A Horse Named Sorrow (8 page)

Jimmy stood and looked at me for a few frozen minutes.

“I don't know. I don't like kids, but I like people who do.”

“Well, then you like me,” I said triumphantly.

He grabbed me. “You ever read Burroughs?”

“Sure.”

“
Wild Boys
?” His face was full of mischief. “Wanna go make a spirit baby, Shame?”

I nodded emphatically.

Up the stairs with the box springs. We threw the bed together like a giant sandwich, and then I guess you could say we ate it. Or made the mayonnaise to moisten it up. Same difference. Garnished each other with kisses.

Lying there spent and naked, up on his elbows, with his cock rakishly splayed across his left thigh, Jimmy winked at me. And then he jumped up and went and gathered strings like berries off his bike, untying several.

Then Jimmy sat down Indian-style in the middle of the bed, saying, “Let me show you something”—and he tied a yellow string around my wrist and told me: “That one came from a rag that was blowing in the wind, caught on a barbed-wire fence near Gillette, Wyoming. It's for you.” I nodded a respectful thanks, though I couldn't imagine why he gave me that one. But I kept listening because there was a whole load of such stories tied all up and down that bike and I wanted to hear them. He stretched out a blue string that he could only remember was somehow about time—”from either Dayville, Oregon, or Ten Sleep, Wyoming, I can't remember which.” There was a red thread he said belonged to a gay priest in Preston, Iowa, who'd asked but hadn't received on account of Jimmy wasn't interested in anything but a place to lay his sleeping bag in the rectory.

“This one”—and he held up a dingy dark blue-green thread—“I yanked off the blood pressure Velcro thingy the day I found out.”

Up in Sonoma County someone had painted that Katmandu Buddha on a barn and it made me think of Jimmy's third-eye tattoo.

“It was very cool once,” he'd said as we lolled on the bed, “but so were a lot of things. I wanna get rid of it.” I agreed with him, it was sort of ridiculous, especially compared with the beautiful Chinese one etched on his sideburn that reminded me of his goodness. Yet after a while the third-eye tattoo seemed so sweet. Jimmy's mistake. Jimmy'd get shy when I'd run my finger around it. It was a black circle with a red dot in the center, more a bull's-eye than a human eye.

“The third eye
is
the bull's-eye, silly,” he'd razzed me when I'd mentioned it looked more like a dartboard than an ophthalmological specimen.

“How 'bout adding a tear?” I said animatedly.

“I never killed anybody. Shut up,” he said, furrowing his brow.

“So, the real third eye—is it open, Jimmy?”

“I found you, didn't I? Must be.” He winked.

“Ah, Jimmy, I'm not third-eye stuff. Hell, I wouldn't even wanna know what I looked like through a third eye. Probably like one of my friggin' paintings.”

He looked offended and furrowed his brow again. “Hey, I like your paintings.”

“Do you really?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, it's like you turn your anger into something funny. I don't know how to do that. I mean, my poetry isn't funny.”

“Your tattoo is funny.”

“Fuck you,” he said with a smile. The timbre of his voice.

“Your anger is actually kinda sexy, Jimmy.”

“Nice to know it makes someone happy.”

“See? You're sarcastic. That's a kind of funny.”

He nodded and sighed.

“If we were clowns, Jimmy, you'd be like the hobo clown with the frown … and I'd be like the white facepaint psycho kind.”

He guffawed. “You're not as crazy as you think you are.”

“And you're not as serious, Jimmy. You always laugh after you cum.”

“Maybe that's because sex is sort of ridiculous once you've gotten it out of your system.”

“Or maybe we need to have more sex so things are funnier?” Brows high, the question that was my face.

He guffawed again. “You are crazy.” And he kissed me. And not long after that we were naked and pretty soon we were laughing too.

And then Jimmy was up on his feet and ready to go out for coffee.

