Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  David hadn’t seen his aunt Helen from Michigan since he was about five years old. That spring Helen Wojnarowicz drove to New Jersey to visit David’s brother, Steven, for the first and only time in her life. Pat flew over from Paris. It was shaping up to be a kind of family reunion.

  David had planned to be part of it. Then he informed Steven that he was going to confront Aunt Helen and tell her that she had allowed them to be beaten. He was going to tell her he was gay and that he had AIDS.

  “And I said to him, you’re not going to do that. Then don’t come,” Steven said. “Do that on your own. If you want to go to Michigan when they get home, do what you want. But this is my home. I protect people in my home. This is my sanctuary, and I don’t want to re-dig the dirt here.”

  Then David asked Steven if he’d told his two daughters that he was gay.

  Steven said, “No, they’re children. I don’t need to do that right now.” His daughters were nine and three years old.

  So David said, “Oh, you don’t like faggots, huh.”

  “He was in a rage,” Steven recalled. “He scared me when he was that way. He said, ‘They have to understand the realities of life.’ And I said, ‘I want my children to believe in Cinderella and Santa Claus as long as they can. The problem with you and me is that we saw the realities of life too goddamn early.’ He said, ‘I’m coming down!’ I said, ‘You’re not coming down. You come down, I’m calling the police.’ “

  At some point, Steven called back and left a message: “Dave, I don’t want to end this thing this way. I’m telling you, we’re misunderstanding each other. And I think we need an opportunity to get together and talk about it. You’re flinging shit at me and I’m flinging shit in defense back at you.… I don’t want to end the thing with a phone call and say, hey this is it. So I’m asking you, please, let’s sit down. Let’s see if we can arrange to get together. I love you.”

  Apparently they did speak on the phone, because Steven left a second message to say, “I think you’re right. Probably the best thing is for the two of us to walk away. We’re just different people, we’ve got different views on things, and I don’t think we understand each other.”

  But Steven called a third time and said he thought they should get together and talk. That did not happen. Steven ended up feeling rejected—but so did David. He kept the answering machine tape. He actually considered using it in ITSOFOMO. But he didn’t.

  Tom remembered sitting out on a stoop with David, discussing it. “He thought they didn’t want him to come because he would embarrass them in front of these relatives,” Tom said. “So he felt they were ashamed of him, and that really set him off.”

  David and Steven never spoke again.

  “I always dreamed that in the end the three of us were going to be together,” Steven said. “That we were going to walk through this stuff and get out. But it didn’t happen that way.”

  David was still asymptomatic but he saw the doctor regularly for aerosol pentamidine treatments. He could inhale the same drug that Hujar had had to take intravenously when he came down with Pneumocystis, or PCP. By ’89, doctors were administering pentamidine in mist form to prevent PCP, and it was relatively effective.

  Still, David was very aware of the ticking clock. He wanted to do another cross-country trip, thinking this could be the last time he would ever drive from coast to coast. And it would be.

  He’d been calling car-relocation services, but they wanted drivers who would keep to a schedule. David wanted to take his time, maybe take an indirect route, and hit some of his favorite spots. He was able to make it happen when Norman Frisch left the Wooster Group for a job with the Los Angeles Festival and needed someone to drive his car from Boston to L.A.

  On May 24, 1989, David took the shuttle to Boston to collect the car. An expense list in the back of his journal indicates that he drove to North Carolina before meandering west. He went back to Graceland to buy Elvis slippers, and sent Judy Glantzman a postcard to complain that they no longer sold them. (“I drove all the way there for that.”) He visited Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo and the National Atomic Museum and the Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque. He went back to Meteor Crater. He told Glantzman in another postcard that he was skipping Monument Valley so he’d have a reason to come back. He loved the Southwest. As he once said in a postcard to Marion, “This country is so screwed up but the landscape speaks of other things.” He was filming images for ITSOFOMO. He found fire ants again. One hitched a ride in his camera bag and bit him the next day. But he had the best drive he’d ever had in Arizona. And once he hit California, he headed straight for SeaWorld.

