DAVID: Do you mean media images of happiness?
JOE: Yeah. But that’s all we have to go on, especially if you don’t have a strong family environment. I mean we all come from fucked-up homes. Most of our fucking input is from fairy tales, from the movies, tv, magazines, and from all that shit. It took me forever to figure out that that’s all definitely a bunch of fairy tales. I feel like an idiot for not seeing that when I was a kid …
Q. Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
A. Because it was dead.
JOURNAL EXCERPT:
I was sitting in Joe’s house trying to figure out where I am and where I am going. That question was solved when he took out a syringe and started uncapping a hit of ecstasy. I joined him in the kitchen and talked him into letting me use the needle after him. It was the only needle he had. He resisted at first, something to do with me being queer and all. I felt insulted and then he remembered bleach could kill the virus if I had it. When he was fixing he dropped the cotton ball out of the spoon onto the dirty floor, cursed and picked it up saying, “Oh what the fuck,” and rolling it around between his filthy paint-covered fingers. After he hit up I cleaned the needle with Clorox and spring water a few times. When I hit the vein and pushed in the depressor it was like a golfball of heat and light blew through my heart and sped up into my brain. An inaudible pop behind the chest and skull and the world was instantly beautiful. I left and walked downstairs and pushed through the group of people waiting on line to score from the old lady on the third floor. The streets were emptying out with the falling of the sun.
Later tonight I was walking around like a loaded pistol, out and around the streets where the air is so thick with pollution and death. The streetlamps burn dim and over in the dusk above the buildings there’s a blimp hovering in a torturous drift, with “McDonalds” written on its side. I wish someone would take an elephant gun and blow it out of the sky. Over on A venue A, near 11th street, three little puerto rican kids are beating the shit out of a giant Snoopy doll with nail-studded boards. They beat its head until the white guts of cotton stuffing were completely emptied. An insulting vision appeared in the burnt-out streets, in the poverty of the block, the broken tenements and doomed kids; the little park filled with broken glass and shacks made of cardboard; and the o.d. sleepers and the puke and shit and the stains of yesterday evening’s bloody knifing and the hungry stray dogs and the old man they sleep with in winter to keep from freezing in the abandoned building; and the little brats waiting to grow old enough to sell dope and shoot other kids that step on their turf and the people with disease selling their used hypodermics—into the middle of all this walks a stupid boy cop fresh from queens and pale with fear trying to twirl his baton like a seasoned pro.
I get back to Joe’s house and he’s still going strong with the needle. I got no other place to live and all the rents are up because the rich people decided the suburbs are really hell and are moving back to the cities. Joe informs me that people die of heart attacks all the time from one i.v. shot of ecstasy. It’s the last time I do it. The darkness that comes from this shit is so pervasive that it taps into the dark tone of american structure. Everything that is horror-filled and powerfully ugly about the american dream and its resulting nightmare descends like a twenty-mile-wide blanket over this part of the city. I wish I was travelling in a disposable body through the landscape of the u.s.a. map and I was like a blinking light moving from state to state. I could be a killer stalking a president or I could be engaging in some sordid and tender sexuality with a stranger I’ve yet to meet in the folds of landscape or among the monoliths of foreign city canyons. I could be on a warm current of air drifting towards the wet and smelly center of someone’s butt in the turning of dirty sheets and summer humidity and neon shop glow and breaking bottles and fistfights down in the streets and abandoned lots and I could live forever in this drift; my body could last a hundred centuries or my brain could last a thousand more without benefit of my body’s weight and it’s all possible and it’s all false and it’s every which way and its all edgy and surreal and maybe I just want to scream a bit right here and even if I were to scream it would do nothing; everything is blowing out sideways: this elliptical stretch of flesh and mortality, the death implied in a refrigerated existence, the mounting and piling up of these words; these fragmented shapes called letters, the piling up of words in the pages of this book and the reader’s eyeball at the voyeuristic microscope or telescope pouring over these sound-images and rattlings and bursts of thoughts and fuck you maybe I should be in some ratty ballerina outfit wearing the mask of a salivating mad dog twirling like some psychotic diva in a circular spot light all for your edification, for your discreet voyeuristic pleasure, and I should make a wild pirouette through the frameworks of my social death; a wild pirouette and a leap through the air to land at your feet only to throw up on your shoes. jerk.
