Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  They began working on a script for a Super 8 film to be called Taste of the Black Earth. Like all of David’s subsequent scripts, it’s a list of images: a Tuileries statue appearing on a Metro track, a Pont Neuf guide boat at night, a face covered in bandages that slowly unravel. Though the project was never finished, they shot some footage, which David eventually gave to Gary, who threw it away. He couldn’t recall their overarching idea but remembered that David found an odd abandoned winery in a remote neighborhood and wanted to paint on the walls there, then film some scenario. Judging from David’s contact sheets, they also visited demolition sites, rail yards, meat markets, and stores selling odd curios.

  In David’s version of what happened in Paris, which he published in the East Village Eye nearly two years later, he doesn’t mention the film but says that after several days, Gary became hysterical and threatened to kill himself if David didn’t return his feelings.

  Gary tells it differently, but on January 25, he did send David a letter of apology. “I’ve treated you very shabbily,” he wrote. “Almost everything I said to you yesterday was horrible and manipulative and cruel. If you can forgive me it would make a great deal of difference to me.”

  Asked what he was apologizing for, Gary said, “Probably something utterly trivial.” He did not want to see a copy of the letter to refresh a painful recollection.

  “Our relationship in Paris was really depressing,” he said. “[David] would call in the morning and ask me to meet him for breakfast. We always went to the Café de Flore, and then as the day went on, he would become more and more silent and would yawn. And it was almost like I could feel that he hated being around me, and I couldn’t really understand why we were spending all day and into the evening together. The best I could figure out is that I spoke French better than he did, and he just needed somebody to negotiate little practical realities for him.” Eventually, Gary left for the Berlin Film Festival.

  David went back to his journal writing during this trip, though he stopped again as soon as he returned to New York. He made sketches and recorded dreams, writing nothing about Gary except for one possible enigmatic appearance in a dream. Somebody calls, sounding upset, and tells David, “You have just one minute.” David thinks it’s Gary and demands, “Gary? Answer me!” But there’s no answer.

  The images that stand out in the rest of the dreams have to do with hiding and with shame: In one, he’s just walked on the moon, giddy with joy, and is told he can go back. But he worries, “Will they allow me on the moon if they realize who I am completely?”

  13 PRESSURE POINT

  Those of us who lived among the alphabet avenues in the 1980s grew accustomed to hearing a certain refrain: “Works! Works! Works!” The drug paraphernalia could be rented for just a couple of dollars, and needles littered the sidewalks and gutters. Neighbors complained about all the dealers at the corner. You had to elbow your way through the crowd in broad daylight and would be offered five kinds of heroin on the way to the grocery store. “That corner”—Second Street and Avenue B—“no longer belongs to the city of New York,” someone from a group of Loisaida block associations told the New York Times in the summer of 1983.

  Heroin was a social drug in the eighties, and Alphabet City was its round-the-clock supermarket—or, as the police called it, “the retail drug capital of America.” Finally it was easy to find a taxi, people joked, what with so many cabbing in from elsewhere to buy drugs. David had described one kind of transaction—the cement block pulled from a sealed-up door and a hand reaching out. It could be that open, with a line of buyers down the street. But often the dealers hammered some cavelike entrance into a sealed building and allowed customers inside to line up on a rickety stairway lit with votive candles. Upstairs something would usually be rigged at a door or landing to keep buyer and seller from actually seeing each other. Or, if the stairway was gone, someone lowered a bucket for the money, counted it, then lowered the bucket back down with product. Millions of dollars were changing hands.

  To an outsider like me—a non-drug user—this was a world of gothic scenery. I’d see ruined buildings down the street a-flicker with candles every night. These were the forbidding cryptlike shooting galleries. Often I saw users on the street, dipping and swaying like cobras. One day I walked out to see someone who’d ODed sprawled on the sidewalk, surrounded by a crowd debating whether he was dead or alive. He’d turned blue. Just then, an ambulance rolled up and the EMTs calmly revived the guy. As if they did it every day, and they probably did.

