Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  Somehow I got drugged. I barely remember the motions of it, a hand with a cloth and another hand with a bottle and a quiet shaking motion and I turned away to fish a cigarette out of my pocket and the guy’s arm appeared around the side of my head saying, “Try this,” and it had a clinical stink to it and I was in slow motion, falling to my knees. I felt the weight of his body in darkness, hovering over me, seeing his face half in shadows, everything grainy and foreign. A quiet claustrophobia entered my body beneath my skin, mixing with the bloodstream to form a sense of fear, not grounded, not severe, but more like a passing notion of vulnerability, wondering at his hands as they reach out of the darkness and slide warmly beneath my neck, over the sides of my neck, palms across my cheeks, then over my eyes. Thinking at that moment of him as a murderer, then slowly falling deep inside pleasure sensations; first the shock of his warm hands slowly tightening for a moment around my neck and then sliding down to my waist freeing the buckle on my belt, then the buttons of my overalls and his face following his hands as they peel back my pants. He gathered saliva in his palms and spit some on my chest, rubbing it in with his hands and I realized it was just the stranger in him that I was feeling cautious about …

  One night, when I was feeling depressed from too much speed, I met Joe. Johnny called me over to the bar to introduce me to him. All I remember now is this sexy apparition in a goofy winter hat with two earflaps that stuck out at angles. He was a dark-haired guy with a corruptible face; I turned to Johnny and fanned my face with my fingers as if I were swooning. I guess coming off the speed made me horny that night. I asked Johnny if Joe was straight and he shrugged and then snickered, “I don’t know. Why don’t you find out.”

  Joe wrote stories about white-trash teens in southern states drugging and fucking and shooting off handguns. He wrote about killer cars and boredom. He showed me a story about a power junkie who invents a machine or system that allows him to suck the brains of other people and ingest all their knowledge. The guy becomes the smartest man in the world. I forget the ending of the story but it left me with a slight gnawing doubt about my proximity to Joe. When I met him he was putting out a xerox magazine that had a. rotating title that reflected all the various possible addictions. He published writings by Dakota, stories and photographs by Johnny, anonymous ramblings by mental patients dropped into the streets of the city by the medical system, and one time used one of my Archie and Mr. Weatherbee cut-ups, where the two of them have anal and oral sex in Mr. Weatherbee’s office. The comic ended when Archie caught a bad case of crabs.

  Joe was also making photographs and super-8 films. His films stripped all the tedious buildup from hollywood movies whose essential draw for the ticket-buying public was five minutes of graphic violence. His films were the five minutes of blood-letting and mayhem. He also explored the power plays embedded in the sexual act. In one film I played a character who was obsessed with an older man. My character was so obsessed with the other guy that whenever he rejected my pitiful advances my neck would explode unleashing torrents of blood or my arm would blast off my body bouncing off a wall. I loved the film because it made the intensity of emotions become an external physicality. Dakota played a lascivious derelict who made goo-goo eyes at my love object one day as we were entering our apartment across from the Bowery Mission. My brains almost exploded out my ears in jealousy. I’ll never forget Dakota’s face in the rushes, licking his lips, with his zomboid eyeballs projecting detailed scenes of sexual romp positions at me. His eyes exhausted me with their energy.

  Another film Joe made showed in grainy black and white scenes a young guy sitting in a chair in his house brooding. Suddenly the guy gets up and begins methodically smashing the entire house apart and the camera follows along as each piece of furniture explodes into toothpicks and a television set with the knob turned on and commercials playing on the screen gets imploded by a series of well-aimed kicks. A mirror gets smashed into thousands of glittering pieces and, thus, they reflect our psychic environments.

  TAPE RECORDING:

  DAVID: When did you meet Dakota and what do you remember?

