Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  “Who the fuck am I and what am I racing towards?”

  Within a week, David had moved in with Jean Pierre at 78 avenue de la Bourdonnais, near the Eiffel Tower. This was probably the wealthiest district in Paris, but JP had a maid’s room on the top floor, with a toilet down the hall and a shower in the basement—even a separate elevator. Someone had given him the place for free; he was saving to buy an apartment. He worked nearby at a salon called New Wave, and that’s the style he specialized in. “Hair in flame and in fire with red, pink, any kind of color and very strange shapes,” he said. “My job was like a show.” Passing window shoppers would stand outside and watch him work. “David saw that. He was laughing.”

  At the Alliance Française, David took an admissions test, then watched as the instructor slashed it with red marks and threw it in a wastebasket. He and JP picked up a larger mattress from an empty apartment filled with “tiny tiny rooms like for midgets.” He was reading Lautréamont’s Maldoror, in English of course.

  During his nine months in France, David worked on his journal nearly every day. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)

  He wrote to two French publishers, Nidra Poller at Soleil Noir and Christian Bourgois at Editions Christian Bourgois, asking for work and making queries about their possible interest in the monologues. It took just two days for a rejection letter to arrive from Bourgois. But Poller invited him to make an appointment, “to talk about your writing and your situation in Paris,” she said.

  He also had a letter from Sylvia Pogorzalek in Bonn, whom he’d queried earlier. She’d published German editions of works by Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine. She would find it difficult to publish an unknown, Pogorzalek wrote, but would be interested in seeing the manuscript. Maybe a piece of it would work for her magazine, Gasolin. David spent two days preparing a cover letter, then almost immediately regretted spending the seven francs postage. That could have bought two chocolate bars.

  On December 4, he met with Nidra Poller, “a great woman.” They talked for two hours. It was probably the first literary-philosophical conversation he’d had since coming to Paris. “I did it all shakily, not having had that kinda contact in a long time,” he wrote, “also not having spoken on the book before.” She pronounced herself interested in looking at the manuscript, but knew of no work prospects.

  Where and how could he even look for a job without knowing French? The American embassy? He actually tried there. JP had made no demands of him; David just didn’t like being dependent. As he explained in a letter to Dennis DeForge, “Being dependent on people always hooks into the Times Square senses, even though it’s not the same. That’s a sense I may never rid myself of.”

  He began a series of drawings in hopes of getting a gallery interested, getting “some food money rolling in.” One drawing showed a huge dog walking behind mountains “filled with planets, stars, peep holes, rays, lines, lightning bolts, rain and the most obsessively pure eyes I’ve ever drawn. The mountains have huge reptile/hieroglyph carvings in them.” He called the piece Night Arrives on the Mayan Coastline, and felt he’d had a kind of breakthrough. “I finally figured out how to draw black and white mountains; mountains that wouldn’t be flat and signboard hollywoodian looking.” He hated the thought of selling this. He liked it. Indeed, with its Western landscape, animal presence, and cosmic symbols, it’s the first drawing he ever did that seems connected to the mythic style he later developed.

  In his journal, late in December, he drew what looked like a Dürer wing, probably because he’d dreamt of a birdman—human legs and wings for arms, “sad man’s eye’s, gnashing beak as if he’s trying to get out of bird appearance.” He wanted to describe it to Brian, who’d been with him in the dream. But the wing was a prescient image to inscribe, as it would figure later in his life.

  By the end of 1978, he’d stopped looking for a job. He would drop his French class after a month or two (by JP’s estimate). And he never did tour the Paris galleries to try to interest them in his work.

  On New Year’s Eve, he dreamt that he’d joined the army or navy—he didn’t know which—and they ordered him into a helicopter, flew him over the Arctic, and threw him out. He crashed through the ice, only to be rescued via rope and taken back to America.

