A Horse Named Sorrow (2 page)

“Me? I'm just a whelp—I got no authority.”

“A whelp?”

“A baby tiger.” And I strolled over and showed him my book of useless facts with its long lists that were suddenly useful.

“You look full-grown to me.”

“Trust me, I'm half-baked.”

“Why a tiger?”

“A whelp.”

“Well, why a whelp then?”

“I just like the word. I could as well be a pullet. That's a baby hen. Shoat's a baby pig. Elver's a baby eel.” (And I began to read compulsively, masking my nerves—or not.) But I soon grew afraid of being a bore, so I shifted to questioning him. “Where'd you come from?” I queried, looking at the bike and its strings—me, a nervous pullet of chatter.

“Buffalo.”

“Buffalo. Let's see—” (consulting my book) “that'd be a calf.” I looked at him regretfully. “Sorry.”

“Don't apologize, I hate the place. Besides, I'm all grown up.” And he grinned again.

I smiled back. “Did you ride this bike all the way from Buffalo?”

He nodded, arching his brows.

The passion: a dye-blond crown of thorns.

My emotions were like a crowd. Give 'em what they want. Barabbas or the J-man. There's gonna be a crucifixion. Well, more or less. Because if you ask me, purveyor of useless facts, the promise of sex with someone you're starting to like puts you smack dab in the center of time, history, and the universe itself. Right there in West Oakland no less. The birth of a new religion, and all the madness that ensues.

I smiled and held out my hand. “I'm Seamus.”

He paused and looked at my hand before taking it, reminding me what a distancing a handshake always was. A safe distance. Gay people don't generally shake hands, not when they've already traversed the distance of acknowledging who and what they are. But it was too early for a hug or a kiss. Instead, he surprised me, grabbing my outstretched hand by the wrist, bending forward and pulling it to his lips, kissing it with a smack like some fairy-tale prince. “Seamus, the whelp,” he said triumphantly.

“The pullet,” I blushed, disarmed.

“I'm Jimmy.”

“You're no calf.”

“No? What am I?”

I could have said a lost puppy, on account of those big brown eyes, or a bantam rooster, with that spiked crest of bleached hair, but I opened the book instead, flipping madly, thinking:
I better pick the right one
. But I already knew he was a colt. I just didn't want to give myself away. “You've traveled a great distance; you must be a smolt.”

“What's a smolt?”

“Baby salmon.”

“That doesn't follow, Seamus.”

“Why not?”

“The baby hasn't been anywhere. I'm an old salmon; the trip's over.” He looked away momentarily, a hint of sadness in his voice, and being that it was 1990 and he was a young gay man, I knew what he meant straightaway.

“This book doesn't have the old ones,” I offered, at a loss.

He shook his head back and forth, as if he knew that.

“Ex-smolt?” I offered, arching my brows, chancing a smile. He grinned. “Wanna go somewhere 'til six?” He raised his brows. “Like food, beer, something like that?” I persisted.

He hesitated. Then: “Sure.”

And off we went, bike in tow. Bike like a horse. Jimmy too. With his long face and big-lashed dark brown eyes; the long slender nose. Strong and free and just a tad startled. Worn-out by miles too. Half salmon and half Pony Express. Some kind of mythic animal that hadn't even been thought up yet.

But he looked nothing like a fish, of course. The fish was inside, in the river of him.

And, truth be told, I didn't look anything like a whelp either. That was lost somewhere way inside of me too. I was no tiger—if I could have mustered a feline at all, it'd just be a little stray kitten. Unselfconfident and somewhat befuddled by life, I had a wide-open, disarming face that made me look like I was always in the middle of asking a question, or perhaps just waiting for an answer, question posed or no. My hair was just brown then, its normal color; kind of long, curly, always messy—a right when you have curls. My eyes were gray like slate, but they turned blue when I was unsure. They were blue almost all the time then.

“What do I look like, Jimmy?” I asked him after he'd negotiated the exit gate. He gave me that one arched brow of his. “I mean—like which animal?”

“I don't know, Seamus. A dog, I guess. A lost dog. A mutt.” I frowned. “Friendly,” he said with a smile.

