Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  After that year, David called Hogan a few times to complain about other teachers. He had given her a stone frog as a gift, assuring her that it was quite old. He said he bought it on a trip. A souvenir. When I called her, she still had it.

  He began an affair with a mentally handicapped twenty-year-old named Anthony. Their two mothers were friends, and they had sex on the roof the night they met. David remembered the young man’s penis against his face, remembered that for the first time he connected to someone emotionally through sex. This scared him so badly he thought he might have to kill the guy, so no one would know he was a homo.

  “I tried to get information in the local library about what a ‘fag’ was,” David wrote later in his Dateline. “The limited information I found depressed me.” The “date” part of the Dateline has broken down here, but the affair had probably begun by the time he entered Music and Art.

  At some point, they went to Florida together. Dolores had been invited by her friend, Anthony’s mother. And Dolores in turn invited Pat, who paid her own way with help from Bob Fitzgerald. She wondered whether her mother had gone there to look for a rich man, but if so, they were in the wrong part of Florida. “The boondocks,” said Pat. Far from the beach and the glitz. Staying in a trailer. Two dramas unfolded there.

  First, Pat remembered that David and the young man who was “slow” stayed together in a dilapidated shack out back because there wasn’t room in the trailer. They were in there during the day, with the door locked. “I don’t know if they were caught in the act or not,” Pat said, “but I remember there was a hoopla about it and my mother was really upset, and I think that’s where her friendship with this woman ended.” According to David, he and his friend “fucked the vacation away,” and the family found out when they made a brief visit to the coast, where David considered suicide, standing in the motel bathroom with a razor pressed to his wrist. Pat recalled nothing about a visit to the coast or David with a razor.

  What she remembered was the conflict she had with her mother when Dolores decided that they were all going to return to New York. Pat had connected with some young people her age, a brother and sister—in fact, with their whole family. They invited Pat to stay on and she wanted to do it. Dolores announced that she had hidden Pat’s return ticket and wouldn’t give it to her unless she came along to the airport. Anticipating trouble, Pat had already found the ticket. “She went bananas and came at me,” Pat said. Now there was no way she was getting on a plane with her mother. In the end, Dolores steamed off to the airport with David. Pat did not see her mother again until she married Bob Fitzgerald in 1972.

  David still found it bewildering years later: “My brother running away, then getting put in a boys’ home. My sister’s clothes all dumped in the hallway because she went on a date.” He never knew how to read the mixed messages he got from his mother.

  “I still have to struggle,” he told me more than twenty years later. “I’ve never been able to fully [overlook her] responsibility for what she did or didn’t do, and I feel anger about it. Yet at the same time, I just think she had a miserable life. She seems to have come through it somehow, but she did not do well. This was very weird to me my whole life. She seemed like such an intelligent woman. And I remember she could sing. She had this voice that would go up and down scales with like bird sounds … so full of life. And beautiful. The sounds and the way she thought, what she talked about.

  “Then all of sudden—boom—it just vanished. And suddenly she couldn’t do very simple things. She made this decision or emotionally came to this point where she felt she was losing her beauty after years of making a living off her looks, and her reaction to it was horrifying. She became full of fear. She had this obsession about meeting someone who was rich. And all the tension that went with that. Dating these absolute assholes. These guys—I hated them. Revolting oily characters. She denied that we were her kids. She introduced us as her little friends if we ran into her on the street. Horrible stuff. The messages were all over the place. I threw myself heavily into sex—for money or no money. Whenever I could get the money, I’d ask for it. But then, I also was very attracted to certain guys. It escalated faster and faster till there were periods when I’d run away for like a week, sometimes for the summer, or just take off. And she was falling apart physically and mentally and playing out all kinds of psychological stuff with me that was very frightening, very upsetting, and I was becoming very violent in reaction to things outside in the streets. At some point, I even stabbed my brother.”

