Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  For the only time in his life, Tom started keeping a journal—which he later found too painful to read. Hujar called him one night and invited him over for dinner. “I asked what he was making, and he said, ‘Tuna noodle casserole.” (At a certain point in Hujar’s life, that was the dish he made every night.) Tom, who was trying to learn to assert himself, said, “I hate tuna noodle casserole. No, I’m not coming.” The affair ended soon after. Not because of this spurned invitation, but because, Tom said, “I would panic inside and lose myself.”

  For years afterward, this was the relationship Tom most regretted losing. And now, Hujar was David’s best friend. Tom thought, “Oh, great. Peter will tell him what an asshole I am.”

  In fact, Hujar thought that Tom would be good for David, that David needed stability and Tom would give it to him. Now he’d have regular meals and maybe take better care of himself.

  But Tom could sense all the fears and insecurities he’d had in his relationship with Hujar starting to build again in this new relationship with David. “I was getting moody and depressed,” Tom remembered. “I was still drinking, and I was afraid to tell David what I felt. I thought he would hate me. It was just horrible.” Tom went into therapy that spring. “I knew that if I didn’t do something about this, I was going to lose this guy.”

  David’s show of “history paintings” opened at Gracie Mansion Gallery on April 27. “People were literally fighting in the gallery over these paintings,” Sur Rodney Sur recalled. “It was horrific. I’d never seen anything like it.” Major collectors had come in before the doors officially opened and before David arrived. So, he didn’t hear people arguing: “I want that one.” The difficulty, Sur said, was “when you have two people fighting over the same painting, how do you decide who gets what?”

  While David missed this feeding frenzy, everything was sold by the time he showed up. He was stunned. This was exactly what he’d complained about—people buying but (he assumed) not apprehending. Gracie remembered that someone had come in a limo. “And to think that somebody would buy something who had come in a limousine—he both loved and hated it,” she said. Gracie had done her job. David was “hot,” and all the pieces went to major collections. His response to this good fortune was to announce that he would again stop painting. He told Gracie, “It’s over. I’m just going to work on my writing.”

  Then he told Tommy Turner that he wanted to make a giant spider for the window of the gallery, and this creature would be preying on a man while a fan blew money out its rear end. Gracie was the spider. “Sucking me dry,” he complained to Turner.

  The day after the opening, David left town with Tom. They went back to St. John’s.

  David had found the relationship that would sustain him for the rest of his life, and he’d found a new direction for his work. Even so, he hadn’t quite finished with the ugly preoccupations of the previous year. He and Tommy Turner worked on their Super 8 “satanic teen” film off and on through the first half of 1986.

  Jim “Foetus” Thirwell offered them a song he’d written about Ricky Kasso. He called it “Where Evil Dwells” and said they could have the music if they made that the title of the film. Turner and David agreed that it was better than the title Satan Teens. They worked out a new title shot. David stapled a piece of transparent plastic between two broom handles, and a couple of assistants held it up in front of a suburban house while David wrote the words “WHERE EVIL DWELLS.” He and Turner felt that Ricky Kasso and friends had used drugs and their own twisted take on black magic to rearrange what David called “the imposed hell of the suburbs.”

  They shot footage of satanic teens around a campfire and of the Kasso figure chasing the kid he would kill. They filmed the Kasso figure gouging the eyes from what is clearly a rubber mask. So it was ham-handed. It was also a horror film of unrelenting gloom, with images of grave robbing, burning cars, and dead or dying animals.

  The most original scenes are set in heaven and hell. (Kasso warned his victim that he would follow him into the afterlife.) The script describes heaven as a “bourgeois restaurant,” where Jesus, played by Rockets Redglare, sits gorging at a banquet table. A maître’d bars the satanic teen from entering.

  Then there’s hell, which turns out to be as barbarous and ghastly as advertised. A number of people have been tied upside down to a locomotive engine, where they’re hit by a man in a hockey mask. Fires burn in barrels. A motorcycle with one Hell’s Angel and two female minions circles slowly. There are people in masks, people with whips, someone in a goat’s head, much smoke and chaos. The Devil (played by Joe Coleman) makes the film’s most indelible impression, whether standing on a railroad bridge and exploding the firecrackers attached to his chest or plucking a live white rat from a tray and biting its head off.

