Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Friends who knew David later in his life spoke of how grouchy and even mean he would get when he was hungry. He began his stay at Hurricane Island by giving up his last cigarette. Already he hated the other boys in his “watch” (a group of twelve) who wouldn’t let him smoke it. But the main issue was food. He commented, usually negatively, on each meal. (“I am about to have hot cocoa in a pan. What a way to live.”) About twelve days into his stay, he had to spend three days alone on an island, living off the land. This taught him how much he’d taken for granted. His first day there, he ate clams and limpets—and longed for Blimpie’s. The next day, he gathered cattails and glasswort to eat. He got dizzy. He threw up. He developed cramps. He couldn’t sleep. He thought of the sandwiches available at his local undistinguished deli. He vomited again. He felt like crying. If it was this bad after a couple of days, he wrote, what must the starving children in India be going through? He dreamed of eating licorice. He gathered and ate wild raspberries. He felt nauseated. At the airport, there would be doughnuts and coffee. And a candy stand. He’d buy a Milky Way.

  He had some good moments on the island—when he found snakes. So beautiful. He captured one he wanted to take home, but it escaped, and some kid in another watch caught it. He hoped the snake would get back to him “alive without any broken ribs.” But he didn’t mention it again. “Thank Swami” he wrote at moments of blessed relief.

  In this unadulterated glimpse into the mind of teenage David, he does not seem alienated from his family. He can’t wait to see them, though he notes, “Things don’t seem to be going right at home between Mom and Steve.” (Steven explained that one summer he didn’t want to go to St. Vincent’s summer camp. “I wound up at Dolores’s place,” he said. “I don’t recall what went on, but I didn’t like it. I might have been there for several weeks.”) David was sure his mother would let him come home early, when the camp called to ask her permission. He had thought of the excuse he needed to get out. He had to have time before school started “to adjust to the city.” Clearly, he intended to take another swing at those missing credits. He mentions school more than once in this journal.

  He got back to the city in September, just a few days short of his seventeenth birthday. But he didn’t go back to school. It would be another two years before he got his diploma.

  David said he did not recall his last day at home with his mother, or why he left. “Something happened. It may have been her who just said, ‘Don’t ever come back.’ I can’t remember.”

  That seems so unlikely. But I can only speculate that David recalled his ejection from the apartment as vividly as Steven and Pat remembered theirs. David never told anyone—at least anyone still living—how he ended up on the street soon after turning seventeen. Until the end of his life, a part of David wanted to protect his mother. He saw his father as a monster, so it was hard to even consider forgiving Ed. But David’s feelings about Dolores were more complicated. He’d cast her as a tragic figure and didn’t want to cause her pain. Despite the rage he would finally allow himself to feel. Despite everything.

  David placed his move to the streets in 1970, a year before it actually happened. Usually he was off by two or three years. All the siblings tended to move events back in time. For example, Steven wrote a piece for his local paper about Thanksgiving with Raymond at the Salvation Army, stating that it happened when he was twelve. In fact, he’d been fifteen. Pat was certain that she’d been thrown out of the apartment when she was seventeen, if not sixteen and a half, when in fact she’d been eighteen. Neither one of them was trying to dissemble. Both made a real effort to help me pin down actual dates. Unlike Steven and Pat, David consciously created a persona or mask, but I think all the siblings shared some internal sense that they were too young to be experiencing these things. Misremembering is one way to protect oneself from a violating reality.

  If David didn’t remember how he ended up on the street, he did remember sexy encounters with sailors and sleeping in doorways and jumping naked from an ex-con’s apartment during a raid. He remembered being drugged, raped, and beaten. But there’s no chronology to these events. David was probably homeless from sometime in autumn 1971, after Outward Bound, until sometime in 1973. He did two stints in a halfway house, possibly living there for as long as a year.

  For a while, he stayed at the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) Firehouse on Wooster Street in SoHo, then a gloomy neighborhood, deserted after dark. A night watchman took pity on him and let him crash at the Firehouse for months. In exchange, David had to sell Lambda pins at meetings. He’d pocket half the money. Though he was hustling, he still did not identify as gay and wasn’t politically involved. He just listened to the factions arguing. He particularly remembered the night German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim screened It’s Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse but the Situation in Which He Lives. The film’s critique of superficial gay sexual behavior and bourgeois striving outraged most of the GAA audience. David had been asleep upstairs and woke to find this foreigner facing an audience out for his blood. Years later, David would make a film with von Praunheim himself (Silence = Death, 1990), but as a teenager, he found the director intimidating. And sexy. After the screening, David followed him through the streets but never worked up the nerve to speak to him. The screening occurred sometime in 1972. An arson fire destroyed the Firehouse in 1974.

  In Times Square, David met a man who was working as a counselor at a halfway house and passing bad checks to supplement his income. David couldn’t remember the man’s name. “He always liked to have sex with me and give me a little money.” The guy had an apartment near Forty-fifth and Eighth Avenue and he invited David to move in. David was going through another phase of shoplifting lizards, snakes, and toads from pet stores and Woolworth’s. Once he moved in with the man, he started building terrariums for the animals out of old chests of drawers and other detritus found on the street. The man put up with it for a few months, and then managed to make a case with his colleagues at the halfway house for admitting David as a potential jail risk. So David entered a halfway house on the West Side of Manhattan that had been set up for kids coming out of jail. “They gave me a room. It was great. I fattened up.”

