Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Before they left Lafayette, David and Steve Brown had another fight. Doughton thought it had to do with “David feeling that his love for Steve was one-sided. According to Steve, David said, ‘The only way you’d love me is if I were a cold son-of-a-bitch.’ ”

  They were in Texas when David gave them the heave-ho. Neither Doughton nor Zimmerman could remember what finally pushed David over the edge or even what city they were in when he drove them to the bus station and announced, fuck you, you’re getting out here.

  They’d had a terrible blowup at the hotel in Lafayette. “I don’t remember the cause of it, but David was angry with all three of us and stormed out of the room,” said Doughton. “The three of us sat there trying to figure out what was eating him. I suggested that it wasn’t us, that it was unresolved anger about something from his past. Suddenly the door burst open. David had been listening. He rushed in shouting at me, ‘You wanna know what it is? It’s you. You’re selfish. It’s you and your selfishness!’ ”

  Zimmerman and Brown left the room so Doughton could hash it out with David. But Doughton couldn’t remember David giving him any examples of his selfishness. Nothing was resolved. “At one point, I decided that I wanted to nail him so I told him that he reminded me of my father,” Doughton said. “It was a low blow, and I knew it. Later, in the fall when we patched it up, he told me that those words hurt and asked me if I meant them. It’s not that my father was a bad guy. David had met him and liked him. He said he just hated to have his faults compared to those of any father.”

  Soon after they crossed the state line into Texas, David was driving up a long incline when he suddenly swerved onto the shoulder. “Steve [Dough-ton] and I started to giggle,” Zimmerman said, “because David had just lambasted us for our poor driving skills. He got so enraged—I was sitting in the back—and when he turned around to snarl at me, I almost didn’t recognize him. His face had turned purple, and his eyes were bugging out. It was actually scary.”

  When they parted at the bus station in San Antonio or Dallas or wherever it was, Doughton and Zimmerman were relieved. “David was tough to be around,” Doughton recalled. “The rage he was going through at that point was just incredible.”

  Doughton bought a ticket for Portland and had a dollar left. “I spent it on a bag of sunflower seeds.”

  David drove on alone toward Albuquerque. Once there, he sent the first of two postcards to Hujar, and their wording suggests that he had already been in touch by phone, that Hujar knew who he was traveling with. “Me and the guys split up in different directions,” wrote David. “I guess it was for the best.… I’m too wound up crazy to travel with them.”

  David called Keith Davis to tell him that he’d jettisoned Doughton and Zimmerman—“such jerks.” Would Keith like to fly out to meet him? They could travel the Southwest together and head up the coast. Keith thought that sounded great. By mid-June he had joined David in the desert. From the time they’d first met, Keith had been very attached to David. They’d also had an affair at some point, though that may have been very brief. Keith was having a tough year. He’d ended a long-term relationship, and his business was in trouble. He’d started Swimming Pool Productions with the goal of bringing fine artists into his graphic design practice. For example, he hired Hujar to photograph ads for a high-end clothing store called Dianne B. (Hujar had used David as his model wherever it was appropriate: David shirtless and wrapped in a luscious blanket. David in the sort of white shirt he would never wear in real life. And so on.) Keith put David’s gagging cow at the pier on the back of an Evan Lurie album. And he was designing Nan Goldin’s celebrated first book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Keith had started the year hoping he’d make enough money to pay off his mortgage. By October, he would declare the enterprise a failure.

  Keith Davis with souvenirs, most of them probably David’s, during the cross-country trip in summer 1985. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)

  David’s contact sheets from this leg of the journey show him and Keith in Monument Valley and in Death Valley. “We made it alive through Death Valley,” David wrote in his next postcard to Hujar. “Peter I feel crazy but I think of you and hope I can work this all out—my problems and such. Love you. Ciao, David.” He continued to photograph roadkill along with his Western obsessions, like kachina dolls and newspaper stories about snake injuries. In his pictures, he and Keith reach the coast and the forests, and whatever has gone awry between them by the time they got to Oregon does not show.

