A Horse Named Sorrow (5 page)

“It's outside having a cigarette.”

“Ivan—”

“It called in sick.”

“Ivan—”

“It died.”

“Ivan,” I exhaled impatiently, “how could
you
be here if the letter
i
died? There's an
i
in your name!”

He considered my remark, shrugged.

I looked around the room and crossed the line of sight of Miguel, unattended and frisky (he with the choicest cowlick I've ever seen).

“Why can't I vote?” he demanded, brash as ever. He'd get no straight answer from me. I always answered questions with more questions.

“Why do you think?”

“I don't know—you're the teacher.”

“Nah, I'm just a tutor. Come on, Miguel. Why do you think kids can't vote? See if you can figure it out yourself.”

“They're stupid?” He hunched his shoulders.

“Are kids stupid?”

“Some are.”

“Try again.”

“Uh …” And then he began thinking in earnest. His eyes rolled back into his head. Then he abruptly dropped his gaze back toward mine. “We're too short,” he announced with astounding confidence. Case closed as far as he was concerned.

“What does that have to do with it? Short people can vote,” I retorted.

“No … see … if they ask everybody to raise their hands, they won't see the kids' hands, so …” And he looked at me triumphantly, not even bothering to finish the sentence, as I shook my head no.

“I like your reasoning, Miguel. But you're wrong.”

“Well, why then?” he challenged me.

“I'll never tell.”

He sighed with his whole body. Then the bell went off like a Jeopardy
too-late
.

“Think it over and tell me next time.” I raised my voice, hoarse above the din of the now-departing kids, gleeful and screeching as they gathered their backpacks and cleaned up their work tables.

Normally, after class, I'd consider heading downstairs to the gym part of the YMCA to take a shower and scope out cute boys, for though it was the Young Men's Christian Association, Paul of Tarsus had little to do with it. The showers were cruisy, and the sauna even more so, while the steamroom was like a primordial swamp, with slithering creatures, their copious juices of saliva and semen flung about carelessly as they emerged and then retreated back into the mists. But I had a reputation to uphold—I was a tutor—so I laid low or, when I just couldn't resist, dragged my prey into the nearby toilet stalls.

Upstairs, we kept our pants on.

Some days I'd read them stories about insects and monsters. I'd half a mind to take them on a tour downstairs to see some in the flesh. They hollered and screamed when I told them there were zombies and trolls right here at the Y.

“Where, where?!”

“Downstairs, in the bowels of the building.” (Pun intended, which flew sailing over their heads.) “You know how trolls live under bridges? They live under classrooms too.” And I bugged out my eyes at them.

Of course, it wasn't
all
fun. Some children are worse than adults, and more rigid and moralistic too. An annoying little girl named Alice was a case in point. She berated me whenever I wore my pearl necklace: “Pearls are for girls. You can't wear them. Are you a girl? It's wrong!”

But there were others of endless delight. For instance, a little Chinese girl named, of all things, Eustacia. (The grandiosity of some of these kids' names was staggering. There was Mohammed, Jesus, and a girl named Shiva. All we needed was a Buddha and Quetzalcoatl, perhaps a Kali—there had to be a little black girl named Isis somewhere in this town—to turn the whole program into an ecumenical acid trip.)

Eustacia liked the oddest animals (possums, wombats, Tasmanian devils, javelinas and ocelots, newts and mudpuppies) and treated me like an encyclopedia/library, massaging my adult ego endlessly with questions about habitat and behavior, while smiling charmingly, and continually thanking and flattering me for my substantial knowledge and assistance (much of it faked). Eustacia was, in fact, responsible for my finding
Useless Facts & Other Fauna
, rummaging as I'd been forced to do, because of her insatiable mental appetite, at various thrift shops and used bookstores.

“What's the ‘Eus'!” I'd call to her in greeting, which made her giggle and scrunch up in her seat.

They ultimately got around to asking about where babies came from, of course. I was hardly the right person to ask, but I certainly would never throw them off the scent with a stork.

“Well, what do you think?” The second half of the question accompanied by the voices of Eustacia and Mo (short for the prophet of Allah) and a few others, since they were used to this ruse of mine.

