Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Back at the Pep, Breer secured a bartending job for her then-boyfriend, Tommy Turner—later one of the directors in the Cinema of Transgression. He and David bonded. Turner was a physically beautiful guy with an affinity for the dark side, obsessed with black magic, medical deformities, murder, and taxidermy. He wasn’t a freak, Breer said, just someone who was truly curious. He’d trained as a geneticist. David called him “one of the sweetest heterosexual guys I’ve ever come in contact with.” David had taken Tommy Turner and Sophie Breer (“in my eighties spandex”) to the meat-packing district after work one night to scout for cow bones. She didn’t recall them finding any. But usually David and Turner went off on adventures by themselves.

  They’d leave the club at four or five in the morning and head into Alphabet City to climb the fire escapes of burnt-out tenements. That was the only way into abandoned buildings whose doors had been sealed with cinder blocks or bolted shut with steel. He and Turner explored the hastily abandoned half-melted slum apartments where there’d been arson fires. Sometimes they’d find people sleeping in there. “We’d try to find a stick before we went inside,” Turner remembered. Just in case. They witnessed the drug trafficking—one cinder block being pulled back from a door, a hand reaching out for money, then the hand coming back with a small glassine envelope. Turner had not yet become a junkie. Some nights he went along as lookout while David stenciled. One weekend, he and David decided to go to “the country,” by which they meant Roosevelt Island and the weeds and trees surrounding the abandoned insane asylum. They entered the broken buildings there to photograph what David called “weird discards of civilization.”

  David also met two friends of Turner’s when they came to hang out at the Pep. One was Richard Kern, who hadn’t yet begun to make the violent exploitative films that would bring him a kind of underground fame. David thought Kern a “sexy apparition … a dark-haired guy with a corruptible face.” Was he straight? David asked Turner, who snickered, “Why don’t you find out?” The other friend was Montana Hewson. (Or “Montanna,” as David consistently misspelled his name.) The night Montana first came to the club, wrote David, he was wearing a white T-shirt “awash with perspiration and floor grime.” He was skinny, with a turkey neck, a hawk head, a jutting chin, and “a las vegas card shark’s smile.” Montana was an artist David thought multitalented. He was a gay man who fell for straight men like Kern. He was self-conscious about being unattractive. And he was committed to self-destruction. Montana would prove to be the ultimate outcast in David’s whole history of interest in outcasts. But that story comes later.

  In January 1982, “gay cancer” was renamed GRID, for “gay-related immune deficiency.” On the 12th of that month, writer Larry Kramer met with five other men at his apartment to form Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

  David knew one person who would be diagnosed that year with GRID—Iolo Carew from Danceteria. Years later, David couldn’t remember ever hearing much about GRID, this “vague thing that was affecting twenty-some people.” And he really liked Iolo, who he felt was being shunned. So he went home with Iolo one night and had sex with him. Telling me all this in 1990, David added that what they did “could only be described as safe sex.” But that was all intuitive, he said. “There were no guidelines. So I did that that one night, and then I went back to having unsafe sex.”

  No one was using the term “safe sex” in 1982. And “no guidelines” hardly describes it—but by 1990 who could remember how ignorant we’d all been just a few years earlier. During the seven months that this disease was called GRID, scientists at the CDC were telling reporters that there was no evidence that this was an infectious disease, and that its sexual transmission was mere hypothesis.

  David and his roommate Tom Cochran lived in the rear of their Fourth Street building, and David had the room with the window, ten or fifteen feet from the back of the fire house on Great Jones Street. Cochran would sometimes come home to find all the lights out and David standing at the window with friends. Maybe Hujar. Maybe Brian or Jesse. They’d be watching the firemen take showers. Cochran seemed to find that amusing. He was straight, of course, but sexuality didn’t become an issue. They’d made a “no sex in the apartment” rule. The only tension that came up was over fumes from the spray paint David was using to make his stencil pieces. It would drive Cochran out for a walk with his dog.

