Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  The day after this meeting, artists and clubgoers packed a benefit at Danceteria for “the ailing Klaus Nomi”—as the Eye delicately described him. Nomi had become a star in the downtown clubs even as “downtown” invented itself in the late seventies. He sang a startling countertenor while presenting himself as a creature from another planet: finlike hair, high forehead, dark lipstick, triangular tuxedo jackets, robotic movements. His illness seemed otherworldly in its horror. His friend Joey Arias recalled going to visit him in the hospital: “They made me wear a plastic bag.… I wasn’t allowed to touch him.… He developed Kaposi’s and started taking interferon. That messed him up real bad. He had dots all over his body and his eyes became purple slits.… He had cancer in his stomach. Herpes popped out all over his body. He turned into a monster. It hurt me so much to see him.”

  In late June 1983, New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. David Sencer, reported a “leveling off of cases” and suggested that gay men might be “getting immune” to the disease, that perhaps AIDS was “not as infectious as we may have thought.” Meanwhile, the chairman of the city’s Human Rights Commission, Isaiah Robinson, told the Daily News, “There is no epidemic.”

  Klaus Nomi died on August 6—of “a disease whose myth exploded through thoughtless babble and media saturation,” said the obituary in the East Village Eye, an obituary that did not mention the word “AIDS.”

  12 “WILL THEY ALLOW ME ON THE MOON?”

  He liked painting directly on the world. It was a gesture of defiance—this work done on some decrepit pier or busy intersection or gallery door, this work destined to be destroyed. For his first one-man show at Civilian Warfare, David painted or printed everything on found materials: driftwood, garbage can lids, supermarket posters. And this too was a way of responding to official reality—to what he would later call “the pre-invented world.”

  He’d been stenciling on garbage can lids since sometime in 1982. Various friends remembered walking the neighborhood with him when he confiscated a lid, or scouted for good ones to take. He wanted them aged or dented so they looked like they had a history. According to Chuck Nanney, it was Hujar who got him to always replace what he was taking, who told him the super would have to do it otherwise out of his own pocket. So David went to the hardware store and bought a new lid to replace each one he took.

  In spring of 1983, David spent a day at Jones Beach with Keith Davis and Elayne Kling, a friend of Keith’s who was then working at Fun Gallery. Keith brought a big bag of tempera paint with him. “We spent the day picking up pieces of driftwood and painting them these crazy colors,” Kling said. Then they built a monolith from these vivid logs, a huge haphazard structure that attracted spectators from way down the beach. At the end of the day, they packed as much painted driftwood as they could fit into Kling’s car. At the last minute, she grabbed one that David had turned into an alligator but left behind. “I’m keeping this,” she told him. She’s certain that this was the day David first began making his driftwood totems, though, as Kling put it, “he expanded on them back at the studio.” Indeed, the finished pieces were complex—often stylized snakes or fish painted with the iconography he’d been developing: globes, targets, cowboys, falling men, and so on.

  David had left the storefront on Houston Street early in ’83 for a studio at the Clocktower, a gallery and studio space affiliated with P.S. 1 but located in Lower Manhattan. He was also working at Keith’s loft on Suffolk Street. Keith had silk-screening equipment and technical expertise, and he loved being part of the process. “Keith always had art supplies around,” said Steve Doughton, who was close to both Keith and David in the mid-eighties. “He was always encouraging people to come over. ‘Paint something, and I’ll put it on my wall.’ He had a little workshop. I remember them printing the food posters there.” In his wanderings, David had found the place where supermarkets had their big window ads made. He told Steve Doughton that he’d watched the guys work and admired their skill, their speed, “just whipping off these stencils freehand with X-Acto knives, cutting into some kind of transfer medium.” When Elayne Kling came in one day to help Keith and David print both the Romulus and Remus piece (True Myth, on ads for Domino sugar and Kraft grape jelly) and Jean Genet Masturbating Metteray Prison (on an ad for ground chuck), she saw that they had boxes of those food posters.

