A Horse Named Sorrow (13 page)

I certainly couldn't risk such an outburst at home.

I'd be clumping up the stairs by the time it occurred to me that I'd still failed to go by the food bank, and then I'd have to turn around and go all the way back up toward City Hall to get our allotted food. By then I was plain punchdrunk. For Jimmy!
Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough!
I'd bellow sarcastically into the incoming fog. That's usually when I'd run into someone I knew—an old friend, or some trick from a past encounter.

“Can't talk.” On a mission for Jimmy.

“Okay man, catch you later.”

Toward the end, only ACT UP people were immune from my avoidance. Black riders, they too were all wrapped up in the ring. “Fuck!” I'd exclaim and fall into their arms. Then I'd unload. “He's driving me fucking crazy, he's this, he's that …” The looming question of dementia, writ subtly on the brow of my confessor.

But not Jimmy. “No, Jimmy's just… moody.” (I'd wanted to say “an asshole.”) “He's not demented.” I'd battle with saying things I might regret, comments I'd never be able to live down, like:
I only wish he were demented
.

To the food bank we'd go together. And all the way home too. Freelance social workers those ACT UP boys and girls were. Most of them were older than me, and I leaned on them. My father was long dead, my mother was useless to me in this, and my country didn't care. So the boys and girls of ACT UP were all I really had.

Back home, they'd accompany me up the stairs for hellos to Jimmy because he knew them all too from the meetings, even though Jimmy didn't go anymore.

“Fight no more forever!” he'd shout at me when I'd invite him along now.

“How, Kemo Sabe,” and I'd throw my
Star Trek
hand up for goodbye.

Very bad joke. And cruel.

Sorry.

So we fought, and I fought back. No pity. He didn't want pity.

He'd lie there in bed, reading and asking me questions I didn't want to answer.

“Have you looked into some jobs?”

“No,” I answered impatiently, busying myself with the dinner I was making.

“Why not?”

“'Cause I'm busy.”

“With what?”

I glared.

“This isn't a job, Seamus, no one is paying you for this.”

“Damn straight.”

“Aren't you enjoying it?”

“Short answer or long answer?”

He sighed. “You need to get a job, Seamus—if not for yourself, for me. We're running out of money.”

“Maybe you need to start going to used bookstores to find some more.”

I felt his paperback hit me square in the back. I exploded, turning around and picking it up and throwing it back at him, along with a shoe, an orange, one of the dolls that was on the kitchen counter for some reason—Genevieve I think it was. Then I dumped the whole meal into the sink and started breaking dishes, and he struggled out of bed and came over and grabbed me, and for the first time ever, I struggled to get away from him. He gripped me tighter and tighter, until I gave up and cried.

But after I'd composed myself a tad, Jimmy went right on with it: “You gotta pull, Shame.”

He hobbled back to bed then, and once under the covers, he added: “You gotta clean this place up.”

I didn't say a word to Jimmy for two days.

Maybe we need couples counseling?” I threw out cynically when I finally re-emerged from my self-imposed exile.

And he laughed and laughed. And I started to laugh with him. And Jimmy was suddenly vital, gesturing and mincing. Jimmy, sitting in his sentinel chair where he often sat now at the window, giggling, imitating a therapist. “… Maybe your illness is a metaphor for your lover's mind… or maybe you're just tired of diarrhea … honey, think of all the poor constipated souls … in India … Not.”

“Norway!” I shouted. And I laughed from the belly, long and hard, and dropped onto the foor, and I hugged his lovely ankles. And I laid there like that for a long time. “I'm sorry, Jimmy.”

“I'm a bastard, Shame—it's okay.”

“You are a bastard, and a motherfucker too.”

“True, true . . . you and me both.”

“And I love you, Jimmy—too, too much. And I'm a fuckup … and I'm trying.”

“Better luck next time.” And he ran his bony foot through my hair.

I got up on my knees and looked him in the eye. “You're hard on me, Jimmy.”

He looked at me earnestly then. “I'm sick, Shame.”

His dear face that I reached out to touch with my hand. Pity.

“Don't.” And he pulled his face away.

So I climbed up and sat myself in his lap: “Is this okay?”

