Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Susan Gauthier was surprised when David finally came out to her; she’d long figured he was gay and never knew he had a crush on her. “When he first came out to a lot of people, it was as if it was the worst thing that could happen,” she said. “He literally took everyone I knew [aside] and told them separately, like it was a big pronouncement. I never understood why he felt he had to do this. It was quite distressing for him.”

  David with Brian Butterick, probably early in 1978. (Photograph by Dirk Rowntree)

  Alex Rodriguez also had a vivid memory of David coming out to him, because David had been so hesitant and tense.

  He was drifting, accomplishing little, and very much aware of it. He thought he might join the merchant marine. Not to emulate his father, but to follow the example of ex-seamen Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Huncke. On September 19, 1977, David wrote in the journal, “I feel a need to make a vast decision soon! Regarding my going out to sea on the merchant marine or maintaining my position as a clerk among books writing so little and feeling things come through the fingertips disappearing into the tabletop.… I have to leave this city this country soon and make my way into the depths of foreign soil where all will turn about.”

  In the journal about a week later, he articulated his plan, for the first time, to “put together a collection of voices—overheard monologues or character monologues that’ll consist of junkies in a Chinese/American restaurant in Frisco, junkie on 8th avenue and 43rd, Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips, Mike the bookstore guard, and the kid in Reno pickup truck, Huncke and others. Illustrations will be photos of odd moments / people retreating into darkness / around corners / sliding off tables in old restaurants / back views / views from the shoulders down.”

  He’d recently collected a monologue from Huncke about “finding” four thousand dollars in Canadian money. Of course, Huncke had stolen the money from the front seat of what was probably a company car, as it was plastered with Canadian Club signs. He boosted two bottles of whiskey while he was at it. When David finally published these monologues in 1982 as Sounds in the Distance, he did not identify Huncke (or any other participant) and simply titled this piece “Man Lying Back on a Couch in 90-Degree Weather.”

  The directness and emotional power of the monologues stand in contrast to what he was writing creatively at this time.

  What could he reveal of himself? What could he write, for example, about what had happened in his family? In September 1977, David pasted one of his poems into his journal: “My Father as the Red Lark Moving in a Photograph of Gypsies by the Sea.” Ed Wojnarowicz? A lark? David was still using imagery to conceal more than reveal. The last lines read: “You are passing through, unable to make music among those / shadows. A sad but musing smile playing across your lips / Everyone else in the room must breathe.”

  What did he dare say about his sexuality? The second issue of Zone appeared that fall with David’s story about the El Paso bus station, “Cutting Through the South.” He writes about sitting on the toilet in the bus station restroom only to have a guy crawl under the partition and grab his ankle, wanting sex. Later the same creep hits on a cowboy, who calls the police. Our narrator knows where this predator has gone but does not tell. Here, for the first time, he dealt in print with homosexuality—though in this case not his own and not in a situation most would find sexy or even palatable.

  One day in October 1977, he went to the McLauchlin-Rivera loft for a photo session with Dirk Rowntree. David was impressed by a woman named Linda who showed up to do the styling, looking “like she stepped out of a dark Parisian s/m night club.” Linda added French hair tonic to David’s shaggy mop top and combed it straight back, off his face. “I was racing beneath my skin. I was wild,” he wrote in his journal, because he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw in the mirror. He needed that hair to hide. When Dirk took the picture, “it was an image I thought I would never let anybody see ’cause it made me uncomfortable—I was too stark—felt naked naked like the word ain’t been used—hairless and all.”

  Two days later, Janine Pommy Vega moved into the Court Street apartment, taking the spare room—actually a walk-in closet they’d turned into their “library.” Pommy Vega lived in Woodstock but spent four days a week in the city as part of the Poets in the Schools program. Adding her to the household had been David’s idea. He’d cleaned the small room, put up some art (Magritte, Ira Cohen, a Japanese print), and set out books (Rimbaud, Elizabeth Bishop). They threw a mattress on the floor. “There’s things I wanna do for people,” he wrote in his journal. “There are emotions, thoughts, ideas, concerns, loves that I wanna grab some people—like Janine—and tell ’em but then there’s a false sense—a fear of not being what I really am—a sense of straying from the inner core; the hot rhythms of all that we are.”

  “A fear of not being what I really am.” Yet David, in his cryptic phase, continued to experiment with ways to camouflage himself. McLauchlin remembered that for a while David took to spelling his surname “Wjnarowicz,” to make it even more mysterious and unpronounceable.

  David had started to see less of Huncke. The old Beat had called him, very upset, early in August 1977. Cartwright thought that Huncke was telling stories about him to David. And for Huncke, Cartwright came first. So Huncke and David agreed not to hang out with each other. David was still working on Morpheus, the book of Cartwright’s monologues, though Cartwright was worried about that too. He thought the taping sessions with David were going too much into drugs.

