A Horse Named Sorrow

  She offered me her yard to camp in, but quickly closed her door the minute I assented and climbed down off the fence to take her up on it.

  I walked my bike up and pitched camp on her vibrant green lawn under a little grove of birch trees, wholly anomalous to the dry barrenness of the surrounding landscape and somewhat an answer to my earlier wish. I unpacked and fell asleep while it was still light as I was dead-tired.

  That night I dreamed of a big buffalo wandering around Eugene, getting honked at by cars and meandering down alleyways, sniffing around in dumpsters, before returning to the bridge and the river and Eugene’s graffiti, where it curled up like a dog, preparing to sleep. And it looked at me then, and it had Eugene’s green eyes.

  Startled, I awoke, on my back and looking up into the stars, which could have been his green eyes as well. Venus all around. Resolving it was just my soup boiling in the night, I burrowed back into my sleeping bag like a little rat. But I couldn’t get back to sleep, and then it felt to me like someone was there watching me. I sat up.

  The moon was big and lit up the whole yard—is that you, Jimmy?—and I could hear the river whispering. I got up and hustled into my clothes. It was freezing cold, and I scurried down the road and up over the gate (I knew enough to figure that cold-blooded rattlers wouldn’t be out at night) and made my way down the dirt road past the big cottonwood tree and the shadowy picnic tables to the rocks at the river’s edge. The river flowed slow and shimmering in the moonlight, vital, as if it were bringing something—something welcome and abundant—before passing by, making me think it might be taking something too.

  I smelled Jimmy then. What was it? I crouched down, shivering in the night air, and took a big whiff of a squat little bush, and sure enough I knew—sage. The kind Jimmy used to burn in the apartment on Guerrero Street and at ACT UP demonstrations. I looked around and saw it was everywhere. I sat on a big fat rock and held my knees close to my chest for warmth for a while, breathing in Jimmy, watching the river flow. I knew I had to jump in. Didn’t know why, just knew I had to.

  I stripped fast and scrambled up a reddish boulder that jutted out over the water.

  I barked when I dropped myself in. Good God, it was cold. I climbed out immediately, muttering to myself that I’m either crazy or I’m not—same difference. Then I huddled on the fat rock like a monkey momentarily, feeling too cold to even dress, with my hands scrunched up at my chest, remembering Jimmy the same way that first day I’d bathed him. I shivered dripping and watching the cottonwood, big slow rollers of night wind undulating its branches and making a sweet night whisper of sound.

  “I love you, Jimmy,” I shouted, and after a quick calculation, “Day thirty-nine.”

  Finally, with one last shiver, I jumped up, and in a frenzy dried my skin, hopping about clumsily in the painful gravel as I got back into my biking shorts and piled on my clothes. Then I scurried back up the road, teeth chattering, climbed up over the fence, and made my way back up the road and into the yard and my sleeping bag, where I quickly nestled with Jimmy-in-the-bag, wondering if I should have left a bit of him down there in the stream. But he said “the way he came,” which was from Buffalo by bike, and not from Oregon by water. Still, I got to thinking about salmon in a stream and all that, and then about how I took things too literally generally—or too metaphorically, or both, or neither. Arguing with myself, until I was so confused, I had to pull. Jimmy’s in the bardo—drop it.

  And when I dozed off, there were Eugene’s eyes again, which woke me up.

  And then that echoing sound of birds in the nighttime started up. Nightingales, I supposed.

  Such a moonlit night wasn’t about sleep, so as soon as I saw a hint of dawn on the eastern horizon, I figured I might as well get my start. I thought I should thank the lady, half-fearing she’d spied my little transgression, but there wasn’t a sound from the house, the curtains still drawn. I got my things together, and once again like a Dharma Bum, I clasped my hands in prayer and thanked the lady and the place both— the moon and stars, the rattlesnakes, the cottonwood and the river too—wondering how strange it was that I’d never seen her eyes, but couldn’t shake Eugene’s, with all the snakes blind and snapping down at the river that smelled like Jimmy.

