by Cynthia Carr
“What was the installation about?”
“About money. About poverty.”
As David neared the end of his life, he worried constantly that he was going to end up back on the street, that he would run out of money. Tom told me that at one point David became convinced that nearly everyone he knew was stealing from him. In this phone call, David told me that he couldn’t find the check he’d just been given in Buenos Aires, but acknowledged, “I’ve been ill a bit, having trouble with my head.”
He asked me if I ever ran into Luis Frangella. I wasn’t quite sure where David thought I was. Luis had been dead for a year a half. I just said no. He told me that Luis was sick. If I went to Argentina, could I take him some money? “Of course,” I told him. David seemed relieved.
“I love you and think of you all the time,” I said.
“Vice versa,” he replied. “Is it horrible to say vice versa? Tom gets upset with me when I say that.”
I told him it was fine for me, but maybe in Tom’s case he could tell him he loved him.
“I have a hard time with those words,” said David. “I’ve had a hard time readjusting after my trip. I get lost sometimes and don’t know where I am. I’m sort of at a crossroads now. I don’t know how they’re going to treat this. I have so many ulcerations. I want to get things together here at home, pare things down. I’m not sure of anything except I gotta hang on. I could die but I may not feel much different till later, like in October or towards the end of the year.”
As we said our goodbyes, David told me that it had been great seeing me in Argentina.
Round-the-clock nursing care began during the last few weeks of David’s life.
Early in that phase, Tom woke one night and saw that David was not in the bed. He heard the shower. The night nurse was agitated but not doing anything. (And was soon replaced.) Walking into the bathroom, Tom saw David taking a shower. He was amazed that David had not only walked unaided to the bathroom but managed to step into the big claw-footed tub.
Tom said, “David, what’s going on?”
“I’m going to Times Square.”
“Ah, well, let me help you get dried off.”
As soon as David turned off the shower, he had to sit down on the edge of the tub. Tom wrapped a towel around him. David was almost too weak to stand, but Tom got him back into bed, and by that time he had forgotten about Times Square.
“There was one that got me the worst,” said Tom. “He was in bed and I was walking out, and he said, ‘Hey, how about if I meet you later at Union Square Cafe and we’ll have dinner?’ And it hit me. I’m never going to sit in a restaurant with him again.”
On June 30, David called me, sounding completely coherent and angry at the doctor. “They’re nuts! They want to put me on methadone. It’s really toxic,” he complained. “I don’t like what’s going on. If they leave me alone, I’ll be fine.” He told me that he would probably come see me before the end of the summer.
They had diagnosed another opportunistic infection, something that could be treated in the hospital. Tom’s first reaction was, yes, back to the hospital. (David had never told Tom that he didn’t want to be hospitalized again and wanted to die at the loft.) But, Tom said, “Looking at him, his mind was gone, and Bob [the doctor] seemed hesitant about it, and I realized that David wouldn’t understand, if he was there, why he couldn’t smoke. He wouldn’t know where he was. He would get scared. Then I finally decided. I told Bob no. But that was a hard decision. That was one of the last things before Bob and I agreed to cut off everything.”
Tom called me on July 3 to say that that night they were going to stop the nutrition, the TPN that David was getting through the Hickman. And that David wanted to see me. “It doesn’t make sense for him to live like this when all he does is lay in the bed and vomit,” Tom said. “The nausea is worse again, and it’s clear it won’t stop. It’s time to let his body take its own direction. What breaks my heart the most”—he began to sob—“is all he’s been through. I just don’t want him to suffer.”
Though David did not know about this decision, he had been clear that he didn’t want to hang on artificially. He said to Tom, “They tell me I’ll be taking care of a baby elephant pretty soon.”
I arrived back in New York on July 9 and went directly to the loft. Overcome with emotion, I was glad to find David asleep. Even his sleep seemed different, heavier. When he woke, he was surprised to see me. I told him I thought it was time for a visit. He didn’t question it. He was wearing a bright green T-shirt and orange swimming trunks. He was drugged, in pain, nauseated, and unable to focus. He could no longer sit up without help. He could no longer stand.
