Memories That Smell Like Gasoline

by David Wojnarowicz

  He followed me across the street into the sixth avenue subway, down two flights of stairs, nobody around but one passenger running for a train down a faraway staircase in the gloom. I slowed up and was in between station platforms when he grabbed me and pulled me close. There was something silly about it but I didn’t resist because it was hot too. He pulled open his pants revealing more scrapes on his muscular legs and his prick was growing hard and he formed the soundless words: I like you. His enormous hands pulled apart my shirt and slid around my chest and under my arms and pulled my shirt back over my shoulders, his grizzled face burrowing into my neck. The earth has a volume, my brain has a volume, and I can’t turn it down; I can’t shut it off, but it’s moments like this that I sure know how to swim inside it. He’s going into a slow motion crouch, his hands moving around rapidly like animated birds. As my dick is beginning to slide into his mouth I realize he’s trying to pick my back pocket. I pulled his hands away and lifted them to my mouth where I sucked on his fingers. He looked up still blowing me trying to read my eyes like a bulletin. My eyes were blank. He slowly pulled his hands away from my mouth and eased them back towards my pockets. We both understood each other. I locked onto his hands again and threaded my fingers through his and made fists and started fucking his face more violently. I didn’t know if he was armed and I was trying to figure out my exit. On the platform below I could hear my train approaching from the distance. It was almost painful the way he twisted his fingers till I let go and his hands insistently went to my pockets; he was starting to get rough. I leaned over and kissed the top of his head and thrust my knee forward sudden and sharp catching him in the chest, sending him backwards down a couple of stairs, that startled mouth gaping and those eyes opening wide, enough time to pull my pants closed and rush down the steps three at a time to the train whose doors had just begun to open. I hopped on with him behind me bellowing and the train doors shut with him on the other side, fingers trying to press between to pull them apart, rage coloring his face. He never got in and I turned and slumped into a seat and realized the car was filled with sleeping winos. Christmas eve and I’m on a train full of drunks heading toward another future*

  SPIRAL

  1

  Back near the monitor the blazing light of the hand jerking the hardened dick is creating a blind spot to the right of it in the room and I can just about make out some silhouetted shape of a guy in shorts and shirt opened, knowing this because as he moves from dick to dick his shirt floats like a curtain billowing into light and disappearing again and he’s got a baseball cap on. I’m moving into this blind spot to watch and he’s on his knees sucking some kid’s prick. There’s an old man In the darkest shadows his flesh is a bland color just a dead white, emptied of blood and he seems afraid of the light keeps shifting weight from one foot to the other in a squatting position at some point the sucking guy has his back to the old man and he’s leaning over the ledge to get another guy’s prick in his mouth and the old man takes a large hand and peels the guy’s shorts down in a slow motion insistence and soon has his tongue planted firmly between the guy’s cheeks. The guy starts rolling his ass in the air in circular motions and continues sucking the prick of the stranger before him. The old guy is lapping away like a puppy with a bowl of milk and I’m standing there in the darkness and there’s a stream of water or something snaking across the floor and the pale glow of faces staring towards us at the monitor that I can only see sideways and on the angled screen is a pair of eyes looking dreamily up at the owner of a fat dick that’s slowly sinking down his throat. A man enters the basement and walks over in my general direction momentarily blinded by the monitor and he runs into me before his eyes adjust, instead of backing up he reaches out and pulls me into a hug his arms muscled and hard and his embrace is squeezing air from my lungs. I rub my hands over the surface of his body his clothes and an almost indiscernible dampness to his shirt his body hard as wood his lips grazing my neck his hand pulling my head down so that he can softly bite the nape of my neck dragging his tongue around to my ear up and down the lines of my throat and my fingers are loosening his belt and my hands slip through his open zipper into all that warmth inside his underwear and down under his balls and his hand is on the back of my neck on my shoulders and he’s pushing and I’m sinking down slow into a crouching position and from there slipping my hands beneath the edge of his white t-shirt and the t-shirt is tight and he’s beginning to sweat his body generating intense heat and my mouth is opening and I’m licking under his balls the length and head of his dick is falling across the bridge of my nose resting against my eyelids and one of my hands swings up to wipe across my mouth to collect spit and then falls to my cock and I’m slicking it up with spit creating a random rhythm while licking at the base of his dick his hands are in my hair moving around cradling the base of my skull. As I stand back up I’m losing myself in the pale cool color of his flesh in the shadows and he takes my head in his hands and pulls my face close to his gaze and I realize he’s one of those guys that you know absolutely that if you’d met him twenty years earlier you both could have gone straight to heaven but now mortality has finally marked his face. He was really sexy though; he was like a vast swimming pool I wanted to dive right into.

