Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  He would really figure out how to combine “ruin” with the elements in the much more sophisticated Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water paintings he completed in 1987. But the mural in Florida had to be counted a success given that the Norton Gallery extended the “Walls” show for eight months. Its press release quoted David explaining his work: “It’s just recordings, so that if life were to be wiped out, these records would still exist.”

  Both James Romberger and David had been invited into a summer group show in SoHo curated by Michael Carter, editor of the East Village zine Redtape. When the gallery director came to Ground Zero to pick up James’s piece, he saw one of Marguerite’s, liked it, and left with some of her work as well.

  “An hour or so before the show opened, they took my painting down and put up a painting by the [gallery] owner’s wife,” said Marguerite. “Carter had an issue with this, and things took a turn for the worse. By the time we got there, they had thrown Carter up against a wall, and he was bruised and shaken up.” Carter did not recall being manhandled or hurt. But he was thrown out of his own show, along with Marguerite. He had a co-curator, however, who finally prevailed upon the owner to let them back in. Marguerite asked for her work to be returned, either that night or the next day. She was told that the back room was locked.

  When Marguerite told David what had happened, he returned to the gallery with her—furious and carrying a sledgehammer. “David took his painting off the wall and told them to give me my work back,” she said. “He swung and made a hole in the wall, and then they opened up the back room quick enough. We carried my work out. David’s too.”

  David then discovered that his painting Dung Beetles had been damaged. In late October, he went back to the gallery with Tom, who knew nothing about the sledgehammer incident. “David had this huge argument with the gallery owner,” said Tom. “ ‘Are you going to repair my piece?’ And the guy was saying no.” Tom realized later that David had planned this out carefully, because they’d come in on a day when the gallery was getting ready to install a new show. There stood all those pristine, freshly painted, empty white walls. David suddenly pulled out a tire iron, which he must have concealed inside his jean jacket, and announced: “That’s what you do to my painting, this is what I do to your wall.”

  “He smashed about five big holes in the walls,” said Tom, who had not known that David was carrying the tire iron. Tom stood there dumbfounded as David stormed out, and the gallery owner screamed at him.

  Outside Tom and David met up with Rilo Chmielorz, who was visiting from Cologne and staying at David’s apartment. “We had dinner together and we were speaking the whole time about what happened at the gallery,” Rilo said. “It was Tom who calmed down David a bit. Tom had both feet on the ground.”

  When David decided to go to Mexico for the Day of the Dead, he asked Tommy Turner to come with him. He would pay for their tickets. He hoped that Turner could break his heroin addiction and thought a trip away from his drug connections and routines would help. Also, Turner had traveled in Mexico before, while David had just dipped a toe in, swinging through Tijuana and Chihuahua on the bus trip he took in 1975 while vacationing from Bookmasters.

  Each of them packed a Super 8 camera, a 35mm camera, and a journal. Early on October 28, they flew to San Antonio, then caught a bus to Laredo, where they spent the night. “Over dinner, David and I discussed the different things we may feel over the next three weeks,” Turner wrote that first night in his journal, “especially concerning respective problems we will leave behind in U.S.A. necessarily.” David seemed prepared to cope with Turner’s withdrawal, and Turner seemed prepared to endure it. He’d slept through most of the trip from New York, so he sat up writing in his journal that night while David went to sleep. Suddenly David sat up, still asleep, and said, “No … life as a bird. Like over a wall. A small wall of feeling. A logging ball. The fast left right. A quiet now. A quiet month.” Then he dropped back onto the pillow. Turner could not get all the lines down because David had spoken so quickly, but he noted, “Wow. I can’t believe it. David dreams in poetry.”

  The next day, they crossed the border into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. In David’s journal entry, which is brief, he mostly recorded observations of people they encountered, and as usual, he was interested in damaged people, like a guy he calls “the elephant man.” He wrote, “Half his face was a hideous color and texture like a truck tire left in a campfire for half an hour.” David followed him, noting the reactions he elicited. He and Turner took the train from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City. Once on board, they were shaken down by cops who checked them “for pistols.” David handed over 160 pesos, the equivalent of twenty cents.

