by Cynthia Carr
They’d become students of the outré and obscure. They got a gig at a club near Brooklyn College—as an opening act for a folk duo (friends of Lackow’s). So they decided to do something neo-Dada. After David had introduced him for forty-five minutes, Lackow walked out wearing only an American flag and read a haiku. They’d modeled this presentation on Robert Filliou’s “Yes—an Action Poem” performed at Café au Go-Go in 1965 and discovered in an anthology they turned up in a remainder bin.
The first issue of Zone—Lackow and DeForge were among the editors—appeared in spring 1977, with three of David’s short prose pieces, written in three different styles. He did incantatory (“I bring it to you silently with your head beneath the pillows. I bring it to you sleeping like unseen gifts”). He did ellipses (“… men wearing military masks walk the streets … defunct railroads … an Indian walks by pounding his forehead … what race are you.…”). He did surreal (“The caped man takes a wild shot and three dogs fall from the sky”). But he never attached his poetic language to an inner life, so he never managed to create a character. The stories slide through the reader’s brain without making much impact. Here, for the first time, he was asked for a brief bio to run at the end of the magazine. So he said he came to the city at age eight, moved into a trailer with a street buddy at fourteen, and lived on the streets for a year “around a load of transvestite gangsters.” He also mentioned that he’d “painted Nathan’s downstairs night club ala Pollock” from twenty bottles of ketchup. He was playing.
RedM finally went to press in May 1977; it was 5½ by 8½ with the gaucho-on-a-cliff cover engraving in red. “Gaucho on cliff is staring at mirage of self in surroundings and within,” reads the least cryptic line on the contents page explaining it all. But then, this was David’s cryptic period. One of the two prose poems he contributed to his own magazine, “2Dream Ash2, for John Hall,” is almost unintelligible in its dream imagery, but the bones of Times Square and hustling are there deep down. He just can’t bring it to the surface. Like many young writers, he was struggling to disgorge his real subject matter and let it blurt.
That same month, at an Atlantic Avenue Laundromat, David struck up a conversation with another guy doing his wash. He turned out to be Louis Cartwright, who was living nearby with the notorious and legendary Herbert Huncke. Lackow was there doing laundry too, and he couldn’t believe David would want to be associated with these lowlifes. But David was enthralled.
Huncke, after all, was the original Beat—a petty criminal, drug addict, jailbird, former Times Square hustler, and sometimes writer who’d given his autobiographical writing the apt title Guilty of Everything. He’d introduced William Burroughs to narcotics. He’d inadvertently landed Ginsberg in the mental hospital where he met Carl Solomon.a And he’d given Kerouac (or was it Ginsberg? or John Clellon Holmes?) the word “beat” to describe his downtrodden hipster lifestyle. He’d appeared as a character in Burroughs’s Junkie, in Kerouac’s On the Road, and in Ginsberg’s “Howl” (“who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium”).
One study of the Beat Generation, John Tytell’s Naked Angels, analyzed Huncke’s appeal: “Ginsberg was intrigued by an ominous aura of danger that enveloped Huncke. Here was a man who seemed self-damned, who believed death was imminent and regarded that eventuality with morbid complacence, a man who suffered greatly, and who possessed almost supersensory perceptions. Huncke was egoless completely rootless, with no sense of permanence, possession or property.” Yet somehow, he would outlive both Cartwright and David.
When David met them, Huncke was sixty-two years old and Cartwright about thirty. According to filmmaker Laki Vazakas, whose Huncke and Louis documented the last years of both their lives, the two had met in Ginsberg’s kitchen, probably late in the sixties. Huncke and Cartwright were not lovers. In fact, when David knew them, Cartwright’s girlfriend Ondine Andriazzi was also part of the household, and for part of that time, Huncke was living with R’lene Dahlberg. Vazakas described Cartwright as a photographer. Indeed, his portrait of Huncke adorns the cover of The Evening Sun Turned Crimson (second edition), and more of his photos appear in The Huncke Reader. But there’s no evidence he ever exhibited or worked anywhere as a photographer. What he and Huncke clearly shared was an abiding dedication to drugs.
