The Lonely City

by Olivia Laing

  I use images of sexuality . . . to deal with what I have experienced, and the fact that I think sexuality and the human body should not be a taboo subject this late in the 20th century. I also use images of sexuality to portray the diversity of people, and their sexual orientations, and one of the biggest reasons I feel uncomfortable about the idea of the human body being a taboo subject is that, had the human body not been a taboo subject in this decade, I might have gotten the information from the Health Department, from elected representatives, that would have spared me having contracted this virus.

  After the trial, after that gruelling and stressful brush with censorship, he made a book about sex. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline combines fragments of memoir with watercolour drawings and sketches of people in porn cinemas. He wanted to celebrate the old wildness before it vanished altogether, though he was also adamant about the need for safer sex.

  In fact, sometimes the recklessness of people in the cinemas appalled him. In one essay he talked about going in immediately after visiting a friend in hospital, and being shocked by the riskiness of the behaviour on display. He fantasised then about filming his friend’s face, covered in lesions, his newly blind eyes, dragging in a projector and hooking it up with copper cables to a car battery and projecting the film on to the dark wall above everybody’s heads. ‘I didn’t want to ruin their evening,’ he wrote, ‘just wanted maybe to keep their worlds from narrowing down too far.’ Denial was always David’s target, whether that meant right-wing preachers who couldn’t abide talk of sex or hedonists who didn’t want to admit to the possibility of death.

  Memories was packed tight with his own sexual experiences, among them the story of how he’d been violently raped as a boy. The memory of this terrifying afternoon had come back to him when he’d happened to pass the guy in a cinema. It was decades later, but he was still instantly recognisable, his skin somehow greyish, like something manufactured, something dead.The incident had happened when he was hitching back from swimming in a lake in New Jersey, his clothes still drenched. The man had tied him up and raped him in the back of a red pick-up truck, shoving a wad of mud and sand in his mouth and battering him repeatedly. He thought he was going to die: saw in a flash his own body drenched in lighter fuel and seared like a side of beef, to be found by hikers tossed in a ditch. Seeing the man again, he was so overcome that he felt like he was being bled, like he’d been shrunk back to the size of a boy, like he’d lost the faculty of speech.

  And yet, despite holding dozens of these experiences inside himself, he could still celebrate the act of sex, the act of opening consensually to another body, another psyche. He was nauseous a lot the year that he worked on Memories, sitting at his cluttered kitchen table, chain-smoking, thinking over all those anonymous acts. But sex wasn’t responsible for his sickness. It was the route of transmission, yes, but as he kept on saying, the virus didn’t have a moral code, unlike the decision makers who wilfully blocked education and funding, who kept allowing the disease to spread.

  As he got sicker, as he felt increasingly more weary and more ill, he began to cut himself off from people, to hole up in Hujar’s loft, as he still called it, hiding away from the world. He’d started writing in his diary again, logging dreams about machinery gone wrong, about abandoned animals that needed to be rescued and cared for. Two baby birds left on a sidewalk in Times Square. A tarantula that someone was dropping from a great height, not realising they die if they’re subjected to a fall. He dreamt of kissing a guy with Kaposi’s, and of finding an apartment full of natural history books, their pages richly embellished with pictures of snakes and turtles. He wished he’d known the man who lived there, who shared his interests but also had money and a family. ‘He’s loved,’ he wrote in his journal the next day, and underlined the words.

  The overwhelming sensation in that period was loneliness: the same loneliness he’d felt at the moment of his diagnosis, the same loneliness he’d felt as a kid, abandoned into one perilous situation or another. No one could touch the burdens he was lugging around; no one could help him with his feelings of need or paralysing fear. ‘David has a problem,’ he wrote bitterly in his journal, ‘he feels pain being alone but can’t stand most people. How the fuck do you solve that?’

