Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  “I remember I had this feeling that I owed a lot to this guy and maybe he needed me,” she said. “I’m not a mystical person, but there was something very strong for me in the fact that we met in Paris by chance. It was unbelievable. That Michael Carter looked out the window at that moment, and that David was passing by—I had the idea that it was not just chance, that it was meant. There was something written somewhere that we had to meet again. And I had the feeling that if something permitted that, it’s because I had a role. I had something to do for him.”

  After David returned to New York on April 26, he and Marion began talking on the phone again—calls that lasted two or three hours. At some point they decided it would be cheaper if she just came to New York.

  David decided to get tested for HIV after he came back from Europe. He never said why he changed his mind.

  Tom had found a doctor he liked right there in the East Village. Dr. Robert Friedman also happened to be a gay man, and he ended up with a large caseload of AIDS patients. That’s where David went for his test. That’s where he learned that he was HIV-positive. Not only that—he had fewer than two hundred T-cells, and two hundred was the line of demarcation. In other words, said Dr. Friedman, “David had full-blown AIDS from the time he walked into the office.”

  However, since he had no opportunistic infections (like Kaposi’s or PCP), he was given a diagnosis of ARC, or AIDS-related complex. “It was a euphemism that made people feel better,” said Tom. The term was eventually deemed useless.

  David’s T-cell number would fluctuate. Somehow he got hold of one of his own lab reports in 1990, showing a count of 237. But Tom eventually learned from the doctor that from the time of his diagnosis until his death, David rarely had more than a hundred. David, however, did not want to hear about T-cell numbers. He asked the doctor to just let him know when there were few enough that he could give them all names.

  He left the doctor’s office on First Avenue that day of his diagnosis and almost immediately ran into Bette Bourne, the lead Bloolip. They’d only met once or twice before, possibly at the Bar or through Hujar, but David immediately went to Bette with his overwhelming news and said, “I’m fucked. What am I going to do?”

  “He was sort of smiling,” said Bette. “It was very strange. It was one of those smiles of recognition and resignation. He was almost laughing at the horror of it. He was still in shock. We held each other for a bit.”

  David tried to sort out his feelings by pounding out a couple of pages at the typewriter. The moments after diagnosis “were filled with an intense loneliness and separation,” and he realized that “even love itself cannot connect and merge one’s body with a society, tribe, lover, security. You’re on your own in the most confrontational manner.”

  He did not make note of the day he was diagnosed. Tom remembered only that it was in spring 1988. But sometime before May 19, David wrote a short disquisition on death in his journal: “So I came down with shingles and it’s scary. I don’t even want to write about it. I don’t want to think of death or virus or illness and that sense of removal, that aloneness in illness with everyone as witness of your silent decline.” He had discussed it with Kiki though—you become fly food.

  David was thirty-three when he got what was then considered a death sentence. The man who’d run down the street as a boy yelling, “We’re all going to die!” had no illusions about “beating” the virus. He expected no miracle. Instead, he began to approach each project as if it were his last.

  19 ACCELERATION

  David set so much in motion that summer of 1988, thinking he might soon become too sick to work.

  He began to write the piece about Hujar’s illness and death. An early draft begins with the words “Rage. Rage. This is something about rage watching the television as some greasy government employee in Texas … said if I have a dollar to spend on health care … I won’t spend it on someone with AIDS.… I turn from watching a man I love struggling to save his life.” And this leads into his account of the trip to Long Island with Hujar and Anita, four single-spaced pages written in one burst. That would later appear in Close to the Knives, while “if I had a dollar” became the first line of text on one of his best-known paintings, Untitled (Hujar Dead).

  He’d received a letter from Amy Scholder, an editor at City Lights, asking him to contribute to a special forum on AIDS—its impact on cultural life—in their annual City Lights Review. She knew him as a visual artist and expected him to contribute a photo or drawing. Instead he sent a short essay titled “AIDS and Imagination,” in which he first described what he meant by the pre-invented world, the regulated world, and how he’d often had the sensation of watching himself from miles above the earth as he moved through this “clockwork of civilization.” But with the appearance of AIDS, he now saw everything at once and was acutely aware of himself “alive and witnessing.” He incorporated about half of this into the essay on Hujar’s death, which he called “Living Close to the Knives.”

  David and Tom were now attending ACT UP meetings. On June 25, 1988, the NAMES Project brought the AIDS quilt to the Great Lawn in Central Park, with the panels for Hujar and Keith included. On June 26, Gay Pride Day, his old friend Zoe Leonard called David. He told her he’d tested positive, and when she asked what she could do for him, he invited her to come along to the next ACT UP meeting.

  He made the film Beautiful People, in which Jesse Hultberg gets dolled up in powder and gown, wafts out to a New Jersey lake, and dips his hand into the water, magically turning the film from black-and-white to color. He’d scrawled this note to self: “Seeing drag queens as true revolutionaries who fuck with visual codes of gender.” The movie as he left it would have benefited from editing, and it needed a soundtrack. Still, this is a film he came close to completing. It’s atypical, though, since it has a narrative.

