Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Meanwhile, post-Alan, he’d gone back to cruising. Just a bit. And it was just sex, without emotion or expectation. Most interesting is the way he writes about it. As if observing from a little outside himself, where he connects this moment to a wider world. This is his voice—or it’s getting to be: the directness of the monologues infused with reflection, the result no doubt of his many months of forced introspection and day after day of tapping that keyboard:

  Standing in the semi darkness of a strangers room, shadow light on blue walls blue lamp blue blankets and sliding blue sheets, pulling on my dusty pro keds dirty rubber sides, dirty laces, socks all smudgy dirty, pants ill fitting, shirt green and too big neck space slipping over shoulder blade, underwear fulla holes and the elastic broken smell of perspiration I look at my hands, my chest, my young arms and lazy stomach muscles and think of age and rest and movement and drawings, think of my rimbaud masturbation drawings while some guy in another room is talking about how he’s heading for rio then on to the islands and later spain itlay Greece oh Greece is so fabulous this time of year and then mexico in the fall and he’s waiting for me to get dressed, we’ve just made love and when I’ve gone to fuck him he says: oh I’m not sure I’m perfect down there—me wonderin if that means the clap or what and in a few minutes we’re to get into his Mercedes down in sub basement level two of this monolithic highrise … what things can I write about anymore what with all my senses having swung towards the exploration of sensuality and sexuality and the images the symbols the refracting light off object and flesh movement beneath clothes light covers and trees, in dark rainy doorways, from the corner windows of autos, in silhouette passing gardens in the misty night, along rivers where once I made love to a hobo down there young guy with his tiny fire beneath tunnel and rough face weathered and old clothes with musty smell and thinking about the changes of time and circumstance; reflecting on lovemaking with that almost penniless character and now this guy with his south-american suntan afric chairs greek statues and gold Egyptian ashtrays with ceramic beetles climbing the sides and what of it all matters really in this strange sense of just the world of solitary character being made up of transient moments in all levels and walks and how little important most of it seems in hindsight.

  All through the journals—and this piece is no exception—he has written with no cross-outs, no words added in margins, no second thoughts.

  David met Brian at Gare du Nord on May 7. JP cooked dinner for them at rue Laferrière. (Pat and Pillu were still out of town.) Then Brian turned in, suffering from jet lag.

  The next day, David took Brian to Versailles. Out where Marie Antoinette used to play at milking the cows, he informed Brian that he was really in love with Jean Pierre. And—so sorry I asked you to come. This shameful incident David “spared from the typewriter.” He never mentioned it, and Brian never forgot it.

  “I won’t say I was misled, because I went into every direction in my life, including him, with my eyes open,” Brian said. “But—he wrote such loving letters—‘You have to come, you have to stay with me, I miss you so much.’ He was often confused about things. If he’d said, ‘I’m involved with someone in Paris but I love you too, so come over,’ I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.” Brian took a train out of town for probably a day, in romantic despair, then returned.

  “I was not a very jealous person,” he said. “How could you be in the seventies? Everyone was fucking everyone.” Also, he thought JP was nice and “very entertaining.”

  David moved Jean Pierre into Pat’s apartment with him. Brian would stay alone over at JP’s place. By May 10, David was showing Brian his favorite spots—like Pont des Arts, a footbridge leading from the Louvre to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and of course, the Tuileries. There they even got to experience a police raid and clamber over a fence.

  That weekend, JP drove them to Vaux le Vicomte, a castle thirty-five miles from Paris. “A royal bore,” David thought, but not a total loss. He was able to photograph a dead and bloated rat. He was doing the tourist things he hadn’t done in nine months of living in France. Like the visit to Père Lachaise, the final resting place of many artistic heroes: Gertrude and Alice, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Molière, Chopin, La Fontaine. Brian took a picture (much reprinted since) of David next to Apollinaire’s grave, holding his head to mimic the head wound that led to the poet’s premature death.

