The Front Runner

by Patricia Nell Warren

  I was more lenient with my athletes now.

  I still expected as much hard work and responsibil­ity from them as before. But I stopped hassling them about their hair. It occurred to me that fights about hair were a big waste of time and energy. The kids ran with their legs, not their hair.

  I stopped hassling them about chastity. I had learned the hard way that when an athlete bottles-up sexual energy, it can create destructive tensions. Sex is na­ture's sleeping pill. If I had a kid who got jumpy the night before a meet, I'd prescribe a hot bath, something warm to drink and a tender half hour with his girlfriend, and he'd sleep like a baby.

  I even relaxed a little on the issue of drinking. How can you tell a kid not to have a beer when he sees so many world-class athletes having a beer? "Frank Short­er had a beer the night before he won the marathon at Munich," they'd tell me. How can you argue? And beer replaces the salts after a long hard run, too.

  There were a number of things that I stayed uptight about, because I knew they were harmful no matter how liberal we got. Like smoking, drugs, hard spirits, etc. But all in all, I was not the same man as before. Coach Brown was rapidly being humanized.

  The campus stood in the middle of 900 acres of wooded hills and lakes, all Joe's property. It was mag­nificent for running. I laid out twenty-five miles of trails through them, and ran on them as much as my teams did, recovering a little of that summer joy of the Poconos.

  As those four happy years passed at Prescott, even my powerful sexual cravings slacked off. "Getting old," I thought, "and maybe it's just as well." I was busy, committed to something outside myself, and had less time for futile fantasies. No one on campus but the Prescotts knew I was gay. I had no sexual relationships with the campus gays, and stuck to my hands-off rule regarding my team. When the spirit moved me, I drove the sixty miles into New York City and picked some­body up.

  A few parents muttered, but by and large no fuss was made at my being at Prescott. No one outside the hard core of the gay community knew about me, and no one knew about my hustling save my ex-clients, who weren't likely to talk about it. As far as the world was concerned, I had just crawled out of sight for a couple of years.

  When Billy Sive came to Prescott, I was just past thirty-nine years old, and beginning to think that my secret fantasy would die a quiet and decent death. But I found I was wrong.

  In those very first winter days, he stirred up all the old feelings, to a pitch of intensity that I'd never felt before. He was not merely physically attractive, but an appealing human being as well. I was that lonely ma­ture man, but I was also like an adolescent seething with longing. For the first time in my life, I was deeply in love.

  And I knew I didn't dare lay a hand on him.

  3

  The three celebrated runners' appearance on our track-mad campus caused quite a stir.

  The campus paper, a mimeographed thing called The Daily Mantra, gave them smudged headlines. I was amused to overhear a radical student, whose ideology should have excluded this kind of feeling, say, "Now we're gonna rip Manhattan and Villanova."

  My track team was simply agog. Their finest mo­ment, so far, had been running in the NCAA eastern cross-country championship in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. They had gotten spattered with mud from the spikes of Manhattan, Penn and Villanova runners, and had placed seventh in the team scoring.

  So having super-burners like Vince Matti fall from heaven onto their team produced mixed feelings among the boys. At first they were elated. "Now we're gonna wipe out the whole country." Then they were intimi­dated. "The rest of us will be ignored."

  The next morning I found my male freshmen stand­ing in a little huddle by the track, wearing their sweats and watching the Oregon three work out. The snow was melting with a rush, and the cinder track lay bare and steaming fresh. The sun was hot and the tempera­ture about fifty.

  As the Oregon three tore past, their spikes gnashing in the wet cinders, my boys' mouths made small O's in their faces. Their eyes shifted to me.

  "Geez," said one of them.

  "Get your asses out there and work," I said, "and maybe you'll run like that too."

  "Yessir, Mr. Brown, sir," they said with a little sar­casm. But they took the hint and all jogged off to warm up.

