Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Tessa Hughes-Freeland remembered David being upset by the production. Tessa saw it too and thought the main problem was that the David character never conveyed any sense of why those stories had been collected in the first place. As Tessa put it, that character “didn’t really have a hunger.”

  David did not speak to Fowler but wrote her one or two letters. A reply from her was among his papers and only hints at what he’d criticized. The piece hadn’t come alive visually, she wrote in her reply to him, and if she had it to do over, she’d chop it up less and change the narrator. She also pointed out that he did not participate in the process in any way after their late-night talks.

  Fowler thinks that he then wrote her a second letter, because the main thing she remembers hearing from him is that he found the show too painful to watch because it was too real. He couldn’t take seeing those people again.

  In November ’85, the Eye published David’s second column, most of it devoted to Tommy Turner—specifically, his little-seen Super 8 film about mind control, Simonland, and his job at the lab, “cloning genes and subjecting hundreds of them a week to embarrassing amounts of dread diseases,” as David described it. And most of all, Redrum (murder spelled backward), Turner’s zine devoted to various ghastly ways to die. The one issue I happen to own (price: one dollar) has Ricky Kasso on the cover and includes David’s appropriated eleven-page Archie comic, in which Veronica suggests, “Why don’t we take acid and go kill rich pigs.” In David’s rewritten word balloons and altered pictures, Archie and friends become another band of murdering teenagers.

  Turner’s project and worldview fascinated David at this point in his life. He wrote, “It’s that thin line that interests [Turner]; what is it that separates mass murderers from people who internalize aggressive forms of anger.… There is so little that separates us.”

  Tommy Turner (Photograph by Jennifer Tull Westberg)

  He recalled the teenagers who’d picked him up in a stolen truck and threatened to kill him when he was hitchhiking back from San Francisco in 1976. David first wrote about that incident right after it happened. Then he said he just wanted to get out of it “alive enough” to tell the story, and that living through it had been a rush. He said nothing about anger. Rewriting, rethinking, refeeling the story in the autumn of ’85, he declared that, if he’d had a chance, he would have blown the kids’ brains out.

  In Turner and Kern, he’d found a couple of artists interested in exploring the ugliest, darkest aspects of human behavior. Their films created bleak worlds devoid of caring, love, or goodness.

  David was beginning to consciously connect his family’s pathology to a larger worldview. He added an anecdote in the Eye about watching a cop kick a dope-sick junkie while arresting him: “And I’m feeling rage ‘cause in the midst of my bad mood this cop is inadvertently reaching in with his tentacles and probing in ice-pick fashion some vulnerable area from years ago maybe when my dad took me down in the basement for another routine of dog chain and baseball bat beatings or when he killed my pet rabbit and made me eat it … blam … blam … blam.”

  David didn’t just identify with that junkie. If there was ever a time in his life when he was going to do more than “dabble” with heroin, this was it.

  One day, after shooting up, David’s arm turned green, and he showed it to Hujar. They were sitting in a restaurant, and Hujar told him, “I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  David gasped. “What?”

  “Don’t ever come to my house again,” Hujar said. “I won’t be friends with you if you’re going to do that.”

  David burst into tears. “I just feel so terrible about living,” he sobbed. “I feel too self-conscious about living, and it’s driving me crazy.”

  Hujar reached over and rubbed David’s arm.

  David never used heroin again.

  That fall, James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook moved their Ground Zero Gallery to 339 East Tenth Street, on the north side of Tompkins Square Park. David was one of the artists they talked to about doing a show. “I had a motto,” Marguerite said. “ ‘Go harder.’ Whoever we invited, I wanted them to present the most profound, challenging work that they could. Something outrageous. Something they’d never get a chance to do anywhere else because no one in their right mind would let them do it. I think that’s one of the reasons that David showed with us.” David decided he would do an installation at Ground Zero that incorporated Kern’s You Killed Me First.

  Kern shot the eleven-minute film over two days in mid-October. Then employed as an assistant to artist Charles Hinman, Kern had the cast come to Hinman’s loft while the artist was out of town. They needed a space that looked “grown-up,” Kern said, unlike the shabby dumps where all of them lived. There was never a script as such—everyone improvised—but Kern put together a list of scenes based on the interviews he’d done.

  David got the chance to play a version of his own father, and he recruited Karen Finley to play the mother. Lung Leg, in a filthy T-shirt and uncombed hair, had the lead role as the daughter who slaughters her family during Thanksgiving dinner. She tells them she hates them while Dad carves the turkey. Then several flashbacks show why. Her parents despise her creepy boyfriend, Cheese (Montana Hewson). They want her to be like her good-girl sister (Jessica Craig-Martin). Her dad comes home with a gun and shoots it off in the living room. Then he kills her pet rabbit and chops it up with a cleaver. The final outrage is that her mom finds her artwork (which looks very “East Village”) and rips it up. The daughter gets the dad’s gun and shoots each of them, shouting, “You killed me first!”

  Maybe David found it therapeutic to restage both a childhood trauma and a murderous fantasy. He had chopped the rabbit with such fury during filming that he left notches in the butcher block. Kern spent a full day sanding the table down and then staining it to erase the evidence.

