The Front Runner (37 page)

In New York, I recall being in a large room somewhere with a lot of reporters and a mike in front of me, and making some remarks about how if I could have every person who had hassled Billy, from people who wrote him hate letters to officials who wanted him off the track, charged in court with first-degree murder, I would do so. But I added that unfortunately there were not enough courts and lawyers in the country to process the case.

The world was in its usual state of futile guilt. We have all become so accustomed to violence that the hand-wringing was now just a social ritual. There were editorials about how such things shouldn't happen. I read some of them. Unbelievably, there were also people who said that Billy deserved to die.

The gays had occupied buildings in New York and Washington, demanding a Congressional investigation into the continuing persecution of gay people, demanding the death penalty for Richard Mech. Thousands of shocked straights flocked to these demonstrations, most of them young. Like an automaton, I put in an appearance at one of the big zaps in New York, and said a few words to the massed men and women, and was overwhelmed by their grief and sympathy, which I did not know how to react to.

The athletes, now home in their countries, were saying that unless their lives could be unconditionally guaranteed at the next Olympics, they would not go. They had struck and walked off the field Sunday after Billy was killed. The Montreal games had ended with the running of the 5,000 meter. Armas Sepponan and the other two finishers had refused their medals. The victory stand stood empty. The anthem was not played.

The closing ceremonies had turned into a gigantic memorial service for Billy, with festivities cancelled. The Olympic flame was dimmed out with the stands packed and everybody weeping but me.

It looked as if Billy's death might have broken the back of the Olympic movement.

But the only thing now real to me was Billy's body in the expensive ornate black coffin hastily supplied in Montreal.

There was the decision of what kind of arrangements to make.

"The decision is yours," said John.

"A big messy funeral," I said, "so the gays can cry over him. Then cremate him."

The funeral at the Church of the Beloved Disciple on Fourteenth Street was bigger and messier than even I'd anticipated. It was a hot muggy day, and gays were fainting in their feathers, sweltering in their leather. The streets around the church were packed. It was another of those gay social affairs overrun by straights and celebrities and tourists. The police had a hard time maintaining order. The separatist gays tried to beat up some straights and chase them off, saying, "This is our funeral." Finally I had to go out and talk to them. In the name of Billy's nonviolence, I asked them to let everyone come that wanted to.

The hot church was packed with hard, gay faces. The smell of sweat, leather and flowers was overpowering—the only smell that was missing was amyl nitrite.

I sat in the front pew with the group, staring at the casket.

It had stood open there for a day and a half, almost —you could say—in state. Thousands of people, mostly gays and young people, had filed past it. Billy had belonged to the young, and he had been openly, coldly assassinated, like a Kennedy, a King. They looked at him and cried and piled flowers around the coffin and spoke yet again of how American society was insensible to human subtleties.

Billy lay there wearing his brown velvet suit. Behind his glasses, his eyes were closed. The gold medal lay on the ruffled breast of his shirt. His left hand,

laid over his right, wore the gold wedding ring. The Montreal undertaker had washed the blood out of his hair, combed it carefully, and had done a passable job on his head. But no, he didn't look like he was sleeping.

The angel of death had cruised him. Death, that hustler, that last lover.

Delphine had put a huge bouquet of white lilies on his body. He had tried hard to find hyacinths, but found to his surprise that hyacinths don't bloom in September. So he had settled for two weeks' groceries' worth of lilies, and their fragrance seemed to fill the church.

The Prescott pro musica played some slow mournful Renaissance songs. Jacques had come, and blew into his recorder waveringly, sometimes breaking off.

Father Moore stood up in the pulpit. The church was very quiet as he spoke.

"Harlan Brown has asked me not to deliver a eulogy," he said. "And he's right. Billy's eulogy is written in thousands of hearts. Anything we could add would be superfluous. Instead, Harlan has asked me to read some passages from the Bible and from the teachings of Buddha that he and Billy read at their wedding."

We all sat with sweat rolling down our bodies. Not a sound disturbed the silence of the church, except an occasional muffled sob from somebody. In his gentle, deep voice, the gay priest read those immortal words:

" 'Let us live without hate among those who hate

" 'Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death ...'"