  Keith was good friends with both Zimmerman and Doughton. They were all Oregonians. Keith told Doughton later that David had been “flying into fits of rage.” But the tension all came to a head when Keith and David stopped to spend the night with Zimmerman at his parents’ house in a town southeast of Portland. (Zimmerman said he and David were “OK” at that point, or enough OK that he could have them spend the night, but he sensed tension between David and Keith.) “My parents had only one extra room,” Zimmerman said, “and Keith and David weren’t going to sleep in the same room, probably because they’d been fighting. My parents have this awful sofa bed in a room full of spiders. Keith got the good room, and David had to sleep on the spider bed. He was furious about that.”

  As soon as Keith and David arrived in Portland the next day, Keith got out of the Malibu and didn’t look back. He called Doughton.

  “I get this phone call from Keith,” said Doughton. “He’s like, ‘I’ve been driving with David, and he’s such a fucking asshole.’ ”

  “I said, ‘Tell me about it. I hate him.’ ”

  “And Keith said, ‘I do too. I hate him.’ ”

  David drove back to Albuquerque alone and spent at least a week there. The Malibu needed repairs. He called Richard Kern and Tommy Turner to tell them that he’d separated from some other friends who were jerks. Would they like to join him on a trip through the South? They thought that sounded like fun.

  David met Kern and Turner and Turner’s wife, Amy, at the Memphis airport. All three of them were using heroin, and Kern admitted to being dope sick for the duration—probably about ten days. He remembered going to Graceland, David’s second visit of that summer to Elvis’s grave, and then going to Charleston, South Carolina, at a time of flooding. Receipts indicate that they overnighted at a truck stop in Georgia and visited the Outer Banks.

  At some point between Portland and Memphis, David had given up his self-imposed diet restrictions and gone back to coffee, cigarettes, red meat, and sugar. That may have helped to smooth some jagged edges. But, years later, what Kern remembered most about this trip was David’s anger.

  David paid for all the hotel rooms, so they always got one room with two double beds. Tommy and Amy Turner took one. David thought he and Kern should share the other. Kern told him, “I’m not sleeping with you, dude. I’ll be laying there feeling weird all night, so I’ll sleep on the floor.” Kern suggested they take turns. The next night, David could take the floor. “After a couple days of this,” Kern said, “we’re sitting in the car, and David’s like”—Kern made a huffing sound—“just like in the movie.” Meaning Stray Dogs, where the David character rages silently until he literally explodes.

  Their last stop was Washington, D.C. David went off to the Smithsonian with Turner, and they arranged to meet Kern later. Without telling them what he planned, Kern went directly to Union Station and caught a train to New York. David and Turner waited an hour. According to Turner, David was relieved when Kern didn’t show up. Later, David remembered his travels with Kern and the Turners as the good part of his summer.

  He got back to New York on August 2 and went to see Keith Davis, an encounter Keith then wrote up in his journal: “I knew [David] would have to call me to get his check book. But I had no idea he would still be full of the shit I experienced out west. More of the line about me sharing responsibility for what happened.… He said that he will be spending less time with art world people like Philip [Zimmerman], Steve [Doughton] and me.
And that there were no problems with Richard Kern, Tommy or Amy so there must be something wrong with us—Steve, Philip, Keith. Real shit. I couldn’t even respond. Fuck him.” Later that day, he added, “I don’t feel any sadness for David. I wish he were dead.”

  The strictures against “art world people” did not apply to Hujar. On August 7, David sent him a postcard: “Dear Peter, It’s time to get together.”

  15 HELLO DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND

  David didn’t just damage relationships that mattered to him that year. He set out to do things in 1985 that—if they didn’t damage his career—they also didn’t help. Of course, he never saw it that way. In a 1989 interview with Barry Blinderman, published in the catalog for his retrospective, David complained, “After the initial wave of acceptance, culminating in the Whitney Biennial, came the tail end of the cycle when suddenly, for a period of time, nobody was interested in what I was doing.”

