Merge

By John Sutton

"John Sutton has seen the world through a runner's eyes and in Merge he captures running's power

 to unite people in a world that divides."

 ~Dean Karnazes, author of the NY Times bestseller, Ultramarathon Man

It's tough enough to be a teenager in the best of times. In 1970s'

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Sutton
• Release date: Aug 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988482024

Book preview

Merge_EBOOK_Cover.jpg

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or

locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2023 by John Sutton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used

in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner

except for the use of quotations in a book review.

First paperback edition July 2023

Cover design by Paige Woolman

Book design by Veronica Scott

ISBN 979-8-9884820-0-0 (hardback)

ISBN 979-8-988-4820-1-7 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-9884820-2-4 (ebook)

www.johnsuttonauthor.com

to the merge

If the hand that rocked the cradle

turned the key that freed the captive

whose hand moved?

Contents

Prologue

Fall

Winter/Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter/Spring

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

1

Ida

Glory to God in the highest. Big Mama’s lips were mouthing the words as she lay in the bed next to me. She heard me stir, opened her eyes and looked over at me.

I said, And peace to his people on earth. Sometimes when she laughed it didn’t make a sound. This was one of those times. She nodded and with a waking up voice repeated, And peace to his people on earth.

Big Mama was my grandmother. We shared a room. She usually said her prayers at the end of the night while I was studying or getting ready for bed. She prayed in the mornings sometimes too.

After school that day, I got called into the principal’s office. Mrs. Daniels told me that Coach Brown wanted to speak to me. I didn’t have any reason to be worried, but no one likes being called into the principal’s office without knowing why. I walked across the playground toward the fieldhouse on the other side of the track at my high school, Fremont, which is in Oakland, California.

Fremont High School was about two miles from where I lived with my parents, brother, and grandmother in East Oakland. It was the end of my sophomore year. I usually took the bus to school with my older brother Raymond in the morning. He was a senior.

East 14th Avenue is the longest street in the East Bay, extending from the banks of Lake Merritt in Oakland to the city of Fremont, where it becomes Mission Boulevard and continues all the way down to San Jose. It’s a double-wide street loaded with buses and traffic.

Raymond and I would walk the two blocks from our house to the bus stop, ride the bus a couple of miles along East 14th, then get off and walk three blocks to Fremont High. It was pretty convenient, and rarely dull. You never knew what would happen on the bus. There were drunks, stoners and crazy people.

Fremont High was on Foothill Boulevard. It too was busy. If the windows were left open on a hot day, you got lots of noise and exhaust fumes wafting into the classrooms from the traffic on Foothill.

When I got to the fieldhouse, I could see Coach Brown through the safety glass on his office door. He was wearing his windbreaker and a Raider ball cap. As always, his whistle hung from his neck. Coach was a big Raiders fan. So was I. Since I was a little kid, I watched the games on TV with my dad and Raymond. Dad would break down the plays while we watched. I knew a lot about football.

On Fridays before game days, I wore silver and black to school. Those were the Raiders team colors. When Coach saw me in the halls, he would always say, RAIDERS!

I tapped on the glass. Coach got up from his chair and let me in. He looked sad. Come in, Ida, and have a seat.

What’s up, coach?

I got a call this morning from Coach Styles over at Tech. He was very impressed with your performances at the meet last week. He thinks you have a lot of potential. He looked down at the floor. And he’s right. You do.

I’m going to get right to the point, Ida. Coach Styles wants to coach you. He was very respectful about asking, but he said that if he coached you, you’d become much faster, and you might even have a chance at running in college. Provided you’re prepared to put the work in, of course. You know what the sports program is like here. We’re outstanding in some things, like basketball. But our track program could be better. If I am honest with myself, Tech will give you a better shot.

I stopped him, I don’t want to leave you, Coach.

You can’t think like that, Ida. Coach Styles knows college coaches. He can open doors for you that I can’t. No one will see you run for Fremont, but they will if you run for Tech.

