Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  David in Hell’s Kitchen with his friend Stephie in spring 1967. He was twelve. (Courtesy of Steven Wojnarowicz)

  The stories David told later about this part of his life emphasized his sexual encounters, first with predators and then with tricks. “I got molested almost immediately,” he told me. “The second month.” A man asked David to take him to what was then the RCA building in Rockefeller Center, and David agreed, proud that he knew where it was. As they got to the entrance, however, the man latched onto David’s arm and dragged him through the whole RCA tour and then downstairs into the basement catacombs. David thought he was about to be murdered. Instead the man pulled David into a bathroom and tried to show him his dick. David somehow got out of this by asking if they could go back to the TV studio part of the tour, then pushing the man as they went through a revolving door. The man fell and David ran. “At home, no one wanted to deal with it,” David complained. “I got yelled at.” This had been a narrow escape, not a sexual escapade, and it would have been his mother who did the yelling. Neither Pat nor Steven recalled hearing a thing about it.

  Nor could they imagine David, fresh from Jersey, as a hustler—though he would imply later that he began turning tricks almost as soon as he got to Manhattan. Pat was especially adamant about this. She recalled that David made friends with a girl in the building named Stephie. “I know what David was like then,” Pat declared. “He was more interested in Stephie and his hamsters.”

  He began hanging out at a gaming arcade a block from home. Later he would tell Pat that this was where he had his first encounter with a potential trick. He told me the same thing—that he was in the game room, where there was a joke and novelty counter. One day as David stood admiring the fake noses and exploding cigars, a man came up and fondled him, asking him if he’d like to make ten bucks: “Come to my house and rub my shoulder.” David snatched the ten and scooted off on his skateboard. He was beginning to figure out that the predators might be good for some money.

  This story rings true for a boy of eleven, twelve, thirteen—as does his account of his first actual trick. He met the man in Central Park. He’d been told: Never get into a stranger’s vehicle. So David took a bus to the guy’s apartment, while the man followed in his car. David still remembered the weight of the man’s body on top of him, the Polaroid shot, the man’s cum. David asked for two dollars so he could get an ice cream sundae.

  In September 1967, when he turned thirteen, David was in ninth grade at P.S. 17, a junior high. He earned the highest grades he would get in his secondary schooling, with a 79 average and no failures. He had skipped eighth grade, probably because of high achievement test scores.

  As for the other things David said he was doing at this time, like stealing lizards and turtles from pet shops and letting them go in Central Park—“I could see him doing that,” said Pat, though she never heard him speak of it. Steven remembered going to Central Park with David to fish with hooks made from bobby pins. The two brothers would go to a grocery store on Fifty-seventh Street and offer to carry people’s bags to earn tips. They played pranks on their mother with items purchased from the above-mentioned joke and novelty counter—placing fake dog shit in the apartment of one of her boyfriends and pasting a fake crack on the television, then calling her at work to tell her Pat had broken it.

  Underneath the kid stuff, however, lay an undercurrent of tension and strife. And David’s life would change after 1968, when both Pat and Steven were booted out of the house.

  Steven was the first to go. He had had the hardest time adjusting to life with his mother. Pat and David became allies, and would remain so. Steven was designated as the troublemaker.

  In ninth grade, Steven found work at a nearby grocery store, pricing and shelving and sorting after school, sometimes till eleven P.M. He was paid in cash and handed most of it over to Dolores. “I was looking for approval,” he explained. “Never did get it. I got a little pissed when she came home in a rabbit fur coat. She never spent the money on us.”

  Steven looked for ways to avoid being home, like going to the lobby to talk to the doorman. Soon he was hanging out with the doorman’s brother, Johnny, who ran a newsstand on the corner of Fifty-first Street and Eighth Avenue. “I was adopted by all the street people, from derelicts to prostitutes,” Steven said. “They called me ‘the kid.’ And I would work the stands until three or four or five o’clock in the morning.” Johnny, a black man who was legally blind, became Steven’s best friend. He was the first adult Steven ever met who encouraged him, saw potential in him, and told him things like “someday you’re going to be the president of a company.” Talks with Johnny lifted his spirits. Often on Saturday nights Steven would help him put the Sunday paper together, and in the morning Johnny would take him to Harlem for breakfast.

