Williams was expected to win. The plan was elegant in the way that plans are elegant before they encounter the world: Williams would win the race in The Nightingale, Victor Lance would publish a feature story about the shoe the next morning, and the orders would begin arriving within days.

But plans are like photographs—they look clean on paper and messy in practice. Three days before the championship, a representative of a rival footwear concern, a concern whose practices I would prefer not to detail but which involved payments to track officials and pressure on competing athletes, approached Williams in a bar on Venice Boulevard and offered him money to lose. Williams refused. The representative left. Three hours later, Williams was in a hotel room with a doctor who was not the one who had told me about his用药, and the doctor was administering something that Williams would not have been able to identify but that would show up in a test if anyone bothered to test him.

I did not know about this. I was busy dealing with Victor, who had called me into his office on the day before the championship and told me, in a voice that was colder than I had ever heard it, that there had been a development. A test had been ordered by the athletic association—routine, he said, mandatory for all competitors in the Pacific Coast Championship. Williams would be tested for everything.

"If he comes up positive," Victor said, "the shoe comes down with him. The brand will be associated with doping, and we will be finished before we begin. Do you understand what I am saying, Jack? This is not about morality. This is about business. And the business of athletics is clean. It has to be. Because if it is not clean, the whole thing falls apart."

I understood perfectly. I understood it in the way that a man understands that he is standing on a ledge and the wind is picking up and the only question is whether he jumps or steps back. I went to Williams's room and told him what I knew about the test and asked him, directly and without preamble, whether he was using.

He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, "I stopped. Three days ago. Before the doctor in the hotel. I stopped. But if they test me, they will find it in my system. It stays in your blood for weeks, Jack. I have been carrying it for months and it is not going to leave by tomorrow."

I stood in his room and watched him lace up his shoes—his old shoes, the ones that Rose had told me were too worn for serious training—and I felt the particular kind of helplessness that comes from realizing that you have built something on a foundation that was always going to crack.

The championship took place at Wrigley Field on a Saturday afternoon in May. Williams won his heat. He won his semifinal. He stood in the starting blocks for the final, wearing The Nightingale for the first time in public, and the crowd cheered because he was fast and fast people make crowds cheer and the particular mechanics of why he was fast were, at that moment, irrelevant.

The final was a blur. Williams ran his personal best, or something close to it—a time that would have been remarkable coming from any other athlete but came from Williams with the cloud of suspicion that followed him like a shadow. He crossed the line first. The crowd cheered. And then the test results came back positive.

The aftermath was swift and merciless. Williams was disqualified. The shoe was pulled from sale. Victor Lance published an article that assigned responsibility entirely to me—the word rogue was used, and unorthodox, and the kind of language that makes a man's career evaporate the way water evaporates from hot pavement. I was dismissed. My column was terminated. And Williams, who had run as though speed were the only truth he knew, turned his face toward a future that consisted of drug trials and disciplinary hearings and the particular kind of isolation that comes from being a talented man who has been caught doing something that the world considers unforgivable even though everyone knows everyone is doing it.

Rose came to see me two days after the disqualification. She stood in my apartment and looked at the photographs of Tommy on my wall and said, "You knew."

It was not a question.

"No," I said. Which was the truth and the lie that I needed to tell to survive the next ten years.

"He stopped," she said. "Three days before the championship. He told me. But the stuff was still in his system. He ran clean, Jack. He ran clean and the world punished him for it anyway."

She left without another word. I stood in my apartment and looked at Tommy's photograph and thought about the war and the Argonne forest and the way Tommy had died believing that truth was something you could capture if you just got close enough to it. I had spent six years capturing truth and learned, too late, that truth does not want to be captured. It wants to be witnessed. And witnessing requires a kind of attention that most people, including me, are not willing to give.

Act IV

Victor Lance continued his empire. His column ran in fifteen newspapers. His radio show reached three million listeners. He became, in the vocabulary of 1950s Los Angeles, a man of influence, which is to say a man whose opinions were listened to by people who had never earned the right to opine about anything more complex than lunch. He never mentioned my name. He never needed to. The silence was more effective than any slander.

Williams competed again in 1954, after a two-year suspension. He was slower. Not dramatically—his times were still competitive—but the speed had changed, acquired a heaviness that had not been there before. The shoes he wore were not The Nightingale. They were shoes made by a rival concern, shoes that had been designed by people who had studied the failure of The Nightingale and decided to build something safer, something that would not carry the weight of a scandal.

I watched him run once, at a meet at the LA Memorial Coliseum. He finished third. He did not look angry. He looked tired, in the particular way that comes from carrying something for too long without anyone acknowledging its weight.

My career never recovered. I wrote for a small magazine for a year and then stopped writing altogether. I took a job with a public relations firm that specialized in automobile dealerships, which is to say I became the kind of man I had spent six years as a war correspondent trying to expose—the people who made things that did not matter sound important. It was not the ending I had imagined for myself, which is to say it was the ending I deserved.

It was a Tuesday evening in the fall of 1955 when I saw the boy. I was walking home from a bar on Sunset Boulevard, drinking whiskey that cost twenty-five cents and tasted of the particular kind of regret that comes from spending too many evenings alone with your own company. The boy was maybe ten years old, running down the sidewalk in sneakers that were too big and worn thin at the toes, running with a speed that made me stop and watch and feel, in a place behind my ribs that I had not felt anything in for years, the particular combination of hope and dread that fast young runners inspire in men who have seen what happens to them.

The boy was wearing shoes that bore a logo I recognized—the Nightingale's wing, painted in fading orange on the side of a pair of secondhand sneakers that had clearly been given to him by someone who had once bought The Nightingale and kept the shoes long after the soles wore out, too proud to throw them away and too poor to buy new ones.

The boy ran past me without noticing me, his feet striking the sidewalk in a rhythm that was the same rhythm I had seen in Williams, in Tommy, in every fast young person who has ever believed that speed is a kind of freedom. And I felt the old weight rise in my chest—the weight of knowing that this would happen again, that this boy would be fast and the world would find a way to use him and break him and that someone else, somewhere, would see him run and feel that familiar combination of hope and dread and decide to build something for him, knowing that the something might not matter and building it anyway.

I stopped at a liquor store, bought a cigarette, and stood on the sidewalk and watched the direction in which the boy had run. He was a speck in the distance, running faster than the eye could follow, running like the sidewalk was something he was trying to escape or something he was trying to reach and both might be the same thing.

I lit the cigarette and felt the smoke fill my lungs and said, to nobody and everybody: Here we go again.

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: