Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Charlie Ahearn, also a Colab member, would begin working on Wild Style in 1981. The film starred real graffiti writers and rappers like Lee Quinones, Fab 5 Freddy, and Lady Pink, with a small featured role for Patti Astor as the intrepid journalist who goes to the Bronx to do a story on them. Astor was an actress in no-wave films and a self-styled blonde bombshell who would open the first East Village gallery in the summer of ’81. “There seems to be little doubt these days that the story of the ’80s is going to center on the merger of the South Bronx and the East Village,” wrote Steven Hager in a cover story on Astor for the East Village Eye. Who knows? Maybe that could have happened if artists were really in charge. Wild Style ends by making an uptown-downtown connection when rappers and break-dancers perform at the East River Park amphitheater just off the Lower East Side—a vandalized eyesore until Quinones paints it into glory.

  In 1980, gentrification seemed eons away in the South Bronx, while Delancey Street—and Rivington, and Grand—were literally within walking distance of Soho, then the epicenter of the art world. The artists could foresee the changes in which they would soon play a part. One of the idealists involved in “The Real Estate Show” promised in a letter to the architecture magazine Skyline, “In the past, artists have been forced to move on once they had adequately defined new real estate values. This time, on the Lower East Side, they intend to stay put and help determine the area’s evolution.”

  Shortly after the New Year, David had a big argument with his mother and told her he’d never see her again. That night, he dreamt that he’d run into Jean Pierre on the subway. They talked like old friends. JP had just found an apartment in Chicago, or was it Washington, D.C.? After they parted, David realized that he didn’t know and had no address for him. “Jean Pierre is lost to me,” he thought inside the dream. “He feels for me but feels its best not to continue. World seems to be crashing apart for me. I feel upset as hell.” Then, still in the dream, he rationalizes it. Birth always meant there’d be loneliness. He goes home with a guy he meets on the street, a “jerk.” Looking out the window in the jerk’s apartment, he sees Dolores scaling the side of the building. They’re on at least the tenth floor. She’s huffing and puffing and losing hold. He opens the window and grabs her hand, pulling her inside. She gives him a look. “Sadness in there.” He turns and now his mother is on the couch with some wealthy middle-age man. The guy is pulling out gifts. David is disgusted, thinking his mother must be going for money. “I sit there wondering if I’m made of the same desperate actions.”

  Though he did not yet identify himself as a visual artist, he entered three pieces in a juried show at Washington Square East Gallery. The art had to be a foot square or smaller. There were three thousand submissions. On January 15, he found out that he’d be one of 457 artists in the show. They had accepted one piece of his, a self-portrait. He wrote to Jean Pierre, “Now I have something to put on a resume.”

  But what this acceptance triggered internally, which he decided he could tell no one, was a sense of himself in time: “a sense of the aging self, a sense of how much I want to do and experience, no country in the world could hold that much.”

  He was still sad about his argument with Dolores. He decided that he’d vented his anger and frustration at her for not being what she could be when, really, he was mad at himself for not living up to his own potential. “I guess what scares me more than anything else in my life or in my box of fears is that I won’t be able to exercise my senses, my leanings in the time period of my living.” He was soon in touch with his mother again.

  On a small paper bag he made notes for an installation or performance (never realized). He would appear shirtless, carrying a piece of timber from the piers like Christ going to his crucifixion. He’d attach a clock to the timber. He’d crush animal skulls, shells, and fossils underfoot. And he kept drawing that power plant. Sometimes with one smokestack, sometimes with two.

  He’d started a new project—portraits of men. This went on for months, with Brian his most frequent subject: Brian blindfolded. Brian in a bow tie. Brian at the barbershop. Brian at home. Brian on the sand, against a wall, in a car, lying on grass, shooting up. Brian as St. Sebastian at the pier, standing in what used to be an office or a cubicle. And of course, Brian as Rimbaud. He began shooting more Rimbauds at the end of February. Brian remembered always complaining, “I don’t wanna,” because he worked nights and David was constantly after him to “ ‘get up, get up.’ “

  Fire ravaged the pier warehouse at the end of January 1980. When David went to inspect the damage a few days later, he found that some of his graffiti had gone up in flames. In the main section of the covered pier, he found an old ratty couch on an upraised ledge and a barrel cover set up on a box “like some wino’s living room.” Upstairs the entire roof had burned. Steel girders twisted like snakes poked into the sky. Some areas were impassable now, “rooms and rooms of crushed plasterboard, cinders, ash heaps, a couple walls with strange graffitied frescoes done in crayons of altars and angelic faces and swooning winds and muscular bodies.”

  He noted in his journal on February 8 that a sheet of corrugated iron had been nailed over the walkway that led into the covered pier. He did at least half his cruising closer to home now, along the waterfront in Brooklyn. But mere iron would not keep determined men off the pier for long. On March 6, David was back at the warehouse watching drag queens pick their way through the charred wreckage while a group of men scoured the place for copper to sell. The guy he made it with that night was built like a weight lifter and had a couple of large feathers hanging from one shoulder of his jacket by a piece of string. David wrote, “[This] decoration … perplexed yet gladdened me for it threw meaning into his image, as if it were a tribal gift.” Later he drew a picture of it in his journal.

  David had begun to feel distance growing between him and Brian, though on certain days it would seem “okay” again. He was also editing more of his life from the letters to Jean Pierre, which he still sent once or twice a week. Naturally he’d never mentioned his sexual encounters, though I don’t think either of them expected fidelity. But when he met a French man at the piers who took him to Los Angeles for a couple of days, he told JP only that he might go—that he’d been told he could find work there. JP apparently responded with some concern, because David’s next letter assured him: “I thought I would possibly go to Los Angeles only if I cannot come to Paris by summer.… Remember I love you.” (Actually, Los Angeles had been “a kind of refuge,” he told the journal, “from thoughts about Paris and the constant limbo I feel I’m in.”) He didn’t tell JP about the drugs either. David tried heroin for the first time in late March. He was with Brian and friends of Brian’s including Sister Roxanne, “nurse of the Nether-worlds,” who selected the best needle from a fistful of hypos and shot them all up. Just days earlier, he’d injected cocaine with Brian and his friends from the Empire Diner, then gone to the Mudd Club—which David thought “bourgeois” but, he wrote in his journal, “with friends it’s endurable.” He told JP only about dancing there and about escaping a mugger in the subway by leaping into an F train just before the door closed, then finding himself surrounded by homeless men, asleep across every seat.

  David also met the poet Tim Dlugos that March and showed him the Rimbaud series. Dlugos wrote to his friend, the writer Dennis Cooper, who was then in Los Angeles editing a journal called Little Caesar. As Cooper remembered it, “Tim said, ‘I bought this hustler last night and he showed me some of his stuff and it’s really good.’ “

  A hustler?

  “Maybe it was ‘trick.’ I don’t know,” Cooper said. “But Tim sort of made it seem like he had bought him at the piers.”

  If David had gone back to selling himself, he never said so. A “trick” could refer to someone he’d picked up. But David might not have been averse to a little cash “gift.” He certainly had not paid for the trip to Los Angeles with the French guy. The upshot was that, in April, David sent a pack
age of sixteen Rimbaud photos and a couple of his monologues to Dennis Cooper, who agreed to publish all of them. There would, of course, be no payment.

  At the beginning of May, David went out with John Hall to shoot pictures of trash in the squalid alleyway called Extra Place that ran behind CBGB’s. He’d been there a few days earlier, and he couldn’t help but notice that the rotting fish he’d photographed then had been stripped to the bone. As he approached a discarded sack of clothing, he realized that it was actually a man, and a gigantic bum called out to tell him he’d be in trouble if he photographed his sleeping friend. The bum pronounced himself sick of “you people coming down here and making money off us.” David told him he was just photographing the trash and had never sold a photo. So the bum told him that if he really wanted a story, he should write about “conditions,” the fact that sixteen hundred men a night couldn’t find a bed in a shelter. And young kids were coming to the Bowery dives and taking the spaces—when those kids could work. His sleeping friend was eighty-six years old and made about ten dollars a day washing car windows on Houston Street. As did he. David asked if he could come back and record their stories. Sure, said the bum. His name was Maurice.

