The Front Runner Read online

  Then he had me on my back and took his sweet revenge. Straddling my torso, smiling pridefully a little, he jerked himself off over my face. That image of him stays burned in my memory: He was kneeling with knees spread, the rain streaming down him, his hair full of sand, and behind him the white boiling burst­ing waves. The roaring deafened us. I scarcely felt the warm spurts on my face—the rain sluiced it off right away.

  We'd scarcely finished when a monster wave sent a flood of swirling foam extra far up the beach. It caught us cold, and in a second we were drenched, foamed, freezing, stung with sand. It nearly swept us back down the beach into the surf. We grabbed our clothes frantically and got up laughing so much we could hardly speak.

  "Talk about boys in the sand," said Billy.

  Endless gay films feature love scenes on the beach-he was alluding to this.

  "The boys in the sand are a mess," I said. "They get clamshells up their ass."

  We threw our clothes farther back on the beach, and Billy left his glasses there. Then he waded a little way into the icy surf. It wasn't very romantic swimming. The enormous waves were crumpling down with terrifying force, and every time the sweeping foam came up, it all but sucked us off our feet. Billy, with typical recklessness, started out to dive under the waves, but I held him back. So we just waded around thigh deep in the foam, watching each other dive and come up, the foam draining down over pur genitals.

  Billy waded over to me and embraced me. Then he shoved me, so that we both went over in the water. We wrestled there at the edge of the surf, laughing, rolling over and over, being really rough with each other. Another big wave went over us and we nearly drowned.

  We crawled out plastered with seaweed and sand, still laughing, and lay gasping safely away from the surf.

  "We have to be out of our minds," said Billy.

  "Do you think they have enough pictures?" I said.

  "Am I behaving like a Virgo?" said Billy. "Seriously.

  Is a Virgo supposed to let himself get balled on the beach in broad daylight in the middle of a hurricane?"

  "Only by a Leo," I said.

  We lay around choking with laughter, making vari­ous silly remarks like this. Finally we got up and went over to our clothes. The first thing Billy put on was his glasses.

  "Men never make passes at boys who wear glasses," I said.

  That broke us up again.

  We stood around for a minute letting the rain wash the salt and sand off us.

  Finally we put on our sticky sandy clothes and started walking back. We had sand in our crotches, and it itched. We walked with our arms around each other. The rain was finally stopping.

  "Sometimes I think back on how afraid I was to love you," he said. "It makes me laugh now."

  "Afraid?"

  "I was always afraid of loving someone as strong as myself."

  Those words moved me even more than when he'd said he loved me. I couldn't have stood anything effeminate in him.

  Vince passed us with a sad little wave, going out for his own run alone. Then we passed a woman in a sou'wester, going out to walk her dog. She threw us an odd glance. We knew she was thinking that the fairies were moving in from Cherry Grove. It was a good thing she hadn't come along half an hour earlier.

  Back in the house, the others were getting up with their sorrows and fixing their breakfasts, but we man­aged to stay happy. The hot shower was good, and dry clothes. We sat at the big redwood table by the window. I had eggs and toast and hot tea. Billy drank milk and ate some ripe pears, rubbing the juice off his chin. But then Steve and the Angel sat down, and Steve was trying to make him eat, and we both found it hard to keep laughing.

  All that day Billy and I tried to shake off the sorrow. We inflicted the sight of our affection on the others. It was cold and dank in the house, so we built a fire in the franklin stove. Billy and I sat wrapped up in a blanket together on the plaid couch. John Sive watched us with a. sad little smile and shook his head enviously.

  "Oo la la," said Delphine.

  The Angel Gabriel watched us curiously too. Pos­sibly it was the first time that he had ever seen any­thing but sadism between two men. We put on a little show for him, kissing each other tenderly. The Angel watched with a grave stoned expression.

  By afternoon the rain had stopped. The gale was still blowing, but it had shifted and was now blowing out to sea. The sky was a dark ominous blue. The ocean was a weird green. The huge waves were still rolling in, but now the wind was blowing their tops off. As each wave curled over, a cloud of snowy spume blew back from it like a comet's tail.

