Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  We need not be friends but we also needn’t be enemies. Blame the alcohol.

  “Adeliiiiiiiiine,” she said. “Why can’t I meet Jon!”

  One could always trust Mother to chase away your weakness.

  “You’re on very shaky ground simply meeting me, Mother,” I said.

  “But Adeliiiiiiiiiine,” she said. “You know I love to take an interest! Baby says he’s a nice young man! Much better than that nasty Kevin!”

  “Whenever did you find the time to talk with Baby about Jon?” I asked.

  “It’s a very long walk up those stairs,” she said. “And I’d had a few drinks, which made it even longer!”

  “Mother,” I said. “You mustn’t ever come back. You know that, don’t you? Cease thinking of us even as anything like acquaintances. Our time together is over.”

  “Adeliiiiiiiiiine!” she said. “You don’t mean that!”

  “You’ve pressing things to which you must attend. You live in Los Angeles. I’m in New York. That’s enough distance. Waste your affections on Dahlia. She’ll always be there.”

  “But Dahlia’s so boriiiiiiing!” said Mother. I walked away. She ordered two Greyhounds, reminding the bartender to salt the rims.

  I instituted a hard rule about the answering machine. We had the thing for a reason, I told Baby, so we’d be damn sure to use it. Every call must be screened. People could announce their selves through the speaker. If they were not Mother or some other malefactor, then we would answer. Otherwise, we’d let the horrible woman ramble.

  Weekly dispatches from Los Angeles were invariably delivered at times when Mother was too tight to comprehend the difference in time zones. She developed a great range, finding new excuses to call. Each message existed in a vacuum isolated from all previous efforts.

  “Who knows,” said Baby. “Maybe she doesn’t remember.”

  In the fine art of giving offense, the woman was a dynamo savant. Her first message expressed interest in my love life. The next was about her confusion as to the mail that arrived in my name, offering financial advice about credit card applications. In another, she spoke about encountering one of my old high school friends at a soirée. They’d asked after me. She wasn’t sure how to respond. Could I return her call and provide instruction as to making these encounters less awkward? She’d appreciate it.

  The worst, reader, was when she’d convinced herself that I’d flown back to Los Angeles with the sole intent of vandalizing her home.

  “Adeliiiiiiiiiiine,” she intoned, “I don’t know why you want to torment your poor mother like this, but that’s fine, if you want to be like that, then you can be like that. But I will not have you coming into our home and throwing things around. Don’t think that you can go around destroying other people’s property! It’s not riiiiiiight, Adeliiiiiine! This is very childish!”

  APRIL 1991

  David Wojnarowicz

  Darlings, don’t believe for the smallest little minute that Adeline doesn’t know how booooring you consider politics.

  I’m right with you, old sport, my eyes running white in the sockets whenever some dreary creature starts on and on and on and on about the winner of an election, or the horrors of Congress, or the latest cruelty wreaked upon some poor unfortunate by the municipal government. I ain’t no nattering nabob of negativity. I couldn’t give two hoots of a hangman’s holler. Tiny miseries are the glue of other people’s existence, the sticky stuff adhering together the dull papers of their lives. But not mine.

  So you’ll simply indulge, trusting in me, won’t you, as I relate a bit of the ol’ ultraviolent American history? This is the good stuff, the politics that matter.

  I’m speaking of the three or four years in which the East Village played host to one of the major combatants in what were once called the Culture Wars. The unhappy late period of David Wojnarowicz.

  Say what you might about the man, and many have remarked upon his occasional forays into cruelty, but Wojnarowicz woke up one morning and found himself embroiled in a kind of Jahannam that I would not wish upon my worst enemy. What made him remarkable, and what warmed me to him, was the grace that he displayed after being thrust into the inferno.

  It starts, I suppose, with the death of Wojnarowicz’s lover, Peter Hujar. Another East Village artist struck down by AIDS. In those days, simply everyone who was anyone died of the disease, and America, being America, politicized the illness with its finest traditions of hypocrisy and bigotry.

