Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Another guest at the Court Street party was Dolores. She’d taken up photography, with David’s encouragement, and had a photo published in Zone 2 under her maiden name, Dolores McGuinness. It’s a black-and-white image of a house with something rushing by, blurry but evocative. Pat’s boyfriend, Jean-Pierre Pillu, showed up with Dolores. (He was a model, like Pat, and in town to work.)b Pillu encouraged David to think about coming to Paris. David did not need much encouragement. Before Pillu left town, he offered more good news: He and Pat would try to find David a job there.

  David’s teeth still bothered him, and he was facing serious dental work. But he decided that once he finished with all the dentistry, he would go to Paris. Pat wrote to say that she would pay his airfare, and she wondered, if she sent David another three hundred dollars, would that be enough “if paying your bills off is delaying you”?

  By May 1978, David had nearly finished his monologue project—the first work he completed that would matter later on. The monologues were central to a life’s mission he hadn’t even articulated yet. David saw the world as devolving, and here were those residing at the shattered edge of the map. An ex-con, a pedophile, a witness to murder, sex workers and johns, druggies, con men, and tramps—some were victims, but some were perps. These are lives characterized by risk and uncertainty. Here the social order does not protect, and does not apply. It’s broken.

  And hadn’t he learned that as a boy?

  After a childhood that had bred a kind of hopelessness, he and his brother—so different in every other way—had both thought about becoming hoboes. Steven considered it the day he ran from Hell’s Kitchen back to their brutal father, while David thought for the rest of his life that he might end up back on the street. In the seventeen-page epistle to Ensslin written in ’76 at the San Francisco Y, he’d fantasized about withdrawing from society to hang out with social monsters, and he concluded, “It’s inevitable—I’ll end up there.”

  So he put himself into the book of monologues too. “Young Guy Hanging Out on Market Street—San Francisco” is the story of David and Keenan getting picked up by the Mafia guy on Seventh Avenue, followed by a somewhat fictionalized account of the night he and Willy spotted a man in a business suit and ran up to mug him, armed with stolen meat cleavers, and saw that he was a terrified old bum. In the real-life account, David almost bursts into tears. In the monologue, the street kid bursts out laughing. But the monologues are about creating characters who inhabit the edge. They are devoid of self-pity—and devoid of pity. He may have moved the action to San Francisco just so all the hustling stories didn’t come from New York. In “Young Boy in Times Square 4 A.M.,” for example, we get the story he told many times of a john hiring him to take his clothes off and watch a man and a female prostitute through a peephole as they have a quickie; and David sees that the woman’s torso is covered with scars. “Fresh scars with stitches in them.”c

  In April 1978, David had hitchhiked to Montreal to visit his old boyfriend Michael Morais, and one trucker who gave him a ride ended up among the monologues. The trucker told David that there weren’t hoboes like there used to be; he’d picked up lots of them—guys who were former dentists, scientists, teachers who “got started on the bottle … see these guys—something happens to ’em in their lives and they end up not wanting to do anything but move on.… They consider life one big zero and they themselves show what they think by becoming the same thing—no aim or point.”

  Maybe now they’re called “homeless” and they don’t move around as much, but David wanted to understand how people got to that shattered place. During his San Francisco sojourn in ’76, David wrote an early version of the monologue “Man in Casual Labor Office 6:30 A.M.” David himself was a regular at that office until he got his egg-sorting job, and he titled this first draft “Journal of Daily Labor.” In the final draft, a tramp he meets there takes over the monologue, the tramp who announces, “I’m tired of being a tramp.” In that second version, David deleted his own reflections, though they go to the heart of his project: “What is the beginning of tramping? Digging thru garbage? Smelly rooms with liquor store signs haunting the windows all night? What lines enclose or remove tramphood? Is it a figure of speech alien to one’s own condition, used to describe other than yourself? Is it a state of mind or body? Is it a style of walking? Does the idea of it hit you suddenly at a particular age: hold me close.… I just had a vision of myself after the tenth grade.”