His hollow-eyed smile indicated it wasn't really, but he nodded in the affirmative.

Our own kind of pieta, Jimmy and me. Backasswards.

It rained on and off over the pass out of California, Mt. Shasta obscured and looming among the clouds, intermittently appearing and disappearing, but ever-present all the same. Hunched over in Jimmy's blue nylon poncho, I couldn't turn my back on it. Had to have just one more look. Lot's wife or Jimmy's. One could do worse than become a pillar of salt. Mt. Shasta was just a heap of ash, the spent side of an hourglass: Jimmy grown huge in death.

I was a long way from Guerrero Street. But no matter how bad it got, the road would always conjure some reminder of Jimmy, and then I'd be inside and warm with him … drinking tea, watching him unspool strings from
Chief Joseph
, watching his big brown eyes grow larger as his lovely cheekbones and chin and Adam's apple grew more pronounced, his hair more black.

I tooled along a frontage road that paralleled Interstate 5 for several miles, but eventually I had to merge onto it as it was the only road through; I had to crawl like a little ant along its shoulder, buffeted by truck wind and thoughts of bloody mayhem—recalling stories of highway workers and civilians changing tires who'd lost their lives quick into pulp. I conjured up visions of my bicycle fung into the ditch, Jimmy like a chemical spill spread out all across Highway 5. What would they think he was? Would they stop all the traffic to investigate, to make sure he wasn't toxic, flammable, or poisonous? Radio communications echoed through my head: “Roger, roger, flaming homosexual. Correction: highly fame-able at one time, but now rendered unto dust. Give 'em the all clear.”

And into Oregon I went, where it began to rain in earnest. I had to stay in a Motel 6 in Ashland—miles short of Grants Pass and Jimmy's red hoop—home to a giant Shakespeare festival, which meant all night I thought of my Romeo and how Falstaff I'd been and how much a Tempest was the world.

And to think I'd once stood on the corner, on the buckled sidewalk under the acacia tree, and I'd shouted up to him on the fire escape as if he were my queerboy Juliet, shirtless in his cutoffs, his long thin chest and scruffy chin, his messy spiked straw-colored hair with his hand running through it: “What kind of milk you want, Jimmy—whole or 2 percent?”

One fairer than my love?

When I reached Medford the next morning, only two hours down the road, my bike and poncho and Hefty-bagged panniers were soaked again. Fuck it, I'm not riding in the rain no more.

I hobbled into the Happy Rogue diner. Everything was “rogue” around there on account of the local river's name, or so they told me. Rogue motels (roach?) and Rogue Inn (hair transplants for rogues?)—a Rogue Federal even, which begged the question: who would trust their money to a rogue? A few days ago, I'd passed through a town named Mad River, where everything was mad—Mad Videos and Mad Markets, mad people too—and even a Mad High, which sounded like a slasher film featuring manic depressive kids. They'd even dammed the river with a Mad Dam, which seemed like a bad idea to me. Madness needs to move. Madness is a rogue.

There was a pay phone in the waiting area, reminding me that I owed my mother a phone call, but I wasn't in the mood, so I plunked down in the nearest sticky red Naugahyde booth and opened the laminated menu to pictures of prettied-up carcasses—and, of course, pancakes. And I sat there at the window, watching the rain increase,
apprehensive and stubborn in my resolve not to go back out into it as I unenthusiastically ordered and then wolfed down another stack of pancakes.
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory
—Dispense with the storm then, dude!

I suppose I could have stopped.

I didn't dare.

And all the time, the question that is my face inviting people.

A big strapping blond guy in a blue sweatshirt was at the counter and looked my way. “That your bike?” he asked.

“Yup,” I said despondently.

“Where you goin' on it?”

“All the way across.” And I motioned my arm perfunctorily toward the far window.

“Across where?”

I'd have said the acronym, but why be off-putting? I liked strangers. “America,” I answered, which always embarrassed me somewhat. America sounds so Pollyanna, with its Kate Smith–rendered purple-mountain majesty, amber fields, and shiny sea B.S. But I can't love an acronym, so America it is.

“Hmm, north-south?”