TAPE RECORDING:
D.: What attracts you to the “dark” things: murder, medical deformities, and other stuff like that?
J.: It just shows the difference between “normal” and “abnormal.” People walk around and everyone thinks they’re normal—like people in suburbia—and anybody could have stuff like that happen to them, like a genetic defect—it’s possible, it’s in everybody’s genes. There are recessive chromosomes for all kinds of unfamiliar stuff. It always fascinated me; the things that determine what the world is made up of or what defines “normal.” Some of the stuff is dark and upsets me but I just can’t stop looking at it—I’m drawn to it. Like murder, I can really see … well, sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t. I’m just fascinated by what makes some guy climb up a fucking tower and start shooting at a McDonalds. The fact that somebody can lead a “normal” life like Son of Sam—working in a post office for years and years, carrying on this regular life while he’s killing all these people. Everyone else thought he was a regular joe. There’s all this stuff hidden inside of people. I’m attracted to what’s hidden. That’s why I’m into the occult too. Things that you don’t see everyday. It breaks up the boredom. When I was making that magazine, MURDER, I was dealing with the imposed line that people put up inside themselves, where they think they are different from those who commit murders or violent acts. Part of my fascination is bringing up these things and putting them in the faces of snobs to see their reactions and make them think about it. I think death is a part of life; death is the end of life, the end of the circle—it’s a new beginning. The mystery of death is seductive. I want people to think about the fact that death is in front of us as well as around us. It’s something we have to look forward to. Also the fact that “normal, everyday people” do go out and cut somebody’s arm off and kill their children, and this happens all the time. There are people who are snobs about it and think that nothing like that could ever happen to them and they’re full of shit. It can happen to anybody. Look at Donald Manes. He fucking cut his heart out. It’s in everybody. The possibilities of violence to themselves or to others. People still believe that cops don’t kill innocent people. Let’s do an experiment: you go kill a cop on the corner and let’s see what people say about it. My work is an outlet for these feelings. I’ve thought about killing, like when I got ripped off—I used to have a gun but I got rid of it because I felt I would end up using it—like Dakota ended up killing someone. I remember I’d be dopesick and I’d have forty dollars left and somebody’d go and take it from me and I’d end up going nuts and want to kill somebody. The drugs are part of that feeling but even without the drugs I get pretty emotional when somebody is taking away my liberty. Dealing with this material is a catharsis. A lot of people say that after they punch a wall they feel a lot better, but their hand is broken. I’ve done that too. It helps to get it out. Some people say that doing this stuff, or obsessing with this stuff or handling it, that you’re adding to the violence in the world. But most people aren’t living peacefully and happy, especially in a city like this with millions of people st
acked up on top of each other. I came across one of the letters Dakota sent me, where he said he had been sleeping in Central Park during this one winter in 1984 and he said he was getting really tempted to just give away everything he owned and just duke it out with nature. He said, “I just can’t think of anything else to do. Can you?”
D.: I’ve had those feelings—why just help maintain the structure you’re surrounded by; why try and struggle and survive in it? Why not just drop everything and go out and do things that are absolutely raw and without boundaries and laws and deal with survival on a real level, not one surrounded by all these fucking illusions? That was my impulse for years.