“Loyal, a good companion,” I added.

And then we were on the sidewalk, in the afternoon sun.

“So what's with the strings?” I inquired, looking more closely at the bike and its adornment in every color of thread and twine.

“Each one's a poem. I hope.” He laughed. “I just collect 'em as I go, and when I have the time, I'll tell their story.”

“Looks like a long friggin' story.”

He sighed. And we stood there and smiled, gazing at his threads.

I didn't actually know a place to go around there. It was a rough neighborhood, West Oakland: an old-style ghetto, houses always burning down. Beautiful old burnt-down houses from high above, out the windows of the BART train. Lots of liquor stores and wide empty avenues, crowded street corners with all number of children and teenagers swatting each other. A place most people only passed through—or over, actually—admiring the public sculpture of incinerated domiciles.

We ended up sharing a forty-ouncer. On the curb, in a brown paper bag, a block from the station.

“Where you goin' now, Jimmy?”

“This is it, man. This is my destination.”

“This street corner?”

He grinned. “San Francisco.”

“That's not very original, Jimmy. And you're not quite there yet.”

He grinned again. “Not till six, at least. So what brings you here, Mr.…?”

“Blake.”

“Like
tiger, tiger burning bright
?”

Oxidation, I wanted to say, but I was always careful not to betray my cynicism to potential quarry. ”Yeah, sure, but you'd have to substitute a whelp.”

“Whelp, whelp burning bright. Doesn't work, Seamus.”

“Try pullet.”

“Pullet, pullet burning bright. Nah, sounds like a rotisserie.”

“Elver?” He just looked at me. “Electric eel?” My eyes matched my face, a big wide question.

“You didn't answer my question,” he said.

“That makes two of us.”

He rolled his eyes. “So you're as unoriginal as I am.”

“No, even more so. I was born here!” And I said it with great enthusiasm, proud of my inconsequence. “Oakland, that is.”

He laughed. “You
are
a whelp.” And he patted my thigh affectionately, which sent my heart racing. Then he got himself up. “Must be six by now.”

I didn't stand up with him, just looked up at him, his body making shade all over me in the lengthening rays of the setting sun that were turning the sky heartbreakingly orange-pink-purple right then and making of Jimmy an angel among the litter and the empty lots and burnt-out houses, loitering children, and liquor stores of West Oakland.

“Where you goin', Jimmy?”

“Goin' to California.”

I threw out my arms and looked around, a big car-salesman smile on my face.

“You're a weirdo, Seamus,” he said with a grin, but I was suddenly ecstatic, as he added: “—and that's a good thing.”

“Stay here in California with me, Jimmy,” I said, patting the concrete sidewalk next to me where he'd been sitting just moments before.

He sat down heavily again and looked at me, as if he were thinking. Then, gravely, he ventured: “You know, I need a place to crash.”

“Coming right up!” I shouted. “You can stay with me.”

He squinted his eyes at me, considering it.

I hopped up, tore a page out of my useless book, and dug a pen out of my pocket. “Can I get you something to drink, sir?”

“Forty-ouncer.” He chuckled bashfully.

“Coming right up.” And back I went down the block to the liquor store, the old black proprietor, his glasses and steel-wool gray hair; his curious way of looking at me, an odd pullet in the neighborhood. The news was going on the TV behind him, and there was the smell of wet boxes and spilled soda, old and sticky; and there was dust, dust everywhere; and cigarettes, liquor, lottery tickets, blistered old plastic Pepsi and Miller signs, crooked and burnt by years of bad fluorescence.

“Don't drink it all in one place,” he chuckled wryly.

But that was just what we did. And then I took Jimmy home.

I ended up right back on that same platform a year later. Alone. And going in the opposite direction. But the bike was the same, and the panniers—even the clothes on my back were the same, since they were Jimmy's: the baggy army cutoffs, the Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt. Even a new tattoo: on my left ankle, the Chinese symbol for “dog,” inspired by Jimmy—or his goodness, or both.

And second thoughts, of course. Eyes a vivid blue.

