by Cynthia Carr
On October 15, he sent four new monologues to Jim Pennington at Aloes and told him he wasn’t satisfied with the title. How about Monologues from the Road or Drifter’s Notes or Everything Is Outside or … Pennington decided to stick with Sounds in the Distance. Then, David told Pennington he wanted to dedicate the book to Jean Pierre and—shockingly—his parents. Or, as he put it, “[for] Dolores McGuinness and for my father, dark shadow on the viridian seas.” Pennington knew nothing of David’s childhood—he just thought the book didn’t need a dedication. “A bit presumptuous of me,” he said, “but David didn’t object.” Pennington had to cut the number of pages, anyway. “Otherwise we would have had to send the binding out.” As it was, Pennington could not get it printed until 1982.
Meanwhile, David decided to enter a photography contest sponsored by Foto Gallery, after learning that Larry Clark, best known for his photos of outlaw teens, would be one of the judges. David was done with Rimbaud now. He would enter some of his portraits of men, like the picture he’d taken in August of JP holding a large white flower. He thought it his best photo. By the end of October he wasn’t just printing pictures; he was back to rehearsing with the band and writing lyrics. Every night that he was not working, he went to the piers. Susan Gauthier remembered that he would leave the apartment at midnight or one A.M., and when he came back in the morning, he would tell her about things he’d seen and characters he’d met.
Then, on October 31, someone called him from the club to tell him not to come to work. Danceteria was closing.j Though suddenly unemployed again, David was now more preoccupied with the photo contest. Soon he would report to Jean Pierre that his mother had entered the same contest and had already been rejected—which made him nervous.
When David entered this photo of Jean Pierre Delage in a contest late in 1980, he regarded it as the best picture he’d ever taken. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
That weekend, fresh out of a job, he went to see the work of his fellow unemployed busboy Keith Haring, who had a studio at nearby P.S. 122, at First Avenue and Ninth Street. Chuck Nanney remembered, “David was really kind of obsessed with what Keith was doing, but I don’t think Keith was ever very friendly with David.” Haring was still two years away from international fame.
When I first visited old Public School 122 with artist friends in the late 1970s, it was not yet a performance and studio space. We scavenged through abandoned classrooms full of old flash cards, battered books, and other discarded school supplies. Community groups in the not-yet-gentrified East Village had invited artists to take the old classrooms as studios in order to keep the building occupied, and in 1979, performances began in what had once been the school gymnasium.
That same year, Ann Magnuson opened Club 57 in a church basement on St. Mark’s Place, a block and a half away. Under her direction, this refuge for the unsuburban created a style other neighborhood clubs would soon emulate. Many of the performances at Club 57 parodied pop culture. Its Sound of Music starred John Sex, for example. Other nights, clubgoers screened bad and beloved old television shows or kitsch artifacts like The Terror of Tiny Town (an all-midget musical western). Even the theme parties became performances; the “Twisting in High Society” evening, for example, meant that everyone came in formal attire and played Twister. Certain events may have been more fun to write into the calendar than to witness—like Lance Loud hosting a punk rock quiz show, “Name That Noise.” But the joy of it was that you never knew what to expect. By 1980, young artists like Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Tseng Kwong Chi were regulars.
The Pyramid Club opened that December, and soon became home to the edgiest drag queens in New York, like the Lady Bunny, RuPaul, International Chrysis, Hapi Phace, Tabboo!, and Ethyl Eichelberger. But the great distinction of the Pyramid was that it did not become a gay club, despite the go-go boys and drag queens dancing on the bar, the many performances by the above-named queens, and the fact that gay men were in charge. This was an artists club—for those who were “queer” in every sense of that word.
It presaged an East Village scene in which the gay-straight split would become just another broken boundary. The summer 1980 issue of The East Village Eye included “Gay Shame by David McDermott, Noted Member of the Queer Elite” attacking the “clone” aesthetic: “First of all the whole Gay lifestyle is an anachronism left over from 1972,” McDermott declared. “No one cares anymore if you are Gay or not, we care about who you are. You Gay Culture Fags have made a culture that can only be your culture, because we do not want your sex-quiche, sex-moustache, sexquaaludes, whips, penis-sex-literary pretentious love …” And so on. Meanwhile, Keith Haring was out stenciling “Clones Go Home” on sidewalks leading from the West Side, signing it “FAFH,” for the imaginary group Fags Against Facial Hair.
