Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Arthur Rimbaud in New York (on the subway), 1979. From a series of twenty-four gelatin-silver prints, 10 ×8 inches each. (Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)

  While the Rimbaud project was under way, he wrote nothing about it in his journals. He said nothing to the posing Rimbauds about what it meant to him. And he wrote nothing about Jean Pierre, who visited for most of August.

  That summer he pasted into the journal his first drawing of a burning house. Somewhere he had seen the work of Saul Ostrow. “Desire one of his fire images,” he wrote. “Stuff haunts the head.” David was then having an affair with a guy acquainted with Ostrow. By September, he’d begun corresponding with Ostrow himself. David told me, “Ostrow was doing paintings of burning houses, and we had a correspondence of at least six or seven letters between us where we sent each other burning houses in the mail. Like, I’d find a logbook for a fire department from 1950 and do dotted lines in bold that he could cut, and make a burning house out of this paper. Things like that.” It would take another two years for the burning house to become one of David’s stencils, and one of the first images associated with him. In the journal, on lined paper, the burning house just sits behind a man in the foreground with a dog-head puppet on one hand saying, “If he’s following my scent … this’ll throw him off.”

  He’d started making “to do” lists. One from September includes this instruction to self: “Do a Saint Genet collage—go to Strand for a copy of his photo on Funeral Rites.”

  He also made a first rough sketch for this. Untitled (Genet) became controversial in 1990 because it includes an image of Christ shooting up. When he began it, he was working with images of the sacred and profane and seems simply to be questioning, what is evil? And by extension, what is good? He was just beginning to find his subject matter.

  The original sketch is overly busy. He wants to set this scene at the waterfront, with Genet in the center, a Madonna and child looking down from a fortress at the right, and a large ship “possibly with flame inside” at the left. Salamanders without legs rain down on the ship. There’s an eclipse. Onshore, left, two men are fucking. He’s thinking the Madonna should have a weapon, maybe a cigarette. His second sketch is much simpler—just Genet on the left and the Madonna and child in a window to the right. He still thinks it should be set at the waterfront, and this time the baby Jesus holds a pistol.

  But no. The waterfront suggests his own life—the piers, and his father the sailor. Madonna and child—that would be the Catholicism he knew as a young boy. It would take him till the end of the year to work this out, to see that the piece had a meaning beyond his own life, and that it is about sorrow. In the final version, he replaces the waterfront with a war-ravaged church. David had been very aware in France of all the people around him who’d come through the war, often at great cost. Genet’s lover had died “on the barricades” in 1944. Funeral Rites is the story of his grief. David has angels flying in from the left side of the picture and at bottom, one comic-book machine-gunner firing bullets toward heaven. Genet wears a nimbus.e David may well have skipped Sartre’s critical study, drawing inspiration simply from the title Saint Genet. But he’d read all the novels. He particularly loved The Thief’s Journal, telling JP in a letter that the book had made him feel good about his own early life. The Thief’s Journal presents a world of inverted values, where criminality is a way to oppose the social order and evil can be the path to sainthood. David may also have noted lines such as, “Going into mourning means first submitting to a sorrow from which I shall escape, for I transform it into the strength necessary for departing from conventional morality.”

  Untitled (Genet, after Brassaï), 1979. Photocopied collage, 8½ × 11 inches. (Private collection)

  As for the junkie Christ destined to so upset the American Family Association, it creates balance with the criminal Genet who’s been exalted into sainthood. But where Genet wants to transcend his sorrow, Christ wants to embrace it, because he has chosen to identify with “the least of these.” Jesus describes this to his followers who will get into heaven by saying, I was hungry, I was sick—and you fed me, you visited me. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” In David’s mind, he could have added, I was a junkie, I was a bum, I was a lonely drag queen trolling the piers.

