The Front Runner (28 page)

children to hang around us. She was not nearly as liberal as her parents. Joe and Marian tried to reason with her, but she was firm. "It's best for the children," she said.

After that, whenever she saw us, she would gather the children and shoo them out of sight. The three little ones didn't understand, they cried.

"We sometimes forget," said Vince bitterly, "that we're lepers."

During those sunny weeks, Leida's words often haunted me. She was right. I had children, but Billy's superior genes would be lost. As it turned out, they had haunted Billy too, and we ended up discussing gay paternity. The subject was brought up when we received an anonymous phone call that was more vicious than usual.

To calm ourselves down, we went for a walk up along the trail where we always ran. It was a cloudy afternoon, with thunder rumbling softly in the distance and a feel of rain coming. We walked slowly along. The marks of our spikes were still plain in the earth from that morning.

"It's something that bothers me a lot," I said. "When we die, there will be nothing left. When other couples die, there are children left. Even an inheritance. Even a name that is passed down. Even just a marriage certificate on file somewhere. For us, nothing."

"I'll make a will," said Billy, "and I'll leave you my brown velvet suit and all my old track shoes." He wasn't joking, though.

We kept walking. The woods were almost obscenely green. A fine mist was beginning to come down, and it cooled our faces and skins.

"Maybe you're going to laugh at this," I said, "but I wish we both had children."

"I've been thinking about that," said Billy. "I'm not laughing."

"Having kids was the least unpleasant part of being married," I said. "Of course they could be a pain in the ass, but it had its rewards too. You come home at night, and they run to you and say Daddy, Daddy."

We came to a little stream that was rushing, foaming full. It boiled around the rocks past us. We jumped over it, and kept on.

I always used to think that living in your children was an illusion," said Billy. "But I changed my mind. Like with little Julie. Supposing she was yours. If something happened to you, that would be all I'd have left of you. It'd be something. I wouldn't be alone, I could do things for her. And if she were mine, you could feel that way ... It isn't you that lives on, it's the other person."

We were both trying to contain ourselves, not looking at each other much. We weren't even holding hands or anything. Billy sauntered along, hands in pockets, kicking at small stones, reaching up to pull leaves from the trees.

"I don't suppose an adoption agency would give us the time of day," I said.

"Not a chance. Dad handled two lesbian cases and one case of a gay. All three of them wanted to adopt. The agencies said no and the courts said no. The idea is that you have a right to be brought up straight."

"Anyway," I said, "it would be better to have our own."

"Sure," said Billy. "But if there was some little gay kid out there somewhere, abandoned like me, and they would give him to me, I'd take him. And I'd have my own too, if I could."

"Look, are you serious?" I said.

"Of course I'm serious," he said. "I have a very positive image about being a father. I really think I'd like it. You and I would both be good fathers."

"Well, I've been looking into it a little," I said. "That gloomy conversation we had out on Fire Island started me thinking. We can, for instance, buy a child on the black market."

"Darling, what would we buy him with?" said Billy, grinning. "We'd have to hock all my trophies, and I'd lose my amateur status."

I smiled too. I had a lump in my throat, so it was hard.

"Then there's something that some couples do who

have infertility problems," I said. "Like, say the wife is sterile or something. They find a female donor, and the. husband impregnates her, and then she agrees to turn the child over to them."

Billy stopped and looked at me. "That's not a bad idea. One catch, though," he said.

"What?" I said.

"I'm not getting into bed with any foxes. Not even to have children."

"Artificial insemination," I said.

Billy smiled slowly. His hair was iridescent with the fine mist coming down. "Weird," he said. "Sooner or later you end up making deals with women. It's an injustice, really." We walked on. "But . . . what're you going to do?" He kicked another rock. "How do we find one of these brood mares?"

"How do I know? Run some kind of blind ad in the papers, maybe. Screen the applicants. Pick some broad who is typey and intelligent. Make her sign the papers before she's inseminated, so she can't walk off with the baby."

