Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Anita had brought a priest, part of a hospice team, to see Hujar early in the year. Hujar asked the priest more questions than the priest asked him. What was that life like? Did he have sex? Anita witnessed this encounter, the priest getting more and more embarrassed. He never came back.

  “He embraced Catholicism at the end,” Schneider said. “But before, he was an atheist.” Hujar had long been interested in Siddha yoga, however, and went to retreats or at least classes at the SYDA Foundation on the rare occasions when he had money. He kept pictures around his bed of SYDA founder Swami Muktananda, along with photos of Kalu Rinpoche and the Tibetan Buddhist Karmapa, and two pictures of Pio of Pietrelcina, an Italian priest with the stigmata who was said to work miracles.

  “He was grasping,” said Schneider. “He didn’t know what to do. He was lost.”

  On October 22, David took Hujar to a neighborhood clinic to see a urologist. He’d been having pain while urinating and for the past day could not urinate at all, despite feeling an almost constant need to do so. They waited for several hours. When they finally met with the urologist, he exhibited what David saw as impatience, constantly cutting Hujar off as he tried to explain his problem. Finally he told Hujar he was going to insert a tube into his penis. Hujar asked if it would hurt. The doctor said there would be no pain, just discomfort.

  In a letter of complaint David sent to the clinic, he wrote, “Peter’s reaction was of shock and much pain. I tried to calm him down while the doctor continued. At some point, Peter could not continue the exam—he sat up very upset and told the doctor to get away from him. The doctor reacted as if his life were being threatened.” Hujar barely had enough strength to crawl onto the examining table. But the doctor ordered him to leave and summoned a security guard.

  David told the doctor he should have a little compassion; the guy just couldn’t take the pain. The doctor and the guard then ordered David to leave the examining room. (Hujar already had.) David declared that he would not go until he had both their names. The guard demanded to know David’s name and blocked him from leaving the room, ripping up the paper with his name and the doctor’s. “He then said he was calling the police and would have me arrested for harassing the doctor. He went on and began manufacturing false charges that he would give to the police when they arrived.” David began yelling out the door for help. Finally the guard stepped aside. David went to the waiting room, where Hujar sat. The guard came out and called the police.

  David left with Hujar before the police arrived, and went home to write his letter.

  One day Hujar sent Schneider into the darkroom to get something. Schneider walked in and stopped in his tracks.

  “He had left the trays in the sink uncovered and all the chemicals had dried up and crystallized at the bottom,” Schneider said. “He had literally closed the door and not gone back in. I just stood there. It was a powerful, powerful image.”

  Schneider had always known Hujar to be absolutely fastidious about the darkroom, but apparently he just suspended all work the day he got his diagnosis. “I just stood there. I was riveted,” said Schneider. “And all of sudden I hear, from his bed, ‘What’s taking so long?’ ”

  Early in November, when Aletti came to visit him, Hujar said he thought he’d seen him less than any of his other friends. (Aletti disagreed but didn’t say so.) So, Hujar asked, “Are you afraid of my dying?” Aletti sat on Hujar’s bed, tears running down his face, telling him there would be a terrible feeling of loss. Then Hujar almost started to cry. Almost. He said that every time a friend visited, he wondered if he would ever see that person again.

  Hujar brought them back down to earth by again invoking the will, the changes he might make. He thought maybe he should cut his mother out—she who had never once visited during his illness. He should put Aletti in as executor. He should say the negatives couldn’t be used for a hundred years.

  Hujar had wavered on his decisions ever since making them, but he never did change the will. Koch said, “Peter assigned roles to people in his life, and I was the bourgeois brother. He left the estate to someone who he thought would make it successful.” Aletti had already been named alternate executor, and Hujar had told Koch that he must consult with Aletti if he was ever unsure about the quality of a print, because Aletti had such a good eye. He had decided that his mother and David and Koch would split the net proceeds, after debts were paid and Koch got the first fifteen thousand dollars for his work as executor. But according to Koch, David refused to accept any income from the estate. “He never said why. Just ‘I don’t want the money.’ ”

  What dismayed many of Hujar’s friends—what Erdman called “the horror of his life at the end”—included a kind of internalized homophobia. Hujar told Erdman one day that if only he’d had money growing up, he might have been straight, because you needed money to take a girl out. Hujar had actually had one or two relationships with women. He just wasn’t straight. But clearly, when he wasn’t in a rage about having AIDS, he was pondering, “Why me?” or “Why us?”