  JOE: The very first? It was around 1980 and I was living in Philadelphia and putting out the Addict Magazines and Dakota wrote me a letter. He was already in New York City. The letter was so fucking weird I thought it was a joke. After a second letter I wrote him back, then I moved to New York and he was the first person I met. I hooked up with him because he told me if I ever needed any printing done for free, he would do it for me. He worked for a big foundation. He was an assistant to a doctor. From what I’ve heard the doctor was a pretty eccentric dude, in his forties, and he hung out on 42nd street all the time going to peep shows and talking to weirdos. I guess he was sort of Dakota’s father figure, because he always supported anything Dakota did and he lent him money when he was broke.

  So I remember calling Dakota and hooking up with him. We had a common bond, being that we were both from the south, plus, he was a punker and I fancied myself a punker. I remember going and visiting him in this huge fucking apartment on the west side. He had a printing press called DAKOTAPRINNERZ, which was basically the copy machine at the foundation he worked for, the best xerox machine made at the time. We’d go in there at night and the magazine I did, which had a circulation of 200 copies, went up to 2,000 copies overnight. He also did free mailing out of there with their postage meter.

  D.: What was your first impression of him?

  JOE: He liked to smoke pot; he liked to drink rum. He seemed real perverse; he seemed to be really into death and stuff—more than I was anyways.

  D.: What do you mean, “into death?”

  JOE: It means: when you can’t have what you want, you want everyone to die. Hahaha … and I know that feeling myself; I felt the same way. I have a fascination with anything out of the ordinary because daily life is so mundane. What I used to tell people was that, when I die, I want the whole world to end at the same time. If I have to die, I want everyone else to die; I want it all to cease at the same time. Everyone says, “Oh, that’s a very selfish outlook.” But then again it’s from a feeling of not feeling fulfilled—feeling that you’ve been denied your due, which I still feel all the time. We grow up having these lofty ideals, which we’re taught to expect by society, but then we don’t get it. We didn’t want to get it the way we’re told to—by working for it—we wanted a shortcut.

  D.: Do you remember what you wanted?

  JOE: Yeah. Happiness. At that age it boiled down to wanting someone to love us …

  “Our society desperately needs monsters to reclaim its own moral virginity.”

  —Sylvere Lotringer

  There is some part of me that has never cared if I died. So what. I know these feelings aren’t genetic or because of chemical imbalances. They were obviously born somewhere, from something. I have always experienced fear living in the world; sometimes it is hidden for periods of time. Maybe it was daddy, maybe it was mommy, maybe it was the american dream. Maybe it was the fact that the american dream bombed out for the parents of our generation. When we rolled around out of the shifting layers of childhood and our teens, we found ourselves reflecting on the national blank spot of the ’70s. At least in the ’60s some of our parents had a momentary idealism they shared as a reference point. They tore down parts of the psychic screens to reveal something a tiny bit more real; something that approximated a freedom for them, however ridiculous some sections of its framework turned out to be. The communes had the same stupid hierarchies as government institutions. Fake jesus-types wandered the dead highways and interstates flashing peace signs even until as late as 1979. Adults from the 60s pushed at the boundaries and borderlines of prescribed social tolerance and acceptance until the boundaries acknowledged and included them to some degree. Then the boundaries snapped in around them like rubberbands around a stack of pencils. Immediately, the interior masses, collected as they were around the illusory core of “government” and “ideals,” began their amoe
bic dance of consumption and assimilation. The Black Panthers at least instituted breakfast programs that were for a time picked up by the State for kids in the slums. The country was at the height of industrialization, so government could afford to buy off poor whites, blacks, and hispanics—in the form of welfare—in order to keep them from organizing as extensively as they appeared to be doing. What does this have to do with the price of milk and eggs? During the Carter years, urban centers started being gentrified, rents tripled, driving up the numbers of homeless, inflation went nuts, and by the time Reagan got lowered into power the agenda was the smashing of unionization, cutting of social programs, and the elevation of the media sound bite. The middle class was so brain dead from the intoxicating effects of its brief affluence that it was a conservative takeover that rivals Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  When kids of my generation hit their twenties and began to reach out to tear down the screens, in the same way that every generation before us exercised as a prerogative (reflecting their states of mind and need for psychic room), we found that our preliminary efforts revealed a black hole and it wasn’t in outer space. It was right here on the surface of North America. The mummified assholes in power could only be imaginative enough to fill it full of propped-up cardboard images portraying the “spectrum” of american ideals, which beneath the two-dimensional surfaces had pieces of exploded brain matter on the lapels of their success suits. It costs millions of dollars to run for president; how much does it cost to hire a madison avenue ad agency to run a campaign? How much does it cost to make a commercial for television? This is not a democracy.

