He’s running down a dream

Bobby TONAS, a small, soft-spoken man, discovered freedom in prison. It was the freedom of memory, scenes of another life that flashed through his head as he ran around the prison yard, mental images that catapulted him over the walls of confinement onto a beach or into the hills of his past. Running was his escape. It gave him wings.

He talked about it in matter-of-fact terms as we sat in a Covina halfway house. At 5 feet, 2 inches, he is a compact and muscular man, a 45-year-old parolee from the state’s Avenal Prison, where he served 6 1/2 years for possession of narcotics. He was lucky. The charge was plea-bargained down from the sale of narcotics, which could have gotten him 31 years to life.

I’m writing this on Friday, two days before today’s L.A. Marathon, in which Tonas plans to run. He’s been training steadily with the L.A. Roadrunners, a marathon training and support group, but hasn’t gone the full distance yet. In prison, a mile was four laps around the yard. Tonas ran it in state-issued shoes that were a half-size too small, slowly increasing his personal best from a mile to two to three and then to 17.

Sister Mary Sean Hodges of L.A. Catholic Charities encouraged him to run in the first place. A marathon runner herself, she came to Avenal in the San Joaquin Valley as part of a mentorship program to help convicts ease their way from prison life back into the outside world. She noticed that Tonas had an interest in sports. He kept physically fit playing handball and softball. She mentioned the L.A. Marathon.

“At first,” he says, sitting on a couch in the barren living room of the halfway house, “I saw it as a way of starting a new life, of meeting new people, different kinds of people.” His dark hair and mustache wear specks of gray, like badges of a new maturity. “Then after I started running, I began imagining myself somewhere else, running along the beach or in the hills. There was a sense of freedom, of accomplishment.”

Tonas was working in a warehouse and living on the city’s Eastside when he began using cocaine. He had recently separated from his wife, a childhood sweetheart, after a nine-year marriage. “The coke was offered at a party,” he says, “and it was like offering beer to a friend. I never knew the implications.”

The “implications” are elements of an old, sad story that tells of lives lost to a powdery white dust that can quickly turn a recreational user into an addict. Tonas had a $200-a-day habit before he decided, oddly enough, not that the stuff was ruining his life but that it was costing too much money. So he began dealing. Making money instead of spending it. But that life too was short-lived. Someone talked and the narcs moved in. He became prisoner No. D58645.

Tonas was released on three years’ parole a few weeks ago and has been training ever since for the marathon. The race is a test of endurance rooted in antiquity. Thousands, perhaps even millions, have tested themselves against a 26.2-mile stretch that was first run on the plain of Marathon in Greece, 490 years before the birth of the Christian era. Legend has it that a courier named Phidippides ran the distance to tell of a victory over invading Persians. He said, “Rejoice, we conquer,” and dropped dead.

For Tonas, it was his own conquest he wanted to celebrate, and it revolved not around death, but around a new life. He saw his daughter, Christina Marie, now 19, for the first time in six years in an emotional meeting on the beach at Santa Monica, where he was training. She represented both the old life and the new one. “She waited for her daddy to come home,” he says. “And it was a different kind of daddy.” Despite his years as a drug user and later as a dealer, he had tried to keep it away from her and from his son, Robert Jr. “I lived two lives,” Tonas says, not quite believing it himself. “They just knew me as a loving father, not as the other man I was.”

Tonas planned to dedicate his race in the marathon to Christina Marie and to God. He hopes one day to enter the ministry and help young people avoid the kind of life that got him into prison. Some actually do follow their vow to warn others about the life that awaits the drug addict. Others, concerned with their own survival, forget pledges to the Almighty and to themselves. Some return to drugs. Some don’t.

By writing this two days before the marathon, I’m taking a chance on Bobby Tonas. I’m betting that he will run, that he’ll finish and that he’ll hold true to his promise to live a new life. I’m hoping that as he runs through the free air of the outside world, his memory will be that of the prison, not hills and beaches, to remind him of what got him into that gray, limited world of confinement in the first place. Only then will he know that he is truly free.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at [email protected].