The Front Runner

next bus. I learned fast not to waste my tenderness on them. Often I'd wonder if I'd run into the youth in the red leather jacket. But he never crossed my path again.
    Once in a while, a man offered me money. A hand would be laid on my arm, a voice would say, "How much?" After all, I really was an athlete. I was only twenty-eight, and looked younger, and didn't weigh an ounce more than in my miling days. I even fluttered the heart of more than one queen. "Darling, how divine you look." But the idea of selling my body didn't appeal.
    Sometimes my nameless lovers asked me how I kept in shape. They recognized that I was the real thing. I'd lie like mad, tell them I was a rower, a long-distance cyclist, anything but the truth: that I was assistant coach for one of America's plushest track teams. I was so mortally afraid of being recognized that I never took my dark glasses off, even in bed. When we were at meets with the team, I'd manage to avoid having my picture taken, for fear somebody who'd chewed my cock on some tenement stairway might read Track & Field News.
    Those were dangerous weekends. I always felt like a spy going behind the Iron Curtain on some nerve-wracking mission. One misstep and I'd be dead. It wasn't the gays that I feared, though a hustler did steal my wallet once. It was the straight homophobes who preyed on gays that I feared. Fascist male hets sometimes roamed the streets downtown and beat up gays for fun. On two occasions I set some kind of new world record out the back door of a gay bar when the police bust came in the front. On another occasion I went straight through the bathroom window into a back alley, amid shattering glass, and had to go bleeding to a hospital emergency room for stitches. There were always the plainclothesmen lurking in the parks and the public toilets. And there was jail if you were caught in the only act of love that made sense to you.
    It wasn't long before I felt that bewilderment, that choking rage, that the gay feels. We were hunted animals. We were huddled underground in the dark, like
    the Christians in the catacombs, sheltering the tiny flame of our sexual faith. What just emperor would declare the edict that would let us out into the light? What harm did we do? Murderers and thieves harmed others, but we harmed no one except possibly—in our confusion and unresolved guilts—ourselves.
    I could never relax until I was on that bus back to Pennsylvania. It was always with a feeling of unreality that I came home to my comfortable suburban house just off the Villanova campus. I would sit in front of the TV with a Coke, with my two little sons (little Mark had been born two years after Kevin). They would be rough-and-tumbling around me on the living-room rug, and I would be haunted by the memory of some strange man's body. The dishwasher would be noising in the kitchen, and I would still be vibrating with the fear of the police bust I'd just escaped.
    "Daddy, Kevin took my airplane," little Mark would yell, and come weeping to me.
    "Kevin," I'd say in my Parris Island tone, "give that airplane back right now." And before my eyes, like a hallucination, would be an erect penis pumping its milky life out over the lean, male hand holding it.
    "Have a good time with your newspaper chums?" my wife would ask sarcastically.
    "Oh, we had a great time," I'd say. "Dinner at Mamma Leone's and a burlesque show downtown."
    "You're disgusting," she'd say. "And you never take me out."
    "Who'd want to take a sourpuss like you out?" I'd say. "If you want to go out that bad, find someone."
    Paradoxically, I tried to cover up by seeing that she had every comfort. My two little sons were growing up, and I found that I loved them more and more as my fear of being exposed grew stronger. Someday they'd find out about me. That would be a hard moment.
    After two years at Villanova, the U of Iowa offered me the job of head track coach. But I turned it down. Out there in the cornfields there was no gay underground for me to lose myself in.
    A year later, my frenzied patience paid off. Penn State offered me a contract as head track coach. It was
    heady stuff for a man only thirty-one years old, and $30,000 a year was more money than I'd ever had in my life. The team had had a slump under the previous coach, who was a soft, permissive guy. The administration and the alumni hoped I would whip things into shape.
    And I did. I was Mr. Parris Island of track. I was Mr. Drill Instructor of distance