Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

“What was ending was the intimacy,” Greenfield-Sanders said, “the sense that everyone knew everyone else.” New galleries were still popping up in old storefronts, but they were not there to present a wry commentary on the art world. They were the art world, and they had swallowed the art playground.

  Greenfield-Sanders asked Glantzman to bring in the wood cutout she’d made of Dean Savard. (She had just done a show at Steve Adams Gallery called “Glantzman Cuts Up Her Friends,” sixty-six cutouts of artists, critics, and collectors at three-quarters lifesize.) That got Savard into the photo of “first dealers.” Just so, one of Nicolas Moufarrege’s embroidery pieces represented him in the critics’ portrait. For a couple of months, he had been in the hospital and was said to be suffering from “a terrible pneumonia.” It was Pneumocystis.

  Moufarrege’s death from AIDS on June 4 sent a shock wave through the community. I spoke to people who hadn’t known him personally who could still recall just where they were when they heard the news.

  For some reason, he’d been hospitalized in the northern end of the Bronx, far from his friends. Nevertheless, David did go to visit. This would have been his first look at what it could mean to be sick with AIDS. Chuck Nanney also visited, though he and Moufarrege had broken up more than a year earlier. The breakup was so bad they wouldn’t speak when they ran into each other on the street or at openings. So Nanney made the trip with some apprehension, but Moufarrege clearly had no memory of whatever had gone wrong between them. He had Kaposi’s lesions on his face and some form of dementia. He actually seemed happy, Nanney remembered. “He was able to respond, but then part of his conversation would be all nonsensical, and then he would apologize for it and—it was so hard.”

  Hospital staff would come in “practically wearing hazmat suits,” said Nanney. “The nurses didn’t want to be around him. They didn’t want to touch him.”

  Myths about how the disease was transmitted would persist for years. Along with fear. Along with stigma. Moufarrege’s obituary in the New York Times said he died of pneumonia.

  Hujar was closer to Moufarrege than David was, so he must have gone to visit him as well, but that’s conjecture. Nor can we know what inspired Hujar and then David to see a nutritionist that spring. But in those days, diet was one of the few ways anyone could think of to combat the disease if they had it—or to keep from getting it if they didn’t. That spring they both began what Hujar, in a phone message to David, called a “lymph fast.”

  This may have had nothing to do with AIDS, however. (David told a few people that spring that he’d been tested for what was still called HTLV-III and was negative, though as previously noted, it was not yet easy to get such a test.) He was unhappy enough to be looking for a major life change. In a couple of handwritten pages found among his papers, he wrote, “I feel lonely and … fear that I am totally unlike other people, that I haven’t the ability to trust them completely … that I am emotionally drifting further away from myself and my abilities to show emotion. I think that I am unloved … and the longer I am not in a relationship the further I am cut off from emotions and I want to be with people but I cut myself off from people … and never let anyone near except for Peter and I think if he were not there I would go crazy.”

  But the day he wrote that, he’d awakened with such wonder from a dream in which he could fly. Now he felt that he was beginning “to get out from under the havoc and meanness I see in people in the art scene. Something from my conversation with Peter yesterday when he showed me my qualities—that unlocked the beginning of change. The cigarettes etc are what I need to stop in order to keep the change stronger.”

  By the beginning of May, David was at work on an installation in the Anchorage beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. He was one of fourteen artists selected to show that summer (from two hundred applicants) by Creative Time, an organization that brings art into public spaces. Until the city shut it down for national security reasons in 2002, the Anchorage was one of the most spectacular spaces an artist could hope to work in. The fifty-foot-tall vaulted ceilings, stone floors, windowless brick, and overhead traffic hum made for an ambience that could be all gothic gloom or cool cave, dungeon or cathedral, depending on the art.

