by Cynthia Carr
Pete admired what passed for decor in David’s loft, especially the baboon skeleton. He asked how the hell David ever got that into the country.
David said, “You want it?”
Pete declined. Then when he came back two weeks later, the baboon was gone. David had given it away, and Pete was filled with regret. If he’d known that David wanted to get rid of it, he would have taken it. “Because I didn’t really want nothing from him,” Pete said. “I was there to get to know my brother, and that was it.”
David had been meeting periodically with James Romberger, and sometimes with Marguerite Van Cook as well, to work on the comic book version of David’s life story, Seven Miles a Second. They’d started in 1987 after Romberger and Van Cook closed Ground Zero Gallery and had completed part one—David’s childhood hustling stories—within a year. Romberger spent a long time drawing the second part, working from a sheaf of David’s writing about his teenage years on the street, especially the adventures with Willy. That was completed, with Marguerite’s coloring, sometime in 1991.
They had settled on the cover. At David’s request, Romberger drew him running down Park Avenue, with one foot anchored in the ground, like a tree root, and the world breaking off in front of him. Romberger also drew two circular insets with David-style imagery—a head in flames and a skeleton with brain and eyeballs intact. They had an ambitious plan for lenticular animation on the cover. (This is usually a simple effect, like a winking eye.) The images would shift as the reader moved the book. The kid would be trying to run, for example. “David loved 3-D,” Romberger said. But they couldn’t get the budget for it in the end, and the insets ended up on the back cover.
The third part was to be about David’s current life, but his feelings about what to include seemed to change from month to month. “All I had to go on were the conversations we had when we met,” Romberger said. “I tried to enact everything he said. He wanted me to draw him huge on Fifth Avenue smashing the buildings. That’s what he said. It seemed logical to make it St. Pat’s. But then, I couldn’t do the last part. He wanted it to end with a happy day—him just happy to be alive, but there’s nothing like that in his writing. His life dictated the ending.”
David would complain as he got sicker that if Romberger didn’t finish the thing, he was going to come back and haunt him.
He had begun to find places for objects he valued, like the baboon skeleton. At one of their last meetings, David gave Romberger his brown leather jacket. Romberger does not remember David saying anything about why he’d gifted him with this. “It was a significant thing. I mean, it’s his jacket. But how much do you want to question somebody,” said Romberger. “It was embarrassing. Here’s this fucking raggedy-ass leather jacket. It’s not like I was going to wear it.” He had the impression that David had been wearing it since he was a teenager.
Marguerite said, “He gave James the jacket, for posterity. Because it was symbolic.” David had told her that when he wore it, he could listen and watch unobserved. The jacket made him invisible.
On October 26, David gave his last reading. The evening at the Drawing Center was set up as a tribute to him and as a benefit for ACT UP’s needle-exchange program. Those who read selections from Close to the Knives included Kathy Acker, Karen Finley, Hapi Phace, and Bill Rice. David himself read a few selections not in the book, like “When I put my hands on your body …”
When Acker got up to read, she referred to David as “a saint.”
“That made me laugh,” Tom said, “but this was a big emotional event for him—and for the audience. He was very ‘up’ afterwards, very moved by it.”
Drawing Center director Ann Philbin, who had organized the event with Patrick Moore from ACT UP, wrote David a letter: “Thank you for providing the soul and spirit of one of the most extraordinary evenings I’ve spent in a long time. I’m sorry I burst into blubbering tears when I went to thank you at the end but I was one of hundreds walking around the room like a raw nerve. It was truly moving and I feel honored to have been there. How can anyone thank you enough for how you share what you know?”
David had decided on the other two images he wanted to use in the series with the skeleton piece When I Put My Hands on Your Body. As in that one, he would match a large black-and-white photo with silk-screened text.
He selected one of the many photos he’d taken over the years of bandaged hands. Gary Schneider made a large print, and over that, a silk screener printed the final section from David’s last completed text, “Spiral,” concluding with “I am disappearing but not fast enough.”
The third image looks like a Japanese temple guardian caught in a conflagration. It’s a very disordered scene, with a burnt shoji screen, lanterns on tilted poles, and piles of detritus in front of the guardian. Apparently the temple was not protected. David never completed a text for this.
On November 6, David flew to Minneapolis to perform ITSOFOMO at the Walker Art Center with Ben Neill. Jean Foos went along to be the “nurturing helping person,” as she put it. David had very low energy, and he had become “suspicious” of Neill. “For no reason,” Foos emphasized. (And Neill never knew this.) David was still struggling, in his isolation, with suspicion about many of the people close to him.
Then he was unhappy with his hotel and checked out after one night. He went to stay with Foos, at her sister’s house. The major drama that played out during four days there was David’s effort to get the sister’s Weimaraner to like him. The dog just didn’t take to David, which bothered him a great deal. Foos remembered that there was a lot of tension until the dog finally came around.
Patrick McDonnell drove up from Normal with his boyfriend and chauffeured them over the Twin Cities’ icy roads. They all went to see Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston.
“David slept in a room in the theater building during the afternoon before the show,” Foos said. “I had to go get him up. There were many nervous moments wondering if he was up to it. But then he gave an amazing performance!”