  I stood in the sunshine, pushing back my parka hood and pulling out my stopwatch, and watched the three ex-Oregoners whipping along the backstretch. They had thrown their brand-new Prescott sweats on the bleach­ers and were running bare-legged, in singlets. They were pacing each other, running shoulder to shoulder, their hair lifting. I could see they were having a good time.

  Now they rounded into the turn toward me, and I could begin to hear the gnash, gnash of their spikes. They floated along on their long legs like whippets. Now I could hear their breathing amid the crunch of spikes. Then they were flashing past me. For a moment I was able to forget about practical things like oxygen capacity of lungs and lactic acid buildup in muscles, and see them as pure myth.

  A nervous contentment suffused me, warm and un­stable as the winter sunshine. The hidden beauties of my subconscious had again risen into view, on this cinder track, in this sweet sunshine.

  The three had finished their quarter-mile speed lap and were jogging to take the recovery interval and let their pulses drop. I looked at my watch. After just thirty seconds they were off again. This was typical of the high-power stuff that Lindquist had his runners do.

  That first morning, I was content just to watch and see what they did. Even their styles were different. Vince Marti hurtled along, full of raw strength. Jacques LaFont punched his way along with a kind of controlled tension. Billy was a puller, light and effort­less.

  After a set of quarters, Vince and Jacques broke away to take a couple miles of gentle striding around the field. But Billy kept on alone, reeling out 60-second quarters with only a 30-second jogging rest between. I was impressed. He was really burning through them. You put together four 60's, and you have a four-minute mile.

  Sitting down beside his carelessly tossed sweats, I clocked him with my Harper Split and noted the times. He did fifteen of those quarters, pacing himself with such spooky precision that he never varied more than a quarter- or half-second. He paid absolutely no attention to me. To judge from the abstracted expres­sion on his face, I don't think he knew that I was there. -

  What impressed me most was the effortlessness. His long, floating stride had an eerie, slow-motion quality. He just ghosted along. And he had a very light, soft stride—now that he was alone, I could scarcely hear his spikes stir the cinders as he went past. He had the most beautiful natural form I had ever seen—no wasted effort anywhere. He was almost unreal. He was that idea of a runner that haunts the minds of track people.

  Finally he finished. While I worked with the other boys, he did two miles at a crisp 5:15 pace to warm down. Even his warm-down was no fooling around.

  Then he came jogging over to me. He smiled a little, still abstracted, but he now looked quite tired. I said nothing, just tossed him his towel, and stood pretending to study his times noted on my clipboard.

  Up close, he was no idea. He was painfully real. He smelled of wet hair and wet cloth. The realness of him hit me like a blow. And he looked even more attractive than yesterday.

  In the daylight, his face and limbs were faintly speckled all over like a bird's egg. He had gotten too much sun on his fair skin. Just looking at his skin gave me a tender, hurting feeling. I wanted to caress it, and knew I would never do it. His glasses were what gave his handsome face its chief charm—they made him look like a sexy, young professor.

  Glancing covertly up from the clipboard as he busied himself with the towel, I noticed that on his right shoul­der he had a tattoo. That surprised me. It looked like a sun sign—a woman's naked torso with a laurel wreath.

  "What's that tattoo?" I asked.

  "That's Virgo," he said. He grinned, a sensual, sunny grin, and jerked his thumb toward the other two, who w
ere back running on the track. "They've got tattoos too. Vince is a Scorpio, and Jacques is a Cancer."

  "The three of you are good friends, aren't you?" My heart was sinking. He was probably sleeping with one or both of them.

  "Yeah, we are," he said. "You're a Leo, aren't you? I looked it up."

  "I think astrology is a lot of crap," I said, looking back down at my clipboard.

  He shrugged pleasantly, putting one spiked foot on the bleachers and toweling himself between the thighs. At that, I was practically getting a hard-on, and I turned away to look at the rest of the team, searching vainly for someone to yell at. One of them ran past carrying his arms too high, and I barked, "Get those arms down!"

