In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  February 26, 1980

  Walking down by the waterfront this morning I met the old guy who looks like Jean Genet, grizzled and dirt lines in the creases of his neck skin, vaguely handsome, red print worker’s hankie around his throat, shorn hair, white and stubbled. He invited me up to look at his room in the Christopher Street Hotel. Climbed three flights of stairs after passing a clerk’s glass booth with a radio playing and no one inside. He turned the key in the lock and the door swung open on a gray dim-lit room about twelve by twelve feet, all over the walls were various gray newspaper photographs torn from dailies and taped up to the peeling paint. Most were photos of President Carter and his wife, and a couple of Carter’s mother. Other photos were of American flags, and he also put stick-on flags over each picture, some on a wall calendar, a flag on each month, and a couple lost somewhere in a paint-splashed collage left behind by another tenant. On an old stained mattress which lay on the floor he had his biggest flag, one that covered most of the mattress like a blanket. He showed me a greeting card with some seminude woman like a Vargas Playboy painting, over which he’d written a letter to Carter’s mother: How do I know if she didn’t look like this when she was younger? See, I figured she prolly did … that’s what I tell her in this letter … He gave me a Xeroxed stapled piece, one of his street-Steinian discourses on being an American and loving the country for what it could be. He started rambling about language and writing, how one should write what they speak rather than play with imagination: You stand up and write, ya know … standin’ up is good for writing because you don’t use your imagination, you let come from yourself what would come if you were speakin’ to someone … when you sit down to write, it’s no good ’cause the whole weight of your body centers down in that position, the weight carried by the head, through the head, so you end up writing with imagination instead of natural speech. He kept asking me to sit down, cackling afterwards and saying, Whatsa matter you afraid I might try and rape ya … heh heh. Later he tried explaining some stuff he realized when he smoked weed: When I smoke I get real intense things going on in my head and it wants to bust out so I start writing, that’s how it comes out … People should sing all the time … ya know … if you say five words very very slowly then you end up singing … if everyone were to speak very slowly then everyone would be singing … then things would be nice. How can you be fucked up when you’re singing?

  February 28, 1980

  He had a tough face, square-jawed and barely shaven, tight-cropped hair, wiry and black, intensely handsome like some face seen in old boxer photos of Rocky Marciano, a cross between him and Mayakovsky, a nose that might’ve once been broken in some dark avenue barroom in the waterfront district of a distant city, a slight hump to it, that curved down towards a rough mouth, beautiful lips. Sitting in a parked car by the river’s edge he leaned over and placed the palm of his hand by the water, and then placed the palm of his hand along the curve of my neck and stroked it slowly, his hands and arms brown like the skin of his face, a slight tan slowly receding to a blush. The heat was pumping in the car, the waves turned over and over by the coasting wind that shot across the river beneath the darkening clouds. Some transvestites circled down from the highway going from car to car leaning in the drivers’ windows to check for business. A couple of trucks from out of state, probably Kansas or Montana or Wyoming, idled near the abandoned warehouse, the interiors cleared of the beef carcasses and the drivers sitting up high in the cabs, the last cowboys with their wives or girlfriends sitting next to them, beehive bouffants and flannel shirts and Saran-wrapped sandwiches and a bottle for comfort. So this guy eases his hand down towards my legs and slides it back up beneath my shirt, says, Take it off, and I reach down and lift the sweaters and sweatshirts up together and pull them over my head and drop them to the floor where my pants are straddling my ankles. He pulls off his olive green army sweater revealing a T-shirt of ice blue, reaches down and lifts that off afterwards, revealing a gleaming torso, thick chest with a smooth covering of black hair, two brick red nipples buried inside the down. He turns and bends over me, licking me softly with his tongue, tonguing smooth circles around my nipples down my sides, his hand massaging slow between my legs, his other hand wetted briefly against his mouth and working his cock up till it’s dark and red and hard. When he lifted away from my chest I saw his eyes, the pupils, the irises the color of lapis lazuli dark chips of circular stone, something like the sky at dusk after a clear hot summer day, when the ships are folding down into the distance and dreams are uttered from the lips of strangers and white jet streaks are etched against the oncoming darkness, connecting whole cities with a single line. I could feel myself falling into them, populating them with dense mythologies and histories, quiet green neighborhoods of tree-lined streets and dusty fields left abandoned and long dirt roads that led into time unknown and secrets loosened by the faint roars of sixteen-wheel rigs barreling over the horizon. Whole dark winds rattling over plains behind those eyes. Yeah, and he had said he was from the West.