  He turned up in Los Angeles a couple of weeks after leaving the East Coast. Frisch had really started to wonder where he was.

  On June 8, Representative Dick Armey, a Republican from Texas, sent a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts, signed by more than a hundred members of Congress, criticizing its support for the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective “The Perfect Moment.” What was the agency doing, Armey wondered, to curtail its support of “morally reprehensible trash”? NEA appropriations were coming up for a vote. He gloated that he had only to circulate the Mapplethorpe catalog and he “could blow their budget out of the water!”

  On June 12, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., canceled the Mapplethorpe retrospective, scheduled to open there July 1. Director Christina Orr-Cahill felt the entire NEA budget was at stake. Besides, she explained, “It would be a three-ring circus in which Mapplethorpe’s work would never be looked at in its own right.” A small artists’ organization, Washington Project for the Arts, stepped in to take the show. The night of June 30, arts supporters demonstrated outside the Corcoran, projecting slides of Mapplethorpe’s work on the exterior.

  Organized in 1988 at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art with a thirty thousand dollar grant from the NEA, “The Perfect Moment” had already broken attendance records in Philadelphia and Chicago. Conservative outrage this time gathered around 7 of the 150-plus photographs in the show: 2 of children with their genitals exposed and 5 documenting gay male sadomasochism. “The Perfect Moment” would soon become a symbol of everything the far right found wrong with public arts funding—and with art. Senator Jesse Helms declared that Mapplethorpe’s work included “explicit homoerotic pornography and child obscenity,” and many of the artist’s new critics invariably mentioned that he had died of AIDS.

  His S-M photos, part of the X Y Z Portfolios, were printed relatively small and not hung on the wall. Museumgoers could easily avoid them if they wanted. Mapplethorpe himself had designed a case for these Portfolios, which displayed thirty-nine photographs in three rows. Along the top were the X pictures (gay S-M), then in the middle the Y (flowers), and at the bottom the Z (figure studies of black men). Seen together, the pictures inform each other. All of them seem sexual. But all of them can be read, horizontally or vertically, for their compositional elements. Mapplethorpe wanted to see if he could turn pornographic subject matter into art, and most people probably find the X pictures far from titillating. Many of them isolate body parts, where pornography tends to show more of the body, if not a whole scenario. Pornography is an aid to sexual fantasy, while the X pictures confront the viewer with dispassionate documentation of sexual extremes. As for the two children he photographed, both were with their mothers, friends of Mapplethorpe’s, when he took the pictures. He captured the children’s unself-consciousness about their bodies. They are pictures of innocence, the opposite of the photos in the X Portfolio.

  New York Newsday published a column in support of Orr-Cahill on June 21 by archconservative Mona Charen headlined “Sex Photo Ban Involved Taste, Not Censorship.” Her first sentence: “Robert Mapplethorpe was a photographer and a homosexual.” She concluded, “If you take the king’s coin, you live by his rules. But their piteous cries of ‘censorship’ are not moving. No storm troopers are confiscating their work. They have nothing to lose but their subsidies.
”

  David wrote a letter to the editor the next day. “Charen is mistaken if she believes the cancellation was not a form of censorship because there were ‘no storm troopers confiscating the work,’ “ he said. “In the lands of dictatorships there are never billboards or newspaper ads announcing that oppressive policies are in action. It is always taking place in much more subtle ways such as in the guise of ‘taste’ or ‘morality.’ At issue here are depictions of some people’s sexuality.” Certainly David’s work—political, emotional—was quite a contrast to Mapplethorpe’s formal, depersonalized studies. But both insisted on homoeroticism as a valid subject for art.

  David hoped to publish a book of his essays but had taken no step to begin that process. The day Random House editorial assistant Karen Rinaldi saw Untitled (Hujar Dead) and then read David’s piece in the Journal of Contemporary Art, she flipped through the rest of the journal and realized that she was acquainted with one of its editors, John Zinsser. She called him.

