The Front Runner

by Patricia Nell Warren

  "Yes."

  "You may lose your chance at Montreal. I may lose my career. We may lose everything we have."

  "If you're worried about it, then we can't be lovers. But I'll have to leave the school in that case. I can't be around you every day and be held off. You've taught me a few things—maybe I could get to Mon­treal alone."

  I thought of seeing his face only in newspaper photographs in the future. I thought of him facing all that fury with his youth and inexperience. Running a 27:30 10,000 meter was one thing. Maybe be could do that. But infighting with the track politicos was something else. They would wipe him out.

  "All right," I said. "But don't say I didn't warn you."

  "Darlings," somebody said behind us, "you're better than the movie, but could you be a teensie bit quieter?"

  "Let's get out of this cruddy place," said Billy.

  We walked out into the lobby. My knees were actual­ly shaking. In the lurid flourescent light, amid the billboards and the dusty plastic potted plants, we looked at each other. Billy's face was a strange pale color. His eyes were dark and wild behind his glasses, and his lips were raw. I presumed I looked the same.

  "What about your father?" I said.

  "Oh, hell, he approves," said Billy. "He'll be de­lighted that I'm not gonna run up his phone bill any more. Calling him up, crying ..."

  "All right, wait here and I'll tell him."

  I went up to the balcony. John and Rayburn were either finished, or not in the mood, as they were sitting there calmly viewing the film. I sat down by John for a moment.

  "I'm going to take Billy back up to school. No alarm. He needs a good night's sleep. Why don't you come up tomorrow afternoon?"

  John looked at me. He knew. He smiled a little. "Okay, see you then," he said. With those four words, he surrendered his only son to me.

  Billy and I walked out onto the street. "We'll go get my car and go on up to the school."

  Billy's face fell. "I thought we were going back to the hotel."

  "I'm a romantic," I said. "I'm not going to make love to you the first time in a goddam hotel."

  "But, at school, that's . .. coming out."

  We were walking along the dark street, stepping over garbage and dog shit and broken boards. Since there were no cabs around, we headed for the 9th Street

  subway station.

  "No," I said. "We'll have to be careful at school. I know Joe won't care, but I don't want to come out with it. What we'll do is, we'll get a good night's sleep first. We're both worn out. Then first thing in the morning we'll go for a little run in the woods. Well find a nice spot up there somewhere."

  Billy's eyes sparkled wickedly. "That's your fantasy, huh? In the grass, huh, like in the movie?"

  "Yeah," I said, "what's yours?"

  He laughed out loud and took my hand. "Oh, I have a lot of them," he said. "Making out in Loon with you, for one."

  We had a dangerous drive back up to the college. I was so shaky that it was a wonder I didn't smash up the car. Billy lay with his head in my lap the whole way, and I kept running my fingers through his hair, and told him the whole story of my life. I had never told it to anyone.

  I unloaded the whole thing on him. It should have given me some relief. But instead, the more I talked, the more nervous I got, the more flimsy my reasons seemed for giving in to my feelings. I kept looking down at his profile eerily lit by the dashboard lights, at his hand on my thigh. He still didn't seem real. I thought to myself: You're out of your mind. You can still back out.

  8

  I'd given Billy this big lecture about how we both needed a good night's rest. But I didn't sleep at all that night. I spent the whole night tossing around in that creaky Victorian bed, torturing myself with thoughts. I was going to do the wrong thing. I was going to destroy his running career, just to satisfy my selfish feelings. If we became lovers, the fury would hit us. It would obliterate us. It might even destroy our feeling for each other. I wasn't so sure that love could survive something like that. Having had no experience with love, I had no data on which to base an opinion.

  Finally it was just getting light, and the birds started to sing off in the nearby woods. They sang wildly, sharp­ly, sweetly. I lay listening to them vibrating with ner­vousness.

  Finally I got up and shaved. I had the shakes so bad I could hardly hold the shaver. I looked at myself in the rust-specked old bathroom mirror, and the great gay dread about aging hit me. There is no society, no law, no social convention to keep two gays together. Every­thing is based on feeling and on personal attractiveness. The moment you cease to be desirable to your partner, he decamps.