  Steven was also cutting school a lot, and some nights he slept in the doorman’s room. The doorman left at eleven P.M. and Steven had figured out how to pull the slats out so he could get his hand under the door and open it. He would put the doorman’s heavy maroon coat down and sleep on the floor.

  Pat thought her mother worried about Steven hanging out with his street friends all the time. Dolores couldn’t control him, but didn’t seem to try. Or didn’t know how to try. “When she told him to do something, he just slammed out of the house,” Pat said.

  He felt abandoned—not just by his mother but also by David and Pat. After he graduated from junior high in June 1967, Steven decided to run away, maybe become a hobo. So one day he headed down the West Side railroad tracks. But when he heard an unfamiliar noise, he realized this was just going to be too scary. Instead he took a bus back to East Brunswick. There he moved in with an old school friend for a few days, then went to his father’s house in Spotswood. Ed was out of town. (He’d found work with the merchant marine on ships delivering supplies to Vietnam.) Marion let Steven move in for a week or two.

  But she knew it couldn’t be permanent. She called Aunt Helen in Michigan. “I said, ‘Steve showed up here. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Helen.’ I said, ‘There’s no home.’ And she says, ‘Well, how about Steve comes and lives with me?’ That’s what we were going to arrange. For him to go live with Aunt Helen. But he took off on one of the kid’s bikes and went way up to East Brunswick.” He’d gone back to his friend’s house. Marion couldn’t remember how she found out where he was, but she drove over and put the bike—probably his half-brother Pete’s—back in the car. Marion said she told him, “ ‘Don’t bother coming back here. I can’t do this.’ [We had an] argument over it, and after that I never saw him.”

  That July, Steven turned fifteen.

  When her husband got home, Marion told him what had happened. “[Ed] said, ‘If he ever comes to the door, don’t you let him in this house.’ So he did come to the door one night and I said, ‘Steve, I’m sorry but you can’t come in. Your father told me that I wasn’t to let you in the house.’ And he went away.”

  Steven moved in with some people Pat knew in East Brunswick, and someone—not Steven—let Dolores know where he was. In late August, Dolores drove out with her boyfriend, and Pat and David, to pick Steven up. Years later, he could still remember hearing the song “Red Rubber Ball” on the car radio as they drove back to Manhattan: “I should have known you’d bid me farewell.…”

  The next night, at dinner, Dolores told Steven that he would have to move out, that Pat and David agreed with her on this.

  As Pat remembered it, Dolores had come to her and David and said, “ ‘Who agrees that Steven should live someplace else?’ She’s the one who set it up, so what were we going to do? We’re not going to say no.”

  “I was told a vote was taken,” said Steven, who was devastated, who could still barely speak about it more than forty years later. This was the most painful moment of his life. “I remember locking myself in the bathroom and crying. I had never felt such abandonment and grief.” He stayed in the bathroom at least an hour. When he came back out, he “begge
d and begged and pleaded—to stay.” Dolores gave in. He could stay.

  One day soon after that, Steven took the elevator to the lobby and found Ed sitting there. It was the first time he’d seen his father since Ed “dumped” them. There were no “how are you’s.” Ed got to his feet and declared, “I’m gonna kill you, you fuckin’ son of a bitch.” He was furious that Steven had come to the house in Spotswood. He was drunk, and he had that terrible look with the curled lips that Steven remembered so well. Steven bolted for the door and ran toward Ninth Avenue and on for another eight or nine blocks. Ed could not catch him.

  That Thanksgiving, Steven woke up in the doorman’s room, where he’d spent the night, and walked to the newsstand. There sat one of the so-called derelicts he’d gotten to know, a man named Raymond who made a few dollars a day at the newsstand helping out. He asked Steven why he wasn’t home for the holiday. Steven said something about his circumstances at home, his feeling that he wasn’t welcome there. Raymond got another local vagrant to take over and said to Steven, “Follow me, kid.”

