by Cynthia Carr
David and Hujar had not yet met each other. This reading probably occurred in 1980, but decades later Erdman still remembered that David read a story from his hustling days about going home with a parolee, only to have the police show up so David had to jump out a window. It became one of his monologues: “Boy in Horn & Hardart’s on Forty-second Street, New York City.”
“I was an instant fan,” Erdman said. “Totally hooked. I thought, this guy is unbelievable.”
Hujar felt an immediate kinship with anyone who’d come out of an abusive childhood. So he and David had that connection, but not only that. “David’s story and his range of emotions and intelligence were fascinating to Peter,” said Vince Aletti. “He was not somebody that Peter could just move past. I sensed from Peter that he had found somebody, that if the lover part didn’t work out, that was OK, because there was something much more important there. And it was rare to get that sense from Peter.”
David had not made a good first impression on Aletti, however. “There was always a certain feeling of jealousy of the new boyfriend. Like, why couldn’t it be me? Which I think a lot of Peter’s friends secretly felt,” Aletti said. “But I remember thinking that David was not very good-looking, that he was kind of gawky and not particularly interesting—or verbal. I’m sure I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to meet him at that point. But—it’s funny. As soon as I saw Peter’s photos of him, I realized what Peter saw in him. Then I could see how sexy he was. It was like seeing him through Peter’s eyes in those pictures, and suddenly I thought, oh my god, this guy is amazing. And I basically just got over myself because Peter was so taken with him, and clearly there was something very solid there.”
Stephen Koch said that Hujar had a strong talent detector. “He knew that David was the real thing—and in Peter’s opinion, a big talent that needed development and guidance.” That, along with the fact that David was a hurt child. “Those two things were just an irresistible combination,” Koch said. “There was going to be art coming out of this. Peter’s gathering sense of being somewhat dead-ended would be relieved by David carrying on.” Koch thought that Hujar was in love with David and would have liked the sexual relationship to continue, but “he adjusted, moving into the paternal role, and when he found the paternal role, it actually was very fulfilling for them both.” Indeed, David seemed to reinspire Hujar, who became very productive in the eighties before he fell ill.
One night Hujar took Schneider with him to see 3 Teens Kill 4. “I have no recollection of the music at all, but there David was and Peter was fixated,” Schneider remembered.
“Almost from the beginning,” said Erdman, “you could see David’s lovingness to Peter, and you could see that he was infatuated with Peter as a person, but you could feel the un-sexual nature of it on his side. As for Peter, it never wavered. He was constantly interested. And it never got ugly. That was clearly not what was meant to be. He just adored David. Just adored him.”
One night, Schneider and Erdman went to Hujar’s place for dinner. And he showed them some doodle David had done. Schneider remembered it as a drawing on the door. Erdman remembered a piece of paper. Neither of them could remember what David had actually drawn.
“Peter thought it was just utter genius,” Schneider said.
Erdman said that whatever it was, he didn’t remember liking it. “But Peter said to us, ‘David left it, and I have told him he has to become a visual artist.’ ”
10 A UNION OF DIFFERENT DRUMMERS
In June 1981, David went to an event called Noisefest to hear Y Pants or maybe Sonic Youth, and there he met Kiki Smith. They instantly became best friends, often meeting for breakfast, and talking on the phone two or three times a day. David did not live long enough to see the international acclaim ultimately accorded to Kiki Smith. When they met, she’d had work in groundbreaking exhibitions like the “Times Square Show” and “New York/New Wave,” but she didn’t yet have a gallery. She was working as an electrician’s assistant.
David told Kiki that he was painting in an abandoned pier off Spring Street and offered to take her to see it. They didn’t go that night, but soon after. She remembered seeing a large painting of a boomerang and a large bird. This was a full two years before the Ward Line Pier Project “opened,” only to be instantly shut down by the police. Brian Butterick remembered, however, that back when he and David were still working at Danceteria, David told him he’d just discovered a new pier. Susan Gauthier recalled that David invited her to see it while he was living with her, but she declined.