  David still wanted Brian to meet Huncke, who had by then vagabonded further east—maybe Red Hook, Brian speculated—to a terrible apartment furnished with discards from the street. Brian thought that Huncke and Cartwright had a “weird enabling codependent relationship” and that “there was something dangerous about the two of them.” He and David talked about not getting too tangled up with these friends. “The drugs were heavier than we’d ever seen before. At that time,” Brian said. “Even though we didn’t do drugs with them, you could tell.” So Brian just withdrew, though, he pointed out, “Had I run into them a few years later, I would have welcomed them with open arms.” Brian did heroin for most of the eighties.

  David wrote his last journal entry about Huncke on the day Pommy Vega moved in, in October 1977. David took her over to Cartwright’s place and Huncke happened to be there.

  A few days later, David was at the Small Press Book Fair, where RedM had rented a table. David sat there all day and sold one copy of the magazine.

  His sister, Pat, remembered that when David was a boy, he always had vivid dreams, and he would wake up screaming from his nightmares. The journals he kept in the late 1970s are filled with descriptions of dreams. Often he remembered three a night. And he began to find imagery there that he would use as a visual artist.

  This dream from October 1977 could describe one of his later paintings, with its multiple layers, its poetry, and its intimation of ruin: He is in a desolate town where there’s an “acute sense of disrepair in the space, a sense that something has taken place, occupied and executed a change, something irreversible.” He’s clerking in a store when his father walks in and says, “Go up there. They’re short and need somebody.” When he puts on his work boots, David realizes that they’ve turned black. He is walking with his father, who is not drunk and not angry, but instead a comforting presence. “With him there, it’s a representation of a whole lot of security somehow—structure in my life somewhere behind me.” David sees a toad and picks it up so it won’t get run over. He realizes then that it’s a special toad with suction cups on its body so it can stick to things. He shows it to his dad, then tosses the toad up the lawn—but it turns back to the site of original danger. Suddenly David notices that the black shoe polish is “crumbling” off his boots. He pulls his dad’s arm, saying, look—someone messed up my shoes with this polish. His dad has a “funny sad look” on his face and splits into the house. David stays outside, trying to scrape the polish off his boots with sand. “The black sc
rapes away and I see a blue sky—there are clouds in it as if drifting away thru it all—as I keep scraping, the sky crumbles away and there’s a panorama of the Grand Canyon with a real little family parked at the edge of the canyon watching a sunrise or sunset.… I suddenly flashed on the thought that Dad might have polished my shoes as a help to me and didn’t realize that they wouldn’t stay polished.”

  During the year and a half that followed his father’s suicide, David was more connected to his family than usual, though the contact was still minimal and he didn’t see Steven at all. In July 1977, however, he went crabbing once in New Jersey with his half-brother, Pete. In October of that year, he went to Spotswood to mow the lawn and trim hedges for his stepmother and to help Pete cut down a tree. Pete visited David in New York City a couple of times, most memorably when they went to CBGB’s to see the Steel Tips. Pete loved the whole atmosphere of the place, including the other spectators, like a girl dressed completely in vinyl, and then the band came on and the lead singer lit some firecrackers he’d taped to his chest and broke a bottle over his own head, and Pete was saying, “Man, what a place this is.”

  Dolores began attending David’s occasional readings. She was not homophobic. She met and liked his friends and seemed intrigued to have a poet son. Dolores had begun studying at Fordham, and in the fall of ’77 she joined the school newspaper staff, contributing a story on David and his circle. Instead of interviewing them, she asked him and some of his poet friends (Ensslin, Lackow, Morais, and DeForge) to fill out a questionnaire she’d prepared. “When did you realize you were going to become a poet?” And so on. David wrote five single-spaced pages for her, with an apology for his “short” replies. In light of his later work, his most interesting answer is to the question “Do you have a message to convey through your poetry?” No, he said. He had no message. “I don’t sit down with an idea formed in my head and then try to put it onto paper. I usually sit down with a mental film running—one composed of visual and emotional images and I will start out with a few unimportant lines and then things connect and I write quickly onto the paper whatever comes through my fingers.… That’s the excitement for me, the discoveries and connections of thought that suddenly appear.… If there’s no discovery involved, writing … isn’t fulfilling for me.”

  Dolores eventually created a scrapbook for each respondent, filled with their answers plus photos of the poets. David kept a few of his answer pages among his papers. But he didn’t keep the rest. Years later, Ensslin was the only one who still had the whole scrapbook. He remembered David being mortified by it.

  David saw Syd again in late April 1978, filled this time with ambivalence. “I feel stilted in seeing him. Seeing him means money for sex.” But they met at a burger joint and just talked. David even collected a monologue (“Man in Brew & Burger …” about Syd’s need for sex with teenagers). As they parted out on the street, Syd wanted to know if David needed money. He did. He really did. Syd handed him a hundred dollars. David began to tremble, and he told Syd, “Man … I don’t know what to say, all these years I’ve wanted to tell you things but didn’t know how. I mean, at this point, I’m happy with what I’m doing in my life, but when I was hustling, when I was in the Square at a certain point in my life, I really needed to connect with someone and you were really important then. You helped me through so many things, in ways you might not even be aware of.” Syd said he was happy to hear it. They shook hands and walked off in different directions. David started to cry. It was the last time he ever saw Syd.