  No one in the art world paid much attention to his dead-family scenarios. David could not make himself take advantage of his slot in the Biennial. The politic course would have been to make some new paintings, have a solo show. He could have capitalized, but for him, that was not a reason to make art.

  Meanwhile, the East Village scene had almost imperceptibly begun its decline. Fun Gallery closed while David was away. Anthony Haden-Guest described Fun’s June ’85 show, “Sink or Swim,” as “a jaunty cri de coeur to collectors, asking them to help … cope with rising rents. Nobody bought a thing.” Patti Astor and Bill Stelling boarded up the gallery with a sign that read “NO MO FUN.” When New York Magazine reported two years later that Fun had closed because they couldn’t pay a shipping bill from the Zurich Art Fair, Astor wrote a corrective letter to the editor, declaring they’d found backers to pay the bill, but that the scene had lost its charm. “When the money moved in and track lights became more important than meaning, I no longer felt inclined to cast pearls before swine,” she declared. Astor was in Hollywood by then, at work on a film called Assault of the Killer Bimbos.

  As if to prove that the scene had not exactly become SoHo, however, another blonde bombshell stepped into the breach. The Lady Bunny kicked off the world’s first outdoor drag festival, Wigstock, with her rendition of “I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet” that Labor Day at the Tompkins Square bandshell. Wigstock began simply as an extension of the nearby Pyramid Club and brought club regulars (Tabboo!, Hapi Phace, Lypsinka, John Sex, Ethel Eichelberger, John Kelly, et al.) into the open air. Inebriated club denizens (including Bunny and Brian Butterick) had dreamt it all up the year before while horsing around at the bandshell in the middle of the night, though no one could remember enough to claim the idea as his or her own. “It’s all such a blur” admits the official Wigstock website.

  Such frivolity no longer seemed to have a place at the galleries.

  Civilian Warfare limped along with Dean Savard back and unrecovered from his heroin addiction. Memories differ on just when the second intervention occurred, this time at the gallery. Friends got him there one day on some pretext and dramatically rolled the gate down. There stood not just Alan Barrows and Marisa Cardinale and Steve Adams and maybe some Civilian artists but also Dean’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law. “Dean was furious at me, furious at everyone,” Marisa recalled. “And he had a right to be.” His mother had brought Dean’s prom picture this time to prove that he wasn’t gay. “It was horrible,” said Marisa. “Because this turned into a misguided journey into coming out for the parents, Martha [his drug buddy] ended up in Connecticut with Dean, which his parents wanted to happen because they believed that Martha was his girlfriend. Of course, Dean as a junkie, and Martha as well, used this as a diversion.” They kept up the pretense that they were a couple, their drug use was never addressed, and soon they were back on Avenue B.

  By August, Civilian stopped paying rent altogether. Marisa remembered that their landlord, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, would come around looking for Savard—whose new idea for saving the gallery was to move to Eighth Street, across from the nightclub 8BC. “Like, we’ll get away from Tim by moving around the corner?” she said. “Everything was junkie decisionmaking. You think to the next fix.”

  When Savard’s brother Perry and sister-in-law decided to move into the city, he found them an apartment next to the gallery and moved in with them. And began stealing from them. Marisa returned from her vacation that summer to learn that she was out of a job. The gallery couldn’t afford to pay her. In October, Barrows and Savard signed an agreement to leave 155 Avenue B before November 1 and to pay the back rent of $2,700 within six months. They moved Civilian Warfare to a storefront at 614 East Ninth Street, but it was no longer a gallery that mattered.

  In the October issue of the Eye, Carlo McCormick published “East Village R.I.P.”—startling news when the same issue carried listings for forty-seven neighborhood galleries. “East Village art is dead,” Carlo declared. “We, who were the first to take credit for the birth of East Village art, now want to be the first to take credit for killing it. But this is what the East Village has always been about, taking credit for other people’s work and ideas. After two years of intense coverage of the scene, the Eye has officially run out of gimmicks to repackage the same old drivel.”

