A Horse Named Sorrow

  He did go back to sleep that day, but the next day I came home from the Y and there was a whole crew of ACT UP people there, gathered around Jimmy. They’d been talking, obviously, but fell silent as I swung open the door.

  They gave me the whole solemn, do-the-right-thing talk, and I looked at the ground before finally saying, “You guys need to go.” They who’d stood by me, and now I was kicking them out of my house. Everything. Them too, then.

  They marched out.

  But they’d left it sitting there on the table next to the bed. I looked at Jimmy and he looked at me. I noticed then how hollow his cheeks had become, how the bones next to his eyes, at his temples, suddenly looked as pronounced as his clavicles. I looked at his “good” tattoo and how big his eyes had become, dwarfing the third one.

  “Take me back the way I came, Shame,” he said quietly.

  “Why do you always say that, Jimmy?”

  “Road’s the place for lost souls … promise?” I worried again about dementia.

  “Where’d the money come from, Jimmy? I’ll trade you my promise for your answer.”

  “Came from a book.”

  “Vague, Jimmy.”

  “Promise?”

  “Sure thing.” I longed for his smile, but his face remained expressionless.

  “You gonna help me, Shame?”

  “No.” And I started to cry. He glared. He took a deep breath, watching me.

  Jimmy had to inject his own morphine while I bit my nails near the window—behind me the corner liquor store, the tree, the buckled sidewalk, the fire escape—watching (unforgivable, inexcusable), wincing, his hand shaking, missing.

  Again.

  The blood. Bingo.

  He looked at me, open as a fower. “Promise?”

  I nodded vigorously.

  Then I climbed into bed with him and made a pocket for him. Held him all those hours while he faded. Muttering and blubbering “sorry,” and “please don’t go,” and “I love you, Jimmy”; “forgive me, Jimmy; I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I’m so sorry for everything. I want you to stay. And I promise … I promise … I promise.” Nothing left to do but promise.

  And then I just hummed to him through my tears—The Blue Danube I think it was—as black eyeliner ran down my cheeks.

  30

  I ate the carrots and treats and amazaki—and even the tempeh raw—my sad little seder feast for Jimmy, sitting against the parking lot wall with Jimmy-in-the-bag and my bike under the big mural of Gaia and her cornucopias and prancing cherubic black children, swinging around fir trees, the big Cascade mountains looming like fairyland behind them. Eating through my tears. I wasn’t going to be able to come back here. No sirree. No morphine, and no boys who don’t talk, with secret Indian names.

  But my emotions were like a crowd: give ’em what they want. Barabbas or the J-man. I was twenty-two. I couldn’t be some old Pilate, washing my hands of it all. I was young and horny, widowed or not. Shadowed in grief sure thing, but my dick jumped like a Jack Russell terrier all the same at the sight of a boy like Eugene. Jumped up and down, tear-proof, grief-proof. People have dogs for a reason—and guys especially. They are exactly like dicks.

  Jimmy’d even told me he thought it was good if I had sex with other guys once he couldn’t anymore. But I’d only shook my head. Other than the occasional backroom blowjob when I was in a mood, I had zero desire to be with anyone else. “You’re twenty-two, Shame. You gotta live.”

  Twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two. I was still twenty-two. And still alive. And I still loved Jimmy. So … if I thought about it like a three-way?

  Only one thing I knew for sure: If I returned to that organic Jerusalem at 7:00 p.m., there would most certainly be a crucifixion, no two ways about it. Because, like I said before, the promise of sex with someone you’re starting to like puts you smack dab in the center of time, history, and the universe itself. The birth of a new religion, and all the madness that ensues. Just like it had been with Jimmy. Jimmy of the platform and Eugene of the bins. Like saints.

  More paintings to think about—but this time in the Byzantine style.

  Lust rose in me like sap. The kids were singing and dancing all over the wall behind me.

  Fate.

  Okay then, Jimmy. I’ll come back. My shorts swelled a Greek chorus.

  But first I had to find a place to stay.

  I was in a city, so I wouldn’t be able to find a campground or sleep in a park. Towns of a certain size are either dangerous or full of cops or both, and sleeping in parks is thus problematic. And Jimmy’s hoops were never specific… perhaps there was a state park just east of town? I remember he had friends here; he’d likely stayed with them, but he didn’t include names, addresses or phone numbers on the maps, so I was on my own.

