Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  By his second week, he was heading out at six A.M. for the Casual Labor Office. There he found work sorting eggs for the V-C Egg Company. The Viet Cong Company, he liked to joke. His job was to sort by size, removing any that were cracked or misshapen, for $2.50 an hour. But his major work in San Francisco became the collection of stories and voices. At the Labor Office. At the Y. And every day during lunch at a Chinatown greasy spoon where he listened to the regulars—junkies and “dull gangsters”—and made notes on napkins. Later he included many of these stories in Sounds in the Distance.

  David and Ensslin were corresponding about RedM, still adding and subtracting poems. “At this point have lost touch with old self” he informed Ensslin on September 7, but it was too much for longhand. He needed a typewriter “to explode on.” He hoped John Hall would send his soon. By September 9 he had a machine, and his explosion produced a seventeen-page, single-spaced epistle to Ensslin—“a letter I could only write to you and maybe John Hall,” he said. He was trying to explain his “attraction to extreme social outcasts.” He’d been talking night after night “till 1 2 3 4 am” to his next-door neighbor at the Y, a “strange Genet-ian character.” This man had checked in with the clothes on his back, one extra cotton shirt, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and a pack of Pall Malls. He told David a long, complex tale about his “self-imposed hermitude in a boarded-up house in New Orleans”—which is part of the title David gave it in Sounds in the Distance. David thought he needed to associate with certain characters, like this man.

  “One of my fantasies for a long time,” he wrote Ensslin, “had been to withdraw again into the streets away from the social mainstream of society and hang out again with every kind of social ‘monster’ and keep secret notebooks hidden beneath my coat … writing the grim sagas of that experience. But I don’t need that fantasy any longer. I no longer entertain it ’cause it’s inevitable—I’ll end up there. Whether in a few years, or more likely when I am an old man, toothless and benumbed.… Ah hell. The way in which I’m living reflects the end.”

  He’d had a cushy situation in New York—an easy job, an apartment with good, energetic roommates, comfort, money, books—and he’d tossed it all. Now he had a tiny room, few friends, and twenty bucks to his name. But he was happier this way! “Why? Because I’m experiencing the more important things in my thought of life. I’m associating with people who interest me and it’s that strange unknown beauty that I touch when riding into a town for the first time, not knowing a single person. It’s an unexplainable excitement I feel when approaching unknown things.”

  He related more of his neighbor’s saga, even some of the guy’s dreams. He quoted Genet, from A Thief’s Journal, the part where Genet takes money that belongs to a friend—money the friend desperately needs—and tears it up, then thinks better of it, pastes it back together, and buys himself a big meal. To “purify” himself, says Genet. To break his emotional bonds. David couldn’t remember all the conversations with the fellow next door, but he remembered the feelings: that the guy was purging himself of everything programmed into him by society. The Genet-ian character wondered why David wrote, assuring him that it was useless.

  The night before David wrote this letter, he began to feel he was disintegrating inside. As he explained it to Ensslin, “I went too far into an area I was incapable of handling at this point.” The area where you let go of the constraining walls that fence in your thoughts. Where you lose your opinions and “thought molds.” Where you see each and every thing as nothing. Where time isn’t understandable and politics are useless. “It’s an almost total abandonment of social ties,” a place in society he’d discovered two years ago when he first read Rimbaud. That night in San Francisco he had “this weird sense of [his] death drawing near.” He felt there was someone in the room with him. He heard a voice like his sister’s whispering his name, then felt what seemed like a jolt of electricity into his head. At three in the morning, the next door neighbor banged and kicked his door till David opened up. The neighbor came in and asked angrily, you have to work and I woke you, so why are you so calm? David didn’t know. The man walked out. Then David too left his room. It was “as if it contained all the things that I dislike,” he wrote, “all emotional and disruptive energies that I’ve come in contact with inside of myself in the last so many years—that I had rid myself of during the last two years at west end avenue.” The Genet-ian character checked out the next day.

  On October 23, after learning that Bookmasters would take him back, David set out to hitchhike back to New York. Again, he started with great luck, as someone gave him a ride to Reno in a single-engine Cherokee aircraft.