  David’s piece was installed in one of the “most confined and sinister spaces,” according to the brochure handed out for that year’s Art in the Anchorage. Here he created a cannibal tableau, a family dinner in hell. Two skeletons sit at either end of a long table. One of them, painted red, applies bare wires from a radio to a yellow skeleton stretched before it. The other skeleton looks blue but is at least partly covered with maps. This one has a blue baby doll raised to its mouth. Blood drips down the torn tablecloth. There’s a centerpiece of burnt wood; around it, debris, half-drunk glasses of wine and a bottle of Night Train (with Ronald Reagan’s face on the label). Dry leaves and other detritus litter the floor. Behind the blue skeleton there’s a roadside scrum of weeds, old tires, and another skeleton at least partly covered in maps. This one is seated in one of the tires, a globe between its knees and a gun in its mouth.

  David hired his friends Steve Doughton and Philip Zimmerman to help him create what he simply called Installation #5. (They gathered garbage and painted the skeletons.) He never talked to them about what the piece meant, but it’s rather crudely apparent. The predatory parents. The alcohol, burning, and blood. The waste surrounding it all. Suspended over the center of the dinner table is the skeleton of a child, ascending into heaven in a white dress and a garland of flowers. “She appears unusually pure and un-mutilated compared to the other child skeletons,” wrote Mina Roustayi, the one critic or journalist who spoke to David about what the thing meant. Roustayi told David that she thought Installation #5 related to “the global nature of problems like greed, nuclear war, child abuse, and the instinct for self-extinction.” That was valid, he told her, but in fact he’d based the piece “on his childhood and life experience.”

  That month, Life magazine published a feature on East Village art with a photo of David spread over two pages. He’d staged this picture months earlier, setting up at dusk in one of Alphabet City’s many vacant lots, this one with low hills of dirt and the usual garbage. Marion Scemama knew someone with a truck, and they’d carted the elephant skeleton, a human skeleton, a burning child, and a few cow skulls covered with maps to this location, then lit a fire in a wire trash receptacle. Marion thought the magazine chose “the most stupid photo. He’s sitting there painting a skull.”

  In New Jersey that month, Steven Wojnarowicz’s wife, Karen, happened to see the magazine and showed it to Steven, who learned then that his brother had become an artist of some renown. Steven managed to track David down by phone. When David learned that his brother was working for the American Automobile Association, he told Steven that he sometimes used maps in his work. Could Steven get him some maps? Yes. He could. It was the first time they’d spoken since their father’s funeral, eight and a half years earlier.

  They arranged to meet at a restaurant on Forty-second Street. “I remember sitting down to talk to him, and David said, ‘You don’t know I was a child prostitute.’ He was hitting me with everything, trying to see if he could just turn me away,” Steven remembered. “And I said, ‘Well, that’s OK. I still love you. You’re my brother.’ ”

  Sometime around May 22, David left town in the Malibu. He gave up the apartment on Fourth Street and told Tom Cochran, who still held the lease, that he didn’t know if he was coming back to New York. Most startling, he left without telling Hujar.

  “He disappeared,” John Erdman said. “I saw Peter a lot, and he was always wondering where David was, wondering what it meant, wondering if he was going to come back. He wasn’t angry. He was never angry at David, ever, about anything. I remember Peter talking about it and I remember thinking, poor David. He really had to do something to get out from under Peter’s thumb. Peter was controlling him or trying to like crazy. He saw him as an offspring and he wanted him to do what he wanted him
to do. You saw David getting quieter and quieter. You saw him pulling in and withdrawing. At the same time, you could see that he adored Peter but didn’t know what to do. I don’t think they had any specific fight. David just had to get out of there. He had to get out from under Peter.”

  David intended to spend the summer on the road with Steve Dough-ton and Philip Zimmerman, the friends who’d helped him at the Anchorage. “We had this romantic idea of moving to New Mexico,” Doughton said. Not to live together but maybe to live near each other.

