A Horse Named Sorrow (12 page)

I'd first gone a year before I'd met Jimmy, because, like I said, it was the cool in-crowd to hang out with, and because Lawrence went all the time, mostly to meet guys—but also for contacts, networking, to promote himself and his art career. And I suppose because Lawrence cared too. In his way. Just as I did, and Tanya did of course. Tanya, who always encouraged me to do the right thing.

Later, it became a constructive distraction in the struggle to stay sane dealing with Jimmy that brought me back each week. I didn't believe we'd ever kill the dragon—the dragons, I should say, because there were so many: the disease itself, Republicans, the pharmaceutical industry, the city, the county, the state, the church, the feds, the NIH, the CDC, the older queens who hated us postering their precious Victorian neighborhood with leafets and fyers and art—and the biggest dragon of all: that it was probably far too late for Jimmy to benefit from anything we did.

But it was fun, too, in a carnivalesque way, with different facilitators each week who dressed for the occasion in drag, crazy hats, and jewelry. One week a lipsticked boy with a beehive, the next a girl with a penciled-in mustache in a three-piece suit.

Each week, we talked and argued, got crushes, and planned actions.

A black-clad procession, marching.

I dreamed at night that we walked with huge tigers and lions on big chain leashes. And I woke up scared.

Mostly I remember whistles, deafening and shrill.

They were blown to signal the beginnings of marches, or whenever we stopped, or when the cops blocked our way, or if there was any bashing danger present. In the middle of California Street, while policemen on motorcycles called us “fags,” dozens of boys lay down and we quickly drew chalk lines around them. One time I lingered too long outlining Jimmy, and boy did I get a truncheon bruise.

Jimmy got arrested a lot before he started to worry about being stuck sick in jail. Then he just showed up at the end of marches, holding a sage stick, which burned slow and smoky. He was wearing an old green army coat by then and his hair, having grown out, was mostly black, with just the tips still golden. Sometimes he wore a brown and white Andean wool cap with the extended ties that dangled around his lovely scruffy neck. So I always knew where Jimmy was … the one green coat, the one Peruvian head, the one smoke-surrounded character with the sage stick.

Jimmy and all the others got arrested or sick or both, and all I did was run around with chalk and a camera.

And I think we were more afraid, the negative boys. The positive guys had gotten it over with, even though they hadn't. Not the hard part. What I mean is they didn't have to worry about getting
it
anymore. Some of them actually seemed relieved and liberated in their strange fashion. They were kind of like guys who'd made the varsity team or been drafted, or joined the Marines. You didn't really want what they had going, but you looked up to them as manlier in the twisted way men do. Jimmy had it: that hot positive-guy air to him that negative guys fetishized and felt guilty about. Motherfucking star.

So I had the secret pride of having a cute poz boyfriend. Some consolation. I tried not to gloat. Which ended up doubling the guilt.

Jimmy said: “Hey Shame, gloat while you can.”

Winked at me.

Well, I didn't gloat much, being that I was scared stiff. I'd even sneak off now and again and go to the forty-eight-hour clinic on Haight Straight, where for forty bucks you could get test results back in two days, unlike the health department's testing center, which took two weeks. I didn't have the nerves for two weeks. No sir.

I never told Jimmy I went there, but I'd go now and again when I noticed a cut in my mouth and started tripping on which blowjob when.

Once these two yuppie guys came running out of the place as I approached. They were all smiles, hopping into their Jeep and French-kissing. I knew what that was. Getting negative results made you wanna fuck like crazy. Saved for another day.

I'd feel it too, but only a little bit, and it had nowhere to go. Because if one of you wasn't negative, it just wasn't that exciting.

I went home to Jimmy and to being careful.

After a while, he wouldn't even let me blow him anymore.

“Ah come on, Jimmy,” I drooled despairingly like a dog.

“Fuck no,” he snapped, annoyed.

“You like it, don't ya?”

“Not about me, Shame. Get a clue.” And he'd get up and go to the bathroom.

“What you wanna do then, Jimmy? What
can
I do?” I continued once he'd returned.

“Quit asking questions.” And out went the light.

“I hate this.”

“Well, you can leave.”

“Jimmy, fuck, don't say that. I don't mean you.”

“This is me, Seamus. Take it or leave it.”

I wouldn't pity him. He'd asked me not to, and I wouldn't. So I'd lie there quietly and I'd wait for him to reach out and hold
me
.

