The Runner (17 page)

everything that I had been before, willingly or unwillingly, so be it. I was happy to shed my skin and assume a new identity backed by the precious piece of paper that certified me as a plausible member of the elite. Hogue’s story had an added twist. He was a ghost who became a living,

breathing vessel for myths and dreams that he shared with millions of other people. And when it was over, he went back to being a ghost.

VIII. The Recognition

On February 16, 1991, a senior at Yale named Renee Pacheco attended the

Harvard-Yale-Princeton track meet in New Haven to watch a friend run, and she noticed that one of the members of the Princeton team looked familiar. Their eyes met, and she recognized Jay Mitchell Huntsman, a mysterious stranger who had arrived at Palo Alto High School in

September 1985.

This was a story that had happened before. Jay Huntsman, or Riivk, as he called himself,

was a talented runner who had arrived in Palo Alto with an incredible story. He was born in San Diego in 1969, and had moved at the age of eight to Ananda Ashram, a Nevada commune where

he lived with his parents, Craig and Rosemary Huntsman, and his sister, Solange. He had

educated himself and, during the breaks in his work, he ran between fifty and sixty miles a week.

After his parents died in a car accident in Bolivia, he had decided to attend Palo Alto High School to complete his education before applying to Stanford University. He found a room in town. He made friends at school. Parents liked him.

A few weeks after Huntsman appeared in Palo Alto, he entered the Stanford Invitational

meet. Blowing past the rest of the field, he won the cross-country race, but he never reported to the officials’ table. He had trained in the wide-open spaces of Nevada, he told a reporter for the
Mercury News
. “I’m just a normal kid,” he added. “I just want to fit in.”

Some of the reporters who watched the race found it troubling that the “mystery runner,”

as the local papers soon dubbed him, had failed to claim his victory. Acting on a hunch, Jason Cole, a reporter with a Palo Alto newspaper, the
Peninsula Times Tribune,
called the municipal office in charge of public records for the city of San Diego and asked if there was a birth certificate on file for a Jay Mitchell Huntsman. There was. Born to Craig and Rosemary

Huntsman of 3145 Rosecranz Place, in San Diego, on January 19, 1969, Jay Mitchell Huntsman

had died two days later of pneumonia. Cole told the school authorities about his discovery and reported it in the
Times Tribune
. The student soon acknowledged that his real name was James Hogue, and left town after passing a bad check.

After seeing Hogue at the Princeton-Yale track meet, Pacheco called Paul Jones, the

coach of the track team at Palo Alto High, who put her in touch with Jason Cole. “I saw him running,” Pacheco told Cole. “I walked right up to him—I’m surprised he didn’t recognize me. I just wanted to scream.”

Pacheco didn’t scream. But she was sure that Alexi Santana and James Hogue were the

same person. Her father was a professor at Stanford, and she had not enjoyed the experience of being fooled by Hogue, who had eased his way into the company of the upper-class professionals of Palo Alto by flattering their self-image as caring, open-minded people who worked hard and eminently deserved the good life they enjoyed.

Cole knew that the administrators and students of Princeton University were in for a

similar shock. After finding out that Hogue had been arrested in Utah, the reporter contacted the police to inform them of Hogue’s whereabouts. Then he informed Princeton that Alexi Santana was actually James Hogue, an ex-convict from Utah who had jumped his parole and had engaged in similar deceptions before. “We know you don’t know this about your undergraduate, but he’s a phony,” Cole told Princeton. “You guys might want to be thinking about what you want to say publicly, because I can pretty much predict that this is going to be a big story.”

Justin Harmon, director of communications at Princeton, was grateful for the warning. He

got off the phone, and he phoned one of the deans of the college, who called a meeting with Dean of Admissions Fred Hargadon and several of his colleagues in order to decide on how the university should respond. Santana’s file was produced. His application, with his essay about working on a ranch in Nevada and learning to read Plato under the stars, was reviewed again.

