Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  One day in Sheridan Square, David ran into his old friend Jim McLauchlin, a.k.a. Jimmy James Strange. McLauchlin had spent the past two years in India, as a Bagwan. He’d changed his first name to “Anado” and was driving a cab. “I was dressed in all orange clothing and had a religious medal around my neck—you know, total cult city,” McLauchlin remembered. And he decided that of all the people he’d known in New York, David was the one to whom he could give a book by his teacher. “David was a spiritual man, despite all the anger,” McLauchlin observed. That was the last time they saw each other.

  David spoke on the phone around this same time with his old roommate Dennis DeForge, and was upset to learn that DeForge had been attacked and nearly killed on the Brooklyn Bridge. David thought of his own close call at the hands of the madman posing as a cop, and he remembered Lee Adler’s brutal murder. “Death coming so close to myself, to people I have shared part of life with.… Being in my midtwenties I sense the incompleteness that an unexpected death would be. I fear death and disablement, I feel the fear and horror of death coming close to friends.”

  He was, however, moving away from his Court Street and West End friends and into a new orbit. Years later, when his old buddy John Ensslin showed up at St. Mark’s to hear him read, David acted, said Ensslin, “like a ghost from the past had just walked in.” Ensslin had moved to Colorado and into a journalism career, and he could see that David did not want to reconnect.

  Around June 1, 1980, the SoHo News finally let David know that it wanted to run four of his photos in its centerfold: Rimbaud at Coney Island in front of the parachute drop. Rimbaud holding a small pistol in front of a “Jesus Is Coming” mural. Rimbaud at the pier with the torso-hypo graffiti. Rimbaud with a wounded hand.

  Sara Longacre asked him to write something poetic to accompany the pictures. He gave her about two hundred words, with lines like “And some of us take off our dreams with our shoes and live in grand cities in day and night while still others move like sailors in a squall, passing among small islands and murmuring their imperfect truths to the shorelines.”

  The $150 payment was the first he ever received for his art.

  The day the paper came out, June 18, David walked for ten blocks with a copy before he had the nerve to open it. He loved how it looked. That issue of the SoHo News also carried an interview with Jayne Anne Phillips, which he pasted into his journal because she’d articulated exactly what he was feeling. She said of her book Black Tickets:

  If it is about anything, it’s about displacement, deracination and movement—and the kind of distortions that happen when this movement is going on. Alienation is probably an end result of that kind of transience—I don’t think that it’s a bad thing to experience but it’s become a national mood. Now it’s possible for people to be absolutely in one place for years and feel as though they don’t belong there.… A lot of the voices [in the book] have to do with that kind of alienation that happens when you’re involved in a culture but you’re isolated within it.… If you can deal with aloneness in a way that finally lets you be unafraid, you’re prepared … for the big transformation and you know certain things about it before it even happens—not only death but passion as well.

  He was printing Rimbaud photos into July. In the end, he had fourteen contact sheets, roughly five hundred images. He mailed twenty or thirty prints to JP, asking him to take them to a couple of magazines in Paris.

  He had become head busboy at Danceteria and now worked three nights a week.

  In July, the “Times Square Show” opened in a run-down former bus depot and massage parlor on Forty-first Street and Seventh Avenue with a hundred-odd artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, and Kenny Scharf. A motorized James Brown cutout (by David Wells) danced just inside the door, setting the tone. This too was a Colab event, but a legal one.

  Mired in inertia at the end of the seventies, the art world was aching for an act of artistic rebellion to kick it in the teeth. The astonishing success of the “Times Square Show” proved how bored everyone had become with sleek white walls, the formalist paintings hanging on them, and the hushed propriety in art’s presence. Jeffrey Deitch’s review in Art in America praised the show’s presentation and accessibility, how direct it all was: “entertainment, sexual expression or communication of political messages.” How wrong it would have looked in an elegant or even a clean setting. “Art must come to be marketed with the kind of imagination displayed by this exhibition’s organizers,” Deitch declared. These lessons from the “anti-space” would soon be confidently applied in the East Village.