  A subspecies of the human primate believed that the virus was sent from the high heavens, YHWH’s direct retribution against the sodomizing sybarites in the New Gomorrahs of these States United. Why not?

  The disease’s victims offered easy targets for scoring cheap political points. The poor, the queer, and the drug addicted. Those with an excess of melanin.

  As best as I can tell, Wojnarowicz’s great anger over Hujar’s death, over the death of so many that he knew and loved, reached a crescendo when the artist received his own diagnosis. His own death sentence.

  He’d always been angry. Now he was furious. His work moved into the realm of the survivor who knew that he himself could not survive.

  A bit later, Wojnarowicz contributed the catalogue essay to an exhibition at Artists Space in Tribeca. A ferocious piece attacking a variety of anti-homo political figures. His targets, blessedly, have passed out of cultural memory into the Gray Havens. They are dead old white men. I shall not name them.

  This particular show, titled Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, had received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. When the head of the organization read Wojnarowicz’s essay, he withdrew the money.

  Instant furor. Instant controversy. Instant scandal. Mr. Wojnarowicz thrust into the public spotlight. He had not anticipated it, nor was it desired. Yet there he was. The man at the center, the queer cause of all that bother.

  Following some outcry, the NEA caved, reversing its decision and restoring funding on the condition that its money not pay for the catalogue. Other sources of filthy lucre were found. The show went forward.

  Wojnarowicz became a figure of national import, his name appearing in every major newspaper and countless smaller ones, his essay spotlighted on national television. It was a time when reactionary forces hunted scapegoats. There he was. Big, gay, T-cell count in the toilet. Positively, absolutely, willfully offensive.

  An organization named the American Family Association, headed by the Reverend Donald Wildmon, discovered that the NEA was funding a show of Wojnarowicz’s in Normal, Illinois: Tongues of Flame.

  The decision to have the show was made well in advance of the controversy at Artists Space. The money was out the door. There was no going back.

  The show’s catalogue made its way into Wildmon’s grubby hands.

  In response, he authored his own pamphlet entitled “Your Tax Dollars Helped Pay for These ‘Works of Art.’ ” Within this well-reasoned publication, Wildmon included slight details from Wojnarowicz’s work, cherry-picked to highlight any intimation of homosexuality or drug use. Thousands of these pamphlets were mailed to every member of Congress and media outlets.

  Instant furor. Instant controversy. Instant scandal. Wojnarowicz grew more famous, the subject of further news reporting.

  Remember, too, reader, that we speak of one of the East Village’s own. For all of its virtues, the transgressive art scene was not a breeding ground for individuals with great social facility. No one ever accused Nick Zedd of oozing politesse and great linguistic facility.

  Wojnarowicz was different.

  So when confronted by this very unusual situation, he did the least expected thing. He sued Wildmon and the American Family Association. Even more unexpectedly, he won his case, blocking publication of the pamphlet. Though he earned only $1 in damages, the victory stood.

  His fame grew. More news coverage. Constant media. Here, too, he shone. Wojnarowicz could articulate himself without giving ground, could speak of his work in
such a way as to get across the sense that he’d done nothing wrong, that his artistic endeavors were legitimate pursuits.

  All the while, the man was dying. His only recourse was to swallow AZT pills and hope that the treatment would not be worse than the disease. His body rebelling, he was out in the media, fighting the good fight that a thousand others should have fought before him.

  I’d read articles in the Times, in the Village Voice, in the trades, in magazines, watched PBS, listened to NPR. I kept myself aware of the man, had thought of reaching out. He was only six blocks away. Yet I was intimidated. By his articulation, by his disease, by the situation. I’ve no small opinion of my own self, but what could Adeline say to Wojnarowicz?

  An old friend from Parsons, a Turkish blackguard named Nayip Otağalu, had years earlier developed a friendship with the artist. Of its nature, I cannot speak. Nayip conveyed one or two things about Wojnarowicz, details both gossipy and humanizing, before the Turk disappeared after our sophomore year, never reemerging from the wilds of summer break. Presumably stuck forever in Gaziantep.

