by Cynthia Carr
David told his journal that it wasn’t her unwillingness to share intimate details that got to him; it was the “trust broken.” He wrote, “My emotional reaction was betrayal and regret, stupid as that may look at a later date. I felt like I was a stranger or she was a stranger in that moment. It could be a child’s thoughts, it could be. But it’s there and I felt a door closing between us.”
They were at a Days Inn in Bakersfield. They were at a stalemate. David asked Marion if she could let it go and she said no. As long as this heaviness was in the air, he said, he didn’t want to go on to Death Valley, where the hotel was expensive. Spending extra money to be miserable—no. They could just head back to New Mexico. She said she could take the bus to Albuquerque and wanted him to help her plan this. He decided, “I don’t have the energy to plan her trip, to plan the disintegration of this one.… I feel like I’m standing in the distance watching this accelerate and grow and implode and yet it seems stupid, what it’s all based on.”
He called the front desk and said they were staying another day. Then he drove off and left her at the Days Inn. He thought she should decide if she really wanted to split, and he didn’t want to sit in the room and listen to her make plans.
He and Marion had not seen each other in nearly two years. “When she was coming with me, all my thoughts were based in old memories of the exciting times, the intense communications that ran deep between us,” he wrote in the journal. “Years ago we were almost inseparable. Others were jealous of us because there was a great sense of reality between two people that outlined something of the soul, previous travelers who recognize each other in the cloak of strangers. Two strangers who know each other intimately and instantly upon meeting. Maybe that’s why it breaks so powerfully. But this time has been different. I can recognize what I loved in her in the past but something has changed.” He decided that he was the one who had changed. And it had to do with “that thing, that form, that location” that had grown inside him through all the loss he’d experienced, beginning with Hujar’s death. “I kept waiting for the switch to be thrown, the close-up recognition that she and I had resumed what we dropped two years ago. It never came.”
Meanwhile, back at the motel, Marion wrote in her diary, made some Polaroids, and cried. She called her sister and Sylvère Lotringer. She called the bus station. She would return to San Francisco, she thought. So she called Amy Scholder and asked if she could stay with her.
Amy said no, reasoning, “I didn’t want to get in the middle of their shit. It was impossible. Then David called me. I told him that Marion had called, and he was furious.” This would go onto David’s final complaint list—the way Marion would call his friends, even his sister, to get information about him or somehow insinuate herself. He hated it.
Marion also called Philip Zimmerman. “She was pumping me for information about David,” he said. “It would have been comical if there wasn’t such weird desperation behind it.”
Meanwhile, David called Tom to complain.
“I’m sitting in a restaurant and eating alone and writing and the world goes on around me,” David wrote. “The Bakersfield world. For a moment I wanted to tell her, Don’t go. On one level, I’d rather finish the trip, on another level, I’d rather be alone. I don’t have a strong feeling of being able to retrieve enough of a connection to her to make the return trip have lovely meaning. Something has shut down, maybe out of exhaustion, maybe out of despair, maybe I need a catastrophe or explosion. This is not clear at all. I just want it somehow to stop.”
Marion said, “He wouldn’t help me to leave, but at the same time he wouldn’t do anything to make things better. On the second day I thought that we couldn’t keep on like this. It was too hard for me, and if I would stop the trip, it would be like a failure. I would feel so bad to leave him and to go back to France. So when he came back in the late afternoon, I had all these Polaroids around me that I did in the hotel room. I was posing, and in one of the Polaroids I was lying on the bed with Close to the Knives on my chest, as if I were reading and thinking about the book—a stupid photo in a way. So when David walked in the room, I thought, I’m going to act like everything is all right. So I said to David, ‘Look at the photos I took.’ And when he saw these photos of me laying on the bed with his book on my chest, he started laughing.” Of these fights that started so unexpectedly and irrationally, she said, “After a while we would laugh to make things relieved, because it was too heavy for both of us to handle. And that’s what happened. From one minute to another we became friends again.”
He wanted to drive through the emptiest parts of the earth. So they returned to Death Valley for a couple of days.
On one of them, they drove out to a canyon and parked. Marion, who shared David’s love for toy animals, had a plastic frog, snake, and alligator and said she was going to photograph some animal scenes among the rocks. David told her, “Go by yourself. I’m staying here.” She thought he wasn’t doing well and wanted to be alone. She left him and walked into the canyon, where she did some self-portraits and staged animal shots. After about a half hour, she went back to the car and found that David had tilted the seat back as far as it would go. He lay there completely pale, “like somebody who was really suffering,” she said, “like somebody not anymore of this world.”
She went up and took his hand, saying, “Come back, David, come back. Don’t worry.”
“I felt that something was going wrong,” she said, “that he was going away, in his mind and in his body. Like he wasn’t there. So I started caressing him and talking to him, and then he came back. I don’t know where he had been, but he had been somewhere I couldn’t reach. And little by little his face started getting color again, and then I asked him, ‘What happened, David?’ And he said, ‘It’s nothing—don’t worry,’ and then three minutes later he was laughing.”
