by Cynthia Carr
Eileen Myles was. She, of course, developed into a well-regarded poet, novelist, and critic. But she and David didn’t get acquainted until the East Village years, the 1980s. In Zavatsky’s class, she said, “We were not interested in each other.” She thought him passive, laid-back, and she didn’t remember his poems. In retrospect, she felt he’d used poetry as a launching pad. “Part of the reason poetry gets sneered at as a form so often is because it’s where so many people began,” she says. “Poetry is very often a plan. Like a list. At the beginning of a career, it can be a list of the directions you’d like to go.”
David brought Richard Benz, his buddy from Bookmasters, into Zavatsky’s class, and Benz recruited four poet friends from Staten Island. David then invited the Staten Island poets to contribute to his magazine, but not Eileen Myles. One of those Staten Islanders, Richard Bandanza, recalled that David also got him some poetry gigs. Ensslin set up readings at West End Café, and David often suggested people to him.
Around the time he started at the Poetry Project in the autumn of 1975, David began a love affair with Jezebel Cook, who was sixteen and Sauna Trenkle’s best friend. Jezebel had dropped out of school and left home, and she liked to go to Sauna’s and hang out with the bohos. “He actually pursued me and had this crush on me,” Jezebel said, “and I remember him bringing me a ring back from Mexico.” She’d just left another boyfriend, a “crazy, sick, nutty relationship.” She moved in with David. “I’m not really sure why it didn’t work out. I was very kind of hurt by not understanding. Seemed like I was madly in love with him, although I remember in the beginning it was the other way around.” The affair lasted for a few months. Jezebel is certain that it was over before she turned seventeen, in February 1976.
David with his girlfriend Jezebel, probably late in 1975. (Courtesy of Peeka Trenkle)
A decade or so later, David was long out of touch with his friends from West End and the Poetry Project, but as he became a public figure and spoke about his background, the old friends were stunned to hear the stories. Each brought up doubts when I spoke to them, even Peeka, one of the few to hear the stories from David directly. Throughout his life, David selected certain people to hear certain things and kept people he knew apart from each other, which Peeka understood. “It’s what the psyche needs to do when there’s been a lot of trauma. There’s no way to have a continuous linear reality. You have to compartmentalize. Otherwise it can flood your consciousness.” He had told Ensslin and Peeka about his hustling years. He’d talked to Peeka about his abusive father. But she found it hard to put his stories together with the David she knew. Even as she heard the anecdotes, she sometimes wondered “where it was reality and where it was elaborated on and where it was fictional.”
When Richard Benz heard about David’s past, he discussed it with others who’d known him. “Hearing some of the backstory about him being on the street, the piers—we were just saying to each other, when did this happen? Because he wasn’t doing that when we knew him, and he didn’t seem to be that kind of person. That sounds terrible, but it didn’t seem like he had come out of that life.” This was actually a general consensus. As Richard Bandanza put it, “Drama was absent from my recollection of this guy. A lot of people felt—wow, this is very counter the kind of guy he seemed to be. In the poetry scene, there was speculation that he sort of made it up—some of it.”
None of them had known he was gay. Eileen Myles, who wasn’t yet out herself in 1975, said that the David who came to Poetry Project “looked like a straight guy with a lot of hair.”
His ex-girlfriend Jezebel said, “That he was gay was weird to us because we had no idea. When we knew him, that wasn’t part of his story.” And she wondered why he hadn’t talked to her about it. She was not judgmental. “I have become a social worker because I’m the kind of person people tell all that shit to. I just find it odd that I wouldn’t know anything about that.” But it was how David handled his conflicted feelings. He just didn’t bring those feelings to the surface. Jezebel didn’t know what to think about the idea that he’d had a terrible childhood. “My impression is that some of that is how he invented himself.”
Certainly, his letters from this period indicate that he’d honed a cheery affect.
David was hiding, maybe even from himself during the poetry years. But part of him would always wear camouflage. No one who ever knew him—not even those closest to him—saw all of David.
