A Horse Named Sorrow (3 page)

The crowds dwindled, but never entirely—not in San Francisco— as we got further from Mission Street. And then there were some big scraggly dusty-green acacia trees, and we turned left, and there it was— the dilapidated brown and white as-yet-to-be-refurbished Victorian, sitting on its grand wooden haunches, lost in the leafy shade of a big unpollarded sycamore tree.

I held the door, and Jimmy rolled in. And I grabbed the back wheel while he held the front handlebars, as up the stairs we guided his steed.

The shower was broken in our apartment, so everyone had to take a bath—which was ridiculous because baths take time and four or five people with one bathroom don't have time. Myself, I rarely bathed there, swimming most days at the nearby YMCA and taking a shower in the locker room.

But I couldn't think of a better thing just then than bathing Jimmy. I'd never bathed anything but a dog, but suddenly it seemed like just the thing to do.

I needed to bathe Jimmy.

Jesus Jimmy.

I needed to oil his feet.

Riding the elevator down, with its buttons for
1, 2, Fire
, I looked at the purple velvet bag full of his ashes under that fluorescent hospital-like light inside those stainless steel walls, standing on that filthy gray rubber floor, with its stuck gum, scraps of paper, and greasy who-knows-what, and I felt shock. Shock that receding foot by foot above me through space and time—not yet a year—was the boy on the platform, with the body he'd lived in, and its wasted, trashed half-bleached over-dyed hair, its intelligent furrowed brow, its long nose and knobby knees, its pronounced shoulders and delicate clavicles—its lungs that breathed, its kidneys that purified and its intestines that digested, its liver that kept working even as it got overtaxed by medicines; its heart that I loved and that loved me, the lips that first touched my hand, the eyes that looked too long, the say-nothing smile—gone and not coming back.

And the elevator opened to the busy crisscrossing of suits and dresses and a newspaper vendor, and a young woman who just dropped her cup of coffee, transfixed over it momentarily. Will she walk on, curse, or look for a janitor? She walked on, the coffee abandoned, running in rivulets among the greasy, shoe-scuffed tiles that made the whole station look like an enormous public restroom.

I rolled up to the booth so the lady could let me through the gate since the bike wouldn't fit through the turnstile. She waved, went out and around, and, fumbling with her huge key ring, let me out with a smile. Then she ran my ticket through the machine and it buzzed.

“You're short,” she informed me.

“Really?”

“Ten cents.”

I dug in my pocket and handed her a dime. What she'd said had reminded me of my father, since that word always did. Which was complicated, as I'd never met him. But he'd been
short
too. Until I was eight, I thought he was a dwarf. “If he was short, how'd he end up getting shot?” I'd asked my mother one rainy Saturday while we played dominoes.

She'd given me the quizzical look over the edge of her glass as she sipped her old-fashioned. “Short doesn't protect you.”

“Sure it does; he's closer to the ground,” I'd responded, as if she were stupid.

She'd sighed then, and, taking my little hand in hers, she explained what “short” was for the first time. He was scheduled to be heading home in ten days when it happened, and in Vietnam “short” was jargon for almost done with your tour.

Like Jimmy, my father died in a hail of acronyms: ARVN and NVA, and VC, and NCO, and PFC, and LZ, and KIA, USA—and all the rest of them in that pile of papers my mother bequeathed to me on my eighteenth birthday. I counted and found that all twenty-six letters were involved; not a one guiltless. An orgy of acronyms; a PTA of them.

Can I have the cherry?”

She delicately pulled the maraschino out of her glass and handed it to me. Then she got up and headed toward the kitchen and her next old-fashioned while I went to put on the records because that's what had to be done when I brought up my father. Otherwise, she'd watch TV and drink far into the night and not do the dishes and act curt the next day.

My mother had a whole record collection of
him
. That's where he lived, in
their
songs, and those that followed in the wake of his disappearance. Which meant we lived in the summer of love and then some, on up into the early '70s, riding the wave of her once-upon-a-time as we played dominoes, mahjong, Yahtzee, and Scrabble. I'd memorize lyrics I liked and that I knew pleased her, which gave her no end of amusement:
Feeling good was good enough for me
, and
Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen
, and
Do you know the way to San Jose?
I did, and pointed.