  Jon knew Wojnarowicz, but theirs was no friendship. Sometime in the early ’80s, they’d gotten into a fistfight outside of the Pyramid Club. Jon’s band of the moment, Ligature Lycanthropee, was on the same lineup as 3 Teens Kill 4, Wojnarowciz’s avant-experimental group. There was an argument about allocated stage time. From the way Jon spoke of the incident, I received the unmistakable impression that the fisticuffs had not ended in his favor.

  Being old hands of the East Village, they had many friends in common. Word drifted in through Jon about the artist’s condition, about the ups and downs of his health.

  Wojnarowicz was getting sicker. People wondered how much longer he would live. Feeling the limits of time, I inquired if Jon couldn’t perhaps arrange a meeting.

  The shrill sound of our telephone.

  I’d been reading a crumbling mass-market edition of Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes. One of Baby’s many books. Despite my aversion to the mystery genre and its hardboiled offspring, I found the title wonderfully suggestive.

  More important, I owed Playboy a cartoon of George Bush driving a Jeep Cherokee through an urban ghetto. I was desperate in my procrastination, so there I was, darlings, reading about Sailor in Santa Fe at the time of fiesta, of burning Zozobra.

  I stood and gazed deep into the answering machine. The Mickey Mouse phone depicted the character as he existed in the black-and-white cartoons of his origin. Pie-cut eyes and two-button shorts.

  The machine picked up. Jon. “Adeline, are you there?”

  “Dear boy, here I am,” said I, lifting the receiver from the Mouse’s clutches. “Where are you?”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Do you want to meet Wojnarowicz?”

  Funny hearing the name pronounced aloud, radically different than how it read in my mind.

  “Indubitably,” said I.

  “Don’t say I never did nothing for you,” said Jon. “You can meet him tonight at 7 pm. He lives above the theater at 12th and Second.”

  “I’m aware of his location,” I said. “Thankee kindly.”

  Anxiety and wonderment. I had nothing to say. Would I simply sit and stare, hoping that the artist would perform like an animal desperate for a handful of peanuts? Worse yet, what to wear?

  When the hour came, I’d passed through several sets of clothing before choosing a modest black ensemble. Of late, all of my outfits were modest black ensembles. I’d gone conservative, retiring the hair dye and ripped stockings. No longer did I dress like a psychedelic kaleidoscope. I could pass as a legal assistant, running from deposition to deposition, plagued by romantic anxieties that brimmed over whenever the senior partner failed to telephone after our latest indiscretion.

  I walked up Second Avenue. I looked at Kevin’s building, attempting to peer with X-ray vision through the brick and mortar. Could he possibly have kept the same place? Did the collected works of Kilgore Trout remain his fixed point of reference?

  It was only several weeks earlier that they’d reopened the Second Avenue Theater as a movie house. I somehow had convinced Baby and Erik to attend a screening of Scenes from a Mall in the main auditorium, a turn-of-the-century Yiddish theater with an unspeakably beautiful ceiling. I retained no memory of the film other than its action taking place in the monolithic Beverly Center, a mall in Los Angeles that looked as if it’d been designed by Albert Speer, and in the parking lot of which I’d once given George Whitney a handjob.

  The marquee read: DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, FANTASIA, SUPERSTAR: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ANDY WARHOL, MR & MRS BRIDGE, MR JOHNSON, THE BRITISH ANIMATION FESTIVAL.

  At the entrance to the apartments, a bespectacled older gentleman with brown hair stood before the door. I thought nothing of him until I examined the buzzers, attempting to figure out which button to press.

  “Are you Adeline?” he asked.

  “I am,” I said.

  “I’m sorry you had to come over like this,” he said, “but David’s too sick to see you. He’s really sorry but he just can’t do it.”

  “I understand completely,” I said. “Tell him that I said hello. Tell him that he’s in my very deepest.”

  “I will,” said the man. He let himself into the building. I stood, waiting, thinking that perhaps he’d come back down and inform me that it’d all been a gaudy prank, a test to see if I were worthy. Your patience, he might say, is indeed a virtue.