  Doughton and Zimmerman were also artists interested, like David, in tough elemental and mythic imagery. Doughton sculpted figures from wood, human blood, excrement, and semen. He thought that both he and David had been much influenced by Zimmerman, whose work Doughton described as “devotional, sometimes made out of his own blood and found objects.” Zimmerman worked with alchemical, magical, and religious symbolism and had created, for example, many paintings of figures on fire. Invited at one point to show his work to a curator at a New York museum, Zimmerman unfurled a painting of a life-size devil standing in flames with the inverted heads of Lincoln, Washington, and Kennedy at the devil’s feet like glowing coals, and a burning church atop the devil’s levitating head. “I got thrown out of the curator’s office,” said Zimmerman. David liked that. He thought it was funny. In 1984–85, Zimmerman was making tiny paintings out of bug parts, fingernails, cat whiskers, gold, paint, dried bats, bones, human blood, spiderwebs, dried bread, and dust. He and David would discuss, for example, the symbolism found in existing belief systems like voodoo or Santeria and how an artist could, in Zimmerman’s words, “articulate an internal paradigm but use symbols from older traditions.” All three of them collected objects like animal skulls, but also traded them and gifted them.

  Their plan was to head for the Southwest, where David wanted to visit the Hopi village of Oraibi, Arizona. Then they’d drive up the west coast and loop into the northern plains, stopping at Yellowstone. First, though, they would travel to Louisiana to visit Steve Brown, who had planned to join them on this summerlong trip until he got a job on a film called Belizaire the Cajun.

  The trip was an utter debacle. Doughton said later that he and Zimmerman should have seen it from day one, when David came to pick them up and said, “What the fuck!” as they brought out boxes of books they were going to read and sculptures Doughton was taking to a show in Portland. “He made us haul half the stuff back,” Doughton recalled. “Then we get to his house and he’s bringing just as much as we had, including a typewriter. This car is just loaded to the gills. We’re all making sculptures, and we’re going to be doing art on the road, so we need our materials. It was just absurd.”

  Nothing practical had been thought out. Doughton and Zimmerman each had about $120 to their name. Even more ominous was the news that David was still following his new diet and had decided that the trip would give him a good chance to detox. “We start this road trip,” Doughton said, “and David is all of a sudden a vegan, not smoking, not drinking coffee, not drinking beer, not eating sugar, and he’s just being a real asshole.” David’s true drugs of choice were caffeine and nicotine, his favorite dinner was steak, and he sometimes seemed to be living on candy bars. Now he was headed across the country drinking spirulina and a barley grass supplement called green magma.

  Something again seemed to be cracking inside him. He’d behaved terribly in April when Steve Brown left for Louisiana and his film job. David and Doughton had helped Brown with last-minute errands before he caught his train at Penn Station. Brown was in a foul anxious mood, and David spent the day needling him. Doughton thought it was because the two had had a brief affair: “David really loved Steve Brown. And the feelings were not returned.” So, as they ran their errands, David elbowed Brown and raised his eyebrows every time they passed a guy, like, “there’s a hottie for ya.” Brown told him to knock it off, so David did it more, with any male they passed—child, old man, or bum. “There’s one for ya.” Brown begged him to stop. David simply switched to something more irritating. He pulled out a black permanent marker and started writing “For a good time call Steve” or “I love cock! Ask for Steve” with Brown’s real phone number—tagging every surface they passed, from signs to parking meters, while Brown threw fits. Finally Brown became hysterical and started crying, and Doughton asked David to stop.

  David stopped. They got to the train platform and helped Brown load his luggage on board. He had reserved a little compartment for himself with a foldout bed and a small desk. He talked about how he was looking forward to watching the landscape roll by while he worked on a script. He apologized for overreacting, after David apologized for writing the graffiti. David and Doughton then went outside to wave goodbye. The train began to inch away. Brown had his face up to the window blowing kisses. Suddenly, David whipped out the marker and wrote “QUEER” on Brown’s window in huge letters. Said Doughton: “I’ll never forget the image of Steve jumping up and down in his little room, veins bulging in his purple face, and the sound of his muffled screams as the train disappeared down the tracks.” David was doubled over, laughing.