  Nidra Poller sent David a letter early in January 1979 to say that she saw the monologues as a writing exercise, “an apprencticeship to the craft.” She wrote, “I feel like there’s no poetry to be distilled from these experiences, that they are lived with a language so minimal that to enrich it would be a betrayal of the reality. And I think that is a serious dilemma for the writer. Barren soil. I wonder what you think?” While David had plenty of thoughts, he did not answer immediately.

  In Normandy for the last time at the end of February, he was still pondering what he called her question on why he loved “sleeping thugs and wandering men and women who made nothing of their lives.” His handwritten draft was tucked into a journal with an empty envelope from Bonn, probably another rejection, and he wrote in such a rush of emotion that it’s hard to decipher, apart from lines like “the sleeping thug represents a sense of life more important to me than whatever I have learned of my own so far.”

  He would give up, for the time being, on trying to place the monologues.

  He’d begun “a personal notebook of drawings,” each maybe four inches by three of “pure bloody madness,” with many of the images drawn from dreams. This would be the visual equivalent of automatic writing—permission to draw anything, to let go. He felt he had an internal censor “constantly at work prodding vision/image with a subtle ‘no.’ “ Certainly the whole journey to Paris had been about giving himself a jolt, a way to remove himself from internal restraints.

  He also began the practice, continued for the rest of his life, of writing instructions to himself. In regard to the street novel, for example: “Walk the streets and accept the return of those senses and return home and push them through the typewriter.”

  He felt that his writing had changed. “The continual silence here, the lack of creative American-style energy and dreams has slowed me down and calmed my writings,” he said in a letter to Ensslin. Still, he was far from done with surrealism, an art form made for the removal of internal restraint.

  He wondered if he should rewrite the street novel in symbolist language.

  He wrote song lyrics like “Louis Bunuel / … can ya enter this cell / take a cinematic photograph of my soundless scream / cut the eye, make it die, before it starts to dream.”

  He outlined ideas for a piece on “a hallucinated America,” another “supportive glimpse into the netherworld,” but this time using dreams.

  He began a project called “the Bolt book,”d dreams again, plus emotionally charged moments from his journals, and surreal stories combined with images.

  He completed none of these projects.

  But he was beginning to find bits of his visual vocabulary. In 1991, David would create what he very consciously decided would be his last piece, a photograph of his own face partly buried in loose dirt. In the Bolt book, in 1979, he wrote what seems to be a description of it: “I am the face beneath the sand still breathing while day pulls down from the sky, and I leaned back thinking he should have guaranteed entrance into heaven.”

  He knew he would have to leave Paris. His love for JP was the only thing holding him there.

  He was having many dreams about the American West and wanted to make another cross-country trip. He missed the wildness of New York. In Paris, he’d observed, “the only anarchy I see is in the public parks after dusk; the ballet of pick-ups and pickpockets, Arabs runnin’ from the police … hoods and local toughs playing soccer with beer cans … dreaming ladies walking their poodles in the midst of all this.” He noted in a letter to Ensslin that France had now discovered the Beats and “wished it was fifties all over again.” He described boys hanging out around Saint-Michel in slicked-back James Dean haircuts and leather jackets with Elvis
Presley buttons. He was very aware of missing the cultural moment in New York—the club energy, “schizo-culture,” and what was left of punk. He wanted to be part of that vibrant, growing scene. Also, he wasn’t sure the change in his writing was for the better.

  Left unsaid was the fact that David just missed his friends. On February 21, he woke up with a shout, sweating and frightened. Michael Morais! David had dreamt that he’d walked into an upstairs room where Michael was sleeping. Suddenly a spirit entered, mostly invisible though he saw “bare folds of clothing.” David felt an overwhelming chill and terror. He suppressed a scream, then saw Michael sit up zombie-like with a luminous yellow blaze behind his eyes, then a flicker as if something was falling inside his head past his eyes—like a window shutting. David then saw that Brian was asleep in another bed, and while the “thing” went straight into Michael, its close proximity to Brian made him groan as if in pain. David got up wondering if Michael had died and immediately wrote him a letter. Brian too. He apologized for feeling susceptible to dream imagery and symbols; he’d been reading Jung. But the dream had truly frightened him and left him in a fog for a week. Michael wrote back to say that on February 22 his wife had given birth to a stillborn baby.