They discussed it among themselves.

Win said they came from kissing. This was followed by snickers and Miguel's announcement that his mother kissed him all the time and he'd never had a baby. The kids laughed, and the collective adrenaline amped up Mo's ADD.

“Quit banging your pencil, Mo.”

“I can't stop.”

“I'm asking you to stop.”

“It does it by itself,” he pleaded.

“Babies just come by themselves!” Ivan roared.

“Like a disease!” Carlos chimed in. The others howled.

“Okay, lesson in neurology,” I digressed, having lost control, holding Mo's hand up as if he were the victor of something. “You have a brain and your brain has these nerves. They're like wires, electric. You can tell your hand to stop.”

“No, I can't,” Mo offered, looking completely sincere.

“Explain to me why you can't.”

“Well, see, I think there is a brain in my hand that is different than the one in my head.” Clever, sure, but it sounded like a serial killer's court defense. The class groaned.

“I don't believe it, and the judge won't either.”

“What judge?”

“In time, Mo, in time. Put the pencil down.”

“But what about the sweet little babies?” Eustacia now whimpered, clearly mocking the subject. If anybody knows, it's her.

“Well?”

Total silence, all eyes on her.

“Win is right, but it's a certain kind of kiss,” she said matter-of-factly. Hoots again, and ring went the bell.

Class dismissed, I lolled home down the busy Central American streets of the Mission, past the popsicle vendors and the short Guatemalan mothers with their strollered babies, their little daughters in Mary Janes, shiny as beetles, their little boys with filthy hands and faces, ecstatic with the action of the world, the circus of it, the promise of adventure and mischief. A thousand windows beckoned to them to step right up and covet Gameboys, soldiers and Transformers, airplanes and cars. How many of these children would one day be queer? How many felled by the acronym? How many by something else? How many would forget the circus? How many would never see it at all? How many would join?

Rounding Shotwell, and clumping up the stairs, my stomach clenching at the sound of Tanya's juicer, dreading all of a sudden what I may have forgotten to do, I stopped and turned around, deciding instead to walk, which was really the only way I knew to calm the roiling, boiling soup that was my mind.

A superstitious ex-Catholic, I soon began bargaining with the God I no longer believed in via signal lights (three greens in a row means Jimmy will appear—father, the son, and the holy ghost), songs heard in shops as omens (happy love songs or sad, laying down their prophecies:
love will keep us together
… and
everybody's got a hungry heart
…), clouds passing in front of the sun (he loves me, he loves me not), spiraling into superstitions about whether to go left or right around a telephone pole or tree, this street or that (the horrifying responsibility of free will and choice)—each decision a fateful algebra determining whether Jimmy would reappear or not.

But after a week and a half of No-Jimmy, way too much coffee, annoying children who couldn't spell, who badgered me with beautiful questions that unnerved me (why does red mean stop and green go? How come there are wars? Why do people die? Why is there cold anyway?), I was tired and anxious to bursting.

Little Miguel at the Y, who previous to then I'd thought was utterly devoid of compassion, put his arm on my arm, reminding me why I tutored these kids and that they trumped SSRIs even on their worst day. He said, “Seamus, what's the matter? You sad?”

“Well, a little bit, Miguel. But I'll be okay.” I was an adult, I told myself (at least relative to them), and I had to make it look like sadness was not a big deal, though come to think of it, kids appear less afraid of it than the rest of us.

“What's the matter?” he persisted. I didn't want him prying, and besides, I was a homo—what could I say?

“A friend of mine went away, Miguel, and I don't know if I'll ever see him again.”

“You think he's dead?”

I laughed. “No, I don't think he's dead. It's just like he moved away or something.”

“Maybe he'll send you a postcard.”