They drove the back roads. They drove through Indian reservations, where David always felt like an interloper. But he couldn’t stand the tourist areas. By May 24, they were in Flagstaff and the next day Gallup. It was there that David said to Marion, “There’s a photo I want you to take.”
Untitled, 1993. Gelatin-silver print, 28½ × 28½ inches. David selected this image from the series of photos taken that day, but it was printed posthumously. (Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)
He drove them north to Chaco Canyon. He had been there before and knew exactly where he wanted to stage this. “We’re going to dig a hole,” he told her, “and I’m going to lie down.”
They began digging without saying a word, a hole for his upper body and a bit for the legs. They used their hands. The dirt was loose and dry. He lay down and closed his eyes. Marion put dirt around his face till it was halfway up his cheeks and then stood over him, photographing his half-buried face first with his camera and then with hers.
“We walked back to the car, and we sat without saying a word,” she said. “He didn’t turn the car on. We stayed like this a few minutes, and then we held hands.”
Marion decided that this project was a last gesture from him because she would not be able to photograph him at his death. But David never said that. Certainly, he had orchestrated all of his last work very carefully.
They always shared a motel room, with twin beds, and on the last night, David handed a postcard of a hairy scorpion across to her. On the back, he’d written, “Dear Marion, Bruja, Coyote Girl, Despite the rough spots it was a good voyage.… I hope I’m healthy enough to see Morocco with you next year. We’ll see. Hope you follow your heart and mind and make the films you carry in your body and write the books I know you can write. France would never be the same. Adios. Love, David.”
He had drawn some little spectacles on the scorpion. David and Marion both wore glasses. “I asked him if it was me or him, and he didn’t answer,” said Marion. “He laughed.”
David returned to New York in time to attend Phil Zwickler’s memorial on what would have been
his friend’s thirty-seventh birthday—June 1, 1991. That night he dreamt that he called Zwickler’s number. And Zwickler answered! David was amazed, and afraid to mention death, as if that would make him disappear again. Suddenly he and Zwickler were seated at a table together. David asked, “How was it?” Meaning death. Zwickler would only look at him but seemed to be suggesting that it wasn’t so bad. “The small distance between us was charged with emotion,” David wrote. “I was trying to understand everything in the world at once. If he died and was now back physically and able to talk to me, then death was a process that was one of transition or travel. I was just so relieved to see him alive, or at least physical and communicating. I started weeping and then so did he. We cried this short intense clear emotion. It felt like what I think grace is.”
25 “DISAPPEARING BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH”
David remained isolated through the summer of 1991 and into the fall. In late July, he wrote a letter to Judy Glantzman, who was again upstate for the summer. “I was so ill since you left,” he told her. “It got pretty extreme where I went so dark that I couldn’t call people or speak to anyone other than Tom in order to get help from him.” Then he started taking steroids, which magically cured his intestinal problems. He felt better than he had all year. Now he could finish Memories That Smell like Gasoline. He attached a letter he’d written her a few weeks earlier at the height of his misery. He hadn’t mailed it then because it was so bleak and ugly. He was not willing to go through that again. He’d found a book outlining how to commit suicide. He wanted the option.
At some point, I had heard that David was feeling poorly—and that he wanted no contact with anyone. We were only acquaintances, but I’d felt some connection with him ever since meeting him through Keith Davis, and his work moved me. I decided to call him. I left a message offering to get groceries or do laundry. He would not have to talk to me. I could hand a bag in at the door. He didn’t take me up on that.
But he called me on July 29 after he’d started the steroids to tell me that his life had been hellish since the end of the trip west. He’d had constant nausea and constipation and couldn’t get out of bed. Now he was supposed to leave the next day for the long-delayed drug trial in Boston, but he’d canceled. It would have meant more biopsies, self-administered injections, and blood drawn every day. Then if he felt bad and didn’t show up for a procedure, they’d kick him out. “I totally stopped talking to people,” he said. “I wouldn’t even tell the doctor what my symptoms were. I’m losing touch with everything. Art—it’s all meaningless. It’s an issue for me, whether I’ll ever work again.”
He complained that his doctor was treating him “like an emotional basket case” and would not discuss suicide with him. “He freaked,” David griped. “His reaction was ‘don’t worry, I won’t let you suffer.’ ”
“He was a very difficult patient,” Dr. Friedman said. “A million questions. But he was difficult because he was in an impossible situation. The options were so limited. How could he not be angry? How could he not be volatile? How could he not be frustrated?”
David seemed to have as much trouble communicating with his doctor as he did with Tom. He told me that before he started the steroids, he’d been injecting himself with interferon, and “no one knows why.” I’m sure the doctor knew why. David just had a hard time hearing what the doctor was telling him. He’d get lost. Or he couldn’t take it in. “He’d get overwhelmed and just give up,” said Tom, who urged him constantly, “you have to tell the doctor if you don’t understand what he’s saying.” Tom sometimes sat down with David, wrote out his questions for the doctor, then went with him to the appointment.
On August 1, David noted in his journal that the nausea, constipation, and fevers were back. He went through his address book. Most of the people he wanted to speak to were dead.
