Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  There is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision. Vision is made of subtle fragmented movements of the eye. These fragmented pieces of the world are turned and pressed into memory before they can register in the brain. Fantasized images are actually made up of millions of disjointed observations collected and collated into the forms and textures of thought. So when I see the workers taking a rest break between the hot metal frames of the vehicles, it doesn’t matter that they are all actually receding miles behind me on the side of the road. I’m already hooked into the play between vision and memory and recoding the filmic exchange between the two so that I’m without a vehicle and I have my hand flung out in a hitchhiking motion and one of the men has stopped his pickup along the stretch of barren road. Now I am seated next to his body in the front seat. We are traveling and speaking soundlessly and he eventually turns off the highway onto a series of dirt roads that end among the psychedelic patterns of the tree-filled hillsides and there are my hands before me and there is the almost inaudible click of his zipper riding down between the fingers in slow motion. There is the taste of sperm at the edge of a lake cast into shadows by the surrounding mountainsides. There is the hungry unreeling of all this in the unraveling landscape of dry scrub plains through the front windshield and the rearview mirror. And here is the solitary form of my body leaning back in the sunburned interior of my car, foot pressing on the gas pedal sending me forward toward the gray veils of rain drifting across the white a hundred miles away.

  Like the ocean’s movement where every seventh wave is higher and more furious than the others, small pieces of last night’s sleep return in the eddy and flow of the day’s turning. The guy in the prison recalls something of his history: he once worked in a canning plant on the edge of the coastal town, in the warehouses that were large darkened metal buildings swept with the cool chill of massive refrigerating units. Under dim ceiling bulbs he spent days and months packing cartons with unlabeled tin cans, each can containing some kind of liquid, forty-eight cans to a carton, thirty-six cartons to a wood palette and then metal strapping bands tightened around each block layer to keep them from tumbling. Each minute of the day was spent making the same gestures of the arms: lift, swing, deposit, lift swing deposit, tape lift drop and push. He gets lost in himself the same way I do at some point I forget I’m in a vehicle, much less driving. After years of this work he begins to dream of the cans sitting packed away in the vast recesses of the warehouse waiting. He slowly developed the sense that each can contained a life, each breathing in forty-eight rhythms to a carton thirty-six cartons to a palette, thousands and thousands of palettes. And the combined sounds of all that consciousness waiting and waiting in the stillness of those dim buildings woke him up some nights tangled among the bedsheets laden with sweat.

  I feel that I’m caught in the invisible arms of government in a country slowly dying beyond our grasp. There is something singing of this, something in the currents of wind and breeze floating along the black electric cables lining the roads, something I can’t see or touch but moves in the shape of vowels and uttered sounds like the spinning soft bodies of birds playing with the sky. I play games with the road to shake myself up, at times squeezing my eyelids closed so that I drive quarter-mile stretches without sight and it becomes a fight to open my eyes before the side of the road overtakes me. It’s as if a second person is sitting within my body at the wheel. The body that holds the wheel understands the danger that mounts by the moment and the second body smiles in the dark interior of the first. When the eyes finally open, they reveal nothing new about the world except a slight shift in landscape proving that increased mortality teaches me nothing. There’s no enlarged or glittering new view of the nature of things or existence. No god or angels brushing my eyelids with their wings. Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head.

  Late at night when most of the traffic on the highways had exited for motel sleep, I turned off the road and drove up a dirt hill toward a truck stop hidden for a moment in the folds of the landscape. In a series of wheel motions, a neon-outlined teepee slid into view out of the darkness. I needed some coffee because the road started becoming confused with the sky. Small rocks turned up by the wheels pinged under the car’s belly. Down along the service road the prehistoric silhouettes of sixteen-wheel rigs ground their gears in the blackness to shift back out to the main road. As each cab swung by me there was a video blaze of tiny green and red ornamental cab lights framing the darkened windows containing a momentary fractured bare arm or dim face filled with the stony gaze of road life. In these moments my face travels an elongated neck out my side window and floats up into the shadows of their open windows to place its tongue in between the parted lips of each driver. I could feel their arms reaching through the breeze of our moving vehicles to embrace me from behind.

  Pulling through the darkness and the swirling dust I parked in front of the building. After stepping from my car and moving across the nightsoil toward the plate-glass doors, I noticed a green beat-up chevy parked under the fluorescent drift of building lights, and behind the shadows of the driver’s window, as if swimming in the depths of lantern seas, was the amazing and beautiful face of a navajo man in his early fifties. He sat hunched in the driver’s seat unmoving, his face tilted as if in wait for someone familiar to exit the silent doors of the building. I stopped for an extended moment lost in his distances. He was trapped within the glassed-in diorama of his metallic-and-chrome vehicle, within the museum of his own natural history as viewed through a white boy’s eyes.

  It was a tabloid moment in time. Issuing between the static waves on the car radio as I entered a small city in the west was a news story reporting that a teenage Native American boy in a small but resilient automobile had made a wrong-way turn against the rush of oncoming traffic in order to mount a curb and run over a college student waiting for a bus. The boy’s car then turned back onto the road and disappeared in the morning rush-hour confusion.

