Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  As they moved from the romance phase into building a relationship, they fought and argued a lot. And what were the fights about? “I don’t think they were about anything,” said Tom. “What would happen is, somebody would say something to set the other one off. Then the other one would go into a mood. Then the one who’d set it off would try to cajole the other one out of the mood, and it wouldn’t work. It would get ugly, and the intensity of these fights was just very, very strong.”

  If the fights were about something specific, they could handle it. They could work it out. But most of them were about “crazy stuff,” Tom said, “and a great many were my fault. That’s one of the reasons I went into therapy. I could kill a relationship within six months with my moods. Awful. I certainly got a lot better as time went on, and I was going through therapy, and I stopped drinking the way I’d been drinking. I really worked at it.”

  In May, Tom went to New Orleans with his stepsister. He and David had not settled whatever they were arguing about at that point. “So when I came back, he was waiting for me, and he was already in a mood,” Tom said. Soon after, Steve Brown showed up and helped David move all his belongings out of Tom’s apartment. With no explanation. “That was a dramatic move-out,” said Tom. “It was rather unpleasant. I thought we were breaking up.

  “This was the first relationship I think either of us had where we were working through things that had probably been haunting us all of our lives. We were both quick to lose our tempers, and once you’re there, you’re just not listening. And we went through lots and lots of those moments. I think neither one of us actually knew how to have a relationship.

  “I don’t know how the hell we kept pulling it back together. There was a lot of agita. But we stuck it out. Sometimes I’m amazed that we did.”

  Tom was clear about his feelings for David. “He was the love of my life. I’ve never met anybody who I was so emotionally changed and moved by.” But David would never say how he felt about Tom. “We struggled in those first couple years,” said Tom, “over ‘who am I to you?’ “ One night during this time of Hujar’s illness, Tom and David had dinner at a restaurant across the street from Hujar’s loft, and it came up again. “What is this relationship about? Where do I belong in all this?”

  David told Tom that he had three priorities: “My work, Peter, and you. In that order.”

  “I remember thinking, ‘I have to decide whether I can live with this,’ “ Tom said. He never felt resentful of Hujar or the time David spent with him. He also knew that David’s work came first, that he couldn’t survive unless he made things. “I decided I could live with it.”

  David was at work on what he sometimes called his “Mexican film.” He had images to shoot in New York, like coins dropping from a bandaged hand and sides of beef moving through the meat market. Then he began editing.

  James Romberger was probably one of the first to see A Fire in My Belly early in 1988. “[David] had me sit in front of his big TV, next to his baby elephant skeleton, and insisted that I watch his Mexican film. What followed was an assault on my senses, a view of a world completely out of control. The strobed, often violent scenes of wrestlers, cock and bull fights, lurid icons, impoverished dwellings, clanking engines, an enslaved monkey, cripples begging for coins, for bread, a burning, spinning globe—it was a picture of indifference to the value of life, Mexico as a grinding machine of poverty and cruel spectacle. I didn’t enjoy the experience.”

  David explained what this work meant to him in a 1988 letter to Barry Blinderman, the curator who was putting together David’s retrospective:

  The film deals with ancient myth and its modern counterpart. It explores structures of power and control—using at times the fire ants north of Mexico City as a metaphor for social structure.… I explore spectacle in the form of the wrestling matches that occur in small arenas in the poor neighborhoods where myth is an accepted part of the sport; the guys with fantastic masks are considered the “good guys” whereas those without masks are personifications of evil. These images are interspersed with cockfights and TV bullfights. There are sections pertaining to power and control; images of street beggars and little children blowing ten foot long flames among cars at an intersection. Images of armored trucks picking up bank receipts. Images of loaves of bread being sewn up as well as a human mouth—control and silencing through economics. There are invasive aspects of Christianity played against images of Day of the Dead and the earthquake buildings and mummies of northern Mexico. There are symbols of rage and the need for release.