  March 6, 1980

  Went down to the river tonight speeding again. Had dropped the Eskatrol in the Silver Dollar sometime in the late afternoon before the sun began fading. It was a mixture or rather overlapping of seasons today, almost but not quite mild weather, a cool breeze circling in from the river and enough of a sun to leave my coat open and flapping. Before I dropped the speed I went for a walk along the river, the light so bright in reflection off its surface that I had to continually shield my eyes to avoid being run over by the stray cars cruising for drag queens. They were out in force, done up in choice colors and makeup and pacing the parking lots, dipping up and down before the windshields of parked cars looking for a horny laborer or businessman on his lunch hour. Half the cars with Jersey plates, making me wonder how far they’ve come, what distances traveled and how they saw New York from that other side, realizing Jersey will never change, the symbol of change at some future point will be recognizable when the tan plates stop showing up along the waterfront.

  Some guys in the early afternoon in the warehouse were shouting among themselves and stepping forward in the musty interior. I realized they were scavenging the place for pipes containing copper wiring—a few sawed-off pipes jutting from the torn upstairs wall. Down on the main floor they were arguing, three of them, about which pipe length in the maze attached to the dark shadowed ceiling held the power lines for the place. One guy up in the rafters, scaling pipe lengths like a gymnasium, was hanging by his arms with his muscles cording beneath his short sleeves, the front of his sweatshirt riding up his belly and revealing a rippled stomach. From his soot-blackened pants hip he unclipped a hacksaw and began drawing it over a length of the pipe like a violinist, his strong legs swinging back and forth in time to the sawing, almost imperceptibly.

  Upstairs some queens were walking amid the charred refuse, picking their way over blackened beams that hung out of the sky alongside twisted iron girders. They had a large black and chrome radio carried by one of the younger members of the group who twirled the station selector back and forth while at high volume so a strange series of voice and music and static bounced in and out of the rooms.

  Later at the Silver Dollar restaurant, I sat at the stool counter and ordered a small cola and let the pill ride the tip of my tongue for a moment and then swallowed it. As usual, just as I drop some stuff I have a sudden regret at what will be the disappearance of regular perceptions, of the flat drift of sensations gathered from walking and seeing and smelling, into a strange tremor like a tickling that never reaches a point of being unbearable, a slow sensation of that feeling coming into the body, from the temples to the abdomen to the calves. And riding along with it in waves, I feel the marvelousness of light and motion and figures on the streets. Yet somehow that feeling of beauty that comes rising in off each surface and movement around me always has a mask of falsity about it, a slight sense of regret I feel at the recurring knowledge that it’s a substance flowing through my v
eins that cancels out the lines of thought brought along with my aging and seriousness.

  So there’s that feeling of regret, a sudden impulse to bring the pill back up, a surge of weariness, then the settling back and waiting for the sensations to begin, wondering what they’ll bring. So I dropped this pill and sat there for a while, smoked a fast cigarette and the door opened in the front of the place and some young guy in his midtwenties with racing sneakers and a boomerang curve of red adorning them comes in slinging a small backpack to the floor beneath the counter and slides onto a stool and orders the same as me. Handsome guy with strong cheekbones recalling France and the jardins and faces in the slight rain towards evening in the summer. Old images racing back and forth and I’m gathering heat in the depths of my belly, flashes of a curve of arm, back, and the lines of a strong neck belonging to some character among crowds in train stations and I get up, pay for my drink, and start through the door for the first of many walks to come that day. Restless walks filled with coasting images of sight and sound, cars buckling or bucking over cobblestones down quiet side streets, trucks waiting at corners with swarthy drivers leaning back in cool shadowy seats and windows of buildings opening and closing, figures passing within the rooms, faraway sounds of voices and cries and horns that roll up and funnel in like some secret earphone connecting me to the creakings of the city. There’s a discreet pleasure I have in the walking of familiar streets, streets familiar more because of the faraway past than for the recent past, streets that I walked down odd times while living amongst them, seen through the same eyes but each time the eyes belonging to an older boy, spaced by summers and winters and geographical locations. Each time different because of the companions I had previously while walking those streets. I can barely remember or recall the senses I had had when viewing the streets years earlier, my whole change in psyche, I mean. Yet there’s still a slight trace of what I felt left, a trace filled with the unconcerned dreams and tragedies and longings that make up thoughts before the seriousness of age sets in.

  Later, after dark, down at the river, a man emerged from the darkness and sounds of the waterfront, waves turning slightly, raising sounds beneath the wheels of the highway traffic. The guy was large, a strapping laborer’s or weight lifter’s frame, his hair cropped close to his skull, growing in recently from having been shaved.