  2

  All I can remember was the beautiful view and my overwhelming urge to puke. I was visiting my friend in the hospital and realizing he was lucky. Even though he was possibly going blind he did get the only bed in the room that had a window and a view. Sixteen floors up overlooking the southern skies as all the world spins into late evening. It was a beautiful distance to drift in but I still wanted to throw up. There among the red and yellow clouds drifting behind the silhouettes of the skyline was the overwhelming smell of human shit. It was the guy in the next bed; all afternoon he’d been making honking sounds like a suffocating goose. He was about ninety years old and I only got a glimpse of him and saw that they’d strapped an oxygen mask over his leathered face and when he screamed it sounded like a voice you’d hear over a contraption made of two tin cans and a piece of wire. Calling long distance trying to get the operator. Someone in charge. Someone in authority. Someone who could make it all stop with a pill, a knife, a needle, a word, a kiss, a smack, an embrace. Someone to step in and erase the sliding world of fact.

  3

  This kid walks into my sleep he’s maybe seventeen years old stretches out on a table says he’s not feeling well. He may be naked or else wearing no shirt his hands behind his head. I can see a swollen lump pushing under the skin of his arm pit. I place my hands on his stomach and chest and try to explain to him that he needs to be looked at by a doctor. In the shadows of this room in the cool blue light the kid, a very beautiful boy, looks sad and shocked and closes his eyes like he doesn’t want to know or like somehow he can shut it all out.

  Later some guy appears in the place. He has an odd look about his face. He tries to make it known that he knows me or someone close to me. He leans in close has flat dull eyes like blue silvery coins behind his irises. I think it is the face of death. I get agitated and disturbed and want to be left alone with the kid. Try to steer him away to some other location. He disappears for a moment and then reappears in the distance but far away isn’t far enough. I turn and look at the kid on the table he looks about ten years old and water is pouring from his face.

  4

  Two blocks south there is a twenty story building with at least three hundred visible windows behind which are three hundred tiny blue television screens operating simultaneously. Most of them are tuned to the same stations you can watch the patterns of fluctuating light pop out like in codes. Must be the war news. Twenty seconds of slow motion video frames broadcasting old glory drifting by in the bony hands of white zombies, and half the population ship their children out on the next tanker or jet to kill and be killed. My friend on the bed never watches his tv. It hangs anchored to the wall above his bed extended over his face and on the end of a gray robotic-looking ar
m. If he bothered to watch the tv he would see large groups of kids in the saudi desert yakking about how they were going to march straight through to baghdad, find a telephone booth and call home to mom and dad. Then he’d see them writing out their wills on the customary government-supplied short forms. Or maybe he’d catch the video where the commanding instructor holds up a land mine the size of a frisbee and says, If you step on one of these there won’t be nothing left of you to find … just red spray in the air. Or the fort dix drill sergeant out of view of the rolling cameras, When ya see those towel-heads …

  But my friend is too weak to turn the channels on other people’s deaths. There is also the question of dementia, an overload of the virus’s activity in his brain short-circuiting the essentials and causing his brain to atrophy so that he ends up pissing into the telephone. He sees a visitor’s face impaled with dozens of steel nails or crawling with flies and gets mildly concerned. Seeing dick cheney looming up on the television screen with that weird lust in his eyes and bits of brain matter in the cracks of his teeth might accidentally be diagnosed as dementia. I catch myself just as all this stomach acid floods up into my throat, run out to the hallway to the water fountain.

  5

  It’s a dark and wet concrete bunker, a basement that runs under the building from front to back. There Is one other concrete staircase that is sealed off at the top by a street grate and you can hear the feet of pedestrians and spare parts of conversations floating down into the gloom. At a mid-point In the room you can do a 360 degree slow turn and see everything; the shaky alcoves built of cheap plywood, a long waist-high cement ledge where twenty-three guys could sit shoulder to shoulder if forced to, the darkened ledge in the back half hidden by pipes and architectural supports, and the giant television set. It’s one of the latest inventions from japan, the largest video monitor available and It is hooked into the wall, then further encased in a large sheet of plexiglass in order to prevent the hands of some bored queen from fucking with the dials and switching the sex scenes to Let’s Make A Deal. The plexi is covered in scratches and hand prints and smudges and discolored streaks of body fluids. At the moment the images fed from a vhs machine upstairs are a bit on the blink. When the orignal film was transferred it was jumping the sprockets of the projector and now I’m watching images that fluctuate strobically up and down but only by a single centimeter. Each body or object or vista or close-up of eye, tongue, stiff dick and asshole is doubled and vibrating. Kind of pretty and psychedelic and no one is watching it anyway. There is a clump of three guys entwined on the long ledge. One of them is lying down leaning on one elbow with his head cradled in another guy’s hand. The second guy is feeding the first guy his dick while a third guy is crouching down behind him pulling open the cheeks of his ass and licking his finger and poking at its bull’s-eye. The shadows cast by their bodies cancel out the details necessary for making the vision interesting or decipherable beyond the basics. One of the guys, the one who looks like he’s praying at an altar, turns and opens his mouth wide and gestures towards it. He nods at me but I turn away. He wouldn’t understand. Too bad he can’t see the virus in me, maybe it would rearrange something in him. It certainly did in me. When I found out I felt this abstract sensation, something like pulling off your skin and turning it inside out and then rearranging it so that when you pull it back on it feels like what it felt like before, only it isn’t and only you know it. It’s something almost imperceptible. I mean the first minute after being diagnosed you are forever separated from what you had come to view as your life or living, the world outside the eyes. The calendar tracings of biographical continuity get kind of screwed up. It’s like watching a movie suddenly and abruptly going in reverse a thousand miles a minute, like the entire landscape and horizon is pulling away from you in reverse in order to spell out a psychic separation. Like I said, he wouldn’t understand and besides his hunger is giant. I once came to this place fresh from visiting a friend in the hospital who was within a day or two of death and you wouldn’t know there was an epidemic. At least forty people exploring every possible invention of sexual gesture and not a condom in sight. I had an idea that I would make a three minute super-8 film of my dying friend’s face with all its lesions and sightlessness and then take a super-8 projector and hook it up with copper cables to a car battery slung in a bag over my shoulder and walk back in here and project the film onto the dark walls above their heads. I didn’t want to ruin their evening, just wanted maybe to keep their temporary worlds from narrowing down too far.