  “He thought there was a curse on all gay people,” Erdman said.

  Schneider added, “He thought we were all going to die.”

  This explains the rather cruel backhanded compliment he gave Koch the day he told him to “send little Madeline to college.” He also said, “You’re no good, but you’re the best I have.”

  Hujar asked Fran Lebowitz to make his funeral arrangements. David called her and said, “Don’t go by yourself. I’ll come with you.”

  Lebowitz had met David before Hujar became ill, but had not paid much attention to him at first. “That’s the first time I really thought that he was an unusual person, morally,” she said of his offer to help with the funeral. “David was an exceptional moral presence.”

  Hujar wanted to be buried from Frank Campbell’s, an Upper East Side funeral home that had arranged burials for such luminaries as Judy Garland and Malcolm Forbes. “Peter had incredibly grand ideas,” Lebowitz said. “I didn’t even inquire there because I knew it was too expensive.”

  Early in the epidemic, there was only one funeral home in all of New York City that would even take someone who had died of AIDS—Redden’s on West Fourteenth Street. Even after other funeral homes changed their policies, many people stayed loyal to Redden’s, and that’s where Lebowitz went with David.

  Hujar wanted a pine box, and the only place they could get one was from an Orthodox Jewish coffin maker. Redden’s arranged this. “They couldn’t get one without a Star of David,” said Lebowitz. “I had a discussion about this with Peter. I became incredibly upset. David was very calm and much more able to deal with it, talk to the guy, and figure out how to get the Star of David off the coffin.”

  An old friend of Hujar’s, Charles Baxter, moved into the loft when it became clear that Hujar could not be left alone for any significant amount of time. On Friday, November 13, Aletti came over to meet Baxter for dinner, only to have Baxter hand him a small note at the door: “Vince, I believe Peter has begun to die.” On Saturday, Aletti called and Hujar answered the phone, slurring words, saying he couldn’t talk and he was alone. Aletti, who lived across the street, could see from his window that actually David was there, sitting at the blue kitchen table. On Sunday, Aletti went over with fresh raspberries and found that Hujar was up, sitting at his desk with an inventory list of everything in the loft—who would get what. He needed help to get back to the bed. “Do you want the blue table?” he asked Aletti.

  Hujar went back into Cabrini on November 16. Koch came to get him and watched as Hujar tottered around the loft, saying, “Goodbye table. Goodbye bed. Goodbye darkroom.” But this wasn’t supposed to be the end. He was going into the hospital for tests because he was still having trouble urinating and the slightest movement of an arm or leg could trigger nausea. He was supposed to be there two or three days.

  The night before Hujar went to the hospital, David had his recurring dream about the lake. He was at the base of a mountai
n and spotted the dirt road that used to take him there. Years ago, he’d jumped in and swum into an interior cave where he found beautiful stalactites. “But it’s like a film in reverse where as I get older, I am getting further away,” he wrote. “Each successive dream seems to start at a point just a little further from the dirt road that leads to the lake.”

  On the 17th, David woke up and wrote in his journal:

  Everything about my life horrifies me at this moment, even the room the bed the heat of the pipe running down the wall the vague breeze never quite passing through the cheap curtains, the weight of blankets on me, the persistent need to piss, desire for a cigarette, Peter in the hospital, Tom sleeping in the other room, Peter’s friends and my feeling of not being understood by anyone anymore, and I think I should throw myself off a bridge or something, that I can’t deal with living the way I used to be able to do—the world is one large fear for me and I feel hot and cold simultaneously and I have no physical comfort in strength of body like when I was 21 and this makes me feel old and wasted like my body is falling apart but so slowly its all I can do to sit and watch it do so.