  34

  My friends kept calling to cheer me up, leaving invitations on the machine. Jimmy’s friends, Julie and Sam, appeared one night after several unreturned messages. There they were, all in black, showered and beaming.

  “We’re taking you out to dinner and Uranus.”

  I managed a smile, but I knew I’d never be able to handle a night out with them. “Jimmy’s dead, you guys—we’re staying in.” And I tried to close the door.

  “No.” Sam’s motorcycle boot held the door open. “Come on, Shame.” He pushed his way in and the two of them dug up an outfit for me and took me for Pakistani food on 16th Street, where I was overly fascinated by the blood-orange color of the tandoori chicken; it was the only thing strange enough to seem interesting.

  We went from bar to bar; I gave it a go. It was great sometimes that in San Francisco you could go to queer clubs that welcomed straight people and that straight people weren’t afraid of. But this wasn’t one of those times. Because all I could do was scan the room for Jimmy, mesmerized by every dark-eyed gangly boy. Like some particularly tormenting obsessive compulsion, I kept searching, even though the minute I saw one I was full of regret for having even looked. I even hated them a little for playing at Jimmy. Couldn’t they save that for another day? Be someone else?

  Even when I wasn’t looking for Jimmy, there was a huge empty mouth waiting inside the doors of all those clubs. It was in almost every face, and every heartless electronic song. Just because it beats like one doesn’t make it a heart. I grew disgusted with the dumb same old dance, drink, blah, blah, blah, take home some sex like a doggy bag. Julie and Sam told me to cheer up, that I should have a better attitude. Great, I’ve finally gone clubbing with Dr. Pinski. I felt guilty, of course, for dismissing their good intentions. But not for long. Cheering someone upislike”What-Not-to-Do-for-a-Depressed-Grieving-Potential-Suicide 1A.” I knew where those clubs would take me as I started to tear up and ask Jimmy, why’d you leave me here? I saw the ropes fray and break that connected me to Sam and Julie. All it took was one trip to the bathroom, one cute boy’s drug-addled stare, and the hole in the ozone of human existence gaped open to full flower like the speechless, screaming mouth of God himself. I knew my feelings weren’t original. Edvard Munch and a few others had beaten me to it, but this was the 3-D holographic version. I pushed through the crowd and got out. And when I hit the sidewalk, I ran. I ran block after block, all the way home. Like a little boy, scared, not knowing what to do—running the same route I’d run with Jimmy.

  Home to his bike and the ritual space of our love, which was just four walls and a bay window, an acacia tree and a corner liquor store and a rickety, rusted fire escape, and the smell of Chinese food, and two little boys’ too-loud screechings and TV volume, and those forever-blinking multicolored Christmas lights chasing each other all through the strings on Chief Joseph, lighting up the ceiling and its plastic glowing stars and planets. And I draped his clothes all over the bike—the battered army shorts and the Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt—surrounding it like a makeshift altar with a whole slew of Virgin de Guadalupe candles, which lit up the shelves of dog-eared books, and in so doing, conjured James Damon Keane, who whispered, as always, God bless him, “Pull, Seamus. You gotta pull.”

  “Can’t,” I whimpered, on my knees.

  Pull.

  And not ten minutes later, the lights and sound of an idling taxi yellowed the window, and the clump, clump, clump of Sam’s motorcycle boots and the rap, rap, rap on my door.

  “You okay, Shame?”

  My red swollen face. “We’re having sex, can you come back later?”

  “Come on, Shame, we were worried about you.”

  Then a crescendo of Chinese erupts as t
he twins’ mother cracks open her door. I’ll have to let them in.

  The candles quickly tame them and they sit down on the bed while I grab the bottle of Carlo Rossi jug wine and a few jars to drink from. But they shake their heads. So we just sit on the bed, the three of us, like monkey see-no, hear-no, speak-no all in a row—with me in the middle—and say nothing.

