In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  Later he took me back to his place belonging to a friend of his who is on retreat, and in the shadows of the living room he pulled a gleaming new guitar from its case and proudly rubbed his hands along its neck. We rolled some weed and he made toast and tea and upstairs in the bedroom we got it on again and he fell back into a relaxed state, his arms outstretched and eyelids closed down, his body brown from some faraway sun, and I let one hand slowly explore him, touching, sliding gently over every inch of surface, dipping around the legs, between them, up the hips, following the lines of muscles, the curve of his limbs, the collarbone, fingers smoothing out his forehead, brushing his temples, dreaming whole relationships against his reposing body.

  He told me he lived in the States for five years, at first with a boy his own age who was heavily into drugs. The police were after him so they moved in silence to Jersey near where I was born along the sea, and he worked and supported both of them, the other being unable to work for fear of discovery. After two years he left him because of differences that threatened to drive him crazy. The other guy was into S/M: I would beat him up not because I had any desire to, or that I felt anything sexual, but because he wanted it and I wanted to give him pleasure. He finally committed himself to a mental hospital and all the doctors said the same thing: Stop seeing this guy.

  And now, two years later, I still miss him …

  Now it’s the next day, having taken some amphetamines yesterday, staying up all night working with clay and paint to produce a yellow-spotted black salamander.

  Came into the city and called this Frenchman. He said, Come on over, and I walked through the streets with a sense of weariness, drinking from a clear glass bottle of seltzer water, feeling heat from thoughts and the drift of images from the day before. Realizing his handsomeness and wonderfully outgoing nature was composed of honesty with himself and trusting his senses. He put it forth so clearly while in the presence of a stranger.

  We dropped some quaaludes and went upstairs into the bedroom.

  Time’s become strange, with the distance growing between me and Brian. There’s moments when I wish I had some money and a fast car so I could step out the door and burn rubber through gravel and create a separation in my head from the past. Sometime I want to say it to him, to tell him I understand what he’s doing. And yet there’s this mixture of an emotional slap I feel, it’s like he’s dragging it out on me. Why doesn’t he just split and be honest about it, rather than let it die so slow? That’s when I wish I had the car. The car and the money to leave this state behind, to leave him behind, so that these senses could slowly fade and eventually become relegated to the past fold of memory, where things assume that drift of function, that drift which allows a cool distance, a view, that emits no color to flush the cheeks.

  Los Angeles for a couple days was like some kind of refuge—from the thoughts about Paris and the constant limbo I feel I’m in by allowing fears of the unknown—aging—to keep me standing on all this solid ground. Solid ground, composed of no movements that suggest chance or change from what’s momentarily comfortable or safe. I gotta break away from this. I gotta try to take apart and rearrange and step away from this past, step into what could possibly be a new shift in my living.

  Sitting in Gary’s place: seeing all these little things from Brian to him. They’re like Xerox copies of tenderness, the small things that comprised Brian’s actions that I took as some kind of symbols of what he felt for me in a personal way. Seeing replicas of those actions makes them no longer personal. I feel foolish, like placing dreams in someone else’s hands. So this is what it feels like, staring awkwardly across a table, cigarettes in hand, creating a slow haze across little notes in semi-French, a truck of yellow-brown plastic that dispenses Pez candies. Notes that no longer show up on the table at home. Why am I so silly about all this? Being sentimental is okay but when it occurs for lack of real emotions it sucks and seems pointless. Brian asks if I want to do the big “H” tonight. I don’t know. Maybe. If the Frenchman doesn’t show up in time to change my mind. The thing that makes me feel silent and brooding with the Frenchman is the realization that all this is my background, a whole group of desperate people, while all I really want to do is be feeling excited by living and possibility and desire. Not to nullify it with pills and needles.

  There’s never been a more foreign kind of rest than heroin, sweet white heat that enters the body slowly (unless it’s booted with that slight drawback of blood, then the plunger of the needle pressing fast). A white heat that brings on a sensation of heaviness, of strange weight to the arms, legs, and torso, up around the base of the neck, warmth, and the continual sensation of these weighted limbs immersed in warm fluids, pools of water, lying down with the head slightly raised. A pleasure.