  In his final piece of published writing, the essay that ends Memories, he wrote about how he was feeling increasingly invisible, how he was starting to hate people for being unable to see where he was, beyond the blunt fact of his body, which still looked healthy enough from the outside. He’d gone, he thought; he’d ceased to exist. There was a vaguely familiar shell, but inside there was nothing: a stranger people kept thinking they recognised or knew.

  He’d always hated the way AIDS activism insisted on positivity, on refusing to admit the possibility of death. Now he poured it all out: the absolute isolation of being terminally ill. He was thirty-six that year. He was a deeply gregarious man, an inveterate collaborator whose letters, diaries, packed phone logs and answering machine tapes attest to how deeply loved he was, how committed to friendship, how embedded in his community. And yet:

  I am glass, clear empty glass . . . No gesture can touch me. I’ve been dropped into all this from another world and I can’t speak your language any longer . . . I feel like a window, maybe a broken window. I am a glass human. I am a glass human disappearing in the rain. I am standing among all of you waving my invisible arms and hands. I am shouting my invisible words . . . I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.

  Invisibility and speechlessness, ice and glass: the classic imagery of loneliness, of being cut off. Later, these extraordinary words appeared again on the final spread of 7 Miles a Second, a graphic novel about David’s life made in collaboration with his friends, the artists James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook.

  The image on the facing page shows Hujar’s loft from the street outside, a Hopperesque perspective. It’s evening. The sky, in Van Cook’s exquisitely lurid watercolours, is turning navy, the side of the building going up in flames of rose and gold. A mailbox, sheets of newspaper blowing down the street. The windows of the loft are glowing, but there’s no one visible behind the glass. NYC 1993, it says at the bottom of the page, which is to say at least six months after David died up there, on 22 July 1992, in the company of his lover, his family and friends, one of the 194,476 people killed by AIDS-related infections in America that year.

  *

  I’d been haunting the Wojnarowicz archive at NYU ever since I first saw the Rimbaud photograph. Some weeks I went in every day to look through his diaries or listen to his audio journals. Everything David made was touching, but those tapes articulated feelings of such rawness that it was devastating to hear them. And yet, as with Nomi’s singing, I found the act of listening somehow alleviated my own sense of loneliness, simply because I could hear someone voicing their pain, giving space to their difficult and humiliating feelings.

  Many were recorded on waking, or in the middle stretches of the night. Often you can hear car horns and sirens, people talking on the street outside. Then David’s deep voice, struggling upward out of sleep. He talks about his work and his sexuality and sometimes he walks to the window, opens the curtains, and reports on what he sees there. A man in the apartment opposite, combing his hair beneath a bare bulb. A dark-haired stranger standing outside the Chinese laundry, who meets his eyes and doesn’t look away. He talks about what dying will feel like, about whether it will be frightening or painful. He says he hopes it will be like slipping into warm water and then on the crackling tape he starts to sing: low plaintive notes, rising and falling over the surf of morning traffic.

  One night, he wakes after a bad dream and switches on the machine to talk it out. He’s dreamt about a horse being caught in some train tracks, its spine broken, unable to escape. ‘It was very much alive,’ he says, ‘and it was just so fucking upsetting to see this thing.’ He describes how he tried to free it, and how instead it was dragged into a wall and skinned a
live. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what it means for me. And I feel horror and a very deep sadness about something. Whatever the tone of the dream carries it was just so sad and so shocking.’ He says goodbye then, and shuts off the machine.

  Something alive, something alive and lovely caught and damaged in the mechanisms, the gears and rails of society. When I thought about AIDS, when I thought about the people who have died, and the conditions they experienced; when I thought about those who have survived and who carry inside themselves a decade of mourning, a decade of missing people, I thought of David’s dream. When I cried while listening to the tapes, which I did periodically, surreptitiously wiping my eyes on my sleeve, it wasn’t just out of sadness, or pity. It was out of rage that this courageous, sexy, radical, difficult, immensely talented man died at the age of thirty-seven, that I lived in a world in which this kind of mass death had been permitted, in which nobody in a position of power had stopped the train and freed the horse in time.