  Five or six days later, he wrote in the journal what would become the beginning of his chapter on Hujar’s illness in Close to the Knives:

  I’m sitting in his hospital room so high up here in the upper reaches of the building that when I walk the halls or sit in the room or wander into the waiting room to have a cigarette—it’s the gradual turn of the earth outside the windows, the far plains filled with buildings that have that look of fiction because so high up they flatten out one against the other … and leaning against the glass of the window in his room I see dizzily down into the next street and wonder what it is to fall such distances. I’m afraid he is dying.

  Schneider and Erdman went to Hujar’s doctor to ask how long he had. Earlier that year, they’d booked a Thanksgiving trip to Santa Fe, which would be their first vacation from the lab in five years. Erdman asked the doctor if he thought they could go away for three days. Would Hujar be OK? “And the doctor said, ‘He’s not going to die this weekend. Don’t worry.’ And so we went.”

  On Thanksgiving, on his way to the hospital, David ran into Ethyl Eichelberger. Ethyl had not been to visit during Hujar’s illness. Hujar and Ethyl had argued and fallen out. All Erdman could remember was that it was over something “so minor” but had something to do with “selling out.” As if either of them could. They had not communicated for at least a year, but when David saw Ethyl on the street, he insisted, “You have to come and see Peter. Now.”

  Then it was Ethyl who first noticed the change, who said, “David … look at Peter.”

  “And his death is now like it’s printed on celluloid on the backs of my eyes,” David wrote, “when I looked towards his face and his eyes moved slightly and I put up two fingers like rabbit ears behind the back of my head … and I flashed him the sign and then turned away embarrassed and moments later Ethyl said: ‘David … look at Peter.’ And we were all turned to the bed and his body was completely still and then there was a very strong and slow intake of breath and then stillness.”

  David asked the other friends to leave the room. He asked Anita to guard the door, to keep out the hospital staff. Then with a Super 8 camera, he slowly made a sweep of Hujar’s body. Then he photographed the face, the hands, the feet of “this body of my friend on the bed this body of my brother my father my emotional link to the world.”

  He took exactly twenty-three photographs, and that number was calculated. He would mark the envelope for these contact sheets as “23 photos of Peter, 23 genes in a chromosome, Room 1423.” He associated that number with the evolution of consciousness.

  One of the photos David took immediately after Hujar’s death from AIDS. Untitled, 1988. Gelatin-silver print, 24½ × 30½ inches. (Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.)

  Before David left the room, he thought he should say some words to his friend. If there was a limbo or a bardo, he was there now and might be afraid, might be confused, might need reassurance. “But nothing comes from my mouth,” David wrote. “This is the most important event of my life and my mouth can’t form words and maybe I’m the one who needs words, maybe I’m the one who needs reassurance and all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, ‘All I want is some sort of grace.’ ” Then David began to cry.

  Hujar got his pine box and his shroud. He had also asked not to be embalmed. So the funeral happened just two days later, on Saturday, November 28, at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village. David wore a suit, which must have been Hujar’s. Tom had a fever of 105 and couldn’t be there. So David sat next to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. At some point, whoever was running this service told everyone to join hands. Said Greenfield-Sanders, “I was there holding David’s hand, and he was trembling.” The burial was at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

  On Sunday—“the third day of his death,” David called it—he drove the twenty-five miles back to the cemetery to be alone with Hujar: “Looking at the fresh ground where he lies buried. I see white light, fix my eyes to the plowed earth and see a white powerful light like burning magnesium covering the soil, his body in a semicurled position surrounded by white light floating hovering maybe three feet from the ground. I try talking to him, wondering if he knows I’m there. He sees me, I know he sees me. He’s in the wind in the air all around me.”

