A Horse Named Sorrow (4 page)

I smiled, inadvertently admiring his happy trail, but also remembering that the actual body of Christ was back in my bed asleep on Shotwell Street. Which made Lawrence what?—the Prince of Darkness himself ? Or just another false prophet? What boyfriend wasn't in the end?

“See you later, Lawrence,” I dodged, and out the door I fled.

It was simply the pinball machine that was San Francisco—it couldn't be helped. You ran into everyone, and nothing could be done about it. It worked wonders for activism and art happenings as the place functioned like a village, rumors and plans blowing about and around like a thorough little wind, reaching every nook and cranny of the city. But it wreaked havoc on any hope for privacy or sexual discipline.

Well, Lawrence wasn't so bad. We'd had our fun, I had to admit nostalgically. We'd gone to Queer Nation kiss-ins at department stores downtown, walked around shirtless on San Francisco's rare sunny days, drawing all over each other with Sharpies. Once we'd gotten royally stoned on sensimilla and wandered the streets in the rain for hours, laughing at absurdities: a Baptist church marquee that read “Come Worship”; a new Korean restaurant named Young Dong; streets named after bad presidents: Pierce, Fillmore, Buchanan. “Where was Nixon Street? Where was Harding?” Bush Street loomed around the next corner.

Back through the squirming crowd I hurried, feeling guilty as I rushed by the homeless men with their cups out, wondering always if they were veterans and if they'd known my dad. I got to Shotwell, where I turned left and then left again up our chipped, rotting front steps, hurrying through the door and back up the stairs, balancing the coffee and the bag, imagining the handsome boy asleep or smiling, dressed or naked, my tiger's quarry hung from the limb of a tree—Jimmy.

But when I opened my bedroom door, I found an empty bed. Something sank in me and something indifferently cruel followed it, ran its fingernails down the inside of my spine and vanished into the floor as I swung my head around to double-check that I had in fact just run past the bike. Yes. I calmly put down the food and coffee on the bookshelf, felt my heart banging around with the dread of
jilted
, and went to look for him in the bathroom. No Jimmy, in the bath or otherwise indisposed. I went out to the common room and the kitchen. No Jimmy on the couch or making me tea. Just Tanya, in her schoolmarm black-framed glasses, sitting calmly on her stool, reading the newspaper, drinking her coffee.

She didn't even look up when she said it. “He can't stay here.”

“I know, Tanya,” I said irritably. I was shaky, like I'd just had eight cups of coffee already, when I'd in fact had only a few sips.

She looked directly at me. “I'm not waiting an hour for the bathroom in my own house, ever again, no way.”

“Sorry, uh …” But I was already heading back down the hall, in no way able to deal with her harangue.

“What were you doing in there—I knocked!”

“Have you seen him?” I yelled back to her.

“Just briefly.”

I turned and headed back to the kitchen. “What do you mean?”

“I told him what I'm telling you.”

“Shit, Tanya, that's fucking rude. Where's your hospitality?”

“My hospitality? You never told any of us you had a guest coming.”

“I just met him!” She rolled her eyes. “Where'd he go?” I demanded. “Did you ask him to leave?”

“No,” she said glibly, which made me suspicious. “He asked to use the phone for a local call, grabbed his bags and went downstairs, and someone came and picked him up.” She shrugged and returned to her newspaper.

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No.” I marched away frustrated, and she barked after me. “You can't leave that bike in the hall either.” I grabbed it by the handlebars in a fury and rolled it into my room, slamming it into my easel and knocking my latest to the floor:
Let Them Read My Lips
.

She appeared at the door as I struggled to get the painting upright.

“Happy?” I snapped sarcastically.

“No; it's not about that. Accountability, Seamus. Being responsible.”

“You're a bureaucrat, Tanya.”

“We've talked about this before.” (I'd royally screwed up last month's utility bill as it was my turn to pay, and the power had gone off right as the sun went down and Tanya was firing up her juicer.)

