by Jarett Kobek
There she stood. Crazy as a daisy. Sally in the alley. Mother. Baby was beside her, keys in hand, shit-eating mouth.
“Mother,” I said. “Why ever are you here?”
“Adeliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine,” said she, her appalling new haircut making her face too round, “I hadn’t heard from you in so long! So I came out here! Baby was nice enough to let me in! I’m so happy to see you!”
She threw her claws around my back. Too shocked, too appalled to say anything. Too stunned to push her off.
“I don’t expect much from her,” said I to Baby. “From you I expect decorum. I expect some modicum of loyalty.”
“Adeliiiiiiiiiiiiiine,” said Mother. “Don’t blame Baby! I ambushed him in the street! What could he do!”
“I can contemplate several things,” I said. “I can think of several things indeed.”
“Adeliiiiiiiiiiiiine,” said Mother. “Something’s different about your voice!”
“Where are you holed up?” I asked. “The Plaza?”
“Of course, Adeliiiiiiiiine!”
“I’ve only now returned home from a long trip,” I said. “I’ll meet you tomorrow at 4 pm in the lobby. Don’t be late. I won’t mount an expedition to find you in the bar.”
“But Adeliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine,” said Mother, “I thought we could get dinner!”
“We can’t,” I said. “You must leave. Tomorrow. 4 pm. The Plaza lobby.”
She departed. Not without passive aggressive protest, insisting that Baby walk her to the street. He obliged. I pressed up against the kitchen counter. Footsteps announced his return.
“How was Graceland?” he asked, smiling.
“Tacky,” I said. “Why the fuck did you let Mother inside our apartment?”
“She literally jumped me on the street,” he said. “No one’s more shocked than I am. I didn’t have any time to think. You know how she can be.”
Back in my bedroom, lying on my bed. I’d returned from the South with no small amount of placidity, the last five hours of driving filled with resolve earned through new experience, exhausted by travel, as if I’d sweated out all mental poisons. As blank as unused paper.
That was gone, ruined, stolen by Mother, a malign spirit summoned from the past, ink staining the paper. I’d journeyed two thousand miles, changed my way of thinking.
Yet one can never change because there is always another desperate to recall one’s old self. Too much change, too much transition into a new person, and this other will lose sense of their own identity. One becomes their unit of measurement.
I excavated Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief. I lowered the stylus upon the second cut. “Reynardine.” Ethereal sound coming off sparse guitar, spectral voice of Sandy Denny moving through protoplasmic transmission. I’d listened countless times and couldn’t begin to speculate as to the song’s meaning. I hadn’t the slightest. I fell asleep reading The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington.
*
Dumb luck is a skill one can cultivate like any other. In the sad days before Jeremy Winterbloss and Минерва packed up and moved out to Northern California, I’d been wandering along Fifth Avenue, my brain addlepated with misty thoughts of Blackberry Lane. A voice cried out my name. It was Luanna Potrero.
We exchanged pleasantries. Her graduation occurred the year before my own, and she’d fallen into print illustration, doing spot work for magazines in Midtown. I inquired as to the pay rates. She said they were fantastic.
“I can get you work,” she said. “I’ve got more offers than I know what to do with.”
I hugged her, sinking my fingers into the excess of her flesh, and thanked her kindly. I said I’d think about it, which was only dissimulation and pretext.
That very night, reader, I gave her a ring-a-ding-ding and informed Luanna that I wasn’t the kind of girl who’d pry the equine mouth and count teeth.
Perhaps you wonder why. Ain’t ol’ Adeline fixed for life?
Consider the long haul after graduation, strung out with anxiety. I could Nostradamus the future. I’d graduated with a degree in Fine Arts, and my family was lousy with beaucoup bucks.
These twin maladies typically produce one of several unfortunate dénouements. A terrible marriage. Substance addiction. Country home in New Canaan. A Francesca Woodman suicide.
So I said yes, of course, obviously, Adeline will raise high the banner of the righteous. She’ll do the work.
