The Runner (5 page)

“He wasn’t taking things to make money,” Purdy explained. “He wanted to violate

people’s trust. He kept everything in his house! He stole gas from every house in the

neighborhood where he lives, and he drives around with gas cans on top of his truck! And then he says, with a straight face, I don’t understand what’s going on.’ That’s the way he would respond. Cold sober. It is funny,” he admitted.

Jim used to appear in runner’s tights at all hours of the day, even in extreme cold

weather, and run. He never got up early in the morning, although he always said he did. Purdy could tell because the lights in his house were never on. He never used to heat his house. Once, snow fell from the roof and hit the pipe on his propane tank and broke it, Purdy said. “Propane is explosive. Propane goes downhill. We all run on propane. So I smelled gas behind my house for a couple of days. That was the only thing that I was really pissed off about. My kid’s bedroom’s right there. It could have caused a problem.”

When things got hot, Hogue’s behavior became even more erratic, Purdy remembered.

He shuttled trash bags full of stolen goods from his truck to his house, and from his house to the truck.

“Oh, no, no, no,” he said, when I ask him whether he felt living next to Hogue was

dangerous. “He was harmless. Was it sad? Was it funny? I would say yes to both. I mean, it’s a very sad story about a man.”

His daughter nodded. “He wanted to go to jail,” she said.

“He was always totally harmless, he just didn’t respect privacy,” Purdy said.

Another way of looking at Jim’s situation, he continued, is that he was a type of pervert

who specialized in property crimes. He really liked breaking down people’s boundaries. “I

should be careful,” Purdy added. “I have a big mouth. He’s not a bad person. He’s damaged

goods. I just think he’s hurting deeply inside, and when you’re hurting, you go to jail. We all have this dark side, and he’s living it.” I like William Purdy.

“He’s part of us!” he declaimed. “We’re all in this together, Republican, Democrat, blue,

green, yellow, whatever. Go to L.A. Go to Wal-Mart,” he said, jabbing his thick finger at the wall, to indicate the greater craziness of the world beyond. “The employees, they talk to

themselves while they’re stacking boxes in the aisles. Mental illness in America is fantastic.

People take a look around them, and maybe they look twice. Then they freak out and shut down for life.”

IV. Christmas Is the Biggest Lie

The road out to Jim’s house on East San Bernardo on the outskirts of Telluride is one of

the most beautiful drives in the Rockies. The beauty of these mountains is hardly a secret, but still there is no describing it correctly. The near-paralyzing effect of the sunlit mountains on the naked eye might be explained by the fact that these are some of the highest habitable mountains in the world. Driving through the high mountain passes of the Rockies is like traveling through a wormhole into geological time. The sheer faces of ice and rock, the blinding reflection of the sunlight off the white snow, accord with Romantic ideas of the sublime in a way that combines with a lack of accustomed levels of oxygen to create a high-order giddiness; can lead to flights of abstraction; and are made pleasurable in an unexpected way by the warmth that settles inside your chest. A few miles before I reached Jim’s cabin I looked up and saw the most perfect

mountain within a hundred miles, Wilsons Peak, which is over fourteen thousand feet high and is best known as the mountain on the Coors Light beer cans. It is hard to imagine a mountain

anywhere in the world that could sell more beer than Wilson’s Peak. Once you are here, in

Telluride, there is no especially convincing reason to be anywhere else. Skiing these mountains is a way to be held aloft on the wings of angels. In even more perfect and terrifying moments, staring off into the abyss that rushes up to embrace you at the edge of a sheer rock cliff, you can touch the true face of God.

Patrick Kurtz has a view of the Rockies out the window of his office. His custom

woodshop, where we meet one afternoon for a few hours, is across the street from Jim’s house.

Patrick has gray hair and the peppy, ultra-caffeinated manner of a reformed ski bum who sobered up and now works hard for a living. He is wearing a blue Carhartt workman’s jacket, a red ski hat, and a pair of dark sunglasses on a string around his neck. He moved here from Iowa, after going to the University of Denver. He is also a real carpenter, having joined the union when he was still a kid in Des Moines.

