Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  He did have some good news, however. The rock band U2 planned to use his falling buffalo image for a record cover and a video. They were among the musicians on Red Hot and Blue, the first CD put out by the Red Hot Organization—founded by David’s friend John Carlin to raise money for organizations fighting AIDS. Carlin had sent the band a “Tongues of Flame” catalog, and they loved it.

  On February 20, he called to tell me he couldn’t get on his feet. His legs were killing him. The doctor was thinking neuropathy, but David hoped it was just because he hadn’t exercised in so long. The week before, he’d been tottering at least. Now that he could no longer take for granted his ability to walk, he was afraid to be left alone.

  I stopped by the loft to get keys from Tom so I could get in the next day and sit with David. He was lying on his side, and I got a look at his legs for the first time. Toothpicks.

  I don’t know why he let me into his life at this point. There were many friends he wouldn’t see or even speak to on the phone, and in most cases, I also don’t know why he cut them off. He and I talked about death on those occasions when it was just the two of us. He was curious about Buddhism. Since I have close friends who are practitioners, I had attended many talks and ceremonies, even a public cremation. I shared what little I knew. He asked if I believed in reincarnation, admitting that the possibility bothered him: “I don’t want to come back,” he said.

  He’d had a visit the day before from Adam Clayton, the U2 bassist. David had taken some Ritalin so he could feel up for that.y The day I was there, he had a doctor’s appointment and took more Ritalin—“hoping it would give me strength,” he told me. It hadn’t worked. He couldn’t even stand.

  About a week later, Tom called to ask if I could stay with David for the day. Tom had been missing a lot of work. He always took care of what David needed first, so he sometimes went in late or not at all. When I arrived, David was sitting with his feet over the side of the bed, hunkered down, hooked up to the bottle of MAI medicine. I noticed that his elbows, feet, and knees were swollen. Probably from the steroids, he told me. The table next to his bed was entirely covered with pill bottles.

  A physical therapist came to help David exercise. They walked once around the perimeter of the loft. The guy had David raise his arms out straight, parallel to the ground, five times. Then above his head five times. After that, David needed to sit down and rest. They repeated this routine three or four times. David paid the guy. He was relieved when he left. Three or four times that day, I massaged David’s feet. It helped, he told me. One of his legs was “two-thirds better.”

  At the beginning of March, Pat came from Paris to visit. And Philip Zimmerman came from San Francisco. David seemed to rally around this time, meaning he actually went outside for a couple of short walks. But he still had depressed, anxious days and terrible nights.

  Tom was getting exhausted. “One night I was just desperate to go home and be in my own apartment for a night’s sleep,” he said. Zimmerman said he would stay with David.

  David spent the night writhing and groaning, emitting sounds like I EE I-EE and saying, “Oh god, please help me.” He had a fever, but every time Zimmerman approached him with a thermometer or a cold cloth, David’s rage would surface. “Always in the eyes,” said Zimmerman.

  Around six thirty in the morning Zimmerman called Tom and said, “You’ve got to come over here. David hates me. He’s yelling at me. He doesn’t know who I am.”

  Tom got dressed and walked over to the loft.

  Zimmerman was standing against a wall in the kitchen, which was just a few feet from the bed where David sat scowling, “Who is this guy? What’s he doing here?”

  Tom said, “David, that’s Philip. He stayed with you to take care of you.”

  David said, “Oh!”

  Clearly the virus had started its work on David’s brain, but at this point, he was still of sound mind most of the time.

  On another occasion, though, Judy Glantzman spent the night with the same result: David in bed screaming, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  Glantzman could not remember if she even stayed through the night. “It was so scary I couldn’t do it ever again.”

  On March 18, U2 sent a limousine to the loft to bring David to the Meadowlands for their show, along with Tom and Pete and Linda—David’s “little brother and sister,” as he called them—and their spouses.

