Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  He’d begun to refine his private symbol system. He continued to work with maps, which remained forever mysterious to him as an acceptable version of reality. Ripping them could be a metaphor for so many things, like groundlessness and chaos. He’d stopped working with garbage can lids and driftwood. The new sculptures used animal skulls, skeletons, mannequins.

  To look at David’s early work is to watch him figuring out how to be an artist. A painting he did in 1983 called The Boys Go Off to War is a kind of diptych, and the imagery is simple. On the left half are two men, naked to the waist, perhaps in a bar (since one holds a drink), perhaps lovers but at least friends (since one has his arm around the other). On the right are two gutted pigs. With the paintings he did for the 1984 Civilian show he was really beginning to develop his collage approach. For example, Fuck You Faggot Fucker features, again, a male couple. The background is all maps but the only one clearly visible is behind the couple at the center. Created with a stencil, they stand waist-deep in water, kissing. Directly below them is a scrap of paper found by David, on which some anonymous homophobe has written, “Fuck You Faggot Fucker,” around an obscene doodle. He’s embedded that in the painting. At the four corners are photographs: one of Brian Butterick as St. Sebastian, photographed at the pier; three of David with John Hall, naked at the Christodora.

  David’s show with the plaster heads, other sculptures, and new paintings opened on May 5, 1984. Though none of the principals, including David, knew it at the time—this would be his last solo show at Civilian. I remember the opening because everyone stood out on Eleventh Street watching David inside, finishing the work. He’d hung the show earlier, placing the heads on a wall where he’d painted a big bull’s-eye. Then he left, and the twenty-three heads started to slide off their shelves. The wall was just Sheetrock with no studs. Savard and Marisa took them all down in a frenzy and rehung them on the opposite wall, where Savard repainted the bull’s-eye. Then they had to rehang everything else. David, who’d probably been sitting in some restaurant, came back furious. He didn’t like Savard’s bull’s-eye. I remember him standing inside with a paintbrush—opening delayed. What he said to me about it later, though, was that he liked the way that broke the art-world rules. You couldn’t go to an opening in SoHo or on Fifty-seventh Street and find the artist still standing there with a bucket of paint.

  Earlier that day, David had argued with Alan Barrows about Fuck You Faggot Fucker. Barrows remembered, “I said, ‘David we can’t have that name.’ It really bothered me. And he said, ‘Well, that’s the name of the painting.’ I said, ‘Can’t you change it?’ I was thinking of these prissy people coming in.” The critics. The collectors. The art crowd. They’d be offended. David adamantly refused.

  David installing the plaster heads at Civilian Warfare on May 5, 1984. (Photograph by Philip Pocock)

  He then responded to Barrows with a work of art, though Barrows didn’t know it until he saw the piece at a New Museum retrospective six and a half years after David’s death. There was the familiar image of the two men kissing, this time stenciled over two contact sheets. The one on the right shows Jesse Hultberg at the pier; he’s naked in most of the pictures and either wearing a dog mask David made or posing as St. Sebastian. No doubt David intended to contrast Jesse, who was literally willing to expose himself, with the reserved Barrows. The contact sheet on the left shows Barrows in photos David took during their European trip. In one, right near the center, Barrows is sticking his finger down his throat over a plate of bad food at the Berlin airport. So, Barrows realized, “because I had trouble with it, he’s forever connected me with that image, and now this”—it’s simply called Untitled—“is in the permanent collection at the Whitney.”

  The Civilian show sold pretty well. David was becoming, in the words of Dennis Cooper, “a lion of the scene.” And around this time begin the stories of his frightening and often irrational rage.

  It was sometime in ’84 that David got mad at Chuck Nanney and stopped speaking to him—snubbed him on the street, wouldn’t return phone calls. Nanney couldn’t figure out why. Finally their mutual friend Steve Brown let Nanney know: “David came over to your apartment while he was tripping, and you looked at him funny.” Nanney was astonished. And hurt. The rift was patched up eventually. They had so many mutual friends that it was hard to avoid each other. But they never actually discussed what had happened, and, said Nanney, “Something odd started to happen to our relationship after that.”

  Then came an explosion at his ex-lover, old roommate, and onetime bandmate, Brian Butterick. One night Doug “Wah” Landau (who later opened King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut) pulled up at the Pyramid Club and asked, “Want to go to Provincetown for a couple of days?” Brian did. David piled in too, and Jesse Hultberg. They left after four A.M. when the club closed.

  In the course of the four-to five-hour drive, Brian said something sarcastic and, he thought, innocuous. He did not remember the content, except that it had nothing to do with David. But David, seated in front, turned to him so enraged that his face had turned purple. He said something about how Brian was acting like a jaded old queen “and he peppered it with some really hurtful personal stuff,” Brian said. David wouldn’t drop it, either, until someone else in the car yelled, “Enough!”

  “Everyone else was signaling to me when David’s back was turned,” Brian said. “Like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ It was so vitriolic and directed towards me, and I didn’t understand why he was mad. It wasn’t even about him.”

  By now, Brian was one of David’s oldest friends, and he’d never seen him behave like this before. “He was usually held back,” said Brian. “With bad emotions. Good ones too. He had never lashed out at me.”