Nightclubs of this era became both clubhouse and romper room to young artists of all kinds, with their outré acts, films that would never play a multiplex, and bands whose names were the best thing about them. In this era of cross-pollination, painters played in bands, musicians acted in films, actors tried visual art, and they were all hanging out together.
The new Super 8 films by Scott B and Beth B, James Nares, Vivienne Dick, and others often played nowhere but in the clubs, and they embody an important point about the scene. While some films were quite accomplished, Super 8 has its limits, and many of them looked like films made by artists, starring artists, just to entertain their friends: other artists. Nares’s Rome 78, for example, features McDermott (a painter) as the demented pip-squeak Emperor, while Lydia Lunch plays Empress in her baby-faced dominatrix mode. Through most of it, traffic is clearly audible in the background as various Romans decline and fall. The risk taking, the micro-budgets, the outlawry, and the willingness to look amateurish in all these enterprises made for an ambience of tremendous energy and creativity. This feeling pervaded the little boho coterie centered in the clubs and visible on the street.
David did not hang out at Club 57, but he’d chanced into a world that was ready to welcome him—or at least let him be who he was.
In November 1980, the Peppermint Lounge opened with Jim Fouratt booking the bands. David applied for a job and again became a busboy, working five days a week, seven P.M. to five A.M. Jesse joined him at the Pep, while Brian found work at an after-hours spot called Berlin and then moved on to the Mudd Club.
Meanwhile, the old Danceteria staff decided to throw themselves a benefit on December 2 at a Tribeca club called Tier 3. This would be the first gig for 3 Teens Kill 4. As Brian remembered it, they prepared three songs and had about ten people in the band—other co-workers. David made posters for the benefit featuring one of his “portraits of men”: Iolo Carew, lying on his back exhaling a big cloud of smoke. David said later that it reminded him vaguely of the spirit leaving the body. Iolo would become the first person he knew to be diagnosed with AIDS.
The night that David, Jesse, and Brian walked through Lower Manhattan wheat-pasting these posters on walls and streetlights, they talked about continuing with 3 Teens. “The band was always based around Jesse and Brian and David and their friendship and their background and their sexuality,” observed Julie Hair, who soon joined them as 3 Teens’ drummer—though she had never played the drums or any other instrument. Hair had moved to the New York City area in 1980 with boyfriend Tom Cochran, who was managing the band Tirez Tirez. One night she went to Peppermint Lounge and bumped into someone she’d met years earlier through a friend—Jesse Hultberg. Jesse introduced her to David. The first thing she said to him, after hearing his amazingly deep speaking voice: “You should be in a band.” Once Hair agreed to join 3 Teens, she went to Midtown and bought herself a Korg rhythm machine, thinking she’d be an interim player. Instead she not only stayed with the band but also joined two others—Noch Nichts and Bite like a Kitty.
To anyone who asked David what instrument he played in 3 Teens, he always replied, “Tape recorder.” He also sang, played percussion, and manipulated li
ttle toys for sound effects. But his tapes of traffic and street talk and random bits from the radio—that was his unique contribution. Of course, he’d also been writing lyrics for years, and now that he’d given up poetry, he cannibalized old poems for lines like “We are all essential laborers / you will die soon enough. / I will not live long / all things will change and move on.” This became part of a signature 3 Teens song titled “Hunger.” Lyrics he’d written in Paris now had a place too. “Luis Bunuel / … can ya enter this cell” became part of “Wind-Up Clock.” However, all songs were credited to the whole band, not to any individual.
“We tried to keep it all even,” Hair explained. That was the philosophy of the band. They were anti-star. They wanted no lyricist, no lead singer, and no lead guitarist. They would switch instruments during their shows. Brian was a strong keyboard player who also played a good rhythm guitar. Jesse was a gifted multi-instrumentalist who sang beautifully. Hair taught herself to play the rhythm machine and then the bass, but David never became proficient on any instrument. Hair remembered that David felt insecure about his musical abilities. One day he said, “I’m being reduced to shaking a can of beans.” This became “The Bean Song,” featuring the lyric “I’ll bet you wish you could shake a can of beans as well as me.”
