Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  David had been feeding it.

  4 THE SECRET LIFE

  He found a job at the original Pottery Barn on Tenth Avenue in Chelsea—then really a barn, actually selling pottery. When co-worker Wendy Wolosoff-Hayes met him, he was still David Voyna. She invited him over for dinner, and in the sketchbook where she was collecting recipes, he drew a bare-breasted woman—one hand holding a breast while her other hand touches a long-eared rabbit. He labeled it “David’s first porno drawing 1973.”

  David worked in the basement with the discounted items, but his main job was packing bags and loading them onto a dumbwaiter. Working with him was a young writer named John Ensslin, who eventually became David’s best friend and co-editor of the literary magazine they started: RedM. By the time they met, David had taken back the surname “Wojnarowicz.” (The change to “Voyna” was never official.) Ensslin described his new friend as a voracious self-directed reader. The two of them spent hours in the Pottery Barn basement discussing poetry.

  In this era, poetry was braided into the counterculture. Every coffeehouse and bar boasted a reading series, or so it seemed, while small presses and little magazines proliferated. When David came off the streets and returned to school, he’d discovered Rimbaud, Kerouac, and Genet. While he still drew constantly, he hadn’t gone past quirky line drawings, occasionally funny, sometimes tentative, often derivative. He hadn’t yet found a way to connect his art to what moved him. But with poetry, he’d discovered a path quivering with hallucination, euphoria, dissociation, and rage—the hot spots on his own internal map. And the legends must have resonated too: Rimbaud leaving Charleville, wandering beneath the stars in torn clothes, sleeping in a Paris doorway, getting arrested and sent home as a vagrant. Kerouac hitting the road with Neal, rhapsodizing over diner food, conversing with bums. David romanticized that life. Certainly he saw it as a model for how to think about his own experience.

  By late ’73 or early ’74, David had left town to live on a farm outside Churubusco, New York, near Plattsburgh and just a few miles south of the Canadian border. Exactly how David came to be living with a couple named Paul and Jane Braun remains a mystery, but apparently he knew both Paul’s father and brother from Pottery Barn.

  Among his contact sheets are three—in an envelope he labeled “FIRST PHOTOS (AWFUL)”—that come from this location: a hippie couple, a dwelling that looks like two connected yurts, a haymow, a potbelly stove, snow-covered farmland, and young, long-haired David. What appears to be his first letter to Ensslin from Churubusco is postmarked February 23, 1974. He reports that he’s practicing the harmonica and will soon help someone build a fieldstone fireplace. In subsequent letters, David mentions planting a half-acre garden, building compost bins, and tearing down an old house “for lumber to build the barn.”

  He and Ensslin were also exchanging poems in the mail. Responding to one critique Ensslin does not recall making, David wrote, “I understand what you are saying about my poetry as far as its bordering on self pity.” In another letter, he says he is “trying to refrain from being hung up on depressing things as all I’ve been writing is about some sad gray dismal thing in life.… people wandering in the great grey void of the world, endless littered streets, sagging docks and railroad cars rusting in the oily rain.… I can’t change what I write about or rather feel so it’s a never ending cycle which really throws me around.” He hopes to do primal scream therapy “so as to work out the tension.” And he wants to take writing classes, “as I need them terribly.”

  Ensslin lived in North Bergen, New Jersey, and organized poetry readings in nearby Weehawken for an antiwar, pro-farmworker co-op called the Community Store. He also edited its mimeographed magazine, Novae Res (New Things), filled with poets who’d read at the store. Though David had never read there—or anywhere—Ensslin invited him to contribute. The one and only issue appeared in April 1974, with David’s first published work: several illustrations, including the cover, and four untitled poems. “Running through the dense underbrush / twigs snapping angrily scattering rabbits / quail and others I fought my enemies / treading softly among the moss and ferns / stumbling over logs I waylaid my father.…”

  John Ensslin, co-editor of RedM, hosting a poetry reading at Morning Star Arts Center, where he got David his first reading. (Courtesy of John Ensslin)

  The other three poems include imagery of farm life, a dream that he and a girl are “enveloped in each other’s feelings,” and a childhood memory of ice-skating on a pond. For the cover, David created a careful pen-and-ink drawing of the Sea-Port Diner in Lower Manhattan. Inside he illustrated some of the other poems—here a caterpillar on a branch, there a hand lifting a child’s drawing from a garbage can. He hadn’t found his style.

