The Front Runner

by Patricia Nell Warren

  This embarrassed me even more.

  Billy went on. "My father started hearing about you in New York. He even saw you around a few times." Billy smiled a little. "I understand you cost an arm and a leg."

  "Listen," I said, "that's a very painful period of my life, and I don't like to discuss it."

  "All right," he said. "But in return do me a favor."

  "What?"

  "I wish you would cut this Mr. Brown crap with me," he said.

  I shook my head. "If I let you call me by my first name, then I have to let all the other students do it."

  Billy sat looking very sad for a moment. He pushed the empty Coke bottle back toward me. Then he shook his head. "Mr. Brown," he said, "I wish you weren't so unhappy."

  My hands were lying on the table, knotted into fists. He reached slowly over and laid one hand over mine. His hand was hot and a little moist. My stomach jerked. Was it possible that he liked me?

  I had an image in my head of a ballroom filled with people. A glass ball was turning slowly overhead, making those spots of light swirling over everything. A thousand John Sives in black suits were dancing cheek to cheek with a thousand sequinned Delphine de Sevignys. They waltzed gaily, thousands of them, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The band in­struments glittered and blared. John Sive and Delphine de Sevigny were tapdancing, looking at each other with eyes of love. Then off among the drifting thou­sands, I could glimpse Billy. He was walking slowly toward me, cutting through the dancers. He was wear­ing track shorts and singlet, and his Tigers with the blue nylon uppers, and a headband keeping his hair out of his eyes. The sweat glistened on his limbs as the spots swirled over him. His face was grave. He came slowly and held out his arms to me. We held each other tightly, and put our cheeks together, and danced slowly while the band played "Stardust."

  I shook his hand off. "Don't do that," I said. "You never know who's watching. I don't need sympathy anyway. I'm just fine."

  He drew his hand away as if he'd been burned.

  On New Year's we didn't go to a party.

  In the evening, the four of us walked around in the streets looking at the lavish Christmas decorations all over midtown. It was very cold. We walked up Park Avenue a ways and looked at the trees trimmed with white lights. We bought roasted chestnuts from the vendors and ate them, burning our fingers. Billy allowed himself to eat some chestnuts. We stopped to listen to the Salvation Army carolers on Fifth Avenue

  . A few blocks farther we stopped to listen to a few shivering members of the Hare Krishna Society, as they sang and prayed half-frozen in their saffron robes.

  John and Delphine walked ahead, arm in arm. No­body on the crowded sidewalks noticed them. John and Delphine were having a sudden romance. Billy raised his eyebrows a little and said, "Dad's off and running again."

  Billy and I walked behind them, not arm in arm. Since the night at the Baths, a tension had sprung up between us. I sensed that I had hurt him, and was sure now that his touching my hand had been friend­ship, nothing more. But I didn't want to apologize, because the distance between us would help me control my feelings for him. At the same time, if anyone had tried to prevent me from walking the streets of New York with him that night, I would have fought with both fists.

  We went to Rockefeller Center and watched the skaters circle the big rink, their breath blowing white in the air. We looked up dizzily at the giant Christmas tree by the rink.

  Billy looked at me and said, with a certain peculiar belligerence, "I'd like to skate."

  I said, "That's all we need is you should twist an ankle."

  "Where do they rent the skates?" Billy asked Del­phine. "I'm going to skate."

  "They don't rent them, cheri," said Delphine, touching Billy's cheek. "You have to bring your own."

  Delphine was madly in love with both Billy and John at once. Billy handled this with tact. He put him down gently by treating him as a potential mother. Billy had total respect and seriousness for all trans-vestites.

  That evening I finally relaxed toward Delphine my­self, and decided he was delightful. I had seen so many flamboyant gay foxes that Delphine's relative natural­ness of dress and manner took some getting used to.

  "I'm past high drag, cheri," he told me as we thawed out over something warm to drink in the Plaza Hotel. "I'm into couture."

