A Horse Named Sorrow (6 page)

I may have been a bit neurotic, but that bathroom was madness incarnate.

Once I'd succumbed, courtesy of a track star named Kevin at the urinal next to mine, I returned almost daily to all number of sexual acrobatics: from sticking my dick through glory holes to lustful embraces with anonymous fratboys, our T-shirts yanked back behind our necks, constraining our shoulders, while our pants dropped in heaps to the floor, semen sloppily catapulted this way and that, busy with some agenda of its own we hardly had a say in. Within a few weeks, I had joined the cast of regulars, and having done nearly all of them, soon became bored, and felt the need to expand my sexual orbit to the local bars, and finally to San Francisco, from which no faggot can ever return. Needless to say, my grades plummeted and my class attendance suffered, with irreversible consequences.

My mother admonished me. The university threatened expulsion. But it was just too late to salvage my academic career, for though I may have been the answer to
x
in the quadratic equations of some of those wild sexcapades, I didn't like math—in fact, there was no major for what I wanted to study.

I didn't even return for the spring term, for it was during the holidays that I came out to my mother and assorted others, and somehow something shifted and Berkeley was like some place I'd graduated from, in a sense, already.

“What will you do now?” my mother asked me, exasperated and still stunned I'd ever gotten into Cal in the first place.

“Move to San Francisco, of course,” was my too-fast answer.

“To do what?”

“To explore my sexuality.”

“But I thought you knew what it was.”

“Well, you know what I mean.” I could have illustrated my point with one of “our songs” (Karen Carpenter belting out “We've Only Just Begun”), but we never listened to music together anymore.

“Solace for my soup” would have been an honest answer. Either way, it was to be a grand adventure, and I was a ship cutting through the waves, full sail, intent on Eldorado, with its towering palm trees swaying in the breeze and loaded with coconuts. A new world and I was greedy as a Spaniard.

Until I met Jimmy, of course. Jimmy, who educated me better than any university ever could.

U.C. Jimmy.

I found a postcard of the old chief in a card shop and pinned it on the wall over my bed, hoping to conjure the boy I'd lost.

I turned and saw Tanya, leaning on the doorjamb, and I gave her a sheepish glance.

“Don't pine, Shame. Do something constructive.”

What was she, my big sister? Well, sort of.

And then she was rushing around, gathering her things, shoving folders, flyers, cards into her backpack with its ACT UP buttons and Queer Nation stickers plastered all over it. There was an ACT UP meeting that night and she was heading there. She went all the time, was on a committee even. I'd been before, but my attendance was spotty, predicated more on a vague sense of guilt, on righteous anger, and because it was the scene for cute boys with the sex appeal of radical politics. I'd gone to street protests and taken pictures, but I didn't like to think about the acronym too much except for how not to get it, and when I spent too much time thinking about it, I got depressed and paranoid. And I was afraid of depression and paranoia almost as much as the acronym. I preferred Queer Nation kiss-ins at downtown department stores. Tanya turned and looked at me as I sat and stared at her collecting her things. “Come on.”

At the ACT UP meeting, I just sat there and listened, slouched next to Tanya with her set jaw, surrounded by the earnest multitude, who ranged from the leather-jacketed pierced intellectuals who ran the show to assorted hot young artfags and desiccated ‘70s-era guys—men who'd seen so many deaths, I feared they were death itself. There were bouncy, rotund baby dykes and menacing butches, smiling holy men, reassuring Venus of Willendorf sex workers, and several male couples with their hands gripped so tightly their knuckles were white. There were guys who looked like they'd never have been at such a meeting if it hadn't been for the great equalizer of the acronym, and there were the wackjobs who existed among all scenes in San Francisco and could be found wherever subversives gathered.

Tanya got up and spoke and said something about Burroughs Wellcome and AZT, and then they spilled out of her—acronym after acronym: CDC and NIH, FDA and PWA, PCP, ddI and ddC, Compound Q.

She was the real thing and I admired that and knew then that's why I sorta liked her despite how we clashed over things around the house. But I still hated those acronyms more than I liked her and wanted to swat them away like mosquitoes.

