Waterfront Journals

by David Wojnarowicz

  In the ledge of that playground, with thousands of cars blindly swinging past, with the sense of my years circling around my forehead, this guy turned me around pressing himself bodily against me, his arms around my shoulders and neck, his hands flat against my chest, nuzzling my earlobe and neck with his warm breath, he entered me and breathed hard and rubbed his hands down my sides and said he wished it were summer so he could stay out all night and I knew he probably hadn’t slept indoors for at least a week. As we both came he fell back against the wall, his arms to the sides like he’d been crucified and was delirious in the last intoxicating moments of it like St. Sebastian pierced with the long reeds of arrows, silhouetted against a night full of clouds opening up, revealing stars and a moon. We felt like figures adrift, like falling comets in old comic-book adventure illustrations. I thought how science texts never reveal how far the body would go for a sense of unalterable chance and change, something outside the flow of regularity: streets, job routines, sleepless nights on solitary damp mattresses.

  I leaned towards him to see if he was alright. He thrust out a hand and pushed me backwards roughly. Piss, he murmured and a clear stream of it jetted out missing my shoe by inches. I watched as he slowly whizzed into the dim light, afterwards he buttoned up his pants and asked me which way the train station was. I led him up to the streets feeling dizzy, saw myself with him in the rough woods of that coastal dream I’d always had of losing myself from the general workings of the world: no Robinson Crusoe but some timeless place where the past was forgettable and there was just some guy with a tough stomach to lie against, and I could listen to his heartbeat sounding through his trembling skin. We passed an old woman sitting on her stoop talking to a cop on a side street. They jimmied open a door … and suddenly they were in. I marveled at the sound and pulled up my collar against the fresh blasts of winter wind.

  From the Diaries of a Wolf Boy

  I’m still a piece of meat like something in the Fourteenth Street markets swinging from stinking hooks in the blurry drag queen dusk. Maybe a hundred dollars to my name, no place to live, and I can’t hustle anymore. I’m trying to keep my body beyond the deathly fingers of my past but I’m fucked up bad never learned shit, how to create structures other than chaos. I’m attracted to chaos because of all the possibilities and I don’t have to choose any of them or die frozen inside one but right now all I know is that I am tired, bone and brain tired. I woke up in this guy’s bed in the middle of the night and realized not a whole lot had changed since I got off the streets. He was an alcoholic doctor I’d known on and off over a handful of years and he let me live with him for the last couple of weeks cooking me upper-class meals in return for me fucking him legs over my shoulders like a video stud. He could have gone on forever like this but the distinct sensation of being made of glass, of being completely invisible to him, was growing and curving like a cartoon wave. I feel so fucking dark I don’t even have the energy to throw myself off a building or bridge. Now he’s starting to come home slam-down drunk banging into walls moaning and crying falling down murmuring: Fuck me my lovely. I told him one night he needed some help and he responded by bringing home a hustler from West Street and I ended up sleeping on the living room floor.

  The doctor takes me on a week’s vacation in his station wagon up to the coast of Maine. No license but I’m driving the almost deserted interstate north. I haven’t slept for about two days and feel sort of drugged, the hypnotic lines of the dawn’s highway wavering like an unraveled hypnotist’s disk. It’s kind of beautiful the foliage on the shoulders still illuminated by the tungsten lamps blip blip blip. The doctor vaguely woke up and his hand drifted over the armrest between us and slid over my leg slowly back and forth till I got a hard-on. Then his sleepy fingers unbuttoned my trousers and he leaned over taking my dick in his mouth. There was a car way ahead of us and another way behind; beacons of headlights were circling the hills and the sky was turning still and black, night being pushed up through the sky over the car by a quiet surfacing day. My whole body stiffened with my hands on the wheel. I had a hard-on for thirty miles moving my hips up and down finally shooting into his mouth, surprised as a lone car overtook us and sped past causing me to realize I’d slowed down to fifteen miles per hour.