  The most unexpected feature was the din, at least in summer. One night I visited a friend who lived across from one shooting gallery and next to another on East Third. We could barely hear each other over the screams from the street: “Works!” when the coast was clear, or “Bajando!” (“It’s coming down”) when cops were near. Cars with out-of-state plates were lined up as if headed through a drive-in bank.

  Community groups had been clamoring for more cops for years, and occasionally they’d get them—standing on corners along Avenue A, when everyone knew the action was on Avenue B and beyond. Certainly the police made arrests. Sometimes there’d be a whole line of perps standing against some abandoned building with their hands up. But they’d all be back the next day. So, when the NYPD began Operation Pressure Point in January 1984, I did not expect much to change. But this would prove to be more than just another sweep. Operation Pressure Point lasted for a couple of years. By January 1986, the NYPD had made 17,000 arrests in the neighborhood, more than 5,200 of them for felonies, while seizing 160,000 packages of heroin. The courts couldn’t even keep pace. New U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Rudolph Giuliani, stepped in to prosecute low-level street dealers one day a week in federal court, where they got longer sentences than they would have in the state courts.

  Why did law enforcement suddenly get so serious? As the operation began to squeeze dealers out, longtime neighborhood resident Allen Ginsberg told the East Village Eye: “It’s seemed to me to be the policy for the last 20 years to destroy the community of the Lower East Side. Apparently the supply of junk has been manipulated by the powers that be to drive the poor out of the neighborhood: use the junk population to burn down the area. The deed is done.” That sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it jibed with what I witnessed.

  When I lived between Avenues C and D in the seventies, I was aware of some drug dealing, but it was nothing like the open-air drug bazaar of the early eighties. Everyone I knew who’d been flushed out of Loisaida because of drugs—because they couldn’t take one more break-in or mugging—fell into the “working poor” category: struggling artists or Puerto Rican families. In the early 1980s, the East Village lay at the cutting edge of the gentrification process.

  After David returned from Europe at the end of February 1984, he visited the art piers with a French photographer, Marion Scemama. This was the beginning of a passionate friendship that lasted for seven years—but a relationship of such ups and downs that for several of those years they were not on speaking terms. They went to the piers so Marion could photograph David for a French-language magazine, ICI New York. David took her both to Pier 34, which she’d visited the previous summer with so many others, and to Pier 28, which few people had seen. (The derelict structures were still six or seven months away from demolition.) Marion had been active in left-wing politics in Paris, and they got to talking about the Red Army Faction, the West German terrorists sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. During this conversation, Marion felt something click between her and David.

  A couple of weeks later, Dean Savard called her to ask if she could photograph David for his next Civilian show. They were doing a poster, and David had suggested hiring her. Feeling too shy to go alone, Marion asked her friend Brigitte Engler to accompany her to the tiny Fourth Street apartment where David now lived alone. (Tom Cochran had moved out, probably at the end of ’83.) The central room, the kitchen, was filled with new sculpture. Plaster heads. Not ye
t painted. David was using the oven to dry some of them. Marion photographed him seated among the heads, wearing shades and puffing on a cigarette, the essence of boho cool. Then they smoked pot and talked until two in the morning. From that point on, David called Marion nearly every day. They’d meet for breakfast and talk for hours over coffee after coffee.

  Beginning with Kiki Smith—or maybe with Peeka Trenkle and Susan Gauthier—David had relationships with certain women that were very intense but never sexual. Marion filled that slot now that he and Kiki had retreated from each other a bit. He was still seething over her comment that she wasn’t going to have children with him, while she’d begun to feel that it wasn’t good for her emotionally to be, as she put it, “so deeply invested” in a relationship with a gay man. Nor did she identify with the aesthetics of the East Village or want to be part of that scene.

  Marion Scemama in 1984. (Photograph © Andreas Sterzing)

  At the time of my interviews with David in 1990, he and Marion were in one of their “up” phases. He explained that they had a “friendship that was beyond friendship,” that when they met “we were both dealing with a lot of dark stuff, working out things from our pasts.” He thought she had an interesting mind.