  David tried to look at what this brought up in him when he did his next piece for the Eye. Walking home from the shoot, he wrote, “I was still shaking somewhere deep inside.” He saw his father as a master of both physical and psychic violence. He thought he’d put that behind him, but he found that psychic violence could extend its effects through time, particularly “when some other character enters your life and through unconsciousness or design manages to push some of the emotional buttons that have survived the erasure of memory. In trying to put myself into my dad’s head, in trying to manufacture his violence and self-hate, I found myself laying open a strange energy, something that rose out of thick scars into the glare of lamps and refused to be identified.”

  David then went on to discuss the psychic violence inflicted on him by someone he identified only as “a well-known writer.” Most people around the scene knew he meant Gary Indiana—as did Gary himself. The placement here is telling. It explains why David reacted to Gary in a way that was rather out of proportion with reality. David claimed, for example, that Gary had made “veiled threats” to physically attack him. He wrote about feeling helpless and fearful. Certainly Gary had tremendous energy. He was a force. He was also a slight man about a foot shorter than David and in no way a physical threat.

  David wrote, “I realized around this time that the fear I felt from his attacks were connecting invisibly to fears I developed as a kid at the hands of my dad. The messages weren’t all that different: nothing I did was any good.”

  “David really distorted things in that article,” Gary said. “At the time, it was more embarrassing than it was hurtful because I just thought, well, people are disposed to believe this kind of thing. They’re not liable to read this article with any understanding that there might be another side to it. I just thought it was lashing out, a really immature way of lashing out.”

  Looking back, he felt that their relationship had amounted to “sort of a mutual and shared craziness.”

  “It seemed to me that David was always casting himself as the victim,” said Gary. “He always seemed wounded. But I understand it better no
w, because when you’ve been hurt by other people, you become almost skinless.”

  In November, Gracie Mansion got David a commission from Robert and Adriana Mnuchin, major collectors and patrons of the arts. David was to create an installation in their basement.

  He hired Steve Brown, Steve Doughton, and Amy Turner to help him collect debris. They spent several days combing through collapsed buildings and rubble-strewn vacant lots in Alphabet City, Harlem, maybe even the South Bronx. They then hauled a car door, a battered old Vespa, the shell of a television, punctured tires, broken windows, old bricks, and scraps of barbed wire into the Mnuchins’ Upper East Side town house. David’s friends talked about how he enjoyed this—bringing rubble from various blighted neighborhoods into the rich guy’s house.

  David probably had more than his share of class rage. But the Mnuchin installation was not a piece of tantrum art. He created an apocalyptic scene that was completely in keeping with the other installations he did that year. He also wrote a four-and-a-half-page, single-spaced exegesis to parse what every bit of this piece meant.

  “I have grown up in a series of violent circumstances,” he explained by way of introduction. “I choose not to turn completely away from this kind of energy even though my life has changed to a degree where I could easily cushion myself from these impulses in the outside world. I would rather look and study and explore these impulses so as to arrive at some kind of personal understanding with them.”

  David painted a gleaming cityscape across the river from a shoreline strewn with wreckage, skulls dangling from a tree, a skeleton seated in front of a campfire, a flying snake with a human head, a large predatory spider, and the burning child on the run. He said he’d sketched Manhattan from the Brooklyn shore, but it actually looks like he’s standing in New Jersey, given the skyscrapers at the tip of the island. A giant figure in a map-covered asbestos suit stands in the city with a hose that gushes fire. He has pulled up a building and set it on fire, but there’s no other human activity over there. The rest of the action is on what I’ll call the Jersey shore with all the wreckage. Here the “picturesque ruins” are three-dimensional. David painted some debris in the foreground of his cityscape, then extended it with what his friends collected on the street, adding papier-mâché rocks painted to match the stylized rocks in his cityscape.

  He added a soundtrack, a tape collage made with Doug Bressler from 3 Teens—apparently mixing sounds like marching feet, children’s shouting, and mortar attacks. The installation was very detailed. For example, he’d hidden a tiny farm complete with trees, cows, pigs, horses, and chickens inside a ruptured tire, explaining, “This is a personal image of an outdated idyllic place.… One can remove [oneself] from a hostile environment and focus totally on the peacefulness of the new environment but as time goes by this illusion of peace cannot continue totally unhampered by what we escape from.”

  Indeed, the piece could be read as a metaphor for his state of mind. The emotional focus is the burning boy, again covered with maps and tongues of flame on his arms and legs. He runs toward the skull tree, an image that comes from the Mayan legend Popol Vuh. David misremembered the story, however. In the Mayan version, a young woman goes to look at a tree in the underworld where the severed head of a god is hanging. The head spits on her hand, impregnating her with twins who evenutally become the sun and the moon. David’s retelling was the myth he needed at that moment. A kid goes into the underworld to find life and comes to a crossroads where there’s a tree hung with skulls. When the kid spits on the tree, the skulls either become humans or start talking. (He couldn’t decide which.) But “the tree helps the kid towards rebirth.”