He handed me a form. This is a form for an inner-district transfer. If you decide to do this, you fill out the form and start at Tech in the fall. I want you to think hard about this. It will mean you leave your friends and teammates at Fremont behind. No teenager wants to do that. But Ida, these kinds of chances don’t always come along. Please give it some thought. It just might change your life.

Coach Brown stood up to indicate the meeting was over. Talk it over with your parents and let me know.

I left his office, and walked home to let it sink in.

Oakland Tech was a couple of miles away, about a mile north of downtown on Broadway. After the meet we had there last week, dad took our family to a restaurant near Tech called Fenton’s Creamery. He said Fenton’s had the best ice cream in Oakland. After I finished my huge sundae, I agreed. There were two really nice shopping districts near Tech. They were nicer than what was around Fremont. But that was no reason to leave.

When I got home, the hose sprinkler was on. It watered the small patch of lawn in front of our house. That was Raymond’s chore. Our house had a narrow driveway along the side that led to the backyard, where we had a converted shed. Ray slept there. A clothesline extended from the house to the shed. My mom grew tomatoes in the summer in the backyard.

Our house was a single-level, two-bedroom, one-bath home. All the houses in our neighborhood were like that. They were all built after the big war for working-class folks moving from the South looking for jobs. Our house was white stucco with a green trim. Dad said he was going to repaint the trim. It needed it. Big Mama and I shared one bedroom. My parents were in the other.

Mom was usually there when I got home. Ever since Raymond got diagnosed with a speech impediment, she worked as a language counselor for kids behind the Scottish Rite building next to Lake Merritt. She started as a volunteer and then went to Laney Junior College. She took some classes in speech therapy at night. When she finished, she got hired as a paid counselor.

When I went inside, Ray was sitting on the couch doing homework.

Hey, Ray, where’s Mom?

She had to go down to Montgomery Wards because the toaster broke. She’ll be back soon. Hey! I’ve got some really great news!

So do I, I think.

We laughingly argued a little over who got to go first. Then Ray blurted it out: I’m going to start volunteering to feed kids for the Survival Program!

What’s that?" I asked him.

It’s a program at Trinity Church in West Oakland. It’s ten blocks from the MacArthur BART station. If Dad can drive me there on the way to work, I can take BART back to the Fruitvale Station and get to Fremont High in time for my first classes.

That sounds cool. Tell me about it.

It was started a couple of years back by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale . . .

Wait a second, Ray. The Panthers run it?

Yeah. But they’ve changed, Ida.

He told me about the Survival Program’s free breakfasts for inner-city kids. But I had a hard time listening after he said Panthers.

Bobby Hutton used to live next door to us. Everyone knew him as Lil’ Bobby, but he was like a big brother to Raymond. Bobby got involved with the Panthers early on. He was killed in a shootout with the Oakland Police a few years back after Dr. King got killed. There was lots of speculation about what happened. Bobby was a really sweet kid, and I think he just got in way over his head.

Ray, Bobby’s dead because of the Panthers.

That was when Eld-, Eld-, Eldridge Cleaver was running things. Bobby and Huey are leading the party in a different direction!

Ray’s stutter would come back every now and then. His words wouldn’t keep up with his thoughts when he was upset or excited. When it got bad, sometimes spittle would fly until he got the word out.

I wasn’t surprised he was stuttering right now. Raymond was crushed when Bobby died. Luckily, when it happened, Mom and Dad still had a lot of influence over Ray. He was still going to church with Big Mama. They all warned him not to let himself get eaten up by anger. They’d ask him what Bobby would want him to do to bring light out of the darkness. I could see how helping with the food program might be Ray trying to do that. But I was worried. It was still the Panthers.

I said, We’ll see what Mom and Dad have to say.

I went into my room and closed the door. It had a full-length mirror hanging on the back of it. I’d gotten a haircut the week before. It was a short afro, and I was trying to decide if I liked it better than the larger afro I had before. I pulled my Afro Sheen off the dresser and put some in my hair. The short afro made my high cheekbones stand out more, which I liked. But I wasn’t sure. As I was trying to decide, Ray knocked.

