"How on earth can he run with a toilet plunger on his head?" enquired my beloved, as we stood on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn in the ball-dropping cold, watching hordes of runners stream by, uniform in their youth and whiteness, apart from the occasional as aforementioned imaginative disguise. It is precisely to address such confusion on the part of the lay public about the myriad subtleties inherent in the magnificent sport of running that the Hash puts on a special show on this Marathon Weekend, hoping to educate said public about our craft as well as putting out a sustained display of drooling drunkenness. As you may know, the New York City Hash is currently in what has been described as a "heavy publicity mode", which has until now consisted of a new telephone answering machine and a rapidly expanding, widely unread Internet page, but which is about to take real shape in the form of a listing in the newly arrived magazine Time Out, where our activities will be listed in the sports section somewhere between Extreme Fighting and Lesbian Chess. So the Marathon Weekend could not have come at a better time to celebrate our art.
But of course, there's always politics to intrude. Believe it or not, there exists in our ranks what can only be described as a mighty schism, between those who think that ETC, that slightly undistinguished bar on a relatively inaccessible part of the Upper East Side, is the greatest public gathering place ever conceived of in the whole history of human ingenuity, and who would move in if they actually provided beds, and those who do not think that it quite reaches those levels, the bathrooms being too filthy for regular living. Just as it is impossible to tell, by looking at the average gentleman in a black coat and curly sideburns, whether he belongs to the 50% which agrees that Rabin was correctly murdered or the 50% which would have been content with mere evisceration, who belongs to which faction is usually impossible to determine. Your scribe, being a moderate sort of fellow, lies somewhere in the middle in considering the place fairly acceptable in most respects, but not actually Nirvana, but I do believe in the power of tradition, which is why I suggested to the management of the Greater Gotham Full Moon Hash that it would be a great idea for them to contribute to the weekend's activities, as long as they held their On-In at ETC, The Official Bar of the Marathon Weekend. So what happens? They do not hold their On-In at ETC, The Official Bar of the Marathon Weekend.
But we did start there. The charisma of Matt the Brit caused a pack of 25 or so to show up at 76th and 1st for a quick A to A jog, many of them having already informed their nearest and dearest that ETC was going to be the seat of the action. Much interface between humans and telephones ensured that the correct location was planted on the official machine, and we were off in a northerly direction. Of course, that was only temporary, as a check at 79th and 2nd led the pack over to the East River, and to the trail leading south. Everybody except myself and Marion chose to follow the trail; she, on the other hand, insisted that I accompany her on trying to build up her mileage, so we went a few long blocks west before heading south and east again to the On-In. Exhausted and irritated by being kept away from the drinking for so long by this female version of Laird and Dave, I was further perturbed to arrive on 59th St. to see that the much-vaunted new generation of Hash bar chosen was a place with almost as much charm as the bars inside Penn Station.
The substitute location chosen was the Carriage House on 59th St., formerly a Blarney Stone and definitely not to be confused with the rather splendid establishment in Park Slope frequently used by the Brooklyn Hash. The advantage of the old Blarney Stone is that one could always find plenty of space there, even for a large pack, the only other inhabitants being old men and cockroaches. This new emporium, by contrast, seems to have placed an advertisement in Bridge and Tunnel Secretaries' News, as it was crawling with them, and unlike with the six-legged roach, a crushing blow to the head goes unnoticed, given the numbers of Rum & Cokes they all seemed to have had by the time we got there. Gradually, of course, as is our wont, the Hashers took over, and as the daytime talk show wannabees thinned out and the rather tasty burgers arrived, we started to have a good time. A particularly good time was had by a "lady" from D.C. who introduced herself as Sperm Bank ("on account of my having brought ten virgins along one night" - go figure). She droned on, in that tedious manner beloved of out-of-towners about how we're not a real hash because we don't suck lint out of each other's navels while pouring beer up our assholes, or something like that. Finally, some wit suggested that we revive the tradition of driving moronic visitors out to the middle of the Lincoln Tunnel, and letting them find their own way back, and she quietened down. Finally, after she and Prodigy Lisa started a round of drunken singing, and the rest of us starting staring at our shoes, Basil escorted her from the building, and she was not seen again the rest of the weekend.
