Harlan's Race

Shelbourne came to my mind — a deep and hopeless sadness at what could have been. Surely he remembered me. Doing a little elementary investigative work of my own, I got hold of the class reunion committee in Chris’ old high school and learned that he was now a stringer for the Associated Press. But they didn’t have a current home address for him.
    Alone now, I kept up the long, long runs, taking unpredictable routes along miles of city streets, an anonymous bone-lean figure in old sweats, a runner with no race to train for except one of the heart. At night, getting more and more tired, I too was jumping awake like a deer. Chingao ... would I ever sleep well again?
    FOURTEEN
    Holidays 1979
    By December, I was exhausted from overtraining, overwriting, and overthinking about LEV. I brooded about the list of names, and made lots of notes about which of those people LEV. might be. I was through with thinking of Vince and myself as having a “relationship”. But it wasn’t possible to tell him to his face — he wasn’t around.
    Then, at mid-December, I got a phone call. Vince wanted to spend the holidays with me — was that cool?
    When I called H-C to tell them, Harry said, “Well, our kiddo is up to commencement exercises.”
    “What’s that?”
    ‘Vince still needs to see some live-fire action. So Julius got him into a ... well, let’s say it’s a training school for civilians who want to do that. It’s run by a Vietnam vet, out in the Carolina boonies somewhere. You pay him mucho bucks and jump through his hoops. If you come out alive, it’s the same as a combat ribbon. You can get jobs anywhere in the world.”
    I sat there in a long silence, digesting this. Finally I said, “You know, part of me can’t accept the fact that Vince is carrying it this far. I keep expecting him to come to his senses ... pull back ... like most of us do.”
    “Part of me saw it a thousand times in Southeast Asia,” Harry said. “Guys going crazy when their friends were killed.”
    I almost reminded Harry that I had gone crazy, too, but I wasn’t out there with a machine-gun, mowing people down. But the words stuck in my throat. The five thousand San Francisco gays who wrecked City Hall after Dan White was sentenced were women and men who were slowly going crazy. That night, gay leaders had tried in vain to calm them, shouting that violence is how straights solve problems. The mob hooted their leaders down, and put 61 police officers in the hospital.
    “Vince could get wasted in Carolina,” I said to Harry.
    “He could.”
    “I want to make one more try to stop him. He acts like he still loves me.”
    “Go ahead and try,” rasped Harry’s voice in my ear. “But it’s risky. You might find out he loves you less than you think.”
    "Look at all this frivolous bourgeois shit going on,”
    Vince growled, his cold breath blowing over his shoulder.
    It was dusk, December 23.
    Fifth Avenue was icy, reflecting car lights and frantic shoppers. People were buying, buying. Vince, Michael, John Sive and I were crunching over the ice, heading downtown. We were passing Saks Fifth Avenue, now owned by some foreign company. From the crowded entrance, a warm gust of women’s perfume and merry, merry Christmas music came out. We’d been spending, spending on tree ornaments, because Michael wanted a real family Christmas, the kind he’d never had with me around. This morning, Vince had shown up in his Jeep. He was surly, finding fault in straight bourgeois Christmas-making. I was guarded, not wanting to be used again.
    A grim foursome, we forged along Fifth Avenue in our warmest clothes. Vince had us all on edge — he was pissed off and restless in the extreme. John was a GQ image, shoulders hunched in a Bill Blass overcoat. Michael and I were Village gay hip in jeans, bomber jackets and earmuffs.
    I tried to change the subject.
    “Jacobs was telling me,” I said, “about a couple of gay men in New York with this immune-failure thing ... who also got some kind of rare cancer.”
    Vince stared at me.
    “The religious right is arming against us,” he growled, “and you’re staring into test tubes. I think that ..
    With his power to mutate like field-corn, Vince was wearing jump boots, jeans and a serious goosedown jacket. Under the commando-type wool cap, his hair was severely crew cut. His voice had changed — precise and toneless. His vibe was eerily straight, and he sounded more angry than ever.
    “... And LEV.