It's hard to run a marathon with a hangover. My buddy Jack and I ran the Canadian International Marathon in late October. Three weeks earlier my girlfriend, Lilly, wanted to have a heart-to-heart.

"I don't love you," she said.

"Of course you do," I said.

"I have a picture in my mind of the future, and you're not in it."

"I can change."

"We've been through this already."

I lay down in front of the doorway as she was leaving and kicked my feet and wailed like a siren. She stepped over me.

All that I had left in my life was my thesis, and that was in bad shape. I hadn't written one good word in a year. My advisor, Dr. Richard Wilde, was deleting the words faster than I could produce them. I was already on academic probation and Dick told me that five years was too long to get a Master's degree.

"What are you?" He asked one morning, "an idiot?"

"No sir."

"Well get it together, will you please."

I started hanging out with Jack again, like the old days.

Jack had an apartment in the Annex, above a futon store, overlooking Bloor Street. Jack worked as a law clerk for one of the big firms. He said it was better than being a lawyer.

"Nine to five, not much homework, decent pay, benefits, relatively few headaches."

We were drinking quarts of Molson and sharing a fatty when we decided to run the marathon. "When I had ten dollars to my name," Jack said, "I wanted a hundred. When I had a thousand I wanted ten thousand. Now I want a hundred thousand. Do you think all millionaires want to be billionaires?"

I owed Jack a lot of money. For a decade I had been mooching off him. This was his way of letting me know that he could handle the entry fees for both of us. I found out that he slept with Lilly when we were all undergraduates at McGill. I would not have found out at all except that Lilly got pregnant soon after and told me, honestly one night, that she wasn't sure who the father was. Jack never found out that I found out. I figured that paying for the marathon would further help him cope with the guilt that I was sure he was experiencing.

I said, "whenever I have ten dollars all I want is a six pack and some change."

The next morning Jack bought himself a new pair of running shoes and gave me his old ones. We played hockey and football together in high school and in those days we had the same size feet.

"How come you are still in school?" He asked me as he slipped on his new runners. "Don't you want to get a job?"

"My problem is that I can't read. I never learned how. I don't know what the words mean. I'm going to sue the Government because they never provided me with a mother tongue."

Jack's old shoes were too big. My heels popped out of them as I walked over to his fridge and got two bottles of beer.

"Reading isn't everything," he said.

The next day we ran for a few kilometers along Spadina. Then we walked to the Wheat Sheaf Tavern for a couple of pitchers. Booze affects you differently after exercise. You don't have to piss as much, and the euphoria lasts longer. Two pitchers turned into two more and then we went to the Paddock for shots of rye and cheap cigars. We played some pool and won ten dollars from a couple of shit-faced street people. They asked us to buy them some drinks, which we did, and they helped themselves to our cigars. Jack arm-wrestled one of them, Joey. They grunted at each other for a moment and then Jack slammed Joey's knuckles onto the table. I got a tray of shots from the bar and then I arm-wrestled the other one, Louis. We grunted at each other for a moment and then I slammed his knuckles onto the table. They told us that they knew these women who would suck our dicks for twenty bucks each. We passed.

Two days later we ran again. We rode the streetcar to the beach and ran along the boardwalk. I had a blister on my heel that burned badly as my oversized shoes rubbed up and down. I had to stop after five minutes while Jack ran ahead. I hadn't been sleeping well and, for the first time in a long time, I noticed that I was exhausted. The beach was fairly empty; there were a few couples strolling hand-in-hand, some teenagers sipping from bottles of malt liquor, throwing rocks, talking loudly. I saw a woman who looked a lot like Lilly, wearing a great big hat, walking by herself, but I knew it wasn't her. By now Lilly was probably living with someone else, at least on a part time basis, stashing her tampons under his sink, moaning in her characteristic, "Oh, Oh, Oh," during orgasm, pleasing him with her mouth during her period. The memory of her voice, "Oh, Oh, Oh," tortured me. Even when we had been together, the remnant of that gasping triplet drove me mad because I knew there were at least a dozen men who knew exactly how it sounded when she got off, and many of them discovered this while she still lived with me. Deep down I was certain that she left me for someone else, I remember her coming home late, smelling of booze and sex, needing to shower before she got into bed. "I've had a really hard day," she'd say.

Finally Jack returned and thankfully he had a joint which he lit as we walked to a patio.

"What is your thesis called anyway?" Jack asked me.

"Mental bacteria."

Jack called a woman named, Lacey, and asked her to meet us at the bar. She arrived an hour later and brought along another woman named, Doreen. Doreen was a big girl, muscular, bulging shoulders, tremendously large calves. I explained to her that my thesis was about how the scientific method is responsible for converting truth into a commodity.

"The alternative hypothesis is competitive," I said.

"I remember learning the scientific method in high school," she said.

Even though I thought Lacey was the better looking of the two, it was Doreen that I ended up in bed with that night. It wasn't much, nothing to be proud of, I was drunk, so I sort of lay on top of her and wiggled my ass until I came. I woke up at five a.m. and sneaked out on all fours.

