In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  It’s a shock in the dusk, the light dusty rose color of the sloping hills, the pearly white spherical shapes of gas tanks glowing in the fading light …

  David’s collaboration with Ben Neill, Itsofomo: In the Shadow of Forward Motion, a multimedia performance, was presented in raw version for four nights at the Kitchen in New York City.

  Ben Neill Performance

  Someone once said that the Ancients believed that light came from inside the eyes and that you cast this light upon things, whenever you turned you cast light from your eyes onto the world.

  March 3, 1989

  Albuquerque Airport

  THIS IS A SONG FOR ANGELS

  THESE ARE THE HANDS

  THAT ARE FILLED WITH VEINS

  THESE ARE THE HANDS

  THAT BREAK THE CHAINS

  FILLED WITH VEINS THAT

  LOOK LIKE ELECTRIC WIRES

  BUT THESE VEINS ARE FILLED

  WITH HUMAN DESIRES

  SWEET SEXY ANGELS

  THIS IS A SONG FOR YOU

  FLYING LIKE DUMB BUGS

  OUTSIDE MY WINDOW

  COUGHING IN THE BLUE EXHAUST

  OF THE BUS STOP BELOW

  WHAT CAN THESE FEET

  OF MINE LEVEL?

  WHAT CAN THESE HANDS OF

  MINE RAISE?

  David and Tom Rauffenbart also traveled to Mexico many times, on this occasion with their friend Anita Vitale.

  April 24, 1989

  Playa del Carmen, Mexico

  Dream. I was in Times Square, the neighborhood of my childhood hustling days, only now I’m older, my present age. It was nighttime, like a Saturday night, streets crowded with strangers off in different directions, moving quickly through the streets along the sidewalks, tourists in awe of the neon and the enormity of advertisements, of characters, a definite sense of people moving with purpose or destination intent in their heads, guarded people, sullen people. At times its filmlike vision picks up movements of bodies, legs, pedestrians from the chest down, sometimes the presence of people in transit, in movement down the streets. I’m on the sidewalk on Broadway maybe a couple blocks above 42nd Street and I see a cardboard carton on a doorway step and two little birds nestlings, one smaller, less formed than the other, hopping around in tiny bird panic. I stop and pick them up and put them in the cardboard box and the littlest one’s mouth opens like a baby bird does for food. It looks hungry but I think of its thirst sitting on a street heavy with soot and grime, sidewalk dirt is magnified.