  When Zinsser then contacted David to try to set up a meeting, he thought David seemed wary. David said he’d always pictured himself publishing with Grove Press, home to his heroes Genet, Burroughs, and Kerouac. Still, he met with Rinaldi, who told him, “I’ve never been so blown away in my whole life by a piece of writing. What else do you have?” David gave her the pieces he’d published in various tiny magazines like Cuz (“Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration”) and Diana’s Almanac (“Losing the Form in Darkness”) and Between C & D (“Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds”).

  “I read it and I fell in love with it, and then I brought it to Random House and tried to get somebody to listen to me,” Rinaldi said. She worked in the flagship Little Random division, where her job description included answering the phone, reading submissions, and handling permissions. Since she did not have the authority to purchase a manuscript, she had to find someone within Random House to do that. “I wound up really fighting for this book. I remember one of the older editors saying, ‘Karen, are you fucking kidding me? You want to publish what? Forget it.’ They all thought I was a little bit crazy for bringing in a box of manuscripts from this downtown artist who was writing this sort of hybrid rant about politics and AIDS and art and memoir.” Finally she took it to Erroll McDonald, executive editor at Vintage, a Random House imprint that published paperback originals.

  “He said, ‘You’re right—this is amazing stuff,’ ” said Rinaldi. “And I said, ‘I’ll build the book with David. Just help me buy this.’ I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was my first acquisition. And it was Close to the Knives.”

  David would not sign a contract until he finished the book. But it would happen, and he didn’t know enough about publishing to appreciate this coup. He told Zinsser that he was disappointed it wouldn’t be a hardcover book. And he wasn’t sure he trusted Rinaldi, whom he regarded as an “uptown” person. They didn’t really connect until somehow the subject of New York Mets center fielder Lenny Dykstra came up. Dykstra was traded to the Phillies that summer, a crushing blow for many Mets fans. “He was a young, butch gorgeous thug,” said Rinaldi. “I was just mad about him.”

  When she mentioned this to David—who was by no means a sports fan—he pulled out his wallet and showed her that he was carrying a worn photo of Lenny Dykstra. “I love him too,” he said.

  Suddenly he had a lot to do in whatever time remained to him. He planned to devote the rest of the year to writing, to film and photography, and to ITSOFOMO. He also had his retrospective to think about. That would open in January 1990.

  David had had some time to reflect on what he now called the “self-portrait film” he planned to do with Marion Scemama. Maybe it didn’t have to be a document of himself just angry and scared. “I want to treat myself as a third party,” he wrote in his journal, “to look at myself from a distance to see what I am made of like what my gestures and existence is so maybe I can find out who I am, what walls I can explode so as to find or further my own distances or to be able to answer the questions that I am silently screaming. Maybe if I achieve the distance thru film I can see myself clearly enough like from the opposite side of the street from where I’m standing and be able to hear those questions see my limits break my chains self imposed or otherwise.”

  On July 5, David and Marion headed upstate in a rented car. Sylvère Lotringer, a friend of Marion’s, had given them the use of his house in the Adirondacks for the month. David brought all his journals, since he also intended to work on his book—which at this point he was calling A Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: A Psychic Walkabout. For the first three days, they were alone and getting along so well that David told her he now thought he could go to Morocco with her. Marion had been born there, and though she also spent parts of her childhood in Uruguay and France, she had lived mostly in Morocco before going to Paris for university.

  Three days into their stay, they drove to the Canadian border to pick up Marion’s boyfriend, François Pain, a video artist. Then, two Frenchmen turned up, friends of Marion’s and Francois’s, along with photographer Andreas Sterzing and his girlfriend. It seemed to be a vacation. But amid visits to a nearby lake, badminton games, boating, and barbecues, David did not really stop working. He would point a video camera at the barbecue while shrieks of laughter came from the lake and he’d spontaneously compose poetic lines as a voice-over: “Sometimes my mind is an automobile but my heart is a prison. Sometimes the stars in sky make my head hurt.” He came up with a more successful prose poem one day when a green bug landed on his finger while they were driving and Marion filmed him in the back seat as he said, “I wonder what this little bug does in the world, what his job is.… Does the world know it, if it dies? … Does something get misplaced? Do people speak language differently if this bug dies? Does the world get a little lighter in the rotation?” His 1990 photographic piece What Is This Little Guy’s Job in the World would feature a tiny frog in David’s hand, with text that is nearly the same as that spontaneous voiceover.

