Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  He’d noticed the characters hanging out at Place Saint-Michel by the fountain. “Just low down beaten people with a wild look of criminality in their eyes.” He wished he could speak to them. His French-deprived muteness was already starting to get him down. “I’m doing so much writing so’s to keep a hold of my sanity and language,” he wrote several days later in letters to Brian Butterick and John Hall, “… never thought so deeply as this.”

  He began a new project called “Study of the Internal Anatomy of the Face,” a visual record of places where something had occurred to effect his life, his consciousness—events now over but “forever fixed in the non-seeing eye.” With his sister’s camera, he roamed the city photographing, for example, candles at Notre Dame—because he’d lit a candle there for his father weeks earlier. If and when he returned to New York, he would, of course, add Times Square.

  He went to a Wim Wenders film, in German with French subtitles, so he could measure “the effect of seeing a film that [he] could only respond to either on a visual level or else on the level of voice intonations.” He concluded that the sensations he had were the same ones he’d experienced “in cross country buses, in the silent dozing seats of a stranger’s automobile … following the spinal cord of highway in a way that transcends the timeclock of the heart … so that one is a viable coasting vehicle of thought and response not held in by boundaries created in the fusion of society and physical law.”

  He wrote a set of letters to his mother, advising her to keep a journal, commiserating over the death of her cat: “For the cat its all completed and for you its an experience to assimilate and then continue with your life, with the realization of the great things that came from that contact.… Since we can’t totally conceive of death as far as all the elements involved, then we owe it to ourselves and the creatures involved (whether it be people animals or senses) to learn as much as we can from it.” In another missive, he commented on her observation that there was “a veil” between them. It was because he couldn’t tell her everything, he said. He was interested in characters and lifestyles that “seem to go against the established order,” and it might cause her pain.

  David enjoyed just hanging out in a sexual milieu like the Tuileries—so forbidden and potentially dangerous. This was the heart of the tourist district, after all, and on many nights, the police raided, sending men scurrying over the fences. One night when David arrived, a man he identified as “an arab” managed to convey the question, “Any cops?” No. The man put his hand on David’s crotch, then dropped his pants and bent over with his arms around a tree so David could fuck him. Afterward David went to the fountain and washed, watching other men in the shadows as he pulled some bread and ham from a sack and made sandwiches for himself. Leaning his head against the stone side of the fountain, he stared “up at the spiralling sky” and thought about the distances he’d come in his life.

  One panel from a two-page cartoon strip David drew in the style of Bill “Zippy the Pinhead” Griffith for his friend Susan Gauthier. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)

  He wrote daily now unless he was traveling, and sometimes even then. During his first six weeks in France, he spent almost half his time in Normandy, where he stayed in an old house across from Pillu’s place. He wrote, drew pictures of the chickens in the yard, created a cartoon for his friend Susan Gauthier, and raced over the country roads on Pillu’s motorbike. On about half those Normandy days, Pat and Pillu were with him. He was completely dependent on them now, and their apartment at 6 rue Laferrière was just a studio. He let them know that he had friends in Paris he could stay with, so he didn’t always have to intrude. But who would that have been? In fact, he had no one even to talk to except Pat and Pillu. In the journal, he wrote, “[I would] sleep out under the seine bridges and in the gardens and elsewhere … staying up all night if I have to among the street characters along St. Michel in my grubby coat with my notebooks and scribbling.… The experiences are needed … necessary.”

  He dreamt that his face was no longer his own. “Realizing that my life has been composed of series of strange and seemingly wounding incidents; time, places and situations that one would suppose would leave deep scars of the invisible forehead.… What I am realizing is that all those periods of my life, all the experiences no matter how some of them smell of shit and others are wrapt in stinking rags. What surfaces in the image mind is that of a brilliant white heart metamorphoses.”