  During the “street” years, the one family member David stayed in touch with was Pat, though their contact was limited. Occasionally he called her, and they’d meet in Chinatown for a meal or Pat would treat him to a movie. At first, she assumed he was living with Dolores. He never told her otherwise. “Never. He knows I would have freaked out,” she said. But at some point, Pat did become aware that David was living in a halfway house.

  He was probably there when Pat married Bob Fitzgerald in September 1972, at a Catholic church on Manhattan’s Fourteenth Street. David served as an usher. As a wedding gift, he created nine colored-pencil drawings in the style of Edward Gorey, labeled “The Undiscovered Works of an Antiquated Photographer by David Voyna 1972.” Pat had invited her mother—the first contact they’d had since the trip to Florida. Not only that, but Pat chose to get ready at the Hell’s Kitchen apartment. There she argued with Dolores, who insisted on wearing a white dress. (Traditionally, of course, only the bride wears white.) Meanwhile, back at the church, the time for the wedding came and went, with no sign of Pat, and the organist was threatening to leave; she’d been hired just for an hour and had other appointments. Finally Pat arrived, with Dolores, an hour late. Both were in white. So as the mother of the bride marched down the aisle on David’s arm, the organist saw a white dress and launched into “Here Comes the Bride” while everyone in the church stood up. Dolores had stolen Pat’s moment.

  The people running the halfway house wanted David to find work. They gave him some decent clothes to wear, and he went out with good intentions, soft-spoken. He remembered getting rejected from loading dock jobs, janitorial jobs. He’d walk in for an interview and see shock on the foreman’s face. He realized that he carried some peculiar energy from the street. He embodied rejection now. “People who
spend a certain amount of time on the streets—something happens. There’s no way they can just drop what that feels like.” David never did find a job during that first stint at the halfway house, but he did meet Willy.

  David’s descriptions of Willy present him as unpredictable, dangerous, a risk taker, a criminal. Willy had done time for trying to kill his foster parents. They’d go on vacation and lock him in the attic with a box of cereal and jugs of water. So he dumped roach poison in their soup. At least, that was Willy’s story. David never mentioned Willy’s last name, but talked and wrote about him for years afterward. In one story dating from the mid-seventies, he described meeting him in the dining hall at the residence. Willy walked in with a boom box he’d rigged up with Christmas lights that would brighten or dim according to the music’s volume. David sat there drawing obese birdlike creatures. David and Willy became inseparable, and they moved out of the halfway house together. David wrote that he was kicked out “for refusing to get a job,” but he said in the same piece that a counselor told him he could return if he came back without Willy, who was thought to be a bad influence. In one story, David said he’d been at the halfway house for a few months; in another, he said he’d been there for a year.

  Pat and Bob Fitzgerald were living by then in Forest Hills, Queens. They had an extra room, and Pat offered it to David. He chose not to take it, but Pat always regarded it as “David’s room” and sometimes he’d spend the night. For one thing, Pat was the only person he trusted to cut his hair, so he came whenever he needed a trim. She remembered him talking about a friend he’d made, and how he’d come to hate the halfway house. So she actually found an apartment for him to rent with this friend, probably Willy. Pat could not remember the friend’s name or the apartment’s location, except that it was in western Queens close to Manhattan. Pat paid the security deposit and the first month’s rent and told David that he and his friend would have to pay from then on. They’d have to get jobs. She was certain that they moved in for a while but concluded, “I should have known he was too immature.”

  One day David’s friend called Pat to say that David was in the hospital. This must have occurred during his brief interlude in Queens, because he’d entered a hospital in that borough. Pat couldn’t remember details but thought the problem had something to do with his teeth. Steven remembered a hospitalization David had—though he thought it came a few years later—when “his teeth were so rotten he OD’d on aspirin. He would dissolve these aspirin on his teeth because he was in so much pain.” Pat rushed to the hospital and then tried to contact Dolores. “Mother was nowhere to be found,” Pat recalled, “and David said to me, ‘No, there’s no point.’ I found out later she was on a trip to the Bahamas.”

  David told me he once went to his mother when his head was exploding in pain and his mouth was bleeding. He wanted her Medicaid card so he could go to the hospital. This is probably when that occurred and the trip out of town would explain why she told him to just slip the card under the door when he was done.