  Five minutes expired. It was just about the worst feeling that I’ve ever had. The finality of it, I suppose, the sense that I would never be asked back. I hate being excluded.

  I did what I’ve always done when there ain’t no place in this world for me anymore. I went to the movies. Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol.

  Très cliché seeing a flicker about one New York artist after being rejected by another, but the other films were so dreadful. Even Fantasia. Nouveau riche Walt Disney meets Stravinsky. Bleeghh.

  I watched the full hour and a half of Warhol, a collection of talking heads and contemporary footage, adding up to a beaucoup banal portrait of the man and his coterie of speed-freak drag queens.

  I didn’t learn a single thing, but the shots of his digs invariably included imagery of 31 Union Square West, which jumpstarted a round of contemplation about our old Bank of the Metropolis, and the day that Warhol had died, standing outside in the street, crying about Mother. All of those people congregating outside of a building that the man hadn’t used for years. Human variety, says I to myself, will never cease to amaze you.

  I walked back down Second Avenue, passing the Kiev, and then passing 6th Street. I couldn’t stomach going home and telling Baby my sorry tale, nor could I possibly telephone Jon and inform him that his efforts were for naught. That I’d been robbed by a disease.

  Don’t you know that it was sheer selfishness? If I felt like this for no reason other than being told no, then what was life like for Wojnarowicz? He was thirty-three years old and every day inched him closer to the coffin.

  Who knew how many were like him? Thousands? Millions? Tens of thousands withering across the five boroughs, driven insane by poison disguised as medicine consumed from a fear of doing nothing. We hid the sick in hospital beds, in sequestered apartments, in houses, in the poorest neighborhoods. I wanted to build a fire on the roof of every building where a hapless soul was consumed by the disease. The city would light up, ablaze, the funeral pyre of a culture.

  All those sad people. I imagine that most are dead now.

  I landed across the street from 84 Second Avenue. DRESS SUITS TO HIRE. Helen Sopolsky.

  The humiliation of the human experience, of being trapped within a body. There was no good way to die. That filthy mannequin with its rotting tuxedo, the fashion getting more baroque with every year. The real artists of New York were not Warhol nor Wojnarowicz, but the unknown relatives of Helen Sopolsky.

  I always imaginated that I would be one of the lucky few who received sp
iritual visitation from the building, one of the people who saw a ghost darting back and forth behind the mannequin. It didn’t happen. It still hasn’t.

  JUNE 1991

  Stacie Visits New York

  Stacie had telephoned the morning after cessation of U.S. hostilities in the Persian Gulf. Operation Desert Storm was over.

  Led by President George Herbert Walker Bush, this military escapade was directed against the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, who’d invaded the Arabian country of Kuwait.

  Yours truly was one of the very first Americans to hear about Hussein’s invasion. I’d been up all night, working on a problematic illustration, with the television droning a rerun of Quincy Jones hosting Saturday Night Live when the screen went solid blue, reading only the words SPECIAL NEWS BULLETIN.

  Coming in the middle of a comedy program known for its satire of contemporary affairs, I assumed that I was watching a very poor gag, but soon realized that this was legitimate product. No images, only the lone voice of whoever was hanging around the studio at 12:45 am, announcing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

  Stacie said that she had an empty month at the beginning of the summer and inquired whether she might not stay with us for a week. I said, why, yes, honey child, you may.

  Televisions and radios and newspapers crowed about American military superiority, but it hadn’t been a Good War where all the citizens buckled down under the weight of collective sacrifice. It wasn’t even a Vietnam, with the American poor and dispossessed mangled by freedom fighters. The war was a video game in real time on a global scale, in which we unleashed billions of dollars of weaponry on a bunch of ill-educated Arabs.

  These battles were massively unpopular around our neighborhood. Gutter punks and hippies ran in the streets, arms interlocked, shouting, “No blood for oil!” Other protests occurred, simultaneously, spontaneously. In New York, in the Bay Area, in cities across the country.