  That fall, both the Steves—Doughton and Brown—made up with David when they returned to New York. When Doughton later threw away the two plaster heads David had given him from his last Civilian show—one down the air shaft outside his apartment at Eleventh Street and Avenue C, one out the window of his vehicle while he sped through the desert—he was merely purging, he explained. He felt weighed down by his possessions. He did not carry any anger at David.

  Philip Zimmerman, however, kept his distance from David for more than a year, explaining that “David had gotten so strange.” David and Keith Davis eventually repaired their relationship, though it’s unclear when, and the joie de vivre between them never returned. David stayed true to his word; for the rest of the year, he would hang out mostly with Richard Kern and Tommy Turner.

  Once more, David had nowhere to live, and he crashed with Kern for the month of August. “I recently got thrown out of my apartment of four years by a plague of gentrifying artistes,” David wrote in the first of four pieces he did for the East Village Eye. This wasn’t strictly true, of course. His old roommate Tom Cochran had offered him the lease on the Fourth Street place, and David had turned it down. He didn’t want to commit. But now, he needed to complain. He needed to show his wounds.

  He needed to get into that dark place reachable via drugs. David had never done a lot of heroin. He still preferred speed. He enjoyed psychedelics. But now his major companions were both junkies. One day, he went to buy heroin with Kern on Eighth Street between Avenues C and D, then “a good place to cop,” as Kern remembered it. Back at his apartment, they shot themselves up and got no high, just a bubble of flesh rising on David’s arm. There was no telling what they’d actually injected. “I remember us both sitting there going, ‘This sucks,’ “ Kern said. “I used to sell ecstasy some on the side, so I had a bunch of ecstasy. I said, let’s try shooting this up and see what happens.” They banged up the ecstasy. “It was like Star Trek—when you go to warp speed,” said Kern. Ideas for a film project began pingponging between them.

  Richard Kern on the set of his 1986 film, Fingered. (Photograph by Tony Coke)

  “I really want to figure out how the kids of today got so screwed up,” Kern told David. Specifically, he was fascinated by Lung Leg, soon to become the snarling cover girl on Sonic Youth’s Evol album. (Kern had just shot the video for Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ’69.”) Kern hoped to interview Lung about her childhood. They’d do a film about a messed-up family. David responded, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve got skeletons. We can use skeletons. Everyone’ll be dead.”

  Then the drug wore off, but Kern told David, let’s do this. The film would become You Killed Me First, in which Lung Leg plays a girl who slaughters her pare
nts. “When I first met Lung, she had a big X carved in her hair,” Kern said. “I wanted to make something just with her because she seemed so weird.” Lung was just ten years younger, but as Kern saw it, that decade had erased the hippie and the glam rocker from consciousness. Lung resonated to the darkness and din of industrial bands like Einstürzende Neubauten. “Punk had gotten all mutated,” as Kern put it.

  In the article where David griped about losing his apartment, he mentioned his first meeting with Lung at a local gallery. “She was carrying around a live toad with plans to sacrifice it in a movie she was gonna make but it had a heart attack from what I heard and now resides in cryonic suspension in someone’s freezer,” he wrote, adding that Lung did “cool drawings” of demons and that she’d performed at an East Village club, playing bass with a bone in a pickup band doing “We Are the World.”

  Lung Leg (actually Elizabeth Carr—no relation) thought that Kern interviewed probably five or six people “about their parents” and then combined those accounts for You Killed Me First. But, she told me, “about fifty percent of it was directly from David Wojnarowicz’s childhood.”

  On September 26, David read at 8BC “in tandem with some typically grisly Richard Kern films,” according to the East Village Eye. The evening was called “There Will Be No Fire Escape in Hell.”

  Then, on October 12, 8BC closed—a huge loss to East Village nightlife and another sign of the scene’s incipient demise. Owners Cornelius Conboy and Dennis Gattra had certainly upgraded from the log cabin ambience of two years earlier—when they’d had a dirt floor and no heat, and didn’t meet a single licensing requirement. They’d staged some fifteen hundred performances, they’d become a rec room for neighborhood artists, and now they were told they needed, among other headaches, a zoning variance.