The Front Runner

snow. The laurel had dropped its seeds, and the dried-up clusters of seed cases had withered away. I couldn't see walking on down there, knocking the snow from those stately bushes and leaving our tracks everywhere, so I made a sign to Vince that we would go no further. Even from where we were, we could hear the little stream noising as it fell from the ledge into its small pool.
    We stood silent, looking down the slope. I leaned against a tulip tree, and Vince walked around a little unsteadily, smoking a cigarette. Now and then our eyes met, with a direct open look—that look that acknowledges the. imminence of a sexual relationship, and, in our case, that look that finally acknowledged the deep affection we had always felt for each other.
    Billy lived again in that look.
    EPILOGUE
    I am out on the track under the smoky lights, and I feel the noise of the crowd, and all the eyes on me.
    It is February 11, 1978. The event is the mile final in the AAU masters championship at Madison Square Garden in New York. I have had to put my body out here on the track again—to feel what Billy felt, to honor his memory with my own pain and sweat.
    There are eleven of us warming up, already stripped to shorts and singlets. We are all over forty, all wiry mature men with varying degrees of baldness and gray hair. But, in contrast to our faces, our hard glistening bodies look strangely young. We are among the finest-looking old men in the world, no doubt about it. We have found the fountain of youth. I feel young as I jog around. I am even a little shaggy, with just a few gray hairs in my longish hair and my new beard.
    In these last minutes before the race, we are all completing our psych job on ourselves and on each other. Each is making out that he is cool and confident, though he might secretly be sick to his stomach with nerves. I am full of nervous energy, but not upset. This is because I know that I am psyching them. They are more worried about getting beaten by me than I am worried at getting beaten by them.
    The promoters have packed the Garden to the last seat. I am aware that I am the box-office attraction this evening, the prime bait of a little genteel Roman circus. Twenty thousand people are going to watch ten straight middle-aged Christians try to eat one gay middle-aged lion.
    "Kill 'em, Harlan!"
    "Go, Gary, burn that queer bastard!"
    Through my concentration I hear the voices. I am
    still thinking about tactics. I have drawn Lane 1, which is a bad place to be. Everything will depend on the pace. If they go out slow, and I don't get boxed in, I might try to run away. But I have a feeling that they will go out very fast, and that there might be blood all over the track, and anew American record.
    I can feel a certain hostility, from the crowd and from a few of the other runners. But I also feel a lot of support. This is a big advantage I have over the others: New York is my home territory, and the gays have flooded into the arena to back me. My entire team is up there in the stands, plus a couple busloads of Prescott students and faculty. John Sive is there with Steve Goodnight and the Angel. Jacques and his wife are there. Betsy is there with the baby, sitting by John, Vince is there.
    I pause for a moment to retie my shoe.
    One of the runners who is friendly, forty-one-year-old Mike Branch, jogs by and claps me on my tattoo. "'The old lion finally grew a mane," he said.
    "Yeah," I said, clapping him back. "About time."
    I have been pointing toward this meet all winter. Because of my coaching and teaching obligations, I could get to only a few meets, so I was reduced to sharpening myself mostly in workouts. I know so much more about training now than when I was in college. And I learned so much from Billy. He taught me as much as I did him. To my delight, I found myself able to recapture the promise that got wasted by circumstances when I was young. The lifetime of taking care of my body finally paid off.
    And I have a mental edge that I have been nourishing for weeks. It is a peace, and no one will ever rob me of this peace again. It is Billy, his living memory inside of me. His psych was yoga, and mine is him. He runs inside of me, with that effortlessness and that total fearlessness of pain. In each race, I re-create that image of him in my mind, and it works.
    To kill him now, they will have to kill me.
    As we jog to the line, I am dimly aware of the rising crescendo of cheers and boos from the crowd.
    We are