Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Given the honor of being last performer, Ethyl Eichelberger rushed over from the Pyramid Club, where he had a job dancing on the bar. I happened to be waiting outside when Ethyl came striding down Eighth Street at three forty-five in the morning in a long green robe, a big wig, yellow hose, a yellow rose tucked between his falsies, and elbow-length red gloves, carrying an accordion case. Ethyl began the swan songs around four: “Will you remember my name tomorrow? Will you remember my trials, my tears, and my sorrow?”

  AIDS, it was said, now had a human face. Rock Hudson announced from Paris late in July that he was undergoing treatment for the illness. He died in October.

  The media was also following the struggles of Ryan White, a thirteen-year-old hemophiliac with AIDS who wanted the right to attend school. On his first day of class, he was allowed only to listen in via telephone.

  In September, the Centers for Disease Control started recommending condom use, at least for heterosexuals, adding the caveat that “their efficacy in reducing transmission has not yet been proven.”

  At the end of the year, however, the CDC stopped all funding for AIDS education. As Randy Shilts reported, conservatives in the White House decided that “the government should not be in the business of telling homosexuals how to have sodomy.”

  In September 1985, David moved into an apartment at 225 East Second Street between Avenues B and C. Tommy Turner helped him carry the baby elephant skeleton over from Keith’s loft on Suffolk Street. They covered it with a sheet because David didn’t want his new neighbors to get odd ideas about him. “So he’s trying to be real nonchalant,” Turner said, “and all these people in the street are going, ‘mooooo, mooooo.’ ”

  Despite the ongoing machinations of Operation Pressure Point, this was still basically the epicenter of the world heroin trade. “It was like Needle Park,” said artist Jane Bauman. “The front door was always broken, and the mailboxes had no locks on them. There was always trash in—I hesitate to call it a lobby. There were lots of junkies hanging out. Lots of panhandlers. It was really crummy, but it seemed like that’s how we were all living.” David never even got mail at this address apart from his phone and electric bills. Bank statements, for example, still went to Keith’s place. (When he left town to drive across the country, David had had all his mail forwarded to Keith’s.) On the bright side, David now had about twice as much space as he’d had on Fourth Street. Bauman remembered paint peeling off the walls, and David’s clutter: “Papier-mâché, stencils, spray cans rolling around on the floor, and a feeling of intense artistic activity amidst all this derelict, run-down, shabby falling-apartness.”

  That fall David found another way to talk, if obliquely, about his childhood when he began writing a script with Tommy Turner based on the infamous “satanic teen,” Ricky Kasso—a drug-abusing heavy metal fan and stone-cold murderer. In June 1984, Kasso killed an acquaintance, repeatedly stabbing him and gouging his eyes out. Kasso did this in front of witnesses, apparently while tripping, then bragged about it, and for the next two weeks, he took other teens into the woods near his Long Island home to view the decomposing corpse. Finally one girl called the police. Kasso hung himself in jail. He was seventeen.

  The tragedy was a tabloid sensation, inspiring several movies (notably River’s Edge) and heated commentary. Why hadn’t any of the kids “told” sooner? Did heavy metal music have satanic content? Could it lead to suicide?

  “Me and Montana were cracking up about the articles,” Turner said. (Montana Hewson was the “turkey-necked” guy David met, with Kern, at the Peppermint Lounge.) Turner said he would sometimes come home from work to find that Montana had pinned a “satanic teen” piece from the Post or Daily News to his door. Then Turner began discussing the case with David. In April 1985, Kasso’s alleged accomplice went on trial. He was acquitted, but for several weeks the story was back in the news every day.

  Here was another suburban kid who’d run away from a violent father and indifferent mother, who slept in parks and friends’ houses, but who didn’t have David’s inner resources. Kasso had been arrested for grave robbing, he ingested hallucinogens every day, he always carried knives, and he claimed he could communicate with the devil. His parents tried to have him committed. David and Turner saw Kasso as the ultimate aimless, alienated kid, and both could identify with that to a certain extent.