  They shot the underworld scene on June 28, 1986, after wheat-pasting flyers around the East Village advertising for “inhabitants of hell: junkies, weightlifters, starving bums, suicides … human oddities, sleepwalkers … screamers, scrooges playing with money … anything you want to be or are and wish to have immortalized forever.” Such volunteers were to meet at a particular spot along Tompkins Square Park for shuttle service to hell. David had found an abandoned warehouse along the river in a not-yet-gentrified Williamsburg. Turner instructed the assembled hellhounds not to tell the locals what the film was about. “Tell them we’re filming Miami Vice,” he said. One of the actors couldn’t contain herself, however, and told some neighborhood kids that they were making a movie about Satan. The kids ran for their older brothers and fathers, who marched down to the warehouse just as filming ended. “It almost turned into a fight,” Turner said. “They threatened to push David’s car into the river.” Somehow David managed to diffuse this situation, but Turner could not remember how.

  John Erdman, who played the father of the satanic teen, remembered them shooting the home scenes at an apartment on Front Street in Lower Manhattan. And then something happened between David and Turner. “Something awful, I felt,” said Erdman. “David never said what. But he pulled out. He was enraged.”

  Turner did not recall this, but speculated, “Possibly the drug thing was bothering him.” Turner’s heroin addiction had intensified. When David wrote years later about making Where Evil Dwells, he did not say that he’d been angered by anything but that Turner “was being pulled around by his addiction and sometimes failed to show up for filming.”

  Turner estimates they had eight hours of footage in the end, but the film was never finished. He and David created a thirty-four-minute “trailer” without sync sound to show at the 1986 Downtown Film Festival. With no sound, though, it’s not coherent. A slightly damaged Howdy Doody appears, apparently to narrate, becoming one more inexplicable image. A couple of years after this, a fire at Turner’s apartment destroyed the sound tape, whatever footage he’d stored there, his rat-fur jacket, and nearly everything else he owned. Turner escaped the blaze carrying little but his infant son, Talon.

  David and Turner spoke a few times about going back to work on Where Evil Dwells, but with this film, David seems to have maxed out on dealing with both family trauma and someone else’s death wish. There were limits to what one could learn from the tragic but witless life of Ricky Kasso.

  He was no longer infatuated with the worldview of Kern and Turner. He began to withdraw from Kern in particular, even though they were neighbors. Kern thought David was angry because he wasn’t using him in any more of his films. “And the fact that the drug thing just got worse and worse,” Kern admitted. David, meanwhile, had cut way down or even eliminated his own use of speed and psychedelics. The night David and Tom Rauffenbart left the Bijou together, David was on ecstasy, as he told Tom later. But Tom never knew David to take drugs. “Two sips of champagne and he would feel off,” Tom said. “Even aspirin bothered him.”

  David wrote of this period in Close to the Knives:

  Death was everywhere, especially in my apartment, a gentrified space right above [Ke
rn’s] place. In my depression, I kept thinking it was [Kern]’s fragmented state of mind that was pumping death vibes up through the floor. Later I found out a woman with three kids had occupied my apartment before I got there. She apparently died a slow, vicious death from AIDS. I felt like the connection between me and this circle of friends was getting buried in veils of disintegration; drug addiction creates this vortex of psychological and physical fragmentation that is impossible to spotlight or put a finger on. [Kern] was wrestling with it and at the same time seemed unconscious of it. I thought he was becoming a creep.… [Turner] was getting more erratic and transparent in his addiction.… I felt myself at a point where I needed to either define certain boundaries for myself or get away from my life as it was.

  Anna Friebe was one of the German dealers who’d been an early supporter of the East Village, and that summer she offered David a solo show. He left for Europe on July 23 and stayed until September 7. He visited Paris, but for most of that time he was in Cologne creating more “history paintings” for the Friebe Gallery.