  The band paired David’s falling buffalo photograph with what became one of their signature songs, “One.” They released it as a single with David’s image on the cover—with all royalties going to AIDS research.

  At the Meadowlands, David and his entourage met the band backstage before the show. He was having a hard time walking that night. Bono asked David if he would like to pray with them. David declined. But everyone had been so kind. Pete and Linda were given seats near the side of the stage. The band had arranged for David to have a chair on the platform in the middle of the arena where the tech crew sat, controlling the sound and lighting. Tom stood behind him. As the band began to play “One,” the buffalo image came up on the screen behind the drum kit, and Bono called out, “David! This is for you!” Tom choked up.

  Eventually, the band would pay for all of David’s private nursing costs.

  He called me the day after the concert and said, “Parts were great, but it’s not my world. It really made me feel my age.”

  Word was getting around that David was in bad shape.

  Doug Bressler, the musician from 3 Teens who had worked with David on the soundtrack for A Fire in My Belly, had not seen David in quite awhile but just thought he was busy. “I didn’t know how bad his health was because he never talked to me about it,” said Bressler, who began to cry as he remembered this. One day Bressler ran into Steve Brown, who told him that David had dreamt about him. Specifically, David had dreamt that Bressler came to visit and flew in through the window. Brown added, “You better go see him. It’s bad.”

  Ben Neill also came to visit. They had talked about doing a video documentary of ITSOFOMO with some of David’s film footage, parts of the live performance, and maybe some documentation from rehearsals. Neill told him that PBS’s Alive from Off Center had expressed interest. But David told him, “I can’t listen to it anymore.” He said what he really wanted was to go for a drive. Neill told him he had a car now. He could take him. David was enthusiastic, telling Neill, “Yeah, I want to take a ride. Let’s go somewhere.” But he was really too weak.

  P.P.O.W sent someone over with the last finished piece—the imploring bandaged hands with the silk-screened text about “disappearing but not fast enough.” Penny Pilkington remembered, “He hardly had the energy to sign it.”

  One day, he asked me if I thought he should contact his mother. Since I knew little about her at that point, I didn’t know what to tell him, but thought that if she didn’t already know what kind of shape he was in—how good could that relationship be?

  Tom said that David told him one day, “I wish I had a mother.”

  I kept a phone log for my calls at work. Just notes. One from David in April reads, “Threw up. No cat.” Tom told me that David decided he wanted a cat, and Tom was trying to give him what he wanted at this point. They took a cab to the ASPCA. “We found one that we both liked, but they told us it was a biter,” Tom said. David reconsidered. No cat. Tom was relieved. They cabbed it back to the loft. David struggled up the stairs and collapsed into bed.

  Karen Finley came to the loft to pick up the baby elephant skeleton on May 4, the day David went into the hospital for the last time. He had endured two weeks of nonstop nausea. Tom woke up that day sick with a high fever. He felt awful, so Finley agreed to take David in.

  When she got to the loft, David was “puking his guts out,” she said, and he looked terrible. She called the doctor, who arranged for an ambulette to pick him up. David was so out of it that when he put his jacket on he pulled out his catheter. He walked down the stairs bleeding everywhere
, puking into a bag. A neighbor ran for paper towels to stanch the blood. As Finley stood with him on Second Avenue waiting for the ambulette, David could not remember what they were doing out there.

  When the ambulette arrived, the driver refused to help David and drove wildly as the blood spurted everywhere. He claimed to not know where Cabrini was. When they got to the crowded emergency room, no one there would help either as David’s blood dripped on the floor. Finally, Finley told me, “I threw a hissy fit.” Someone then fixed his IV, but no one would clean him up. They handed Finley a towel. David was still puking into a bag. There was nowhere for him to sit. Finley said he looked like he’d passed to the other side.