  I ran my hands back over my close-barbered curls. My hair was still good, though its brunette color now had a gunmetal tint. But sooner or later I'd start to bald. My tanned face was still recognizable as the Villanova miler of twenty years ago, but sun and bit­terness had cut hard lines in it. My body and skin were the best things I had, but for how much longer? I wondered if I'd ever get paranoid enough for cosmetics and hair transplants. I needed a love that I could lean on for the rest of my life, and that was too much to hope for. By the time Billy was my age, and still a healthy vigorous man, I would be nearly sixty. Sooner or later he might elbow me aside for someone younger, the way he might elbow some stranger in a race.

  My heart almost stopped when I heard him knock on the door. I looked at my alarm clock. He was fifteen minutes early.

  When I came out on the verandah, the sun was just Showing through the trees. Billy was kicking around in the pine needles by the house. He was wearing a faded red long-sleeved T-shirt, his old blue shorts, his spiked cross-country shoes, no socks and his headband. "Hi," he said cheerfully. "Did you sleep?" I said as I shut the door. "Some," he said, smiling a little. Now that the un­certainty of the past months was resolved he was his normal relaxed self. He wasn't nervous at all, I could see. He could hardly wait. Fifteen minutes early.

  We set off across the field, and shortly we were in the woods. It was an unseasonably warm morning, and we started sweating right away.

  "Stay at a seven-minute pace," I said. "This is going to be a rest day."

  "Seven minutes?" said Billy. "Christ!" He was used to clipping along out there at a five-minute-mile pace. But he struck a seven and stayed on it with his usual uncanny precision.

  At first I was so shaky that my legs felt bad. But after I warmed up, I felt a little lifted. The woods smelled fresh and spicy—there had been no rain for a week, and the leaves sent up their herby smell. The bird songs were everywhere, echoing through the groves and hollows. They stopped singing as we passed, then started up again, or flew off and started singing farther off. We could hear no other sounds but the steady crunch of our spikes along the soft trail, and our breathing.

  Billy ran about ten feet ahead of me, not looking back. Even on his way to make love, he was busi­nesslike about running. He seemed hardly to touch the ground—I had to look to see his spike marks to make sure. His elbows and buttocks moved a little — rather, the rhythm suffused his whole body. After a little while, his shirt was soaked through in back, and his shorts had that dark line between the buttocks. Without missing a stride, he pulled the shirt over his head and tied the sleeves around his waist. Now I could watch the subtle play of muscle, spine and shoul-derblade in his back.

  I kept my eyes on him so hard that, a couple of times, I nearly stumbled over rocks or roots. He was not real. He was just a photograph, just a flickering phantom in a film. When the reel ran out, he would disappear.

  We ran softly for about three miles. We wended among the great silver beeches hazed with pink buds. Early violets and wood anemones poked up through the carpet of dead leaves. In the marshy spots, the skunk cabbages' bloom was long past and they were thrusting up their coarse green leaves. We leaped over logs fallen across the trail. We splashed over streams, where the witch hazel still bent its frail yellow sprays of bloom. We leaped up hills and floated down on the other side.
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  Only once did Billy turn to speak to me. "Seven minutes," he said over his shoulder, grinning a little. "You have to be some kind of masochist."

  Then we came to a spot where a faint side trail forked off.

  "Billy," I said. He looked back. My stomach plunged with nervousness. "This way," I said.

  He fell in behind me this time. We followed the barely visible trail over the ridge and down along a slope through some stately, old, half-dead hemlocks, then up another slope and down along it into a little valley. The slope here was grown up with mountain laurel, shoulder high. At the bottom of the valley, a little stream noised along among the rocks. It slid in a shining sheet over a mossy rock shelf into a little pool, then wound on. I had slowed us down—we were bare­ly more than jogging now. I wanted to warm us down as much as possible, and the trail was so rough here I didn't want Billy to trip and hurt himself.