  To see him play with his drink and his cigarette holder, there among the potted palms and crystal chan­deliers, of the Plaza, you would never know that Delphine lived in a tiny apartment on 123rd Street

  with ten cats and rent owing. He bought his beautiful clothes at thrift shops, and learned his French from a Berlitz record. "My limousine awaits," he would say as John put him into a taxi. He was Palm Beach, the Riviera, a box at the Metropolitan Opera.

  "I warn you," he told Billy that night, "I plan to go to the track meets, and cheer you and Vince and Jacques onward. I may even throw flowers at you."

  "I'll look for you," said Billy, smiling.

  He smiled at Delphine more than he did at me that night. Gentle filial smiles, devoid of sex. I would have settled for even one of those.

  Back in John's room at the Chelsea Hotel, we thawed out again and John ordered up a big ice bucket. Reposing in it were two bottles: one of French champagne, and one of sparkling mineral water, as a concession to Billy and me. Delphine turned on the color TV so we could watch the midnight doings over on Times Square. John popped the cork on the cham­pagne. As he opened the bottle of mineral water, he made a loud popping noise with his mouth, and we all laughed a little. He filled the glasses.

  "Oh, bubbly!" Delphine cried.

  The television was playing "Auld Lang Syne." I felt as if my heart was going to break. It was 1975, and on August 18, 1975, I was going to be forty years old.

  We all touched glasses. "Heart's desires for all of us," said John. "For Delphine, a millionaire. For Billy, a sub-28 10,000 meter. For Harlan, love." His eyes rested on mine briefly, and I wondered how much he had sensed.

  "And for you, and for all of us," I said, "good luck with the Supreme Court."

  Billy and John hugged and kissed each other, and Delphine hugged and kissed me. John hugged and kissed me, and Billy hugged and kissed Delphine. But neither Billy nor I made a move toward each other. He just smiled a little, touched my glass with his, and said in an even voice, "Cheers, Mr. Brown," and drained his mineral water with the air of a debauchee.

  On the TV, everybody was kissing everybody else. I drank off my mineral water in one gulp too.

  6

  When the holidays ended, Vince and Jacques came back to Prescott with their news.

  Jacques had died a thousand deaths before he finally told his family. A cultivated, sensitive family of musicians, they were distressed but trying to under­stand. I was glad that it had turned out this well. Jacques went back to his studies and training more relaxed than I had seen him.

  But Vince had had a bad time. His father was a union official in Los Angeles. He and his son were on poor terms already. He was ambivalent: proud of Vince's track exploits, but unhappy that Vince did these things while wearing a beard. When he heard that his son the miler was also a "fag," he was first incredulous, then livid.

  "He told me never to come home again," said Vince bitterly. "He talked about killing me. He even talked about going to court to make me return the money he spent on my education. Can you believe? Fuck him."

  He bared his shoulder to us, and showed us a new tattoo. It was the Lambda, the symbol of gay activism. He'd had it done in a Los Angeles tattoo parlor before he flew back.

  I was distressed. "That's just the kind of thing I think we shouldn't do," I said. "That thing is going to be visible at every meet you're in."

  "Oh hell," said Vince, "the old farts at the meets aren't going to know what it stands for."

  On February 17, 1975, something very important happened to us. By a seven-to-two vote, the Supreme Court made their now-famous ruling on sodomy. They struck down all law
s regulating sexual activity by both straight and gay consenting adults, stating that they were an unconstitutional attempt to regulate bedroom matters. The decision also clarified homo­sexuals' protection under the anti-discrimination laws of 1964.

  The gay people and their liberal supporters re­joiced. John Sive and his colleagues had prepared their case painstakingly, and the years of work paid off.

  But the ruling jolted the country, and gays were suddenly feeling more pressure than before, instead of less. I'm not a sociologist, but I have my own visceral theory about why.

  Unlike the abortion issue back in 1973, the sodomy issue was not bruited about in the media a lot before­hand. By the time the Court finally ruled on abortion, most Americans were pretty accurately informed on the pros and cons. But the sodomy issue was just one of 126 other matters on the Court docket that year, and it hit middle America straight out of the blue.

