In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  Guy I’m talking to and walking with finally says, I wish you would lay down and bunch up with me, meaning embrace me, snuggle, etc., and I’m delighted. I take off some clothes, turn him over and kiss his ass cheeks and see/feel a rash or dirt, hope he is not ill with a weird disease, then it looks more like grime that one gets lying naked on an unswept floor. I kiss his naked sides, his arm, his mouth. Later he talks a lot. I wish lights would be shut off so I can have privacy with him because all these other guys are awake and watch from lying positions around the room.

  At some point wandering around the place, floors covered in layers of refuse, objects, clothes, torn fabrics, etc., a coffee machine or water bottle or something with wires plugged in wall, waiter trying to put water in machine and water spills and spreads like a rain puddle beneath clothes, objects, water raining down onto electric outlet, a dull buzz of electricity building muffled whoomp inside wall, afraid to go near it all, afraid of electrocution or fire. Everything is quiet. Waiting.

  One guy asks me if I remember my past, if anyone has ever told me of my past. I’m trying to figure out that question, it’s such an odd question. Guy I was kissing says he found out his diagnosis in ’88 or something like that and he’s relieved he knows I have this disease. I was afraid to kiss him too extensively before telling him. Feel a bit emotional towards him and it feels clear and good. Wake up.

  I was standing in the shower rubbing my body with a bar of soap and thinking about death, thinking about sex, thinking about the drama on television last night, a courtroom drama where some guy with HIV is on trial for having sex with a woman without rubbers and she has contracted the virus and he was on the court stand trying to articulate why he didn’t tell her he had the virus. He said he just wanted to make love to her; the virus didn’t enter into his thoughts at that moment. I thought of the “AIDS Monster” headlines of the New York Post back a few years ago: some guy on Long Island with AIDS paid a few dollars periodically to suck off the dicks of teenagers. I thought of a news story in California of a Buddhist monk who was HIV-positive and was found having unprotected sex with his followers. He was asked why he did this and he replied, I don’t know, or, Because this is the world, something along those lines. And I thought of a projection into some part of what these people embody in terms of states of mind. I saw myself having unprotected sex in this projection and saying, We all will die one day, days from now, years from now, and in all the vast kinetics of the moving world of what we call life, what difference is there in my life if I die tomorrow or if I die a dozen years from now? What is the difference between tomorrow and the dozen years? What does the dozen years contain in terms of difference if you measure this against the fact that we all die? If you can tell me the difference, if you can tell me what the dozen years means in terms of the structure of death as a natural component of life, tell me what that twelve years means, tell me what it contains that makes a difference not just emotionally but in the wider structure of the planet and moving forms. If you can explain what that twelve years gives or means to a person other than a continuance of groping within a blind structure, then I can understand and enact a desire to live beyond the sad gestures of human activity which is about rejecting the concept of death. I guess somewhere I feel that the twelve years makes no difference other than an emotional abstraction of the idea of death for another twelve years—a thrusting away of death which our social structure battles with, by creating distractions, endless distractions.

