Waterfront Journals

by David Wojnarowicz

  … last night was the first time I ever saw a guy and a girl fuck … I was in the Comet Hotel over on Forty-fifth Street and this guy brought me up there and asked special for room number seven … he must’ve known what the room was like cause after we got in there he had me take off my clothes and then he pulled up a chair to the door that separates our room from the next room. It’s like a double room for families but they keep the door locked when only one room’s being rented. So there’s this big crack in the door and when the guy shut out the lights you could look into the next room without being noticed. So he had me wait till someone rented out the next room and then he had me watch what was goin on while he went down on me … it was crazy … this prostitute I remember from in front of the Port Authority walked in with this Spanish guy and they threw off their clothes and the guy hops on the bed and this girl jumped on top of him and the two of them went at it, changin positions every couple of seconds until he shot, then she got up and put her leg up on the bed and took a wipe at herself with a towel and they got dressed again. The whole thing took two minutes and when she turned around to get into her dress I could see this huge area of her chest and stomach all scarred up … fresh scars with stitches in em … I almost puked … the guy I was with gave me a lot to make up for it but it flipped me out … it made me feel really funny watchin them …

  Young Runner Hanging Out by the River

  THE BRONX

  I know this guy who deals amyl nitrite. A friend of his, this chemist, makes it pure, not like that shit they sell over at candy stores, so this guy I know sells it for him. Last night we were out running along the river when he says: Look I gotta stop by some guy’s house to drop off some amyl ya wanna come? So I said: Yeah so we took a run over to this house over in the middle of the neighborhood, this old place built around the 1800s. We ring the bell and this heavyset priest opens the door. He’s wearing these thick glasses and he’s got a funny look on his face like maybe I shouldn’t be there. Then he invites us in and starts apologizing for this, mess in the hallway. It was a huge load of Louis the XIV antiques obviously worth a shitload of money. So we go down the front hall and this ratty little dog jumps out at us. It was like a poodle but fat as a watermelon. It started shrieking and gurgling and running around in circles and the priest takes us into this living room filled with tons of porcelain and crystal and brass and this little dog follows us in jumping into the air doing little pirouettes and licking us all over our bare legs and fingers … it was disgusting … and we’re sitting there and my friend and this priest are shooting the breeze when this cellar door opens and this other priest comes up with another dog. This dog was about as big as me and fuckin ugly and when it walked over to me and stared at me for a few minutes without moving I felt obliged to give it a pat cause the two priests were watching me. Then this one priest says: Oh please please don’t pet the dog she’s really quite old and paranoid. She may bite. Man, what a fuckin relief. So my friend gives these two priests a couple of bottles of amyl and they start talking about their drug experiences. The priest with the glasses turns to me and says: Now I hope this doesn’t shock you. I said: Oh no, and he goes on about how he tried this THC that a student gave him and it was: Ab-so-lute-ly marvelous and how he copped twenty tabs of it cause: It has all the effects of marijuana without the fuss and mess. It was like a fuckin commercial. The other priest didn’t say anything but: Um ah hum. And this heavy guy kept talking about doing acid and how he was worried he’d have a flashback while he was working. Then he got into talking about guys he’s been to bed with, how this guy named Stone from Coney Island had a big cock and how this other guy from the Village had a bigger cock and how this guy he met on vacation in Puerto Rico knew how to fuck best of all and how he had thoughts about this student who was hung like an ox … I don’t know man … it just sounded so fuckin lonesome …

  Young Woman in Coffee Shop on the Lower East Side

  NEW YORK CITY

  Sometimes when I’m walking through the streets I want my fingernails to grow long and hard so I can make scratches in the concrete or make grooves in the sidewalk or scratch windows or by concentrating real hard make all the windows shatter and rain down on the street or make cigarette smoke go back into cigarettes like a film running backwards or make the streets crack open like earthquakes like huge crevices split open in the surface of the asphalt. Sometimes I think by staring hard enough I can make the sky turn into a storm, make dark clouds suddenly twist around and send rain and lightning over the rooftops. Sometimes if I’m feeling frustrated and men hassle me on the street I wish I could raise my hand and suddenly dimes would be welded on their eyeballs so they couldn’t see where they were going. And when guys on the street make kiss noises at me I wish I could make their dicks wither and drop off.