I nodded, and we got back to work on Miguel's math. If only love could be as simple as addition and subtraction, division, sets and multiplication. I thought math beautiful just then. Beautiful like a lie of simplicity. White lie. Love was actually more like calculus or physics. What was the half-life of love? Did it have cosigns and slopes, or quarks that morphed from wave to particle faster than you could say,
please don't leave
? Love was unpredictable, unquantifiable, or so multidimensional it was like string theory, and not even geniuses could form an equation that worked. People avoided those they loved; hated them; killed them; renounced them; ran away from them; called out their names; embraced them; kissed them; made sweet love to them; fucked them like dogs; telephoned them; comforted them and offered consolation; did just the opposite.

Perhaps Miguel had been right—Jimmy had been murdered, or run down in a crosswalk by a MUNI bus.

I groaned audibly, marching down one street after another, tempted to drag my knuckles along the brick walls, but stopping myself on account of hope—because bloodied knuckles were no good for safe sex with Jimmy. And then I felt the dread of not knowing. How long
had
he been positive? I just assumed not long because he was young. But he was twenty-eight. That wasn't young considering—but it used to be. Maybe he was really sick. Maybe he'd already checked in to one of the city's many hospices that had sprung up like mushrooms to handle the huge numbers of ill and dying men in those days.

No way.

Healthy as a horse.

I grabbed my camera and started photographing hospices, ACT UP posters, billboards about safe sex, all the little '50s-style boys and girls with arms akimbo that had sprung up wheat-pasted on walls and trashcans, newspaper racks and mailboxes.

Maybe he'd figured I was negative and he just wasn't up for the hassle of dealing with the mix. Maybe he was just horny. Maybe this, maybe that, and a long line of conjecture, honking and maneuvering for position in the traffic of my wracked mind.

But the bath. The bath. That wasn't casual sex—
was it
?

Maybe I no longer knew the difference. Since Lawrence, and even most of the time
during
Lawrence (him and me both—we had an “open” relationship), I'd been a true fisher of men. Catch and release. I slept with hundreds of boys. I drank them up like water, bolted them like food. Because in San Francisco, when you're twenty and aimless and willing, you can literally fuck your way up and down whole streets—paint the town white, and then go back and start over and put on another coat. The world is your oyster, they say, so fill it with pearls of semen. Pearls before, on the chest of, up the alimentary canal of, and down the gullet of—
swine
. Downright biblical. And though San Francisco's a small city, and you might think it likely that one would run out of new men—not to worry: thousands of new ones arrived each day, pouring out of Greyhounds down on 6th Street like well-hung locusts. San Francisco was like Ellis Island back in the day when you didn't even need papers or so much as a name. Desire alone was the ticket.

I did come up for air now and again. Usually when I got VD or crabs. Then I'd reconsider what the hell I was doing, how close to the acronym I was getting, not to mention what effect my constant fucking around might be having on my mind. Even Pinski had said: “Don't focus on outward means of satisfaction if you want to be happy.” I suspected he was right, so I dabbled in yoga and Buddhism, but in the end I returned to seeing my brains as soup. Soup with too much salt. My mom had come up with that: “There's nothing wrong with you, Seamus. It's just your soup. A little too much salt.” And she'd smile. I'm not sure I totally got it, but soup, soup was a comfort.

And boys—boys were like sailors from a sea of it. Merchants from the Maldives. San Francisco wasn't a candy store; it was a spice rack. How about a little of this, or a little of that to flavor your soup? Imagine a world of boys named Tarragon, Sage, and Thyme. And wouldn't you know it, in San Francisco there were actually dozens of boys who went by such monikers. I actually met two Sages, blew a Catnip, fucked a Fennel, and jacked-off with a Willow.

Tasty boys.

Their rose hips.

Whatever ideas I'd had about true love, or convictions about inward means of satisfaction, had paled next to the endless outward thrills. Beige vs. brilliant white? True love's like a job. Who needs it when you got food stamps? True love can wait.

But fate wouldn't. And suddenly I didn't want anybody but Jimmy.

And pretty soon I'm in Berkeley—and rising above the campus in front of the steep dark green hills, I can see the Campanile Tower, like some phallic monument to my dashed college career. I'd lasted but a semester—not so much due to the difficulty of my studies as by my decision one afternoon—while defecating in the basement bathroom of Wheeler Hall no less—to finally act on my long-dormant sexual desires.