Chapter 3: St. Kitts and Nevis

Lydia

It felt like the whole world came crashing down upon me. My relationship to my own son was so messed up it beggared belief. We were both head over heels in love with each other, but at the same time we knew it couldn’t be. And now I had to deal with the death of my grandmother on top of it. The only thing I could console myself with was that she had died peacefully in her sleep. Bea promised to keep an eye on and take care of grandpa. Losing his wife after sixty-five years of marriage was bound to come down hard on the poor man. The question of us coming back to Germany wasn’t even worth asking. We had started over from nothing twice in our lives, and there wouldn’t be a third time. We had enough problems to deal with as it was.

With twelve more days until the Vienna marathon, we decided to stay a few days at Bea’s place, our old second home in Lübeck. She was four years younger than I, but I hoped she would be able to help me sort out my messed up life and perhaps even provide an idea what to do.

Mark

I was sleeping in the guestroom, while mom and Aunt Bea shared her room. Bea’s girlfriend Rita had her own apartment in Hamburg and even though we had told her that we would not want to intrude, she had just smiled and said that she had a feeling we would need the time alone among family and decided to stay in her Hamburg home for a few days. I wondered if she knew more than she let on.

Until two days before the flight to Vienna, we had mainly relaxed and dealt with a lot of grief. Especially mom needed some days to get over the death of Granny Aurelia, who had practically been her mother, being that she had been disowned by her biological mother. During the second-to-last night at Bea’s place my world was about to be turned upside down, yet again.

Woken up by a full bladder in the middle of the night I walked to the bathroom. On the way back I heard a muffled conversation from the living room. Mom was crying. Normally I was not in the business of eavesdropping on mom, but somehow I got the impression that I would be a topic, and I was proven right in an instant.

“Bea, I don’t know what to do,” mom said amid sobs. “It’s just so wrong.”

“What makes you think he still loves you more than just as a mother? Every boy has a crush on his mom at some point, but those things go away.”

“You know Mark always loved drawing. I found dozens of drawings of me in his room. Most of them naked. Damn, he made me look like a goddess in his pictures. And I found love letters. He obviously never sent them, but they all started ‘My beloved mom’ and some aren’t even a month old.”

Oh my dear god, they were talking about me, and mom had found my pictures and the love letters. I could feel my face burn up in embarrassment and my heart started pounding so hard against my chest, it hurt. I was so flabbergasted, I even forgot to be angry with mom for snooping around in my room, repeatedly by the sound of it.

I heard a rustling sound and I quickly tip-toed back into the guestroom. I kept the door open a bit and I saw Aunt Bea go into the kitchen and come back with a bottle of wine. Once she had disappeared in to the living room again I carefully ventured out. She had left the door open a bit, most likely to hear if I was about, which was ironic, wouldn’t you say?

“What about you Lydia,” I heard Aunt Bea ask. “You said he made you look like a goddess. That doesn’t sound as if you’re really horrified by those pictures or the love letters for that matter.”

“Of course not. On one had I want that he finds a girl his age and takes the problem off my hands. On the other hand I’m terrified that he does. I love him more than I can say, but I’m his mother, Bea. I’m not supposed to feel like that!”

“Let’s leave society out of it for a moment,” mom’s younger sister insisted. “His love is obviously not unrequited.”

Mom didn’t answer, but I could guess what head gesture she was making. And my heart was beating so hard my vision swam.

“Lydia, he loves you and you love him, and if you need to know, it is obvious to anyone who bothers to look. Do you really want to let other people’s opinion keep you from exploring that love?”

“It’s wrong sis, I’m his mother,” mom insisted, still in tears.

“I love another woman,” Bea said.

“I know,” mom answered, and I could hear the confusion in her voice. Everybody in the family knew that Aunt Bea had a girlfriend and we had met Rita in person a few days ago.

“Yeah, but twenty years ago it was ‘wrong’,” my Aunt said, sarcastically emphasizing the last word. “And there are parts of the world where people still insist that it is wrong when two women or two men love each other. Doesn’t stop me. What will break your heart more – someone censuring you for who you love, or losing the chance to really love that someone? And really, who could love you more than your own son? For all it’s worth you’ve always been more like best friends rather than mother and son anyway. Your lives haven’t exactly gone in a straight line or along well-trodden paths.”