Back in New York, David was still stuck in his depression, still morose. “It was sometimes hard to talk to him,” Tom said. “No matter what you said, it wasn’t good enough. I’m not quite sure what he was looking for. Then I’d get worked up and not know what to do and probably made it worse. It wasn’t until he had those two weekends …”
The first two weekends in December, David was running a fever of 106 degrees. Both weekends he called Tom in the middle of Friday or Saturday night to say, “Can you come over?” Tom arrived to find him not only running a high fever but also shivering violently. He stayed with David and did not sleep. When it happened the second time, Tom called the doctor, who said to take him to the hospital.
On Sunday, December 8, Tom took David to the emergency room at Cabrini, the hospital where Hujar had died. David, uninsured, was soon enrolled in Medicaid. Two days later, Tom left on a long-planned trip to Mexico with Anita and other friends. David had never wanted to go along. “I was just relieved because he was in a room, he was being cared for, he was comfortable,” said Tom. “He was actually happy to be in the hospital that first time.”
David spent a week in isolation because the doctor thought he might have tuberculosis. This was a precaution. Tests showed the problem to be pigeon TB, or MAI. Once David received this diagnosis, he was moved to the IV drug users ward—all AIDS patients—because that’s where there was a bed, and he called me. “Everything started falling apart lately,” he said. “I’m having invasive procedures.”
I went to see him. The guy in the next bed kept his television blaring around the clock, which was driving David nuts, but he said of the junkies on the ward, “They accepted me right away.” Remarkably, this hospitalization brought him back to his artist self. In a green journal he designated as “rough notes,” he started writing observations on the other patients. For example, “ ‘That was my best tattoo …’ shows me amputated stump ‘not much left—it was a dragon.’ All I could make out was
a wing uttering from the wound.”
I went to see David again on Christmas Eve. That’s when I finally met Tom, who was seated next to the bed, learning from a nurse about how to administer antibiotics and total parenteral nutrition (TPN) through David’s newly implanted Hickman catheter. “It looks like a Christmas tree ornament,” David said, staring down at the thing in his chest.
David was cranky. The ward reeked of Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion for Men, which had been distributed to everyone as a gift, and it felt impossible to have a regular conversation amid the chaos and noise: TVs blasting, people shouting, carolers bumming everybody out. “It’s like trying to get better in a subway car,” he complained. “I’m going to write about this.”
On his good days, he talked about working again. But he never again had enough energy. In the last entry in the journal of rough notes, added shortly after a line about the Elizabeth Taylor perfume, his handwriting is ragged. He wrote, “My life is no longer filled with poetry and dreams. I can smell rust in the air. Sometimes the fact that we can’t deal with death, our mortality—it’s the same with cultures—anything that doesn’t reflect our faces and soul. We wish to annihilate things when we fail to see ourselves inside it.”
Even here, in what I think of as the last journal entry, he felt compelled to connect his situation to the wider world. That had always been his style. His writing, his neo-Beat prosody, was built on the long breath that leaves one body to engulf the endless world and, returning, sees the universe in a single action. Call it a Howl.
“My life is no longer filled with poetry and dreams.” This last journal entry is undated but follows events he recorded on Christmas Eve, 1991.
(David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
When David came home after Christmas, Tom decided that he’d better move into the loft. He would go home to feed his cats and get the mail, but he was now David’s principal caregiver. The upstairs neighbor Dori brought a mattress down for him, and they put it on the floor.
David asked a few people to come over for one day to help him go through his things. Among them was Norman Frisch. “He was obsessing about how he no longer knew where things were,” said Frisch, “and he was worried about things not getting to the right people after his death. He was in bed most of the time, giving instructions about what he wanted. Or maybe he was sitting at the kitchen table. People would bring stuff over to him and spread it out on the bed and he would decide what to keep or what went where. When it came down to it, there was very little that he was actually willing to part with.” He had piles of work prints, however. They were substandard, and he was afraid they could make it onto the market. Those were destroyed.
Given that he now had a catheter in his chest, he had to worry about infection. To that end, he had the friends take out the old terrariums. His scorpion was dead—no need for crickets. The loft was filthy but the friends did more sorting than scrubbing. One pile for journals and notebooks, another for film and video materials, another for anything related to Hujar.
Frisch remembered it being a very long day. “He was in rough shape—not entirely rational, very emotionally raw, easily overwhelmed, taking a lot of pain meds, sometimes drifting in and out.”
David still had high fevers and nausea. He would tell me later that his spleen was now so enlarged that it had pushed his intestines to one side. But in this interval, before the second hospitalization, he did not want me to come over.
Karen Finley saw him a couple of times during this period. She said, “He was very suspect. He actually got mad at me for coming over. He told me, ‘I don’t understand why you’re here. What do you want?’ He expressed anger. He gave me the ninth degree. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t coming over out of pity. Or, people could come over with their own issues about death and be gazing upon him.”
This was when she got to know Tom, whom she’d met for the first time the night of the reading at the Drawing Center.
