Harlan's Race

relief. “Let’s — I don’t know .. “Let’s get to know each other.”
    “Court me, Harlan. I’d love that. Everybody always wanted my body, but nobody ever courted me first. Except Russell, who wanted to shower me with diamonds and caviar. But you ... just dragged me off to your cave.” “What’d you have in mind? Sleigh rides in the moonlight?”
    “Mr. Brown finally has a sense of humor. Unbelievable.” “Carry you up the stairs?”
    He looked down with pain in his eyes. ‘Yeah—we never got to the stairs, did we? We fucked on the door mat.”
    I studied his expression. In it was the heartbreak of every man’s hunger for love, warring with every man’s hunger for pure napalm sex.
    “How about starting out with a run together?” I said.
    It was good — running at an easy pace along Rosewood Avenue, with the santa ana in our faces. Watching that magnificent young human being in motion beside me. Seeing his sweat slowly stain the back of his faded Watergate T-shirt. His feet striking so decisively onto the concrete. His long burnished legs with their bandage-wrapped knees, striding with the rangy ease of a wolfs. Genitals jarring gently in the front of his shorts.
    At mid-afternoon, Vince and I walked up the alley to Paul’s and Darryl’s.
    As the house prepared to celebrate New Year’s, Harry was helping Chino move in. The gay caterer almost had a heart attack as he went out to his van for another tray, and met Chino coming in with his shoulder harness and gun holsters. The caterer asked Paul quaveringly if he expected trouble at the party.
    Out in back, on the sheltered deck, six gay men luxuriated in the warm afternoon sun, celebrating the New Year. Paul’s and Darryl’s Abyssinian cat went from lap to lap. The Fame sound track was blasting out of the stereo. We traded raunchy jokes, and laughed till our sides hurt. I’d been sad for so many years, I had almost forgotten how to laugh.
    At sunset there was a wonderful surprise — Michael and Astarte arrived from LAX. Paul and Darryl had flown them from New York. Russell arrived later. The laughter got louder, as Vince started clowning. Holding Nefertari, the cat, in the air, he was disco-dancing around the patio with her. The cat hung in his hands with bored trust, paws dangling limp, yellow eyes staring down at him. People were falling over laughing as they watched.
    Moi? I prowled around feeling the warm sun on my skin, holding a goblet of orange juice like it was the Holy Grail.
    Was it possible that I was starting to like being gay?
    The patio was crowded with friends and associates of Valhalla, people I’d be working with. A toast was proposed.
    “To Harlan’s move,” Paul yelled above the music.
    “Hear, hear,” everyone yelled back, and drank.
    Raising my own glass, I saluted them. But as evening came, and the party got even louder, a shadow came over me. I got to thinking of holidays past, and family lost, and went indoors, to the quiet, empty TV den. There I sat at the phone, got Marian and Joe’s number from Information, and called them up.
    “Hello.” Marian’s familiar voice sounded sad and heavy.
    “Hi, sis,” I said.
    “Bro!” Her voice wavered between glad surprise and embarrassment.
    “Happy New Year. How’s Joe?”
    “Not good. He’s dying slowly. Where are you calling from?”
    “West Hollywood. I just moved out here.”
    ‘Wonderful,” she said with false brightness. Then her voice broke. For a minute, all I heard was muffled sobs.
    Finally she said, ‘Bro, I’ve missed you for years. I burned my bridges with you, and I’m so sorry.”
    “Well, maybe we should talk about new bridges.”
    Marian didn’t know that Betsy’s lover had been killed, and she was shocked. Betsy had been out of touch with her, too.
    At midnight, as everybody sang “Auld Lang Syne,” Harry, Chino, Vince and I traded looks, and touched our glasses together. The challenge that faced us in the coming year — the Memorial 5-K, eight months away — passed over us like the shadow of a great wing.
    PART FOUR
    Coming Home
    TWENTY
    First months in 1981 Readying for the race
    Valhalla had surprised everybody — the upstart whose Night and Fog had taken the documentary prize at Cannes. Now Paul was pitching the Angel development to potential investors. But suffering homos in Nazi death camps was a safer subject than Steve Goodnight’s tale of abused youth. Tinseltown, even the rich closet gays in it, wouldn’t touch