As Janine Pommy Vega saw the relationship, however, “that was deep love there.” She regarded Huncke as her oldest friend. (And the only Beat who was not sexist. She’d known them all.) Pommy Vega had left home at seventeen just to be near them and had ended up living with Huncke, who was fresh from another prison stint for burglary. That was 1959, when Huncke had an apartment at 170 East Second Street in the East Village, upstairs from Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. The building served for a while as a veritable nest of Beats. Poet Bob Kaufman also lived there, as did Jack Micheline, John Wieners, and Elise Cowen, who was hopelessly in love with Ginsberg and typed his manuscripts.
In late May 1977, David recounted an evening with Huncke and Cartwright in a letter to Pommy Vega: “I spent the other night hanging out till twelve hearing a couple of great storytellers talk on about Afghanistan of ’70 or ’71 in a way where the voice gets all dreamy and soft from both subject recall and late hours and by the time I left, I was ready to pull on these beat-up boots of mine and haul off across a couple of large bodies of water in search of a sun-scorched hotel roof and some number one hashish as they call it and watch all these characters brought up like one-legged smugglers and desert bandits.”
While David identified with the Beat tradition, he’d never expressed interest in punk—except for Patti Smith. But then, she was a poet who revered other poets. Ensslin reported that they had played her album Horses incessantly at the West End apartment. And David did love to pogo. His friend Susan Gauthier went with him to CBGB’s for that. “A great show every night for two dollars,” she said.
No wave would get his attention later. Certainly it was the caterwauling soundtrack best suited to the ravaged New York he took for granted. There’s a photo from the late seventies, taken by David Godlis outside CBGB’s, that captures a certain essence of the city at that time. It shows a group including Diego Cortez, Anya Phillips, Lydia Lunch, and James Chance lounging against a car—or on top of it, in Lydia’s case. These are some of the major stars of no wave. But the photo shows no clamor, no glamour. Just another gritty night. Behind them we can see a closed hardware store, one passing cab on the Bowery, and two sets of headlights on Bleecker. We’re a block and a half from the worst men’s shelter in the system. But it all fits. Punk embraced ugliness and turned your “wretched refuse” into a style.
Later David would come to know and respect Lydia. “New York City during the 1970s,” she writes in her foreword to the book No Wave, “was a beautiful ravaged slag—impoverished and neglected after suffering from decades of abuse and battery. She stunk of sewage, sex, rotting fish, and day-old diapers. She leaked from every pore.”
The apartment at 115 Court Street was in downtown Brooklyn, just above a Yemenite social club where the sounds of men playing Ping-Pong could be heard at all hours. David’s friends at this point included not just Ensslin and his new roommates, Lackow and DeForge, but also a young artist from Oklahoma named Jim McLauchlin. McLauchlin had lived briefly at Court Street early in ’76, during David’s fling with Michael Morais, but he had fallen ill with hepatitis and gone home to Oklahoma to recuperate.
When McLauchlin returned to New York in September ’76, he brought a friend, Dirk Rowntree, who was then a musician. The two had performed together in Oklahoma—McLauchlin’s poetry backed by Rowntree’s experimental rock—and they wanted to try their luck in the big city. Among all the people David got to know during the Court Street days, the one person he stayed in touch with till the end of his life was Rowntree (who happened to be the only heterosexual in the group). Soon after arriving in New York, Rowntree and McLa
uchlin performed at a new gay arts space called the Glines. When McLauchlin did a second theater piece there in ’77, he gave David a silent role in it. McLauchlin thought David had a “sinister grin”—as if he was on to some inside joke and wouldn’t share it. He wanted that wry presence in his piece, so he instructed David to sit on a couch and look bored.
According to Lackow, David learned something from both McLauchlin and Morais about how to put some emotion into his readings. His affect during their neo-Dada performance had been “deadpan,” as Lackow put it, while Morais’ readings were “ablaze.” McLauchlin could also light up a room when he appeared as his alter ego, Jimmy James Strange, “the rearranged Son of Cain who was feeling to blame for inflicting the pain but was not ashamed because he was just part of the scenery.” Strange delivered his “rock and roll poetry” at venues like CBGB’s, sometimes with musical accompaniment.