  David hadn’t abandoned his monologue project. In fact, he’d added a piece about a sexual encounter he had in February with “a young tough” who probably hadn’t slept inside for a week (by David’s estimate). They met on a bench along the river, where the guy was having trouble rolling a joint because his fingers were so frozen. David helped him, and then they walked down a ramp to have sex in an abandoned playground.f

  Even if they didn’t become monologues, David was still making notes on intriguing marginal characters. Like the drag queen at the Silver Dollar with a cardboard suitcase under her feet and a cigarette held between shaking fingers, “writing letters with a chewed pencil and stuffing them nervously into envelopes destined for Texas.” Or the ravaged old “Genet” character who invited him to see his room in the Christopher Street Hotel, a room about twelve feet square and plastered with news photos of President Jimmy Carter, the First Lady, Carter’s mother, and the American flag. A large flag covered most of the guy’s mattress. He pulled out a greeting card featuring a seminude woman, “like a Vargas Playboy painting.” On this he’d written a letter to the president’s mother, explaining to David: “How do I know she didn’t look like this when she was younger?”

  But if David ever found Maurice again, there’s no record of it. He did end up with a photo showing the lower part of a man’s body in a pile of trash.

  The day he took that picture, he and John Hall went to Squat Theater on Twenty-third Street to see James White and the Blacks. The doors had opened at nine, but these were the days that clubs had to add the word “sharp” if there was any chance of the show beginning close to the advertised time. James White (a.k.a. James Chance) showed up at twelve thirty. David wrote a long description of his performance and the feelings of aggression it aroused in him. White snaked out into the audience touching people. He was famous for attacking spectators. When he grabbed a woman’s sweater and pulled her about a yard, David wanted to punch him. “I was gonna grab him by the hair if he fucked with me,” he then decided. “That’s the intense stuff he inspired—didn’t feel good contemplating it—just thought he was both brilliant and a creep.” Hall felt certain that the people there must have known White’s reputation for these assaults. Dirk Rowntree analyzed it as “a method of making you impatient for freedom—feeling the limitations or boundaries of your freedom by exiting from his self-made boundaries into yours.”

  Soon after Dennis Cooper accepted his work for Little Caesar, David wrote to Sarah Longacre, editor in charge of the centerfold at the SoHo News, wondering if she’d be interested in considering his Rimbaud photos. She would. He met with her on May 7, after he’d spent the afternoon making new prints in a darkroom on Prince Street. She immediately asked if she could use the image of Rimbaud shooting up to illustrate a story they were doing on heroin. (It ran in the very next issue, one column wide.) She loved the whole series, but told David she wasn’t sure enough New Yorkers would know who Rimbaud was. She needed time to consult with the editor in chief.

  That same week, between his meeting with Longacre and the appearance of junkie Rimbaud in print, David finally got a job. He ran into Jim Fouratt at Julius’s bar. They knew each other from hanging out late nights at Tiffany’s coffee shop. Fouratt had just opened a new club, Danceteria (with business partner Rudolf Pieper), and David asked if he might work for him. Fouratt told him that the only position still available was busboy. Fine, said David. He was so elated to get this job he nearly fell over a chair.

