boy horse

H and I met recently for Thai food. I picked him up in the Mission and drove us to the Tenderloin. On the walk from the car we passed two independent piles of human excrement. On one particularly offensive looking heap somebody had centered an empty package of menthol cigarettes. There were several of the totally exploded kind of homeless person you don't see too often in New York but seem prevalent in California cities, unshod, deranged, unreachable, around whom you and your walking companion walk silently. H said, "Welcome to the T.L., baby." I didn't know what to call him. Sometimes he goes by his Chinese name, sometimes by his chosen name, H, which had come to him when he found some beached cup shards while walking on Ocean Beach, and never by the name I first knew him by. He had gotten a tattoo of his Chinese namesake, a phoenix extending from his right shoulder to his right wrist, the tail of which was just visible under the cuff of his plaid shirt. It was complete at his shoulder but H was still waiting to make enough money to color in the rest. We ordered far too much food, including a brackish black broth with udon-like noodles, deep-fried pork belly, and a wine-colored, average penis-sized sausage sliced into stretched coins, and ate until we were sick. We talked about whether to wear a helmet at all times. I called us a bunch of pussies for feeling sad about girls. After we pushed the last pieces of pork belly into our faces, H looked over and said, "So. If you had to be half human, half animal, what animal? And which half?" I said winged horse, human head, the conqueror of two domains. H said slug head. We walked back to the car and saw that somebody had stepped onto the menthol cigarette package and left a footlong streak of diarrhea on the sidewalk. In the car H said, "So are you into pissing and shitting, or what? Scat? Because you keep talking about shit." We went back to his apartment in the outer Mission. Very San Francisco, four bedrooms in a Victorian building shared by strangers, closed terrace turned into guest bedroom via Christmas lights and secondhand bed, toilet in a closet, sink in a different room, five hundred pound 1950s-era gas stove with exotic broiling/charring/grilling compartments, storage compartments built into the walls, dirty homemade ceramics, dozens of teas, motorcycle helmets, custom fixies with cruiser handlebars, crap pinned to walls, crap leaning against walls, translucent colored crap hanging in window bays, boy in second bedroom playing the same twenty-second loop of an intolerable electronica project. We had peppermint tea with cookies H's mom had mailed. I was going to stay in the city since I was to be in Oakland the next morning, but H was staying with another person that night so it would have just been me, alone on H's sheetless bed under a naked brown 50W overhead bulb surrounded by mountains of his dirty clothes, books, bike parts, broken things, with garbage trucks making slamming noises up and down South Van Ness. I said I was going to drive home. He said, "What are you reading?" and I said, "Shit," and he said he had been reading sci-fi again. He called it "candy," and said it was a break from political tracts. H is a union organizer. He pushed a battered copy of "Dhalgren" into my hand and told me I would like it. I gave him chocolate covered blueberries. I drove him to his friend's apartment. Just before closing the passenger door behind him, he laughed and said, "Hey, do you remember when you wrote that story about me and you said I kissed like a horse?" Not so, dear H, I said you kissed like a "fourteen year-old boy horse," but I also said you were hot as hell.