  David would identify with the tramps and outcasts of the world his entire life. It’s what he saw in Louis Cartwright, this destitute and minimally educated “lowlife” who’d traveled to exotic locales and acquired special knowledge, though admittedly most of that was drug-related. By the spring of ’78, David was feeling bad that he’d failed to get Cartwright’s book launched, and he still intended to do it. In May, Cartwright brought him photos he’d taken of William Burroughs preparing dinner, which David very much wanted to publish in the second issue of RedM. He brought Cartwright along to a RedM meeting to show the pictures off to Ensslin and Rodriquez. “He is growing immensely in his thought, spirit/psychically,” David wrote of Cartwright. David kept, with his own papers, two autobiographical pieces Cartwright wrote out in his big grade-school handwriting. One was about his bicycle trip through Nepal. In the other, “Confidence,” dated 1974, Cartwright described his orphanhood and how he’d come to see eventually that he wasn’t “born bad” but was “a good open free man who stopped being second class.” David probably hoped to incorporate these pieces into the proposed book. But he was still making a hundred dollars a week in salary and would never have the money to publish even a small book in modest quantity. Not in the seventies. Nor would there be another issue of RedM.

  By the early 1990s, Huncke and Cartwright were living in the East Village between Avenues C and D, a short walk from David’s loft, but he had long ago left their orbits. (Nor was he willing to cope anymore with drug addicts.) Filmmaker Laki Vazakas began documenting Huncke and Cartwright in 1993. They were “using,” of course—but organized. And coping. Then Huncke got hurt and went into the hospital, moving afterward to the Chelsea Hotel to convalesce. Without Huncke, Cartwright fell apart. His habit got worse, the apartment grew squalid, and he couldn’t pay the rent since he spent what he had on drugs. He ended up in a flophouse on the Bowery.

  On June 6, 1994, nearly two years after David’s death, Louis Cartwright was murdered in broad daylight on Second Avenue near Seventh Street, a crime that remains unsolved. Police were astonished when several Lower East Side poets came to the precinct to make inquiries into the death of this … bum.

  In summer 1978, David moved in with Brian Butterick, who had a loft in Manhattan on Orchard Street above a button seller. David stayed there rent-free, saving money for the trip to Paris. He would leave September 6.

  On August 25, he began a passionate affair with a guy he met at Julius’s, Phillip Seymour. At least, it was passionate on David’s part. Phillip didn’t want a relationship; he’d just broken up with someone and was depressed to be back in New York after a cross-country trip. David accepted this. But, the day after their second meeting, he felt compelled to explain the connection he sensed with Phillip in a three-page single-spaced letter. Through Phillip—who loved camping and had branches, rocks, and a wasp nest on display at home—David suddenly saw how he’d abandoned his own interest in nature. Through Phillip—who did ceramics David thought exquisite—he came to question why he’d stopped drawing. Phillip lived on Christopher Street, and when he said he was troubled by the gay male lifestyle surrounding him there, the constant cruising and constant temptation, David said he felt the same way. He just didn’t know an alternative to it. “His feelings were so completely like my own,” David wrote in the journal. “This unspoken connection of two figures moving about this dark planet at two separate times and finally connecting.” He decided he had to give Phillip a piece of driftwood he’d found years earlier on his Outward Bound trip and t
hen presented to his mother. Dolores was upset when it disappeared from her apartment, but David reasoned that he had to give it to Phillip “to show him my feelings.”

  However, as soon as he delivered the letter and driftwood to Phillip, David began to worry. And this was already a familiar worry: Had he revealed too much of himself? Maybe he’d been too open. What if the letter frightened Phillip, or produced some other effect that he “wouldn’t wish for”? Even after they met for lunch the next day and Phillip called the letter “beautiful,” David couldn’t stop obsessing. Back at Bookmasters, where his co-workers were throwing him a bon voyage party, David was tense and unhappy. He’d been so anxious with Phillip that he hadn’t enjoyed seeing him. He worried that he’d “done silliness again in [his] life—the big risk of the heart communication.” That night, David went back to Julius’s—and there he found Phillip again. This time David put it to him directly; he was “feeling funny about the letter, how it might have been taken.” Phillip told him again; the letter was beautiful.