He had made for himself a kind of shrine. He’d hung a dozen necklaces on the wall next to his bed, each a different vivid color, thick and sparkly. This man who had dressed most often in jeans and a pocket T-shirt (to hold cigarettes) never wore jewelry, but he’d been collecting it for years. He’d bought charms on his travels, complex special ones, then strung them on a necklace. He gave this to Karen Finley. When he came home from the hospital for the last time, he hung the bright necklaces he’d bought at an Afghani store on Bleecker Street. Then he put on a silver bracelet and a silver necklace with an antique cross and a kachina doll charm. On his last trip out of the loft, he went to a jeweler with his day nurse and bought a solid gold necklace, thick with an Indian weave. He didn’t put it on but kept it near.
He still had the same artwork hanging on the wall. It had been there all through his illness—his Fever, two photos of the moon above a photo of a skinny anxious-looking dog that he’d taken in Mérida, at a slaughterhouse.
During the two and a half days I spent there, he slept most of the time. Every period of wakefulness ended with him vomiting into one of two plastic dishpans that were always on the bed. He repeatedly inquired about the Demerol pump attached to his Hickman. What was it? Steve Brown stopped by and David told him he was thinking about getting tattooed. “Something mythic but kind of contemporary. Machine but flesh.”
Fever, 1988–89. Three gelatin-silver prints on museum board, 31 × 25 inches overall. David had this piece hanging above his bed at home through at least the last six months of his illness. (Private collection)
He slept most of the next day but woke periodically to tell me something. He had just been to Queens, he said, “to see about that commotion. About God. All these people had had visions.” Tom explained later that it was a reference to the trip they’d made with Hujar in 1987 to find the healer, to find a cure.
At one point, David said to me, “I’m just trying to figure out where I am.”
“Home,” I told him.
He looked confused.
“Second Avenue and Twelfth Street,” I explained.
“Hujar’s place?”
“Yes.”
He looked relieved. Later he lurched to a somewhat upright position and asked the nurse, “Is there a bathroom here?”
I met a friend for dinner and returned to find only the night nurse there with the sleeping David. I decided to wait for Tom to return. When he did, he told me he wasn’t sure what to do about funeral plans. He and David had never discussed it, and now it was too late. He’d thought about burying him near Hujar, but that was a Catholic cemetery. “I just wish I could hold him and make him better,” Tom said and began to cry.
Just then, David woke up, lucid and fully present for the first time that day. He smoked a few cigarettes and drank some water. Tom sat next to him on the bed. We chatted and David kept asking what time it was: ten ten, ten fifteen, ten twenty. Then he got tired and went back to sleep.
The next day, a Saturday, David woke up and asked Tom, “Can you find somebody to get me a diagnosis?” It made Tom cry.
There were many visitors that day, and I stayed away from the bed to give them privacy. Pat had arrived from Paris and was staying in New Jersey with their brother, Steven, whom David had not spoken to since 1989. Every day, Steven drove Pat to
the loft but would not come in. Not out of rancor toward David. He was convinced that David did not want to see him, that David had rejected him permanently and would yell at him if he came upstairs. When Steven spoke later at David’s memorial, he said that basically he and David had played hide and seek and had played it too well and never found each other.
That day, David got a letter from his English publisher, Serpent’s Tail, with a copy of its cover for Close to the Knives. Tom began to read the letter out loud to him, choked up after a sentence, and handed it to me to finish. They were using Hujar Dreaming on the cover. David stared at it for a long time, loving how it looked with the green type and yellow background.
Did David even know that this was a book he’d written? A painting he’d made? We couldn’t quite tell anymore. But because it delighted him, and because he no longer had a short-term memory, Tom was able to bring it back every half hour or so, and say, “David, have you seen the English cover for your book?”
And David would look up in wonderment. “No!” Tom would get it back out. And David would love looking at it again.
He slept most of the time, however, sometimes clenching his fists, making faces. Sometimes he looked very old, but more often childlike and rather dazed. “Oh boy,” he’d say about the pain. I noticed how he accepted things, how he no longer asked questions like “Why can’t I stand up?” In his moments of lucidity, he described his condition as “not feeling too good.” I looked around at the clutter—the yeti on a trike; the crawling baby doll whose head had been replaced with an alligator’s; the plastic exploding volcano, kachinas, and dinosaurs; and the framed color photo of a duckling.