  Marion introduced David to Catherine Texier and Joel Rose, who’d just started their insanely labor-intensive Lower East Side fiction magazine, Between C & D. The publication was actually a fanfold computer printout sealed in a ziplock bag with handmade East Village art on each cover. (Price: four dollars.) For their second issue, released in summer 1984, they accepted a piece David wrote about his hustling days, “Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds.”

  Even though the neighborhood galleries embraced everything from graffiti (at Fun, for example) to conceptualism (at Nature Morte, for example), I knew what people meant by an East Village “look”—a kind of cartoony figuration, painted quickly, probably meant to register quickly, often helped to that end by simple shocking imagery. By that standard, the quintessential East Village artist was Rick Prol, whose paintings all featured skinny men in business suits with knives stuck through their necks, or some variation on that theme. Prol also curated one of the quintessential East Village group shows, “Underdog” at East Seventh Street Gallery, which included David’s work. The same issue of the Eye that covered the NYPD’s Operation Pressure Point also carried interviews with Prol and another artist Mark Kostabi. They made it clear that a deep cynicism had already infected the scene.

  Prol said he’d gone through art school hearing that painting was dead, but “then painting found itself again by letting itself be stupid.” As for curating, artists were willing to do anything, Prol declared. “You give them a group show called ‘Shit in a Road’ and they’d paint pictures for it.”

  But Prol’s was the voice of innocence compared with Mark Kostabi, who liked to say that his middle name was “Et.” (“Mark-et.” Nudge, nudge.) He told the Eye: “Paintings are doorways into collectors’ homes.” He was still a few years away from opening his own version of Warhol’s Factory, Kostabi World, where assistants would manufacture his work for him—a practical approach for someone who regarded his paintings as mere “product.” Kostabi would later claim to be a satirist. And maybe he was. In August 1985, while a gaggle of East Village artists painted a mural at the Palladium nightclub, Kostabi threw fifty bucks in singles out over the dance floor and watched people dive for dollars. The problem was that Kostabi’s persona rather overwhelmed his actual artwork. A documentary on him that appeared in 2010 was titled Con Artist.

  By March ’84, some thirty galleries had opened. At Fun, Patti Astor and Bill Stelling had taken to wearing sweatshirts that read “The Original and Still the Best.” Nicolas Moufarrege, that early enthusiast, published a piece called “The Year After” in Flash Art that summer. The key word was now deal, he reported, when last year it had been show. “The underground Bohemia of last year is now an all-out new establishment with all the intrigues that this engenders,” he wrote. While he thought there were good artists at work, “there are too many fastly painted pieces; neo-expressionism and ‘bad painting’ have made it easy for many to pick up the figurative brush.” He hoped this did not signal “the beginning of an era of ‘souvenir’ art and tourist boutiques.”

  Nowhere was the blatant commercialism of the scene embraced more openly than in a now-classic piece by Carlo McCormick and Walter Robinson that appeared in Art in America that summer. “Slouching Towards Avenue D” cheerfully described the East Village as a “marketing concept” suited to “the Reagan zeitgeist.” The neighborhood itself, with its poverty, drugs, burnt-out buildings and crime, they called “an adventurous avant-garde setting of considerable cachet.” I found this statement shocking, but they were also naming something real. Tour buses would soon arrive to show the curious-but-timid what the artists had wrought amid the rubble. Art in America allotted twenty-eight pages to a celebration of the scene’s history and artists. Then, two pages went to Craig Owens for his retort: “The Problem with Puerilism.” In Owens’s view, the East Village was “an economic, rather than esthetic, development.” But had anyone pretended otherwise? He decried the appropriation of “subcultural productions” (graffiti, cartooning). Was this an East Village problem? He criticized the scene as a “simulacrum” of bohemia. But it felt real to me.

  What can be seen in hindsight was that reality and hype were tumbling over each other so quickly that both reactions were possible. The whole concept of marginality was in flux here. The media spotlight pushed cultural change at such a velocity that bohemians barely had a chance to stew in their legendary juices before someone was there trying to decide if they were the Next Big Thing.