  I had an idea and hopped on my bike and headed toward the University of Oregon to find frat row. Jimmy’s friend Sam had told me once that when in a university town, fraternities were a sure way to get free shelter. He’d been doing it for years, and it allowed him free lodging in almost any college town when he went to see concerts or whatever. Of course he was straight, but I figured I could pass when I really had to. According to Sam, all you had to do was say that you were a brother from the chapter at U of ABCDE, etc., and a year—say ’91—and they’d say “cool” and let you sleep there. I figured in the modern world, considering, Jesus himself would have likely been born in a frat house.

  I picked one with beat-up ’60s-era architecture, too intimidated by the Colonial and Georgian-style behemoths, with their suggestions of Biffs and Muffys within. I wasn’t a good liar and I didn’t need to make it harder by lying to someone who would consider me a freak or a loser.

  I pulled up and leaned my bike near the door of my chosen domicilic prey just as some guy holding a bunch of books stepped out—on his way to the library, I guessed.

  “Hi,” I said, in my best, friendly, regular-guy manner.

  “How’s it going?” he answered, a little suspiciously.

  “Well, I’m traveling cross-country on my bike and I’m a brother from U.C. Berkeley. I was wondering …”

  But he finished my sentence. “Cool, dude, you can stay here if you want. Use the living room. There’s a keg in the library.” Then he added, looking a little perplexed: “I didn’t know we had a chapter at Berkeley.”

  I didn’t even know what fraternity it was, but I was quick to respond: “Uh, it got kicked off campus a couple of years back, right after I left. Real partiers, you know?” And we both smiled.

  “Phi Delts are wild,” he guffawed (thanks for the info). “Well, let us know if you need anything, man. The guys here are real cool. Just tell them you know me. Name’s Jeff.” We shook hands.

  “Thanks, man. See ya!” And I dragged Chief Joseph into the frat house. An odd place for him. I stashed my gear in the corner of the enormous living room near a brick fireplace, behind one of the several threadbare couches. Then I got unpacked, took a shower, had a beer with the brothers, and told them lies about the guys at Berkeley and how they got kicked off campus for a drunken brawl (all while I washed my clothes with their free washer and dryer, stage left). You didn’t have to be that creative to pull this particular con, I was finding out—but it helped—and I was grateful for that, since I had other things on my mind. If they’d only known what. But frat boys are easier to lie to than you’d think, and not half as bad as you’d assume either, so it was with a tinge of guilt—shooting fish in a barrel—that I told them my shameful lies in order to save thirty bucks.

  I was back at the organic grocery at 7:00 sharp—sans Jimmy, the first time I hadn’t carried him with me on this whole trip, and I was feeling kind of skittish. (I’d hidden him deep in the bowels of my sleeping bag back at the frat.)

  I went and peered in the big front window, and there I saw his grin coming at me from down the aisle—that shy, crooked-mouthed smile on that handsome, unknown face. I had a feeling then he was gonna haunt me. And I remember
ed then what Jimmy had said: Attraction is a message.

  Sure thing, Jimmy.

  And Eugene had his hands and his brows up with all his fingers splayed, saying: “Ten minutes, okay?” He made me smile, and I felt my heart crack slowly like a pomegranate, showing its seeds. I nodded and went to lock up my bike on a parking meter, after which I sat out front on a bench watching all the hip people, just like in San Francisco, sitting and eating whole-wheat burritos or hummus and tabouli or some such, or lugging their full-to-bursting cloth grocery brags down the sidewalk back toward home.

  While my heart beat like a piston.

  At least the rain was gone.

  The rain had stopped when I woke up that morning back in Roseburg, post-Ralph, and the sun was breaking through, making the whole city of Roseburg into a big steam vent, with rising mist, the still-wet sidewalks and trees and cars all shimmering like glass. It made me want to whistle as I strutted down to Denny’s two blocks away. Every crack in the sidewalk was lousy with moss, and even the signs and the billboards were all rusty and molded, thick weeds at the base of them, growing mad and wet at the stems. It was unnerving after living all my life in California (it’s only the golden state because all the grass is dead), and I didn’t know whether to be reassured or horrified by all this green fecundity. I was used to plants wilting and being sort of perennially desiccated, but it looked to me that morning that if you were a plant in Oregon, you couldn’t die if you tried. There was even a rainbow, and it was so close, I followed it to see what really lay at the end of it.