  David had started referring to Turner as “a beacon” because everywhere they went, someone would come up to him and offer him drugs. Turner would say no and David would tease, “Everybody knows.” Turner got through his first two days of withdrawal, consulting his tarot deck, trying to find a spiritual path out of addiction. “I’m going to scorch out my past on top of the Pyramid of the Sun, impregnate my future on top of the Pyramid of the Moon,” he wrote, in anticipation of their planned trip to Teotihuacán, the ancient sacred site and Aztec ruin.

  Once they got to Mexico City, Turner came down with dysentery and began hallucinating. He saw a statue of a three-headed nun flying right at him, saying, “Why do you think I’m dinner?” A tortoise made of cactus tried to stab him. Some Mexican cards he’d bought now seemed to have faces on them, all staring malevolently. “I was saying all this stuff out loud,” Turner remembered, “and David was cracking up, writing it down.” Some of these images ended up in a painting David made when he returned to New York, Tommy’s Illness.

  Turner recovered after a day, and they took a bus north to Guanajuato, where both shot some film at the town’s Mummy Museum. Later David printed a still from this footage, a dead child with an open mouth that he called Mexican Mummy (Munch Scream).

  On November 2, they went to watch Day of the Dead rituals at a cemetery in the Coyoacán section of Mexico City. Turner reported in his journal that he no longer had any withdrawal pain. He felt great. “Flowers everywhere,” he wrote, “incense clouding crucifixes, baby angels painted with blue house paint.… Me and David felt very self-conscious filming this stuff.” This had been Frida Kalho’s neighborhood, and they found her museum, but it was closed for the holiday.

  They had more chances that day to think about mortality. As they walked away from Coyoacán, they passed shattered buildings and wreckage still there from the September 1985 earthquake, which had killed some ten thousand people. They climbed aboard a bus “to film unobtrusively,” Turner wrote. “Yea right. My regular camera sounds like a bank vault being slammed when the shutter closes.” On their way to the cemetery that morning, they’d passed a seedy-looking circus, and that’s where they wanted to go next. “David was hoping very much to see a bear ride a tricycle,” reported Turner. “No such luck. The same three guys did everything. Acrobats (missed almost every attempt), clowns, musicians, lion tamers, and motorcycle daredevils.” David filmed all of this.

  They found a cabdriver who agreed to take them to see Mexican masked wrestling and act as a sort of interpreter for three thousand pesos (roughly four dollars) per hour. Turner described an anarchic scene at the arena, fighting that kept spilling out into the audience, a wrestler called La Erupción with “a volcano erupting on his chest and flames shooting [up between] his eyes. Me and David were filming like locos.” Then they both nearly lost their cameras. First a security guard accosted Turner and pulled him into the lobby, demanding to see a permit. The cabdriver intervened, and it all got straightened out for a bribe of a thousand pesos. As Turner sat back down, a couple of other guards grabbed both his camera and David’s. They were told that they would have to give up their film. Again the cabbie intervened and worked it out but they had to stop filming.

  Film still [“legless beggar”] from A Fire in My Belly, 1988–89. Black-and-white pho
tograph, 26 × 31½ inches. (Collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

  David was not insensitive about using a camera here. While he wrote nothing in his journal about the Day of the Dead, the circus, the wrestling match, or the mummies, he did reflect on his own voyeurism, and the fact that it was a luxury he could now afford. “If I were penniless, I’d be just another person hustling for food there,” he wrote. “So in filming in Mexico I pushed the voyeurism to the limit, always shooting through a zoom lens whenever possible, from car or bus windows; points of elevation, third story windows, shop balconies, cliffs, etc.” He was most interested in the street characters and wrote that the best thing he saw in Mexico City was a man walking into a fancy restaurant, carrying his right shoe up to a table of wealthy diners and lifting his leg so they could see that he had no foot, “just a blood red bone covered in tissue thin skin—looked like a cow bone, the kind you see on 14th street in barrels.”