"That sounds complicated. Shell want money."

"Yeah, we'd have to pay all her hospital expenses too."

Billy ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head. "It sounds like the kind of thing we can't do until after the Olympics. Assuming I get there."

"Something else too. Supposing we find out, after it's too late, that babies need mothers too?"

Billy shook his head. We were coming to another little stream, and stepped across on some broad flat rocks. Billy slipped and got one shoe wet. He walked on with his shoe squishing. We were coming toward the fork where the side trail branched off, the one we had taken on that first spring morning a year ago.

"That doesn't worry me too much," he said. "Dad and I talked a lot about that. His theory is that the important thing is a lot of attention and cuddling and touching. He doesn't think it much matters who does it. When my mother left, he was stuck with looking after me and he said he was afraid even to pick me up. He had a babysitter during the day, but she

wasn't paying much attention to me. He said that I got kind of funny for a while there. I didn't notice things, and I was like a little retarded. I didn't walk till late." Finally he got over being nervous, and he started paying a lot of attention to me. He'd get up early in the morning, and spend all evening with me if he could. He said finally I snapped out of it. Then when Frances came everything was fine. He was convinced it was just the loving. Maybe that's why love and being touched means so much to me, because of those few months when I didn't get any ..."

"You like being touched, huh?" I ran my hand up his arm.

He smiled. "That first time we kissed, and when you started caressing me, that was unbelievable."

The thunder was rumbling softly nearby. It was a soft, fertile summer storm, and if it hadn't been for the phone call in the afternoon, we could have been peaceful. We walked along the side trail. It was hard to follow now that all the ground plants had sprung up.

Billy was serious again. "You know, I wish we could do it now—start this baby. Maybe I'm being paranoid. But after what happened this afternoon, you know—something could happen to one of us tomorrow."

We came to the top of the hill, and looked down the slope that we'd gone down that morning. The mountain laurel was all in bloom. The pink and white bell-like blossoms hung heavy, and the green foliage glistened in the mist. We walked down through it slowly, our shirts getting wet from brushing on the leaves. Finally we were in the little open spot where we had lain on the leaves. It was all grown up now with ferns and wild asters.

I stood looking at the little waterfall, feeling sad and frightened, and Billy walked around slowly kicking gently at the ferns.

"Why do we always end up talking about death?"    he said. He bent and smelled the mountain laurel blossoms.

"Look," I said, "why don't we do the following.

Let's have some semen samples stored in a semen bank. They freeze it. You can thaw it out and use it anytimes"

He walked back toward me, smiling suddenly. "No kidding."

"Sure," I said. "That way it'll be there."

"All right, let's do it," he said. "Like, let's do it tomorrow. That way we'll both be less anxious about it."

He put his arms around me and we just stood there holding each other, our bodies feeling very warm and good through our wet shirts.

We got in touch with a very discreet and liberal gynecologist and told him what we wanted to do. He thought it was picturesque, and agreed to help. We made numerous trips to the clinic and masturbated assiduously until we each had a dozen samples in the freezer.

As if in ironic comment on this, the last weekend in June I got a hate letter from my elder son, Kevin. The letter was the only personal communication I'd had from my family since the divorce.

He wrote: "We've had to move away because everybody knew who we were. The kids in school all knew my father is a fag. I hope you get what's coming to you."

On July 2, Vince left us to go to Europe with the pro tour. We were both very worried about him. He and Jacques had broken off completely. He was alone, and morose, and inclined more and more to brood about injustices done to gays in general and himself personally.

Since our wedding, the track world had been pretty quiet about Billy. No one mentioned the subject much. The athletes themselves continued to be either supportive or indifferent to the issue, with just a few of them showing hostility.

We suspected that the reason for this silence was that the AAU and the USOC were saving their ammunition to use on Billy in the Olympic Trials.

This suspicion, it turned out, was right.

