A Horse Named Sorrow

by Trebor Healey

  Not that it was ever simple.

  “You gotta give thirty days, Shame.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Isn’t there someone?”

  “You know anyone?—reliable?”

  Tanya was right, and while I was flaky and irresponsible, I wasn’t a jerk and wasn’t going to stick it to her. Besides, after the recent ACT UP meeting, I had a newfound respect and admiration for Tanya, as well as a sudden ability to forgive her for sending Jimmy packing, since I’d tracked him down and was now about to be living with him. I didn’t always like her style, but she was just and at least deserved justice in return.

  “I’ll find someone, don’t you worry.” But my only friends were six-year-olds at the YMCA. Or boys I’d hooked up with. And contacting them—which likely would entail bodily contact—was no longer an option now that Jimmy was in the picture.

  I certainly couldn’t afford paying rent in two places, even though Jimmy said I didn’t have to pay rent the first month. But, as it turned out, Tanya found someone through ACT UP and I was off the hook. I was glad she’d found someone because then she wouldn’t blame me if my choice turned out to be a fuck-up, which was about 75 percent likely.

  Where’d you get the money for this place, and how’d you get it without a job?” I asked Jimmy, hefting a box up the long stairwell from the sidewalk where my pile of boxes sat post-cab ride. The cabbie had even agreed to take the bike, though we’d had to hang it out the back of the trunk. Just then, Jimmy carried it up the stairs before me on his shoulder.

  “I gave him six months, up front.”

  I did a quick calculation. That had to be three thousand dollars, give or take. A lot of money. And Jimmy didn’t look to me like the kind of guy who would have that kind of money.

  “Where’d you get the money?” I looked at him, incredulous, as we reached the landing.

  “I found it.” He gave me a quick smile over his shoulder, but by the time I registered the oddity of that response, he’d vanished through the door and into the apartment, where he placed the bike carefully in front of the fireplace.

  “Where?”

  “In Eugene,” he answered, without turning around.

  “How do you find that kind of money?” I asked suspiciously.

  He turned and laughed and said: “By reading books.”

  “What?” I felt like I was talking to Ivan.

  “Uh-huh,” he said and changed the subject before I could ask where. “Let’s go get that mattress.”

  Of course we had to carry the mattress and box springs ourselves, on top of our heads, as no cab could accommodate their dimensions. But it wasn’t more than twelve blocks anyway, so like ants with our prized sugar we set off—for what lovemaking would soon sprout like flowers upon our holy platform, and feed us all the short days of our betrothal. We were a psalm. And it was right to hold the bed high like a king and carry it above our heads across town, intermittently laughing as we pumped it up and down to prevent our muscles from stiffening.

  Arriving at Jimmy’s door, we met the twins. They’d peeked out previously when we’d unloaded all the boxes from the cab, a wind of ginger, garlic, and sesame oil at their backs. But they’d quickly slammed the door when we got with in five steps of the landing. When we’d showed up with the mattress, however, they’d gotten up the nerve to come out—perhaps emboldened by the fact that our limbs were all occupied with the mattress and we were clearly compromised as predators. Dressed in identical Taiwanese sweat suits, with the small-billed caps to match, they couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old.

  As we maneuvered this way and that, they not only came out and watched us get it stuck in the downstairs doorway but went so far as to direct us the minute we got through and up the first few steps.

  “Oh, oh, no this way. … No, it’s hitting the wall!”

  “The light!”

  “No, up this way—wait!” And like little mice they ran up and down the stairs, under the mattress and in between us, laughing, shouting, and throttling each other.

  “Hey, you guys aren’t helping,” Jimmy gruffly announced. “Besides, it’s a mattress; it doesn’t matter if it hits the walls!”

  “Let’s drop it on them, Jimmy,” I threatened playfully.

  They howled then, and went careening out the door and into the street.

  When we finally achieved the threshold and got the mattress in the door, we went back down to get the box spring that we’d left leaning on the wall outside.

  And there they were bouncing themselves off it.

  “Hey!” Jimmy barked and down the street they ran, yipping and clipping at each other.

  “Antidepressants,” I commented in a deadpan to Jimmy.

  He rolled his eyes. “You like kids?”

  I nodded enthusiastically. “I even tutor them, down at the Y.”

  “Tutor them in what?”

  “Whatever. It’s like study hall.” I didn’t go on to explain that I went to be tutored by them more than the other way around. They were far better therapy than Pinski, serotonin reuptake-inhibitoraderos all. Or maybe they just made me try a little harder, since having nervous breakdowns around small children was just not kosher.

  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.”

  16

  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, d
idn’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:

  Men who look like frogs

  And gather bullet casings from highway ditches

  With their tongues

  Men like flies who smell the shit of consumption

  And gather

  Men like big wandering hairy children

  Who’ve turned in their stingray bikes for F-150s

  They know the earth in the way that children do

  By its trash and its puddles

  Men

  Like frogs

  Tadpoles of a promising four-legged, croaking death

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

  17

  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.”