The Front Runner

own risk," I told them. "Make sure you understand that."
    In the warm autumn sunshine, I was out at the track-side every day, with the Harper Split in my hand and runners hurtling by, their spikes gnashing in the cinders. For the first time in my life, I saw those runners stripped of sexual myth. They were moving objects, oxygen capacity of lungs, glycogen breakdown, nothing more.
    I tried hard to remember Billy running on that track, standing by the bleachers toweling himself, his shoulders and thighs steaming in the winter sunlight. But his living memory had been obliterated. As I looked at
    the track, all I could see was his body lying in lane 1 with the broken glasses by it.
    In the locker room, I could see his body on the bench, one leg fallen aside, the spiked shoe resting on the cement floor. The blood was dripping slowly from his head onto the floor.
    At every spot on campus where a memory of him might have been evoked, I saw instead his death. It was stuck in my mind like a color slide stuck in a projector. In our living room, he had fallen forward in his chair with his head on his typewriter, and the blood had run onto the disordered papers. Out in the yard, he lay dead in the unmown grass, by the last asters in bloom in the border.
    It was the same in New York City, when John and I sometimes went down on business. We passed Central Park and I could glimpse the carousel off through the trees—he was slumped on the gilded horse, his head leaning on the pole, and blood ran down the pole as the carousel turned slowly, playing "After the Ball Is Over." We passed the theaters where the all-male films play, and I could see him lying in the seat with his head fallen back, his shirt open. In the light from the screen, the blood glistened on his face.
    For the first time in my life, I cursed the control I had —that control that had deprived me of five months of his love. I prayed to God, "You're helping me too much, God. You've made me too strong. Lay off a little. Let me come apart at the seams, let me cry, let me grieve, let me go a little berserk and howl and beat my head against a wall."
    I ran ten miles every day, prepared the cross-country team for the upcoming Eastern meets, and fended off necrophiliac reporters.
    With both Vince and Billy gone, the gay-studies program was drifting rudderless. Joe quickly brought in a young New York activist, Jan Van Deusen, to take over, and he, the psychotherapist and several students pulled it together. It wasn't easy, because Billy's compassion and personality had been its heart. But Van Deusen
    agreed with me and with Joe Prescott that such a program had to have a value independent of that of the people running it. Shortly the gay-crisis switchboard was in operation again, to take those sporadic but desperate calls from other campuses, some of them from miserable athletes.
    That fall I saw little of Vince. After Billy's death, he had seemed to go completely haywire. In a way, I envied his enormous capacity for experiencing grief.
    He announced that he didn't want to run any more, and quit the pro tour, and hung up his spikes. Settling in New York, he shortly was involved in the heaviest kind of gay activism. His status as Billy's best friend, his own status, his raging grief and his physical im-pressiveness moved him immediately into the front ranks of the radical gay leaders. Shortly he wore the charisma of a revolutionary.
    When Vince did come up to Prescott to see me, or when I ran into him in New York, he always talked about Billy so much that I was glad when he left. He was the only one in my circle of acquaintances who hadn't learned that I couldn't bear even to have Billy's name mentioned in my hearing.
    With the cross-country season under way, I had to face up to the "fox-hunting," as Billy called it in Montreal.
    I wondered emotionlessly if maybe, with his child around, I would finally be able to feel human again. It was a painful business, and I might have procrastinated, except that the doctor warned me that the frozen semen was good for only about two and one-half years. If we found a suitable woman soon, we might be able to get two children out of those samples.
    One afternoon in late October, Betsy Heden came to talk to me in my office in the athletic building. She was wearing a long tightly belted green raincoat, carrying her briefcase, and her hair was damp.
    She sat down in the oak armchair by my desk, and we talked about her running. She was having