“I guess when the robbery happened is when I met him,” he said. One Friday morning, he

came into work and noticed that the rocks that he had placed on top of a tarp outside were

missing, and that the load of rare Honduran mahogany beneath the tarp appeared to have been depleted. “A good-sized kitchens worth,” Kurtz’s partner, James Guest added. “It was for a job in town, at the Oak Street Inn. The whole place was Honduran mahogany.” Hogue was spotted

taking boards from the pile by a worker, who described the runner’s slight build and the clothes he habitually wore in the winter.

Kurtz called the police with Hogue’s license plate number. The next morning, one of his

workers called from Trout Lake, a nearby nature reserve, where he saw Hogue’s truck parked

near a Forest Service shed. “He saw him walking down the road with a hoodie on, trying to look inconspicuous,” he remembered. “And so I said, ‘Call the police right now.’ And that was the last time anyone saw him up here before he got arrested down in Arizona.”

By coincidence or not, Guest went cross-country skiing later that afternoon near Trout

Lake, where he saw a pile of ski boots and other gear under an old water tower. There was

another pile of stuff further down the road. The police were already there. A week later, they invited Kurtz and Guest across the street to visit Jim’s house. In the kitchen, they saw cases of wine and champagne. On the shelves of Hogue’s bedroom upstairs were what appeared to be

family pictures, some of which turned out to be Photoshopped composites. In a secret room in the basement, concealed behind a refrigerator, Kurtz and Guest found their Honduran mahogany.

“There was just like this cavity,” Kurtz remembered. “There were these super-expensive old

photographs of the Indians in this area. Super-pricey stuff. And then, there was all of our lumber, piled up super-neat.”

I asked Patrick whether he agreed with the thesis that Jim Hogue only stole from rich

people, who deserved it.

“Nah, I never felt that way about him,” he said. “His drug of choice was stealing. It

sounds like he’s been doing it most of his life.”

We talked for a while, and then I put on my jacket and my Princeton ski hat and went

outside, where I stood for a while in the snow before I crossed the one-way street and made my way to Hogue’s house, a simple pinewood A-frame cabin next door to William Purdy. A rustic

mountain shack like this, half an hour outside of Telluride, might cost north of $400,000, which isn’t a lot for this neighborhood. I had lived in a few houses like it, none of them in the Rockies or with such gorgeous scenery. It’s the place where Nick Carraway would come to live after his quickie marriage to Jordan Baker didn’t pan out.

Hogue didn’t care much for telling stories about himself. He wanted other people to tell

stories about him. His voice was in my head because I had been listening to tapes of our prior conversations, which had recently been forwarded to me by a lawyer, who had been holding

them as evidence in a case that I am not allowed to talk about or write about here. What struck me was his modest way of speaking, his soft, quiet voice, never volunteering more information than was absolutely necessary. He had a habit of using the word “little” in a way that casually diminished whatever he was talking about. It made him feel bigger to think of other people as small. You had to listen to him speak for hours before you got the point. Their little parties. Their little Thanks-giving. Their little Christmas. Their little Nude Olympics they had in the snow.

At first, Hogue’s distinctive habit of attaching diminishing modifiers to varied objects

and facets of existence seemed like a preppy affectation meant to signify that he was a humble person who was not easily impressed. He lived in a world of things that were small. Yet he was not so humble or distracted that he didn’t spend time and energy making judgments about the lives of others. Occasionally, a darker, more aggressive presence made itself felt in his language, insisting that he was the smartest and strongest person in the room. He embraced a higher and more challenging form of existence, on a more elevated, abstract plane.

In the back of the house was a big yard that bloomed in springtime with red-stick willows

and cottonwoods, and a lovely stand of aspen trees, which grow here like weeds. On the first level of his house was a long garage-like room with a concrete floor where he set up his

woodshop, in which he made cabinets and did custom work for the apartments he renovated in

town. He kept his stolen pictures and paintings in the secret room where he hid Kurtz’s

mahogany. On top of the garage-like structure was a wood-sided A-frame made out of pine, with a satellite dish clinging precariously to the sharply pitched roof. An external staircase led up to the living quarters in the crook of the frame, protected from the elements by a cantilevered overhang supported by a thick wooden beam. Beneath the living quarters, the first floor kept going another forty feet into the back yard.

Here, in the Rockies, with sheep-like mountains rising behind his wreck of a cottage,

with the windows long shut and rusted-out siding rising halfway up the bare concrete foundation, he found a landscape that matched the magnificent abstraction he found inside his own head.