  David walked to the Seine just about every day to observe: an interesting rock, a bandaged hobo, another who’d made a pillow of two Tintin books. That spring the river overflowed, throwing up pieces of crockery that stayed on the banks when the water receded. David found a bottle with a waterproof cap. He wrote his name and Brian’s on a piece of paper with the words “the sea revolving in the eye of the horse, the distances of the forest in the eye of the fish,” then sealed it in the bottle and tossed it into the current.

  David working at his sister’s apartment on rue Laferrière, Paris. (Courtesy of Jean Pierre Delage)

  That March both Pat and Pillu got work that took them out of the country, so David moved back into their place. Nothing had changed between him and JP, but Pat’s studio was roomier, with better light, and she had a dog for him to walk.

  Just before moving in, he completed the first collage that would remain part of his oeuvre, Bill Burroughs’ Recurring Dream—using a photo of Burroughs bought in a Left Bank shop and an image of a centipede bought from a Seine stall.

  In March, he made a drawing of a man in a suit falling onto some tracks, based on a warning sign posted everywhere in the Paris Metro. This later became one of David’s stencils and an image sprayed onto many walls in Lower Manhattan.

  On March 30, he drew Rimbaud J.O. Study #1 in pencil, with the poet clothed, and at the end of April he made a colored-pencil version, Rimbaud Masturbation Study #2, with the poet naked.

  Bill Burroughs’ Recurring Dream, 1979. Collage, 6½ ×7 inches. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)

  Surely David had seen the cheap newsprint Rimbaud posters plastered everywhere in Paris in 1978—79. French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest had attached the famous 1871 photo of the poet’s head (then on the cover of Illuminations) to a photo of a leather-jacketed young man with a coat or perhaps a bundle thrown over his shoulder. The posters were life-size and plastered on walls, phone booths, and billboards. David would begin photographing his Rimbaud in New York series during the summer of ’79.

  By the beginning of April he’d made no solid plan to leave Paris, only knew that he had to. Sometime during the first week of that month, he met an Englishman his own age in the Tuileries and took him back to Pat’s place for sex. It was the first time since meeting Jean Pierre that he’d had sex with someone else, and he did it very consciously. “It was sort of a removal point.” To help him leave JP.

  Still, he made excuses to himself about what a “breakthrough” it was to go to bed with someone his own age. Usually his lovers were older, and he liked that maturity, the extra years of reflection those guys had behind them. Plus, the age difference created an inherent separation. Making love with someone like this Englishman, Alan—that was frightening, but now he’d overcome it.

  He made plans to meet Alan again, on April 10. But he decided he’d better tell JP. He fretted over this for a couple of days. Maybe he was wrong. But “then came senses of myself as a human being who needed freedom to do exactly what he desired in way of contact, sexual or otherwise.” So he told Jean Pierre, I’m having dinner with this guy, and I’m sleeping with him. He was still committed to JP, but he said, “I … just need to explore things as they move my way.” JP told him he had to feel free to do as he wished. Though David worried whether JP truly understood.

  The night with Alan was almost comical, and completely foolish. First, David got lost trying to find the right street. Alan had a student room on the seventh floor at the top of a creaking staircase, and down dank hallways with dripping pipes. When David arrived, Alan was in red rubber gloves, chopping celery and apples for their meal. He struggled out of one to shake David’s hand. David took a wobbly chair, noted the crumb-littered rug, the tiny cot, and the skylight with one broken pane. They listened to the BBC news while Alan finished chopping fruit and vegetables and poured nuts over them: their dinner. David knew immediately that he and Alan weren’t clicking. “At one point I wanted to leave quite badly.” But he wouldn’t. He’d told JP he was going to spend the night; therefore he would. Alan’s bed was so small that David felt he couldn’t move an inch without falling out. He lay there—rain tapping his head through the broken skylight, a cat yowling in the alley, his thoughts on JP. Alan, meanwhile, wondered if David would be interested in a threesome next time.

