The Front Runner

plunged forward through the barriers of pain and effort with a serene expression on his sweat-streaked face. His blank look in races frequently brought comments that he was doped.
    Once, out of curiosity, I took him to the Bingham Center for Athletic Research down in New York. They had been doing some research on other athletes who were using TM. They put Billy on the treadmill, ran him to exhaustion and found that while in the alpha state, he exhibited the highest tolerance of lactic buildup of any champion athlete they'd tested, as well as increased blood flow to the muscles.
    It's been said that Billy was a classic animal. "Animal" is the somewhat derogatory word for an athlete who feels no pain. This was true. I don't think he felt pain much. If he did, he accepted it as casually as eating and breathing. By contrast, Vince Matti was a connoisseur of pain and gloried in it. Jacques had trouble dealing with pain—it was part of his nervousness.
    Billy "The Animal" Sive, the sportswriters started calling him. My feeling was that, if being an animal got him to Montreal, I wasn't going to criticize. Watching him, I used to get cold chills sometimes. I thought: if I can ever get him to train right, and keep him injury-free, I might really have something here.
    I kidded him a little about it. "Are you in Nirvana out there?"
    "Oh no, Mr. Brown," he said. He didn't laugh at my joke. Among other things, he had little sense of humor. "I'm a very pragmatic Buddhist. I just need a good dharma to run well."
    Dharma, I knew, was the Buddhist's right way of living, in which one had a state of inner balance. If you were in control and peaceful, your dharma was good. If you were racked by anxieties and cravings, your dharma was bad. The idea was to rid the mind of all cravings, leaving only peace and compassion. Obviously I had a very poor dharma—my craving for Billy was stronger every day.
    Right away Billy became enormously popular with the students and faculty. His sunny candor disarmed everyone. He hardly stirred anywhere without other boys and girls trailing after him. He was the gay Pied Piper.
    Soon half the girls on campus were madly in love with him. Several always went to the track to watch him work out. He was friendly, went with them to campus films, even danced with them. But he mystified them by his refusal to date and/or sleep with any of them.
    "Billy, you've got a secret old lady," they insisted.
    He just shrugged and smiled.
    Vince and Billy both loved to dance, though Jacques didn't. Evenings, in the faculty-student union, there was a permanent floating canteen-discotheque, and the three of them usually spent a while there. In my youth I had thought rock music was sinful and un-American, in spite of the fact that Elvis Presley was already on the scene when I was at Villanova. But in recent years I had come to tolerate rock because I associated it with New York, gay bars, Prescott, peace of mind and—now—Billy. So sometimes, in the evening, I took to drifting past the canteen, hoping to glimpse him in action.
    One evening just before Christmas, I was passing the canteen after a faculty meeting and saw him. I looked in.
    From the crowd in the place, it was obvious that something unusual was going on. The driving beat filled the room, and a black singer was shouting and
    screaming. The tables were packed with students and teachers eating healthburgers and drinking health drinks. More stood along the walls, and more were coming in and craning their necks to watch.
    Vince, Billy and two girls were right in the middle of the floor, and the other couples were stopping and watching. The two girls were doing a rather abandoned heterosexual version of the Flop. Vince and Billy were not. They were doing the gay boogie. And they were doing it as I had seen it done only in films and at parties in New York.
    The gay who is a good dancer can turn even the foxtrot into an uninhibited celebration of male sexuality. Billy and Vince were doing the boogie about six feet from their partners, not looking at them or at each other. They were dancing like blacks. They were loose, cool, with all the foot-stomping and finger-snapping that goes with it. Their shoulders and torsos barely moved. All the action was in the hip-jerking, the crotch-gyrating, the buttock-twitching and the thigh-weaving.
    Vince was aware of the crowd, grandstanding a little. But Billy was a shade more restrained, inner-directed, as if he were dancing to that