I Know Something About Running (Kelley Shinn)

-an excerpt

SAMUEL PATRICK LOCKNEY[1] WAS MY FIRST LOVE, and a guy whom I did not fuck.  He was nineteen, a journalism major at a small college two hours southeast of Akron, and three years older than I.  On a particular two in the morning, we happened to be the only people in the University of Akron movie theatre watching Conan the Barbarian.  Since my brother, Neil, had the driver’s license and was going to an overnight gaming convention at the student center, and I was sixteen and bored and hormonal, I had tagged along.  Revved up on all the free coffee from the convention—a herd of Dungeons & Dragons poobahs of monstrous sorts among whom even the cute boys were enough to make you believe in aliens—I had gone for a walk to the theatre, fully aware of the main attraction. 

            As Sam later recalled to me, he had come to visit a friend, a student at the university, who had fallen into what Sam called a Dionysian hangover.   So Sam strolled alone through the “Rubber Capital of the World,” the cityscape of my childhood, the city in which I would soon lose two of my most precious assets, and nearly my life.  He walked past the law offices and churches, past the old Quaker Oats silos that eventually became a Hilton, and farther on past the Diamond Grille and some of the rubber factories that were abandoned in the eighties and became a home to late-night punk bands, Devo among them.  On his way back toward the university, he walked by the Wonder Bread bakery, where a cloud of sweet fermentation methodically punctuated the vulcanized air of the city—a smell that, in less than a year, would give me a wisp of a reason to exist as the morning nurse would push me in a wheelchair around a city block.  As soon as the