  I stopped in a little clearing in the mountain laurel and looked around. I knew this place already. It faced south, the sun would hit it in a few minutes, and we'd be warm here. It was secluded—the teams never took that side trail during their woods workouts. Surely nobody would come, especially at this hour. And if they did, the gnarled trunks and green leaves of the laurel would screen us. The crunching of leaves would warn us.

  I stood there, still breathing a little heavily. Billy was still coming down the slope through the mountain laurel. All around him, the laurel was putting out the buds that would bloom in June. His torso, arms and legs were laced with bright sweat. He looked at me questioningly. I couldn't speak. My eyes said that this was the place.

  Slowly he came on toward me, his spiked shoes crunching softly on the carpet of tan beech leaves. His eyes had the same intent look as in the movie last night, but less tortured now. He was that image of myself, which had been torn from me in my teens and sent off on a long lonely trip. Now he was coming back, to join with his own flesh again, with that body that had been kept waiting for him like a house rented to many tenants, but now swept out for its returning owner.

  He came up to me and laid his hand on my wet, hairy chest. I put my hand on his tattooed shoulder. It was that loaded gesture of two males touching each other. We destroyed the tabu in it, we made it clean.

  We stood lightly pressed together, breathing now less from running than from excitement. Suddenly we were free to caress each other. To caress him—how unbe­lievable that was after twenty years of starvation and paid grapplings. Do people really understand what it means to caress someone? We kissed and touched everything we could reach, tasted the salt of each other's skin. His sweat was sweeter than mine because of the no-salt diet.

  I buried my face in his damp hair and untied the sleeves of the red shirt from his waist, and it slipped to the leaves. Billy took off his glasses and let them lie on the sweatshirt. His hands were already sliding feverishly under the waistband of my shorts. There was no sound but the silence of the woods and the birds carol­ing senselessly, and the leaves crackling under our spikes.

  I went to my knees, sliding down against him and kissing his body all the way down. My hands shucked down his shorts and jock strap both at once. The harsh brown patch of pubic hair was startling on his pale, supple, veined loins, and the swollen cock between those runner's thighs.

  I had it in my mouth almost before I'd seen it. The only sound, in that silence, was Billy groaning softly as he fondled my head and thrust his hips slowly against my face. He was real.

  Despite my wish to be frank, I can't describe every­thing we did.

  There are several reasons why. I am better at hiding feelings than displaying them. I am not literary enough. I have to keep some memories for myself. I am not sure that I remember what we did in exact serial order. Besides, I think it is generally known by now what happens when two human bodies come together.

  Maybe it I were the Jean Genet or the Steve Good­night of the trackwriters, I could put on paper the peculiar intensity of that first sexual encounter.

  The word "ecstasy" isn't quite right. We both re­jected mysticism in favor of simple directness and rough tenderness. If Billy let himself go so far as to moan sometimes and close his eyes and toss his head around on the leaves, I was silent and open-eyed. I had to see in order to believe. Even in his arms, I was the doubting Thomas.

  The lesbians tell us that only a woman knows how to love a woman. The gays will answer that only a man knows how to love a man. I had always found women passive, devouring. They seemed to have no notion of how important sex is to a man, and no willingness to learn. Women had always robbed me of my sex for money—first my wife, then the prostitutes. But Billy's male intensity met me halfway. Instead of taking, he gave. Each of us gave, and gave again, until we were drained and hurting.

  That first time, we shied away from the ultimate act of love and possession that the Supreme Court had de­clared legal. In our macho pride, neither of us had ever permitted another man to do that. For months yet, each of us would still have a deep-rooted fear of of­fending precisely that maleness that we loved in the other. In addition, I dreaded the idea of hurting Billy physically, or of upsetting that relentless psych that kept him in front on the track.

  It would take far more trust and confidence than we had on that April morning before each of us would not only tolerate being taken, but actually wish for it as the ultimate way of pleasing the other. In fact, I would be the first to surrender—my fear of damaging Billy was so strong that I would wind up hurting his feelings by at first refusing his own surrender.