  In a letter postmarked April 23, 1974, he asked Ensslin to send copies of Novae Res to his sister’s house in Queens because he was leaving Churubusco for a while. Obsessed with going to California, David had come up with a mad plan. Later, his claim that he tried to ride a bicycle to California and made it as far as Ohio would seem especially unbelievable. But he really did this. (He just, typically, had the date wrong.) That spring, he returned to his sister’s place in Forest Hills to prepare. Somehow David had acquired a nineteenth-century edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, which he sold for two hundred dollars—to Fitzgerald, who wasn’t sure they were worth that much. But this allowed David to buy a bicycle.

  Fitzgerald recalled the day David left for the West Coast. “Pat and I went out to bid him farewell, out in front of the house in Forest Hills. He got on his bicycle with a knapsack on his back and started wobbling up the block, and I said to Pat, ‘He’s not going to make it to the Brooklyn Bridge. He’s just ridiculous.’ And she goes, ‘You’re always putting him down,’ and I said, ‘Pat I’m not putting him down. I’m realistic.’ “

  They did not hear from David for two weeks. Finally he called collect—from Ohio. He’d been sleeping on the ground and someone had stolen his wallet, leaving him flat broke. He was also very sick. Pat and Bob wired him money, telling him to ship the bicycle and take a bus back to New York. Fitzgerald recalled David going into the hospital with pneumonia upon his return. Then he went back to Churubusco. In an undated letter to Ensslin he reported, “I am doing a lot better after abandoning my insane cross-country trek to primal therapy.”

  The sojourn upstate is most notable for David’s changing perspective on it over the years. In a letter to a friend written in 1976, he described his time there this way: “I did an acre of organic vegetables and an acre of grass in the backwoods in a clearing.… The people who owned the property were almost never there it seemed & I had no vehicle other than my own legs so I spent weeks wandering through the woods & streams & sitting in a rocker in one of two domes we built burning cherry wood and letting the mind wander out into the dusty fields.” But when he constructed his Dateline in 1989, he wrote: “Worked as a farmer on Canadian border. Was supposed to share profit from ten acre vegetable garden. When time to pick crop, the vet tried to run me down in a pick-up truck. Left for n.y.c.” Both accounts could be true: An idyll that ended badly. But it’s like hearing from two different Davids and it’s right there in the syntax—from breezy long lines to telegraph staccato.

  David returned to the city by late August 1974. In September, Pat left for Europe—a move she never expected to become permanent. She had signed with the Stewart Modeling Agency sometime in ’73, and the agents there decided she should go to Europe “to build her book.” Within a year, she was on the cover of L’Officiel. She appeared in a Vitalis commercial that ran during the Super Bowl. Her modeling career would continue until 1986.

  Steven had left New York City in ’71, after taking an extra six months to graduate from high school. (He too had had excessive absence.) “I had turned my life around in the Home,” he said. “I started to understand conceptually how you can get ahead if you just cooperate. And so I was given an honor from St. Vincent’s for being an excellent child an
d student, and consequently they agreed to pay all of my college tuition.” St. Vincent’s also gave him money for rent and, when he was ill, paid his medical bills. Steven began his studies at Middlesex County College in Edison, New Jersey, about fifteen miles from his father’s place in Spotswood. He began trying to reconnect. He’d go see his father at five in the morning. “It was the only time he was sober. He would take me to the bar at seven, and he and Tuna Fish Charlie would have five or six shots of Seagram’s. Then I’d take off and leave him be.”

  David and Pat visited their father once after Pat’s marriage. She wanted him to meet Bob Fitzgerald. Pat and David hadn’t seen the house in Spotswood before. What stayed with Pat is that her father wanted to show her the upstairs. “As I started to walk up the steps, he smacked my behind. I had a short skirt on. So I turned around and he said, ‘Oh come on. I changed your diaper when you were a baby.’ And I said, fuck this, and never went back. Couldn’t go back.”