  In January 1982, David answered an open call at Public Illumination Gallery for artwork that measured ten by ten inches. He submitted a stencil piece with a burning house at the center for “100 Works, 100 Artists, 100 Sq. In,” which the gallery accepted and then sold for one hundred dollars.

  David knew he had to find studio space. He often went to the White Wave coffee shop on Second Avenue for breakfast, and there he became friends with the woman who would wait on him, Jan Mohlman. When she found a storefront studio on Houston near Eldridge, she asked David to share it. “I had a kind of fluke brief art career,” said Mohlman. Meaning, she did an album cover for the Bush Tetras and it ended up in Art-forum, which led to her inclusion in a few shows. She painted, then started working with mosaics, and she did backdrops for Bush Tetras gigs. But she did not take her art making very seriously. Even so, she liked hanging out at the studio and offered to pay two-thirds of the three-hundred-dollar rent.

  Mohlman, who went on to teach psychology at the university level, observed that David had intense one-on-one relationships, and many people felt close to him, including her. “We were in some ways like a couple. We could spend such amazing time together. I really felt like he was one of the people in my life who loved me unconditionally.” Some years later, David reminisced in a journal entry about his friendship with her: “I was working as a busboy in clubs and felt like the alien among a species of people I couldn’t understand—it was also a time of intense relationship with Peter. Jan gave me my first bike in years, an old sturdy delivery bike from the 40s or 50s—15 dollars from some thief she ran into and we took late night rides to Staten Island among the darkened hills and homes and Wall Street plazas Dubuffets mushrooms circling til dizzy around the fountains at World Trade Center til the crabby guards came screaming at us to stop we rode around anyways.”

  Sometimes Hujar would drop by the studio. He and David were so intensely bonded, Mohlman said, “they rarely had to use spoken language. They just seemed to communicate so much with silence and proximity. Peter would come down and look at the artwork in the storefront and he would just stand there in silence and study it.”

  She remembered David working with stencils. “I started to see the soldier motif. The camouflage motif. The science-project paintings with the antigravity theme.” (All three appear, for example, in Science Lesson, with its large and small floating bodies.) And he’d begun to paint on found objects like maps and trash can lids. Mohlman also remembered him talking about work he was doing in some abandoned pier, but she never went to see it.

  Marisela La Grave was a student at the International Center for Photography in 1982. Assigned to document a site of her choosing for her class on color, she was halfway through the semester and still hadn’t found a place. She kept going back to the Hudson and walking the waterfront. One day, probably in March, near Canal Street, she noticed something through a broken window on Pier 34. “There was a figure painted on the wall. A big-scale figure that touched wall and ceiling, and then there was more than one, and then as I started getting close and breaking into the fence and breaking into the pier, I realized that I had found paradise.”

  No one else was there. La Grave had no idea who’d put the art on the walls, but she’d found her site. She came back with photo equipment and began documenting the work. She was in one of the smaller rooms when she heard voices and picked up her tripod to use as a weapon. In walked David Wojnarowicz and the painter Luis Frangella, going, “Hey. What’s up?” La Grave may have been the first of the many photographers who would eventually document Pier 34 (the Ward Line Pier). David and Luis squired her around thr
ough the other crumbling rooms to show her everything they were working on.

  They also took her farther south to Pier 28. “That was a very difficult pier to trespass because the floor was collapsing,” La Grave said. Pier 28 was also the location of the documents David and Kiki had plundered. La Grave called it “very officelike. Mostly just paper and boxes.” David would continue to work there alone after the art world discovered Pier 34.

  Jane Bauman, one of the artists who’d gone stenciling with David, remembered visiting the pier during this phase with David and Luis. “The three of us would go down to the pier and sometimes we’d work on each other’s pieces, but in a playful way. That was the most playful I ever, ever saw David. He was so comfortable in that milieu, so relaxed. Serious but childlike. Not ‘childish’ but ‘childlike.’ It was his Disneyland. Going into all the different rooms—it’s like, This is Frontierland. There’s Tomorrowland. Something really innocent came out when he was working there with Luis. That was some of the prettiest, most alive work that he ever did. It was when he seemed the happiest.”