  Before leaving New York, he’d sent the monologues to City Lights, where he wanted so badly to be published that he even dreamt about it. They wrote him in Paris to say that they weren’t looking at new manuscripts now. He decided to try for a European publisher. After a month in France, nothing was coming together for him. He was in free fall, “a viable coasting vehicle,” and he couldn’t really see what he was doing.

  Just observing. Just writing. Just thinking. France would prove to be his education, and this was the homework.

  But he had made no effort to learn French, or to get a job. By the end of October, he was talking in the journal about a return to the United States and his plans for “extended hoboing.” He wrote, “I need constant intense experience so that I feel I’m living and alive … as opposed to dreary existence of stabilization. But for whom?.… Who am I illuminating with my writings—myself and a handful of known people or what?”

  That night he dreamt that the sun and moon had merged. Then two suns appeared, spinning like pinwheels, much like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. He knew he was dreaming and would want to write it down later. So he observed carefully, trying to memorize the shapes. There were two skies now, and strange objects zooming through them. “They represented some important knowledge or symbol I couldn’t understand.”

  “Met a fella towards dark dark evening.” It was November 1, 1978. David had spent the day reading a book on surrealism that he’d found in a West Village garbage can and brought with him. He made a sandwich to eat on a bench on rue Guillaume-Apollinaire. He took a Nico poster from a Saint-Michel wall, thinking he’d write a letter on it to Brian. He thought about Auto Noir, imagining himself at an artsy dinner party where someone would ask, “and what do you write?” and he’d reply, “It’s the same as asking me what I see; both before my eyes and behind them.” He headed for the Tuileries.

  There he met Jean Pierre Delage, “a stranger leanin against the midnight doors of the Louvre,” as David, ever the romantic, wrote a couple of days later on the Nico poster. Actually, JP told me, they’d met “in a bush.” David went home with him. He wrote: “It’s hard to relate the changes I went through as a result of meeting a fella so fucking genuine and sincere and full of warmth—to lie down in a bed; on a mattress nude with another man whom you feel is both sexy and sensitive is a relief that wipes the brow clean of all insecurities and frustrations.” They put the mattress on the floor so it wouldn’t squeak as much and stayed in bed for about four hours. “First time in two months aside from Brian’s great letters that I’ve laughed and felt good in such a way,” David wrote later. “It was marvelous. Felt the old energy stirring within my veins finally.”

  JP had a rough Gallic handsomeness. He was eight years older than David and worked as a hairdresser. He showed David a book he was reading about Sufism. He didn’t practice, he explained—just had an interest in Eastern philosophy. When they discussed some French traveler who’d gone to South America, David recommended he get Burroughs’s Yage Letters. Jean Pierre apologized for speaking poor English; he was self-taught. David wrote: “I took his beautiful face in my hands and said, look man; I should be the one apologizing.… Communication was in the eyes and fingertips; the senses we traded back and forth in small gestures would make statues blush. I felt so good and comfortable in his arms, in contact with his body and mind, that I coulda wept at the release it provided; it was a sudden and great unleashing of sexual tensions and held-in desires.”

  JP took David’s face in his hands and said that it would be di
fficult to say goodnight to him. David felt the same, but declined JP’s invitation to spend the night. He’d promised Pat that he’d come home. “Plus” he wrote, “there’s a sense I get when I’m having such an intense and good time—I need to get away so I can assimilate the feelings/emotions that run so wildly in those periods of release; release of tensions sexual and otherwise.” He was writing all this back at Pat’s apartment, at three A.M. “I can’t find the words for what took place tonight and what is still taking place down in that bird within the chest.” JP had driven him home.

  David underlined the following in red: “I slumped into the corner of the elevator and stared at my face in the big mirror on the opposite wall illuminated by fluorescent light. God I could hardly recognize myself.… I could hardly see with all that racing movement behind the eyes.”