  David spent five days at the beginning of December creating an installation for “The Missing Children’s Show” in Louisville, Kentucky—an exhibition created to raise money for the Kentucky Child Victims’ Trust Fund.

  There isn’t much documentation, but one report in a Louisville newspaper called David’s piece “a macabre representation of child snatching.” He’d brought the yellow skeleton with him from the Anchorage show and suspended it facedown from the ceiling over a black chair with flames painted on it. “The chair is hell,” David told a reporter. “It’s a metaphor for the aftermath of that kind of act.” He had a crawling battery-powered doll, with a globe for a head, on the chair’s seat, restrained by a string. In front of it were targets like those used on a firing range, with a deer pictured at center. “The image of the deer being hunted is transferred to the kid,” David said. On the back wall he painted a field of cow carcasses, beheaded and slit open. On a wall to the side, he added his trademark large gagging cow.

  Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger, 1985. (Photograph by Karen Ogle)

  Five other East Village artists had been invited to Kentucky to work in an old factory undergoing conversion to apartments, the closest thing the curator could find to an abandoned New York building. The art would be destroyed when that renovation occurred.

  Judy Glantzman created one of the other site-specific pieces and shared a hotel room with David. This is where they actually became friends. Someone loaned David a 1950 Chevy, and at night he and Glantzman would cruise Louisville, talking. Back in New York, they started meeting for breakfasts that took hours.

  The day David returned from Louisville, however, he began working on the installation for You Killed Me First. He and Kern drove around to building sites and stole cement blocks and mortar. Ground Zero was a long skinny space. Toward the back, Kern built a cement block wall with a broken window in it. Spectators looked through that window to see the Thanksgiving dinner table, three seated skeletons wearing the characters’ outfits from the movie, pigs’ blood (from a local butcher) splattered everywhere, and the film playing on a monitor. David and Kern then dragged garbage, dead leaves, and dog turds from Tompkins Square into the front part of the gallery, to make it look like an alley complete with graffiti and a No Parking sign on the wall. David added purple light and wired it for sound. “Foghorns,” said Marguerite. “Rats and stuff,” said Kern.

  People had to pass through that to peek in the window at the dead family. Some walked in and got completely disoriented. Some didn’t get past the door. “It smelled bad and was just kind of genuinely revolting,” Marguerite said. “We were sitting in the middle of this war zone for a month.”

  David spent Christmas ’85 with Richard Kern and Tommy Turner. They drove to Virginia Beach in the Malibu, stopping to buy fireworks at a roadside stand.

  “Weirdest Christmas of all time,” Kern said. “Tommy had a whole sheet of acid and we ate the whole sheet.”

  David brought his typewriter along and about half an incoherent page survives: “what you were talking about before a half cat half dog that ate a poodle and was sweeping out the cloisters man … none of the last fifteen or twenty minutes happened.” Out on the beach, he started breaking the wood sticks off the bottle rockets. Without that to guide them, the rockets flew crazily, one looping back to explode right over their heads. Armed with his Super 8 camera, Turner drew a big pentagram in the sand with a stick and write “Satan Teens” so he could film it.

  Back in New York, David wanted to pick up on Turner’s “written in the sand” idea for the opening of their film. He drove around collecting discarded Christmas trees in the Malibu. At Caven Point, he’d found a car that had apparently been pushed from a bridge, its front end stuck in the mud. He and Turner filled that vehicle with the Christmas trees and wrote “Satan Teens” with spray paint on the ice near it. “The idea was to burn the car and then the heat would melt the ice and dissolve the words,” said Turner. “Then we’d run the film backwards so it would look like the words were emerging from the liquid.” By the time they got this set up, it was dark. When they came back to film it the next day, Turner said, “There were fires all over the place. And firemen.” Their Christmas trees were still there in the half-sunk car, but they could hardly set that ablaze under the circumstances. So they just walked a
round, grabbing other images such as a dead dog teaming with maggots. The mysterious fires, the repellant carcass, their thwarted idea—it made for a suitably bleak ending to a painful year.

  16 “SOMETHING TURNING EMOTIONAL AND WILD”

  On New Year’s Day 1986, Tom Rauffenbart drank champagne all day while he cooked suckling pig, collard greens, and black-eyed peas for dozens of friends. It was probably eleven thirty or twelve that night when he left his apartment, wired and drunk, to walk to the Bijou, a porn theater on Third Avenue near Thirteenth Street. And there he saw that guy again, the guy he’d described to a friend as so ugly he was beautiful.

  He was Tom’s type, tall and lean with a long face and buckteeth. Tom had encountered him at the Bijou sometime in November ’85, and they’d had sex in a bathroom. “Sometimes you can do that and it’s awful,” Tom said, “but with him it was so sexy.” Though they hadn’t talked much, Tom had mentioned that he’d lived in the East Village since the sixties, and then he heard that startlingly deep voice for the first time: “You must have seen a lot of changes.” They did not exchange names.

  When Tom saw him again on New Year’s, he thought maybe the guy wouldn’t be interested again. But he was, and they went into the same little bathroom and began to have sex when Tom asked, as he rarely ever did, “Want to go to my house?” Out on the street, they said their names.

  “Tom.”

  “David.”