  He began to work in the darkroom with the many photos he’d taken over the years but never printed. Marion Scemama came from Paris for a month that summer with her boyfriend, François Pain. They stayed at her sister’s apartment, and though she had assignments for a French photo agency, she was often free to see David. She was taken aback by the condition of the loft. He didn’t like to clean, and he hated for anyone else to do it. He seemed to regard it as an intrusion into his privacy. Besides, they might throw something out. Marion cleaned anyway. He drove her to the Great Swamp in New Jersey and took pictures of her in a pond, naked and covered with mud. He took her to a favorite junkyard to photograph old broken cars. “I could feel he was excited, regaining energy,” she said. He wanted to get a new exhibition together and asked if she could come back in the fall to help him.

  He was also painting that summer. Composer and musician Ben Neill wrote him a letter asking if David would create the cover art for Neill’s first LP, Mainspring, featuring the experimental instrument he was developing, the mutantrumptet. Neill had seen David’s work at Gracie Mansion. “I literally felt like I was looking at a visual representation of what I wanted to do as a musician,” Neill said. “He was essentially sampling—borrowing different kinds of visual imagery and putting it together—but it had this sense of mystery and a kind of resonance between the images.” Neill sent David the recording, told him he was borrowing from baroque dance forms for this work, and mentioned that he’d become interested in dance diagrams. When Neill arrived at the loft to look at the image, he saw that David had incorporated dance diagrams into the painting, Something from Sleep II. A sleeping figure drawn on maps lies at the bottom (first seen in History Keeps Me Awake at Night). A system of tubes holds images in place above the sleeper against a background of clouds. In the largest of these, an elephant in a pond is walking up to a floating elephant fetus (first seen in Mortality). David painted this elephant image on dance diagrams. Right above the sleeping figure is the surrogate mother’s head from Childhood. On the right, upside down, is the Cyclops monster first seen in Queer Basher/Icarus Falling. At the top is a heart that could have come f
rom a lotería card (reminiscent of the heart in Tommy’s Illness). David added a new element, a watchface without hands—often a symbol for death. Bits of this painting were covered with torn dollars. Somehow this all worked together as an image of emotion at one remove, emotion under control. It would appear, in May 1989, on the cover of Artforum.

  He worked on the mock-up of a square thirty-six-page book “in memory of Peter Hujar,” The Angel Inside Me Has Fallen to Its Knees. This book was never printed, but he completed the design, starting with a cover image of ants crawling over coins and a watchface. On the dedication page, he sketched (in black felt-tip) his painting Mortality. He would include all six fire ant photos, thirteen of his paintings, and the text for “Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration.” In 1983, he’d made a piece called The Angel Inside Me Has Fallen to His Knees as a stenciled self-portrait. That was the year he’d done all the stencil pieces of Hujar.

  When David told Gracie Mansion about his diagnosis, she wondered if he wanted that to be known in the art world—a question that made him furious. He was not going to hide it. Gracie then called Barry Blinderman, the former director of Semaphore Gallery who had moved on to become the director of University Galleries at Illinois State. Blinderman remembered Gracie calling to say “Do you know that David has ARC?” and “You should give him a retrospective. Nobody’s done one.” Blinderman thought it was a good idea. Gracie sent him slides, and Blinderman set about applying for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  The estate of Peter Hujar had been paying rent on the loft since December 1987, while David reimbursed it each month. He had tried to pay the landlord directly, but his check was returned with a note saying that his payment would not be accepted since his name was not on the lease. During the first week of August 1988, David heard from a lawyer representing the landlord who ordered him to leave the loft by the end of the month or face “legal action.”

  In the case of David’s particular building, the landlord wanted to convert it to commercial space and get all the tenants out. Throughout the neighborhood, though, artists had done their job of acting as detergent, and were now to be washed away, along with the rest of the poor. The symbol for it all was the Christodora House on Avenue B, where David had once cavorted naked with John Hall. By 1988, it was filled with high-priced condos. T-shirts reading “Die Yuppie Scum” were ubiquitous in Loisaida. So was the graffiti tag of an upside-down cocktail glass (“the party’s over”) attributed to the industrial band Missing Foundation, or at least to its leader, Peter Missing. The same East Village streets where artgoers once made their rounds now exhibited raw evidence of the growing crisis in homelessness. Tompkins Square Park had become a tent city, filthy and foul. Homeless people who didn’t have so much as a makeshift shelter slept in the bandshell.

  On the night of August 7, 1988, the Tompkins Square riot began when police moved into the park to try to enforce a one A.M. curfew imposed by the local community board. Since it seemed quite possible that the tension would come to a head that night, I was there as a reporter. Motley demonstrators trooped defiantly through the park with their “Class War” banners, and then a contingent of mounted police pranced out onto Avenue A. It was twelve thirty Saturday night, a peak traffic hour. I heard an explosion, probably an M-80, and so it began: war in the neighborhood.r I witnessed cavalry charges down East Village streets, a chopper circling overhead, and people out for a Sunday paper running in terror—from the cops—down First Avenue. Rioters smashed the Christodora’s front door and liberated a potted tree from the lobby, replanting it across the street in the park. A cop swinging a billy club chased me away from the park, despite my press credentials. The photographer I was working with had her camera smashed. It was an awful night.

