Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  With the PCP responding to treatment, Hujar was discharged after ten days. According to Koch, David had been a constant visitor, “practically sleeping on the floor.”

  He took the letter confirming Hujar’s diagnosis and stenciled on it a smaller version of the two men kissing from Fuck You Faggot Fucker.

  David’s “Mexican Diaries” opened at Ground Zero a few days before Hujar went into the hospital. Tom Rauffenbart remembered that David had worked quickly, wanting to help James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook make some money. But they didn’t know who David’s collectors were, so they didn’t invite them, and they bought no ads. Nothing sold.

  David had created five new paintings with images from Mexico. Two of them pick up on a theme in the “history paintings”—the destruction of indigenous culture. Portrait of Bishop Landa was typically allegorical. Landa was the fanatical Spaniard who imposed Catholicism on the Mayan people, tortured those who did not accept Christ, and burned as many Mayan codices and images as he could find. David painted a street performer breathing fire at the center of this piece, a Mayan priest cutting the heart from a human sacrifice on the left, and, on the right, a papier-mâché head of Christ resting on a cluster of live firecrackers. He connected both religions with violence. David later told Romberger that he had destroyed this painting, an act of poetic inevitability given the subject matter. The burning papier-mâché Christ head appears in the film he would soon begin editing, A Fire in My Belly.

  Mexican Crucifix also contrasts two spiritual systems. Christ on the cross appears on the right (paired with an eyeball that is also a globe, a planet Earth with veins) while the Aztec goddess Coatlicue is on the left (paired with a brain). Coatlicue was the earth goddess who gave birth to the moon, the stars, and many a god (like Quetzalcoatl). She was also a destroyer, in her skirt of writhing snakes and necklace of human hearts and hands. Between Coatlicue and Christ, David painted, among other things, the steam locomotive that meant, in his iconography, the arrival of the future, of civilization, of death.

  The other few paintings were more personal than anything he’d done since starting the history work. Tommy’s Illness is a surreal scrapbook of their shared travel—Turner, in the center, is surrounded by the imagery he hallucinated while ill with dysentery along with small Mexican versions of various Hollywood monsters. Spanish headlines and newspaper cartoons are barely visible behind it all. For the Ground Zero show, David suspended a marionette in front of this painting, a cartoonish souvenir bandito holding pistols. A similar puppet appears several times, dancing and finally burning up in A Fire in My Belly.

  Street Kid was based on an encounter David had in Mexico City. A boy threatened him with a knife, then ran off. David noticed that the boy’s other hand was bloody, bandaged, and holding a few coins. David could identify. This painting is the first in which he directly connects the sensations of doom and crisis he himself felt as a street kid with his sense of a corrupted wider world headed for ruin. He collaged Mexican “Wanted” posters, lists of lottery winners, lotería cards (La Corona, La Bota, La Sirena), wrestling posters, and headlines like “Sacriligio!” around a large, bandaged bloody hand on the right and the figure of a knife-wielding boy on the left. Images of a bandaged hand dropping coins or catching coins appear throughout A Fire in My Belly.

  David’s small painting of a monkey walking along dressed in a red suit comes directly from the circus he filmed in Mexico City. This monkey also appears in A Fire in My Belly—somersaulting, riding a goat, always on a leash. David said that he painted the monkey because it looked so lonely. Hujar loved this painting, and David gave it to him. He kept it next to his bed.

  New York City hospitals and Gay Men’s Health Crisis had begun advocating with Mayor Ed Koch in 1985 to do something about the growing population of People with AIDS who could no longer work and needed public assistance. PWAs were being turned away at welfare centers, where some workers would not even touch the forms they filled out. The few who managed to get into the system often died before they received any benefits.