As quiet as I could, I tip-toed back to the guest-room, my mind overwhelmed with what I had heard. My mom loved me the same way I did. Oh. My. God.”

The next two days went by in a bit of a haze. For all the discoveries I had made, mom was supposed to run a marathon, and she was supposed to run it fast, so I didn’t make any attempt at letting show that I was aware of her chat with Aunt Bea. I still accepted the distance mom kept between us, even though it hurt a bit that she even booked two different rooms in the hotel. As far as I was concerned, two separate beds would have done the trick.

Race day came and I was standing in the start-finish area, about eight-hundred meters from the finishing line, just across from the large view screen. And mom was on fire.

Normally the African runners would try to get rid of everyone on the first ten or fifteen kilometers with a murderous pace, but no matter how hard the two Kenyans and the Ethiopian woman tried, they couldn’t get rid of mom. Her face was contorted in pain, but she held on. When the Africans saw they couldn’t shake her, they took the foot off the accelerator, lest they blew a gasket themselves.

Somewhere around kilometer thirty the Africans started to gesticulate that mom should join the pace making as well, and I saw her grin. It wasn’t a friendly grin, it was the mean grin of someone who was about to kick you in the face, hard.

She took the lead and floored it. The Ethiopian blew up within two kilometers and then mom went at it hammer and tongs with the two Kenyan favorites. By the time she had dropped the first one at thirty-three and a half and the second Kenyan at kilometer thirty-seven I was out of my mind screaming and cheering. I was mostly surrounded by Americans and I had truly infected them. The flags were flying when mom came round the corner onto the home-stretch.

She saw me and despite her obvious exhaustion she still managed to indicate that I should climb over the barrier. Some really huge guy hoisted me over the cordon and shoved an American flag in my hand. Mom grabbed my other hand and I could barely keep up with her as we ran along the last eight hundred meters hand-in-hand. After forty-two kilometers she still ran fast enough that I nearly had to sprint. When I let go of her to let her run through the ribbon across the finish line by herself, I was completely spent, but I had never been this happy in a very long while.

Of course the fuddy-duddies of the IAAF made a stink about my presence on the track, but in the end mom was only given a verbal warning and the result stood, mainly because the Kenyans in second and third place refused to lodge a protest. The second-placed woman, who had watched us from the distance, later came to us and said it was the sweetest thing she had ever seen.

Lydia

Back in the States, I was the flavor of the month, or actually several months. The Playboy stunt, the Vienna race and my background as a former East German got chewed through by the media and I was passed on from one talk show to the next like a baton in a relay race. Viewership numbers for marathon and half-marathon races went through the roof and USATF begged me to try out for the 10.000 meters track run as well. I agreed, but life had cheated me out of two Olympics already, so I wasn’t getting my hopes up too much that I would actually be in Barcelona in 1992.

In addition to the talk shows, I appeared at several charity events, ran another three marathons and had filming days with Volkswagen USA and Gatorade for TV commercials. I think in those months poor Mark saw me more often on TV than he saw me at home. I was dead tired, but it was a welcome respite from having to deal with the illicit feelings I had for my own son. The opportunities were few and far in between, but whenever I returned to our home for a day or two, I both hoped and dreaded that he would introduce me to a girlfriend of his.

But he didn’t. No, instead he spent every waking minute nursing his completely exhausted mother back to health. That was especially bad after the London marathon in September 1990. Having exhausted my energy, I tanked spectacularly, running out of steam after twenty-five kilometers and for the first time since 1984 I had to abandon a race. I was not happy. But that, frankly, was the least of my problems. My body told me loud and clear that enough was enough.

When I came home, I was barely able to stay upright and things weren’t helped by the fact that Mark didn’t speak a single word. He just brought me to my bedroom and left me to get ready for bed. I merely stripped down to panties and bra and fell over into my bed, my whole body tense and tied up in knots.

Ten minutes later he was back and I could see nothing but utter sadness in his eyes. Had I been anything but completely exhausted, I would probably have felt guilty, knowing that he most likely felt abandoned, but I didn’t even have the energy for that. He put the blanket to the side and shoved a large towel under my legs. Did I mention that I had run out of steam? I didn’t even have the strength or will to ask him what he was doing, but I was about to find out anyway. He bent my legs, rubbed massage oil into his palms and started massaging my wrecked leg muscles.