  That night at Julius’s, he also met Arthur Bressan Jr., a filmmaker. David was thinking about making a Super 8 film. Arthur was all for it, said that’s how he’d started. They rambled around the Village, ending up at the Hudson River, where they had sex out on one of the piers. David would realize a couple of days later that he hadn’t even seen Arthur’s face clearly, but at the end of the evening Arthur had held David’s hand. David reacted to this gesture with “almost bewilderment insofar as people rarely do that in this city, much less when they hardly know you, and I really dug it.” He met Arthur again a couple of days later, feeling self-conscious because of the “honesty” they’d shared in talking and touching. They went to the pier, and Arthur told him he wanted to make a film about child abuse—actually a film about a man making a film about child abuse, in which a fourteen-year-old boy leaves his cruel parents and finds love with the filmmaker.g

  Arthur thought that when kids had sex with older guys, they grew up suddenly—even adopted the mannerisms of an older person, while the older guy became more childlike. David thought this perceptive, based on his own experiences. He flashed back to teenage times when he’d been on the street: “The older men I’d lain down with and the recollection of my movements, my mannerisms with them, those scenes in dim-lit rooms in Jersey swamp motels manipulating a cigarette in my fingers and reflecting on my life and past while talking in a purposefully more sophisticated manner, out loud to the man unseen in the bathroom combing his hair before a fluorescent-lit mirror.” David was quite taken with Arthur and gave him the two Rimbaud prints he requested. However, Arthur thought that David wasn’t really a still photographer; he should be “doing cinema.” Nowhere does David say that Arthur made mostly porn films. Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered to him.

  Arthur was at least ten years older than David and took a paternal approach. David had never been truly appreciated, Arthur told him, and had a sadness about him, a loneliness. David didn’t agree with this. The line that came into his head immediately was “I never feel loneliness,” but he didn’t say it out loud.

  The affair with Arthur Bressan lasted most of May. That month, David sent fifteen cards or letters to Jean Pierre. He waited for a decision from SoHo News, and he began working at Danceteria on Friday and Saturday nights.

  He was soon dismayed by his new job and disgusted with the clubgoers. His duties included keeping bartenders supplied with iced Heineken or Bud, carrying broken sacks of ice between floors, emptying garbage cans, pulling bottles or whole rolls of paper towels from toilets, mopping up vomit, and diving “through human walls of sweating pounding thrusting dancing bodies to sweep up broken bottles.” Arthur told him that the club goers thought destructiveness was anarchy, and if someone told them to do whatever they wanted with a window, they’d just break it. In a letter to JP, David complained, “Fou! The punk new wave people are becoming very boring to me.… [They] destroy anything they desire, break chairs, doors, light fixtures. I have to clean up after them.… These people have no imagination concerning what to do with freedom.” It was in this letter that David told Jean Pierre he’d met a filmmaker who was showing him how to use a movie camera.

  The film David planned—silent, black-and-white, Super 8—would be all about eroticism in everyday life, i.e., cruising. But also about repression, re
presented by cops bursting into a room. A naked man would be bound to suggest “that waterfront/bar sexuality can be seen as either a result of, or an attempt to break the weight of social/political restraints.” He wrote two scripts for this film, which he never made.

  Just before meeting Arthur, he’d written to JP: “I do not think I will be in love again in my life, except with you. These are honest words.” And they were. His anxiety about the long separation from JP seemed to intensify during the affair with Arthur, especially after he decided that Arthur wanted him only for sex. “I’m still very much in love with Jean Pierre,” he wrote in his journal near the end of May. “I still desire the chance to leave here and live with him in Paris. Jean Pierre was the first man to be completely relaxed and loving with me. Unafraid of my personality or my creative movements. There was room with him to love and live and grow and change. Time has put a distance between us. And my meeting Arthur filled up that kind of empty space.” He hadn’t even gone to the piers in two and a half weeks. But he felt that he didn’t have Arthur’s real attention. Something was missing.

  Ever since David left Paris, he and JP had tried to figure out some way to get back together. Like dual citizenship—which would have allowed David to work in France but would also require his mandatory service in its military. Then there was the idea of entering a French university, but David didn’t have the money. That May, they had one last pipe dream between them: David would get a position with UNESCO. Jean Pierre knew a woman who worked there and she promised to help, but David had none of the skills or education the agency required.

  It would have been easy to lose touch completely. David still had no telephone. Letters usually took about a week to arrive and sometimes as long as three. But now that David finally had some income, he hoped to visit France in August. He and JP had, of course, not seen each other since the previous August.