Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  He did not know at that point that David had AIDS. Marcus began to talk about his volunteer work with the Montefiore outreach program in the Bronx, where he’d been helping a young Hispanic woman who was dying of AIDS. “The whole experience had knocked me for a loop,” Marcus said, “and I remember that I was pretty emotionally trashed at that point. I told him about it, and from there we started to have a real rapport.”

  They began meeting occasionally at an East Village coffee shop, talking for hours over chicken soup and borscht. “I’m very strong in my political view of things, and as a result have found it difficult to function within the art world,” said Marcus. “David was more willing to accept people’s differences, and I have problems with that, definitely. I want people to see the light. I demand that people see the light and recognize the light and walk towards it.”

  During one of these meetings, they began drawing caricatures of political figures on the napkins. As they played more and more with this, one of them drew what he called a ship of fools. They knew they wanted to see Jesse Helms on that ship. “It was like throwing a rock into water,” Marcus said of their process. “It started rippling out in this free-floating word-association game over the course of three or four of these encounters where one of us would pick it up and just continue to visualize it. We found it totally hilarious. Then it grew into these other compartment. And the sketches grew. The complexity of the idea grew, and we started to take it seriously, seeing it as this sort of morbid, black, poignant way of expressing our sentiments about the whole AIDS situation.”

  Susan Pyzow, Marcus’s wife, came up with the title. A lazaretto is a quarantine station, sometimes a ship. “It’s a metaphor for exiling people that society doesn’t want around,” she said. “Just cast them off, and whatever happens to them, happens.”

  “There were nights he would come over to our place,” said Marcus, “with two pints of strawberry sherbet and smoke a pack and a half of cigarettes and stay from nine o’clock in the evening until four o’clock in the morning, go home, take a shower, come back within a couple of hours and continue the conversation. There was no middle ground with David. There was an intensity about him, which wrapped itself around the shortness of time that he was always conscious of, so when he embraced you, he fully embraced you.”

  When the gallery went on hiatus in August, Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington turned the keys over to the three artists, who found a few other helpers among Marcus’s art students at Parsons. David and Marcus had been collecting stories from people with AIDS about the physical horrors, the victimization, and the discrimination they often faced. (For example, “I spent nine days in a hospital emergency room corridor. They sent me home when I refused a colonoscopy in the hallway.”) They began the installation by constructing a labyrinth with black plastic bags. Then they wrote out the stories they’d collected on large sheets of paper and attached those to the billowing walls. This maze led into a grotesque sickroom where, in a corner, a skeleton lay under a blanket on a cot. Decorating the walls around the cot was a screed about access to health care and other issues affecting the politicized body. On a nightstand sat many bottles of pills and a small TV pumping out daytime drivel, crowned on top with an actual dead cockroach. There was garbage on the floor, splotches of vomit, a Raggedy Ann. In the hallway leading from this room, blue hands reached out of the walls. This led to the ship of fools and its papier-mâché passengers—Cardinal O’Connor, Jesse Helms, and George H. W. Bush. They floated across a sea of blood—red satin in which hundreds of small human faces seemed frozen in mid-cry and hundreds of human hands reached out for help. Past this centerpiece came a dancing Howdy Doody, who talked nonstop: “How’m I doin’? Hey, don’t look at me. I’m a puppet. I’m a politician. I have a wooden head and sawdust for brains. Hey, ain’t my fault people are dying. Is it your fault? How’m I doin’?” Just outside the installation stood three long tables covered with pamphlets, fact sheets, condoms, and needle-bleaching kits from a diverse selection of groups trying to address the crisis. The soundtrack to it all, on a loop, was what David claimed as his favorite song, Louie Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”

  “The Lazaretto, an installation about the current state of the AIDS crisis,” 1990. (Courtesy of P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)

  The artists had decided that they would present The Lazaretto anonymously. “We felt sort of desperate to bring a light to this issue,” Pyzow explained. “We were worried that the impact of the show would be diluted or diverted by bringing names into it.”