Around ten thirty or eleven P.M. David woke and Tom told him about all the people who had been there to see him that day. Apart from his sister Pat, he’d been visited by Brian Butterick, Judy Glantzman, Philip Yenawine, his stepbrother, Pete, and stepsister, Linda, and many others. David did not remember any of it. Tom asked him if he’d seen the English cover for his book. “No!” said David, and Tom pulled it out again. David stared again for quite a few minutes. This would always be new.
Then he got the hiccups. His whole stomach was spasming. None of the tricks that usually stop a hiccup attack had any effect. Finally he started to vomit, and the hiccups stopped. As if his stomach had been trying to throw up but didn’t have the strength. David looked down at the scar, healing nicely from the surgery done in May. He said sweetly to Tom, “What were they looking for?”
David had always wanted a ring with a green stone, and he’d found such a stone on one his trips to the Southwest. Tom asked him if he’d like that for a ring and had one made for him with 23 karat gold. “He was really very emotional when I gave it to him,” said Tom. “He was out of it, but I put it on his finger and he cried a little bit. Jean Foos was there, and she started to cry on the side. There were so many of those moments while he was sick.”
Philip Zimmerman came back from San Francisco, bringing David a turquoise bullet, and remembered him saying, “It would be great if it was made out of meteorite.”
Tom and Anita went to Redden’s Funeral Home “to pre-plan what had to happen,” as Tom put it. He was crying, so Anita gave them David’s name and spelled it wrong. Tom corrected it, and they both cried.
As David moved further into dementia, he finally dropped the burdens he had always carried. The rage. The anxiety. The emotional toxicity of his childhood. “At that phase of dementia, he was the happiest I ever saw him,” said Judy Glantzman. “He was delighted with life.” That might be the saddest thing I ever heard about David.
Back in Los Angeles, I called him on July 14. He actually took the call but sounded very weak. “I’m just feeling so-so,” he told me. That was the last time we spoke.
Patrick McDonnell came to visit from Illinois. One day David said that he wanted to sit by the window. Tom was there, with Patrick, Steve Brown, Philip Zimmerman, maybe others. David couldn’t walk at all, so they picked him up in a sheet, and David went, “Wheeee!”
“So we started to bounce him and he loved it,” said Tom. “He kept going, ‘Wheeee! Wheee!’ ”
One day soon after this, he went into a coma. He was suffering from what his doctor described as “overwhelming sepsis—probably bacterial sepsis with multiple infections, everything from disseminated candida, which is fungus, Mycobacterium avium, overwhelming HIV infection, Kaposi’s sarcoma, which manifested internally, and probably Pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia.”
Judy Glantzman remembered lying on the bed next to him, telling him—since people in a coma can still hear: “David, if you need to go, it’s OK” and his face took on the old look of rage, as if to say, I’ll go when I’m ready.
David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS on July 22, 1992, at the age of thirty-seven.
This occurred at “Hujar’s place” at about nine thirty P.M. Present were Tom, Anita Vitale, Jean Foos, Steve Brown, Philip Zimmerman, and David’s siblings Pat, Peter, and Linda.
Once David was declared dead, Pat threw herself on the bed, hugging him and calling his name. She became so upset when the hearse arrived that Tom felt he had to stay with her instead of walking down the steps with David’s body.
Judy Glantzman had left to meet with her sister and so missed David’s passing, but returned about ten minutes later. When the hearse arrived, Steve Brown and Philip Zimmerman said they would carry David downstairs. Glantzman walked down with them.
As they walked out onto Second Avenue, with David in a body bag, there was one last surreal moment. The singer and composer Diamanda Galás happened to be walking by. She and David had never met, but they’d spoken once on the phone. She shared his commitment to addressing AIDS, in her case through The Plague Mass, which showcased her five-octave range and fierce persona.
