The Front Runner

rumor stayed around, and continued to poison my life. It reached my wife. She had been looking for an excuse to divorce me, and now she had one. She put on a big act of self-righteous anger, got the divorce, and the house, and the children, and a really punitive alimony and child-support settlement of $12,000 a year. She told the rumor to my mother and the rest of my family, and they turned their backs on me and froze me out. (At least I didn't have to bear my father's disapproval—he had died the year before.)
    There were no headlines, except PENN STATE TRACK COACH RESIGNS FOR REASONS OF HEALTH, and a casual quote from me that I was thinking of going back to newspaper work. But the rumor washed gently through the track world and died out. A number of people said they didn't believe it. "After all, he was married, and he acted so masculine." But the thought stayed there, in the back of people's minds.
    Shattered and angry, I fled to New York and took a small apartment downtown in the gay ghetto. My savings went to pay my lawyer and the initial alimony payments, and then I was faced with finding money or going to jail for nonsupport. "The first check you miss," my wife had sworn, "I'm having you arrested."
    Bruce Cayton, an old buddy from the New York
    Post, offered to help me find a newspaper job in town. But I was all panicky, sure that everybody in the world now knew the rumor, and that I would be turned down because I was a homosexual. Besides, the last thing I wanted at the moment was to be part of a big institution again, where I could be scrutinized and pressured. The best thing would be self-employment, that would let me drop out of sight and sneak over into the gay world sometimes for relief.
    So I told Bruce thanks, and I forged off on my own.
    There wasn't much skill I had, to start earning immediate money on my own. I tried freelance writing, but the market had become very difficult to break into. I ran ads offering to work as a free-lance copyreader and editor, but it paid pitifully little—four or five dollars an hour, and even this market was tightening up due to the recession. Coaching had taught me how to give rubdowns, so I tried to set myself up as a licensed masseur. My ad, a typical one, ran in the Village Voice and other papers: "Rubdowns by Chris, athletic masseur." (I didn't want to use my real name.) But New York was full of masseurs who went out at all hours of the day and night to rub down sleepless middle-aged ladies. The customers came in slowly.
    So I tried some modeling. My ad read: "Handsome ex-Marine, athlete, miler's build, 6' 1", 155 pounds, 25-inch waist, 42-inch chest." I did get some calls, but it wasn't totaling more than the $200 a week I had to send my ex-wife.
    There were just a few weeks to make up my mind what I was going to do, and I did it.
    In a bar one evening, I had met a personable gay named Steve Goodnight, a struggling serious writer who kept himself alive by doing pornographic books. Steve and I became friends, not lovers. Through him I met a number of other gays in a kind of inner artistic circle and hidden high society. To these people I revealed my true identity, and found that the Penn State dismissal made me something of a martyr/celebrity in a small way.
    So it happened one night that a well-to-do and lascivious gay acquainted with this circle thought I should
    go to bed with him, and I was needing money and I said, "I think that's going to cost you $200." That was how I became a hustler. I was a very expensive, very exclusive hustler. None of your twenty-five-dollar sodomies in hotel rooms, none of your selling your meat on the street. I couldn't risk it. Nobody got to me except through a blind of telephone calls. I usually charged $200-250, and sometimes went higher. I was worth every penny of it, and pretty soon had more business than I could handle, but I didn't have to exert myself. At $200 a trick, twice a week was enough to satisfy the divorce court and to pay my living expenses.
    They tell you a hustler's career is over at thirty, when his youth starts to fade. I started mine at thirty-four, and found that there was a small but solid market for meat like mine. My numbers didn't want faunlike boys. They wanted a hard, angry, bitter, mature beauty. Sometimes they wanted a whipping too. I am not a sadist at heart, but I was angry enough to pass for one —I gave a damn good whipping for $200. It was clear profit, because I wasn't working for a