  But there was more to it for David. He’d begun collecting articles about murderous children, especially those who’d killed their families. (Kasso had reportedly threatened his own sisters.) Now that David had allowed his rage over his childhood to surface, he wondered, Why hadn’t he, or somebody, picked up one of his father’s guns and shot him? Why hadn’t he fought back?

  Turner said that once they’d decided to make the film, David wanted to include material based on “friends who had strange problems growing up.” Which sounds like the Kern film. But here the “strange problems” would be given to Kasso’s friends. The finished script followed the actual case in many respects. David and Turner even drove out to Kasso’s hometown to interview teenagers at a local park mentioned as a hangout in some of the news accounts. Their screenplay, however, added the devil as a substitute father figure and carried on into the afterlife. Kasso had promised to follow his victim to hell.

  They wrote the treatment at David’s Second Street apartment in three nighttime sessions, blasting Black Sabbath for inspiration. Turner remembers Steve Brown joining them for at least two nights, before declaring the project “fucked up” and “the devil’s work.” Steve was so upset he went to Hujar to discuss it, and Hujar advised him to just tell David how he felt, not to worry about seeming “uptight” or “Catholic.” Steve never did acknowledge working on the screenplay. He later told an interviewer that he and David fought over the film after he heard about Caven Point. That was one of David’s favorite abandoned industrial sites, in New Jersey along the Hudson. David and Turner went there location scouting, since it had so much they could potentially use: a swamp, junked cars, a deserted Coast Guard post, and a cemetery. But walking in, they saw a life-size doll in a white dress hanging from an old bridge, a noose around her neck. Steve was spooked when he heard about this. He told David it was a sign that the film would bring evil into the world. He told Doughton, “Fuck this. Tommy’s just into death, death, death. He’s into shooting up drugs, and David is too, and I’m out of here.”

  David had begun spending time with Karen Finley. Maybe three times a week, he’d show up at her apartment on East Third Street at seven A.M. with coffee. Sometimes they would go out for breakfast. Sometimes they would drive out of town to a swamp or a forest. But mostly, they talked. David knew Finley’s performance work from the East Village clubs. In those raw early monologues, she spoke without euphemism about rape, incest, abandonment, brutality, emotional damage, and other subjects for which there are no polite words. She exposed the victimizer’s monstrous impulses; she validated horrors the victim could barely speak about. As Finley once said, “There are a lot of people walking around in pain from something that happened to them when they were seven, and now they’re forty-two years old and they carry it with them every day. Somehow I bring that pain up to a conscious level. I think that’s one of my jobs.”

  Finley observed that David liked the emotions her work brought out in him. And at this point in his life, when he felt so skinless, he opened up to her about his most painful secrets. He told her that he hadn’t just been beaten by his father; he’d been molested. Finley did not ask him for details, and he didn’t go into them. Then he told Finley what had happened with his mother after his siblings left home. Though it may well have been inadvertent on her part, David perceived her to be sexually provocative. She occasionally walked around in see-through negligees, and once she came to the door naked. He did not say that his mother molested him or even touched him, but as he saw it, she hadn’t maintained the boundaries women usually keep with a teenage son. This had created confusion and anxiety. It’s what may
have led him to begin spending nights on rooftops and in parks, and then, in stranger’s hotel rooms.

  He talked to Finley about his street life, his sadness, his history of relationships, his queerness but also his feelings for women, which were sometimes sexual. David had begun to question his whole identity. He told Finley he wondered if the different abuses he’d suffered with each parent had turned him into a queer. In the eighties, homosexuality was still regarded as a psychological deviation. As People magazine observed after a certain sex symbol had been diagnosed with AIDS: “In some parts of Rock Hudson’s America it is still a fairly radical proposition that someone can be both good and gay.” Finley recalled, “David was questioning whether he could be in a relationship with a woman. Was it possible that part of him didn’t develop?”

  Mostly, Finley just listened. “I think he was talking things out with himself,” she said. “What is a relationship? What is sexuality?” Though she wondered at first why David needed to tell her these things, she concluded, “It’s comforting to talk to someone who isn’t shocked, who doesn’t feel pity.” He also tried to start arguments with her, but she didn’t engage.