Luanna had a studio in the West 20s, from which she and a rotating band of illustrators pounded out material at a healthy gallop. There was no house style.
My linework soon appeared on the newsstands.
She had arranged everything, talking with editors, doling out pieces, taking her cut off the top. Our arrangement was flexible. If I wished to disappear for a week and become a Californy transplant gone to seed down in Dixieland, I needn’t do much but call my friend and let her know.
The money was good enough that I was able to sever most ties with Mother and her deep reservoirs of filthy lucre. This isn’t to say that your faithful friend wasn’t still eating a certain amount of the family’s pie.
A year before his death, Daddy had gone and visited his trusts and estates lawyer, and established a certain payout for both Dahlia and myself. Barring incompetence on the part of the trust’s administrators, we’d both pull in some cash for the rest of our lives.
But it wasn’t Mother’s money. That was the key. Great God All Mighty, I was free at last.
Which was, of course, the reason for her impromptu visit. Mother was rather shaken when she realized that without the IV drip of her liquid assets, I wasn’t very much beholden.
Thus the ambush, darlings.
*
The next day I took a cab to Central Park. The driver let me out by the statue of William Tecumseh Sherman. When last I’d looked upon the general’s likeness, it was a dull rotted color. Now it blazed with a bright gold leaf that defied the winter late afternoon. I couldn’t fathom why the authorities of Central Park had transformed Sherman and Wingèd Victory into disco icons.
My period was upon me. The stress of Mother had thrust me into my heavy flow. The morning was spent plagued by cramps, shitting out my guts.
The woman was not in the Plaza lobby. Despite my vow, I went on an expedition and found her imbibing in the Oak Room.
“Adeliiiiiiiiiiine,” she said. “Have a drink with your mother.”
“How many have you consumed?” I asked.
“Only three so far,” she said.
“Bloody hell,” I said. “Why not.”
I ordered a vodka tonic. I suppose there was symmetry in it. How insane Mother was! She believed in the appropriateness of our setting, in the righteousness of stewing herself in the Oak Room beside her deeply estranged daughter.
“Did I ever tell you about the first time that we stayed in the Plaza? I think it must have been in 1970,” said Mother. “Your father and I flew out to New York. I didn’t know anything about the city, but your father insisted on the Plaza! He said only the best for his girl! Your father had some business with the university. Don’t ask me what! After he was done with that, we went to Madison Square Garden and we saw Blind Faith. You remember Blind Faith, don’t you, Adeliiiiiiiine? It used to be your favorite album when you were an infant. You made us plaaaay it and plaaaaaay it. You’d cry so much if we turned it off!”
We need not be friends but we also needn’t be enemies. Blame the alcohol.
“Adeliiiiiiiiine,” she said. “Why can’t I meet Jon!”
One could always trust Mother to chase away your weakness.
“You’re on very shaky ground simply meeting me, Mother,” I said.
“But Adeliiiiiiiiiine,” she said. “You know I love to take an interest! Baby says he’s a nice young man! Much better than that nasty Kevin!”
&nb
sp; “Whenever did you find the time to talk with Baby about Jon?” I asked.
“It’s a very long walk up those stairs,” she said. “And I’d had a few drinks, which made it even longer!”
“Mother,” I said. “You mustn’t ever come back. You know that, don’t you? Cease thinking of us even as anything like acquaintances. Our time together is over.”
“Adeliiiiiiiiiine!” she said. “You don’t mean that!”
“You’ve pressing things to which you must attend. You live in Los Angeles. I’m in New York. That’s enough distance. Waste your affections on Dahlia. She’ll always be there.”
“But Dahlia’s so boriiiiiiing!” said Mother. I walked away. She ordered two Greyhounds, reminding the bartender to salt the rims.
*
I instituted a hard rule about the answering machine. We had the thing for a reason, I told Baby, so we’d be damn sure to use it. Every call must be screened. People could announce their selves through the speaker. If they were not Mother or some other malefactor, then we would answer. Otherwise, we’d let the horrible woman ramble.
