A Horse Named Sorrow (9 page)

“Stop, Jimmy.”

“Huh, Shame?” And he turned around. “It's not pretty; it's very fucked up. I didn't expect I'd meet somebody the day I got here, you know?”

He kicked a shoe, “Dammit.”

I didn't wanna be Jimmy's problem.

“I can leave then, Jimmy.” And I got up and started grabbing stuff. Dramatic, yes, but I was twenty-one and I wanted him to show me he wanted me to stay.

“Shame,” he barked, and he took my arm and made me drop the handful of T-shirts I'd started gathering from the floor. Tight, tight, tight he held my arm. “Just let me figure this out. I'm trying to do right by you. I came here and figured if I met somebody … If I met somebody … it wouldn't be like all the other times …” And he looked away. And then he looked back at me intently: “If I met somebody to … if I met somebody to love (his eyes all glassy), … I was gonna love and take nothing back …”

I wanted to grab and hold him so bad right then, but I checked myself. He didn't want pity. I kept reminding myself of that, though he kept teasing me to express it. Instead, I argued: “Jimmy, you don't take nothing … you're like … like the lottery or something … I'm …”

“Shame … I'm gonna take everything you got, man.” And he dropped my arm and looked at the floor. “My numbers are bad, Shame.” And he raised his face again, his long eyelashes and creamy pale-skinned healthy young handsome face. “This disease, it fucking wrecks people.”

I could put out my hand. And I did. And he took it. Two young naked men. Too young. “It's not gonna wreck you, Jimmy. Besides, you're young and strong … and now there's like AZT and like … ddI …” But I stopped. I'd been to ACT UP meetings; I knew how dubious those drugs were.

He took my other hand then, and we came slowly together into a tender embrace. And I started dancing with him then, holding his naked body close. And soon enough, we were waltzing around that little apartment, dodging combat boots and paperbacks, humming songs from
2001: A Space Odyssey
because Strauss's were the only waltzes I knew. I hated to dance but knew how to make him laugh. And soon enough, his drawn face, with its black-as-iron-filings chin scruff, the slightly turned-up nose, the doe eyes, and the Blakean angelic crown of spiked blond hair, smiled, listening to me hum
The Blue Danube
as we danced faster and faster.

“Crazy motherfucker,” he said.

I just nodded in the affirmative.

We showered and got dressed and I made Jimmy tea, and we sat on the fire escape and Jimmy told me all sorts of long stories while the cars passed back and forth below us and the wind rippled the acacia tree. Man of few words, Jimmy … man of short answers, let out the line and didn't pull until the very end.

“I always went out with older guys, Shame.” And he told me about Franco the dancer and Thomas the poet. “But I couldn't really deal with it when they got sick.”

Jimmy went inside and dug around in the piles up on the mantel. He came back out with an old coffee-stained envelope. And he opened it, and there was Franco, a handsome Italian-looking Argentine with a big smile holding Jimmy close against his shoulder, and Thomas, a serious priestly looking man, standing next to Jimmy. Jimmy had dark hair in all those pics and he looked eager and boyish and enthusiastic. Not so tentative and horse-like. He told me how he met them and what they were like and where they lived and what they liked to do—Thomas had been his English professor at Empire State College one semester, and with Franco he'd lived in Alphabet City after college. And then he started in with the acronyms. I, who didn't want to hear it, listened, but I preferred having Jimmy to myself, with no past—just my William Blake angel appearing on the train platform coming for to carry me home.

But he continued: “I always found some way to pull away, and then I'd end up in some whole other city.” By then he was looking out into the street, talking to himself really. “It was easy to come up with reasons to leave upstate. New York City too, I guess, ‘cause it wears people down. People disappear from there all the time.”

I nodded, and we just sat in silence, watching cars and the corner liquor store and the people going in and out. Then I started suggesting places we could go, talking about museums I wanted to show him, the statue of Georgia O'Keeffe in Sydney Walton Square where the cherry blossoms always accidentally bloomed in February and got torn away by the rains; the Bufano sculptures scattered about the city; the churches and bloody Jesuses I'd found. “Let's go to the Cliff House, Jimmy.”

Jimmy put the envelope back and off we went to Land's End.