  That was the prelude to a full summer of blowups between David and his friends. Doughton, though, said, “We were not battling 24-7. Many of our experiences were great and among the best of my life.” They camped in the Blue Ridge Mountains, visited the shore near Virginia Beach, and one day, driving west of Richmond, spotted a bottle tree. They backed up to take a look at the dead tree festooned with bottles on its branches, driving up to a house on a bit of a rise. This turned out to be a highlight of that summer. An old man came outside. They told him they were artists and had noticed his tree. He then invited them into his house and showed them his own amazing work. Zimmerman said the man had taken “dolls with pink plastic flesh and long blonde nylon hair and given them new faces made out of sawdust and Elmer’s glue. So the figures had dark crude and crusty faces with a shock of flaxen blonde hair coming out of the top. Others were robust women carved in wood from pieced boards with these same crusty sawdust and glue faces. They had teapot lids for hats. He also made animals out of logs and stuck real antlers on them.” David bought one of his deer. Doughton and Zimmerman each bought one of the woman sculptures. The man had signed each of the figures: AbeL Criss. They found out later that he was a rather well-known folk artist, Abraham Lincoln Criss. He was selling his pieces for about twenty dollars each.

  They meandered on toward their rendezvous with Steve Brown in Louisiana, dipping into Alabama and north into Tennessee, visiting Graceland and Loretta Lynn’s country store and a rattlesnake exhibit set up in cages along the side of the road. But what stood out in both Doughton’s and Zimmerman’s memories was their growing friction with David. He criticized their driving when he himself was none too good behind the wheel, in Doughton’s opinion. David never looked more than twenty or thirty feet ahead, so he was always slamming on the brakes or swerving at the last minute. He stopped constantly to take pictures of roadkill, no matter the situation. “He’d cross three lanes of freeway to photograph a dead animal,” Doughton said. Also, David always drove with the windows open, even when it rained, because, Doughton observed, “he hated having glass between him and the world. He hated being in a bubble.” But these were endurable irritations. The real tension began when they stopped for the night. David grew increasingly angry because Doughton and Zimmerman would refuse to undress in front of him.

  Philip Zimmerman (left) and Steve Doughton in the only photo David took of them together during the rancorous cross-country trip in summer 1985. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)

  This was not about sex. “He thought we were having a secret life apart from him,” Zimmerman explained. Doughton is straight and Zimmerman is gay. They were roommates and best friends, but never undressed in front of each other either. Still, Zimmerman thought, they were about as intimate as a straight man and a gay man could ever be. “We were almost symbiotic,” he said. “It is hard t
o explain, but we had an understanding about each other and a connection that David was jealous of.”

  They got to Lafayette, Louisiana, at the beginning of June. Steve Brown was happy to see them, though he acted a little miffed at first over David’s prank. Lafayette is on the western rim of the Atchafalaya Swamp, where they spent a few days trying to find alligators—and restaurants that served gator steaks. (They found none.) David still wasn’t officially eating meat, but he hadn’t lasted long as a vegan. One of their first nights on the road, they’d stopped at an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet and David packed away three plates of crab. In Lafayette, they went to what was probably a wrap party for the movie and feasted on crawdads.

  One day they went into the Atchafalaya with a guide. Zimmerman said, “David was in heaven, looking for alligators and water moccasins. He just had amazing empathy for animals and their innocence. His best stories were about innocent creatures who were tormented by their owners, then rescued by [someone who] would give the evil humans their comeuppance” David identified with such animals. He took photos in the swamp, but they found no alligators and finally had to go to a gator farm to see some.

  One night they went to a Black Flag concert and were astonished to see a drag queen walk into the roiling crowd of slam dancers. When some muscular jock pushed the queen to the floor, Brown yelled, “Let’s get him!” Doughton recalled that Brown punched the jock while feeling him up until a bouncer pried them apart and that “David was laughing hysterically and snapping photos.” For years after, David would not show them the pictures. When he finally did, they saw that these were not vacation snapshots, not a record of friends’ antics. David had framed most of the photos to show just legs and torsos, to make people unidentifiable. “He reduced this wild experience to anonymous sweaty male bodies in some bizarre state of rage and ecstasy,” Doughton said. Even then, David was making his art. A few years later, one of these photos ended up in a piece called Spirituality (for Paul Thek).