  I turned on my heel with no hesitation; he turned down by the brick wall that bordered the walkway leading to the crushed sides of the covered pier. Hesitating he muttered something that sounded like a cross between a low whistle and a statement. I followed him as he turned the brick corner and disappeared in the direction of the warehouse. Stepping over rigging irons and broken pipes I followed his retreating back, covered by a black leather jacket that shone softly in the darkness, like shining shoes beneath a surface of water. Stooping beneath the half-raised doorway (loading doors) I saw him walk further into the darkness and then turn suddenly and squat down, motioning me towards him with a single wave of his large hands. Rubbing my palms around the base of his neck over and over, feeling the bristle of his shaved skull against the sensitive undersides of my wrists, movements like birds in a stationary flexing of wings, my hands riding his forehead, smoothing along his jacket, over his hard shoulders and muscles … feeling something soft and foreign, I realized he had a couple large feathers hanging from one shoulder by a piece of string, some decoration that perplexed yet gladdened me for it threw meaning into his image, as if it were a tribal gift, a sense of mysterious beauty placed within the projections I had put upon his sturdy shoulders of who he was and what distances he had traveled. His face buried itself beneath my shirt and rose upwards like an enormous fisted hand, tongue easing out between slightly parted lips so I could feel the coolness of a breeze follow his motions. I freed the buckle on my belt and then the button of my overalls, and he followed up with a series of movements of his hands, sliding the zipper down and his face leaning first back and then forward into my belly. I wrapped my hands around his body, my arms pressing against his sides, the wind moving closer and the lights of turning cars spreading beneath the slight cracks in the wall where it joined the concrete floor.

  Somewhere behind us in the darkness, men stood around. I could hear the shuffle of their feet, the sense of their hearts palpitating in the coolness, the drift of a slightly luminous hand curving an arc against the night with a cigarette, adrift like falling stars or comets in old comic-book adventure illustrations, a sense of unalterable chance and change, something outside the flow of regularity: streets, job routines, sleepless nights on solitary damp mattresses, a river flowing like a gray film of life past our eyes endlessly, unaltered but by physical actions.

  When I came he stood up and whipped out a white rag from his pocket and smoothed it over his forehead and mouth and laughed: Jesus, and I said, Yeah, whew. And he said, The fire really took this place apart, but man if those floorboards could talk …

  Yeah if those floorboards could talk, if those streets could talk, if the whole huge path this body has traveled—roads, motel rooms, hillsides, cliffs, subways, rivers, planes, tracks—if any of them could speak, what would they remember most about me? What motions would they unravel within their words, or would they turn away faceless like the turn of this whole river and waterfront street, all of its people, its wanderers, its silences beneath the wheels of traffic and industry and sleep, would it turn away speechless like faces in dreams, in warehouses, pale wordless faces containing whole histories and geographies and adventures?

  Effects of crashing: It’s like you’ve been bone-tired for the last twenty years and just now suddenly becoming aware of that weariness, the heaviness of it contained within a gesture of a hand, of a gait, or of the turning of vision towards darker things, hoping for eventual and smooth sleep, turning one’s back to the shape of the world, looking for rest and respite.

  Out along the waterfront asphalt strip, more cars are turning and circling. Headlights like lighthouse beacons drift over the surface of the river, swinging around and illuminating men, strangers, men I might or might not have known because their faces were invisible, just disks of black silhouette outlined briefly as each car passes, one after the other, pale interior faces turned against the windows, then fading into distance.

  [No date]

  Standing here seeing the outline of my form thrown three times against the glass and metal walls of the doorway, I’m inside, having retreated from the rain. Rain streaking through the spheres of lampposts, making the sidewalks and streets and especially the curbsides boil and foam while taxis sail through it all. One A.M. on the corner of Sheridan Square—across from the unlit triangle of park benches streaming in the night, neons as far as you can see, then the shell of darkness beyond, and back there over that indiscernible line drawn by lack of lights is the whole pocket of memory and a sense of the past few hours, past days, seeds of weariness brought on by the crashings of black beauties.

  Afternoon brings me down to the river, a lazy afternoon with the highway traffic rushing along past me, bringing with it all concerns of the working world, schedules blown away in that traffic, in the breeze from the river as I pass beneath the West Side Highway in between slow-moving columns of cars …

  Inside in one of the back ground-floor rooms of the warehouse, there’s a couple of small offices built into a garagelike space. Papers from old shipping lines scattered like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture, three-legged desks, a Naugahyde couch of mint green upside down, small rectangles of light and river and wind over on the far wall. Met this French guy, born in Paris, working in Los Angeles, has this navy blue sweater with buttons that line the left shoulder, allowing me to slowly fumble in shy awkwardness to set them free, lift my pale hands beneath the sweater, finding the lip edge of his tight white T-shirt, feeling the graceful yet hard curve of his abdomen, his chest rolling slightly in pleasure.

  We’re moving back and forth within the tiny cubicle, an old soggy couch useless on i
ts side, the carpet beneath our shifting feet revealing our steps with slight pools of water. We’re moving around, shifting into positions that allow us to bend and sway and lean forward into each other, arms moving so our tongues can meet with nothing more than a shy hesitation, sunlight burning through the river window empty of glass but covered with a screen that reduces shapes and colors into tiny dots like a film directed by Seurat. His mouth parts, showing brilliant white teeth within the tan of his face, hands unhooking the buttons at the front of my trousers, the arc of his back sending indiscernible shivers through my arms and legs—haunted by the lines of shadows that dip down around his warm neckline, I lean down and find the collar of his sweater and draw it back and away from the nape of his neck and gently probe it with the tip of my tongue.