  He rented a motel room somewhere on the breezy oceanside. An oddly beautiful coastline but I knew this was temporary so I didn’t let myself buy into it. I went for a walk while he slept and climbed through the craggy rock postcard views among postcard families and vacationing heterosexuals, drifted away from the sand and up onto this mammoth asphalt parking lot bordering the motel. This guy, young and handsome in an indefinable way, with short brown hair, a pair of dark shorts that revealed muscular legs slightly browned from weather and sun, a ruddy color to his forehead and cheeks and nose, coasted up on a bicycle and stopped short a distance away checking me out. I was walking under this long canopied bench area so I sat on one of the empty seats, folded my arms over the back of the bench and laid my head on it staring at him sideways. He rolled a little closer and dismounted, standing next to his bike hands thrust deep into pockets for a while. He finally moved towards me one more time then tossed back the hair from over his eyes, a boyish gesture suggestive of a remote past, school days, something that still makes me weak in the knees. He said: Hey, hello. I straightened up and said: How’s it going? He gestured okay with his head and then said: Where do ya go for fun around here? I told him I just got into town and didn’t know nothing. I felt that blush in my chest as we talked stupid talk never quite revealing our queerness to each other but somehow wordlessly generating volumes of desire like some kind of sublanguage that makes you want to splash into it even with all its tensions. He continued loose conversation watching me closely for reactions to his coded words and then finally seemed to abandon it all and said: You want to get together later? We made a date for 11 P.M. at the same spot and I walked away wondering how to handle the doctor.

  The doctor started drinking after dinner and I encouraged him to go to bed. He finally fell asleep around 10:45 and I slipped from between the sheets, put on my clothes, and fished the room key out of his pocket, every movement noiseless until the barely audible click of the door. I walked to the bench area overlooking the ocean and stood around. The night was heavy, the water indiscernible in the darkness. The tide was way out so it was just this screen of grainy blackness that contained the rushing hollow sounds of waves crashing way out there. Every so often a lone car would swing to the lot, its headlights illuminating one patch of ocean in a field of circular light, and beyond that I could see the low caps of broken waves spreading in towards shore, lit as if by luminous microbes. I walked down to the sand into the darkness to see how far I could go before I touched water, leaving behind the cars turning round and round and the windows of the motel along the beach with rectangles of burning orange light and the flap of banners and flags as the staff hoisted them on poles for the holidays.

  I got close to the water’s edge when an old ghost of a man materialized with his open palms stretching out towards me. I heard a murmur: Want some action? I turned and walked to the opening of the bay along the coastline, climbing the boulders to the back end of the parking lot. Walking to the bench area two local toughs: Hey yo! came up fast behind me their arms dangling at their sides like whirligigs. Both were kind of sexy but dangerous. One guy with close-cropped hair and a red face said: Any women out here tonight? then they came up on me on both sides spinning their heads from looking for witnesses. I became as charming as possible: Cigarette? As they took one a car spun in the lot illuminating all of us and I took that moment to tip towards the headlights and lose myself among the parked cars. I circled back to the benches and the young guy I’d met earlier was sitting on the hood of his car. He told me to get in and we drove out into the town, parking behind a deserted bank and walking through the streets looking for a bar. He wanted to drink some beers. His name was Joe and he was in town for the naval reserves, a t
wo-week training with a few days off in between. There were no regular bars around just a couple of queer joints with heavy cover charges and pounding disco, so we ended up walking a couple miles down a dark road talking about ourselves and the distances we’d been. We turned back to his car. The gearheads were out in their pickup trucks whizzing around the curves of the small streets. One truck sped by a club we were approaching and white ugly distended faces blew out of the side windows: We hate queers! I turned to him: Let’s go somewhere. Okay? Yeah, he said: We really should. There’s got to be a place we can just sit down and have a drink and talk. I was wondering if I had this guy wrong; if that’s all he wanted was talking company. I was already drawn in by the movements of his chest and belly beneath his shirt, his arms and the outline of his thighs in his trousers. I turned to him in the darkness behind the bank and said: Well, what I really meant was that I want to lie down with you at some point. Tonight. In fact the sooner the better; I can’t stay out all night. He laughed: For sure for sure. We got into the car and I was feeling nervous. He startled me by reaching his arm out, encircling my neck and pulling my face over his. His mouth opened slow and he kissed me for a few seconds. He drew away leaving his hand curved around the nape of my neck and smiled, leaned back in for another kiss, and then drew away again. He patted me on the leg and turned the key in the ignition.