  Turned out to be an on-ramp onto the 5. Place for lost souls.

  Et tu, Roseburg?

  Off in the distance, there were mountains with firs so dark, they looked like they led somewhere you could never return from. There were big evergreens in town too—they looked out of place next to fast-food joints—and they were the dark green of zombies, with trunks as black as Jimmy’s roots. Not like the Trinity Alps, and Shasta, blasted as those places were with California sunlight and covered with pines, which were emptier trees than these dense firs, of a lighter green, with orange/red trunks—Kodachromic cheer. Because whatever California is, it sure is hopeful—sometimes annoyingly so. Even the redwoods, lurking in silvery gray mists, are the red of Chinese happiness and the green of good luck and everything’s-okay suburban lawns. But these firs of Oregon, they were plain foreboding, gothic with darkness.

  Then, as I rode whistling down the drying blacktop an hour north of town, there were suddenly big madrones everywhere with their barkless, smooth, orange naked wood—smooth and creamy as Jimmy’s neck and belly and ass, sure thing. Only difference was that Jimmy wasn’t orange. Jimmy was never orange; he was white-green from the Sicilian half of him, like lime.

  I finally heard the door click and there was Eugene grinning orange as a jack-o’-lantern.

  First thing he did was grab my hand and take me around to the back of the store where there were some cardboard boxes full of fruit past its shelf life, and he grabbed some apples and oranges and put them in his backpack, where he already had past-its-date tofu and yogurt. Then he motioned with his head for me to follow him out across the old, pot-holed, broken-glassed parking lot, rimmed with weeds. He led me into some trees by a little path that went down through maples and madrones to the river and the big cottonwoods along its banks. There was a lot of garbage lying around—cigarette butts, aluminum cans, used condoms draped like Christmas decorations over weed stalks—like any wild place within a city. We sat on a log and ate the fruit, watching the river, sometimes him pointing to things: leaves floating, a tree across the bank, a turtle rolling itself off a log, a fish jumping, strider bugs. It took me back to Ricky’s oak groves in the hills, the creek beds on Mt. Tamalpais with Jimmy.

  And I reached out with my hand to touch Eugene’s shoulder, and he smiled and took my hand in his.

  He pointed at me with the other hand, but he stopped when he saw I looked confused. Then he began to draw on the ground. First a stick figure of himself, distinguished by an E above it, then one of me with a ? over its head. He wrote “where?” next to it. To or from I wondered. So I told him both: How I’d come from San Francisco and I was riding my bicycle across the country, just passing through—whens, wheres, whats, and hows, but no whys. He smiled with a sigh that pointed straight at that omission.

  “I should probably get goin’,” I announced. “I’m pretty tired and I gotta get up and go early, and, and …” But he just looked at me, and I heard the river, and me lonely—and the next thing you knew we were kissing hard and hungry.

  We kept kissing—it was like thirst in the desert, like hunger and the food you craved most—tempeh. We gulped each other like starved puppies at a tit. Then we stopped and looked at each other, and I could see he wasn’t afraid of my vague sorrow and its spilling. In his eyes I saw that he was somehow lost too, and something there said: “I want to hear your story, and I want to tell you mine.”

  Eugene pulled out the rest of the food then and we ate the yogurt, and big wet chunks of tofu, damp and cold as Jimmy’s lips in the San Francisco fog. We laughed in the eating of it.

  Then he urged me up, anxious to show me around. And off we went down the river path, among the deathless damp fora of Oregon, the golden and brown loam of leaves thicker than any carpet. He hugged a tree; he kicked a stone; he found a little dead mole.

  I watched the way he moved, how he looked around—hooded now in his black sweatshirt—the way he noticed birds, insects, the wind.