  David visited Père Lachaise cemetery with Brian Butterick, where they took turns posing at the graves of cultural heroes. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)

  One night as he, JP, and Brian hung out, the tension got to David, who said, “so long,” and rushed to the nearest Metro, willing to go anywhere. There, on a train, he witnessed a robbery, and it left him feeling nauseated. The psychic tension that entered the car with the thieves, the practiced motions, the weary tourists they’d robbed—farmer types in their Sunday best. It only added to the emotional overload.

  He couldn’t quite parse everything he was feeling in those last days in Paris but told himself he felt rearranged. On May 31, he sat down, crying, to write Jean Pierre a goodbye letter, then rushed outside to walk, feeling displaced, “seeing so suddenly my faults laid bare, how I coulda done it all differently.” JP had gone back to his place on Bourdonnais, so David took the letter there, with a painted rock JP had particularly liked. He sat tensely as JP read the letter for what seemed to him a long time. Was the English too difficult? Finally, Jean Pierre told him it was beautiful. “We embraced and held each other as strongly as possible. [JP] said, ‘I never told you how much I love you because I was afraid to make it too heavy. I thought you might one day leave and I didn’t want it to be difficult.’ I held him and felt such a harsh love for him, a thick fist rising in my throat. He said, ‘You know I’m sad you go back to America, but I’m happy I had the chance to love you for this time.” They both cried.

  The reentry into Brooklyn was such a shock. He and Brian took a cab to Court Street through the clattering din, the grainy night light, the filthy chaotic streets. New York—he felt a sense of “almost horror” at being part of the place again.

  7 GO RIMBAUD

  “Coming back here after that time in Paris so many scenes I once embraced as a living movement now seem weary and burlesque, a step outta rhythm,” he wrote two weeks into his return, still adjusting to the new pace and timbre of his life. It wasn’t just what he’d added while in Paris, but what he’d subtracted: “the removal from media, hard street energies, manic violence … and tension.” He didn’t specify what he now found “vapid, harsh and useless,” only observed that there was “an energy here that destroys the most subtle responses in human nature.” That same day he made notes for a new piece called “Wounded Wild Boy.”

  He pulled back into his shell. At least in what he recorded about his life. (The passage above is unusually ruminative.) The effusiveness and reflection he’d accessed so instantly in France—gone. Maybe he just didn’t have the time.

  Once again he had nowhere to live. And no job. He wrote a letter or postcard to Jean Pierre roughly every other day, mostly to say that he loved him. Brian had remained a faithful friend despite everything and was basically supporting him at this point. They’d moved into Court Street temporarily with friends of Brian’s, downstairs from David’s old place.

  The first thing David covered in his journal after his return, on June 6, 1979, was a trip with Brian to the West Village—“its immediate visual effect,” which he doesn’t describe except to agree with his ex-roommate Dennis De-Forge’s assessment: It’s an outdoor whorehouse. “Don’t think I’ll ever forget that initial sense of shock.” He didn’t elaborate, but clearly he wasn’t talking about cruising on Christopher Street. He meant the piers, which would become the center of his life for the next year and a half.

  These rotting treacherous structures along the Hudson River provided cover for acres of public sex. The waterfront from Christopher to Fourteenth Streets was the unofficial gay men’
s playground. Separating the piers from the edge of the Village was the elevated West Side Highway, which had been closed to traffic since ’73 but still provided shelter to transvestite hookers among its stanchions. On the city side of the highway were gay bars like the Ramrod, Peter Rabbit, and Alex in Wonderland. This big libidinous play district included the trucks parked along the highway every night and somehow never locked. Certain men preferred the truck ambience to the piers for casual sex. David would surely have been familiar with this area. He’d been frequenting the nearest dive coffee shop, the Silver Dollar, since his street days with Willy, but he usually picked up men on the streets or in bars. The piers could be dangerous, not just because they were falling apart and pock-marked with holes open to the river. Men had been murdered there. For many, the lawlessness and risk only added to the excitement. This was an autonomous zone.