  Olsoff called Marcus the driving force behind the construction of this piece. “David got too weak,” she said, though he was certainly present and engaged. And he was dealing with the announcement card for the show. Olsoff and Pilkington had driven to Massachusetts to visit artist Carrie Mae Weems. On the way back to New York, they kept stopping at gas stations to call David, because the card had to get to the printer. And they were arguing. David wanted the card to say that the show had been funded by the NEA.

  “But that isn’t true,” Olsoff told him.

  David screamed, “This is what I liked about Dean Savard! He would have just done it.” Eventually they worked out a compromise. The announcement card said: “Artists involved in this installation have received NEA funds in the past which they have chosen to help support this exhibit.”

  Above that ran words, probably David’s, evoking the ambience of The Lazaretto, which would open on September 6, 1990: “You’re awakened by a thick societal smoke, you cough, you can’t see your hands in front of you, your body is paralyzed, your lungs squeeze tightly, all you can do is whisper, ‘help.’ “

  In the midst of installing The Lazaretto, David asked Marcus and Pyzow to take a break with him and go upstate. They were all exhausted and wrung out, after working through a typically brutal and muggy New York August in a space with no air-conditioning. “He insisted that we go to Lake George,” Marcus said. “Why? Because of whatever it rekindled in terms of his memories that he wanted to hold on to one more time. Wasn’t our idea to go to Lake George. That would not have appealed to me, but it seemed important to him. So we rented a car and just went. And I said, ‘David, it’s August. Where are we going to stay?’ We traveled all the way up there on the spur of the moment, and there was nowhere but this dive that had a spare room. And of course it was only one room, so we were all in there together. That didn’t matter to David, as long as he was there. Then he had to take us to all these places that he remembered. He knew the watering hole, he knew where to swim, he knew where to eat.

  The “dive” was in Warrensburg, about five miles from where David had spent a month the summer before with Marion Scemama. There’s no way to know, of course, if he wanted to remember her or just the general intensity of their month together. Often he simply liked to go back to a place he knew.

  Dolores usually wrote to David on or near his September 14 birthday. Her 1990 letter indicates that he had finally told her about his diagnosis. “Your letter was a profound shock to me,” she wrote. She had sincerely hoped that he would have no more trauma in his life.

  She told him she was concerned about his last two notes. She hadn’t understood them. David did not keep copies of those letters, but apparently he’d said something about being depressed, and she’d assumed he was still mourning for Hujar.

  She concluded by telling him, “I send you positive energy and love always—you know I am here for you whenever you need me. Love, Mom.”

  The letter was tucked inside a birthday card that featured a spluttering Daffy Duck: “Admitting your real age? What honesty! What courage! What veracity!”

  This was the last time David ever heard from his mother.

  Scheduled construction at the loft now threatened to bring unrelenting chaos into his life. There was no way he could do any work there for his November show. He decided to relocate to his new home-away-from-home: Bloomington-Normal. He could again stay with Barry Blinderman and family and find a c
heap studio.

  He arranged to have a storage unit built in the middle of the loft to hold artwork and other valuables. His upstairs neighbor Dori Poole would supervise the sealing of darkroom equipment and generally keep an eye on everything. The construction company agreed to give him a thousand dollars for airfare and studio rental. He left for Illinois on September 15, the day after his birthday. He stayed for one month.

  Patrick took him to the old Montgomery Ward building in downtown Bloomington, where he had a studio and where his roommates had opened a gallery. “It was an old rickety building, with old elevators and grand staircases,” Patrick said. His roommates had rented two rooms and a long hallway on the second floor and called it Upfront Gallery. David rented one of those rooms. Patrick described it as enormous with northern light and sixteen-foot hammered-metal ceilings. It also happened to be near the local restaurants David loved, greasy spoons that served steak. David rented a car for about ten days. The studio was in walking distance of both Blinderman’s house and Patrick’s house, but according to Patrick, David rarely walked anywhere. When he didn’t have his rental, Patrick would drive him in his old beater of a pickup truck.

