A Horse Named Sorrow Read Free Page A

San Francisco. They were all there in their skinny checkered pants and knit caps, with their tattoos and their piercings, among the vendors of elotes and pork skins and tacos, a portly Mexican in a white shirt and tie bellowing out Spanish Jesus-talk from a bullhorn. And there were the homeless too, heaped in coats and plastic bags, and the ubiquitous Central American women, kids in tow, wearing their T-shirts and skirts and grim brown shoes—and on the uncomfortable-looking benches: indigent youths and hustlers, speed freaks and men with canes dealing crack cocaine and heroin. On the chained-to-a-pole newspaper vending machine, a plethora of Queer Nation stickers barked out their messages in primary colors: Rugmuncher , Buttfucker , and What Causes Heterosexuality?
    â€œYou made it, Jimmy.” His sideways grin, rattling the bike off the escalator and across the dinful plaza. He played it cool, but I could see he was taking it all in. I should have put him back up on the bike and led him by the halter so he could better look around as I guided him along toward my own private manger in Bethlehem on Shotwell Street, just a few blocks beyond.
    I had a slew of roommates, a sort of musical chairs of roommates, in the big flat where I’d lived the past year. They’d come and go with circumstances, or fall in love and get driven out by the others who didn’t want a fifth or sixth to share the bathroom with and to clean up after. I was the only one who hadn’t pulled that, but now here I was—and he had a bike with him too, and stuffed-to-bursting panniers that hung on either side of the back wheel. They wouldn’t read him as a one-night stand, no sirree.
    â€œI don’t know how long you can stay, Jimmy, but at least a few nights before they turn on you,” I sheepishly told him, rounding the corner, anticipating furrowed brows and general passive aggressiveness that wouldn’t go full-blown until midweek at the earliest. It was a tolerant city after all. Tolerant until it wasn’t, and then you were cooked good. Such was our fair PC city.
    Jimmy just smiled at my warnings, seemingly unconcerned.
    The crowds dwindled, but never entirely—not in San Francisco— as we got further from Mission Street. And then there were some big scraggly dusty-green acacia trees, and we turned left, and there it was— the dilapidated brown and white as-yet-to-be-refurbished Victorian, sitting on its grand wooden haunches, lost in the leafy shade of a big unpollarded sycamore tree.
    I held the door, and Jimmy rolled in. And I grabbed the back wheel while he held the front handlebars, as up the stairs we guided his steed.
    The shower was broken in our apartment, so everyone had to take a bath—which was ridiculous because baths take time and four or five people with one bathroom don’t have time. Myself, I rarely bathed there, swimming most days at the nearby YMCA and taking a shower in the locker room.
    But I couldn’t think of a better thing just then than bathing Jimmy. I’d never bathed anything but a dog, but suddenly it seemed like just the thing to do.
    I needed to bathe Jimmy.
    Jesus Jimmy.
    I needed to oil his feet.

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    Riding the elevator down, with its buttons for 1, 2, Fire , I looked at the purple velvet bag full of his ashes under that fluorescent hospital-like light inside those stainless steel walls, standing on that filthy gray rubber floor, with its stuck gum, scraps of paper, and greasy who-knows-what, and I felt shock. Shock that receding foot by foot above me through space and time—not yet a year—was the boy on the platform, with the body he’d lived in, and its wasted, trashed half-bleached over-dyed hair, its intelligent furrowed brow, its long nose and knobby knees, its pronounced shoulders and delicate clavicles—its lungs that breathed, its kidneys that purified and its intestines that digested, its liver that kept working even as it got