Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  He hit another low point that spring of ’81. Peppermint Lounge laid him off for twenty days, then rehired him for just two days a week. Business was slow. Some artist, never named, engaged him to paint his house in the Hamptons, but David had little to show for it after paying for train fare and meals.

  In April, Gauthier and Gliboff told him they had solved their financial problems and wanted more privacy. Could he please move out? He didn’t have the money to do this. In May, Jean Pierre sent him some francs. David was now using his money to eat in restaurants because he didn’t feel comfortable using the kitchen at home. Nor did he feel comfortable typing there. (Again, this was David’s interpretation, and Susan Gauthier was surprised to learn of it—from me.) Nor could he afford to develop photos or print.

  One morning, though, happy over a good dream, David called Jesse Hultberg’s place and Zoe Leonard answered the phone. She was there taking nude pictures of Jesse, and told David to come on over: “I’ll take photographs of you too.”

  In one of the last long journal entries David would write for years to come, he gives a rare description of friends hanging out. But he probably wrote it because he began a short affair with Zoe that day and was trying to figure out what it meant.

  When David arrived, she was trying to clip a lamp onto a floor-to-ceiling pipe, staggering and weaving because she’d taken four Quaaludes. Jesse posed on a bed illuminated by the blue light of a television. Then he began to read aloud from a trashy novel (“Hot Hips or Love is My Business or some such,” David wrote). Jesse tape-recorded this while David and Zoe provided orgasmic sound effects. David took one Quaalude. Zoe went into the other room to lie down and asked David to lie down next to her. She told him she was depressed. She showed him the bruise on her arm where she’d been shooting up. She said she wanted to leave New York.

  Zoe was a bit unsettled by this journal passage when she read it years later. “I was bottoming out here,” she told me. “I was definitely tricking at the time, and I was getting really strung out. I’d been shooting a lot of coke and then—I was the one with the bag of Quaaludes. But my feelings for David were incredibly warm and sincere and real. I felt a kinship with him.”

  Zoe too had had a rough childhood, leaving what she called “a really neglectful and difficult household” at age fifteen and enrolling herself in an alternative high school (City-as-School). Though she never graduated, she soon had a number of classmates crashing with her at the East Village apartment she’d rented. (The one who stayed longest was Jean-Michel Basquiat.) She was younger than David—nineteen at the time their fling began.

  Zoe told David that day that he always acted like he didn’t really like “some of us.” He replied, “No, it’s not that,” and explained: “I have this whole area of myself I can’t share or talk about.… Because of that and because I don’t want to lose that part of myself, I just get distant. I feel so different from most people I know.”

  When Zoe initiated sex, he hesitated, telling her, “I’m enjoying this, I’m feeling this, but I’m trying to understand it.” Zoe said she didn’t think it right to call what they had a “romance” or an “affair.” It was “an extension of this sense of connection, a sense of being kindred spirits, as artists.” She estimated that they slept together maybe three more times, but said that “it clearly wasn’t going to go anywhere sexually.” Mostly they talked about art and their messed-up childhoods. They would sit on the West Side piers. They’d take pictures. “It was very kind of tender,” said Zoe. “I don’t know another word for it.”

  At that time, Zoe considered herself bisexual. Looking back on it, she said she felt drawn to David because “he had this depth to him. And even when he was lighthearted, he was sort of solemn.” She added: “Also, I think my desire for him was about finding my queerness, finding my own gayness. The way I came out into being an artist and becoming who I am was really through the Mudd Club and punk rock. I really didn’t grow up with any kind of understanding of a lesbian culture, and I just loved the whole way that gay men were with each other.”

  Shortly after this, Zoe left the country for a year and a half. The drug use and sex work had taken a toll. She said, “I just had this feeling: If I don’t get out of here, I’m not going to make it.”

  In the eighties, every wall, Dumpster, and streetlight in the East Village was aflutter with wheat-pasted flyers advertising gigs at assorted hellholes and hot spots. David had taken it upon himself to design the signage for 3 Teens and sometimes for other bands. He’d make a collage or use one of his photos, then spend the wee hours slapping the flyers up all over the neighborhood. After a while, he realized that rival bands were ripping his posters down. This, he told me, was why he started doing stencils. You could spray your message anywhere. Abandoned cars. Doorways. The sidewalk.

  Then he started using stencils on paper. Often he went to Julie Hair’s place to work—though she had the classic tiny tub-in-the-kitchen tenement. Since Hair and her roommate had already stenciled their own floor, “it was a place he could come and be messy,” she said. Hair remembered him stenciling on maps, or doing what she called “glorified posters for our gigs.”

  David liked street art. He told me about seeing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “SAMO” graffiti and Keith Haring’s subway drawings: “It was the first thing I connected with in terms of the art world because I had disdain for what I sensed of that world. I just didn’t believe they were dealing with anything real.”