  “I did not have a childhood like David’s by any means,” she said, “but I had the trauma of suicide and mental illness in my family, and I had the idea of taking that energy and making it transgressive, into an artwork. We both felt that coming to the East Village and creating work came out of a different need than it did for other artists, like if we weren’t creating the work, we would be going crazy.”

  David did not want to be seen as a victim, said Finley. “We would have conversations about that. How do you reveal this information? What do you do with it? How do we take the experiences we’ve had and transform them into good? Or how can you transform pain into compassion? How do we transform it into creativity?”

  “He was searching for what was him,” she said, “to separate that from what was put upon him.”

  David had told these same secrets to his old friend Susan Gauthier back in the seventies, and he’d told his sister, who found it all very hard to believe. If he did not divulge these stories about his mother to anyone else in his life, he still had a need to vent about her in a more general way.

  Nan Goldin ran into David one day in 1985 at the gas station on Fourth and Bowery. After he filled his tank, he offered her a ride. Nan had met David years earlier through Kiki Smith, and she’d appeared in the first incarnation of Sounds in the Distance at Bill Rice’s garden, but that day in the car was the first time they’d had a conversation.

  “He just let forth and started to talk about himself and his life and his mother,” Nan said. “He said he hated her. He passionately hated her and blamed her for so many things, like not coming to look for him when he was stolen by his father.

  “That meeting in the car was very, very intense for me. But then we would meet for breakfast and he would talk to me about his life, and I’d go over to his house sometimes. His anger wasn’t just at his mother and his past, although that was vehement, and he talked about it often. There’s almost no one he didn’t get furious at. And that rage was all-consuming.”

  Nan also knew Hujar, whom she regarded as a great influence and teacher. She observed that the only relationship David had that didn’t turn into rage was his relationship with Hujar.

  Around the time Carlo McCormick wrote “East Village R.I.P.”—August or September 1985—he received an invitation to curate yet another East Village show, this one at Neapolitan Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. His immediate reaction was “forget it, this is gross now,” but he told them he’d do it if it could be an installation. He’d bring the artists. So Carlo recruited the painters Luis Frangella, David West, Christof Kohlhofer, Marilyn Minter, James Romberger, Marguerite Van Cook, David Wojnarowicz, and his own partner, the experimental filmmaker Tessa Hughes-Freeland. She documented the weekend. “And we just destroyed the space,” said Carlo.

  The idea was that the artists would spend the weekend working in teams, painting directly on the wall. Marguerite described the gallery as pristine, with stained glass in the balcony and polished wood floors. But the setup was strange. “They didn’t feed us, just put cases of beer and liquor in the middle of the room,” Marguerite said. For lodging, the artists had a big empty mansion with no beds. In fact, no furniture of any kind. James and Marguerite had come with their four-month-old son. They put a rug down in the middle of the gallery and people took turns playing with him.

  David West thought maybe some people slept the first night, adding “I don’t think they even had blankets for us. I mean, they were afraid of us. They thought we were just freaks.” He remembered the case of beer being handed over when they left. “Because they just couldn’t wait for us to be out of there.”

  Carlo provided the key ingredient, handing out hits of acid. Marilyn Minter, just out of rehab with eighteen days clean and sober for the first time in ten years, was the only one who abstained. She spent the weekend eating candy. Minter and Christof Kohlhofer worked together with an overhead projector, and so wanted the lights dimmed, which annoyed some of the others. But that was a minor irritant compared with the awful accommodations. No one remembers sleeping the second night.