  One night David and Brian went to the Christopher Street pier and sat on the loading dock of the abandoned warehouse under a streetlamp, reading Genet’s Funeral Rites out loud. David had begun the practice of going to the piers to write. He’d pick up a cup of coffee at the Silver Dollar and sit with his journal in the yellow streetlamp glow that came through the side of the warehouse. He was there to record the whole scene, including its architecture and ambience—headlights moving across a wall, the sound of tin doors banging, water slashing at pier posts. Later, he would tell me that he saw these dying structures as symbols of what was essentially a dying country. In the first journal entry he made after visiting the pier with John Hall, he wrote, “It’s so simple, the man without the eye against a receding wall, the dog’s head impaled against the surface: the subtleties of weather, of shading.”

  It was the first draft of a piece he would include in Close to the Knives in 1991: “Surrounded by shadows, the mudcaked floors and harsh scent of urine in damp corners, men moving with unbuttoned shirts, teeshirts tied around thick waists, dreams falling in dense heaps along the stairways, last flies of summer circling the busted windows, his hands red and moving thickly where his lips traced lines down on the belly.”

  By mid-September 1979, David had noticed that his “Marcel Duchamp” line was flaking off the wall, and someone had thrown rocks through the Rimbaud face he’d painted on a window.

  But he would have heard nothing of the following news, also from September ’79: Two young gay male New Yorkers went to their doctors complaining of odd purplish lesions on their bodies. Kaposi’s sarcoma, declared the doctors—baffled, since KS was a rare cancer that usually appeared among elderly men of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern descent. The disease these young men would soon die from would not get the acronym “AIDS” until 1982.

  One day, David went to the piers to draw, but the wind made it hard to manage his paper. He ended up helping the warehouse’s self-appointed artist in residence, Tava, carry paint cans inside. Tava was working on a huge mural of two men masturbating that would cover the back wall. David had encountered Tava before, in a former washroom among the broken shards of porcelain, and had watched him paint a giant hand on a giant cock. David thought of Tava’s work as “thug frescoes.” Outside, facing every passing boat, Tava had painted two men with huge erections, like two caryatids, as tall as the central doorway.

  David loved just hanging out in this ambience. The piers were a glimpse of life outside the approved social structure. And the pier denizens were more than sexual objects. They represented what the hoboes in Paris had represented. “They can be seen as a physical rejection of society’s priorities; which elevates many of these characters in my eyes,” he’d written to a friend regarding the hoboes. Sex just added to the fascination—and the layers of meaning.

  In October, David had a sexual encounter at the piers that he mused over for days:

  I’m losing myself in the language of his movements—he drifted, turned on his heel in grey light and passed into a quiet room with torn walls and glass “paymaster” windows boarded over on the other side. A hermaphrodite was scrawled on the wall near the broken window, lines of rain slowing to a halt.… I moved towards the stranger in the leather jacket, the brief motion of his body eyes and hands a brief shuffle in the vacant room, the swirling of fine shadows in the corners, the grace of his movements, all contributed to erasing the formality of being strangers, we eased towards one another and my jacket swung loose and to the side; blue colors of light, blue moving effortlessly over his face, the red glow of the skin making the hands luminous as they passed o
ver my legs to my crotch. I slipped my hand between his shirt and smooth chest, fingers touching lightly to his nipples as he rubbed slow and hard with his hand. I felt his neck and grew hard and he unzipped my trousers, drew them down slightly, a strong palm beneath my balls, face lowering slowly as he squatted and took me into his mouth. I bent my torso forward and rolled my hands down the linings of his collar, smoothed out the shadows and the heat of his skin, felt my blood had been removed, boiled slowly and then replaced, warm currents in the forehead and stomach, sleep rolling outside in the hallways in coils like rope. He stood up briefly as I tongued his chest, running my lips over his belly and chest, sucking at his nipples, caressing his smooth sides, his arms encased in leather, the leather becoming an extension of his flesh only in the way that belongs to men who have graceful animal movements and sexual energies running through their corded arms and legs. I felt a sweat run down my body in the cold air as is the case, rare that it is, when I’m in the company of a man like this; a culminating sense of time and age and direction coasting on a single track towards walls of life lived, felt naked as I came and grabbed his shoulders and shook him violently ramming my cock into his mouth with each movement, grabbed his hair between my fingers and stroked his face and neck and skull and embraced his back and shoulders and blew out shadows and bleak visions of sky and rain and water and blew out delirium from the base of my skull, felt heavy and lightweight simultaneously, felt a pitch of heat in my chest and belly, and he rose to his feet, said: whoah … really good, and I blushed slightly, all these unspoken sentences at the tip of my tongue.

