The Front Runner (6 page)

So he traced me through Bruce Cayton, and came to see me.

I'll never forget that evening. We sat in my small apartment on West Ninth Street. Joe made me his pitch. I vacillated. Joe kept talking.

I sat there looking at this tall, genial, old curmudgeon with his thatch of prematurely white hair and his baggy, gray suit. He was drinking a whiskey straight up, and I was drinking a glass of milk.

I thought about being back in the locker rooms with naked athletes again, and all the torments that would mean. I was now a battle-hardened gay veteran, used to indulging my sex, and I might lose control of myself with some really attractive runner.

"Look," I said, "I think I have to be honest with you. It's something you ought to find out now, rather than later. I was forced to resign at Penn State because a rumor went around that I was a homosexual."

"Yes, I heard the rumor," said Joe, "when I was trying to track you down."

"The kid started it himself. I didn't touch him, and that's a fact. He was gay, and he knew I was gay. I wasn't interested in him, so he started the rumor out of spite."

Joe sat thinking.

"Nobody knows it for sure outside," I said, my voice shaking a little. "But if it ever comes out, your school might be embarrassed. And your alumni, the parents . . ."

"My alumni are still mostly under thirty," said Joe. "And nobody pressures me."

He sat thinking a moment more.

"Well," he said, "I've already got a couple of gays on my faculty. They haven't given me any problems. I offer you the job with just one condition. If you feel like shacking up with one of the students or faculty,

that's your business—as long as he's not a minor. I just don't want trouble with the law. Otherwise it's not my business, or the school's business, or society's business what you do. And frankly, nobody on campus would pay attention. It's a live and let live place, which is what I wanted."

By now I was so scarred and cautious that I could scarcely believe the incredible Christian kindness of this offer.

"I'm hard on kids," I said. "I'm not one of your mealy-mouthed permissive liberals." (This from a man who was having some second thoughts about conservatism.)

Joe looked reflective. "I've talked to some men who were on your team at Penn State. One of them expressed their sentiments pretty well. He said, 'Harlan Brown was a mean son of a bitch, but the runners that failed him went away knowing that they had failed personally. They were unable to blame it on his harshness.' "

He swallowed the rest of his scotch. "A four-year contract, Harlan. Twenty thousand to start with. Board and keep on campus, so you'll be spared living expenses. Think about it. Let me know sometime during the next week."

I swallowed the rest of my milk. "I don't have to think about it," I said. "I'll take it."

At Prescott, I found—for the first time since my childhood—a home. Joe's wife Marian was as kind as he was. Both of them taught me the real meaning of liberalism—a tough-minded and virile liberalism. The two of them were patient with me during the first few months as I licked my wounds and healed myself.

Prescott was even structured like a family. It was, if you must, a kind of a commune, and it worked. Faculty and students lived mixed together, with no visible difference in status. The students ran the campus, worked in the administration and even shoveled snow. Joe was almost never to be found in his walnut-paneled office in the main building (which had once been his house), unless he actually had some work to do there. He was

Usually out on the campus with his clipboard, thinking, listening, talking. Or he was traveling to get new ideas and new people.

No attempt was made to regulate anybody's morals at Prescott. Students and faculty were free to set up their own living arrangements. The dorms were coed. I found a few other gays already on campus. There was a tiny gay-lib student group, about four or five, 'and there were the two male faculty members he'd mentioned, who were living together. Since both the faculty and the student body were already so full of colorful heterosexual eccentrics, nobody paid much attention to them.

Prescott was not a fancy place. The buildings were strictly functional, and the equipment was simply what was needed. Joe wanted something that really worked, not a glittering showcase full of problems and high overhead. As a result, it was one of the few private schools in the U.S. that wasn't having money problems, and whose enrollment was growing. When I came there, the school had 1,500 students, about the size of Oberlin.

The reason that an ex-Marine officer could feel so comfortable at Prescott was that a lot of my ideas had changed. My hardshell conservatism had suffered a death blow. I was no longer able to judge people, or myself, by the same standards as before. I was still deeply patriotic, and loved the flag, and believed in America's mission. But my patriotism was now tinged by deep anxiety over the human flaws in my country, and I began to think that these flaws should be polished away.

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, some-

thing 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.

THREE

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 were 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.