Sauna Trenkle was most surprised to learn that he’d become an activist. She’d always had the impression that “he felt he had to keep a low profile.” She also used to notice him crying over “things you wouldn’t assume someone would cry about.” Like some poignant moment on a television show or “a beautiful meal with people all being nice to each other.” He and Sauna talked about “how overwhelming the good things could be,” she said. “Because neither of us had had a lot of good stuff happening in our lives.” Even with these sisters, he compartmentalized. Sauna knew nothing of his emotional talks with Peeka. And Ensslin knew nothing of the crying, but said, “There were times he would just retreat to his room and you knew to leave him alone.”
On November 29, 1975, David wrote to his sister Pat. “I really want to show you what I’ve been heading towards in my life,” he explained. So he composed a manifesto, a first articulation of his resistance to what he would later call “the pre-invented world.”
He wanted to explain his “feelings on the voice within the body, the voice of the subconscious.” While he had to follow this voice, or be unhappy, he knew that it would take “a separation from the normal levels of existence,” a rejection of “the foundation that really covers over the real world underneath.… The reasons for my wanting to reach this level … is to find the entirety of my own soul … to find that area in the vast cosmos both internally and externally where the true voice is to be found. Rimbaud came close to it, he came so close but turned his back to it on its very steps, either out of fright from what he saw or because he was unprepared to meet it.… I am a poet, one who hasn’t found the true voice yet.… I won’t worry about total acceptance once I break through the immediate binds around me which hold me back. What is really more important is that I at least give my life up to it.”
He did not mail this letter.
In December 1975, Lee Adler was murdered in the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. Though she and Ensslin had split up by spring of that year, he was still quite traumatized and remembered what a good friend David was to him then, talking to him about it, not letting him isolate. Police never figured out who killed Adler. She was one of 1,631 homicide victims in New York City that year.
David had begun to work, with Ensslin, on the journal they would eventually title RedM—and dedicate to the memory of Lee Adler. The title stood for “red mirage,” or as David used to say, “Red M I Rage.” Ensslin explained: “It had to do with this thing David talked about. There’s what you see in front of you and then there’s this movie that plays in your head, this internal vision that you have of what’s going on around you. He used to call it ‘the film behind the eyeball.’ That was his expression. So the magazine, if it had any kind of collective reason for being—it was a celebration of people’s individual visions.”
By 1976, David was making some headway with his poetry connections. Peter Cherches had taken over as editor at riverrun, and he accepted a poem along with two of David’s photographs: a winter woodland scene and an old man alone in a coffee shop. Zavatsky’s class did a xeroxed zine, Life Without Parole, which included two poems by David, one on the Nashville bus station. But the big coup was getting a poem accepted by Cold-spring Journal. Not only did the other contributors include Aram Saroyan and Gerald Stern, but one of the editors was Charles Plymell, a poet who’d lived with Neal Cassady for a while and counted all the Beats as friends. Coldspring no. 10 included David’s prose poem on the Denver bus station (“7 blocks from station / the sidewalk in fronta liquor store filled w/great ass
ortment of bums old/young all w/the same looka shock in their eyes / standing/leaning w/taut bristled faces”).
On February 22, David went with John Hall to hear Plymell read at the Fugue Saloon. Plymell called in sick, but the other reader that afternoon inspired David to write a fan letter. That poet was Janine Pommy Vega, younger than the other Beats but also part of their scene. She didn’t reply to that letter, but David wrote to her again in May, asking her to contribute to his then-unnamed magazine. He had decided to just write blind to poets he admired. He even tracked down Carl Solomon, the man who’d inspired Allen Ginsberg to write “Howl.” David found Solomon working in the appliance department at Korvette’s. In the end, RedM included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgettt, Charles Bernstein, Plymell, Solomon, and Pommy Vega along with friends like Benz and Bandanza, De-Forge and Morais. While they had no trouble drawing contributors, David and Ensslin hadn’t realized how much labor would be involved. Producing RedM would take more than a year. They published only one issue.