The following week, Jack had to be out of town for a case. I was happy to give my blister a day or two to heal. I went to the library and tried to work on my thesis. I spent time reading some weird philosophy about unknowing, surfing the net, and flipping through compendia of Superman and Batman comics. Finally, I wrote down a few lines:

My thoughts,
like puss,
painfully ooze from the sores of my mind,
left over from the infection,
of method,
and style.
I've been raped, and paid for it.

Then I erased them.

I went home with a porn video and six tall boys of Labatt's Blue. I drank the beer, but left the video in the case. Doreen had left two messages on my machine. The rest of the week was similar. I tried to work, but ended up each night frustrated and drunk. I finally called Doreen and she invited me over. She poured wine in coffee mugs and fed me Doritos.

"I had fun the other night," she said. Her hair was big and blonde and curly, she had on green surgical pants and a white tank top and no bra. Her arms were petrified with muscle. She sat on the couch with her ample legs curled under herself.

"What are your dreams?" She asked me.

"To think for myself."

"This isn't one of your strengths?"

"No, not really," I said. "It's a learned behavior-to think you are thinking when in fact you are not."

"You're weird."

"My problem is that English is my second language," I said. "And I don't have a first, unless you consider, Screw You, as its own dialect."

She let me try again with her in the bedroom. It was much better this time. We both enjoyed ourselves. There was a satisfying rudeness to it.

That weekend Jack returned. "We've got to get running," he said. I had a meeting with Dick scheduled for the following Monday, but I didn't have anything new on paper to show him.

"Can DNA be collected from shit?" I asked as we jogged along Dupont, inhaling car exhaust.

"I dunno," he said, "I suppose, if there was blood in it."

"Some smart guy is going to take his MIT education and open up a shop that does DNA testing on dog shit," I said, as a dull pain started to grow along my side. "All neighborhood dogs will have to be genetically pre-screened as part of their licensing procedure. That way you can tell which bloody dog it was that shit on your lawn and you can go after the lazy ass owner." The stitch continued to grow sharply and I had to stop running.

"We're going to die out there," Jack said. "We can't even go three kilometers."

We drank heavily that night and slept half of the next day. I skipped the run, although I think Jack managed to jog a few blocks. I needed to work, but couldn't write anything down that sounded intelligent. I struggled with my thesis for the rest of the weekend, but ended up with nothing. Finally, at three o'clock on Monday morning, after drinking a bottle of wine and twelve ounces of Jamaican rum, I decided to write down my DNA-dog-shit idea and show it to Dick at nine a.m. I only managed two hours of sweaty sleep and woke up with a scorching case of diarrhea.

After the meeting I rode the subway to Davisville and went into the Broken Arrow for a pint of Guinness. The bartender told me that they had to cancel the show the night before on account of the headliner being too wasted.

"He wrecked the room upstairs," the man said, "pissed all over everything, smashed the chair. It's going to be a goddamn nuisance to clean up. You'd think a fiddle player wouldn't be such trouble."

On my way back from the washroom I darted up the stairs and found a door ajar at the end of the hallway. I pulled it open and looked inside, the bartender wasn't lying, the room was trashed. The guy was sleeping on the bed, wearing green military fatigues with dark sunglasses and he had a bottle of whiskey tucked under his arm like a teddy bear. There was a broken violin on the floor. I wondered how come it was okay for him to be violent. I gently pulled the bottle out from under his arm and took as big a swig as I could and then left it beside him on the mattress.

Dick had thrown me out. He told me that I was not graduate school material and he thought I might need a psychiatrist. The worst part was that he was going to stop paying me out of his research grant. Eight-fifty a month wasn't much, but it kept me clothed and fed. I figured what little money I had would last me another week. I drank for most of the afternoon and then called Doreen. I got her machine and rather than leave a message I hung up.

The day before the marathon there was blood running down between my legs. It wasn't associated with pain-so I wasn't particularly worried, but I had to lie down for an hour before it stopped. Jack came over with Lacey and they fooled around on the couch while I lay in my bed and tried to count how many times I'd blacked out from drinking. It had to be at least a hundred and fifty.

Lacey took us to the Danforth for some lunch. I nursed a bottle of beer, and Jack and Lacey ate grilled octopus and drank mineral water. I tried to make conversation with them, but they were engrossed in baby talk. I let my burning eyes wander around the restaurant. The sun beamed through the front glass igniting all the tables into a blaze of orange and brown. There was a buzz of conversation all around while a tape of generic dance music thumped lightly. I couldn't force my mind to make sense of the scene. There were women, and there was food, served by other women, and there was odd blurting laughter, cutting through the blue metallic smoke, swirling from cigarettes. The diamonds, and coiffures, and wardrobes, all meant nothing to me. Cell phones, and lipstick on wine glasses, nipples, and boyfriends with stock portfolios and tans. I felt fearful of everything. I was a stranger, passing time in the wings, unsure, uncomfortable. When the waitress came by I ordered a liter of intermission and drained it in five minutes.

"Are you sure?" Jack asked me when I ordered another liter. "We've got an early call."

"Fuck early," I said. "I'm here now, and I'll be there then."

Morning came. So did more blood and bile.

We ran the race. Jack finished it in less than six hours. It took me longer. It's hard to run a marathon with a hangover.

^