Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  For Americans Can’t Deal with Death, a painting of a pink flower, he wrote a new piece about his visit to the National Atomic Museum, where death is an abstraction, where in the offered documentation you can’t see the bodies, “the burnt flesh and sores.” He can’t deal with the guide who explains the bomb’s invention like a proud parent, so he wanders off, watches families snap vacation pictures. If he were in charge, he’d “hook the constant smell of rotting flesh into the air conditioning unit.” The other text block is a dream about a kid who has a swollen lump in his armpit. David tells him he needs a doctor. A guy comes in, “acts like he knows me,” and David understands that this is Death. He steers him away. “He reappears far away but far away is not far enough.”

  One night David took a break at a local adult-film joint to watch some porn, wild scenes both gay and straight. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he noticed someone following, flashing his brights at every stoplight.

  David ignored him, “not wanting to connect with anyone in this small town figuring that my diagnosis could freak someone out or maybe my semi-notoriety, and any cop or priest or bigot in the state would probably love to arrest me for even breathing on another guy’s body.” He got to Blinderman’s house with the car still right behind him.

  David parked and walked over to the driver. The guy said, “What ya up to?”

  “Oh I dunno it’s hard to explain,” David said.

  “You married?”

  “No, I got other problems. Medical ones.”

  He noticed that the guy was jerking off as he tried to get David to describe his body. Finally David leaned in the window and slid his hand over the guy’s chest, and the guy came.

  David walked into the house where everyone was asleep, and found that Blinderman’s son Gabriel had fallen out of bed and rolled into the hallway, “looking like he’d fallen off a sled.”

  This incident recorded in the journal became one of the text blocks on the flower painting He Kept Following Me—a piece about what cruising meant to him in 1990 contrasted with the old sense of possibility and freedom, and how he still saw sexuality as a way to embrace the world. The flower he chose is an anthurium, very phallic. He also included text about an encounter at the pier that ends: “In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.”

  Hujar was alive one night in David’s dream. His death had been faked, or else he’d revived and gone to live elsewhere. David was at the loft with a Puerto Rican man he’d picked up on the street for sex. They’d arrived to find the scorpion tank full of water. David thought Lucy was dead, but once he spilled the water out, Lucy started climbing the wall. Then David found a second scorpion in a shoe. His mother showed up. “I’m trying to understand what she’s there for,” he wrote. Then the door opened and Hujar was standing there, looking sheepish.

  “Peter comes in and I feel a lot of anger at him for allowing me to believe he had died. Why would he do this? How did he do this? The Puerto Rican guy or my mother had earlier touched the wall of the darkroom and it collapsed like a house of cards. I picked it back up but it was wobbly and rickety. I thought of this now looking at Peter. I’m living in his house and since he has returned, what will he think of … all my things, the darkroom’s condition, the dirt and dust and pile-up of objects and papers and … I can’t quite get over my anger at his disappearance, his ‘death,’ and I’m trying to figure out how to tell him that two scorpions are running around.”

  Suddenly Hujar walked to the door and said, “I’ll see you—good-bye.” He was gone. “I realize he may be gone for good. Forever. He may not have planned on staying.”

  David wanted to do some new photographic pieces for his upcoming show. He bought a large plastic spider with a rather bulbous body and painted parts of it yellow, red, and blue—with a red swastika on the body. He stuck a photo of Jesse Helms’s face on the spider’s head and photographed it on Blinderman’s front porch. David wanted some humor in this exhibit.

  He also fashioned a bee from dollar bills and photographed it hovering over a flower made from world maps. This and Subspecies Helms Senatorius, Cibachrome prints, would be the only new pieces for his show that did not combine image and text.

  The other new work would synthesize all his skills. One day, Blinder-man and his wife, Christina Nordholm, took David to the site of a Native American settlement and burial ground near Normal—Dickson Mounds. “This was hallowed ground, and they built a museum over it,” Blinderman said. “One could look down into the pit and see these skeletons.” Here David took the black-and-white photo that became one of his best-loved pieces after he matched it with the words, printed in red, that had come to him so many years ago: “When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending.… If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time to me I would. If I could open your body and slip up inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fuse with yours I would.”

  In Illinois he dreamt again about the lake. “I returned to that place the reoccurring place where it’s been years the sinkholes filled with aquamarine waters, the road of history and infatuations, of myth and killing spiritualities—Christian maybe Mayan and whatever else. I was on the verge, close to it. I talked to people in this sleep and realized I was near my own death, that to finally return to this elusive place meant my death in clarity. Over the years in various sleeps the place got obscured, the forest, the labyrinths of paths, sandy shoals, the fragmented stones, carvings, priests, crosses become entangled in super highway structures and now it was revealing itself with all the detail of reality. And that was at the verge of my final death.”

  Then the dream changed. He was in a hotel, and he felt that Hujar was nearby or had just left. He thought he caught a “brief fragmented sight of him eating a meal” in a room where three to seven Buddhist monks sat eating.

