The Front Runner

by Warren, Patricia Nell

  The two other American runners in the race, Bob Dellinger and Mike Stella, placed ninth and fifteenth with a 28:15 and a 28:25.3. They had the AAU's blessing.

  Sepponan finished his victory lap, came up to Billy and put his hand on Billy's shoulders. Billy, recovered now, palmed him back.

  Sepponan was a plain skinny man of 27 with close-cut blond hair and high Asiatic cheekbones. "You make me work very hard," he said in accented English.

  "Yeah, you made me work hard too," said Billy.

  That night, Billy, Sepponan, Felts and a few other European runners sat down together, and talked. They all had beers. Billy had milk. They managed to talk, in their limited common languages, of running, and laughed a lot. Sepponan was straight as a yardstick, but his friendship and respect for Billy endured all the uproar that came later. "He has sisu," he said bluntly, using the Finnish word for guts and pride.

  John Sive and I let the runners have their fun, and we went off somewhere else to sit and talk.

  "You know," I said, "I think when Billy gets anoth­er year under his belt, he's going to be giving us some surprises. I think there's a reservoir of strength and speed that we're just now beginning to tap."

  John was so proud of Billy's run that he got pretty drunk that night.

  Those three weeks in Europe were the only length of time that Billy and I were able to spend together during the whole 1975-76 school year.

  Of course, with Vince and Jacques along, we weren't precisely on a honeymoon for two. But at least we could be natural with each other in front of them. Little by little, I was getting over my fear of showing my feel­ings for Billy in front of other people.

  Much was rumored about that trip. The gossips talked about little orgies for four. I am sorry to disap­point them, but it was a pretty innocent and proper affair.

  The Europeans hadn't heard the rumors yet. Or else they were that much more broadminded. Or perhaps it was just because we couldn't understand any of what spectators shouted from the stands. But we didn't hear the word "fairy" once while we were over there. Jacques was delighted by this, and his performance improved in direct ratio to the absence of hassles.

  The four of us traveled on the cheap, lost among the mass of young Americans who invade Europe in the summer.

  We had come over on a charter flight. The boys' stu­dent ID cards got them a further fare reduction. We carried nothing but one suitcase each, with our athletic gear and one or two changes of good clothes. In front of the American Express in Helinski, we bought a third-hand Renault for $250, and drove from meet to meet.

  From Helsinki we went to a meet in Oslo, and saw some of Finland and Norway in the process. Then we took a ferry across to the Continent, the salt breeze blowing in our faces. Then we were driving again, through Germany, Belgium and France. The Europeans, who subsidize amateur athletes, kept asking us how the U.S. could allow athletes of the three boys' caliber to go on a European tour under such humble conditions. We were really pinching pennies. But we didn't mind —we had a wonderful time.

  For the first time, I was as much a friend as a coach to, Vince and Jacques. Finally I let them call me Har­lan. How can you make a guy call you Mr. Brown after you borrow his tube of Tinactin to put on your case of jock itch?

  We lived a warm footloose life. I had never felt so young and at ease—I was recapturing something of that summer with Chris. I don't think I was trying to lower myself to their age bracket on a false basis. It was just that my anxieties about getting old were finally falling away.

  At any rate, my fortieth birthday fell during that trip, and I observed it without any heartbreak.

  We celebrated it sitting in the sun by a canal in Bruges; eating some crusty bread and cheese. The boys gave me goofy presents. Jacques gave me a bottle of cheap wine. Vince gave me one of those weird Euro­pean supporters with buttons (they don't have jock straps over there). Billy presented me with a little American flag, which I sewed on my knapsack.

  Vince and Jacques drank a little of the wine, and then we poured the rest ceremoniously out as an offer­ing to the earth.

  The boys gave me a terrible razzing about being forty, and I loved it, because it was the kind of razzing they would give each other.

  "Now you are a dirty old man," said Vince.

  "Well, what was I before?" I asked.

  "Just a dirty man," said Jacques.