  The two of them never discussed this incident. “I didn’t go there, because it was so nutty,” Brian explained. “I talked about it to the other people in the car.”

  It was a preview of things to come.

  Like most villages, this one reveled in gossip. At some point, a delicious story circulated that Gary Indiana had written a feature on David for Art in America, but then got so furious with him that he went to the magazine’s office and ripped the type off the boards. Carlo McCormick called it “common knowledge at the time.” Gary denied it, and Betsy Baker, then editor of the magazine, said that nothing like that ever occurred.

  But what had happened between Gary and David in Paris didn’t end there. Gary was still in love, and now when they met on the art-world circuit, David acted as if they hardly knew each other. As Joe Vojtko put it, “The more Gary kept trying, the crueler David became.” Vojtko said that for many months, even years after, when he ran into one of them on the street, David or Gary would complain for what seemed like hours about the other. Vojtko thought they were both irrational on the topic.

  David told people that Gary was stalking him. Marisa Cardinale remembered David coming into the gallery to discuss this, but she couldn’t recall specific incidents. “I remember more the emotional tenor,” she said. “I remember fraught conversations. Like, ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to get him to stop?’ “

  Judy Glantzman, part of the Civilian stable and later a good friend of David’s, confirmed that “David was unnerved.”

  But Gary adamantly denied that he did any stalking, and when David later wrote about Gary in the E ye, he did not mention stalking. Instead he complained, for example, about Gary leaving fifteen screaming phone messages in one night. Gary said he has never called anyone that many times in a day, but in a short letter to David he wrote, “I’m sorry I terrorized your answering machine Saturday night. The more direct thing would have just been to scream in your face.” David also charged that Gary was writing him letters of “up to twenty pages outlining how I was still a prostitute.”

  “We said a lot of things to each other,” Gary said. Which isn’t exactly a denial, but there is a surviving letter (of five and a third single-spaced pages) in which Gary says, “If you can’t cop to th
e fact that everyone is corrupted by the need to make money, maybe it’s because you’ve never transposed your experience of being a hustler to the market for works of art.… Don’t you imagine that part of your public image, like Kathy Acker’s, has ANYTHING to do with your willingness to expose yourself sexually, and the sexual attraction to you of the viewer/reader/spectator, whatever?”

  David was writing letters too. Once the two of them made up—years after this—they agreed to destroy each other’s letters, which Gary did. David either did not or he overlooked a couple—quite possible since he always lived in chaos.

  But until the end of his life, David believed that Gary had spread stories about him that hurt his career. He thought, for example, that Gary told people he was a junkie. Gary denies this—and it’s not clear that such news would have discouraged anyone’s interest. Look at Jean-Michel Basquiat, a notorious heroin addict who practically had collectors lined up at his studio door. David also claimed, for example, that Gary put other critics up to writing bad reviews of his work. Gary denies it, and it’s hard to imagine any critic taking such direction.

  I have spoken to everyone in the art world who’s in a position to know, asking them to speak off the record if they must, but to answer the question: Did Gary hurt David’s career? What everyone has told me is that David hurt his own career. Whenever his work was most in demand, he would stop painting.

  In 1984, Lydia Lunch moved back to New York after spending several years in Los Angeles and London. By the age of twenty-four, Lydia had worked with more than a dozen bands, starting with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, starred in at least a dozen underground films, and become a pioneer in what would later be called “spoken word.” As a self-described catastrophist and contrarian, Lydia liked to rant. Underneath the fierce persona, however, Lydia—like David—was as much a seeker as an agitator.

  That spring, she invited David to participate in several spoken-word events she set up at the Pyramid Club: “Readings from the Diaries of the Sexually Insane and Other Atrocities,” “The Grand Finale of the Memorial Day Parade of Idiots,” and “The Weekend of Emotional Abuse.” Other participants included Vojtko, Richard Kern, Thurston Moore, and Victor Poison-Tete. David probably read from his monologues. He’d written some new ones based on stories he’d heard from Bill Rice and Alan Barrows.

  Reminded years later of her menacing titles, Lydia laughed. She’d forgotten them but had a clear memory of what mattered back then to her and the artists she was close to: “We were just so disgusted with the hypocrisy of everything, whether we were talking about sex or money or the police state or personal relationships. Everyone felt that they had to do these performances, had to paint these pictures, had to make these films. They were driven to get it out of their system. To expel into the world what was trying to kill us or silence us or just beat us down.

  “We lived with a toxicity in our blood or in our brain or in our psyche that drove us in an explosive way to try to create,” she said. “We were going as fast as we could because we didn’t think we were going to be around much longer. It’s not only about AIDS. It’s that you didn’t think you could last because you were going to burn out one way or another. It seemed that it was already written for you. That you better do as much as you could right now. Maybe because some people had already gone through so much and they couldn’t take much more.”