So there we are on the Sunday morning in Brooklyn, trying to pick Hashers out of an ever deepening crowd. Dave and Laird - no problem; Marie, no problem, but it's Croft, the Poster Boy of the Hash this year, a first-timer for whom everybody is rooting, that we're really trying to spot. Just as we are about to give up, a figure stops, dripping with sweat, his face a peculiar gray color, several layers of clothing already ripped off his back and tied around his extremities. "Dave! Fifi! he cries. It's me! Bill Gates! You know, I'm the chairman of Microsoft and I rule the world!" he screams. About to turn away to avoid being dripped on by this perspiring, half-dead hysterical lunatic, at the last minute we realize that it is the ex-Body himself. We turn him around, point him in the right direction with an encouraging "You're on the home stretch - only the last nineteen or so miles left," and wonder for the rest of the day whether we did the right thing.
Leaving Alison to go home and defrost, I dash into the subway, to find the train packed with Midwestern visitors doing the same thing to catch up with their running relatives. One can tell that they are not from these parts by their endearing habit of engaging their fellow-passengers in conversation, along the lines of "That's an interesting toy, sonny. What's it called? A Box Cutter? That's nice. What's it used for?" Fortuitous connections got me to the 23rd mile in time to get to work on what was left of the keg, and to conduct several public urinations over the next couple of hours, this being the only time of the year you will catch me (or not catch me) so engaged. There had been a Hash, led, as usual, by Dave Cary, but nobody was interested in talking about it, the other, longer trail taking precedence. With the aid of the keg, we settled in to watch the various hashers huff and puff their way toward the end. Dave and Laird, Feinsod, Bahamonde, Marie breezed through with their expected ease; Guillermo, rumors of whose parlous physical state had been circulating for some time, came by in respectable time, demanding a beer, the only local Hasher actually to do so; Amy and Karin seemed to have not a hair out of place, and the aforementioned Croft, whose long-term survival had been in some doubt seemed to have made a miraculous recovery, with not an inch of his head out of place, and finished in a time of 3:46, shocking even himself. As the unexpectedly chilly temperatures caused us to sink further into hypothermia (a condition which actually landed young Melanie briefly in the hospital, I believe, but, thank goodness, a speedy recovery ensued), we started to count down the numbers of people we were still waiting for. Just when we thought Alice was the only one left, somebody else would go by, forcing us again to re-draw our charts and calculations. Finally, we gave up, electing Jennifer and John to represent the cheers of the entire Hashing community, and hot-footed it to ETC, to the only occasion of the weekend actually to be held there. So much for the Official Bar of the Marathon Weekend. (By the way, when profuse apologies were offered to Alice for our not waiting for her, she responded that, since her own family had not waited for her, she did not for a second expect any of us to do so.)
The On-In at ETC was the closest they have ever come to a disaster, which may be the root of the renewed calls for a new Default Bar to be chosen. (When even Hardy starts making such noises, things are getting serious.) To give Ronan his due, this may be the one day of the year when he does not actually need our custom, but there were many dark faces when, for the first hour or so, no tab was started and the waitress (waitress!) did not seem to know who we were. The very indignity of it... But the evening was ultimately a success, as evinced by the stories of twenty drunken Hashers taking over a local Indian restaurant for the traditional Chunder Derby, and of Croft, in his post-achievement high, actually drooling with delight.
Monday night saw a smaller turnout for the habitual recovery run. A Chicken and Eagle trail were laid by Keith, mostly through the park; myself and a few semi-crippled marathoners, for our various reasons, elected the Chicken, and apart from some scary rustlings of either rodents or very very short homeless people in the undergrowth, had an uneventful but reasonably exhilarating jaunt, reaching the bar by 8:15. Together with a few visitors, we waited and waited and waited for the Eagles, with even Keith, not known for being a nervous Hare, starting to look a little edgy. Eventually, through the miracle of technology, it became clear what had happened: the other 80% of the pack, in a burst of mass stupidity, had "decided" that ETC was where the On-In "had to be", leaving the rest of us in the smoke of the Shandon Star examining the contents of their bags. Eventually, we were re-united, but the debacle provided more evidence of the absurdity of the ETC situation. One well-coifed female Marathoner suggested that they should be reimbursed for the taxi fare to get across town, to which Keith's sotto voce response was, even by the standards of these pages, unprintable.
Anyhow, I shall not attempt a comprehensive list of Hash marathoners, for fear of leaving out one, but sincere congratulations are due to all, especially those who we never thought would be able to do it again, to do it this year, or to do it ever. You know who you are.