In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  Sometime last night I felt like crying. It’s been a long time. Today I’m getting lethargic and a strange distorted sadness. Her key in the door. I feel like leaving again but what would that do? Just extend this shit further than it deserves. So what’s she going to say? What am I going to say? What do I feel? It’s all too much. She, if she leaves, wants me to carry her luggage to New Mexico. I don’t want to. I don’t want the responsibility of having to reconnect with her after all this. Its ending would have to be final for me because otherwise the confusion hovers over all of my future. So what if it’s nine more days? I want release in the strongest way if this disintegrates. She always said in the past, even recently to a friend of mine, that when a relationship needs to be broken off it should be done strongly, sometimes that’s necessary so that you can look at it, at yourself.

  So she says she has her period and I should come down to the pool and get her when I’m ready to go to the drugstore. It’s too far to walk. This place is so desolate and industrial. I’d be surprised to find a drugstore. It’s just feed barns, 7-Eleven stores, burger huts, and drinking lounges.

  Tomorrow I am driving back to New Mexico if this continues. She says she doesn’t want to go to a city and wait out the days. Too bad. I’m not going to be a chauffeur in this self-styled hell. Maybe that’s my cruelty, maybe it’s simply my need to finish this, get it over with and separate so there’s a few days of my own silence, not two people’s fucked-up silences. I realize all this—the air in the room, the vacancy of what she and I were attempting, the sullen darkness cast over everything—makes me suspicious. I carry memories of our past and feel if some of those things come alive in the form of her gestures I wouldn’t be able to handle it. Maybe I’ll explain what I’m talking about later. To revive it in words right now would be too far, too much for me. It would make the end of this concrete. I just need to be alone as soon as possible, that’s what I feel.

  As a form of life I can’t believe how fucked up humans are. Or can be. What is this need to erase all evidence of other people when the conflict feels unresolvable? I did this all my life since my teen years, even against my desires or needs. If the emotional state felt destructive, I felt it was over, better to be over than to repeat it. I don’t feel it’s a healthy thing to do but at least in the finality of it my loneliness is concrete and in no one else’s hands. I can’t be touched any longer, and that settles into the general sense of existence I’ve carried. Way outside looking in. Way way outside. Waiting for all sounds to cease. All movements to come to an abrupt halt. The eyes to go blank with light or dark. To become a window, a form like glass that treads through walls and down streets into the horizon.

  When I am sitting with her, even in easier times, I feel I am a stranger, not her, me, and she doesn’t seem to notice. I keep thinking it’s my mortality, but maybe not. Maybe it’s that I’ve been isolated so long that something died in me in terms of my sense of direction or the sensitivity of my body in space, among others, I’m not sure.

  She told me she made arrangements to go back to San Francisco by Greyhound, I guess. We drove to a mall to locate a drugstore where she could get what she needed. Then a bank so she could cash traveler’s checks. I felt annoyed to have to spend this much time with her. Yeah, I’m a selfish guy in moments like this. She says she doesn’t want to go to war with me. I understand what she means, but I don’t think I’m going to war. I just feel like she successfully disassociates from the situation and can start conversations about something totally inane like the book she is reading, written by a friend of hers in Paris. I tell her, Look, this is too much for me. That book is meaningless to me in the context of this situation. It irritates me to have a conversation when this is going on.

  She can disassociate and I can’t and each sound of her voice has left behind evidence of her presence, brings the cloud back down. Does this have something to do with how much I care or how angry I feel? Are they the same thing? It’s extremely rare for me to write about something like this while it’s current, no less when it’s in the past. My distance physically allows me a chance to sift through it all and then lay it to rest. I don’t know, I just can’t go through the motions with her and not feel the pain of loss at her presence. When she said she was going to San Francisco, old feelings came back. There’s always been the pattern that she goes to my friends when she and I have a split. I used to be paranoid about it, less so now. I guess what bothers me now is the same thing about the evidence of her presence among my friends. In San Francisco it’s that I feel she’ll contact Amy and she asked me for Philip’s phone number. So why does that bother me? It does and then it doesn’t, or else I refuse to let it bother me much. I guess it bugs me that all this can’t help but make the public rounds. Everyone expected it would come to an end again like the previous two times. It almost didn’t, but then the events of yesterday and my weariness at the idea of finishing this trip in tension and then having to go to Boston for treatments and all that shit in New York with the landlord’s crew wanting to bust up my place to replace windows and hot water system—Fuck it, I can’t take it.