  Sometime I’d like to make a film of a woman murdering someone in which she stabs the person butchers and dismembers him rips his stomach open and at the end of this she sits down in the midst of all this, her clothes and hands and face all covered in blood and she starts crying …

  Guy in Car on Wall Street at Midnight

  NEW YORK CITY

  I’ll never go to Texas again swear to ya, I won’t ever go there again. Last time I was there see, I met this guy in a bar in Arizona where I was growin up and he invited me to visit him in Dallas. I was young and didn’t let my parents know I was goin. I just packed a small overnight bag with some clothes and I took a flight there and met up with this guy and it was during the day so he took me for a walk on the grounds of this psychiatric hospital that he worked in and he said: Not only do I work here but I once lived here … I was a patient, and I remember laughing nervously and saying: Oh yeah, therapy does anyone a world of good. You probably feel better now. And then we went to his apartment sitting in his bedroom and he’s gettin depressed and starts talking about killing himself and says it’ll be easy to take me with him and he says he’s got this gun in the car and I’m thinking oh my god my parents don’t even know I’m here and if he kills himself the police will come and what would my parents say when they found out and then he says I don’t need to go down to the car I got knives in the kitchen and he rushes in and pulls open a drawer and I followed right behind him and he pulls out this fuckin meat cleaver and I’m wrestling with him over the meat cleaver and this was a big guy and I was pretty young and I wrestle the cleaver out of his hand after banging all around the kitchen and I pull open the door of the apartment and throw the thing as far as I could but he turns around and runs back into the kitchen and I start running like hell and knock over the television set and a table and some chairs and there’s this guy sleeping on the couch some next-door neighbor had asked if a guest who was visiting him could sleep on this guy’s couch and I ran through the room and threw open the door and started screaming like hell and he woke up and I was screaming at him telling him what was happening and he was sitting there like: Uh. He couldn’t believe it and suddenly the guy comes out of the kitchen. He just snapped out of it and he was saying: Alright, alright. Be calm I’m okay now. And I grabbed my bag and took the next flight back …

  Boy in Coffee Shop on Third Avenue

  NEW YORK CITY

  I used to hustle over in the Square but I don’t no more … too many creeps wackos loonies. I hustled just about every night runnin tricks for anything between ten and twenty-five bucks. I’d save a lot of it up for the weekend when a friend of mine, this guy who lived out in Queens who I met in summer camp, we’d hang out together and do crazy stuff. I’d save my money and that way we’d have a lot to blow when we got together. I mean he was into hustlin too but rather than waste all weekend gettin up the bucks for a good time I’d hustle during the week and give him half when he came over. The last time I hustled the Square I had about fifty bucks in my shoe … it’d been a fucked up night and I was trying to get twenty more and then I was gonna call it quits. This was on a Friday night and my friend was gonna come over the next morning. So it’s about 10:30
and I ain’t found no one for about two hours, heat must have been on, I don’t know, so anyway I’m standin lookin in this sporting goods store window and I see this guy about thirty years old checkin me out from the corner of his eye. I’d seen him around every now and then, not too often but I’d seen him around so we got to talkin and I told him that I wanted twenty bucks and he said yeah okay and we decided to go down to Forty-first Street around Tenth or Eleventh Avenue so we could save him the money for a room. That’s where they park some city buses that they ain’t usin … so we get down there and on the way down we pass the train lines and he says: Let’s squeeze through the fence and do it in there. So I followed him in and he tells me to go down on him. Here we are standin on this two-foot ledge about thirty feet above the tracks and rocks and I go down on him but he can’t seem to get it up. A couple of cars come down and their headlights almost picked us out so he says: Fuck this, let’s go over to the buses. So we go behind this long line of buses and he tells me to go down on him again and as I’m doin this he still doesn’t get a hard-on and I start wondering if something’s wrong when all of a sudden I hear this voice come from him … it was real strange like he was crazy … he says: Hey kid get up slow now. I’m a vice cop and you’re under arrest. I stood up and almost passed out. I started cryin and he goes: Okay give me all your money, all of it. I tell him I only have about seventy cents, like I don’t tell him about the fifty in my shoe and he says: Look if I gotta search ya and I find any more than this I’m gonna kill ya. So I said: Hey man this is all I got. That’s why I was out there hustlin tonight. So then he says: Oh yeah? What about in your shoes, got any money in there? I say no and he says: Well take them off then. So I reached for the shoe that didn’t have the money in it and just as I got it untied he says: Forget it. Then he says: Ya know you can go to reform school for this. I can take you in and call your parents and bring you through family court. I just kept shakin and then he says: Drop your pants and turn around. I did it and he grabbed me and tried to shove his cock up my ass. It hurt really bad so I kept pullin away and finally he reached in his jacket and pulled out this big knife … that’s when I knew the fuckin guy wasn’t a cop … so I stopped strugglin and he came quick and then told me to pull up my pants. When I did he grabbed me by the shoulder and started walkin me towards the river. I was shittin bricks at this point cause I knew if he planned to let me go he would’ve by now cause there was nobody around but he had other plans and we walked down to Eleventh and then towards Twelfth and this guy didn’t say nothin the whole way just starin straight ahead with his hand on my shoulder. Then everything happened so fast. This city bus pulled up out of nowhere about forty yards away and stopped at the curb. I could see it was empty except for the driver who was sittin there writin in his pad. So I turned real quick and gave this guy a shove and ran like hell towards the bus screamin at the top of my lungs. The guy chased me a couple of yards then turned and ran in the other direction. I stopped and turned around and screamed: You ain’t no fuckin cop, ya bastard! and started runnin again only past the bus. The driver was sittin there with his mouth open wonderin what the fuck was goin on. I circled the block and ran up Fortieth Street towards Eighth Avenue and just as I turned the corner of Ninth Avenue I almost ran smack into the fuckin phony cop. He didn’t see me but he was comin my way at a fast walk and I dove down between two parked cars and let him pass before I got up and continued runnin uptown. That whole thing left me with a weird feelin … I’ve only been close to death two times in my life and each time it left me feelin kinda weak … like not scared or crazy or anything … it’s just that ya get this feeling like: Man, it’s that easy, it’s like you can die that fast or simple or whatever and you don’t feel no wiser or you don’t feel like you got a new start on living … it just amazes you that your time can come up just like that before you can even decide to go straight and clean or change your fuckin socks or say good-bye to your friends … like after I got away I sat down on a street corner near my house and waited for the fuckin tears to come but all I could do was shake my head and decide I’d never go down to that Square again …