  On November 3, he and Turner took a bus to Teotihuacán. David was excited because he’d heard that there were fire ants there. He had brought props with him: watchfaces, coins, a toy gun, a toy soldier, a small Day of the Dead skull, a candle, a sign, a crucifix. Once they reached Teotihuacán, they separated. Turner went to the southern end of the site to meditate and do a tarot card reading atop the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl. David found nests of big red fire ants somewhere between the pyramids to the sun and moon. He placed the objects he’d brought with him there, took pictures, and filmed the images that would so upset the Catholic League eighteen years after his death. He filmed the pyramids and the Avenue of the Dead. At the end of the day, he and Turner climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Moon during a thunderstorm and tried without success to film the lightning.

  David didn’t talk about what the ants meant to him, just as he hadn’t talked about any of the other things he’d filmed and photographed. “He was just grabbing images,” Turner said, “and he’d use it later.” When he printed the fire ant pictures in 1988, he explained, “Ants are the only insects to keep pets, use tools, make war, and capture slaves.” In these photos, they represent human activity within pre-invented structures: time (the watchfaces), money (coins), control (the toy soldier), violence (the toy gun), language (the sign), and spirituality (the crucifix). His photos of ants crawling over an artificial eye (knowledge) and over a photo of a naked man (desire) were taken on another occasion (and the eye photo was printed at a smaller size). Writing about Untitled (Ant and Eye), he explained that humans often treat nature as an abstract concept, hardly noticing the ground they walk on. “Using animals as a form to convey information about scale or intention is to take that power away from the human and return it to the life forms that have been abstracted into the ‘other.’ ”

  The next day, November 4, David flew into a rage at Turner over the loss of a receipt. It was another inexplicable blowup. Turner wanted to call his wife, Amy, because she was in the hospital. The hotel required a fifty-dollar deposit, which Turner paid. Then David told him he would hang on to Turner’s receipt, and Turner gave it to him. Turner never completed the phone call, because Amy didn’t pick up. So that evening, David said, go get your money back. Turner said, give me the receipt. The fight started there. Apparently David had lost the deposit slip but attacked Turner for entrusting it to him. “What a stupid thing to do!” And so on.

  On November 5, they went to the airport together to fly to the Yucatán. They already had their plane tickets, but at the airport David announced that he’d had it with Turner and could no longer travel with him. He would go elsewhere. He handed Turner, then nearly broke, a few hundred dollars. Turner thought that “very kind.” He flew to the Yucatán, alone and astonished. He spent about a week there. “I knew David’s history of traveling with people,” said Turner. “That it could go awry. But we had always gotten along.” Turner had to take a bus back to New York from the Yucatán. He borrowed money from other tourists for the ticket.

  Without Turner, David probably stayed in or near Mexico City. He sent Tom a postcard from there: “Hey Cookie, I wish in moments I could live down here with an endless supply of film—being on my own is a bit lonely but filled with strange adventure. Wish you were here and we was driving. Sometimes the slowness of busses is too much.”

  David arrived home on November 18 and began to work on paintings inspired by the Mexican trip. He had promised James and Marguerite a show at Ground Zero, scheduled to open January 10.

  In Close to the Knives, he wrote, “When I returned to New York City I saw [Turner] about two weeks later. He was in town a couple days and his eyes were heavily lidded from dope. I started avoiding him after that.”

  Turner, however, is sure he stayed clean for several months.

  Sometime in 1986—no one remembers when—Dean Savard reappeared in the East Village, living in an old Dodge van parked on Tompkins Square. According to Dean’s brother, Perry Savard, their parents bought him the van. “My parents basically said, this is the last thing we’re doing for you.”