  On the drive back from the Canadian border, they had seen a turtle in the road, rolling because it had been hit by a car. David, who was driving, stopped to pick it up. A bit of its shell was broken. They put it in the pond behind Sylvère’s house, and David went out to check on it every day. He was also filming frogs, fish, and spiders.

  When Andreas and company departed after a week or so, he left them his 8mm video camera. It could do freeze-frames, split screens, strobe effects, and frames within frames. David had never had anything that fancy to work with, and he spent days experimenting with it. “One day we were driving on the road,” Marion said, “and David took the camera and started filming with a strobe effect, going from a hand on the steering wheel to the top of a tree, to the white line on the road … a series of fragmented views. The soundtrack was live: laughing, conversation, music.… Back home at night, we watched on TV what we shot. David’s images were beautiful. François turned off the sound and put a song by the Doors on the tape recorder. ‘This is the end …’ The effect was immediate. It didn’t look like a vacation movie anymore but like somebody in a car, getting close to a car accident. Just changing the soundtrack turned the shooting into a video piece about death, tension, and emotion. The tone was set. We knew from that moment that everything we would shoot could be used for other purposes. An amazing ballet began between us with the camera going from hand to hand, shooting each other, trying new forms, new feelings and emotions.”

  David holding a tiny amphibian during the July he spent in the Adirondacks with Marion Scemama and other friends. (Photograph by Marion Scemama)

  One night they put on Patti Smith’s Horses and Marion told David about the excitement and sexual tension she remembered from riots she’d participated in back in 1970s Paris, how she’d met a guy in a leather jacket and kaffiyeh scarf who’d saved her from the cops by pushing her into a hallway, where they began kissing and almost had sex, listening to the sounds of screaming, running, and confusion outside while
the voice of Patti Smith screamed “Horses” from somewhere on an upper floor. David said, “We should stage that.”

  “He set up a strobe light, put Patti Smith on again, and asked me to dance topless with the energy of a street fight,” Marion said. “The piece would be called Using My Sexual Energy as a Tool to Fight the State Is as Good a Tool as Any Other. To tell the truth, when I saw the footage, it looked more like a go-go dance than a street fight. I didn’t say anything, but a few days later, it was raining, we were stuck in the house, getting bored. On an impulse, I put Patti Smith on, gave David the camera, and asked him to shoot. I called François and asked him to follow me to the garden. We started dancing in the rain, a strange dance between attraction and rejection, violence and love, fighting and sex. At one point, I threw away my T-shirt and François too. We were topless, jumping on each other, rolling on the wet grass, driven by the Patti Smith beat. David’s images were exactly what we could expect: ambiguous enough to question what was going on—sex fever or rape?” David would use these images later in ITSOFOMO, contrasting violent images of heterosexuality with tender images of homosexual sex.

  One night, Marion filmed David reading to the house cat from The Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom. “And this is Aunt Claws,” he said, pointing to a photo of a jungle cat. “That’s your mommy,” he continued, pointing to a leopard. David described the rest of the cat family, the bad one who’d gone to jail, the uncle in Africa, and so on, then turned to the snake pictures (“Don’t ever go near these”) and the birds (“These are fun to chase around the yard”). The cat on his lap actually looked quite attentive.

  “He really lived his dreams and nightmares,” Marion said. “I remember when he woke up, he would be completely in his dreams.” He recorded a few on audiotape during this stay upstate, most of them violent. One morning at breakfast, after a night of bad dreams, David delivered a long monologue about his desperation and, yes, his anger over what he was facing. Still asymptomatic, he could only wait to see what vicious path the virus would choose. He could do nothing to stop it. Marion suggested they go to the lake and take the boat out. She would film him swimming. Then he would record his monologue and they’d use it as a voice-over with the watery images. “It’s like every emotion we would have, we tried to turn it into a piece, so we could control it in a way,” she said.