The Front Runner (8 page)

He shrugged. "I've taken it. Always."

I sighed. "That's bad."

"Everybody was taking it," he said.

"I know," I said. "But the point is, they close their eyes to their favorites taking it. If you're blacklisted,

suddenly they maybe discover that you've taken it, and whammo."

"Then I guess the kiss of death is on me," said Vince morosely.

"Well, we'll just have to be optimistic," I said. "At any rate, from now on, we have to think of every contingency. We have to figure out every strategy that they'll try beforehand, and block it if we can. Because at least one of you is going to Montreal, probably, and I wouldn't want you knocked off the Olympic team just because we messed up our tactics. Some people in track, and some people in the country as a whole, will be very unhappy if any of you represent the U.S. They're going to take it as an insult to our national masculinity. I have a feeling that these people won't stop at anything to keep you kids from setting foot on the Montreal track."

Their eyes were fixed on mine, full of naked seriousness.

"We don't know anything much about track politics," said Billy. "We'll mess up for sure."

"You leave the politics to me," I said. I smiled a little. "That's what I'm for. All you have to worry about is running. And when I figure out the politics, you do what I suggest. That's all."

"We may have to go to court before it's over," said Billy.

"We might," I said. "Your father may have to help us out."

"Shit," said Vince, "I'd love to see the AAU in court."

"It won't be fun," I said. "Before this whole thing is over, we may have moments when we wish we'd never been born."

"But it's worth doing," said Billy, softly.

"Yes," I said, "it is."

When they got up to leave, I pointed at the messy kitchen and said, "One of you stay for KP." I hoped Billy would volunteer. To my delight, he did.

In another minute we were alone, busily cleaning up the piles of carrot peelings and nutshells and washing teacups. I was feeling benevolent and able to control

my feelings. And I was hungry to know more about him. So I said, "Tell me about your father."

"He's, coming to visit me at Christmas," said Billy, "so you'll meet him. My dad is a great guy."

I was washing the teacups in the old-fashioned enamel sink, and Billy was drying them with one of my scroungy dishtowels.

"So your father is gay."

"My mother left him when I was about nine months old. She abandoned me. He married a gay after that, and the two of them raised me."

"How did your father manage to hold onto his law career and live openly with a gay?" I asked.

"Well," said Billy, "my father goes for TV's. None of my father's business colleagues ever suspected Frances was a male. He looked like a very slender Marilyn Monroe. He had beautiful silver-blonde hair. My father would entertain, and Frances would float around, saying, 'Another cocktail, darling?' Visually, he was incredible."

"A hermaphrodite?" I asked.

Billy shook his head. "No, he had male organs. I know, because I stumbled in on him once when he was in the bathroom. He was very modest 'and he screamed. After that I took it for granted that everybody's mother had a cock." He laughed a little, very busy with the teacups. "You can imagine what a shock I got when I found out the truth. I was in seventh grade, and one day the kids were handing around some dirty pictures. I saw a cunt for the first time. It was all red and wet, like a wound."

He was putting the cups carefully back in the cupboard. "To me, the real trauma was learning about the heterosexual world. Know what I mean?"

"So you're the second generation of the nation of gays," I said softly.

"But Frances and my father broke up when I was twelve," said Billy sadly. "After that, he's had a whole raft of lovers, but nothing permanent."

"So you grew up knowing everything?"

"Shit," said Billy, "I was into junior high before it really sank into my head that I lived in a different

world than the other kids. I mean, I grew up in the gay ghetto in San Francisco. It was all I knew."

As a veteran of secretiveness and agonizing, I was fascinated by the kid's openness and directness. I was shortly to learn that Billy didn't volunteer personal information unasked. But if you asked him something straight out, he would give you the cold answer, without dramatics and without hesitation, no matter how personal it was.

When we had cleaned up the kitchen, I motioned him to the fireplace and threw one more log on the fire. He sank down onto the rag, and the setter immediately came over and curled up against him blissfully. I sat down in the wing chair.