By the end of 1981, however, they’d decided they needed an accomplished guitar player and added Doug Bressler. The guitar they’d been using, Bressler said, “was a piece of junk, and it wouldn’t stay in tune.” They not only didn’t have quality instruments; they didn’t seem interested in acquiring any. The electric guitars would be crackly. “You’d show up at a gig and the amp wouldn’t work. Stuff like that,” Bressler said. “It was really low-tech. And they were proud of it. That was part of their thing.” Hair began to play a thirty-dollar violin that had one string, placing it horizontally on a walker and sawing away. “Early on we used to joke about how we could take all our equipment to a show in a garbage bag,” Hair said, “because it would just be a lot of toys and crap.” As they continued to switch instruments during their gigs, tension developed over Bressler’s resistance to handing over his “gorgeous Les Paul to people who devalued it completely.” He remembered being encouraged not to hide behind his guitar, and being told, “You’ve got to pick up something that’s outside your comfort zone.”
David created this poster, with a photo of his friend Iolo Carew exhaling smoke, for the benefit where he performed with an early incarnation of 3 Teens Kill 4—No Motive. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
Despite all this, 3 Teens were way more than three-chord wonders. They had a distinctive sound, very rhythmic and chant-y and percussive and spare, but filled with musical and verbal ideas. Bressler wondered later if he’d ruined the band with his musical stylings. “There was this whole movement in music, like the Young Marble Giants,” he said, “where you really were supposed to hear the white of the canvas. And that was very much true in early 3 Teens.”
They played their first solo gig at La Rocka Club in the West Village the end of February 1981.
On January 4, 1981, David wrote to JP that he’d “spent the night talking with a new friend about life/photos etc—rare that I have a chance to just talk and listen to interesting things.” On the 7th, he again mentions “new friends” and how certain people inspired him to keep working. On the 9th, he finally named a particular new friend: Peter Hujar—and that he enjoyed talking with him about “photography, life, etc.” It’s quite possible that they actually met in late December. Naturally David never discussed his sexual escapades in letters to Jean Pierre. If he ever referred to those men, they were “friends” and not named. Hujar was in a singular new category David couldn’t have named at that point. Hujar would prove to be the most important person in his life.
Early in January, David learned that one of his photos had been chosen for the Foto Gallery exhibition, though what he mostly felt was disappointment that the judges had not picked his portrait of JP. Instead, they’d chosen a picture he’d taken outside the Beaubourg of a kid with James Dean tattooed across his back. This same photo was set to appear on the cover of Sounds in the Distance, and that week, he also learned that William Burroughs himself had agreed to blurb his little book. David didn’t seem happy or even impressed by any of this.
His life now was “desperate, surreal, awful, and slightly wondrous,” he wrote in the journal he’d barely touched since the Danceteria bust. He finally went back to it on January 21, 1981, trying to make sense of things. After the bust, it seemed, “everything became groundless, apt to fall apart at any moment, nothing offering security or permanence.” He noted: “It wasn’t just the arrests or the eventual loss of work, but rather a period of time in which I grew tired of all the scenes I’d been involved with.”
He wrote about meeting Hujar in the Bar at Second Avenue and Fourth Street. “He stared at me and I looked back several times. I guess I wanted him in a strong way.” When they got to Hujar’s loft at Second Avenue and Twelfth Street, he handed David a book, saying, “This is the kind of work I do.” David was stunned to see a volume he’d been drawn to years before—Portraits in Life and Death. Hujar’s photographs of artists, drag queens, and others who intrigued him were utterly straightforward and empathetic. Along with his friends, Hujar included photographs of mummies in the catacombs at Palermo.
They may not have exchanged last names at the Bar, but David now knew very well who this was. “Hujar” appears, mysteriously, on a list David made in August 1979 while working on the Rimbaud photos, along with items like “brian’s collage/pistol” and “parakeets in woolworth’s”—and across from each of these, a film speed.
Whatever that was about, David felt that he had an image of Hujar the artist that blocked him from seeing Hujar the person. But over a series of days David let that dissipate. And then what he saw in Hujar was a kind of mirror image; they were both desperate and confused, but David felt he still had hope about the future, and Hujar did not. Maybe because David’s art was still developing, while Hujar’s art was fully formed and his career had never flowered.