Weekly dispatches from Los Angeles were invariably delivered at times when Mother was too tight to comprehend the difference in time zones. She developed a great range, finding new excuses to call. Each message existed in a vacuum isolated from all previous efforts.
“Who knows,” said Baby. “Maybe she doesn’t remember.”
In the fine art of giving offense, the woman was a dynamo savant. Her first message expressed interest in my love life. The next was about her confusion as to the mail that arrived in my name, offering financial advice about credit card applications. In another, she spoke about encountering one of my old high school friends at a soirée. They’d asked after me. She wasn’t sure how to respond. Could I return her call and provide instruction as to making these encounters less awkward? She’d appreciate it.
The worst, reader, was when she’d convinced herself that I’d flown back to Los Angeles with the sole intent of vandalizing her home.
“Adeliiiiiiiiiiine,” she intoned, “I don’t know why you want to torment your poor mother like this, but that’s fine, if you want to be like that, then you can be like that. But I will not have you coming into our home and throwing things around. Don’t think that you can go around destroying other people’s property! It’s not riiiiiiight, Adeliiiiiine! This is very childish!”
APRIL 1991
David Wojnarowicz
Darlings, don’t believe for the smallest little minute that Adeline doesn’t know how booooring you consider politics.
I’m right with you, old sport, my eyes running white in the sockets whenever some dreary creature starts on and on and on and on about the winner of an election, or the horrors of Congress, or the latest cruelty wreaked upon some poor unfortunate by the municipal government. I ain’t no nattering nabob of negativity. I couldn’t give two hoots of a hangman’s holler. Tiny miseries are the glue of other people’s existence, the sticky stuff adhering together the dull papers of their lives. But not mine.
So you’ll simply indulge, trusting in me, won’t you, as I relate a bit of the ol’ ultraviolent American history? This is the good stuff, the politics that matter.
I’m speaking of the three or four years in which the East Village played host to one of the major combatants in what were once called the Culture Wars. The unhappy late period of David Wojnarowicz.
Say what you might about the man, and many have remarked upon his occasional forays into cruelty, but Wojnarowicz woke up one morning and found himself embroiled in a kind of Jahannam that I would not wish upon my worst enemy. What made him remarkable, and what warmed me to him, was the grace that he displayed after being thrust into the inferno.
It starts, I suppose, with the death of Wojnarowicz’s lover, Peter Hujar. Another East Village artist struck down by AIDS. In those days, simply everyone who was anyone died of the disease, and America, being America, politicized the illness with its finest traditions of hypocrisy and bigotry.
A subspecies of the human primate believed that the virus was sent from the high heavens, YHWH’s direct retribution against the sodomizing sybarites in the New Gomorrahs of these States United. Why not?
The disease’s victims offered easy targets for scoring cheap political points. The poor, the queer, and the drug addicted. Those with an excess of melanin.
As best as I can tell, Wojnarowicz’s great anger over Hujar’s death, over the death of so many that he knew and loved, reached a crescendo when the artist received his own diagnosis. His own death sentence.
He’d always been angry. Now he was furious. His work moved into the realm of the survivor who knew that he himself could not survive.
A bit later, Wojnarowicz contributed the catalogue essay to an exhibition at Artists Space in Tribeca. A ferocious piece attacking a variety of anti-homo political figures. His targets, blessedly, have passed out of cultural memory into the Gray Havens. They are dead old white men. I shall not name them.
This particular show, titled Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, had received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. When the head of the organization read Wojnarowicz’s essay, he withdrew the money.
Instant furor. Instant controversy. Instant scandal. Mr. Wojnarowicz thrust into the public spotlight. He had not anticipated it, nor was it desired. Yet there he was. The man at the center, the queer cause of all that bother.
Following some outcry, the NEA caved, reversing its decision and restoring funding on the condition that its money not pay for the catalogue. Other sources of filthy lucre were found. The show went forward.