  It was an awesome spectacle, and we all went out on the beach to look at it.

  Then we walked over onto the National Seashore. The whole area was deserted. We might have been the last people left on earth after some terrible natural disaster, and we would, of course, not be able to re-populate it.

  We wandered barefoot along the boardwalk that winds through the park. All around us, nature was giving life. In the marshes, the cinnamon ferns were pushing up their great silky heads. On the dunes, the bayberry was coming into bloom. We bent to sniff the masses of little waxen white flowers, but the wind blew the fragrance away before it could reach our nostrils. I thought how incredible it was that a drop of my semen on Billy's skin, or of his on mine, would not root into life somehow. Nothing of our feeling would survive our deaths.

  I broke off a spray of bayberry and brushed it on his lips, so that they were yellow with pollen. He looked at me, possibly understanding what was bothering me, and kissed me so that both our mouths were dusted yellow.

  We were six threatened men. Only Billy and I walked holding hands. Each of the others ambled along alone with his thoughts. Vince was hunched, diffident, hands in pockets. Jacques was tight-faced, staring. Delphine played distractedly with his fluttering chiffon, scarf. John Sive strolled heavily, hands clasped behind his back European style. Steve kept looking anxiously at the Angel, whose hair was a tangled mess in the wind. Finally, gently, he took the boy's hand, but the Angel pulled his hand away.

  We walked down along the tide ponds on the bay side of the island. There the wind ruffled the flat water.

  "Look," said Jacques softly, "a snowy egret."

  We stood still. Across the nearest pond, near the inlet, the tall bird stood in the shallow water. It was" startlingly white and pure against the desolate stretch of salt grass beyond. It waded along slowly, bending its slender neck down, looking at us suspiciously. Then Vince moved, walking on, and the bird flapped up. It was frighteningly white against the stormy sky.

  For a moment the gale blew the bird cruelly. I felt a lump in my throat as I watched it. It planed sharply to one side, fighting with its wings. Then it was gliding safely downwind, away over the tide flats and dunes.

  I saw Billy's eyes follow it too. The last of my young birds.

  The ferry left the island at seven p.m. Steve and the Angel were staying on, but they walked down to the pier to see us off.

  As the ferry pulled away, the six of us were all leaning on the rail on the top deck, the wind blowing our hair, our collars turned up. We waved at Steve, who was standing on the pier. He waved back. The Angel Gabriel didn't wave.

  Then we sat down amid the jumble of suitcases, cat-carriers, dogs on leashes, children, and casually dressed straight parents. I felt defiant. Why should I take my arm off Billy's shoulders just because we were going back into straight country? I kept holding him. Sleepy from all the fresh air, and lovemaking, he yawned, slid down a little in the seat and put his head on my shoulder.

  None of the others were being demonstrative, so to all appearances we were the only gays on the ferry.

  Billy gave a soft chortling laugh. "You're getting there," he said. "We're gonna live together any day now."

  "Life is too short," I said.

  Finally a man in a heavy Irish sweater got up and came over to us, swaying, carrying a half-full glass in his hand. He was one of those Fire Island lushes wh
o walk onto the ferry with a martini.

  "Would you mind," he said, "not doing that in front of my wife and children?"

  I looked up at him with macho insolence. "Would you mind not drinking in front of us?" I said.

  13

  It was incredible that right after the Fire Island week­end Billy and I had our worst fight.

  With all the hassles and pressures, my fear of losing him had been troubling me more and more. I tried hard to hide the fear from Billy, but he sensed it. He was hurt more and more by what he saw as my lack of trust. He was quiet, less tender, and retreated into his training, his teaching and his yoga.

  On Friday morning, April 23, he mentioned casually that he had sat up late in the dorm talking with Tom Harrigan. "Consciousness-raising," he said.