And like we did a million times (I wish, but it was more like a few dozen, Jimmy not being here that long—it felt like a million all the same), off we'd go to sit in cafés like two kids with our projects. He'd lay out his strings, a handful he'd tied to his wrist that morning after removing them from the bike. Me, I'd sit and sketch up new Marie Antoinette ideas: as Ronald Reagan (
let them eat ketchup
); as a Palestinian teenager (
let them live in refugee camps for three generations
); as two guys having sex (
let them laugh like clowns
).

“You're more of a performer than a painter, I think,” Jimmy said.

“I'm no artist, am I, Jimmy? These things are crap.”

He laughed, and then he stopped when he saw I wasn't saying it humorously.

“Maybe you should take an acting class or something.”

“Yeah, then we could become porn stars and laugh at each other,” I sighed.

He rolled his eyes. “I just mean it's good to try something different for a change.”

“Like fight no more forever?”

He nodded with gravity, as if he weren't sure whether I meant it like he'd mean it or if I was just being smart-aleck ironic and/or defensive.

“I'm sorry, Jimmy … I just meant …”

Funny till I wasn't. Then I'd get all apologetic and it would annoy him. “Sorry, Jimmy. Good Mr. Jimmy. Sorry to bring you down.”

He knew where that was going. He reached over and shook me hard by the shoulder. “Hey. Pull yourself together. What's the matter?”

“I talk too much. I say the wrong shit all the time.” And I shook my head.

“Just stop.” He shrugged. Easy for him to say.

I looked at him. “It's just the soup, Jimmy.”

“Pull.”

“I don't know how to love you,” I said, but in my mind I was singing
Jesus Christ Superstar
.

He put his finger to his mouth, then leaned across the table and kissed me on the forehead. “That's how.”

He went back to his strings, and I pulled.

And
pull
meant all sorts of things: shut up and pull yourself together; pull the rope of your life—because I'd let it all run out all over the floor with my endless chatter. Or it was like skeet-shooting even: pull, concentrate, aim, and fire.

Jimmy in a white T-shirt with his ratty green sweater over it, the dark scruff of his chin running all the way down to his Adam's apple, which was a red delicious, so pronounced it was. He'd stop on the sidewalk and I wouldn't notice until I was ten feet past him, so lost I'd been in my musings about Ivan or Tanya or my mother's preference for Jim Croce over Joni Mitchell.

Pull.

He'd catch up then and grab ahold of my hand, maybe bite my ear. And sometimes he'd run me like a dog down the block. Because I really was like a dog to Jimmy. A good companion. And he knew how to calm my barking.

Sometimes he just grabbed me. The steadying embrace of James Damon Keane. Pulling me. Squeezing me. Making a bowl for my soup.

Jimmy loved to dance, while I'd go on and on about how I didn't like to dance and didn't know why, and maybe it was the places, or the people, or the music, or maybe there was just something wrong with me. He'd just look at me and say: “Seamus … pull.” Then he'd give me a big hug, and I'd go and just find a nice place to sit more often than not, with my sketchpad, or put back beers and smoke cigarettes or pot and watch Jimmy like some mom at a soccer game. How he danced all alone in his own little trance, his head rolled back past his shoulders, the Chinese sideburn tattoo on his pale skin like a beacon to spot him by. He danced sort of like Pig Pen, and dressed like him too, all grungy.

And I sat and watched him a lot, whether it was dancing or when he was reading his poems.

Because Jimmy had quickly become a little sensation in the SF poetry scene—and not just because he was cute and edgy, with that tattooed face, but because he was different in that he wrote no poems about Jimmy or gimmicky hipster drama. He was never arch. He wrote poems about nothing places and the nobody people whom he described in vivid colors—little knots in his long, long string:

Hot damn Jimmy and the silences he wrought. The timbre of his voice.

Jimmy had gotten a job through Sam and Julie, those same friends who snatched him away from me after the bath. Good thing too because he'd get insurance eventually, but not for six months, at which point we'd also learn it didn't cover pre-existing conditions. So much for that.

Well, he got paid at least. He worked at the blood bank, as a warehouse man. Funny Jimmy. Dark Jimmy. A vampire at the blood bank. He was the warehouse man, shipped the blood all around.