  Before they parted, David learned that the man was originally from Texas—and though the guy didn’t live there anymore, David added that image to his musings. The cowboy. The pickup truck. The drive toward endless vistas with a bullet in the dashboard—the romance of that. This was about freedom. The fact that he connected anonymous sex with possibility. He decided that he’d never yet lived the life he wanted. “Really it’s this lawlessness and anonymity simultaneously that I desire, living among thugs, but men who live under no degree of law or demand, just continual motion and robbery and light roguishness and motion, reading Genet out loud to the falling sun overlooking the vast lines of the desert … aimlessness in terms of the senseless striving to be something, the huge realization of the senselessness of that conscious attempt in the way this living is really constructed.”

  David decided that if he was living his life for anything, it was for this man from Texas—not that individual so much as what the encounter represented, “the combination of time, elements, visuals, visions, light, movements, all associations … as if that past moment holds everything that will make my life valid, that will save my life.” That was the sense he had until he wrote it down, and then he was faced with emptiness, “having tasted a real freedom, a freeing of myself from this life from this city rotating with the world on its axis.”

  Writing about sex at the piers always sent him into these reveries, even when he was not personally involved. One day he watched as men drifted toward a corner of a warehouse to watch a blow job—like metal filings drawn to a magnet—and the scene spiraled out in his mind to the vistas he wished to travel and then back again, to his own mortality, to his wish to extend time, to turn sunsets “into lifelong moments, unbreathing, no need for food, no need to scratch or shift, the lengths of measure contained in the dragging feet of the large man who follows me from room to room, emptiness shadowed by rusting floor safes and broken glass that holds pieces of sky along the dark floorboards.”

  One of the men he met “along the river” took to him to see his first opera, Le Prophète. Tedious, David thought, except for the parts where he had to pinch his leg to keep from laughing. Afterward, David showed this man his artwork and could see that he didn’t like it. How was it, he wondered, that his imagery was so threatening to those who enjoyed the established order? How could he explain that his images reflected energy he’d picked up “in society, in movement through these times? It’s just a translation of what takes place in the world.” But sometimes he questioned himself about why he was so drawn to imagery that unsettled and disturbed. Once he’d kept his life hidden. He wondered, did he now keep beauty hidden?

  In November, David and Brian finally moved into their own apartment, in a desolate Brooklyn neighborhood called Vinegar Hill just north of DUMBO (down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass). DUMBO felt deserted and dangerous in the Seventies. A few artists had moved into old industrial buildings, but there were no grocery stores, newsstands, or Laundromats. Just one seedy bar stood between the York Street subway stop and the Brooklyn Bridge. Vinegar Hill was even harsher and more isolated. The blocks between the subway and their apartment at 59 Hudson Avenue were industrial, mostly cobblestone, and inhabited at night only by packs of stray dogs. It was a fifteen-minute walk that felt like an hour. But the apartment had five rooms. Out the back window they could see the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Out the front they could see the Manhattan Bridge, and beyond it the Brooklyn Bridge. They kept a three-ring binder to which, every day, they would each add an artwork: a drawing, a found object, a poem, a collage. They had no telephone.