  Sam scoots closer and I let my head fall in his lap. But I don’t cry. I only cry alone, or with Jimmy, or out on the street. I just stare into the candles while Julie holds my hand.

  They exchange looks, and Julie, ever responsible, ruins the silence: “I think we’ll stay here with you tonight, Shame.”

  “No, Julie. Me and Jimmy, we want privacy.”

  “Shame, you gotta . . .”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Julie, it’s cool,” Sam chimes in.

  I clasp her hand, give her what little I got. If she doesn’t understand, so be it. As for Sam, he’s loyal, I’ll give him that—he digs male intimacy, in a soldier football player kind of way. I snuggle into his crotch, purposely pressing against his dick. I don’t want sex; I just want someone who isn’t afraid. He pats my shoulder, and sweet heterosexual Sam passes the test.

  I look up at Julie, who still thinks I gotta . . . Pull. Now I can. It takes two straight people, I realize, where it only took one Jimmy fag boy.

  35

  I rode into the sunrise, followed it in my backasswards way, since all the time it was sliding right over me, going in the other direction. A backasswards wise man looking for a star over Bethlehem. Bethlehem Steel more like, because I was going to Buffalo.

  I came into the town of Redmond in the bracing cold desert morning, passing an old rusted Army jeep on the edge of town as I arrived—how long sitting there? What story untold? What soldier? Whose father? Rusting in peace.

  The geometry of the town soon shifted my brain to the left of those endless and unanswerable right-brain conundrums. I rode down streets past curbs and mailboxes and houses all in a row, street corners at ninety degrees. There were traffic lights and stop signs, auto repair shops, feed and grain, markets, gas stations and restaurants, a guy at the Shell station watering his Astroturf—a high school with a sign about the Spartans’ big game Friday.

  I entered a Hardee’s, joined the early crowd, truck drivers and locals jawing about weather, the Spartans game, and the tragedy of Californians moving in with their German cars and fences. I wanted to chime in that I felt the same way about Californians, but I was one, and a wacked faggot one at that, so I thought better of it. Besides, they didn’t even acknowledge my existence. They’re yammering, that’s all, that’s what geezers in small towns do.

  Listen o nobly born ...

  I watched out the window as the sun rose and the town’s shadows headed for cover. I was happy to be in a warm place after that ride this morning that woke me with its chill like no amount of caffeine ever could. Out on the street, I could see the old men in their pickups holding their coffee cups, looking cozy, lolling down the main street at 10 mph. There was dew-soaked sage growing in the lot past the parking lot and bright-eyed green signal lights over the intersection, swinging in the morning high-desert wind. I’d been delinquent about pancakes, so I ordered two plates of them to make up for yesterday. The father, the son, the holy ghost, plus Ralph, Eugene, and the spirit baby—a pantheon of male love.

  I left the waitress a three-dollar tip, imagining she was the woman by the river who’d put me up for the night and saved me from the snakes. And I headed out of town past a couple more big cottonwoods and through the sagebrush, scrub, and sand-diamond-sparkling-something in the pavement on the shoulder of the road. The garbage and the flowers. Looking ahead into nothing because the sun was blinding me. I could just see a gradual rise in the road, a gray strip leading into sagebrush nowhere, smelling of Jimmy. I heard a truck bearing down the grade before me, but I couldn’t see a thing, just a blotch in front of the bright ball of the sun. I knew that soon enough I’d hear the chugging wind-down of the hydraulic brakes as he slowed down to enter the town, huge and blind as the future, carrying a full load of whatever was in store.

  Jimmy came to California.

  36

  I went to visit Jimmy, but they wouldn’t let me in. I gave the flowers to the security guard, who sort of held them out in front of him like a soiled diaper.

  “What am I supposed to do with these?”

  “They’re for Jimmy, the guy in there.” I motioned with my head.

  “This is a morgue, sir.”

  “Well, you can give them to your girlfriend if you want.” Hot potato. I wasn’t carrying them home.