  When I’ve gone to a movie house periodically to jerk off, there are at times men who approach me and begin to lick my throat or kiss my hands or jerk off next to me or try to kiss me and I sometimes allow a measure of touch and suddenly this guy’s head attempts to go further and with the weight of my hand I prevent him. I feel comfortable to take responsibility to prevent him from doing anything that is dangerous to himself, but I also recognize in that moment that he has released himself from responsibility for himself. He submits to desire which negates death for him, which negates the possibility of death. The virus is invisible to the eye for both of us in that moment, but the pushing motion of my hand against his forehead even if he struggles with all his might in order to force me to let him do what he wants, my hand is like iron, I won’t let him pass this line of desire. If I were to speak and tell him I have this virus in my body, he might flee or he might be angry because he kissed my neck or licked my chest, or he might not care and want to chance doing what he wants, which is to suck my dick. Sometimes a guy will get angry at me for not allowing him to do what he wishes and then go off down the aisle and immediately start blowing someone who will let him do what he wants. Some of these guys stay all day in the movie house and blow dozens of men. Everything is in motion inside the dark confines of this theater that shows blurry porno flicks on a cheap unfolded screen, and life and death is simultaneously being hatched, structures of life and death, plans of life and death are being made by physical communications and gestures. This guy doesn’t trust the idea or concept of death enough to take his own precautions, or else maybe he feels it’s too late to worry because of his history and the possibility that he already has the virus and that in the mechanics of sex many people don’t believe it is highly possible to transmit the virus orally if they refrain from swallowing semen. I don’t know what it is he thinks but I feel safe in what I allow or don’t allow in terms of touch by fingers or tongue, all of it confined to the external and the areas free of seminal contact, but it also makes me wonder about the machinations of the world and the fragmentations of social order and disorder, all shifting simultaneously and creating designs and patterns that we call the world, that we call life. And I’m still wondering what that twelve years makes in terms of a difference beyond the frail human structure we call society and the world and personal activities that make up our lives. I guess I’m still trying to understand some concept of life in measurement against the universe and life/death cycles or capsules. What does that twelve years mean? to him? to me? to all whom we interact with? What does it mean outside the time we refer to as life? What does it mean to our selves? What does it mean?

  1991 (through August)

  [No date]

  [Notes for conference]

  I’m not so much interested in creating literature as I am in trying to convey the pressure of what I’ve witnessed or experienced. Writing and rewriting until one achieves a literary form, a strict form, just bleeds the life from an experience—no blood left if it isn’t raw. How do we talk, how do we think, not in novellas or paragraphs but in associations, in sometimes disjointed currents …

  [No date]

  I was feeling burnt out and shitty and all I had working in my head was some little place in the brain that wills the body to find another body and fuck it kiss it lick it follow the tongue and the senses where they lead. I was coming off of speed which always left me so consumed in a search for a body that would hook into some buried dream or fantasy whether violently or passionately it wouldn’t really matter which, they might be interchangeable. I didn’t really know what I wanted. When I’m caught in the search for it, it is like the body is a conduit, a receptor of symbols or energy or merely moving forward drifting through the urban scenery waiting for a dozen signals to intersect the right way as to surprise, open the eyes, stir the senses, find me, and unexpected hard-on.

  I was walking the streets below Times Square, around the 30’s between 7th & 8th Avenues. There used to be a thirty-story office building on 7th Avenue with revolving doors locked down for the evening after the last worker had left for the day, and behind the dark glass one night at two in the morning I saw a night watchman waving his big dick at me. He unlocked the door and let me in, relocked the door and led me to a back ground-floor hallway where he had a folding chair and a little desk and a shitty transistor radio playing Latin music on a low volume. It crackled and hissed tinny music that lifted and floated in the marble and polished halls.

  He pulled his pants off, folded
them and lay them on the desk, pulled down his fake silk boxer shorts around his ankles, sat on the metal chair and directed me to kneel before him. I did this once a week for the better part of the summer until one night he wasn’t there. I could see his little lamp burning back in the shaft of the hallway but he must have quit or got fired. He never returned no matter how many times I did.

  The streets at one A.M. are very very dark up in the 30’s, as if all the lights are concentrated in 42nd Street. Everything else dims in the radius spreading out from that street. Everything, each surface has a glittering quality. There is so little light that touched anything directly, as signs of life, little granules of glass in the asphalt, the sidewalks, pools of wet stuff, occasional faraway streetlights, pools of black darkness where it’s hard to discern grates and barricades and doorways and burglar gates and occasionally the dim light of what seems like a fifty-foot-high streetlamp illuminating a sphere of sidewalk, piles of large cardboard boxes from factories and sweatshops hidden behind the fashion/garment district facades and showrooms. Nothing but the sound of skittering newspapers, pieces of cardboard dragging down the street, garbage spread everywhere, rotten produce in the gutter, sounds of traffic on the main avenue, occasional side street cabs bumping potholes, indiscernible click of traffic lights on empty streets, vague silhouettes of mannequins behind dark windows and solder gates, poor versions of American fashions for overseas. On 8th Avenue there’s rarely a living being below 40th Street—it’s maybe too dangerous or the pickings too slim to draw any interest.