  3 THE STREET

  In late 1978 or early ’79, a decade after these events, David began writing what he called his “street novel,” based closely on his own experience. He abandoned the project after composing nearly sixty single-spaced pages, but it seems to have established a template for how he would speak of his life later. The book’s narrator, a kid of unspecified age, begins in New Jersey with a drunken brute of a father and a beautiful mother he doesn’t remember because she left so long ago. The kid runs away from home, thus eliminating family from the story and getting right to the crux of it: life in Times Square.

  David’s descriptions of the teeming square are surely drawn from his own observations. Already our child narrator knows that the “hustling strip” extends from Forty-third Street down Eighth Avenue to Thirty-eighth. He studies the crowd of sailors, runaways, winos, pushers, and prostitutes in two-foot-tall wigs. “Pimps lean in shadowy doorways with carved ebony sword canes and deadly looking fat peepshow operators chew cigars under the flashing entrances.” He is enthralled. “The sense of it, be it anarchy or just exploding mad energy, grabs hold of you and shakes you through to the bone. My movements became animated and there was something stirring within, some valve opening and I was ready to go in all directions at once.”

  He finds a hotel where, for six dollars, he can spend the night in a squalid room smelling of decay and old food, where he has a bed with a bulge in the mattress and two water bugs to kill. A day later and nearly broke, our narrator describes the moment when—seated in the Automat with a plate of rice and beans—he decides to become a hustler. “I didn’t have a fear of the sexual contact at all. Actually that seemed interesting.” But he feels uncertain about “whether [he]’d be able to discern the fine line between a fella out for a good time or a knife wielding lunatic.”

  He then turns his first trick with a man he meets in front of a sporting goods store on Forty-second Street. They go to a hotel much like the one where the boy spent his first night. The narrator earns fifteen dollars and gets to keep the room after the guy leaves to catch a bus to New Jersey. “In the bathroom I slumped into the corner by the sink and stared at my face in the mirror illuminated by the fluorescent overhead light. I could hardly recognize myself.”

  David’s school record indicates that by the time he was fifteen and in eleventh grade, something had gone very wrong. He missed seventy-two days of school that year, arrived late on fifty-three of the days he did attend, failed four classes, and just barely passed three others. His overall grade point average was 62—passing was 65. Eight out of twelve teachers gave him a personality rating of “N,” for “needs improvement.” (He’d earned just one “N” the year before.) He also fell out with John Hall—needling him over something. Hall couldn’t remember the details, but he was certain that David had dropped out. He stopped seeing him at school.

  This is most likely the point when David began his double life. In Times Square, he easily tapped into the man/boy underground and sold himself once a week or so. In the “street novel,” he had assessed his narrator’s desirability in a way that does not seem fictionalized. Customers had a type in mind when they searched among the boys on the street, wrote David, who was skinny and had glasses. “So I wasn’t numbered among the most desired, though that gave me little trouble in scoring. Most of the Johns had it going for blonde kids, kids who were young and ‘pretty’ and had an eternal air of innocence about them. Some of this was just f
antasy material from the porno shops, but I found a good deal of the characters who seemed to get a kick out of ‘corrupting’ a young boy. Johns would pull out a sheaf of porno magazines and ask you to page through it as they sucked you off. Others would just sit there with a gleam in their eyes jerking themselves off as you paged through a magazine filled with lurid photos.”

  David was still living at home, still more or less in school, and still more interested in lonely-kid things: wandering through the Museum of Natural History, walking over the George Washington Bridge to play on the cliffs, riding the motorized scaffolds at construction sites. Dolores always tried to send him to summer camp. At one, he met a kid who became one of his hustling buddies.

  This was Keenan, a wild character a year younger than David. Keenan was already so jaded that, as David put it, “the only thing that kept him running now was a plunge in the Times Square and city scenes for a pure sensation of the unknown and unexpected. He was on a death trip continually.” David ran into Keenan again in a gay bar in 1978 and wrote up his memories of one of their teenage encounters in his journal. He then fleshed it out in his “street novel” with dialogue and descriptions of decor that differ from those in the journal, but the basics are the same.