  Driving around the city, it didn’t take long to realize that if you didn’t have a vehicle, a machine of speed, you owned poverty. It was yet another city dying of a disease whose anatomy was just beyond the inhabitants’ grasp. Its origins may have been as a trading post in another time but now it had become a government war town filled with a half million workers employed in the various research centers attempting to perfect a president’s dream of laser warfare from the floating veil of outerspace. Local papers were filled with patriotic hard-ons in the face of recent successes in the nearby desert where researchers were able to knock a dummy missile out of the clear blue sky with a laser discharged from a device the size of a refrigerator. Other than the clouds in the sky, an occasional bird or dog and the anonymous nomadic poor, all movement in the city was confined to the automobile. Those who owned cars, when witnessed close up in the tiled halls of shopping centers, had a vague transparency and thickness to their skin. The city during the day was bathed in a hot white sunlight; a steel-pounding heat coursed off the walls of miragelike architecture in the waves of desert wind. There was a distant energy surrounding everything like fear because there was nothing about the architecture that the eye could settle on; the eye was constantly adrift almost as if it were experiencing a small panic. It was an architecture of a population anticipating impermanence or death. It was a vacuum turned inside out, prefab materials of housing resembling the dry husks of insects halfway through their molt. All along the sidewalks were the people reduced to walking; the desperation of whole families sitting in lethargy on the curbsides lost to the sounds of automobiles; the swollen slit-eyed heads of drunks bobbing in the blue air as they staggered along the sidewalks. Owning a vehicle, you could drive by and with the pressure of your foot on the accelerator and with your eyes on the road you could pass it quickly—maybe not fast enough to overlook it completely, but fast enough so that the speed of the auto and the fear centers of the brain created a fractured marriage of light and sound. The i
mages of poverty would lift and float and recede quickly like the gray shades of memory so that these images were in the past before you came upon them. It was the physical equivalent of the evening news.

  The motor replaces the horse; the speed and the intent of the vehicle replaces the dead bows and arrows of history: the kid made the next day’s newspapers. An early afternoon bicyclist reported a teenager driving a dark-colored camaro who chased him down a one-way street. The cyclist narrowly avoided being run over by abandoning his bike and scrambling on top of a row of parked cars. The bicycle was left mangled and the camaro scraped along the sides of the cars in a fury before making a U-turn and disappearing. Two middle-aged women came forward with a story of having been menaced in the previous week while crossing an intersection not far from the state campus. Other sightings of the kid were reported in the next twenty-four hours. One woman told of being grazed by a dark-colored auto that purposefully accelerated and swung toward her as she got into her own car. A slow private history was beginning to reveal itself. The hotel I stayed in was an ex-prostitution hotel with a nonfunctioning swimming pool in a former skid-row section of town. It was in the general striking area of the camaro. Every time I walked down the street or got out of my car I thought of a body stripped of flesh turning slowly on the end of a rope, I thought of the wind reeling through the red skulls of flowers, I thought of the face of our current president floating disembodied and ten stories tall over the midnight buildings. I wondered why any of these things, like the kid in his camaro, are a surprise. Why weren’t more of us doing this?

  There were times in my teens when I was living on the streets and selling my body to anyone interested. I hung around a neighborhood that was so crowded with homeless people that I can’t even remember what the architecture of the blocks looked like. Whereas I could at least spread my legs and gain a roof over my head, all those people down in those streets had reached the point where the commodity of their bodies and souls meant nothing more to anyone but themselves. I remember times getting picked up by some gentle and repressed fag living in a high-rise apartment filled with priceless north american indian artifacts and twentieth-century art who was paying me ten bucks to suck on my dick. As I studied his head bobbing against my belly while seated on a leather couch, I marveled at how simple it would be to lift the carved stone fish from the glass coffee table and smack the top of this head in and live on easy street for a while. I thought of the hundreds of times standing in a moving subway car, a cop standing with his back to me, his holster within easy reach and me undoing the gun restraint with my eyes over and over. I thought of the neo-nazis posing as politicians and religious leaders and I thought of my genuine fantasies of murder and wondered why I never crossed the line. It’s not that I’m a good person or even that I am afraid of containment in jail; it may be more that I can’t escape the ropes of my own body, my own flesh, and bottom line in the pyramids of power and confinement one demon gets replaced by another in a moment’s notice and no one gesture can erase it all that easily.