  “Julie Hair had a box of international symbols in stencil form. I thought, Oh, we should do stencils that they forgot, such as burning houses. You know, images of resistance or violence. They never make international symbols like that, so let’s develop the burning house, a falling man, the target-face person, and little soldiers.”

  Political art at the time often focused on American support for repressive military regimes in Latin America. David began applying his political yet enigmatic non-advertisements to downtown walls in 1981. He liked going to SoHo and spraying war imagery on gallery doors—an art guerrilla leaving a trail of El Salvador for those wafting toward the Schnabels. Though he would use some of these military images in early paintings, the stencil that registered most was more personal: the burning house.

  Artist Jane Bauman was one of several friends who used to go out stenciling with David. “You don’t stencil alone,” she said. “You need somebody there as a lookout.” Usually it was spur of the moment, a plan made when they ran into each other on the street. “The East Village was like a small town,” Bauman recalled. “Walk outside and there were all your friends.” They’d head out after midnight, venturing as far afield with their spray cans as Tribeca. “He would alter other people’s stencils too. A lot of us were doing that. Adding your own little flavor to it.”

  Years later, he admitted that stenciling hadn’t exactly been effective as a political gesture. “It definitely got construed as a whole other thing—as my attempt to get into the art world,” he said. “But at the time I thought it was a great rude thing and I never counted on showing in the art world. I didn’t think my work was developed enough. I felt, with my lack of education, that wasn’t something that was possible.”

  Even so, Julie Hair remembered that after some art critic disparaged either David’s stencils or the idea of stencils in general, David decided to make a less subtle assault on this world he thought he would never enter. “I think that’s why he wanted to target Castelli,” she said.

  One afternoon that spring, the two of them dumped a pile of bloody cow bones on the stairway outside the Leo Castelli Gallery at 420 West Broadway, the “power building” that housed many of the top dealers. On the walls of the first-floor landing, they quickly stenciled an empty plate, a knife, and a fork. (David told me they’d added war stencils too; Hair did not remember doing those.) They littered the bones down the staircase—which wasn’t used all that much. Most people took the elevators, so few people would have laid eyes on this installation. And they nev
er heard about any reaction at the gallery.

  3 Teens Kill 4—No Motive: Clockwise from David, they are Doug Bressler, Jesse Hultberg, Brian Butterick, and Julie Hair. (Photograph by Mark C)

  This mostly unseen piece became legend, and stories circulated about blood dripping down the steps. That did not happen. After David collected the bones from the meatpacking district, he brought them to the framing shop where Hair worked, and they encased them all in plastic. There was still meat and fat on some of the bones but no dripping blood. They were basically shrink-wrapped. They transported them to SoHo heaped in a red wagon they found on the street.

  David saw this as the first in a series of “action installations,” which would “trespass the boundaries of art world activities.” He wanted to organize another in which friends would show up at Macy’s in military fatigues, with one person blindfolded, and they’d stage a mock execution by firing squad. Just to literally bring home what was happening in certain parts of Latin America. Friends talked him out of it.

  By June, he was uncomfortable enough at 159 Second Avenue to try spending the night with friends like Jesse Hultberg or with men he picked up for sex. To Jean Pierre, he wrote, “I rarely come home. Only if I have no other place to sleep.”

  He also mentioned to JP that he was reading a book by Renaud Camus, Tricks, the French writer’s account of twenty-five one-night stands. And David joked, “I looked for you in it.” In one of his increasingly rare—and now undated—journal entries, he described taking the book to Hujar, who’d once photographed Camus and was curious about Tricks. “As I neared the building I could see strobic flashes of light issue from the windows.… Upstairs Ethyl [Eichelberger] was sitting on a chair below some extremely bright floodlamps, huge painted face topped with an enormous wig shaped like a bundle of laundry. I said hello and gave Peter the book and left. At the door I turned to him and said, It’s gonna be a great decade. Ethyl shouted: I HEARD THAT!”

  David would spend years reworking the story of his connection with Hujar, not because anything changed but because of his core issue—how much could he reveal, even to himself? By the time I interviewed him in January 1990, more than two years after Hujar’s death, he thought it the central connection in his life. He told me that the sexual affair had been brief, but that they then began “a very complicated friendship/relationship that took time to find a track to run along.” He told me that with Hujar, who was twenty years older, he eventually began to feel easier with himself. “He was like the parent I never had, like the brother I never had. He helped me drop a lot of the shit I carried from the streets—the pain, the fear, the guilt. Stuff I could barely speak to people about. I remember revealing to him that I’d been a hustler our second night together. We were having dinner, and I fully expected him to reject me. And I remember he just said, ‘So?’ And we got into this long conversation where I just revealed all my fears.” Certainly, Hujar was not the first to learn of David’s hustling days, just the confessor who ended up mattering.

  “There was a density to the emotional contact between us that was great,” David recalled, “and that was what was most valuable. After a couple years knowing each other, it really solidified.”

  Eventually he would say of his art career: “Everything I made, I made for Peter.”