  As a rule, the two boys would sit on the subway post railing at Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street to wait for customers. Keenan was prettier and got more attention, but no matter who went first, they’d make a plan for where to meet later. One day, however, a man approached Keenan to say “my friend wants you,” and Keenan declared that he wouldn’t go without David. They walked to a parking lot on Forty-first Street where a limo sat, bearing “a fat guy with a face like a gizzard.” In the “novel,” this man promises both of them fifty dollars—more than David usually got. The limo then ferried them all to a doorman building in the East Seventies. Once inside, the fat guy told them he was “connected”—with the Mafia. He pulled out an authentic police badge to show them, and a German luger.

  “He wanted to get it on with the two of us at once but we said: no,” David wrote in his journal. “We were still new to hustling together and to have sex in front of each other would confirm what we were doing in each other’s minds—it would make concrete the act of selling one’s body.”

  So Keenan stayed in the bedroom with the guy while David waited his turn in the living room.

  A few minutes later [Keenan] came out holding his ass—he mumbled “He wants to try and fuck you—he tried me and said he’ll give both of us $25 more if we allow him.… So don’t say no.” I didn’t wanna do it but the guy grabbed me as I took off my clothes and wrestled me onto the bed—he had a huge bloated belly hospital white body like a huge codfish—he turned me over and got on top of me—it hurt and I struggled I thought I was suffocating and finally with one thrust managed to throw the both of us over the side of the bed.… [Keenan’s] story was bullshit—the guy had never promised 25.00 extra and I realized that the guy had forcibly fucked him and he was into one of his rationalizations, that I should have the same happen to me so he wouldn’t lose face. We got our promised money and split the place, heading back to the Square for a balcony movie on some horror theme—bloody monsters and eyeballs plucked out in between soda and ice cream.

  Usually, of course, David was hustling by himself. One night a man picked him up and took him not to a hotel but to a parking lot for city buses around Tenth or Eleventh Avenue. There he announced that he was a vice cop and that David was under arrest. When David began to cry, the “cop” said, OK, just give me all your money. David told him he had seventy cents. The man tried to fuck him, then pulled a knife, and David finally put it together: This was no cop. The man was marching him toward Twelfth Avenue when suddenly a city bus pulled up—empty, at the end of its route. David shoved the phony cop and ran screaming toward the bus driver, who sat there openmouthed. The phony cop turned away. David felt he’d come very close to being murdered by a madman.

  Another Music and Art graduate, artist David Saunders, remembered meeting David Voyna, probably during the 1969–70 school year, eleventh grade for both of them. Saunders had run away from home the year before and realized that Voyna was a kid he already knew from the streets, specifically from Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, then a hippie hangout. “Sundown would come and rain would come, and you’d see that only a small group of people actually had nowhere to go. So we would band together and someone would say, ‘I know a place to crash.’ “

  In those days, Saunders assured me, it was easy to survive as a street kid in New York. “We’d just eat out of the garbage,” he said. “There was practically a half-eaten hot dog on every corner.” And there were plenty of places to stay. New York was a broken city then, dotted with a large assortment of abandoned buildings. Anyone could just pry the barricade off a window, crawl in, and light a candle. When it was cold, Saunders said, he would just troll through the trash cans for something to insulate him at night. “You could stuff your clothing with newspaper, but that was a last resort.”

  David had changed physically by this time. He’d finally begun to shoot up toward his eventual six feet four, and he’d grown his hair out. Saunders described him as angular, goofy-looking, sloppily dressed. The two Davids were never close, just part of the same circle: “heads” at school, “dirty filthy freaks” on the street. According to Saunders, “heads” got together for inspiring discussions about philosophy, mind-blowing books—and drugs. David Voyna smoked pot and hash if someone passed it around. “While he was in my world, we were all pretending to be the same basic kind of character—a disgruntled leftist misanthrope or something. So we were hating the establishment, trying to find a new world, questioning everything, and just trying to be virtuous hippies.”

