by Cynthia Carr
As they walked to Tom’s place on East Ninth, they told each other what they did. David said he was a painter.
Tom replied, “Oh. A house painter?”
David seemed bemused. Tom didn’t know a thing about art, and he’d ignored the galleries popping up around him in the East Village. Ironically enough, he worked for the city’s child welfare department, where he’d spent ten years “in the field,” going to allegedly abusive homes and deciding on the spot whether to take the children out with him. By the time he met David, he was in management.
“We spent the night together, which was really erotic and wonderful,” Tom said. “I invited him to stay over, and he said, thanks, because he was living in a place where there were a lot of junkies around and it wasn’t that comfortable walking home. This was unusual. I rarely invited someone to stay. I usually wanted them out.
“I remember waking up the next morning. I had to go to work, and I just kept looking at him in bed. I was filled with all this emotion. I made a cup of coffee and stood in the doorway watching him sleep, just thinking how wonderful this guy looked and just being really moved. I hadn’t been moved by anybody in quite a long time, but this guy really touched something in me, and I don’t know what it was. I could just feel this electricity going on. And I just wanted to touch everything that touched him. I’d never done anything like this before but—I smelled his shoes.”
Later that day, January 2, Peter Hujar’s show opened at the Gracie Mansion Gallery. David had insisted on this, and Gracie agreed despite Hujar’s reputation in the art world as “difficult.”
A couple of years before this, Timothy Greathouse had offered to show Hujar’s work with Nan Goldin’s, when she was not yet famous. Greathouse then canceled Goldin to give Hujar a solo show, and Hujar canceled out of loyalty to Goldin.
So he had not had a solo show in New York since 1981.
“The rumor was that Peter hated all his dealers,” Gracie said, “that he was worse than David, that he was impossible to work with.” But this time, everything clicked. According to Gracie, “Peter was a sweetheart.”
Hujar’s old friends, Gary Schneider and John Erdman, remembered how happy he was. “He was totally in awe of Gracie,” Schneider said. “He thought she was this brilliant light in the East Village.” Erdman added, “He thought Gracie was enormously glamorous, and he was shocked that she would do a show of his.”
Gracie turned the practical matters over to Sur Rodney Sur, who had a particular knowledge of and interest in photography. Sur asked Hujar what he wanted.
To show a hundred photographs.
Sur told him to bring them in and lay them out, and they’d do it. “We pretty much said, ‘Do what you want, and we’ll make it happen.’ ”
Sur explained, “I installed our shows, but I said, ‘I’m not going to hang a hundred photographs behind glass, all perfectly neat.’ So we hired a very expensive art installer who installed for Pat Hearn, and they did the whole thing beautifully. It was laid out exactly the way Peter wanted, and he was thrilled. Totally thrilled. Because he got the show to look the way he wanted. And I think we sold two prints out of that show. They were six hundred dollars apiece, and no one would buy them.”p
In the opinion of Gary Schneider, this was Hujar’s best show, and though no one knew it at the time, it was also his last show. Gracie had basically given him a retrospective, and she paired him, in her back room, with Al Hansen, an important Fluxus artist from Hujar’s generation and someone Gracie had known for years.
In another decade, another season, the show would have been regarded as an event, but in 1986, the art world ignored it.
The one exception was Village Voice critic Gary Indiana, who wrote a piece called “The No Name Review,” in which he discussed several exhibitions without naming a single artist. As Indiana explained, “Open a fucking art magazine and there’s one proper name after another after another. The proper names just start to stand in for whatever it is you’re looking at. Everybody becomes a brand in the art world. It was something that was particularly bothering me at the time.”
Given that whatever hurt Hujar would hurt David, the two of them probably saw Gary’s review as revenge for David’s East Village Eye piece, which was still on newsstands as this show opened. Maybe Hujar was even thankful not to be named, since his portraits were described as “those serene, elegant, haunting views of dead people and living people who look dead.” Even his pictures of animals were maligned. Gary quoted someone he calls “N” who evokes Alfred Eisenstaedt’s portrait of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and claims that most of the people photographed by Hujar looked like Goebbels. “So did the duck. So did the dog.”