  David leaping in front of an early piece at Pier 28, south of the Ward Line Pier and never as public. (Photograph by Marion Scemama)

  One piece David did was a wall-size color version of the Rimbaud Masturbating studies he’d drawn while living in Paris. Next to that was a large face, another early David work. He was learning how to be a painter here. He and Luis did not really collaborate; their styles were too different. But Luis taught him something about how to paint. Luis was an expressionist with a line that was both fluid and confident, and he often worked big, painting with a brush or a roller on the end of a stick. “Luis really understood the scale aspect of working in a public space,” said La Grave, who grew close to him. They were both from South America and would go out for drinks and Spanish conversation. She remembered David’s admiration for Luis—“for the control that he had of the line and how he managed the proportions and perspective.” When David eventually covered a whole wall at the pier with a gagging cow head, “that came out of their relationship,” she said. “He was saying, ‘OK, watch me do a bigger scale.’ “

  For a while, the gagging cow was a Wojnarowicz trademark. He explained it as a cow “exploding with fear.” It was a cow going to slaughter. Back in the East Village very late one night, Tommy Turner watched as David spray-painted one big enough to cover the entire intersection of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street. So Hujar could see it from his window. Another night, possibly in a different year, Chuck Nanney watched as David spray-painted not a gagging cow, but “a friendly cow,” as Nanney put it, in that same intersection. This cow had a thought bubble, and in that bubble, a hamburger. David cracked up as he drew it, as he thought about Hujar looking out his window in the morning and spotting the joke. He painted at least one more “friendly cow” there, this one thinking of a television. That one he wrote about in a short piece “for Sophie,” where he first talked about cruising Stuyvesant Park and then about coming down Second Avenue to see “the telly cow head seven feet tall and some boy outside La Bamba”—the bar on the corner—“screaming at me to grow up and get some crayons … and don’t fuck up the street … I walked at him like I was gonna spray-paint a cow on his forehead and he split.”

  Gracie Mansion’s “Loo Division” opened on March 30, 1982. This became the scene’s best-known origin story—an exhibit put up around a toilet, a party that turned into a gallery.

  Gracie was then Joanne Mayhew-Young, an artist with a job in a commercial SoHo gallery selling prints and posters, but she’d already done other projects that functioned as wry commentary on the way art is presented and sold. One Saturday afternoon, for example, she and her friend Buster Cleveland rented a limo for a few hours, parked it at the corner of West Broadway and Spring, and sold Buster’s collages out of the back seat. At the SoHo gallery where she worked, she and her co-worker Sur Rodney Sur took over the space behind the windows—space where they stood to change the displays—and hung a friend’s art there, clipped to coat hangers. Spectators had to open a door and walk in sideways. It was not visible from the street.

  Gracie was then living at 432 East Ninth in a fifth-floor walk-up with a tub in the kitchen, though she had the luxury of a loo actually inside her apartment. There she decided to exhibit “photographic work prints” by her friend Timothy Greathouse. She invented her moniker,l made up letterhead for a nonexistent Gracie Mansion Gallery, and wrote a tongue-in-cheek press release stating that in an age when a single painting could cover “the entire interior of a normal apartment”—and who could afford it anyway—“Gracie’s ‘less is more’ gallery offers private seating … allowing the viewer to relate ‘head’ on with the work.” It was a real show but it was also the parody of a show.

  But in March 1982, there wasn’t an East Village scene to provide context. Fun Gallery hadn’t attracted much attention in its first seven months. Gallery 51X opened the same month as the “Loo Division,” in Rich Colicchio’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place, but flew under the radar. Colicchio worried about zoning, the legalities—and what would happen if he got too much attention.

  One of the “friendly cows” David drew for Peter Hujar on the intersection of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street, photographed from Hujar’s loft. (Courtesy of P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)

  Gracie avoided such issues by opening the Loo Division for just the one day—and after that, by appointment only. She did not intend, at that point, to ever run a gallery. The “Loo Division,” though, posed all the questions that would later be brought up by the East Village scene: Did art have to be so pretentious? So intimidating? So expensive? So huge?