  Raymond took Steven to the Salvation Army on Tenth Avenue and handed over his last three dollars. “We’ll take a Thanksgiving meal for two, please.” They went down the cafeteria line and got their turkey and trimmings. Once they sat down, Raymond talked to Steven, telling him that many of the people seated around them had once been professionals, had once had families, and now they had nothing. He thought there were things Steven could do to avoid this destitution. What the specific advice was, Steven couldn’t remember. But he never forgot this act of great kindness extended to him by someone who’d been labeled “a bum.”

  Steven and David had returned to their familiar pattern of fighting. One day early in 1968, in the midst of some ruckus, Dolores announced that she was going to call a girl Steven liked and, in his words, “tell her what a rotten shit I was.” So Steven grabbed the address book out of Dolores’s purse and ran to the newsstand. He did not come home that night.

  David at thirteen or fourteen in an early photo booth picture. Few, if any, photos exist from the rest of his teen years. (Courtesy of Steven Wojnarowicz)

  The next day, David appeared at the newsstand, demanding that Steven return the address book. He refused, and David stabbed him in the arm with a pocketknife. Steven walked to the nearest hospital, where he got four or five stitches. Police were called. They took him to the precinct station, where the cops were waiting with David and Dolores. Steven didn’t want to press charges. As he saw it, Dolores could manipulate David, who was “trying to protect Mommy.” Apparently this incident hardened her resolve—either Steven or David would have to go.

  Dolores was dating a policeman at the time. A couple of weeks after the stabbing, the police picked Steven up at the newsstand. They sat in the police car and told him he now had a choice. He could go immediately to Rikers Island. Or he could go to Brooklyn, to an orphanage. Steven had no idea that the cops couldn’t just pick up a minor, someone charged with no crime, and deposit him at Rikers. He had no advocate.

  So this was how, sometime in March or April 1968, Steven entered St. Vincent’s Home of the City of Brooklyn for the Care and Instruction of Poor and Friendless Boys.

  Years later, Steven would say that entering St. Vincent’s had been “a gift,” the best thing that ever happened to him. But he floundered at first, as he adjusted to living with 150 other “friendless boys.” St. Vincent’s was just a residence. He remained a student at Charles Evans Hughes High School in Manhattan, though he could have opted for a school in Bay Ridge and later thought he should have. He was a minority at Hughes as a white kid, and the late sixties were the days of rage. He got smacked around and threatened, and he started cutting school. But he stayed at Hughes because he wanted no more changes in his life—and because Hughes put him just two subway stops from the newsstand, still the epicenter of his emotional life. He returned there just two days after the police delivered him to St. Vincent’s—and he ran into Dolores on the street. “I knew she was livid,” said Steven. “She thought she had me locked up.”

  Or she was concerned that he was still hanging out with “street people.” But if so, she’d never said it. Never said “I’m worried about you.” The machinations that she used to get Steven into “the Home,” as he called St. Vincent’s—that’s what he couldn’t recover from. Voted out of the family! And to feel that both Pat and David had a hand in it. The bitterness he felt was slow to dissolve. It rankled. It hurt.

  The major irony here is that Steven would prove to be the one who most valued family life, while David became the one with a life on the street.

  Pat, meanwhile, had been transferred to the Woolworth’s at Fifty-ninth and Broadway. There she met Bob Fitzgerald, who’d just been hired as assistant manager and, in his own judgment, was doing a horrible job. “If it wasn’t for her, I probably would have gotten fired. She’d tell me what to do,” Fitzgerald said. He and Pat started dating in March and would eventually marry.

  Fitzgerald observed that Dolores thought she deserved a medal for taking in her three screwed-up kids. She felt abused by them. She told Fitzgerald she’d had to put Steven in a home because he tried to burn down the apartment. (Both Pat and Steven say this is not true.) “No sooner had she gotten rid of Steven than she started on Pat,” said Fitzgerald. “Pat was getting the blunt end of everything at that point.”