  David spent one day working with Doug Bressler, from 3 Teens, on a soundtrack for the film. They combined atmospherics, Bressler’s guitar, and sounds David recorded in Mexico (street noise, Spanish talk from the radio, a televised soccer game, a mariachi band, and so on). About halfway through the score, he begins to whisper something inaudible over a small drum and a gradual crescendo of guitar until words do begin to come through: “Go inside your own head, and you can do all these things—easy as drawing blood out through a needle.” The score has everything from machinelike riffs to burbling water to what seems like a funeral march, some of it haunting, much of it arresting, but there’s no overarching theme. Bressler couldn’t recall whether he’d even seen the footage before they started working, and David didn’t talk about what the film meant to him. A cassette labeled “Mexico soundtrack” was found in David’s archive at NYU’s Fales Library. He had never synced it up with the footage. “It may not have met his quality standards or been what he intended,” said Bressler. “That’s how he was. Often you weren’t completely in on the whole picture.”

  David created at least two scripts for A Fire in My Belly. Really they were just lists of images. He had begun to make these “lists of associations” for almost every project, whether a film or a piece of visual art. Most of the time, one image was not enough for him, though there are notable exceptions. But usually his work was collaged and layered, and if he used photos, it would be multiple photos arranged to resonate off one another. He wanted to surround a subject. He wanted to peel back layers.

  But he never found a way to do that with film, an inherently linear medium. His films are the weakest part of his oeuvre.

  Even when it’s nonnarrative, even when it’s a collection of images, the filmmaker has to create a flow and establish some thread that pulls you through. David certainly knew how to make a potent image—a spinning eyeball, a kid breathing fire, coins dropping into a bowl of blood, ants on a crucifix. But if the meaning of each image isn’t instantly clear, and those images simply follow one another at brutal speed with much repetition, the work just doesn’t cohere.

  With A Fire in My Belly, he intended to address this problem. As he explained to Blinderman, “What I explored in the film is the workings within surface image; so I split open continuous images and placed studio shots or other related images within the splice—the film uses spliced-in images almost as subliminal messages but each image is used at least long enough to register on the brain; sometimes longer.” He intended to create the cinematic equivalent of layering or collage, but it doesn’t work. David may have realized this. That would explain, at least, why he never regarded any of these “image” films as finished.

  In the catalog for his 1990 retrospective, David lists A Fire in My Belly this way: “went through two versions then disassembled for other projects.” What remains in his archive is a thirteen-minute silent “film in progress” with title and end credits. It’s divided into eight parts, each introduced by the image of a steam locomotive. In his final script, some of these sections have labels: aggression, hunger, religion, celebratory death, prostitution. He’s also trying to work the four elements into this plan. The death section is labeled “wind,” for example. Not that he actually followed his script, but it shows how ambitious this project was. He was trying to pack the universe into it. Most of what Romberger describes above is still there, and then some. Like screaming tabloid headlines, Aztec
pyramids, a dancing bandito marionette, and two seconds of fire ants (on dirt). David also left an “excerpt” from A Fire in My Belly, seven minutes of footage found on another reel. This imagery is even more intense. Here’s all the ant action (apart from the above-mentioned two seconds), as they scurry over coins, bread, a Day of the Dead skull, and a crucifix. That’s intercut with images of mummified corpses, lips being sewn, legless men walking on their stumps, a hustler stripping, a cheetah pacing, a giant roach dying, the bandito marionette burning, and so on.

  In Mexico, he found a bit less of the “pre-invented world,” an unvarnished Catholicism, an acknowledgment of mortality (in Day of the Dead), and actual picturesque ruins. He loved the images he collected there but he needed time to understand their resonance.