Tom called David on January 3 and they decided on a first date. They would drive to Robert Moses State Park on the western end of Fire Island. Tom got his first look at the beat-up Malibu, with its saints and monsters on the dashboard and, at this point, two cat skeletons in the back.
They walked the beach in the bitter cold, and David picked up a bird wing. It was a friend’s favorite image, he said, without mentioning the friend’s name: Peter Hujar. Then he picked up some metal bits. “For my rust collection,” he explained, while Tom thought but didn’t say, “What?” They drove on to a marina, where they sat outside drinking coffee, and Tom confessed to the most violent—and most uncharacteristic—moment of his life. After eleven awful months with his first boyfriend, Tom snapped into such a fury one day that he blacked out, and when he came to, he was pounding his boyfriend’s head on the floor. David would later tell Tom that he had wondered then if he was getting involved with a psycho. They were still strangers, but felt enough of a connection to begin forging past the unexpected and mysterious in each other.
For the next two or three weeks, David came to Tom’s place almost every night. “I was totally crazy about him,” Tom remembered. “I was just so emotionally moved by this guy. And erotically. It was wonderful, terrific sex. It was great being around him too. And I’d be crazy at work all the time. I couldn’t stop talking about him.”
David began to sort out his own feelings as he wrote his fourth and final piece for the East Village Eye:
Walking back and forth from room to room, trailing bluish shadows, I feel weak; something turning emotional and wild and forming a crazy knot in the deep part of the stomach. And on the next trip from the front of the apartment to the back I end up in the kitchen turning once again and suddenly sinking down to the floor in a crouching position against the wall and side of the stove in a blaze of wintery sunlight; it’s blinding me as my fingers trace small circles through the hair on the sides of my temples, and I’ve had little sleep, having woken up a number of times slightly shocked at the sense of another guy’s warm skin and my hands having been moving independent of me in sleep; tracing the lines of his arms and belly and hips and side.… So here I am heading out into cold winds of the canyon streets walking down and across Avenue C towards my home with the smell and taste of him wrapped around my neck and jaw like some scarf.
David did not tell Tom he was writing this. Nor did he show it to him. Tom found it by chance when he picked up a copy of the Eye. He could not remember what they then said to each other. Probably little. While David found it easy to rage at someone, positive feelings were not only hard for him to articulate but also frightening.
He went to talk to Karen Finley about Tom. “He was scared about his feelings and what to do about them,” she said. “I think he was afraid of love because what he had experienced as love from his parents was abuse. With a human who’s been damaged by inappropriate sexuality and the power of abuse—we know that the human psyche becomes schizoid and splits, and he would do that. But I told him he was nuts if he walked away from Tom.” She encouraged him to tell Tom his fears.
During the last week of January, David called Tom at work, said he had to see him and wouldn’t say why. “I immediately thought, well, he wants to break up,” Tom said. They arranged to
meet at Veselka, a Ukrainian place on Second Avenue. “David came in and he was just a nervous wreck,” said Tom. “I’d never seen him like that. And I don’t remember exactly how he put it, but the message was that he was really scared. He had all these feelings he didn’t know what to do with, all this churning, and he felt lost. I remember being so relieved. Like, is that all? And I said, ‘We can take it slow, because I’m confused too. There’s so much emotion going on here, I don’t know what I’m doing either.’ And I remember he went, ‘Oh. OK.’ Of course, we immediately went to my house and fucked.”
David’s account of this appeared in a letter he wrote to Luis Frangella in Argentina. After years of not allowing himself to get into a relationship, he wrote, he’d let himself go and now he’d just talked to the guy in a restaurant “and he said something about not seeing each other so much.” That was David’s version of “We can take it slow.”