  Television, when viewed from four centimeters away, was quite beautiful to us, especially if one could afford a color set. But television was what the church revealed itself to us as—nothing more than an experiment in mass hypnosis. In laboratory experiments, entomologists have discovered that they could approach a moth while it was in the middle of laying its eggs and cut its head off with a scalpel, and it would continue to lay its eggs until its genetically programmed job was done. Then it would die. I could only relate this information to the spectacle we are witnessing in the White House and its government functions.

  Maybe all these things are genetic. Maybe it all boils down to the issue once raised: that we are all of different species; that like the frog or the bird world we all break down to an intense variety of forms with only our physical characteristics binding us together or distinguishing us as separate. We are cursed with an absence of varieties of bright feathers or radical pigment designs on our faces and bodies to delineate our psychic differences. Because our forms are so similar, our only defense and survival mechanism is mimicry and silence.

  Some of my friends got it together enough to play house, so the next logical step in this environment was to learn to play doctor. Ever since my late teens I have fought the urge to go to sleep for a thousand years. Then I discovered that Johnny had been doing heroin for a period of time. During that period of my life I always tended to do the exact opposite of what I emphatically stated as something I wouldn’t ever do. I would try it at least once, just to see what I was afraid of.

  JOURNAL ENTRY:

  ANDROGYNOUS BLACK WOMAN LYING ON MATTRESS IN DEALER’S HOUSE: “You know all these (Operation Pressure Point) busts have to do with the economy. See, it’s a plan of Reagan’s, see, where the cops are told to allow all these junkies to get in and buy their dope and then when all the money is in the hands of the dealer, then the cops bust the dealer and take the money and put it back into the economy. This way the economy is gonna get better, and they only got until september to get the economy back in shape. You watch, if september comes around and the economy isn’t fixed up—all hell’s gonna break loose.”

  TAPE RECORDING:

  DAVID: What was it about “dark” things that attracted people back then?

  SYLVIA: Well, if you’re afraid, then you dive in and you want to get inside it so it’s just not a separate thing. My nature, the nature of how I see things is I can barely look at some of those things.

  DAVID: I find myself at times sliding towards depression in confronting some materials—my attraction for a moment might be more of: why are they attracted to it—I mean; medical deformities, nazi regalia, videotapes of that politician upstate shooting himself in the mouth …

  SYLVIA: Exactly … it’s once more removed. I think we’re observing that—because all these people had specific things; it’s: why did all these people have these specific attractions. The attractions themselves are arbitrary.

  D.: Well, what was the attraction to drugs?

  SYLVIA: I’ll tell you—talk about a generation. Whatever it is that’s there when you are in your twenties—I could put things down to age; before you’re deciding, you just do whatever is there. I don’t ever remember saying, “I need drugs. I’m going to do drugs.” It wasn’t really a decision, they were just there. If they weren’t there, it would have been something else. I think drugs themselves are their own issue. I didn’t do them to explore or anything, I did them for fun. I did coke to get to work—it was just there. I didn’t really think about why I did it. It was only in my marriage that drugs became an issue, when I did heroin with my husband because life was so miserable and I would go down with him and I definitely did it to try. and hide, which never worked for me anyway. I can never fake myself out. Eventually I was doing them just so I wouldn’t be sick. You don’t use drugs—they always end up using you. I did them for the buzz, to take the edge off, to go through all the motions and go through it with a smile. To get through the everydayness, the pointlessness, the two dimensionalness of everyday life, which is sort of ironic because all we do is look underneath it all the time—I don’t exist on the two-dimensional sphere; I see way beyond it. So why are we taking a drug to help us to do that? I think we do the drug because we do see so much more, but we want, on some level to keep things two-dimensional. It’s a dichotomy; you can’t stand things because they are so superficial so you take drugs to stop seeing further.

