Harlan's Race

had wet dreams about Vince bringing drama back to track. But all that ended in 1976, when his closet door was blown open at Oregon State. Along with Billy and Jacques LaFont, who were also fingered in the gay witch-hunt. We had hoped that Vince would join Billy on the 1976 Olympic team. Ironically, it was greed, not gay, that blitzed Vince out of athletics — he’d taken under-the-counter money from meet directors. So the AAU tore up his card.
    Now, at 26, Vince was no boy, but he still had a vulnerability, an odd kind of innocence, that made him so deeply appealing to me. He even got me feeling goddam protective. Now he faced life baffled, lonely—running career destroyed, best friend murdered. He was running wild, lost somewhere in the gay bars and back rooms of Manhattan, where he’d plunged after Billy’s death. We’d been out of touch since Mech’s sentencing. I had no idea if he was still in New York, still single.
    My hand unzipped my jeans and pulled it out. Closing my eyes, I felt the sun on me. My hand was Vince’s — his mouth, his heat against me like the sun. How I wished I’d done this with Chris Shelboume, my high-school love. It was amazing how deep the pain and guilt still was, of that stillborn passion of my youth.
    By mid-afternoon, I was tired as hell, my shoulders hurt, and I had four bushels on.
    Screw this. Time to quit.
    As the boat thrummed into the Patchogue marina, one buyer’s truck was still parked on the quay. A clammer was already there, selling seven bushels of little necks at $30. The buyer’s helper was bagging clams for the truck. I tied up and unloaded my own modest haul. Buyers had me pegged as a beginner, because I always came in light.
    “One chowder at $10, two cherry at $15, one neck at
    $30,” the buyer said, and slapped $55 cash into my palm.
    I wasn’t kidding myself that I’d survive at this line of work. But never had a bit of money seemed so sweet. Grabbing a water hose, I cleaned my boat.
    Then I walked into the marina parking lot, grabbed my truck and drove into town. Nobody looked at me with any idea that they’d seen my gnarly unshaven face on the TV news. A dime into a pay phone told Steve that I was coming. By evening, I had checked out of the motel and was back at the marina, with a sack of groceries. At the pump, I spent the last of the $55 to gas the boat. As the sun set, I was heading out past the breakwater again. The ten-mile trip across the bay could be short if I pushed full throttle on the 150-horsepower engine. Yet I was still so hungry for aloneness that I didn’t hurry the trip.
    It was dark by the time the boat neared that long barrier beach, with its dunes showing in the moonlight. I slowed the engine to a crawl. Ahead was Davis Park, that small marina and community of beach houses. Windows glowed with gentle gaslight or kerosene lamps. People in this part of the island liked to live primitive.
    Off to the west, a lone glow in some wind-bent trees was the house of my friend, Steve Goodnight.
    To me, that 30-mile sandbar was one of the most beautiful spots on Earth.
    Carved by the sea, Fire Island once belonged to a few tiny communities of smugglers and whalers. In the 1930s, fey folk of the arts and theater started renting beach houses here. Cherry Grove became the world’s first gay and lesbian town, followed by The Pines. Meanwhile, straight freedom-seekers were clustering in Davis Park and Bayberry Dunes. By the 1970s, Fire Island had become a beachhead of the sexual revolution, and lived out its courting rites like some South Sea society that Margaret Mead was there to study.
    Here in Davis Park, some weekenders wanted family fun. But most were single, looking to party and do drugs, and find true love. Failing that, they’d settle for screwing anybody of the opposite sex. All this made Davis Park a trading-floor of disease. But didn’t antibiotics fix almost everything? Nine miles to the west, similar partying — minus children — went on in The Pines and Cherry Grove.
    Steve had chosen Davis Park because he swore he did more writing here than in The Grove. He also hated the idea of living in a gay ghetto, and carved a toehold in the mainstream. The straight visitors, who tended to be liberal, had learned that the recluse writer was not a stereotype sally, but a prickly Texan whose shadowy young companion was not a lover but his adopted son.
    Stomach churning, I shut off my running lights, and nosed the boat silently into