  Anita Vitale became the first director of the city’s new AIDS Case Management Unit in January 1986, the month David and Tom became a couple. Fear of the illness was so intense at that point that when its offices opened at the welfare center on Fourteenth Street, the AIDS CMU had to maintain not just a separate entrance and separate bathrooms but also separate air-conditioning. Walls were extended to the ceiling to ensure that no one would breathe the same air.

  Anita was Tom Rauffenbart’s best friend. They had worked together in the city’s child welfare department for many years. Tom called her early in ’87 to say that David had a dear friend sick with AIDS. Could she help him? When Anita went to meet Hujar at his loft on February 14, she’d already put the paperwork through to get him Medicaid, food stamps, and a rental allowance. She came by to see what else he needed, and they ended up talking for hours. Hujar showed her his photos. She remembered his burning eyes and how weak he was already. And how stubborn. He’d been seeing Dr. Emanuel Revici, who treated AIDS patients with fatty acids, sometimes combined with elements like potassium or selenium. Revici (who died in 1998 at the age of 101) had developed this approach while treating cancer patients. He’s still celebrated in the world of alternative medicine, the subject of a hagiography called The Doctor Who Cures Cancer. But Revici also gets a chapter in a book called Doctors from Hell and the Quackwatch website debunks his approach in no uncertain terms, noting that “state licensing authorities placed Revici on probation in 1988 and revoked his license in 1993 after concluding that he had violated the terms of his probation.”

  Anita had decided to become Hujar’s caseworker. Even while managing the whole program, she had clients. There was such a backlog of people who needed help. Occasionally she accompanied him to Revici’s office. Azidothymidine (AZT) the first drug developed to treat AIDS, had just become available, but many regarded it as toxic, and it had terrible side effects. Hujar refused to take it. “He didn’t want any orthodox treatment,” Anita said. Certainly there was one thing he could get from Revici that he could not get from a conventional doctor, and that was hope.

  David set up a meeting of Hujar’s friends who wanted facts about AIDS, still such a new horror. This meeting, at Aletti’s apartment, included Fran Lebowitz, Gary Schneider, John Erdman, Stephen Koch, and probably others. Anita came to speak and brought a colleague, Peter Ungvarski, then in charge of the AIDS Home Care Program at Visiting Nurse Services. They talked about what to expect—for example, the kinds of opportunistic infections they might see in someone with a severely impaired immune system. The PCP Hujar suffered from, Anita told them, was “the least of the worst” because at least there was a treatment for it. She had provided Hujar with a home attendant, but that hadn’t lasted too long. Like many others, he didn’t enjoy having a “stranger” in his apartment.

  Erdman said that after this meeting “David took the lead and set up a loose immediate schedule of caregiving, but that was temporary. Peter always had someone coming in to cook, though mostly not us from that meeting. Peter was very popular and the line was long to feed him. David seemed to orchestrate everything, except food.”

  Several times a week, though, David took Hujar to breakfast at a nearby Second Avenue coffee shop. Occasionally Anita joined them. “I think David saw him every day,” Anita said. “Sometimes twice.”

  Writer and firebrand Larry Kramer came to speak at New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Center on March 10 and drew a large crowd.

  First he asked two thirds of that audience to stand and told them they would be dead within five years. He reminded them of the article he’d published exactly four years earlier, “1,112 and Counting.” Now the number was 32,000. And counting.

  In an echo of that essay, he declared, “If my speech tonight doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If what you’re hearing doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men will have no future here on E
arth. How long does it take before you get angry and fight back?” He talked about a government that was murderously indifferent and a Food and Drug Administration that moved at a glacial pace to approve anything.

  “I think we must want to die,” Kramer harangued the crowd. “I have never been able to understand why for six long years we have sat back and let ourselves literally be knocked off man by man—without fighting back. I have heard of denial, but this is more than denial; this is a death wish.”

  According to eyewitness Maer Roshan, Kramer ended the speech by asking, “What are we going to do?” “Suddenly,” Roshan said, “a slight woman in the back stood up and shrieked, ‘Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!’ ”

  Two days later, some three hundred people met back at the center to form the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, ACT UP.