  The way he’d watch me move and look. I didn’t need to say anything, and soon I realized that silence was just part of how you talked to him. It even started to feel rude and sort of rough when I said yes or no, so I just nodded or shook my head. The river was our voice—well, along with the wind and the traffic, I suppose. And maybe we were talking with our feet too—in where we went, how we stood. And his eyes, enormous and green-gold, were a kind of voice as well—in a way bashful, and yet piercing and direct: when they looked, they really looked, and they spoke in the looking.

  Pretty soon we saw a green steel bridge arcing over the river and Eugene led me right under it, where he showed me some graffiti art, shadowed by the bridge—and then he pointed to his chest and smiled, proud of his work.

  I raised my eyebrows, and then I climbed up the rocks piled there to get a closer look.

  It was a very involved Hieronymus Bosch allegorical kind of thing with people crawling around on the pavement, drunks in doorways, twisted trailer homes—and in the big empty sky above the miserable scene were a few stringy clouds, along with big vertical eagle feathers. And underneath everything too, lying near some bum’s dropped wine bottle, and under the cinder blocks of teetering trailers, were broken arrowheads and buffalo skulls.

  “It’s beautiful, Eugene.” But it was more than that. It suggested something I couldn’t quite put my finger on—something unknowable, something Jimmy. It was colorful, shadowy, pretty, sad, dark, light, everything all at once. Sublime is what it was. I grabbed his hand and squeezed while I looked at it, the rhythmic thumping of cars above us making it seem almost as if the picture were alive and beating like a heart.

  I pointed to the feathers and arrowheads and buffalo, and he pulled out what I learned later was his medicine bag, which he wore on a string around his neck, and he held it then in his fist with a firm kind of strong smile on his face. He touched it to my forehead and put it back under his sweatshirt, and I wished then I’d brought Jimmy-in-the-bag to share with Eugene the same way.

  “Hey, hey, Eugene.” And I held his shoulders and couldn’t not kiss him with everything I had.

  Invigorated, he pulled me along, over the riprap stones abutting the underside of the bridge as we made our way further down the river, the big cottonwood boughs rolling like waves in the sea of the sunset sky, which was streaked with long drawn-out clouds, all purple, orange, and golden, dappling the trail with sepia light. I breathed deep the dusty-leaves-scentedlatesummera
ir,andIwonderedaboutEugene,andabout my own heart’s strength. I figured he was either desperately lonely, or he really liked me. True for so many gay encounters, I’d given up ever knowing which it was, or if there was even a difference. But I hoped Eugene was just lonely. Be a lonely boy, Eugene. My heart’s too full up and scarred for anything more.

  I threw my arm around his shoulder. My buddy. And Eugene, he sort of became his own red line after that, and I stopped all my ruminating and just followed it; I followed him along that river, as he pointed out moss on stones; three-foot-high dandelions in tiny meadows between firs and maples; huckleberries, blackberries, salmonberries like red hoops. Which he fed me.

  He found a salamander that moved like a baby walking, its eyes locked on us as intensely as Eugene and I looked at each other right before we kissed. And Eugene grinned big and crooked.

  He took me up to Skinner Butte. The hillside going up was dense with undergrowth and fir, but at the top it opened up into California, all dead golden grass and oak trees. There was a sign at the top and Eugene placed his hand over the r and the last e. “Skinny butt,” I read out loud, and patted his.

  I thought of Jimmy then on Mt. Tamalpais, where he’d once read me Rilke poems:

  …And sometimes in a shop, the mirrors were still busy with your presence…

  Actually the whole world was. I satisfied a tear.

  Eugene took off across the grass then, running for the overlook. And I ran after him all the way to the edge, where, breathing heavily, we looked out over the whole town, heard and saw the train whistling down by the river, passing the big grain elevator (is that where all the bulk-bin couscous, amaranth, and spelt comes from?), and out beyond it the freeway with the people on it always going, going; circling, circling.

  I kissed him while my chest still heaved, wanting to breathe his air, and him mine.

  There were squirrels in the oaks that made me want to play, and I kissed Eugene more passionately and groped him, but I kept pulling back the minute I started. And he seemed to understand, and again grabbed my hand and onward we went—down the other side, through the smell of wood and dirt and the sour milky scent of just-cut blackberry stickers.