  "But I take a shower twice a day," I said.

  We laughed until we were dizzy. Billy nearly choked on the fruit he was eating. Finally we calmed down.

  "Someday we'll be forty," said Vince.

  "It's not so bad," I said. "If you take care of your body, and have the right attitudes, and have someone you can count on, it's all right." Billy caught my eye and smiled.

  We sat thoughtfully, gazing at the still canal. All around us were the mossy old stone houses, and the gabled roofs, and the church spires of Bruges. A pair of the city's famous swans swam slowly past us, with three half-grown cygnets paddling between them. Jacques pointed at them.

  "There we go," he said. "Subtract the female, and you have us."

  "What do you mean, Professor Audubon?" asked Vince.

  "Well, the cob—the father swan—he swims behind, so he can look out for the little ones He'll kill anything that goes near them. He's ferocious, really protective." He looked at me and grinned.

  Jacques was right.

  Day after day we fought our way through the sum­mer traffic jams of little European cars. We were so bathed in fumes that I wondered what was happening to my runners' lungs. In Europe in summer, everybody is migrating somewhere else. The Germans go to Spain, and the Spanish go to Germany. The Swedes go to France, and the French go to Sweden. The main roads are lined with litter, and the smell of shit hangs over the roadside grass and bushes, in the hot air. We learned fast, and kept mostly to the byroads. There it was cleaner, the countryside less spoiled, the towns less crowded. With Jacques' French and Vince's limping Italian, we had few language problems.

  The three of them taught me the sensuous joys of traveling. I had been on European tours with athletes before, but always as the ill-at-ease Yankee yearning for apple pie. They taught me how to fall in with people, how to react viscerally to every sight and sound. We picked up hitch-hikers, often other athletes going to meets.

  We got drunk on the air and silence of the northern forests. We sniffed the flowers in the flower market of Brussels, though we were too broke to buy any. We ran very early in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and saw the whores going home to call it a night. In Paris the three of them marched me into a tattoo parlor and made me get a lion put on my right shoulder. "You have to join the club," they said. In the Rhine valley, we filched ripening grapes from the road­side vineyards.

  I have one haunting memory of stopping somewhere on the plains of northern France, at Billy's request. We parked on the side of the road in the silence, while he went along a wheatfield picking a fistful of the little red poppies that grow wild in Europe.

  When he put them in my hand, they were already wilting. "The Leo flower," he said.

  "I hope I stay up better than that," I said. But we put them in a paper cup of water, and propped them between two suitcases, where they flopped and shortly died

  At night we settled in some cheap hotel in a small town. Hotels were one small luxury I insisted on—the boys had to get proper rest to do international-class running. No flopping somewhere on the ground in sleeping bags, or sleeping in the car. A runner can go short of sleep one night, but not two nights, or his performance suffers.

  We ate dinner in small restaurants or cafes, and other meals out of grocery stores. That was another area where I didn't skimp—they had to eat right. Luck­ily one can eat very well in places like that in Europe (though sometimes I had to holler if grease was put in the food—neither Vince nor Billy could tolerate grease in their systems).

  Sometimes we ate, talked, laughed with other athletes if we had them along. B
ut usually we ate alone. By ten we were usually in bed. Billy and I could sometimes hear the mattress squeaking next door as Vince and Jacques made love, and no doubt they could hear our mattress.

  A couple of times on the road, we had to share one large room with two beds. Those were nights that we did without. Vince and I were shameless enough for it, but neither Billy nor Jacques would have tolerated it.

  But, relaxed as we were, we didn't forget for a mo­ment why we were over there.

  The boys were scrupulous about training, working out wherever they could scrounge a track or a city park. I can still see Billy pacing off a quarter-mile along a lonely country road in Belgium, so that he could do his ten quarters for the day. We made sure we showed up for meets in plenty of time to settle in, case the scene. In between, we talked tirelessly, analyz­ing their performances and their European opponents, some of whom they might be meeting in Montreal. I could see them picking up the rough European track tactics, and knew the trip would not be wasted.