Among David’s papers, I found answers to a questionnaire about his poetry life. “I have plenty of interests besides writing but I devote no time at all towards them,” he reported. “I gave up the application of paint to paper some time ago because I found writing a much more effective release for me.” Prompted to say where he’d published, he omitted Novae Res but listed the other publications above, along with Zone (where his work appeared in 1977). That was the extent of his poetry career.
And once he began to tell his own story, David erased it all. Even the people closest to him at the end of his life knew nothing about RedM or Forest Hills or Pottery Barn. Fales Library at New York University ended up with 175 boxes of material. Along with his diaries, correspondence, and photos, the collection includes torn to-do lists, envelopes with footprints on them, wads of ATM receipts—but not a single one of the literary magazines that published David’s poetry except for one copy of his beloved RedM.
The poetry in particular seems an odd thing to hide. Maybe David regarded his poetic output as juvenilia he couldn’t be proud of. Maybe it was just too much the conventional path into the artist’s, or certainly the writer’s, life and didn’t suit the persona he’d crafted. Certain friends of David’s from the mid-seventies came to feel that this was about more than creating a persona, however—that David had willed himself into becoming someone else.
David yearned to hit the road, and later in his life he would speak of his many hitchhiking and freight-hopping trips across America. He certainly hitched to Montreal and back at least once to visit Michael Morais. But he made just one round-trip to the West Coast and back that way, with very little freight-hopping, in summer 1976.
He intended to head, once again, for the holy grail of City Lights Bookstore, this time with his tall, skinny buddy, John Hall. They studied The Hitchhiker’s Field Manual, with its state-by-state suggestions about where it was safe to thumb a ride, and they found Michael Mathers’ photo book Riding the Rails a great inspiration. Hall said they knew they wouldn’t be able to hop a train until they were away from the eastern seaboard. Not that it couldn’t be done. But it was “like secret hobo knowledge and more advanced than we were capable of.”
David had hoped to finish production work on RedM before he left town. But a friend who was going to surreptitiously typeset the poems at his shop had been too busy to do more than one a week. Ensslin had left Columbia, broke, and gone up to the Berkshires to work for the summer. Early in June, David wrote him to say they’d have to do most of it on an IBM Selectric at the Print Center in Brooklyn. David used vacation days from the bookstore to type. In another letter to Ensslin he said he’d found an image for the cover in the twenty-five-cent bin at Argosy Books—a geological survey plate showing a cave town cut into a cliff, and a man in a cowboy hat seated on the cliff edge. This “gaucho,” as David described him in a letter to Janine Pommy Vega, was staring in a trancelike way, “like someone who has seen behind the eyes for the first time.” At that point, RedM went into limbo. The nonprofit Print Center had shut down till October for lack of funds.
On July 15, 1976, David left town with John Hall and Peeka Trenkle, who drove them to Massachusetts in a borrowed VW bus. They wanted to visit Ensslin before the hitching began. For the first time since his Outward Bound trip, David would keep a journal, and he waxed Kerouacian as he recorded day one: “into dense sound of all of America rushing forward—destinations—shaved forests—lonely tollbooth guards with empty holsters—all the country moving … crossing state lines into areas unknown myself now homeless (no base place) makes me feel that disconnectedness.”
Ensslin had rented a room in West Stockbridge from Rosemarie Beenk, a former Isadora Duncan dancer then in her midsixties. David was entranced by Rosemarie, someone who had lived for her art. At her little house on the Williams River, he and John Hall spent a five-day idyll, swimming in a nearby marble quarry and hiking. They also created the first of their “Trail-o-Grams,” news on their travels that they would send to friends back home. David drew R. Crumb–style illustrations and they both wrote, though David wrote most.