  9 THE POVERTY OF PETER HUJAR

  They developed a way to signal each other—I’m here—at crowded gatherings: two fingers up like rabbit ears behind the head.

  Hujar would eventually come up with a list of the ways in which he and David were karmically connected, but it wasn’t something he wrote down. All his friends could remember him saying was that both he and David had redheaded mothers. That was the least of it, of course.

  Peter Hujar was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1934 to parents who soon abandoned him. His father, Joseph, reportedly a bootlegger, actually absconded before he was born. His mother left for Manhattan, where she worked as a waitress in a diner after turning the infant Hujar over to her parents, Ukrainian immigrants who lived on a New Jersey farm. Hujar did not learn to speak English till he entered kindergarten. And while he remembered his grandparents as loving, especially his grandmother, he went to live with an uncle after the grandparents died, in an environment that was “worse than Dickensian,” according to his friend Fran Lebowitz. “His uncle had a lot of children,” Lebowitz said. “They would all sit down to dinner and all the other children would get chicken. Peter would get a piece of bread. On Sundays, the uncle’s children would get ice cream, but not Peter.”

  While he lived in New Jersey, his mother would show up every week or so with whatever money she was contributing for his care, loudly complaining about it. Unlike David, Hujar did not often speak of his childhood. The detail above about his mother comes from Stephen Koch, who first met Hujar in 1965 and eventually became executor of his estate. When Hujar made his will and insisted on leaving one third of the net proceeds of all photos to his mother, Koch was taken aback. He asked why. She had never made one gesture of support to Hujar. She never once visited while he was sick. She would not attend the funeral. Hujar answered, with a fury, “I’ll pay her back every penny.”

  Hujar had moved to his mother’s place at 340 East Thirty-second Street in Manhattan by the time he was twelve or so. His mother had remarried, and his new stepfather had a drinking problem. Or she did. Or they both did. Hujar left home while he was still in high school on the night his mother threw a bottle of beer at his head.

  “He walked out the door, and he never went back. He lived on somebody’s couch,” said Steve Turtell, who met Hujar in 1971. “Somebody put him up for the last few months of his high school career. He attended his own graduation and sat in the audience, and when they called his name and no one stood up to get the diploma, Hujar sat in the back slowly clapping, and he was the only person applauding. He loved telling that story to me.” Hujar told Lebowitz, however, that he moved out when he was fourteen and had his own apartment in the West Village. He pointed out the building to her numerous times.

  Hujar had attended the School of Industrial Art (later called the High School of Art and Design), knowing he wanted to be a photographer. There he had the good fortune to encounter a teacher—the poet Daisy Aldan—who recognized his artistic potential. According to Koch, she is the one who urged Hujar to start doing apprenticeships in commercial photography studios. He became very technically skilled in the darkroom, a master printer.

  Steve Turtell heard one story from Hujar about an attempt he made to connect with his mother after his career took off in the sixties. He wanted her to know that he was making it. He wasn’t a nobody. So he told her that he was now friends with Andy Warhol. And she said to him, “Oh, isn’t he that fag?” It’s unclear how much contact Hujar had with her after that. Still, she had the power that mothers have. David once told me, outraged, that she’d often told Hujar he was ugly. And Hujar believed it.

  “He never thought that people found him attractive,” said another old friend, critic Vince Aletti. In reality, Hujar was so handsome, charismatic, seductive, and engaging that often, when Aletti introduced people to him for the first time—it didn’t matter whether they were men or women—they’d be on the phone to Aletti the next day, burbling, “That guy is so fabulous. I love him!” Hujar was unable to take that in. He never believed that people actually valued his work, either, even when they told him they did.

  In 1956, Hujar took photographs at a Connecticut school for developmentally disabled children. These were the first photos to become part of his oeuvre. This was also the year he met artists Paul Thek and Joseph Raffael. When Raffael won a Fulbright in 1958, he took Hujar with him to Italy. In Florence, Hujar found a Catholic institution where he took more pictures of neurologically impaired children. He was not yet doing portraits. His pictures show the children at play, and if they are visibly “different”—some have Down syndrome, for example—they are not caught up in their difference. They are not grotesque. They are who
they are, and Hujar identified with them. “His experience of himself as a hurt child from a damaged family was lifelong and very powerful,” Koch said. “The beauty of things broken and damaged was what he was interested in. The reverse of Robert Mapplethorpe, who was interested in things that were perfect.”

  In 1963, Hujar was back in Italy with a Fulbright of his own, traveling with his lover Paul Thek, photographing the catacombs at Palermo—where the corpses are dressed up and posing. Eleven pictures of these mummies, along with twenty-nine portraits of living people, ended up in the one book Hujar published in his lifetime, the one David saw: Portraits in Life and Death. “We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures,” Susan Sontag wrote in her introduction to this book, “but all eyes at rest contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera knows, inexorably.… Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death.”