  Maybe it is the dark light of dawn just as the sun is rising in the east but buried behind buildings, maybe it’s midnight, the light qualities fluctuate, the little bird has the beginnings of feathers, the larger one has short new feathers. I had walked away from the box and was sad, didn’t think I could take responsibility to take care of them because I was consumed in the dream feeling or wondering what my purpose was being here in these streets at this moment. I had no sense of having a home to go to, no sense of how I arrived. It was like I’d been dropped into this landscape from above, like the entire landscape and neighborhood had the sense of a miniature train-set village, yet all the particular details were breathtakingly real. I crossed Broadway and 7th Avenue in the midst of heavy traffic, dodging vehicles, drivers with feet on gas pedals, heavy traffic mayhem like rush hour. I remember fragments of other people in the middle of the avenues dodging the cars as well, I got to the other side, kept thinking of the baby birds, felt I had to go back, dodged the traffic again barely missed by cars, arrived at the carton on the doorstep, saw a bird nest, thought if I would get one of my bird nests I would put it in the carton for the two birds to sit on so they would feel protected and warm. It was cold as hell, dark sky, rain, cold feeling to the light, to the sidewalks, to the air of this sleep, a masking tape cardboard cylinder in my hands or on the sidewalk. I was thinking about a bird nest and this cylinder flipped into the box, the birds climbed immediately inside of it, a little piece of cardboard or tin suddenly on top of the cylinder sealing off the thing with birds inside. I left it like that so they wouldn’t get out of the carton and be killed or lost. Crossed traffic thinking I have to get an eyedropper from a drugstore to feed them water, wondered if eyedroppers were still legal in NYC, thought of bread soaked in water to feed them, found myself at 42nd and 7th Avenue facing west, rows of movie houses and the dark light of my childhood and the streets were filled with people moving in different directions. Intensity from all the movements around me but I’m surrounded by anonymity and a sense as if the streets of the entire city were empty, emptied of people, houses, automobiles, movements, and sounds. I’m magnified and I’m seeing the movie view of myself from behind. I’m seeing my upper body, the back of my head almost silhouetted against the intensity of dusk, light blowing from the west across 42nd Street, and I begin to scream. I see the grillwork of the movie marquees and the lettering of the current shows. I see the glimmering of the asphalt between 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue in the bleached out blind light as if the street were wet after a brief spitting rain and all that light is reflecting off it turning it lakelike in pools of light and I am screaming. I am screaming so loud and so deep I am inside my body and I feel the scream and it is as if I have a ten-year-old’s body and that body is as full of life, full of flesh and muscle and veins and blood and energy and it all produces and propels this scream, this scream that comes from twenty to thirty years of silence. It is a sad great deep scream and it goes on forever. It lifts and swells up into the air and the sky, it barrels out into the dusk, into the west and my head is vibrating and the pressure of it makes me blind to everything but the blood running in rivers under my skin, and my fingers are tensed and delicate as a ten-year-old’s and all my life is within them and it is here in the midst of that scream in the midst of this sensation of life in an uninfected body in all this blurry swirl of dusky street light that I wake up.

  June 4, 1989

  Drove from Tucson to Gila Bend a couple hours before dusk and stopped at the crest of some mountain watching the light fade over the curve of the earth with silhouettes of goofy cactus and desert scrub and occasional cars or trucks slicing through the silence and one flippy bat tiny one wobbling through the wind under a roadside lamp getting knocked around trying to catch insects gathering from the shadows and a bunch of honeybees trying to drink from the steel rim of the flooded water fountain some of them stupid and drowning and a sixteen-wheel rig pulled in just as it got dark and a young guy with no shirt covered in sweat and dirt and wearing cowboy boots jumped out: What’s up? and kicked each tire on his truck while I held my breath and then he climbed back in and drove away and I wondered what it’d be like if it were a perfect world.

  November 1, 1989

  Dear Dolores,

  Thanks for your letter. I was glad to hear that you’re getting close to receiving a teaching license. I wish you luck on that as I imagine that it represents a big change in life direction and security. It does sound intense to be working in the city school system. The school system wasn’t any great shakes when I was a kid so I can imagine how much worse it’s gotten. The whole city is at this point a slow dying city; I doubt the next elections will change its direction very much. I don’t trust Dinkins any more than Giuliani. Both treat drug addiction problems with the same stupid proposals: more cops. The street I live on is one of the many drug alleys in NYC and it’s been like this for two years and cops coast by here all the time and once in a while arrest some junkie too sick to run fast enough. Waiting time for treatment programs is at the minimum nine months. People sleep in tents in the local park and now I hear they want to throw people out of the subways in winter.

  I’ve been going through a lot of personal problems for a couple years now and am not sure how any of it can be resolved. I’m pretty tired at times and stopped therapy for a few months but may continue sometime soon. I’ve been involved in a lot of projects related to art and video. I am dealing with health issues in both friends and in myself. I w
as diagnosed with ARC recently and have been trying to find a treatment I can physically deal with—AZT was too toxic for me to handle so I’m looking into some experimental drug trials. I have been wrestling with the psychological aspects of this as well as some of the social problems. Sometimes I get involved with groups fighting city and government policies towards people with AIDS. I also have a great deal of anger I am carrying towards events in my life, in my past as well as what I see around me now. A fair amount of this anger comes with the territory of facing some measure of mortality. I find it hard to tell you about all this because I have been pretty isolated for the last few years; I’m rarely that social and even with the diagnosis of having this disease [sic] I feel it necessary to be by myself most of the time. I’m trying to resolve some of my own feelings of self-hatred that I carried from the early days of New Jersey and from some things in New York. It just gets so complicated in terms of what is buried and what I come across in therapy.