  By the next day, though, he was better. No more vomiting. Four bags of fluid on the IV stand. He had a south view this time. Once he was strong enough to stand up, he could see the roof of his building from the window. David did his last writing during this stay, which lasted for most of May. On a couple of pages torn from a notebook, he wrote “Hospital.” I won’t quote it all, but this seems most salient:

  The world is way out there sort of in the distance vibrating and agitated like a bowl of gruesomeness. They shot me with Demerol and gave me a powerful sleeping pill and then started blood transfusions that took place all night long and I watched the dawn arrive among the southern view of the city. It was quite beautiful as plastic pack after plastic pack of other people’s blood emptied into my body. I wish I had language enough to speak what all this is to me. I’m losing my memory at an alarming rate. It’s been going on for months slowly at first and now accelerating. Events are lost to me seconds after they take place.

  One of the horrors of the disease was its unpredictable course. There could even be moments that seemed like remission along the twisting but always downward spiral—and then there were the ghastly surprises. This time, after a week in the hospital, David’s feet swelled up to twice their normal size. He joked that he thought they might explode, that he could feel things breaking in there. He was staring at the awful things when I got to his room. Dr. Friedman walked in, looked like he had not expected to see this, and prescribed a diuretic.

  Once medicated, David insisted on a trip to the smoking lounge, hobbling with one white-knuckled hand around his IV stand. He’d been hooked up to IVs or PICC lines for months, though he’d refused to let the doctor insert another Hickman catheter. “Too brutal.” But now he had track marks, which he showed me after we sat down in the cheerless nicotine den.

  Somehow we got onto the subject of cameras. He told me Hujar had repeatedly tried to show him how to use his Leica, his street-shooting camera, but David could never get the hang of that stuff about F-stops and preferred his automatics. I told him I’d once had a Nikon F, but it was stolen from my apartment, and I’d never found another camera I liked as much. “Really?” he said. “I’ll give you that camera of Peter’s.” I was moved that he would offer such a thing, but did not expect him to remember our conversation. He was clearly losing his memory.

  David was waiting for certain infections to clear up. Then, he told me, he would have his spleen and his gall bladder removed. The other person in the lounge, an old guy in a wheelchair, decided to butt in to say he’d just had his gall bladder removed too, and he had this incredible doctor. David, tottering and wincing his way to the bathroom, turned when this man mentioned the doctor’s name and said angrily, “That guy nearly killed a friend.” Once David was out of the room, the man in the wheelchair assured me that the doctor was good. His own T-cell count had risen from zero to seven.

  When I came back to Cabrini a few days later, David was sleeping heavily. His upper and lower arms, where he used to have IVs, were wrapped in blue bandages. They were infected. I decided not to wait for him to wake up. Tom was there and walked me to the elevator. He told me that David was talking about suicide again. Because if this is all there is … Because if there’s no hope … Tom had convinced him to see how he felt after the surgery.

  It was Tom’s presence that most reassured him now. Tom would enter the room, calling “Hi, handsome” and David would brighten. One day David told me, “I worry he’s going to spend the best years of his life taking care of me.”

  David had surgery on May 22. Tom called me when it was over and said he thought David was going to be upset. “Because the cut was so big,” he said, and started to cry.

  The next night David called Tom at eleven P.M. quavering, “They’re trying to kill me.” He was having a bad reaction to the morphine. Tom went to Cabrini and spent the night in the empty bed next to David’s.

  I went to see him the day after that. He looked so tense, so vulnerable—eyes bugging out, body taut, tube up his nose, not able to say much. “You know what?” he said to me quietly, his voice breaking. “They had me on a five cc drip …” He was still getting the morphine out of his system. I took his hand and felt the pulse beating through it, hard and rapid.

  A couple of days later, he had someone call me at work to make sure I was coming to the hospital that afternoon. He had something to give me. When I got there, he pulled Hujar’s Leica out from under the bedclothes. Overwhelmed, I stumbled through a thank you. “I figured you could do some stories where you did both the words and the pictures,” he said.