  But if David was even aware of this show, he did not mention it. He was still preoccupied with the riverfront, and the nonstop show around Sheridan Square: The woman at Tiffany’s coffee shop painting the frames of her sunglasses with purple nail polish. The drag queen from the previous year’s “hell hath no fury fight” (on Christopher Street with another queen) buying pills. Homeless men searching the garbage outside a bar for beer cans that weren’t quite empty. Someone in an apartment building at two A.M. throwing firecrackers at the winos on the stoop, though the winos were so drunk they barely flinched. The man with steel blue eyes on Christopher Street standing in front of the church with the wrought iron fence, then walking with David down to the warehouse that had caught fire. “He pulled me down to take him in my mouth.”

  “Passing by the river awhile later … I threw a penny over the water and watched it sink—threw a penny in the river for history, for time and future archeologists and studying civilizations.” To David, this collapsing wreck would always be a monument. In just a few years, he would paint a picture called Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins, featuring multiple images of the Acropolis as a backdrop to a crumbling building and a couple of the alien heads he created at the beginning of his career. Often he spoke of “the compression of time.” To him, Rimbaud was easily transposed to his New York. And we were all in the Acropolis, thinking it permanent.

  At the pier, he’d seen some chunk of his own graffiti leaning against a wall. One day in July, he filled two pages of his journal with descriptions of the “vagrant frescoes” still visible, the men moving over charred floors, the sexual motions in rooms that he passed—and he climbed a ladder to an unburned section of the roof where men lay sunbathing nude. He stood facing west and there he had a moment of feeling himself connected in defiance and exhilaration to all of America and all of its history from this epicenter of queer freedom. “I pulled myself up through the roof overhead and stood above the city and saw … the red hint of the skies where the west lies; saw myself in other times, moving my legs along the long flat roads of asphalt and weariness moving in and out of cars … dust storms rolling across the plains and the red neoned motels of other years and rides and the distant darkness of unnameable cities.”

  8 NIGHTCLUBBING

  For its brief moment in time, the first Danceteria was New York’s hottest club. (Two more incarnations of Danceteria would follow.) The East Village Eye even anointed it part of the neighborhood: “exhibits the Lower East Side aesthetic (stiletto heels, purple hair, and pointy sunglasses), although it’s located on 37th between 7th and 8th.”

  Employees worked four nights a week from eight P.M. to eight A.M. David hated this job, but he liked his co-workers. Fellow busboys Chuck Nanney and Jesse Hultberg became good friends, and by midsummer, David had pulled Brian into that fold. One of the other busboys was Keith Haring, then a month or two away from beginning his chalk drawings in the subway. Another was Peter McGough, who would soon become known (with partner David McDermott) for both his art and his dedication to living a late-nineteenth to early-twentieth-century lifestyle.h Poet Max Blagg tended bar. Zoe Leonard, a photographer whose work was destined for the cover of Artforum, worked coat check. The doorman was Haoui Montaug, who later MC’ed the No Entiendes cabaret, introducing the world to everyone from Madonna to Karen Finley. Artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong designed and pro
grammed the first “video lounge” in all of clubland and documented the bands. Steve Brown, later a friend of David’s and soon to edit the film Wild Style, sold tickets at the door.

  Maybe working with this community of strivers gave David a push. Maybe a regular schedule helped. But that summer, David pulled out his monologue project again and asked Max Blagg to look at it. Blagg was impressed and sent the manuscript to a friend in England who ran a small press, Aloes Books.

  David had also been gravitating into musical projects since he’d started the job—and he entered a cassette he described as “experimental” in some unidentified competition. While a friend played guitar, David applied himself to some “invented drums,” adding sirens and arguments he recorded on the street. He didn’t win, but soon after that he began talking to friends about starting a band.