  6

  The old guy is still honking away when I get back to the room. There are tiny colored lights wobbling through the red threads of dusk and I’m trying to concentrate on them in order to avoid bending over suddenly and emptying out. I’ve been trying to fight the urge to throw up for the last two weeks. At first I thought it was food poisoning but slowly realized it was civilization. Everything is stirring this feeling inside me, signs of physical distress, the evening news, all the flags in the streets and the zombie population going about its daily routines. I just want to puke it all out like an intense projectile. I sidetrack myself by concentrating on the little lights at dusk; imagining one of them developing a puff of smoke in its engines and plummeting to the earth among the canyon streets. Any event would help. The nurse finally shows up and behind the curtains I hear the sounds of a body thumping, the sounds of cloth being rolled up, of water splashing and the covers being unfurled and tucked. Finally she leaves taking the smell of shit with her in a laundry cart. My friend wakes up and starts weeping; he’s hallucinating that he can’t find something that probably never existed. I understand the feeling just like I understand it when he sometimes screams that he hates healthy people. A senate group was in new york city recently collecting information on the extent of the epidemic and were told that in the next year and a half there will be thirty-three thousand homeless people with AIDS living in the streets and gutters of the city. A couple of people representing the policy of the city government assured the senators that these people were dying so fast from lack of health care that they were making room for the others coming up from behind; so there would be no visible increase of dying homeless on the streets. Oh I feel so sick. I feel like a human bomb tick tick tick.

  7

  I had an odd sleep last night. I felt like I was lying in a motel room for hours half awake or maybe I was just dreaming that I was half awake. In some part of my sleep I saw this fat little white worm, a grub-like thing that was no bigger than a quarter of an inch. When I leaned very close to it, my eye just centimeters above it, I could see every detail of the ridges of its flesh. It was a meat eater. The worm had latched onto something that looked like a goat fetus. It had large looping horns protruding from its head. The whole thing was white, fetal in appearance, its horns were translucent like fingernails. The grub was beginning to eat it and I pulled it off. It became very agitated and angry and tried to eat my fingers. I threw It onto the ground but there was yet another one and it was crawling toward some other fetal looking thing. I smacked it really hard. Picked it up and threw it down but my actions didn’t kill it. My location was a wet dark hillside around dawn or dusk with a little light drifting over the landscape. Looking around I realized that the entire contents of a biology lab or pet shop had been dumped on the ground. Maybe I had stolen everything. There were big black tarantulas, all sorts of lizards, some small mammals and bugs and frogs and snakes. At some point a big black tarantula was crawling around, blue-black and the size of a catcher’s mitt. It made a little jump like it had seized something. I looked closely and saw it was eating an extraordinarily beautiful monitor lizard, a baby one. The spider didn’t scare me; my sense of anxiety came from mixing the species. They all seemed to have come from different countries and were now thrown accidently together by research or something. I pushed at the spider, picked it up and tried to unfasten its mandibles from the belly of the lizard. Someone else was with me; I handed them the spider
and said, Take it somewhere else or put it in something until I figure out what I’m doing. The person threw the spider on the ground in a rough manner. I said, Don’t do that, you’ll kill it. If you drop a tarantula from a height higher than five inches its abdomen will burst.

  8

  Fevers. I wake up these mornings feeling wet like something from my soul, my memory is seeping out the back of my head onto the cloth of the pillows. I woke up earlier with intense nausea and headache. I turned on the television to try to get some focus outside my illness. Every station was filled with half-hour commercials disguised as talk shows in which low-grade tv actors and actresses talk about how to whiten your teeth or raise your investment earnings or shake the extra pounds from your bones. I am convinced I am from another planet. One station had a full close-up of a woman’s face, middle-aged, saying, People talk about a sensation they’ve experienced when they are close to death in which their entire lives pass before their eyes. Well, you experience a similar moment when you are about to kill someone. You look at that person and see something in the moment before you kill him. You see his home, his family, his childhood, his hopes and beliefs, his sorrows and joys; all this passes before you in a flash. I didn’t know what she was making these references for.