Chuck Nanney visited the pier early on. He hadn’t seen David since the Danceteria bust, but one day they ran into each other at the sex pier. David brought Nanney down to the Ward Line Pier. There wasn’t much work there at the time. He remembered seeing some Krazy Kats that David had done. And he saw Kiki’s piece. She’d chosen a small room with holes in the ceiling where the plaster had all fallen down, “so it was like walking on icebergs,” as she put it. Light coming through the holes made “perfect circles on the floor” that she outlined with paint. Once a day, the light and the paint would align. So—a conceptual piece.
David had picked the Ward Line Pier (a.k.a. Pier 34) because it wasn’t a cruising ground. At least, not during the day. And he could be alone. One day he’d watched a huge dog run the football-field length of the main room, toward New Jersey, and he’d followed the animal but never found it, so he began to think the place magical. He’d also investigated Pier 28, just a bit farther south,k and discovered thousands of cardboard cartons filled with files from—he thought—the city prison system. “Psychological profiles of prisoners, documentation from murder scenes, surveillance photographs, court transcripts,” he told me. “It was all from the fifties, and that material was so heavy visually that my reaction was not to touch it.” But he went through some of the material with Kiki. She remembered this trove as “a one-and-half-story mountain of people’s information.” It included psychological tests administered by the Psychiatric Clinic of the Court of General Sessions, in which offenders had been compelled to draw both a man and a woman. David and Kiki took many of these drawings.
They planned to silk-screen them onto fine paper and poster them in the streets. They even got a grant to pay for the materials. “I think we sort of lost interest in it halfway through,” she said. They never did paste them up in the streets, but did make some prints. And Kiki taught David how to silk-screen.
Years later, many who were part of the scene would recall the day they read a one-column article in the New York Times headlined “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” It appeared on July 3, 1981. Photographer Nan Goldin’s recollection has always seemed especially poignant. Still a couple of years away from meeting David, Nan was on Fire Island with a gaggle of friends, including Cookie Mueller, a “queen” of downtown—writer, wild woman, and actress in early John Waters films. Cookie read the article out loud, and, said Nan, “We all kind of laughed.”
“Gay” cancer? The second paragraph carried the reassuring news that “there is as yet no evidence of contagion.”
This news story was pegged to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on July 4: “Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Pneumonia Among Homosexual Men—New York City and California.” News reports were focusing on KS, the rare cancer that manifested in purple lesions. Most of these patients had severe defects in their immune systems. But how could that cause cancer? Doctors didn’t know, but a CDC spokesman said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals. One theory already floating was that the illness had been caused by poppers—amyl nitrite, a drug used to enhance sexual pleasure.
At the time the “gay cancer” article appeared, David was again between homes. He’d moved out of 159 Second Avenue at the end of June ’81 with no place to go, though Susan Gauthier insists she wouldn’t have let him leave had she known that.
He was in the midst of recording songs with the band. He was bursting with ideas. But now he spent a
lot of time just walking around, dropping dimes in phone booths trying to find a place to stay for a night. As he wrote to Jean Pierre, “I wish I could find the way to stop feeling that time is running away.”
JP sent more francs. And David considered selling his camera. All this as Foto Gallery let him know, mid-June, that not only would his photograph be exhibited but that he was also one of its ten prize winners. By mid-July, however, he still hadn’t gone to the gallery to see what he’d won. He was afraid the dealer would make him pay for framing the picture.
He had the camera with him the July day that he broke into the abandoned sixteen-story Christodora building, a former settlement house on Avenue B. His old buddy, John Hall, had already been in there a couple of times. He showed David how you could get out onto the roof at the Charas/El Bohio building on Ninth Street and then crawl through a window into the Christodora. They explored. Walls were crumbling and sand had accumulated on some of the steps. Downstairs they found a big swimming pool full of black water, with stuff floating in it. In the vandalized library, books and papers covered the floor. In the theater space, they took their clothes off and posed in a decrepit corner—David seated, John standing. David would later embed three copies of this photo in a painting called Fuck You Faggot Fucker (along with one of Brian posing as St. Sebastian). David also photographed Hall wielding a club in a broken-down bathroom (clothed) and standing on what seems to be a balcony (naked).