First I was gripped by a moment of panic that Mark would take things in his own hands and would try to touch me in places he wasn’t supposed to touch, but as soon as he started kneading my tortured muscles, I noticed he was giving me quite the professional massage. Shortly before exhaustion took me to the night I remembered that Jonjo’s older brother was a physiotherapist, who had sometimes unwound my muscles in my early training days. It looked like my son had used the time of my absence to broaden his horizon beyond painting. Then it went dark.

The next day would just leave me ashamed of myself.

I woke up in the late morning. Vaguely remembering the evening before I looked under the blanked and saw my underwear was still in place. I picked up the faint whiff of massage oil and I noticed my muscles did not hurt even half as much as I had expected after such a bad race. Mark brought me breakfast to bed. Apparently he collected it later, but I was already asleep again. The same happened with lunch and supper. In the evening he massaged my legs again, finally untying the last knots in my muscles, cleaned up and left me to sleep through a second night. He hadn’t spoken a single word to me all weekend.

When I finally got out of bed, after over thirty hours, the next morning, I was feeling more refreshed than I had any right to feel after the hard slog of recent weeks. Mark was nowhere to be found, having left for school already, but everything was prepared. I found my bathrobe near the shower, breakfast was prepared. He had basically pampered me the whole time I was home, and I felt guilty about it. All he had seen of his mom was an utter wreck he had to nurse back on her feet. I felt relieved when my manager John called with the next appointment for a sponsor event in Vegas. It allowed me to escape. I wouldn’t have to look into the sad, disappointed eyes of my son.

Mark

Mom made a truckload of money but I barely got to see her anymore. I spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve with Jonjo and his parents as mom was in South Africa for altitude training. She spent her thirty-first birthday winning a half-marathon in Italy and my seventeenth birthday in March saw me sit at home getting myself wasted out of my skull, drinking beer with Jonjo while watching soccer. He and his family did the best they could to keep me upbeat, and the Bachlmayer’s made sure I had no shortage of good German food. But I was reaching critical mass. I felt abandoned. I went to the gym, learned cooking – well it was either that or starving – but the days in an empty house wouldn’t end.

Mom was of course home now and then, but never more than forty-eight hours at most before her damn manager would call again and shoo her away for her next gig. And when she was home she was often so exhausted she never got out of bed some days. I would bring her three meals to her bed and in between she slept like dead.

I did everything in the house. When something needed fixing I called a repairman or fixed it myself. If you think someone is useless with tools, just because he’s academically gifted or an artist – think again – my fingers are nimble enough to produce a very realistic drawing. They can operate a screwdriver just as well. I had become the man in the household, but nobody was ever there to notice.

It was a sunny day in May 1991, over two months after my lonely seventeenth birthday, normally just the right weather to sit at the pool or swim in it, but instead of spending another boring day alone, I was storming into the lobby of XIS Management Consulting in downtown Pasadena and rudely told the bewildered lady at the reception desk what I would do to her pets if I wasn’t granted an audience with Mr. John Handworth, preferably yesterday. Obviously she loved her poodle or whatever shat on her carpet at home, as less than three minutes later I had an audience with the man.

“Mark, it’s good to see you,” he greeted me with a phony smile. That was another pet peeve of mine. The guy called me by my first name although I had never offered him the privilege. That was a rude thing to do, at least in Germany. He had only seen me three or four times, but spoke to me as if I was his bestest buddy. I didn’t like that much

He had been to our house a few times to talk to mom over contracts, while I was always the designated waiter bringing them snacks and wine. And those evenings had always ended the same way. They would drink a bottle of wine or two, chatting, and then he left, leaving me behind to deal with my exhausted, drunk mother.

What do you expect? Mom rarely drank any alcohol to begin with and she was a 55kg lightweight in peak competition form. But those kilos could get damn heavy if you had to wrestle them up the stairs when she was wasted out of her skull. At the time I couldn’t shake the feeling that the scumbag hoped she would take him to bed one day and just left when it didn’t work out, and after December ‘90 he didn’t show up anymore. I should only learn later what the drinking was about. At the moment though, I certainly wasn’t in the mood for niceties or overly familiar address.