Taking six or seven courses a semester, Santana had received a grade of A in nearly every class he took for almost two years. Attention was also paid to the university’s role as a custodian of public funds. “It became clear to us,” Harmon remembered, “particularly to the deans, that the only course of action, from the standpoint of the institution, since this young man had applied to Princeton under utterly false pretenses, was to declare the admission null and void.”

Alexi Santana was a phantom, summoned forth by an imaginative drifter from Utah with

a flair for telling people at places like Princeton the kinds of stories they wanted to hear. Now that the truth was known, the face of the phantom student would dissolve into that of his creator, the ex-con. Since Hogue had been admitted to Princeton under false pretenses, the records of his time at the university were also false. By the time the meeting was over, the Princeton deans had agreed on a course of action: Alexi Santana, member of the Class of 1993, was officially

expunged from the university’s records. It was like he had never really existed at all.

IX. The Fall

The problem of James Hogue’s physical presence on the Princeton campus took less than

twenty-four hours to solve. On Tuesday, February 26, two men in suits arrived at the door of the laboratory classroom where John Suppe was teaching Geology 316, a class that dealt with

large-scale structural phenomena such as faulting and folding that are associated with violent ruptures in the surface of the earth.

Brian Sax was one of eight students in the classroom that afternoon. It was an interesting

class, he remembered. It interested him enough that, almost ten years later, he could still remember the subject in exacting detail. “We were given all the stresses and strains put on a well due to all the faults in a general area,” he said. “When you’ve got a well, usually it’s perfectly cylindrical. But then, after time, it deforms. Sometimes,” he continued, after a longer, more technical explanation of the pressures that might affect the well, “it will get more oval-shaped, and so you know that there are pressures coming in from different directions and different layers of rock.”

The men at the door were not interested in shifting plates or geological stresses. They

took the professor aside and told him that they needed to speak with one of his students. Santana joined the two men outside, and they asked him his name. His answer, “James Hogue,” was not audible to the rest of the students in the room. “All of a sudden they started reading him his rights, and they put him in cuffs right there,” Sax remembered. “And we said, ‘Holy shit! What’s going on?’”

As news of the arrest spread around campus, about fifteen to twenty members of the track

team gathered in Jon Luff’s room, which was in one of the older dorms on campus, with wood

floors and an open fireplace—the perfect admissions brochure illustration of what a dorm room looks like at Princeton. When Sax entered the room, Luff was on the phone with Jason Cole in California. The atmosphere reminded Sax of the silence that follows an upset in sports. The phone kept ringing. With each phone call new bits and pieces of information about their

teammate filtered in. He had been arrested for stealing bicycles in Utah. He had served time in prison. He had been to college before.

“There was an air of total disbelief,” Sax remembered. “There were no words for what

had happened, because here was somebody who was a good friend of a lot of people in the room and all of a sudden he’s somebody totally different. And we know very, very little about this person, and he could possibly be dangerous. People were saying, ‘What did he do? Did he

commit murder? Did he commit multiple felonies?’”

Luff, who had spent the previous summer living with Santana in Boulder, Colorado, and

knew him better than anyone else on the team, appeared to be in shock. The shy young man he had shown around Princeton was not twenty years old. He was thirty-two. Now that he knew that Alexi Santana was an impostor named James Hogue, the gaps in his friend’s stories, and some of his odd behavior, began to make sense. The racing bike that he supposedly built from scratch had been stolen from Dave Tesch’s shop. The African runners he had run against, like Joseph Nzau, who were famous when Santana would have been fourteen years old, were real people, figures

from Hogue’s past.

Santana’s creator possessed an undeniable genius, Luff believed. At the same time, he

felt betrayed by the fact that his friend had turned out to be someone else. The troubling

encounter with a person who was actually someone else haunted Luff for many years thereafter.