They were in the library, clothed and looking out a window onto Avenue B, when a truck pulled up and someone proceeded to unweld the front door. A man Hall described as a “power yuppie” came upstairs and found them. “We said something like, ‘Ah, we’re just looking. We’ll be out of here soon,’ “ he remembered. The yuppie remained calm. He didn’t ask how they’d gotten in, or how they’d get out. When he left, he welded the front door shut again.
That July the East Village gallery scene very quietly began.
Patti Astor, still months away from filming Wild Style, had a day job working for her friend Bill Stelling at his roommate-referral service. One day Stelling asked Astor if she knew of any artists who might want to show at the tiny storefront (eight feet by twenty-five feet) he was using as a textile studio. She did. Astor had already met some of the graffiti artists she’d be working with on Wild Style. That summer she threw an “Art Opening Barbeque” at her apartment on East Third Street across from the men’s shelter, and Futura 2000 spray-painted a mural on her wall. “The entire art world showed up!” she would later declare. If not exactly “entire,” the party did include future big names like Jeffrey Deitch, Keith Haring, Fab 5 Freddy, and Kenny Scharf—who customized her kitchen appliances during the party by gluing little figures to them.
For the first show in Stelling’s space at 229 East Eleventh Street, however, Astor recommended her ex-husband Steven Kramer. She did not plan to involve herself; she knew nothing about selling art. So Stelling ran the gallery for the first month with another friend. They put up twenty Kramer drawings at fifty dollars each, and sold them all. Astor decided to participate in the second show, in September, which went to Scharf, then a recent School of Visual Arts graduate.
Astor may have known little about the business of art, but like some of the others running the first East Village galleries, she was an artist at heart—and she knew how to get a party started, how to create a sense of permission and play. She decided that each artist should get a chance to choose a new name for the tiny space and to completely change the decor. So it was Scharf who dubbed the space Fun Gallery that September. There he introduced his mutant Hanna-Barbera characters to a world that wasn’t quite ready for them. He sold just one, for fifty dollars.
When Fab 5 Freddy Brathwaite got the next show, he thought about renaming the place Serious Gallery. That’s when Astor realized she’d have to change her stationery every month. So the name remained Fun, but Astor stuck with her idea of letting each artist do whatever he or she wanted with the space—a policy that continued when they moved a year later into more square footage at 254 East Tenth Street. Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example, chopped the space up with half-constructed walls. Scharf did a black light installation for his second (rapturously received) show. Haring and his partner LA2 painted their trademark squiggles over everything in the gallery, including Astor’s outfit, and even the snow outside.
After bouncing around for six weeks, going home with tricks or crashing with friends, David moved in with Tom Cochran, “the manager of our band,” as he described him in a letter to Jean Pierre. Cochran had broken up with Julie Hair and moved to an apartment upstairs in her building at 36 East Fourth, near the Bowery. It had the same floor plan as Hair’s tiny railroad flat, a classic tub-in-the-kitchen arrangement. In rooms on either side of the kitchen, Cochran and David each had a loft bed. The whole thing was about 325 roach-infested square feet. They shared a toilet in the hall with the occupants of another apartment. David would live in this bolthole for nearly four years.
He let JP know that he did not have enough money to come to France. He also told him, by way of reassurance, that he had a private part of himself that few would understand—but that was the part he could share with JP. Jean Pierre sent a rather anguished letter in September, one of the few from him that David kept, confessing his disappointment and his nervousness about the state of their relationship. David still felt that he loved JP. “To be honest with you,” he wrote, “I sometimes meet people that I like very much, but I never meet any person with your qualities.” He hoped to come to Paris that winter. But the eight days they’d spent together in New York that March would be the extent of their contact for 1981. JP had met Hujar during that March visit. ‘I felt something between them,” he recalled. He’d worried then that his relationship with David was in danger because of Hujar—though he did not express this to David.