  We were careful about the water, sticking to bottled stuff, but we all got tourist diarrhea anyway Billy got it so bad in Oslo that, after the 10,000 meter, he ran straight off the track to the bathroom.

  We showed up at the meets travel-stained, but rested and ready to kill. The officials looked at me and the expressions in their eyes said: This is the coach? A couple of times I was taken for an uninvited runner. While I wasn't dressed exactly like a hippie, I did wear faded stevepipe jeans, hiking boots and a lumberjack shirt, and had let my hair grow a shade—it was now maybe two inches long. But when they saw my kids run, they stopped smiling. They knew I was dangerous.

  After the meet, there was the pleasant socializing. The awards banquet, maybe a dance, young athletes arguing about training methods in six languages, girls hanging around. I was always proud of the three of them—handsome in their good suits, ties, dress shirts, showered and combed and glowing, each poised in his way. They danced straight-facedly with girls, and if they boogied, it was never gay.

  Vince and Jacques were both unfaithful to each other—Jacques for the first time—and tasted the joys of European females. But Billy was—as usual—im­pervious.

  "Hey, Harlan," said Vince, "these European foxes, they don't work as hard as American foxes at being sexy."

  The morning after the meet, we loaded up our car and were on our way again.

  Never again were the four of us so close in feeling and purpose. We were two couples in love. We were friends that would do anything for each other. We were a motherless clan, a gay commune, a little band of guerrillas living off the land. All three boys were in top form, injury-free, pitting themselves against some of the world's best, racing flat-out every few days, running well, placing if not winning.

  I was engrossed in taking care of them. There was always something I could do. Vince bruised his left foot badly, and I crafted a marvelous emergency insert for his shoe that would be springy enough but legal. Just toward the end, Billy started losing his edge a little and having muscle tremors, and I had to feed him magnesium and massage his legs. Jacques was having insomnia, partly from the usual nervousness about rac­ing, partly from euphoria. Vince would get the hotel kitchen to heat milk for him while I rubbed him down, and usually we managed to get him off to sleep.

  They looked after me too. When I stupidly injured my knee running in the Bois in Paris (it ended my running for the rest of the trip), they were all icing the knee and winding the Ace bandage around it. When I got laid low by stomach flu, they ransacked the drug­stores for something powerful to kill it.

  We left a trail of victories and surprises across the Continent.

  Jacques had the first stretch of consistent running since he'd left Oregon. He ran mostly the 800 meter, his best event, and he was beaten only once, by Willi Kruse in Stuttgart. All my work on Vince's knees was finally showing—he was having one of his rare stretches of injury-free competition, and he was un­beaten in the 1,500.

  Billy didn't win a single race, but his explosive ap­pearance on the international scene was causing a lot of talk. He was usually second, or third.

  The feeling of a couple of European track experts was that, if I brought the three of them to Montreal like that or better, we would collect enough gold to balance the U.S. foreign debt.

  I wasn't so sure, though Jacques' euphoria would wilt once he was back in the U.S. having "fag" yelled at him. Vince was clearly one of the top 1,500-meter men in the world at that moment, but I didn't know if I could keep his legs in one piece for another year. Billy was still, as he had always been, a question mark.

  But we decided to leave these matters to the analysts, and live for the moment.

  In Amsterdam there was a rock concert, and the boys begged to go. I agreed, providing they would depart at a decent hour. We went, and I sat getting my eardrums bent while the three of them whooped and shrieked with the other 20,000 young souls crowded into the park. When I said, "Let's go," they left, looking back lingeringly.

  In London, Billy reached the other wayside marker on his road to Montreal. He ran third in the 5,000 meter and broke 13:35 for the first time, turning in a 13:26 with an impressive effort. The 5,000 was defi­nitely his second-best race.

  When the month ended, none of us wanted to go home. I told myself I was unpatriotic.

  "Happiness," said Vince, "is bumming around over here, running like a dream."