  I felt drenched by his physicalness. I tried hard to remember if I had ever had this feeling with a woman. Perhaps in college with a girlfriend or two, perhaps with Mary Ellen. The gay feels this same total eroticization toward the body, only it's the male body. It wasn't merely the fullness in the crotch of his shorts that made me want him. It was even the littlest things. His damp wind-tossed curls. The moist, brown stubble that he still hadn't bothered to shave off. His shoulders and thighs steaming in the sunshine. His brown nipples and his navel showing through the wet shirt. The way his faded blue shorts were slit up the side a little, baring the hip (the manufacturers do this for more leg free­dom, but it is also very sexy). To me his long, finely muscled legs, laced with veins, were as evocative as Raquel Welch's legs would be to a heterosexual. His light, spiked shoes were more fatal than Cinderella's slippers.

  I turned back to him as the poker-faced Marine, having crushed my rush of feeling successfully. Then I saw something that made me forget about sex. He had fine muscle tremors in those beautiful thighs of his. He was really tired.

  "You have trouble with cramps?" I asked.

  "Sometimes." He was bending, busy, not looking at me.

  "At night?"

  "Yeah, sometimes at night too."

  "You must not be getting enough calcium and mag­nesium," I said. I was liking less and less what I saw.

  That magnificent body of his was on the edge of exhaustion. "And you've had a lot of injuries."

  "Stress fractures," he said. "I was red-shirted all last year. One in the shin, one in the metatarsals. I try to drink a lot of milk, but I seem to have these brittle bones." He was shivering, standing straight now, look­ing at me with something like an appeal in his eyes.

  "Get those sweats on," I said.

  "Yeah, right," he said, and pulled them on.

  "Well," he said, "I don't know what you're going to think about my program. I was doing what Lindquist told me to. But obviously we were doing something wrong."

  "Why?"

  "Because I should be improving, and I'm not. I mean, I've been putting in a lot of work, and no results. My best events are the 5,000 and the 10,000. I know there's a sub-28-minute 10,000 inside of me there. But I can't get down to it."

  I stood looking at him thoughtfully, sex forgotten now. This was naked ambition. Breaking 28 in the 10,000 meter is a big deal, like breaking 4 in the mile, and only about 15 runners had ever done it.

  "Well, we'll study your program carefully," I said slowly.

  "That's one major reason I came here. I feel I need a good coach. I suppose I could have tried to cut it alone, training myself. I could forget about collegiate running, I guess, and just go into open. But I don't know enough yet about training to find the right way. I feel totally confused and stymied. So maybe you can figure it out."

  He was zipping up the jacket of his sweats. Then he was polishing his glasses, which had a little moisture condensed on them. For a moment those spooky, clear eyes of his met mine without the glasses in between, and I noted his thick, chestnut eyelashes.

  "I'm thinking about the Olympics," he said.

  I was dubious. Vince and Jacques were clear Olym­pic prospects, but I didn't want to get Billy's hopes up.

  "I want to double in the 5,000 and 10,000 in Mon­treal," he said.

  The 5,000 meter and the 10,000 meter are the clas­sic long-distance runs on the track and are equivalent to nearly three and six miles.

  "That's a big order," I said. "You'll have to be break­ing 28 in the 10,000 and 13:35 in the 5,000 by next fall. To win, you'd probably have to run anywhere between 27:30 and 27:35 in the 10,000, and around 13:10 or 15 in the 5,000. You haven't had any inter­national experience, so we'd have to get you out there a time or two beforehand. That's why Steve Prefon-taine lost the 5,000 at Munich—he didn't know how tough those European babies are."

  I didn't add that Americans had won only two Olym­pic 5,000s and one 10,000 in history, and that only now were American distance runners becoming a se­rious challenge to European power in these two great events. Billy knew that.

  "I worry that maybe I'm too young for this Olym­pics," said Billy.

  "It isn't how young you are. It's how good you are."

  "Okay," Billy grinned, "I'll take your word for it."

  "Get your ass into the shower," I said. "I want to see all three of you at my house tonight. Seven sharp. We have team open house there every Monday and Thursday. Training films, consciousness-raising, and stuff."

  "Okay, Mr. Brown," he said.