  Years later, what Phillip most remembered about David was how little he’d known about him. He could never quite figure out where David lived, for example. Then, after digging through an old box, Phillip managed to find what I figured must be one bombshell of a letter. But no. It’s cautious and rambling. David tells him, “Watching the excited and animated way in which you described thoughts and theories of your art and life somehow opened up an area which helped me connect with those important senses that I had somehow lost hold of.”

  Brian drove him to the airport. Brian had been there, through all the other fellas for the past ten months, but David had mentioned him in the journal only in passing. On the day he left town, however, David wrote: “Brian is gonna be missed in a way I can’t explain—writing of him and what he means to me is too heartfelt and unintendedly personal that I haven’t written the senses down. I wish he were going with me—if I do get money I will send for him.”

  Once David got to Paris, he and Phillip Seymour exchanged a few letters, but when they passed each other on Christopher Street sometime in the 1980s, Phillip didn’t speak. He realized that David hadn’t recognized him.

  6 THE FLANEUR

  David thought he might live in Paris for the rest of his life. So, during a last itchy week in New York, he attended to things he’d been putting off. He took his driver’s test—and passed. He finally came out to his old buddy John Hall—who did not reject him, as David had feared. And he called Dolores, who said she’d contacted a medium on his behalf. David would find success, get his hot temper under control, and be healthy all of his later life.

  David was so filled with tension, that something seemed to have cracked open in him. When he said his last goodbye to Phillip Seymour, he hallucinated—he saw a wolf’s head and felt his own jaws elongating. A few days before that, he’d written in the journal, “feeling animalistic. Feeling hyena. Feeling wolf. Feeling dog. I am tongue and heart. Stillness in the morning. I reject all other thoughts of love and friendship.” And in that same piece came the line, “My heritage is a calculated fuck”—the first sentence of a book he would write more than ten years later, Close to the Knives.

  His life was about to change, and everywhere he looked were signs and portents. Everything was magnified now. Everything signified.

  Two days before leaving town, David witnessed the legendary Marsha P. Johnson “flipping out” on Christopher Street. The Stonewall veteran and cofounder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries was walking toward the river, rifling through garbage cans, stuffing bits of trash into a white gift box, “saying in mock suburban housewife: my my what a pretty gift,” David wrote in his journal. One minute, she was jumping—shoeless but in white athletic socks—and the next, lying in the street, where people who knew her tried to help her up, “the green glitter making her eyes more manic.” She wanted money: “I ain’t eaten in three fuckin’ days.” And David handed her some. He couldn’t articulate just why this scene so disturbed him, beyond feeling “a sense of imprisonment.” But this was his old street life, his hopelessness, turned into spectacle.

  On September 5, 1978—the night before he left for Paris—he had dinner with John Hall and then stopped by Dirk Rowntree’s apartment in the West Village to give him a poster. He suggested that Dirk might document this momentous occasion, do a portrait of the artist walking toward Europe. Out on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Tenth Street, Dirk photographed David’s legs stepping from the curb, then David’s head almost haloed in a blur of passing headlights, mouth open, eyes full of eagerness—and trepidation.

  David took to Europe everything he owned. Two big bags. Heavier perhaps were the plans and goals with which he’d weighted himself: He would write a novel. He would find a publisher for the monologues. He would create illuminations for Rimbaud’s Illuminations. He would illustrate Dennis DeForge’s new poetry manuscript—and the children’s book Phillip Seymour planned to write. He would make money from his drawings and writings, then send for Brian. He would work daily on the journal and correspond with friends. He would take Brian’s old guitar, learn to play it, then write songs. And, of course, he would master the language. Finally. He had failed second-year French for three consecutive school terms.

  In fact, his nine months in Paris would change him profoundly, though he accomplished few of the goals he’d set for himself. Instead, he fell in love for the first time, found his voice as a writer, and discovered that he was rather hopelessly American.

  The plan was to meet Pat on September 8 in Normandy, where her boyfriend, Jean-Pierre Pillu, had a house. David flew to London. There he caught the train to Southampton and began recording the foreign. The grass out there! English grass! While waiting for the Channel ferry the next day, he pictured French docks right out of Genet: “a hooded area of fog and broken sliding piers populated with cutthroat sailors.” I don’t think this was willful naiveté so much as—hope.