  In the last evening in the motel room, falling to sleep amid the sounds of splintering glass from a fight in another room, I found myself walking in this rural section of the country. It was dirt roads and a thick strangling brush and woods appearing over the tops of brambles that lined the road. There were groves of beautiful firs and leafy oaks and some beech trees. I came into this area where the road turned triangular. The triangle had a stretch of sidewalk with small-town stores. There was a coffee shop, a ma and pa-type restaurant with formica counter and shining stools and a gallon bottle of hard-boiled eggs in vinegar and maybe some containers of beef jerky. I stepped up onto the sidewalk which was built like a slightly raised boardwalk of slatted wood and in the shadows of a wall there’s this fourteen- or fifteen-year-old kid with long black hair and a denim jacket with cigarettes in the top pocket. He’s standing outside this open screen door of the coffee shop with one leg folded beneath him the sole of his foot flat against the wall of the building and hands in pockets. As I pass the doorway of the shop, I glance inside out of the corner of my eyes and see three or four teenage guys playing a couple of pinball machines, riding the flippers and machines with bucking hip motions and thrusts and they’re actually in the process of breaking open the machines to get the money. I flinch a little in that moment, realizing there is danger and I don’t know where I am. I’m a stranger in these parts. My body is in motion as I take all this in and the kid leaning outside the door says what the fuck you lookin at? and before I can answer he whips out this long knife. It’s about nine inches of thin steel blade and with a flick of his wrist slashes my bare arm open from wrist to elbow. I look down in slight shock and step back waving my hands in front of me saying, “Nothing man … nothing … sorry.” He seems satisfied and lets me pass on down the sidewalk. I’m holding my arm to keep the wound as closed up as possible and when I reach a section of the sidewalk where there’s an alley I step inside to lean shakily against a wall. I notice two other guys about my age all cut up on the arms, legs and bellies. I stumble out of the alley and suddenly this policeman shows up. He’s wearing tan pants, shirt and cap and black boots and he’s holding a whip about a yard long. The kid spots him coming and starts running down the road in the direction I came from. The officer starts chasing him and I run after the two of them to see what happens to the kid. The kid is in the distance and the officer stops in the middle of the road. The kid turns while running to see where we are just as the officer snaps his arm and the whip elongates into the distance and wraps around the kids head bringing him to a halt—his hands come up to his face completely wrapped in leather thong. The officer runs the distance and catches up to the kid and hog-ties him like a rodeo calf. By the time I reach them the officer steps back a few feet and pulls out a shotgun taking aim on the kid. I’m thinking, “Oh man … he ain’t gonna shoot him—he wouldn’t do that.” And as I’m thinking that, the officer pulls the trigger and blows a hole open in the kid’s side. The kid’s side is gaping open near the waist showing pulsating intestines and stomach. I’m crouching near the kid’s head looking into his eyes as the officer comes up and squats down next to me. The kid is no longer a kid; he’s some kind of stray dog with bristly black fur and frightened eyes. The officer takes the kid’s knife from the ground and with the other hand carefully parts the flesh of the wound until the organ that seems to be the stomach is revealed, its delicate pink grayish bloat quivering like a lung puffing in and out. The officer delicately cuts it open and clear liquid pours out. I look into the dog’s eyes and watch the terror and pain change into an opiumlike daze. A sensual pleasure passes beneath their surface, a strange state of grace in the flight behind the eyes speeding up, the fading of life into the pale glaze of death.

  Americans can’t deal with death unless they own it. If they own it, they will celebrate it, like in the air force base museum of the atomic bomb, where whole families of camera-toting tourists gather after the required i.d. security checks. In the gray-carpeted rooms, they walk the mazes of portable screens and platforms and enlarged photographs of death and incineration as seen from a discreet distance. The distance is far enough so you can’t see the bodies, only the architecture. The tour in this museum is led by an ancient matronly type who explains various levels of the bombs invention with all the glad bearings of a parent who has just given birth to her first child. I couldn’t deal with the clouds of perfume and the decaying personalities of the crowd so I wandered off by myself to walk the maze. There were machines that clicked on, set off merely by my presence and I’m walking through a paranoid blur of mechanical men’s voices crawling out of hidden speakers and image after image floating and shifting into fragments of large grainy black-and-white blow-ups of sullen men standing half conscious with pride next to sinister fat canisters looking like overturned pot-bellied stoves. The voices have all the tone and texture of high school film soundtracks explaining the abstract motions of the sperm entering the side of the eg
g and fertilizing it, or the hunger and desire implicit in the tiny snake swallowing the egg ten times the size of its own head.

  Outside the shedlike buildings are the constant shrill vibrating sounds of jets taking off into the afternoon heat. Through a back window that overlooks the concrete edges of the runways I see a playground with defunct miniature jets and spare broken engines from spacecraft of the past decades. It is a playground for the kids and at that moment there is a family gathering among the hulls of bomber planes and world war two relics for a photo op. Standing in the shadow of a late-model bomber cabled to the asphalt surface of the ground a grandmotherly type gathers three kids in close to her body, fitting them in the frame of their parents’ camera shutter. It’s three generations of a family and everything is so clean and abstract that I’m feeling dizzy. I’m watching all this surrounded by two screens showing speeded up videos of a nuclear reactor being built by men the size of ants. They build and rebuild the reactors in twenty seconds flat. I’m thinking if I owned the place I’d hook the constant smell of rotting flesh into the air-conditioning unit and have all the screens filled with speeded-up films of rotting corpses and the family outside the window is moving to the next plane for the next photo. A man steps out from behind a doorway I hadn’t noticed before and offers me his hand in greeting, asking if I’d like a cup of coffee. He looks like the kind of guy who’d one day end up in an alcohol detox center studying snakes and insects. I turn away without a word; I’ll never shake the hand of someone I might be fighting against in wartime.