  Out on the interstate, he was fixing his sign (“East I-80 New York”) when another hitchhiker showed up. They stood there for four hours—the other hitcher walking back some yards to snag the first ride. No fair, David thought. But he didn’t say anything. Finally a battered pickup pulled over and, sure enough, the other hitcher got into the cab with two guys. As the truck cruised by slowly, looking for a place to nose back into the interstate flow, the hitcher yelled at David: “We’re going to Denver.” David yelled, “Can I come?” The truck stopped and he climbed into the back.

  He was headed into the most dangerous ride of his hitchhiking life. The teens who’d picked him up had stolen the truck, and they began stopping to rob what David described as “supermarkets.” The other hitchhiker joined right in as their accomplice. According to David’s account in the Dateline, the self-described outlaws showed him their shotguns and said they were going to kill him, and if the police tried to stop them at any point, they intended to shoot it out. The account David gave Janine Pommy Vega in a letter was less dramatic; he’d pared it down to a couple of sentences: The outlaws did two burglaries and a robbery and “one hung out all night in the back of the truck with me talking about going to Mars.”

  Later, when David typed out the entire journal he kept on the trip west, he wrote what he labeled “an intro of sorts” for John Hall. Here he tried to explain why he had not tried to escape from these kids, because he had had a chance, and whatever the exact details, he did feel his life was in danger. “After I had accepted all foggy notions of death,” he told Hall, “and slipped into that quiet reflective stage where I would think of anything and it was savored slowly … all I can remember is wanting to get out of it alive enough so I could tell you the story.” The outlaws had entered one market with the other hitchhiker, leaving David alone in the truck with their two shotguns. He could have run. Yet he just sat there. “I had to live it through,” wrote David, “regardless of what it led to—oh gee! Adventure! That’s all it really is sometimes and that’s all that matters to me in a series of systems that attempt to quash that kind of rush. Sure I get afraid, but somewhere in the midst of the action of following through an experience, there comes a sense that’s incomparable to any other. Ah, that’s what I strive for.”

  He wrote this up for Hall by way of thanking him. He might never have jumped into that first railroad car without his presence. “I believe that it takes a number of things (objects or people) to stimulate certain currents inherent in one’s own system.”

  He spent at least twenty-four hours with the outlaws. In the Dateline, he wrote that, when they finally dropped him off on a dirt road, he assumed they were going to shoot him and he ran into the woods. Later, a woman and her daughter picked him up in another stolen vehicle. As he told Pommy Vega, the women ducked every time a cop came into view, “which made the car swerve.”

  Into the back of his journal, David pasted a warning issued to him by the Indiana State Police on October 27, 1976, for hitchhiking.

  Soon after returning to New York, David moved to Court Street in Brooklyn with the other poets—the other gay poets. David had a long talk with Ensslin at the end of a pier on the Hudson and told his friend that he thought he was gay. He also came out to Laura Glenn, but added that he’d give up men for her if she’d have him. She declined.
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  Poet Steve Lackow drove David and his belongings from the Upper West Side to Court Street in Lackow Sr.’s old Chrysler New Yorker. It was snowing, the car had bad brakes, and they cruised into Brooklyn on a controlled skid. Lackow moved into Court Street shortly afterward. He remembered a David who drew compulsively on anything available and who survived almost exclusively on cheese sandwiches. David, Lackow, and Dennis DeForge shared the typewriter always in place on the dining room table.

  That autumn, David read at the Prospect Park band shell in a series sponsored by Mouth of the Dragon, the first gay male poetry magazine. Among the spectators was Brian Butterick. “As soon as I saw him read,” Brian said, “I was like, ‘Wow, I want to meet him.’ “ David soon realized that he’d read one of Brian’s poems in the window at Brentano’s bookstore in 1973—and loved it. That year, Brian had won second prize in the New York City high school poetry contest, earning the display of his poem. David was either living on the street or at the halfway house.

  Shortly after he met David, Brian moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts. But he would return almost a year later and become one of the few people from this era to stay at least semi-connected to David for the rest of his life.

  Steve Lackow met David in 1975 and felt certain that David hadn’t seen his mother in years.

