Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Just days after Hujar left Cabrini, Keith Davis was admitted. Maybe he’d contracted pneumonia in Oregon or on the long flight back, but he was in the hospital within a week of returning to New York, and he deteriorated quickly. He was having trouble breathing. He had a high fever and dizziness, and he was too weak to walk. David came to visit every day, as did Zimmerman. Family members flew to his bedside. A lawyer came in to help him draw up a will. Zimmerman told me, “I still have a piece of paper with his weak and shaky handwriting that says things like ‘give to family,’ ‘give to Philip.’ He was on a ventilator and could not speak.”

  The will is dated July 22. The next day, he had two cardiac arrests. He’d left no directive, no “do not resuscitate.” Doctors put him on life support at the direction of his anguished family.

  “There were so many days of waiting for him to die the third and final time,” David wrote in Close to the Knives, “and we’d been talking to him daily because they say hearing is the last sense to go. Sometimes alone with him, the nurse outside the room, I’d take his hands and bend over whispering in his ears: hey, I don’t know what you’re seeing but if there’s light move toward it; if there’s warmth move towards it.”

  Zimmerman remembered the days dragging by—it seemed like weeks—as it became, he said, “increasingly difficult to maintain the hope for a turnaround.” Doctors told the family that in all likelihood KS had spread throughout his body, including his brain. There were a series of conversations, said Zimmerman, “a series of letting-gos that finally allowed the family to agree to the withdrawal of life support.”

  On July 27, a doctor came in and removed Keith from various tubes and pumps. Zimmerman was there, and one of Keith’s sisters, and David. Then, Keith went so quickly. As David described it, “The guy on the bed takes two breaths and arches his back almost imperceptibly, his lips slightly parted. I have hold of one leg and his sister one hand Philip another hand or part of his arm and we’re sobbing and I’m totally amazed at how quietly he dies how beautiful everything is with us holding him down on the bed on the floor fourteen stories above the earth.”

  I’ve always been struck by that image. “Holding him down.” As if he might have floated away. Keith was thirty-two years old.

  The next day, friends came to an open house at Keith’s loft on Suffolk Street. It was a jolt: here the funky, aggressive East Village art that Keith so loved and championed, there the sweet, bewildered retirement-age farmers who were his parents. This juxtaposition seemed to illustrate the new world of disharmony we were about to inhabit as we lost so many people who were not supposed to be dead.

  The day before that open house, Vince Aletti stopped by Hujar’s loft and found him propped up in bed holding two big crystals Fran Lebowitz had given him. He held one over his heart, one over his belly. “He was wondering if maybe he was dying,” Aletti wrote in his journal. “I tell Peter I can’t see that.… I can’t feel it really happening.”

  At Keith’s open house, David had told me he was doing something with Hujar related to yoga. He had seemed so positive about Hujar’s prognosis.

  “But you had to be,” Gary Schneider told me. “You had to support his alternative processes. He wouldn’t allow anyone else around him.”

  Hujar so needed money that his friends were trying to recruit people to buy prints from him but, said Schneider, “if they came to the door and they said one word wrong, Peter would tell them, ‘Fuck you, get out.’ ”

  John Erdman recalled that Hujar’s anger got worse and worse as the year went on. “He threw out one of the people cooking for him—banned him from coming back because he used one square too much of paper towel.”

  One day Schneider made pasta primavera and was pulling leaves from a bunch of basil while Hujar complained that he wasn’t doing it fast enough, that he shouldn’t pull the leaves off one at a time. “He was screaming at me,” Schneider said. “At a certain point, I gave up cooking for him because it was just too painful.”

  Hujar talked to his friends about killing himself. He would throw himself off a building, but he couldn’t decide which one.

  “He became a different person,” Erdman said. “Everything just fell apart for him. And it was scary.”

  “There were physical outbursts,” said Schneider.

  Schneider and Erdman were out with him at a neighborhood restaurant, when Hujar picked up a glass of water and threw it at a waitress, for no reason. She understood what was going on, said Erdman. “It was so on the surface. You could see that he was sick, and you could feel him just radiating rage.”