While at Rosemarie’s, David also worked on a “story about brief time doing the streets,” the account in which he refers to Willy as Lipsy. “I no longer have any scars on myself in any sense of the word,” he wrote in an introductory paragraph. “Confronted by the past I take it as the present.… Regret hasn’t any meaning.”
On July 20, two hopeful hitchhikers bound for California left Rosemarie’s place near the western edge of Massachusetts carrying a sign that said “Syracuse.” After some initial good luck—a ride to Albany—their first twenty-four hours developed into an almost comical ordeal: the hours of waiting on an entrance ramp in the rain, the three other hitchers jumping ahead of them into the one car that stopped, the decision to then camp in a marsh infested with mosquitoes and potato bugs, the scramble back to the highway, the can of fruit cocktail split for dinner, and finally the ride near midnight to a rest stop east of Utica, where they slept behind a state police station in the rain and nearly got arrested in the morning.
They finally got to Syracuse on their second day, after someone dropped them a mile away and they walked. David went to the university library and read half of Kerouac’s Tristessa—a novel almost impossible to find in 1976—in the Rare Books Department.
Already David was collecting stories from people he encountered, some of them destined for his book Sounds in the Distance (reissued after his death as The Waterfront Journals). He never taped, just listened intently, and the storytellers I’ve been able to find vouch for his accuracy. At this point, however, he didn’t have publication in mind. The first “monologue” he’d recorded was Rosemarie Beenk’s warped account of the American Revolution—how it started when the king ordered people to drink tea instead of coffee. Then, as he moved across the country, David also wanted to hear, for example, from a guy he met who took his nephew rail-riding and who never looked for work until his money got below fifty dollars. David wanted stories from those who’d opted out of society, or had never gotten in—the footloose, the pariahs, those who did what they wanted, paid the price, and didn’t care. David treated these (usually) marginal people as if their positions on the margin gave them access to secret truths.
In Northfield, Minnesota, they stayed a couple of days with a friend of David’s, a poet he’d known in New York as a “burning Cassady character.” But now that energy was gone. The friend was a forklift operator. “He’d given up in a way I never thought he would,” David wrote to Ensslin, disquieted. While they were in Northfield, David and John Hall assembled their second and final Trail-o-Gram.
From here, the trip became arduous as they began trying to freight-hop. In St. Paul, they prowled the train yards, consulted hoboes for advice, snuck into open cars that would back up instead of move forward, and kept running into security guards. Then someone shot at them from a car full of kids, and David felt the bullet go th
rough his hair. But later he wrote in his journal about what he considered the truly disturbing moment of that day—he’d gotten a haircut, thinking it would make travel easier. He assured himself, that, while his new image felt unnatural, he still saw through the same eyes. And if the people driving the cars or sitting at counters could see behind his eyes, he’d be in trouble.
After another bungling day or two at the rail yard, he and John Hall went back to hitching. In North Dakota, they waited twenty-four hours for a train they then rode for four hours. (They had to ditch when workers began searching the cars.) They were halfway through Montana before they had consistent success with rail-riding. Finally they put their hammocks up inside a freight car and rolled toward the coast. Nearly broke by the time they hit Portland, Oregon, they spent a day there in fruitless job hunting. David decided then that they better head for San Francisco, where he would “either find work or slowly fall into becoming a bum.”
David and John Hall on their cross-country trip. David joined the two separate photos, taping them onto a three-ring binder labeled “Journal New York–California 1976.” (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
They were able to freight-hop for one more night, until the train stopped just south of Mount Shasta and two officers of the law chased them away, brandishing clubs. That ended David’s rail-riding career. They hitched the rest of the way, arriving in San Francisco on August 12, only twenty-three miserable and exhilarating days since western Massachusetts.
John Hall took a bus back to New York after about a week. They’d moved into the San Francisco YMCA, where David remained as he started looking for a job. “Oh silent San Francisco with your long streets of movement yr New Yorkian times square with pomegranate nosed winos leafing through the trash where is your secret,” he wrote in his journal. “Do I stand a chance in your woeful streets?”