When I couldn't find a campground or state park near Jimmy's red hoops, I'd stay in whatever small town was nearby. Like me, Jimmy obviously liked back roads and empty places as that's where his red line took me. I'd sit in diners, or coffee shops, wondering what it was like to live there, especially for queers. And I'd look at the chairs and booths and people's clothes and wonder if any of their threads had made it onto Jimmy's bike. I'd see possibilities and make up stories about how Jimmy had done them some small kindness and secretly yanked a string from their sleeve.

In Hayfork, out on Highway 3, I came upon a sock lying on the sidewalk as I exited St. Brigid's, three wishes the richer. And I picked it up, and that's when I started collecting strings too. Not for poems—I think they were prayers or wishes, but even I wasn't totally sure. They gave me an idea for a new kind of Marie Antoinette painting:
Let Them Be Lost Souls
and
Let Them Ride Bicycles Cross-Country Taking Their Lovers' Ashes Back the Way They Came
, and
Let Them Pull
. This time, though, Marie Antoinette would merge with Our Lady of Guadalupe, whom I'd just seen in all her glory and wished before in the church. I liked how she was clothed in the sun, mandala-like, and she'd been my favorite Virgin Mary for years besides as I'd always known she was actually Tonanztin, an Aztec goddess who'd been co-opted by the Spaniards. Queer that way (that's why me and Jimmy had her in jar candles all over the house). I suddenly wanted to paint her a thousand times and garland her in strings and mayonnaise jars, bicycle parts, bandages, AZT pills, third eyes, and Chinese characters for good, holy, and better. But never any image of Jimmy. No sir. Jimmy was the light behind her.

When Jimmy had started to lose interest in the scene of San Francisco, we went to the ocean or the woods, or both. Handy Jimmy sewed straps on his panniers, so we could each carry one to use as a backpack. Of course I needed a sleeping bag and found an old Boy Scout bag at Community Thrift.

“Maybe I should get a bike too, eh Jimmy?”

But he just looked at me.

“Nah, biking's over.” Never once did he ride
Chief Joseph
in San Francisco. Jimmy had a way of letting you know some questions he didn't want to answer—a look away and down—so I didn't ask, or just let them fall aside, ignored.

Once, we took a bus out to Mt. Tamalpais and walked the rest of the way into the hills to a campground he'd read about that looked out through the oak trees to the Pacific beyond. We watched the sunset there and made a fire and baked zucchini and potatoes all wrapped up in foil, with tofu dogs we cooked on sticks. We smoked pot and drank whiskey from a pint flask, and then we talked about Tom Spanbauer's
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
, a magical story about a bisexual Indian boy and a cowboy and the higher form of homosexual love that they found together alone in the wilderness. I can still see Jimmy's face in the firelight, the shadows that his pronounced brows and chin and Adam's apple made, fitting about him while he went on and on about how important a book he felt it was. Then we made love the same way they did in the book. No, there was nobody like Jimmy—my cowboy, my Indian.

Another time we hiked the whole Dipsea Trail, from Mill Valley all the way out to Stinson Beach, through redwoods and over creeks, across wind-waving fields of green yellow-flowered grass, through groves of squat little oaks so dense we had to bushwhack through their branches and made a racket trudging through their heaped-up fallen leaves. Then I picked more of those leaves out of his spikey rapidly blackening mane above his say-nothing smile.

We went south too to the reservoirs on the peninsula, and east to the redwoods above Oakland and the forested canyon behind U.C. Berkeley.

I followed after Jimmy, his cute horsey behind in his faded jeans, his ratty green sweater, his head like a star thistle gone to seed, dry and fading, going who knows where up the trail before me.

And then one day we never left town again.

Back in San Francisco, we'd go up to Dolores Park to amble, sit somewhere, amble some more under the big date palms, amid the shiny-eyed Guatemalan boys dealing weed and grinning—because long before the cannabis club, we had to buy Jimmy pot for his appetite on the street or in the parks.

There were children there, evident from the unattended multicolored balls that would bounce by, and off into the street. A small brown kid would inevitably appear and give chase right to the curb, at which point he'd stop as if having reached a river. Sometimes I'd go after the ball then, reminding the kid to never go into the street, as his mother came hobbling along thirty yards behind, two other tykes in tow. I'd have left Jimmy back at the corner, and there he waited for me in his army coat, all bundled up now even though it was summer, and looking very alone.

