Harlan's Race

but he dropped out of UCLA.”
    “I can’t hack the attitudes,” Chino growled in my ear. “There was a loud noise outside the classroom, and I hit the dirt. The fucking kids laughed at me. There’s no respect.”
    Neither Chino nor Harry said anything about Operation Boomerang. Now and then, they sent me a bill, and I paid it. To make ends meet, they were doing a little bounty-hunting. Harry handled the big predators. Chino was still jittery, afraid he’d shoot somebody for no reason. So our terrible SEAL handled the cases where you walk unarmed into a local beanery and collar somebody who owes lots of parking fines.
    Doc Jacobs kept mumbling about gay men’s health. But everyone I knew was healthy. Steve’s and Angel’s deaths seemed like a horrible fluke.
    Besides, I was too worried about other things.
    One worry was Jacques. After an angry silence, my pheasant finally wrote a chatty letter from Hawaii.
    Dear Harlan,
    Well, it’s a different world here. I am a barnie
    —    short for barnacle. Another way of saying haole
    —    white man.
    Two of my research assistants are Hawaiians who know the uplands really well. One of them, Eric, turns out to be mahu. He blurted this pleasantly in front of Eileen, so there was no question of closets. My work has started off well.
    Mahu is Hawaiian for gay. “Oh, he’s mahu,” you say about somebody. There are no shadings of mahu. None of the obsession with taxonomy that the haole gay world is stuck in. No queens, bears, machos, tops, bottoms, dads, nellies, muffins, butches, femmes, kikis, bi’s, etc. It’s all just mahu.
    A bigger worry was why Betsy was so out of touch. When she finally sent the first snapshots, she wrote:
    Hi Harlan,
    ’Scuse the delay. So much happening. Buried in practices and meets. A new school year. I do apologize. And I have a lover! I met Marla right here in Marysville, at the spring rice festival. She is living with me, and I think it will be good for Falcon to see two of us in the house.
    Gotta run ... more next time.
    Love, Betsy
    A couple of times I called her, but our conversations had to be vague because of possible bugging. She never called me. Our warm alliance was struggling to survive the chill of time and distance.
    September 9, 1979
    The first Billy Sive Memorial 5-K came off. It was held in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. I didn’t go, but I sent the race director a telegram that he read to the crowd.
    Unlike the elephant, the gay community has a short memory. Maybe it is our slavish devotion to fleeting youthful looks, and our loss of family oral history, that makes us so careless about our posterity. I had already seen a few early-day pioneers dropped by the roadside like used-up tubes of lube, to make room for the porn star of the day, and the activist of the month. Celebrated drag queens came and went like footprints on the beach. So I was surprised when the gay press reported the large entry for the race — 724 runners. And the large crowd, that listened to my words. Straight sports news ignored the event.
    So Billy was not forgotten by gay America. His death had stained so deep in the wall of memory, that it couldn’t be wiped away like some graffiti.
    If only the larger America remembered him too.
    THIRTEEN
    Autumn 1979
    One October evening, Vince called me up. He was in town, he said.
    We chatted a bit. In his voice was the yearning, so I invited him to dinner the next night. Michael grumbled about my bad taste in lovers, then went to Astarte’s for the night, so I could have some privacy.
    When Vince came in the door, he didn’t kiss me hello, just touched my hand. Then he stood studying the table laid for two, with some of Steve’s good linens and silver.
    “Living in town brings out the piss-elegant in you, Harlan,” he said. “It’s a side of you I don’t know.”
    We sat down to beef Wellington and other good stuff that I’d ordered sent over from the Fifth Avenue Hotel a few blocks away, because I didn’t want to cook. I was dressed casually. White-on-white shirt, no tie, best jeans, and Steve’s favorite beaded belt that I’d found in his closet.
    Sitting there in the candlelight, Vince looked magnificent — and it wasn’t the look of gym and tanning salon. Clearly he had been mountain-climbing, sky-diving, mud-sucking through swamps. His fitness had the tension, the knife-edge that I recognized. He even held himself differently — that “at ease” manner with neck always braced.