  Early on, David went to Walmart to buy a boom box for his studio. While he was there, he spotted a gumball machine full of Super Balls and started loading in quarters and filling his pockets with them. They got into Patrick’s pickup and drove out onto a parkway with people traveling fifty-five to sixty-five miles an hour. David wanted to throw Super Balls out the windows. “To shake things up in Bloomington,” he told Patrick, instructing him to slow down to thirty-five miles an hour while they launched the balls as far as they could in front of the truck. The balls would bounce, hit the front of the truck, hit the bed, and bounce onto the cars behind them. “He was just laughing. He was having such a good time,” Patrick said, “and people were swerving and flipping us off.”

  David’s aggression against the “pre-invented world” had never manifested in such a potentially disastrous way before, but it didn’t last long. He had a follow-up idea for a project he and Patrick would do together, traveling the country. “He just thought we were all too complacent,” Patrick recalled. “He wanted to go to rural America and camp out in a hotel and get a sense of what every one did there. Then we were going to make these icons of fear, just these real scary masks, and leave them where people could find them and be stirred by their fear of what this was and where it came from and who left it there.” And they’d finance it by applying for a grant. Or so he told Patrick. For David, very aware of the state of his health, this may have been fantasy or even a joke, given his recent adventures in the world of grants.

  He created a costume for a new photo series, a kind of skeleton with a monstrous head, a large penis, big spiky-looking hands, and a goggle-eyed crazy face attached to its rib cage. David had Patrick pose in this for what became Death in the Forest and Death in the Cornfield. “I was afraid we were going to get shot, because we were out on some farmer’s land,” Patrick said. “I told him, ‘David, they’re going to bring out the shotgun.’ And he goes, ‘There’s nobody out here.’ He was always so willing to take chances. At other people’s expense.”

  A visitor to new territory can have the wrong idea about what’s safe and what isn’t. One day David sent Patrick into a site that he assumed would be unfriendly, an Army-Navy store. He wanted dog tags printed with the inscription “I really want to farm that blow boy.”

  “I would do things more daring than he would do,” said Patrick. “He’s sitting in the truck, saying, ‘You’re really going to do this?’ I said yes. But I don’t think I would have done it had he not been sitting in the truck. He put me up to it and I would just do it.” Patrick found some sorority girls at work in the Army-Navy store, and they were unfazed by his request.

  David was not pleased with the subsequent photo shoot in the forest and cornfield. They began in a wooded area, with David yelling, “All right, you’re a monster. Act like a monster.” Then, “you’re not scary enough!” When Patrick finally settled on rocking, squatting, and reaching like a gorilla, David said, “Yeah, like that. Now yell.” The ground was muddy and wet and the feet David made for the costume began to disintegrate. “Screw it,” he said. “We don’t need ’em.” Then all the way back to Bloomington, he fumed, “That was just horrible. That was a waste of time. It’s not going to work. It’s terrible.”

  While these photos were never exhibited during David’s lifetime, Wendy Olsoff thought they were the beginning of a new direction. “I don’t think he felt like it was a finished thing. That’s my gut feeling,” she said.

  He bought a cheap notebook at Walgreen’s and began a journal. He dreamt that Hujar was photographing him. David was looking through the contact sheets, “small images of my body near naked, naked, piled around with wet potter’s clay. They were beautiful and harrowing. Wet clay with impressions of fingers, hands, pull marks, piling and pounding and at times shot from below my knees, me on my back, some just shots of torso, a large clay hard-on.… Peter never photographed me nude. He was always ‘protective’ in some way of what interpretations or taboos might come towards me, and in the photographing he was observing limits of his own choosing but there was sweetness in his limits of documenting me. In this sleep it felt like he’d freed up that stuff and the resulting images were very sexy and primal and almost what he would have dismissed as ‘french’ or ‘arty’ but the sensuality of the wet clay hard-on was pretty wild and even a little disturbing in the questions of who? What hands made this?”