  More than half the images in that first solo Civilian show were printed or painted on these posters. Savarin Coffee, for example, re-creates frames from the pier cartoon that ended with the word bubble “Every day my mind grows keener …” Tuna features a cowboy outlaw, and Slam Click, a man in a prison cell printed over deli ads. David explained years later that he’d used the food posters because they marked a specific time (with their prices) and represented consumption—moral, mental, psychic, and physical consumption. The supermarket ads represent the wallpaper of our lives, while the unspeakable surfaces in David’s images of violence, repression, and desire.

  David complained that, during his first show, someone at the Milliken Gallery had said to him: “Why can’t you be like Keith Haring—full of fun?” David’s work was full of sex and violence—politics expressed at the level of the body. He painted distress. Soldiers and bombers. Falling buildings and junkies. His images had the tension of some niceness opened up to its ruined heart. In the montage style he began to develop, David would expose the Real Deal under the artifacts—wars and rumors of wars, industrial wastelands, mythological beasts, and the evolutionary spectrum from dinosaur to humanity’s rough beast.

  The Civilian Warfare show opened on June 4, 1983—the day of the police raid on Pier 34.

  Between the end of 1982 and the end of ’83, David had three one-man shows at three galleries—Milliken, Civilian, and Hal Bromm—while also participating in fourteen group exhibitions, not including the Ward Line Pier Project. In the context of the eighties art boom, this was not so unusual. Artists like Basquiat, Haring, and Schnabel were selling work as fast as they could crank it out. Still, after years of struggle, David was suddenly attracting attention. He would be written about now. He would become a public figure.

  This brought him up against one of the central dilemmas in his life: How much could he say? What could he reveal?

  Hujar always said that an artist should have an artificial biography. As Vince Aletti explained, Hujar thought such factoids did not matter. Because who really cared? “So he had fun often just making up some kind of slightly believable but odd early history for himself. Each bio was slightly different.” On the CV he prepared for his last show, for example, Hujar said that he’d been born in Cairo.

  This was also an era when many in the art world—Lydia Lunch, Gracie Mansion, Sur Rodney Sur—played with their identities or flat out reinvented themselves. But there’s a light, jokey touch to Hujar’s fakery, and a kind of cheekiness to the name changes, while David was engaged in creating camouflage. He’d entered a world where he felt like an alien, acutely aware of being uneducated and working class. He told me he’d felt intimidated at Milliken. He wasn’t his own idea of what an artist should be. He thought his work at this point was raw and rudimentary. Hujar pushed him to show it anyway.

  David began to create an image for public consumption that wasn’t quite who he really was. He simplified his story. He took real events and moved them back in time to make them more terrible. He began crafting this persona right from the first show at Milliken. He would be the street kid, the abused child. A draft of the press release from the Milliken gallery states that David’s visual language is informed by world events, but that this is filtered through “his own survival experience, which includes his leaving home and going out on [sic] the world alone at the age of nine.” The biographical statement on page two says he came to New York at nine and left home a year later. He revised the age he left for the streets in later versions. But, while David actually moved to Manhattan when he was eleven, he always said he was nine—including in sworn testimony given in U.S. Distri
ct Court in 1990 when he sued the American Family Association.

  David told me that he’d discussed hustling early on because it would have helped him when he was younger to know that someone else in his world shared his frame of reference. But then he said, “There was an element of mythmaking, which I can’t say I’m not responsible for. Also I think [the hustling story] was used by some people to hit me over the head and by others to find me very attractive on some level.” There’s nothing in Milliken’s press release about hustling. Or Civilian’s. David was unusual in speaking about it at all. Early in the eighties, artists who had worked in any part of the sex industry were just beginning to admit it or use it as subject matter, and women (like Diane Torr with “Go-Go Girls Seize Control,” 1981) led the way.