  She said for me not to worry about her saying things to my friends in San Francisco. I told her it wouldn’t have any effect on me if she did. She said, Don’t be insulting. I just can’t care if she did say things to people; it just doesn’t change who I am if they think I’m fucked up or if they think I’m okay. Maybe a little less alone in the world, but I’m alone any way you look at it, and gradually feeling less and less touched by people. Phil, who died a couple weeks back, used to say towards the end how much he hated healthy people, people without AIDS. I understood immediately what he meant. It’s that no one can stop you from dying and they remind you of your own isolation in your dying, in the events of death.

  If death from this disease were instantaneous like from a car crash or bullet it would make it all more bearable. I’m sitting in a restaurant and eating alone and writing and the world goes on around me. The Bakers-field world. For a moment I wanted to tell her, Don’t go. On one level I’d rather finish the trip, on another level I’d rather be alone. I don’t have a strong feeling of being able to retrieve enough of a connection to her to make the return trip have lovely meaning. Something has shut down, maybe out of exhaustion, maybe out of despair, maybe I need a catastrophe or explosion. This is not clear at all. I just want it somehow to stop. I don’t want to expend so much on what seems essentially stupid. It’s strange. It’s not what we clashed about but the fact that our perceptions and views couldn’t lead us past it in some way. I could let it all go but I can’t sit in her silences and heaviness anymore. All yesterday evening was enough for me. And it depressed me to feel that it would continue into Death Valley, and for me ruin what tiny moments of release I had with that place when we passed through it earlier. Or to witness her disassociation from the heaviness while it made me fall deeper than the inside of the earth. You probably wouldn’t understand. She can’t seem to. I’m stuck in what all this feels like. I know I’m a neurotic, but I feel fiercely protective of myself. I feel and have felt for years that I may as well be alone rather than go through things like this. I never traveled well with others except Tom because we could separate for long periods of the day and each enjoyed ourselves or didn’t feel strange. With most others I always felt caught in their drift. I felt tension at the way I had to go in their directions when my own style was much more spontaneous and fragmented. I would drive others crazy if I insisted they follow me or adopt my style and yet I couldn’t adopt theirs. Anyway, here I am and once again it all feels like major sadness, again like I can’t ever fit. I can’t be fluid and slide past all this. I feel deeply fucked up and simultaneously feel like this is who I am and what I need to insist on. I have to give myself room regardless what it looks like or is perceived by even the people I love or want to love. What a strange and complicated place to be. From the outside I doubt anyone can understand. Maybe that’s not the point anyway. Maybe I need to
reach a depth in which it all pours out. I have fragmentary thoughts of suicide, images pop into my head of driving my Hertz rental off this unbelievably high mountaintop road we passed on the way to San Francisco or else the chasms in New Mexico outside Taos. But I would need a guarantee that it would be a final act. When I think of suicide it relieves me, relieves the pressure. It’s done that for me since I was a teenager. I went years at a time not thinking of these thoughts but they return now and then. The relief is momentary and I know it’s momentary and therefore not an option that I’ll take. Not at this point.

  Yeah yeah blah blah. So we kinda resolved the situation. It’s not completely resolved but at least the heavy shit has been pushed aside enough to joke with each other. That’s what I wanted, and it was a roller-coaster ride for twenty-four hours. Sitting in the lobby with some suspicious white woman in her sixties, shooting looks at me over her newspaper, like I’m going to snatch her purse …

  In anonymous sex it’s the consciousness that his eyes carry and convey, the weight and beauty of that consciousness whether a projection on my part or a clear reading of it in his face, his eyes, the small gestures of his hands, rhythms of breathing. It’s never so simple as a dick or a mouth. It’s every bit as complicated as life and death was before society destroyed it.