  He had not remembered our earlier conversation about cameras, but he did remember that I was leaving town. I had taken a job in Los Angeles for the summer. Leaving David was my only regret. We did not say goodbye but spoke of how we were both sure we would see each other again. In hindsight, it looks like denial, but I don’t think I was the only one who expected him to at least live through the summer. Everything that could be done for an AIDS patient in 1992 was being done, and we all thought the surgery would buy him time.

  Dr. Friedman explained that they had operated because “the spleen was enlarged and there could have been a rupture. We thought it was infected, that he had a splenic abscess and that we had to remove it as a focus of infection.” What they found, though, is that the MAI had spread through his intestines.

  The last time I saw him at Cabrini, David told me that if he got a little better, he would come visit me in L.A. When he shuffled off to the bathroom, the nurse told me they were going to give him another Hickman, but hadn’t told him yet. This one would be “permanent.”

  The day David left the hospital to go home, he had a talk with the doctor. “He was very clear about what he wanted,” Dr. Friedman said. “He told me, ‘I know that if I go back to the hospital one more time, I will die there. I want to die in my apartment. I want to die in that space.’ ”

  David wanted to make sure that Peter Hujar was part of the photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art, and to that end, he donated four Hujar prints—probably right after he got home from the hospital. In a thank-you letter from the museum dated June 29, 1992, John Parkinson III, chairman of the Committee on Photography, said, “Artists often give their own work to the Museum, but it is much rarer that they give the work of others. Your generous gift has significantly enhanced our collection of Hujar’s work and I am pleased to thank you for it on behalf of the Committee and the Board of Trustees.”

  One night as Tom lay on his mattress on the floor, David looked down at him and said, “You can sleep in the bed. Get in.”

  “I thought the operation would make things better,” said Tom, “but he got sick pretty soon after coming home. Started throwing up black stuff.”

  David and I still spoke on the phone. On June 22, David called me and said, “Something changed drastically. My brain.” Certainly, the dementia had been coming on for a while, but on this day, he felt some physical sensation he couldn’t describe beyond “everything’s strange, everything’s upside down.”

  He was still following his self-imposed rule of not telling Tom the bad news, not discussing death with him. “He thought talking about death scared me,” said Tom, “and there were times when I didn’t want to talk about it, because I wanted to keep hope going.” So Da
vid did not tell Tom that he had felt something change in his brain. But Tom knew something was off. One night he cooked David one of his favorite meals, roast beef and broccoli, and they sat eating at the blue table. “He ate it but I could tell he was somewhere else,” Tom said. “He had this goofy look on his face.” Not a self-presentation Tom had ever seen before from David. Not the normal David.

  One night Tom was sitting on the end of the bed, and David said, “I guess I’m not the star of this movie.”

  Tom said, “You’re not a star in everything but you probably have a good cameo.”

  Then David asked, “Do I die in this movie?”

  Tom paused and then said, “Yes, I think you do.”

  “How do I die?”

  Tom replied, “How would you like to die?”

  David looked alarmed, so Tom said, “How about quietly in your sleep.”

  And David said, “Yeah, that’s OK.”

  In Los Angeles on June 28, I saw part of the Gay Pride parade down Santa Monica Boulevard. It seemed to be at least 80 percent male and white, mostly tanned, buff guys who must have run right over from the gym and then a tiny contingent of pale, scrawny politicos with banners about AIDS. At least that was my impression. I couldn’t stand watching too much of this denial of reality. I went home and called David.

  “All sorts of weird stuff is taking place,” he told me. “I don’t know what money I have and what I don’t have.” He told me he had just been away for a week and a half, driving. He’d done some work in Argentina. Then he went to Normal, where he’d slept in a barn. Contradicting him would have been pointless and cruel. So I asked him why he’d been sleeping in a barn.

  “I was trying to do work. But I feel like I try to do too much. I’ve really been ripped off quite badly.” He went back to discussing Argentina, where he’d had a good time. “But I lost something. My direction. My focus. I did an installation at the home of an artist who died on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.”