He must have had a sense. Two weeks later he was sniffling and coughing, moaning with a cold. A cold that turned to pneumonia. I made chicken soup, I did laundry and everything I could so he wouldn't ask me to go away again. I smiled, kept quiet, and didn't mope once. I pulled. On account of Jimmy, I pulled.

He came home from the doctor's one day feeling much better—and with a doll, the first. “Here, a spirit baby—it's for you,” he'd said. “Give him a name.”

“Little Joseph,” I said spontaneously. A fat little plastic-headed boy, with plastic arms and legs and a cloth body full of sand. Hourglass boy. “He's got your nose, Jimmy.”

Later he'd bring home Elmer and Genevieve, Sebastian and Victoria, who all nestled together on the mantle, leaning on Our Lady of Guadalupe candles and plastic tubs of lube. Our family. World without end.

I'll light the fire … and you place the flowers in the vase … that you bought today …

I slept in campgrounds—all up California, all the way to Eugene—among redwoods, on rivers, sometimes near motorhomes or young hikers with tents. I always camped a ways off though, on my own in just my sleeping bag on a foam pad, with Jimmy, a pile of dust in a velvet bag, held close against my belly in the pocket of me, under a huge vault of stars and a traveling moon.

And I wondered if I'd ever tell anyone about Jimmy. And what would I say? “Grungy, scruffy … 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 matched these like an electric cord matches a wall socket.”

Sometimes cars would come into the campgrounds late, and there'd be that searchlight swing of the headlamps that would pass over me, reminding me of when I was a little boy after Mom had tucked me into my bed in the apartment in San Leandro, and I would watch all the lights flashing across my ceiling, which Mom told me were angels and shooting stars. But, in fact, they were the headlights of cars from the freeway, named for animals and Indians: Pintos and Cherokees, Dodge Dakotas and Falcons, Winnebagos—and even some with names from deep space: Vegas, Coronas, Novas, and Corollas. All going who knows where.

In the woods, there were shooting stars for real, and they got me remembering the plastic glowing ones Jimmy and I pasted on the ceiling in Guerrero Street—and the string of Christmas lights we wrapped around his bike for the holidays that blinked at five different speeds in five different colors.

Looking up at those Day-Glo stars, I'd ask him, “Who are the Three Wisemen, Jimmy?”

“Jimmy, Seamus, and Priapus,” he'd snicker, right on cue, his biceps flexing as he pulled a reversal and pinned me with a kiss. And the gifts we gave? Cock, and ass, mouth and nipple and belly and flank, leg and arm and foot and hand—and things from way inside: our saliva, our cum, our hearts. Little drummer boys. And we drummed each other good too.

I had half a mind to make love to Jimmy when I'd get to thinking like that. To drive my slimed member into the dust of him. Jimmy, who I held close to me like a warm chunk of coal that I'd heard the Japanese Zen monks use at night in the monasteries high up in the mountains where it's cold and they have no furnace. Just a lump of coal they hold to their heart.

Because it was cold among the redwoods at night. San Francisco cold, but no Jimmy and the silk warmth of him.

What does love feel like to the touch? The silk of skin. What does it look like? Tall, brown-eyed, horsey, with knobby knees and shoulders. How does it taste? Like cold water on a hot day, or jasmine tea when it's raining outside. And what does it sound like? Buffalo twang. And how does it smell? Like Clorox.

Yeah, and bleach kills everything.

All I am is clean. Clean out. Clean outta Jimmy.

Jimmy made really good miso soup and we ate it all winter long, with different vegetables we'd scrounge up at Rainbow Market, the big co-op on Valencia Street. One night it would be purple potatoes, beets, and burdock root with tempeh; and the next green cabbage, carrots, and acorn squash with tofu. The night following would be sweet potatoes, zucchini, mushrooms, and asparagus, with sweet mochi on the side. Jimmy'd direct me like a master chef: cut these, sauté those, run down to the corner liquor and get us some salt. And off I'd go. I'd love going out on errands because it meant I could come back, and I always liked coming back to Jimmy, seeing him from behind working the stove, the spikey hair and the way the steam floated through it. One time, he turned and his eyes were puffy with tears from cutting onions. Jimmy who never cried.

