the face in the tree
chapter 19
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Our college years were when Tommy and I first started to run together.
In high school, it was never necessary—for me, at least—to run for exercise. I played soccer in the fall, which involved plenty of running, and otherwise, I was a skinny kid who could eat three cheeseburgers without gaining an ounce of weight, thanks to my overpowered metabolism.
Tommy ran constantly. It was a good and healthy way to satisfy his need for perpetual motion and, like most runners, he spent way too much time and energy trying to extol to others (mostly me) the virtues of running and why everyone should do it.
I saw running as a physically expensive chore, each step as meaningless as chasing a carrot on a string. But in college, I gained the dreaded ‘freshman fifteen’ as my metabolism slowed, the inch of fat around my belly-button giving me a reason enough to stave off the incoming ‘skinny-fat’ label.
We ran whenever we visited home together, which during our freshman year was often due to the bouts of homesickness we both endured. That’s not to say my freshman year was bad, per se. I made friends, did well in class, and learned to drink and party with responsibility. But none of my new friends were as interesting as Tommy. None of them used Joycean vocabulary from Ulysses in casual conversation, none of them texted in poetic verse, and none could derive the hero’s journey from the subtext of the movie Superbad.
How Tommy was getting on in college was a bit opaque to me—he didn’t say much about it or mention any new friends—but it was clear he was learning things, as revealed to me after a run we went on when we both came home around Thanksgiving.
It was cold, below fifty degrees, and most of the leaves had already blown off the trees, rendering the beauty of autumn inert and robbing it of its excuse for being an acceptable end to summer. We ran through Tommy’s neighborhood, then mine, then through the ‘bad’ part of town, and finally down by all the abandoned mills and factories. It was overcast, and that seemed to suit Veddersburgh, as if the lack of sunlight covered up its flaws, the town’s grayness complementing the sky above rather than contrasting harshly.
Tommy led the way, making sure not to leave me behind but pushing my pace all the same. We got back to his house, and I bent over, hands on knees on the sidewalk outside, panting, my throat dry and lungs aching. It was only a five-mile run, but our longest yet. Tommy stood, hands on hips, his breath visible in the cold, unbothered by our exertions. He wore only a t-shirt and shorts as if it were 80 degrees out, while I had on leggings and a long-sleeved shirt.
“How the fuck do you do this?” I asked. “You’re insane, you’re just insane.”
“Aye, that I am,” he said. “And therein lies the key.”
“Seriously though, how?”
“Well, I can be pretty competitive, you know,” Tommy said, stretching his quads.
“You don’t say?”
“That’s it. That’s the key—or at least it was. In high school track, I wanted to beat everyone else. I had to be the best. And when I played soccer, it was the same. We had to dominate; we had to impose ourselves, and that gave me strength. I simply wanted to be victorious. But after busting my leg, I realized that kind of competition was dangerous. There’s a whole other competition going on inside us all the time: competing with ourselves.”
“Really? I think I’m probably content to let my inner self win when it says, ‘let’s take a break.’”
“You can give in to that voice, Jude-dude, or you can fight it and beat it. I’ve decided I always have to best myself. That’s what I do,” he told me as we went inside. His dog Waldo greeted me at the door like he always did, as if Tommy and I had been away for a thousand years.
“Wait for me in the backyard. I have a surprise for you,” Tommy commanded, and he went upstairs three steps at a time. The house was quiet and empty—his parents weren’t home—and I went to the backyard, where the leaves had yet to be blown away, crunching them beneath my Asics.
Tommy came outside with Waldo, now wearing a track jacket, holding a piece of ceramic in one hand and a baggie of green plant in the other. He held them both up to me. “My friend, do you partake in the wacky tobacc-y?”
“The what?”
“The herb? The ganja? The Mary Jane?”
“Never! Since when do you?!”
“Since earlier this semester. My roommate does it all the time. You gotta try it, Jude-dude.”
“I don’t know…” I said, but Tommy was already loading up a bowl and walking into the woods.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go do it at the old birdwatching place.”
“I don’t know if I want to,” I said as we headed down the trail into Whispering Pines Park, Waldo bounding along behind us. “Didn’t I just clear out my lungs? Now I’m going to dirty them again?”
“It’s not that bad for your lungs,” he said. “Besides, the Beatles did it—they loved it! How bad could it be?”
We got to the old birdwatching hut, which was even more abandoned than it had been when we were younger. I knew that, despite my misgivings, I was going to smoke marijuana for the first time right then and there. I shivered as the warmth from our run wore off.
Tommy packed the bowl and pulled out a lighter to inaugurate the flame. “A torch to bear our friendship,” he said, lighting the herb. I watched how he inhaled, released the carb, and took it deep into his lungs before exhaling. Then I did my best to mimic him when he passed the bowl my way.
I did well—too well—and doubled over, coughing so hard it felt like my lungs would fall out. Tommy patted me on the back, and after a couple of minutes, I straightened up, red-faced and teary-eyed, and for the first time, I saw the world in a slightly different light.
“Whoa,” I said, looking around, laughing for no reason. Waldo wagged his tail and licked my hand.
“Right?” Tommy said.
Now, of course, marijuana is not a psychedelic. It doesn’t cause hallucinations. But it can make you see familiar things in a new light. In my case, it was a large knot in the wood of a tree nearby.
“Hey,” I said, nudging Tommy. “Do you see that? There’s, like, a guy in that tree.”
Tommy looked up at the branches. “In the tree?”
“No, no, not in the tree. On the tree. There’s a face in the bark. Do you see it?” I pointed.
“That does look like a face! Holy crap, it looks like an old man! How have we never noticed that before? That’s wild.”
I took a picture of the face on my new smartphone, and later, I was able to see that the knot in the tree did, in fact, look like an old man, even when sober.
I wondered how long the man in the tree had gazed upon us, how much he had seen between Tommy and me, what conversations he had overheard. Could he know things about us that even we didn’t? If he could speak, what would he tell us about our friendship? Would he issue warnings? Blessings?
We stood there laughing, looking at the face in the tree that only he and I could see.
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