The Runner (3 page)

literature and American lives that we frequently confuse our wishful imaginings with reality.

Living with one foot in the present and one foot in the future, we native optimists often feel that we have little choice but to make things up, a slippery procedure that can lead to the full-scale onset of the liar’s disease from which I am in no way immune.

I, too, had lied about the year I was born. I met people on buses and I lied to them for

hours, beginning with my name and where I was from, and continuing on to encompass every

last detail of my present and past, in the hopes that my stories would help them feel comfortable enough to open up and tell me intimate details of their lives. The immediate effect of these lies was never less than exhilarating. The best comparison I can think of would be the rush of hot air into a hot air balloon as it wobbles and shakes until the ropes are released and it begins to rise into dreamless blue skies of the prime-time television commercials for the powerful drugs that regulate levels of serotonin in the brain.

The lies I told were products of circumstance, and of some real and obvious instability in

my own character. They were born of a lifelong habit of listening and watching and pretending, through methods ranging from strategic silence to deliberate prevarication. I lied because I had to. I lied because I felt like it. When I met people from the South, I spoke to them in a gentle Southern accent. I wondered how many made-up versions of myself I would run through until I arrived at a self that felt right. Lying, by omission, and with the intent to deceive, is part of the equipment of my chosen profession. It is also a part of the price that a classless society demands of those who would dream of escaping the station into which they were born.

I stopped telling stories about my past because I felt like I might lose track of myself in some permanent way, I told Cindy. I felt like I might do serious damage to the feeling of being a whole, real person.

“Me too!” she said, happy to share her stories of youthful deception with another

recovered liar. Maybe lying is a phase to which imaginative introverts who are particularly desperate to connect with reality are prone. I remembered that Jim’s friend David Eckley said that part of him hoped that Jim would get away. I wondered what is so attractive about a

grown-up person who can’t stop lying.

“I can’t imagine how it would feel anything but lonely,” she said. She and her husband

moved to Telluride because it was the most beautiful place they had ever seen.

“I guess I’m just one of those shallow people that needs a really beautiful place to live,”

she said. The part of Iowa where she grew up was dead flat. “I am addicted to beauty,” she

sighed. “I can’t help it. I could never live out on the plains.”

Jim’s goal was not to become rich, or to become better educated. Those goals were only

secondary to his true purpose, which was spookier and more unsettling, and more universal. He turned his life into a story in order to escape from reality.

“It’s why I love to read fiction,” she said. To become a fictional character is a scary,

high-altitude thought, she agreed, especially for people who spend a lot of time inside their own heads. It would take an incredible amount of dedication and endurance to pull off a stunt like that.

1. The arrival of the drug dealers came after a coterie of West Coast hippies took over the town from the unemployed miners who were busy drinking themselves to death in the local bars.

The smarter hippies soon got tired of gazing at the mountains and signed on with some

out-of-state ski moguls to build a resort. The drug of choice in Telluride in the seventies was the white powder memorialized in the eighties coke ballad “Smugglers Blues” by ex-Eagle Glenn

Frey: “They move it through Miami, sell it in L.A./They hide it up in Telluride, I mean it’s here to stay.”

II. An Extraordinary Young Man

Floating one thousand feet above Telluride is a snow-capped and pleasantly artificial

version of an Alpine village done up in winterized hues of the tan and stucco palette popular in wealthy subdivisions and shopping malls throughout the Southwest. Connected to the old mining town below by a spectacular gondola, Mountain Village is a gated community with no visible

need for gates. Protected against intruders by its high property values, an active police force, and the general inaccessibility of a planned vacation area at nine thousand feet above sea level, with one road in and one road out, Mountain Village is a man-made paradise for doctors and dentists, Texas oilmen, California property hunters, and other wealthy types who love to ski but can’t afford their own mountain, a likely setting for a skewed postmodern version of F. Scott

Fitzgerald’s short story “The Ice Palace.” Skiers can ride black diamond trials from early

morning to late afternoon in relative isolation, and then head down from the slopes to the sliding doors of their condos. Those in the mood for after-ski nourishment can gulp down teriyaki bowls while listening to stoner tracks by Bob Marley and the Wailers, whose eyes would have likely bugged out of their heads at the sight of so much perfect white snow.