  All that the average taxpayer in Peoria, Illinois, knew was that suddenly the Court was saying it was all right for his kids to be fairies, a thing he had been taught to fear and despise. His ideas about homosexuality stayed away from facts, in the medieval murk.

  This deep irrational fear was at the bottom of the re­action, and behind the unsuccessful but fanatic or­ganized groups who tried to get the Court to reverse the ruling. In all the furor that spring, most people seemed to forget that the ruling also covered lesbians and straights, and they shot their hostilities at gay men.

  The psychotic fear of gay men shows how deeply the issue went. American men are insecure and on the defensive anyway, what with all the women's lib stuff. And despite all the women's lib activity, American society still tends to regard a man as having a higher responsibility than a woman. A man has his privileges, but he also carries his burden. So a man who refuses to impregnate Miss America, who wastes his semen between another man's thighs, is a sexual traitor who threatens the very future of a society.

  In my opinion, no other big social change in re­cent years—such as integration, drug use and relaxed heterosexual morals—has provoked the degree of anger that the sodomy thing did. Maybe I am biased, because I felt that anger. But I always felt keenly that the biggest backlash came from men who were insecure of their own roles. They feared—secretly perhaps—that I was a bigger stud than they were. I might practice my prowess on their own sons, and thus cut off their life­line to genealogical immortality.

  As far as I and my three gay runners were con­cerned, the Court ruling meant that we were both bet­ter off and worse off than before.

  I wouldn't have to worry any more about their getting busted in some state with strict laws, while traveling to meets. We now had solid legal backing in case they were hassled on their way to the Olympics.

  On the other hand, with the whole country boiling on the issue, people might show us even more hostility than they would have otherwise. And, as everybody knows, it's one thing to get a fair civil-rights law passed, and another thing to get it enforced.

  By April Billy was recovered from the stress fracture and making some progress, and his 5,000 and 10,000 times were dropping slowly toward the goals I'd set. But he wasn't making the progress he should, because he was fighting me tooth and nail about his program. I wanted him to train just once a day. He insisted on twice. Sometimes he'd give in, and then a couple of weeks later, he'd fall off the wagon. It was like trying to keep an alcoholic away from booze.

  We had all three of the boys entered in the Drake Relays, which were to be held April 25 and 26. I was especially anxious that Billy be fresh for this important meet, as it would be a major test of his po­tential.

  I was cold and correct with him, and he was cold and correct with me.

  As my feelings for him tortured me more and more, I started training hard again, the way I had at Villanova. The coach was working fully as hard as his athletes. Every morning I got up just as it was getting light, and busted ten or fifteen miles over the trails in the woods. In the afternoons, I even managed to squeeze in some speed work on the track. I was pathetically pleased, in my old age, to see how quickly my body responded and came back to racing condition. I was running 4:20 miles in time trials that spring.

  And so the weeks passed, I barking at Billy and he running silent and stubborn.

  One day his faculty advisor came to me and shook his head about Billy's portfolio. "It hasn't gone any­where since that spate of studying when he had the cast on his leg," he said. "I know Billy's serious about track, but if he wants to graduate ..."

  "Yeah, sure," I said, sounding like the detached concerned athletic director. "I'll talk to him about it."

  On April 15, in the early evening, I was working in my office in the silent athletic building when I heard Billy call me sharply from the dressing room down the hall.

  "Harlan!" There was a note of urgency in his voice.

  I ran down the hall and into the dressing room. He was standing bent over strangely by one of the benches. He was nude except for his jock strap, and his damp running clothes were thrown over the bench. His face was white and his teeth gritted, and he was kneading his thigh desperately. He had a mammoth cramp in his leg.

  I knew at a glance that he had been out for one of his clandestine workouts. With Billy, muscle trem­ors and cramps were always the result of magnesium loss and overwork.

  "Harlan," he panted, "help me."

  It had always been my policy to stay away from the locker rooms and leave any rubdowns to my assis­tant. But there was nobody else around, and a cramp like that can do real damage if it's not handled right.

