The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Author:Leslie Jamison [Jamison, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Essays, Literary, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9781555970888
Google: ZVUlnwEACAAJ
Amazon: B00FCQW7NK
Barnesnoble: B00FCQW7NK
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

FOG COUNT

It’s early morning and I’m hunting for quarters. Downtown Fayetteville is quiet and full of stately stone buildings: mining money, probably. We’re in the heart of coal country. The corner diner isn’t open yet. The “Only Creole Restaurant in West Virginia” isn’t open yet. City Hall isn’t open yet. Its window holds a flier raising money to build a treehouse for a girl named Izzy.

I’m looking for quarters because I’m headed to prison. I’ve been told they will be useful there. I’m going to see a man named Charlie Engle, with whom I’ve been corresponding for the past nine months. He has promised that if I bring quarters we can binge on junk food from the vending machines while we talk. Visiting hours are 8 to 3. It makes me nervous to think about talking from 8 to 3. I’m afraid I’ll forget all my questions or that my questions are wrong anyway. I’m plotting my meals in advance: vending machine breakfast, vending machine lunch. I’m already thinking about what I’ll do—what I’ll eat, who I’ll call, where I’ll drive—once I’m out.

Charlie and I met two years ago at an ultramarathon in Tennessee, several months before Charlie was convicted of mortgage fraud and sentenced to twenty-one months at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Beckley, in Beaver, West Virginia.

Charlie is a cat of many lives: once-upon-a-time crack addict, father of two, professional repairer of hail damage, TV producer, motivational speaker, documentary film star, and—for the past twenty years—one of the strongest ultradistance runners in the world. Charlie started running in eighth grade: I was awkward and gangly and self-conscious pretty much all the time, except when I was running, he wrote to me once. Running made me feel free and smooth and happy.

Charlie’s accomplishments are well known in the ultrarunning community: he’s run across Death Valley; he’s run across the Gobi; he’s run across America. He has trekked hundreds of miles through the jungles of Borneo and even more through the Amazon. He’s climbed Mount McKinley. In 2006 and 2007, he ran forty-six hundred miles across the Sahara. The journey was documented in a film and it was this film, incidentally, that set his legal nightmare in motion.

The story of Charlie’s arrest and conviction is long and harrowing, but here are the basics: an IRS agent named Robert Nordlander started wondering about Charlie’s finances after watching the Sahara film. He wanted to know: how does a guy like that support all his adventures? I’ve tried to understand Nordlander’s curiosity as vocational instinct. Perhaps he wonders how strangers pay their taxes the same way I wonder how strangers get along with their mothers, or what secrets they keep from their spouses.

Nordlander opened an investigation, and he didn’t find anything wrong with Charlie’s taxes. But instead of closing the case, he pushed further. He authorized garbage dives. He authorized tactics that wouldn’t have been possible before the Patriot Act. He started looking into Charlie’s properties. He sent a female undercover agent—rigged with wires—to ask Charlie out to lunch.

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