  He was creating work in Bloomington-Normal for what would be his last show, and he wanted to change his image. In a letter to Judy Glantzman, he wrote, “I feel like I’ve been in a place this last year that I don’t want to be back in again. I’m sick of the bigot stuff, the press, the reputation as bad boy, etc. I really need to have things come and go on a quieter level.” Since people thought of him as the angry artist, he wanted to show that he could make something beautiful.

  So he began the flower paintings. But David had never in his career created beauty for the sake of beauty, and he didn’t do so now.

  According to Marguerite Van Cook, David was very interested in the Decadent movement in literature—Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), but also Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature). She and David had had a long discussion about À rebours. At one point, the principal character, Des Esseintes, collects hot house flowers “to see the death in them and the decay in them,” as Marguerite put it. Des Esseintes is thrilled by plants that seem to have sores and abrasions, that have the look of a half-healed wound, a crusted scar, or gangrened skin. “Des Essientes was mourning his virility,” Marguerite said. “He’s become weak and wrestles with a variety of spiritual matters. All of which happens as he sequesters himself as his health fails.” At one point, Des Esseintes looks at a caladium flower and has, in Huysmans’s words, “a sudden vision of the human race tortured by the virus of long past centuries.” He means syphilis, but his ability to look at an exotic flower and see “the malevolence of the virus” must have resonated with David. With the flower paintings, he made an unusually sly gesture at addressing the hideous things the AIDS virus could do to a human body. “David was sick of being so dark,” said Marguerite, “but at the same time, he was David.”

  He told Patrick that he’d taken photos at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. In his Bloomington studio, he projected these slides onto a thin wood board, drew the images, then painted them. He showed Patrick his process, how he used his sketchbooks and journals, telling him, “You need to develop your own methodology, but this is how I do it.”

  “I’d been trained as a photo realist,” Patrick said, “and I talked about how I’d learned to paint—what people told me. We just discussed it.” He did not demonstrate anything. David was working on a Hawaiian flower and invited Patrick to critique it. “I said, ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous. The light is beautiful. I wouldn’t change a thing.’
I couldn’t believe he had done this—the whole plant, the sky—in twenty-four hours, like he hadn’t gone to sleep at all. And he said, ‘I don’t like it. Tell me what I should change.’ I couldn’t find a thing I would change. And he said, ‘You’re just flattering me. Let’s go to lunch.’ So off we went. And I came back the next day and he had changed it. It was even more gorgeous with better light. He had repainted the entire flower.”

  Of course, the piece wouldn’t just be a flower. Each of these forty-eight-by-sixty-inch paintings had small openings where he inserted photos held in place with red string. Each also had two or three blocks of silk-screened text. “The flower paintings were supposed to be very peaceful,” Wendy Olsoff said. “Of course, they were layered with his text. He wanted people to linger on the text, so he made it really hard to read. You had to stare at it quite awhile and stay with the painting.”

  I Feel a Vague Nausea features a large blood-red flower with fleshy petals, small black-and-white photo insets of images like the surrogate mother (from Childhood) and an X-ray of a heart, with some of his writing from Close to the Knives: “I feel a vague nausea stroking and tapping the lining of my stomach. The hand holding the burning cigarette travels sideways like a storm cloud drifting over the open desert. How far can I reach? I’m in a car traveling the folds of the southwest region of the country and the road is steadying out and becoming flat and giving off an energy like a vortex leading into the horizon line. I’m getting closer to the coast and realize how much I hate arriving at a destination. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me.”

  We Are Born into a Pre-Invented Existence includes that core text, already featured in ITSOFOMO and Close to the Knives. The painting of one red flower with a yellow stamen is quite phallic, and among the photo insets around it is the head shot of Steve Brown used on the cover of the “Tongues of Flame” catalog.