  After six days in Normandy, he and Pat and Pillu arrived in Paris on David’s twenty-fourth birthday, September 14. His first impressions shocked him. So bourgeois. Where was the city of Rimbaud? Or, as he put it to Pillu, “Where’s the underworld?” Pillu promised that some night soon he’d drive David through the Bois de Boulogne to show him “the travesties”—transvestites. Which was not, of course, what David had in mind.

  Then, just blocks from their apartment in the Ninth Arrondissement, he discovered the Pigalle: “very much like Times Square with leather suited pale ghostwhite anemic boys—some muscled brutes with lowset eyes,” transvestites, and “sailor types straight from the pages of Genet … prostitutes.… bag ladies … young Cocteauian boys struggling through the gas and heat of passing cars.” Now he felt more at home. Even better was his discovery the next night of the Left Bank. Here Brassaï and all the writers he loved had sipped coffees in cafes, and he was walking where they had walked. He slept on cushions on his sister’s floor. Out the window, he noted the “starlit world over Cezanne rooftops.” Pat and Pillu bought him an Underwood typewriter at a flea market for his birthday. Now he could write poems and start the novel and do some letter writing, though he wondered how he was going to afford the postage.

  During his first full day in Paris, he visited the Louvre, and the first painting to really catch his eye was Le sommeil d’Endymion by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson: a naked young man swoons in a forest glade, while a grinning cherub hovers in the air. David glued a postcard of it into his journal. For him, the painting was all about sex. “Sexual tension is in my loins at this point,” he wrote. “The departure from the sexual life of NYC now up in my smooth throat—like a gasp—the body of the fallen male—intoxication.… I could put my mouth to his and taste wine.” The next day, back at the Louvre, he found Un coin de table, Henri Fantin-Latour’s group portrait of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and their circle. After leaving the museum to walk along the Seine, he unexpectedly had a sexual encounter—outdoors—with a man who parted from him by drawing, as David
put it, “an ‘X’ in invisible red lines over my heart.… I tasted blood on my lips and walked delirious through the side streets of the Louvre.” It would take him another ten days to figure out that the big gay cruising ground in Paris after dark—and maybe even during the day—was the Tuileries, the large formal garden just west of the museum.

  Within his first week at his sister’s apartment, he’d outlined a “a semisurreal erotic novel,” Auto Noir. He intended to base this on his own journey from New York to Paris. Sort of. Apparently it would be about sense impressions, and probably more “surreal” than “semi.” In a letter to Michael Morais written on October 1, 1978, he explained the term “auto noir” as “automatic entry into the subconscious in foreign spaces … the black auto that waits around every corner; black auto of fear or groundlessness … black auto containing within its trunk all the unspoken desires and actions; black auto of chance.” There would also be photos in this book: a snake, a whirl of “light lengths,” desolate passageways beneath bridges, moon-or lamp-illuminated statues in public gardens, and “daytime photos of symbols that reflect areas of thinking.”

  David kept trying to access his subconscious through lofty imagery and a kind of automatic writing, hoping no doubt that something “real” would shake out. He was terribly afraid of his actual subject matter, and finally admitted as much in a letter to his old girlfriend Jezebel Cook. He told her he’d started to overcome this fear—because he was outlining the “street novel” based on his life. He’d started it three times in New York and given up each time.

  By the beginning of October, he was a regular at the Tuileries. On October 9, for example, he squatted outside the Louvre in the afternoon listening to a street musician, went home for a nap, and returned after dark, noting the bums and bag ladies at the Metro station “laid out like mortuary bundles on the slatted benches.” He squeezed between the locked gates at the Tuileries and immediately encountered a blond guy in a black leather jumpsuit, who approached David and grabbed his crotch. “I felt as if I could only surrender to it.… I have never felt any need or desire for exhibitionism … but there was a great sense of pleasure in doing this all within eyeball of any number of buildings and national monuments.” They were close enough to the fountain to hear fish splashing.