  But for now, what we were able to give and receive was more than enough.

  We lay finished.

  I had expected to feel shattered after this intimacy with my ghost. Instead I felt peaceful. It was warm there on the dry leaves. The morning sun was shining right on us, and I felt empty, almost weightless. I felt very clean, as if the light were shining straight through me—as if the forest air were moving through all the cells of my body.

  His legs lay across my arm, and my head lay on his thighs. He still had his arms around my lower body, and his face pressed against my groin. In the silence, I could almost hear our hearts beat. They had the slow deep pulse of the distance runner—mine was about forty-eight and his was forty. I could see that pulse beating in his genitals—the penis, still swollen and moist, moved slowly as it lay across his thigh. My mouth tasted of his salt and his semen.

  The leaves crackled a little under us. Nearby, the water gurgled as it slid over the rock. The birds had stopped their dawn caroling and were into the softer, more businesslike daytime notes. In the distance was the soft rumble of a jet plane.

  I couldn't move. In my sweet inertia, I was like a rock. I would lie there till a glacier moved me.

  Billy drew a long slow breath and ran his hand along my thigh one more time. My arm was going to sleep, so with deep regrets I pulled it slowly from under his thighs. It took an effort, but I raised myself up on my elbow. He stayed as he was, his face between my thighs, his hand stroking. My groin was spattered with a little glistening semen, and Billy started to lick it up slowly, first out of the pubic hair, then off my bare skin to the side. His eyes were closed.

  It was dreamlike yet so real: the feel of his warm tongue on my body. He moved slowly, turning against me, kissing his way up along my torso. He was dry now, and warm, with a fine dust of salt on his skin. His tongue left a wet trail in my body hair. He reached my breast, kissed my nipples, nuzzled his face in my thick, chest hair. Something in this mute act of wor­ship made me think that no other lovemaking had ever stirred him so deeply.

  I lay back down, putting one arm around him, and he lay against me with his face buried in my neck, his fingers playing slowly in my chest hair.

  "You're hairy," he said in that low voice I could barely catch. "I like hair." Suddenly he raised his head and smiled at me drowsily. "The first time I saw you in shorts, your hairy thighs really turned me on."

  I stroked his head, picking the leaves out of his
hair.

  "Mr. Brown, you're very well hung."

  I laughed a little. "You're good for my ego."

  "Really. You have a great body. I hope I look like you when I'm your age. You look more like thirty-three, thirty-four."

  He wasn't going to lie and tell me I looked like twenty-three. I couldn't have accepted that, and he knew it. Thirty-three I could accept. It made me feel relieved. I wondered how I could have panicked in front of the mirror earlier.

  "How did you manage all these months?" I asked.

  He laughed softly. "I got very depraved. My dharma was a mess."

  "Now I suppose you'll tell me you slept with Vince or something."

  "Christ, no," he said. "I just thought of you like mad and jerked off."

  He sat up slowly, blinking in the bright light. We were both a sight. That book of photographs hadn't shown the cruel realities of screwing in the woods. Our sticky buttocks were stuck with bits of leaf and bark and moss. Our knees and elbows were black with dirt. The carpet of leaves was somewhat torn up. All around us, the silky fiddleheads of ferns were pushing up—we had rolled on some of them and crushed them. Our clothes lay in soggy disorder where they had fallen.

  "You're jealous," said Billy.

  "Sure," I said. "Would you want me to be other­wise?"

  "I'm jealous," said Billy. "I know Vince tried to cruise you when we came. And you told him he was a very attractive kid." He smiled blissfully, picked off a broken fiddlehead and threw it at me. "But there's no reason for either of us to be jealous."

  I was gently, sleepily brushing the leaves off him. It was not a tense conversation—we were both too limp for that. But suddenly we were saying things we had to say.

  "Does that mean you won't get tired of me too soon?" I said, trying to say it as casually as possible.

  He looked at me steadily. "Yeah," he said, "my dad is anxious like that. He puts up a good front, but . . . Anyway, you don't have to worry. I'll be loving you for the rest of my life."