  Late Afternoon in the Forest, for example, continues the general theme of apocalypse and ruin. One of his hybrid creatures—part bird, part airplane—has crashed in the forest. Behind it sits a large alien head with its lips sewn shut. Visible in the torn fuselage of the bird-plane is a bit of gothic architecture, all arched doorways, and from it crawl a couple of red fire ants with human faces. Maybe only the hybrids survive in this future. Everything 100 percent human here seems to be an artifact, and it’s all quite small—the Greek statue of a man fighting a centaur, the Indian chief that looks like something bought from a souvenir stand, the Parthenon visible in an upper corner.

  David was living and working in the gallery, since it was closed for the summer. Before Anna Friebe left town, she asked one of her other artists, Rilo Chmielorz, to look in on him occasionally. “We connected in a strong way,” Rilo said. It felt like “an eternal association.” David made a piece to give her, painting his symbols for Earth (the globe), wind (a cloud with a face, blowing), fire (a devil), and water (a snowman) on a German supermarket poster. They had intense conversations. They went to the zoo. She remembered that he was suffering from insomnia.

  In History Keeps Me Awake at Night (for Rilo Chmielorz), he stenciled a sleeping man onto maps at the bottom of the piece. (He would use this sleeping figure in several subsequent paintings that suggest dream imagery.) The history he dreams of here is all violence—a criminal with a gun (the image commonly used in target practice), a headless warrior atop a headless horse, a one-eyed monster, and so on. The same monster appeared in a piece done earlier that year for the Gracie Mansion show—Queer Basher/Icarus Falling. History Keeps Me Awake is a painting about fear, from the violence he dreaded as a gay man to catastrophes that threaten us all, in his view. The titles of other pieces also convey the dystopic vision of America he’d taken as his subject in 1986: The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of the U.S.A.; The Death of American Spirituality (begun in ’86 but completed in ’87).

  Art historian Mysoon Rizk pointed out that as David developed his iconography, he began using animals to depict, among other things, “certain Sisyphean characteristics of the human condition.… Crawling bugs, in particular, appear regularly in his work, often as tenacious protagonists or super-sized heroes invoking an eternal sense of time.” Just so, David created two Dung Beetle paintings in 1986. Both feature two large scarabs rolling dung around a picture of an American eagle, and in both paintings, disaster strikes an outmoded form of human transportation—the crashed Hindenburg in one, a steam locomotive exploding off the tracks in the other. Rizk observed that in David’s work, “even human apocalypse is unable to prevent nature’s incessant struggle and cyclical compulsions.”

  Back in New York, Tom remembered David working on Super 8 film projects during this period. Tom sometimes assisted or posed.

  David was creating an image bank. He recorded Tom lifting a baby doll from a bucket and dropping flowers into water. He filmed a doll in stark black and white with a strobe going. He had Tom pose with bandaged hands, sometimes holding coins. He filmed and photographed Tom with his lips sewn shut. “It won’t hurt much,” David would joke. He attached the red string with glue and used red food coloring to simulate blood.

  Tom began introducing David to the wonders of Zagat, to the city’s best steak houses, for example, since David loved steak. Another favorite spot was Union Square Cafe, the kind of great but pricey restaurant where David had never eaten before. Tom also loved cooking for David, and he introduced him to such middle-class concepts as “thread count.”

  David still spent many of his nights at Tom’s. Tom gave him a drawer but they never officially moved in together. “It would have been hard without a thirty-room apartment,” Tom said. “Neither one of us was easy to live with.” They had their first fight while changing the bed. Tom liked the sheets tucked in. David asked why, and Tom said, “There is no why.”

  “I hate those kinds of answers,” David steamed.

  Every morning, David would announce that he’d had some dream while Tom would groan to himself, “Oh great,” but tolerate the telling. “David never slept well in all the years I knew him,” Tom said. “He’d talk in his sleep and thrash around. He was always worried that he was going to smack me. One night he did. I wasn’t upset because I knew he didn’t mean it, but he did haul off and whack me. Some nights I’d wake up, and he’d be giving some long dissertation. I’d try to talk back to see if he’d answer, but he never did.”