Since there was no longer room for him at Court Street, McLauchlin moved into a basement under a SoHo storefront. He created, in the space above him, the sort of magical installations that would call for, say, covering the floor with rose petals six inches deep. Sometime after the citywide blackout in the summer of ’77, McLauchlin and his boyfriend, Luis Seralta Rivera, moved to a loft at West Fourth and Barrow. Here they began to hold salon evenings every Saturday where gay men in the arts would discuss their current projects. Regulars included writer Perry Brass, performer Emilio Cubiero, and the legendary drag queen skater Rollerina—though she never appeared there in her trademark ’50s hat, rhinestone glasses, and dress. (No one at the salon ever learned her real name or occupation.) Nor could anyone remember David reading at the salon. Instead, he brought small sketchbooks filled with quirky comic line drawings to share with the group.
McLauchlin described the David he first met, in ’76, as a hippie, a dweeb in straggly hair and overalls. Perry Brass remembered him from the salon, in ’77, as “un-pretty,” with bad skin and bad teeth, rail thin, not very well groomed. Though David wasn’t in overalls anymore, he hadn’t become a “clone” either, and this was the clone era, when gay men walked Christopher Street in army/navy surplus, short hair, and often a mustache.
Brass was seven years older than David and a self-described member of the “liberation generation” when he began to attend David’s readings. To him, David was shy and vulnerable “with a standoffish affect, but,” Brass recalled, “attractive in that it was unique and very, very self-contained. Some of us were still kind of put off by him because he was so far-out. We weren’t quite sure what to make of him, and his poetry—it was sort of deforming itself. It was hard to get a bead on it, to figure out, was this even poetry?”
Back at Court Street, David collaborated with Lackow on a screenplay about a CIA assassination plot against Idi Amin. He was drawing “in small formats,” Lackow remembered—thumbnail sketches about his cross-country trip and the people he’d encountered. David and Ensslin were also meeting to prepare a second RedM. They’d added a third editor, a friend of David’s from Bookmasters named Alex Rodriguez.
This activity too he erased from his life story—Zone, the salon, and the performances with Lackow and McLauchlin.
When David went back to journal writing in July 1977—the first time since his cross-country trip—he’d just been to court with Huncke. This time the old Beat had been arrested for buying four Valiums from a pill pusher on Fourteenth Street. David waited with him from nine thirty in the morning till four, when his legal aid lawyer showed up and Huncke presented the judge with two letters, one from his methadone clinic and one from an unidentified professor of English. The judge allowed Huncke to plead guilty to disorderly conduct and let him off. David had paid for lunch—two oranges, a Coke, and a shared candy bar. Neither had enough money at the end of the day for subway fare—fifty cents—so they walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge. Back at his building, Huncke borrowed five singles from a neighbor and handed one of them to David, saying, “Here’s a fin for ya.”
David had begun taping Louis Cartwright’s stories. Here was another lost voice from the margin—an important one, in David’s opinion. A “monologue” wouldn’t be enough. Cartwright deserved a full book. After all, he’d ridden a bike over the twisting mountain roads of Nepal, visiting monasteries “where they worshiped love and light on one side, death and darkness on the other.” He’d passed a winter in Kabul, sleeping on a rope bed for five cents a night. He’d learned how to press powder into hash from “rogue Afghanies.” He’d taken drugs so pure people died from them. David transcribed one of the tapes and labeled it “an excerpt from Morpheus, a book forthcoming from Redd Herring Press.” David never actually set up Redd Herring, nor did he finish this project. But the taping went on for several months.
He was working by then at Bookmasters’ Pennsylvania Station store. Huncke came in one day in July to ask for a loan, and David gave him five dollars. Suddenly he saw that Huncke looked exactly like his father, heavier but with “the same scowl grin.” A couple of days later, after Huncke had paid David twelve of the twenty-two dollars he currently owed him, David wrote in his journal that Huncke was “a kind of model in roles that I form my life after.”