  Marguerite recalled Luis painting with his usual facility, such elegance, making beautiful marks, teamed up with David, “a pragmatic painter … and so damn in-your-face,” using what Marguerite called “revolting colors.” (For one thing, he used the cheapest of cheap paints.) The existing documentation shows some rather monstrous imagery. David wrote a description in what seems a stray page of journal writing: “I painted this six foot decapitated head spewing guts and hellish material from its screaming mouth oh shit acid kickin’ in what’s this brush in my hand some extension of my brain and all these demon things springing out like cartoon animation.” James and Marguerite did a comic strip at the bottom of one wall, the actual size of a comic book page, a worried conversation in paint about what might happen to their son if the government reinstituted the draft. As James saw it, everyone else was “going crazy, just making a mess.” David West began inserting a character he called Needlenose around the space. He described this half human, half mosquito as “our little buzzing spirit of futility and malice.” David Wojnarowicz joined him in adding those to the mix. Soon everyone’s images were overlapping and West started writing, “Fuck your mother, fuck your father” over everything. As Marguerite saw it, West’s slogans and Luis’s “ornamental threads of continuity” held the disparate imagery together.

  Back home, these artists (with Keiko Bonk replacing Minter) dubbed themselves the Wrecking Crew and did two more shows where they’d drop acid and paint around the clock at James and Marguerite’s Ground Zero Gallery. They didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of these shows or if anyone even saw them. James described them as “purely an outpouring of the id.” But in Richmond, where it began, they probably did the most actual “wrecking,” spilling paint on the beautiful floor and drawing on the walls with pencils, felt tips, and spray paint, “invasive materials you’re going to have a hard time getting rid of,” as Marguerite put it. James suggested that it might have been revenge for the way they’d been treated. Carlo admitted, “We were a little immature about it.”

  When Flash Art commissioned Carlo to write yet another East Village roundup, he got David to collaborate on it. They decided to feature, said Carlo, “anyone who was not making an object to sell in a gallery.” David started the piece with the image of a flashbulb bleaching the life out of a scene. “We were basically saying that the art world, so driven by money and fame, cast this blinding soul-sucking light on artists,” Carlo said, “so we were moving to the shadows where certain artists made work that was so extreme they inherently resisted such market forces.”

  Therefore, they discussed the odd drawings of Lung Leg.

  And Tommy Turner’s rat bags. He worked in a medical lab where he had access to abundant dead rats, though he had to skin them
and tan them at home. Each bag used two. The front rat kept its paws; the back rat kept its tail and had its head folded over to close the bag. Turner lined each with red silk or satin and attached a leather strap. He had also made an entire jacket of rat pelts, tails intact, by sewing their tanned hides to a jean jacket.

  David and Carlo also lauded the unknown Montana Hewson. He had covered the windows of his apartment with hundreds of photocopies of planes crashing. He had written a film script related to voodoo myths and deities, “making use of the psychological properties of light.” He had covered his lamps with construction paper chains of “spiritual figures from voodoo history … jagged frenetic energy explosions, bodies in lotus positions with enormous hard-ons.”

  They wrote about Tessa Hughes-Freeland, then just beginning her association with the Cinema of Transgression with short films like Baby Doll. (Two go-go dancers get ready for work and discuss their job, intercut with footage of their dancing feet.) Tessa happened to be married to Carlo, but David really liked her work and even bought her her first good Super 8 camera when they passed someone selling it on Avenue A.

  Naturally, the article included Kern. “His films stripped all the tedious build-up from Hollywood movies whose essential draw for the ticket-buying public was five minutes of graphic violence,” David wrote later. “His films were the five minutes of blood-letting and mayhem. He also explored the power plays embedded in the sexual act.”

  Carlo speculated that they may have also discussed Kembra Pfahler and others then working the margins. But none of this was what the Flash Art editors had in mind, and they rejected it.

  On November 6, the most ambitious production yet of Sounds in the Distance opened at Limbo, which had moved from its tiny club space on Tompkins Square to become Limbo Theater on East Ninth. This time ten actors presented twenty-two monologues, held together by a twenty-third character called the Listener—the David proxy. Molly Fowler had added slides of David’s work and music by 3 Teens Kill 4. She even thought of their guerrilla rehearsals as an homage to David. They’d “borrow” a space, using, for example, empty classrooms at John Jay College of Criminal Justice by just walking in and pretending they belonged there.