  I assume he threw them in the trash, as marigolds aren’t romantic enough for your girlfriend. She might think you’re dumping her.

  So all I really had was the pay phone.

  Other than those hourly phone calls, I just stayed in bed, staring at Jimmy’s bike. Or rather, it stared at me.

  I’d promised, but I stalled, stayed in bed, grief-frozen. Waiting. Waiting for Jimmy. To tell me what to do. Even though he already had. Though the last thing he’d asked of me I hadn’t done. I hadn’t killed the man I loved.

  Jimmy’s father never called, of course, but Monique finally did.

  “Mr. Blake, I have some news for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Uh, Mr. Keane—your friend James—?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He actually did the paperwork. You don’t need to call his family. He’s got it all taken care of. He filed all this six months ago.” And she read: “‘In the event of my death, I hereby request my body be disposed of by cremation.’ And he paid the fee.” Doing what needs to be done.

  “How much?”

  “Eight hundred dollars, Neptune Society.”

  “When you gonna do it?”

  “It’s done.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry. Day four. I held it up for you.” Dear Monique and her sweet subterfuge of the big ugly acronyms of county government.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you . . .” And I kept thanking her to stave off the tears.

  I hung up before she shattered me with the sweet honey of her voice.

  Monday I had to go get him, the dust of him.

  Jesus Jimmy, to dust you have returned.

  You didn’t take me with you, Jimmy, but I can still take you with me. Chattering away, my soup and me on the bus with Jimmy in a cardboard box on my lap, like the sweet baby Jesus.

  I sat in the bay window on Guerrero Street with that box in my lap for a long time, looking out at the pay phone, the corner liquor store with its comforting, constant golden light at night and in the rain, and at the acacia tree next to it, buckling the sidewalk. Too big, and I knew one day they’d come for it. They—like the collective God in Genesis— and their giveth-ing and taketh-ing away. They got Jimmy, and they’re gonna want the tree and the liquor store one day too—and they’ll come for the twins, who’ll soon get big, fearful, and opinionated; and they’ll come for this big bay window on Guerrero Street like they’ll come for me.

  37

  I reached the Ochoco Mountains within an hour, rising up east of town into pine forests. So much for my dream or delusion of sagebrush forever after my previous delusion of Douglas fir forever. One delusion leading into the next like Biblical begetting.

  It had gotten warm, almost too warm, and fast. But I felt a breeze as the pines thickened and the elevation increased, and I looked at them as if I were passing cattle or milling people and I wondered about them and what the future held. They might end up as baseball diamond benches that only really bad players get to know, or as coffins, forging a lonely intimacy with some stranger. I hoped that they appreciated that we didn’t put Jimmy in a pine box. Which got me wondering about the fuel they used for the incinerator. Probably gasoline, not pine planks. Jimmy, my Vietnamese Buddhist monk. Imagine if all those downed by the acronym burned themselves like monks in the street. A
new kind of Gay Pride parade. Floats of burning monks. Even Ronald Reagan would have had to have said something. But the acronym is forever a symbol of how the kindness—let alone the attention—of strangers is a rare and special thing indeed.

  The pines thinned out in time, just like my friends had done. And my father’s friends before us. And back into the rocky desert I went, with its post piles of orange stone, deep canyons cutting into the fat plain, clefts of shadow, and those ubiquitous yellow flowers growing in the gravelly silver and pink dirt. Hardly anyone on the road but me and the bugs. And it was warm and quiet and very empty, and sometimes—a lot of times actually—in the middle of all those sad musings, in all that vastness, I felt strangely happy or peaceful or something.

  You were right, Jimmy—road’s the place.…

  38

  Looking over at Jimmy-in-the-jar on the mantle, I realized I needed to find something to put him in for the journey. I remembered he had a velvet sack, Jimmy did—purple as I recalled—and I rooted around for it. He’d kept his drug paraphernalia in there: a bong, roach clips, pipes, papers, rollers, all that. I had an inkling it was big enough to hold Jimmy.