We walked on to where the tanning queens staked out the upper reaches of the park, near where the J Church trolley stopped after coming out of the trees where the green parrots lived—legend had it that they'd begun as one or two escapees and had now burgeoned into a squawking colony. They weren't the talking kind, but we imagined if they were: cruisy come-ons and drug marketing would erupt from their screeching beaks: “suck my cock, yeah boy; weed, weed; fuck me, fuck me; dime bag?”

“San Francisco, Jimmy.”

“Yeah.” His deadpan.

With Jimmy I tried mightily to be agreeable, even when he wasn't.

Usually, I'd go out for walks when Jimmy was sleeping or in difficult moods. I felt guilty leaving him of course, but I was also freaked out considerably, and besides I felt justified in that he was taking out all his frustrations on me of late. But I tried to keep my head up. He was dying after all.

Still I got pissed off at him, lost my patience. “Fuck off, Jimmy,” I barked when he chastised me about forgetting to go to the food bank. His harangue had begun with my unemployment (I'd started giving deep discounts at Java Baklava one day because it felt good to do so, but soon was caught in the act and dismissed), moved on to my forgetfulness, my general unreliability, and my utter lack of focus. All true, sure, but still deserving of a “fuck off ” for one as stretched thin as myself during those times.

“Didn't you mean to add
and die
to that, Seamus?”

I glared.

“'Cause you're killing me.” His little smile.

“Bitch,” I said with disdain.

“Pull, Shame.”

I walked out and slammed the door, running into Michael (one of the twins) in the stairwell. The part of me that wanted to kick his seven-year-old good cheer and innocence down the stairs was quickly subsumed by his look of concern. “Is diarrhea boy sick?”

It was a harsh nickname, but Jimmy'd had a bad afternoon in the stairwell two months before that the twins and their mother, Mrs. Hsieh, had witnessed. We'd all tried to joke through it as I got him upstairs—to save face, retain human dignity, all that. Nothing could wipe a smile off Mrs. Hsieh's face of course. She'd have smiled as an earthquake brought the building down, all in the service of not freaking out the twins.

“Diarrhea Boy is okay,” I answered, offering him a cursory smile as I stepped past him and proceeded down the stairs. I'd have liked to sit down and explain it all as a responsible adult, but being a responsible adult was even harder than explaining it.

“Where you going?” he called after me.

“Goin' to California!” That's what I always said to him, and it got him to smile and wave sadly as I turned and saluted him from the landing.

Then I'd roar down the streets, hands in pockets, knit cap pulled low on my eyes to indicate my unavailability for human interaction, carrying on long conversations with Jimmy, trying to find new ways to dodge his anger, new methods of rationalization, new five-year plans (more like five-day) to make things work. I'd rehearse dramatic breakup scenes, holier-than-thou tirades, fantasies of him throwing me out so I wouldn't have to bear the agony of
leaving him
to die alone, resolving always in the end to become positive so he'd quit treating me like the lucky, clueless one and take care of me instead.

Checkmate.

That's what the acronym was and will always be. A better chess player than the rest of us. Bobby Fischer.

From that hopeless place, I'd spin off into my imagination, where I'd get a medical degree, cure
it
, assassinate Jesse Helms, William Dannemeyer, and George Bush, burn down all the Baptist churches, and legalize love. By that point, I'd be in the Excelsior, having traversed all of the Mission on my forced march. I'd turn and head into Noe Valley, then up over the hill and through the Castro, where I'd get offers to buy drugs and sexual come-ons via fixed stares and smiles (the finest escape of all, but I'd balk), before climbing up into Buena Vista Park for the view and more furtive looks and temptations. Finally, I'd shamble down into the Haight Ashbury and cut back through the Lower Haight. On really bad days, before returning home, I'd end up stumbling tired into a South of Market gay dive where I'd drop my pants for a blowjob, rationalizing my infidelity around Jimmy's cruelty, and, as I zipped up, reviewing the whole scene to make sure I'd played safe (avoiding the disease that was destroying my domestic life by playing right up against it as well as worrying about any other disease I might thus bring home to my immuno-compromised boyfriend. Oh the guilt). Then I'd realize, as I hoofed those final blocks home, that my resolve to get infected could only involve the agent being Jimmy. Then, and only then, I'd finally cry. On a random doorstep, or as time progressed and I got used to it, just while I walked. Who cares what they think?