  The next week, a lawyer for Hujar’s estate sent David a letter, reiterating the landlord’s threat to begin proceedings against him “unless we can arrange some kind of agreed upon stay for you. As we discussed before, the estate can not really defend your right to remain in the apartment once proceedings begin.”

  David never considered leaving, but he would have to fight to stay in the loft.

  David had not seen or spoken to his mother since sometime in 1985, his year of creating work about dead families. During his intimate talks that year with Karen Finley, he complained that Dolores was always calling and that he’d cut ties with her. Tom said that after he came into the picture, on the first day of January 1986, he never met Dolores and never knew David to have any contact with her. But in the late eighties, they did write each other once or twice a year. Dolores usually sent a birthday card.

  That year she sent her card to David’s old address on Thirteenth Street, and it was forwarded to Tom’s house. In pink ink, Dolores wished him “universal abundance” and sent her love. She enclosed a letter, saying she thought of him often and hoped he was healing from the loss of his friend. Was he still writing? Was he still painting? “David, I get worried sometimes that we will lose touch with one another and I would of course feel most distressed if that happened.” While she respected his decision to keep her out of his life, she wondered if he could give her the address of a friend, someone she could contact if she needed to reach him.

  In a postscript, she asked him how Pat and Steven were doing. Both had stopped speaking to their mother in 1981.

  David was now occasionally meeting Ben Neill for coffee at Disco Donut on Fourteenth Street. They discussed the book Pure War, a conversation between French thinkers Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer. The book is difficult to summarize, but major themes are the impact of speed on a civilization, the way speed dominates everything that moves slower, the potential of a culture to obliterate itself, and how consciousness of that leads to a mindset of perpetual war.

  Some of these notions had already manifested in David’s work, with its “picturesque ruins,” with its locomotives, the instrument of a westward expansion that wiped out Native American culture and that, to him, symbolized the acceleration of time. “He was interested in the whole phenomenon of things speeding up,” Neill said, “and I think, for him, that was very much a metaphor for the speed or advancement of his own illness at a certain point.” They talked about collaborating and sealed it when Neill was offered a slot to perform at the Kitchen in late ’89.

  David decided that he would call his next show “In the Shadow of Forward Motion,” and the performance with Neill would take the abbreviated (speedier) name of ITSOFOMO. He explained the concept in one of his audiotaped journal entries: “Consider that you’re in a car speeding along on an expressway. Everything that you see out of the corner of your eye which doesn’t register [while you’re] in the pursuit of speed … is what’s in the shadow. It’s all the things quietly occurring, within absence of sight.”

  He was scheduled to have another show with Gracie Mansion that winter. She too was about to move to SoHo, but then her backers pulled out. “Nobody was coming to the East Village anymore,” she said. “I had stayed way too long, and I just decided I had to close the gallery.” She let her artists know immediately. “David knew he was ill at that time,” Gracie said. “He didn’t know how much time he had, and he wanted a show right away. He was so pissed off at me.” After word got out that she was closing, another backer came forward. But in the month or two between Gracie’s telling her artists and finding that backer, David had already gone with P.P.O.W Gallery, which had just moved from the East Village to the eastern edge of SoHo.

  ACT UP was planning a big October action at the Maryland headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration to protest the agency’s slow pace of drug approval. Hundreds of people now attended the weekly meetings in New York, while branches had formed everywhere from Seattle to Berlin. During its first year and a half, ACT UP had organized nine protests designed to have national impact, along with an unknown number of “zaps.” ACT UP was in Washington when Ronald Reagan first uttered the word “AIDS” (after six years of silence), only t
o call for mandatory testing. Activists tracked Reagan’s laughable Presidential Commission on the HIV Epidemic (which included no experts but several people who wanted mandatory testing and/or quarantine). They protested outside the offices of Cosmopolitan after the magazine ran an article asserting that straight women were not at risk for the disease. One of the major goals of ACT UP was to find and disseminate the facts about AIDS, from prevention to possible treatments.

  As relatively new members, David and Tom were not yet part of an affinity group.s Nor was Zoe Leonard, who’d become a regular at ACT UP, often meeting David there. “David and I started an affinity group call the Candelabras,” said Zoe. Tom was in the group and maybe ten other people. No one can remember who came up with that name or why. Each affinity group had to plan its own action and make its own props for the FDA protest.

  ACT UP had already been doing “die-ins,” and Zoe suggested that their group make tombstones with slogans on them. They could each lie down with one during the demonstration. “Then David said ‘foam core and paint,’ “ Zoe remembered. “I had pictured something much more elaborate, but he said, ‘They’re signs. Foam core and paint.’ We all made them together at my house. The headstones became a real trope in ACT UP. Leading up to that action, David and I were very close, very in sync, and channeling all this emotion into something. I was so happy to have David in my life again in that way.”