“Okay, okay,” I muttered, but she'd proceeded to the bathroom and out of earshot. She was Queen Bee. Only because she'd been there the longest and was older than the rest of us. Like all bureaucracies, it was all about seniority. But her name wasn't even on the lease. The name on the lease, we'd learned, was someone none of us knew. Such was San Francisco. Rooms were passed on like sex partners, the common cold, or currency.

We'd only found out who was in fact on the lease when Darren was dating Cynthia and she'd shown up with an enormous duffle bag. This after Darren had already proved himself a jerk on several counts in the paltry three months he'd lived there: dirty dishes, late-night TV, loud music.

After Cynthia had disappeared into the bathroom, Tanya cornered Darren in the common area, which consisted of two couches, a TV, a dining-room table, and a fireplace, with surrounding built-in bookshelves—like the walls, all paneled in mahogany, or something that looked like it anyway.

“She's not moving in here,” Tanya stated calmly.

“Says who?” Darren responded defensively.

“Says me.”

“And you're the landlord?” he said mockingly.

“I've been here the longest.” She raised her voice.

“So what?” he'd snapped back, “your name's not on the lease.”

She just stared back. An admission.

“Whose name
is
on the lease?” I'd ventured from the corner dining table, where I was flipping through a pile of photographs from my latest “art project,” a study of shoes (and a rich vein it had proven to be: the endless color variations of Converse hightops, often mismatched on the same biped; prescription shoes for clubfeet; stickered Doc Martens; dozens of paratroopers' boots, and not once on a paratrooper).

“I don't know,” Tanya answered matter-of-factly.

“Well, let's find out,” Darren demanded self-righteously (he of three month tenancy). He was one of those swing music guys, a sax player, though he'd kept that to himself when he'd interviewed for a room, mentioning only his day job—word processing downtown (read: safe bet). He wore thin ties and played the morose, put-upon genius, and kept to himself generally until he had a gig. Then he'd don his trim black suit and pork-pie hat, snort some speed, and get all chummy before jerking jauntily down the front steps, off to play with his band, 22 Fillmore, which was named for a local bus line.

Tanya dug self-righteously and intently through a box in the kitchen, and when she'd found what she was looking for, she stopped, put on her glasses, and sauntered back out, Darren impatiently snapping, “Well?”

“Someone named John Galt,” she said dryly.

Proving nothing but the absurdity of them both as well as the whole concept of private property, tenancy—even Tanya's precious “accountability.”

“John Galt's gonna hear about this!” I snapped.

Tanya glared at me, but I looked at Darren, wanting to ask, but balking:
So what'll it be, Darren: Cynthia or the sax?
I could take Tanya's stares—I even sort of liked her for some odd reason I had yet to understand—but Darren's arrogance riled me. I smiled. He sneered.

“Darren?” Tanya said, folding her arms across her chest.

He didn't even look at her as he shouted: “Cynthia!”

“Just a minute,” we heard her reply from behind the bathroom door far down the hall as he stormed off to his room and loudly began to pack up, calling out as he did:

“I'm outta here and I'm not giving thirty days.”

Tanya didn't protest.

I got Darren's old room after that, which beat the back room where I'd been before—it listed toward the alley, abutted the forever-utilized bathroom, and smelled of mold and Pine Sol.

I sat down on the bed and slowly drank both coffees, nibbled a bagel, worried, and waited.
He'll be back
, I thought. But why'd he take the bags? I sat and ruminated about those moments of emotional distance that always held the clues to a boy's disappearance—in Jimmy's case, the comment about pity, the short answer regarding
Chief Joseph
, and the loss of eye contact after he told me he had
it
.

Finally I sighed, took a deep breath, and began to clean up my room. And it was only then, when my eyes passed over the bike, that I looked again at the strings all over it. No one would abandon a bike like that— would they?

I reached down and grabbed my water bottle, quaffed a gulp, and returned it to its holder on the bike frame. Then I hopped on the bike and rode down the very same street Jimmy and I had wandered a year ago, only now it was misted with morning fog. There was the empty sidewalk and the curb and the open lot, and the fennel-choked cyclone fence where we sat and drank King Cobra and discussed the virtues of infant critters, the life cycle of salmon, the dream of California—the colors of that not very long-ago sunset unimaginable in the morning gray.