  Gary and Val went for the stuff somewhere on 8th Avenue around Times Square, left in a taxi while I stayed behind to wait for Viola who’d broken a bone in her hand just the previous day after catching it in a door. Later in a slight midnight rain as Val and I walked down 8th Avenue to the West Village he told me, God, here I was standing outside this fuckin’ restaurant, see, it’s a fuckin’ front for this dealer, and I wasn’t allowed up, so I’m standin’ there in my leather jacket and this guy comes up out of nowhere, all these fuckin’ hookers paradin’ around, right? And this guy comes up and says, Hey, ya wanna go with me for a drink? And I says, No thanks, sweetheart. Then this other guy comes up and starts askin’ me if I know where the Barnum Room is, some transvestite disco club, so I thought, Oh gawd, what if my parents ever saw me right here leaning against this bogus facade of a restaurant, fuckin’ nighttime in Times Square waiting for a friend who’s scoring some heroin …

  They all showed up sometime later. It was a sublet joint Gary was stayin’ in on the fringes of Chelsea, not too far from the apartment of a guy whose head I almost bashed in when I lived on the streets ’cause of his American Indian stonework collection, this twenty-pound stone fish, black rock, that I wanted as soon as I touched it. Viola walks in and says, Oh gawd, I’m in pain, where’s the fuckin heroin? She reaches into her shoulder bag and pulls out a fistful of hypos. Now I gotta find one that works …

  She’s popping the plastic tops off and dipping them one by one into a glass of water, testing them, and finally selects one and pulls the depressor out of the hypo and dips it in a jar of Vaseline, rolls it slightly and sticks it back in. Asks Gary for a spoon: These designer spoons, the guy who sublet this place will kill me if he finds ’em bent. The spoon’s bent and the smack is taken out of the tiny snap-lock bag and unfolded from its wrapping. Who’s first? asks Viola. Can I be first? She’s gonna shoot half of a fifty-dollar cut. Gary and Val say, No, you better do David first ’cause once the needle’s out of your arm you’ll prolly be in no shape to do anything but nod. So I sit down as she cuts off a quarter of the hit and pushes it onto a matchbook cover and drops it into the bent spoon, a red candle nearby flickers and she’s singeing arm hairs, cooks it and drops a wad of cotton from a Q-tip into the spoon and draws the liquid into the needle through the cotton. My arm is tensed up with a robe belt around the biceps and they’re both marveling over them big fuckin’ veins. Always said I’d make a good junkie. Put your arm down and hold still, she says, a fuckin’ pro. The needle slides in easy but she don’t boot it since it’s my first time. I remember when I was shootin’ the coke at her place, her sister the nurse said, Don’t worry, if ya drop dead we’ll just toss ya outta the window. The plunger pushed and it slides out. Now hold your arm up and rub it so you don’t get an air bubble. A minute later I look and can’t even find a needle mark. No red dots, nothin’. That’s how good she is, Sister Roxanne, nurse of the Netherworlds. Walked over to the couch and lay down and returned to reading the sleazy b-mags the people that own this place left behind: National Enquirer and Star, etc. “I was Elvis’s secret lover for fifteen years.” “Tree leaps off hillside and attacks the car of drunken driver.” Etc. Waitin’ for the effects to come on, feelin’ imp
atient, finally it does, real slow while Viola’s takin’ the needle from her arm going, Aahhh shit, what a fuckin’ rush, having booted it.