“I think I'm gonna go, Tanya,” I whispered to her after she'd sat down post-speech. She put her hand on my thigh to keep me there, but I squirmed free, inconsolable despite the playful antics of the moderator, who had a lampshade on his head and strings of Mardi Gras beads across his chest.

He looked at me, grinning, when I got up: “Bye,” he minced.

I waved sheepishly, mortified at the public flirtation that put me on the spot.

Off I went to walk and ruminate, hurrying up 18th Street from the meeting at the Women's Building, and through Dolores Park, which was living up to its name just then, misty and shadowed in the growing darkness. And in spilled the fog, huge banks of it over Twin Peaks, silent, crashing and breaking like a slow wave, then creeping and foaming around corners, slipping down alleyways and loitering among the buildings, moving heavy and steady like a giant slug ghost down hillsides and streets, or surreptitiously whispering through the cypress trees, insinuating itself.

The city was full of smoke. And where there's smoke, there's fire, each infection like a red-hot coal, waiting to catch enough wind to blow into flame.

Halfway up Portola, the lone walker on the sidewalk, a terrible feeling of loneliness overcame me. Icarus, but in the darkness and mist this time, falling not because of the melting wax of my wings, but because there was no updraft to keep me aloft. I turned and went back down the hill, snaking down among the empty streets and Victorian corner markets into Noe Valley, intent on the Mission, where I just
had to
find him.

First I went to Kaos on Valencia Street, where all the cute ACT UP boys went after meetings, all of whom would arrive soon—and who knows, maybe Jimmy had already joined up and just hadn't been at tonight's meeting or had arrived after I'd left. In which case, he'd appear here? But no Jimmy among the tacky neon décor and smiling boy-crowd, all sweating and shirtless on the cramped dance floor, or crowded around the little tables, hip to bursting, young and full of promise and hormones. I drank too much, ran into Lawrence and assorted others, even made out with some lanky dark Italian boy named Limbo, who wasn't even nice. But my loneliness needed a tit to suckle and he was it on the Naugahyde couch. I tore myself away when he commented on how weirdly blue my eyes were. Off I went, home to masturbate, thinking of my horseboy and how gray he could make my eyes.

Berkeley became Albany became El Cerrito became Richmond—like biblical begetting, the miles passed me and that bike from one on to the other, like the word of God (or in this case, the words of Jimmy—In the beginning was the word, and his were:
take me back the way I came
). And into the hills past Richmond, past housing tracts and industry, determined and pumping away, the bay still out there, the big pill-shaped oil storage tanks on the golden summer-desiccated hillsides. I'd catch a glimpse now and again of the Amtrak train, rushing down the tracks to who knows where. Or I'd look out to the water to see a ferry bouncing along over the waves, heading for the dream city that stood out there like a promise, beckoning. And always the whoosh, whoosh of cars passing me. And Richmond became Hercules became Crockett, and pretty soon I was crossing over the Carquinez Strait itself, looking down into the slow-moving end of rivers. I tried to remember their names and how many: the Sacramento, the San Joaquin, the Napa, and the Mokelumne—and before them, having merged with the growing flood miles inland: the Tuolumne, the Stanislaus, the American, the Cosumnes, the Merced. All come to San Francisco, just like Jimmy had.

I looked at Jimmy's strings then—rivers all—going back now to wherever they came from. Was I supposed to return each one of them? How would I ever find their source? What garments, what bags or awnings, what rags and carpets? What tasks were completed with the frayed remnants of rope? What packages were held secure with that twine? And who were the sheep? Where were the cotton fields? What bleak West Texas plain had the synthetics been once spit up out of ? Who'd worked to transform them in refineries and factories and sweatshops? How many people and how many things were involved to discard a string on the side of the road for a young man dying to find and tie to his bike, resolved to tell its story, but running out of time and never quite getting the chance?

I remembered then his long beautiful fingers laying the strings out on a café table, the wrinkles on his knuckles, the scar on his thumb, how it felt to hold his warm alive hand.

The next day I went to Crystal Pistol, figuring Jimmy just had to eventually appear at one of these sideshows of choice for the lost young punky boys who came to San Francisco, who did things like collect strings, and—like Jimmy—ravaged their scalps with color. Which reminded me to be thorough in my search. His scalp might have morphed to hot pink by now—or green or blue. I had to be vigilant and keep an eye out.