J.: Yeah. It’s giving up on the world and the imposed structure of everyday life; it gets really frustrating—like living where I am now, living in an apartment where there’s been a fire and there’s soot everywhere and I got a kid and I still have to pay the landlord money to live there and there’s this fucking killer; this guy John who’s killed a bunch of people—I found him stripping my bicycle and I came out in the hall with my sword and was going nuts. This guy is friends with and lives with the woman downstairs with all those kids. He’s been hanging out there and he told me when I came out with the knife, “Don’t pull a knife on me. You don’t know how many people I’ve killed for doing that.” He recently came out on parole after years in prison for killing people. I told him that if he keeps fucking with me, something’s gonna happen. I’m trying to deal with this guy and he’s a scary guy; all muscular and bigger than me …
My arm was turning green and black. All I can remember from my flirting with heroin is the problem I had keeping myself from throwing up each time I did it. Normally after a week or two of doing it on a daily basis I’d imagined that I wouldn’t be wasting what little money I had on bending over the curb between parked cars and trying to discreetly empty out my guts onto the asphalt, which appeared in some sort of magnified state with each fragment of garbage and wrapper and dog shit and scraping and bottle cap. Somebody had given me a number of fresh hypodermics and for a while they made me happy and focused on something outside the black cloud of depression that seemed to swallow the streets outside my door every time I left the house to go do the meaningless work routine or buy food. I lived in a shitty one-room apartment in the back of a building on east fourth street. My back window had a view of the shower room of the firehouse on 3rd street, where occasionally I would watch some sexy fireman step out of a shower stall and dry his body off and put on each article of civilian clothing he kept in a neatly folded pile on a ledge behind the window. There were a couple of weed trees that were about four stories tall that waved between the brick walls of my building and the firehouse. I literally felt I was at the end of my life; existence seemed like a bad series of routines that led to nothing I cared about. Ever since I was a kid I couldn’t shake the realization that life was essentially a series of activities designed so that one could pay out money to keep from dying; if one stopped paying, one died; whether from exposure, starvation, lack of medical care or invisibility.
I fixed myself a shot and went out for a walk and got about seven blocks when I started puking. I had to stop about five times on each block to spew out water between parked autos. My eyes were tearing up and the city streets expanded and contracted ’til they became tunnel-like and brilliant with sunlight bouncing off the edges. I went home and laid down on the mattress. It was like a cave, all dark and cool, while outside the brick wall was glowing with sunlight and the whispering shadows of a breeze-tossed tree. I saw a series of transparent images appear in the air halfway between my face and the windows, almost like a slide projector carousel clicking away. First a series of physics equations and then a donald duck no more than five inches tall looking at me with his quacky smile. I leaned over the side of the bed and threw up into the wastepaper can I’d placed there. Then I felt warm, like my bones were resting in a bathtub full of almost hot water. Then I went unconscious.
Later, in a restaurant with Peter Hujar, having a cup of coffee, I showed him my arm. It felt foreign to me, like an arm out of a monster movie that belonged to somebody else. I felt like a long distance scientist showing another scientist a weird animal relic. I was almost completely disassociated from myself. Peter looked at me with an odd look in his eyes and said, “Don’t ever come over my house again. I won’t be friends with you if you’re going to do that.” I burst into tears. “I just feel so terrible about living,” I said. “I feel too self-conscious about living and it’s driving me crazy.” He reached over and rubbed my arm. I went home later and never did it again. It took a number of months for the grainy black pall to lift from the surfaces and activities around me. It never lifted completely, but I realized that would never happen unless the entire society stopped dead in its tracks and the direction it was speeding in got erased.
Sometime in the mid-80s, I was working on a filmscript, with Johnny, called Teenage Satan. We based it on a true story of a group of kids out in Long Island that followed an older kid through a series of motions that embraced black magic and mescaline and any other drug they could lay their hands on. The leader of the group ended up killing one of the other guys in an acid laden hallucination of communication with lucifer. None of the thirty or more kids who learned about the murder said anything to their folks or the authorities. Some kids even went back to the local park where the body was lying under a pile of dead leaves to look at the states of decomposition. The leader of the group said if he got picked up by the cops he’d kill himself and chase the dead kid’s soul to hell. Some girl eventually heard about the murder at a pool party and called the police. The leader got arrested and killed himself in jail. We were using the script to talk about relationships of power: how the leader was given power by the other kids and even though he was kind of stupid, the other kids’ adulation and respect kept him propped up there in control. It’s kind of like Ronald Reagan.
