The Front Runner

fell a little. Billy looked at me strangely.
    "Okay, Mr. Brown," he said.
    TWO
    ALL my life, I have been haunted by the ghost of a runner.
    I was born in Philadelphia on August 14, 1935. My father was a track nut, and among my earliest memories is being taken to meets. He'd hold me up so I could see over the crowd at the distant, flitting figures of men in shorts and singlets. "Look there," he'd say, "look how fine they are, my boy."
    My father, Michael Brown, was a big, strapping man, half-English, half-Scot, who owned a small printing plant there in Philadelphia. From 1941 to 1945 he was off in the Pacific fighting with the Marines. He helped take Guadalcanal, and he came home with a slight limp and a Purple Heart.
    He was a strict man, but also warm and merry, and I adored him. My mother was less close to me—she was a devoted, dutiful Black Irish woman, but a little cold and always nervous. He and my mother were both staunch Protestants, and they gave me the upbringing that one would expect. No smoking, no drinking, no dancing, church every Sunday, pledge allegiance to the flag.
    And running. For my father, running was almost part of his religion. "Runners," he used to say to me, "those are the real men. Baseball is for babies, and football is a brainless business. Running takes more effort and more discipline than any other sport."
    Ironically, then, it was my fine, big, straight father who taught me to worship at the altar of manhood. Whereas if stereotype had its way, I should have had a milquetoast father, a fierce and castrating mother, and grown up disturbed and shy with girls. That was not the case at all. My father, at odd variance with his puritan-
    ism in other areas, had no objection to girls. He said it was part of being a real man. Already in grade school, I discovered that the sexual part of my nature was powerful and insistent.
    When I got to the Fairview High School, the main thing on my mind was getting onto its famous track team. I wasn't much of a student. But I worked at it, because if I got poor grades, my father scolded me and asked what I was doing with the school taxes he paid so painfully.
    I loved competition, and pitting myself against the other boys. But running was also good for its own sake—the discipline and the joy of motion. And physically, running made me different from boys (especially the fat, pampered ones, whom I despised) who didn't engage in high-stress sports. Very early, I got to thinking of myself, and of all runners, as a separate and superior species of human being.
    In the summers, we always vacationed in the Po-conos. My mother had asthma and said the city air was bad for her, and my father loved to fish. So we had a tiny cabin in a remote area of the mountains. My father would drive up to be with us on weekends. I was alone there all week long with my mother, and missed him very much. So I hunted up any boys I could find in the area, and spent the days roaming with them.
    The summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I met a boy whom I'll call Chris Shel-bourne. His family had just bought a summer cabin nearby. He was blond, with calm, blue eyes, very quiet, lean and sun-browned. It turned out he was a runner. We were delighted to discover this common passion, and we quickly became close friends.
    In fact, my feelings for him became so strong that I wonder now why I didn't understand them correctly. Perhaps it was because I was so poorly educated about these things. My father had told me what he thought I needed to know about girls. But he had never told me such feelings could exist between two males. As far as I knew, there was no name for what I felt. But instinctively I realized that these feelings were something to
    be hidden from everyone, even from Chris, even from myself.
    Chris, possibly, felt the same confusion. He feverishly sought every opportunity to be with me that summer, but he never discussed his feelings.
    An hour passed without Chris was an eternal loss. We fished, hiked, or just lay in the sun and talked about track. We daydreamed out loud to each other about being top college runners, then of going to the Olympic Games.
    Every day we took long runs together through the woods, following the many lonely trails for eight or ten miles. We jumped the streams and ran brushing through the mountain laurel. The laurel was all in bloom shortly after we met, heavy and fragrant with pink and white blossoms. We tore up hills and ran sliding