Harlan's Race

his hard back through the expensive conservative shirt.
    “Have you been anywhere that wouldn’t look good on a lab report?” I whispered.
    “Do I look like I’m dying?” His hand was at my fly.
    Steve’s old bedroom was luxurious but masculine. The wide bed had an antique headboard carved with naked Greek gymnasts and youths on horseback. Vince’s elegant clothes, and my more casual wear, made a trail across the Chinese rug. We yanked off the covers. Naked, he threw himself down prone, looking startlingly bronze against Steve’s expensive linen sheets. He wanted to head straight into what he loved most. Bracing his thighs apart, he was trembling violently all over. In the bed-lamp light, his carved runner’s buttocks had a metallic sheen. My knees were vibrating like a 16-year-old’s, from pure emotion, and need.
    I lay down, and kissed the inside of one thigh, letting him feel my warm breath. He groaned — I knew he loved the feel of breath.
    ‘What did you say about foreplay?” I said against his skin.
    He smelled like a forest — everything that is natural to a forest, compost and ferns. As I ran my mouth up his spine, he moved like a forest under me — vines twining, fronds unfolding, strange orchids penetrated by strange birds with long bills. For a moment, he was a cloud forest, unexplored, a thousand miles into some lost continent. A hundred thousand kinds of trees and vines and flowers, some poisonous, some with power to heal, none known to me. I was a stranger, feeling baffled and ignorant, like a young botanist with an empty note-pad. I wanted to be a tree, and sink my taproot in his body for a thousand years.
    “Turn over,” I said. “Make love to me like a man, not a goddam animal.”
    He obeyed, and swallowed me into the kind of kiss that had haunted my memories. I jujued the foreplay out of him. Then, with pure recklessness and contempt bred of familiarity, I forgot every spooky thought about health, every caution of Doc Jacob’s, every question about where this man had been, and both of us went absolutely wild.
    Early in the morning, waking to the roar of a sanitation truck outside, the clang of garbage cans, and pigeons cooing on the windowsill, I heard Vince quietly dressing. The feeling that I’d been used came over me. He left without a word. But when I finally got up, a note lay on the dining table. He’d written it on a sheet of my typewriter paper. Standing there naked, I read it over and over:
    Dear Harlan,
    I still love you ...
    you don’t know how much,
    and ...
    I hope you and I will someday get in synch, but...
    right now things feel weird.
    Anyway ...
    I’ve got my thing happening.
    So ...
    I’ll stay in touch.
    Love, Vince
    I went to a pay phone and called Harry and Chino about Vince’s visit. “Rich daddy?” said Harry. “Mox nix.”
    “Who is he? Julius?”
    “Come on, you dumb shit. Hang in there.”
    “But —”
    Harry’s voice had a cold-steel edge. “Read my lips, mister. Back off. Or I’ll be very pissed.”
    Harry had never called me “mister” before. So I choked down my rage, and said no more. A week later, I was even angrier when it was clear that Vince had given me clap. The whole thing was so embarrassing, that I almost went to a strange doctor for the shots. Instead, I faced Jacobs. He didn’t tsk-tsk as he jabbed a needle into me. Instead, he talked about the cases in New York — several dozen now
    —    in which the common factor was swollen nodes and immune-system failure. Jacobs was ticked off about the way a few public-health workers were circulating the phrase “gay disease”.
    That month, Pollen Kisses came out to wildly mixed reviews. More than anything else that Steve wrote, his autobiography made America’s toes curl. A couple of bookstores were fire-bombed for selling it.
    I got so angry over the lack of understanding for Steve’s work that I jumped at a chance to set the record straight. Bruce Cayton was now 55, and tired of globe-trotting after stories. He wanted stories to trot to him. So his gift at yarning and social comment had landed him a late-night talk show, and after the Pollen storm broke, he wanted me as a guest.
    “You were one of the few people who knew Steve well,” Bruce pointed out.
    It would be my first public appearance since the trial
    —    a testing of the waters. If I were going to publish my own work, I had to be seen.
    The day we did the show, the network was a nervous nelly, with