  ON PHIL’S BIRTHDAY/MEMORIAL

  I can’t live like a “normal” person. I can’t fake that I am, or forget that I am dying. I am a stranger to others and to myself. I am a stranger and I can’t pretend to be familiar. I am moving. I am moving on two legs or all fours. I am a stranger. I can’t find what I’m looking for outside anymore. I can’t find what I’m looking for out there. I guess I can only find it in here, in my head, in my solitude, in my distance, in my new persona as a stranger. I feel like I come from another world and can no longer speak the right language. I see the signs I make with my fingers and hands. The earth has a volume, hell has a volume. I’m a blank spot. I’m a smudge in the air. I feel like a window. I’m a broken window. All I feel today is sorrow. All I feel is loss. I’m a glass human disappearing in rain standing away from all of you waving my invisible arms and hands shouting my invisible words. I’m disappearing but not fast enough. I feel this blank spot, a great emptiness inside of me and for a while it made me nervous. Maybe because of my sense that I may never work again, never have reason or substance to work or paint or make photographs or make things that have meaning outside of myself. In that state what I make has meaning that circulates inside rather than outside, which defeats communication other than with myself. I move through landscapes or among people and all I see are echoes, echoes of what was familiar not too long ago, but the echoes are a skin of what was once an experience or a moment of living while now I can’t feel the experience any longer. With Phil’s death and maybe my own in front of me I am left with threads, threads of intellect, of emotion, of desire, of impulse, of survival, of need. I feel this sensation is no longer good or bad, it just exists and I can’t give it words but I decided to let it live in me as long as it needs to, even for the rest of my life. It’s where I am, it’s my location at this time like an invisible map, invisible even to me but I embody or carry it and it is now my identity, it is my emptiness, it is my loss of reflection in the mirror. I talked to Steve and he says he feels the exact same thing and he doesn’t know what it is either. I was once so filled with a desire to live and now that’s changed and my only desire to live is my fear or reluctance to die. I’m not ready. What does that mean; there’s no context for that statement. Everything has been reduced to echoes—all memory, all experiences, all motions of light and wind. When I stand in the street it’s as if I am outside time, that fluid thing that expands or contracts. Everything I witness sets off echoes that look familiar but evaporate before I can physically touch them. All your faces, the faces of those who are not dying have become echoes, too. The movements of your lips have the echo or transparent quality of a film made fifty years ago and yet you are contemporary. At least you have an echo of contemporary about you. Who knows? Who knows? It’s all abstract and my life is somewhere in the middle of it all.

  In this sleep I was walking around near some large white piece of architecture that felt like a university or cavernous space. Picked up a telephone and dialed Phil’s telephone number and someone picked it up after a ring or two. It was Phil even though he’s been dead for two months. I was so amazed I was afraid to speak of his death as if it would make him disappear. I made small talk tentatively, just completely overwhelmed that he was alive. Suddenly we were before each other at a table in the white building. I asked him, How was it? meaning death. What was it like? He looked at me and seemed to be answering that it wasn’t so bad. I could feel what he wanted to say but he seemed hesitant to speak of it other than shrugging his shoulders and looking more emotional suddenly. I think I reached over and touched him. The small distance between us was charged with emotion. I was trying to understand everything in the world at once. If he died and was now back physically and able to talk to me, then death was a process that was one of transition or travel. I was so relieved to see him alive, or at least physical and communicating, I started weeping and then so did he. We cried this short intense clear emotion. It felt like what I think grace is.

  I had to piss and went to an old bathroom, mostly metal stalls and shadows like the subway station toilets of my childhood. You could sense sex as soon as you walked in. I went into a stall and big sections of the divider were peeled away to allow for sex. A young guy in his late teens or early twenties was jerking off watching me. I jerked off and he bent and leaned through the partition to blow me but I covered the head of my dick and let him lick my balls instead. I reached through the hole to touch his chest but he backed away to clean up. I was so happy to have seen Phil. Woke up.