  Actually, David had had some contact with her. In a letter to his sister, Pat, dated February 21, 1976, he wrote, “Dolores has been pretty quiet, getting in touch now and then out of a sense of motherly duty, I guess.… She’s sort of coming into her own and leading a life in her interests. I feel happy about that and don’t mind at all not hearing from her ’cause that means she’s happy.” About a week later he wrote again and mentioned that Dolores was on vacation—though he’d only heard that from Bob Fitzgerald and didn’t know where she’d gone. Clearly, he and Dolores weren’t close, but she did make the list of people who got Trail-o-Grams that summer.

  After David moved to Court Street, she apparently made more of an effort to connect. “She caught up with him on the phone and then she came on over one day,” Lackow remembered. The moment stayed with him because, as he put it, he “couldn’t help hating her guts.” Lackow had had such an emotional response to David’s stories about living on the street. None of the other friends remembered this reunion, but in the end, everyone from the Court Street era met Dolores—and liked her. No one from West End had ever met her and didn’t remember David ever talking about her.

  “Dolores is probably the most guilt-ridden individual I ever met in my life,” said Lackow. “Totally filled with regret about her life, about what happened with her and David. She did everything she could to remake that relationship. At first I don’t think David was all that interested, but ultimately he really was won over to it, and responded in kind.” Dolores was charming, vivacious, almost “puppy-doggish” as she sought her son’s approval. “She won us over. Basically we were following David’s lead,” he said. “He bent over backwards. I don’t know where he found it within himself.”

  Since age eleven, David had seen his father for just a few hours, the day he visited with Pat and Bob Fitzgerald. Now David was twenty-two, and even as he reconnected with his mother, Ed Wojnarowicz was in a state of serious self-inflicted decline.

  Ed’s alcoholism had worsened after he sent his three oldest children away. He had also left the merchant marine, after working on ships that took cargo to Vietnam, so his family no longer had the respite of his weeks at sea. He found boiler room jobs at local factories and schools, but he was always fired for drinking. He lost his driver’s license three times for DUI, first for six months, then for two years, then for ten years. He bought himself a moped. But usually Marion had to drive him to work. When he had work.

  Marion now took the brunt of his beatings, though his two youngest children also lived in a state of terror. What came through in Pete’s and Linda’s stories was their father’s constant childlike need for attention: Waking Pete one morning to tell him some interminable story and giving him a fat lip when he didn’t appear to be listening closely. Coming home one night when Marion, Pete, and Linda were in the middle of dinner and heaving a plate of spaghetti against the wall when they didn’t stop eating to listen to him. Picking up the family dog by the neck and threatening to kill it if he didn’t get a reaction.

  Marion took to shutting herself in the bathroom when Ed’s rampages began. It was the only room with a good lock. She’d bring a book and sit in there until he gave up or passed out. “He had a hatchet, and you’d see the marks [on the lock],” Linda said. Pete began trying to intervene in the attacks on his mother when he was thirteen or fourteen. Linda, Pete, and Marion all testified against him in court at some point. The police were now regulars at the house.

  When he was unemployed, he’d head for the bar as the kids headed to school. Coming home from school was always fraught for them. Sometimes he’d be sitting in the front yard with a baseball bat. They could always dodge him when he took a swing, or outrun him—he was so drunk. But usually, they’d keep going, past the house to hang out with friends in the neighborhood. “We would stay for hours and hope for him to pass out on the couch,” Linda said.

  “We were petrified whenever he’d start fooling around with a gun,” Pete said. Ed kept his rifles in a locked cabinet: a .30-06 rifle, a shotgun, an M1 carbine (now banned as an assault weapon), a .22, a .32 Marlin, and a BB gun. He hunted, but also liked firing the guns at home “outside the door for no apparent reason,” said Pete. “Just to be angry.”

  He fired a gun in the house only once that anyone knows of: three shots through the downstairs bathroom ceiling with his .32 Marlin. Marion swears she was sitting on the couch when this happened, though both Pete and Steven believed her to be in that bathroom. Linda was the only other person home at the time, but she was upstairs, thinking her dad had just shot her mother dead. The bullets tore through the upstairs bathroom and out the roof. That night, the police arrested Ed and confiscated his rifles.

