In the Shadow of the American Dream (26 page)

Later there is an odd moment on the top of a staircase in a building when I've just gotten a tattoo on my chest of burning buildings and strange dinosaur monsters thrashing around one looking vaguely like an eagle but a very expressionistic tattoo and I look down holding my arms around my belly and seeing it upside down then in a mirror and it looks okay. I've let the tattoo guy go to town with his own vision, it ain't exactly mine. In that odd moment I suddenly realize: This is permanent and there forever and always and never to be removed unless I can dig up the hundreds of dollars to remove it by laser and with the size and scope of this one that would cost prolly about 40,000 bucks. And in that moment of thinking Why the fuck did I get this thing put on my chest—I became aware of the two levels of sight I have always moved on in my life: the primary one neglects all thought of future or past and I move in an excited state through events and choices of movements. The secondary sight usually involves regret, seeing the primary sight as impulsive, stupid and with reverberations of trouble, never realizing implications or consequences until the act is done. Somewhere in here comes the fear of rejection and punishment. Will they allow me to the moon if they realize who I am completely?

February 1984

I was meant to be a thief-—growing up I traveled some of those roads for a ways and then backtracked and relearned my possibilities of functioning in a less horrendous way among my peers and neighbors. But the process of self-education lost contact with societal education and now years later I realize I am stranded as if on a barely drifting boat caught in the fog of a body of water in between two lands whose distance I do not know. Drifting so that it's too late to return to old ways and too little knowledge of communication to go on to new ways. A traveler without a country without a base, the map long ago switched for a piece of paper whose language and charts I cannot understand.

November 1987

November 13, 1987

DREAM

I unlock a door of an apartment, it's a small studio with one partial wall separating the windowed room from the front door hallway. I'm inside without locking the door, wondering if I've locked it. I hear a sound of some person as I come in the door. I turn, it's night. I look toward a wall shielding the front door, no one there. I feel a slight shiver of fear. A bed nearby. This isn't my apartment. I've come through the night streets of a foreign city someplace and someone is allowing me to stay in this room/studio. Tom R.
*
lives downstairs directly below in an identical studio. Suddenly this guy comes around the wall and pushes me backwards onto the bed. I am pushing him with my arms but he's too strong and heavy. His silhouette is muscular, but he's entirely covered in small spots of Kaposi's cancer. He's wearing no shirt, he has an almost shaved head. He lowers himself onto me and opens his mouth in some sort of grin, his teeth are rotted and wet, saliva spilling from behind them. He leans close to my face to kiss me, first saying, You would have thought I was sexy and cute if you had seen me before I got ill. I'm upset but I give him a quick kiss so he won't think I'm rejecting him completely because he has AIDS. I feel sorry for him just briefly, but I push him off me and rush out the door into the hall and staircase. I get downstairs to Tom's apartment door and push the bell/buzzer wondering if it's loud and if it'll alert the guy upstairs as to where I am. A bell rings. I push it again and it no longer works. I'm frightened, start banging. Tom opens the door. Oh god, I tell him. You won't believe what just happened.

*
Tom Rauffenbart, David's lover since 1986, is the executor of the David Wojnarowicz estate.

Peter Hujar was diagnosed as suffering from Pneumocystis pneumonia and AIDS on January 3, 1987. He spent the following year undergoing medical treatments. On November 26, 1987, he died of complications accompanying AIDS. Three days later, he was buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County
.

1987 (or thereabouts)

Peter's death. On the third night after his death it began to sprinkle rain very light. I had met Kiki Smith at a memorial at St. Mark's Church for Keith Davis who died in July. His was the first Death I'd ever witnessed. In some odd way, witnessing his death prepared me a bit for Peter's, though I wasn't as emotionally connected to him as to Peter.

I realized Peter was many things to me, or I realize it now. Peter was a teacher of sorts for me, a brother, a father. It was an emotional and spiritual connection such as I never had with my family. Maybe with my sister [Pat], as far as some real and deep connection. I remember her reading a book behind a Jersey gas station—Lee's gas station, Lee, a handsome man with grease-covered hands and arms, and a cigarette machine where I bought Dad's Lucky Strikes for 35¢ a pack. She, reading to me and to my brother Steve to calm us. We had run away from one of Dad's beatings.