  That evening David went to the long-scheduled memorial for Keith Davis at St. Mark’s Church. There he ran into Kiki Smith and asked her to come back to Hujar’s loft with him. To dance. “I wanted to show Peter some joy, some celebration.… We turned on a few lights.… Each time I come in a little less of him is there.” They put on Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor and tried to waltz, but David couldn’t coordinate with Kiki’s movements. He felt his body had shut down. Kiki let go of him, turned off the lights, and began whirling through the space. David did the same, “whirling and jumping and driving through the darkness, the window curtains open with the rain roaring through the street … and for a moment everything went loose in my head and I was beaming some kind of joy.”

  Schneider and Erdman were back at the lab on Monday, devastated. “We were just a mess,” Erdman said. David walked in. He had them sit down and then recounted the funeral—everything said, the rituals done. “He sort of acted it out,” Schneider said. “And it helped.”

  Then he pulled out a photograph he’d printed for them in Hujar’s darkroom. It was a photo David had taken probably years earlier on one of his excursions with Hujar, when they’d drive to Caven Point or some other decrepit site to take pictures.

  Hujar had imparted one of his lessons that day on how to live cheaply. Somewhere in this wreck of a building he’d found a pair of sunglasses. They were old, and they were fogged, but he put them on, telling David, “See. You don’t need to buy sunglasses. You can find them.”

  And at that moment—so Peter Hujar—David had snapped his picture.

  Schneider and Erdman stood there weeping.

  Soon after, David disappeared. “I wouldn’t know where he was,” Tom said.

  For part of that time, he was at the loft, sleeping in Hujar’s bed. Then one day, he came over to Tom’s place. “He was just morose and started to cry. He told me he had hooked up with some guy in an S-M relationship, someone he’d picked up in a bar. He was the masochist side of it, and he allowed the guy to abuse him for a while. He told me, ‘I was just a pure slave.’ He didn’t tell me all the details. He just felt so guilty for getting involved.”

  David had found his bad father to be with, if briefly.

  “I remember saying to him, ‘I’m glad you told me. I understand how crazy you were, but if it happens again, I don’t know what I’ll do,’ “ Tom said. “I guess we both thought we needed to be monogamous at this point. He was really upset about it. But I also could tell he was just lost. It was as if the whole world had come out from under him. And it was c
lear to me there wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t fill the shoes that were vacated by Peter’s death. And part of me resented that, but part of me understood it. It was painful to me that I couldn’t help him get over this thing.”

  Tom gained perspective as time went on. In 1993, he said of David and Peter Hujar: “They were both more than and less than lovers. Peter was the one who saved him, who changed his life in a major positive way. They were kindred souls. Part of David was missing after Peter went.”

  18 ELEGIAC TIMES

  Hujar had wanted his service to be at the Church of St. Joseph after attending a funeral there in May for his old friend Charles Ludlam, star, director, and playwright for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. I still recall the horror and dismay that swept through the theater community when Ludlam died of AIDS mere months after his diagnosis. A friend of mine had been to that funeral, and she described how, in all that collective grief, “the church lifted up.”

  Suddenly we were living in apocalyptic and elegiac times. Every day now began with a look at the obituaries. I could sense the path of the virus around me, the tornado that devastates one house and leaves the next pristine. It was a time to worry about friends—and all the other brilliant, aspiring, wild spirits who’d landed in what we then called “downtown.” We were not prepared to see each other die.

  Tom Rauffenbart told his doctor that he did not want an AIDS test. That was the general consensus among gay men in 1987. Why be tested when there were no treatments to look forward to—only depression, only stigma. “Everyone was afraid their name would end up on some kind of list,” Tom said. But when his doctor suggested a T-cell test instead, Tom agreed. He did not know what a T-cell was. The count that came back was between five hundred and six hundred, indicating that his immune system was somewhat compromised. (A healthy immune system has five hundred to fifteen hundred T-cells per cubic millimeter of blood.) He went to get an AIDS test when he learned that the city’s public health clinics would do it anonymously.