When you let go, and the world around you expands back to its normal size, you discover that the world is a lot bigger than you remembered it. You discover that you are alone.

I had a good idea of what the house looked like inside. On the hook near the door was a

black leather jacket with a Dead Kennedys patch and a variety of rude punk emblems. The CDs were more his taste: Dave Brubeck and Nat King Cole, collections of Christmas music,

recordings of the
Carmina Burana
and
The Magic Flute,
a John Coltrane box set, and a box set of gospel music called
Testify!
The Western-themed books on his shelves had titles like
The
Endurance
and
The Eternal Frontier.
On the shelves was a copy of
The Complete Idiot’s Guide
to Learning Russian.
There were yellow Post-it notes with the Russian words for “window” and

“door” and “stove.” The windows were covered with cheap printed cotton tapestries. The floors were clean but littered with athletic equipment. In the center of the living room was a

Southwestern-style leather wing chair. In the bedroom was a VCR, a television set, and movies that he had found in other people’s homes. There were fresh boxes of New Balance running

shoes, and nineteenth-century snuff boxes painted with charming woodland scenes.

Few if any of the things in the house had originally belonged to him. The polished copper

pots that hung from the ceiling were stolen, though to his credit he knew how to use them. He had a friend in Las Vegas who had been a chef. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf was filled with cookbooks. Above the sink in the kitchen, with its drop-dead-gorgeous view of snow-covered

mountains, was a copy of the
Principles of Internal Medicine
and a Cleveland baseball cap with a grinning Indian-head logo. There was also a stack of books in Russian. He kept five pairs of Dalbello ski boots in the hallway near the closet, along with a set of Dansk china that looked like a gift from someone else’s wedding. His goal went beyond simple theft. He was aiming to

assemble a new self out of the bits and pieces of other people’s lives.

“This is a genuine antique engraving guaranteed to be more than 100 years old Framed

27 Cecil Court London,” read the fine print on a colorful portrait of a blue-hooded parakeet. The claim that it was a “genuine engraving” had probably struck him as funny. Hanging from the

ceiling was a collection of fancy Panama hats that he used to hide his middle-aged baldness, which made it difficult for him to continue to claim that he was twenty-six or twenty-nine. There were scattered pictures of Hogue with his Russian girlfriend, the doctor. There was a clumsily Photoshopped picture of Hogue in a red cashmere sweater with his arm around a different girl whom I could not identify.

Inside Jim’s refrigerator was a container of yogurt, a bar of low-fat Philadelphia cream

cheese, and a dozen bottles of Dom Pérignon.

In a storage locker in nearby Fort Garland were building materials that looked like they

were intended for a house—window frames, a skylight, lighting fixtures, plastic pipes. There were also rugs, boxes of skin-firming cream, expensive skis, a Bob Carver subwoofer, an awful blue-tinted lithograph of winter morning light over high mountains that may have been the

Rockies, and a painting of a stag in the mountains, awkwardly balanced on its hind legs, as though the artist had more experience painting people or dogs. Even in his crazy state, Jim had enough taste to put this stuff in storage. There was a carousel horse with thinning handfuls of genuine horsehair plastered to its scalp. There was a mounted mountain lion head, a pair of moose antlers, the head of a deer, a snowboard, a tennis racquet, a fax machine, and several power drills. There were two Burton Cruzer 145 snowboards. There were more kinds of crap

than you could shake a stick at.

The longer I live, the more of my friends from college settle into patterns of behavior that make no sense except as the outcome of internal pressures and forces that lock them into ways of thinking and behaving that would have caused them to look on in horrified disbelief when they were eighteen or twenty-nine. They get married. They have kids. They gain thirty pounds, and dress in expensive, brightly colored clothing. I am talking about myself here, but I could say worse things about almost any one of my close friends. In my heart, I think of what happened to Jim as what could easily have happened to any smart, sensitive person who was more than a little unbalanced, which is to say that given the right circumstances any one of us might wake up one morning in a dark forest, severed from any essential and sustaining feeling of connection to the universe, with no way to escape this dark and isolated predicament except through the culturally determined pathway of reimagining that allows each and every one of us to start the journey over again.