Sometime in August, a fired destroyed much of Tom’s apartment. A neighbor phoned him at work to tell him, and Tom called David to ask him to go look. David rang him back to say, “It’s bad.”
Tom had left a lamp on. Firemen speculated that one of the cats knocked it over into an old chair, where it smoldered into a small flame. In any case, the place was a mess, mostly from smoke and water damage. Most of the furniture was not salvageable. Part of Tom’s large cookbook collection was ruined. A supermarket poster David had given him had water damage. A small painting of a tornado that David had made for him was completely black.
“I didn’t know what to do, so I said to David, ‘I guess I’ll be staying at your house for a bit,” Tom recalled. David could not understand why Tom wasn’t more upset.
“I was sort of calm. I went and had dinner with him. I was laughing,” Tom said. “Actually I was shell-shocked. I didn’t quite know what to do, but being upset wasn’t going to make it any better. I don’t freak out. He would explode and scream and throw things. That’s not my way—and he was really upset about that. I said, ‘Well, David, we’re just different.’ ”
That weekend, about twenty of Tom’s colleagues came to the apartment to help carry out the wreckage. David was there too but decided he couldn’t handle being around so many people. He went home. Meanwhile, Tom’s cat Evelyn disappeared. Someone in the crew hauling things out had left the door open, so Tom worried that she had gotten out of the building. He began hunting for her.
In the midst of the chaos, David called. Marion had put together a sheet of his old photobooth pictures and he’d left them at Tom’s house. Where were they? Tom didn’t know.
David said, “Those are very important to me. I have to have them.” Marion had a copy but he did not want to ask her for it.
“I told him, ‘I’ve got twenty people here helping me, the cat’s gone, I can’t find her, and as we go through things, I’ll see if I have it.’ But David wanted me to look right then. I said, ‘No, I can’t do it.’ And he got furious,” said Tom. “Then the next thing I know, he’s outside walking up and down the street, looking for Evelyn.”
Eventually, the photobooth pictures turned up. The cat was found in the empty apartment across the hall, hiding behind the stove.
Nan Goldin had come by to photograph David. He posed next to the baby elephant skeleton in what looks like Hujar’s suit jacket, with his hair slicked back. And he’s wearing makeup. Nothing heavy—just foundation. When I asked Goldin about the makeup, she explained, “He wanted to wear a mask.”
Goldin inadvertently played a role in one last flare-up between David and Marion Scemama. They still spoke on the phone occasionally. One day that fall, Marion called him to say she’d run into Goldin in Paris, and Goldin told her all these things David was saying about her. Things like “she’s fucked up, she’s crazy.”
“I said to him, ‘You swore to me that you wouldn’t reject me again, and here you are saying to everybody that I’m fucked up and people believe it,’ “ said Marion. “We spoke for an hour or two. We start getting mad at each other and then we cooled down and he explained certain things to me—that he went through depression after the trip, that he couldn’t deal with certain things about me, et cetera. When we hung up, we were not saying, OK it’s over. We just cooled down. But that was the last time we ever spoke to each other.”
Goldin wrote David an apologetic letter, saying that Marion had misinterpreted what she’d said.
Occasionally David went to visit Anita Vitale, who was still running the city’s AIDS Case Management Unit. He would sit in her office and they’d chat, sometimes about Tom as he and David went through their ups and downs.
One day in the autumn of 1991, David told her that he’d been diagnosed with Mycobacterium avium-intracellulare (MAI), a form of tuberculosis usually found in birds. People with healthy immune systems are not susceptible. For those with fewer than fifty T-cells, however, this was not an unusual opportunistic infection—and it was David’s first such infection. Years later, Anita could still remember his despondent tone of voice. “Pigeon shit in my lungs,” he called it. Tom did not recal
l hearing about the MAI before David entered the hospital. Instead, David told him that he felt like he was trying to breathe underwater, that something was weighing him down. But Tom saw that David was terrified.
David knew what it meant when the bird and animal diseases set in: time to put one’s house in order.
Sometime in October, David called his half-brother, Pete Wojnarowicz. They had not spoken in more than ten years. Not since David was a busboy at the Peppermint Lounge.
Pete was thrilled.
David had simply fallen out of his life, and he never knew why. He figured that maybe during their last conversation—the night David called him from the Pep—he’d said something wrong. He’d get the occasional update from Pat or Steven. He knew about David’s appearance in Life magazine in 1985. He knew David had AIDS. Pete would say, “Tell him to call me.” He’d gotten David’s number from Steven and left messages but David had never called back. Until this time. The end time.
Pete worked as a UPS driver. He was married and lived in New Jersey. The Saturday after David called, Pete drove into Manhattan to meet him at the loft. “I got up there and hugged him,” Pete remembered, “and I said, ‘Why the fuck didn’t you call me in all these years?’ He just said he was sorry.”
They spent the day together talking. About their father, for one thing. David had believed since childhood that Pete and his younger sister, Linda, were the favorites, that their father had only beaten him and Steven and Pat.
Pete told him, “No. Sorry. There were no favorites in that family.” He sensed a kind of relief in David, who said, “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
David told him about Hujar—how Hujar had saved his life and made him believe in his work.