  David worked in Illinois until October 15, and so missed the opening of Luis Frangella’s show at Gracie Mansion’s new SoHo gallery. By then, Luis was nearly paralyzed, but he still made small drawings on notepads. Gracie offered him a show, which would be his last. He came to the opening in a wheelchair.

  In Normal, meanwhile, David had agreed to do a reading at University Galleries on October 9, a benefit for the McLean County AIDS Task Force. He told Judy Glantzman in a letter that he was nervous about it: “Dunno why.” In the end, he decided he didn’t want his face out there. He wanted Patrick to perform.

  David stood behind a wall with a microphone, reading from his galley of Close to the Knives. He told Patrick to pretend that he was a cartoon character living in a cartoon jail and that he had to find ways to pass the time. Patrick dressed himself in solid black and painted his hands and his head blue. The top of his head was red with a white stripe separating red from blue. “I was going for a matchstick look,” Patrick said.

  Some days earlier Patrick had been breaking up glass, in his job as preparator at the gallery, to make it smaller and safer for disposal. David happened by and said, “Stop. We can use that in the show.” David arranged to have a fifty-five-gallon drum filled with broken glass and a kettle drum set brought into the gallery. The space was between shows, walls blank, and they put up big sheets of newsprint. David had given Patrick a cue for when he was supposed to start drawing on them. Before that, Patrick banged the drums and smashed the glass. He had a big black marker and a ladder. When he began to draw, he wanted to work quickly. He drew cartoon characters, a big eagle representing American government, and some of Dav
id’s iconography, like the tornado and the alien head.

  “I had never been out in front of a crowd,” Patrick said. “What made him think I’d be a good guy to perform? He was pushing me to be this artist that he saw in me.” The gallery was packed—standing room only. Patrick was not happy with any of the drawings. Then the last thing he painted was an “exit” and, in the spirit of Wile E. Coyote, he ran into it.

  “I did it as many times as I could until I hurt myself. I mean, I literally threw my body into this thing. And that pretty much ramped up the show. After the audience stood up and applauded, I was hooked. I was a performance artist after that. I just loved it. I felt so powerful up there, and it was his words, but it changed my life.”

  A pipe broke at the loft four or five days before David was to return from Illinois. Dori Poole, the upstairs neighbor, called Tom, who came over and sloshed through a few inches of water to get to the storage unit that was supposedly guarding David’s valuables from the hazards of construction. Dori knew David’s temper and she wanted Tom to be the one who took action.

  “I decided to pull the stuff out. His stencils were all wet, and all these other things,” said Tom, who took them into the darkroom and placed them on the drying racks. “I tried to make sure everything was out of the water. Then the question was, do I tell him while he’s away.” He decided to wait till David returned, since David was busy and couldn’t do anything about it from Illinois.

  “He got home and flipped out,” Tom said. “I mean, went into a rage: throwing the telephone, screaming, saying it would have been better if I’d let everything just rot—at least then he could sue the shit out of them. And I got so furious I left. Here I’d gone through this struggle with it, and I’d done the best that I could do trying to save the stuff. So I went home and then he called me up and started yelling at me on the phone. I remember yelling back at him that it was not my fault. And slammed the phone down in his ear. Slammed it down. About ten minutes later, he called me back, calm. He didn’t apologize, but he was saying, ‘You gotta understand.’ And I said, ‘I do understand. But none of us knew what to do. Your temper—we didn’t know whether to tell you out there. The way you’ve been feeling lately, I didn’t know what to do. So if I made the wrong decisions, so be it. But decisions had to be made and I made ’em.”

  David thought about getting an appraisal on what he’d lost. But there’s no evidence that he did that or took even the first step toward a lawsuit. Now that his life “fit into a tiny funnel,” as he’d put it to Judy Glantzman, that could not be a priority.

  He had about two weeks to finish the darkroom work for his show at P.P.O.W. He printed some of the photos he’d taken the previous summer with Marion in the Adirondacks—a caterpillar on a leaf, a honeybee on a stem, his own hand holding a tiny amphibian. He also printed photos of various critters in formaldehyde that he’d taken in Normal at Illinois State’s science labs. He matched each of these images with short texts. For example, he placed “what is this little guy’s job in the world …” on the picture of his hand holding the small frog or toad. In this way, he created a set of eleven unique black-and-white gelatin silver prints.

  Gary Schneider printed the skeleton photo David took in Illinois, When I Put My Hands on Your Body. It had to be large enough to accommodate silk-screened text. David planned to do two more pictures in this series—large photos with text. He would eventually complete one of the two.

  He told his doctor that he had felt so weak and tired while doing the four flower paintings in Normal that he wasn’t sure he would have the strength to finish them. He didn’t have the energy to make enough new work to fill the gallery. So he decided he would reprint the Rimbaud in New York series. When he shot those pictures in 1979 and 1980, he did not have a good camera and certain scenarios were badly lit, so some of the negatives were not good. Printing them was difficult, and he was proud when he pulled it off. The Rimbaud series had never been exhibited before. He also turned his controversial 1979 collage Untitled (Genet) into a large lithograph.