"Did your father actually take you around in the gay world?" I asked.

"Not right away," said Billy. "He was pretty careful about what he let me see when I was smaller. He let me find out about things little by little, as I was ready for them. You know, like straight parents do."

"The straights would say you've been brainwashed," I said.

"Maybe," he said. "On the other hand, they brainwash their kids too. Anyway, I might have grown up straight. My father didn't force it on me. I mean, I chose it freely."

I was curious to see just how far I could force my probing.

"The straights might wonder about the relationship between you and your father," I said.

Billy shook his head and smiled. "No way. He was always very concerned about that. He wanted our relationship to be as healthy as possible. He never fooled around with men in front of me. He and Frances were very modest. He knew it had to be that way if I was going to grow up with my head in one piece."

I was shaking my head slowly in disbelief. John Sive had to be some kind of gay Dr. Spock.

"When did you have your first lover?" I asked.

"When I was fifteen." Billy was gazing into the fire, stroking the dog slowly. "It was kind of an unhappy

business. I mean, I was happy with it, but he wasn't. Ricky was a mess, he couldn't accept himself. We broke up. Later on I heard what happened to him. In college he got busted on drug possession, and sentenced to twenty years. In prison he got gang-raped and committed suicide."

For a minute I had a terrible image in my head of Billy being gang-raped by five or six macho convicts. "Anything like that ever happen to you?"

He shook his head. "I got beat up by straights a few times, that's all."

"I presume," I said, "that you don't mess around with drugs."

"No," he said, "I was never into dope. That's something my dad is pretty uptight about. I don't even use poppers. I've always been afraid they would take away my edge in a race or something."

"Who came after Ricky?"

"Three more. All unhappy. Like, I haven't had much luck. My father was always saying, 'I raised you to be such a well-adjusted boy, what's going wrong with you?'"

He was still gazing into the fire, and his hand had stopped stroking the dog. He looked sad, and somehow older. I got my first glimpse, at that moment, of a tremendous sense of loss that he lived with. He was only twenty-two, and two mothers and four serious lovers had already caved in under him.

"So you weren't open about being gay in school," I said.

"No, I wasn't," he said.
"I
kept very quiet about it. I didn't feel guilty or anything. But I felt very, you know, very intimidated by straight attitudes, the more I learned about them. I'm not really a very brave person, maybe. But when I felt troubled, I could always go and talk it out with my dad. By the time I got to my junior year at Oregon, I wasn't really worried about it. So when Lindquist blew my cover, I thought, what the hell, from now on I'm going to come out."

His casual low-key confession was giving me a lump

in the throat. We sat listening for a few moments to the soft sighing of the log on the fire. It was getting late, but I couldn't resist prolonging the moment.

"Have you ever slept with a girl?" I asked in a half-teasing tone of voice.

He shook his head and laughed.

"Do you hate girls?" I asked.

He laughed again. "No. Why should I? They just don't interest me. I mean, I'm not
totally
indifferent. I can feel amiable toward a girl, and be friends. There was a girl at Oregon, Janet Huss, we were friends. A lot of people assumed we were serious. Once in a while I thought I'd tell her I was gay, but I didn't. Then she found out about it when Lindquist kicked me off the team." He paused a moment, gazing into the fire. "She was very ugly about it. I told her, 'It's your own ugliness, it's going to make you ugly.' But she didn't believe me."

"Well, now you know," I said. "Men give, and women take."

He looked at me questioningly, and didn't say more. I sensed that he wanted to question me about my life. Since it had always been my policy never to discuss my personal life with my athletes, I was not about to answer his questions.

"Well," I said, "it's nine-thirty, and you ought to be getting back to the dorm. Who are you rooming with?"

I got up, and he got up too.

"I asked for a room to myself. Vince and Jacques are rooming together."

"What are the relationships here? Just so I don't put my foot in it."

Billy was picking up his battered Mao jacket from the window seat.

"Vince and Jacques are the lovers. I'm alone."