  Mom, I have a lot of mixed feelings towards my relationship with you. I am caught between the understanding of what problems you carried from your experiences with your family and with [?] and also with dealing with three kids, and the experiences of what I carried as a kid. There is no immediate answer for any of those things; I just have so much buried inside me that is scary to touch and at the same time I am trying to reach it when I am in therapy. I don’t feel very healthy mentally although given what my life has been I am doing okay. I’ve hesitated telling you about this diagnosis because I need privacy and distance right now. I’m not sure when I will feel ready to get together with you because it feels so loaded with things I haven’t been able to resolve. I do think of you and always hope for the best for your life and whatever things you are trying to do. I appreciate your words in the letter and wish your parents were able to write the same things to you.

  I have found that even with these issues of mortality that I am facing that things aren’t all that different. Maybe I appreciate things more on a certain level but I still have the same problems I have always had. There is just a little more pressure. Sometimes I feel scared and then because my health has been steady for a while I pretend that things are okay in a certain way so I can continue moving.

  1989–90

  [No date]

  Dreamt I was in a club of sorts. Tom was there, a show was about to take place onstage and I’m sitting near Tom and he is acting a bit strange. I’m not sure about the situation but it feels public in the way that has always made me tense. We are in a relationship, but some emotional part of the relationship has never fully connected, maybe because of my need to be a stranger to all events so that I can witness them without complicated emotional connections. So I can lay back in my fantasies in the process of witnessing, something extremely self-conscious in the act of witnessing, as in the warehouse days, coming through a series of abandoned rooms filled with evidence of various elements—wind, rain, rust, decomposition of plaster, etc., and also the evidence of sex acts and bodily functions such as human shit and tissues balled up with the same and occasional pairs of underwear or socks or T-shirts sometimes covered in shit or lying overlooked and abstractly human in piles of plaster and lumber or pools of rainwater—and then suddenly I’d come across two or five naked men in the throes of various leanings of sexuality, a glimpse that takes all the details in then I move on, away from the source of heat and flame.

  Tom is acting aggressive, saying things to me and interrupting the act onstage, and the audience is watching us and I say I’m going to leave and he grabs onto my arm and I can’t get his fingers off and he gets louder and I think he’s telling the particulars of our relationship. I’m getting angry and thinking that our relationship is definitely over after this scene and all my clothes are in bags my coat nearby and maybe a camera lots of belongings to have to be responsible for and I can’t even get away from the table and I start pinching his fingers. He holds on tighter and I’m yanking and pulling away but can’t get away. I suddenly have a knife like a vegetable paring knife. There’s a guy onstage in a spotlight doing a routine or announcing the unfolding events and I press the knife to Tom’s fingers clutching my arm and the knife immediately cuts into the flesh of his knuckles and I slow down and lift the knife a bit—all as if this is irretrievable or unalterable once it happens and that upsets me deeply. I feel I have nothing to bargain with nothing to threaten him with as it’s all gone too far and finally he lets go and I leave to another room without most of my things and I realize I have no shirt on, my shirt is in my hands. I’m a little embarrassed to be in public without my shirt on so I go into the men’s room to put it back on. A young guy is peeing in the upright urinal. I step into an unconstructed part of the room with dangling wires and two-by-fours and a dim bulb light and the dream goes away as I wake in New Orleans—twelve hours sleeping in a shitty hotel room where the shower curtain has printed on it: ALL OUR GUESTS ARE V.I.P.S.

  The window is my television set and the streets are my newspapers—

  David and his lover Tom Rauffenbart traveled several times to New Orleans for holidays.