  With A Fire in My Belly, David had begun to work out core ideas that came to fruition later. Many of the Mexican images ended up in work he created for his 1989 show, “In the Shadow of Forward Motion.” The Fire in My Belly script represents, for example, his preliminary thinking for the “Ant Series.” Religion and aggression and prostitution in the script become spirituality, violence, and desire in the ant photos. Also, in the hunger section of the script, he wrote the words “silence through economics.” That’s the title of a multiple photographic piece he completed for the ’89 show. Images from A Fire in My Belly also ended up in Spirituality (for Paul Thek) and The Weight of the Earth (Parts 1 and 2) and in slides for his performance ITSOFOMO. The red-coated monkey appears again (painted) in Seeds of Industry, along with some of the photos. He also printed some of the film stills. Then, he gave the seven-minute excerpt to Rosa von Praunheim, who incorporated a great deal of this disturbing footage into his 1990 film about AIDS, Silence = Death.

  Tom Rauffenbart, Anita Vitale, and Peter Hujar at Coney Island on the day they also went to Queens, with David, to find Hujar a “cure” for AIDS. (Courtesy of Anita Vitale)

  Early in May, Hujar told Aletti that he was feeling a loneliness and a need for people. Friends were coming to see him every day. But then they would leave, and he would feel so alone. Aletti told Hujar it sounded like the same depression he’d fallen into periodically over the past ten years. Hujar seemed to agree. It worried him. He was trying to survive by thinking positively, and this depression could affect his ability to get better.

  David and Tom were now sharing an old Toyota once owned by Tom’s mother, though David still had the hardy Malibu. On a weekend in late spring, they drove with Hujar and Anita to Coney Island, where they walked the boardwalk, visited Sideshows by the Seashore, and had lunch in nearby Sheepshead Bay.

  Then Hujar told them he’d read a story in one of the tabloids about a healer in Queens. She could perform miracles, he said. He had to find her. She was in Flushing Meadows Park every weekend. That’s all he could remember, but he insisted, “We have to go. She can cure me.”

  So they drove to Queens as a storm developed. They couldn’t find out anything more about who or where this healer might be in a park whose acreage is significantly larger than Central Park’s. They drifted aimlessly through thunder and lightning. “We all got disgusted,” said Anita.

  “We finally just gave up,” said Tom, “and Peter got pissed off. Then David got mad. We’d had a nice time in Coney Island, but this thing, this quest, just set everybody off.”

  In June 1987, New York Magazine reproduced the group portrait of the East Village scene’s first dealers taken by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for his “New Irascibles” series in 1985. Of the thirteen people in that picture, ten were out of business.

  Among the galleries that hadn’t closed, half a dozen were about to catapult out of their cramped East Village spaces to the next frontier, Broadway below Houston. And more would follow. Jay Gorney, part of the third or maybe fourth wave of dealers and one of the few still in business in the twenty-first century, told New York writer Amy Virshup, “The galleries that showed ‘East Village art’ closed because they weren’t showing terrific art. They had a media run and now that media run has ended. If you’re doing well here now, it’s time to move on.”

  Ground Zero had closed by then, and didn’t move on. Its last location was a basement space, and damp, so James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook had decided to put gray carpet down. “We all got into the same trouble when we formalized our spaces,” Marguerite said. They could no longer allow artists to fling paint around or build campfires on the floor. “I think none of us had much energy, given what was going on,” she said. “It didn’t seem important to paint Needlenoses all over the walls when people were dying down the road.”

  Romberger began to work with David on a project they’d been discussing for years. David wanted to tell the story of his life. He wanted it to be a comic book, so that young gay people would realize that there was someone else who’d survived the things they were going through. David gave Romberger the monologues about his own childhood that he’d written for Sounds in the Distance. Romberger had it worked out in pencil form by the beginning of 1988, when he and Marguerite went off to spend the next half year or so in Belgium.

  On June 5, I ran into Keith Davis for the first time in many months. I can be precise about the date because this encounter so disturbed me that I wrote it down in my journal. We stopped to talk on the traffic island at Bowery and Houston. Keith looked uncharacteristically scruffy, in old clothes with a scarf tied over his head pirate-style. On the end of his nose was puffy bluish-purple lesion. I was horribly shocked. My first impulse—not acted on—was to ask what had happened to his nose. As if he’d tell me that he’d fallen off his bike, and it was all going to get better. But I knew the lesion was Kaposi’s sarcoma. I knew instantly that Keith was going to die.