  Wojnarowicz articulated a sense of being not just outside society, but actively antagonistic to its strictures, its intolerance of different life-forms. ‘The pre-invented world’, he’d started calling it, the pre-invented existence of mainstream experience, which seems benign, even banal, its walls almost invisible until you are crushed against them. All his work was an act of resistance against this dominating force, driven by a desire to contact and inhabit a deeper, wilder mode of being. The best way he’d found to fight was to make public the truths of his own life, to create work that resisted invisibility and silence; the loneliness that comes from having your existence denied, from being written out of history, which after all belongs to the normal and not to the stigmatised.

  In Close to the Knives, he set out very clearly what he thought a work of art could do, writing:

  To place an object or writing that contains what is invisible because of legislation or social taboo into an environment outside myself makes me feel not so alone; it keeps me company by virtue of its existence. It is kind of like a ventriloquist’s dummy – the only difference is that the work can speak by itself or act like that ‘magnet’ to attract others who carried this enforced silence.

  These feelings about the public and the private informed his thinking about death, too. He didn’t want a memorial, his friends weeping or too numb to weep in another anonymous room. He didn’t want his or anyone’s death to be abstract, to pass by unnoticed in the world at large. At the memorials he’d been attending with increasing frequency over the past few years, he’d sometimes felt the urge to run screaming into the streets, to force every single passing stranger to see the destruction that was taking place.

  He wanted to find a way to make each loss tangible, to make death count. The essay in which he first set down these ideas ends with a fantasy that whenever a person died of AIDS their body would be taken by their friends and lovers and loaded into a car and driven to Washington and dumped on the front steps of the White House. It was a vision of accountability, of breaking down the divide between private grief and state responsibility, a divide that had permitted so much suffering to go by unseen.

  As such, it’s fitting that his memorial was the first political funeral of the AIDS epidemic, the first of many memorials in the form of protest marches. At 8 p.m. on Wednesday 29 July 1992 a crowd of mourners gathered in the street outside Hujar’s loft. Hundreds of people processed in near silence through the East Village, forcing the traffic to a standstill. Down Avenue A, passing over the tarmac where David had once painted a giant cow’s head to amuse Hujar. Along East Houston and back up the Bowery, walking behind a black banner that announced in big white letters:

  DAVID WOJNAROWICZ

  1954–1992

  DIED OF AIDS

  DUE TO

  GOVERNMENT NEGLECT

  In a parking lot opposite Cooper Union some of his work was read out loud, and some of it was projected on a wall, just as years before he’d stencilled his own images on to the surfaces of the city. One of the phrases read was: ‘To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions on the pre-invented world.’ Then the banner was burned in the street: a funeral pyre for someone who had fought lifelong simply for the right to be seen, to coexist, to live his life without the threat of violence or arrest, to enjoy desire in the way he pleased.

  A few months later, on 11 October, ACT UP organised the Ashes Action, a march on Washington that was a kind of political funeral on a vast scale. It was a crushingly bleak time. There was still no cure for AIDS, no reliable treatment. People were in a state of exhaustion, of grief and gathering despair. Hundreds met on the steps of the Capitol building at 1 p.m., bringing with them the ashes of their loved ones. Then they marched on George Bush’s White House. When they got there, they began to empty the ashes on the lawn, upending caskets and plastic bags and pouring them through the chain-link fence. David Wojnarowicz’s ashes were among them, scattered by his lover Tom.

  Years before, David used to buy grass seed from a store on Canal Street and roam the piers scattering it in handfuls, Johnny Appleseed in sneakers, wanting to make something beautiful from the rubble. My favourite picture of him showed him lounging on a meadow he’d planted in one of the abandoned baggage or departure halls: grass scattered with debris, grass growing out of disintegrating plaster and particles of soil. Anonymous art, unsignable art, art that was about transformation, about alchemising what was otherwise only waste.