Jim Hogue was planning to make his home in Mountain Village, in a condo provided by

Dr. Louis Alaia. A skier and local real estate developer, Dr. Alaia is a pleasant, grandfatherly man with thick white hair and olive-tan Mediterranean features that look out of place in the winter landscape. When I met him for lunch at his home, he was wearing a thick navy cashmere sweater. His gentle, absentminded manner betrays a singular degree of involvement in his own thoughts and a corresponding lack of attention to large clues that other people may not be exactly what they seem: he is a mark, a living, walking, breathing study in the self-delusion that afflicts the victims of a con.

Dr. Alaia’s condominium apartment is a temple to skiing, with pictures of skiers on the

walls, and skis and ski boots propped up against the sliding glass doors through which we can watch skiers heading down the slopes. We shared toasted tuna fish sandwiches and tomato soup for lunch. He approaches the details of the Hogue case with the same obsessive nature that he brings to his discussion of property values in Telluride. Somehow, his obsession with Telluride real estate and Jim Hogue’s story merge together in his mind, in a way that seems at first like a symptom of mental confusion. As I stay with it, the two stories merge together in a way that reveals greater synchronicities at work.

“Did I tell you about the sofa chairs?” Alaia wondered. Hunched over his bowl of tomato

soup, he lifts another spoonful to his mouth, and then continues his story.

“Jim was our property manager from 2003 until the beginning of 2006, and so for two

and a half, almost three years, he managed this condo for us. He would take care of it for a nominal fee. We turned down a sixty-thousand-dollar asking price for a parking space for this condo when we bought it, because I figured I could do better things with sixty thousand,” he explained, laying his soup spoon down on the table. Like fantasists, or liars, obsessives are a particular kind of person. Normal conversation makes their skin itch, until finally, the hour gets late, and the other guests falter, and then they are free to talk about the one subject that is actually worth caring about, and which is big enough to encompass the universe. He fidgeted for a moment before resuming his pitch.

“And take the gondola. I mean, it’s right there. So why blow sixty thou? Anyway,

realizing that in the interval, parking spaces went up to over a hundred thousand dollars in value, I’m thinking, well, if I build this project, one of the ways that I’m gonna sell it is if I give parking spaces to people, so why not give them two?” he said. The immediate subject of Dr. Alaia’s

obsession is a $20 million dollar condo project that he is shepherding to completion in Mountain Village. Jim was Dr. Alaia’s right-hand man.

When they met, Jim was doing work for Alaia’s neighbor, Sheila Murphy, who owned

and then sold the condo next door. “He told me that he was a distance runner, and that he loved to run, that he’d been in the Olympic trials,” Dr. Alaia remembers. “Oh yes, and that he was a chemical engineer, and that he had got his chemical engineering degree from the University of Texas. Which, of course, was totally untrue.” As he talks about Hogue it is clear that Dr. Alaia’s mind is still confused about which parts of Hogue’s biography are real, and which are fiction.

“My presumption was that he came to Telluride and fell in love with the place,” he told me. “He spent a couple of years in Italy, which I also don’t think is true.”

Hogue and the Alaias soon fell into a comfortable routine, with Hogue managing their

condo and doing repairs, and helping out paying guests when they were away. When the family came to town, they took Hogue out to dinner. When I asked how Dr. Alaia’s bond with Jim had developed, the doctor smiled and sat up straight in his chair.

“Well, there you hit the nail on the head,” he answered. “You must remember that all this

time, lot thirty-one was sitting there with trees on it, doing nothing. I had spent all of my time doing the due diligence on that, three single-family detached condominium lots, ski-in/ski-out right across the road, right in the face of Oprah Winfrey’s old house.”

If it is hard sometimes to figure out what exactly Dr. Alaia is talking about, it is clear that Hogue saw him as a meal ticket and succeeded in ingratiating himself. After hiring a local

architect named Jerry Ross to do the plans for the three cabins, Alaia began using Hogue as a contractor, paying him small sums of money here and there. After a while, Hogue began putting more pressure on Alaia to provide him with a steady income. Sometimes Jim rented out the

Alaias’ condo and pocketed the proceeds. Around town, they began to see him in the company of the Eastern European girls who worked in the shops and bars. When they came back home once

they found their bed covered in dog hair. Another time, they found multiple long-distance calls on their phone.