  Suddenly darkness moves and a human is sliding along the storefronts close to the windows and doors moving bent over with intent or with loss—something in the body language or the clothing, broke, in pain, weary, hopelessness. Cars come in twos or threes burning up the Avenue with foot pushing the gas springing from a red light that’s finally changed, charging uptown giving the impression there’s nothing here to stop for, people rushing from one location to another and I wish at times I could read the entire history and intentions and structure of a person to know what sad destinations they have before them in that moment.

  On 37th Street on the west corner of 8th Avenue, there was an illuminated window, gates half down, a donut shop, and the apparition of a man naked above the waist mopping the floor around the horseshoe counters. I stood on the opposite corner—the image was kind of beautiful, in the periphery of sight it was just six-story buildings and empty streets, everything buried in black shadows and gritty low-level light, newspapers lifting gently in the warm breeze, the skip of occasional car wheels over manhole covers, the metallic hum of circuitry in the traffic lights and the sky that weird charcoal blur gray where night is softly illuminated from the city below. And in the midst of all this desolation a bright rectangle ten feet by twenty feet fluorescent unreality and thousands of fresh donuts stacked into the racks and a sexy Puerto Rican man, his muscular body just beginning to fade from youth softening up at the edges sweeping motions of the mop from side to side, white kitchen pants and athletic shoes and he’s totally unaware of being watched.

  I worried that he might beat me up if he took my presence the wrong way but also figured there were no witnesses to my desire so he shouldn’t feel threatened or the need to defend his honor, being the recipient of any gaze. I walked slowly back and forth along the sidewalk. At some point his head swung up. He was remopping the floor with a dryer mop but his head dropped back down and I vanished from his perception. Next I decided to be obvious.

  I stood a few feet from the main window and hands in pocket, I stared. He caught on and waved me away and went back to mopping. I figured that was it but my legs wouldn’t respond. I thought I better not push it but then even getting punched would ease the lust, the pressure of coming off speed, the need for connection, to be at the hands of another, to be led into some ritual or experience where flesh connects with flesh. It’s funny, the chemicals that the body can manufacture. I could feel them burning through my solar plexus into my chest my heart my neck tightening my forehead and cheeks getting hot. He looked up again and seemed mildly angry, dropped his mop into the steel bucket and unhooked a mass of keys from his waist and walked towards me. I felt like I should run but stood my ground feeling weak in my arms and legs the way you do when you’re about to fight a stranger or a group of teenagers are suddenly surrounding you. He swung open the door and in an impatient manner waved me inside. It was odd stepping out of relative darkness into such illumination—someone three blocks away could see every detail of our interaction. I felt naked and stupid. What do you want? He had locked the door again but left the keys dangling from the inside lock as if my answer would determine whether he moved forward or backwards.

  Uh, you.

  How much you pay me?

  I never did this before, never even considered it. I sold my body literally thousands of times and always thought it was sad that people paid others for the use of their mouth arms legs hands assholes chest back feet. I don’t know, I said. You like to get fucked? he asked. Yeah. Twenty dollars. All I had was a ten and some change. My head was pounding from blood. I’d decided. Ten dollars you suck me. You wanna get fucked it’s twenty dollars. Okay, I said, reaching into my pocket. Not here, he said. Come in the back. We walked into the kitchen area, a long steel table covered in flour and confectioners’ sugar, large steel pots hanging above a stove, scents from smoke or burning food. Where’s the money? First the money. His belt was black with a gold buckle. I could see the outline of his underwear beneath the white cloth of his pants, the skin of his legs slightly darker.