  I was tired and edgy, and my imagination jumped to conclusions. I questioned Billy sharply. He insisted that they had only talked, about something troubling Tom. I scolded him for breaking a training rule. At that, he just walked away from me.

  All that day, he didn't speak to me much. That evening he didn't come over to my house.

  The next morning, Saturday, he put in a hard workout. Around noon, I realized that he had disap­peared from the campus.

  I was panic-stricken and asked Vince if he knew where he'd gone.

  "He went to New York," said Vince. "He hitched a ride down with Mousey, Janice and a couple others," naming four heterosexual students. "I just thought he was going to meet his father."

  A gay kid loose in New York City on a Saturday night could do almost anything. Or almost anything could be done to him. Horrors flooded my mind.

  I could see him being cruised or cruising on the street. The neon lights bathed his hair and shoulders in harsh color. I could see him agreeing, walking away with the other man. This was ludicrous, because Billy had never been fond of cruising. But I could see it.

  I could also see other, more possible things. He could be 'kidnaped and held for ransom by someone who recognized him. He could be beaten up, and his body wrecked, with the Trials just weeks away. He could be spirited away somewhere, drugged, gang-raped, whipped. I was sure that someone, somewhere, wanted to get their hands on the body of my Angel Gabriel.

  Recently a big murder scare had hit the Manhattan gays. In three weeks, five gays—two of them known activists—had been murdered. Two were fished out of the East River. The other three were found in tene­ment basements. All had been tortured, mutilated and killed by multiple stabs. The killer, who seemed to be a straight Jack the Ripper with a vendetta against homosexuals, had not been caught. The gays were convinced the police weren't working very hard at it. The wildest rumors were going around, and everyone was being careful.

  I could visualize Billy falling into the hands of this maniac. I could see the police photographing his nude body as it lay on the dirty cement floor, stuck in a pool of black, dried-up blood.

  My first impulse was to go to the city and look for him. But where?

  I hurried to my office and dialed his father's Cali­fornia number.

  John sounded sleepy—I must have awakened him. But when I told him, he was instantly alert. Hearing his deep, warm, precise voice reassured me a little.

  "I've tried hard to explain to Billy," he said, "what it means to be a man your age, and to go through what you did. He keeps saying he understands, but I don't think he really does, yet. But I don't think he would be unfaithful. The other times, he stayed with it to the end, and the end was always hard on him. It was always the other guy who walked out."

  "He always told me those other affairs weren't serious." "Serious, not serious . . . you can't pigeonhole feelings. They were intense, but they were kid stuff. The feeling he has for you is very different. One thing above all, Harlan, you have to trust him. He panics when someone he loves doesn't trust him. I learned that the hard way. I gave him a very bad time about drags, and it was the only time he ever ran away from home. He was in love with a kid who was using drugs, and I was just terrified he'd start. But when I quit nagging him and told him he was on his honor, the trouble stopped. And I don't think that, outside of smoking a joint now and then that he ever went near drugs. And of course when he got serious about running, he quit smoking."

  "Where am I going to look for him?"

  "Look, try the movie theaters. That's where he always goes when he's really down. That time, he was gone a week and I found him in a theater. You got a paper there? Tell me what's playing, and maybe I can give you a lead."

  "I fished the new Village Voice out of my pile of mail. (Ten years ago, I wouldn't have been caught dead reading the Voice.)

  "Is Song of the Loon playing, by any chance?" John asked.

  "No."

  "Too bad. That'd be a sure bet."

  "There's Warhohl's new film. There's a whole festi­val of Peter de Rome. The Experiment. That looks about it."

  John was silent a minute. "Try The Experiment first, then the others."

  "Experiment's at the Bedford on East 69th. Uptown. We're coming up in the world, John."

  "Slumming," said John.

  "The first show he can see is the two o'clock. If I leave right now, and he's there, I can catch him before he leaves."

  "Call me the minute you find him. And call me if you don't."

  I jumped into my Vega and drove like a madman down to Manhattan. It was a fine warm spring day, and I drove with the window open. The smell of the woods along the parkway reminded me painfully of that day, just thirteen months ago, when we'd begun our relationship.

