The Front Runner

they were harmful no matter how liberal we got. Like smoking, drugs, hard spirits, etc. But all in all, I was not the same man as before. Coach Brown was rapidly being humanized.
    The campus stood in the middle of 900 acres of wooded hills and lakes, all Joe's property. It was magnificent for running. I laid out twenty-five miles of trails through them, and ran on them as much as my teams did, recovering a little of that summer joy of the Poconos.
    As those four happy years passed at Prescott, even my powerful sexual cravings slacked off. "Getting old," I thought, "and maybe it's just as well." I was busy, committed to something outside myself, and had less time for futile fantasies. No one on campus but the Prescotts knew I was gay. I had no sexual relationships with the campus gays, and stuck to my hands-off rule regarding my team. When the spirit moved me, I drove the sixty miles into New York City and picked somebody up.
    A few parents muttered, but by and large no fuss was made at my being at Prescott. No one outside the hard core of the gay community knew about me, and no one knew about my hustling save my ex-clients, who weren't likely to talk about it. As far as the world was concerned, I had just crawled out of sight for a couple of years.
    When Billy Sive came to Prescott, I was just past thirty-nine years old, and beginning to think that my secret fantasy would die a quiet and decent death. But I found I was wrong.
    In those very first winter days, he stirred up all the old feelings, to a pitch of intensity that I'd never felt
    before. He was not merely physically attractive, but an appealing human being as well. I was that lonely mature man, but I was also like an adolescent seething with longing. For the first time in my life, I was deeply in love.
    And I knew I didn't dare lay a hand on him.
    THREE
    THE three celebrated runners' appearance on our track-mad campus caused quite a stir.
    The campus paper, a mimeographed thing called The Daily Mantra, gave them smudged headlines. I was amused to overhear a radical student, whose ideology should have excluded this kind of feeling, say, "Now we're gonna rip Manhattan and Villanova."
    My track team was simply agog. Their finest moment, so far, had been running in the NCAA eastern cross-country championship in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. They had gotten spattered with mud from the spikes of Manhattan, Penn and Villanova runners, and had placed seventh in the team scoring.
    So having super-burners like Vince Matti fall from heaven onto their team produced mixed feelings among the boys. At first they were elated. "Now we're gonna wipe out the whole country." Then they were intimidated. "The rest of us will be ignored."
    The next morning I found my male freshmen standing in a little huddle by the track, wearing their sweats and watching the Oregon three work out. The snow was melting with a rush, and the cinder track lay bare and steaming fresh. The sun was hot and the temperature about fifty.
    As the Oregon three tore past, their spikes gnashing in the wet cinders, my boys' mouths made small O's in their faces. Their eyes shifted to me.
    "Geez," said one of them.
    "Get your asses out there and work," I said, "and maybe you'll run like that too."
    "Yessir, Mr. Brown, sir," they said with a little sarcasm. But they took the hint and all jogged off to warm up.
    I stood in the sunshine, pushing back my parka hood and pulling out my stopwatch, and watched the three ex-Oregoners whipping along the backstretch. They had thrown their brand-new Prescott sweats on the bleachers and were running bare-legged, in singlets. They were pacing each other, running shoulder to shoulder, their hair lifting. I could see they were having a good time.
    Now they rounded into the turn toward me, and I could begin to hear the gnash, gnash of their spikes. They floated along on their long legs like whippets. Now I could hear their breathing amid the crunch of spikes. Then they were flashing past me. For a moment I was able to forget about practical things like oxygen capacity of lungs and lactic acid buildup in muscles, and see them as pure myth.
    A nervous contentment suffused me, warm and unstable as the winter sunshine. The hidden beauties of my subconscious had again risen into view, on this cinder track, in this sweet sunshine.
    The three had finished their quarter-mile speed lap and were jogging to take the recovery interval and let their pulses drop. I looked at my watch. After