  Not really.

  At six, David got up and scurried back to Jean Pierre, picking up a croissant for him on the way. They exchanged ça va’s and sat down to coffee. JP told him he was making plans to go to the shore for a week by himself. He needed some time alone.

  They didn’t discuss the affair for another three days. JP then admitted that it had hurt his feelings. David admitted that he hadn’t enjoyed it, but he would not apologize. Though he concluded that “all this shoulda been spared from the typewriter,” David not only typed it—he also pasted it into his journal. And when JP went off for his week of vacation, he took David with him.

  David’s relationship with Jean Pierre would prove to be one of the two major love affairs of his life, yet for all his talk of “emotional commitment,” it seems likely that he allowed himself to fall in love with JP (and actually write about him in his journal) because he knew from the start that it would have to end. He’d never taken any step needed to stay in Paris.

  For all his talk of needing to “explore things” moving his way, David sometimes wondered whether to trust his instincts. While he did not want to continue a sexual relationship with Alan, he thought they could socialize. Alan gave him a book, Christopher and His Kind, in which David immediately found two quotes to support him in what he’d done.

  Author Christopher Isherwood had seized upon the same quotes: “There is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature.” (This from anthropologist John Layard, who seems to have picked it up from psychologist Homer Lane.) Isherwood was talking about his decision to go to Berlin in 1929. To go there to meet boys. When he meets one who becomes a magical figure for him and he can’t explain why, Isherwood tells himself what he thinks Layard would have said—and this was a major one for David: “Anything one invents about oneself is part of one’s personal myth and therefore true.”

  For one thing, this eased David’s mind about the “fiction” he’d included in letters to friends, “the distortion or make up of events—for entertaining reasons or for reasons illustrating senses.”

  Like writing in a letter that he’d met JP “leanin against the midnight doors of the Louvre” instead of “in a bush”? After reading many letters, both those pasted into the journal and those gathered from friends, that seems a typical distortion.

  The bigger truth-telling issue he had at this point was with Brian. He had written to him about JP on the Nico poster, but never mailed
that—or any other letter explaining that he had a new boyfriend. Brian thought David was still at his sister’s place, where he continued to get his mail. In fact, David was coy with many friends about Jean Pierre. “Mon ami,” he would call him. My friend.

  On April 25, David talked to Brian on the phone for ten minutes, and they made a plan. Brian would arrive in Paris for a visit on May 7. They would return to New York together on June 1.

  David admitted to the journal that he was feeling nervous, feeling strange—maybe because Brian was coming. And he was depressed about leaving JP. Into that emotional mélange dropped a mind-blowing letter from John Hall, who confessed that he was having fantasies about making love with David. He currently had a girlfriend but was interested in exploring his “homosexual aspect.” He’d never said this to another man, he wrote, adding, “I hope this isn’t anything heavy for you.”

  David was startled but took it in stride. Sex was easy for David, something he could always handle without self-consciousness or awkwardness. It’s the emotions that were hard, though distance from the person in question made them easier. His reply to John Hall was gracious and thoughtful. “Its a damn nice compliment in the form of trust that you’ve given me,” David wrote. “It really brought about some intense feelings on this end, a sense of gladness that you felt comfortable enough to share those feelings with me.” David told Hall of the fear he’d had about coming out to him, how he’d never allowed himself “to consider you in a sexual way,” so now he would have to push back that sense—but sure, David would like to make love to him. “I just see so many things arising from it and want you to understand some of them before we attempt it.” There was a possibility that Hall wouldn’t like it, and if it was his first time, it had to be approached “openly and with talk and also with the idea that if you feel uncomfortable at any point then we don’t go on.… The most pressing thought I have is that I don’t want anything to get in the way of our friendship.” Plus Hall needed to think about his relationships with women. David had always thought it difficult to do both at once.