  Marion began to stand up to him after she joined Al-Anon. Ed hated this, of course. He’d take her keys away and lock her out of the house when she went to a meeting. But she persisted and had the kids join Alateen. “I wanted them to understand they weren’t the only kids going through what they were going through,” she said, fighting back tears. For years, Ed had had the habit of stopping the car at some bar and telling the family to wait for him while he went in and drank. Sometimes they’d sit out there for an hour. Then, one day Marion decided to just leave him there. She drove away.

  For eight or ten years, Marion worked a minimum-wage job at a blouse factory, sorting the pieces cut from patterns. She had to, since Ed was drinking up his pension check. Marion knew he hid his Seagram’s in a tire in the garage, and she tried pouring it out, especially when there wasn’t enough money to replace it. But the bar always gave him credit.

  One night he came at Marion with the baseball bat and chased her out of the house. She called the police, who hauled him off to jail again. Several times, the court ordered him into psychiatric institutions for rehab. He’d detox. He’d work the program. He’d be pleasant when the family came to visit. But once he returned home, Ed was never sober for more than a day.

  In December 1976, there’d been much talk in the family about Pete getting his license and helping to chauffeur the still-unlicensed Ed. Steven came to the house to confront his father. He was worried about Pete, knowing from his own experience that Ed saw his growing sons as a challenge to his authority. Steven pushed his father up against a wall and said, “Do you realize what it is to be so fucking afraid of you? Do you know what you’ve done to your children? I’m not afraid of you anymore. But I love you.” Ed broke down crying. Steven urged him to get away from the family and straighten out his life.

  Pete turned seventeen on December 21, and Steven drove him to the Department of Motor Vehicles to take his driving test. The next day, Pete was the first one home from school. Walking in from
the breezeway, he could see straight down into the basement. And there he saw his father’s feet. Off the floor.

  “I got a knife and I cut him down,” Pete said. “And when I cut him down, an exhale of air came out of his lungs. I tried to give him mouth-to-mouth. And realized he was gone. I’m looking at him thinking, ‘This can’t be. This is friggin’ surreal.’ And I sat down on the steps. I cried maybe ten seconds, and then I stopped. And as I sat there—this was the oddest thing that ever happened to me—but the weight of years and years of abuse, it lifted off my shoulders. An unbelievable feeling. You never know the burden that you’re carrying until it’s lifted, but someone just pulled it right off me. And I felt free. There’d be no more abuse. It was over.”

  Pat happened to be back from Paris for the holidays. Bob Fitzgerald drove her and David to New Jersey for the funeral. Three or four times, David begged Fitzgerald to pull over and stop so he could throw up. Since these pit stops followed an already late start, they actually missed the church service and joined the rest of the family graveside. Ed had drinking buddies but few friends. The funeral home had had to hire pallbearers.

  That year, David spent Christmas Eve with his sister, his brother-in-law, and his mother at the Hell’s Kitchen apartment. David had been very quiet, when he suddenly stood up and said, “I have an announcement to make.” They sat there waiting until he blurted, “I’m gay!” and ran out of the room crying.

  “Dolores really got pissed off,” Fitzgerald remembered. Not about David being gay. She just thought he’d ruined Christmas.

  5 AT THE SHATTERED EDGE OF THE MAP

  “HE SAID THAT TO TRULY DREAM ONE MUST NOT DO ANYTHING THAT RESTRICTS EVEN AS IN LIVING BY THAT CODE SO HE DID LITTLE AND LIVED FULLY IN HIS OWN QUIET WAY HE ACHIEVED A STRANGE STATE OF GRACE.”

  Those are the words of Emanuel Pancake, an alter ego David experimented with. Briefly. The “PANCAKE” piece consists of unpunctuated uppercase type whose lower lines dip and bend at the bottom into a photo of two unsmiling men who could be French race car drivers from the 1920s, or a couple of scrappy surrealists. David went through a little surrealist phase at Court Street. Entrusted with a stuffed dog’s head that belonged to Brian Butterick, David and Steve Lackow began taking it out on a leash, dragging it behind them down Montague Street or the Promenade. They’d heard about Gérard de Nerval taking a lobster for walks along the Seine. “We were into outraging people,” Lackow said.