In the last substantial piece of journal writing he would do for years, David wrote on September 1 about meeting a fella at Stuyvesant Park. There he’d run into Hujar, who was also cruising. “I sat next to him and we talked for a few minutes. One night when he was feeling down, we’d gone into the west park and built a little fire like scouts on one of the walkways feeding it twigs and leaves for about half an hour, laughing while other guys in the park stared at us like we were nuts. After awhile we parted.… I hadn’t planned on meeting anyone but then I saw this young guy.”
Whatever distance had grown between David and Jean Pierre at this point was only about … distance. And the fact that David’s life was changing so quickly he could not articulate it even to himself. In the middle of September 1981, David decided to quit the band. He needed time for his writing, his painting, his photography. Besides, “Brian, Jesse and Julie … have a way of seeing the world that is very different from me. Too much cynicism,” he wrote to JP. (Doug Bressler had not yet joined.) David informed the band of his decision and reported “some anger.” But then he changed his mind. He did not leave the band. Yet.
That October, he got a chance to create a gallery-friendly version of the Castelli “cow bone” action for a group show called “Hunger” at Gallery 345, a space on Lafayette Street near SoHo that specialized in political art. He asked Hair to collaborate.
On the street, they found a wooden chair and a wooden crate the size of a smallish refrigerator. They painted the crate black and set it on end so it would open fridge-style. In homage to Robert Indiana’s EAT/DIE diptych, they painted “EAT” on one side of its door and “DIE” on the other—adding stencils of planes, burning houses, and a large falling man. Inside they placed a large transparent bag of cow bones and a stereo.
They intended this to be an interactive installation, with a visitor wearing headphones while seated on the wooden chair they’d painted and stenciled. Hair couldn’t remember what the visitor was supposed to hear on the headphones. Most likely it was one of David’s tape collages, with bits recorded on the street or from the radio, but 3 Teens did have a song called “Hunger.”
We are all essential laborers …
David did not meet as many kindred souls at Peppermint Lounge, “the Pep,” as he had at Danceteria. But a bartender he bussed for, Sophie Breer, became a friend. He worked two nights a week for minimum wage, so he was dependent on the bartenders for tips. She gave him hundreds a night. When punk icon Johnny Rotten hassled Breer one night, standing on her shoe and not letting her move, David came up and threw a drink in his face. Other nights he’d do things to amuse her. He would make mice out of napkins and lemons. Once he brought in a cock-a-bunny and let the costumed roach out of its jar at three in the morning. “This little ‘rabbit’ running down the bar,” he recalled. “The ears make them top-heavy, so they learn to obey the edges of the table.” His cock-a-bunnies were creepy-cute, a riveting combination. Breer decided she wanted to film David making them.
One weekend in November 1981, she rented a Betamax, which she didn’t exactly know how to use. “I did cocaine and drank and shot skits all weekend long. I have forty-eight hours of mostly crap, but it was fun. Remember, I was twenty-one years old.” She’d asked David to come over Sunday morning with “supplies.” She had decided on a Romper Room approach. David—with his rounded scissors, Q-tips, rubber cement, and a jar with six or eight cockroaches—obliged her with a kindergarten-style presentation, cutting tiny ears from a piece of paper, pulling the cotton end off a Q-tip for a tail, and applying these accoutrements to a reluctant roach he named “Benny.” The roach spent some time running around on David’s arm before acquiring his ears and tail. David remained deadpan throughout. “Oops, I glued his back legs together.”
“Are you trying to take the ‘s’ out of ‘pest’?” Breer asked him. She filmed it with “the camera flying all over … trails of light.… I didn’t know how to zoom.” But she ended up with a thirteen-minute video piece, Waje’s Cocka-bunnies. At the end, David got out the piece of pie he’d brought along, to show that you could easily pick a roach off your slice if you’d given it rabbit ears. He then induced Benny to check into a roach motel.