  I was reminded of that picture when I first watched the footage on YouTube of the ashes falling, the clouds of greyish dust, the last remains of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people, a tiny proportion of the hundreds of thousands, now millions, lost. It was one of the most heart-breaking things I’d ever seen, a gesture of absolute despair. At the same time, it was an act of intense symbolic power. Where is David now? Like Klaus Nomi, like all the artists who have died of AIDS, he lives on in his work, and in everyone who sees that work, as he suggested years before, when he told Nan Goldin in the conversation recorded in Interview, ‘once this body drops, I’d like some of my experience to live on’. And he is also scattered across the White House lawn, which is to say at the absolute heart of America, resisting exclusion to the end.

  7

  RENDER GHOSTS

  ‘TO MAKE THE PRIVATE INTO something public is an act that has terrific repercussions on the pre-invented world,’ Wojnarowicz had said, but it hasn’t worked out quite like he imagined, not by any means.

  In the early spring my sublet in the East Village came to an end and I moved instead to a temporary room on the corner of West 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue, on the tenth floor of what had once been the Times Square Hotel. If I looked south, I could see the mirrored windows of the Westin. The gym was at eye level, and at odd hours of the day or night I’d sometimes catch a figure churning circles on an exercise bike. The other window looked down on to a run of camera stores, bodegas, peep shows and lap-dancing clubs, PLAYPEN and LACE, a stream of men in backpacks and baseball caps passing through the doors.

  It never gets dark in Times Square. It was a paradise of artificial light, in which the older technologies, the neon extravagances in the shape of whisky glasses and dancing girls, were in the process of being made obsolete by the unremitting flawlessness of light-emitting diodes and liquid crystals. Often I’d wake at two or three or four in the morning and watch waves of neon pass through my room. During these unwanted apertures of the night, I’d get out of bed and yank the useless curtain open. Outside, there was a jumbotron, a giant electronic screen cycling perpetually through six or seven ads. One had gunfire, and one expelled a cold blue pulse of light, insistent as a metronome.

  I’d found the new apartment the way I always did: by putting an ad on Facebook. It belonged to an acquaintance of an acquaintance, a woman I’d never met. In an email she told me that the room was very small, with a kitchenette and bathroom, warning me too about the traffic and the neon ads. What she didn’t mention was that th
e building was a refuge: a flagship development run by the charity Common Ground, which rented cheap single rooms to working professionals in addition to housing a more or less permanent population of the long-term homeless, particularly those with AIDS and serious mental health problems. This was explained to me by one of the two security guards on the front desk, who gave me the white electronic card I needed to enter and exit the lobby and took me up to the room to show me how to operate the locks. He’d just started the job, and in the elevator he told me about the building’s population, saying of things I might or might not see if we’re not worried about it you don’t need to be.

  The halls were painted hospital green, flushed red and white by wall lights, ceiling lights and EXIT signs. My room was just big enough to fit a futon and a desk, a microwave, a sink and a small fridge. There were Mardi Gras beads hanging in the bathroom, and the walls were lined with books and cuddly toys. The sound of stereos and televisions seeped through the walls, and outside crowds of people surged intermittently up from the subway at Port Authority.

  It was the epicentre of the twenty-first century, and I lived in it accordingly. Every day I’d wake up and before my eyes were even properly open I’d drag my laptop into bed and lurch seamlessly into Twitter. It was the first thing I looked at and the last, this descending scroll from mostly strangers, institutions, friends, this ephemeral community in which I was a disembodied and inconstant presence. Picking through the litany, the domestic and the civic: lens solution, book cover, news of a death, protest picture, art opening, joke about Derrida, refugees in the forests of Macedonia, hashtag shame, hashtag lazy, climate change, lost scarf, joke about Daleks: a stream of information, sentiment and opinion that some days, most days maybe, received more attention than anything actual in my life.