  Finally it came on and I stopped readin’ the mags, swept them off the bed and lay back, oh yeah, oh yeah, and lay there feeling warm and not wanting to budge. Television on in the corner with no sound. Later Viola shuffles out the door trying to figure an excuse to get outta work but heading there nonetheless for night duty. Gary leans across the bed and kisses me good-bye first time, I loved him for that gesture though I couldn’t move and conversation seemed silly so I stayed silent. Val and I sitting there for a while then getting our coats on and leaving, walking downtown in the rain, a quick bite at Tiffany’s restaurant on Fourth Street and down into Soho via Italian neighborhoods, all-night bars, neon in the drizzle, we’re talking friendly and I’m feeling mellow and I say, I feel like I’ve really lost my innocence, now that I finally have fucked with needles, the whole romantic attachment to them being blown with the first shot. Now it’s just down to the simple level of intake and warmth. Whatya mean? he says. You think we’d be walkin’ in this fuckin’ rain talkin’ like this if we’d lost our innocence? And he was right. We walked through Chinatown checkin’ out kung-fu movie posters and over into his old neighborhood where we caught the train, shook out our wet jackets, and made it home.

  In the spring of 1980, David sent his Rimbaud series of photographs, “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” 1978–79, to Soho News, a local weekly that covered the art world and downtown scene at the time. Its publication significantly affected his ability to see himself as a visual artist. That same year, his work appeared in three group shows in Lower Manhattan.

  May–June 1980

  May 11, 1980

  Julius Bar, 7:00—7:30 P.M. Standing around in Julius Bar. Minutes earlier I had run into Jim. He asked me why I hadn’t come to Danceteria last night. John had me down on the guest list but I had felt this ache in my stomach probably from the past few days of nervousness because of the SoHo News photo deal: the continual delay of definite answer as to whether they planned to use the Rimbaud series or not. So I told him why I hadn’t come but mentioned that I was interested in working for him. He said the only stuff available was the same job John was doing. I said fine, and he said to call him Tuesday night. He introduced me to a guy named Riccio, a stage manager for Danceteria. I was so nervous and elated at getting the job I almost fell over a chair on my way out. So I call John, hip him to the news, and fall into Julius, some interesting characters hanging out in the dark open doorway, sounds of conversation floating out, clinking of glasses, jukebox music, etc. I make my way over to the counter and order a beer and the bartender slaps this cool wet bottle on the counter and I make my way with it back to the door. Standing there for some minutes drinking from it slowly, watching this character looking like one of the guys in a Jean Genet prison movie scene with low white T-shirt over powerful hairy chest. My eyes follow down to his stomach packed tight beneath the shirt, down his legs to his highly polished black leather shoes, thinking I’ve seen this all before, feeling a bit weary suddenly, and my beer is half finished and all the chattering in the bar is getting louder in waves like when you have a fever, I’m thinking suddenly about leaving, eventually turning towards the door, the streets out there leading to other scenes, people, sounds, and occurrences. As I’m turning towards the door, this guy walks up, turns the corner of the street and moves up to the door. I have a sudden snap of recognition—a different quality—something in that stranger tells me he’s either transient or different in terms of his sensibilities. I feel something not usual about him, not routine in my daily revolution of faces and personalities and leanings. He steps up into the noisy darkness of the bar, moves slow into the crowded space, steps past and moves over to the counter, hands buried deep in his pockets, hair unruly and sweeping back over his ears, brown lovely hair, strong face, a look around his temples and eyes, a gaze that suggests real thinking and other concerns. I’m taking swigs from my bottle, tapping time, feeling a sense of myself there and nowhere else, not my usual drift where I’m standing silent in a bar in my head moving through other places in the city or the world. Our eyes met a number of times. I remember looking away when the gaze reached a point when it was obvious and strong, turning away to deal with that, feel it through and make some kind of sense of what was coming up inside. Then suddenly he walked up to me and spoke. We talked loosely for a few minutes and I learned he was a filmmaker. I told him of my thoughts about doing a film in Super-8. He was all for it—working with Super-8—said that’s how he started.

  What followed is difficult to write about, as it’s difficult to write about most things that affect me in such a way as to rearrange my view of the world and the lines my life follows within it. But it was beautiful and amazing. We walked in various directions finally ending up by the river. Somewhere out on the docks he turned towards me and embraced me and we made love out there. Later, sitting by the side of the river, he kept leaning over while talking and staring into my eyes. He slipped his hand into mine and my reaction to that was almost bewilderment insofar as people rarely do that in this city, much less when they hardly know you, and I really dug it. A defenseless warmth. We made plans to get together in a couple days, and we left each other after an embrace on the corner of Christopher and Hudson Streets. After walking half a block I turned to look back, and he was standing there, hand in pocket, the other hand up waving. I waved back and turned towards the subway and home.

