Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  It becomes too much after a while. Seeing so much death, hearing of so much death, feeling so much loss. I wondered recently if I was becoming numb to the idea of death itself. What was in the mid-eighties a recognition of loss so profound upon hearing about the first person I knew who had just died of AIDS, has slowly become so familiar that I wince upon hearing that someone new has died and then tuck it somewhere in my psyche and try and refocus my thoughts to something simple like paying the rent or buying the food for my evening meal. A month ago someone called from out of state to inform me that a guy I knew from ten years ago had died. I’d had a fight with this guy and thought he was an asshole up until the moment when I’d heard he was ill. He then become perfectly human in my eyes. I’d been comforted seeing him on the street since then; something about his being alive and occupying space meant that my life was not threatened by this virus. Now he’s dead and I feel more vulnerable, like I’m standing on a conveyor belt leading into an enormous killing machine.

  There is one homely queen I used to see years ago on the streets of the west village on nights when I was on the prowl. He had coke bottle thick glasses and long straggly hair. Sometimes he was alone, sometimes on the arm of a tough-looking street hustler or borderline homeless type. Our eyes have met for twelve years and we have never spoken a word, not even a nod, but we have had whole conversations in that brief contact. I have always been amazed at his regal bearing and the enormous sense of intelligence that lay in his eyes, the rest of him buried under that cultivated surface of salvation army cast-offs. In the last few years I have taken comfort when rounding a corner east or west and suddenly coming upon this familiar stranger and seeing that he’d changed very little; he was still looking healthy in the midst of a terrible epidemic. There was the familiar rosy flush of his cheeks and the same searching movements of his eyes behind the now-yellowing lenses of his eyeglasses, and each time I’d seen him since the mid-eighties I’d think: “Good for you—you’re still around, still alive, still healthy.”

  Yesterday I was walking down first avenue and was crossing the street from one corner to the next when I came upon him walking in the opposite direction. I saw him at the last second just as our bodies passed among turning cars and the first thing I recognized were his eyes, only now they were wild with misery and panic and it was only then that I realized his face and neck were blurred with Kaposi lesions like a school of burgundy-colored fish upturning around the contours of his jaw.

  My heart is a vacuum of horror; I want to run amok but I am too civilized. Instead I lay his thick yellowing glasses at the shrine in the back of my head and buy some take-out soup from the counter in the nearby restaurant, surrounded by this unbelievable noise made by the living and the unconscious with various silverware against plates and bowls, and I think of what a shit planet this is these days. I think about the seven other people I know who have died this month from AIDS. I think of one guy in particular who was a junkie for years and who ran every scam imaginable on his friends, and all his past routines and games and delusions have become charming because they all boil down to survival and survival is such a lovely thing, such a transient thing.

  Why does this one die and that one not? What does all this mean? How do I map all this down? I respect just about every attempt at survival I witness these days. But every person will eventually lose his struggle just as I will one day, and that makes each attempt more filled with life; that means sadness at the loss, but more sweetness in the attempts. That means maybe fewer hours on the face of this disorderly planet, but less shit I’ll have to deal with and anyway here I am in the back seat of this taxicab waiting for the light to turn green so that I can arrive at my home, because I feel too sick to walk or wait for a bus and isn’t it lovely this pattern of sunlight drifting through the side window across the back of my hand, laying at rest on my thigh. Isn’t it beautiful, the fact that I can see this light? One day I won’t. One day you won’t either. Sometimes I watch the leaders of this country on television and think, at least “nature” will reach where assassins are unable to tread. Maybe they’ll die of massive coronaries from all their cannibal banquets, or maybe brain tumors from the radiation in their environment. Education is, and will always be, a generational thing and because of that I lose hope sometimes in the idea that the shape of what we have to live in might change. I have always viewed my friends as checkpoints in a series of motions of resistance to the flood of hyenas in state or religious drag. If we all die off what will happen to those we leave behind who are just this moment being born? I realize that cretins have roamed, and always will roam, this planet, whether I am here or not; there’s one born every minute—this is a jarring drift; this perspective makes my heart and soul sway. I want relief from this tired yap yapping of my brain. I wish I could pluck it out and throw it into the corner where it can chatter away while I go out for the evening.