  He asked if I was on my way to the Richard Kern films playing on Fourth Street, an odd question since I was headed in the opposite direction. So I told him I was on my way to a Lydia Lunch performance in SoHo, and we stood there chatting about Lunch and Kern—inanely, I thought, given the gravity of what was really going on. He was so weirdly upbeat.

  “So how are you?” I finally blurted.

  “Oh, I have AIDS.” He pointed to his nose: “This is Kaposi’s.”

  I grabbed his hand and arm. “Oh, Keith.”

  He shrugged off my reaction, completely cheerful. His doctor had him on a new experimental drug, and he’d gained thirteen pounds. “I’m gonna beat it,” he said.

  I learned later that he was seeing Dr. Emanuel Revici.

  I learned later that he’d known he was sick since the previous fall, and just hadn’t told anyone.

  “When Keith finally told me about his diagnosis,” David said when I interviewed him in 1990, “I remember I was going every day to help Peter, and it was so overwhelming, emotionally and physically, that—I didn’t know what to do. I knew I couldn’t do with Keith what I was doing with Peter, in terms of being that emotional contact. I felt terrible about it, but I knew I would crack.”

  Philip Zimmerman became Keith’s principal caregiver. Zimmerman’s relationship with David had been strained ever since the disastrous cross-country trip in ’85, and they hadn’t seen much of each other. He was working as an assistant in Keith’s graphic design business. “As he got sicker, I was there more to help him deal with his illness,” said Zimmerman. “Then David started to come back around.” He and Zimmerman reconnected.

  Keith agreed to pose for Rosalind Solomon’s project “Portraits in the Time of AIDS.” “She took this beautiful portrait,” Zimmerman said. “I mean beautiful and horrible. She brought a big one over to the house, and when I came into work that day, the portrait was sitting up on the cabinet, and Keith was just completely devastated because he really hadn’t been able to see clearly or objectively how disfigured he was by the KS. I just really felt from that point on there was a rapid decline. Psychically it did something to him, this portrait. It really disturbed me. He set that up and then he set up a mirror beside it.”

  Sometimes children approached h
im on the street and asked if he was a clown. He would say, “Yes. I am.”

  The last time I spoke to Keith, he was about to fly to Oregon for his parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. He said his doctor had told him not to go, but he was determined. Keith was very close to his family. He called his parents every few days. “A fiftieth anniversary only comes once,” he told me, still sounding positive about his own prognosis: “That thing they say, ‘Always fatal.’ That’s just the media. ‘Two years to live.’ That’s the media. Some people have lived for five years.”

  Hujar went back into the hospital on July 9 with a recurrence of Pneumocystis, or PCP. According to Stephen Koch, who took him to Cabrini Medical Center, Hujar turned to him as they were leaving the loft and said, “I’ve decided that you should have the pictures. Send little Madeline to college.” Hujar knew that Koch and his wife wanted a child. (And once she arrived, they duly gave their daughter the middle name Madeline.) Koch had talked to Hujar about making a will and found him a lawyer. The will was drafted while Hujar was at Cabrini and signed when he got back home.

  Lynn Davis called Aletti to tell him that Hujar had been admitted and that she’d never seen him weaker. “She says he asked that no one come and see him, that no one call,” Aletti wrote in his journal. “He said he didn’t want to answer any questions.” Hujar did want to see David—and Anita, who went to visit him at Cabrini that night. What he apparently wanted from her was help getting out. But she couldn’t get him out. He needed the pentamidine treatments that were usually administered by IV. “Awful stuff,” said Anita. David came and again altered the hospital decor, adding creatures to the pictures on the wall. Based on a receipt for the phone in the room (paid for by David), Hujar came home again on July 17.

  “Sometimes they sent them home on oral medications,” Anita said. “But for me, that hospitalization marked a downturn. That marked, for me, his decline, starting that summer. He began to talk about himself in the third person. He would say things like, ‘Pete’s scared.’ ‘Pete’s dying.’ ”