  As Fitzgerald remembered it, Ed had been friendly, nice, doting, giving them food. When Pat announced as soon as they left that she would never go back, he didn’t know why. As for David’s experience of the visit, Fitzgerald said, “I can picture him right now. He sits in this chair with this long hair. He had very long hair. Way down past his shoulders. With glasses. And he sat there and said nothing. Sat there and listened all day.”

  Sometime in 1974, David visited Steven in New Jersey and drew some pictures for him. They would not really spend time together again for ten years.

  After his sister left for Europe, David moved in again with Bob Fitzgerald in Forest Hills and got a job in Manhattan at Barnes and Noble, where he met poet Laura Glenn. There was a flirtation, “a little bit of a romantic entanglement that we had just briefly,” as Glenn put it. But David scared her with his stories about living on the street. “There was a seamy side to his life.” She also thought he was gay. David told her he was not. Ultimately, they were “just friends,” but there’d been a spark. When Glenn left for a job at Marloff Books on Sheridan Square, David would visit her there.

  He soon left Barnes and Noble himself for a job at Bookmasters, a chain with several stores in Manhattan. There he hit if off immediately with a coworker, Peeka Trenkle, who was living with her boyfriend in a large apartment at 104th and West End. David had moved in with them by January 1975.

  David lived at the West End apartment for at least a year and a half. Peeka’s boyfriend, Lenny, was a part-time musician and full-time purveyor of Thai stick. He had a music room lined with cork, a living room covered with red felt, a cat named Spider, and three extra bedrooms to rent out. David had a mattress on the floor, a pile of books, a Patti Smith poster, and a manual typewriter, at which he worked diligently on poems and stories. He sported a droopy mustache and hair down to his collar. The roommates took to calling him “Woj-narrow-witz” and recalled that, despite his shyness, he could be cuttingly funny, and though he wanted to be a writer, he also did a lot of drawing. “That was almost compulsive,” Peeka said.

  On January 31, David gave his first public reading at Morning Star Arts Center in Union City, New Jersey, thanks to Ensslin, who organized it and acted as MC. The next day, David wrote a rapturous three-page letter to Ensslin, though by then Ensslin was ensconced nearby, in a Columbia University dorm. “Oh joy,” David began. He’d been so nervous, so keyed up, he wrote. “But when you gave that introduction, it bang-knocked away all fears inside.” A world had opened and David was feeling expansive. So, if the Community Store in Weehawken needed anything—a political cartoon for the newsletter, a painting to sell (the co-op could keep all the money), any resources he had—he would give it. He wrote that he was again anxious to travel but said, “I get this vision that I’ll lose all I’m hoping to do if I leave now. Just starting to get slowly in touch with work (writing) and I have so far to go before I can successfully release my unspeakable images, visions, whatever. I’m glad having friends like you.… Maybe it’s all inside me and it takes certain people to strike a thing inside that releases it all or in parts.”

  Ensslin was dating a woman named Lee Adler, who lived on Court Street in Brooklyn with two young gay poets, Dennis DeForge and Michael Morais. Ensslin had invited DeForge and Morais to read in Union City along with David. Though David doesn’t mention them in his letter to Ensslin, this had been a significant encounter. The poets at West End began to socialize with the poets on Court Street. Morais was editing Brooklyn College’s undergraduate literary magazine, riverrun, and David drew the cover and an illustration for it that year.

  He also had an affair with Morais, much to the surprise of everyone who heard about it later, including DeForge, who did not think David was gay. David was not even sure he was gay at this point. He kept the relationship secret, but Morais told DeForge about it. People who knew Morais seemed to be in awe, describing him as not just a dynamic performer of his own poetry but also “a muse” and “creativity personified.” He’d been part of the Negro Ensemble Company. He was also bisexual. Within a year or two, Morais had married and moved to Montreal, where David kept in touch with him by letter.