  Keith Davis interviewed David, probably in spring ’83, because as the tape begins, they’re discussing work that ended up in the June show at Civilian. (“Ol’ Romulus and Remie,” David says. “Looks good.”) Keith wanted to help David in any way he could, and he’d wangled some kind of interview assignment. It never appeared in print, but Keith tells him, “They want me to ask you questions about symbols in your work. The kind of information I want to get at is what aspects of your life experience indicate how authentic your images are.”

  This was the first interview David ever did. Several minutes in, he tells a couple of—well, they have to be jokes, but Keith doesn’t take them that way. First, David says he used to hitch into New York City to ride “the elevated” in second grade. An incredulous Keith replies, “Second grade?” Then David tells him he started hustling in third grade. “This bunch of farmers that had a club down at the end of this wheat field near my block used to pay me to jump out of birthday cakes, get it on with half the farmers. Who were widowers, because their wives had died chopping down twenty-seven truckloads of hay every day.” That one is rather perversely funny, but Keith doesn’t laugh. He just says, “Third grade?” Yes, and Bob Dylan began traveling with a carnival at the age of thirteen (as he used to tell interviewers). David never told these whoppers again.

  Keith recorded a couple of hours of conversation, David talking about Times Square, about being a kid on the lam, telling many of the same stories he would tell other interviewers over the years, including me. He has the same affect with Keith that he has in the Biographical Dateline printed in the Tongues of Flame catalog. Hard-bitten. Blasé. As if he’d been through hell and he didn’t care. He tells Keith he left home at age nine or ten. But when Keith asks why, he ducks the question. He starts talking about how his brother ended up in a boys’ home. As for his mother, he says, “There were times that I’d just walk out of the house for the night, and my mother would be screaming her head off for something, and I’d just say whatever I said and just take off and end up somewhere down around Times Square getting picked up by some guy.” (That could have happened—when he was fifteen or sixteen, not nine or ten.) He does not say much else about life at the Hells Kitchen apartment except that home was unstable. That’s what he would reveal to a good friend. It’s more than most interviewers got.

  In August, he met with Robert Pincus-Witten for an Arts magazine article. The writer found David to be “diffident and taciturn” and wondered “how much of his uneasy manner consciously plays to a myth in formation.” That same day, Pincus-Witten also visited artist Stephen Frailey, whom he described, by way of contrast, as a “privileged boy at his ease.” Still, he was unsure what to make of David and his evasions. “To build a sociology around him is awkward—to infer it, easy—as the few facts offered up are of such high profile,” Pincus-Witten wrote. “I don’t for a moment doubt them, though scads are glossed. He’s been on his own since childhood, rejected by a New Jersey family at nine. From what little he says (that’s a problem: he hints, not to be flirtatious, but to maintain distance), he had no use for them and they apparently had even less for him. Survival was dependent on itinerancy and vagabondage.… A reasonable model is Genet.”

  I think there’s a simple explanation for David’s “mythology.” He did not want to talk about living family members. It was too complicated and too painful. Instead, he followed the outline he’d established in the unfinished “street novel” he’d written in Paris. Discuss the brutal father, now conveniently dead, and go directly to Times Square. In the novel, he’s a runaway with no siblings and a mother who’s disappeared, while the dad he flees is clearly modeled on his own.

  Coincidently, by the time David did these first solo shows and first interviews, he was completely out of touch with everyone in his family, including his sister. Unknown to him, Pat had remarried that year and moved. He would visit Paris in early ’84 and not be able to find her. David had not seen his brother, Steven, since their father’s funeral in ’76. He’d called his half-brother, Pete, one night from the Peppermint Lounge, just to tell him how much he hated the job. That was the first time Pete had heard from David in years, and they would have no further contact until late in 1991.

  Susan Gauthier, who still saw David occasionally, was one of the first people David had ever opened up to about his past, and probably one of the few to get the real story. Hustling? Yes, but not till his teen years. “He put out there what he wanted people to believe, and he wanted to be something of an enigma,” Gauthier said. “He had fun with it. He really didn’t want people to know who he was. So he was very aware of what he was doing. He wanted to be a puzzle that nobody could figure out.”