“You ever drop it, Jimmy?”

“Yeah, and it bounces.” His little grin.

“Never breaks?”

“Nah, the bags are thick and rubbery.”

“Do you get to drink for free like I do at the coffee shop?”

“No, but I smear it all over my face when I'm angry—what do you think?” Jimmy would get tired of my caffeine-blitzed chatter after work, especially if he wasn't feeling well. And I talked on and on while I opened mail, folded clothes, listened to phone messages, throwing out my doubts and anxieties and talking my endless nonsense. Sometimes he'd grab me—and squeeze, and squeeze, until it was like all the caffeine went right out of me, and then we were kissing, and our clothes were being pulled by the other, and we were naked, our eager cocks poking at each other, the dark hair around his cock as black as his chin's, and me muttering, “Jimmy, Jimmy, oh fuck, Jimmy.”

“Shame,” and he'd look me in the eye. And then he held his finger to his mouth, “shhhh.”

It's like he fucked the madness right out of me.

“I fuckin' love you, Jimmy.”

“Oh yeah?” Deadpan Jimmy.

And I'd squeeze him back, hoping to squeeze out of him what ran through
his
blood. And sometimes I convinced myself that I was doing just that. Sex magic—and I thought of my semen as a healing balm when it jetted out of my cock and onto his chest. And I rubbed it around all over his lovely long pale chest and pronounced clavicles like it was Vicks VapoRub, lying with him, kissing him, telling him he was my new favorite thing.

“What's the old one?”

“Well, they come and go, you know?”

“So you don't remember?”

“Well, probably this little girl, Eustacia.”

He looked at me, brows furrowed.

“She's one of the kids I tutor.”

He nodded. “So, what? Am I like her?”

I had to think about that. “Come to think of it, yeah. Sorta.”

“Hmm, this should be interesting. She's what?—eight?”

“Yeah. She's cute and she likes me. Maybe it's as simple as that.”

“Ah, give me a little more than that, Shame.”

“Uh, she's Chinese, has this really cool, long silky black hair that shines.”

“Well, I'm not Chinese and my hair is blond.”

“You dye it,” I corrected him. “Same roots? I don't know, Jimmy— shit, you make me want to smile and cry all at the same time. How's that?”

“Hmm. Better. What's her sad part? I know mine.”

He didn't want my pity, so I checked it. “I don't know her that well. She's a kid. I mean, it's sad to be a kid. It's not easy, or carefree and fun like people think and choose to remember it. Kids are …” But I didn't say it. I was thinking “powerless.” He didn't want my pity. “It's nothing specific, Jimmy. I think when you love somebody that's just how it feels. A little sad. I mean, we're all fucked ultimately.”

“Vulnerable, right?”

“Yeah, sure, that's a good word for it.”

“I'm not a kid, Shame. You don't have to take care of me.”

“Jimmy,” and I ran my hand through his chaff-like golden scalp.

He sat up then.

“You're gonna probably leave when things get fucked up, Shame.”

“I don't think so.” And I sat up then too, hands around my legs, head between my knees.

“I think so, Shame. And maybe we need to take a little break, see some other people or something.”

I said nothing to that; felt offended in fact and thought of a new Marie:
Let Them Go Find Some Other Boy Even Though They Found the One They Love Already
.

“What do you mean, Jimmy? You want me to go away?”

“Shame, I came here with a lot of intention, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” and I looked down.

“I came here to die, okay? Fight no more forever.” And he reached over and lifted my chin with those long fingers of his. “Shame … I'm not pushing you away; I'm just not pulling you down with me.” And his eyes were all glassy after he said it. Jimmy, who didn't cry.

“You aren't pulling me down, Jimmy … you pick me up.”

I got a pained look on my face then and he got up and walked to the window and the fire escape, and looked out at the acacia tree, and the corner liquor store and the pay phone and the buckled sidewalk, and he said without turning around:

“You ever been there for it? Someone dying slow and ugly? Huh, Shame?”