  [No date]

  Walking off the curb on 10th Street and 7th Avenue I ran into Arthur. He was making his way towards Julius Bar where we’d agreed to meet. I was remembering him from the other night when I’d met him there, the ensuing walk down into the darkness of the avenues bordering the river, the long stroll out along the broken boards of the pier and the stretch of winds out there, the whole canopy of darkness swelling out from the river’s surface and erasing the lines of the dock, the forms of people that moved like silhouettes against the Jersey coast, the removal of ourselves from the rushing city, out there hundreds of yards from the highway and the drag queens and the cruising autos along the asphalt strip, never really having seen his face so clearly as just then bumping into him on the street corner with late sunlight revealing every detail of the street and the characters rushing by him.

  We stopped in a dive Greek coffee shop I’d never been in before and had sandwiches and an omelet and afterwards walked down to the river. I was feeling kinda self-conscious, mostly in the aftermath of all those sensations having come up the previous night, of real honesty, of talking and touching, something that at times seems so foreign in this city, times when I start feeling like that communication and contact I have with some characters is what the movements of the world is all about, senses that are really a part of me and my vision of things but haven’t much of a place to be expressed. I wanna try and make this more clear—it’s like after so many contacts with characters who have lined their bodies and mannerisms and visions with so much guard like gate after gate over solitary rooms, there are these experiences of dealing honestly with people, of laughter and an unguarded movement through living and time and aging, that some of us rarely have a chance to express, rarely feel the freedom to express, rarely feel the freedom to express in the company of others. And so in those moments that previous evening it kind of all opened up at once with him and left me feeling amazed and excited and so here it is a couple days later and I’m wondering what the contact is gonna be like, if the senses will remain real and warm or if a great deal of that was some kind of projection, that kind that some of us put on the forehead of another in unexpected times and moments.

  So we hit the pier just as the sun was starting to lose its intensity, and we strolled out towards the end of the dock, couples sitting on the long square timbers lining the edges of the dock, joggers out making the rounds with sweaty bodies and hair drifting and dogs racing back and forth and the waters of the river g
liding by nonstop like the unraveling of a film. Arthur was explaining his ideas for this next film he’s gonna shoot, these scenes of child abuse: a film of a man making a film on child abuse, in particular, scenes of the kid’s exit from his family into the life and arms of the filmmaker, of loving between the filmmaker and this fourteen-year-old kid. Some of his comments: These changes in personality or roles where kids when they’re having sex with an older person grow up suddenly, assume postures and manners of an older person, become more serious, whereas the older guy becomes much more like a child. Yet when the scenes are over and they’re out on the street, the kid becomes a kid again and the older person resumes the manners and posture of the older person he is. It amazed me, that sense of perception, my flashbacks of the times I’d taken off from home and lived on the streets and the scenes I became involved in, the older men I’d lain down with and the recollection of my movements, my mannerisms with them, those scenes in dim-lit rooms in Jersey swamp motels manipulating a cigarette in my fingers and reflecting on my life and past while talking in a purposefully more sophisticated manner, out loud to the man unseen in the bathroom combing his hair before a fluorescent-lit mirror. A sense of my life at that moment came circling back to me as I lay down there on the hard boards of the dock with the sun turning this strong rose color and slipping so much faster behind a bank of clouds. We lay on our sides facing each other and every so often he reached over and placed a hand on my arm or my leg or my neck and I felt that sense of amazement from the previous night renewed and the sky and the turning of the earth and river on its axis assumed that quiet and timelessness that comes only in the more peaceful moments when the body is in some state of grace and ideas and thoughts become thoroughly bound up in the quiet state of the unfolding scenes around me.