  As Saunders remembers it, he and David Voyna spent nights in the same place maybe four times. Along Columbus Avenue, from Seventy-second Street to Harlem, stood hundreds of empty tenements. In one around Ninety-second Street, Saunders himself crashed probably fifteen to twenty times. Five people were squatting there, with “cans of old baked beans sitting around, candles on the floor.” David Voyna stayed there with him just once. On another night they both ended up in a building on the Bowery near Fourth Street. Then on a couple of warm nights, they slept in Central Park. That was always a group experience, everyone sleeping in a circle like a wagon train so if one was attacked, they would all wake up.

  David was by no means living on the street full-time. He would still return to his mother’s place, and occasionally he’d spend the night in a hotel room some trick had rented. He didn’t bathe when he was gone from home for extended periods. Instead he began the practice of taking a bus out into Jersey, begging his way off when he spotted a good lake or pond, and wading out into it fully dressed. He’d lost touch with his siblings. He never visited Steven. He rarely saw Pat. She had moved to Jamaica, Queens, with Bob Fitzgerald and never called home, since she didn’t want to speak to Dolores.

  In his art classes, David began making very violent images—three-dimensional riot scenes with pig policemen and Black Panthers firing scope rifles from windows. He’d been going to antiwar and Black Panther demonstrations, and these were among the few things that made sense to him. He wore a black leather glove on his right fist. He told me that teachers destroyed his work or begged him not to pull it out when the principal came around, though I could not find anyone to corroborate this. He tried to set the school on fire with some Anarchist Cookbook device, but failed. (Both ex-teachers and ex-students remembered such a fire, in a stairwell, but no one knew who’d set it.) He disappeared from school for weeks at a time, but one of his hustling lines became “I need money for art supplies.”

  The two Davids never once spoke about their home lives. And Saunders never knew that the other David was hustling. By the time Saunders got off the streets in 1971, David Voyna had disappeared from school and Central Park both. At least, Saunders didn’t see him anymore and assumed he’d dropped out.

 
; He hadn’t. At sixteen, he entered twelfth grade and his life somehow stabilized. This was apparently when he met a man named Syd in Times Square. Syd was thirty-five. He became one of David’s “regulars” and then became something more. As David explained it, “He gave me some emotional warmth that I just was totally lacking and maintained contact with me up till I got off the streets.” David used a street name with tricks, but he soon dropped it with Syd and told him who he really was. He loved Syd and felt he could have lived with him forever, if Syd hadn’t been married with kids of his own. Sometimes when his family was away, Syd would bring David home. Syd stayed in touch after they stopped having sex, always encouraging David to write and draw. And David would call him when he was desperate for money.

  David claimed that he met Syd when he was “around fourteen.” Syd himself insisted that David was sixteen—when he came to David’s memorial in 1992 and spoke to David’s boyfriend, Tom Rauffenbart. While men who have sex with boys aren’t above boosting the age of the boys in question, sixteen seems the likelier age in this case.

  That last year at Music and Art, David missed twenty-one days of school and was tardy fifty-seven times, but his grade point average was in the 70s. He didn’t fail any class, though he was right on the cusp in three of them. He just didn’t have enough credits to graduate in June 1971.

  Apparently David then tried summer school but—something happened. The record says, “Grades earned in summer 1971 are not included in high school average.”

  In August 1971, David traveled to Hurricane Island Outward Bound Camp off the coast of Maine. He would have qualified as an “at-risk youth.” Given that he kept a journal here for the first time, he may have expected a life-changing experience. But the premise of Outward Bound seemed lost on him—the notion that an adventure in the wild would build character and self-esteem. David had had his share of physical challenges in the city. So the weeks spent rock climbing, sailing, and rappelling down cliffs simply taught him that he’d rather be in New York. There, he wrote, at least if you were starving, you could steal something.