  On August 15, Hujar asked Aletti to go shopping for him. After Aletti went to five different stores to find the best peaches and the right beets, he listened to Hujar complain about other people’s shopping. For example, he had sent Stephen Koch out for white corn, and since Koch couldn’t find any, he brought back yellow. Then Hujar informed Aletti that he’d made a will, and he’d named Koch as executor. Early on, he had asked Fran Lebowitz to be executor. She told him, “Peter you’re not dying.” After that, he went back and forth between Koch and Aletti. At one point, he had told Aletti that he would choose him. “He admits he changed his mind about me because I wasn’t seeing him very much,” Aletti wrote in his journal. Then Hujar told Aletti he would probably change his mind again and launched into “a list of [Koch’s] petty transgressions like the white corn incident.” Aletti told him the decision should not be based on whether he had visited enough or whether Koch had purchased the right corn. Hujar should imagine Aletti as his executor for a few days and see how it felt.

  The next night, Aletti came to make or get dinner for Hujar and inadvertently crossed a line when he commented on how quickly a couple of Tylenol had reduced Hujar’s fever.

  “It doesn’t change the PCP,” Hujar said.

  “Right, you’re just treating symptoms,” Aletti said.

  “Let’s not argue,” Hujar said.

  “Are we arguing?” Aletti wondered.

  Hujar began mimicking Aletti’s remarks about aspirin and told him to just leave.

  Aletti said he’d make him dinner and moved to hug him. Hujar was, Aletti said, “batting [him] away, then jumping out of bed teeth bared, enraged, yelling, ‘I don’t care if I felt good in May! I’m dying!’ and looking for things to throw.” Aletti waited for Hujar to settle down, then washed the dishes and asked again what he wanted to eat. Hujar said he’d just eat bananas.

  “I told him he didn’t need to be a martyr. I wanted to make sure he had a meal,” Aletti wrote. “He got up slowly and worked himself into a rage again, flailing at his rolodex on top of the TV, white saliva coming out of his mouth, waving his arms and telling me he’s dying and he just wants me to leave and never come back.”

  Aletti could not calm him down. Hujar walked Aletti to the door and shut it behind him. Very upset, Aletti called David and a few other friends to discuss what had happened.

  David’s show “The Four Elements” opened at Gracie Mansion Gallery on September 17. James Romberger remembered seeing Hujar there, “in a terrible state, just completely fucking vaporizing.” But Hujar wouldn’t have missed this for anything.

  Critic Lucy Lippard called Wind (for Peter Hujar) “one of Wojnarowicz’s most transcendent paintings, emotion distilled.”

  David explained this painting to me once in his typically oblique way. It was all about portals (an open window) and extinction (a dinosaur) and destruction (a tornado). The open window with curtain blowing, top center, came from a horrifying dream—“a dream of death that shook me”—about a friend in Canada. I now know that he was speaking of the dream he had in Paris about Michael Morais, in which a spirit entered a room where Michael and Brian Butterick were both sleeping, and the “thing” passed over Brian and went straight into Michael. Later David found out that Michael’s wife had given birth to a stillborn child on that day. (Michael would die of AIDS in 1991.)

  “The horrifying thing was something I couldn’t even
paint,” David told me. “It was a sense of something moving past me very quickly, and whatever it was filled me with a great deal of fear, but it started out with this window with all this light behind it, the wind blowing the curtains into the room. This was in the later part of Peter’s illness.” A red line coming through that window attaches to a newborn baby, based on a photo of his brother Steven’s new baby. Wind, in part, is about rebirth. The other end of that red line is attached to a paratrooper jumping from a plane (above the baby). Right behind the paratrooper is David himself, in probably the only self-portrait he ever painted. (His other self-portraits were photographs.) The lines of circuitry in the painting came from what he described as a “nuclear reactor handbook” he found in Argentina. That was wind at its worst—explosions, the wind that follows. That and the tornado painted at bottom right—wind that destroys. He also painted a wing based on Hujar’s favorite image, the Dürer wing. When David first met him, Hujar had a postcard of the Dürer, along with a mummified seagull wing, hanging over a mirror. Hujar had always wanted that image tattooed on his arm—in sepia, so it would disappear when he got a tan. David would have the wing carved onto Hujar’s tombstone.