  Sex among the ruins—David found it fascinating. He wanted to cruise the piers, but he also wanted to paint them, photograph them, and record what happened in them. Soon he was back with Brian and a can of spray paint. He drew a crude Rimbaud face on a windowpane. On a wall, he sprayed a male torso shooting up with a big hypodermic needle. Elsewhere he painted a target. Then he sprayed a kind of a haiku onto a wall: “Did you watch the dogfight yesterday (under Mexican sky).” He graffitied a line often quoted by William Burroughs: “ ‘There is no truth / Everything is possible’ Hassan I Sabbah” and added his own ten-line poem underneath, beginning, “Some men gun fast trucks down red roads / Down into distant valleys where mountains / Are slowly eaten by deserts.”

  Other artists had already seen the possibilities in these abandoned structures. Gordon Matta-Clark, for example, had cut a large half-moon shape from the end of Pier 52, off Gansevoort Street, to create Day’s End in 1975, but David may not have known about this. While in Paris, he’d discovered Joseph Beuys—in a book. He’d been especially excited to learn of I Like America and America Likes Me, a piece in which Beuys lived in a gallery with a coyote for three days. A Beuys retrospective was scheduled for the Guggenheim that fall. In homage, he sprayed a Beuys statement on another wall: “THE SILENCE OF MARCEL DUCHAMP IS OVERRATED.”

  David had one short-lived minimum-wage job that summer. In mid-June, an ad agency trained him to print photographs and to run a photostat machine. They fired him when he almost immediately started using his sick days. But while there, he was able to photostat the cover of Illuminations to create a life-size mask of Arthur Rimbaud.

  Rimbaud was a kind of lodestar for David at this point in his life. He identified with the poet. They’d been born a hundred years apart—Rimbaud in October 1854 and David in September 1954. Both were deserted by their fathers and unhappy with their mothers. Both ran away as teenagers. Both were impoverished and unwilling to live by the rules. Both were queer. Both tried to wring visionary work out of suffering. David just didn’t yet know the rest—that he would soon meet an older man and mentor who would change his life (as Paul Verlaine had changed Rimbaud’s), and that he too would die at the age of thirty-seven.

  He began photographing Rimbaud in New York that summer with a borrowed camera, using Brian as his model. In 1990, the first time these photos were exhibited as a series, David told an interviewer from the New York Native, “I felt, at that time, that I wanted it to be the last thing I did before I ended up back on the streets or died or disappeared. Over the years, I’ve periodically found myself in situations that felt desperate and, in those moments, I’d feel that I needed to make certain things.… I had Rimbaud come through a vague biographical outline of what my past had been—the places I had hung out in as a kid, the places I starved in or haunted on some level.”

  Brian posed in the Rimbaud mask on Forty-second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a block then lined with porn theaters. He stood in front of dangling cow carcasses in the meatpacking district. He rode a graffiti-scarred subway. He spent quite a bit of time at the Hudson River sex piers and wandered among various other crumbling eyesores. He posed at the dancing-chicken booth in Chinatown. He stood outside the Terminal Bar. He shot heroin.

  David wrote two “35mm photo scripts,” with dozens of ideas for the poet’s adventures. He had a narrative in mind. Rimbaud would arrive by ship, alighting at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in one script and at Coney Island in the other. Eventually he would die of a heroin overdose. Most of these scenarios were never photographed—like Rimbaud eating in the Salvation Army cafeteria, Rimbaud inside Port Authority, Rimbaud making rude gestures at St. Patrick’s during mass—probably because David lacked money for film and processing. Usually he economized on what he did shoot. Rimbaud on the subway: two exposures, one printed. For the heroin shot, he removed the needle and replaced it with a pin, its point inside the hypo, which he’d glued to Brian’s arm. “The head of the pin was pressed into the flesh,” Brian said. “It looked like it was in the flesh.”

  Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Pier, Junkie), 1979. From a series of twenty-four gelatin-silver prints, 10 ×8 inches each. (Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)

  John Hall also took part in the Rimbaud project, though he doesn’t remember when. He posed at the piers and in the meat-packing district as Brian had. (David used the images of Brian from those locations.) He was also Rimbaud wounded (bandaged hand) and Rimbaud with a Dubuffet sculpture. Most famously, though, John Hall was Rimbaud masturbating. He remembers nothing about where this photo was taken or how it came about, only that David put him at ease when he thought he was too skinny and didn’t have a good body. Brian thought the photo might have happened when David went to photograph Hall’s apartment, whose disarray he found fascinating. Indeed, David even described the place in his journal: “The hurricane dive that seems to be John’s symbol, obsessively in turmoil—wild in a sense—I photographed parts of it for the images—the clash of headlines and food containers and loops of stereo wires and bass guitar—piles of papers sliding down hills of music magazines and newspapers. Posters of the Slits and James White on the walls—ashtrays of cigarette butts from guests who came and departed weeks ago.” The Ludlow Street building was so old and decrepit that, according to Hall, tenants had been known “to fall through their living room floors into the apartment below.”

  Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Coney Island), 1979. From a series of twenty-four gelatin-silver prints, 10 ×8 inches each. (Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)

  When Jean Pierre came to visit, David quickly incorporated him into the project as well. JP became Rimbaud at Coney Island. JP remembered going two or three times. They’d leave at five A.M. to get there when it was deserted. He remembered the black jacket and white T-shirt he wore. Alone on the beach. Alone at the closed kebab stand. Alone in front of the parachute drop. JP could not remember where they stayed. Not Brooklyn, he thought. David still hadn’t found a place to live.

  All that summer and fall, David and Brian bounced around. After Court Street, they lived with Dolores for a couple of months, taking the bedroom while she slept on the couch. They crashed in a photographer’s studio. They stayed briefly with Susan Gauthier and Steve Gliboff in the East Village. Sometimes David talked about looking for work, but he didn’t look. He was drifting again.

  During this first year after Paris, he devoted a great deal of time to the piers. He’d spent his first night there with John Hall early in July. Just as John’s presence had once helped him to cross the country freight-hopping, now it seemed to reassure him about beginning to cruise the piers. He did his graffiti there during the day, but at night, you couldn’t even see the floor until your eyes adjusted. David and Hall just dipped into the warehouse between Perry and Charles Streets and watched men drifting through it, then headed back to the Silver Dollar for English muffins. They dropped in at Dirk Rowntree’s place, where Dirk photographed them. David and Hall walked out talking about no-wave bands, how good it was that they always broke up so fast and “nothing gets stale.
” They moved on to Tiffany’s, a Sheridan Square coffee shop with terrible food and a colorful Christopher Street clientele. Then on to the Bank Street pier, which was open, and there they discussed the propriety of watching public sex—while they watched it “from a discreet distance … as it is an intense visual to be confronted with,” David reported. That’s when Hall proposed, for the first time since suggesting it by letter, that he and David should have sex, and David decided that if they were ever going to do it, this was the right place. They entered the warehouse again, but just as they started to make love, they heard shrieks and terrified, moved out along the river, where they found themselves trapped. Then the source of the racket, a gaggle of drag queens, burst out through the doors a few yards away. Outside, along a “U-shaped arena of warehouse walls and windows,” they found “miraculously” a cheap rug to lie down on, where they watched the disappearing night, the waves slapping up from tugboats and barges, and they finally made love. All night, David had been carrying Burroughs’s Algebra of Need. He lit a cigarette and looked up at the World Trade Center, “the very top of it emerging into a dim sunlight of rising dawn. It was framed by crossbars of metal on top of the far warehouse roof and it was like some kinda vision in all this.”