  Brian paid the rent. He worked the graveyard shift at the Empire Diner in Chelsea, as a short-order cook. David had a few short-lived jobs, often acquired through men he met cruising. Mostly he painted the occasional apartment, though one guy got him a job with decent pay in a piano factory. David quit after a week. The labor was exhausting, the commute too long. Early in November, David went to a clinic on Forty-second Street and sold some blood. Then for a couple of months that winter, he worked at a bookstore again, but it folded.

  For David, these were “grey and confusing times.” This was the year he began admitting to his sense of mortality, at least in the journals. He was now twenty-five.

  He dreamt he’d been buried in coarse brown earth, all the way up to his teeth. That image again—of his own partly buried face. But it doesn’t seem to be a death dream. One molar’s been exposed to air, it’s throbbing, and after running “with cutthroats,” he returns to his own burial spot to lift out the aching tooth. He sees that it’s rotten, filled with maggots. He feels he mustn’t scream since it’s his own tooth. He’s given a shot of morphine and feels secure. “The matter of having no home becomes something relegated to the self of the past.”

  By the end of 1979, he’d rewritten the piece about the piers, which he now called “Losing the Form in Darkness.” The four paragraphs in his journal appear almost verbatim in the final version:

  It’s so simple: the man without the eye against a receding wall, the subtle deteriorations of weather, of shading, of images in the flaking walls. Seeing the quiet outline of a dog in the plaster, simple as the splashing of a fish in dreaming, and then the hole in the wall further along, framing a jagged sky swarming with glints of silver and light. So simple, the sudden appearance of night in a room filled with strangers, the maze of hallways wandered as in films, the fracturing of bodies from darkness into light, sounds of plane engines easing into the distance.

  He did the first of many drawings of a factory with one large smokestack, like the one on the Jersey side of the Hudson that he could see from the West Side piers. He drew this factory, with reindeer, on his Christmas card for JP.

  He still wrote to Jean Pierre once or twice a week. For all his fantasies about “freedom” and living with thugs, he also fantasized about going back to JP. This would be a lifelong internal struggle: the urge to roam versus the longing for stability. He responded to warmth in others with such hunger, wanting to connect. But when he did, it scared him. On December 30, he wrote to JP: “For the first time in my life, I don’t have any idea what will happen to me—I think sometimes that I would like to return to Paris.”

  On that same day, December 30, a tremor hit the downtown art world, but the shift in tectonic plates was so small that few noticed it at the time. This was the day that some thirty-five artists—their bo
lt cutters in a guitar case—broke into an abandoned city-owned building on Delancey Street and set up “The Real Estate Show.” The artwork, in every medium, addressed how “artists, working people, the poor are systematically screwed out of decent places to exist in,” according to the East Village Eye. Few people ever saw this exhibit, which opened on January 1, 1980, and included works by Rebecca Howland, Jane Dickson, Bobby G, Christy Rupp, Mike Glier, Edit DeAk, and others. Police closed it on January 2. But no matter. In retrospect, “The Real Estate Show” was a conceptual project, and the idea that it had happened was much more consequential than anything exhibited. The city responded to the break-in and attendant agitprop by giving the artists another building on nearby Rivington Street. It became ABC No Rio, its name lifted from a sign fragment across the street. No Rio not only preceded the East Village galleries but also outlasted them.

  Ironically enough, the artists had never intended to start an “alternative space” in the neighborhood. They were members of Colab (a.k.a. Collaborative Projects), a nonprofit set up to do thematic shows and access funding. They were the harbingers of new energy in a stultified art world. Members included Jenny Holzer, John Ahearn, Kiki Smith, and others who felt they had no access to that closed world. They were also “political” and acutely conscious of what it meant to bring their work into a neighborhood off the art world’s beaten path. In 1978, Colab member Stefan Eins had opened a storefront art space called Fashion Moda in the famously blighted South Bronx. Fashion Moda connected graffiti and hip-hop artists with the downtown scene. Graffiti writers were beautifully “bombing” the trains. At least, most artists thought so. Wait on any platform and a masterpiece might roll in.