I dive in the water and swim for the longest while beneath its surface slow and quiet. I’m aquatic, surrounded by silence, everything gray beneath my eyelids, feeling like I’m aware for the first time of my arms and hands and kicking legs and what they all mean. I lay sideways on the water’s surface seeing pale bodies of strangers moving waist high on the shoreline far away.
In the shallows of the lake I walk on my hands, digging into the sand. Further out it’s silt so soft and deep you know it’s black and rich; my feet sink up to the ankles. It’s a texture that’s like the inside of a body when your fingers go wandering. I pulled smooth objects to the surface, some kind of freshwater mussels. He’s doubtful when I tell him so I toss one to him and he’s amazed. Later he holds it against the top of a wooden fencepost and slams it with a rock cracking the shell to bits, which he pulls apart revealing tan flesh. I pick up my little camera off the backseat and take his picture. He gets embarrassed: You just take a picture of me? Yeah, I said. Just of you talking. (Not of your beautiful chest which I’d love to spit on and rub my dick over.) The car radio is on and the announcer says: The worst riots in England in memory; worst civilian damage since World War II.
Later we drive the kid back home, up the small darkening road of the hillside into the blue shadows of evening. The house is softly illuminated from behind by a back porch light. The kid gets agitated: Uh oh … my mother’s probably home … uh … just let me off here and if ya can turn around in someone else’s drive … I didn’t leave that light on … she’s probably home. We say good night and he whispers: Joe … call you later in the week. He turns and runs across the lawn disappearing into the shadows of the porch, screen door squeaking and the bowwow of a dog.
His brother has buddies hanging out in their apartment; they might spend the night since it’s heading towards the weekend. He wants sex with me really bad all of a sudden. He’s trying to get a motel room so we’re on the interstate driving miles and miles. Finally he spots a Holiday Inn. I wait in the car as he goes inside to register. I’m sitting there for a long time feeling this melancholy circle around me. Couldn’t tell exactly what it was, part of it I guess was being outside New York City in a slow place with air and grass and bodies of water to lie down in. Some of it was the growing tension leaving soon almost broke and no place to live. Death was a smudge in the distance. I don’t know what exactly I mean by that but lying down inside this cradle of arms in my head was sometimes all I wanted. Sometimes I wonder what planet I got dropped off from; what foreign belly did I get birthed from. This shit is painful, it’s like being on a raft way out in the middle of a sea completely alone. I wave my hands in front of me, I know I’m not invisible, why are my thoughts so fucking loud? I’m lost in a world that’s left all its mythologies behind in the onward crush of wars and civilization, my body traveling independent of brushes with life and death, no longer knowing what either means anymore. I’m so tired of feeling weary and alien, even my dreams look stupid to me. They belong to another world, another century, maybe another gender that fits the codes of all this shit. I don’t know.
He comes back visibly upset, swings into the car through the driver’s open window, slumps back: Shit. How could I be so fucking stupid? The clerk asked me if I lived nearby and I told him where and he goes: We have a policy not to rent to nobody who lives within a thirty-mile radius of here.
He was upset. I put my hand on his leg and said: Look, don’t let the asshole get you down. So what? Let’s look for another place or else forget it and go for a ride. (I really wanted to try to fuck him.) We drove onto the highway again and rode for a while in silence. He pulled into a Ramada Inn. He got a room. Everything was calm again. He took a six-pack of beer from the trunk along with a carton of photographs and albums from his days at sea. It was a standard motel room with double beds and cheap thick white curtains, a sink with glasses wrapped in wax paper and a color television with air conditioner humming behind it.
We’re sitting on one of the beds, our shirts off, shoes and socks lying scattered across the floor, our legs resting together and stray hands smoothing down each other’s sides and chests. We’re looking at his notebooks filled with Kodak pictures of faraway places and naval scenes of boy sailors passing the equator. Mop wigs and overloaded halter tops and string skirts and underwear of different colors. Some of the photos look like a drunken fashion show with sturdy-legged guys with balloons or cloth tits beneath their T-shirts, sort of like a hula nightmare but more sexy. In other pictures they’re dressed like canines, on all fours with sheets of paper and cardboard curved and strung around their faces with Magic Marker lines drawn like grinning dogs. One Filipino guy has a white T-shirt with a pirate’s skull drawn on his chest. Another guy is dressed like a hound dog bitch with eight fat papier-mache tits dragging on the deck. There were other pictures of him with all his friends, bare-chested waist high in a foreign sea with delicate pink and white flowered leis around their necks. I put my hand casually on his butt and he jerks away. Anyone ever put their hands on your ass? I ask. He makes a disgusted noise: That’s fucking gross; I’d never put my dick in somebody’s ass and I’d never let somebody try that with me … makes me sick to think about it. Same way I’d never be in a relationship with a guy, maybe a girl but never a guy … it just ain’t … uh … normal … it just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t mind playing around here or there but not a relationship … No way.
Sometimes I wish I could blow myself up. Wrap a belt of dynamite around my fucking waist and walk into a cathedral or the Oval Office or the home of my mother and father. I’m in the last row of the bus, the seven other passengers are clustered like flies around the driver in the front. I can see his cute fuckable face in the rearview mirror. I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I’m looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don’t know where I’m going; I decided I’m not crazy or alien. It’s just that I’m more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests of India. A wolf child. And they’ve dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles. They’re trying to give me a damp mattress to sleep on in a dark corner when all I really want is the rude perfume of some guy’s furry underarms and crotch to lean into. I’ll make guttural sounds and stop eating and drinking and I’ll be dead within the year. My eyes have always been advertisements for an early death.
About the Author
David Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1954, and first gained notice in New York’s East Village art scene in the 1970s. He rose to fame for his exceptional range, intelligence, and passion, and by the 1980s had become one of the most provocative artists of his generation. In the years before his death in 1992 from AIDS-related complications, he worked tirelessly as an AIDS activist and anticensorship advocate.
In 1985, Wojnarowicz brought his fight for freedom of expression to the case of David Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association, in which Donald E. Wildmon claimed that Wojnarowicz’s work was pornographic and undermined family values. Wojnarowicz won and was awarded a symbolic dollar. He was thrust back into the spotlight in 2010, at the center of a censorship battle over the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. In 2012, Cynthia Carr published the critically acclaimed biography Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1996 by the Estate of David Wojnarowicz
Introduction Copyright © 1996 by Tony Kushner
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
Cover image © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; Courtesy Pace/MacGill, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
ISBN: 978-1-4804-8957-8
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