“Met a fella.” That’s the phrase David often used in his journal when he wrote about his sexual encounters. He’d stop at Julius’s or another West Village bar before taking the subway to Brooklyn. Or he’d walk the Brooklyn Promenade before heading to Court Street. And he’d meet a fella.
Much of what he wrote in his journal during this period was about sex. He had two or three lovers at any given time, a fact that he never remarked on, for indeed it was not remarkable in the seventies. During that wild era, a gay male friend of mine told me that if he went out to post a letter, he could find someone to have sex with between his front door and the mailbox. Another told me that, if he wanted, he could find a sex partner every day after work on the subway between the Village and the Upper West Side. (I had these friends. Both are dead.) In comparison, David wasn’t particularly promiscuous. He enjoyed one-night stands (“sensuality among strangers is unmatched for some reason”). But more often, he found something praiseworthy and intriguing about each guy and wanted to know him better. It just usually didn’t work out.
The first five weeks of journal entries, beginning in late July, are fairly representative. David said goodbye to Don Muir, who was leaving New York (“one of the few people I’ve really communicated with”). He broke up with Charlie, who hadn’t treated him well (“even a friendship would be difficult”). He spent the night with Paul, who worked at Pace University (“I feel a lot of warmth in him”). He agonized over his feelings for Susan Gauthier, a cashier at Bookmasters who’d been a good friend since 1975 (“I love her, entertain ideas of a relationship, but realize that my desire for men affects this. I can’t do both”). He kept in touch, through the mail, with his old boyfriend Michael Morais and his future boyfriend Brian Butterick. He spent the night with a “big brute” he met on the Promenade (“said he wrote a little poetry so I went with him”). He began an affair—contact of some kind almost daily for two weeks—with Ken Sterling (handsome, self-taught in five languages, “sensitive as hell”). He began an affair with a lawyer named Randy that would continue intermittently into the eighties. He worried about coming out to John Hall (who might feel “uneasy”). He considered going to Identity House for counseling on it all. And on September 1, he went to the Promenade and “wondered if I could feel sexual. Um yeah … met a fella.”
Still, he wasn’t quite sure he was gay. “I don’t profess to be of any kind of sexuality,” he wrote on September 4, ten days before his twenty-third birthday. “I have a terrible sexual desire for men—emotional at times in a certain way.… I don’t know what my capabilities are in reference to women.… Don’t know and may never as I rarely give myself a chance.”
So, although he’d been sexually active since he was a teenager, he was still coming out, a process with many layers. With Ken Sterling, for example,
he felt relaxed enough for the first time in his life to accept the touch of another man in public: once at a restaurant, when Ken touched his hand below the table; another time at a movie theater, when Ken put an arm around David’s shoulders. Affection in public scared him, but he thought the fear was good to go through. That was mid-August. By the end of September, he was embarrassed to realize during a phone call at work that he couldn’t remember Ken’s name.
At the end of September—a point when he was involved with three men—David called Syd, the lawyer who’d been a regular during his hustling days. They had not spoken in two years. “I was afraid to call at first as I didn’t know what was going on in his life, like maybe everything had changed and he was no longer interested in going out anymore.” David never states the obvious—that the date they set up was a sexual assignation, and it would be for money—but Syd picked him up near Port Authority and they went to a motel in New Jersey. David always said he could spend the rest of his life with Syd. He wrote that in 1977. He said it to me in 1990 when he told me his life story. But he said it knowing that it could never happen. Syd was married, with kids and a complex career.
That fall, when Brian Butterick returned from Provincetown, he and David became lovers. Brian joined the salon at the McLauchlin-Rivera loft, and David got him a job at Bookmasters. They set up readings to do together. David mentioned none of this in the journal—not because Brian meant so little to him but because he meant so much. This was a pattern that would continue for the rest of David’s life. The men he loved the most got the least ink, at least in the journals (with the exception of a man he would meet in Paris). In fact, David stopped keeping his journal in early November of ’77, and did not take it up again until April of ’78. By that time, he had stopped talking about his attraction to women.