As he racked his brain in search of clues to the mystery of who James Hogue was, and what he was actually like, he returned again and again to the summer between his freshman and

sophomore year. He couldn’t remember exactly how Santana came to live in the house that he

shared with his older brother in Boulder that summer. Santana had crashed on the couch one

night, and somehow never left. As the summer wore on, Luff had become progressively less

enchanted with his new roommate. Santana stayed up late at night, and rummaged through

closets and cupboards. Luff and his roommates began to notice that food and personal items, like CDs, jackets, and money, were missing. While Santana claimed to have a job at a local ski shop refurbishing skis, he slept all day and never left the house. When the roommates gathered for dinner, he would talk about his job as if he had worked a full day. One of the roommates

determined that the ski shop at which Santana claimed to work never existed. But perhaps he was mistaken. Santana also told stories about outracing famous runners that Luff knew personally Luff knew at the time that the stories were lies. Santana also claimed to have entered local races and run remarkably fast times. Luff found these stories particularly baffling because he was working that summer in the sports department of a local newspaper, and had easy access to the official results of the races that Santana claimed to have run, and in which his friend’s name never appeared.

Still, Santana’s brand of weirdness was hardly that unusual among the world-class

athletes who congregated in Boulder during the summers, running lonely marathons in the

mountains late at night in search of a jolt of transcendence and then sleeping through their day jobs. The two runners from Princeton continued their friendship for most of the summer. A

frequent subject of conversation was their classmate Peter Hessler, who often spoke of his hope of winning a Rhodes scholarship. Santana was fascinated by Hessler’s ambition, and he decided that he would give the Rhodes scholarship a shot, too. He would keep up his grades and continue to run track. His unique life story and his membership in the Ivy Club would impress the Rhodes selection committee. Luff agreed that Santana’s goal was plausible.

Since Santana was an accomplished outdoorsman, Luff was eager to take him camping in

the San Juan Mountains in Colorado with his friends from high school, who were also in Boulder that summer. “It was one of those classic American camping trips, where you go out in the

woods or the mountains with your two best friends to the same place you’ve been five times

since you were kid,” Luff recalled. His friends liked to drink, and were annoyed when Santana refused the beer that they had lugged up the side of a mountain. When the three childhood

friends climbed a mountain peak together one day and slept in the next morning, Santana decided to go running. He returned to the campsite two hours later and told Luff that he had run to the top of the neighboring mountain and back on his own—a feat that would have taken an experienced climber the better part of a day. Luff’s friends were not impressed. “They were just like, This guy is so full of shit,’ “ Luff ruefully remembered. “ ‘I can’t believe that you’re even friends with this guy, Jon.’”

Plenty of Princeton students have had the experience of having friends from back home

take an instant dislike to their college friends, who seem snobbish or pretentious or otherwise annoying, and who threaten the familiar rhythms of childhood friendship. But his friends’

visceral dislike of Santana took Luff by surprise. The climax of the trip came when the three friends and Luff’s new friend from college neared the spectacular peak of Wetterhorn, one of the jewels of the San Juan Mountains. Before they reached the top of the mountain, the trail ended, leaving fifty feet of broken rock between the climbers and the peak. It was a difficult passage, but nothing that would make an experienced climber sweat. “If you looked in the guidebook it said, ‘Ropes aren’t required, but suggested,’ “ Luff recalled. “And we were like, ‘No, forget that.

We’ll just scramble to the top.’”

When he looked over at Santana, Luff saw that his friend appeared to be paralyzed with

fear. “He was absolutely petrified, so shaky that we didn’t think we could get him to the peak,”

Luff remembered. “And all three of us were just sort of standing around for a while, wondering, This guy is supposed to be a rugged outdoorsman who spent his whole life in the mountains and running barefoot through desert canyons and now he can’t make it up this semi-exposed little staircase of rock.’” As the four climbers began their descent, a sudden bolt of lighting hit near the top of the mountain. While lightning storms are common in the Rockies during the summer, Santana again seemed terrified, and refused to move from where he was standing. “For a while, I think we thought he was joking,” Luff said. “But he was truly petrified. And we were like, This guy supposedly lived his life outdoors, herding cattle on five-thousand-foot-high plateaus in Utah, and now he’s afraid of a lightning storm.’ You get lightning storms every afternoon in Utah and Colorado. But he was clearly not comfortable, and it just seemed odd.”