Harlan's Race

photographs. Maybe he knew he’d overstepped, and wanted to recoup by returning them. I’d have to assume he kept copies.
    At home, depression closed in again. No new thing. Love was a crematorium with Billy’s body in it. Having Billy, then Vince, had insulated me briefly from the homosexual’s terror of having nobody. Would I wind up being the old guy cruising bars again for five minutes of skin contact with another living human being? Haunting the tenderloin and paying the young guys like I’d been? Who cared about an old guy?
    About to burn the photographs wrathfully in my own fireplace, I remembered the grand statement that I wasn’t ashamed. And I wasn’t, dammit. So the photos went into that banker’s box of mementos that I called The Box.
    I wrote a note on the stuffiest-looking card I could find:
    Dear Russell,
    Thanks for a special time. I’m glad to know you.
    In the long run, friends matter as much as lovers. Best always,
    Harlan
    FIFTEEN
    Winter 1980
    The visit with Russell was the start of several months where I stepped off into deep space, into strange and scary worlds.
    Prescott College had folded. With intense emotion, I read in the January 20 Times about a leveraged take-over of Joe’s software company. Joe had lost his means to underwrite the college, and too many alumni had backed off from “immorality on campus”. Eyes filled with tears, I was sure that religious fascists were behind this move to cut the school’s throat. When I’d calmed down, I called Marian and Joe at their home number.
    They didn’t have much to say. But Joe wasn’t starchy now —just sad.
    “They gave me a golden parachute,” he said. “We’re selling the property to a developer. Financially, I should be happy, because my health isn’t up to it any more. But.. ” He paused. “I, uh, I kind of miss having morning tea with you. Hey ... remember those foul shots with our tea bags and your wastebasket?”
    “You were always high-score man.” My eyes misted. Then Marian got on the phone. “My daughter Sara is going to Ghana to study herbal medicine,” she said. “Joe and I are moving to California. He needs the climate.” The Prescotts were embarrassed at the way they’d fired
    me. I was ready to swallow my pride, sad about losing them. We could have gotten together for dinner before they left. But neither side budged.
    ‘Well,” I said, “send me your new address.”
    Once upon a time, I was the man bom without tear ducts. Now it seemed like anything at all could get me weeping. As I sat over my dog-eared Bible, crossing out more passages, it occurred to me that I was having a delayed breakdown over Billy’s death. Like a moray eel, I dealt social shocks, till people started avoiding me. Michael tried to give good advice about a therapist. When I barked that I thought humanity were fools for running to shrinks, my son backed off too.
    Now and then, I got out my .45 automatic and stared at it.
    If life was a race, I had run thousands of miles since Montreal, and gone nowhere. The dark Front Runner loomed ahead with every stride. My efforts to beat him to some vague finish-line were a joke. I was losing. And I was judging myself into a personal hell for losing a no-win race. Why hadn’t I killed myself yet? The old Harlan believed that suicide was a sin against God. But if I set my heart as the heart of God, it meant that I owned my life, and had the right to dispose of it any way I chose.
    I did put the gun away.
    But, for the first time since high school, it was suddenly too much effort to get out there in the morning and run a few miles. Time to break the pattern. So I quit.
    George Rayburn had just been diagnosed with a funny kind of pneumonia, caused by a little organism called Pneumocystis that is usually harmless. He had the immune system ticking down too.
    Doc Jacobs kept muttering about the patterns he was seeing. Several gay men had died of immune failure now. Some unhealthy men shared a profile. They’d had amoebas, hepatitis B, mononucleosis, every kind of STD, plus a fondness for poppers, alcohol, drug abuse, tricking and passive anal sex. Now and then, listening to Doc, I felt a chill. Thank God I didn’t fit the profile. But George didn’t fit the profile of bathhouse warrior either. He’d been monogamous for two years. So was his lover, Earle. Neither of them used drugs or booze. The only thing George ever did to himself was work to death in the gay-rights movement; he was