  "No sarcasm," I barked. "And I mean that."

  He looked at me strangely. "Sure, Mr. Brown," he said in a low voice and walked off.

  That evening at seven, my house slowly filled with runners.

  I lived in what had once been the head gardener's cottage. It was a pleasant rambling stucco place, with a wisteria-covered veranda in front. It stood on the warm south side of several big spruces and pines, near the greenhouses. (The greenhouses had once housed Joe's famed orchid collection—now they sheltered a clutter of exotic botany and ecological experiments.) From my front window, I could look across the field to the track and the bleachers. Joe Prescott must have known what balm that little house, and that view, would be to my wounded soul.

  The runners came in tracking mud. The big living room had windowseats and windows on three sides. Now the red chintz curtains were pulled. The fire in the fieldstone fireplace threw a pleasant glow on the dark old board floor, on the threadbare Afghan rag before the hearth. I had bought the wing chairs and sofa and coffee table at the local thrift shop.

  The decor fit my needs exactly. Nothing fancy, so the boys could flop all over it. Easy to clean, since my ex-wife was still soaking me and I couldn't afford a cleaning lady. On the pine-paneled walls, I had photos of runners and a few fly-spotted old sporting prints.

  On either side of the fireplace were two doors. The one on the right led into a small sunny kitchen, with old-fashioned cupboards painted so many times you could hardly close the doors. I did as little cooking as possible, preferring to eat with the students in the col­lege dining room.

  The door on the left led into the paneled bedroom. The hideous burled-walnut Victorian bed and dresser had come from the local Salvation Army warehouse. The big windows looked out into the spruce trees, but now the curtains were pulled. By the bed, another creaky door led into an ice-cold old-fashioned tile bath­room with a rusty shower and a cranky old toilet.

  Four of the cross-country team were already there. I had two of them bringing in more wood from the tarp-covered pile behind the house, and the other two in the kitchen slicing carrots to make carrot sticks.

  The Oregon three came at five after seven, just to establish their independence. They shucked their jack­ets and looked around.

  "Carrot sticks," said Vince with disgust, leaning in the kitchen doorway.

  "No junk food served on this campus," I said. "No potato chips, no hot dogs, none of that crap. Runners are what they eat."

  Jacques came into the kitchen and started cutting carrots with exquisite precision. He was a biology ma­jor, and had probably gotten his skill dissecting speci­mens in the lab.

  Shortly" they were all there. Joe Prescott came too, and settled into a wing chair (I had made a
track nut out of him, and he came to the open house as often as he could). After initial awkwardness, they were all talking nicely, and my team discovered that the three newcomers were human beings. I showed a film of the recent national cross-country championship. We had a discussion, and all munched carrot sticks and cracked nuts and drank tea.

  It was a pleasant evening, and when the rest moved off at about 8:30, I motioned Joe and the Oregon three to stay.

  The five of us sat on alone by the fire, Joe and I in the wing chairs, and the three boys sitting on the rug. I said a few things that had been on my mind.

  "You know," I said, "I took you guys on the team in a weak moment. I don't regret it. But the more I think about what's ahead, the more I realize what a hassle it's going to be."

  They were all silent.

  "First of all, we've got to keep your being gay under wraps for as long as possible. I don't want you coming out on campus, joining the gay lib group or anything like that. Sooner or later, the rumor is going to get around, and we'll deal with it when it does. But let's buy ourselves as much peace and quiet as possible, for now. Is that agreeable?"

  They all nodded.

  "Another problem. When that rumor gets around, invariably people are going to remember what hap­pened to me at Penn State. Did Billy's father tell you about that?"

  "Yeah, he told us the whole story," said Vince.

  "Okay," I said. "So I never touched the kid. But the fact is, the suspicion was planted in people's minds. Now, because of John Sive, you kids have become privy to information about me that very few people have. On this campus, for instance, only Joe and Mar­ian know that I'm gay. Not even the other gays know that I'm gay. So I'm going to keep your secret, and you're going to keep mine. Agreed?"