  So I knelt on the concrete floor in front of him, and massaged the leg desperately. He bent over me, his hands clenched in the back of my shirt. Finally the cramp started to ease. I made him lie down on the bench and kept working at the leg, from the calf to the hip.

  We were alone. The building was silent. It was the first time I had seen him so close to naked, and I found myself wishing that he had gotten the jock strap off before the cramp hit.

  His body lay on the bench as if offered to me. His right leg" was in my hands, and the other had fallen aside, the bare foot braced on the floor. His crotch was exposed: the powerful hamstrings, the small but­tocks with curls of dark wet hair between them. More curls framed the manhood tight and hidden in its sup­porter. The broad dingy elastic band across his lean abdomen contrasted curiously with his pale skin. He was not flaunting himself, as Denny Falks had done, and that made the sight of him all the more moving.

  He lay breathing deeply, one arm over his face, fighting to concentrate, to use his yoga to relax the muscle. Since he wasn't looking at me, I dared to let my eyes run over his body. He was beautiful by no standards save those of distance running. His muscles were good, but too starved-looking. The legs were too long and thin, too veined, the muscles too cruelly defined, for most tastes. His curving thigh was scarcely thicker than his calf.

  Finally his leg lay limp and supple in my hands. I could still feel a feeble muscle tremor in the thigh as I held it.

  "How does it feel?" I said, still daring to hold his thigh a moment.

  "Okay," he said in a low shaky voice, still not taking his arm away from his eyes. "It hurts a little. There's a tremor there."

  Then I saw that the front of his jock strap was swell­ing a little. Now that our worry was over, it had oc­curred to him as well that we were in a sexual situation. Possibly he liked me. Possibly he was just hard up for sex. But in any case he wanted me to touch him. All I had to do was bend over him and put my face against his hot flank, and gently pull the damp jock strap down around his thighs.

  Instead, I panicked, and with the panic came my anger.

  I let go of his thigh. "Serves you right," I said.

  My voice cracked in the silence of the locker room. His body jerked as if I had lashed it with a whip.

  "How far did you run?" I demanded.

  He still had his arm over his face, and his pale skin had turned a mottled pink-blue covered w
ith goose-bumps. ""Fifteen miles," he said.

  "What pace?" I said.

  "Five fifteen," he said.

  "A week before the Drake," I said. "You're an ir­responsible brat. Who the hell do you think you are, taking my time with your tantrums? If you can't settle down and do this right, then I invite you to find another coach."

  He sat up, turning away from me. His back was straight, but I sensed how humiliated he was. The front of his jock strap went back to normal. I ached with regret at having hurt him, but I also felt safer now.

  "And now you're chilled too," I said. "Get your ass under the hot water."

  Silently he got up and fumbled in his open locker for his towel. I looked mournfully at his body, feeling as if I was saying good-bye to it.

  "Have you been taking magnesium?" I asked.

  "No," he said in a stifled voice. "Just eating spinach and stuff."

  "Well, get on the Magnesium Plus then," I said. "If you're out, I'll give you a bottle." I pretended I only cared about that: my athlete's condition.

  Without looking at me, he started toward the shower room.

  "One more thing," I barked. "It's Mr. Brown. Don't forget it a second time."

  But that night, lying awake, in bed, the memory of his body came back to me like a hallucination. My imagination staged a hard-core encounter between us, right on that locker-room bench. We would both be half-mad with desire, like in all the gay skin flicks I'd seen. Our panting and gasping would echo in the silent locker room. It was amazing how many different ways I could think of for us to make love to each other without moving off that bench. I rehearsed it over and over, and had an ejaculation just thinking about it—I didn't even touch myself.

  In my misery, I tried to pray. It didn't make much sense to pray after having indulged in erotic fantasies like that, but I did. "Out of the depths I cry unto thee, oh Lord. . ." But then all I could think of was the Song of Songs. ". . . That at night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth, I sought him but found him not. O that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me. Refresh me with ap­ples, for I am sick with love."