“Uh, no, west-east,” I corrected him, hiding my annoyance. How backasswards a question is that? Whatever traveling north-south is called, it's not
across
.

“What are you on the 5 North for?”

A good question, I suppose, come to think of it. I wanted to reply: I'm a whelp, sir. “Uh, I'm going to Eugene; then I head east.”

“Well, it's a nasty day for riding.”

I agreed with a nod and a sigh.

“I can give you a lift as far as Roseburg if you'd like. I'm heading to Coos Bay—in a rig.” And he motioned with his head out into the parking lot to a big shiny yellow Mack truck (yellowjacket?) towing a trailer full of—what? Venom or honey—same difference.

I imagined some kind of hairy blowjob scene, which made me hesitate, so I stalled. “Oh yeah?”

“Well, I'm heading out of here in five minutes. Take it or leave it.” He turned and ordered a coffee to go, cream and sugar both.

“I'll take it,” I said, forcing a smile. I pulled myself up out of the booth with a ripping sound, as I was stuck to it, and hobbling over to the counter—God how the stiff muscles in my thighs burned today—I paid my bill and ordered a coffee to go. And I stood there in Jimmy's soaked, wrecked hightops, his army cutoffs, cradling his ashes and wrestling with folding up the poncho like some pathetic grief-ridden idiot—better luck next time—while the trucker headed off to the bathroom. I considered slipping away out the door. I hadn't even asked for this ride. He'd offered. He must be queer. Was I really willing to go through with it to stay dry and make it to the next red hoop? God knows, the world's full of homos with trucker fantasies, but I wasn't one of them.

What you hauling? How long you done this? Where you from? And what were you before?

To Ralph I talked a blue streak. Because I didn't feel I had a choice. A hitchhiker owes his ride wisdom or entertainment, as I see it. There's no better way to stretch a ride this side of sex. And if sex is what you're afraid of, there's no better way to take it down a few notches from someone's projected fantasy of you than to talk, and thus become “somebody” and all the annoying unsexy things that accompany such a condition.

Ralph wanted to talk about young people. Uh-oh. At twenty-two, there was always the chance I was too old, of course. He also wanted to talk about drugs and alcohol and divorce and all number of social ills, each and every one of which he bemoaned. Well, at least it was a buffet.

I opted for divorce, something I knew nothing about, to keep him off the scent of my drug-addled sodomite matriculation. And I talked and talked because, like I said, a hitchhiker is a prostitute and if there's to be no sex, then he's gotta give the client what the client truly, underneath it all, wants: someone to talk to.

Ralph wanted to fix the world. He talked about how it was and how it should be. Well, it beat a serial killer or a lech. I just let Jimmy talk through me, as I didn't have much to say. I sat back and listened to them both: Jimmy's Buffalo childhood and his parents' divorce versus Ralph's Ohio alcoholic father—gone by his fifth birthday—and the delightful drunken stepfather who replaced him. It was a tennis match of misery.

“Kids need guidance and discipline,” he announced. “They need a father in the home. They need structure and a purpose. When you have children …”

Aye, hell'll freeze over. Then again, as he seemed so keen on fatherhood, perhaps I could sell him on the idea of two fathers being better than one—or maybe even spirit babies. But I didn't want to fix the world or Ralph. Unfixable. All I wanted was a little peace.

“You got a family of your own, Ralph?” I ventured.

And so it commenced. “And she this, and she that, and her …” Suffice it to say, there was acrimony involved, and then some. “It got me sober, I'll tell you that,” Ralph continued.

“So you don't drink anymore?” And here I'd been about to suggest a couple forty-ouncers for the ride.

“No.” And he shook his head.

“Were you doing drugs too?”

“Was I!?” he chortled, pulling on the horn strap that hung from the ceiling of the cab, letting out a comic blast. “Why do you think I'm telling you all this?”

I wanted to say I hated cautionary tales, but he was the ride, so I let him run. Before he found sobriety and Jesus—
take this cup
before I fill it up again—Ralph found cocaine and speed.

He talked on and on, the miles peeling away in the rain. I felt suddenly very old, like I'd heard it all so many times before. I turned to look out the rain-streaked window at a dilapidated barn as his words faded into another song: …
everybody's talking at me
…