  I thought of all the truck drivers and factory workers that would be eating 69¢ breakfasts at the counters in the other room in a number of hours. Would they taste this moment of sex of energy in their donuts, in their meals? Would they sense it having taken place and say something to the waitress? How long does the smell of sex or its energy hang in the air? I handed him the ten. It was moist. He took it by the tips of his fingers and laid it gently on the steel table avoiding the flour dust. Then he started opening his belt. I kneeled down before him so that my face was just inches away and watched his magnified hands, each detail of his fingers as they unhooked the belt and slid it open. The zipper took hours to finish its ride from top to bottom. He pulled down the front of his underwear until it nestled tightly beneath his balls and his uncircumcised dick jutted out. I moved forward and turned my head to lick his balls and his hand pushed my head away. None of that, just suck it. As I took it in my mouth both his hands grabbed around the back of my head and roughly pulled me down on it. He started pumping like a piston. I unzipped my zipper and pulled out my dick. Somewhere in the back of my head I thought of my childhood and how it made sense to pay this guy. I kept trying to understand what it was I was thinking. No images formed at all, no continuous thoughts, everything fragmented, this dick in my mouth, the earlier sense of potential violence, the mouths I stuck my dick into as a ten-year-old and the rough texture of anonymous men’s hands, wedding rings, old suits, hands opening wallets, a few old bills, hotel countermen and sign-in cards, registration cards with fake names and signatures, the sweet dust of sugar in the air, his hands tightening in my hair, the close-up of the white chef’s trousers like hospital pants, the black pubic hair brushing my nose and his lips, the expanding qualities of his dick, the heat it was generating, his face looking down at me with a mixture of anger and the beginning sense of losing himself entering the dark pupils of his eyes. He came. I swallowed. I came and he stepped back pushing my head away and reaching for a paper towel to wipe his dick off with. He looked at the little splash of cum on the floor between my legs and looked disgusted. I felt confused. What did he think it was I got from putting my mouth around his dick?

  [No date]

  San Francisco

  I would like to evaporate into the walls into the surfaces of things. I’ll never fall in love again. He is shocked at me saying this. It doesn’t shock me. It feels perfectly natural and sane.
I mean I’m empty and I feel like I am dying and when you’re dying it’s not like you can make plans that aim like arrows into the future through the boring walls of this crammed up existence. I’m not unhappy. Only when I feel sick I feel unhappy. I feel more like my body is in neutral. On the television set they keep doing live reports from Sacramento because of the Thrill Killer who strikes on Tuesday nights. I might not be able to stop myself from laughing if the newscaster gets thrill-killed on live camera. This doesn’t mean I am cruel, just that I am empty at the moment. It is not that I am cynical it’s just that I am facing reality, I guess. In a movie house today on Market Street a man in the balcony sat down next to me and pulled out a fat wet dick, I couldn’t see it only knew it was there when he wrapped my fingers around it. I have to admit he was repulsive. White like a body sucked dry of blood but that dick was thrilling to hold. It kept leaking all over my fist, his hand pushing the back of my head. I became iron and silently refused his dick—it wasn’t that thrilling, if you know what I mean. It was just circumstances, the little kid on the movie screen dressed like a baby Satan and the vague sound of police helicopters shuttle over the theater blaring commands that lose translation in the circuits of their loudspeakers. Dying is boring—it narrows down too much. I keep dreaming of years ago when I wanted to be a hard-assed thief in a car on a road leading to any horizon and death would be a banner waving in miniature behind my eyes in my pupils seen only by the people I kissed and chances are the circumstances would be too ill-lit to be read and my body would slam into that hustler’s body, I thought he was like a swimming pool I wanted to dive right into. This neighborhood in six months has gotten dark and heavy. I walked around after getting into town and it was like a blanket of violence had descended, something atmospheric and fragmented not made up of specifics just a wound drying up on that guy’s face, the skinny bony queens with fake colored hair in thin windbreakers crouched next to bushes and basement windows on the side street waiting for customers and abuse in the fucking chill of evening. The woman maybe sixteen maybe seventy with a catalog of beatings still bloody or fading to bruises and she’s not self-conscious walking into a cheap coffee shop asking to use the locked toilet and being refused. Groups of teenagers whose eyes you bypass because of their death banners waving waving waving waiting for the wind to stop blowing or the breeze to slow down. So silken death folds and twists and embraces you tighter at the throat. It’s all fragmentation nothing specific and it’s reading the signs the codes the walking moving evidences buried in shadows.