  On March 24, hundreds of new activists charged onto Wall Street at seven A.M. after hanging an effigy of the FDA commissioner in front of Trinity Church. They tied up traffic and handed out copies of Larry Kramer’s speech along with a fact sheet labeled “Why We Are Angry,” focused on the official indifference toward finding a treatment for this illness or educating people about it. Seventeen people were arrested in front of the FDA’s Wall Street office.

  David dreamt that he was helping to sell Hujar’s photos. This was his sole journal entry for ’87 before November.

  For some reason, he tries to get a literary bookstore like the Gotham to sell the pictures. A man there tells him they don’t have room; it’s a small shop. “I seize a person nearby. ‘Can I talk to you privately? … Peter has AIDS and needs the money, and he has a few beautiful portfolios completed.’ ” The man he’s grabbed says, “Maybe.” The photos are in color and have religious content—Buddhists in India, and a church where Hujar had had a “strong experience.” Then David sees that the pictures are already in the back of the store, stacked in a pile.

  Hujar recorded the dates and subjects of his photographs in a cheap eight-by-five-inch spiral notebook. He made one entry after his diagnosis: John Heys on March 2, 1987. Heys was an old friend and a performer probably best known for his portrayal of Diana Vreeland. Hujar had photographed him many times. According to Stephen Koch, “John Heys desperately needed a photograph done while Peter was sick, and Peter agreed to do it, and that is the last picture he ever took.”

  Gary Schneider processed the film, one roll, and either Schneider-Erdman or another commercial lab printed the photo.

  Tom knew that Hujar was David’s best friend, but said that at the time of the diagnosis, he did not understand “the depth of that relationship.”

  Tom had never even seen them together, although he’d been involved with David for a year at that point. After Hujar got sick, though, the three of them met a few times for dinner. Tom cooked over at Hujar’s loft. “It became clear that these guys were cemented somewhere,” said Tom. “They were like extensions of each other. They were so similar. Each had a kind of presence, a depth. It radiated from them.”

  Typically, David never wrote or spoke much about him while Hujar was alive.

  But David had a dream he labeled “recurring,” and Hujar was there in two of the three accounts of it he wrote down. It seems to speak to their connection. This was a dream about ancient lakes with caves beneath their surface. In the dream, David was always traveling toward them, and they were always in a different location.

  In the first written account, David began in a churchyard where a fat priest guarded a pile of gold bars. He could feel that he was in an Aztec or a Mayan city, walking with Hujar. “I suddenly realized where I was. I had a faint recollection of the lakes.” Rounding a curve, he encountered a woman selling ancient Mayan carvings and fossils and tree branches covered with turquoise paint. “Beyond her were the lakes, but she now owned the land and didn’t want anyone walking around.” David was upset. “All I wanted was to find the lakes and show Peter.”

  The second account was a dream within a dream. That is, David woke (in the dream, not in reality) and Hujar was there, turning to him in the shadows and saying, “Where did you see them? Think about it, and I’ll get us there.” David knew that Hujar was referring to the deeper dream he’d just woken from, a dream about the lakes.

  “I look at Peter strangely with a slight smile,” David wrote, “as if I know he’ll bring us there because he can see into my images, something like psychic dialogue. He walks down this path with me.… There’s one doorway with two Indian chiefs standing on each side of it.… I walk through with him and both of us burst out laughing. I feel so happy that we can transfer thoughts without talking.” They were in a semi-forest. “A feeling of centuries behind the scene. Something from the Aztecs. Something from Indians. A place of refuge.”

  The image of the distant lake, the one he could never reach, figures, of course, in one of the last pieces David ever made, described many chapters ago, but it bears repeating. Over a photo of skeletons exposed in an Indian burial ground, he silk-screened words inspired by his yearning for connection and his fear of impending and constant loss: “When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending …”

  When Hujar left Columbia Presbyterian, he thought there must have been a mistake in his diagnosis.