  The West End apartment was convivial most of the time, with occasional agitation—and there David stepped in. Lenny, thirty-eight years old to Peeka’s nineteen, was constantly criticizing and browbeating her. David would sneak up behind Lenny, mimicking all the huffing and puffing, making faces. One night, a roommate named Leo—a black belt in kung fu—tried to break down the bathroom door so he could beat his wife, who’d taken cover there, and David stopped him.

  On Easter they were all sitting around, too broke to do anything festive, when David caught one of the cockroaches that infested the place, cut out bunny ears, gave it a cotton tail, and set it down on the kitchen table, where it lurched along in its costume to the delight of the roommates. Years later, David would name these critters “cock-a-bunnies.”

  He spent hours in the kitchen talking to Peeka. She was the one he spoke to about his father’s violence, perhaps because she too had had a rough childhood. Her memories of these conversations were vague, but she recalled their “heart connection,” that David was troubled, that they talked at length about painful things, and that he would cry. She felt there was a softheartedness in him that he was not interested in cultivating. After he moved out, in 1976, they lost touch. “He was very enamored of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and this sort of self-destructive brilliance—he loved that and we used to have talks about it,” Peeka said. “My big question was, do we have to destroy ourselves in order to be creative. I felt like he was kind of hell-bent on it. He wanted that. He wanted the dark part.”

  Peeka Trenkle became a confidant of David’s while they were roommates at the West End apartment. (Courtesy of Peeka Trenkle)

  By early ’75, David was working at the Bookmasters in Times Square. Sometime during that year, he ran into his old high school pal John Hall—either at Bookmasters or on the street. They hadn’t seen each other since David was fifteen and they’d squabbled over something. John Hall couldn’t get over how much better David looked. Aviator glasses instead of “goofy” glasses. A decent haircut. “I remember thinking pleasantly … he looks more normal now, whatever that means.”

  Late in the summer of ’75, David went on vacation and finally made it to California, the first of many cross-country trips. This time, he took the bus. First stop: San Francisco, where he made the neo-Beat’s pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore. “A three floor rush,” he reported via postcard to Richard Benz, another poet and a colleague at Bookmasters. He dipped into Mexico, which he found difficult—“as I know little Espagnol (?)”—and spent his twenty-first birthday at a religious youth hostel in New Mexico.

  He wrote prose poems about both the Nashville and Denver bus stations, along with a short story set in the El Paso terminal. All those bus stations. If he wasn’t yet ready to write about his own experience, the transients and lowlifes often found in such spaces, especially in the seventies, wo
uld do nicely. David identified with street people and outcasts right to the end. “Every stinking bum should wear a crown,” reads one of the epigraphs to his book Close to the Knives.

  In 1975, David took the bus to San Francisco and made his first pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore where he asked someone to photograph him. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)

  By the time David returned, Ensslin had taken a room at the West End apartment. Earlier that year, Peeka’s sister Sauna had moved in. She was just seventeen or eighteen but soon found herself going to readings with David and Ensslin, immersed in their ongoing raptures and debates over poetry.

  Bob Fitzgerald also accompanied David to readings occasionally. Fitzgerald described David’s poems as “letters” because they didn’t rhyme. “He was very introverted,” Fitzgerald said. “Until he got up on those little stages and he started reading his letters, wailing about something that was bothering him in society. He’d go to these sleazy little coffee shops and there’d be about eight readers. He could stand up in front of a crowd, which always amazed me, because he was so shy.”

  That fall, David signed up for Bill Zavatsky’s free workshop at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. The class met one night a week from September to May and constituted the whole of David’s higher education. Zavatsky remembered him—a beanpole, very gentle, very soft-spoken. “You kind of had to pry stuff out of him.” David’s work from this period could be dense if not overwritten and purplish. Zavatasky would tell him, “Cut back, cut back, find a spine here somewhere.” But he encouraged David because he worked so hard, while some in the class produced very little. Zavatsky advised his students to do readings, do magazines, proliferate. At some point during this workshop year, David decided he’d start a journal—with Ensslin, who was not part of the class.