Jimmy

High school water ballet
Is a great escape
From awkward boys'
Locker rooms
And competitive sporting games
So, if you have to take PE
Why not be on the synchro team?

And it's just before lunch break
So if your eyes are red
From getting baked
You can blame it
On the chlorine

On the team I met Roger
Who didn't leave much of an
Impression on me
He graduated
And I didn't think of him
Again
Until I saw him at the youth rap group
Arranged in our suburban city
By volunteers from
The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Centre

George Kelley was the name
Of the volunteer facilitator
And the first guy
I knew
Who got skinny
With Kaposi's Sarcoma
And died
Yeah, George
He was that guy

George disappeared
And Roger disappeared
And so did I
High school was soooo fun
That I got expelled
For truancy and forgery
And then packed up all my belongings
While my father was trying to persuade me
That I was arrogant
Or lacked discipline
His lips just kept moving
And moving

I moved to downtown LA
And my apartment got riddled
With bullets
And my '69 Ford Maverick
With its cracked head gasket
Broke down on the freeway
And I cranked up the fucking radio
Til it was blowing out the fucking speakers
And I turned the fucking wipers on
The headlights, the blinkers
Everything
Fucking piece of shit
Die, die
I just wanna fucking die

Reading the complete works
Of the Marquis de Sade
In a laundromat at night
So many fricken pages
And so many unfiltered Camel cigarettes

Writing poems about
Anuses stretched wider than birth canals
Blood and shit and sperm
And scabs and wasting away

Lying in a snoring stranger's bed
And feeling like I was going to die
If I couldn't get him to hold me

Knocking on a door
On the thirteenth floor
Of an apartment complex
At 3:00 a.m.
And finding out the guy
Only has oil-based hand lotion
To lube the condom
It's what he always uses
He says

Fucking Ronald Reagan
Won't even say the word AIDS
But I have KY in my glove box

And after we'd sweated and excreted everything
We had to excrete
And laid there in a heap
I discovered
This guy
Was Roger's
Ex-boyfriend

They'd lived together
And everything had gone to hell
Or rather this guy felt he delivered them there
Poor Roger got mangled
In this guy's wood pecker chipper

And now it was just this guy and me
Lost
Together
Thinking of innocence
Numbly

We invited other strangers over
And I made a charcoal drawing of this guy
Getting pounded
With his eyes averted
Looking at me
Smoking
My smoke drifting out the thirteenth floor window
My tube of KY emptying out on the floor

This guy thought I looked like James Dean
And changed my name to Jimmy
Hey Jimmy, he'd say to my answering machine
For the few weeks after we met
That we tried to keep in touch

This guy bought me a gift
He told my answering machine
And he really wanted to get it to me
But where are you?
Wouldn't it be nice, Jimmy
He said
To have a normal date
For once?