On weekend mornings we'd go for coffee and sit for hours riding the caffeine high, discussing all manner of topics, from the alienating horrors of Republican politics to literature, movies, and art.

Jimmy would look at something and he'd say, “How would you make art out of that?” He'd do this randomly, regarding a plant, a shoe, a street sign, some argument between two people on a sidewalk. He was pointing at a gaudily painted Edwardian across the street. I hated all the quaint Victorians because they suggested too much, had way too many stories coming out of them. In fact, to me, they looked like stages—like if they didn't have a story they'd insist upon telling one regardless. They were self-consciously of another time and too much had happened in them, much of it dissonant to their appearance; too many different things. So I told Jimmy I'd gather together all the people in one room who had lived in that house since it was built: top-hatted and corseted Victorians, labor movement dock workers, giant Irish families, hippies, People's Temple and Krsna devotees, Rajneeshis, Chinese people who painted it green and red for luck, Mexicans who packed each room with five young men—finally gay guys fucking each other with tubs of Crisco.

“What is this, Shame?—a painting, a play?”

“Uh, yeah, a play.” Overwhelmed, I could only express myself in collage or absurdity. He sat back and listened. “Or I could speed it all up, do it like a video, compress it so that people get lost and disoriented—I could call it 'Time and Space Are Bunk'—and some dude in a top hat would be blowing Jim Jones to a Grateful Dead soundtrack, with everything falling around them in an earthquake, Sir Francis Drake riding the edifice down like a bucking bronco. And Dan White just blasting away at the windows from out on the sidewalk, killing Harvey Milk first, then Moscone, then Feinstein, then Warren Harding, Gerald Ford, Jack Kerouac, and Jim Jones, Joe Montana and Dwight Clark in bed together, Billie Holiday, Allen Ginsberg—everyone of any consequence who ever stepped foot in this city, Dan gets them. Twinkies like snow falling. Or maybe something sexier, more vulgar …”

“More vulgar?” He smiled.

“How about porn pictures, like with little Victorians instead of penises going up guys' butts or into girls' pussies? Or I could have like a dollhouse-scale Victorian and have guys fucking all the windows, the cum dripping down a big funnel inside that directs it out and onto the front steps where it would run like blood down an Aztec pyramid. I'd call it 'Aztlan, Ass-tlan,' ‘The Sword and the Cross,' ‘Montezuma's Rear End' … your turn, Jimmy.”

He'd begged off, laughing, saying, “You are sorta insane … in a good way, of course … I was just curious what was on your mind.”

What could I do but smile? A backassward compliment. My soup for brains.

“So, Jimmy, I'm waiting …”

“I'm a poet, I'd just look at it until something happened and then I'd report back with everything associated with that moment.”

“That's boring, Jimmy.”

“Is not.” He smiled.

“Is so.”

“Funny isn't everything.”

“Is so.” He rolled his eyes.

“Why don't you paint me, Shame?”

“If you write a poem about me, I will.”

“He

can't see

the forest

for

the trees.

There.”

“Smartass.”

But I wouldn't paint him because the image that kept coming up was him nailed to a cross, and he would have seen that as pity.

Let Them Die for Your Sins
.

But they did crucify him. Or
IT
did. The mother of all acronyms, like the artist formerly known as … I don't dignify it with a name. KIA, AZT, INRI: Here's the King of the Jews.

I thought I could wander around with him forever like some disciple, fishing, sitting under palm trees, visiting wells, watching him walk on water . . . Jimmy did enjoy balancing tightrope-like on curbs and cement walls when he'd find them. And there was always a timeless miraculousness when we got naked and he climbed on top of me and kissed me—
I was blind and now I can see
. But it was me who liked St. John of the Cross poems and Rumi. Jimmy, he liked Lorca and Ingeborg Bachmann.

In the storm of roses, thorns illuminate the night
…

The nails went in, one by one just as soon as the weather turned, not two months into our love. Illness after illness. Endless colds that turned to pneumocystis: left hand to crossbeam; two blows with the hammer will do. In December, thrush: right hand to crossbeam. February was shingles: let's just pile one foot atop the other and blow through ‘em both with one big nail . . .