David told Finley that he was very worried about his baby elephant skeleton. She promised him she’d take it. “He knew that I would take care of it, and that I could handle the heaviness of what that was,” Finley said. “I always saw it as an image really of him, of his totem. He’s the elephant. The elephant never forgets. You know—there’s the ancientness of it.”
David was doing so poorly that Tom was convinced he was close to death. He could remember sitting in a chair in the loft, crying while David slept.
On January 19, David called me. He was back in the hospital, on a quieter floor. “They lured me in, saying three days,” he said, “but I guess it’ll be ten.”
Tom had told David that, while he was at Cabrini, he was going to clean the loft. “I cannot sleep in this pigsty.”
David was resistant. He said, “I have things here.”
Tom promised he would throw nothing away. Not even a matchbook. He’d put everything in boxes.
“I finally convinced him to let me clean it up,” said Tom, “and I remember looking at the bed and, literally, the foam had taken on the shape of a body. It was a futon or something and it had almost an indentation from where Hujar had been. This was a platform bed, so he was basically lying on wood. I called David’s downstairs neighbor and we hauled it downstairs and threw it away.” Tom had a real mattress delivered and hired someone to build a headboard so David would be able to sit up in bed. Then he had shelves installed on the windows for flowerpots. Tom washed the floor and cleaned the disgusting stove.
David called me again on January 22. I had not been able to visit him because I had a cold and couldn’t risk bringing germs to someone with no immune system. He told me that he had a blood infection now. They’d pulled out the Hickman. “Just pulled it out. It’s scary how cavalier they are.” He had night sweats so bad that the bed would be soaked. They told him to drink water. “It takes hours to get my hand over to it,” he said. Now though, he had come to trust the doctor a lot more. “He’s on top of things.”
He asked Tom to call his half-siblings, Pete and Linda, to tell them he was in the hospital. From about this point until the end of David’s life, Pete and Linda and their spouses came to visit David nearly every weekend.
“I didn’t know who Tom was at that time,” Pete said. “Then David said, ‘He’s my boyfriend.’ And I said, ‘Well, do you trust him?’ And he goes, ‘I think so.’ I said, ‘Do you or don’t you? You gotta be sure.’ Then when I met Tom and I saw Tom—next time I talked to David, I said, ‘Why are you worried about him? The guy loves you.’ ”
David came home again on January 30, and his top priority was to get over to the Kitchen to see Karen Finley’s installation Memento Mori before it closed on February 1.
Finley’s work is about deep emotion, the feelings that propel someone to use a four-letter word because they can’t articulate what they really feel. In this case, she wanted to deal with grief about AIDS, addressed so inadequately at a typical memorial service, and with violence against women.
David went with Tom, Anita, and Philip Yenawine. At the entrance, they were each given a glass of wine at the Spit Bar, then led to a wall covered with flags from every country. An assistant there invited them to spit the wine onto the flag of their choice. The flags had begun to look like they were covered with blood.
David was given a chair and his friends moved it through the installation, allowing him to sit at each station. They came to the Ribbon Gate, where each took a ribbon and tied it to the gate in memory of a loved one who’d died of AIDS. The floor in the Memorial Room was covered with dead leaves. Here was the bedside vigil, illustrated by a volunteer in a bed and another in a chair next to it. Finley had written texts over the walls, “Lost Hope” and “In Memory Of.” In the corner was a mound of sand where they could place a lit candle in memory of someone. At the Carnation Wall, they pushed the stem of a flower through a hole in a lace curtain.
The Women’s Room addressed abortion rights and violence against women. Finley had written the text
s “It’s My Body” and “My Own Memories” over these walls. In the corner was a mattress surrounded by dead leaves and flowers. A woman sat there, wrapped in sheets.
Finley told me later that David sat at the Spit Bar for a while and did all the rituals. He told her that being there made him feel human again. “I could tell that he forgot he was sick,” she said. “It broke my heart when I saw him reading everything on the walls. He was almost unable to walk.”
Afterward David wanted to go to Union Square Cafe for smoked shell steak, his favorite. When they got to the restaurant, they were told that dinner would not be served for another three hours. Knowing that David was too weak to make it to the loft and back, they sat there and waited the three hours.
I went to visit David at the loft early in February. He sat propped up with some pillows in a blue corduroy shirt. There was an image of an Indian chief on the blanket over his legs.
Tom injected him with some anti-nausea medication and made him chicken soup. Then he left to feed his cats. As soon as Tom left, David told me he was thinking about suicide. It was about quality of life, he said. He’d had two months of treatment with no improvement. Now they were talking about taking out his gall bladder and putting in another Hickman. He hated that “brutal” stuff. He said this as he injected antibiotics into the catheter in his arm, then hooked a small bottle to it. The bottle had what looked like a balloon inside, which would collapse as the medicine flowed out. “That’s for the MAI,” he said.
Tom had purchased a comfortable armchair, in case David wanted to get out of bed and sit in something besides a kitchen chair. The loft was still incredibly cluttered, with piles of paper everywhere. “I should just throw it all away,” he said.
When I saw David in the hospital at the end of January, he’d talked about making art again. He’d felt better. But on this occasion, he told me he could not remember feeling better.