Memories That Smell Like Gasoline
Page 3
The nausea comes back. I try a new position on the bed with some pillows and slip back into sleep. I’m walking through this city not really sure where or why. I’ve got to piss really bad and go down this staircase of a subway or a hotel. (Architecture grows around my moving body like stone vegetation.) I find this old bathroom, mostly metal stalls and shadows like the subway station toilets of my childhood. I could sense sex as soon as I walked in, the moist scent of it in the yellow light and wet tiles and concrete. I go into this stall and pull out my dick and start pissing into the toilet. A big section of the stall’s divider is peeled away and I see this guy in his late teens early twenties jerking off watching me. When I finish I reach through the partition and feel his chest through his shirt. He zips up and comes around into my stall and closes the door and leans against it his hands on his thighs. I unzip his trousers and peel them down to his knees. I roll up his shirt so I can play with his belly. When his pants are down at his knees I notice a fairly large wound on one of his thighs, lots of scrapes and scratches on his body. The wound does something to me. I feel vaguely nauseous but he is sexy enough to dispell it. He pulls down his underwear and leans back again like he wants me to blow him. I crouch and slowly start licking under the base of his prick. The wound is close to my eye and I notice this series of red and green and yellow wires, miniature cables looping out of it. There are two chrome cables with sectioned ribs pushing under the sides of flesh. Then this blue glow coloring the air above the wound. I stop licking and look closer and see it is a miniature monitor, a tiny black and white television screen with an even tinier figure gesticulating from a podium in a vast room. There is the current president, smiling like a corpse in a vigilante movie, addressing the nation on a live controlled broadcast; the occasion is an enormous banquet in washington, a cannibal banquet attended by heads of state and the usual cronies; kirkpatrick and her biological warfare husband. The pope is seated next to buckley and his sidekick buchanan. Oliver north is part of the entertainment and he squats naked in a spotlight in the center of the ballroom floor. A small egg pops out of his ass and breaks in two on the floor. A tiny american flag tumbles out of the egg waving mechanically. The crowd breaks into wild applause as whitney houston steps forward to lead a rousing rendition of the star spangled banner. I wake up in a fever so delirious I am in a patriotic panic. Where, where the fuck at five in the morning could I run and buy a big american flag. My head hurts so bad I have to get out of bed and stand upright in order to ease the pressure. I go to the bathroom and finally throw up. I come back into the room, yank open the window and lean out above the dark empty streets and scream: THERE IS SOMETHING IN MY BLOOD AND IT’S TRYING TO FUCKING KILL ME.
9
I still fight the urge to puke. I’ve been fighting it all week. Whenever I witness signs of physical distress I have to fight the urge to bend over at the waist and empty out. It can be anything. The bum on the corner with festering sores on his face. It could be the moving skeleton I pass in the hall on the way in. Some guy with wasting syndrome and cmv blindness who is leaning precariously out his wheelchair in the unattended hallway searching in sightlessness for something he’s lost. He’s making braying sounds. What he’s looking for is beneath the wheels of his chair. A tiny teddy bear with a collegiate outfit sewn to its body and a little flag glued to its paw. I pick it up and notice it has saliva and food matter stuck in its fur and I wonder if this is what civilization boils down to. I place it in the guy’s hands and he squeals at me, his eyes a dull gray like the bellies of small fish. I have to resist that urge to puke. It’s upsetting but I realize I’m only nauseated by my own mortality.
My friend on the bed is waking. The hospital gown has pulled up along his torso in the motions of sleep revealing a blobby looking penis and schools of cancer lesions twisting around his legs and abdomen. He opens his eyes too wide a couple of times and I hand him a bunch of flowers. I see double, he says. Twice as many flowers, I say.
10
Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form; my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I’m fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists; drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there. I’m a xerox of my former self. I can’t abstract my own dying any longer. I am a stranger to others and to myself and I refuse to pretend that I am familiar or that I have history attached to my heels. I am glass, clear empty glass. I see the world spinning behind and through me. I see casualness and mundane effects of gesture made by constant populations. I look familiar but I am a complete stranger being mistaken for my former selves. I am a stranger and I am moving. I am moving on two legs soon to be on all fours. I am no longer animal vegetable or mineral. I am no longer made of circuits or disks. I am no longer coded and deciphered. I am all emptiness and futility. I am an empty stranger, a carbon copy of my form. I can no longer find what I’m looking for outside of myself. It doesn’t exist out there. Maybe it’s only in here, inside my head. But my head Is glass and my eyes have stopped being cameras, the tape has run
out and nobody’s words can touch me. No
gesture can touch me. I’ve been dropped
into all this from another world and I can’t
speak your language any longer. See
the signs I try to make with my hands and
fingers. See the vague movements of my
lips among the sheets. I’m a blank spot in
a hectic civilization. I’m a dark smudge in
the air that dissipates without notice.
I feel like a window, maybe a broken window.
I am a glass human. I am a glass
human disappearing in rain. I am standing
among all of you waving my invisible
arms and hands. I am shouting my invisible
words. I am getting so weary. I am growing
tired. I am waving to you from here. I
am crawling around looking for the aperture
of complete and final emptiness. I am
vibrating in isolation among you. I am
screaming but it comes out like pieces of
clear ice. I am signaling that the volume of
all this is too high. I am waving. I am
waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am
disappearing but not fast enough *
About the Author
David Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1954, and first gained notice in New York’s East Village art scene in the 1970s. He rose to fame for his exceptional range, intelligence, and passion, and by the 1980s had become one of the most provocative artists of his generation. In the years before his death in 1992 from AIDS-related complications, he worked tirelessly as an AIDS activist and anticensorship advocate.
In 1985, Wojnarowicz brought his fight for freedom of expression to the case of David Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association, in which Donald E. Wildmon claimed that Wojnarowicz’s work was pornographic and undermined family values. Wojnarowicz won and was awarded a symbolic dollar. He was thrust back into the spotlight in 2010, at the center of a censorship battle over the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. In 2012, Cynthia Carr published the critically acclaimed biography Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion there of in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1992 by David Wojnarowicz
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
Cover image © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; Courtesy Pace/MacGill, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
ISBN: 978-1-4804-8962-2
This edition published in 2014 by O
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