  But the order of events during his time on the street with Willy is really unknowable. Obviously, David did not hang on to the Queens apartment. For a while, he and Willy stayed with an ex-con who had an apartment across from the Bowery Mission on Third Street. At some point, they went to Wooster Street because there was an abandoned bus there where they could sleep. Some nights they made their way to rooftops or boiler rooms. David also told a story about finding an abandoned bus on Houston Street, already occupied by an old bum who tried to choke him as he squeezed through a window. In that story, he and Willy ended up at a dive waterfront coffee shop where they slept in a booth till the counterman held a bottle of ammonia under their noses. David also told me that Willy tried to kill him a couple of times, once slamming him in the face with a marble slab. “He’d go on these jags where he’d suddenly get so ragey he’d try to stab me or something.” Yet he stayed with him. Some nights they’d walk hundreds of blocks, practically the whole island of Manhattan, on opposite sides of the streets picking up every wino bottle they found and throwing it ten feet in the air so it crashed a few inches from the other one’s feet. “On nights that called for it, every pane of glass in every phone booth from Midtown to South Street Seaport would dissolve in a shower of light. We slept good after a night of this in some abandoned car, boiler room, rooftop, or lonely drag queen’s palace.”

  He could not remember who offered them the place near the Brooklyn Academy of Music, then a high-crime area. Some lesbians who owned a building there had awakened one night in the middle of a robbery and decided to clear out. David and Willy were told they could stay in the building if they guarded it. David said, “We tried. We were getting robbed in our sleep. We were nailing down windows and people were scaling the walls and coming in.” David wrote two accounts of this sojourn—one in a letter to a friend. He and Willy found the place loaded with books and a guitar. They set up rooms for themselves, stole groceries, and cooked steaks over a fire in the hard dirt backyard, living unmolested for a week. When the robberies started, they couldn’t figure out how people were getting in. Thieves got the guitar and all the food. One night, the women who owned the place suddenly showed up, screaming, since no one had informed them that they had house sitters. One of them was very pregnant and gave birth a day later in what passed for the living room, surrounded by candles. (There was no electricity.) A guy who was in the building courtesy of David and Willy proceeded to steal this woman’s money (seven dollars) while she was in labor. Naturally, her friends then threw them all out.

  David headed back into Manhattan with Willy, who knew some transsexuals they could crash with for a few days. But David’s street life was winding down at this point. He’d become skeletal. During the last days in the Brooklyn house, he felt dizzy and had what he called “a massive toothache.” He could no longer sell himself except to the worst creeps, including guys who would beat him up. He stopped trying to hustle. He and Willy were now hoping they could get on welfare. “We waited days in these offices,” he told me. “I remember going to the Salvation Army, and this son of a bitch—I’ll never forget it—he just took one look and said, ‘We don’t help people like you.’ “ Somewhere they secured two night’s stay in a welfare hotel. “They sawed the bottom and top off the doors so it was like a barroom door,” said David, “and these creeps would crawl in. You’re trying to sleep and some salivating creep would drag himself into your room. We didn’t even last one night there.”

  “Willy and me got so weak after awhile our judgment was bad,” he wrote in one of his unpublished accounts of this period. Meaning—they went to Macy’s kitchen department and stole meat cleavers they could use to mug people. For several nights, they prowled Park Avenue, looking for someone rich and alone to rob. A gay man picked them up, but when they got to his front door, a cleaver dropped out of Willy’s pants and the intended victim began to scream. The next night, they spotted a man in a business suit and ran for him, but he turned in terror at the sound of their running feet, and they saw that he was just an old bum, filthy and wearing a found suit jacket with rips in the shoulders. “I almost burst into tears,” David wrote.

  Back when they first met, David and Willy had fantasized together about going upstate to search for Willy’s real father, who supposedly owned a large farm. They would ask him for just a few acres. Whatever they intended to do with those acres, David never said, but they argued over it in the end. David was beginning to understand that he had to separate from Willy.

  In another one of the stories he later wrote, he gave Willy the name “Lipsy” but the incidents, again, seem drawn from their real life together. They hang out in the Village after meeting in a halfway house. Lipsy had been in jail for trying to poison his parents. The narrator had left home after years of a double life split between home and Times Square. He and Lipsy steal meat cleavers at Macy’s but can’t pull off the robbery they plan. Briefly they move in with a transsexual. And so on. At the end, the narrat
or and Lipsy walk out onto a pier at Twenty-ninth Street where they share a stick of weed and talk about the end of their friendship. “I was getting too crazy and needed a break,” says the narrator, “after a year of sleeping in boiler rooms, abandoned autos, gas station trailers and rooftops.” They head over to a deserted diner near the river to spend the night. Inside it looks like a neutron bomb had gone off—no humans, but dried food still sitting on plates along the counter. “We cleared out the back room where a mattress lay sideways along the wall.… After setting the mattress on the floor we lay down ignoring the roaches flitting across our bodies and fell into deep sleep.… The next morning when I woke up, Lipsy was gone leaving behind his coat and a dollar in coins and two joints.”

  David begged the people at the halfway house to take him back. They said yes—if he promised to return to school. He agreed and became what he called “a model A citizen,” earning his high school diploma around the time he turned nineteen in September 1973. He graduated 403rd in a class of 440.

  Bob Fitzgerald remembered vividly the day he and Pat went to visit David at the halfway house. They decided on the spot that they were taking David with them, back to Forest Hills. To Fitzgerald, the place looked like a flophouse. Drunks everywhere. Cockroaches everywhere. And when he walked into David’s tiny room, he saw a rat on the windowsill, just outside.