My connection to Peter in this time and space we call daily living … I can't form words these past few days. Sometimes I think I've been drained of emotional content, from weeping or from fear. Have I been holding off full acceptance of his dying by first holding a mane camera—that sweep of his bed, his open eye, his open mouth, that beautiful hand with a hint of gauze at the wrist, the color of it like marble, the full sense of it as flesh, the still camera portrait of his amazing feet, his head, his face, his eye, his folded hands. Now maybe I'm holding his death away through impulsive ritual, not any prescribed ritual but driving north on a gray day filled with random spots of rain on a dirty windshield, all those bird nests high in the winter trees, everything rich and wet and black and brown, the serious rich black of his photographs almost wet looking, kicking around the cemetery mud among huge lifeless tractors and the ravines they made strewn with boulders and wet earth talking to Mum first walking around trying to find him. So difficult. I started to laugh nervously—maybe I can't find you—and this erratic walking, pacing back and forth from his soil, the ground to the car, cigarettes lit, camera taken back for a picture of Neal's flowers. He loved flowers, months and months of illness and the house filled always with different flowers, some so big and wild they looked not like flowers but like sentient beings, something from lunar slopes or big pick-weed fields or cow hills all wild and scrubby. All erratic movements till I stopped myself, forced myself to contain my movements, walking backward and forward at the same time, realizing in that instant how rattled I was. I was talking to him. I get so amazingly self-conscious talking to him, a thousand thoughts at once, the eye hovering in space inches from the back of my head, myself seeing myself seeing him or the surface of him, of wet tossed earth, and further seeing his spirit, his curled body rising invisible above the ground, his eyes full and seeing him behind, me looking over my shoulder, watching me, looking at the fresh ground where he lies buried. I see white light, fix my eyes to the plowed earth and see a white powerful light like burning magnesium covering the soil, his body in a semicurled position surrounded by white light floating hovering maybe three feet from the ground. I try talking to him, wondering if he knows I'm there. He sees me, I know he sees me. He's in the wind in the air all around me. He covers fields like a fine mist, he's in his home in New York City, he's behind me, it's wet and cold but I like it, like the way it numbs my fingers, makes them white and red at the knuckles. Cars at the roadside and long valleys and ridges and everything torn up, uprooted, all the wet markings of the earth and the tractors, all these graves freshly developed and those giant wet-leaved bird nests like they've been dropped by hands into the crooks of tree limbs and leafless branches. I talk to him, so conscious of being alive and talking to my impressions of him, suspending all disbelief. I know he's there and I see him, sense him, in the hole down there under that earth's surface. I sense him without the covering of the pine box, the box no longer exists in my head. It's not till later that I realize I didn't see the box just huge wide earth and grass and fields and crowfoot trees and me, my shape in the wet air and clouds like gauze like gray overlapping in fog and I tell him I'm scared and confused and I'm crying and I tell him how much I love him and how much he is to me and I tell him everything in my head, all contradictions, all fear, all love, all alone, and how I don't want him to stay around, how I wish him love and safety, feelings of warmth and beauty outside language, that I hope he will be helped and make the connections he needs so much, make the connections so that his travel will be quick and sure and that he reaches all that none of us know but instinctively some of us sense is behind that event called death—I start crying. I wish I could just touch your head, put my hands on your head … I'm happy for him, I tell myself at times. I feel so sure of what he's experiencing that … that nun that rushed into the room flinging open the door with one knock and chattering away about now you/ he accepted the church or god or something in his final days and she's chattering nervously about some text, chattering some text at me about a man she did not know and all I could feel is helplessness. I think of this guy lying on the bed with outstretched arms, I think how he's so much further there than this woman and her text, he's more there than the spoken forms, the words of spirituality. I mean just the essence of death, the whole taboo structure in this culture, the whole mystery of it, the fears and joys of it, the flight it contains, this body of my friend on the bed, this body of my brother, my dad, my emotional link, this body I don't know, this pure and cutting air, all the thoughts and sensations this death produces in bystanders is more spirituality than any words we or I or she can manufacture. The meaninglessness of words these past few days … I'm standing there trying to talk to him, maybe to give him something in the form of words. If energy disperses and merges with everything around us can it immediately know my thoughts?… So I try to speak, to tell him something maybe helpful in case he's afraid or confused or needs a tool. I want to talk about light, move towards the light, move towards warmth, but the words tip out of my mouth and immediately I know there's no meaning to them, to have meaning they have to have necessity, but they haven't that, I know, he already knows all this. I know he's beyond it already. It's maybe me that needs reassurance. I open my mouth to form words to talk, all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, I need some sort of grace, and water flows from my head.