  Lydia didn’t know a lot about David’s life but was drawn to the immediacy of his work. “He made it sound like ‘I experienced it, I wrote it, I took it to the stage.’ That was very attractive to me,” she said. “He was just a spontaneous performer or artist. Not trained, like myself. Not trained. So in a sense we came from a similar background or maybe a mind-set. There were a few people that were really hard-core people just because they were hardcore from circumstances beyond their control. David was one of those. You knew that the experiences were written deeper than the paper he was reading from.”

  Vojtko recalled performing with his boyfriend, David Said, at one of Lydia’s “Weekends of Emotional Abuse.” They’d prepared a piece about AIDS, “Secret Love (From a Room at the End of Everything),” using money to record tapes of ambient sound that should have been applied to their overdue electric bill. Fellow readers like Kern and Henry Rollins had attracted what Vojtko saw as an aggressively heterosexual crowd that night. Over the weeks of performing with Lydia, Vojtko remembered, he and Said and David had grown bolder in their “willingness to push the limits and to flaunt the grimy details of [their] sexuality in ways that made the humorless straight crowd uncomfortable.” On the night Vojtko and his boyfriend did the AIDS piece, they brought it to a cacophonous crescendo, banging on metal and breaking furniture. “Half of the crowd was weeping and applauding, and the other half was shouting obscenities and throwing things at us. It was just the kind of reaction that Lydia liked best.”

  Later in the dressing room, Lydia divided the door money among the performers. David tried to give Vojtko and Said his share, saying that he was selling paintings now and didn’t need the money. Vojtko and Said told him they appreciated the gesture but couldn’t take it. At home later, Said went into his backpack for cigarettes and was astonished to find a wad of twenty dollar bills—more than David’s share of the door.

  In June, when Luis Frangella traveled to Buenos Aires to visit family, David went with him.

  “The colors here are colors that brought me close to fainting,” he wrote in a letter to Hujar. He loved the drives with Luis into the countryside and the jungle. They stayed for a couple of days near Iguazú Falls and went hiking. David ventured out into a raging stream above the falls, his feet on bamboo while he held a vine overhead—as Luis screamed, “Come back! You’ll be swept over the falls if you slip!” David laughed at him. Until the bamboo broke. He managed to pull himself back to dry land, heart in throat, and found Luis “in the forest too sick to watch me anymore.”

  He hadn’t gone to Argentina to work, but David rarely stopped working. No doubt it was Luis who arranged for him to show at the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. David created A Painting to Replace the British Monument in Buenos Aires on a street poster—burning race horses running below a large smoking alien with one eye a British flag, the other an American flag. One of the other pieces he made, Altar for the People of Villa Miseria, refers to a shantytown he’d visited with Luis, where he’d seen “huge families picking around mountains of smoking garbage.” The major elements in this sculpture: a human figurine seated in a wood cabinet painted pink. A red hand reaching for that human. A loaf of bread on the shelf below, cut in half and sewn together with red thread. All of this on a plinth. A Mayan statue sits at the base of the plinth. Above it all hangs a torn red banner. In a real departure, perhaps an experiment, David also painted about twenty watercolors in a sketchbook, mostly landscapes, which he never chose to exhibit.

  He hoped he could come back to Argentina, he wrote Hujar. He would learn the language and travel the continent. But something changed in his relationship with Luis during this trip, according to Marisela La Grave, the young photographer who’d met them at the pier. David and Luis had had an affair, and Marisela thought that Luis broke it off during this trip or maybe just after. He discussed it with her. David and Luis remained friends, however.

  David got back to New York on July 8. A couple of weeks later, Jean Pierre came to visit. According to Marion Scemama, David had decided that his relationship with Jean Pierre was over, but he didn’t know how to tell him. So David proposed that they take a trip—the three of them. He rented a car and drove them first to Virginia Beach, then to the Outer Banks—two spots he’d come to love during an earlier vacation with Kiki Smith, probably in ’83. As Marion remembered it, David was nervous and paranoid for much of the trip. One day in a restaurant, when Marion and JP began conversing in French, laughing at something, David stood up and went to sit at another table. One night David left them alone at the hotel for most of the night. Then there was the fight in the car w
hen David said something so insulting to Marion (she couldn’t remember what) that she demanded to be let out so she could take the train home. He let her out, then came back and got her. “David could be really mean with people when he didn’t know how to handle the situation,” she said. Jean Pierre didn’t seem to remember any of this, but he is also the sort of person who doesn’t want to speak ill. He maintained that he and David never broke up.

  In 1984 Richard Kern began making Super 8 films like The Right Side of My Brain, a collaboration with Lydia Lunch. She plays a woman drawn to increasingly abusive men—though they’re never abusive enough for her. In the film, she loves how she feels with a man when she’s “squirming under his fist.” It would have looked like a work of pure misogyny if Lydia herself hadn’t written the script.

  David in Richard Kern’s Stray Dogs. (Photograph by R. Kern)

  The Cinema of Transgression reveled in depravity, deliberate ugliness, and amorality. A line from Right Side of My Brain summarizes the whole ethos: “We’ll take the bad with the bad and make it worse.” Some of the films that came out of this movement were just silly, but Kern had enough talent to create others that were truly horrifying. Most of his films revolve around sexual power plays, with an emphasis on bloodletting and self-injury.