  He had this shitty piece of plastic that he’d fashioned into a tent strung between two trees in a forest of firs. It was some rarely used campground way up in the hills, no lights just dirt roads among the trees. The car twisted its way along illuminating a pitched tent or rusting trailer. He finally swung in between some trees and came to a stop snapping the headlights off. He left his door open a bit softly casting light on nearby trees. His tent billowed in the slight breeze.

  We stood in the dark kissing for a while, then he went to the back of the car and got an old sleeping bag out from the trunk and spread it under the tent. He closed the car door extinguishing the interior light and turned on a tiny flashlight, lying on the ground between us. We struggled to get our clothes off we were so blasted from a bowl of pot he produced as we drove up the hillside. We were trying to pull off our pants standing on one leg, tipping over and making crashing noises in the bushes. I was completely disoriented but he grabbed onto my arm pulling me into the opening of the tent his skin so warm. We couldn’t stop tasting each other’s mouths, changing back and forth in different positions, lying on top of each other, moving down and licking each other’s arms and bellies and chests. At some point I was hovering over him in a push-up position leaning down drawing my tongue over the wet curves of his armpits when an intense light swept over the tent. I felt like we were in the path of a searchlight. A lot of noise, shouts, and the slamming of car doors. I froze with my mouth on his chest and then the light disappeared.

  At about two in the morning he dropped me off outside the hotel and we exchanged addresses. I entered the room as quietly as I could and saw the doctor still passed out in the bed. I had that rude perfume of sex all over me and needed to take a shower. I passed through the darkened room into the bathroom and closed the door, stripping off my clothes and hitting the light switch. I was in front of an enormous mirror that reflected an image of my pale white body covered in dozens of thick red welts. Mosquitoes. Everywhere. I took a hot shower, soaped off, and finally crawled into bed without waking the doctor. The next morning the welts were gone. Everything was casual and we left the motel and drove up the coast.

  My life was falling apart. A hustler moved in and I spent a week’s worth of nights on the living room floor. I scavenged for leftovers in the refrigerator rather than sit for sullen meals at the dining table. I’d wake up early and leave for the day coming back only after the doctor and his boy were asleep. He left me a couple of angry letters taped to the refrigerator saying he didn’t like the ghost routine and that he thought I should give him his set of keys back. I’d been writing Joe for a while and asked if I could come up for a visit. He wrote back saying he had a four-day break coming up the next week. I called him long distance and he gave me instructions to some small town in Massachusetts and said he’d meet me at the bus station. I packed a small shopping bag and left without saying anything to the doctor. I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going I was just leaning into a drift and sway that I hoped would set me down gentle. I walked around the streets until five in the morning around the East Village and sat on a bench near St. Mark’s Church watching dawn coming up. A pale, depressed queen sat down next to me and eventually invited me to his place nearby. It was a filthy room in a tenement with lots of dirty bed sheets and clothes. I stayed there a week till I caught the bus to Ludlow.

  He met me at the station and drove to some queer bar on the outskirts of a city. We stood in the dark near a cigarette machine and hardly spoke, grinning at each other and sucking on cold bottles. Later he drove us back to his apartment complex where he shared a small place on the second floor with his brother. We went for a walk in the back fields and woods down a dirt road where a fat ’coon kept trying to beat the cars to get across. We followed rusting steel railroad tracks long ago abandoned, reddish brown and swallowed up by the dense undergrowth. We pushed through thick nets of trees and bushes catching our feet on vines past a house with a howling yard dog behind a storm fence, through some forest with a steep incline tumbling towards a river. Further on we came to tracks that continued on a trestle bridge which went over small rapids that merged into a vast smooth curve suddenly broken up on more rocks creating a whooshing spill towards the west. Watching the trees dipping down towards the banks we were forty or fifty feet up in the air tightroping these tracks with nothing but rotting steel stanchions holding us up. There were sounds of leftover fireworks somewhere in the distance, huge bullhead clouds, some rosy from the disappearing sun, others dark and bruise-colored drifting heavily overhead. We sat on a girder, the water rushed below giving us the sensation that we were moving at high speeds through the quiet and dying world.