I step through the slight rain into the area before the doors of St. Mark's Church. I see candles on a table and figures moving about. I suddenly feel odd, fish out a cigarette, light it in the mist, walk to the shadows near the edge of the overhang, see people I know or don't know, silhouettes of them passing by through the bars. One waves at me as he enters the church. Finally after a second cigarette I walk into the church, someone touches me from behind, I turn and it's Kiki and the look on her face makes me start to cry again and we hold each other a long time. Later after the memorial I have this urge to go back to Peter's. It's late in the evening, Kiki and I have coffee nearby in a restaurant of stained glass, and it's the third day, the end of the third day, the papers Lynn Davis gave me say it's the time for the spirit to leave the body. Peter wanted not to be embalmed, but to be wrapped in cloth and put into a white or plain pine box and buried within twenty-four hours after a Catholic mass. He wanted to have time and no disturbance so his spirit could leave his body uninterfered with, the Tibetan papers said, three days of his spirit wandering, trying to communicate with people, the papers said not to do anything that would disturb the spirit, don't rush for his money or property. I made a simple altar or shrine on one of the large photograph tables near the side wall with an enormous beeswax candle, honeycomb we found in a drawer cabinet wrapped round and round.

I asked Kiki to come back with me and dance. I wanted to show Peter's spirit some joy, some celebration. Kiki said it was still sprinkling a bit. We turned on a few lights in his place; each time I come a little less of him is there. I spread his photos on the bed—all his childhood history, from a tiny one pressed into a stamped brass frame, almost indistinct, of him at seven or nine years old, I can't tell, and one of him at fifteen. I think he's in this rowboat set on the surface of a lake with beautiful summer leaves overhanging from the top of the photo and he is gesturing with his left hand whether to cover his laugh or to wave away the person holding the camera and now looking at the photograph I see it's a virtual cascade of leaves, pine or oak leaves, all of them tumbling around his shoulders, his other hand on the oar, and it's a canoe he sits in, naked but for his camper shorts and a laugh and the structure of his interior body pressing through. I first looked at this photo days ago, the day after he died, and thought, How could his mother not love this boy? As I spread some of his history across the surface of the bed, with the candle in the shrine burning, I put on the record Lynn found that we tried to use for his funeral mass—Tomaso Albinoni Adagio, G minor, and Kiki and I tried to waltz. I felt so extremely fraught, self-conscious, trying to follow her simple foot movements, one large step sideways, two small movements of feet, one large again, turn, swing large. Finally we shut all the lights off, started the record again, tried again, at times my whole body disappointingly shut down, all emotions shut down. I wanted to dance so freely but all this stuff of years circling over my shoulder … Finally Kiki let go of my hands and started whirling in the space, I did the same, dizzy from not eating all day, whirling and jumping and driving through the darkness, the window curtains open with the rain roaring through the street in huge sheets and veils across the downstairs theater lights, her body whirling through the room, her bare feet, my bare feet, never any sense of collision but sometimes dizziness exploring the place with music circling loud through the room, streetlamps burning and the rain and the rain and the rain and for a moment everything went loose in my head and I was beaming some kind of joy and I was happy for him happy that he could be seeing this naïve body starting to loosen this man and woman whirling in an invisible flutter of cloth and feet.