  Constant exposure to the bands featured at Danceteria had only reinforced his idea that he and his friends could do just as well, or better. So what if he couldn’t play an instrument or read music? By 1980, it seemed like half the people in downtown Manhattan were in a band. No musical skills? No problem! Old rules and categories had cracked open behind the head-banging force of punk. All over the East Village and beyond, the impact of punk’s DIY aesthetic was evident. It questioned the basics: What was music? What was fashion? What was art? Anything went and anyone could do it.

  The busboys made five dollars and change per hour; tips from the bartenders added sixty to a hundred each night. Once he had an income, David began contributing to the rent at Vinegar Hill, and he finally saved enough money for a ticket to France, though not enough to come back. Jean Pierre would have to pay for that.

  Both had declared themselves nervous to see each other again. That August, hearing JP’s voice for the first time in nearly a year over a pay phone at the Paris airport, David felt confused, almost angry. “Angry at the loss of his image: the one I’d grown slowly over the year, the image of the tough angel.” The tough angel or thug saint was a romantic and sexual ideal for David. But could anyone truly be that?

  Waking up at JP’s new apartment in Montmartre after fourteen hours of sleep, David felt he’d come to stay with someone who was both completely familiar and a total stranger. At first, they had some big arguments over nothing, started by David and, as he put it, “carried by my sense of being dazed and confused as to what I was feeling.” It took him nearly a week to snap out of it, or “loosen up.”

  They spent several days in Normandy visiting Pat. David photographed JP there for his “portraits of men” series. He had also photographed him in Paris in front of the Eiffel Tower, wearing the Rimbaud mask. On August 11, David wrote to Brian to tell him he’d taken a walk through Les Halles thinking, “Where am I going? What’s to be done? What was this last year … these reservations in the face of mere living?” He did not mail the letter.

  David and JP then spent a blissful week in Montgalliard, a small village in southwest France, with some friends of Jean Pierre’s, Marie Jeanne and her husband, Septun. It would have been hard to find a more ideal vacation spot for David. Their first afternoon there, Marie Jeanne pulled out her box of treasures found in the surrounding hills: hundreds of small multifaceted quartz crystals, giant snails turned to rock, fossilized mussels and clams, a stone almond, four tusks and a tooth from a wild boar. David was soon out photographing the bleached jawbones of a rabbit and some prickly flowers, expecting to find vipers. They never materialized but he hoped to catch other snakes after Marie Jeanne informed him that there were some in the hills as thick as a bicep, seven feet long, and a hundred years old. David didn’t find those either. Marie Jeanne speculated that the wild boars had eaten most of them. She cooked a local specialty for him and JP: snails grilled over a fire made from vine cuttings, seasoned with crushed chili pepper and sprinkled with hot pork fat, served with homemade wine. David managed to choke down some of this gourmet treat, though he described it as “dripping with slime.”

  At the top of the trail past the village’s stone houses sat a slab of concrete “embedded for unknown reasons on the side of the hill.” David and JP went up there one night to make love, afterward smoking and “watching the drifting beacons of car lights follow invisible roads.” The town was so poor they’d had to close the school and the church. The iron key was still in the church door, and Marie Jeanne told David he could take the head of a baby Jesus he found there. The head enthralled him, as its “vacant blue eyes never stared directly at you no matter how you turned the head.”

  Leaving France after a month with Jean Pierre was less emotionally devastating this time. Still, David felt anger over the constant separation. “This cutting off of emotions because of laws, governments, and borders.” JP drove him to the airport, and David found an empty employees’ bathroom where they had sex one last time. This left him with ten minutes till his plane took off, so they rushed. At passport control, he looked back to see JP, “something indefinable draining from his face.”

  For his first twenty-four hours back in Vinegar Hill, he felt terrible. He wanted to cry. “If anything in this world can mean something it’s my being with him.” He’d loved the week in Montgalliard among people with no pretensions. He felt he was surrounded in New York by the “pseudo-individuality” of new wave and “bourgeoisie set values.” Of course, Europe was repressed, Paris a police state. “Yet away from the blatant exhibitionist energies of the NYC music scenes, gay scenes, I feel uncontrollably sane. I’ve got to return to him and allow myself to change to a more subtle existence for nothing else but my love for him and my own peace of mind.”