  Jean Pierre Delage. (Courtesy of Jean Pierre Delage)

  He continued, “At one point late in the evening as we sat cross-legged smoking, talking, and stroking each other, he picked up the dictionary and looked up a word; looked at me and said: ah yeah … ‘caress’ … and smiled happily.”

  That was written on a Thursday, in the wee hours. He didn’t see JP again till Saturday after work.

  In between, he came up with three arty (and never realized) film ideas, advised himself on the direction of Auto Noir (never completed), dreamt that he was traveling the world to photograph “optic designs” and drew those he could remember, dreamt that he restored two dried-up snakes to life by putting them in water, watched The Hound of the Baskervilles dubbed into French, trolled the Latin Quarter (but noted, “I don’t find myself searching … now that I met this fella”), copied quotes from Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Jack Kerouac, and Giorgio de Chirico into his journal, drew someone leaning on a table, face not visible, with a bottle and some spillage, above the caption: “lost words of the loveless surviving the night.” And wrote a sort of prose poem, which became increasingly incoherent but began: “For Jean Pierre Delage: I’m resting on the surface of the Seine; a giant whose legs fit end external beneath the curved stanchions of the bridges; an anchoring down of this sometimes terrifying weight; my hands and arms made of sky.”

  He couldn’t calm down.

  He wrote to Janine Pommy Vega and Alex Rodriquez to say that he’d started talking to himself so he didn’t lose his English and that he could hear the music in the trees and the earth now: “little creatures wonkin among the grassblades, but contact and sensation has always been the jumpin point of departure for me; that swift journeylike sensation of being a viable living vehicle among the elements of the earth’s turning.” And now he had this new love. He’d have to clear old baggage, which was hard work—“like deciding to move the tree ten or fifteen years after we planted it.”

  On Saturday night, he waited nervously for JP at Saint-Georges Metro station, thinking maybe he’d screwed up the time, maybe this wasn’t going to work. But JP was just late. David’s account of their dinner, their talk, their lovemaking is one long breathless sentence. JP showed David that he’d bought a French translation of The Yage Letters, and he’d nearly finished it. This time David spent the night, but neither of them slept well on the tiny bed. In the morning, Jean Pierre heated coffee on a camp stove and took a tiny package of butter and half a loaf of bread from the window ledge overlooking the courtyard six flights down. David wrote, “It tasted like food from the banquets of Monarchs but EVEN BETTER!”

  They drove to Normandy. David was to spend the next two weeks there, but JP had to leave after two days. They had wine and wonderful meals (cooked by JP) and walks on the beach and “delicious sexual contact.” David even thought his French was improving; he could speak a full sentence now, with maybe an English word here or there. David began trying to recapture it all in words as soon as JP was gone. He remembered feeling near the end of the three-hour drive from Paris as if JP’s mind and body had suddenly merged with his own. “I’m breathing a sense of him in such a way that we are just about indistinguishable,” he wrote. “This is all in silence in the car with landscape drifting and what I suddenly feel is that he is mine and in some sense possessed within my coursing blood in my pores, not a selfish owning sense but just a total merge within and at that exact moment in comes arrowlike a realization that he is an entirely separate person and living independent of me and my blood and that it’s a subtle unknown thing that has drawn us together that is by no means certain or everlasting and from that I feel a striking and sudden faintness, a fever in my throat and forehead and my hands tremble invisibly and I’m about to black out in this fever and wanna grab onto something for all the frightening bareness I feel.”

  He would revisit these feelings in a piece he made for his last show, in 1990 in a world devastated by AIDS. David took a photo of skeletons exposed in a Native American burial ground, then silk-screened over it words inspired by his yearning for connection and his fear of impending and constant loss: “When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending.… If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time to me I would. If I could open your body and slip up inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fuse with yours I would.”

  During one of their talks that weekend in Normandy, David felt he had explained himself “fully and justly” to Jean Pierre. His life. His work. So now, David concluded, “wherever this goes, it will at least go open-hearted.” As JP left and said he felt funny about going, David decided to stop pretending that it wasn’t affecting him. “You know … I feel,” he began, but realized he couldn’t articulate it. So he stopped and JP said, “Yes? What do you feel?”