  With these masterful paintings, David had found a way to explain the world using the iconography he’d developed. For example, Water contains more than two dozen individual paintings, or maybe film stills, that combine biology, his own history, and a great melancholy. Fish, frogs, skulls, explicit sexual images, a small monkey trying to drink from a petri dish, concentric circles around pebbles hitting a pond, a baby sinking below the waves where “Dad’s ship” patrols—all are organized in a grid inside one drop of water. “Dad’s ship” shows up in the background in two of the other small works and also outside the water drop, where a large ship moves through the ocean, its hold peeled back to reveal a fossil. At the top right, a bandaged hand drops a flower from a prison window surrounded by snowflakes. Also appearing in the ocean and around the grid—a great deal of sperm.

  The Museum of Modern Art now owns all four of the “Elements” paintings, but in 1987, Gracie Mansion said, “Nobody was interested. I called all these people who had wanted his work, this huge waiting list—and they had moved on to something else. I sold one piece.” That was Wind (for Peter Hujar). The rest of the exhibit, also unsold, included Mexican Crucifix, Tommy’s Illness, and a new painting titled The Anatomy and Architecture of June 19, 1953 (for Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg). It couldn’t have helped that Arts magazine published a piece that very month that lumped David in with artists from the dissolving East Village scene “who seem to have been making better work three years ago.” The article pissed David off. He had very little income in 1987.

  But he kept to his habit of leaving town the day after a show opened, flying to New Orleans with Tom for a long weekend.

  One day Hujar went by himself to eat at Bruno’s, a coffee shop at Second Avenue and Twelfth. David heard from Hujar how Bruno himself had approached his table and said, “Are you ready to pay?” and then made Hujar put his five-dollar bill into a paper bag. Bruno came back with the change in another paper bag and tossed it on the table, declaring, “You know why.”

  “At first I wanted to go into Bruno’s at rush hour and pour ten gallons of cow’s blood onto the grill and simply say, ‘You know why,’ “ David wrote. “But that was something I might have done ten years ago. Instead I went in during a crowded lunch hour and screamed at Bruno demanding an explanation and every time a waitress or Bruno asked me to lower my voice I got louder and angrier until Bruno was cowering in back of the kitchen and every knife and fork in the place stopped moving. But even that wasn’t enough to erase this rage.”

  Hujar stopped seeing Dr. Revici in August. He had decided to try AZT. The drug had to be taken every four hours, so Anita had to call him every day at four A.M. Apparently, he had his alarm set for midnight but could not manage resetting it.

  One day at breakfast, Hujar told David that he’d seen a news report about a doctor on Long Island who was injecting AIDS patients with typhoid vaccine. The idea was that this would spark the immune system into working again. Hujar insisted that he would visit this doctor alone. He would take the train from Penn Station. At this point in his illness, Hujar could barely cross a room without falling. Still, it took three days of arguing before he consented to let David and Anita drive him there on a Saturday.

  David wrote about this trip in Close to the Knives. He wrote to bear witness about the epidemic, but also to deal with what these moments brought up inside him. He got sick writing about Hujar’s illness. He came down with shingles. It had been so wrenching to admit to his anger—at Hujar who was imparting one last lesson to David. How not to die. Since David saw him more than anyone else did, he took the brunt of the rage. Still, his account of Hujar’s struggle is both harrowing and compassionate, one of the classic pieces of testimony to emerge from the AIDS crisis.

  On the day of their trip to Long Island, David and Anita spent an hour and a half getting Hujar dressed and into the car. Before they’d even left Manhattan, Hujar began to complain angrily that there was a faster way to get there. Then he insisted he had to piss at a gas station where there was no bathroom, staggering off to urinate in a flower bed in what David saw as unfriendly territory. He refused to wear a seat belt. “Don’t touch me, it hurts.”