We planned to shoot scenes involving the constant hallucinations of the leader and use those hallucinations to outline a series of power structures in american society. We understood the kids’ use of drugs and their kind of ignorant understanding of the basics of black magic to be nothing more than the only available tools with which to rearrange the imposed hell of the suburbs for brief periods of time. We wrote the part of lucifer for Dakota. The leader of the gang was constantly hallucinating conversations with lucifer. An independent tv group had filmed the leader in an interview that was later played on television. We figured that even if the leader was delusional, the power of media helped validate his sense of power among the peer group and helped add a bit of rocket fuel to the murder that ultimately came about. We planned to film the suicide from the leader’s perspective—after he dies from hanging himself in the jail cell, he tries to get into heaven. Shooting from his point of view, heaven was an ultra-fancy restaurant with a maitre d’ that refuses him entrance. Jesus was played by a myopic overweight guy with frankenstein stitches evident around his neck and temples, bad teeth, and a penchant for gluttony. He sloshes wine around and chomps into a roast chicken, throwing half-eaten legs into the air where the camera would follow their slow-motion descent through the floor into hell, and starving wretches would scramble for it. Muzak played in the background and a soundtrack of a man’s voice periodically announced, “ATTENTION SHOPPERS … THERE IS A SPECIAL SALE ON HOLY WATER IN AISLE THREE.…” Tapes of Jimmy Swaggert were recorded backwards and mixed in the soundtrack to reflect the practice of the church to plant subliminal messages in our environment.
During the making of this film, Johnny was getting yanked around by his addiction. There is nothing worse to me than witnessing a friend’s addiction to dope accelerate. It leaves me with the feeling of standing in the distance watching a person I like and respect slowly twitch around and disintegrate into fragments, quietly becoming a shell of his former self. It feels like something related to body-snatchers films on late-night tv, and nothing you say, no gesture you make, sto
ps the unravelling of it. I remember at the time that his addiction brought a quality of energy to the filming. Even though I’d get pissed off and depressed with all the kinetic fragmentary whirls of darkness, it seeped into the scenes and the constant odd occurrences that seemed more than chance. Things would happen that gave us an impression that our environment was fucking with our minds and adding spice to the proceedings once the cameras were rolling.
I don’t remember what happened to Dakota. There were times leading up to the beginning of filming when he disappeared for long periods. I remember people wondering if he had committed suicide. I heard that he had a crush on Joe. Then he’d surface again. I heard he was addicted to dope. I heard he stabbed somebody and it wasn’t sure if the guy died or not. I felt a disjointed kind of sadness for him; everything was too erratic in my daily life and if I thought long enough about it I could only think that there wasn’t anything I could do. I didn’t know him well enough and I didn’t think it would have mattered—he was blasting towards something in another neighborhood and though he was familiar to me in terms of something he carried, some similar code and energy, I felt like my own life was twisting and rushing just out of my grasp. I was waiting for something to drop like a mile-long boulder on top of me or on top of my life. I wanted a radical shift to occur so I could have a few minutes’ peace or experience the silencing of my brain. I wanted to be another person living a quiet farm life in a foreign culture. I wanted to wake up and find that I was five years old and my parents and neighbors would say, “My, my, what an imagination.” I wanted to be physically erased and start over again. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be there. I guess I wanted to be nowhere, I wanted to listen to my brain talk inside of nothingness. I wanted to be untouchable and have no need. I figured if Dakota stabbed and killed somebody, it was for a reason that only made sense to him. The stranger he stabbed was one-dimensional in my mind. I knew Dakota wasn’t dangerous; he was simply skidding through the grainy black pall that surrounds addiction and life in america.
Close to the Knives Page 18