Surely I'm going to cry now, I thought. Oh God, help me to cry. I don't even want to be comforted.

But my eyes stayed dry and burning. With all its strength, my body denied his death. Yet in my mind, his death was so present that I couldn't even remember him. As the priest read those passages, I tried to recall how Billy had looked sitting on the grass in that brown velvet suit, with the spring sunshine bright on his hair. But the image was gone.

The gay priest was saying, ". . . and I'll close this brief service with a contribution of my own. It's fitting,

I think. It's A. E. Housman's poem 'To an Athlete Dying Young.'"

As he read it, I tried to remember how Billy had looked running on the track in Montreal, just—it seemed—scant hours ago. But the image was gone.

"'... And find unwithered on his curls/ That garland briefer than a girl's,' " Father Moore read, finishing the poem.

Beside me, Vince bent over his knees, choking out loud. John sat very straight and silent, with the tears running down his cheeks. A wave of sobs went through the church.

Even Father Moore was crying. He looked down at the coffin and said in a stifled voice, "Good-bye, Billy. One of the joys of paradise will be seeing your blithe spirit again. Good-bye."

After the funeral, we took him to a Manhattan funeral home. The director, a gay, had offered his services free of charge. We watched the casket rolled away to the crematorium.

A few of us stayed and waited. His death was before me. I had X-ray eyes and could see through the thick walls of the crematorium. I could hear the roar of the retort and feel the heat. The flaming coffin burst open, and the fire ravished that perfect body. It cramped into rictus, the curls ablaze, the velvet smoldering, the brain seething in the shattered forehead. Molten glass dripped from his eyes, and molten gold ran off his breast.

He would not burn like other men. No fat there, only bone to char and muscle protein to carbonize. The lactate would still be in his blood from that last effort.

Several hours later, the funeral-home director put in my hands a heavy tin canister labeled with Billy's name and the date, containing his ashes.

The next day I departed from the group, and drove back up to Prescott alone. I had told everyone to stay strictly away from me for the next 48 hours, and they did.

The house was just as we'd left it. The Irish setter ran to meet me—one of the campus maintenance men

had been feeding him. He jumped and barked. Billy's bicycle stood on the porch. In the border, a few lilies, asters "and phlox were in bloom. Behind the house, the tomato plants were wilting a little from lack of water, but they had ripe tomatoes on them.

Moving like an automaton, I put the sprinkler by them and turned the water on.

In the house, a pair of his old Tigers, the ones he wore for everyday, lay dusty by the door. His typewriter on the table by the window, and the folders full of plans for the gay-studies program. In the kitchen, nuts and cereals on the shelf, and a few much-sprouted potatoes in the refrigerator. His belts and old jeans hanging in the closet. The burled-walnut bed, with dust on the bedspread.

I locked the door and sat alone in the house the rest of the day, not eating, hardly moving. The canister of ashes sat on the bedside table. It was hard to remember that he'd existed. Yet there were those ashes, and those things in the house, and a dozen semen samples in a clinic deep-freeze, and one Olympic world record, and all the headlines, and all the memories of him in other people's minds.

Night came. I had asked the campus switchboard to take all calls, and nothing disturbed the silence of the house. I lay down on the bed fully clothed, with all the lights out. Through the window came the soft soughing of the breeze in the spruce boughs. Then, as the hours passed, I could hear a dripping from the eaves. It was raining, a gentle warm autumn rain. The canister sat on the bedside table.

Exhausted, I must have dozed off. Suddenly I woke up with a terrible start. A sound.

I lay on my elbow, listening. In the silence of the house, it came again. A clear musical clink in the kitchen, like a teacup.

I began to shake all over violently, and a hot prickling sweat sprang out on me. In that moment, possibly, I was close to insanity. I got quickly out of bed and went into the living room. The sound came again, making me shudder with a terrible joy. My legs trembling,

I went toward the kitchen. What did I expect to see there?