  When they arrived at the doctor’s house, David dropped Hujar and Anita off in front and went to find parking. “In the distance,” David wrote, “I could see Peter staggering on the front lawn flailing about in rage. He staggered towards Anita then turned and teetered to the roadside.… By the time I reached Anita he was in the distance, a tiny speck of agitation with windmill arms. I asked her what had happened. ‘I don’t know, one minute he was complaining how long the ride took and when I said that maybe you did the best you could he went into a rage—he threatened to throw himself in front of the traffic. The saddest thing is that he’s too weak to throw a proper fit. He wanted to hit me but he didn’t have the strength.’ ”

  They caught up with him, calmed him down, and got him into the doctor’s office. The waiting room was filled with men Hujar recognized from other waiting rooms, since the AIDS grapevine led PWAs from one supposed cure to the next. This actually cheered him up. David and Anita looked at each other in disbelief.

  “Finally the brains behind the business called us into his personal office,” David wrote. “It looked like it had been decorated by Elvis: high lawn-green shag carpets, K-mart paintings and Woolworth lamps. Lots of official medical degrees with someone else’s name on them.… The doctor asked Hujar how he knew he had AIDS. ‘After all, you may not have it.’ ”

  Hujar stumbled through a disjointed medical history, angrily refusing help from Anita. Then, while Hujar was in another room getting his typhoid shot, David asked the doctor to explain the theory behind this treatment. The doctor then admitted that he was really a research scientist and talked about the thymus gland, “wherever it is,” and drew a diagram of circles divided by a line: “Say ya got a hundred army men over here; that’s the T-cells.…”

  On the way back to Manhattan, they stopped at a diner. David told Hujar about this unsettling encounter with the scientist. “He looked sad and tired,” David wrote. “He barely touched his food, staring out the window and saying, ‘America is such a beautiful country—don’t you think so?’ I was completely exhausted, emotionally and physically from the day, and looking out the window at the enormous collage of high-tension wires, blinking stop lights, shredded used-car lot banners, industrial tanks and masses of humanity zipping about in automobiles just depressed me. The food we had in front of us looked like it had been fried in an electric chair. And watching my best friend dying while eating a dead hamburger left me speechless. I couldn’t answer.”

  Back at the loft, David and Anita asked Hujar if they could do anything, if he needed anything. When he responded with an angry “No,” they left. David learned later that Hujar had called
Aletti almost immediately and said, “I don’t understand it. They just put me in bed and rushed out.”

  Hujar had continued to discuss his will with Aletti, needling him over whether he’d have the time to be an executor, interrogating him about what he would call any future books about the work, and sometimes exploding in rage. After one phone call that ended with Hujar slamming down the phone, Aletti wrote him a note saying he just wanted to be his good friend now, not his executor. “I don’t want to be constantly on trial with him,” Aletti wrote in his journal. “I felt he was using the will as a wedge between us.”

  On October 11, Hujar’s fifty-third birthday, Aletti came early to prepare for the party, “smothering my dread in determined cheer,” as he later wrote in Hujar’s obituary. “And while I set out paper plates and plastic cups, he started to talk about dying. He wondered how long his friends would grieve, how long we’d remember him. He wasn’t needling or fishing for sympathy, only clearing the air. We were gathering to celebrate his last birthday, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. For a few hours, though, he might allow us to cajole him into a mock-festive mood, and as guests arrived, he deflected their edgy merrymaking with gentle good humor. When his bed was surrounded by apprehensive friends, still tensed for the misstep that would send Peter into a tirade of denunciation, he looked up, smiled, and said, ‘Pretend you’re at a party.’ And for awhile, we were.”

  On the next day, Columbus Day, Anita came to visit. “We started to talk about his dying,” she said. “I asked, ‘What would you like, and do you want me to write it down?’ That’s when he told me he wanted to be buried in the Catholic Church. He wanted to have just a shroud. He wanted to be buried in a plain box. He wanted a Mass. I wrote it down.”