By the end of January, David had moved into a fifth-floor walk-up in Richard Kern’s building at 529 East Thirteenth. He had declined Tom’s offer to help, saying he had friends who could do the hauling. This was the beginning of a pattern. David would keep Tom separate from nearly everyone he knew.
As Tom once described the contrast between himself and David’s boho friends: “I was settled, I cooked, I had furniture.” He wasn’t just being facetious. Tom had never gone to the Second Street apartment. But on a first visit to Thirteenth Street, he saw that David had a couple of hardback chairs, a futon on the floor, paint, clutter, and a baby elephant skeleton. “Nothing comfortable anywhere,” Tom remembered. And he told David, “You have to buy a bed.”
Like Jean Pierre, Tom was middle class and utterly dependable. He was nine years older than David. He loved cooking and the comforts of home. “David met me at an opportune time for him,” Tom said. “He thought his career might be dead, and he was fed up with the world he had been in, and in a sense, he hid away with me.”
They decided to go to Montreal together the last weekend of January. Tom had always wanted to go there in the winter. So on the appointed Friday morning, he went to Grand Central and bought their tickets and waited. David never showed up. He’d gone to Penn Station. They didn’t reconnect until lunch at an East Village sushi bar, and David offered to pay for airline tickets to Montreal. Then they looked at each other and said, “We’re crazy. Let’s go to the Caribbean.”
Neither of them had ever been there. They went to Tom’s house, called an airline, and asked the ticket agent, “What’s a good place in the Caribbean?” So began their improvised odyssey to the Virgin Islands. From a guidebook bought at the airport, they settled on St. John’s as a final destination. The trip became a honeymoon, and nothing could destroy the glow or the afterglow. Not the wait in San Juan’s airport from three A.M. to six for the flight to St. Thomas. Not Tom learning to drive stick shift on St. John’s as they climbed hairpin turns up a mountain in a rented Jeep. Not learning that the room they’d reserved was unavailable. They loved the inn they found by chance. They abjured the chichi restaurants for great local cooking. They had sex on various beaches and in the ocean. At night they could lie on the sand and see a million stars. It was so romantic.
Tom Rauffenbart photographed by David on the beach at St. John’s. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
They amazed each other with how public they were, having sex not just on the beach behind some rocks but also in the minivan driving them back to the airport, where they jerked each other off in the back seat. “We were just so aroused. We were outrageous,” Tom said. They didn’t change out of their bathing suits till they got back to San Juan, where they were still walking around with big erections. Someone came up to them and said, “You guys were the scandal of the St. Thomas airport.” They waited for their flight back to New York in a coffee shop, where Tom said to David, “I’m falling in love with you,” and David said nothing. His eyes filled with tears and turned red. He looked away.
“It was fine with me, that response,” said Tom. “I just remember his whole face went into shock.” They boarded their plane. Both liked aisle seats, so David sat in front of Tom. During the flight, David reached his hand back. Tom grabbed it. They held hands.
David wanted to paint again. He did not mention that he’d devoted a year to “imperiled child” or “dead family” scenarios when he explained his hiatus from painting to the New Art Examiner. “The attention and money for me was getting in the way of any kind of clarity, and I needed to pull away,” he said. “All of this media stuff, you get lost in it. You can take it too seriously and become self-conscious. It seemed like a joke at a certain point. People just come into the gallery and take what you put out and they don’t even look at it. You just become a workhorse filling a list. You self-imitate to meet demand.” His main journal for 1986 is all sketches, lists, and ideas for paintings. He seemed infused with a new confidence and focus.
Early that year, he began preparing for an April show at Gracie Mansion he would call “An Exploration of the History of Collisions in Reverse.” David was beginning his mature work here. There would be no more stenciling on a poster, though the title of a painting he’d done in 1984, Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins, still functioned as a theme. That painting was simple, even crude, however, while the new work was dense and multilayered, loaded with messages and storylines about a civilization hurtling toward apocalypse.