  Two weeks later he dreamt that he was coasting the New Jersey highways in a car, musing on the diners, auto parts shops, lawn figurines, and oil refineries, the strangers in their ugly houses, “instant death in the heart over the whole sad business of everywhere USA,” when he suddenly turned and saw that Syd was driving. He felt terrible about taking the hundred dollars and woke up so depressed that he called into work sick.

  He wanted the reassuring arms of some man around him. Someone he could love for the rest of his life. He felt scared, and he didn’t know why. Just an ominous feeling, “like a passage coming to an end somewhere soon.”

  On April 5, David and Brian presented a performance at the Glines called “Leaning with That Grey Beast of Desire.” Brian described it later as “David’s poetry and my songs.”

  David did not yet think of himself as a visual artist, but he met a couple of men that spring who may have influenced his later work. Ron the translator did not last long as a boyfriend, because David thought Ron wanted him only for sex. David wrote, “I should strengthen my character by not submitting to just loose fucking.… I want or desire more than just that from a person.” But Ron did show him some artwork by Catalina Parra, daughter of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra. David sketched her piece Diariamente and described it in detail in his journal. It’s a newspaper page—the bottom half is made up of obituaries torn out and then sewn together with rough stitching; the top half is an ad for bread, five slices folding forward wrapped in newsprint and stitched. The ad has been torn open, revealing another newspaper page: a photo. Someone is being seized. Parra’s piece was a response to Pinochet’s 1973 coup and the subsequent disappearance of so many Chileans. Ron told David that the stitching represented an old custom people had of sewing up the mouths, nose, ears, and eyes of an infant thought to possess evil spirits. In about 1988, he would create a photo of his own sewn mouth—though it looks very different from Parra’s piece—and, in 1987, an image of two hands stitching together a loaf of bread.

  Within days of meeting Ron, David also began seeing Arthur Tress, one of the few photographers in the art world at that time dealing with up-front gay imagery. Though their affair lasted only about a month, Tress encouraged David’s artistry. He learned of an artists’ postcard contest and urged David to enter. David planned to make a collage that would show Arthur Rimbaud spraying words from a ray gun, but the Rimbaud photo he’d found in a thrift shop was too big. Instead he came up with an image of a man “concealing messages behind a false eyeball” which he’s plucked out. Lines of poetry curve over a map behind him. The design is fine, the meaning opaque. It didn’t win.

  Tress lived at Seventy-second and Riverside, near an abandoned Pennsylvania Railroad yard and a series of abandoned piers where gay men went for nude sunbathing. At the time of his affair with David, Tress had taken over the crumbling railroad workers’ YMCA on the property and was using it as a studio, filling it with props gathered from the street and recruiting models from among the sunbathers to act out what he called “dark erotic fantasies.”

  With David, though, he was almost romantic—sex on a deserted pier after dark in a soft rain, sex followed by a comparison of poetic fantasies. In one interaction David recorded, Tress said he imagined himself on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and David said, “I was on the highway in a truck with the Vermeer gleam of fields hot insect whine screaming through the sunburnt brush.” David read Tress some passages from his journal and was moved by the older man’s reaction. (Tress was thirty-eight.) David wondered if he could live with him—an option he sometimes considered when the man in question was not really available. Tress was about to move to California.

  David invited Tress to a big party he and his roommates were throwing at Court Street on May 6. The night of May 5, David went to the Promenade, “hoping to find someone to lay down with for awhile, to make love to and communicate with; a stranger—someone totally devoid of any mental connection with my past, present, or future.” He met Ken the construction worker. He needed this, he decided, because of the way he’d been rejected by Ron and another fella who no longer called, Bob Culver. He wrote two pages of neo-Beat prosody on his night with Ken—the sensuousness of it all.

  He was still figuring out what he wanted from a relationship. Not the amyl nitrate–fueled “cold loveless sex” notorious during the disco era. Not an exclusive partnership either. He tried to imagine sitting in an apartment with the same guy every night—“the dre
ariness of it, the inability to be moving.” At times, though, he wondered if his hustling days had stunted his ability to actually have a relationship. That was the word he used. Stunted. More often, he saw no reason to question his nightly walks through New York searching for sexual contact and conversations with various street characters. Why question this need “when the fulfillment is not only a sense fulfillment but an education”?

  “What I want is to know someone that I am sexually attracted to so well that we are kin, we are more than two lovers; we share something in common like a recorded sense of each other’s characteristics … where the communication is complete to the point of not having to speak to convey everything one feels.”

  The Court Street poets threw their big party on May 6, 1978, to celebrate RedM, Zone, and Dennis DeForge’s thirtieth birthday. David had also invited Louis Cartwright, John Hall, Susan Gauthier, and her boyfriend, Steve Gliboff. David took “Susie the blonde cashier” to his room to show her a mobile he’d made: a globe with animals hanging from it on strings, or as he described it in his journal, “falling from earth when gravity has failed.” He’d gotten the idea from a third grade science book. This was the first piece of sculpture he ever made, at least the first he made note of, and the first of his pieces to deal with gravity, one of the forces he would ponder in his work for the rest of his life. He would re-create it early in his art career.