"Tell me one more thing," I said.
"I
just can't believe three of you on that team. One, maybe, but
three, . ."

Billy laughed, pulling on his jacket. "Why not? It's a big team, sixty guys. And a big school."

"How did the three of you end up there?"

"Oh, we sort of accumulated. I met Vince my senior year in high school, when we rah in the Golden West Invitational. That was some race, man. He sat on my neck, and then he tried to blast me. Lucky for me, it was just over his distance. I beat him to the tape by about three inches. After the race we got to talking, and we became friends right away."

"Lovers?"

"No," said Billy, leaning against the door, answering as if I had just asked him the time. "D'ya have to be lovers all the time? No, we're just best friends. That summer we went crazy running together. We went to every open race we could get to, and we had a great time. And we'd decided we wanted to be on the same college team, and Oregon wanted to sign us both, so that was that."

"Then you met Jacques at Oregon."

"Right. And Jacques was still straight, then, but he'd been having suspicions about himself. When he saw Vince, it was love at first sight. Poor Jacques, he really suffered. Both of us helped him. Jacques adores Vince, but he's awfully nervous about the whole thing. I'll never forget how he cried when Lindquist got done with him. Vince and I were ready to kill Lindquist just because of Jacques."

"I've noticed he's very protective about Jacques."

"Yeah. A lotta guys that don't know Vince, they think he's a bird of paradise, and very fickle. But he's more of a mother hen."

Billy was leaning against the door, looking so wise and so appealing that the old panic was rising in me.

"Well," I said, trying to sound hearty, "any time any of the three of you have something on your minds, feel free to make an appointment to see me in my office."

Billy was opening the door, and the fresh night air poured into the room. "We sure will, Mr. Brown. You've been great. Thanks a lot."

He went out into the snow and closed the door. I was left alone.

FOUR

THE three boys' coming to my team also caused quite a little stir in the track world. When runners of their caliber change teams, it always causes a stir. Usually, however, such runners move to a team or school of equal or higher status.

"Prescott?" everybody wanted to know. "Where's that?"

Right away we had some reporters nosing around the campus. The three runners said glibly that they'd come to Prescott because they liked my coaching methods, and that they were tired of the impersonality of big schools.

As the December days passed, I was better able to assess my three new team members.

Jacques' biggest problem, I could see, was his nervousness. He was going to be one of those runners who wind up with a shelf full of trophies and a bleeding ulcer. He was not only nervous about being gay, but about competition. He went through agonies before races, shaking, throwing up.

He settled straight into his studies, spending long hours in the biology lab. His main interest was ornithology. He also played the alto recorder, and immediately joined the campus's tiny pro musica. He made a few friends and amused everyone no end, but mostly he stayed with the team and me.

Vince's biggest problem was going to be those fragile legs of his. He came to me broken down by Lind-quist's high-power training methods. It pained me, as I worked over his tendinitis, to think that a little common sense would have averted this. Slavedriver though I am, I think that there is such a thing as enough stress, beyond which a given athlete's system breaks down. I

got hold of an experimental drug, dimethyl sulphoxide, that had been successful in reducing the pain and inflammation of tendinitis, and started dosing him with it.

Despite all I'd heard of Vince's temper on the track, he was very docile with me. I just told him what I thought he should do, and he did it, and I checked in on him every other day. Like Jacques, he was a good student, and he went right to work. He was also cheerfully promiscuous—while he didn't sleep around much, because he was too busy, he would lay anything that interested him, even girls. Jacques put up with this stoically.

Vince hadn't been at Prescott a week before he tried to lay me. "How about it, Mr. Brown?"

Had this been Denny Falks six years ago, I would have jumped right out the window. This time I took it very casually.

"Listen, you little nymphomaniac," I said, "you're a very attractive kid. But I have a rule about not going to bed with my runners, and I never break it. It's the only way I can keep a job and earn a living. You understand?"

"Shit," he said, disappointed. "I really wanted to find out what you're like. We heard so many stories."