Come in, I said.

Ray opened the door and nearly hit me with it. Oh, sorry, Ida, he said. Checking out the new ‘fro?

Yeah, I said. I can’t tell if I like it shorter or longer."

Ray closed the door and stood behind me, facing the mirror. He pulled his cake cutter out and put it into his enormous ‘fro. Well, you can’t store things in your ‘fro like I can, he joked. Like a lot of guys, Ray carried his cake cutter in his back pocket to groom his giant afro. He looked silly with that cake cutter in his hair. The three-inch-long teeth of the comb dug into his rad ‘fro, and the handle stuck out to the right. He got me laughing.

Ray was a full head taller than me. But it was easy to tell we were siblings: we both had cleft chins—just like our dad—and dark brown eyes that smiled when we were happy.

He said, You forgot to tell me your good news.

Coach Brown thinks I might be able to run in college. He wants to put me in for an inner-district transfer to Tech. He thinks the coach there could get me to the next level.

What do you want to do, Ida?

I’m not sure, Ray. I have to talk to Mom and Dad and think about it for a while.

I’d miss having my friends at Fremont telling me how my sister was burning up the track. But that’s not the important thing. He held my shoulders and squeezed them. I’m sure you’ll make the right decision, Ida. Ray went back to his studies.

I would make the right decision. No matter what Mom and Dad said. I didn’t want to leave my friends in high school, but I knew this was my big chance. Opportunities didn’t come to our house every day.

My parents and I talked about it over dinner that night. Mom and Dad said they would find a way to send me to college when the time came. I wasn’t so sure. Ray had the grades to get into Hayward State but would start at Laney in the fall. That was because if he began at Hayward State, we might be unable to afford the last two years of college.

Mom and Dad weren’t going to tell me what to do. We’ll find a way, they said. I nodded and smiled. But as they spoke, I knew the right thing to do. I was going to Tech.

2

Levi

There was one guy at Piedmont High that nobody could stand. His name was Ed Covey.

Covey’s family moved to Piedmont from Pinole when he was in fifth grade. I was a grade older, so I only had one year of elementary school with him.

When he came to our school, I guess he felt like he had to make an immediate impression. He would push kids around on the playground and tell them that his big brother was a cop. If anyone messed with him, he would boast that he would get his big brother to kick their ass. Covey had front teeth too big for his mouth and a cowlick where his blonde hair parted in front. He was big and gangly and had an unhinged expression in his eyes. He looked stupid and crazy at the same time. But there was a better adjective to describe him- cruel.

His cruelty ramped up in middle school and through high school. In eighth grade, there was a girl in our class whose nose turned up. Anyone could tell she was self-conscious about it. So what does Covey do? He labels her THE PUG! Hey everybody, here comes the Pug! How’s the world smelling today, Pug? And nobody could get the guy to stop, not the jocks, not the teachers, not the principal. He was a flat-out asshole.

A couple of years ago, when I was still a junior at Piedmont High, I was jogging the required mile for P.E. during the last period of the day. The jocks trained then too, so we shared the track with the runners. As I ran past the football practice field, I heard the head coach yell, COVEY! I have no idea what he had done, but we often heard the coach yelling those two syllables. The coach would have loved to kick Covey off the team, but he was the best player. He was an all-league linebacker and a total gym rat. His testosterone levels were something the coach just had to deal with. And boy, did he have to deal with them.

So Covey is exiled by the coach to the track to run laps for whatever rule he broke. Steve Windsor comes around the corner by the adjacent elementary school playground to finish his mile at a swift clip. Steve was a sophomore and a runner who moved with such grace and intensity that anyone who saw him had to rethink why running wasn’t cool. I’m right behind Covey, who sees Steve coming and trips him. Steve goes flying, and the red dust of the track kicks up all around him. The cross-country coach sees it, comes running over, and starts yelling at Covey. He tells Covey to stay right where he is, then runs to the practice field to get the football coach.

