Harlan's Race

extra security in the studio. Bruce and I sat at his spotlit table, with two coffee mugs between us. I talked about Steve as son of the West — pioneer and native-American stock, beatnik in buckskin — the dreamer who wanted to write his own maverick version of the great American novel. Bruce didn’t bring up Steve’s real-life relationship with Angel — too complicated to handle on a talk show.
    “His work was his lover,” I told Bruce.
    The show pulled Bruce’s biggest audience yet. The switchboards lit up. The following days brought hate calls and hate letters. The letters mostly sounded alike, and it was clear that some evangelist had given his flock a form letter to be copied and sent.
    Inevitably, there was a letter from LEV., a swat on the knuckles, that said:
    I THOUGHT I’D GOTTEN YOU MORE DECENTLY FEARING AND BETTER EDUCATED
    BY NOW. I FAILED.
    Thanks to network twisting of Bruce’s arm, the next show featured the Rev. Chuck Chatsworth, just emerging as another spokesman of the religious fanatics. This way, the opposition’s view of awful books like Kisses could be aired. A few days later, there was a bomb scare in my condominium building. So I sent Michael to stay with Astarte, and called Harry to blow off steam.
    “Sounds like you need a little help from your friends,” he said.
    “I don’t need help,” I raved. “I need another planet to live on.”
    “Why don’t you babysit Chino for a change?” Harry asked. “He may be half nuts, but he’s still good in the woods. And he likes you. Maybe you can help him.”
    The cormorant did the unexpected and arrived at Westchester County Airport instead of Kennedy — spit-polished and jeans-generic as ever. His little .38 revolver had sneaked past airport security in a crotch holster. But he was thin, depressed and fighting a malaria flare-up. A packet of quinine bark rode in his luggage, that he’d gotten from some curandera.
    I wasn’t in much better shape — three years of harassment was starting to wear.
    Chino broke the set pattern immediately. He herded me to a travel shop, made me buy a flight bag and toiletries. He made me put on the hated body-armor vest (he was wearing one himself). An hour later, on tickets bought with his own pocket cash, we were on a flight to Florida.
    “Chingao, man. This is the best way to be unavailable for comment,” the Chicano grinned.
    “Where the hell are we going?”
    “I always wanted to see Key West. You can call Mikey from there, and tell him to feed your cat.”
    We were gone a month.
    When we got to Key West, Harry wired us $15,000 cash from somewhere, probably Julius, on the proviso that I repay it later. I wasn’t going to use credit cards — too easy to trace our movements by purchases.
    When I complained bitterly to Chino that he had dragged me far from my desk, where I needed to write, he said,“You’re rich now, shithead. Buy a portable typewriter.” So we went to a pawn-shop and paid cash for a used Olivetti. From there to a clothing store, where I got a linen suit and he got a Panama hat. From there to a sleazy beach hotel, where we melded into the herd of sleazy types who infest Florida. There I sat at a table under a palmetto shelter, hiding behind bad-guy sunglasses, growing long hair and a beard again, pecking out short stories and ignoring gay boys who didn’t recognize me, but were positive I was some rich daddy ready to be plucked. Chino swam like a barracuda in his ever-more-faded Speedo, looking like a drug-lord’s shotgun on holiday, and ignoring boys in his own style. He seemed strangely apathetic to brown asses now.
    As the hot humid days passed, my friendship with this brother enemy of LEV. went into a new phase.
    Chino kept educating me. He showed me alternate routes in and out of hotels, motels, gay men’s houses, stores, bus terminals, that a sewer rat would have missed. He taught me some of his best and dirtiest tricks. Sleight-of-hand with transport, so I’d be a less likely victim of car-bombing. Disguise — not so much wigs and makeup as changing the voice, body movements, even height — everything short of plastic surgery.
    “LEV. is a genius at disappearing,” he said. “If I could disappear on a boulevard in Saigon, with my gray eyes, you can disappear on the streets of New York. Most celebrities, they’re not willing to fucking disappear to escape the danger.”
    Chino brought a lonely and poignant presence into my lonely life. I chewed him out