  His life did change suddenly in the autumn of 1980, but not in the direction of subtlety. First, Brian had returned from his own vacation in Province-town and announced that he wanted out of Vinegar Hill and that he wanted to live alone.

  Then, on David’s first day back at work, he learned from Max Blagg that Aloes Books would publish the monologues, which he’d decided to call Sounds in the Distance. Blagg’s friend Jim Pennington liked the project because it showed that “deep angst is not just for the literate and educated,” and he liked the structure—“short pieces, almost routines, the moment dominant, no time or place for narrative, and only a faint smell of jism.” He had already published work by Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, and Paul Bowles, but Aloes was, for Pennington, “a spare-time occupation.” He worked for a commercial press as printer-in-charge and was able to print the Aloes books there after hours or in downtime. He provided the free labor and got the paper “on a quid pro quo arrangement involving unpaid overtime.” Occasionally he requisitioned the paper, though he “couldn’t go mad.” Aloes would print five hundred copies of Sounds in the Distance and would make no money. David too would make no money, nor had he asked for any.

  Within days of hearing from Pennington, David also began meeting in earnest with Blagg, Brian, and Jesse Hultberg to put a band together. They were preparing for a night a few weeks away when Danceteria employees would get a chance to perform at the club. Half the band—Brian and Jesse—could play an instrument, and that was more musicianship than some groups had. Still, Blagg remembered the band beginning as more of a performance group. He was already doing his own poetry with musical backup (as he did years later when he played a poet on television, in a Gap ad). But Blagg was not part of this particular band for long. The main thing he contributed was the name. He came to one of their meetings with a whole list of possibilities. Though David liked Sissies from Hell, they settled on 3 Teens Kill 4—No Motive, taken from a New York Post headline.

  They never did play Danceteria. On Saturday, October 4, 1980, police raided the club and shut it down for selling liquor after hours without a license. Blagg, Brian, Jesse, Zoe Leonard, and Keith Haring were among the twenty-seven employees arrested. David had come downstairs to warn Blagg, who simply didn’t move fast enough. Nor did Chuck Nanney, who’d been promoted to bartender. But Nanney managed to see his arrest as an absurdity. For one thing, he was so emac
iated from drug use at the time that his handcuffs kept falling off. And he thought the cops were … nice. “They let us all go into the bathroom one at a time to do anything we might need to do.” Like get rid of the drugs they were holding. Meanwhile, David had mingled with the customers, who’d been told to get out or face arrest. For him, one of the few employees not going to jail, the evening was horrific. He wrote in his journal that he’d noticed people with bloody faces. Later he told Brian that he was trying to figure out how to make a Molotov cocktail and blow up the paddywagon without hurting anyone. Then he saw a friend in handcuffs—Iolo Carew, another busboy—nodding toward the door, mouthing the words, “Leave. Leave.” So he did.

  The next day, October 5, David moved from Vinegar Hill to the East Village, the neighborhood he would call home for the rest of his life. He’d taken a room at 159 Second Avenue with his old friends from Bookmasters, Susan Gauthier and her boyfriend, Steve Gliboff.i For him, though, the move was of little note because he was so depressed and disturbed over what had happened at Danceteria. He wrote to JP on October 8, “This week has been the worst time in my life.” He felt so worried and alone. He wished he could talk to JP and asked if he’d heard anything yet about the UNESCO job he was still hoping to get. That month he would send Jean Pierre twenty-three letters and postcards. On October 10, he wrote to say, “Everything here has fallen apart.” His life. His friends’ lives. No one knew whether the club would continue now that it couldn’t sell alcohol. Meanwhile, his new roommates were fighting. That Friday, though, Danceteria reopened and he returned, promoted from busboy to security.