“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.
2
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.
3
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 unconc
erned.
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.
4
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.
5
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 harm
ony with Jimmy.
6
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.
A Horse Named Sorrow Page 2