  By the end of his life, David had a reputation as someone who would speak out and hold nothing back. When it came to politics—absolutely. I think people also had the impression that he was telling “everything” because he spoke so freely about sex. But sex was easy for him to talk about, and it wasn’t everything. He never told everything.

  Artist James Romberger popped into the Civilian Warfare storefront to show his drawings to Dean Savard, probably in the fall of ’83. Savard wasn’t there. But down on the floor was someone who looked like a lumberjack: David in a flannel shirt, hacking at a log with a hatchet. David put down the totem-in-progress and said, “I’ll look at your work.” He liked Romberger’s stuff. He thought Civilian should show it. He’d mention it to Savard. James Romberger and David were destined to work together later in various ways. But the point here is that David took an almost proprietary interest in Civilian Warfare. Its funky confines felt like home, and he wanted the place to succeed.

  Alan Barrows (left) and Dean Savard outside Civilian Warfare Gallery on East Eleventh Street. Barrows has a “friendly cow” patch on his sweater and one of David’s burning house stencils is visible on the window. The sculpture is by Greer Lankton. The gallery’s sign includes three stencils of Hujar. (Photograph by Marion Scemama)

  He and Keith Davis made a distinctive sign for the exterior of the storefront—no name, but three squares, each with a stencil of Hujar. David had also brought Marisa Cardinale to the gallery in early ’83 and told Savard to hire her.

  Marisa had been working at the Second Stage Theater as “assistant to the assistant to the assistant stage manager,” as she put it. She knew David from the Kiev, a cheap Ukrainian restaurant on Second Avenue where she always seemed to run into some combination of him, Hujar, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Apparently David just had a feeling about her: This person is competent; this person is responsible. Marisa had an art history degree but no gallery experience, and she admitted to being a terrible typist. At Civilian, that would not matter. They had no typewriter. Savard wrote everything out by hand on the Civilian Warfare stationery they made at the Xerox shop.

  The gallery also had no record-keeping system, and when Marisa started, Savard was still living there. Marisa said that David brought her in because “they had started to make some money, and it was all just sort of disappearing.” David was already worried about getting paid.

  It was an era when things could be tried, and there was space for the tryout. So photographer Allen Frame and multimedia artist Kirsten Bates decided to form
a theater company called Turmoil and began looking for material. Bill Rice suggested that they look at David’s Sounds in the Distance.

  Rice had been acquainted with David for years, and he thought the monologues “stunning.” Rice was a painter and an actor, a sort of underground renaissance man. A few years older than Hujar, he’d somehow found his niche in the so-called Blank Generation. He began acting in no-wave films when he was almost fifty, working with Scott and Beth B, Amos Poe, and Jim Jarmusch. He would soon find his way, with David, into Richard Kern’s Cinema of Transgression. Onstage he appeared in plays by downtown luminaries like John Jesurun, Jim Neu, and Gary Indiana. Meanwhile, he was in the midst of compiling some two thousand pages of notes on Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, determined to prove that it was originally based on men. For his day job, he worked as a researcher on a scholarly study of Gertrude Stein. By 1983, he was one of about three tenants left in a building at 13 East Third Street, across from the men’s shelter, and he’d opened his backyard to underground theater by writers like Indiana. That summer, Rice decided to open his “garden” again, and Turmoil hoped to work there.

  When Bates approached David for permission to use Sounds in the Distance, he seemed, she said “taken aback.” By the time he met Frame, he’d apparently gotten used to the idea. Frame said, “David was very excited about having us adapt it but wanted to be hands-off. He hadn’t had any experience in theater.” Bates and Frame worked together to adapt and direct eight of the monologues. They called it Turmoil in the Garden. David could barely stand to watch. He got Kern to come with him and they crawled into an abandoned building near Rice’s backyard and watched from a fire escape. Apparently that got him past his embarrassment, since he came twice more and sat in the audience. Frame said he seemed “captivated.”