I went by the corner liquor store next, and out front with a broom I saw the steel-wool proprietor. I hoped he wouldn't recognize me, as I hadn't taken his advice, about the forty-ouncer or Jimmy. But he didn't even look up.

And neither did I much, after that. Which means I ran red lights and stop signs and angered drivers, who angered me in return. But I did what my mother always taught me to do:
When you get angry, sing a song
, she'd said. And it worked too. Humming Leonard Cohen's “Suzanne,” I couldn't stay mad
among the garbage and the flowers
, which I soon learned is what the shoulder of every road is made of.

Pinski'd once warned me about such music: “No '70s folk music,” he'd barked. “Do you know how many people have gone over the edge listening to that stuff ?”

I hate rhetorical questions. What do I get if I guess right? A trip to Mexico? What are we—the sad legions—jelly beans? “3,456,” I answered him.

He'd looked at me, vexed, but ever distracted and short on time, he dismissed it, not having expected an answer anyway. “And why are you wearing those gloves?”

I had scabs on my knuckles from my habit of dragging them along brick walls, but I wasn't going to share that with him, although just then some of the scabs on my knuckles were sticking to the cotton, making me wince. “It's the cold, Doc; it's just the cold.”

Because I didn't tell Pinski much of anything. Not only because there wasn't time, but because I didn't want to talk to him. He was a drug dealer. I wanted the pills. Even though they never worked.

Well, fine then, I'd tried and I could rust in peace.

… all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
.

I watched the fog down those intermittent street crossings as it pulled back out of the bay and over the Golden Gate Bridge like a slow tongue, serpentine and torporous—the whole Bay Area a sleeping dragon just like how the Chinese immigrants of gold rush days described it, with each peak—Tamalpais to the north, Mt. Diablo to the east, Mt. Hamilton to the south—the spikes of its back. And right in the center, encircled, was its treasure: Gold Mountain, San Francisco. Or maybe it wasn't a treasure at all—such a trickster of a city. Maybe it was a little anthill and the fog wasn't a dragon's tongue but an anteater's snout, its long tongue reaching in and pulling out tasty morsels like Jimmy, one by one.

A week went by after that blissful truncated honeymoon and not a word from Jimmy. So, after a dubious digging around in the alley looking for my discarded Zoloft with no success—to think I'd thought I could escape the warlock Pinski so easily—I attempted to go about my business, slinging coffee at Java Baklava, all the while playing the B-52s to steady my nerves (something askew in their rhythms comforted me), but still assailed by anxiety, tempted to blame Tanya, but guessing it was probably something in me that had driven him away.

I drank too much coffee, drew no hearts in the foam of the lattes I made (part of my job description), and when I went to the YMCA, where I tutored kids twice a week in the after-school program, I was curt and impatient.

And as luck would have it I got stuck helping Ivan with his spelling. “Ivan, there is a letter missing from this word.”

He'd peer at it with great concentration. “It says ‘mountan.'”

“Correct—but a letter is missing.” He then proceeded to place a
w
after the
u
.

“No, I think it's a vowel.” Various efforts at placing
a
's and
e
's around in the word were met with frowns on my end until he gave up with a growl, at which point I told him, raising my voice in frustration, that the missing vowel was in fact an
i
. “Now, where does it go?”

“Nowhere.”

“I'm telling you that's the missing letter,” I explained irritably. “So it doesn't go
nowhere
. It goes in that word.” And I hammered the word with my index finger.

“No, it doesn't.”

I jerked my head backward, quickly reviewed the arguments for and against swatting a child (just a mental exercise), took a deep breath, and looked at him. Then I showed him where the letter went, raising my brows, “Okay?” He raised his brows in response. Smartass. Then I turned the paper over and asked him to re-spell the word, which he spelled without the “i” once again.

“Ivan, where is the
i
?”

“Next to the nose.”

“Wise guy, eh? Where's the
i
?”