  Gracie liked to say that she was created by the media. Her press release caught the eye of Howard Smith at the Village Voice, who covered the “Loo” opening and asked her, what’s your next show? That’s when she decided she’d do another.

  Filmmaker Ivan Galietti was another who found himself entranced by the poetic ruin of the sex pier. He’d been born on the island of Capri, near Pompeii, and in the pier’s labyrinths and caves, its decay, and its sexually explicit “frescoes,” Galietti saw the phallic cults of pagan times. In 1982, the city scheduled the crumbling structure for demolition. (The warehouse finally came down in September 1983.) Keen to preserve it, at least on celluloid, he began filming Pompeii New York in early April. The Pyramid Club held a “Save the Pier” benefit to help Galietti raise money.

  He didn’t want to “shoot voyeuristically from a corner” for a surreptitious documentary. Instead he recruited players from the Bar on Fourth Street and asked them to re-create what they’d done at the pier. David was one who immediately agreed to participate, though he appears only briefly: He’d brought an unidentified friend along; he walked over to this friend and started rubbing his chest. Galietti ended up with about half an hour of edited footage from Pier 46. He had even found a “cruising” passage in Dante’s Inferno to add to the voice-over.m He kept filming the waterfront over the years, but dceades later, Pompeii New York was still unfinished, more talked about than seen and thus another legend.

  David’s moment in the film struck me as purposeful, brisk. But then, he was busy. Galietti filmed him on April 4—the same date that’s marked on the master tapes for the first and only 3 Teens Kill 4 album. So he was also working in the recording studio that day. And Jean Pierre was about to arrive for his first visit in more than a year.

  JP stayed for two weeks. A few days after he left, David recorded himself, talking into his Walkman. He’d just done some heroin. Because Brian and Jesse were doing it. Because he’d been able to get some at work. Because he’d been told it was weak stuff, and he wanted to experiment. He seemed to be after “disordering the senses” in the spirit of Rimbaud, though he concluded by the end that it hadn’t worked. “I don’t think this tape really achieved anything in terms of speech or ideas or logic or thought.” However, after a slurred and rather incoherent beginning, interrupted by bouts of nausea, he r
eflected on his life the way he once did in his journal writing. It was a catalog of woe. He felt he’d lost the ability to be happy, to be romantic, to be energized, to dream. He wondered if it had all started when he’d fallen in love with Jean Pierre, then couldn’t live with him. And then realized that he was afraid of that—afraid “that loving someone and living with him will ruin me.”

  He wanted to start writing again, but felt he needed to be “fully alone” to do that, not living with a roommate in a tiny space. He was in turmoil. As he explained on the tape, sometimes he wanted to be by himself and sometimes he loved people so much. Sometimes he wanted to walk out the door, just disappear and start a new life somewhere else. Sometimes he thought he was struggling in a way that would keep him struggling for the rest of his life. Sometimes he talked to the winos in the neighborhood and he could tell that they’d once had abilities to create things that might even exceed his, yet there they were—homeless. Sometimes he thought of his own death but always projected it as way in the future. And then there were times when he thought it could be soon. But he didn’t think about death much. “It won’t let itself be thought of.”

  “I didn’t really enjoy doing this,” he concluded, “taking the junk.” He preferred speed. But he continued to experiment with heroin, a drug he romanticized. In Paris in 1978, he’d asked his sister to photograph him “shooting up” in front of the Eiffel Tower. He had tied off an arm with his neck scarf and posed with a BIC pen as the supposed needle.

  That spring, the artist Ed Baynard set about curating a show for the SoHo gallery, Alexander Milliken. He wanted painters who were both figurative and expressionistic, like David Salle and Francesco Clemente, mixed with artists then considered graffitists, like Basquiat and Haring. And he kept wondering who’d done the burning house stencil he’d seen all over SoHo and the East Village.