But no dice at the Crystal Pistol.

On Saturday, to Klubstitute I scurried, swirling through the retro circus of young multi-gendered boys, some with rhinestones ensconced between their eyes, tiaras on their shaved heads, dresses and combat boots highlighting their skinned, hairy knees; there was lots of slopped-on eyeliner, garish crabapple red lipstick, darling chin stubble. I saw some friends and even wanted to stay, but without knowing where Jimmy was, I found it hard to socialize with anyone, my face a question, obsessively worrying that somewhere my
answer
was laughing and drinking, dancing and jawing on and on about infant critters to a steady stream of cute available boys. I downed proffered kamikazes foolishly and careened toward a pathetic drunkenness.

A boy got ahold of my left buttcheek and held it like a potter would clay. I smiled politely into his lascivious eyes, but I was through with suckling—my thirst would only be slaked by Jimmy. I walked, all through and up and down the streets of the Castro, where I doubted I'd find him. Sometimes I'd stand on a corner and just watch the parade. The screeching and slap-happy weekend queens, the bow-legged diesels and swaggering butches, the golden-age-of-Hollywood lipsticks, the snooty sweater guys, the quiet watchful artists, the jabbering mainstream social crowd, the gaggles of serious ACT UP boys in small black leather jackets and paratrooper boots, the playful babydykes, the drunks, the broken, the loners, the addicts, and the mad. To some I said “hi”; to others whom I didn't know, I just smiled, investing perhaps in future liaisons as we'd thus now noted each other on the scene. But really, I just wanted to ask all and any of them if they'd seen Jimmy.
And how would I describe him? …
“Horseboy, … sloppy bleach job, … gangly, … doorknobs for shoulders, knees, and elbows, … pants baggy—there's not a belt that could hold anything around that waist, … eyes, eyes that … that …
Here, look into mine
—they match these like an electric cord matches a wall socket.”

A few nights later, I went to the End Up for Club Uranus. My last chance. And that's where I saw him. Out on the patio, smoking a cigarette, alone.

I swallowed what felt like a whole hard-boiled egg.

It was crowded and I was on the other side of the patio, so he didn't see me as I scooted myself up onto the bench that ran along a sad little hedge of neurasthenic bushes. And I just stared across at him. No way was I going to walk up to him. Someone else did though and tried to chat him up. He didn't even smile, just took a hard drag off the cigarette, nodded his head, and looked away. Which made the point. Then he was alone again.

I leaned forward, wanting to be the next someone, but hesitated. I was dying to give him a hug is the honest truth, grab him like he'd survived a natural disaster and squeeze him until my teeth unclenched and I could breathe easy again. But I couldn't let him see I wanted him that badly. That'd finish it. He might even push me away, repulsed by my presumption. I breathed deep to calm my beating heart. He was like the deer in my sights and I couldn't shoot.

I stared at my shoes, scuffed black clownish-looking things I'd found at Community Thrift, and I must have been looking down at them when he spotted me. I'd stopped my head halfway up when I saw he'd discovered me, and I eyed him from under my brows, with my chin still almost touching my chest. That was probably what made him laugh, which momentarily made me blush, and then made my face erupt into a smile that almost hurt, it stretched my face so.

He walked over, pushing through the drinking crowd.

“Well, if it ain't Mr. Blake, the station master,” he beamed.

“Hey Jimmy,” I answered back, my heart bouncing off my sternum like a rubber ball, the dog in me wanting to jump up barking and lick his face. I knew better.

“How you been?” And his hand went to my shoulder and shook it lightly.

“Uh, okay, I guess. How about you?”

I was still sitting down, and he bent his knees to crouch down in front of me, grabbing my hand as he did and kissing it, like he had on the platform.

My lashes fluttered, my heart and stomach leapt, my legs and arms tingled, my throat caught.
Don't do this, you dog.
He kissed me on the lips next, and I leaned into the kiss.

“I'm glad I found ya,” he said.

Found me?
I wanted to say, …
but you knew where I was all along, Jimmy
. I didn't dare. And I was never going to admit I'd been looking for
him
. “Here I am.” I raised my eyebrows. In the background the music throbbed—Soft Cell: “Tainted Love.”