We parked the bike in the hall and tossed his gear in my cluttered, messy little windowless room, and I marched him grinning into the bathroom, which was miraculously empty. And I turned the lock behind us and ignored what came to six knocks during the course of our bath.

Jimmy let me pull his shirt off and unbutton his trousers. It was no lusty come-on kind of thing either. Not at first anyway. It was just me preparing to bathe Jimmy. But I got all bunched up and heartbeat-giddy when I had him down to his shorts, and with sighing smiles we looked straight at each other and kissed long and crazy. I don't remember how the rest of our clothes came off, but they did and fast, and the water making a racket filling the tub behind us, and his skin so silky and his scent so horse-sweat sweet—and someone knocking on the door.

And then Jimmy had me balanced up on the sink, all naked, with my lanky limbs clinging to him like a spider, and he grabbed my face in both his hands as our cocks swung around like antennae, and he said, “Hey Seamus, whelp, I got something I gotta tell ya.” He stared for another second. “I got
it
.”

Any faggot worth his salt knew what
it
was too. My heart skipped a beat all the same, not because it was news—I'd figured it on the platform when he'd called himself a salmon—but because words from the source make it more real, and because I didn't want to say the wrong thing.

“I know, Jimmy. I'm not afraid.”

Lie. But a white lie.

He looked down at his feet momentarily, and then we both opened our mouths and kissed deep and crazy, and I wrapped my legs around his back and squeezed.

And off we went, galloping until with a shuddering groan and clenched brow, every mile of America was flying out of him and onto me, and without a lot of choice in the matter—in bodily enthusiastic courtesy—I gave him back my own paltry travels, which ran off his pale waifish chest and belly like lost—no, not lost at all anymore—tears.

Then Jimmy in the bath, and the wet dark roots under his platinum hair, and the muted green of his pale skin, and how dark he was under his arms and at his waist. I went to work with a big loofah sponge, and I scrubbed Jimmy's back, and his bony shoulders, all around his little dark nipples, each with a single hair, and up under his hairy armpits, where he captured my hands and then leaned forward and kissed me long and deep. Then I made him stand up as I scrubbed his dark-haired shins and his long chicken-thin thighs. I soaped all around his cock and held the heft of his balls as I soaped up his sweet perineum. And every part of his body I washed, I sealed with a kiss.

And then I pulled him down to rinse him off.

And Jimmy said, “I don't want your pity.”

My stomach sank and I just looked back at him. At a loss. I handed him the sponge: “Here.”

But Jimmy surprised me with a quick little upturn of his mouth, and then he sponged the whole of me from behind while he hugged me close and nibbled my neck.

He dried me off and I dried him off as he shivered, arms tucked close against his chest. I got a little carried away drying his cock and balls and hairy ass crack, and before I could mutter my awe or cry my sweet sadness, Jimmy was down on the floor with me and 69 trombones in the big parade, and then he was asking me for a condom, which put me up against the door, my hands pressing into it as someone on the other side knocked rhythmically in perfect harmony with Jimmy.

I hadn't packed up and left right away, thinking it a fool's errand—which everyone agreed it was. And yet I
was
a fool, so what kind of argument did that make? Besides, he'd asked and I'd promised, and all the naysayers with their chorus of “dementia, Seamus” couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Fact was, I couldn't bear our place on Guerrero Street once he was gone anyway, even though I never left it for more than beer, coffee, and ramen.

Something there watching me all the same, telling me to pull. Pull myself together. I'd look at that bike in front of the fireplace, and the two Best Foods mayonnaise jars on the mantel that were Jimmy. They'd tried to talk me into urns and wooden boxes and other bourgeois accoutrements at the crematorium. No sir, as in life, so in death— Jimmy goes in a jar. Best food I ever had.
Let Them Eat Mayonnaise
mocked one of my horrible Marie Antoinette paintings staring down at me from the wall.