  On April 23, 1984, Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler appeared in Washington with Dr. Robert Gallo to announce that he had found the virus that causes AIDS. This should have been good news. Instead it marked one more spot where progress had snagged. French scientists at the Pasteur Institute had actually isolated the virus almost a full year earlier. In other words, a couple of months before the death of Klaus Nomi. Not that it would have helped Nomi. There were no treatments. But the news that this was an infectious disease might have been useful to know, even if no one could say for sure how it was transmitted.

  Gallo had shown in 1980 that a retrovirus he called HTLV caused a rare form of leukemia. His hypothesis was that a related retrovirus caused AIDS. The Pasteur Institute scientists sent Gallo samples of their retrovirus, which they called LAV, in July ’83 and again in September, to establish that it was not a leukemia virus. Gallo announced at the end of that year that he’d discovered the cause of AIDS: HTLV-III. The assistant secretary for health asked him not to make the finding public just yet. It was an election year and credit for the discovery was to go to the Reagan administration, to the president who would not even utter the word “AIDS.”

  By March 1984, however, the Centers for Disease Control had proven that HTLV-III and LAV were one and the same. The CDC director let the news slip in a March 28 interview with the New York Native: The AIDS virus had been discovered—by the French. The New York Times picked up on that and ran a story on April 22. Which forced Heckler and Gallo to make their announcement the next day.

  Ultimately, the French scientists got the Nobel Prize in Medicine, while it was Gallo who demonstrated that the virus first isolated at the Pasteur Institute is the virus that causes AIDS. So everyone contributed, but the controversy over credit had a negative impact on research. As Randy Shilts pointed out in And the Band Played On, scientists working internationally on AIDS were forced to take sides, and certain good virologists opted out to avoid the politicking. Meanwhile, it was time to develop an antibody test, and while Gallo sent samples of the virus to pharmaceutical companies, he did not send any to the CDC until the end of 1984 because the agency had leaked news of the discovery and he saw it as allied with the French.

  In April 1984, however, very few people understood the significance of these
events or the magnitude of the crisis about to engulf them. The issue of the Native that broke the story on the virus did not even give it a cover line. It was just one more theory at that point. More coverage went to the possible closure of the bathhouses.

  On April 15, 1984, Mike Bidlo re-created Warhol’s Factory in the attic at P.S. 1.

  Bidlo appeared as Warhol and spent the evening making silk-screen prints of “Marilyn” to give out gratis. Silver foil covered the walls. Naturally, the not-quite-Velvet Underground performed. Keiko Bonk—a painter, musician, and friend of David’s—put the band together and played Nico. Julie Hair was John Cale while David played Lou Reed and sang a creditable rendition of “Heroin.” He also dropped acid for the first time in his life. Dean Savard wafted through the crowd dressed as Edie Sedgwick. Rhonda Zwillinger appeared as Valerie Solanas. Many who’d been there commented later on the crush and the rhythmic bouncing on the floor—remembered indelibly because they thought it was going to collapse.

  That month David was engaged in finishing work for his show at Civilian. He had made twenty-three plaster heads with, as he put it, “a couple of extras that were separated from the series,” which he called Metamorphosis. They looked like the alien heads he’d started to include in a few paintings. No two were alike. A few were covered with maps or parts of maps, others were painted, the colors of the eyes changing “according to what colors mean spiritually,” he said. Then halfway through the progression, the heads showed signs of distress: bandages, blood, black eyes, incineration, and finally one “fell off the shelf.” A twenty-fourth head sat on the floor in a doctor’s bag, an old one. He said the piece was about the evolution of consciousness. With perhaps the attendant consequences. He’d been thinking, twenty-three genes in a chromosome; a twenty-fourth causes mongoloidism. (That was also the reasoning behind the story that was about to appear in Between C & D, “Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds.”) Some of the individual heads were photographed, but the piece as a whole was never documented. David threw one of the “extra” heads into the Hudson as a sort of offering.