  Young Boy in Bus Station Coffee Shop

  DENVER

  Yeah … I almost got killed when I was going cross country … but I guess everybody comes close to death at least once if they make that kind of distance. I was in Las Vegas … man Las Vegas was beautiful … well I was hanging out at this apartment with two roommates. We were all working at different hours. One of the roommates owned a motorcycle and one day when he was at work my other roommate turned to me and said: Hey let’s take a ride on the motorcycle. He didn’t have a license or nothing but I said: Okay and we split going around the roads in and out of town and all of a sudden we passed this fuckin cop car. We kept going and this cop car circles around and starts following us. We turned down one street and then another and the fuckin cop was still following us. Finally he puts on his flashing lights and gave a few blasts at his siren so we pulled over to the side of the road down at the bottom of a hill near a fork. The cop pulls to the side and starts getting out of the car and right across the road is this path that cuts through a forest to another highway so my roommate driving the motorcycle waits till the cop is a few yards away and then guns the fuckin bike and cuts across the road onto the path. The cop made this big scramble to get back to his car and he goes blowing out in the dust to chase us. We were heading through to the other highway and we made it and started heading further away from town. The cop car was coming up behind us pretty fast with the siren screaming he was weaving in and out of traffic and so were we. We finally cut to the side of the road to get past all the slow cars and the cop saw what was happening and did the same. Now we’re really going fast as hell and getting further and further away from town … we kept cutting down side roads and finally we turned down this one street and it was a dead end … there was nothing in front of us but the whole goddamn desert so we said: Oh shit! and we hear the cop car racing down behind us. We had been traveling up to eighty miles per hour with this cop behind us. So my friend guns the motor again and we cut out into the desert. We were going about twenty-five miles per hour brrooommmm up and down these slopes and dunes and hills with this fucking cop still behind us and we got pretty far out but then we went up the side of this slope and it turned out to be a small cliff on the other side and the bike dropped off and we went through the air and slammed into the sand at the bottom. I had the wind knocked out of me and I could hear the cop coming so I stood up and turned around with my hands in the air waiting for him to come over the rise and get me. I figured there was nowhere else we could go because the bike was smashed up from the fall and this cop comes running over the slope towards me and he drops to his knees in a crouching position and aims his gun and shouts: Halt you sonuvabitch! Halt! and I turn around and there’s my roommate running commando style across the fuckin desert dodging back and forth. I couldn’t fuckin believe it. So the cop handcuffs me and I’m lying there on my side in the sand and he radios for reinforcements. About twenty minutes later two squad cars show up and these big beefy bastards pull out a bunch of dogs. They were out there about two hours sniffing around but they never got the guy. I don’t know how the hell he got away. So they took me back to town and threw me in jail. I was in there for three days under the charge of grand larceny resisting arrest and some other shit … but let me tell you it was alright in that jail … I just slept and ate … I mean I would rather have not been there but the guys in the cell block were right guys. We would write these notes on small pieces of paper and shove them through the slots in the doors and wiggle them around to try and get the guard’s attention in the early morning when they walked through the cell block. You know, notes like: HEY I’M INNOCENT or PLEASE CALL THIS NUMBER FOR ME. After the day they finally let me make a phone call they took me into this empty room with bars over everything and they got this fuckin ugly cop leaning back in a chair against the wall smoking a pipe and a radio was playing. I ca
lled my other roommate and he came down to convince them that the bike was his and that I didn’t steal it. The cops tried to get me to say who it was who was driving the bike but I kept telling them that I didn’t know, that I knew he knew my roommate but that I had never seen him before in my life. Two days later I was taken to court and they let me off …