David showed Hujar some of his work, but doesn’t say what. Rimbaud? The portrait of JP? The monologues? Whatever it was, Hujar seemed disinterested or maybe just unaffected. At least, that was David’s impression, though it would prove to be untrue. In any situation that was even slightly ambiguous, he would seize upon the worst interpretation. One night, he stopped by Hujar’s loft to film him for his first Super 8 movie, “Heroin”—silent, three minutes long, and one of the only films David ever completed. If Hujar made the final cut, he played one of the people passed out or dead on various floors and sidewalks. David said only that he left the loft that night feeling a lot of anger about the state of his own work, feeling that he was basically a failure, that he wasn’t “capable of affecting change in anyone other than friends.” But then, he asked himself, what was it that he wanted to change? Maybe his images were too aggressive. “I seem to really desire some way to seduce people, make them feel at ease and yet make them renounce all the terrible things of the earth and say: Yes, this is what is true.”
On the day he did this journal writing—January 21, 1981—Hujar called to tell him he had syphilis. So David went and got his shot and wrote, “[I] am in a state of pain and reexamination of all I once held as my life, not because of the shot but because of the weariness of all these daily routines.… But I continue the only ways I know how, always with looking over my shoulder for that chance to change direction and run, escape, depart.”
It was a depressive’s reaction, but something had lit a fire in him. Susan Gauthier observed that David’s life definitely changed when he met Hujar. “Someone saw that [David] was a true artist.” She couldn’t quite articulate how it changed except to say that David was “full-on” after that, in regard to his work—and he stopped going constantly to the pier.
Truly, everything was beginning for him, but David couldn’t see it. Early in February,
he learned that Keith Haring had selected him for two group exhibits he was curating, one at Club 57 (“The Erotic Show”) and one at the Mudd Club (“The Lower Manhattan Drawing Show”). He was also in rehearsals for 3 Teens’ La Rocka gig. And at the end of the month, Dennis Cooper’s journal, Little Caesar, finally appeared in bookstores with sixteen Rimbaud photos and two monologues. This on top of winning the photo contest and finding a publisher for Sounds in the Distance.
David fixated on the glass half-empty, on the fact that he still spent most of his waking hours as a busboy and was in love with a man he rarely saw. (Jean Pierre came to visit for eight days at the beginning of March, and David still entertained fantasies about moving to Paris to work for UNESCO.) He was also unhappy with his home life. “Susan and Steve are sweet but I don’t feel very comfortable with them,” he wrote to JP. He did not share this with his roommates, of course. Years later, Gauthier still puzzled over the fact that David would never eat dinner with them. Gliboff was such a great cook, she said, yet David ate nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or sometimes an egg.
In March, he met a fella at his newest cruising ground, Stuyvesant Park, on Second Avenue five blocks north of where he was living. For the two weeks or so that this affair lasted, David suffered and obsessed over a familiar issue: “Fear to show myself completely to somebody who I desire. That it will drive them away or that it will give them cause to become disinterested.”
He realized now that when he was afraid to share his feelings, he put them into his work. He’d shown this man, Bill, some of his photographs, and Bill thought them disturbing or weird. “I feel kind of tense about that, and he’s already asked me if I hustled after looking at some of my monologues, and it was very difficult to say ‘yeah.’ ”
In the midst of this affair, David ran into Hujar one night at the Bar, which functioned as a social club for gay men in the East Village. David told him he was making a portfolio, but first he was going to throw away any drawing he’d made that was aggressive or upsetting. Hujar counseled him not to throw out any drawings. “I shouldn’t start compromising and trying to adapt to other people’s taste, that no matter what my taste is and what my ideas are, or what my work looks like, if it’s good, there’ll be somebody who’ll pick up on it,” David said Hujar told him in a taped journal entry. “And last night, I was standing around here at five, six in the morning, looking through the portfolio, looking at my photographs, just leafing through boxes, and I was really startled. It was like the first time that I sat down and looked at these drawings in ages and ages, since I did them and I realized they are good, and there’s absolutely no reason for me to deny them or correct them or throw them away or bury them. They’re my life.”