  “Peter thought AIDS didn’t exist,” John Erdman said. “And if it did exist, it wasn’t what they said it was. He thought it was some anti-gay media invention, even while people were getting sick around him. So when he got diagnosed, he thought, ‘Well, this probably isn’t a fatal disease,’ because he didn’t believe the publicity.”

  Vince Aletti remembered that period after the first hospitalization as one of the best he ever had with Hujar. “For the first time in years, we hugged, held hands, cried together, sat and talked about how much we cared about each other,” Aletti wrote in Hujar’s obituary. “We said things we’d always taken for granted or were just too cool to put into words. Peter was radiant with emotion, our visits so passionate they were almost sexy. In the first months, meeting was an event, and Peter had events every day. All the friends he’d kept at arm’s length came around, grateful for a chance to be unashamedly loving, to cook a meal, to shop and clean and listen. And we said to each other, that now, finally, Peter knows how much people care about him. Peter accepts.”

  On April 6, Aletti met Hujar for dinner at a health food restaurant. Hujar declared that he was now meditating three hours a day, and he got Aletti to sample some wheatgrass. Hujar was in a pleasant mood. As they were leaving the restaurant, he announced, “You know, I have a feeling that in a year, a year and a half, I won’t have AIDS. It won’t be in my body.” He said that he personally knew someone who was beating this illness. Aletti recounted the story in his journal. There’d been an experiment in San Francisco with a hundred AIDS patients. Half were told they had a fatal disease; the other half were told they had an unknown disease. Then all were given an antiviral diet. Of the fifty told that they had an unknown disease, fifteen were still alive. Of the fifty told that they would die, all but one had died. That one was the man Hujar knew, still alive because he refused to accept that the illness was fatal. He had kept himself alive with his mind. “Peter says that if you really want something, it will come to you,” Aletti wrote.

  By late spring or early summer, however, Hujar’s attempts at optimism had passed. “When he remained still sick, still plagued by money problems, not knowing where this was going, and not knowing how to get better,” Aletti told me, “then started this whole odyssey of trying to find a cure for himself. All these nutty crackpot cures.” Someone even had him drinking his own urine, mixed with supplements. David reported this to Anita.

  “He ended up getting very angry in general at what was going on with him,” said Aletti, “and then just more generally angry at everyone.”

  In April, David and Tom made their third trip to St. John’s. This time they decided
that, instead of just passing through the San Juan airport, they would stop and spend a few days in Puerto Rico.

  David wanted to film a cockfight. They found a place in San Juan that Tom described as “upscale” and “classy,” the top of the line for this activity. But they had a few days before fights were scheduled, so they drove off to explore the island. They found a special beach. They visited Loíza, a town originally settled by Africans, where they tracked down a local artist whose posters they’d seen in a store. They both bought work from him.

  On their way back to San Juan from the west coast of Puerto Rico, they ran into a heavy storm and flooded roads. At one point, they got stuck in a puddle and had to hire some kids to push them out. Tom found an alternate route through the mountains, so they avoided further floods, but they got back to San Juan too late for the cockfight. “David was miserable,” Tom said. “I mean, fucking miserable as only David could be. Inconsolable.” Then as they drove through town, Tom happened to spot a large drawing of a cockfight on a building. “As luck would have it, they were just starting their day’s fights,” he said. “Thank god.”

  This was a neighborhood place, shabbier and thus more interesting to film. The proprietor not only gave David permission to shoot the fight but also let him go back to where the handlers were prepping the birds, attaching razor-sharp spurs to their legs. David included this footage in A Fire in My Belly. The cockfight must have seemed essential to him because it gave him an animal-versus-animal fight. He already had animal versus human (a bullfight filmed off a television) and human versus human (Mexican wrestling).

  “We almost broke up twice during that trip,” Tom said.