Crash: The Birth of Language/The Invention of Lies is emblematic, its central image a steam locomotive that is about to collide with a very small planet Earth. Parts of the train are cut away, and the biggest scene visible inside it, the focus of the whole painting, is a dead human tied facedown in the desert and now serving as carrion for two vultures. References to his own past work are embedded throughout—a floating alien head, a burning building, a ground of supermarket posters visible in bits behind the train. In front of the locomotive, above planet Earth, is a skeleton with a lizard head and possibly a human body. Letters of the alphabet explode above that head but form no words. There’s more, but that describes the major “action.”
David would have been able to say what every single image meant to him. Nothing in his paintings was ever arbitrary, nothing was by chance. The train, in his cosmology, symbolized the acceleration of time. He chose that—over, say, airplanes—because trains were the instrument of westward expansion; they had wiped out a culture. (A pueblo and a kachina are visible inside one of the locomotive’s wheels.) In another of these “history paintings,” Some Things from Sleep: For Jane and Charley, the side of a locomotive is cut away to reveal a baby, floating in water and still tethered to its umbilical cord. Jane Dickson and Charley Ahearn were about to have a baby, and Dickson described David as “enthusiastic” about that. But in David’s view, each new human joins the collision course humanity is on.
The “history paintings” seem to follow naturally out of the Mnuchin installation, down to the gray pile of debris, mostly old machinery, that dominates Excavating the Temples of the New Gods. One image in this painting is a head of Christ with crown of thorns, made to look like one of David’s “alien heads,” green and floating over a background of paper currency. Corrupted spirituality is a new theme. While he was still using supermarket posters, maps, and other paper ephemera to symbolize what people accept without question, his new imagery included Western landscapes, Native American objects, gears and other industrial detritus, hybrid creatures (some combination of animal, human, and machine), and repellant animals with serious jobs (vultures, dung beetles). He was still fascinated by relics and rubble.
He explained a couple of years later that he saw machines as fossils of the industrial age. “For me, the image of the gear or the defunct machine is the image of what history means, reached through the compression of time,” he said. “Scientists have discovered that if the head of a moth is cut off, it can still continue to lay eggs. Somehow I don’t think civilization is all that different.… Society is almost dead and yet it co
ntinues reproducing its madness as if there were a real future at the end of its collective gestures.”
Though he hadn’t articulated it in 1986, he had found the subject matter that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. Broadly speaking, this was what he called “the wall of illusion surrounding society and its structures”—false history, false spirituality, government control. His shorthand for it was “the pre-invented world.” He explained that phrase in Close to the Knives:
The world of the stoplight, the no-smoking signs, the rental world, the split-rail fencing shielding hundreds of miles of barren wilderness from the human step. A place where by virtue of having been born centuries late one is denied access to earth or space, choice or movement. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I’ve always felt like an alien.
When David talked with Tom, he often mentioned a particular good friend, Peter. “One day,” Tom said, “it hit me. Could this be Peter Hujar?”
David told him it was funny, because just recently Hujar had said to him, “Are you talking about Tom Rauffenbart?”
Tom and Hujar had had an affair early in 1974 that lasted a couple of months. When they met, Tom knew that Hujar was a photographer. “But I didn’t know anything about his world,” said Tom. He did know that “the man had no money, ever.” He too had seen Hujar wash his jeans out in the sink and dry them on top of a radiator.
One night they went out and Hujar asked Tom if he’d be willing to close his eyes and let Hujar guide him around. “It was great fun for about two hours,” Tom said. “We’d stop places and he’d say, ‘Feel this and try to tell me where you are.’ ”
Then Tom discovered that Hujar knew certain people who were more or less famous and that he was taking pictures at Warhol’s Factory. “So I was getting the sense that this guy was sort of a mini-celebrity,” said Tom, “and that was intimidating to me. We had some really nice dates, but I just got more and more frightened, more and more self-conscious. It became hard to talk. I remember one time saying to him, ‘I’m just so impressed by who you are and I don’t feel like I’m anything,’ and Peter said, ‘Well, I’ve actually been fascinated by you.’ ”