I'm the first to admit I had little if any talent, but it was San Francisco, so of course I had to be an artist. Besides, I was an emotional wreck and being an artist gave that some dignity, nobility, cachet. Consolation, if nothing else. So I painted, mostly therapeutic black-and-green abstracts, with flashes of orange when I was feeling particularly anxious or had had too much coffee. I liked doing it, and there was a scene of folks who even thought my paintings were good. I'd hang them in cafés, have openings, the whole charade. People even bought them. I was too guilty to sell them for more than a hundred bucks, so I got a name as a real cool artist: “The real thing—he's not in it for the money.” And what
was
I in it for? I never painted anything that was worth more than the canvas it was spilled on, so who can explain the added value of ninety dollars? It was just a guilty Catholic's version of greed (highly discounted, but still profitable). Or maybe it was more about the greed of just being somebody, because I had a vague sense that deep down I wasn't anybody at all.

“Let them buy shitty paintings!” Marie Antoinette would say if she were me, which is a ridiculous hypothetical notion. But I painted her all the time after that, since it seemed appropriate.

Let Them Buy Timeshares
,
Let Them Get 2 for 1
,
Let Them Shop 24 Hours a Day
,
Let Them Gobble Prozac
.

Jaded. I never understood the term. Jade is pretty and worth something, yes? I was rusted if I was anything. Too long in the rain. Going out in an orange blaze of muted, anonymous, common-as-dirt oxidation. Nothing pretty or valuable about it.

And then Jimmy … in the nick of time.

After the bath, Jimmy had pulled out his maps and showed me how he'd traveled. One long red squiggly line, from Buffalo to Eugene, Oregon—with circles where he'd stayed the night—and then down the coast to San Francisco.

“Why'd you go all the way up to Eugene, Jimmy?” My brows arched.

“I knew some people there,” he said with a shrug. Short answer.

I looked at the bike. “And you picked up all those strings right along that red line.”

“Every one of 'em.” And he let the map fall to the floor. “I'm so tired.” And he kissed me on the forehead, lay back, and just like that, closed his eyes. And then after a while, Jimmy curled in on himself, like a cat.

I awoke early and petted his wrecked hair and his knobby shoulder, and then I got up, threw on some clothes from one of the piles on the floor, and snuck out of the room, spying my new bottle of Zoloft on the bookshelf near the door, which I grabbed and—once in the hall— pitched out the window before leaping, three steps at a time, down the stairs and through the door, to go fetch coffee and food.

I was on Jimmy! Like a PhD or MFCC was his saving pedigree— Jimmy Keane, SSRI.

Past the madding crowd of 16th and Mission I hurried, and up two blocks to the coffee shops, where I ordered two triple lattes and bagels and ran into my ex-boyfriend Lawrence.

“Hey Shame, what's up?”

“Oh hi, Lawrence,” I said distractedly, paying my tab while he beamed next to me as my mood rapidly deflated. I was hoping I could make a quick getaway. Lawrence was annoying, unresolved, hot, charming, lethal, desired and undesired in ways I couldn't get a handle on.

“I got a show coming up.” He smiled seductively.

Of course he had a show coming up. Handsome Lawrence with his big handsome nose and glittering green eyes, his sultry smile. Chemistry. We'd met at an art show as we both painted, though that had little to do with it since we were alterna-boys and attended all the ACT UP and Queer Nation benefits and art happenings and would have met anyway. He was a “serious” artist, he'd reminded me on several occasions, as he attended the Art Institute and I didn't. Be that as it may, we'd urgently needed to fuck each other the minute we met, and within a few hours were doing just that.

“Cool. Where?”

He handed me the little orange postcard from his stack. I saw he was still doing big bold-colored phallic flowers with titles like
Bob
,
Mike
,
Jim
(his sacred/profane shtick).

“OK, I'll try to make it,” I lied.

“What are you working on?”

“Oh, haven't been doing much lately,” I fudged. Actually I'd been painting like a fiend, but saw no point in bringing it up as he didn't really care anyway. I knew what Lawrence wanted; what he always wanted.

“Check it out.” And Lawrence, shifting his gaze to his waist and leading mine with his, pulled the front of his pants down a bit so I could see his underwear's elastic band, revealing what he'd written there in black magic marker:
This is the Body of Christ
. It was all an inside joke with us, this underwear business, a natural progression from the endless variations of Queer Nation stickers. We'd worked it to death, so that even then I still had loads of jockey shorts and boxers left over from our affair, stenciled with
Om Mani Padme Hum
,
What Me Worry
,
Joe Boner
,
To Buttfuck Just Lift Handle
, etc. We'd even put our phone number on there one day, in search of a third.