A dark shape moved in the kitchen, came toward me.

It was the dog. He had been nosing in his china feed bowl, and his metal ID tag had struck musically against it. He was hungry, and sad, and came whining to me, pushing his nose into my hand.

Sinking into a kitchen chair, I sat there a while and managed to stop shaking. Then I turned on the light, opened a can of dog food and fed him.

The gray light came at the windows, later now that the season was advancing. Did I expect to hear the joyous abandoned bird songs? But it was fall, and few birds sang now.

I got up and put my shoes on. It was just past five A.M. Without putting on a raincoat, I took the canister in the crook of my arm, left the dog shut in the house, and went out alone."

First I went over to the old cinder track, and scattered a couple of handfuls of his ashes there, to sweeten the spikes of my freshmen. I felt no horror at handling them. In fact, I felt nothing at all.

Then, with the mist cool on my face, I took the long three-mile walk up into the woods. No one had used the main trail since Billy and I had last run there, back in July. The marks of our spikes had long ago been washed away by the rain.

Turning off onto the side trail, I made my way along, detouring around poison ivy and getting my pants caught in brambles. Finally I came down the slope through the mountain laurel. The seed pods hung on the laurel like clusters of tiny green grapes. The clearing was all grown up with ferns, which were now yellowing and dying down. The leaves on the giant beeches were browning a little. The waterfall over the mossy ledge had dried up to a tiny trickle.

I scattered the rest of his ashes there. I scraped a hole in the loam and buried the canister. Then I washed the ashes and dirt from my fingers in the trickle dripping from the ledge.

The Buddhists would have said that he'd been returned to the round of life.

Two weeks later, school opened and I went back to coaching.

Joe Prescott had offered to give me a semester off, with my assistants taking over, so that I could go off somewhere and rest. But I didn't see how that would help me.

A week after the flood of students arrived, I gave the usual campus-wide talk with color slides, to get the kids to turn out for track. The talk wasn't up to its usual par—I didn't crack any jokes—in fact, it was more low-key than usual. But 115 freshmen boys and girls signed up immediately. It was the largest number I'd ever had.

In addition, we had another influx of quality runners from other colleges and universities. For the first time, we were going to have a big-time team in terms of depth, rather than in terms of a couple of superstars like Billy and Vince. The boys came to me with their eyes blazing with ambition, and with sympathy because of Billy. Several wanted to talk about the 1980 Olympics.

Two more gay runners came to me, a pair of mara-thoners from UCLA. I had to shelter them. Who else would, if I didn't? Billy would have died in vain if I had turned them away because of my personal grief.

"But you're coached by me at your own risk," I told them. "Make sure you understand that."

In the warm autumn sunshine, I was out at the track-side every day, with the Harper Split in my hand and runners hurtling by, their spikes gnashing in the cinders. For the first time in my life, I saw those runners stripped of sexual myth. They were moving objects, oxygen capacity of lungs, glycogen breakdown, nothing more.

I tried hard to remember Billy running on that track, standing by the bleachers toweling himself, his shoulders and thighs steaming in the winter sunlight. But his living memory had been obliterated. As I looked at

the track, all I could see was his body lying in lane 1 with the broken glasses by it.

In the locker room, I could see his body on the bench, one leg fallen aside, the spiked shoe resting on the cement floor. The blood was dripping slowly from his head onto the floor.

At every spot on campus where a memory of him might have been evoked, I saw instead his death. It was stuck in my mind like a color slide stuck in a projector. In our living room, he had fallen forward in his chair with his head on his typewriter, and the blood had run onto the disordered papers. Out in the yard, he lay dead in the unmown grass, by the last asters in bloom in the border.

It was the same in New York City, when John and I sometimes went down on business. We passed Central Park and I could glimpse the carousel off through the trees—he was slumped on the gilded horse, his head leaning on the pole, and blood ran down the pole as the carousel turned slowly, playing "After the Ball Is Over." We passed the theaters where the all-male films play, and I could see him lying in the seat with his head fallen back, his shirt open. In the light from the screen, the blood glistened on his face.