  D.: Yeah … You have a headache, you take aspirin. You have a normal life, you take drugs. Is that what it boils down to?

  SYLVIA: Well, like I said, I took them just to get rid of the mundane aspect of everything I am seeing, but I’ve never seen anything mundane in anything, so I must be taking it to eliminate the depth, to get through the everyday and see it that way. You talk about this nation of zombies, what do they do? I know they don’t question things but how do they do it? I don’t think I’m special—

  D.: I think we are. We see something about the structure that others take for granted or seem blind to; the structure consumes them and all they know is to get that job, get that food, get that comfort and, hopefully, get that retirement.

  SYLVIA: I’ve always envied people like that on some level, people who knew what they wanted to do, what they had to do, didn’t question it. And they don’t want you around; they’ll fuck you so bad if you say, “Excuse me, stop and lets talk about all this for a minute. Why are you doing this?” They’ll fucking kill you.

  Last night I called my mother. I said, “I’m really fucking smart.” Everyone has been saying I’m too smart for my own good. I say, “Get the fuck away from me—that’s right, I’m too smart, that’s all I have.”

  D.: I’ve been told all my life that I’m “too sensitive,” as if you could just turn the tap off and feel a little less sensitive for the rest of your life and everything will be okay.

  SYLVIA: “Too sensitive”—oh, definitely. Too smart, too sensitive, intuitive. It is “much sensitive,” not “too sensitive,” as if it were derogatory. Excuse me, that is what I am. I’ll spend my whole life trying to maintain this rather than trying to turn it off. That’s why it is hard. I want to be as smart and as sensitive as I am and see things the way I do. I want to be strong enough to stay that way. I don’t want to dull that. I did drugs to dull these feelings, to avoid paying bills I couldn’t pay. On the other hand I can fa
ce shit head-on. I’m even stronger than I want to be. No matter what happens technically, no matter what kinds of jobs I’ve worked—it’s all incidental to thinking. That’s all that is important is the thinking. I don’t know how to make money from it. It would be great to pay the rent. And I don’t want a million bucks and then just sit around thinking all day—I also have to be in the middle of it, I don’t care what it is. I’m not justifying the horror of the last five years—that’s mine; that’s my choice, that’s my reason—I’ll move on from here. None of that is going to set me back because I’ve been thinking all along through it; I cared about it. It doesn’t matter what’s happening, it’s how you look at it. I’ll never let anyone take that away from me, with, “You’re too sensitive.” Fuck you—you’re lucky there’s people out here thinking about why we’re doing anything. But one is not good without the other. Even if someone can go through the motions and not know it, they’re not getting anything out of it. They are just getting through it. We can’t be alive and questioning it without doing a little of that “maintaining.”

  TAPE RECORDING:

  JOE: … I know a lot more about what I was feeling back then than I did at the time. Someone asked me recently about the movies I made, and I said, “My only intent is to destroy sex.” They said, “What do you mean?” It occurred to me that whatever we are denied or whatever we do not get in the way that we want, we want to smash it. I could never understand romance and shit—it never seemed to work out like in the picture books or the movies, so, naturally, I wanted to destroy it. It is just that in your twenties you don’t realize that you don’t necessarily want that which you cannot have—it just seems that way. It is states of life that end up being attractive; things where other people seem to be content. Like—I wish I had a wife. And a house. And a car. But my desire for that makes me hate it. Such as, seeing a couple kissing; I hate it. It makes me sick. Just because I don’t have it.