Wojnarowicz became a figure of national import, his name appearing in every major newspaper and countless smaller ones, his essay spotlighted on national television. It was a time when reactionary forces hunted scapegoats. There he was. Big, gay, T-cell count in the toilet. Positively, absolutely, willfully offensive.
An organization named the American Family Association, headed by the Reverend Donald Wildmon, discovered that the NEA was funding a show of Wojnarowicz’s in Normal, Illinois: Tongues of Flame.
The decision to have the show was made well in advance of the controversy at Artists Space. The money was out the door. There was no going back.
The show’s catalogue made its way into Wildmon’s grubby hands.
In response, he authored his own pamphlet entitled “Your Tax Dollars Helped Pay for These ‘Works of Art.’” Within this well-reasoned publication, Wildmon included slight details from Wojnarowicz’s work, cherry-picked to highlight any intimation of homosexuality or drug use. Thousands of these pamphlets were mailed to every member of Congress and media outlets.
Instant furor. Instant controversy. Instant scandal. Wojnarowicz grew more famous, the subject of further news reporting.
Remember, too, reader, that we speak of one of the East Village’s own. For all of its virtues, the transgressive art scene was not a breeding ground for individuals with great social facility. No one ever accused Nick Zedd of oozing politesse and great linguistic facility.
Wojnarowicz was different.
So when confronted by this very unusual situation, he did the least expected thing. He sued Wildmon and the American Family Association. Even more unexpectedly, he won his case, blocking publication of the pamphlet. Though he earned only $1 in damages, the victory stood.
His fame grew. More news coverage. Constant media. Here, too, he shone. Wojnarowicz could articulate himself without giving ground, could speak of his work in such a way as to get across the sense that he’d done nothing wrong, that his artistic endeavors were legitimate pursuits.
All the while, the man was dying. His only recourse was to swallow AZT pills and hope that the treatment would not be worse than the disease. His body rebelling, he was out in the media, fighting the good fight that a thousand others should have fought befo
re him.
I’d read articles in the Times, in the Village Voice, in the trades, in magazines, watched PBS, listened to NPR. I kept myself aware of the man, had thought of reaching out. He was only six blocks away. Yet I was intimidated. By his articulation, by his disease, by the situation. I’ve no small opinion of my own self, but what could Adeline say to Wojnarowicz?
An old friend from Parsons, a Turkish blackguard named Nayip Otağalu, had years earlier developed a friendship with the artist. Of its nature, I cannot speak. Nayip conveyed one or two things about Wojnarowicz, details both gossipy and humanizing, before the Turk disappeared after our sophomore year, never reemerging from the wilds of summer break. Presumably stuck forever in Gaziantep.
Jon knew Wojnarowicz, but theirs was no friendship. Sometime in the early ’80s, they’d gotten into a fistfight outside of the Pyramid Club. Jon’s band of the moment, Ligature Lycanthropee, was on the same lineup as 3 Teens Kill 4, Wojnarowciz’s avant-experimental group. There was an argument about allocated stage time. From the way Jon spoke of the incident, I received the unmistakable impression that the fisticuffs had not ended in his favor.
Being old hands of the East Village, they had many friends in common. Word drifted in through Jon about the artist’s condition, about the ups and downs of his health.
Wojnarowicz was getting sicker. People wondered how much longer he would live. Feeling the limits of time, I inquired if Jon couldn’t perhaps arrange a meeting.
*
The shrill sound of our telephone.
I’d been reading a crumbling mass-market edition of Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes. One of Baby’s many books. Despite my aversion to the mystery genre and its hardboiled offspring, I found the title wonderfully suggestive.
More important, I owed Playboy a cartoon of George Bush driving a Jeep Cherokee through an urban ghetto. I was desperate in my procrastination, so there I was, darlings, reading about Sailor in Santa Fe at the time of fiesta, of burning Zozobra.