The bike was still covered in those strings—he'd only gotten to a few dozen, and there were hundreds: every sort of string imaginable— from all colors of cotton thread to skeins of silk, and even braided hair and plastic fishing line. There was a short section of some of that yellow police tape, and a twisted length of shimmering tinsel from some old Christmas tree; a thong of leather, some Mardi Gras beads, and even plastic ties from food bags in yellow, blue, and white. And there was yarn and hemp and tangles of packaging twine. There were the shimmering brown remains of cassette tapes—I wondered what songs? There were twisted pieces of ribbon—cherry red, navy, kelly green—and even a frayed knot of rope. And the name, painted over where it used to say
Schwinn
on the front handlebar post of the bike—scrawled in Jimmy dime-store model paint:
Chief Joseph
.

And Jimmy, of course, in an old purple velvet bag with gold drawstrings, all ten pounds of him, tied tight around the center of the handlebars.
Taking him back the way he came
, just like he'd asked.

I'd yanked a coarse blue thread off the seat cushion on the BART train that day we'd met as we sped along under the bay toward San Francisco, lights flashing by that I always liked to believe were those deep-sea fish with organic lightbulbs on their heads. But they weren't; the tube was concrete and not a window in it anywhere.

“Here, Jimmy, your final string.”

He gave me that quick smile of his, leaned forward, and tied it onto the frame, right under the handlebars, which brought me face to face with
Chief Joseph
.

“What's with the name?”

He looked at me, like I'd already asked too many questions, and then he looked at it, and contemplated it for a minute. “There's a long answer and a short one to that,” he offered somewhat reluctantly, enigmatically.

“You don't gotta tell me at all, if you don't want to; I was just curious.”

Whoosh, whoosh, went the BART train, people yammering above the din.

“Chief Joseph said, ‘I will fight no more forever.' That's why.” But he wasn't looking at me when he said it. The short answer. I let it drop as the train beeped and we emerged under downtown, the platform a scurrying anthill of suits and hairdos. Jimmy perked up and looked slightly alarmed, but I shook my head no: “Four more stops, Jimmy.”

Beep, beep, like the roadrunner, and the windows exploded with light and faces for the fifth time.

We came up the escalator from underneath, the BART tube under the Bay having now delivered us from Oakland like a birth canal to the garden of earthly delights at 16th and Mission, ground zero for the lost youth of America come to San Francisco. They were all there in their skinny checkered pants and knit caps, with their tattoos and their piercings, among the vendors of
elotes
and pork skins and tacos, a portly Mexican in a white shirt and tie bellowing out Spanish Jesus-talk from a bullhorn. And there were the homeless too, heaped in coats and plastic bags, and the ubiquitous Central American women, kids in tow, wearing their T-shirts and skirts and grim brown shoes—and on the uncomfortable-looking benches: indigent youths and hustlers, speed freaks and men with canes dealing crack cocaine and heroin. On the chained-to-a-pole newspaper vending machine, a plethora of Queer Nation stickers barked out their messages in primary colors:
Rugmuncher
,
Buttfucker
, and
What Causes Heterosexuality?

“You made it, Jimmy.” His sideways grin, rattling the bike off the escalator and across the dinful plaza. He played it cool, but I could see he was taking it all in. I should have put him back up on the bike and led him by the halter so he could better look around as I guided him along toward my own private manger in Bethlehem on Shotwell Street, just a few blocks beyond.

I had a slew of roommates, a sort of musical chairs of roommates, in the big flat where I'd lived the past year. They'd come and go with circumstances, or fall in love and get driven out by the others who didn't want a fifth or sixth to share the bathroom with and to clean up after. I was the only one who hadn't pulled that, but now here I was—and he had a bike with him too, and stuffed-to-bursting panniers that hung on either side of the back wheel. They wouldn't read
him
as a one-night stand, no sirree.

“I don't know how long you can stay, Jimmy, but at least a few nights before they turn on you,” I sheepishly told him, rounding the corner, anticipating furrowed brows and general passive aggressiveness that wouldn't go full-blown until midweek at the earliest. It was a tolerant city after all. Tolerant until it wasn't, and then you were cooked good. Such was our fair PC city.

Jimmy just smiled at my warnings, seemingly unconcerned.