“He got me those skis at a swap meet, though,” Dr. Alaia recalled, pointing to a pair of

nice skis leaning against the wall. “I would have had to pay six hundred bucks for those skis in L.A. without the bindings. I love them, they’re great skis. So you know, I have to give him credit for that.” Susan rolled her eyes.

There were strange holes in the stories Hogue told. One time the Alaias’ niece came to

visit. Because she was a horsewoman, they thought she would get along well with Jim, who

spoke of having grown up on a ranch. Instead, Jim avoided her. “He never talked about

horses—said what kind of horse do you like, where did you ride,” Susan Alaia remembered.

Hogue brought over a copy of the FLEX exam, the test that foreign doctors take to become

certified in the U.S. He had obtained a copy of the test, he said, for his girlfriend in Russia, who was a doctor.

“He was going through the questions, he read one to me, and asked me if I knew the

answer,” Dr. Alaia recalled. Hogue seemed upset when Dr. Alaia answered a question correctly.

“I felt a note of dejection in his voice that I knew the answer and he didn’t,” he said. Of course, Dr. Alaia added, there was no reason why Hogue should have known the answers to the

questions on the test or felt sad, since he was a doctor, and Hogue was not.

Living in Telluride is the fulfillment of Dr. Alaia’s lifelong dream of endless mornings

and afternoons on the slopes, and also perhaps of acceptance into a private club. His heroes are the local developers who had the vision to turn a busted-out mining town into a ski resort, and through the gift of his capacious enthusiasm, it is possible to fall in love with the mighty vision he was sold of sunstruck winters without end. “I was here the day the ski area opened on

December 7, 1972,” he said, pointing to a framed newspaper clipping on the wall. Listening to him talk about Telluride is like listening to an old man’s memories of a pretty girl he kissed when he was young. As he remembers the day that his dream was realized, he smiles the inward smile of a lifelong introvert whose high intelligence and skills had combined with a shy nature to isolate him from normal human companionship and to lose himself in work and hobbies.

“I was a practicing orthopedic surgeon, heavily into joint replacement in Southern

California,” he said. “One of the things that brought me to California was the fact that I was a boater and a skier and I could do both in the same week. In fact, one of the first weeks I came out here, I went skiing one day and water-skiing the other day I happened to subscribe to something called the
Kiplinger Letter.
And one day, I saw an ad about Walt Disney putting up the Mineral King resort. I still have the posters for Disney’s Mineral King task force in my garage. I can’t bear to throw them away,” he added as his eyes mist over. He paused for a moment before he

continued on.

The Mineral King boosters were led by a plastics engineer named Hap Wood who had

some connections to Disney, who helped lobby the forest service to let Disney establish a ski area. Ronald Reagan, before he became governor of California, got the pass for the road to go into Mineral King. “I skied it twice by helicopter. The skis I skied it with are still in the closet,”

Dr. Alaia said, pausing again. “I am not sure why I get emotional about that. But anyway, I was president of Mineral King Ski Club in 1972, happily, just for a couple of years, and we made those two trips into Mineral King by helicopter. It was very rewarding. Disney gave us an

animated movie with drawings from their artists of what the resort would look like, and we set up a booth at the Ski Expo in October 1972.”

At the 1972 California Ski Expo, the doctor in search of the perfect ski condo

encountered a new hook on which to hang his dream of endless idyllic winters in the person of Joe Zolene, a resort promoter who promised to bring him to Telluride. The California Ski Expo is a disorienting place, a perfect setting for lost characters to embark on weird schemes while suffering from bouts of severe dissociation. Convention-goers exited the 80 degree heat and fortress-like riot-control architecture of downtown Los Angeles and entered the great hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center, where they were greeted by a plastic mountain covered with a dry white substance that had been chosen for its snow-like qualities. Ski-world celebrities were regularly flown in by the equipment manufacturers, and famous skiers like Jean-Claude Killy attempted desultory stunts. Warren Miller movies, the samizdat chronicles of the freestyle ski culture, were projected on giant screens above the convention-center floor while salesmen for Rossignol and Salomon sold expensive skis and boots to natives of Los Angeles, many of whom had never seen actual snow.