  David said, “Ah, never mind. It’s nothing.”

  That night when he got into bed alone, he began talking to calm himself down: “My hands my arms my thoughts and all I can do is write yes that’s all I could do.”

  David typed a letter to Brian on the Nico poster, covering both sides. It was all about meeting JP, his feelings for JP, including much of what he’d written in his journal. “I’ve changed since New York,” he announced. He was now “less afraid of emotional commitment.” And he had no intention of returning to America. “All it contains when I visualize the place is you … nothing else but fading photographs.” He hoped Brian would make it to Paris and maybe the two of them could go on to India together. “I still think much of you and still love ya.” He also wrote that he’d typed till three A.M. and thought he might tear the poster up now, “because of its personal sense.”

  Again, he was afraid that he had said too much. But he didn’t tear it up. He just never mailed it.

  Jean Pierre returned to Normandy the next weekend. The weekend after that, David took the train back to Paris. JP was feeling ill with a bad cold and got into bed, while David sat cross-legged on the edge talking about how angry and hurt he felt that he had to stay out in the country for such long periods of time. He also felt unable “to fully protest the situation as I am ‘guest’ and ‘being supported.’ “

  Three days later he had a huge screaming argument with his sister. She thought he should go back to New York after Christmas. David was furious. She’d encouraged him to come, with the idea that he could stay for a long time. So he’d broken up his life in New York, sold his books, torn away from his friends—and developed a relationship with Jean Pierre. “She and her boyfriend encouraged me to explore life here, open up to it here—so I’ve done so and am faced with all this shit in the end.” David didn’t record her side of it, except to say that she called him selfish and told him to grow up. He told her he had grown up—to the point where he didn’t fear emotional commitment to JP.

  “She doesn’t understand the depth of my emotions at this point—she said ask Jean Pierre to move to America—I could’ve slapped her at that point—she threatened to slap me.” She told him that now he�
�d seen what existed in Europe; he could save up and return. He told her he’d live on the fucking street before he’d return to New York.

  Finally he walked out, toward the Seine. “I wanted to kill myself so fucking bad—nothing mattered anymore—but the idea that she would suffer for it made me not do it; the idea that I would never put these lips to JP’s again made me cease the action—I don’t want to die and yet I can’t face New York after all this. I CAN’T!!!”

  He went back to Pat’s apartment and took a bath. She came in, but left again before he was out of the bathroom. He wrote her an eight-page letter to convey his confusion. By five P.M. he was walking the streets, waiting to call JP at six. He’d have to move in with him. That was his only hope. “The descending night,” he wrote in the journal he always had with him. “Auto noir—it is for sure delineated; the sense of the man spiraling on the tracks of oblivion.”

  Just as he wrote those lines, standing by the Saint-George Metro, Pat stopped in front of him talking to some male model she knew. Pat and David then walked home together, talking more quietly. Later he would admit in a letter to a friend that both Pat and Pillu were having trouble finding work; “the responsibility of my being here is a little more than they expected,” he wrote. He loved Pat. He felt awful that they’d fought.

  The next day, November 22, he went to the Alliance Française to inquire about enrollment in a French class and the requirements to get working papers. On November 23, he walked around Paris, realizing he didn’t have the faintest idea how to find work. He thought about his many plans: the illustrations for Rimbaud’s Illuminations, the “sensory journal surreal illustrations of day and night,” the Auto Noir project, the photos he still wanted to take in Paris, the novel, a book of surreal dream sketches, the song lyrics he’d begun to write. And he thought about Jean Pierre, the completeness he felt when lying against him. “I get hit with sudden fearful concern for all I know and all those I love … the vulnerability of things … the death that hatches … unravels like a seed in all of us.”