  There was a period of time immediately after getting off the streets that I could barely talk. I lived in a halfway house with a group of ex-cons. There was a high rate of recidivism for the guys I hung around with. Someone in the old neighborhood kills a distant cousin; you get a gun and shoot the guy who killed him and then tap into the old family network and take a series of trains to the south—honor is upheld, revenge extracted, and nobody gives a shit in the overloaded law enforcement agencies. I kept going back and hanging around on the streets every chance I could. It was the only place where I felt comfortable and surrounded by people with a similar frame of reference. In the halfway house, guys were provided with the minimal structure of Other World existence: how to do your laundry, how to wash dishes, how to keep a bank account for part of your meager earnings, how to make a bed, how to impress a boss when asking for a janitor job. No one spoke my language except for the hustlers back on 42nd street or the occasional John who’d picked me up for some cash and wild times. I learned how to appear in such a way as to never give an indication of my past when walking through the structures of daily life and work. But in order to not go crazy, I planned robberies of electronics shops in Herald Square and I planned robberies I never committed of banks and some individuals on the streets or at the fund-raising parties given by city politicians for kids in the halfway house. We were invited to upper park avenue co-ops to eat meals with shrunken rich people, sitting at banquet tables attended by servants in uniforms. Hours afterwards I’d be in a midtown hotel bathroom, fucking some businessman in a quiet toilet stall for twenty dollars. Death was a corporate type wearing an oversized death-skull mask and gesticulating at me from the horizon. My fear was based on understanding the social structure that beckoned to me and promised a life of security and support to me if I would just embrace its illusion and lies. If I let this illusion wrap is stinking arms around me I knew I’d suffer a death more terrifying than physical death: an emotional and intellectual strangulation. The life that the man in the grinning death mask waved like a banner from the edge of the horizon was one in an activity that I cared nothing about but one that I would repeat endlessly until the day my teeth fell out, all in order to be able to eat and sleep inside a tiny wood and plaster structure he’d allow me to call: home.

  I did what I could to pull away from the certain demise I’d been facing on the street and at the same time threw myself into situations that suggested a possibility of looking into the eye of death which was disguised in a more attractive form. I crawled through the walls of every social taboo I could come across. I wanted to celebrate everything we are denied through structure of laws or physical force. I just did it quietly and anonymously. As a homosexual in america I couldn’t openly explore my expressions of loving. Expressions of loving are never an acceptable thing publicly in this society—even straight loving, let alone homosexuality. Just look at television. We can look at the latest body count in close-up and yet the human body is still taboo. So if I couldn’t express my sexuality I could at least subvert it within forms of violence which could pass through the streets witho
ut resistance. The circle of friends I interacted with publicly shifted and was replaced over and over until one day the violence of my street life finally arrived at a point where it was indistinguishable from aspects of my public social life. The vietnam war and its daily tv displays of faces numbed with horror, the repeats of slow-motion videos of burst flesh and dead babies and ravaged exploding villages, slowly came to an end. I saw photographs of necklaces of human fingers and ears. I saw album pictures of guys my own age standing in a field littered with human heads. I saw the caved-in faces of people whose skulls had been literally popped out of their heads by mortar fragments, looking like obscene balloons left over from a distant celebration. The youth of the urban centers of america, as well as their dislocated counterparts in the suburbs, began slowly warming up for a dance of social death by first quietly and then publicly tracing all the outlines of taboo and violent activities and forms of nihilism they came across. They began to push everything they could to see how far they could go before they exploded it, or it exploded them. By the time these activities went public, nobody outside of those social activities seemed to notice, or maybe they thought that by having bought the illusion of security, or having money and food, it wouldn’t touch them. Maybe it was that the violence they’d witnessed on television during wartime had gotten completely confused with the seductive commercials that surrounded those images. I felt the whole landscape surrounded by media faces expounding how normal things were and how thoroughly wonderful life in america was and how well we all were doing and yet all my friends were doing a death dance in front of these surreal propped-up facades: little jerking physical movements suggesting suffocation in the asphalt streets of slums and imploding neighborhoods. Whole neighborhoods of youth entered a period of superficial communication masked in the black clothes of mourning. Most of them were in their early twenties and in a nation gone numb they didn’t want people to know who they were or how sensitive they were and how much they suffered. Drugging gave them the salve for the schizophrenic nightmare they were living in and literally gave their brains a television quality of unconsciousness so that they could survive a walk from one side of town to the other. The people in power knew their own physical deaths were well within striking range, so they cared about nothing more than strengthening their secret accounts and their control forces and the height of their security fences. They invested more in the design of manipulative sound-bites than they did in any form of moral food and social answers.

  For a period of time I entered a circle of people who were attracted to forms and expressions of violence and bloodletting because these things contained some unarguable truth when viewed or experienced against a backdrop of america. In a country where an actor becomes the only acceptable president, a country where fewer than half of those eligible to vote even bother to do so—and when they do they elect for two terms a man whose vocation is to persuade with words and actions an audience who wants to believe whatever he tells them—in this context, violence presents a truth that can’t be distorted like words and images. Living in america during the Reagan years had the same disorientation as a texture dream; that sense you get at times lying with your face against the sheets with your eye open, millimeters away from the microscopic weave of the linen, and suddenly your body freezes up and your eye is locked into the universe of textures and threads and weaves, and for an extended moment you can’t shake yourself from the hallucination. Instead of a piece of linen, it was a television set in the corner of the room and on the tv was a series of carefully choreographed gestures, winks, fake warm smiles, hand motions, and feigned deafness beneath the roar of helicopter blades. The criminal tidbit that Nixon got booted out of office for was a joke in comparison to the Iran-Contra affair alone. During the Reagan years, outright starvation or murder by assassination of the competition or opposition became public and commonplace, yet an entire country was plugged into an accelerated decomposition of the bogus morality america had come to define as its purpose for existence, and almost nobody blinked. And it was televised. And it continues.