  Airport (waiting)

  It’s that late-afternoon winter light that bathes everything in the landscape giving it an apparition of warmth. I’m sitting at a second-story table behind the plate glass of some crummy piece of architecture feeling dark. Maybe it’s what we call sadness, maybe it’s darker than that, and all I can think about is the end of my life. In the far distance at the edge of the runway is a thin wedge of horizon made up of dark dead brush maybe trees formless other than the rusted oil refinery or the couple of odd buildings made of blond concrete and shadows. What does it all mean? What’s going on in this head of mine? What’s going on in this body? in these hands? that want to wander that guy’s legs over there …

  A construction crew down below in the framed-off area of the runway asphalt: I can count eight or more of them in winter drag and helmets. I feel like shit. I guess years ago I could think of what the interiors of those trailers look like, filled with drafting tables or cheap oak furniture and calendars and ringing phones and a ratty couch and some fantasy of one of them taking me inside and locking the door and removing his sweater and thermal undershirt all in one move so I could taste his sweat but that’s a drift of thought that takes effort and I don’t care about making that effort. What does it mean? What for and why and the red tail fins of some of the planes parked below have white crosses on their sides and I’m afraid I’m losing touch with the faces of those I love. I’m losing touch with the current of timelessness. Maybe I won’t grow old with a fattening belly and some old dog toothless and tongue hanging in the house. I won’t grow old and maybe I want to. Maybe nothing can save me. Maybe all my dreams as a kid and as a young guy have fallen down to their knees. Inside my head I wished for years that I could separate into ten different people to give each person I loved a part of myself forever and also have some left over to drift across landscapes and maybe even to go into death or areas that were deadly and have enough of me to survive the death of one or two of me—this was what I thought appropriate for all my desires and I never figured out how to rearrange it all and now I’m in danger of losing the only one of me that is around. I’m in danger of losing my life and what gesture can convey or stop this possibility? What gesture of hands or mind can stop my death? Nothing, and that saddens me.

  A man on the balcony takes a Kodak picture of the sunset and uses a flash. What does he hope to illuminate? If I could I’d descend the stairs and run with my eyes closed across those runways to the horizon and break through the screen of dusk like a large piece of paper held vertical and enter a whole other century or life and jump into a warm ocean and swim until I disappeared … Once in a warehouse along the Hudson River I wrote about a man who drove a single-prop plane out over the ocean till it ran out of gas and I envied that man and this was years and years ago so I have been living on borrowed or new time. Should I count backwards like the Mayans so I never ge
t older? Will the moon in the sky listen to my whispers as I count away?

  David took his last trip to the West Coast in the summer of 1991, on the occasion of his book Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration being published by Random House, and the Outwrite Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference, for which he was invited to speak on a panel on AIDS and literature.

  January 6, 1991

  Sleep. Some sad homeless guy telling me to bring him some citrus fruit, telling me which street by which brick wall he’d be sleeping beneath cardboard. I wanted to bring him more substantial goods but he made it clear what he wanted: oranges.

  A house, a building, a barnlike structure or a gutted loft or a store on street level, broken wood slats, windows, walls broken out in the interior, men, five or more young men, nude, seminude, communal, lying around. One of them is talking to me, engaging me in conversation. It’s late, lights are turned on, actually it’s going towards sunrise. At first the scene looked possibly dangerous but the guy is sweet and earnest. They all look poor and just in the building, crashing. Trucks outside like circus trucks. These guys workers? The one guy, built and half naked standing up clutching a silly costume of some sort wrapped around his waist like a dress made of gold gilt fabrics dyed turquoise/silver/gold/yellow like Cleopatra 1980s floor show uniforms but now treated as blankets for sleep. At times I think this is my place or vague echoes of Patrick, maybe his friends or just his energy, vague connections to energy of university students. Waiting like someone will return to dwelling and disrupt the writing process in the dream.