  He pulled a little bowl of pot from his pants and lit up. I had a difficult time not staring at his arms and torso, he left his T-shirt back at his place. I was falling, like from the portal of a plane way up in the skies. He had the kind of sexy grace that you want to swim in, currents warm and breathing. In those years I fell in love easily: gestures of an arm, the simple line of a vein in the neck, the upturning of a jaw in dim light, the lines of a body beneath clothing, the clear light of the eyes when your faces almost touch. We talked about flying saucers, whether it’s some kind of psychic reality for those who claim abduction or whether it’s some kind of psychic schism that people have experienced. I was slowly leaning towards him and without any reason suddenly kissed his bare shoulder. He kind of wigged, pulled back in vague shock: Uh uh. Don’t ever do that. There’s people around here.

  Two days later at around midnight he stepped out of his bed and squatted next to where I lay on a sleeping bag on the floor of his room. He was wearing shorts and he pulled his dick out the leg part and bounced it against my lips. We hadn’t mentioned sex since I arrived. We got into something quiet and slow, came, and then he slid back into his bed and fell asleep.

  I was feeling dislocated, my money was going to run out fairly quick from fast-food meals and occasional beers. The feeling of dislocation was really about dreaming too much in this guy’s movements. There was nothing ahead of me but a return to the streets of New York unless there’s something called love but it probably doesn’t exist except in the mythologies we’re fed in the media or by lying to ourselves over time. It’s not only the urge to climb inside someone’s skin and fuse in the rivers of their blood; it’s wanting to leave the face of the planet, our bodies rolling against each other in the cool spacious sky. But this guy couldn’t verbalize anything that touched his sexuality; he had a look of pain when I strayed near words so I slid back into my solitary drift and waited till his hands began to move towards me.

  We were
going to go swimming so he lent me a pair of cutoffs which I put on, slightly self-conscious about my hospital-white legs. His legs were darker, sturdier, that’s what I recall about first meeting him on the windswept coast, late afternoon beneath the flapping canvas awnings and the lines of his muscular thighs and calves. We were in his two-door car stopping outside of town to pick up a six-pack and then onto the interstate. We went many miles further, finally swinging onto this small asphalt road, then onto an even smaller road that climbed up through trees and into hillsides. He was picking up some kid who wanted to come with us. (Telephone call: Is your mother home? Well, then, meet us on the rock near the road.) (Hanging up the phone: He’s really worried about his mom or sister seeing him going out with other guys.) We pulled onto this fucked-up asphalt strip that rolls vertically up another hillside, made a curve and there’s this young kid maybe seventeen sitting on a large white boulder lodged in the green lawn. He looked vaguely Indian, and he also had muscular legs, a baby-hair mustache almost transparent on his lip. (Later that evening: Yeah I met him outside a bar in Springfield. They carded him and he had to stay outside. We camped out in his backyard a couple times … Yeah I slept with him once. The first night I met him we talked for a long long time. He didn’t have a ride home so we got in my car, ran out of gas the needle on empty just outside his home. His mother works in a hospital, father dead. We spent the night in his house no one home.)

  Down by the lake right off the road in a dirt patch we parked with the windows open and a slight breeze easing through. The kid was rolling a meticulous joint on a cardboard cover of a shoe box; gypsy moths, hundreds of them, beat soundlessly against the trunks of trees, some flying over into the windshield of the car, climbing inside, around the dashboard, on our legs, leaving behind a blond powder. Someone’s ugly poodle, hairless, almost gray skin, was tied to a tree shivering in the tall grass. We could hear sounds of splashing and ripple currents drifting nearby. I was smoked up to the point of getting stupid. I got out of the car and drifted to the water’s edge. I walked ahead of them into the lake with my eyes focused on the horizon like a happy zombie, steady, smoothly upright, I moved forward into the dreamy nothingness with the waters riding up around my waist and further up around my chest, shocking my armpits, I was far from shore without my glasses; everything took on that indistinct look like water cascading over a window, just wobbly form and light and color. Without my glasses color seems to fade because there are no true lines to contain it, it mixes with things and rides outside its surfaces, no density to anything in the world but what I feel beneath my feet.