69 Read Free

and as a result had quite a following. He’d also been on the basketball team until his junior year and earned a reputation for helping solve a lot of his teammates’ personal, woman, and money problems. In order to make our festival a reality, we had to get him to join forces with us.
      
    Adama and I left the gibbons’ cage and climbed the observation tower. The sun had begun to dip toward the sea.
    “I guess everybody’s cleaning the classroom right now, eh?” he said, gazing out at the bay and smiling. I smiled, too. Adama was learning the joy of ditching class. He asked me to show him the book of poems again.
      
    I have found it
    What?
    Eternity
    The fusion of sun and sea
      
    Adama read it aloud. Peering at the ribbon of sunlight sparkling on the water, he asked me if he could borrow the book. I lent it to him, as well as an album by Cream and another by Vanilla Fudge.
      
    That’s how 1969, the third most interesting of my thirty-two years, began.
    We were seventeen.

IRON BUTTERFLY
    In 1969 we were seventeen. And we still had our cherries . To be a virgin at that age is nothing to be particularly proud of and nothing to be particularly ashamed of, but it’s something that weighs on your mind.
    The winter I turned sixteen I’d run away from home. My reason for doing so was that I’d perceived a fundamental contradiction in the entire entrance examination system and wanted to get away from my home and school and out on the streets in order to better think about this and to ponder the significance of the struggle that had developed that year between the student radicals and the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Sorry. That’s not exactly true. The truth is that I didn’t want to take part in a long-distance race at school. Long-distance running had always been a weak point with me. I’d hated it ever since junior high school. Now that I’m thirty-two and wiser, of course, I still hate it.
    It wasn’t that I was a wimp or anything; it’s just that I had a habit of abruptly slowing down to a walk and deciding that I’d run enough. It wasn’t that I’d get a pain in my side, or feel sick or dizzy, either; just that as soon as I felt a bit tired I started walking. If anything, in fact, I was healthier than most. My lung capacity measured over 6,000 cc, and soon after I got to high school I’d found myself among thirteen or fourteen boys summoned to the track and field clubroom. The coach was a young guy, a recent graduate of the Nippon College of Health and Physical Education. He was one of six new P.E. instructors the school had hired to help prepare us for the National Athletic Meet, which was to be held in Nagasaki two years later. One was an expert at judo, one at team handball, one at basketball, one at field events, one at swimming, and one at long-distance running. In 1969, when “Smash the National Athletic Meet” became one of the rallying cries of our student uprising, these experts were a convenient target to attack. They didn’t like us much, either.
    Kawasaki, the running coach, had a square head, curly hair, and short but powerful legs that had earned him Japan’s third-best time in the 5,000 meters. This was the spiel he made us listen to in the clubroom:
    “For fifteen-year-olds, you boys have all got terrific lungs. I want you to form a long-distance relay team. No one’s forcing you to join, of course, but I strongly recommend that you do. You may not know it, but you were all born to be long-distance runners, and we’re going to make champions out of you.”
    I was appalled to learn that my cardio-pulmonary system had condemned me from birth to this dismal prospect.
    Once winter vacation was over, all our P.E. classes were devoted to training us for the annual school marathon. That first year, I was subjected to a constant stream of abuse from Kawasaki. Because I tended to slow abruptly to a walk, he called me—I quote—“a scumbag.”
    “Listen,” he said. “Running is