FIFTEEN

WITH the Olympic Trials, Billy and I said good-bye to our quiet home life at Prescott. The next two months, with its disruptions and its forced separations, we would just have to live through.

"After the Games," Billy said, "you and I are going to get in bed and stay there for a week."

With the Olympic Trials, the great hassle moved into fourth gear.

The Trials are a messy, spectacular mini-Olympics. They are the finest track meet held in the U.S., and are organized by the USOC to select the Olympic teams in each track and field event.

They are also a slaughter. Any sociologist looking for choice research material on male aggressiveness will find it at the Trials. The aim is to be among the first three finishers in your event; If you're fourth, you're out, no matter how good you'd been all that season. Novices and veterans alike are thrown into the meat grinder. Runners shove and spike each other on the track. A fall, an injury, a foul, running wide, a tenth of a second, a cramp, a hot day, a sleepless night—just one of these little things can rob a runner of four years' sweat, pain and financial sacrifice.

The U.S. is the only major track power that selects its Olympic team in this brutal way. All the others handpick their teams on the basis of that season's overall performance. Track people argue about which is the better way. Either way, there are a lot of behind-the-scenes politics that can get just as bloody as the spiking out on the track.

So, when Billy and I flew out to Los Angeles for

the Trials in the first week of July, we knew that people were saying openly that Billy would not make it. The handful of powerful officials and coaches who control U.S. athletics can exert all kinds of subtle pressures.

"They'll louse him up somehow," one friendly official told me.

"And besides," everybody was gleefully saying, "Billy just got married, so . . ." Myth still hath it that having sex is not good for a runner, especially before a big meet.

Another thing to worry about was that Bob Dellinger had been working hard. His own 5,000 and 10,000 meter times had improved to the point where he was within shot of Billy's best times. Like Billy he had been playing it smart. He had not been racing himself to death all season, as so many others do, only to arrive at the Trials past their peak. Like Billy, Dellinger had even passed up the AAU national championships in June.

It would have been cheaper to drive to Los Angeles, But several days' sitting on his hamstrings in the car might have made Billy stiff, so we shot the money on airline tickets. In Los Angeles, we checked into the Costa Clara Hotel near the stadium, where a lot of other runners were staying. We tried hard to keep the press at arm's length. Billy had gotten tired of answering the same questions over and over, so he mimeographed a one-page resume of his nine years in track and silently handed it out.

The afternoon that we drove to the stadium for the 10,000 heat, it was Billy's first public appearance since our marriage, and we got a shock. A big crowd was waiting there at the entrance. When we got out of the car, we were mobbed and the police had to pry us through.

Shrieking worshipful girls and quieter worshipful gays begged Billy for autographs, and crowded him so hard he could hardly move a pencil to sign them. Dozens of admirers, both gay and straight, were wearing T-shirts that said
GO BILLY
and
BE KIND TO THE

ANIMAL.
They all wanted to touch him and hug him. Some of them even wanted
my
autograph.

But in the same crowd, there were also people who screamed curses and obscenities at us. Their eyes were blazing with hate, and their faces were twisted. As we struggled through, my face and Billy's were spat in several times. Someone pitched a ripe tomato at Billy and it made a red spatter on his blue warm-ups.

Inside, Billy turned to look back at the crowd. I was shaken, wondering if it had spoiled his psych for the race. He looked thoughtful, but still calm, and wiped the spit off his face with his sleeve.

"Well," he said, "now we know how the little black kids felt the first day they walked into the white school."

Activist distanceman Mike Stella, who had also been caught in the crush and nearly lost his athletic bag, stood there appalled. He was the one who had privately spoken up on Billy's behalf.

"Christ," said Stella, "you guys ought to have a couple of bodyguards."

At the nearest water cooler, he helped us wash the tomato stain off Billy's warmups with cold water.

But the experience seemed to provoke Billy's cold stubbornness, and he ran a good tactical race that day, qualifying for the final. Stella, who also had his eye on the 10,000-5,000 double, qualified too.