I had gotten to know Steve in driver training the year before. I was a year ahead of him in school, but because he was old for his grade and I was young for mine, we shared the car. We discovered we both really dug R&B music and jazz. We became friends.

I stopped jogging and stood over Steve while he was assessing the damage. He was not a big kid, about five foot six. He was skinny and had straight, stringy brown hair covering his ears that went down to just above his neck. He was banged up pretty good—hands, knees, even his forehead had gotten a good road rash.

While Covey waited for the football coach to come over and chew him out, Steve looked up and said, Covey, you’re an asshole! Covey looked down at Steve and sneered, Track weenie! When you went down, you looked like you were having a total spaz attack! He stumbled down the track with his arms flailing like he was Steve falling. He was laughing at his own joke, which neither of us found funny. Then he came back, looked me up and down, and said, What’s your problem, Panty Boy? He called me Panty Boy because my name is Levi. You know, like the jeans? He’d been calling me Panty Boy since we had lockers next to each other in junior high. Pretty clever, asshole.

After P.E., I walked to my afternoon shift at a nearby supermarket. I was picking up some afternoon shifts, but mostly at that point I was working Saturdays. No surprise, Saturdays were always the busiest day on Lakeshore. Lakeshore has one long block of family-owned shops and has everything but a good bakery. There’s metered parking on the street, but most people park in Lucky’s lot. That was the store I worked at- Lucky. It was at the far end of the shops and adjacent to the bottom of an Interstate 580 offramp.

The parking lot was pretty big, two levels, and when I worked there as a bagger I spent a good part of Saturdays corralling shopping carts in the lot and pushing them back to the store. I couldn’t afford to go out to eat, so on weekends I would usually bring a sack lunch, buy a can of Lady Lee flavored soda for fifteen cents, and eat in the lunch room at the back of the store.

One Saturday, one of the produce guys was in the lunch room bundling greens and watching Big Time Wrestling on the little black-and-white TV. He wore rimless, round spectacles and was bald. He couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds, but he seemed to be in great shape—lean, sinewy. Maybe he was forty, maybe sixty—you couldn’t tell. His name was Wing.

Pat Patterson was fighting Alex Smirnoff that day. Patterson was the blond-haired good guy, and everybody rooted for him. Smirnoff was a Russian and a living, breathing propaganda instrument of the Cold War. Most folks hated Smirnoff: he was anti-American, fought dirty, and even dissed the beloved host of the show, Walt Harris. Walt looked like the kind of man who sold life insurance and tended a backyard garden with his childhood-sweetheart wife. But Wing’s disdain for Smirnoff had nothing to do with a fondness for Walt or anything related to wrestling.

As the match was coming to an end, and Smirnoff had Patterson in a headlock, Wing set down his knife and started twisting his body as though he was trying to free Patterson. I stifled a laugh as I watched Wing contort his body in a vain effort to change the match’s outcome. He was speaking with a strained voice, Come on Pat! You can do it! Break Smirnoff! Break Smirnoff!

Well, he didn’t break Smirnoff that day. As boos rained down from the crowd, Patterson tapped out and Wing released a sigh of resignation. Wing was so disgusted he turned off the TV, not waiting for the post-match interview between Smirnoff and Walt Harris.

Wing turned to me and shook his head. I hate Smirnoff!

Yeah, he’s a pretty bad dude, I said.

And here is where the world according to Wing was unveiled to me: You know what he does? He gets all his money in the United States and then goes back to Russia and spends it all there! Vodka, caviar—big life in Russia! No appreciation for the American worker who pays the money that he earns!

I thought it was funny when I heard it. But I soon understood that this was part of Wing’s unique perspective, along with his determination to let nothing go to waste. He lived in Berkeley and rode a bicycle to the store. I don’t know how long it took him to get to work, but it had to be at least five miles. He got his exercise and saved 50 cents a day by not taking the bus.

One day I saw him step out of the meat department with a big double plastic bag he was taking home. I asked him what it was, and he made a funny face. Guts! he said. I asked him what he wanted with guts. He told me that the butchers threw the guts away but that he had a use for them. I didn’t know what that use was, but I am sure he had one. Wing wasted nothing.