  Alan Barrows remembered that the point was to get him a van so he could leave New York and get cleaned up. And he did leave town for a while, but “he couldn’t stay away,” said Barrows. Drugs were still so easy to get in the neighborhood. Savard had with him all the paintings that artists had given him during his years at Civilian Warfare, and he began selling them out of the van to get drug money. “Eventually the van wouldn’t run anymore, and he sold the van,” Barrows said. “After that, I guess he probably lived in abandoned buildings. By that time, I couldn’t have anything to do with him. When you watch somebody go down the hole, they can pull you in with them.”

  Barrows decided in December that he had to close Civilian. By then, Savard had disappeared completely. The two had been partners, but Barrows was left holding all the debt. “I had to declare personal bankruptcy,” he said. The gallery owed more than a hundred thousand dollars, most of it for advertising, but also for back rent and payments to artists.

  Barrows left New York in 1987 when his partner got a job offer in Washington, D.C. “I felt like Ratso Rizzo, that character from Midnight Cowboy, spitting up blood on the bus,” he recalled. “It took me a long time to recover mentally from everything that had happened in New York.”

  The day after New Year’s 1987, Tom Rauffenbart came home to find David sitting at his dining room table.

  “He was very withdrawn,” Tom said. “I knew something was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me. I tried to draw it out of him, and then he just broke down in tears. He was a wreck. I finally grabbed him. I was hugging him, and he said, ‘You can’t tell anybody. You can’t tell anybody. Peter has AIDS.’ ”

  17 SOME SORT OF GRACE

  The chest X-ray revealed a lesion. So, on New Year’s Eve, Hujar had a bronchoscopy with biopsy to determine why he couldn’t get a full breath, why he always felt so exhausted.

  Of course, he had no health insurance. Someone he knew arranged for him to see an eminent lung specialist, who did not charge him, and David paid for the lab work. When the doctor called Hujar right after New Year’s to say “Come to the office,” Hujar refused. He demanded that the results be read to him over the phone. And so he learned that he had PCP, or Pneumocystis, therefore AIDS. He called Stephen Koch, who remembered, “He was overwhelmed and in despair and howling, in terrible shape.”

  And he called David. “I remember picking up a television, and I was going to throw it through a window,” David told me. “Then I stopped myself.” He walked the two blocks to Hujar’s loft, in shock, not knowing what to say. It was odd—and he would come to feel this about his own diagnosis too—how the buildings didn’t collapse and the traffic kept moving and you still had to make yourself breakfast.

  “You can’t shut out the sights and sounds of death,” David wrote of this moment later in Close to the Knives, “the people waking up with the diseases of small birds or mammals; the people whose faces are entirely black with cancer eating health salads in the lonely
seats of restaurants. Those images hurl themselves from the corners of a fast-paced city and you can’t even imagine death properly enough to tell this guy you understand what he’s railing against. I mean, hell, on the first day that he found out he had this certain virus he bent down to pick up a letter addressed to him that had fallen from the mailbox and he turned and said, ‘Even something so simple as getting a letter in the mail has an entirely different meaning.’ ”

  Fran Lebowitz and Lynn Davis took Hujar to Columbia Presbyterian on January 13. According to Lebowitz, a “saintly doctor” got him admitted to a private room in the posh Harkness Pavilion. He was being treated like a rich person, which cheered him up. He asked Lebowitz to buy him some pajamas, since he did not own any. “Pale green with dark gray piping,” he specified. She spent a full day hunting for such an item. On January 15, Vince Aletti found him resplendent in blue pajamas with white piping, purchased at Paul Stuart. “She could have gone to Mays,” Hujar told Aletti, naming the proto-Kmart on Union Square.

  On the uptown subway Aletti had run into David, who was carrying art supplies to further alter a small painting on the wall of Hujar’s hospital room. To this picture of some Rockefeller Center buildings with the Atlas sculpture out front, David had already added “a mangy bug-eyed dog and a folksy character with a pig on the sidewalk,” Aletti wrote in his journal. That day David added a monkey face in the treetops—because this amused Hujar. Hospital staff did not seem to notice. On the way back downtown, Aletti asked David if he was more afraid of getting AIDS now that an ex-lover had it. “He said he was more worried about the contacts before Peter,” Aletti wrote.