  In Manhattan I drove around for half an hour, swearing out loud, trying to find a parking place in the crowded upper East Side streets. Finally I squeezed into one in front of an antique shop, and I ran, not walked, the six blocks to the theater.

  It was a plush new one, with a gleaming glass box office. It was twenty-five minutes to four. I asked the cashier, then the ushers, if they recalled seeing a young man of Billy's description. They didn't re­member, which wasn't surprising, since I didn't even know what he was wearing.

  So I went into the lounge and sat down on the jazzy red sofa of real leather to wait. About fifteen people were waiting there for the next show. They were drinking coffee from the expresso bar.

  I waited those twenty-five minutes in anguish. I was remembering seeing Loon with him, and touching him for the first time. I was sure I wouldn't survive losing him. If he ever leaves me, I thought, I'll kill him, and then I'll kill myself—even if it's before Montreal. I would put a single bullet hole into his perfect body, destroying it as effectively as the mur­derer I was still worrying about.

  Across from me, two well-dressed gays were sitting on another red sofa, sipping at their little white cups and talking in low voices. One was handsome, about six feet, with a build that even I would have called athletic. Not a runner—a swimmer, maybe. He had long, unbelievable, auburn curls. I looked at him hatefully, seeing him not as a possible lover but a possible rival.

  Finally the people started coming out. I sat watch­ing them pass the lounge door, shaking with ner­vousness. Then I saw Billy.

  He came walking slowly through the lobby, alone, hands in pockets, wearing an abstracted air. He was wearing his most tattered jeans, a washed-out purple jersey, his eternal worn-out Tigers, and a $150 jacket of brown split-suede that his father had given him for his last birthday. As a concession to anonymity, he had on dark glasses. With an aimless air, he stopped in front of the billboard announcing the coming attraction. a revival of Last Tango in Paris. Gravely he studied Marlon Brando as he grappled with his teenage dae­mon. He did not see me.

  My muscles started to slump with relief. I was just getting up when I overheard the two strange gays talking excitedly.

  "Look, that's Billy Sive," said the swimmer.

  "Darling, I can't believe it."

  "It's him. I saw him close up at the Garden."

  "And he's alone, darling. He must have broken up with what's his name, the coach."


  "God, he's beautiful," said the swimmer softly.

  He got up, his eyes fixed on Billy. I knew he was going to cruise him. My first impulse was to walk over there and break his thoroughbred neck. Then a base thought entered my mind. I would try to watch what happened, and stay out of sight, and see if Billy would let himself be picked up.

  Billy turned away from the billboard and pushed out through the glass doors. The swimmer followed, while his friend stayed sipping coffee. As casually as I could, I went out on the street. I could see then-two heads among the people milling outside. My hands were clammy with the sweat of fear.

  Billy was already halfway down the block, ambling sadly along, not looking at anything, his uncombed hair blowing in the spring sunshine. The swimmer came up by him, walked at his side, spoke to him. Billy didn't look at him, just hunched his shoulders, and kept going. The swimmer laid his hand on Billy's arm. Billy shook it off.

  They reached the corner. The swimmer was still talking and put his hand on Billy's arm again. This time Billy turned swiftly on the swimmer, his fists clenched, and even from thirty feet away I could see the hostile expression in his eyes. The swimmer shrugged and turned back toward the theater, passing me.

  Billy stepped off the curb and started across the street. He hadn't noticed that the light was red. A battered yellow cab was speeding along the crosstown street toward him. He didn't see it.

  I sprang forward, yelling, "Billy!" I could see him lying terribly injured on the street, legs shattered. I could see an ambulance screaming with blinking red lights.

  The cab screeched to a halt just four feet from Billy's uninsured million-dollar injury-free legs. It skidded a little sideways, the smoking tires leaving black skidmarks on the street. Billy started a little and jumped sideways.

  The cabbie leaned out the window. "Mutha-fuckin cock-sucka! Why doncha watch where ya goin?"