Some folks in the Bay Area were waking up to the fact that there was more to conservation than not being a litterbug. We needed to pay more attention to what we used and threw away. Every so often, my mother would go to one of the anti-pollution demonstrations organized by the Friends of the Earth, which had been founded in San Francisco just a few years earlier. She and her friends—and their kids, like me—were advocating for the need to protect the environment. Wing had probably done so all his adult life. Not by attending demonstrations. But in how he lived his life.

I’d been hired to bag groceries at Lucky earlier that year. The dude who hired me was a former cattle rustler from Oklahoma called John Goodall. John had gotten out of the Army after the Korean War. Like lots of soldiers returning from the Pacific, he had been processed for discharge in Oakland. Before he returned to Oklahoma, he fell in love with a girl, Peggy Mae. They soon married and settled down, and he started working for Lucky. He did well in the grocery business, and he was the store manager on Lakeshore Boulevard when I met him. We were the 41st Lucky store, Lucky 41. Our store was the highest-earning store in the region, which was pretty impressive considering its location. That had a lot to do with John.

Lakeshore stands at the cultural crossroads between Piedmont, a wealthy, sleepy community in the hills above Lake Merritt and the volatile city of Oakland. Piedmont aspired to be dainty cucumber sandwiches served on china. Oakland couldn’t be anything other than it was: boiling jambalaya that spat from under the lid, onto the stovetop, and down to the floor.

I lived in lower Piedmont, which is more Oakland than Piedmont. A lot was going on in the East Bay at the time—and it still is. Since the mid-1960s, Oakland’s become a mecca of social change and upheaval. The Black Panthers are big. Bobby Seale, who founded the Panthers along with Huey Newton, nearly beat an establishment candidate for mayor a couple of years ago, coming in second in a field of eight. Change, violent at times, has been in the air. Lakeshore is where worlds collide.

John isn’t a big man. At Lucky, he generally wore snap-button shirts, with a bolo at times. He had a ready smile to greet folks that would turn on in an instant and turn off with equal speed. It was a big, toothy grin that showed not-the-greatest-dentistry. John didn’t care; he would look you straight in the eye, and whether he said it or not, his visage always asked, How can I help you? There was also something in his countenance that was intimidating. He seemed to me like a coiled spring, like a jack-in-the-box just waiting to jump out. He was a bit scary.

But he was also a man who loved a challenge. I think that’s why he refused the many offers from upper management to move down to San Leandro and work in the corporate headquarters.

Every summer, John took a month off to return to his Oklahoma ranch. He really was a cattle rustler. In his younger days, he busted broncos, taming wild horses. It must have been a perfect job for John. His marriage kept him in Oakland, and Lucky 41 provided him the occasional adrenaline rush—handling the unbridled, unpredictable situations that sometimes broke out in the store.

3

Steve

Here’s how I got into running. When I was in ninth grade, P.E. was my last period. One day, in the fall, the coaches sat us down in the bleachers at the end of the period. This didn’t happen a lot. When it did, it was usually because some kid had screwed something up, and it was their chance to give us all a hard time. So I was surprised on this occasion to see Bill Wilcox, the Advanced Algebra teacher, standing on the track with the football coaches.

Wilcox told us that he was the coach of the cross-country running team and that if anyone wanted to give running three miles a shot, we were welcome to join the rest of the freshmen cross-country team who were about to have their last race of the season. He asked if anyone had any questions. No one said a word. Into the silence, Wilcox said, Well, okay. If you want to give it a try, just come on down. Then the head coach of the football team dismissed us, and everyone walked up and out of the bleachers to the field house.

Wilcox neglected to tell us that it was both the first and last race of the season. No one wanted to run cross-country. Football was the glory sport. I wanted to play football. I had good hands and wanted to be a wide receiver. Some of my friends were surprised I didn’t go out for football. I had been the fastest kid in my elementary school. But my dad told me I was too