  Sadly we sold our car for $200 in front of the Lon­don American Express, and took our plane back to New York.

  When we arrived, we found that the boys' fine Euro­pean showing had gotten the press coverage one would expect. Track people maybe didn't approve of them, but they couldn't ignore them either. Special note was taken of Billy's lightning appearance as an international threat in the 5,000-10,000 double.

  In fact, the discussions about the boys' being gay— rumors, arguments, were they, weren't they, how could they be if they were so masculine, etc.—were going on so openly at trackside that we realized public disclosure was near.

  Possibly we were all wanting to get it over with, and tired of pretending.

  At any rate, when we were back in New York, we started to get a little careless, and went about more openly in gay society.

  The gay community wanted to lionize the three of them. Jacques refused to go to the parties, mostly be­cause big parties made him nervous. But Vince and Billy went with John and me. We went to a big party at Steve Goodnight's and a few other parties. Billy and Vince didn't stay up too late, and they didn't drink anything, and they managed to handle all the intense interest in their persons graciously. They had become the reigning sex gods.

  The gays threw themselves on their necks. People who had never looked at the sports page were sub­scribing to Track & Field News and Runner's World. Delphine de Sevigny and a number of others an­nounced their intention of going to every eastern meet where the boys would be running. In his old age, Del­phine had become a track nut.

  A number of men made some heavy passes at Billy. It enraged me. Several were far younger and (I thought) far more attractive than I was. Had Billy shown a flicker of interest in any of them, I think I might have been capable of killing him. But he looked at them pleasantly through his glasses and said, "You'll have to ask my coach."

  To even things up, a number of men made heavy passes at me. Billy didn't like it any better. His eyes were on me, clear, trustful—but also level and watch­ful. I never knew if, despite all Buddhist nonviolence, he thought of killing me.

  We didn't exactly send out press releases about those parties we went to. But one of them got into the news. In a way, it helped precipitate all the trouble that came that fall.

  Steve Goodnight was suddenly a celebrity. His book The Rape of the Angel Gabriel had emerged as the great break-through gay novel. All the straights were reading it, and some were saying, How shocking, and others were saying, How moving. So his big party got written up on the "People" page in Time. My name, Billy's, Vince's and Joh
n's were listed among the peo­ple present. There was a photograph of Billy and me, he in his velvet suit and ruffles, both of us holding glasses of what looked like gin on the rocks (it was mineral water) and looking social and happy.

  The track conservatives all over the country read this, and they shuddered. Billy's and my publicly asso­ciating with a man famous for his novels about gay sex was just too much for them.

  Meanwhile, the four of us sadly went back to Pres-cott to start the school year. Billy and I returned to our life of seeing each other only a few hours a day.

  10

  That fall, several class high-school runners came to Prescott for the express purpose of being coached by me. Not one of them was gay. They had been reading about me in the papers, and thought also that Prescott sounded like a school worth attending. Also on the strength of the European publicity, five top college run­ners had transferred to Prescott. Of these, three were straight and two were gay. The gays came for shelter.

  It all meant that, for the first time, my track team was gong to have some real depth. And when the cross­country season started, we went to the NCAA re­gional championship in Van Cortlandt, and we wiped out Penn and Manhattan and a few other fine teams, and came in second in the team ranking.

  If Billy and I had been living together, my happi­ness would have known no bounds. For the first time I was really enjoying everything I did, and feeling that what I did meant something. The humanization of Coach Brown was finally complete. If I barked now, it was a joke. The kids laughed—and they obeyed me instantly. I became something that I'd never wanted to be or planned to be—a popular teacher.

  But Billy was a more popular teacher than I was. I can still see him bicycling across the campus, with his briefcase full of the brand-new gay studies program. I can still see the warm autumn sun shining on his wind­blown curls (now that he was a prof, they were as uncombed as they'd been while he was a student). As he pedaled past the track, he'd always wave at me if I was out there yelling "Get those knees up" at the girls' team.