  It became a time in which one had to choose one’s tribe; choose one’s reality. Some of us felt like the incredible shrinking man on the late night television movie; he realized that no matter how small he shrinks (how invisible to the eye of government he becomes), he is still alive, just his environmental references have changed. It is the moment where you understand the con that you bought by being born into this pre-invented existence and speaking your first word in imitation of your family, how that word supports and continues a structure that is basically about death of the soul, of the emotion and the intellect. Sure, one could practice voting and maybe rearrange a few of the threads, but in the end it is just the same old fabric covering the pillow that covers one’s face. An act of violence spoke with an implicit truth. Drugs provided a psychic rearrangement of a physical landscape that is totally owned by white people with money, power and all methods of communication and control. We understood the message from our elected representatives in government: who could go for the ride and who couldn’t. Some of us chose our own transportation, some of us got on the national roller coaster to hell our own way. As the ride through the 1980s came to an end, we look around and realize that some of us are still surviving while others fell to the wayside along the route. The television still blinks out its increasingly accelerating display of the variousness of the con routine—the sawdust pouring out of Reagan’s head on the landscape of television did nothing to wake very many people up, and thus we have a former cia director as our current death god. The streets have become our sacrificial temples, with millions of homeless and millions more entering that status. What form will the death dance take in the next decade?

  “This is life—let’s swim in it.”—(dream conversation)

  One night I ate a bunch of mushrooms and walked out into the psychedelic streets and headed uptown to see Johnny. He lived in a building up on third avenue that would be the first building in new york to fall if an earthquake struck the city. It swayed in the breeze and like most people’s apartments it had floors that slanted at extreme angles. In ten minutes’ time I was beginning to feel amphibian-like; my arms felt twice as long as they should have and I kept trying to stuff my hands in my pockets so that no one else would notice. It took me an hour to find my way through the thick paranoid atmosphere of the Jell-O streets and traffic to the front door of his building. It was a trip through the fun house. I kicked the front door until it cracked open on its bent hinges and a swarm of particles rushed at me: the smell of sushi gone bad mixing with a scattering of grime and dust like billions of tiny demons came screaming through the yellowing haze of cheap fluorescent hall lights, flying into my nostrils and face. It was a topsy-turvy mix of darknesses and lights which gradually formed the vague outlines of hallways and rickety staircases. He lived four flights up. On the second floor I interrupted a sale of dope between the resident dealer and a white boy with pimply face and biceps. The dealer was a skeletal apparition that forever stood in the shadowy depths of the darkened hallway, and every time I visited the building he made me for the heat and would spin aroung pocketing the dope and mutter something about how he’s tired from walking up the stiars and just in the hall taking a breather blah blah blah. The next flight up reveals a short huge-bellied middle-aged guy leaning across the hallway windowsill with his head over the traffic. He had an operation the year before and they took out one of his lungs and leaning over the sill on a beach towel was the only way he could stop the sense of suffocation, so this was his prime activity for eighteen hours a day. I thought of beached whales as he breathed-wheezed hello, at my passing to get to the next flight. Standing next to him in the shadows is this prematurely-aged alcoholic woman whose boyfriend is in rikers prison and whose kids are sometimes referred to as the demon kids; they’re up the next flight of stairs heading towards Johnny’s place. They stop mid-flight and break into a rap routine and attempt to break-dance on the staircas
e. They’re ten and eleven years old and usually found sitting on or around Jimmy’s easy chair. They come up so they can smoke Jimmy’s cigarettes when he’s out in the streets foraging. Jimmy is the guy who lives in the hallway outside Johnnys’ front door; he’s got the chair and a radio and an ashtray stand and some current hardcover novel he’s been reading and he’s a sweet guy. Jimmy stopped drinking recently and was almost stabbed to death by his best friend not long ago. Five days after getting out of the hospital he let his best friend sleep with him in the hallway because he had no other place to go and the kids in the building woke him up saying: “Now’s your chance Jimmy—he’s asleep. You can cut his throat while you got the chance.” Jimmy said sweetly: “No no he’s my best friend, I can’t do that.” The demon kids plop down in his easy chair, big enough for both of them, and light up one of his cigarettes. They have the eyes of forty-year-olds. Downstairs their mom screams: “COME DOWN HERE THIS MINUTE BOTH OF YOU.” The kids ask: “For what?” and the mom goes: “WHATTAYA MEAN, FOR WHAT—IT’S CHRISTMAS—THAT’S WHAT. NOW GET DOWN HERE,” and the kids hop up and down in the slimy july heat saying: “Oh goody—it’s christmas, it’s christmas!” and I wearily reach the front door of Johnny’s place and bang bang bang bang he’s not home.