  *David went on his cross-country book tour by car, though he was getting symptomatic at this time. Hoping for inspiration to write again, he planned to drive alone through the desert. At the last minute, he decided to go with a friend, Marion, with whom he had a complicated, sometimes charismatic relationship.

  *Peter Hujar was diagnosed in January 1987; Tom Rauffenbart tested positive for HIV in December 1987, and David followed a few months later.

  August 1, 1991

  I’ve pretty much isolated myself from almost all the people I know, especially since the last two months when I was so fucking ill—constant nausea, head pains, unable to shit for weeks at a time feeling that my system is poisoning me and having bone biopsy, intestinal biopsy, and blood work and doing all them drugs that don’t do shit for me. For a while I was injecting myself with interferon, now I’m on steroids. They made me feel a boost for a week or so but now I have trouble shitting again, fevers 101-102°, nausea all day, on some days head pains again. I’m sick of being sick and it aggravates me to speak to people who have a degree of normalcy in their lives. I hate it when someone calls and I tell them I am sick and they go off on this mundane bullshit about what they had for breakfast or what their kid is doing or whatever. That drives me insane. I can’t tell if it’s just their denial or their humanity. Humans obviously can never fathom what suffering feels like; there’s a block in the brain that prevents it. Maybe we’d be so filled with horror we’d throw ourselves in front of automobiles. But it’s all exhausting. I see that the relentlessness of my illness is boring for others, yet I’m the one who’s fucking enduring this shit and at times I have to verbalize it despite other’s fear of hearing it. So, that’s why I isolate myself. I can’t deal with another, But you look good. It’s not affecting me too much in how I look, but it’s hell in how I feel, the quality of my life sliding down to the point that I haven’t worked on hardly anything for nine months.

  I just hate people sometimes. I’m sick of feeling like a fucking empty Xerox version of my former self. Myself of last year is gone, is totally away in the past, floating like a rag in the wind. I’m blank, I’m a copy of my features. I look similar to a year ago but
that sense of living, of fantasies, of hope, of purpose, of need, all of it’s gone. I’m empty in regards to what used to touch me. I have no fantasies, even sex is a blank for me other than recognizing beautiful gestures or bodies: my kind of beauty. It’s a bore to think about sex or try to jerk off, my body just doesn’t give a shit. People, even when I explain some of this, tend to just yak away about their lives or say, Why don’t you go away, take a trip, do something fun?… They don’t know what they’re talking about. There is no fun. Being sick in a hotel in the woods is worse than being sick in a familiar bed. I’ve lost the faint degree of hope I always mustered inside of drift or fantasies. None of it works anymore. So what, right? It’s just what it is and nothing I say or do can touch it. Nothing anyone else says or does can touch it. I’m empty, other than of illness and dark thoughts. I want to die but I don’t want to die. There’s no answer right now.

  This psychiatrist called me at the bidding of a friend. We talked for about forty minutes. He asked me about my sexual activities, my depression, my background a bit, and other things (health). I was candid. He wanted to know if I had been into S/M. I was surprised at the question. I told him of my few experiences and how I realized with low tolerance to pain I wasn’t into it. Sometimes a slap on the butt in fucking was interesting, but the mechanics of pain were not what I was after. When Peter died I had two experiences, placing myself into the hands of a sadist I met in a movie house. My memories of it are complicated. Kind of makes me ill. It hurt a lot and emotionally it shook me up to the event of death in my face. Or something like that. Anyway I stopped after a couple of times and thought for a long time about what I wanted. I guess with the most important guy in my life dying, and I remember feeling I could never live by myself or go through this world without him (Peter), I guess I wanted to lose control as completely as possible. I mean this guy, this sadist, had me tied to the four corners of a bed and he sat on my chest and said, You are completely in my hands, in my control, right? Yeah, I said. I can do anything to you and you couldn’t stop me. I nodded. Answer me, he said. Yes, I said. Okay, he said, untying parts of my body in order to lift my legs up to swipe at my butt a few times with a belt. It just hurt too much. Later when he left, I took a long hot bath in Epsom salts and wished I would die and leave everything/ everyone behind. I was tired.