Galás does not remember being on Second Avenue that night, but she made an indelible impression on Zimmerman and Glantzman. She had walked by, but as they were putting David into the hearse, she spun around and ran back, yelling, “Who is that? Is that David Wojnarowicz?” Zimmerman and Brown didn’t answer. What Glantzman remembers is that Diamanda Galás was there at the door, screaming. “As if our feelings were being amplified,” said Glantzman. “Hysterical screaming.”
EPILOGUE THROW MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE WHITE HOUSE
David’s memorial took place at St. Mark’s Church on what would have been his thirty-eighth birthday—September 14, 1992. But at the urging of Judy Glantzman and Steve Brown, Tom opened the loft to David’s friends on the Sunday after his death in July. Along with many friends, two members of an ACT UP affinity group called the Marys turned up. Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka had never met David, but they knew Jean Foos. They wanted to talk to Tom about giving David a political funeral.
The Marys had an established reputation for commitment and audacity. These were the activists who rented a room at the Waldorf Astoria so they could throw fake money inscribed with “George Bush—Blood on Your Hands” out the window when the president’s car pulled up to the hotel. They’d shut down the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour to protest the scant attention paid to the war at home, AIDS, while the media covered the war in the Persian Gulf. They’d dumped a coffin full of bloody bones in the Citicorp atrium, with explanatory flyers, on ACT UP’s Day of Desperation. They’d organized a march on the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, and helped shut down Grand Central Station during rush hour while other activists hung huge banners (“One AIDS Death Every 8 Minutes”). They met often, they were close-knit, and they regarded each other as family. Then in late ’91 and early ’92, two of them, John Stumpf and Dennis Kane, died of AIDS and had the usual ungratifying memorials.
Everyone in the Marys read Close to the Knives, and when they got to the part in which David suggests, that people drive the body of their loved one a hundred miles an hour to Washington, blast through the White House gates, and “dump their lifeless form on the front steps,” the group decided, in Episalla’s words, “Goddamn right. That sounds just
about right to us.” They decided to dedicate themselves to David’s idea of making AIDS deaths visible to the public, and named the new project Stumpf/Kane. During the 1992 Gay Pride parade, they circulated flyers asking for volunteers who would agree to a political funeral, who would “leave your body to politics.” There were no takers.
David worried that people affected by the AIDS epidemic were becoming professional pallbearers, perfecting rituals of death instead of “a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets.” (Photograph by Brian Palmer/bxpnyc.com)
When they came to Tom that day at the loft, he hesitated. He didn’t want violence. He didn’t want people arrested. Episalla and Yamaoka assured him that they could do this without mayhem. And so, one week after David’s death, he had the first political funeral to come out of the AIDS crisis.
The procession began outside the loft, moved down Second Avenue, then east to Avenue A and south to Houston. The Marys had created a banner wide enough to shut down traffic: “DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, 1954—1992, DIED OF AIDS DUE TO GOVERNMENT NEGLECT.” Two women beat snare drums. Others clapped sticks of wood together, but they all walked in silence. Someone had handed out a few sunflowers to carry, while friends held up reproductions of David’s work. As they marched through the East Village, people began to step off the sidewalk and join the procession. They had no permit, and the police were involved by the time they got to Avenue A—one squad car with lights flashing, leading them. Marchers walked west on Houston, then north on the Bowery.
Hundreds were marching by the time they got to the parking lot across from Cooper Union (now an undulating glass tower filled with luxury condos), where Yamaoka and activist Tim Bailey waited with a slide projector set up on top of Yamaoka’s car, plugged into a nearby electric pole. The slides playing across the wall behind parked cars showed David’s name and dates, then a photo of the White House with the passage superimposed about driving your dead friend to Washington, D.C. Dirk Rowntree read the extended version of this from David’s most controversial essay, “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” beginning with the words, “To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions in the pre-invented world. The government has the job of maintaining the day-to-day illusion of the ONE-TRIBE NATION. Each public disclosure of a private reality becomes something of a magnet that can attract others with a similar frame of reference; thus each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of a ONE-TRIBE NATION.” Rowntree ended his reading with that image of the lifeless body on the White House steps. It might be summarized as: My grief as a tool to fight the state is as good a tool as any other.