  On the Fourth of July that summer of ’68, Pat told her mother that Fitzgerald had invited her to go to Coney Island to watch fireworks. She promised to be home by eleven. Dolores said no. She wanted Pat to stay home, telling her, “We never spend enough time together.” They argued and finally Dolores said, “If you go out the door, you’re not coming back.” Pat didn’t take the threat seriously—though Dolores took Pat’s keys.

  That night, when Pat returned at eleven as promised, she found her suitcase downstairs in the lobby. Pat tried ringing the apartment. And ringing and ringing. Dolores didn’t respond. Pat spent the next three days in a hotel. (Fitzgerald paid for it.) Then she went home to talk it over, and Dolores suggested that maybe Pat could move to the YWCA.

  Pat was eighteen, about to enter her senior year of high school. She found herself a place at a women-only residence on the Upper West Side. The room was tiny, with a bathroom and a kitchen down the hall. Pat paid for everything out of her part-time Woolworth’s salary. Soon she was struggling and had to apply for welfare.

  David was still acting as his mother’s protector. Dolores sent him up to Woolworth’s in November to invite Pat home for Thanksgiving. “I was at the cash register taking care of people,” Pat said, “and he kept insisting, and I said, ‘Look—tell her I said no. What do I have to be thankful for?’ And that upset him. He was really pissed off, and he just—he left. It’s something that’s always stayed in my mind, because I knew I had hurt him. I would have been glad to be with him. But I was not having anything to do with my mother.”

  One weekend, Dolores and David went to visit Steven at St. Vincent’s. David told his brother that Pat had moved out, that she had no money but needed a winter coat. Steven, who’d been working as a messenger, decided that he could give her a hundred dollars. He was able to track her down at her Woolworth’s job and gave her the money. For a winter coat, he told her. “And then I never really saw her after that.” Pat could not recall getting this gift from Steven.

  That fall, David had turned fourteen and entered the High School of Music and Art with a portfolio he’d thrown together overnight and a shoebox full of painted rocks. Applying there was probably his mother’s idea. Pat remembered that Dolores wanted him to get into a good school.

  “There was one teacher I met when I first got into school, who I really loved,” David told me. “One art teacher. All I remember is this image of her standing on the desk, excitedly yelling about purple in the tree across the street. ‘Look at that purple.’ And I loved her.” She was Betty Ann Hogan, the only teacher he connected with in high school, and the only one
I could find who even remembered young David Voyna. She taught Introduction to Studio Practice, where David learned how to mix colors, stretch a canvas, paint a still life.

  Hogan had no idea that David Voyna had become David Wojnarowicz until I contacted her, yet he’d stayed in her mind. “I was always sort of attracted to the ones who were afraid to be noticed,” she said. As a fourteen-year-old sophomore, David wasn’t just younger than his classmates; he was shorter than most of them. “Puny-looking,” as Hogan put it. She allowed talking in Studio Practice, but David did not participate. He always sat by himself. He did not seem neglected. He was clean and still wore his hair short. He liked to do figurative line drawings of mythological or fantasy creatures. “There really was a hidden person that he wasn’t sharing with anybody,” Hogan said.

  That year, David became friends at school with another skinny nerdy kid, John Hall. They were both misfits, both loners, and by no means constant companions, but sometimes they skipped school together to go on adventures. (David missed twenty-three days of school sophomore year.) John Hall remembered David taking him, for example, to Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip of Manhattan, the last patch of natural forest on the island and territory David had clearly explored before. He showed Hall a cave big enough to sleep in. Once or twice, David took Hall home, where he joked about Dolores’s multitudinous cosmetics. “The preservatives,” he called them. If Hall wasn’t the only friend David made in high school, he was one of the very few.

  David hated the High School of Music and Art. He said Hogan was the only teacher he respected. She taught there just a couple of years, but observed that there was a style the students had to emulate to get a good mark, a “bastardized Cezanne-ish, Matisse-y kind of look”—while she encouraged the kids to explore their own way of seeing things. Indeed, he got his best grades that year in Hogan’s class—an 85 both semesters. He failed French once and math twice, and in four other classes he was right on the “passing” line with a 65.