  David editing Super 8 film at Tom’s house. (Photograph by Tom Rauffenbart)

  David told Tom that he wished he never had to sleep. He would prefer to be awake all the time. “He was almost afraid to lay down and sleep,” said Tom. “It’s probably when all the demons in his mind got let loose.”

  In April 1986, the Eye ran a cover story titled “The East Village Yuppie.” As the subhead put it, “Into our post-apocalyptic playground come the renovators, the upscalers, bringing tidings of America’s New Order.… Survival has replaced self-expression and upward mobility is no longer optional.”

  Meanwhile, Ground Zero Gallery maintained its highly original and completely impractical operations. At the beginning of the year, scene-maker and would-be gossip columnist Baird Jones asked if he could exhibit his photos of Mark Kostabi posing with celebrities. James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook agreed on the condition that he keep the pigs’ blood from You Killed Me First on the walls. That spring they showed Dragan Ilic, carrying out his farcical directive that they rotate all the paintings by ninety degrees every twenty minutes “to simulate a zero-gravity environment.” Then Mike Osterhout did an installation called Hell, painting the walls red, covering the floor with gravel, building a fire in the middle of the gallery, and adding a screen door. “We had all these punk kids coming in, sitting around it like it was a campfire,” Marguerite said. But the fire department came daily. From the park across the street, Ground Zero appeared to be on fire, and someone called it in every day. The firefighters had to respond, even though they knew what it was, so James and Marguerite decided to shut the piece down after a couple of weeks. Then when Marguerite did a show of her own work, she and James covered the front of the gallery with silver Mylar so it reflected the park. For an inside wall, Marguerite created a life-size photo of the Pyramid Club by placing the negative in a slide projector and getting a whole team of friends to roll developer onto a huge paper, then carry it—in pitch-dark—to a bathtub they’d filled with fixer. She put that photo up and hung her artwork on it.

  The Wrecking Crew did a show at Ground Zero that summer, with the artists working from the afternoon until sometime the next day and possibly tripping, though Marguerite wasn’t sure everyone dropped acid. “David did a nice big cop eating skulls,” James remembered. “A big cop head. It was really hard to paint on the bricks, so everybody was making these ugly marks. David’s thing looked the best because he had the
smooth wall.”

  “We all did whatever we wanted,” Marguerite said. “With some flying Needlenoses. I mean, there were general themes of rebellion. Then the psychedelic effect of the artwork got viewers so crazy. We did some performances in there. I think we had Nick Zedd do a poetry thing, and the readings were energized by the environment. There was so much movement within the artwork it unsettled people. It exposed a wildness in the viewers that we were unprepared for.” By that fall, the gallery had moved to its last location, on East Ninth Street, and the Wrecking Crew did its final show, working outside in the backyard. David was probably out of town, since he did not participate.

  In September, the East Village Eye, house organ to the scene, became simply the Eye in an attempt to broaden its appeal. It published its last issue in December, then put out a sort of greatest-hits collection of landmark pieces in January, and folded. The scene was clearly melting away, though in 1986 it was hard to see that because no one wanted to. Perhaps Wrecking Crew participant David West offered the best metaphor when he suggested that it was like the sound of a gong reverberating long after it’s been rung.

  Early in October 1986, David went to West Palm Beach, one of three artists selected to paint a mural on a courtyard wall at the Norton Gallery of Art. His Some Day All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins; Four Elements would be obliterated when the show closed. But of course, he had always enjoyed painting something that he knew would be destroyed.

  In the mural, symbols for all four elements hover over a Southwestern landscape, and there’s a kind of narrative at work about the destruction of Native American culture. A tornado (wind) destroys a kachina doll. The devil (fire) represents the invading white people. And so on. Earth is a globe with an emerging brain, while a snowman represents water. He’d been working this out in his mind for a few months. In another Earth, Wind, Fire, Water painting done earlier that year, he created a similar scenario, using a cloud with a face to represent wind.