  With this combination of new and old work, his show, “In the Garden,” opened on November 2, 1990. Calling it “In the Garden” was a logical choice given the flower paintings, given that all the new photos from caterpillar to Subspecies Helms Senatorius came from nature. But it also harks back to something he’d written for his last show about a mixed-media piece, Where I’ll Go After I’m Gone. “I thought if there was indeed a place one goes after death then it could only be a place determined by one’s vision of the world … The garden is the place I’ll go if I die.”

  David knew he was getting weaker, but otherwise, the disease didn’t yet show. He never had KS lesions on his skin. He was no thinner than he’d ever been. And he kept all thoughts about impending death to himself. He wouldn’t talk about it even with Tom, maybe especially with Tom, who said, “He thought I wouldn’t be able to put up with it.” So David tried to work out his feelings in his journal. The following entry is undated but was written in 1990, probably soon after he came back from Illinois:

  Will my death be terrible and difficult? Will I let go easily as a body among the waves or the reeds of a pond? Will I sink below the surface of life like a swimmer whose feet become entangled in the undulating weeds? Will I be embraced by all those who have gone before me? Will I be loved before I go? Will I know it? Will I turn to stone like a grey dot in the field? Will I burrow into the dream of the earth, the humming of the motor works? Will I speak in numbers or symbols? Will I shock myself by dying when I feel it is time, not waiting a moment longer than necessary?

  24 “LIKE A MARBLE ROLLING DOWN A HILL”

  “In the Garden” was still up at P.P.O.W when David’s retrospective rolled into New York, headed for Exit Art, a large nonprofit space. Cofounders Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberman had a special appreciation for artists who worked against the grain, against stereotypes, against aesthetic norms. They’d made it their mission to highlight the uncodified and the marginalized.

  Ingberman called David “the perfect artist for Exit Art.” She had offered him a mid-career retrospective after his troubles began at Artists Space. Told that such a show was already in the works out in Illinois, Ingberman agreed to take “Tongues of Flame” when it toured.

  Then she discovered that she was going to have trouble raising the money; David was now a targeted artist. Even colleagues in the nonprofit world were asking her, “How can you do this show? You’ll lose your funding!” She collected just a fraction of what she usually did—a donation from the Cowles Charitable Trust. Everyone else said no.

  Colo and Ingberman didn’t really know David and were surprised to find that this artist with the aggressive sensibility was so reserved, almost shy. He came in one day with several shoe boxes and asked if he could put up some ephemera in a small room. They said they’d be delighted. So David went to work hanging flyers, notes, letters, doodles, personal photos, and posters that traced his history, while Colo installed the rest of the show. They got to talking, and Colo reported that David was installing “an archaeology of himself.”

  This show opened on November 17, 1990. A week later, David was back in New Orleans for a vacation with Tom.

  David’s physician, Dr. Robert Friedman, was waiting at the barbershop one day when he spotted the December 1990 Art in America with the name “David Wojnarowicz” on the cover.

  The doctor said to himself, “Gee, I have a patient by that name. That’s not a common name.” Friedman read the piece, by Lucy Lippard, and realized then that his patient was a rather well-known artist. “I wasn’t even charging him. He had no health insurance, and he looked terrible, and I didn’t have the heart to ask him for money.” He brought the magazine back to his mother, who worked as his receptionist, and told her he didn’t know what to do about it.

  David really liked Mrs. Friedman. She was always telling him to eat. Sometimes when he came in, she would run across the street to Christine’s, a Polish coffee shop, and bu
y him soup, then make him eat all of it in front of her. “I thought he was just a poor struggling East Village type,” said the doctor.

  When David came in for his next appointment and began to walk out without paying, as usual, Mrs. Friedman pulled out the magazine and said, “Would you autograph this for us?”

  “What?” David said, startled.

  Dr. Friedman remembered: “My mother said, ‘David, you’ve been coming to see the doctor for like two years now and you’ve only paid a couple of times. Don’t you think you should do something for the doctor?’ I would never have had the chutzpah to say what my mother did. So David went down the block, and he came back and handed me a copy of The Sex Series. The whole series in a portfolio.” It was David’s artists’ proof. This was, of course, his preferred method of payment. (Coincidentally, that cover of Art in America featured his mixed-media piece Anatomy and Architecture of Desire, which he had given to Jean Foos in exchange for her work on the “Tongues of Flame” catalog.)

  Dr. Friedman was so busy he did not take the time then to look through the portfolio. “So,” he said, “I see my mother and David looking at these big photos, which are highly sexual. And my mother, this Jewish lady from Rockaway, in her seventies, picks up the one of the forest with the circle insert [one man with an erection rimming another], and my mother—I’ve never forgotten this moment; it made me love my mother even more—my mother looked at the image and slaps her finger across the trees and says, ‘This is nature,’ and then she points at the insert and goes, ‘I guess that’s nature too.’ And David says, ‘You’re exactly right.’ “

  Luis Frangella died of AIDS on December 7, 1990, at the age of forty-six.